Biohell (52 page)

“Yeah, well, that’s because I’m a
sensitive guy.”

The HTank juddered forward,
through the black, through the silence, and Keenan eased it down towards the
abandoned rails where once, a millennium ago, underground trains thundered. “Cam,
you sure this train system is dead?”

“I’m sure. Dead as a donut.”

“You’re absolutely
positive
now?
I don’t want to end up with two thousand tonnes of train up my arse when we’re
stuck out in No Man’s Land. You hear?”

Cam, rotating with a gentle
flicker of condescending orange lights, snorted,
“Trust me,
Keenan. I’m
a GradeA+1 Security Mechanism with advanced SynthAI and a Machine Intelligence
Rating (MIR) of 3450. I have integral weapon inserts, a quad-core military
database, and Put Down™ War Technology! You think I don’t
know
when
there’s a damn train due? This place has been deserted for a thousand years!
All the DBs say so. And anyway, we only have to travel a few klicks. Should
only take us five minutes.”

Keenan nodded. He eased the HTank
around, and with a giant
clunk,
down onto ancient rusted tracks. The
aged metal squealed beneath the HTank. Keenan eased the vehicle away from the
platform, and into the tunnel opening. Like a hungry mouth, it swallowed them.

~ * ~

“I
can smell fire.”

Keenan glanced at Franco. “You
sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Since when did you train as a
sniffer dog?”

“Trust me, Keenan, I can smell
fire!
It’s behind us. It’s approaching fast.”

“What, you mean, approaching
fast? Like a
train?”

Franco shrugged, and cast a
glance at Cam. “Ask Mr MIR 3450 over there.”

“I assure you, there’s nothing
moving on these tracks.”

Keenan had slowed the HTank, and
suddenly realised that was a
bad
idea. He accelerated again, the
lumbering behemoth pounding down the lines which weaved, gently left, then
right; an underground umbilical from dead mother to abandoned abortion.

Something trembled. They felt it,
rippling through the HTank’s chassis.

Keenan shot Franco a glance.

Franco shrugged, as if to say,
Hey,
who am I to argue with a PopBot?

Gradually, over the heavy
rumbling of the HTank, a noise intruded at the seams of hearing. It was
metallic, insect-like, a constant, ululating low-level scream. Keenan glanced
at the rear visual scanners. Behind them, glimpsed then lost on a bend, he saw
a glow of orange.

“Cam,” snapped Keenan, “Franco’s
right. There is something behind us. On the tracks. On fire. Remind me of your
promise?”

“I guarantee,” began Cam. But
stopped. On the screen for all to see, and advancing rapidly towards them at a
frightening speed, came a train, but not any normal train, this was an
underground passenger
juggernaut.
It was massive, a blazing inferno of
fire and pumping smoke which filled the tunnel, sucked along by its own mammoth
burning vacuum. At the helm, at the train’s controls, tiny behind cracked and
ribbed plasti-glass, were five or six screaming, wild-eyed zombies.

“Aiee!” said Franco.

Keenan slammed the HTank’s
controls, and the vehicle lurched, accelerating on matrix with a howl of
churning power. The train slammed at them, a glowing fireball, its elongated,
pointed snout reaching out to touch their tail as they hurtled down the lines
in sudden raging competition.

“We should have turned the HTank’s
guns before we entered the tunnel!” wailed Franco. “We could have blasted it!”

“Too late for that,” snapped
Keenan. Sweat glowed on his brow. He kept one eye ahead, one on the screen. The
juggernaut train bumped them, sending the HTank careering wildly and scraping a
scree of sparks from the wall. Bricks detached, flew off, bounced against the
flaming train’s hull.

“Two klicks ahead,” said Cam,
voice cool. “Our exit point.”

“Not at this speed,” snarled
Keenan. “It’s too close! We’d never get off the tracks!”

They hammered, a close convoy,
the flaming passenger juggernaut howling like a banshee as it bore down on
the—by comparison—miniaturised HTank. Fire roared. Somewhere, a detonation
rocked the tunnel, deep down, a bass concussion the Combat K squaddies felt
through their feet and stomachs.

“Don’t like the sound of that,”
muttered Franco.

Keenan reached out, grabbed a
digital lever, and pulled. It moved on slick gears. Before them, the HTank’s
twin guns started to lift, rising with hydraulic, ratchet thumps until...

“It’ll hit the roof!” wailed Cam.

The guns ploughed into the tunnel
roof and bricks exploded outwards, back in a stream of violent smashing
destruction. The HTank slowed, its guns yammering, juddering, buckling, but the
fire-billowing train slammed them with a violent jolt urging them on as the
HTank’s armour screamed and buckled, caught between the impaling guns and the
force of the ploughing train. But the more the train pushed, the more the HTank’s
guns smashed through bricks and concrete above, screaming and growling, steel
mashing bricks which flooded behind in an accelerating stream until...

The tunnel’s roof collapsed.

