by Andy Remic
"Death," whispered Franco, eyes wide.
"Yes," nodded the avatar. "You must cross the Morgue. Only then can you enter the core of VOLOS's domain."
"What do we have to do?" said Keenan, grasping his gun tight.
"Absolutely nothing," smiled the avatar, "although so far you have been tested on your intellect, and your mercy." The avatar licked alabaster lips, an opening in the blank, a pink stain, a crimson scar. "Now you will be tested on your savagery." Like a flow of quicksand the world dissolved and Combat-K were falling, spinning down through the powdered remains of a billion doctors and nurses, patients and madmen, through the sterile purified dust of the twisted, the deformed, the injured, the lame, the diseased, the toxic, and ultimately, the dead...
down,
down,
to the Morgue.
The corridor was old. Ancient. Pipes hissed and steamed at ceiling level, a high gothic ceiling filled with stone arches and rusted brackets, swinging chains and rust. Rust dominated, an entropy of corroded, eaten metal.
"I don't like this," muttered Franco.
"You don't like anything," said Pippa.
"Yeah, well, it gives me the heebie jeebies."
"At least we're together."
"Shh." Keenan held up a gloved hand, his attention focused. He gestured above them, where a wide metal sign, pitted with rust and battered flakes of old paint, read: THE MORGUE.
Keenan led the way through a wide archway, then through a gradually reducing tunnel of increasing rust and accelerating decrepitude. They came to a square door, made from black iron and boasting huge rivets. It was solid, in the same way a castle portcullis is solid, and Keenan grasped a thick bracket and tugged, half expecting the door to resist his efforts. Instead, it swung easily open on well-oiled hinges revealing a huge space, football stadium huge, and completely tiled with small, square, white ceramic tiles. The isolated pools of light were weak, green orb islands between seas of black.
Combat K stepped through the iron door, and only Franco turned when it eased shut behind them, grinding shut and giving a tiny, metallic click.
"We're locked in!" bellowed Franco, and his voice slammed down the giant tiled space, acoustics taking his diarrheic words and bouncing them from wall to wall to wall. "IN IN IN," boomed the echo, and gradually, eventually, faded to silence.
"It's a solid door, indeed," mused Pippa. "I thought it was to make sure we didn't get in, but it opened easily enough."
Keenan gave a nod, eyes fixed ahead, body tense, alert, ready for combat. "A thought occurs - that the door, possibly, is not so much to keep us from getting in... but rather, to keep something from getting out."
Pippa swallowed. "That's a bad thought, Zak."
"I have bad thoughts all the time," said Keenan, glancing towards her and giving a wry grin. "Come on. We need to clear this space. We need to get to VOLOS."
They moved forward, easing through the black and green globes of light. There came a sudden clatter, as Franco kicked an object which rolled out from blackness and rocked to a halt in a pool of light. "Damn and chicken bollocks!" he snapped, and his echo was picked up and smashed around the interior. "OLLOCKS, OLLOCKS, LOCKS, LOCKS, OCKS."
Keenan glared at him. "Idiot!" he hissed.
Franco gave a shrug, and trigger fingers tightened on twin Kekras as his eyes fell on the object to stub his toe. It was a skull, gaping, with the lower jaw missing. Franco stooped and scooped, and stared into the eye sockets of the skull.
"Nice place."
"What's that over there?" Pippa shifted her D5 shotgun, and the barrel light lit up a dim line of cylinders. Franco eased over to them, treading warily through the gloom. They were old. Older than old. Decrepit, with faded markings and long-ago peeled paint. The brass nozzles looked... broken.
Franco reached out...
"No!" snapped Keenan, but it was too late.
Franco twisted, and there came a hiss. Franco sniffed, then squeaked shut the valve. He held up a hand. "Hey, it's OK, it's cool. They're oxygen cylinders, alreet? Don't be all getting your knickers in a twist."
"It could have been poisonous," said Keenan, glaring as his weapon's beam swept the darkness.
Franco held out his hands. "But hey, it wasn't, right? We're cool and fine and dandy. Just a bit of leftover oxygen, down here in the..."
"Understand?" snapped Keenan.
"Eh?"
Pippa and Keenan had joined Franco. Their lights swept the ancient cylinders. There were perhaps a hundred, about thirty of them portable and small enough to carry.
