Toxicity

by Andy Remic

  Wincing as shards from his suit dug into buttocks and thighs and biceps - the suit was getting worse; more fractured by the minute - he pushed himself to his feet and spat blood on the rocks.

  “Wow,” he said, frowning. He watched Lumar clamber up more distant rocks and stare off across the ocean, shading her eyes with her hand.

  Svool looked around himself. There was nobody else visible. No people. No animals. No servants. No wine. No cunnizinga liquor. No SLAP-snort. No ship. Oh shit, no ship.

  Svool climbed down from his rock and started off after Lumar, hobbling a little in his glossy high-heeled boots, hand on the hilt of his jewelled sword. All the while he was shaking his head, and wondering what the hell had swayed his Mistress and turned her Massive Love against him. It must be a serious concussion, he rationalised. That’s it! A massive blow to the head during our recent crash, despite the crash foam. It’s left her unknowing, and stupid - an idiot, in fact. He nodded to himself at this train of deduction. Of course. She’s now an idiot. What else could there be?

  He crunched to a stop on the glinting beach, and stared up at Lumar. “Lumar?” he crooned. “Lumar, my darling. Come down here for a moment, my sweet, ripe little butterfly peach.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Svool frowned. “Hey, baby, now listen to me, I understand you may have taken a rather nasty bump to the head...”

  “Bump to the head?” she shrieked, and her rage and hatred were real animal things as she bounded across the rocks like some lithe, supple leopard, for a moment all humanity lost as she proudly displayed her alien physiology and utter physical power. She landed on all fours before Svool with a crunch, and uncoiled like a striking serpent. She leaned close, until her mouth was just inches from Svool’s tender battered red lips, and he could see a raging green fire burning like a supernova inside her eyes.

  “Er?” he ventured.

  “What am I?” she hissed, forked tongue flickering out and tickling Svool.

  “Er, my Mistress, a creature of great physical pleasure, a female kroona who has shared my bed for many months now and brought me squealing and moaning to massive multiple orgasms, a sexy alien SLAP-snorting culacoca-licking bitch of the highest degree.” He nodded, getting into the flow of it. “And appointed by my management company to cater for my every flippant whim... and I know you were very happy to comply, because a) you signed the contract, and b) you were so naturally happy to comply to the whims of a natural genius of my truly natural awesome reputation and ability and genius!”

  Lumar was shaking her head, and she took a step back. “You truly don’t understand, do you?”

  “Understand what?” He was wearing a look of injured pride. As if she should dare question him on the finer points of their contract.

  “I am your slave, Svool. Your fucking slave. The kroona are persecuted across Manna; we are the lowest of the low. On my planet, my sister was taken hostage by the kroon ganga gangs. I was sold into slavery in order to earn big fat wages for the Men in Power, and to stop my sister, my own flesh and blood, from being murdered.”

  Svool opened his mouth to speak, saw the fire in her eyes, and closed it again with a clack.

  “You have abused me for five months, Svoolzard. You have used me for drugs and sex and sport. And I have taken it. I know my position in the galaxy. And I know the kroon ganga gangs are the most dangerous of bastards to cross. For once in your life, I want you to use your brain and think about what I’ve just said. Really think about it.”

  Svool frowned even harder. He thought about it. Finally, he licked his wet lips. “So, you faked your orgasms?” he managed.

  Lumar hissed, and tossed back her green dreadlocks, moving away from Svool and walking in a tight circle before returning to him. She thrust her angry face close, and Svool shivered, not used to seeing such primal expressions on the face of a lover he had so much adored.

  “You are an idiot,” she snarled.

  “I don’t get it!”

  “You owned me. Well, your management company owned me. I had to play ball and they paid the gangs. And my sister would live. Surely you can understand the simple concept of trade?”

  “But... but why didn’t you go to the police?”

  “The PUF? Ha! Do me a favour, you docile lump of tard.”

  “Now listen, I’ve had just about enough of your insults, young lady. If you’re not careful, I’ll...”

  She came even closer, oozing malevolence. Svool stepped back, stumbling on one high-heeled boot.

