Bad Timing

by Rebecca Levene

  "Sneck!" Red swore. Couldn't life cut them just one break?

  Apparently not, for after only a few seconds, the heat from the chute became so intense, so painful, that Red had to consciously force herself to keep hold of it. She bit through her lip with the effort and her mouth was flooded with the warm copper flavour of her own blood. The taste instantly set her salivary glands flowing and an unhuman hunger started gnawing at her guts. It had been a long time since she'd eaten. Too long. She looked longingly at the Blimp's neck, white and exposed beneath her chin where the mutant's head pressed against her chest. It would be easy, so easy...

  She snapped out of her bloodlust at the Blimp's scream of fear. At the same time, she realised that the burning sensation in her hands had stopped. The chute's control pod was now icy cold. Her moment of relief turned to horror as she realised that the chute had burnt itself out. Gravity would be able to have its way with them again.

  She looked down as the mass of flower-strewn vegetation rushed up to meet them. They were still two hundred metres above the trees - but not for much longer.

  Standing beside the beautifully crafted bulk of his ship, the Warfly, Carl Kale looked at his team with pride. On the way down, they had seen the fate that befell the other mutants' ships, too ill-prepared or too ill-equipped to deal with the defences around Epsilon Five. Only the ship belonging to the dark-clad mutant called One-Eyed Jack had landed safely, but even that seemed to have caught some laser fire on the way.

  That hadn't been a problem for Team X. After months of training together in the Doghouse - the home base for every Strontium Dog, housed in a satellite orbiting the Earth - he had melded this disparate group of mutants into a coherent and unbeatable fighting force. They were more than ready for their first mission together. Carl frowned. Of course, he'd rather they hadn't been undertaking it for the galaxy's most wanted criminal, but it wasn't as if they had much choice and - his frown lifted - they were hunting down another criminal, so that was probably all right.

  He looked up at his team-mates, ranked in an orderly line ahead of him. "Stand easy, mutants," he said, and they all relaxed, but - he was happy to see - didn't slouch. Except for Min Qi Man, who didn't have much choice. The strontium radiation which had given each of them their unique mutation had endowed him with a simian form that didn't take well to standing upright.

  Beside Min Qi Man stood the Sloth, a three metre-tall, muscular, fur-covered behemoth. As Carl watched, he stabbed a nail into the golden down covering his chest. He pulled it out with a small insect - possibly a tick - wriggling on its tip. His tongue darted out and licked the tiny morsel off. Carl shuddered, and turned his attention to Enigma, looking as beautiful as ever. Her expression half-bored, half-hidden by the sweep of jet-black hair that fell across her face, she was staring at a chipped flake of varnish on one of her nails. Beside her, Woman Man was nervously biting hers.

  "Well," Carl said, striving for a jovial yet business-like tone, "we've landed."

  "More'n we can say for those other poor souls," the Sloth said in his slow, deep voice.

  Min Qi Man leapt in the air, performing a perfect somersault to land easily on his toes. "The world turns. Those who do not turn with it fall."

  "Indeed," Carl said, nodding wisely, as if he had the faintest idea what his fellow mutant was talking about. "However, it should be a lesson to us too. We can't afford to become complacent. This planet is a very dangerous place, and if we let our guard down for a moment we're likely to suffer the consequences. I'd hate to lose any of you."

  "That's so beautiful," Enigma said. After a moment of pleasure, he realised that she wasn't referring to his words. She was staring at a small, jewel-like bird that was hovering in the air an arm's length away from him. With his enhanced senses - a product of the enlarged nose, eyes and ears which marked him as a mutant - he could hear the faint, high-pitched buzz of its wings, and smell the sweet scent of the nectar on which it must have been feeding. Its wings were so blue they seemed to radiate the colour into the air around it.

  He realised he'd been staring at the bird mesmerised for a few seconds, and shook his head impatiently. "Really," he said to Enigma, "I think we have more important things to worry about, don't you?"