"Why," said Pippa, by way of explanation, "do they need oxygen in a morgue?"
"Good point," said Franco. "Come on! Let's go."
They moved further down the huge space, boots tramping small white tiles, until they came to a wall, a titanic metal wall filled with the horizontal drawers traditionally used for the storage of the deceased. Combat K stopped, eyes staring up, and up, and along the huge wall of battered, rusting metal.
"Don't like this," said Franco, slowly.
Pippa took a step back. "Me too. I'm getting a bad feeling."
"Another test?" snarled Keenan.
"A bad, bad feeling," muttered Franco.
Their lights swept along the wall, along the rusted dented drawers. It was finally Pippa who asked the question they'd all been considering.
"Do you think they're... full?"
"I bloody hope not!" snorted Franco. "I had enough shit with zombies and shit during that bloody Biohell outbreak!" He laughed, although it was a very weak laugh accompanied by a very weak grin. "Same shit couldn't happen again, right? Lightning doesn't strike twice, an' all that? Night of the mooching dead, an' all that?" He laughed again. Nobody else did.
They walked along the banks of drawers, hundreds upon hundreds, dented and battered, the lights from their guns sweeping tiny pools of yellow against rust. Franco gulped, a few times, and couldn't bring himself to point out that nobody had answered his question.
"I mean," said Franco, jabbering a little now as trace elements of fear and angst and worry threaded through his brain like a maggot cocktail of last night's drugs, "we went through all that shit before, down on The City, with all those damn and bloody bugger zombies turning all foul on us and hunting us through the streets, and things like that can't happen more than once, oh no, not to serious hero fodder like ourselves. It left me quite traumatised, it did. In need of some serious counselling."
"Is that why you humped one?" said Pippa, gun sweeping along a low barrage of corpse drawers.
"No-oooo," said Franco, and gave a little cough. "Actually, you'll find that Mel, actually, wasn't actually technically a zombie, noo, she was actually, technically, a deviated super-soldier. So I didn't hump a zombie, did I? Actually."
"It looked like the same puddle of slime to me," said Pippa.
"And that puddle of slime happens to be dead," said Franco, teeth clenched tight.
Pippa stopped. She placed a hand on his arm. She smiled, a kind smile, which looked crooked, unreal, plastic, wrong on Pippa's face. She wasn't used to being nice; being nice was something other people did.
"I'm sorry, Franco," she said.
"That's OK," grumbled Franco. "I kinda feel she's better off dead. I remember watching her watching herself. In the mirror, y'know? She didn't realise I could see her crying, remembering how she used to be, all slim and lithesome and sexy. But she did. She remembered, deviated monster or no, and it hurt her, it burned her deep, like a knife through her soul, through her humanity. If I got changed into a zombie, I think I'd rather be dead."
"Well, I'm always here to pull the trigger, sweetie," smiled Pippa.
Franco looked into her cold, grey eyes. "I know that," he said, without any trace of humour.
"I found something."
Keenan halted up ahead, his gun poised, light fixed on a huge machine, easily twenty feet in height. It was metal, gently degraded, patched with rust. It had a squat base, solid, heavy-look
ing, and from the base rose a mechanical arm the width of a man with several hydraulic junctions. At its end sat a huge disk, with four wide, flat light bulbs glaring grey in Keenan's gun-light.
"An operating light?" said Pippa.
"Nah," said Franco. "That's a CANKER XRD Analytical X-RAY Residual Gamma Stress Analyser. It uses NDT, or non-destructive short-wave electromagnetic gamma rays, to examine the volumes of specimen, or specimens, or more precisely, bones or tissue, inside a hospital environ of course, and produces a radiograph of any particular subject, showing changes or otherwise subsequent alterations in thickness highlighting defects (internal and external) and revealing surface or near-surface organic-structural information. The gamma squeezes through any particular gap, even at a sub-atomic level, and can induce DNA alterations via the effects on whole-body gamma irradiation on localised sub-atomic beta-irradiation-induced tissue reactions, thus causing transformation and distortions on said DNA strands and posing possible cancer-causing issues when over-used and abused. Ironically, as well as causing cancer, gamma beams can be used to kill cancer cells, or they used to, before the introduction of that technology we all love-to-hate, namely biomods which attack a cancer from within and have thus negated any need for a CANKER XRD Analytical X-RAY Residual Gamma Stress Analyser in modern medicine."