  “You’ll what?” she asked, eyes narrowed. And he saw her claws had emerged. Wow. She has claws. Like a cat! If only I’d known that during our sex games, I could have used them...

  “I’ll, er, I’ll...” The claws were glinting in the green sunlight, each one an inch of razor-sharp wickedness.

  “You could write a fucking poem about it,” she mocked, and the barb flew straight to his heart, sharper and more deadly than any intrusion of serrated steel.

  Svool deflated. “That’s a little... unfair. Okay. Okay. You win. I won’t do anything. I just... find it hard to understand, hard to comprehend this sudden change.” He realised his voice had emerged as a squeak. He felt tears at the corners of his eyes. He would have dabbed at them theatrically, only his cuffs were made of chipped glass-shard.

  “Your company bought me. And I played their game. But now? Now we’re on our own.” She gave a nasty little smile. “You are on your own.”

  “Er,” said Svoolzard.

  Lumar retracted her claws and looked around, and then at the jungle that was swaying... oddly. She pointed. “That way is north. If I’m right, this place is Jusko, the largest island of the archipelago into which we have plunged. It has a trading port, which means people and ships. But there are bad things out in the jungle, Svool. Real bad things. So be careful, yeah, mate?” She winked. “Be careful, lover.”

  “Be careful?” he echoed, stricken with horror as her words sunk into his detoxing brain.

  “And goodbye.”

  She started crunching up the green pebble beach and suddenly, as if lurching onto this side of reality, Svool realised the beach wasn’t green pebbles but green bottles and many still had part-faded jagged plasti-labels, which read things like Arthur’s Piss Whiskey Gin and Puke Puke Tonic and Raw Sewage Alky - Great For All You Cheap & Nasty Drunkers.

  What? What the hell is this? He stared at the ground as if it had betrayed him. I don’t get it. And distant words drifted to him, words spoken by a machine in a soft lilting female voice. The planet of Amaranth in the Zynaps System is run by The Greenstar Recycling Company, sometimes referred to planetside simply as The Company. The Greenstar Recycling Company recycles the majority of Manna’s waste, leaving the rest of the galaxy free to pursue its Heavenly Pursuits.

  Svool stared at the quite obviously non-recycled waste under his glossy boots. Then up towards the jungle, and the athletically disappearing figure of Lumar. Within the blink of an eye she had vanished, and Svool realised he was alone. Alone, with no bodyguards, on an uncultured world fondly referred to by the locals as Toxic World. Tox World. Toxicity. Or even just Shit City.

  “Great,” he muttered, and drawing his jewelled sword, more for his own morale than as any real form of protection, he started awkwardly up the bottle beach, his glass suit prickling him all over and his heels playing havoc with the slippery glass underfoot.

  What I’d give for some fresh drugs, he sulked.

  ~ * ~

  SVOOLZARD HUNG UPSIDE-DOWN from a tree, twine cutting into his ankles and giving him a particularly intense new type of agony, as he watched the collection of short, waddling, hairy men and short, waddling, bare-breasted hairy women with weary, cold-turkey eyes. He wondered how his life had gone from damn-near-perfect-with-a-thousand-whores-on-tap to sucking-on-the-lollipop-of-imminent-death in such a short period of time.

  “Shit,” he said. He coughed, and spat, which is harder than it sounds if you’re upside down.

 
“Ug!” said one hairy beastman, and waved a stick at Svool. Svool paled, noting the stripped human skull adorning the top of the stick like some grotesque totem. It still had a small patch of scalp and hair attached, as if the face and head had been peeled like a fruit leaving a hairy summit, then shrunken, then stuck on a pointy stick, then waved at him.

  It did not fill Svool with confidence and hope.

  After all, he was used to more... sophistication than this. He was a respected academic, dammit!

  He was... a Poet.

  “Er, excuse me? Excuse me! Do you know who I am? Do you realise who I am? Do you actually comprehend the magnitude of your error? I” - he puffed out his chest, which was quite a feat when all the blood was in his skull - “am Svoolzard Koolimax XXIV, Third Earl of Apobos, son of Svoolzard Koolimax XXIII, grandson of the great Svoolzard Koolimax XXII, and seventh in line to the Throne of Apobos. I’m practically royalty, I am!”

