by Andy Remic
Shit.
“The zombies are flying the choppers!” he snarled. “How’s that possible? How, I ask you?”
He continued to fire the EMF in heavy bursts, but the Black Tigers had manoeuvred and missiles streaked towards Combat K. With a squawk Franco dropped the Apache out of the sky, cutting power and they fell, chasing the plummeting, spiralling Black Tiger out of control and heading groundwards at an incredible, terminal rate...
The damaged Black Tiger fell. And as it fell, zombies disgorged from the side door in what appeared an attempt at escape—and Franco screamed, suddenly, as a zombie flashed up at him, slammed the Apache’s cockpit with a pus-riddled maw trailing ooze and slime, then slid free and through the rotors, distributing fine minced zombie cubes over a kilometre wide area.
“What the fuck was that?” snarled Keenan, shaken by the ferocity of the impact which had rocked the entire chopper.
“A flying zombie,” yelled back Franco, hard on the vibrating, almost-out-of-control, controls. Below him, the Black Tiger disgorged more panicking, free-fall zombies. Only now Combat K’s Apache was travelling faster, vertically, than the zombies could fall, and despite Franco veering left and right and spinning them around various axes, still more zombies splattered against the web-riddled cockpit windscreen with thuds and crunches and cracks.
“No no no!” muttered Franco, trying desperately to avoid this random sky-kill.
“What the hell’s going on?” bellowed Keenan.
“It’s a zombie apocalypse,” spat back Franco, before wrestling control and veering the groaning Apache around on a wide arc that shaved the roof from an abandoned street-level juggernaut like a tin-top from a can of spam, and left the Apache without landing gear.
“Neat,” said Keenan, voice dry and calm, eyes full of ice.
“Hey, they don’t call me Franco ‘Sky Captain’ Haggis for nothing, you know!” Franco beamed optimistically, all of Keenan’s considerable sarcasm lost on him.
“They’re still on our tail!” said Xakus. The man, strapped tightly behind his X-BELT, was watching a wall scanner. “You can’t outrun Black Tigers. They’re the fastest combat choppers on the market.”
“I know that!” said Franco, wrestling again with his dodgy controls and ignoring a swathe of red warning lights which decorated the console. “Why d’ya think I’m doing all the fancy piloting?”
They screamed through the streets at psycho low-level. More bullets roared from the pursuing Black Tigers. Then, there came a whumpf. Fire roared around them and Franco squawked like a head-hacked chicken as his entire rear-view was filled with an expanding blossom of fire. Heat smashed the men. The Apache groaned, rattling, and the tail-rotors started to smoke. Franco veered left, and the two Black Tigers missed the turn and disappeared in a blaze of billowing, grinding flame-throwers.
Franco slowed their wild onslaught, slowed with nervous care, and hovered for a moment near street level. Glass sparkled like snow across the ground. Franco checked damage reports.
“What hit us?” he said, finally.
“They’ve got anti-chopper flamethrowers,” snapped back Keenan. “I thought you’d know?”
“How could I know that, eh lad? How?”
“Because it’s been on the news,” said Keenan, voice low. “KAZ Systems have been heavily criticised for their inhumane approach; but, seeing as the staff at KAZ are all aliens, they consider it an intrinsically dumb criticism.”
“I never saw no news,” said Franco. “Shit. Too much time in bed with Mel! Hey, better get us moving.” Even as he spoke, a swarm of heavily armed zombies charged from a side-street with a roar. Limping and dragging and lolling, they attacked the hovering low-level chopper and started to hurl bricks and bottles.
Franco gave them a V-sign through the web-crackled cockpit. “Dickheads!” he shouted. “What d’ya think you’re doing, throwing bottles at a damned armoured chopper? Go on, bugger off the lot of you!”
“Franco!” hissed Keenan, as a zombie lifted an RPG and shouldered the long, sleek, matt green military-grade weapon.
“Yeah yeah, OK, I’m on it. Don’t get your knickers twisted all backside waywards.”