Franco stopped. Keenan and Pippa were staring at him.
"What?" he said.
"You ingest the fucking manual?" said Pippa.
"Nah," said Franco. "It's a weapon, innit?"
"Meaning?"
"I'm a weapons expert, innit?"
"Meaning?"
"Anything that can be used for explosions, or detonation, or otherwise form a basis for conflagration, I have an avid interest in, thereof. A CANKER XRD Analytical X-RAY Residual Gamma Stress Analyser when used in topical applications with certain chemicals and explosives can cause a certain amount of, shall we say, Big Bang."
"Big Bang," said Pippa.
"Yeah." Franco grinned. "It's an X-RAY machine. And you can turn it into a bomb."
"Sounds good. Only pointless, here."
"They must have decommissioned them," said Keenan. "Dumped them down here. Look," he played his gun-light over the sad collection of rusting specimens. "There must be twenty of them. Like extinct cyborgs."
"All dead," said Pippa.
Keenan shivered. "Come on. We're wasting too much time. Let's get out of this..."
"Morgue?" suggested Pippa.
"It certainly feels that way."
They eased along the far wall, subconsciously edging away from the huge banks of corpse receptacles. Still, their lights splayed nervously over the endless resting places for hospital unfortunates. Drawer after drawer of horizontal coffins, all metal, all grey, all flaked with rust. Combat K felt chilled to the bone. Combat K could smell the death of millennia.
Franco was the first to stop. Somehow, he had edged to the front of the group, beyond their normal subconscious formation, and Keenan almost bumped into the nurse-outfitted ginger squaddie.
Franco held up a hand.
"What is it?" hissed Pippa.
"A... feeling. An itch I can't scratch."
Pippa was just about to retort with an insult, when she too felt the horror of the grave wash over her. She could taste earth, feel worms on her flesh, smell the stench of oiled wood and roses and pity and hear the rattle on the coffin lid. She coughed, and blinked, and there were tears in her eyes. She looked down, and for the briefest of moments her flesh was grey, sagging, infused with the colour of the dead, the perfume stink of the departed.
She screamed and stepped back. Her scream echoed up and down the cavern, booming from the endless banks of metal drawers and seemingly taking on a weird shrieking life of its own, increasing in volume, shrieking and hissing and snarling up and down the vast space, booming from wall to wall to wall, to finally and gradually die out in a dwindling mini-wail of tortured pain and final agony...
"Shit," she breathed.
Somewhere, somewhere deep, there came a grinding sound.
"Don't like that," said Franco, and took a step back. He realised without humour that his back was against the wall. The corpse drawers were reasonably distant, but still far too close for his liking.
"I think we need to run," whispered Pippa.
"Too late," said Keenan.
On the wall where his gun-light shone, a single drawer edged away from the wall. Rusted wheels squeaked on rusted chassis, until the drawer was fully extruded and there came a solid thud. The drawer shuddered. Combat K stood, rigid, frozen, guns aimed as one at the simple opening of steel.
She sat up. Franco gasped.
Her legs swung over the side, and she dropped lightly to the ground.
She was ten feet tall, her skin grey and sagging and quite obviously dead. She was a corpse. A walking corpse. Franco's gaze dropped, and worked its way up. She wore a gold ankle-bracelet which stood out fetchingly from mottled grey corpse-flesh. She wore stockings, sexy items, held by suspenders done in a tasteful white. There, the clothing ended, and the corpse/nurse/zombie was naked.
Franco wished she wasn't.
With shuddering jerks Franco's gaze swept up, past the inverted V of grey sagging horror, the limp waxy pubic mound, the wide rolling hips, the generous tyre of blubbery molten dead flesh, to breasts which mocked femininity and a face... ye gods, a face that was straight out of a comedy zombie horror movie, only framed with shocking peroxide-blonde hair and dead cracked bleeding lips painted a fetching, shining, cherry-red.
"A zombie nurse corpse," croaked Franco.
Keenan cocked his weapon.
"She's ten feet tall!" cackled Franco.
