“What is this stuff?” Miz asked.
“Restraining fluid,” Nana Joan said. She struggled briefly against the bonds, but stopped quickly. “Virtually inescapable. Don’t try to use your weapons, unless you’re keen to lose a hand or two.”
“Did I hear your thingy going off?” Mech asked.
“The doohickey?” said Cal. “Yeah. I’m pressing it right now.”
Mech’s eyes darted around the room. “And?”
Cal tried to shrug, but failed. “Doesn’t seem to have done anything.”
“Oh, well ain’t that just great?” Mech sighed.
“Well now, what the fack does we have here, then?”
Gurt strolled in through the door, a couple of his henchmen behind him. Although the cocoon muffled the sound, Cal felt the vibrations of the tank rolling along the street in the direction of the restaurant.
Kicking through the rubble, Gurt stopped in front of Cal. “This is becoming a habit. Ain’t it?” he said. “You know what I do with habits?”
“Put them on and pretend you’re a big nun?” Cal guessed.
Gurt looked momentarily confused, but rallied quickly. He leered, showing off his revolting teeth. “I break them.”
“Ha! Good one,” said Cal. “I see what you did there. Clever.”
Gurt rabbit-punched him in the face. It wasn’t particularly hard, but because Cal’s head had nowhere to go, it hurt more than it otherwise might have.
Cal licked the blood from his burst lip. “Well, that felt a little unnecessary.”
Gurt hit him again. Cal grimaced, then wrinkled his nose as a trickle of blood emerged from each nostril. “As did that.”
The Tribunal agent drew back a fist to hit him again. Cal didn’t blink, and Gurt realized he was wasting his time. “Hit one of the other ones,” he said, gesturing to Nana Joan’s group. “Maybe that’ll stop his smart mouth.”
“OK, OK, I’ll stop,” said Cal, but one of Gurt’s men had already picked his target.
Higgsy’s bulbous face looked comically huge in the cocoon, as if it were being squeezed out through the gap. His bottom lip trembled, and Cal could see the boy was holding back tears.
“Hey, come on, he’s just a kid,” Cal said.
“You leave him now,” Nana Joan warned the agent. “You hear me? You don’t touch him.”
Gurt sneered. “Yeah. That one’ll do,” he said, holding Cal’s gaze. “Make it a good ‘un.”
“N-no, please, don’t, don’t!” Higgsy whimpered. The agent raised his fists, bobbed and weaved a couple of times, enjoying the moment, then struck with a jab at Higgsy’s puffed-up cheek.
FLOMP.
His hand sunk into Higgsy’s flesh, all the way up to the wrist. “Sommy,” said Higgsy, his mouth squished to one side. “I twied to wan oo.”
The henchman screamed. He leapt back, the skin of his hand sizzling as it dissolved into raw, wet flesh. That, too, was eaten away by the thin veneer of orange slime, becoming bone, then dust, then nothing at all.
Gurt and the other agent snapped up their weapons as Higgsy’s attacker passed out in shock.
“It… it wasn’t my fault,” Higgsy sobbed. “I didn’t do it, it’s not my fault.”
“Don’t hurt him!” Nana protested.
“Yeah, come on, guys, it’s me you want,” said Cal.
“Leave the kid alone,” Mech added.
But Gurt was advancing on Higgsy now, regarding him with a sort of morbid curiosity that suggested he wanted to find out what was inside the boy, and didn’t mind how many holes he had to make to do so.
Handing his shotgun across to his remaining henchman, Gurt slid a knife out from a concealed sheath below his beard. “Well now,” he breathed. “Ain’t you a facking interesting one?”
He brought the knife closer to Higgsy’s bloated face. The boy tried to draw back, but there was no way for him to move.
“P-please,” Higgsy whispered, but the word was lost in a mess of tears and snot, and Gurt just kept coming closer.
“Hey, back off, you big jerk.”
Alan emerged from behind Higgsy’s cocoon, his arms shaking as he pointed the gun up at Gurt. “Leave him alone, or I shoot.”
Gurt took a step back and slowly raised his hands.
“Yeah, that’s it,” said Alan. “Ain’t so tough now, are you?”
