by Andy Remic
“What’s first?” came a woman’s voice. “Fingers, toes or cock?”
“No,” growled Sick Note, “not like this, not here, not with a chainsaw. Make it clean! A bullet! Give me a soldier’s death.”
“No soldier’s death for you, you hacking, coughing piece of human offal.” The woman - Vasta - advanced. She was dressed, bizarrely, in black PVC. Almost a sex suit. Jenny’s mind was spinning.
“Make them stop,” she snapped at Randy. “Make them stop! I’ll talk. I’ll tell you everything!”
Randy reached up with a tiny spray can, and sprayed it in her mouth. Something grew fast, like expanding foam, filling her mouth and bubbling out, forming immediately into a solid ball. It almost blocked the back of her throat. She wheezed, struggling to breathe.
“Shhh,” said Randy, sharply, a finger to his lips. “I think he has something to say.”
Tears were streaming down Jenny’s face.
Ahead, Sick Note was trying to strain away from the tiny spinning blades of the chainsaw. It buzzed, revving again and again, each time accompanied by a squirt of blue smoke.
“No!” said Sick Note, head thrashing from side to side. “No, I’ll talk, I’ll tell you everything you want to know...”
“Too late,” hissed the woman, and the chainsaw descended, buzzing and bucking, cutting through Sick Note’s arm. Blood and flesh spat out and back towards the mirror, and Jenny found she was thrashing also, tears streaming down her face. Sick Note was screaming, screaming, screaming, and an ocean of blood flushed onto the floor. As the chainsaw cut through and came free, his body slumped to one side and his severed arm flopped about uselessly on its chain, drooling gore. Sick Note was, miraculously, still conscious. He was babbling inanely. “I’ll do... do... do it. Anything. What you want? You want to know about Jenny? Jenny Xi? Please. No more. No more. Please. I’ll talk. Anything you want. I’ll tell you anything. Just keep back. Keep away. I can’t... can’t think.”
The woman revved the chainsaw. “Who cares anymore?” she said, advancing on Sick Note’s other arm. In a feeble display of desperation, he tried to beat at her with his stump. Jenny watched, face flooded with tears, unable to believe what she was seeing. It was a sick charade. A freakshow tortureshow. Designer-fucking-entertainment for the sick, slick masses. She was amazed they didn’t have the cameras rolling with a billion fat fucks slouched in couches stuffing popcorn and pies into slack jowls whilst slack brains observed slack entertainment on the Dead Eye...
The chainsaw rattled and buzzed and cut into Sick Note’s remaining arm. Flesh and blood spat. The chainsaw jigged. Sick Note thrashed, dancing, a marionette with cut strings.
There came a sudden whap and the chainsaw got stuck. The woman started to tug at the machine, and Sick Note was making a low moaning noise. She tugged and pulled and wrenched, but the damn thing was stuck halfway through his arm. She turned to the camera/screen in her ridiculous PVC outfit, and gave a kind of half shrug. Sorry, guys, that half shrug said. Damn bloody chainsaw got stuck in a human being again!
The scene faded, the long mirror returning to its state as a mirror and fading Sick Note from view.
“You see?” Randy was close again. “You see what you did? You fucking people, you fucking terrorists. You think you can go around destroying what is ours, what belongs to Greenstar Recycling, and you think that’s fucking acceptable? We own the fucking police. We own the fucking politicians. And we own you, little bitch. So you will tell us what we want to hear. Or else...” He laughed then. “Or else fuck it, I’ll kill somebody else just for fun. Just to watch your eyes widen. Just to watch the colour drain from your pretty little cheeks.”
“Mmmnnnn,” said Jenny, thrashing her head from side to side. Don’t! Please don’t do it! Please don’t kill my people! I’ll talk! I’ll tell you everything you want to hear. Anything and everything, and even shit I didn’t know existed in the bottomless pit of my fevered brain. I’ll do anything you want. Anything. You have won. I can’t see my friends die like this... But of course she could not speak, and could not plead. She could not enunciate her message.
