Biohell (63 page)

The Black Tiger opened fire,
miniguns howling and Keenan ducked under the ocean, down into a cold obsidian
muffled world dragging Xakus with him. Franco slammed the IMS around, charged
it again, and unleashed a scream of energy which cut through the Black Tiger’s
runners and sent it spinning off through the dark under-sky. Franco, grinning
like a maniac, muttered to himself, “Bastards! Blowing us from the sky then
wanting to come down here with dirty guns and pick us off when we’re bobbing on
the sea well we’ll have to see about that because Franco Haggis is here to save
the day and he’s not taking none of your crap and believe me this weapon is a
bad
ass
weapon and they don’t call me Franco ‘Happy Detonation’ Haggis for
nothing!” The IMS howled, and reality seemed to warp and wobble around the
industrial demolition tool. Inside the Black Tiger, the zombies were fighting
and screeching. The IMS beam slammed through the Black Tiger, first cutting it
in half vertically, and, as Franco waved the Industrial Molecule Stripper
around in his calloused powerful hands like a madman with a chainsaw,
horizontally. The Black Tiger, effectively quartered and spitting showers of
sparks and outpourings of fuel, toppled in cubes into the ocean where the fuel
flared and the wreckage ignited, burning atop the rolling waves.

“Ha!” said Franco, switching off
the IMS with a
clump.
The machine vibrated for a while in his hands,
then was still. “No bugger’s going to mess with this redneck!”

Keenan surfaced, dragging the
unconscious form of Xakus with him. He glared at Franco. “You finished, idiot?”

“Idiot? Moi? I think you will
find, Mr Keenan, that once again the wily and wonderful Franco has saved the
day! He has disposed of the dastardly enemy! Spliced their little attack
chopper into pieces! Saved us all from a sound and jolly buggering!”

Keenan paddled close, until his
face was inches from Franco’s. Then, so close the glare of nearby fires burning
on the ocean reflected crazy-lights in his narrowed eyes, he growled, “Take a
good look around, you drug-infused moron.”

Franco licked his lips. Had there
been something he’d overlooked? There couldn’t have been. He was Franco! And
Franco never, well, rarely, well, sometimes, well,
many times,
made
mistakes. And on this occasion he’d been super careful! He’d been sure of his
actions! Hadn’t he? After all, they were out at sea. What could possibly go
wrong?

Franco turned, paddling in the
black ocean. Overhead, the fifty-lane freeway veered in a climbing arc soaring
high into the heavens and blocking out the stars. Franco stared hard at the
freeway. Perhaps a kilometre across, it was vast, epic, a monument of
world-class engineering skill. An example of man conquering nature, and
imposing his Will over the World.

Franco opened his mouth to say
something.

Then he closed it again.

He squinted.

One of the fifty-foot-diameter
crystal support struts had a narrow, glowing line across its base. Franco
stared hard at that line. Stared at it for a long time.

“No,” he said. “I couldn’t
possibly have.”

Keenan was by his ear. “I think
you’ll find it’s much worse than
that,”
he hissed.

Franco peered again, myopically.
The next support strut had four glowing criss-cross marks on its flank; simple
orange lines, like scars of molten glass. Franco looked to the next strut. And
that, also, was marked.

“That
can’t
have been
little old me,” he said, finally, uneasily.

“What fucking
range
setting
did you have on the thing?”

“Only about...” Franco stopped.
It was fifty metres, right? He’d clicked it to fifty metres. 50.0m. He stared
down at the dial. He felt something curl up and die inside his belly.

It was set to
500
metres.

Franco looked up. Up.
Up.

Above, several glowing lines of molten
steelconcrete criss-crossed the fifty-lane freeway. Even as he watched, the
titanic mega-structure gave a long, low, agonising groan. It was a concrete
dinosaur, dying. A Ket-i World Warrior in the throes of global agony. A
behemoth ready to
awake.

“No! Shit! Keenan! It wasn’t me!
It can’t have been me! I mean, even
I’m
not that stupid!”

Keenan was swimming hard,
dragging Xakus behind him by the scruff.

“Hey? Where you going? What you
doing, Keenan? Come back!”

Franco started paddling after
him.

Keenan turned. Glared at his
friend. “Swim, you idiot! When that lot comes down it’s gonna drag a whole load
of shit under the ocean! We need to get out of the suction radius.”

“Hey, relax, it’s not gonna fall!
Don’t be silly! Don’t be a crazy fool!” Franco swam on, a beady eye peering
back over his shoulder. Already the pillars had started to shift, minutely at
first, molten edges screeching in a torturous, long-drawn out
wail
which
became gradual agony to the ears and made Franco want to vomit.

“It just
can’t fall!”
he
whispered.

A sound like thunder began. The
two men powered through the ocean, heads down, entire strength focused on
swimming now; and swimming
fast.

The thunder warbled and rumbled
through the heavens, growing louder and louder and louder and louder. Behind,
dust and chunks of concrete started to fall, tumbling from the slow-motion
undulating freeway. Huge splashes echoed across the ocean. Waves rammed Keenan
and Franco, and they both swam faster in accelerating urgency. Franco’s arms pumped
like pistons and he overtook Keenan at a rapid crawl, then stopped, grabbed
hold of Xakus, and helped tow the unconscious professor after them.

“I think it’s gonna fall,” he
gulped at Keenan, spitting out water.

“You don’t say.”

“Where we going?”

