by Rob Grant
'Question one: just how serious is this? Can we actually be killed in this reality? Question two: given the demonstrations we've all been kindly given at first hand of the awesome destructive powers of the brothers Apocalypse, does this useless lump of remedial plastic we call "Kryten" stand a Nazi in hell's chance of beating them? Question three: what's to stop the virus spreading to my hologram generation unit and rewriting my personality?' He widened his eyes. 'Anybody? Take your time.'
Lister raised himself painfully on to his elbows. 'OK, Rimmer. I'll give you your answers. Probably, probably not, and nothing.' He eased back down on to the table.
'Oh, good. Sterling. Excelente. That's settled then. Marvellous. I suggest we contact old Pete Pessimism down the road and have him knock up four coffins for us, so we can be lying in them conveniently when the Apocalypse bastards ride into town, and save everybody a lot of clearing up.'
The Cat wandered back in from the washroom, with his trousers round his knees. 'Hot damn!' he said. 'Look at this,' he turned and flashed his buttocks. 'My ass is prettier than my face! When we get back, I'm gonna have them surgically swapped.'
Lister said, 'When we get back, we won't be injured. The virus in the AR unit is simulating all this stuff.'
'If we get back,' Rimmer corrected.
Lister noticed that Kryten had stopped tending to him, and was staring off, unfocused. 'What is it, Kryten? Are you remembering?'
'Yes,' Kryten said, his Western drawl slipping. 'This... badinage. This childish quibbling. It strikes a chord.'
Rimmer was affronted. 'Is he saying we quibble? We don't quibble.'
Lister held up his hand to silence Rimmer. 'Go on, Kryten. Concentrate.'
'I just don't like being accused of quibbling,' Rimmer protested. 'It makes me sound small and petty.'
Lister half-closed his eyes. 'Rimmer, for crying out loud, get a mind. Kryten. Think.'
'You,' Kryten focused on Lister. 'Something about you. When I see your face, I get an image of curries and morning breath that could cut through bank vaults.' He turned to Rimmer. 'And you. You seem familiar, too, somehow. I keep getting a name. Smuhhh... Smuuh-hehhh... ?'
'Smeghead? Rimmer offered, tentatively.
'That's it!'
Rimmer beamed. 'He remembers me!'
Kryten turned to the Cat. 'And you. I don't know why, but you make me think of a drive-in wardrobe the size of a warehouse.'
The Cat furrowed his brow. 'Don't know what that could be.' He snapped his fingers. 'Unless you're thinking of that drive-in wardrobe of mine, which is the size of a warehouse.'
'All right!' Lister twisted his legs and eased himself off the desk top. 'The guns. Do you know how to use them?'
Kryten picked up the chamberless guns and shook his head. 'I know they're important. That's all.'
Lister cringed into the cell room and came back with the gun belt. 'What about this? What about the bullets?'
Kryten took the belt and looked at the dozen bullets. 'I don't understand. They're made of ice. Why don't they melt?'
'Because they're impossible.' Lister was faint from his exertions. 'They can't possibly exist. They must be part of the answer.'
Kryten plucked out one of the bullets and examined it. It was egg-shaped. 'There's some sort of code on them.'
Lister nodded and instantly regretted it. 'Look, whatever part of you is creating the virus antidote has made these guns and these bullets. You have to work out the sequence, I guess.'
'Yes.' Kryten pulled out the bullets and laid them on the desk. He cracked open the cylinder of one of the guns and studied it for a second, and then rifled through the bullets and chose one. 'This, I think, should go here.' He pressed the ice bullet against the smooth metal of the gun cylinder, which yielded magically to allow the bullet inside.
'Brutal,' Lister grinned. 'Can you do the rest?'
'I don't know... I think... if I had more time...'
As he spoke, a clock appeared on the wall behind Kryten's head. There were no figures on it. The hands were set at one minute to twelve. As they watched, the minute hand ticked over, and the clock began to strike.
'High midnight,' Kryten said. His shoulders sagged. 'Too late.'
Rimmer peered out through the knot hole. He could make out the outlines of four horses, lined up at the end of the street. From one side of them, the orange glimmer of the blacksmith's forge illuminated the steam rising from their flanks, cloaking them in an unworldly glow. There was no mistaking the identity of their riders.
