Hardcore - 03

by Andy Remic

  "Shut up," growled Pippa, dignity ruffled, eyes scanning the ceiling.

  There came a crash, further down the ward, and the baby emerged from a hole and hung by its toes, surveying the group. Its tiny wrinkled face was indeed human in appearance, as was every other part of its wrinkled body, right down to the newly-clamped umbilical.

  The baby gurgled, with the sort of lovely wobbly baby sound only a baby can make.

  And attacked...

  It bounced like a mad little Yoda amongst the group, kicking and punching, head-butting and biting. Like a thing possessed, the tiny naked pink baby growled and spat and bounced and tore at flesh with tiny clawed fingers. Franco's gun fired, a slam of quick succession bullets that tracked the baby as it spun fast past Betezh. There came a whum whum whump, the final bullet embedding in Betezh's shoulder and smashing him back onto his rump. The babe landed on Betezh's head, and both hands slapped him on the forehead with stunning force, making him reach up and grab it. It squealed, wriggling and clawing at his powerful fingers.

  "Shoot it! Shoot it!" screamed Betezh, half in triumph, half in horror. Baby fingers tore at his flesh, drawing blood, snapping his fingers, as both Franco and Keenan aimed uneasily, guns weaving, aware that an incorrectly placed bullet could blow Betezh's head clean off.

  "Hold it still!" bellowed Franco.

  "It's fucking biting me!" yelled Betezh, "how can I hold it fucking still?"

  Keenan's gun cracked and the bullet slammed the baby's chest. However, instead of separating the baby into baby bits, its body accepted the spinning bullet with a plop that seemed to stretch flesh and skin and shake the baby as if it was a pink flesh rattle.

  The newborn kicked backwards from Betezh's grip, and landed lightly on disjointed legs. It scowled at Keenan, eyes dark and narrowed, then gurgled something unintelligible in baby-speak which might have been, "Urgle wurgle bubble cubble", then bounced off down the corridor in a curious mixture of running, jumping, bouncing and leaping, using floor, beds and walls to aid its mad dash.

  Franco tracked with his Kekras, but couldn't bring himself to shoot a fleeing newborn in the back. "Damn," he said, then glanced at Keenan. "Man, you're a savage shot."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "You shot a fucking baby in the chest!"

  "It wasn't a baby."

  "It looked like a baby!"

  "Guys, guys, I'm bleeding over here," said Betezh weakly, and Pippa and Olga knelt by him, rummaging in packs for bullet pads as Betezh did his own impersonation of a baby wailing.

  Keenan and Franco stood guard, scowling as Betezh moaned about Franco being a bad shot, and how it was bad enough with the damn and bloody enemy firing at you without your own damn and bloody team putting a bullet in your muscle.

  "Shut up," said Franco, through gritted teeth.

  With Betezh patched and nursing an injured arm, they moved off down the Maternity Ward again, only this time far more alert, and not about ready to be overcome by the con-cries of an apparently innocent babe...

  There came a final, terrible buzz and the lights died. Combat K cursed, to a man, and flicked on the barrel lights on their weapons. The Maternity Ward seemed suddenly a much more eerie place; a place of long shadows and strange shapes, all imbued with the stink of iodine.

  They moved slowly, with care, guns tracing every shadow, every flicker of movement. All were hairline triggers waiting to be tripped; all except Franco. He seemed quite laid back about the entire proceedings.

  "I gotta admit," said Franco, "I just don't like babies."

  "Well, one did just try to kill you," said Keenan.

  "No, not because of that. I mean, in general, sort of thing. On a day-to-day basis. I just don't like the little buggers."

  "What a stupid thing to say," snapped Pippa. "How can you not like babies? What's not to like?"

  "We-eell," said Franco. "They're ugly, ain't they?"

  "Ugly? What is ze craziness of this man?" boomed Olga.

  "They are, admit it, every damn baby ever born is damn and bloody ugly. They're all wrinkled up and squashed up, with the funny little putty faces and big mouths with no teeth going 'Wah!' and 'Wurh' then covering you in baby sick. It's quite a revolting thing, really. Humans are quite revolting."

  "Are you mad?" snapped Pippa. "I've never heard such drivel in all my life! Babies are cute!"

  "Cute like my arse," said Franco.

  "You're a heathen idiot," said Pippa.