All she could do was watch. And suffer. Like her squad suffered.
~ * ~
FLIZZ WAS WHAT could only be described as glamorous. She was tall, voluptuous, with shining golden hair, perfect healthy skin, white teeth, blue eyes - but more than all these things, things that went up to make a glamorous woman, they all connected in the right way, every part of Flizz complementing every other part of her to create a platter of damn near perfection. She somehow was more than the sum of her parts. The day Jenny met Flizz, in a downtown toxpark at a wayward stubborn no-leave village at the foot of the Mercury Peaks, she had been quite literally blown away.
They sat together, on a bench, watching toxi-scarred children playing on the swings. The kids didn’t seem to mind their horrific injuries, inflicted by Greenstar’s ever-loosening safety procedures and an army of corrupt lawyers willing to sell their souls to whatever devils inhabited their own personal hells in order to win the case. So, much as it had always been.
Jenny took occasional sideways glances at Flizz, finding her at once beautiful and thrilling. There was disbelief there as well, because the squad slip she’d been sent by McGowan said that Flizz was the best sniper from their mountain training camps, high up in the peaks where the snow and rocks were streaked silver by mercury poisoning.
“You’re our top ranking sniper?”
“Yes.” Her voice was low and husky. Sultry. She gave a half-shy smile to Jenny, then looked away.
They talked for an hour, Flizz explaining how her father had been a hunter, out in the remotest parts of the mountains and out on the lagoons at their base. From an early age, he had taken her on week-long hunts, teaching her how to conceal herself in her environment; teaching her how to use all manner of different rifles. Flizz had been a natural. Not just a natural shot, but a natural born killer.
All that came to an end in the ‘68 Acid Tanker Crash in the city of Faex, where four hundred and seventy-eight thousand people died when the tanker pilot lost control, and the mammoth vessel fell on the city, breaking in two, spilling its fifty-billion-gallon load. Fifty billion gallons of sentacyclic acid. Flizz’s mother and father had been amongst those thousands left writhing on the streets, skin burned off, eyes smoking in sockets, lips scalded from mouths, fingers and toes melting into the road like some bad cartoon on toxic comedy...
Of course, Greenstar had paid out some minimal compensation via its insurance policies; their smallprint was legendary. And the crash site at the core of Faex was turned into a shrine blessed by fifteen different religions. It was only when news leaked to the independent Quad-Gal media about both pilots of the Acid Tanker that things really started to kick off; a lax attitude to medicals on the part of Greenstar, a refusal to drug-test its pilots even though its pilots were controlling ships capable of mass destruction; well, it could only go one way.
After the story broke, and Greenstar Recycling Company were found culpable, Flizz had left her house and made it known around the shady quarters of the city that she was seeking gainful employment with the Impurity Movement. Her beauty stood her in no good favour, and it took several knives between ribs, and the burning down of a casino, to persuade the gangster syndicates that she meant serious business. Eventually, word did get around. Flizz was beauty and the beast. Bad news. Deadly trouble. And eventually she was picked up and monitored by Cell Commander McGowan.
In many ways, Jenny had fallen in love with Flizz the moment she met her.
She remembered their first intimate moment. It was like a dream. It was a dream when it happened, for even though Jenny knew she loved Flizz from the moment she saw her, Flizz was a hard woman to crack, and never gave any indication that she returned her feelings.
They been training out in the Shattered Uranium Jungle, building shelters, surviving off what they could find on the harsh toxic beaches, avoiding the wild deviated beasts and c
annibals. A severe toxstorm had come in, smashing a bloody red string of bruises across the sky, followed by the blood rain. Huge red droplets pounded the jungle canopy in a torrential onslaught, and Jenny and Flizz had pushed into their narrow shelter in a panic of drenched hair, soaked clothing and giggling.