Pippa levelled her D5 shotgun, face grim.
"But hey," said Franco, cheering a little, "this is a test we can win, reet? Three Combat-K über-squaddies against one ten-foot zombie nurse chick? We can beat this bitch! We can slap her arse, put her down, show her who's boss."
"Pick up your guns," growled Pippa.
The nurse walked forward, as if all her limbs belonged to different people. She was gangly, despite her fat; disjointed, despite her womanhood, and she leered down at the three little humans, grinning through bad make-up.
"You've come to play, little people?" she slurred, as if drunk. Her head swayed left, then right, as if attached by loose ball-bearings. "You come to my morgue to pay your last respects?" She giggled, coquettishly, and stared down at the Combat-K soldiers, apparently unperturbed by their guns.
"Let's take her," whispered Franco... as more squeaking and grinding noises filled the air. To their horror, hundreds of corpse drawers began to slide from the rusted metal wall. They slid free, squeaking open, and in panic Combat K's gun-lights roved along the wall for as far as the human eye could see... and for as far as the human eye could see the wall began to disgorge corpses, some male, some female, some tall and short and wide and thin and ugly and ugly and ugly and Franco felt a scream welling in his throat because he knew, knew as hundreds of feet with hundreds of toe-tags slapped the tiny white tiles, he knew there were way too many to take out -
"Which way?" snapped Keenan.
Pippa pointed, and they began to run but the corpses moved like a wave, moved like a tide, two or three hundred flowing across the tiled floor and squatting, hands touching the floor, suddenly motionless and with every set of dead eyes in gradually decomposing faces fixed on Combat K.
"The avatar said this was a test of aggression," said Pippa, motionless, her eyes raking the wall of animated corpses.
"Maybe it was a double bluff," said Keenan.
"I don't think we have a choice," said Pippa.
The wall of dead grey bodies shifted, undulated, like grass in a breeze. And from their midst came the ten foot nurse they'd first seen, with her blonde hair and cherry lips. She approached Combat K, hips moving seductively, and her large naked feet slapped on the tiles and she stopped, ten feet away, swaying. Behind her, hundreds of corpses growled a
long, low growl, like a guard dog baring its fangs.
Franco gulped.
Keenan stepped forward, with Pippa at his shoulder. Franco, cowering behind, decided what they really needed right now was a brave rearward guard.
"Let us pass," said Keenan.
"No."
"Why not?"
"None living shall enter."
"We seek VOLOS."
The dead nurse smiled then, and Keenan caught the cunning in her eyes, in her dead eyes, rimed with treacle mascara. "Nobody shall meet with VOLOS. That is the privilege of the dead."
"Why so?"
"I say so, because I am the Morgue Matron, this is my bridge, my passage, my domain."
Keenan lifted his gun. "Then I will kill you."
"You think others have not tried? You think thousands haven't fallen screaming into the void, worms in their hair, ash on their tongues? You petty fucking mortals, I despise you, you, the living, the sane, the arrogant, the superior, I despise you all. You shall die."
She lifted her arm, and smiled.
Her arm dropped.
"Attack!" she screamed... and the corpse-horde surged forward.
Guns screamed, but the corpses were on them...
Keenan discharged his machine gun in a grey twisted face, and brains and skull shards exploded from the back of its head in a shower of gore. He twisted as a savage punch whirred past his face, knuckles scraping his cheek, and rolled, rising in the path of another corpse which lunged at him. He slammed a right straight, dropped and swept the undead's legs away. Hands grasped at him, and something whacked the back of his head. He felt himself go under, and heard a boom as a marionette accelerated above him in a tangle of naked green limbs, toe-tag flapping. Pippa was there, and she helped him rise. He'd lost his gun.
"This is chaos!" she screamed, and Keenan nodded, drawing a knife from his boot and stabbing a corpse in the eye. The eyeball popped free to dangle against the creature's cheek, but still it came on, grey spittle raging on lips and Pippa and Keenan kicked apart, Pippa's shotgun blasting a head from shoulders as she back-peddled and looked crazily about. They were a swarm, a horde, an army, and she saw Keenan back away, knife slashing out to open a throat in what should have been a shower of arcing blood, but no blood emerged. The corpse was necrotic; and more importantly, rigor mortis had set in.