  As if it had heard him, the buzzing little creature spun in his direction. He had one moment to marvel at the tiny perfection of its beak and the twinkling pinpricks of its eyes. Then it shifted the angle of its wings and - faster than any eye, even his, could see - flew straight at him.

  While the rest of Team X watched in paralysed horror, the hummingbird flew straight through Carl's body.

  Milliseconds later, it emerged to hover the other side, its plumage now a deep scarlet. Carl remained standing for one second longer, a look of slight surprise on his face. He opened his mouth, as if to say something - but no words emerged, just a gush of blood. Then his knees buckled and he collapsed, dead, to the ground.

  The last hundred metres of the fall were the worst. Red could see every single twig, branch and thorn that was about to be making contact with her flesh at approximately fifty-six metres per second. The Blimp - who, despite the futility of clinging on to Red when the anti-grav chute she held was no longer working, had refused to let go - was screaming continuously in her ear. The noise was swept away as it was uttered, lost in the howling wind of their descent.

  Then the Blimp stopped screaming and a look of revelation came over her face. She opened her mouth to shout, but Red couldn't make out what she was saying, though it seemed to include the words "emergency" and "back-up." Realising she wasn't being understood, The Blimp reached out desperately with one meaty hand and wrenched the chute's control pod from Red's grip. She did something to it, pressed some button Red couldn't see, and a snow white, genuine silk parachute emerged from the unit to float beautifully above them.

  A second after it had fully extended, they struck the trees.

  The pain was worse than Red could have imagined, like a hundred hammers and claws banging and tearing at her flesh. To make matters worse, the emergency chute which the Blimp had remembered far too late had tangled them in its folds, making movement, any attempt to stop or ease their fall, impossible.

  They tumbled through layer after layer of branches, each one slowing them a little, but wounding them more. Red felt a hot red agony in her side as one branch ripped through her armour and skin to tear open the flesh beneath. Tangled with her in the parachute, the Blimp seemed unconscious, maybe dead.

  Finally they stopped. For a few seconds, Red merely tried to regain her breath, to steady her heart and head. It was some time before her eyes were able to focus, the green blur around her resolving into the riotous colours of the jungle canopy. She was, she realised, hanging upside down, facing the loamy floor of the jungle.

  They were still more than twenty metres above the ground. Beneath them, there were no more branches to break the fall. Very carefully, Red tried to move. It was impossible. The parachute was wrapped tightly around her, pinning her arms to her sides. Even her head was held immobile in a tangle of wires and ropes. Suspended above her in the tree, she could feel the huge bulk of the Blimp.

  Red shouted out the mutant's name. Silence. She thought the other mutant had probably been killed in the fall. In which case she was stuck in a tree, in a jungle, twenty metres above the ground, with a corpse. Gritting her teeth, she shouted again.

  There was a muted groaning from above her. Then she felt the Blimp's vast bulk stir in its silk moorings.

  As it did, the branch holding them creaked ominously. Red froze. Above her, she felt the Blimp freeze too. That branch was all that stood between them and death. As she listened, with bated breath, she heard it creak again. A little louder this time.

  Very gently, being careful to move only her mouth as she did it, Red called out, "Help!"

  Beneath them, out of Red's limited range of vision, One-Eyed Jack looked up at the two mutants hanging so perilously from the slenderest of branches - then s
hrugged and walked away.

  5 / ANGER MANAGEMENT

  It was a hard slog through the dense undergrowth of the jungle. The machete Middenface had been using to hack and slash a clear path in front of them was beginning to feel like a dead weight in his hand. The sweet smell of the blossom around him had stopped being pleasant and started being nauseating about half an hour ago, aided and abetted by the odour of sulphurous decay from the mulch beneath their feet. He paused for a moment to wipe the dripping sweat from his brow.

  He was knackered. But more than that, he was no longer at all sure they were heading in the right direction. It was just so easy to get disoriented in the jungle, where visibility went little further than the tip of his nose, and every square metre of it looked like every other dank green square metre. The only way they'd be able to get their bearings would be by climbing a tree. Middenface looked up at the nearest, at its gnarly brown trunk stretching into the impenetrable canopy above them. He didn't relish the thought.

