by Andy Remic
How far?
Vasta. She’ll know.
Vasta?
Head of The Company’s Security. She, like you, is a torturer.
Android?
Not sure. She’s certainly a fucking bitch.
So. Then.
Don’t do that. Not again. Please...
One more answer. Where do I find this Vasta?
The Hub. Greenstar Factory. Base HQ. East of the River Tox, west of Ebola Palace. Can’t miss it. Ten fucking klicks wide...
Horace sighed.
Thank you, he’d said.
~ * ~
HORACE CLEANED HIS tools and stowed them away in the velvet roll. Silka, who had been cleaning herself during the torture and execution, ruffled up her fur and stared brightly at Horace.
“Are you okay?”
“I think I might have to repair myself.”
“There’s a medical kit in the bathroom. It’s basic...”
“Can it repair a Silka-sized hole in my abdomen?”
“I’m sure it can,” she said, sweetly.
Ten minutes later, with the biggest holes stapled shut but still feeling like a perforated sack of shit, Horace checked his T5 and then opened the door, peering out into the corridor.
“Do you think they know?”
“I guarantee it,” said Silka, padding out into the corridor and standing by the skirting.
They moved down the corridor, as a chambermaid rounded the corner with a trolley.
“Oh!” she said in surprise, one hand to her mouth, eyes wide in shock at Horace’s battered, torn and bloody appearance. She pushed a little wheeled alloy trolley containing towels and toilet rolls and soap. Her other hand came up with... a Makarov 11mm.
Horace’s T5 cracked, and a hole appeared in the maid’s head. She toppled back, dead.
“I told you,” said Silka.
“Hmm,” said Horace.
After that, there was no pretence. They took the back stairs, and five porters appeared with machine guns. Bullets screamed on trails of fire, spitting sparks from metal rails and thudding with puffs of disintegrating plaster into the walls. Horace returned fire, his T5 blamming down the stairwell. Two porters went down with bullets in their throats, fingers scrabbling at the wounds as if they might claw out the metal parasites. Then Silka jumped to the rail, paused for a second, bright eyes surveying the scene below, and dived, landing atop one of the porters. Her claws slashed left and right, ripping out one man’s throat, and the other man’s eyes. They dropped, screaming, and Silka glanced up, and Horace could see her face, triumphant and feral...
The explosion seemed to rock the very foundation stones of the hotel. Horace was picked up and thrown back through the door - actually through the door - by the pressure of the blast. Fire roared in the stairwell, which filled with thick black smoke in an instant. A Babe Grenade. Designed to really fuck you up.
Horace lay on his back, all wind knocked from him, brain swirling in a blast of confusion. Stunned, he slowly realised Silka was dead, and a heavy bitterness fell on him like funeral ash. Horace’s eyes went hard. The bastards had detonated their own in order to take him out. The porters with guns had been a come-on, a prick-tease, urging him into a fight... a few more steps down that stairwell and he would have been minced dog food. Instead, Silka had dropped into the abyss -and had been detonated for her trouble.
“You bastards,” said Horace, lips trembling.
Don’t lose your temper...
Don’t ever lose your temper...
Horace lost his temper. Not in an explosion of anger and rage; no. When Horace lost his temper it was a dangerous, internalised pressure. All rules of engagement were lost. Everyone would die: friends, enemies, babies in prams, dogs trotting down the sidewalk. All flesh to be annihilated.
Horace rolled to his knees, then his feet. Every bone in his body hurt from the blast, but he ignored the many agonies that assailed him. He was focused on the task.
A human would have died from the pressure of the explosion. Horace was hurting. But he channelled the pain to fuel his rage. He changed tactics: returned to the stairwell, stared down into the still-billowing thick smoke. Good cover. He headed upwards, noting that quite a few steel bars were twisted out of shape, and the whole staircase had lost its integrity. The building had been damaged, been twisted by the bomb.
Horace sprinted up the slightly skewed steps, noting cracks in the alloy and concrete.
A man appeared ahead of him, and Horace shot him in the face. He knew not whether he was an enemy or simply a member of the public. The gloves were off. All would die.
Fuck them, thought Horace.
Fuck the world.
He burst out onto the roof. A wind ripe with toxic stench slammed him, stealing his breath. Towering stormclouds rose overhead in great billows of iron-coloured bruises, offering naught but threat. Sunlight burst between the columns, radiating beams of freedom.
Horace stared around. The roof was large and flat, punctuated by thick pipes and blocks of fans.
Machine-gun fire rattled behind him. He squeezed off five shots down the stairwell and ejected the mag, replacing it with a clack. He limped across the roof and leant against the low wall. Below him, streets spread away, filled with queuing groundcars and ribbons of tourists buying tat and crap from tat and crap shops. There was no obvious place to jump; Horace was going to have to climb.
From over the Biohazard Ocean came the clatter of rotors. Horace’s head snapped up. A chopper. Shit. Coincidence? He doubted it.
A hotel receptionist appeared at the stairway, carrying an SMKK. Horace shot him through the eye. He’d always wanted to do that. Fucking snooty hotel receptionists.
