Biohell (54 page)

Franco puffed out his chest. “What?
Me? Listen, they don’t call me Mr Franco ‘Moral Fibre’ Haggis for nothing, pal.
A man has his morals, right? His standards. A man has his, y’know,” he
twitched, “sanity to think about. And crawling around in anal pipes and
suchforth is just too much like a dodgy pulp SF novel. I shall complain, I
shall.”

“Oh, you shall, shall you?”

Xakus’s kicking feet disappeared.
The lips of the vegetative tube squelched shut. Jelly glistened. The flaps
quivered like an epileptic vulva. Keenan nudged Franco. “This is us.”

“Bugger!”

“Just imagine something erotic.”
Keenan grinned with his teeth. “After all, some of the shit you programmed in
Immersion Consoles defies belief.”

“Pippa went wild, didn’t she?”

Keenan nodded. Sighed. “Yeah
mate. She did.” He shook his head. “Come on. Mel is waiting. I’m sure she won’t
mind you molesting a giant alien vegetable suction dildo in the name of true
love.”

Keenan parted the lips, and a
stench of rotting cabbage washed over him. He nearly gagged; holding his
breath, he took the weight of the heavy flaps and crawled inside.

Franco, kneeling, ducked as
another live limb whooshed over his head. He stared around, eyes wide in
disbelief, as distant machine gun chatter sang a metal symphony. “How can the
same shit happen to the same guy twice? Huh?” He pulled free a small white tub,
popped the cap, and eyed the rainbow pill. He pushed it into his mouth, where
it sat under his tongue, slowly dissolving.

“Into the Lion’s Pussy,” he
whispered, and lifting the cabbage-reeking flaps, he held his breath, squinted
his eyes, tensed his muscles, and slipped, and struggled, inside.

~ * ~

For
a few moments Franco fought with slippery veg flesh. He kicked and scrambled,
clawed and fought his way into a tight black pouch. He glanced up—at where
Keenan, with a tiny torch, grinned down at him. “I thought this would be right
up your particular back alley.”

“Get to fuck, Keenan.”

They climbed, using ridges of
vegetable-strand muscle as handholds. The tube was greasy to the touch, like a
slick, ribbed onion, like crawling inside a hollowed leek. It was dark, despite
the needle beams from torches, and the tentacle gave regular shudders as if
threatening a revival that would surely kill them.

Franco tried hard not to vomit as
he climbed. It wasn’t just the stench, but the globs of purple jelly which
rolled down the interior of the tubular walls, sliming over his hands and face,
pooling on his shaved head and in his beard, covering him with an afterbirth of
vegetable semen. But, to Franco, most disgustingly of all, the jelly pooled
over his hairy, sandaled feet, squelched between his toes, tickling the
undersides of his paws and making him slip and slide within the violated
sanctuary of his own footwear. Franco
hated
his feet being touched,
tickled or mauled. Not by human, not by alien, and certainly not by drooling
vegetable pus.

They climbed; for what seemed an
eternity.

It was a very long way up.

Franco mumbled profanity all the
way.

With a final, tremendous grunt,
which came not without sexual comedy merit, Franco slopped over what appeared
to be a tiny volcanic mound and onto a rib- and muscle-ringed floor. It was
pink, with gnarled green crusty knobbles, all gleaming. Franco lay, panting,
shining under his coating of jelly and staring about with undisguised raw
hatred.

“Damn that vegetable spunk slime,”
said Franco, face puckered, voice forlorn.

“Come on,” snapped Keenan. “We’ve
got a job to do.” His weapon was slimed, his War Suit also slimed; damn, even
his EBH was coated with natural vegetable gunk.

Xakus, by some unwritten agreement,
led the way. Unarmed, however. Keenan stayed by his shoulder, Techrim in one
fist, MPK in the other, face grim. Franco, as ever, took the rear and squelched
along miserably muttering obscenity after profanity after obscenity in the hope
of a vegetable exorcism.

Xakus paused, dropping to one
knee.

“Everything good?”

“Yes. These lower tunnels and
caverns are the organotower’s foundation structure; what gives it the ability
to grow and regenerate, and also support the heavy bone tower chassis above.”

“You sound like you know the
place well,” muttered Franco.

“I’ve seen the genetic
blueprints,” said Xakus curtly. “Taking this tower from its homeworld was not
something with which I ethically agreed. I have a moral standpoint, you
understand?”

Franco nodded, shuddering.

They moved on, through endless
quivering tunnels which sometimes spilled into large caverns filled with slime
and slop. On several occasions all three men retched, kneeling in the corridor
and vomiting so hard they cried as blasts and waves of thick cabbage odour
swamped them with a semi-poisonous gassing.

“Nice place you brought us to,
Keenan.”

“You’ve got sick in your beard.”

“Damn and bloody blast!”

“Anyway, we’re here to rescue
your
fiancée. It could be argued it’s
your
damn fault.”

“Have a heart!” said Franco, but
Keenan was being sick again and Franco soon joined him.

Gradually, they left the lower
bowels of the organotower and climbed a series of spiral staircases made of
what appeared human, or animal, bone. Franco halted, halfway up, and fingered
the smooth ivory surface.

“Definitely feels like bone to
me,” he announced. “How the hell does a vegetable grow bones?”