  Behind him, Johnny stopped too. "Need me to take the lead for while?" he asked.

  Middenface shook his head. "Naw, just gi' me a second, I'll be back tae fighting form." Middenface knew that for all Johnny's smarts and all his tactical skills, when it came to brute strength Middenface beat him by a whisker. And he'd rather do the grunt work now, hacking away at the jungle for as long as it took, so Johnny was sharp and ready for action when any real action came.

  All his life, Middenface had relied on no one but himself. Then he'd found Johnny, and he didn't mean to lose him in a hurry - there weren't many men around you could trust to watch your back. Besides, he kind of liked the daft gowk.

  Realising he'd been wool-gathering for a good few minutes, he shook himself like a dog and made to move off. The top half of his body obliged. The bottom half, which had become inexplicably attached to the ground, didn't - and he toppled forward onto his face.

  "What in the name o' the wee man..." he shouted as he twisted round to see what had attacked him, his machete raised for attack. It took him a moment to register that there was no one there. And another moment to realise that the reason he couldn't move his legs was that they had been tightly wound around with vines. As he watched, the vines crept another two centimetres further up his leg. That's when he realised what was happening. The wee scunners were growing, four hundred times faster than they should. From their point of view, he must have been standing still for nearly a whole day.

  Behind him, Johnny was carefully slicing away the vines that had imprisoned his own legs. Middenface used his machete to do the same, having to saw the knife to cut through the fibrous plants. "I've only been here an hour and I already hate this place," he said to Johnny.

  "You never know, it could grow on you," Johnny said, straight-faced.

  Middenface groaned. "You'll nae be gettin' many gigs wi' material like that," he said. Freed of the vines now, he clambered to his feet.

  Johnny suddenly spun round, his body tense and alert. When Middenface opened his mouth to ask what was up, Johnny held up his hand, silencing him. Middenface looked around, straining to see or hear what was bothering Johnny. But as far as he could see it was just the same dull old jungle all around.

  Then, faintly, he heard it. Drifting over the gentle breeze, almost drowned out by the cacophony of tweeting and screeching coming from the jungle's inhabitants, someone was calling out for help.

  With renewed determination, Middenface raised his machete and began to slash a path towards the source of the noise.

  Not far away, but totally out of sight, the remaining members of Team X looked at the fallen body of their leader.

  The tiny bird that had killed him had flown off many minutes ago, oblivious to the havoc it had wreaked. But they had remained frozen in place, unable to countenance what had happened.

  In the time they had been standing there, decay had already claimed Carl Kale's body. The huge lobes of his ears had been eaten away by invisible parasites, reducing them to a lacy network of cartilage. His eyes were long gone, the empty black sockets now staring up accusingly at his former team-mates. As they watched, a small maggot-like creature flopped out of one of the holes and scurried across his face to disappear into his nose. There was a tiny pause, then a horde of the wriggling white creatures emerged to crawl down their leader's corpse like the smallest, most chaotic army in the world. In their wake they left nothing but bone, and the tattered remains of his uniform.

  It was when the maggots started eating Carl's tongue that Enigma suddenly broke out of her paralysis. She spun round, sank to her knees, and vomited the contents of her stomach into the bushes.

  The cries for help grew louder as Middenface and Johnny hacked their way towards them. After a short while, the first voice was joined by another, deeper one. Middenface was pretty sure by now that the voices belonged to Durham Red and the huge mutant who had introduced herself as the Blimp.

  Suddenly the voices weren't coming from ahead of them. They were coming from above them. Middenface looked up but there was nothing to see, just the usual dense layer of leaves and, hanging from one branch, what looked like an enormous white cocoon. Middenface didn't fancy sticking around to see whatever insect was going to emerge from that.

  "Middenface, Johnny - is that you?" said a voice that he now definitely recognised as Red's. He peered intently into the gloom of the canopy, but he just couldn't see where it was coming from.