The chopper came close, making a bee-line for the hotel. Horace heard the spin and whine of charging miniguns and cowered behind the low parapet as bullets howled around him, chewing brickwork and rendering, sending huge chunks spinning off into the toxic tourist haven below. People started to scream and run, scattering for cover. Groundcar horns screeched. The thump of the chopper’s rotors grew louder.
More people appeared at the stairwell and started to fire, SMKKs bucking in hands like live wild creatures. Horace returned fire, T5 slamming his hand, his mind bleak, memories a wasteland. One, two, three heads exploded, and Horace turned his attention to the chopper sweeping overhead, a line of bullets chewing the concrete by Horace’s boots and skidding off across the hotel roof. Horace sprinted for a huge section of pipes, but had to dive low and long as more hotel staff appeared, all shooting at him. His mouth was a grim line.
I’m going to execute every last motherfucking one of you.
He smiled at that, tasting dust from the roof, and rolled onto his back. The chopper swept overhead once more, and Horace began to fire the T5. Bullets glanced from the flanks and whizzed and pinged through the rotors. Horace had been hunted by choppers before. And he knew he could bring one down with a T5 with just the right shot...
There came a strange whining sound, and Horace frowned. It was out of context; unusual. He’d never heard that sound before. What was it? He spun onto his knees, shot more hotel staff, who seemed to be pouring like an unending stream from the building beneath his feet. Bullets whizzed and flickered past him, but he seemed suddenly immortal, untouchable, as if God had blessed The Dentist and sent him forth onto Amaranth to do His Bidding-Horace laughed out loud.
Shit. This was living! This was joy!
There came a hiss and thump, and Horace coughed. He coughed blood. A bright red splatter hit the concrete.
Horace looked down at the barbed hook protruding from his chest, then turned, slowly, following the swaying cable back up to the chopper. The whining sound. Now he understood. A tensioned harpoon gun. The fuckers.
He looked over to the hotel staff. There must have been twenty of them now, all heavily armed. Horace counted their dead. Thirteen. Nearly every single one had been taken out by a head shot. Damn, he was good. The rest of the staff had lowered th
eir weapons and were staring at him. Their faces were grim.
The cable gave a small tug, and the barbed hook before him settled into his flesh. He heard steel cable grate against his breast bone as the barbs dug in tight and he gasped, coughing up more blood. The chopper engines increased in pitch, the rotors whining fast, and then suddenly he was yanked off his feet and up into the sky like a fish on a hook.
The pain was incredible, tearing through him like fire.
But worse was the total helplessness...
The hotel dropped and Meltflesh City spun away like a toy, the streets, the groundcars, the cowering tourists, the bright Hawaiian shirts, the candy floss, the anti-tox chewy bars, the beach loungers and umbrellas to protect against the sun, the little coloured windmills for children, the foam surfboards with an anti-melt guarantee and a thousand other bits of trinket and tat endemic to any seaside resort... It all fell away, and Horace dropped his T5 weapon, his hands coming up to grasp the barbed steel fixed in his flesh, in his breastbone, barbs biting like steel teeth. His fingers prised at the barbs with inhuman strength, with android strength. But they were fixed tight, pinned in place by his own body weight. To get it free he’d have to carve himself a new chest cavity.
Horace spun like a child’s action figure on a string. The chopper headed up, high, and then turned and powered across the Biohazard Ocean. Within moments, Meltflesh City was gone; within moments, all that surrounded Horace was the ocean, yellow and purple and red, sloshing and churning, an unhappy toxic mix of God-only-knew-what deadly chemicals and savage pollution.
Horace started to laugh.
He roared with laughter, as pain rioted through his punctured frame.
He was fucked. He knew that.
He was dead meat on a hook.
Greenstar had won.
Eventually, the chopper stopped and hovered in the sky against clouds of iron and lead. Horace hung, suspended, swaying in a sea breeze that cooled the dome of his skull and ruffled his disintegrated, bloodstained suit. That hurt him more than the pain. He was going to die looking scruffy. Damn.
Horace grinned, and his teeth were stained with blood.
“Hey!” came a voice. “Hey, Horace!”
Slowly, Horace looked up. There was a woman there, but he could not make out any features; everything was going blurred. Weakness crept through his limbs like a slow poison. Suddenly, his feet felt cold. That was bad, he knew. It meant he was dying.
“Who are you?” he slurred, voice barely audible over the sounds of the chopper.
The thump of the chopper’s blades was giving him a headache. It reminded him of a bad hangover. A real bad hangover.
“I’m Vasta, Head of Security for The Company,” she shouted. She seemed to be smiling. It was hard for Horace to tell.
“I... was coming for you,” he said, and his head hung low. He could feel strength and life ebbing from him.
This was it, he knew.
This was it.
“I know,” she shouted, and the chopper swayed. The storm was coming; Horace could see it sweeping across the ocean, a great wall of violent rain. He swung on his steel cable. His arms fell to his sides, limp and useless. He felt his eyes closing.
“We couldn’t let you live,” shouted Vasta.
“I know,” whispered Horace.