  "Maybe," said Franco, smugly, "but it doesn't remove the fact that all babies are ugly. To a man. Woman. Boy and girl, I mean." He beamed. "And they smell. That kind of weirdy milky puke chocolate smell all babies carry like a bad, um, smell. You getting the drift of my argument?"

  Olga's fist whacked Franco on the top of his head, and he grunted, head shunted down into his neck like a turtle retreating into its shell. He scowled at her, and hissed, "Violence isn't the answer to everything, Olga."

  "It's ze answer to your drivel!"

  "If you can't argue your bloody corner, then retreat with dignity!"

  "Grrwl," said Olga, clenching her fist again.

  "OK, OK!" Franco held up his hands. "Come on, let's stop bickering, we have a mission to attend!" He trotted forward to where Keenan walked point. "Tsch," he said, gesturing backwards with his thumb, "women, hey?"

  "You'll feel different," said Keenan.

  "Eh?"

  "When you have your own kids. They're an awesome experience, mate. Like nothing on earth. It's just... there's nothing worse than other people's children. All the good things become evil." He smiled at Franco's confusion and melancholy.

  They moved through the darkness.

  Occasionally, they heard scrabbling sounds, as of something small and quick scuttling into a recess. Sometimes, a solitary baby wail echoed distantly, as if sent to taunt them; to mock them with its high-pitched music.

  "What's that?" said Franco, shielding his eyes. "Over there? Right over there? It's stairs!"

  "The end of the Maternity Ward," said Keenan, relief in his voice.

  "Well!" beamed Franco, turning to beam at Pippa, Olga and a pale-faced Betezh. "This wasn't so bad, was it? A single pinky and wriggly baby sent to stop us! No problems battling something like that, eh, people?"

  There came a roar, only this wasn't the roar of men charging into battle, or the roar of a caged or cornered lion; this was a roar of a thousand tiny baby voices squeaking in hatred, each strand of sound entwining to form a terrible high-pitched vibrating, ululating whole. The noise rushed over Combat K, and from the darkness they came like a wriggling pink tide, sprinting and bouncing, climbing and running along the walls; babies, lots of babies, hundreds of babies, all shapes and sizes and colours, pink ones and white ones, yellow ones and brown ones, thin ones and scrawny ones, wobbling ones and fat ones, some so obese they dragged themselves across the ground like huge pink wriggling slugs. They came with a roar, and Combat-K stood, stunned, rooted to the spot with something other than fear, something far greater than fear. This transcended fear right off the bloody scale past horror and on its way to an indescribable insanity-inducing disbelief.

  "Run!" screamed Franco, at last, voice like a girl.

  This broke the spell, and Combat-K pounded down the Maternity Ward, pursued by the fast-moving tide of babies, gums snapping at heels, finger clipping boots and WarSuit legs as they ran and crawled and spat and hissed...

  A baby leapt onto Franco's back, tiny pink-brown arms encircling his throat. "Gerroff!" he screamed, "Gerroff!" He turned, and the baby puked sick into his eyes, stinging him, blinding him and he stumbled backwards as claws raked his bearded face and there came a boom. Pippa's D5 shell plucked the baby from Franco's back and spat it upwards and out into the throng.

  Still running, Franco whirled, and scooped baby sick from his eyes. "Thanks, chipmunk," he panted, and realised in horror one of his Kekras had gone. "Damn and bloody blast bloody babies!"

  Overcoming their uneasiness in the
face of claw-like fingers and sharp baby gums, Combat K opened fire as they ran, bullets and shells whining and blasting into the pursuing ranks of deviant hunting babies. Babies were shot from walls and ceilings, blasted in flails of tiny limbs, gums gawping, dummies truly spat out as they whirled under a hot metal onslaught only to fall, roll, and be trampled by the hordes of their scampering fast-crawling bouncing comrades...

  "I've never seen so many babies," panted Pippa, sprinting alongside Keenan. "Duck!" Keenan ducked and Pippa's D5 blast picked the spread-eagled, leaping baby from the air and smashed it away into the darkness, separating it into five separate baby pieces with an almost comical "Waaahhhhhhhh!"

  "I can see the stairs!" screamed Franco, and Combat K, gun-barrels glowing, pounded on. Betezh, ahead of Franco now (after all, Franco was only a little fella) had a fat baby land on his back, and Franco grabbed the little tyke and for long seconds found himself staring into wide baby-blue eyes. "Wah!" went the baby, and "Wah!" went Franco before he tossed the kid backwards over his head, to be trampled by the stampede of hungering baby flesh...