  Johnny was looking up too, squinting into the darkness. Middenface recognised the intense expression on his face. Johnny was using the strange powers of his eyes, the alpha rays which could penetrate both solid objects and the insubstantial mysteries of the mind. After a moment, his expression cleared, and he shouted up, "I see ya, Red!"

  "Where?" Middenface asked him.

  "That white thing - I think they're tangled up in their chute," Johnny explained.

  Middenface took a closer look at the cocoon. Johnny was right. Poking out from the bottom of it he could see the red-fringed white oval of the mutant vampire's face.

  "Dinnae worry, lass, we'll get ye doon!" he shouted to her.

  Even from twenty metres away, he could read the expression of annoyance on Red's face. "It's not getting down that's the problem, you moron," she said. "This branch is about to snap."

  "Now then, honey," another huskier voice said from somewhere above Red, "there's no need to take that tone - the boys are only trying to help."

  In the tree, Red twisted her face in an attempt to face her fellow mutant, but she was held too tightly in the parachute's silk grip. "Yeah, well we wouldn't need their help if you didn't weigh about five tonnes."

  "See, there you go again, venting your anger on an innocent bystander. Now me, I have great self-restraint. It's one of my strengths as a person."

  "Yeah, well, it's a pity that doesn't include self-restraint in the eating department," Red gritted.

  Johnny shouted up again, forestalling any reply the Blimp might have made. "I reckon if you can get yourself free, the chute should break your fall. The ground down here's pretty soft. Long as you're not coming down too fast, you should be fine."

  Red glared down at the circle of his head below her. It was barely visible from this distance, only his blazing eyes shining clearly in the gloom. "We can't get free," she shouted. "We're too tangled up."

  "Leave it tae me, hen!" Middenface replied.

  Before she could protest, the tiny stick of his arm lifted up and a bright flash emerged from somewhere around his fingertips. Almost instantaneously, Red felt the burning agony of a laser wound in her right leg, and smelt the horrible burning smell of her own flesh.

  She cried out in mingled pain and anger. "Stop it! You're gonna kill us, you Scottish cretin!"

  Far below, Johnny had already put his arm on Middenface's. "We can pile some more leaves down here to break your fall," he shouted to Red, "But you're gonna have to get yourselves free."

  Red despaired. She'd felt such hope when Middenface
and Johnny appeared so unexpectedly after an hour of fruitless cries for help. Johnny was arrogant and annoying and a hundred other negative things - but when it came to a fight, there was no one she'd rather have at her back. So to discover that he was as powerless as she... For about the tenth time that day, she contemplated the imminent possibility of her own death. It really pissed her off.

  Then, as if she'd been paying no attention at all to the previous conversation, the Blimp said, "Of course, if I was angry, it sure as hell would make things easier for us."

  "What?" Red snapped.

  The Blimp shifted slightly above her, pushing Red's wounded leg further into the branch, which creaked a complaint and sank a little lower. Red was glad she couldn't see it more clearly. She suspected that it was now attached to the rest of the tree by little more than a splinter of wood.

  "When I get angry, I get thin," the Blimp explained patiently. "It's like I was telling you, all this fat is just a reserve. My body uses it up when I get het up, kind of like fuel."

  Red wanted to both hug and kill her. "So do it! Get angry!"

  "Ain't as simple as that," the other mutant replied. "I've got to be provoked."

  Red didn't think that should be too hard. "You useless lump of lard!" she shouted.

  "No good," the Blimp replied calmly. "I've never been one to be sensitive about my weight."

  "You're not just fat, you're ugly," Red said.

  The Blimp laughed. "If I had a credit for every time someone told me that..."

  Red groaned in frustration. Then, with a rush of relief, she remembered their argument aboard the ship, just before the crash. "I'm a vampire," she said. "To me all you are is a hunk of meat I can't wait to sink my teeth into. You're just food to me!"

  The other mutant shrugged, pulling the silk chute tighter around them. "I know what I said to you earlier," she said, "but that was before you saved my life back on the ship. Far as I'm concerned, you can take all the blood you want, and my gratitude with it."