by Andy Remic
~ * ~
THERE CAME THE creak of leather, and boots hit the dust hard as a heavy rider dismounted. There came a hawk, a gurgling of phlegm, then a spit.
There was a metallic screech, then a ratcheting sound; then another curious sound, of spinning, and grating metal, like a heavy flywheel; then a soft clang.
There came a patting sound, like a heavy hand in a leather glove whacking the flanks of something big; big and made from metal. There was a snort. Steam ejected from nostrils like a kettle boiling oil.
“Whoa boy,” came a low, gravelly voice, a voice so low and gravelly you wouldn’t believe it was real.
There came another snort, then a stomp of a metal hoof, then a whinny. And a tiny, tiny sound. Like a ticka ticka ticka. Then a clonk.
The sun was high in the sky, now, casting its eerie green light across the jungle. The street was deserted, except for the one rider and his mount, which creaked and groaned, and made strange metal sounds. It could only be described as a horse because it occupied the same physical wireframe. It appeared to be made from old, rusted metal panels, hand-beaten to a tube trellis frame. The creature had a gangly look, like most of its legs weren’t put on quite straight, or were indeed even sturdy enough to support the bulbous bulk of the metal creature’s rotund body. Rivets lined flanks like bullet holes. The mane was made from a mad tangle of razor wire. The equine head was long and brutal and sharp, ending in fangs like knives and watched over by eyes like boiling blood oil.
The metal horse snorted again, and turned as more hoofbeats drummed down the street. There were six more riders, all clinging to their savage metal animals and wearing a collection of thick pants and shirts, and long leather coats. They wore wide-brimmed hats to shield their eyes from the sun. They carried guns at their hips, and each man had dark eyes, a hard face, narrow lips and a ten-day beard.
They reined in around the first, who was broad shouldered and cruel, with a scar from eye to chin. He was chewing on a fat cigar, and he watched the other six riders dismount, and spit, and rub at stubble. They all appeared weary, but they watched their leader with bright intelligent eyes.
“Are you right?”
“Yes,” said the man with the scar, and spat again. “Somebody has been here.” His nostrils seemed to twitch, as if scenting the air. “Somebody has entered the Sheriff’s Office. Somebody has claimed the sheriff’s uniform and badge. So you know what that means, boys?”
The seven men grinned, and drew their pistols, long, dark, gleaming weapons; six-shooters, battered and old, but well maintained. Well-used.
“What’s it mean, General?”
General Bronson chewed his cigar, and grinned at his men. “It means we have a new Law Maker in town,” he said. “And new Law Makers are not wanted in this town! So we have to gun him down, boys. Kill him right dead here in the street. No prisoners. No mercy.”
~ * ~
FIVE
THE FIRE RAGED, an inferno of thundering and screeching and wild detonation. Chaos lived. It walked the world on jagged legs of razors, breathing fire and gas, its eyes pits into hell, its soul a tarry mess of compressed evil. Both Jenny and Sick Note were picked up by the blast, and flung like rag-dolls away from the Greenstar Reprocessing Plant. They were joined by the other special ops soldiers, many of them burning. The hovering choppers, their bright piercing searchlights fixated on the captured ECO terrorists, were slammed skywards out of control in hissing, fizzing arcs, engines screaming and stalling, until they plummeted to the earth a kilometre away to explode in roaring balls of flame. Randy had been facing the factory as the explosion kicked in and the world erupted. He, too, was picked up and thrown away like a plastic toy, but not before the detonation blast had ripped most of his face off.
The Reprocessing Plant roared like a dying monster as the fire tore up and outwards, and inside it a million pieces of combustible rubbish ignited and detonated, and the whole messy fireball raged and fought itself, purples and blues scything the heavens and cutting the sky in half.
Jenny landed hard in a ditch, and lay for a while, wheezing, all wind, all life kicked from her. She looked to her left, and saw Randy lying in the mud with most of his face missing, his blood-red features like melted wax, his nose gone, his face stripped very nearly to the skull. Jenny coughed, and grinned, and realised she was on fire herself. “Serves you right, motherfucker,” she managed, as she heard the screams and the shouts. And then a squaddie cracked her with a rifle butt, put a knee in her back, and after that, it was all stars and blackness and the eternity pit.
