by Andy Remic
"Please don't shoot!" wailed Grandall.
"We have wives! Families!" blubbed Bebooz.
"Rubbish," clanked Mrs Strogger, grinding forward. "Your families are from the clone vats, picked out to look like whatever deviant sexual fantasy you had on the day! Your children are slush grown puppies designed to give you a hard time! So stop your whining, you sadomasochistic wriggling maggots!"
"Hey, it's easy for you to criticise, you mechanised heap of junk! Get back to the fucking scrapyard!" shouted Grandall.
"Keys!" hissed Franco, prodding the cannon into Grandall's face. The guards both fumbled and produced hefty bunches of digital card keys. Franco looked around for a pocket to stow them in, realised his underpants had no such compartment, and handed the keys to Mrs Strogger, who slipped them neatly into a battered alloy drawer, scarred by fire and bullets.
"Don't kill us!" mumbled Grandall.
"Don't hit us!" whined Bebooz.
Franco knocked Bebooz out with a straight right, and Grandall froze, his steel truncheon half raised. He was like a rabbit caught in the glare of headlights. Like a SPAW caught in a helium-blasted meteor storm.
"It's either my fist, or answering to Sourballs," grinned Franco, toothily.
Grandall closed his eyes, and made an impatient gesture.
Franco whacked him, and Mrs Strogger opened the gate, which buzzed and shunted open. They moved through, and Mrs Strogger closed the gate behind them, pulling a thick-bladed drill on a long, black, rubber cable from a compartment in her chest. The drillbit whizzed, and Mrs Strogger plunged it into the slick door control panel. Sparks erupted, and thick oil flooded out, staining the alloyconcrete floor.
"To stop them following?" said Franco, raising his eyebrows.
"Yar," said Mrs Strogger, stowing away her flexi-drill beneath an alloy tit.
"Let's go."
Sourballs and twenty guards emerged from the corridor. She grabbed the bars and howled after her quarry, as her guards opened fire and green laser pulses slammed down the corridors, scorching alloy and steel. Franco and Mrs Strogger ducked and ran, and then were gone...
The Nechudnazzar Correctional and Reintegration Facility was a vast and incomprehensible maze. Mrs Strogger, despite claiming to know the way, seemed to have got them lost and Franco was grinding his teeth in annoyance, trying not to lose his temper.
They stopped at a sixteen-point junction. Around them, the screeching alarms had quietened. Only the red stroboscopic lights flickered, casting eerie shadows and underlining to the prison authorities that they were still in a state of high alert, and that fleeing fugitives were still on the run.
"Which way?" said Franco.
"Give me a minute. I must orientate."
"Orientate? Why don't you just pull out your MonkeyMan satnav, that should guide us through the damn place..."
"Do not be criticising," said Mrs Strogger primly. "I am simply working out the best route."
"Stuff the best route," snapped Franco. "Just get us out of this shithole!"
Guards tramped past the end of one corridor, boots slapping dully on the alloyconcrete floor. But they did not turn. Franco hunched, waiting, then relaxed as the threat passed. He turned, and caught a glimpse of what looked like paper. He gaped at the old org mech.
"Are you really looking at a map?"
"No!" snapped Mrs Strogger.
"What's that? There? In your claws?"
"It's paper."
"And what's on the paper?"
"Um. A map. But listen, it's reliable, it was drawn by an old inmate I met, before you arrived. He sold it me for a carton of puffweeds."
"Give me that!" snapped Franco, snatching the paper from Mrs Strogger. Now, Franco was no genius, but he could see the actual structure of the map was an impossibility: corridors crossed one another, or occupied the same time/space. He snorted. "This is crap. This is a map of your own arsehole. I thought you were going to get us out of here in exchange for an airlift to The Org States? Eh?"
"What I said was that I knew the prison and Nechudnazzar well. You extrapolated what you wanted to hear from my dialogue. As I said before, there is definitely a tunnel, way down in the bowels of the prison. We have to head down, looking for our means of escape."
"Hmm," frowned Franco, unconvinced, and handed the absurd map back to Mrs Strogger. "Go on, then. Looks like I haven't got much of a bloody option, do I?" Except maybe breaking away on my own, carrying out mass slaughter and escaping into the wilds without the ball and chain of Mrs-bloody-Strogger round my constricted throat. "You lead the way."