The Apache soared towards the sky, zombies waving fists to become distant stick-zombies. The RPG disgorged and the warhead slammed towards them trailing fire and smoke. Franco twisted the Apache, and the rocket arced off into the distant sky like one of the world’s largest, deadliest fireworks.
Franco turned and beamed at Keenan and Xakus, the Apache still climbing vertically. “See, com-padre? What you panicking for? You’re with the smart party now! Nothing can touch Franco ‘Chopper King’ Haggis when he’s got his War Head on!” He beamed, congratulating himself on the metaphor. “You see what I did there? Warhead? War... head! My head? You see? Geddit? Ha! Now, all I need is to get those bloody Black Tigers in my sights...”
They slammed up from the jagged toothline of skyscrapers, just as two Black Tigers crossed their path. Franco’s Apache smashed into the lead Black Tiger Gunship side-on with a devastating crunch, the Apache’s nose poking into and through the passenger hold, through buckled side-cargo doors.
The two war machines merged with a scream of metal.
Franco stared, slack-jawed, as ten zombies glared at him through his web-riddled cockpit windscreen. They cocked weapons, and with chewed, severed fingers and lolling, pus-oozing jaws, levelled a bristling array of guns...
The two choppers, locked together in an unholy embrace, fought to travel in different directions. Engines whined and screamed. Exhausts spat fire and oil-smoke, ice-shards and matrix-spill. Rotors, spinning at 10,000 rpm only inches apart, set up a weird aural wailing as sound waves bounced and chopped between them. Suddenly, this gestalt machine entity began to jerk and wobble and weave across the sky in looping arcs, in the most un-balletic example of combat chopper flight ever witnessed above The City; the joining jerked and fell, lifted and spun, a spastic dance of screaming motors and wrestling controls. Franco fought with his Apache F52 Gunship, cursing and howling, one eye on the ten armed zombies who were growling and spitting beyond the spider-screen. However, he didn’t need to worry. As the locked and mating choppers gyrated and pulled, dropped and whirled, so the ten zombies with aimed weapons were suddenly tossed about inside the hold like rotten, fuzzy tomatoes in a blender. They bounced and spun and slammed and thrashed. With wide eyes, Franco watched them disintegrate slowly before him, rotten limbs pulled free, heads bouncing from his cockpit, green pus spewing to swill first across floors, then walls, then ceiling. Occasional random bullets zipped and pinged as zombies head-butted one other into oblivion.
Franco patted his harness with relief.
The second Black Tiger had roared past the merged and buckled machines, lifting and banking, coming around with two zombies arming heavy machine guns. It levelled, watching for a moment for a clear shot... and then, obviously deciding it was willing to sacrifice its comrade in order to bring down the enemy Apache, the Tiger’s guns opened fire...
Bullets roared. They slapped up the Apache’s flanks, then on into the Black’s Tiger’s fuselage.
“Hey! Hey stop that!” screamed Franco, as the zombie mincer mashed and churned before his beady eyes. He was starting to feel sick. He tried again and again to pull the Apache free, jerking backwards, full-throttle, with engines roaring in a grinding, pumping frenzy. The Apache’s nose-cone groaned, and tugged, and resolutely refused to budge.
Keenan, every few seconds, got the third Black Tiger in his sights. He squeezed the EMF’s heavy triggers, watched bullet and tracer slam off across the night. Then, in their erratic dance, the gun would be pulled from his hands with a slick curse.
“I feel sick!” moaned Franco, observing the organic zombie blender.
“Get us out of this shit!” screamed Keenan, firing off more heavy calibre rounds. Several found their mark, and the Black Tiger leapt up into the sky, circling, aiming for a safe, clear shot. More bullets slapped the wal
tzing machines. More punctures appeared in both the Apache F52 and its unwilling lover.
“What’s that smell?” said Franco, voice suddenly cool, head clear. An arm landed against his cockpit window. It only had one finger. A middle finger. It seemed to be giving Franco a final, mocking farewell.