Keenan nodded. “There’s an
oil-carrier platform over there. I think we’ll be safe. That is, unless the
fall creates a fucking tsunami to wash us to our well-deserved deaths.”

“You mean you
don’t know?”

“I’m a soldier, Franco, not an
expert in hydrodynamics.”

They reached the platform, which
was rusted, greasy, and bobbing wildly as more and more chunks fell from the
towering, swaying, kilometre-wide freeway. Keenan climbed up, hauled Xakus after
him, and dumped the man on the corrugated deck. He helped Franco to scramble,
little legs kicking, aboard. Keenan traced around the dark edges, and found the
platform linked to something beneath the sea by wrist-thick chains.

Keenan rolled Xakus to his back,
then rolled him over, locating the wound in the man’s flank. Beneath, a rib was
broken, and a ten inch gash, not too deep, had been carved in flesh from the
explosion aboard the Apache. Keenan found his medkit and applied field strips,
effectively gluing the professor’s flesh together. He turned the man’s thermal
jacket to full. Out there, in the ice-laden ocean, they were all beginning to
freeze.

As he finished his work, Keenan
looked up, watched the freeway teetering around in the darkness, then slowly
topple sideways, pillars sliding apart with gruesome growling sounds,
disintegrating neatly, a billion billion tonnes of steelconcrete sliding under
the surging water carrying abandoned cars and juggernauts, and twenty-carriage
ultra-coaches.

Grimly, Keenan injected Xakus
with painkillers and nutrients, and spat discharged stingbots into the rolling,
seething ocean.

“Bad habit, that,” said Franco,
watching uneasily as a fifteen trillion dollar building development sank in a
surge of bubbles and churning black.

“You’re the bad habit! Franco,
are you sure want to continue on this mission?”

“I must rescue Mel.” He sulked.

“Well, in that case, you do
exactly what I tell you, when I tell you. Or I’m going in alone.”

“You can’t do that! I have
rights!”

“Oh yeah? Well for the first time
in history, Franco, I’m going to pull rank on you. Now, you do what you’re
told. And that’s a fucking order. Understand?”

“Mnmnffmnf.”

“I said, UNDERSTAND?”

“No need to shout. I get it. It’s
got. Up here. In my skull.” He tapped his head.

The platform rolled violently,
pulling at its clanking chains which stretched, screeching and dripping iced
brine. Where the freeway slice had tumbled beneath the waves, the sea surged
and bubbled as if boiling. Distantly, buoys clanged. The ocean seemed to roar,
and it went on for a long, long time...

And was gone.

The ocean fell still. Eerily
still.

Xakus groaned, sitting up,
touching his side tenderly. His fingers explored the repair strips, then he
rubbed at his head and accepted the water canteen from Keenan.

“So we survived, then.”

“Just,” said Keenan, throwing
Franco an evil glare.

“We’re not far. From the entry
point. You still want to go in the front gates?”

Keenan shrugged. “I kind of get
the feeling we’re expected. I’m starting to feel like this is... a test.
Although what kind of test, I’m not sure. One thing that’s certain is those
zombies keep turning up with unerring regularity; and well-tooled, for such a
bunch of deviated twisted individuals. This is starting to feel like training
school.” He gave a sick, twisted smile.

“Come on,” said Franco. “We’ve a
long swim ahead.”

They slid into the ocean, which
had grown calm now Franco’s embarrassment had disappeared, and gazed off into
the darkness. They could not see the lights of NanoTek’s Black Rose Citadel HQ;
but it was out there, squatting in the gloom, in the night, in the blackness...
ominous, and waiting, like a giant maw for their impending arrival and a
necessary feed.

~ * ~

The
swim took an eternity. It was cold despite thermal electronic jackets, and
portentously dark. The sea was filled with debris. Packets and tins, slimy
boxes, skank-filled bottles. Combat K swam through filth; gradually, they
absorbed the scum of The City.

During the monotony of swimming
Keenan thought back, drifted back to a better life a good life an early life
when everything had been... well,
right.
His children. Shit. Rachel and
Ally. Their sweet faces. Their sweeter smiles. Giggling and clinging like loose
monkeys to his arms, begging him for sweets or SLAM music or glitter shoes.
And... Keenan no longer swam though an endless cess-pit of churning toxic
ocean; he was back with his wife, and children, when there was still manic hot
love between them and she held him round the waist and laughed at some small
joke, lifting up under his arm, coming round, arms drooping over his shoulders,
kissing him. He could smell her perfume. Still smell her perfume. It was
powerfully erotic. And... then the image crashed down around him and he
realised with a start rain was falling on the ocean in thick black droplets,
probably containing oil or some other toxic contaminant.

Around the three struggling men a
storm arose, swift and powerful, slamming at them with predator ferocity. And
in the storm Keenan could see Pippa’s face and he realised; she was poison in
his blood, in his veins, in his heart and in his soul. She always had been.
Always would be. He remembered Hekkan Grail. J
should have killed you then,
he
thought.
I
should have ended both our miseries. Either that, or died
in that bed under cold green sunlight.

In bitterness, he swam on.

Franco, on the other hand, was
reliving happier memories. At first he thought of Mel, of their chance meeting
down to a certain lack of tax contribution, and the wonderful acceleration of
sexual intimacy that followed. In truth, Franco had never had such an intimate
and deep relationship (despite being married, twice) and he savoured every
nuance of post-coital chatter, every syllable of ear-whispering delight, every
instance of tongue-teasing exploration... right up to the point where Mel
transmogrified into an eight-foot zombie deviant with dubious body odour.