With a hiss of hydraulics, Mrs Strogger led the way.
They'd travelled down endless corridors, through endless gates and barriers. It was hot. Unbearably hot. And getting hotter. Franco, despite being in underpants and flip flops, wiped sweat from his brow and flicked it to the steel and alloyconcrete floor.
"By all the gods, it's like a furnace down here!"
"It's going to get hotter," said Mrs Strogger.
"Why's that?"
"We've got to pass through the kitchens."
"Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"
Mrs Strogger gave Franco a sideways look. "Have you ever eaten prison food?"
"Er. Yes. But how is that relevant?"
"Well, you should know the sheer amount of toxins floating around make any prison kitchen more lethal than the core of an active volcano."
"Ah."
"And the prison chefs are pretty good shots with a thrown cleaver."
"Ah. Can the kitchens be avoided?"
"Not according to my map."
Franco stared at Mrs Strogger. She clanked to a stop, hydraulics hissing and machines whirring, and her metal toes flexed, chipping the concrete. Franco acknowledged to himself, there and then, that there were indeed people in the world who were a damn sight more insane than he. Mrs Strogger, third human, third machine, third... something else, was one oil-fed nutjob.
They moved on, dropping down deep stairwells into shadowed gloom. High above, large extraction fans spun in eerie silence. Down they moved, laser cannons poised for combat, Franco's head twitching left and right as he scanned for enemies. But there were none. Curiously, the Nechudnazzar Correctional and Reintegration Facility seemed deserted. And Franco realised: they think we're trying to escape. Heading upwards... and so concentrating their searches that way! Nobody tries to escape by heading down into the bowels - but they'll catch on, soon enough, and then we'll be flooded and overrun by the bad guys.
It would seem time was of the essence.
After yet more stairs, that saw Mrs Strogger clanking and moaning and groaning, and occasionally leaning against the wall to puff and pant, and allow oily clouds of steam to ooze from her mechanical vents and orifices, they reached a long, straight corridor. It was lined entirely in steel and gleamed with the sort of shine given by chefs with a particularly anal obsessive compulsive disorder.
Franco stared at the steel. Floor, walls and ceiling gleamed. At the far end of the corridor were large double doors, also of polished stainless steel. Somewhere, echoes of red stroboscopic light gave the scene an eerie cast.
"I don't like this."
"This is our route," said Mrs Strogger.
Franco felt like saying, Go on, show me the bloody route on the bloody map then, because it's more like a tracing of your mad cyborg arterial system than any damn map of a prison I've ever seen, but he didn't. He acknowledged, deep down somewhere, that maybe - just maybe - this org, in all her insanity, could read an insane map - as if both insanities cancelled one another out, making the end product whole and normal and understandable. Yeah, right.
"You lead the way," said Franco through gritted teeth, and pressed his implanted earlobe comm in the hope that Pippa and that Fast Attack Hornet were on their way with a few 65 Stroke Missiles to rescue his ass from this shit. But the comm was dead. Pippa wasn't there. There would be no rescue. "Damn and bloody bollocks," muttered Franco as his situation went
from worse to worse to bad to serious shit, brother. And it was about to get a whole lot badder...
Mrs Strogger seemed to be using some kind of stealth mode. She hunkered down, her body compressing and hydraulics gliding, and she moved sideways, feet not so much clanking as sliding. She obviously thought something bad was beyond those double doors. Franco wiped his sweating hands on the only bit of cloth available; his underpants. Shit. What I'd give for a decent Permatex WarSuit right now! And a Bausch & Harris Sniper Rifle with SSGK digital sights. And a D5 shotgun! Oh, for a D5 shotgun!
As they reached the doors, Mrs Strogger suddenly stopped. She glanced at Franco. "Lots of chefs beyond," she said. "Bad ganger chefs, if I'm not very much mistaken, and they're all fast and tough, and jabber-jabber when they attack. I am not at full power; I need a recharge socket. There will be a recharge socket in the prison kitchens."
Franco nodded. "Let's do it," he said.
