Biohell

by Andy Remic

  “She still has the same heart, the same brain, she is still my Melanie, deep down inside her soul. Only... only... to the casual observer, she may appear to have changed a little.”

  “Hello Francis.”

  “Oh, hiya Cam.” Franco twitched. “Didn’t notice you there for a moment, what with all the, y’know, frantic charging and destruction of rented property and such-forth.”

  “Francis. Have you noticed your girlfriend is a zombie?”

  Franco’s eyes glazed for a moment. “Whadya mean?”

  “She’s one of them, Franco. One of the mad horde who’ve been rampaging through The City tearing people limb from limb, eating brains and generally causing a riot in a bloodbath.”

  “Nah. Nah she ain’t,” Franco shook his head in denial, but his eyes betrayed his heart.

  “Yes,” said Cam gently, “yes she is. Look at her. She is a genetic mutation! She’s a disfigured monstrosity! She’s a pus-oozing, slimy-scaled, distended, quivering sack of shitty rotting flesh and twisted bones!”

  “That’s a bit harsh,” said Franco dejectedly. “That’s my bird, that is. The woman I intend to marry. The woman I... love.”

  Mel turned, a sudden movement. Her lower jaw crunched open like a breaking femur, and she was on Franco in a second, her disjointed maw wrapped around his lips in what could only be described as a suction snog; with full-tongue action.

  Pus oozed into Franco’s mouth as his arms flapped frantically, like a suicide jumper desperately trying to push away the fast-approaching ground.

  Mel kissed him.

  Franco swooned.

  Keenan stood by, uneasily, and glanced at Cam, shrugging. He puffed on his cigarette, and only then realised he was holding his Techrim. Damn those reflexes, he thought.

  Mel pulled free.

  Franco spluttered.

  Mel fluttered her spider-hair eyelids.

  Franco gagged.

  “Now then, when you two lovebirds have quite finished?” said Keenan, and stooping, pulled Franco to his feet. Mel growled, and Keenan shot her a dark look. “Not now, girl, we’ve got some important business to attend.”

  Franco slumped to his battered couch. “I can’t get married to her like this,” moaned Franco.

  “Listen, there are more important matters afoot,” said Keenan. “Have you stopped to wonder why Mel has been so afflicted?”

  “I thought it might have had something to do with the biomod upgrade thing she took,” said Franco miserably.

  “You’re damn right mate,” said Keenan. “Her and half the fucking population of The City.” Franco’s eyes went wide. “That’s right. This thing is planet-wide. There are millions of zombies out there, all waiting to tear off your head and shit down your neck.”

  “I have to help her, Keenan.” Franco’s face was filled with pain. “I have to get her back to normal. It’s my girl. My bird. My woman.”

  “Well, I have a mission down here. You help me with mine, I’ll help you with yours.”

  “What’s the gig?” Franco was suddenly professional.

  “My home planet of Galhari has been overrun by junks.”

  “Them bastards? They’re a toxic pollution. You’re lucky to be alive.”

  “Tell me about it. I have one of their SinScripts, because these things are kind of semi-mechanical, semi-sentient; they follow a set of instructions. I need to decode the disk, find out what game they’re playing... and more importantly, how to fight them, how to get rid of their toxic scourge.”

  “How many invaded?” said Franco.

  “Around ten million. I liaised with Steinhauer. He’s lifted our Prohibition D. We’re back in business, Franco. Combat K is back in business. Together again.”

  “Rasta billy!” grinned Franco, suddenly.

  “The only problem we have is that The City is now under QGM martial law. You—me—Mel, the lot of us, we’re quarantined here, mate. We can’t leave. Not until we find out what’s going on.” Keenan grinned, and slapped a woeful looking Franco on the back.

  “You know,” said Franco, “a fella goes to sleep with the whole world just fine, and he wakes up and the bloody galaxy is out to feed him a big shit sandwich. What’s damn well happening? I feel like I missed a bloody decade.”

