by Andy Remic
“We sure gave them a sting in the arse,” said Pippa, voice soft.
Keenan nodded. “I don’t think NanoTek will forget our names in a hurry. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a fucking mess. It’ll take the engineers months to sort out the wreckage. Years!”
“Ha!” snapped Franco, who was beginning to look more himself. Colour had flooded back into his cheeks, but Cam was still working hard hunting down every last trace of poison from the ginger squaddie’s polluted system. “Nothing that couldn’t be sorted with a dustpan and brush. Don’t know what you lot are moaning about! My bedroom looks worse than that after a night on the piss!”
“Yes,” said Pippa, head turning to survey Franco. “But you won’t be doing that anymore. Not now you’ve met Melanie.” She nodded towards the sleeping, injured mutation.
“Ahh. Yeah. Right.” Franco glanced back, to where Melanie snored off her excessive bout of violence. “Um. You know before, that little thing I said to you?”
“You mean about wanting to go to bed with me? Because we were all about to die?”
“Yes.” Franco considered this. “I think you may have misunderstood my intentions.”
“No no,” said Pippa, watching QGM Shuttles and Hornets slamming through the skies, roaring high overhead. “I think I understood you quite clearly.”
Franco’s eyes widened. “Hey, please don’t tell Melanie!”
Pippa sighed. “Cam. You finished with his blood yet? Only,” she wriggled, “I think my insides are about to fall out.”
“Oh my God!” snapped Cam. “You poor girl!”
“It’s OK, Cam,” said Keenan, taking Pippa’s hand. “I’ll see to her.”
“You sure?” she said, head tilting.
Keenan nodded. “I’ll sew you up. Only, don’t get too friendly. I’ve still got a bullet with your name on it.”
~ * ~
Slick brought the Marine Frigate down on the towering, abandoned, fifty-lane highway. All were awake, except for Mel. Cam had worked feverishly on her injuries, cauterising wounds and bone-welding breaks. Finally, he gave her a massive sedative and, with Franco holding her claws as her eyes flickered and closed, she fell into a thankful sleep.
Frigate legs clanged, cracking the highway. After engines had died to a muted after-roar, the Frigate’s belly opened and Combat K stared out into a new, rising dawn.
“Wow,” breathed Franco, hopping down the buckled, lava-scorched ramp, and out into a fresh new world. “It’s beautiful!”
“QGM are on the ground at last,” came Slick’s voice over the ScreamSpeaker, as he checked his scanners and PAD. “They finally thought it was time to restore order! Bastards. Maybe it had something to do with Steinhauer’s Panic Burst, hey? Shit. What a mess.”
Keenan nodded, and followed Franco outside, boots clumping on the smashed, rubble-strewn highway. He glanced down, at the decimation of The City stretching away for as far as the eye could see. Fires burned, barricades smouldered, but he could identify no signs of the zombies which had infected the planet like a plague. “Beautiful?” Keenan laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far, Franco,” he said, surveying the aftermath of an atomic blast.
“But we’re alive!” beamed Franco, and did a little dance, sandals flapping.
“Only just.”
“You’re missing the point!”
“Am I?”
“Yeah. We always pull through! We always surge ahead. After all, we’re Combat K... we’re the smarty party!” He did another little shuffle, then punched the air in glee.
Pippa emerged, holding onto her tightly bandaged side. Her clothes were in tatters, the gleam of her white, neat, tightly-bandaged flank somehow at odds with the desecration of her current wardrobe.
“Franco’s right. It is beautiful.”
Keenan grunted, and turned as the Marine Frigate disgorged its crew. Knuckles ran forward, and gave Franco and Keenan a big hug. Behind him strode Olga, freshly attired, beaming with a face-wide smile and licking her lips in anticipation of meeting a still-breathing Franco. Finally came Slick, followed by a motley crew of rag-tag ex-Combat K men.
Keenan shook Slick’s hand. “It’s good to see you, mate.”
“And you.”
Keenan grinned past Slick. “I see you there, Chicken. And Clinty Eastwood! I thought you died five years ago? Still smoking those cigars? And you Bob Bob, you wily old bastard.” Bob Bob grinned at Keenan, and rubbed at a custard stain which marked his worn and faded combats.
“We have a stowaway,” said Cam, emerging on a stream of ionised air. His battered shell spun, lights flickering. He looked far from being the polished, immaculate PopBot of a few days earlier.
“Oh yeah?” said Keenan.
“Steinhauer. But he’s nearly dead.”
“He saved my life,” said Pippa. “He must have crawled up the ramp during the fight!”
The Combat K men carried the battered, unconscious shell of Steinhauer from his hiding place in the SLAM Cruiser, and away to the medical deck of the Marine Frigate which towered above them on their vantage point across the elevated, curved highway.
“That bastard has a lot to answer for,” snarled Keenan. “He played us as pawns. Do you believe we’ve got logic cubes in our spines? That we are required to cooperate?”