Mrs Strogger suddenly reared up, and slammed both fists against the doors, wrenching them from their hinges and catapulting them across the prison kitchens. The doors whammed, spinning and crashing through pans of bubbling soup and a hundred steel plates and trays and pans, and the air was filled with an eruptive, explosive cacophony of clattering metal, of screaming steel, of raining kitchen appliances. In the midst of this sudden chaos, Franco saw about twenty chefs, identifiable by their trademark starched white uniforms and their cheery tall chef's hats. Each chef was a big, cheery-looking chap, with a bearded, happy, fat face, wobbling jowls, and a serious overhang of gut from maybe ten thousand excessive tasting sessions. In any other setting, the whole scene would have appeared friendly, convivial, a jolly jaunt into the world of prison cooking; but within the blink of an eye, the cheery plump chefs had armed themselves with knives and cleavers, machetes and skewers, and a hail of weapons flashed through the air like the deadliest of archery fire...
Franco unleashed a burst of green laser bolts, which fizzed across the kitchen expanse, blackening steel, knocking over pans of bubbling broth, and knocking two chefs backwards with chomping, hate-filled faces and waving machetes. They disappeared behind the steel cupboards as Franco grunted and hit the ground fast. Knives and skewers clattered overhead, falling around him with a musical tinkling of steel. Franco glanced left, at the razor-sharp cleaver. His eyes narrowed. "The cheeky bastards," he said, reaching up to grab a steel tray from the work surface. He stood, holding the tray up as a makeshift shield, and looked down to where Mrs Strogger was cowering behind a large cupboard. "A bit of help wouldn't go amiss, you big quivering pussy!" he snarled.
"I need my recharge socket!" she whimpered. "I need more power, more energy, more zazazoomph!"
Franco stared at her, then sighed. "Great," he muttered. "Stuck in a firefight with a useless bloody pacifist pussy org!" Something heavy bounced off his tray with a mammoth clang! and Franco cursed, raised his laser cannon, and shot a chef in the chest, blowing the hapless culinary maestro backwards through the swing doors and out of sight. "That's for making fucking celebrity TV programs," he muttered, and ducked as another chef appeared, this one with a rifle.
There came a whiz and ping as a projectile ricocheted off the wall behind Franco and embedded itself in Mrs Strogger's thigh. She didn't seem to notice.
Franco aimed his laser cannon over the steel cupboard, watched the chef reloading an ancient battered Crack Rifle, and Franco shot him in the stomach. "That's for flooding the Festive Market with shite cookery books," he snarled, spittle launching from his aggravated lips.
"Aaah," said Mrs Strogger, as if taking a huge and relieving dump, as Franco watched, nervous now, as fifteen chefs appeared carrying Crack Rifles. They started to load the weapons, hunkering down behind steel benches, their tall white hats wavering.
Franco glanced down. Mrs Strogger had slumped down, opened a flap at her groin, and extracted a long thick black cable, which she'd plugged into an IWS - Industrial Wall Socket.
"Er," said Franco.
"Yes?" said Mrs Strogger, staring at him.
"You got shot then, you realise?"
"So?"
"Didn't it hurt?"
"Should it?"
"Hmm," said Franco. He stared at her recharge socket. "So, that thing, then."
"What thing?"
"That, er, that big tube coming from your groin."
"My recharge cable."
"Odd place to put it."
"Your meaning?"
"A-ha-ha," said Franco. "What I'm meaning to say, is that you're a, y'know, female org. A girlie. And that there big sausage thing, well, it looks a bit like a..."
"Yes?" Each letter contained knives.
"What I mean to say is, somebody, a pervert or something, or a comedian, might say it looks like you've got a massive black..."
"Yes?"
"Nothing," said Franco, and smiled, clenching his teeth.
At that moment, a volley of ammunition slammed across the prison kitchens, and Franco cowered on the floor, tray held over his head as bullets pinged and clanged, and one neatly removed the bottom inch of his little finger.
"Aargh!" screamed Franco, staring in disbelief at the minor amputation. Blood pumped from the wound, and Franco's instant reaction was to put it in his mouth.
Mrs Strogger suddenly reached over, her face a scowl, and grabbed Franco's arm. He struggled for a moment, like a fish on a hook, as she dragged him towards her and produced, from a flap in her belly, what turned out to be a glowing soldering iron. Holding Franco in an unbreakable grip, Mrs Strogger cauterised the stump of Franco's little finger as he screamed again, gnashing his teeth as the stench of frying pork filled the air.