With a roar like the ending of
worlds a flood of debris slammed down, instant, flattening, impacting
everything under the weight of billion-tonne buckling skyscrapers above. The
train was caught by its mid-section, yanked to a sudden halt like a dog on a
leash which sent the piloting zombies smashing and bouncing around the cockpit
in a blender of living dead organics. The HTank, drunk, slewed ahead, bouncing
from tunnel walls and slowing to a limping, buckled, squeaking halt as all
around them the roar of collapsing tunnel boomed, and howled, and gradually,
like a retreating, growling tsunami, subsided.

Keenan slammed open the hatch,
lifted himself free, and jumped down to the tracks. Smoke and dust drifted over
him. A roaring continued, muffled, as above an entire tower block shifted and
realigned—sitting back and down on its haunches as it crushed the flaming
passenger train in staggered compression crunches.

Franco hopped, yowling, across
the red-hot hull of the HTank, his sandals poor protection against glowing
metal. He dropped to the ground, scowling back at Keenan. Then he glanced
ahead, perhaps twenty feet, where the platform—and their exit— waited
patiently. Franco stared at the destroyed HTank, fully a half of its former
length, its hull unrecognisable as a war machine. Its guns were buckled,
cracked, glowing hot from their intimate integration with the tunnel’s roof.
The HTank groaned, and with a sigh of escaping gas and spurting hydraulic
fluid, squatted down on its arse like a dying metal dinosaur.

“That brought the roof down,”
grunted Franco.

“As you can see,” Keenan pointed
at the platform, “we will be disembarking in one minute. If sir would like to
step onto the platform? I’m sure Cam will escort us promptly from this
trap.”

“Very neat, Keenan, very neat.
Just don’t milk it, lad. Nobody likes a smart arse. Reet?”

Franco led an ashen, coughing
Xakus towards the platform. Cam followed, but Keenan gave a whistle—as one
would to a dog.

Cam rotated; his black shell
remained the same, but Keenan could tell he’d managed to irritate the Pop-Bot.
He smiled, a grim baring of compressed teeth.

“I am not a canine,” said Cam,
testily.

“I thought you said there were
no
trains.”

“Ha! What I
actually said
was
that the lines had been deserted for a thousand years.”

Keenan thumbed the wreckage, and
the growling wall of collapsed tunnel behind. Dust was settling, making the
raging inferno hazy and surreal. “You call that deserted?”

“Tsch Keenan, don’t you think you’re
being a little picky?”

“Getting fifteen thousand tonnes
of flaming engine up our jackass is being picky?”

“I cannot attest for every
eventuality. An eternity crystal ball, I am not.”

“Damn right,” snapped Keenan,
striding onto the platform and towards the skewed, buckled steps where Franco
had wrenched free a rusted gate, which lolled on broken hinges, squeaking
forlorn. “But you’re certainly a ball. As in, a
testicle.”

Keenan disappeared.

Cam surveyed the wreckage, his
tiny AI mind whirring like precision clockwork.

“How rude,” he said.

~ * ~

The
night air was chilling as they emerged. Green veins lit the clouds turning the
sky into solid onyx. “Whats’ the hell’s going on with the weather system?”
growled Franco.

Keenan shrugged. “The zombies
have taken control. Could be anything. Who knows how a deviant’s mind works.
Well, maybe you have a vague idea.”

“Listen Keenan. About this word.
This Z word.”

“Zombie?”

“Aye. I don’t think we should use
it.”

“Why not? They look like fucking
zombies to me.”

“No no, it’s more, well,” he
shuddered, “the more we see of them, the more I think of them, well, to be
frank, I’m getting more and more uncomfortable killing them.” He eyed Keenan
beadily. “They were human, right? Deviated and mashed out of all recognition, I’ll
give you that, but still human at the core. And, if all this shit is down to
biomods, then one day they might just get changed back. Zombie just seems the
wrong word to use.”

Keenan slapped him on the back. “Shall
we call them
accidents?
Will that make you happy?”

Franco brightened. “Yeah. That’s
better.”

“This got anything to do with
Mel?”

Franco nodded. “I’m missing her,
mate. I never thought a woman would get to me like this. I thought I was Mr
Testosterone, a proper hero in tights, flitting like a star-struck magpie from
one dangerous love tryst to the next.”

Keenan stared hard. “You need
some tablets, mate?”

“Aye, aye, I’ll have one in a
minute. What I’m trying to say, is, Melanie came to check my taxes, and I ended
up wanting to marry her. It’s a funny old world, ain’t it?”

“She’s a tax collector?”

Franco nodded. “Yeah. Why? What’s
wrong with that?”

Keenan grinned. “Oh. Nothing. I
just thought, well, I thought you’d never paid any taxes.”

“I haven’t.”

“And she’s still alive?”

“That’s the funny thing,” said
Franco. “Once I fell in love with her, I no longer wanted to blow off her head
and bury her in a shallow grave. Call me Mr Old Fashioned, but that’s just the
way I am.”

“So, you have used the L word
then?”

“Shit. So I did.” He reddened.

Keenan patted Franco kindly. “Take
your tablets, there’s a good lad.”

Cam, who had headed off into the
black to reconnoitre, emerged from the gloom trailing smoke. “It’s up ahead,”
he said. “And by God, this Hammer Syndicate Tower is big. And not quite...
normal.”

“Not quite normal?” Franco’s ear
pricked up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Like you, Franco, it has to be
seen to be believed. Follow me.”