With a flick of his foot, Gurt kicked the gun from Alan’s grip. “Yes, I facking am,” he said, then he toe-punted the little man in the stomach with such force it lifted him off his feet.
Alan fell to the floor, doubled over, coughing and wheezing. Gurt turned his attention back to Higgsy. “Now, where was we?”
“I said,” Alan spat, forcing his legs to lift him. “Leave him alone.” There was a shake in his voice that was impossible to miss, but to his credit, he carried on. “Or you know what I’m going to do to you? I’m going to make you eat your own feet.”
The other agent decided it was his turn to kick the little guy this time. Alan flipped in the air and his head hit the ground with a crack.
“Stop it!” Nana Joan said, her face contorting in rage. She struggled against the bonds. “Leave him alone!”
“Alan, stay down,” pleaded Jork, but the little man was already pulling himself up again. Blood ran from a gash in his forehead, partially blinding him.
“And you know what I’ll be d-doing?” he managed. He spat a wad of blood onto the floor. “I’ll be watching, you piece of shizz. And I’ll be dancing.”
“Oh my god, he’s going to do it,” Cal muttered, as Alan began to jig and prance on the spot.
“Like this. You’ll be chewing on your own feet, and I’ll be—”
Gurt’s knife entered Alan’s stomach and emerged through his back, cutting his dancing short. “Oh, facking think so, do you?” the Tribunal man hissed. He leered, showing off those teeth again, and as he withdrew the knife, then rammed it home a second time.
“No!” Nana roared.
“Alan!” Jork cried. Higgsy just stared, open-mouthed, too numb to say a word.
Gurt let out a little gasp of pleasure as he stabbed Alan a third time. The little man’s eyes were wide and staring. He didn’t scream. He couldn’t scream. He just went limp and lifeless as Gurt placed a hand on his face and shoved him to the floor with the rest of the debris.
“You… You fonking piece of shizz!” Cal growled. He struggled against the cocoon. “You worthless fonking piece of shizz!”
Gurt coolly regarded the blood on his blade, then wiped it on Jork’s cheek. The streak of red looked even more vibrant against Jork’s snow white skin.
“Now, then,” said the agent, turning his attention back to Higgsy again. “Where did we get to, boy?”
A hand wrapped around Gurt’s ankles. It was a big hand. And it was getting bigger.
“What the fack?” the agent managed, before another hand – even bigger than the first – caught him by the head.
There was the sound of several bones all snapping at the same time, and a scream that quickly became a damp, gargling wheeze.
Alan stood up, but it was a version of Alan that had been filtered through a nightmare. He was several times his original size, and still growing. Rather than an Incredible Hulk-like physique of bulging muscles, though, his diminutive frame was mutating into a sort of dark, oily putty that wriggled and writhed as if a living entity all on its own.
“Hol-ee shizz,” Cal whispered. “There’s something you don’t see every day. Thankfully.”
With an inhuman screech, Alan bent Gurt backwards, twisting him into a full circle. If the Tribunal agent wasn’t killed by his first foot being rammed down his gullet, the second one almost certainly finished him off.
Alan hurled the mangled wreckage of the man at the other agent, who stood rooted to the spot in terror. The force of the impact slammed the agent against the partially-collapsed wall, and a rain of rocks and other debris toppled down on him, trapping him below.
“Wah
ey! We’re saved!” cried Cal. “You did it, giant monster Alan, you…”
Throwing back his head, Alan let out another terrifying screech, then he hurled himself through the wall and galloped away, using his enormous front arms to propel him along the street.
“Uh, he’s going to come back, right?” said Cal. “He hasn’t just left us here?”
“I fonking hope not. He needs to break us out of this stuff,” said Mech.
“I was thinking more about his little dance, which we didn’t get to see,” said Cal. “But, sure, there’s your thing, too.”
Growling, Miz managed to force her claws through her cocoon. She scraped them up and down, her movements becoming bigger and more violent as she made space for her arm to move.
Finally, with a roar of triumph, she tore herself free. “Hold still,” she told Cal – quite unnecessarily, he thought, what with him being completely immobile – then she hacked and slashed at his cocoon until he was free.