Strogger abruptly let Franco go and he slapped back onto his arse - as another volley whirred overhead. The chefs had organised themselves into two fighting lines, one line reloading ancient Crack Rifles whilst the other took aim and fired. Franco grabbed his laser cannon, his movements fired up by the pain not just in his finger, but in his pride, and started blasting away like a cowboy madman with pistols at a disco.
Chefs were slammed backwards, left and right, leaving trails of steaming cabbage soup, sending platters of rotten vegetables into the air, sending bowls of black braised beef scattering across the steel floor with dry, hard, drumming sounds. Another line of bullets whined across the kitchen, puncturing bubbling pans of donkey stew, and suddenly the air was filled with screaming alarms and more red strobes flickered into life. Behind them, in the corridor leading to the kitchens, Sourballs appeared with a squad of ten prison guards.
"Found you! At last!" she screeched, barbed-wire hair bobbing madly. "Kill them!"
Lasers whined from the corridor, and Franco scrambled sideways across the cupboards, miraculously missing a combined crossfire of laser blasts and ancient steel shells. He dived, slamming into a cupboard, and fired his laser cannon down the corridor without looking, squeezing off twenty bursts of crackling energy. When he peered round, three guards were dead, their corpses smoking, and the rest had fled for cover.
Franco glanced at Mrs Strogger. "We're in the shit!" he snapped, pain in his finger giving him an urgency he hadn't felt in a long, long time. "I could do with some fucking help, you old hag!"
"Almost charged," smiled the old org, her wrinkled face relaxed into the euphoria of a terminal Crack67 sniffer.
Franco started to crawl along a line of cupboards. His idea was simple: flank the chefs, take them out in a hail of laser fire, then get the hell out of the kitchens and away before Sourballs and her laser-shooting chumps caught up with him. To Hell with Mrs Strogger! The ancient mechanised bitch was too busy getting juiced up!
"I would call a ceasefire, if I was you," came the trembling voice of Teddy Sourballs.
Franco halted. He didn't speak; to make a sound would be to give away his new position. And he liked it just fine that nobody now knew where he was. Franco listened. The chefs had ceased their fire; obviously they recognised their illustrious Governor Sourballs and were loathe
to fill her full of lead. Although Franco couldn't think of a better ending for the irascible bitch.
"I have a deal! You've run down here, thinking there is a way out, but you are mistaken! You're trapped! You are pincered down with pincered claws! As if caught by a crab! Ha-ha. You cannot ever leave here without my help! Well, what I offer is for you to come on trial, on TV, and get a fair trial, and we will get good TV ratings right across Quad-Gal and we'll all be winners. I can..." she paused, as if listening to commands through an earpiece. "What? You'd give the little fucker those terms - oh, oh, sorry, yes, I am now in a position to offer you a guaranteed safety clause. You are Franco Haggis, Combat K, and this will get us better viewings than Torture! In fact, the episode where you decapitated Opera - well, it appears my, er, boss and superior, the Mistress, has received the viewing figures. You are a star, Franco Haggis! By your act of violence, you have earned our TV network more commissions, advertising revenue and new subscribers in one day than we've had in the last three years!"
She paused, out of breath from gabbling. Franco considered this.
There came a bang, the whine of a discharged round, and a shot that nearly took Sourballs's head clean off. It parted her hair in a rush of spinning steel. Theresa scowled, and one of her guards lasered the chef in the face, leaving him burnt and broken and twitching.
"I said ceasefire!" screeched Sourballs. Here was a woman used to getting what she wanted via screeching. It was quite worrying.
Franco scratched his stubble.
"Well, what do you say? You are a Quad-Gal phenomenon, Franco Haggis! Okay, the people hate you for what you did to Opera, but in terms of monetary value, you are going to be... rich! Very rich. In fact, one of the richest individuals on the planet!"
"You want me to work for you?" said Franco, frowning as understanding bit his balls.
"Yes!" beamed Theresa. She had strode forward, and stood in the doorway, her confidence growing with each passing second that no bullet or laser round removed her head. "You can come, act on our network. We'll have a trial, milk it out, play to the media for months and months - it will be most lucrative for all of us!"