~ * ~
IT HAD TAKEN a lot of effort, money and time to infiltrate the Impurity Movement; and even more effort, money, time and cunning to get accepted into the Impurity5 ECO terrorist cell, as they liked to be known. Randy Zaglax, however, simply thought of them as cunts. Terrorist cunts, if pushed for more detail; but cunts all the same.
Randy had started his infiltration a year previously when a tip-off led his surveillance team to one of the minor runners working for the Impurity Movement. Technically, this should have been a police or military job, but Randy, as Governor of Internal Affairs at Greenstar Company, had been taking the recent bombing and hellfire destruction of fifteen of the facilities under his direct jurisdiction personally. Also, with a background in covert ops himself, Randy felt more than qualified to take on this little responsibility; after all, you couldn’t trust nobody in this world, in this life, and he knew if the order had come from above, from Director Renazzi Lode or Assistant Greenstar Director Sowerby Trent, then somewhere along the myriad of connecting information streams there would have been a leak. And, no matter how small, it would have compromised his position; indeed, his very life.
And so Randy had set up his own intelligence and observation systems and teams, which had been running on and off for three years now. When the snippet of information about the runner, a lowlife dregscum SLAP peddler called Caleb, had been confirmed as an Impurity lead by his own people, Randy had sat down alone one night, naked on his jelly couch, with a bottle of finest Isle5 HoneyWhiskey, and come up with The Plan. And it had been a Good Plan. In fact, it had been The Best Plan.
Randy, as Governor of Internal Affairs, had always kept a very low public profile within the company. After all, he investigated the investigators, and a certain lack of familiarity with staff and the public helped him no end in the kidnapping, torture and interrogation of suspects. As such, he was well-placed to infiltrate the Impurity ECO terrorist movement himself. A high risk, yes, but not as high-risk as the wound he had taken to his pride, his ego, his self-esteem. Impurity5, their Cell Commander and the Squad Leader he knew simply as “Jenny” were fucking him over and pissing on the grave of his career. And Randy would not stand for it. Randy would not stand for anything.
With Caleb tagged, they’d watched him for three months, building up a database of his movements and contacts and rhythms. He was a SLAP dealer, and a SLAP user, which made him unreliable, violent, unpredictable; but he did have certain routines which panned out over a five-week period. Randy admitted he was amazed Caleb could remember the sequence over a five-week period, but it later emerged he was fitted with an in-brain electro-zap stimulator which would painfully guide him in the right direction if he went off course.
Impurity5 were careful, and used Caleb to courier messages between other message couriers. It was in this careful set-up, one evening in November, that Randy had introduced himself. Caleb was delivering his message to his superior, and they found themselves surrounded by five PUF - Police Urban Force. Very nasty, very tough, very aggressive. Screaming. Weapons cocked. Get down on the ground, motherfuckers, or we’ll shoot your fucking skulls in.
From a dark side-alley Randy stepped out, and calmly put five bullets in five skulls. The PUF wore helmets, but if you shot just below the visor then a round would smash through cheekbone and into the brain beyond it. Instant kill. Headshot. Just like a game. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, then Randy was helping Cal
eb and his superior up off the ground.
“Wow, man,” groaned Caleb, in the throes of a SLAP high. But the other runner, the superior, was switched on and panting hard. “Why did you do that, brother?” he asked.
Randy shrugged. “I hate the fucking system, man. Hate those Greenstar maggots. They killed my father, right? So now it’s time for me to fuck them over in any way I can.”
“Where do you live?”
Randy told them, giving a shitty downtown dreg address.
“We’ll be in touch.”
Randy went off the grid, then. For five weeks. Five weeks living in a slum, eating from the gutter, fucking only the warped and diseased meat that walked the toxic streets of the downtown shithole. But playing his part well, and looking as good as Randy did, it would have been foolish and out of character to not play the game. So he went to bars and picked up hot chicks with tight sweating bodies and an eagerness to show him how good they were. He fucked them all. He ate in the shitty slumscale burger joints, forcing down tepid slimy meat which could only be called meat because it came off some kind of animal; although he suspected it was rotten, raw fish. And the beer! Don’t get him started on the beer, from shit-filled kegs and tox-filled pipes, each glass afloat with scum like open sewage, each mouthful a burning of his pride and body temple and purity. Yeah, purity. Oh, the irony.