While Miz freed Mech, Cal took Gurt’s knife and began cutting through Nana Joan’s restraints.
“The boys. Get the boys out first,” the old woman told him, but Miz and Mech were already working on them, and soon all six of them were free.
Although ‘free’, Cal realized, was something of an exaggeration. The turret of a tank pointed at them through the collapsed wall. Two squads of agents – one dressed all in white, the other wearing the same dirty, worn-out old outfits Gurt and his men were dressed in – flanked the tank, their rifles raised.
“So, what now?” Mech grunted.
“We could take them out,” Cal suggested. “I’ll get the guy over there with the wonky eye, you two take down the tank and everyone else. Deal?”
Mech held up his damaged arm. “I’m down to one cannon,” he said.
Cal sighed. “Fine. You take the guy with the eye, then. You’re such a drama queen.”
“Ready!”
The voice roared from somewhere out in the ranks. The guns, which had already been pointing into the restaurant, pointed even harder.
“Aim!”
“Wait, hold on now!” Cal protested. “Can’t we talk about this?”
“Fi—” boomed the voice, but before the commander could reach the end of the word, the sky exploded.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The doohickey bleeped in Cal’s hand, and Ronda’s voice chimed out once more. “Signal detected,” it announced. “Colossobot has arrived.”
With a sound like all the thunder in human history rumbling at once, a foot landed atop the tank, instantly pancaking it, and anyone unfortunate enough to be inside.
The agents who had been pointing their guns at Cal and the others decided this was a much more pressing target to be focusing their attention on. They swiveled their rifles up above the foot, to where, presumably, there was a full leg, although what was left of the roof made it impossible for Cal to see anything above the thing’s ankle.
“Colossobot defensive measures initiated,” the doohickey announced, this time in soulless computer tones instead of Ronda’s voice.
A number of energy beams sliced down from somewhere well above ankle-height, and carved through the Tribunal guards like a concentrated high-intensity laser weapon through quivering, unprotected flesh.
A near-silence fell over Nana Joan’s, broken only by the distant wail of approaching sirens, the panicky screams of Down Here citizens, and the distant screeching of whatever the fonk Alan now was.
Miz’s ears were also able to pick up the faint hiss of sizzling flesh, but as she didn’t mention it, no-one else was any the wiser.
Mech cautiously peeked out at the foot, leaning down so he could see past the knee, and a good way up the thigh. There was another foot, too, much the same as the first, positioned a little further along the street.
“Tell me this thing’s on our side,” he said.
“Well, like, it totally killed everyone who was about to shoot us,” Miz said. “So I’m guessing it doesn’t hate us.”
“Maybe,” said Mech. “But it’s got Zertex written all over it.”
Miz nodded. “It does look like the sort of thing they’d build.”
“No, I mean it literally has Zertex written all over it,” said Mech. “I can see it from here.”
Cal stepped out into the street, glancing around quickly just in case there were more tanks or people with guns lurking around. When he was sure the coast was clear, he leaned back and looked up.
He couldn’t, however, look up enough. The head was hidden behind the bulky chest, and Cal could only really get an impression of the thing.
It was big. But that was a given. It was a giant robot and giant robots were, by their very definition, usually on the large side.
Cal had no idea quite how big it was, but even the tallest buildings around it barely reached its waist, and its broad, stocky frame fit onto the street with just a foot or so to spare between it and the buildings on either side.
“What’s her name? Narp’s mom. She said she stole it from Zertex. Or from the Xandrie, who’d stolen it from Zertex, or something,” Cal said.
“Isn’t she, like, an old lady?” asked Miz.
Cal shrugged. “Yeah, but…” He gestured with a thumb to Nana Joan, who was sweeping the area with her rifle.
Miz nodded. “Yeah. I guess.”
“And Lady Vajazzle,” said Cal. “Actually, what is it with space old ladies? Are they all butt-kicking ninja-types?”
Mech shrugged. “My mom once killed an Ejaculating Thunce with a hair clip.”
Cal turned to him. “What the fonk is an…? In fact, no. I don’t want to know.”