  “Don’t you keep your eye on the news?”

  Franco grunted. “I’m in love, ain’t I?” He glanced at Mel. Shuddered. “I had other things on my mind.”

  Keenan sat down next to Franco. “Listen mate. We’ll sort her out, you see if we don’t. You said she took a biomod upgrade. Which clinic did she attend? NanoTek have got a thousand this side of the river.”

  “No. She didn’t get it from a clinic. She said...” Franco screwed up his face, “yeah, said it was cracked. An illegal. Got it from a pirate out in the street. Friend of a friend, yeah?”

  “A friend of a friend? Who?”

  Again, Franco screwed up his face, wrinkling his nose and ginger goatee. Then he nodded. “Down the market, she said. A lad called Knuckles. Friend of Emily. Although I’ve never met Emily.” Franco scratched at his beard. “You think that’s the way to go?” He looked lost and lonely, forlorn in the middle of the couch. Like a little boy in a big room, kicking his scuffed shoes.

  Keenan patted his shoulder. “We’ll get right on it, mate. I’ve a Shuttle parked down the street at Porky Paupers. Come on, tool up.”

  “You think we’ll meet resistance?”

  Keenan eyed Mel warily. “I know it, bruv.”

  ~ * ~

  BLACK AND WHITE NEWS CLIP

  The City’s Premier News Delivery Service

  [available in: print, TV, vid, mail, dig.bath, ident.implant, comm., kube, glass.wall, ggg, galaxy.net and eyelid transpose— all for a small monthly fee].

  News clip GL/14/12/TBA:

  NANOTEK

  A CORPORATION AT WAR?

  NanoTek is, as we know, the all-powerful omniscient and friendly face of NanoTek Corporation based here, in The City, in its alleys and gutters, skyblocks and cubeblocks, in the New York Clusters, New Tek London, Old Athens, The Sydney Pipe and Cape Town Smash and Shaghai and The Dregs, Sub-City, DOG Town and POSH Town right up to the Black Rose Citadel itself— NanoTek’s heart and home and pumping core. NanoTek are the unrivalled and most affluent entity in Quad-Gal, single-handedly responsible for the ability to cure death! NanoTek are indeed God—achieving a technological apotheosis, for the biomods have brought the ability to cure any disease known to man, to alter any aspect of a human organism from finger nail and hair structure to factors such as weight gain and loss, facial restructuring, skin tone and texture... the list goes on. NanoTek, the saviour of modern medicine—able to rebuild organs on demand without recourse to opening the body with a primitive scalpel! Able to increase sexual appetites, decrease race hatred, evolve man to a God Platform from which he may look down and survey with pride all he has achieved. What God created, NanoTek perfected. 2-1 to NanoTek.

  But...

  There’s a worm at the rotten core of the apple.

  A chicken beak in the burger.

  A severed finger, trailing tendons, in the cheese pie.

  Despite only being available for three months on The City’s streets, the biomod (v1.0) human and alien upgrade has been cracked, replicated and pirated by illegal and immoral code monkeys. Where once NanoTek with global government support could control the facilities of biomod upgrades and monitor activity via control pad dials and GreenSource links to CoreCentral and GreenSource Mainframes, now the pirates have stolen biomod chassis modules, re-programmed existing biomods, deviated and twisted the design from the original NanoTek blueprint and ethic. In differing Dregsides across The City, these SubCs are awash with pirated biomods... which allow humans and aliens to give themselves immoral and perverse upgrades never originally intended by NanoTek! Last week, one suspicious suspect was arrested by the Justice SIMs—when he resisted arrest, it took ten SIMs and twenty-four bullets to put him down, so fast, powerful
and agile had he become. And all by the abuse of illegitimate biomod technology!