  Combat K stumbled onto the landing, bouncing from the wall and sprinting onto the stairs.

  Suddenly, all noise ceased... and Combat-K faltered to a halt, panting, slick with sweat. They glanced back, and found themselves staring at a sea of tiny, wrinkled faces, eyes blinking, some sucking on dummies, many wearing nappies and bibs, but all suddenly, strangely motionless as if they'd met some invisible barrier they could not cross.

  "Hell," hissed Franco.

  The babies blinked at him, sucking on soothers.

  "Looks like it from here," said Keenan, panting, and wiping blood from his forehead where a baby's savage talons had slashed a long line through his flesh. "Come on. I think we're safe from them."

  Franco pointed at the mass of babies, numbering in the hundreds, and he shouted, "See here, you little bastards! If I happen to come back through here, reet, then you lot are in for a kicking so you are!"

  Pippa leant close. "You tell those damn babies," she said.

  "Well!" snorted Franco, indignantly. "They messed with the wrong squaddie, didn't they?"

  "Yeah, Franco. You saw them off just fine."

  "You think so?"

  "No, idiot."

  Combat K scrambled down the stairs, which seemed suddenly infused with a thick, grey fog, oily and spun around corded grey tendrils. The fog filled the stairwell, almost blinding the group as they moved fluidly down steps... and in the process, managed to become totally and hopelessly separated.

  Pippa stopped on the stairs, deeply disorientated. "Franco?" she hissed. "Stop being a dick, Franco, where are you?" No answer. "Keenan?" No answer. Now she started to get edgy, and with arms stretched out before her in the oily smoke, and coughing a little on its thick, intrusive fist, she descended further, down and down, her boots making faint slapping noises on the concrete.

  The steps ended, and Pippa stumbled. Smoke cleared, and she saw herself in a huge, huge warehouse-type space. Far above, the ceiling was a corrugated slope. She moved forward, could discern distant walls, distant boundaries; parts of the interior space were filled with huge stacks of cargo containers, as used on Stack Truks and Grey Ships. Their huge rectangular bodies, in a myriad of subtle colours, were strangely eerie, so huge, so silent, in this massive cold place.

  Pippa moved forward, then turned back to see if her colleagues emerged from the stairwell. She could not see the stairs, only a perfectly flat wall of smoke, rolling and coiling behind an invisible barrier.

  I've been moved, she thought. Shunted. Like a rat through a maze. Shit.

  Her gun felt hopelessly inadequate in her gloved hands, and Pippa moved warily across the vast expanse of matt black floor. She began to weave between stacks of containers, eyes narrowed, gun tracking, searching out possible new targets.

  She smelt it, before she saw it.

  Fire.

  Or, more precisely, burns. Charred flesh. Scorched skin. The aroma of frying, human fat. The sizzling stench of a cooked person.

  Pippa shivered, in horrible anticipation. And recognised the reality of her waking nightmare.

  Nothing scared Pippa. Nothing. Not guns, not knives, fists, boots or bombs. She'd endured broken ribs, broken legs, even a broken neck once in a skiing accident. She'd been shot on no less than sixteen occasions; once in the head, the scar now happily concealed by her thick, bobbed hair. She'd been stabbed in the belly, and in the right kidney, and had two fingers amputated in a sword fight with a GG AI (now, thankfully, grafted back on). None of those things brought so much as a tremor of fear to Pippa's steel-like countenance...

  But fire. Fire was a different story...

  She'd been six years old. She remembered, vividly, her mother putting her to bed and reading a story about a magical tortoise with a shell like Doctor Who's TARDIS, in which he lived a life of tortoise luxury with three female tortoises and a stack of mouse burgers. After the story, as Pippa dozed, so her mother kissed her brow and put out the light, remembering of course to leave the landing light on, and the door ajar, providing just enough ambient glow, just enough idea of sanctuary.

  Pippa drifted into happy dreamland, in which she was a tortoise living in an over-large shell. But noises infected her dream, shouts and screams and they were screams of panic, of fear, of pain and she opened her eyes and was coughing even before she was awake on thick acrid smoke...