For the first time in her life Jenny regressed, felt like a happy schoolgirl again. This wasn’t training for war and violence; it lost its sombre mood and purpose. In this slice of time, she was young and carefree, enjoying life, enjoying love. They were pushed in tight together, blood rain drumming on the broadleaf roof and running in rivulets along the ridges, dripping in long spumes of red. The sky darkened more, and thunder ripped in from across the ocean. Machine-gun lightning crackled, smacking into the jungle in ten, fifteen, twenty violent strikes that made the women hold their breath, anticipation shining in their eyes, fists clenched tight. They’d heard about the lightning before, but never experienced it first hand... until now.
Crack-crack-crack went the wild machine-gun lightning, random sparkles of electric violence through the blood-red rain. Aftereffects snapped across the sky. At any moment they could be pulverised, and they lay there, looking into one another’s shining eyes, breath held, waiting for random destruction and death to visit them, to strike them, to merge them into one being...
Flizz leant forward. Her breath was sweet, tender, perfect. Their lips met, and they kissed as the lightning continued to crackle above them, striking the forest in random bouts of intense violence. And Jenny knew. To die now, that would be perfect. But they didn’t die, and they kissed, and fell into one another, and as the machine-gun lightning passed it left behind the tropical rain, pounding against the shelter, and they kissed, and held one another, and slowly undressed one another until they were naked and pressed tight in that narrow space. Everything dissolved into nothing, into a microcosm of time and the universe. Time had no meaning. The old clichés are the best, thought Jenny, as time spiralled off into a maelstrom of eternity. They kissed and touched and eventually made love, moving together, wet, sliding together, tongues entwined, a languorous long eternal fucking.
Afterwards, they lay together and slept and the storm eventually passed.
~ * ~
JENNY HAD NEVER thought of herself as gay, and she’d had many lovers - all but one of them men. But that time, that day, that moment in the storm, focussed and distilled by the promise of lightning death - that had been the most intense and beautiful moment of her life. She’d always been slightly dubious of girl-on-girl relationships, wondering how you could possibly be satisfied without the right equipment; but in that tiny shelter she had been satisfied, and more than satisfied, not just by meeting a physical need but by love.
The morning after, they had walked through the jungle in easy silence, stopping by various blasted trunks to examine the damage. The storm had caused a riot, and the pools of standing water were just beginning to steam as the green sun rose and cast an eerie glow through the high jungle canopy.
“Why do they call it the Shattered Uranium Jungle?” asked Flizz, at last.
“It goes back to the early days, when Greenstar invaded Amaranth,” said Jenny, leaping lightly onto a fallen tree and staring off through the jungle. “There were various indigenous local tribes, quite simple in their beliefs; they refused Greenstar’s generous offer to relocate them to another universe, and instead waged war on the tankers and shitships that rumbled low overhead. So Greenstar sent in a series of mercenary units to remove them; but the shitbag dirtbox mercenaries were not regulated by Quad-Gal Military. They flew over the jungle using skimmers, located villages, and exploded depleted uranium shrapnel charges over the tribespeople. Men, women, children. Not military targets at all. Not combat, but extermination. Well, there were a lot of fucking tribes, and nobody to intervene; not police, not army, nothing. Greenstar were unregulated back then, and anyway, they claimed to have no knowledge of the mercenary army causing havoc in the southern jungles of the planet. It went on for months, and the bastards left an army of corpses and pollution in their wake. Pollution that causes severe birth defects. By the time Quad-Gal Military got involved and wiped out the mercs, it was too late. The tribespeople who survived - well, let’s just say they were made very ill and very antisocial. Such is the way with corporate takeovers.”
They continued on through the jungle, until Flizz gave a low gasp of wonder. Jenny moved to her and they stood at the edge of a concealed cenote. It was about a hundred metres across, with crumbling rock edges, a wide shaft that dropped perhaps two or three hundred metres straight down, a cylinder punched vertically through Amaranth’s crust by the fist of God. It was almost perfectly circular, the rock a sandy colour, and deep down below them a turquoise lake sat, perfectly still.
“That’s beautiful,” said Flizz.
“Incredible,” agreed Jenny.