“Aviation fuel,” snapped Keenan.
There came a roar as the free and painfully dangerous Black Tiger unleashed a blast of industrial flamethrower over the two machines. Flames sped along the Black Tiger’s tail and Franco, chirping and squeaking like a panicked budgerigar, wrestled with his controls and gnawed with his teeth. He slapped open his harness, sat back, and kicked out at his cockpit with both sandals. The arm with its offending middle finger vanished into the mire of pulped churned zombie slush. The cockpit folded over, and fell inside the enemy chopper. Franco scrambled out, onto his own machine’s nose-cone. He could hear the roar of fire. He could smell smoke and hear the ping of superheating alloy. Bullets whirred and whined. There! There! He could see the ridge that trapped them! The alloy lip which ensnared their brave Apache! Franco scrambled down the nose cone, and around in a circle, a monkey atop a cracked and sliding cockpit screen which in turn floated atop ten mashed mushed zombies. Franco poked his MPK into the ridge gap and with a grunt, levered at the locked and battling choppers. The barrel of his gun groaned, then bent in a comedy U shape.
“Bastard. Bastard.”
Panting hard, and with the temperature rising fast, in the gap between nose-cone and door-rim Franco could see Keenan pumping round after round at the enemy Black Tiger through a funnel of flames. He scrambled back, bottom sliding on the gore-slippery screen. With both sandals, he slammed at the Apache’s nose cone. Again, and again, and again.
As he kicked, grunting, sweating, he made the mistake of looking down. Several zombie faces were pressed against the underside of the battered cockpit, squashed and leering at him with lolling tongues and the permanent inebriation of the alcoholic dead.
“Aaii,” said Franco, shuddering, and with a final surge of sandalled feet, he disconnected the two combat helicopters. There came a deep and heavy groan of stressed and twisting steel. The two machines eased apart, and Franco punched the air several times.
“Yes! Yes YES!”
And then he realised.
He was inside the enemy chopper, surfing a glass platter atop a sea of mulched zombie. The chopper was on fire. And, quite possibly, about to explode.
“No! No NO!” he squeaked, and ran, leaping from the buckled doorway to skydive towards his falling, out-of-control Apache F52. Behind, there came a click of detonation. The Black Tiger billowed into a raging howling screaming fireball, the nose turned towards The City far below... and began to suddenly accelerate in a smoking, fiery plummet. Straight at Franco.
Franco dived like an Olympic athlete, but his body was far from aerodynamic. Below, inside the Apache, he could see Keenan fighting to free himself from his harness. Franco gave a wave, beard flapping in the wind, and watched Keenan return him a scowl of pure evil.
With a grunt, Franco landed on the Apache’s buckled, battered nose cone, sandals slipping treacherously. “Yeah, baby!” he cheered. His nostrils twitched. He could smell smoke. Beard snapping violently, he glanced back. The fiery fireball of the burning detonated Black Tiger was gaining. Inside its roaring shell, there came further cracks of ignition as bullets exploded.
Franco screamed, clambered through the cockpit hole and into the Apache, grabbed the controls and veered them to the right and down, levelling out with a sudden thudding of rotors and an instant rush of cool, rhythmical calm.
They hovered.
Behind, the flaming Black Tiger disappeared to ground level and there came a whumpf. Flames roared a hundred feet high, broiling. Franco sat, breathing deeply, eyes saucer wide. He patted frantically at himself, to check he was still in one piece. Then he turned and beamed at Keenan.
“Hey hey hey!”
“You dickhead.”
“What? I mean... what?”
“You utter arsehole.”
“Hey, come on, admit it, that was a serious bit of adventuring, right? Couldn’t have done it any better if I’d been a stunt man in the movies.” He chuckled to himself. “Huh. I tell you something, they should give me a job in Holy Hollywood!”
“Yes,” snarled Keenan, “as the fucking tea boy. The other chopper’s coming round. Get us moving!”
“Right you are, boss.”
