Biohell (23 page)

“Urrrww?”

“Hi love,” he said weakly. “Look,
I’m knackered, and I was just thinking of putting my head down. Getting a bit
of much earned kip. What with all the recent excitement, and all that.” It
sounded lame, even to his own ears. He took a few tentative steps towards the
bedroom. Mel grunted, and padded after him.

Franco stopped. Mel stopped. He
looked at her.

“I thought I might sleep...
alone. You know how it is. Just for a few hours, you understand?” He yawned
theatrically, as if to say,
boy am I bushed and in need of some serious
solitary sleep-time.

Mel grunted and gave a little
bubbling whine. She shook her head, a heavy, pendulous motion on a heavy,
undulating, corrugated neck.

Franco, holding up his hands,
started a wary retreat. “Hold on, now. Oh no, no, love, you’ve got the wrong
end of the stick here. I’m really pooped. Exhausted, in fact. After all that
being chased by zombies fiasco, and them trying to munch on my brains an’ all.
I’s just ready for a good bit o’ quality lonely one-man shut-eye.”

Mel followed the retreating
Franco, taloned claw-steps cracking the floorboards.

Franco gave an accelerated
stumble backwards into the bedroom and ended in a heap. Mel leapt, catching in
the doorframe and dragging the splintered, tearing wood with her, to straddle
him, claws on sagging hips, pink and gesticulating vulva only inches from
Franco’s terrified and locked gaze.

How did I know it’d come to this?
he thought
sourly.

I
meet my dream girl. The One.
And I mean,
THE FUCKING ONE!
The gal I intend to marry. Quality. Class.
Hard-working. Great cook. Stunning in bed. Stunning out of bed, in fact. And then
she goes and turns into an eight-foot bloody zombie mutation. What did I do
wrong? Which evil god did I annoy this time?

A name drifted in his distant
subconscious.

Leviathan...

“Shit,” muttered Franco,
remembering
bad
times. “Ahhh.
That
god.” He focused on Mel, who
was squirming above him, trying to align their bodies.

“Can we talk about this?” Franco
whimpered, as she lowered herself ponderously towards him, and her small, round
head came close to his face, her neck constricted into a tight inverted U. She
must have possessed only limited motor skills, because her distended lower jaw
bumped Franco’s chin. He laughed nervously.

“Ove ou.”

“Yeah, yeah babe, I’m sure you
do, only the
thing
is, now don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve
lost a teensy weensy bit of your physical appeal. I mean, don’t get panicky
now, I still want to get married, still want you to bear me six strapping sons,
but at
this very moment in time,
shall we say, your
excess
of pus
and oozing orifices does little to inflame my libido.” He smiled with the sort
of shocked and stunned expression reserved for car-crash victims.

Mel reached around with a long
talon. She sliced the buttons from his shirt, which flapped open in a betrayal
of welcome to reveal Franco’s hairy curly chest. Mel reached out with a
blood-encrusted talon, and started to rub gently at Franco’s flesh.

“Ha ha ha,” said Franco, his
voice containing a nervous, underlying whine, like the discharge on a greenscale
sniper’s scope. Franco coughed. “That fight back there. It made you horny, didn’t
it?”

Mel nodded, her chain and collar
jangling.

“And you’re not going to take no
for an answer, are you?”

Mel shook her head, collar still
jangling. To Franco, it looked a little like she was pouting. But it was hard
to tell, through the sheen of pus, and what with that distended jaw, and
blackened, twisted lips like curls of lightning-struck oak.

Franco closed his eyes. “Oh. My.
God.”

There came a discreet knock at
the front door, and in a swift, deft, panicked martial arts movement, and with
a twist and a slither, Franco rolled and squirmed from beneath Mel’s stocky
legs, grabbed her chain and looped it twice around the wooden bed post. Mel
growled, leaping up, vagina swinging. The chain went tight. Franco backed to the
door, hands up, palms out. “Calm down, honeysuckle.”

Mel roared, saliva glistening on
fangs. She tugged, and the whole bed moved like a tectonic plate.

“It’s only while I answer the
door, my little chipmunk-scented rose-petal.”

Mel roared again, like a caged
lion poked with a pointed stick.

Franco turned and legged it,
slamming the door in the smashed and twisted half-frame behind him. In the
bedroom Mel proceeded to charge around the room, dragging the slowly
disintegrating bed after her. It bounced from floor, walls and ceiling, making
the whole apartment shake and boom in a bass sonata.

Franco stood behind the front
door, hands on knees, panting. He opened it. And stared at Keenan.

“Keenan!” he roared, and leapt
forward, embracing his old war buddy.

“Franco,” laughed Keenan, taking
a step back. “How’s it going, you mad ginger midget? Still drinking yourself
stupid? Still picking bar brawls with women? Still, y’know,” he twitched, “a
bit mad and slick and bad?”

Franco’s laughter boomed even
louder, but was drowned out by the sounds of a crashing bed bouncing from walls
fifteen feet away. Something roared like a wild cat with its testicles in a
nutcracker, and dust drifted lazily from the living-room’s swinging light-bulb.

“Problem?” Keenan lifted an
eyebrow.

“You’d better come in and meet
the missus,” said Franco grimly.

Keenan stepped across the
threshold, Cam floating in behind him. Franco fought to make the door fit its
frame, and eventually leant a crushed piece of furniture against the warped
portal.