“I’ve got the feeling it was true,” said Pippa, voice hushed.
“Well, we’ll find out what he wants, soon enough. When the bastard awakes.” Distantly, as if in a dream, he could hear Franco trying to push Olga away.
“One kiss,” she was saying. “For little Olgy Wolgy.”
“No! No! Listen, the missus is asleep in there, and I’m warning you, she’s an eight-foot deviant with a love of fresh brains! You’d better be careful! She’ll not like you mauling me! I’m an honourable man, I am. I am betrothed to be married!”
“Ahh, for you, Franco, I would battle all ze deviants in Hell itself!”
Keenan strode to the edge of the freeway, and leant on the bounce barrier. He patted at his battered WarSuit, dipped his hand inside, and pulled free a buckled, battered, but miraculously intact tin of Widow Maker tobacco. He balanced the tin on the barrier, and started to roll a cigarette. A cool breeze ruffled his hair. Distantly, the destroyed crater of NanoTek rumbled.
Knuckles moved to him. “Did you destroy the GreenSource Mainframe entirely?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I can feel it. Up here.” He tapped his skull. “Back on Ket, when the Fractured Emerald alien entered me, she left me with a gift. She gave me an ability to... see certain things. Unwittingly, the GreenSource unleashed this ability—freed me of a mental restriction. Now, I can feel it... feel her. She is crushed down there, under a million tonnes of shit. Exactly what she deserved.”
“Listen. Something’s happened to the zombies.” Knuckles rubbed his hands together, then one strayed to the velvet bag at his waist. “When you blew the SPIRAL dock, when you pulped GreenSource, all the zombies lay down in the street. As if going to sleep. Slick has received intel from QGM; apparently, very slowly, the zombies are changing back!”
“Into people?”
Knuckles nodded. “Yeah. It’s a miracle!”
“Not a miracle,” snorted Keenan. “A function of technology. The biomods, without instruction or command, are reverting that which they deviated. GreenSource told me NanoTek were experimenting on the whole damned city; the whole planet was a testing ground for zombies and their different deviated definitions. The aim was to create and select the strongest and most lethal forms of toxic killer. GreenSource was building a new junk army.” He laughed. He sounded bitter. “A new pestilence to replace the old, and powered by a deviant microscopic technology that would spread like bacteria across a million conquered worlds! I just love science. It’s so clinically amoral.”
Knuckles shivered. “That’s bad, Keenan.” He leapt up to sit on the barrier, and glanced off over the ruins, hair in disa
rray, eyes sparkling. He kicked his red gloss boots against the barrier with thumps.
Keenan sighed. “Anyway, how are you doing, lad? I’m here moaning like a geriatric with back pain.”
“It’s been... an adventure! And I’ve learnt a lot of lessons in the last few days.”
“Haven’t we all?”
“Are you referring to Pippa? I thought you two were enemies? Ready to kill each other the instant you met? I just watched you talking. You could not mistake the body-language.” Knuckles gave a cheeky grin, but his eyes were old; older than death.
Keenan stared at Knuckles for a long time. Then he ran his hand through matted hair, took a long drag on his smoke, and sighed. “I think I never truly wanted her dead. I loved her... once. Hell, I still love her. But I can’t forgive her. And here? Well, she came good in the end. Combat K were forced into a reunion; and it looks like for the immediate future we have no choice in the matter. Without Pippa,” Keenan gestured across The City, “well, all those people out there, they would still be deviants. Walking dead-meat. She played her part.” His eyes were filled with pain. And confusion.
“I believe you don’t really know how you feel.” Knuckles’s voice was gentle. He was still rubbing at the velvet bag, hung at his waist.
“Maybe you’re right, lad. I’ll think on it.” He laughed. “Anyway, that bag you carry. We made a deal, didn’t we? Although you were right. We never did change Mel back to human.”
“You decoded the SinScript?”
“Yes. I used GreenSource.”
“And what does it say?”
Keenan grimaced. “Destroy Quad-Gal.”
“That’s... bad, Keenan.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Hey, he’ll be OK, Knuckles,” said Pippa, approaching to place a hand on Keenan’s arm. She forced a smile to her mouth, although her eyes were still dark, hooded, the eyes of an unreadable killer. “We’ll look after him now.”
“I can’t even look after myself.”
“So, go on, what’s in the bag?” said Pippa.
“The knuckle bones of my parents. They were killed three years ago. That’s why I live on the streets. I keep them as... a reminder. One day, I will find my parents’ killers. I will exact a terrible revenge!” His eyes shone, full of unshed tears. “And I will never forget my friends, Little Megan, and the others; all those killed by The Hammer Syndicate.” He eyed Keenan thoughtfully. “I have a lot of revenge left in me.”
Keenan nodded, and smoked.
Knuckles moved off, filled with melancholy. Olga, tired with Franco’s rejection, gave the lad a bosom-engulfing hug.