'They're here,' he said, softly.
'I've failed.' Kryten shook his head. 'I've failed you all.'
'Not yet.' Lister turned to the Cat. 'Break out the rifles.'
The Cat slipped into the cell room.
Rimmer watched as the four horsemen dismounted and started walking slowly towards the sheriff's office.
The Cat returned with three rifles. Lister took one. 'Kryten, you concentrate on the bullets. We're going to buy you some more time.'
'Excuse me?' Rimmer twisted from his vantage point at the knot hole.'Pardonnez-moi?. In what way are we buying him time?'
Lister snapped open his Winchester and checked it was loaded. 'We're going to go out and face them.'
'Define "we".'
'We. The three of us. You, me and the Cat.' Lister snapped the rifle closed. 'Have you got a problem with that?'
'Well, now you come to mention it, yes. I do have a minor problemette with that. My head is jammed at an angle of forty-five degrees, my shoulder has a couple of bones jutting out of it, and my right arm is set rigid in plaster of Paris. The Cat has a hole in his foot, and his face is concave. And you, Listy, you don't have two bones in your entire body that are actually connected. One strong gust of wind and you'll come apart like a matchstick model of the Eiffel Tower. How long do you think we'd last against these guys? How long d'you think we'd last against a couple of enthusiastic grannies with Zimmer frames?'
'We just need to distract them for a few minutes.'
'Oh, we'll distract them all right. As soon as they see us hobble out of the door like refugees from a geriatrics ward, they'll collapse in fits of helpless giggles. Our one hope would be they die laughing. Come on, let's have a sanity check, here. We belong in an intensive care unit, not the OK Corral.'
The Cat thrust a rifle into Rimmer's good hand. 'Let's go, bud.'
'But we could get killed. Forgive me if that's not quite the macho, cowboyistic thing to say, but it's true.'
Lister was buttoning up his shirt. Even that small exertion brought a sheen of sweat to. his forehead. 'Look at the alternatives, Rimmer. Unless Kryten can work out the sequence, he's finished, and even if we manage to get back to reality, the ship will be uncontrollable, and we're goners anyway. We've got nothing to lose here. Nothing.' Painfully, he shucked on his jacket. The throwing knives jangled against his chest, and he felt like some demonic surgeon was using his ribcage as a xylophone.
Rimmer raised the rifle so it rested in the crook of his broken arm. 'How about if I cover you through the knot holes?'
The Cat thrust the barrel of his rifle into Rimmer's nostril. 'How about I cover the ceiling with your brains?'
'Just a suggestion. No need to get uppity.'
Lister winced towards the doors. When he reached them, he looked back at Kryten. 'Don't take too long, matey pie,' he said, and pushed through the doors out into the unforgiving gloom of the midnight street.
TWELVE
A small argument later, the Cat prodded Rimmer out on to the sidewalk, thereby rejecting Rimmer's latest plan, which was that they should go out and face the brothers one at a time, with the plan's originator as the last line of defence.
Rimmer's eyes flitted right, which, for him, meant he was looking up. A smoky blue cloud was drifting across the full face of the moon. Someone somewhere was playing a lilting theme on a muted trumpet. War, Pestilence and Famine stood in a line about thirty yards in front of them. Lister stopped. The Cat and Rimm
er lined up either side of him.
Famine leered lustily at the sight of Lister. 'You sure you want to do this, boy?' he grinned. 'Because I'm in the mood to suck your liver through a straw.'
'Wait!' A voice like glaciers colliding echoed down the street. A thin, gloved hand laid itself on Famine's chest and effortlessly slapped him aside. From behind the three brothers, the hand's owner stepped forward.
Death Apocalypse was not a handsome fellow. Beneath the black rim of his hat, there was no white in his eyes, just huge, milky grey pupils that stared out of deep sockets, more reptile than human. The pallid, green flesh of his face hung loosely on his skull, as if he was wearing someone else's skin. Below that, there was no colour in his clothing. His black longcoat brushed the ground, the front pushed back over the handles of his guns in their ebony holsters.
He was a good seven feet tall, but there seemed to be nothing but bones under the tight-fitting suit.