  “Ug.” Another wave. Another flash of the quite terrifying shrunk-head totem.

  “Oh. I assume I don’t get a phone call, then?”

  “UG!” The stick swished past his nose.

  “Ahh. I’ll be quiet then, shall I?”

  And that’s another thing, thought Svool morbidly as he swung by the tight twine digging through and ruining the fine gloss leather of his boots and now threatening to cut off the blood supply to his toes. These trees. They’re not right. As he swung around aimlessly, observing the trees, he tried to work out what was wrong with them. What exactly. The colouring was nearly right, but the trunks were made from a kind of ribbed rubber. Like... like... like a stack of old tyres? he thought. Gods! And the massive, breeze-wafted fronds and leaves, although green as Nature had intended, seemed to be made from...

  Green plastic bags.

  Like supermarket bags, folded into leaf shapes.

  Is this for real?

  And then the beast-man wearing naught but a loincloth poked Svool with the sharp end of his skull stick, and grunted, “AG AG KAK!” and Svool realised it was definitely bloody real, and he’d been caught as easy as a chicken in a sack, a fly in a web, a sexy starlet in his own bed... and now he was to be...

  Well. Well?

  He eyed the fire they were stoking in a circle of rocks, rocks that looked, to his untrained eye, suspiciously like rectangular lumps of lead or some other heavy metal, and he wondered uneasily exactly why they needed a fire. For warmth, maybe? But it was already warm. Warm enough to make him sweat like a cooking pig.

  “I say,” he said.

  The hairy men and women, many of whom, he now noticed, seemed to be wearing bones on strings around their necks and - horror - pierced through their very flesh, continued to ignore him. As if he was a chicken. Or a captured pig. Or throat-slit cattle hung up to bleed.

  More uneasy prickles ran up and down his spine.

  Why do I feel like a chicken on a spit?

  Why do I feel like a lamb joint in the oven?

  Why do I feel like a beef carcass in a warehouse?

  Svool had an unusual relationship with food, indeed, as with sex. With sex, he’d fuck anything that couldn’t crawl out of his bed. And with food, he’d spear and eat anything that couldn’t make the leap from his plate.

  And here, and now, he suddenly began to feel like food.

  It was a new one on him.

  A sarcastic part of his inner psyche snarled, Write a poem about that, you fucker.

  He suppressed the urge to giggle.

  Svool swung gently, and watched the fire being built higher and higher. Then he watched as some of the -savages? indigenous peoples? cannibals? - erected a kind of spit with good solid sturdy timber. The spit was a little over six feet long. Svool anticipated it would take both his length, and his weight.

  “Er. Excuse me? Can you listen to me for a moment, good peoples?”

  “Ug.”

  “Ag.”

  “Kak.”

  “Wok.”

  “Snuk.”

  “Snog.”

  “Dek.”

  “Fak.”

  “I say, I say, I am a very famous poet, about to become a very famous film star, and I do believe I have lots of money in a ggg Galactic Account which I could access for you if you were to escort me, for example, to the nearest cash dispenser.”

  He looked on, hopefully. The hairy bone-clad stick-waving peoples ignored him.

  “I could also offer to include a little stanza about our meeting in a future poem? A published poem, I might add.”

  Nothing. Nada. Zip.

  “Indeed, being a leading member of the Culture Ministry I could perhaps bring some kind of foreign aid to your plight? Make the people in power and with money and influence aware of your terrible afflictions, your lack of funky clothing, your horrible predilection for rendering your own bodies with bone piercings. How’s that sound? We could maybe supply you with razors to get rid of all that ghastly body hair. Especially for the women; indeed, if you are women. Lots of people in corduroys would trot along, become involved, and start getting you medical treatment and building schools for your children. How’s about that for a slice of fried gold?”

  He beamed, pleased with his proposition.