“Sounds like he has the perfect family history to join Combat K!” said Pippa, shaking her head.
“Yeah, well, the lad came good in the end. Who knows what the future has in store for him.”
“We’re a brutal species.”
“It’s in our nature,” said Keenan.
“Yeah, but one day, maybe, we’ll change.”
Keenan eyed her warily. “I doubt it,” he said.
Franco arrived, rubbing at his bristling beard. He patted Keenan on the back, and the three of them stood there, Combat K, together, watching the destroyed world of The City through cynical eyes.
Keenan leant over the barrier, staring at the vast scene of total desolation. “There’s a war coming,” he said, voice barely above a whisper. He turned, stared at Franco and Pippa. “When we unleashed Leviathan, on Teller’s World, we thought we’d put it back in the cage. But we didn’t, did we? We failed.”
Pippa’s eyes were glittering. She took a deep breath. “We need to put this thing right,” she said.
Keenan nodded, turning to stare back over The City.
“Yeah, but how do we do that?” said Franco. “After all, there are so many pubs to visit? And I’ve got a wedding to go to!” He beamed. “I’m the groom!”
“Yeah mate, well, you better get married fast. We have to stop the junks,” said Keenan, smoke drifting from him like ribbons. “And they know it.”
“But how do we do that?” said Franco.
Keenan looked at him, laughed, and slapped him on the back. “We have to find out where they come from. What spawned them. Where they’ve been hiding. Where they were born. And more importantly, how to stop them. Only then can we tackle Leviathan.”
“Where they were born?”
“Yeah,” said Keenan. “And I know where to start. I’ve seen it. In a dream.” He laughed. “An alien dream.”
“Where’s that?”
“Sick World,” said Keenan, and flicked his smoke into the fresh ripening dawn.
~ * ~
“And here on City Newsnight, I’d like to welcome English Teacher Ellie Midget, formerly of POSH Town’s Blessed Hilda’s Perfect Educational Emporium and, apparently, formerly a reconstituted mutation zombie! Please, can we give Ellie a huge round of applause.”
[Studio audience: applause].
“Actually, I’d just like to point out I was the Head of English at Blessed Hilda’s Perfect Educational Emporium,” said Ellie, face compact, voice somewhat stiff.
“Well, many apologies for that monumental coooooooock up!.”
[Studio audience: laughter].
“Now, tell me, many people have been wondering just how horrific it actually was for you, being turned into a zombie and having your genetics squished and squashed arseways and bumward? Would you be willing to comment on life as a zombie?”
“Well the funny thing is, Eamon, that for much of the time it was actually quite enjoyable.”
[Studio audience: hushed silence].
“You mean, eating people’s brains was enjoyable?”
[Studio audience: laughter/ increase volume +12].
“No, no, not like that, what I meant to say was, on occasion, well, being a zombie, it wasn’t something horrible to eat somebody’s brain, because brain gloop smelt so good, like the best of sloppy puddings, and once you dipped your claws in it was a bit like having a Matrix-Choc Sicko Cream Egg...”
“Eating brains was like eating a chocolate egg? Why, you sick, sick perverted woman!”
[Studio audience: sigh of horror].
“Hey, you keep twisting what I say, you bastard!” Ellie lunged across the table, and with squeals of rupturing flesh and bone, long claws ripped from the ends of her delicately-painted nails. With one deft swipe, Ellie Midget removed the summit of Eamon’s cranium, straddled him—before any of the security guards had even moved—and was dipping her long, oak-gnarled claws into the TV Presenter’s yummy blue goo before anybody could even say resurrection of the zombie curse.
As they dragged Ellie Midget from the studio, her legs kicking, her mouth rimed with fresh brain, she thrashed and struggled and squirmed and shouted, “It’s not my fault, I tell you! You bastards! None of this is my fault! It was NanoTek! All NanoTek, I say!”
~ * ~
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 GG/11/12/TBA:
Quad-Gal Unification Peace Forces have issued a statement regarding recently deviated zombie creatures and their return to supposedly “normal” human status after the desecration of NanoTek’s Black Rose Citadel HQ and the biomod central controlling structure, the GreenSource Mainframe. Despite all known zombie fingers returning to human status, there have been several subsequent outbreaks of violence around rejuvenating areas of The City. It appears that, in a few instances only, those who succumbed to the pirated biomod curse [Legal disclaimer: we are in no way blaming the NanoTek Corporation for this instance of semi-genocide, and totally uphold the view that it was the fault of all hackers and pirates who deviated biomods in the first place]— well, many ex-zombies have had moments of minimal relapse. On five occasions, heads have been opened and brains e
aten.
There is no reason for panic or alarm, and we are sure that the biomod deviation is nontransferable from human to human or alien to alien. And remember, just because somebody was once a zombie, this should not affect their employment rights! Several restaurants have been found carrying
So. Be safe. Stay indoors. And whatever you do, carry a weapon—and shoot for the knee-caps.