'This is a private party,' he rasped. 'You weren't invited.' Even at this distance, Lister swore he could feel the chill of the man's breath.
'Anyone comes down this street has to come through us.' Lister nodded at Rimmer and the Cat, and straight away wished he hadn't. He felt like Bruce Lee had dealt a flurry of rapid blows to his neck with steel nunchakas. He had to concentrate, keep movement to a minimum. The key was delay, delay. Keep the bastard talking.
Death flicked his tongue over his thin lips. There was something obscene about the way he did it. Almost as if the tongue had a life of its own; a slimy, grey snake nestling in his mouth. 'You don't know what you're dealing with, son. Stand aside.'
Lister smiled. 'Don't any of you gutless turdburgers have the cojones to take me on? One on one. Mano a mano?'
The three brothers all moved forward, but a flick from pappy's eye stopped them dead. 'I'd have thunk you'd had ample demonstration of what my boys can do. But maybe I can spare a couple seconds to punctuate the point.'
On the P of 'point', Death's hand moved. By the time he hit the final consonant, he'd drawn, aimed and fired and the gun was back in its holster.
Lister had no idea where the bullet had gone. He established that it hadn't entered him, and that the other two were still standing. Rimmer was looking puzzled, too. Lister turned and saw the Cat, standing wide-eyed. There was a hole in the middle of his forehead.
'Ouch,' the Cat said, ineffectually, and keeled over backwards.
Death said, 'You catch my drift, now?'
Rimmer knelt beside the Cat and lifted his head. The Cat was still staring, shocked and bewildered. 'Are you all right?' Rimmer asked.
The Cat turned his face to Rimmer's and looked at him, incredulously. 'I've been better,' he said. 'I have a hole clean through the centre of my head, but on the bright side, I now have somewhere to keep a pool cue if both my hands are full.'
Rimmer looked up at Lister. 'He's alive.'
'Then they can't kill us.'
'No,' Rimmer concurred, 'but they can inflict limitless pain on us, which has got to be considered a major negative.'
'It's not real. It's just an illusion.'
'Well,' the Cat chipped in, 'as illusions go, it's a damned good one, bud. I, for one, am totally convinced. I cannot move my body, and I feel like someone's stuffed an umbrella in my brain, opened it up and started twirling it around.'
Lister glanced anxiously at the sheriff's office. No sign of Kryten. Time was the precious commodity here. Whatever the cost, he had to keep them talking. 'We don't need guns,' he said, and threw his rifle down. 'Come on, fat boy. Bare-handed.' He took an unconvincing step forward. He had no doubts that Famine would deal with him swiftly, and extremely painfully but at least it would take the lardy blob time to cover the distance between them, and that was all that mattered. 'Come ooooon!' he taunted, palms up, wiggling his fingers. 'Come on, you flab-titted slag.'
Death was looking at him, curious. Famine grunted in anger and hitched back his sleeves, but the thin, gloved hand snaked out and stopped him. Death nodded at War. 'Tommyhawk the son of a bitch.'
War's eyes lit up with delight, and he reached around his back, under his jacket, crouched, and threw.
Lister could see the tomahawk spinning towards him, almost as if it were in slow motion. His brain was telling his body to duck, but his legs weren't keen to bend. He made a half-hearted job of dipping at the waist, but it was too little, too late.
The tomahawk hit him, and suddenly he was spinning over and over, the pale moon orbiting his vision far too quickly to be real.
He hit the floor, dazed. When the dust settled, he looked up. To his astonishment, he was looking up at himself. He could see his body, swaying, his fingers still wiggling. He was thinking 'how could this be happening?'
The realization swept over him like a tingling wave of static.
The tomahawk had decapitated him.
His headless body turned towards him. He could still control it. Still felt its pain.
Rimmer looked down at his head, horror and disgust and fear jostling his features. 'Lister,' he gasped, 'are you OK?'
'Boy,' the Cat shook his head. 'In the awards for all-time stupid questions, that one takes the Nobel prize.'
Lister's head snarled. 'Come on, you spineless bastards. You're going to have to do better than that.' Through the blur of pain, he turned his body to face them and started advancing, blood gushing generously from his severed neck.
'Wow,' the Cat grinned in admiration. 'Does he have balls of steel, or what?'