They cruised, low, at a slow and manoeuvrable speed, waiting for the attack—which never came.
“We’ve lost him!” beamed Franco.
“Hmm,” said Keenan, and by the look on his face it was clear he was unconvinced.
“Either that, or them damn zombies recognised in me a superior flight commander. I tell you something, Keenan, I would have made a great Luftwaffe pilot, I would! Untouchable! King of the Skies! Fighter Pilot supremo!”
“Have you finished?”
“No.”
“Well finish. Now. And get us the hell out of here.”
“North?”
“Yeah. To NanoTek.”
“I’m on it.” And, still muttering about superior flight skills, clever aerial combat manoeuvres, and how he’d beat them damn zombies in a fair dogfight any day, Franco—eventually—flew them north.
~ * ~
They flew for an hour, sometimes low through deserted city streets, sometimes whumping over armies of zombies. After several incidents of RPG tracking, Franco avoided close confrontation with battalions of tooled-up deviants.
“They’re getting more frisky,” said Keenan, as they passed low over yet another collection of maybe ten thousand zombies. They milled around, armed to the backbone, eyes on the heavens and the stench of fresh brain scooting overhead.
“You think they can smell us? Even from down there?”
Keenan shrugged, smoking, eyes on the damaged readouts from the Apache’s battered and cracked console. “Mate, I wouldn’t put anything past them. One thing’s for sure; they’re a damned sight more advanced than any living-dead creature has a right to be.”
Xakus remained silent, withdrawn, often closing his eyes and resting his head back against the wall. After their recent near-death experiences, and the death of MICHELLE, Xakus simply wanted this mission finished. He had lost his sense of humour.
They flew through heavy falls of snow, then out under crystal clear heavens. Cold wind howled into the Apache F52 through a vacant lack of cockpit windshield and the three men pulled on heavy thermal jackets which ignited with a chemical click.
After a while, the world seemed to fall silent.
It was as if they had left the zombies behind.
Mile after mile of vacant, blank, cold, dead skyscraper scrolled beneath them. There was no life here, no movement; nothing. They had entered a ghost town, a dead world, a planet of lost dreams.
“We getting close?” said Keenan, after a while.
“Yes,” said Franco. “Not far now.”
They sped out under fifty-lane highways which soared, veering above a vast and choppy ocean gleaming like black glass. Huge thick crystal struts with a fifty-foot diameter soared from beneath the ocean, supporting arcing bridges and walkways and elevated cubescrapers. The giant support plinths glittered with twinkling lights.
“This place is surreal,” said Franco, finally.
Keenan nodded. “An echoing underworld,” he said, smoking and sipping at a coffee from the Apache’s CoffeeChef™—perhaps the only single item aboard the vehicle which hadn’t been battered, bashed, scratched or scorched in some way.
“It’s spooky all right. Reminds me of Teller’s World.”
“Yeah, and that other place after the K Jump.” They both fell into a brooding silence, contemplating the Zone they’d travelled after the jump from Teller’s. By all rights, they should have been dead. In all reality, they carried a splinter to another place in their souls. It made them not quite human. But then, t
hat was another story...
Keenan leant forward, catching a glimpse of something nestling in the Apache’s foot-well. Franco had cunningly draped a jacket over the item in disguise. “What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
“Franco?”
Franco looked shifty. “‘Tis nothing boss. Honest injun.”
Keenan made a grab for the jacket, and Franco made a grab to stop him but Keenan was too quick; the jacket whipped away to reveal...
“Is that the damned IMS Knuckles took from the SIM back at Porky Pauper’s juggernaut depot?”
“Aye.”
“And what do you want with it?”
“Protection.”
“Franco, it’s fucking dangerous, mate. You know why they made them illegal. Because if some moron got hold of one, he could do some real fucking damage! It’s about the only thing that’ll get you ejected hardwire offworld from The City, for God’s sake! It is their one Statute Law. Gods, they see an IMS as far worse than any suitcase nuke.”