“Sounds like you’ve caught
yourself a bear,” said Keenan, slowly, eyes never leaving Franco’s.

“No. No no.” Franco laughed,
voice weak. “Much more entertaining than that, I assure you. In a serious and
psychologically bleaching kind of way. The stuff of nightmares, so to speak.”

Keenan slapped Franco on the
back. “So, where’s this amazing girl, then? The one who’s gonna stop my mate
Franco doing exactly what he wants, ten... times... a night.” He stopped.
Franco’s face could have sunk the Titanic. His chin was more brutally chiselled
than any iceberg. “You OK?”

Mel roared again. The building
shook.

“It’s nice to see you Keenan,
really it is, it’s just I’m having these
teething
problems in the old
relationship department. It’s Mel, you see. She’s not, um, not well.”

“Touch of a cold, by the sounds
of her,” said Keenan with a totally straight face, as a roar like the colliding
of worlds vibrated windows in twisted frames. “Want me to pop out, get her a
few packets of
Wankers
Honey & Lemon Flu Cure?”

“You’re fucking with me, aren’t
you Keenan?”

“Look. I’m honoured you asked me
to be best man. There was an internal struggle, but my humanitarian side won.
So, if you’ve got a problem with the lovely lass then don’t be shy. Bring her
out, and we’ll all deal with the situation. That’s what best men are for,
right? Franco, buddy, we
have
been through the shit together. Remember
Termi-nus5? Remember Leviathan?”

“I remember,” said Franco
dejectedly. “Only...” he squinted. “This is worse.” He trudged to the bedroom
door and kicked it open on the fifth attempt. Inside, everything was dark,
quiet, still. Dust drifted through the gloom. “You can come out now, Melanie.”

Mel charged, knocking Franco from
his feet, her claws raking up yet more floorboards and head leaving a long
jagged groove in the ceiling. She stooped, sliding to a halt with a rake of
sparks, her out-thrust face mere inches from Keenan’s.

Breath like a sewer rolled out.

Slowly, Keenan lifted a
home-rolled cigarette, cupped it, and lit the weed. He lifted his head, drew
deep with a bright glow of burning tobacco, removed the cigarette, and blew a
ball of smoke into Mel’s face. She blinked. And gave a little, feminine cough.

“Nice to meet you,” said Keenan,
as he took in the mottled skin, small round head with ears and nose-holes
oozing pus, and the dangling, distended grey-flesh breasts which reached to Mel’s
waist and swung in a cumbersome, pendulous cycle.

“Grwwlll.”

Keenan leant left, and eyed
Franco as the little man picked himself shakily from the floor. He started
brushing crumbled plaster from his clothing. Franco looked up at Keenan. He
grinned weakly.

“You’ve had worse,” said Keenan,
leaning back to stare into Mel’s small black eyes.

“Hey!” shouted Franco. “Now don’t
be like that, this isn’t the kind of situation you think it is.”

“What, that my old Combat K buddy
has netted himself something from a Nazi’s experiment laboratory? Where you
getting married? Castle Wolfenstein?”

“Oh. Ha and ha, Keenan. Listen,
my Mel is a beautiful creature, sleek black hair, slim and voluptuous—and a
demon in the bedroom!” Mel turned and eyed him.
“Sorry
love. Didn’t mean
to give away the intimacies of our private life. However,” he gritted his
teeth, eyes narrowing, “as you can see she has recently been a victim of a
series of unfortunate and badly coincidental accidents which have transmogrified
her into the admittedly inelegant creature you see before you.”

“You don’t fucking say,” said
Keenan, smoke curling from his nostrils.

“She still has the same heart,
the same brain, she is still my Melanie, deep down inside her soul. Only...
only... to the casual observer, she may appear to have changed a little.”

“Hello Francis.”

“Oh, hiya Cam.” Franco twitched. “Didn’t
notice you there for a moment, what with all the, y’know, frantic charging and
destruction of rented property and such-forth.”

“Francis. Have you noticed your
girlfriend is a zombie?”

Franco’s eyes glazed for a
moment. “Whadya mean?”

“She’s one of
them,
Franco.
One of the mad horde who’ve been rampaging through The City tearing people limb
from limb, eating brains and generally causing a riot in a bloodbath.”

“Nah. Nah she ain’t,” Franco
shook his head in denial, but his eyes betrayed his heart.

“Yes,” said Cam gently, “yes she
is. Look at her. She is a genetic mutation! She’s a disfigured monstrosity! She’s
a pus-oozing, slimy-scaled, distended, quivering sack of shitty rotting flesh
and twisted bones!”

“That’s a bit harsh,” said Franco
dejectedly. “That’s my bird, that is. The woman I intend to marry. The woman
I... love.”

Mel turned, a sudden movement.
Her lower jaw crunched open like a breaking femur, and she was on Franco in a
second, her disjointed maw wrapped around his lips in what could only be
described as a suction snog; with full-tongue action.

Pus oozed into Franco’s mouth as
his arms flapped frantically, like a suicide jumper desperately trying to push
away the fast-approaching ground.

Mel kissed him.

Franco swooned.

Keenan stood by, uneasily, and
glanced at Cam, shrugging. He puffed on his cigarette, and only then realised
he was holding his Techrim. Damn those reflexes, he thought.

Mel pulled free.

Franco spluttered.