  She sat up, a sudden movement, rigid with fear. She could hear a roar. "Mummy!" she yelled, but by shouting she sucked in great lungfuls of smoke which sent her slamming into a choking fit. She climbed out of bed, rushed to the door which was hot to the touch, but she was too young to realise the dangers... she threw open the door and fire rushed in, a living dancing demon, hammering her like a wall of glass, shattering over her, taking her in a fist of flame and crushing her, mercilessly.

  Glass smashed.

  Something smothered her, a fire blanket, and she felt great strong hands patting out her flaming She Girl pyjamas. Something pressed over her mouth and she was flooded with a precious sweet oxygen which she gulped at, like a dying fish. She blinked up at this huge strong man, with his crooked nose and yellow helmet and awkward but reassuring smile, and for moments thought it was her daddy come to rescue her but realisation dawned. It was a fireman, and he lifted her in powerful arms, cooing as if she was an injured fawn, and he carried her to the window and she remembered seeing the brutal fire-axe leant against the wall with its battered, scarred head. He climbed out, amidst smoke and searing flames, and she heard the gasp from below, then the cheer and the turntable ladder rotated and lowered, hydraulics hissing, ratchets clanking, until the smiling dirt-smeared fireman delivered her into the arms of her weeping mother...

  "Where's daddy?" she asked, wondering why her daddy hadn't rescued her.

  "He's been burned. In the fire."

  Then the paramedics were there, checking her over and rushing her into the ambulance and away, to the burns unit of the local hospital. Most of her hair was scorched away, and the back of her neck and entire back seared by flame to a black, charcoal cinder. When the firewall had leapt at her, she turned to run...

  Pippa blinked, now, remembering the following months of pain, the skin-grafts, the agony. Tears developed at the corners of her eyes, for here and now the smell of frying flesh reminded her of her own, all those years ago, when she'd been nothing but an innocent little girl. She discovered, much later, her father had fallen asleep, in bed, with a cigarette. The happy glowing little cig had burned down to its filter, a long and delicately balanced cylinder of ash, a mocking middle finger of grey which gradually crumbled, and ignited the duvet. In seconds her father's legs had been consumed, and he had run from the house screaming, setting fire to the stairs and landing in his fast, self-preservation exit - thus condemning Pippa to a fire-ensnared tomb. If it hadn't been for the bravery of the firemen, she'd be dead...

  "Bastard."

  The word ejected
from a snarl of lips, and even now Pippa felt the old scars on her back itching, and she thought of her father, and she hated her father. She remembered the thick yellow cream, remembered vividly the many skin-graft operations continuing for a further six years, simply to return her to a semblance of normality. She remembered school, and her torture at school: kids were evil little bastards at the best of times, she knew, and even now she shivered, remembering the other kids chasing her with matches and lighters, making dolls of her and burning them in the classroom and playground. She'd wept, oh how she had wept and begged to be left alone. But the bullying continued, merciless, endless. Her parents couldn't stop it, her teachers couldn't stop it, because bullies were clever, cunning, they knew when to strike in those tiny moments when nobody else was around, nobody else there to witness the pain. The worst - Emelda, a big butch lass with legs like girders and a spotted face like a burst melon, with facial lumps and frizzy hair like bad candyfloss - Emelda, yeah, Emelda had taken particular delight in torturing Pippa, chasing her on long winter mornings across frosted fields, throwing lit matches at her in class, singing "Burn the witch, burn the witch, burn the witch!" This went on for years. For long, agonizing years. Years of subtle fear, of checking the coast was clear before leaving school and before joining the dinner queue; always the last to enter the classroom, just after the teacher, much to the amusement and general hilarity of Emelda and her group of mocking cronies. Pippa the Prick, they called her. Pippa takes Prick. Pippa the Witch. Pippa the Bitch, Pippa the Walking Corpse, fucking burnt bitch, you should have died in that fire with your mum and dad, you should be a blackened stick-corpse stinking like fried pigmeat, lying in a mass grave for the burned, all curled up together like burnt bacon and your fingers like black twisted twigs.

  They caught her by the local shops. Ironically, her dad had sent her to buy cigarettes and matches, and she stood, arms limp, matches in one hand, as the girls formed a semicircle cutting off her escape and Emelda, with her frizzy mass of back-combed curly hair, snarled words filled with poison and hatred and Pippa did not understand, did not understand this hate. What had she done? She said it, finally plucked up the courage to say the words which burned in her breast.