  The cannibals, for now he was sure they were cannibals on account of a toddling toddler who’d just wobbled into view sucking on a small human skull, ignored him.

  Svoolzard felt his lower lip start to emerge; a prima donna pout. What a cheek! First, his thesis performance was interrupted. Second, the indignity of a crashing starship! Third, Lumar, that sexiest of sexy pliant bendable mistresses, goes all weird and strange on him, no doubt because of a savage bump to the head, he was surer than sure, and stalked off into the jungle in a huff like they’d had some kind of teenage lover’s tiff! Then he was hit from behind by some kind of sleeping dart, and awoke to find funny little hairy people refusing to speak to him.

  It was just... not on.

  Svoolzard felt his temper flare, aided and abetted by his cold-turkey situation from at least fifteen different types of narcotic. One of them, SLAP, had a cold-turkey come-down period of seven years. Now that’s what you call an addiction.

  Right, he thought. RIGHT!

  “OKAY,” he suddenly bellowed, swinging frantically as he really punched from his diaphragm, “THIS IS A BLOODY DISGRACE AND I’M JUST NOT HAVING IT! NOT HAVING IT AT ALL! THIS IS A RIDICULOUS SITUATION AND YOU FAIL TO UNDERSTAND THAT YOU HAVE HERE, TIED TO THIS TREE, A BONAFIDE BLOODY GENIUS! I AM A POET! I AM A SWASHBUCKLER! I AM A GENIUS! I AM REVERED THROUGHOUT THE GALAXY OF MANNA! I AM WORSHIPPED BY ALL WOMEN! I AM WORSHIPPED BY MOST BLOODY MEN, ACTUALLY! I AM A HELL-RAISER, A DRUG-WORSHIPPER, A LOVER AND A HIPSTER, AND YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO HOLD ME LIKE THIS! NO RIGHT TO TIE ME TO A TREE AND SHOUT ‘UG’ AND ‘KAK’ AND WAVE YOUR POINTY STICKS AT ME, YOU SHITTY LITTLE HAIRY HEATHEN SAVAGES! I WANT THE AMBASSADOR FOR EARTH CONTACTING RIGHT NOW! I WANT A COMM CALL! I WANT MY RIGHTS! GET IT?”

  There was a long, long pause.

  In his passion at his oratory, Svoolzard had closed his eyes, as well as drooling down his own forehead. Passion-spittle, he called it. He knew his many lovers found it extremely sexy.

  As he opened his eyes, a “shitty little hairy heathen savage” was crouched before him, skirt of grasses parted, long pierced penis unrolled to touch the ground. The shitty little hairy heathen savage grinned up at Svoolzard, showing teeth filed to points and inset with rusted twin razor blades rescued from old disposable razors.

  “Yes?” said Svoolzard, hopefully.

  The shitty little hairy heathen savage held up a knife and fork, his grin getting wider at the same time as his bulbous eyes.

  “Time for supper, fancy man,” he grinned.

  ~ * ~

  TWO

  “She’s pretty hard.”

  “Not as hard as my cock.”

  Smoke swirled. Glasses clinked. Chips clattered.

  “No, really, mate, I’ve heard she’s as tough as an iron bar.”


  “Heh, I’ll give her my iron bar up every single orifice, I can tell you. Hear her sing like a canary.” Laughter.

  “Come on, Jones; don’t talk about the lady like that.”

  “Fuck you, Zanzibar. All I’m saying is, no matter how hard she is, my cock is harder. And bigger. And man, would I give her a good time long time. I’d ride her like a fucking donkey. I’d fuck her like a fucking donkey. She’s lean, and mean, and if I got my hands on those little titties she’d be moaning and creaming in my hand before you could squeal ‘Give it to me, Big Boy.’”

  The group of squaddies laughed, many uneasily and casting nervous glances about, and Jones threw down his cards and cracked open another beer. It was hot, and he was bare-chested, his upper physique criss-crossed with scars from downtown knife-fights. His dark eyes burned with a fever as he pictured in his mind’s eye the tight hard little body of his Squad Leader, Jenny Xi.