Xakus smiled a sick smile. “The
organotower is a kind of alien genetic construction; and just because it’s vegetable,
doesn’t mean it’s a herbivore.”

Franco stared hard. Realisation
dripped like honey into his pill-addled brain. “You mean... you mean
it eats
people?”

“Digests is a better word. It has
no mouth.”

“And you brought us
inside,
you
madman?”

“I was under the impression,”
said Xakus, voice tight, black features scowling in the eerie gloom, “that
you
brought
me
here; that you needed my help. I’m just a guide. A
translator. A decoder. For the good of mankind, right? Help the war effort
against the junks?” He laughed. “Damn that bastard Steinhauer. He’s got me by
the balls.”

“I never did ask why you were
helping,” said Keenan, watching Xakus in the limited light provided by torches.
Around them, organic walls filled with strips of muscle pulsated. Beneath their
boots sat the reconstituted bone of the digested unfortunate.

“Let’s just say I owe Steinhauer
my life. He stopped NanoTek from... well, that’s another story. A story of
betrayal, blackmail and espionage.” Xakus laughed. It was filled with bitterness.
“You’ve always got to ask yourself the question, Keenan. Who do you trust?”

“I trust no man.”

“I learnt that lesson the hard
way. Come on. It gets more civilised above. Unfortunately, that also means we’ll
have company.”

“The Syndicate?”

Xakus smiled. “That would be a
reasonable assumption. And they’ll be armed.”

Franco cocked his Kekras. “Good.
I’m sick of killing
unfortunate accidents
whose only crime was sucking
the wrong pill at the wrong time. I want me some
real
payback.”

“You know where they’ll be
keeping Mel?”

“Where else? Voloshko’s Bedroom.”

“Bedroom?” Franco frowned. “What
do you mean, his bedroom? I don’t like the sound of that!”

Xakus scratched at his matted
hair. “Let’s just say Voloshko is renowned for his...
esoteric
tastes.”

~ * ~

Keenan
and Franco crouched, waiting. The heat had increased to furnace level, and
sweat poured from the men mingled with vegetable juice and dribbles of
hardening vomit. There came a heavy, rhythmical bass sound from up ahead.

Cam disappeared, scouting ahead
in an attempt to find Voloshko and “to
assess the level of threat for
purposes of health and safety”.

Xakus, who had called the halt,
back-tracked to Combat K. He was shaking his head. “We can’t go on.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“Nothing’s too dangerous for the
men of Combat K!” beamed Franco. He pushed forward, eager. “Let me see!”

With Keenan by his elbow, Franco
advanced. The floor was slippery with green jelly and a slime of organic
dribble. Suddenly, the floor fell away into a large cavern supported by huge
bones—what looked like giant
ribs.
However, it was the sight below that
churned their stomachs.

“Is that what I think it is?”
said Keenan softly.

Franco nodded. “It is.” He
blinked. Shivered. “It’s... It’s a... it’s a fucking
disco.”

Both men stared at the strange,
sobering sight. Other than the encompassing bass rhythm it was a silent disco
filled with ambling, bumping, aimlessly meandering zombies. Not hundreds of
them, but
thousands.
They filled the chamber, packed tight, occasionally
giving low moans as they squeezed past one another or nudged aimlessly and
repeatedly at other zombies, or the walls, or the supporting bone columns.
Above, coloured lights whirled and spun, strobe-lights giving short machine-gun
bursts of white to turn the scene into a
rave, man, a fuckin’ rave. Mad for
it!
Franco and Keenan stared at one another, then back down to the insane
spectacle arraigned before them. Suddenly, there came a
crackle
as music
blared out, reverberating deafeningly throughout the chamber. It was Ronan
Keating’s
Life is a Rollercoaster.
Ronan was one of rock’s
Eternals.
Like
Cliff Richard, and Elvis, he would never die, down and down through millennia,
songs reissued, rerecorded, repackaged and supporting the H-section undercarriage
of popular contemporary music. Franco groaned. “I tell you, Keenan, even in a
zombie-infested pit-disco inside an anal vegetable bowel-pit, you can’t get
away from Ronan.” Bizarrely, the zombies started to amble faster, a kind of
enlarged version of Brownian motion jiggling in their disco squalor amidst
millions of whirling, coloured lights and zaps from the starship-sized strobe
flickers. Franco felt himself going light headed. Quite
insane.
But then
again, that might have been the drugs. Or lack of.

“What a
hellzone,”
said
Franco, voice hushed in awe.

“I don’t know, it looks quite
interesting.”

“What, the brain-dead living-dead
rotting-dead bopping to an insane tune with no sense of style, rhythm or élan?”
Franco considered this. “Actually mate, you might be right. What concerns me,
however, is how we get across. Any ideas, bro’?”

Keenan watched as a fight broke
out, and three zombies bore another deformed biomod victim to the ground. They
bit free his face, black blood arcing and dribbling, then fed on his brains
until nothing more than a bone-ringed empty fruit-husk of a skull remained. The
triumphant, and now partially-fed, zombies howled, lifting gnarled and broken
hands in the air and drooling blood and mucus and gore. A cackle roared around
the disco like discharging static, and several zombies attacked other zombies,
feeding and drooling and caving in skulls to feed on the brains of their
half-dead horribly deformed comrades.

“I’m going to be sick,” said
Franco.