  A month ago, a Dreg porn syndicate was raided—to find a man with three erections filming a movie with a series of biomod deformed women, the most modest of which had turned her anus and mouth into two extra vaginas, and the worst of which had grown her arm into a huge flopping clitoris so that a gaggle of biomod deformed sexual deviants could suckle their way to multiple biorgasm! And let’s not start on the pirates’ abuse of the biomods as a drug... the ultimate drug, able to give week-long highs without risk of going cold turkey, and with the programmable ability to live out twisted biomod drug-induced fantasies in differing periods of depraved history.

  My friends, this catalogue of abuse goes on unchecked and, sadly, out of control. Where will it end? This sorry piracy and abuse of the biomod human upgrade escalates and degrades with each passing day. The GreenSource Mainframe reports more and more ‘snatch’ samples of pirated biomods being used. They are on the increase, my friends, and have infiltrated up through the Dregs and SubCs to mainframe life cycles. No longer a pastime of the Non-Credits, now our wealthy executives, doctors, teachers, bureaucrats, publishers, editors, inspectors, critics, thespians, all the revered in our modern revolutionary and evolutionary society are partaking in these pirated and dangerously hacked biomods with apparent disregard for their own health and sanity!

  We are slowly becoming a society of the depraved: a circus act filled with freaks riding parasite-like on the back of NanoTek’s abused and twisted technology. It must stop! We must stop this farce. NanoTek must take responsibility for their abominable creation and withdraw the biomod technology until it’s made foolproof! We, the people, should not be subject to such a dangerous and out-of-control technological deviancy. It must be stopped. And it must be stopped now!

  News clip: END.

  ~ * ~

  They stood by the door, Franco in armoured jacket and pants, D5 shotgun strapped to his back, Kekra machine pistols in his broad hands, a large variety of grenades clipped to his belt, and a long sha sha knife strapped to one thigh. He wore leather sandals on his feet showing toe-nails in serious need of a clipping.

  “At last. Are you ready?” growled Keenan.

  Franco nodded. “Just need the kitchen sink.”

  “Very funny.”

  “You think I’m joking? Great weapon is a kitchen sink. Once clubbed a Slab to death with one. Especially if you get a good hold on the taps. Gives you a bit of leverage, y’know?”

  “Grwwlll.”

  Mel stepped forward, her chain jangling. Keenan glanced at her, then back at Franco, then back to the mutated woman. “Wait a minute,” he said, as comprehension dawned.

  “She’s got to come with us,” said Franco.

  “Oh no. We’ll go and find this Knuckles guy, then bring help back to Mel. We’re not dragging an eight-foot slab of muscled zombie torso on a damned mission. And that’s final.”

  “But Keenan, she’s my girl, my woman, my chick, my bird, my bit of fluff. I can’t leave her behind. Y’know. With all the,” he shivered, “all them there zombie monsters wandering around. She might get hurt.”

  Keenan eyed the rippling muscles, the jaw which could chew through hull steel, the razor talons. “What, in the name of fuck, is going to hurt that?”

  “Hey, she’s a she, not a that. And you never know!”

  “Franco, no.”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “She’ll compromise the mission.”

  “She is the mission.”

  Keenan stamped his foot. “Dickhead, listen, she’ll draw attention to us like groupies to an arse-ugly rock star. She’ll be fine here, just leave her... the TV remote. Or something.”

  Franco stared with puppy dog eyes at Mel. “Sor-reee love. Keenan says no.”

  Mel barked, a savage canine ejection. She bared her teeth and growled again. “Grwwll.”

  Keenan took a step back. He clenched his teeth tight, his Techrim not-quite pointing at Franco’s fiancée. He bit back a flood of jokes about Franco’s woman being a dog. “Come on Cam, back me up on this one. We can’t drag an eight-foot mutant on a mission.”

  “Actually,” said Cam, “I think Mel could well be beneficial to our very survival in this place. And having her aboard will actually reduce our mission time if we do happen find a cure for her, ahem, condition. Speaking logically, of course.”