“I’m sorry it has to be this way,” yelled Vasta. There was true regret in her voice. After all, Horace had been a valuable asset. A perfect tool in the extermination of - well, whatever Greenstar needed exterminating.
Another face appeared beside Vasta. It was the Fat Man.
“Drop him,” he said.
“No last words?” said Vasta, looking into the Fat Man’s dark eyes.
“No. Fuck him,” he said. “He’s just a tool. An organic machine.” He smiled. “He’s just an android.”
Vasta’s muscles clenched along her jaw, but she said nothing. She signalled to the pilot, and the man hit a button. There came a click beside them in the winch gear, then a sudden violent whizzing sound.
Beneath, Horace plunged to the Biohazard Ocean, the cable flapping and plummeting with him. He hit the water with a great splash, and sank beneath the waves, turning slowly, unconsciously winding himself up in the steel cable and further sealing his fate.
The Fat Man spat after Horace. His face was a snarl. “Good fucking riddance to a bad android.”
Vasta said nothing. She signalled for the pilot to take them back to the Greenstar Factory Hub.
The Biohazard Ocean surged, and boomed, and rolled. And if Vasta hadn’t known better, she would have sworn it was sighing.
~ * ~
TEN
“YEAH, SON. WHEN the music stops, then draw and fire. I’ll do the same. Whoever’s left standing gets the little lady.” General Bronson said the words in a deadpan voice. A voice that had spoken the same words to a hundred condemned idiots down through the years. General Bronson never lost. He was the fastest gun in the West. Well, the South. You know what he meant.
“Er, Mr Bronson?”
“Yes, son?”
The watch tinkled away, the tune getting slower, and slower, and slower...
“I have a question?”
“Yes, son?”
“About this music, about when it stops...”
But it was too late.
The music stopped.
For Svoolzard Koolimax XXIV, Third Earl of Apobos, that splinter of time lasted an eternity. He remembered his childhood, sat under huge palm trees, writing poetry with his crayon. All the other toddlers toddled over to him and drew scrawls on his poetry, but for Svool, the poem was perfection, and he batted away their crayons, then batted away their heads. They tended to hit the ground hard, being only toddlers, and sometimes Svool kicked them in the face for spoiling his poems. Times were hard, and toddlers were rough, and Svool knew how to deal with them.
Then he was in school and he remembered meeting his two first playmates, Darren and Kevin. Darren and Kevin were nice, and they also liked poetry, and so began years and years of “poetry raps” and “fuck yo bitch poetry comps,” where they’d have stand-up rows about poetry, and compete with alliteration, personification, and battles of enjamment. It was truly exhilarating! And in the under-11s, Svool ruled the poetry in the playground. Nobody fucked with his poems. Because Svool was Poet King.
The transition to high school - Raptor, as it was known to the high fee payers and snub-nosed posh parents - was difficult. Svool came, despite his grand title of Third Earl of Apobos, from a relatively poor family that struggled to feed its thirteen children. The Estates of Apobos took every single dollarpound for upkeep, and Svool’s parents had such massive financial headaches that even the basics of Svool’s upbringing were sporadic at best. Still, he had his poetry to care for him, and spent hours and days - and weeks and months - doodling away in his ever-fattening notebook, convinced that one day his poetry would become the saviour of the family. He would write his poems, and become a zillionaire, and save the family fortune! In the end, though, his mother ran off with what few dollarpounds remained, and thus precipitated the crash and sale of the Apobos Estates and Svool’s ignoble ejection from Raptor School. He remembered the day with shame burning his cheeks red. The booing and hissing as he dragged his huge trunk down the massive gravelled drive, without help, its little wheels sticking in every rut, its rectangular bulk bouncing and wobbling like a drunk fat lady on a hen night. All along the avenue, the other students booed and hissed at Svool, pelting him with wholemeal bread rolls and bananas (Raptor liked its students to be regular), and tears streamed down his reddened embarrassed face at the shame and the horror. Reaching the end of the drive, he turned back to face his thousand or so tormentors, and he screamed, screamed until he was blue, and spat as he screamed, “I’ll show you! I will immortalise you all in my poetry!” And he did. He penned The Horrors of Raptor, which sold three billion copies before he was twenty years old.
Fitting into a normal state high sc
hool, Bolltton School for Dweebs, came with great hardship. He knew nobody, and found it hard to fit into any kind of established friendship group. Instead, he ended up siding with the idiots, the geeks, the muppets, the greebos and the... poets. Poetry became the outlet for his angst, for all his teenage fears, for the way he’d been treated by his old school chums after the complete reversal of their friendship. The back-stabbing bastards.
Poetry, and more importantly, quickfire poetry competitions where speed of mind and tongue were the Masters of the Competition, had helped sculpt and build Svool’s life; but more, helped sculpt and build his control.
Now, as he faced General Bronson and his gunfighter brethren - dirty, stinking, kidnapping horrors to a man - as the tinkling of the music haunted him down through a billion years of primeval horror, he saw his terrible plight simply as a quickfire poetry contest. He deconstructed it back, stripped it way down from life and death to an exchange of words. And one thing Svool was superb at was exchanging words...