Death nodded again, and War reached back, pulled out a bola and hurled it knee-high down the street. The metal balls wrapped around Lister's legs, snapping his knees with a sickening crack, and his poor body pitched forward and lay, wriggling in the dust.
The Cat looked up at Rimmer. 'OK, Flash,' he said. 'You're on. Take 'em.'
Rimmer looked over at the Apocalypse boys. He looked over at the sheriff's office. He looked over at the Apocalypse boys again.
He let the Cat's head down and stood. 'Right,' he said, rubbing his good hand down the front of his chaps. 'I think I can honestly say I've seen enough to convince me of your awesome awesomeness. As you can see,' he raised his broken arm as far as he could, 'I really am in no condition to offer anything other than the most token resistance, so, under the circumstances I must reluctantly adopt the most prudent course open to me, which is to surrender, totally and unequivocally.' He put his right hand in the air. 'This is me, surrendering. Obviously, we'll have to imagine I've got both hands up. Good enough?'
Pestilence reached down to his belt and pulled his machete out of its sheath. 'I'm gonna carve you up so small, the worms won't even have to chew.'
'Now, now,' Rimmer started to back away from his stricken companions, 'you can't frighten me. I'm a coward — I'm permanently scared.'
Rimmer tried to keep his eyes on Pestilence's crouched advance, but something drew him to look at Death. The lizard eyes were staring at him, strangely. Something about the stare disturbed Rimmer deeply. He slowly became aware of heat in his heels. He looked down.
His boots were smoking.
The heat spread up his feet. He took another step backwards. There was a gruesome squelching sound and the step left him a good inch shorter.
What the smeg was going on now? Sweat drooled down his face in salty panic. He felt as if he was melting from the feet up. Then, the full horror of what was happening slapped him.
He was, in fact, melting from the feet up.
The virus had invaded his hologram generation unit. He looked around for some water, spotted the horse trough and tried to move towards it, but found himself rooted to the spot. Suddenly, his boots gave way and he lost a foot in height. He looked at his arm which was a fizzling, moving mass of seething white boils. He opened his mouth to scream, but only smoke billowed out of his scorched lungs. This was pain beyond pain. An infinity of agonies.
Then he was down to his knees in a puddle of steaming, melted flesh. He tried to will himself unconsci
ous as his thighs gave way and the hellfire reached his reproductive system.
He was aware of the brothers striding past him through his own choking smoke. A stream of sputum from Pestilence's snarled lips hissed as it hit his face and sizzled down his nose.
He was still conscious as his chin slumped to the ground.
Then he was just a pair of eyeballs in a boiling puddle of his own fomenting flesh. And he was still conscious.
On the periphery of his sight, he saw the Cat's eyes flick towards him. 'Hey buddy,' the Cat leered, 'are you all right?'
Lister was trying desperately to swivel his head, but it was no use. The Apocalypse boys were behind him, and he had no way of seeing what was going on. At the very edge of his vision, he spotted the chiselled toe of the Cat's tailored boot. 'Cat!' he yelled, 'can you reach my head with your foot?'
'I can't move, bud,' the Cat yelled back.
'Try! I need you to turn me round.'
The Cat strained, concentrating on his leg muscles. He felt a twitch in his toe. With a supreme effort of will he moved the twitch up his foot to his ankle to his trembling knee, and put everything he had left into one last kick.
He caught Lister's head on the temple, spinning it end over end.
Lister's head landed with a sickening glop in the bubbling gruel that Rimmer had become. He was upside down, his hair glued by the Rimmer mess to the ground, and almost blinded by the throbbing pain from the Cat's kick, but at least he was pointing in the right direction.
The Apocalypse boys were maybe ten steps from the sheriff's office.
Lister yelled out for Kryten, and right on cue, he emerged on to the sidewalk.
The Apocalypse boys stopped.
Kryten had the suit on.
His face was lit by the white gleam of his stetson brim. In the ethereal glow of his perfect white outfit, he looked as if some massive floodlight was trained on him as he clicked a handful of easy steps down on to the street and turned to face his tormentors.
Lister watched the back of Death's head tilt slowly up and down as he took in the view. 'Well, looky here, boys. Ol' Sheriff Carton's got hisself all dudded up to die.'