He jumped as a hatch suddenly slid upwards in the robot’s foot, revealing an elevator beyond. It would be a tight squeeze, and barely enough room for three of them.
“OK, Nana, you take Higgsy and Jork up first, then send the elevator back down,” Cal said. “Mech, Miz and I – mostly those two, if I’m honest – will shoot at any bad guys who show their faces.”
“No,” said Nana.
“’No’?” said Cal. “Which part?”
“We’re not going with you, dear,” said Nana. “We’re going to find Alan.”
“Alan?” said Mech. “You mean…?”
“The big scary monster guy,” Cal explained. The expression on Nana’s face told him he probably shouldn’t argue. “You sure?”
Nana nodded. “I have an obligation to keep my employees in check. All my employees. I must, by order of the Tribunal, know where they are at all times.” She adjusted her grip on her gun. “Which, you’ll understand, prevents me from letting you aboard that… thing. However…”
“Hey now, Nana, we don’t—”
“How. Ever,” Nana barked, glaring at him with a boggle-eyed intensity that made his mouth stop talking of its own accord. The old woman’s face softened as she continued. “As of right now, you, Mr Muntch, are fired.”
“Aw, seriously?” said Cal. “And I thought it was going so well!” He smiled at Nana, then glanced over to Higgsy and Jork. “You’re going to take care of those two, right?”
Nana nodded, just once. “Always.”
“Guys, it has been a pleasure from start to finish,” said Cal. “You know, apart from maybe ninety per cent of it. But you three made it all bearable.”
He patted Jork on the shoulder, and Jork responded with his three-fingered salute. “Be safe, Nob Muntch,” he said. Over Cal’s shoulder, Mech and Miz both snorted.
Cal gave Higgsy the same friendly shoulder-pat, but the blob-faced boy threw his arms around him, almost smothering Cal with his bloated head. “I’m going to miss you,” he said.
“Maybe I’ll come back one day,” said Cal. “You know, if I ever fancy a Five Guys.”
Nana glanced at the ruins of her restaurant. “Oh, I don’t think we’ll get the old place fixed up any time soon,” she said.
Mech and Miz stepped into the elevator, and Cal joined them. “Oh? What will you do?”<
br />
Nana looked up. “We have a ship,” she said. “Maybe it’s time we had some adventures of our own.”
Cal grinned. “God help the galaxy,” he said, then the door dropped closed, and the elevator launched Cal, Mech and Miz towards the sky.
When the door next opened, they were presented with a bird’s eye view of the city, assuming the bird was sitting inside the head of a giant robot, rather than actually flying. Down Here stretched out for hundreds of miles ahead of them, a jumbled mish-mash of architectural styles that Cal broadly categorized into ‘that one looks like something from the future’ and ‘that one doesn’t.’
Beyond the edge of the city was ocean on all sides. Cal remembered the sea-monster that had attacked the Untitled, and briefly contemplated going down there for some giant robot vs Godzilla type action, but decided it would have to wait.
There were thirteen seats inside the robot’s head, positioned in front of various screens, terminals, and flashy things that went beep. To Cal’s disappointment, there wasn’t an obvious Captain’s chair he could jump onto and claim before anyone else. Every seat seemed to bring with it quite a lot of responsibility, and they were clearly a full ten people short of the recommended staffing levels.
Two screens curved around the wall ahead of them – possibly one screen, with a strip down the middle to create the effect of the robot’s eyes. The gray cloud layer was only a couple of hundred feet above them, and Cal could clearly make out the engine glow of the floating cities beyond it.
“So, hands up if you know how to fly this thing,” Cal said. He looked hopefully at Mech in particular. “Anyone…? Anyone at all?”
“Man, I ain’t even seen one of these things,” Mech said. He studied a terminal, and cautiously poked a switch.
From somewhere over by the screen came a series of pleasant chimes, like a little xylophone ditty composed with the sole purposes of being reassuring and calming.
“Self-destruct sequence initiated,” announced an equally pleasant, yet less reassuring voice. “Detonation in T-Minus Ten Seconds.”
Space Team: The Guns of Nana Joan Page 20