They were watching him, obviously. So he threw in the odd hint. Beat up a PUF policeman outside a bar one night; gave him a kicking so severe he’d be paralysed and pensioned off from work; no doubt his family would descend into the slime like all the other scumdreg who worked Toxside. But hey, you makes your choices, right? And Randy was after bigger fish.
After five weeks of slumming it, of casting aside his favourite lacquers and unguents, creams and potions, oils and shampoos, waxes and aromas, of getting his long dark curls full of toxic shite, dirt under his nails, shit in his pores, effluvia in his bed; well.
She came to him.
Jenny. Jenny Xi.
Thus started the recruitment process, and at least then Randy could drop some of the forced bad habits, because he was now being “professional” for the sake of the unit, for the sake of impressing his new employers. And they watched him, always watched him. At this point, he reported back to Renazzi Lode, for the Director of Greenstar Company, he knew, was the one person he could trust. She allowed him maximum freedom and it had come as no shock to the petite, meticulous brunette when Randy had disappeared. After all, he was either dead, or on a special mission. He had a reputation for doing this kind of thing. Always for the benefit of Greenstar. Always for the benefit of The Company.
The Impurity Movement gave him tests, sucked him slowly deeper and deeper into their organisation. They were in no rush, and despite anger and loathing burning Randy like a red-hot brand to his scrotum, he paced himself, and played the game, and infiltrated the ECO terrorists... all culminating in the attack on the factory, and the detonation which had gone so very, very wrong.
Jenny Xi had clocked him, at the last picosecond.
How had she done that?
How had she realised at the last moment that he didn’t have the interests of the ECO terrorists at heart?
Maybe it had just been a hunch. Listening to her weird, twisted sixth sense. Maybe she was just being extra-super-cautious; after all, Jenny had a reputation for being a bitch’s bitch. Harder than hard. A radio-controlled psychopath.
And then... the bomb.
The blast. Destruction. Another factory destroyed...
Along with his face.
~ * ~
RANDY ZAGLAX WAS a vain man. He was a beautiful man, for sure, but he accentuated God’s fabulous gifts with an excess of effort. Every morning, he would step from the soft cotton/silk sheets of his vast bed into a specially directed stream of cool air, where he would languish for three or four minutes, cooling off his night-sweat. Then he would walk, naked of course, for one as fine as he should be proud of his body, to his gym, where he would spend precisely thirty minutes in a hard workout, usually press-ups and sit-ups, or bag work, or a thirty-minute sprint. Something to get the old cardio-vascular system pumping, something to bring a red blush to his dashingly handsome cheeks. Then it was to his vast porcelain bathroom, white and pure, so pure, where he would begin with clipping his toenails, gently scouring the dead flesh from his feet, then rubbing a thick lavender unguent between his toes and around his heels, followed by electro-shocksocks which gave an electric-shock foot massage for the duration of his pampering. Then into the shower with tweezers, and as the hot water soothed his shoulders and spine, he’d generally tidy up his leg hair, moving gradually up to the pubic mound.
Oh, how Randy loved his pubic mound, the carefully cultivated bush of which he was so proud. He acknowledged that usually it was the female of the species who took excessive pride in her pubic smash of straggling garnish, because - let us be frank - a man gives pride of place to his cock, and what a superb and magnificent cock Randy did have stashed in his pants. Not thinking of the mass of scar-tissue beneath it, no; but his cock, that was a thing of beauty. But, not to be outdone by so many bush bashers he’d met in his career as Gigolo - after all, it would not be done to drop one’s pants in the company of six or seven voluptuous Valkyries just to have them mock and chortle at your barbed-wire tangle - Randy went to great pains to trim and pluck and groom and condition and pamper his poodle. Yes, it came secondary to his throbbing penis, but only an uncouth barbarian would so overlook the quality of the silk matting behind such a prominent rod. It was at this point that he obviously became hard, rock hard, so hard it was harder than hard. Viagra? Fuck that. Viagra was for other men. Men who weren’t hard. Or at least, not as hard as Randy.