“God’s own private lake,” said Flizz.
Their hands found one another’s, fingers entwining, and they stood for long moments soaking up the atmosphere, the beauty, and listening to the tinkle of a narrow gentle waterfall that sprayed white foam into one edge of the distant lake. Birds chattered in the trees. And for the first time in her adult life, Jenny found peace. And joy.
Flizz turned to her, eyes sparkling. “Let’s do it.”
“It?”
“Jump.”
Jenny peered down. “We might break our backs.”
“We might die,” agreed Flizz.
Fingers still entwined, they took several steps back. Their breaths caught in their throats, and laughing with pure adrenaline, with pure abandon, with absolute anarchy, a disintegration of convention and social expectation and normality and training and common sense, Jenny and Flizz ran, and leapt out into the wide expanse, and fell, fell, fell into the still turquoise waters of the deep, perfect cenote.
~ * ~
NOW, JENNY WATCHED her ex-lover, ex-partner, ex-girlfriend, ex-God in the mirror. Flizz was tied up tight, head upright and proud, eyes harsh and narrow. She was naked, just like Jenny, and this fake reflection was a parody of their once beautiful relationship. Jenny still loved Flizz, and she knew Flizz still loved her; but they had chosen Impurity and their work of bringing down The Company over their love. To both women, Amaranth and its freedom was more important than their own desires. But now, as Jenny, strapped to her slab, mouth filled with injected foam, watched her true love through the transparent mirror, she wanted to scream - no, oh, no, you cannot do this, not to my love, not to my Flizz, not to the perfect woman in my life; because that would be beyond comprehension, that would be a torture so great I might not arrive out of the other side...
If you want to visit the realms of insanity; this is how to do so.
If you want to break me like a stick; this is the way forward.
Jenny watched, in horror, her mind ticking faster than any supercomputer. She struggled against her bonds, steel straps around wrist and ankle, but they were too tight, too strong, too permanent. She caught Randy from the corner of her eye and he was watching the peepshow-fuckshow-tortureshow about to begin, and he was grinning, and Jenny’s brow darkened because she wanted him dead. She fought her bonds with renewed violence. They were too strong, too tight. Bastards. Bastards! Her eyes flickered to Flizz - Vasta, Head of Security, had appeared on the other side of the mirror. Was it a direct portal to the place? Or just a TV screen projecting an image? Vasta carried a long, gleaming cut-throat razor. They were speaking, but the sound had been muted. Jenny could see the muscles working in Vasta’s jaws, saw Flizz, angry, eyes bright, talking to Vasta but watching the blade hung low, a curve of dangerous, sharpened steel.
“She won’t be dissuaded, you know,” said Randy, almost conversationally.
Jenny watched them talking, Vasta edging closer and closer, the blade coming up, a threatening, terrifying, simple sliver of steel. In her mouth, the ball of foam had started to loosen. Only a little, but spit had finally worked between her cheek wa
lls and the compacted foam. Jenny started to probe and push with her tongue, working it around, pushing at the ball of foam.
“Flizz is talking now. Pleading. Telling Vasta everything. But it’s too late.” He turned and stared and moved close to Jenny. “Too late for you cunts. Tell me about McGowan. And Mr Candle. Especially Mr Candle. And then we’ll stop...” - he glanced over his shoulder, where the cut-throat razor was resting against Flizz’s perfect white breast - “peeling your friend like a ripe fruit.”
Jenny nodded her head vigorously, eyes frightened, head bowing low, and Randy brought up another spray and pushed it into her mouth. He squeezed the trigger as, over his shoulder, the blade moved swiftly down, slicing off Flizz’s right breast to leave an oval of raw flesh. Blood ran down her belly. Her muscles strained at her bonds, like vibrating tendons of steel. Flizz’s mouth was open in a silent scream at the ceiling, as the cut-throat razor began to slash, carving up the flesh of her chest and belly into bloody ribbons. She danced and jerked against her bonds. She screamed and screamed and screamed...