  Keenan glared at Cam—just as a shuffling sound came from the stairwell. Keenan whirled, but Mel was already bounding past him, talons lashing out as the bulky zombie appeared, strips of skin hanging from its mutated face, pointed teeth bared with yellow mucus, hands like claws scrabbling at the pistol in its human-skin belt. Mel’s talons hammered the creature, which toppled backwards down the stairs with a series of sickening, bone-breaking crunches.

  Everybody froze.

  Franco beamed. “See! See what she did! There’s a good girl Melanie! Atta girl!”

  “OK,” said Keenan, grimly. He deflated. “OK. I relinquish. Melanie can come on the mission.” She turned and growled at him, long drools of saliva pooling from her crooked maw. He eyed the black blood on her talons. Dangerous, screamed his mind. “Just make sure you keep her on a damned tight leash.”

  Franco bounded forward, and wrapped the chain around his fist. “Don’t you worry you none, Keenan, I’ll look after her, she won’t be one ounce of trouble, I promise! Just get us to that Knuckles lad and let’s get this business sorted.”

  “Come on,” sighed Keenan. “Let’s get to the vets.”

  “The vets?”

  “Sorry mate. I meant the market.”

  ~ * ~

  The street was deserted. Rain pounded a torrent. Keenan led the way, with Franco and Mel close behind, Mel’s claws raking the enamel-tarmac. Cam brought up the rear with sensors spinning.

  “Something’s affecting my gyroscope,” said Cam.

  Keenan halted, boots splashing puddles. “Which means?”

  “There’s a big power surge coming.”

  “What kind of power surge?” said Keenan, eyes narrowed in suspicion.

  “I suggest,” suggested Cam, voice smooth and calm, “that everybody hits the ground. Right about now!”

  They hit the ground, and the storm-clouds above crackled. A cold wind smashed down the street. Below, the ground rumbled. The wind increased, pounding the rain horizontally as the two Combat K soldiers and their mutant accomplice crawled to the edge of the desecrated road and cowered below a teetering, wobbling skyscraper.

  “What is it?” screamed Keenan over the roar of the wind. “An earthquake?”

  “No. There’s a surge pretty much as big as anything I’ve ever felt. It’s rolling across the planet.”

  “A surge? Of what? What the hell is it?”

  “Just scanning.”

  Franco grinned at Keenan, gripping his guns to his chest. “Just like the old days, eh buddy?”

  “I don’t remember crawling through puddles with an eight-foot monster. Which old days do you mean, exactly?”

  “I meant, the facing of uncertain odds, Combat K out in the wilds again. Y’know? That sort of nostalgic bull-shit. All we need now is... Pippa.” Franco saw Keenan’s face darken, and he put a hand on the arm of Keenan’s storm-drenched War-Suit. “I’m sorry, mate.”

  “So am I.”

  “Here it comes. Cover your heads!”

  A roar filled the ground, filled the sky, filled the world. The streets shook. Distantly, three tower blocks crumbled and dust whumped into the sky in blossoming dark mushroom clouds. For a terrible, heart-lurching moment Keenan thought the Quad-Gal boys had nuked the planet to rid it of its zombie infestation; one quick succession of strikes, or maybe a single Halo Strike from a Titan IV, and bam. Game over. Dogmeat. For everybody.

  A smell like acid washed down the street. Keenan’s nose wrinkled as the powerful stench invaded his senses, burning his nostrils, scouring his t
hroat...

  And then—

  The lights went out.

  Like a dimmer switch on The City’s orbiting twin suns, the world was slowly turned down into darkness. The rain still pounded, the storm howled, but now nothing more than an eerie glow shone from the sky. Distant stars glittered. It was...

  “Night,” said Keenan, crawling to his knees. Ozone filled his nostrils and he coughed on tox. He could feel every pore of his skin tingling. “What happened, Cam? Where are the suns?”

  “The City has no self-sustaining climate. It relies on machines, what are known in the trade as Global Equilibrium Pumps; they come from the old days, back from the time of terraformers—before the Helix War blasted World Builders and Ion Platforms into infinity and beyond.”