So Randy would have his morning masturbation, sometimes a slow sensual thing, his head buzzing with images of all the fine ladies he’d known, for although at times Randy could be effeminate and wear perfume and silks and lace and ruffs, thus confusing the odd homosexual into thinking he was similarly inclined, in all reality Randy was hot damn bona fide straight. Straighter than straight. Occasionally, his wank would be a hard fast one, almost as if to get it over and done with; a necessity of habit, rather than something sensual and romantic. Either way, job complete and necessary satisfaction taken care of, Randy would continue his grooming. Shampooing and conditioning first his pubic hair, then his brown curls, washing behind the ears, and then stepping down to dry off with fluffy towels... then the real cream and potion pampering began...
~ * ~
RANDY STARED IN the mirror. Normally, at this time, he would be applying a thick pink ointment to his face in order to “iron out those little creases of accelerated decrepitude” and “banish those nasty wrinkles which creep up on a man as he progresses through life” and “moisturise your male skin with our Male Man’s Man Moisturiser™, we fight the TOX! so you don’t have to!!” He’d put Moose’s Magical Mousse into his hair and scrunch it with the ends of his fingertips. He’d apply a light touch of kohl around his eyes to give them that deep, brooding, menacing, meaningful air. And finally, Randy would apply a delicate gloss lip balm to accentuate the natural curve and pout of his full, generous lips. Lips which, many ladies had told him, were very fine for kissing.
Randy stared into the mirror.
He couldn’t do that anymore. Because he had no lips.
No lips, no cheeks, no eyelids.
Hell. No fucking face.
The surgeons had performed an emergency medical rush job in order to save his life. A kind of Fast Food Face Surgery for the Needy. The blast that ripped off Randy’s face with sheer unadulterated force had also popped three fingers from their sockets. He’d been holding a gun, which had wrenched his hand apart. And his fingers had been lost in the mud, despite the best efforts of the search team. What had they called that, he wondered, hysterical giggles rising in his throat as he studied his destroyed visage. The Find Randy’s Lost Fingers Search Party? “Here sir, I’ve found one! I
Which one is it, son? I It’s Randy’s middle finger, raised just for you...”
Yes, the surgeons had done the best they could in the short time available. And the problem was, here on Amaranth - on the Toxic World - the medical profession was incredibly and suitably awesome when it came to skin diseases, toxic poisoning cases, radiation poisoning, mutating genetics - any and every condition relating to the excess of toxic shit pumped into land, air and sea by The Company and its affiliates. What it did not specialise in was plastic surgery.
Randy stared at a face created by Frankenstein. A monster stared back.
What once were lips were now bulging flaps of skin which did not quite connect properly to the rest of his face, but that was irrelevant because the rest of his face looked like a patchwork quilt of sewed-together skin panels with, it had to be said, some very untidy stitching. Skin had been grafted from his thighs, arse and back, and they’d rebuilt his face with all the expertise of a DIY motorcycle mechanic. He still had no eyelids, and his eyes were wide and bulbous, as if he was in a permanent state of shock. His nose was a flat blob of a thing, twisted and constantly leaking blood and snot. His lips did not fit his face properly, and he permanently showed his teeth. The blast had knocked quite a few teeth out, and for reasons unknown to Randy as he lay in a pit of pain and incomprehension, they had fitted new steel teeth straight into his jawbone. When he smiled, which was not often now, they’d made him look like some torture-victim doll; he looked like an advert for plate steel. He had burnt tufts for eyebrows, and annoyingly, random tufts of beard seemed to grow in tiny patches all over his face, thick wiry spider hair like nothing he’d ever cultivated before. And his curls! His glorious curls! Burnt, gone, massacred. Now, random knots of hair sprouted from his head like the leafy stalks of a carrot; the rest of his head was bald, and scarred, and blackened by fire and pressure into coal-black blotches that would not come off. The fire had tattooed him with its permanence.