Biohell (61 page)

“Neat,” said Keenan, voice dry
and calm, eyes full of ice.

“Hey, they don’t call me Franco ‘Sky
Captain’ Haggis for nothing, you know!” Franco beamed optimistically, all of
Keenan’s considerable sarcasm lost on him.

“They’re still on our tail!” said
Xakus. The man, strapped tightly behind his X-BELT, was watching a wall
scanner. “You can’t outrun Black Tigers. They’re the fastest combat choppers on
the market.”

“I
know that!”
said
Franco, wrestling again with his dodgy controls and ignoring a swathe of red
warning lights which decorated the console. “Why d’ya think I’m doing all the
fancy piloting?”

They screamed through the streets
at psycho low-level. More bullets roared from the pursuing Black Tigers. Then,
there came a
whumpf.
Fire roared around them and Franco squawked like a
head-hacked chicken as his entire rear-view was filled with an expanding
blossom of fire. Heat smashed the men. The Apache groaned, rattling, and the
tail-rotors started to smoke. Franco veered left, and the two Black Tigers
missed the turn and disappeared in a blaze of billowing, grinding
flame-throwers.

Franco slowed their wild
onslaught, slowed with nervous care, and hovered for a moment near street
level. Glass sparkled like snow across the ground. Franco checked damage
reports.

“What hit us?” he said, finally.

“They’ve got anti-chopper
flamethrowers,”
snapped back Keenan. “I thought you’d know?”

“How could I know that, eh lad?
How?”

“Because it’s been on the news,”
said Keenan, voice low. “KAZ Systems have been heavily criticised for their
inhumane approach; but, seeing as the staff at KAZ are all
aliens,
they
consider it an intrinsically dumb criticism.”

“I never saw no news,” said
Franco. “Shit. Too much time in bed with Mel! Hey, better get us moving.” Even
as he spoke, a swarm of heavily armed zombies charged from a side-street with a
roar. Limping and dragging and lolling, they attacked the hovering low-level
chopper and started to hurl bricks and bottles.

Franco gave them a V-sign through
the web-crackled cockpit. “Dickheads!” he shouted. “What d’ya think you’re
doing, throwing bottles at a damned armoured chopper? Go on, bugger off the lot
of you!”

“Franco!”
hissed Keenan, as a zombie lifted
an RPG and shouldered the long, sleek, matt green military-grade weapon.

“Yeah yeah, OK, I’m on it. Don’t
get your knickers twisted all backside waywards.”

The Apache soared towards the
sky, zombies waving fists to become distant stick-zombies. The RPG disgorged
and the warhead slammed towards them trailing fire and smoke. Franco twisted
the Apache, and the rocket arced off into the distant sky like one of the world’s
largest, deadliest fireworks.

Franco turned and beamed at
Keenan and Xakus, the Apache still climbing vertically. “See, com-padre? What
you panicking for? You’re with the
smart
party now! Nothing can touch
Franco ‘Chopper King’ Haggis when he’s got his War Head on!” He beamed, congratulating
himself on the metaphor. “You see what I did there? Warhead? War...
head!
My
head? You see? Geddit? Ha! Now, all I need is to get those bloody Black Tigers
in my sights...”

They slammed up from the jagged
toothline of skyscrapers, just as two Black Tigers crossed their path. Franco’s
Apache smashed into the lead Black Tiger Gunship side-on with a devastating
crunch,
the Apache’s nose poking into and
through
the passenger hold,
through buckled side-cargo doors.

The two war machines
merged
with
a scream of metal.

Franco stared, slack-jawed, as
ten zombies glared at him through his web-riddled cockpit windscreen. They
cocked weapons, and with chewed, severed fingers and lolling, pus-oozing jaws,
levelled a bristling array of guns...

The two choppers, locked together
in an unholy embrace, fought to travel in different directions. Engines whined
and screamed. Exhausts spat fire and oil-smoke, ice-shards and matrix-spill.
Rotors, spinning at 10,000 rpm only inches apart, set up a weird aural wailing
as sound waves bounced and chopped between them. Suddenly, this gestalt machine
entity began to jerk and wobble and weave across the sky in looping arcs, in
the most un-balletic example of combat chopper flight ever witnessed above The
City; the joining jerked and fell, lifted and spun, a spastic dance of
screaming motors and wrestling controls. Franco fought with his Apache F52
Gunship, cursing and howling, one eye on the ten armed zombies who were
growling and spitting beyond the spider-screen. However, he didn’t need to
worry. As the locked and mating choppers gyrated and pulled, dropped and
whirled, so the ten zombies with aimed weapons were suddenly tossed about
inside the hold like rotten, fuzzy tomatoes in a blender. They bounced and spun
and slammed and thrashed. With wide eyes, Franco watched them disintegrate
slowly before him, rotten limbs pulled free, heads bouncing from his cockpit,
green pus spewing to swill first across floors, then walls, then ceiling.
Occasional random bullets
zipped
and
pinged
as zombies
head-butted one other into oblivion.

Franco patted his harness with
relief.

The second Black Tiger had roared
past the merged and buckled machines, lifting and banking, coming around with
two zombies arming heavy machine guns. It levelled, watching for a moment for a
clear shot... and then, obviously deciding it was willing to sacrifice its
comrade in order to bring down the enemy Apache, the Tiger’s guns opened
fire...

Bullets roared. They slapped up
the Apache’s flanks, then on into the Black’s Tiger’s fuselage.

“Hey! Hey stop that!” screamed
Franco, as the zombie mincer mashed and churned before his beady eyes. He was
starting to feel sick. He tried again and again to pull the Apache free,
jerking backwards, full-throttle, with engines roaring in a grinding, pumping
frenzy. The Apache’s nose-cone groaned, and tugged, and resolutely refused to
budge.

Keenan, every few seconds, got
the third Black Tiger in his sights. He squeezed the EMF’s heavy triggers,
watched bullet and tracer slam off across the night. Then, in their erratic
dance, the gun would be pulled from his hands with a slick curse.

“I feel sick!” moaned Franco,
observing the organic zombie blender.

“Get us out of this shit!”
screamed Keenan, firing off more heavy calibre rounds. Several found their
mark, and the Black Tiger leapt up into the sky, circling, aiming for a safe,
clear shot. More bullets slapped the waltzing machines. More punctures appeared
in both the Apache F52 and its unwilling lover.

“What’s that smell?” said Franco,
voice suddenly cool, head clear. An arm landed against his cockpit window. It
only had one finger. A middle finger. It seemed to be giving Franco a final,
mocking farewell.

“Aviation fuel,” snapped Keenan.

There came a roar as the free and
painfully dangerous Black Tiger unleashed a blast of industrial flamethrower
over the two machines. Flames sped along the Black Tiger’s tail and Franco,
chirping and squeaking like a panicked budgerigar, wrestled with his controls
and gnawed with his teeth. He slapped open his harness, sat back, and kicked
out at his cockpit with both sandals. The arm with its offending middle finger
vanished into the mire of pulped churned zombie slush. The cockpit folded over,
and fell
inside
the enemy chopper. Franco scrambled out, onto his own
machine’s nose-cone. He could hear the roar of fire. He could smell smoke and
hear the
ping
of superheating alloy. Bullets whirred and whined. There!
There! He could see the ridge that trapped them! The alloy lip which ensnared
their brave Apache! Franco scrambled down the nose cone, and around in a
circle, a monkey atop a cracked and sliding cockpit screen which in turn
floated atop ten mashed mushed zombies. Franco poked his MPK into the ridge gap
and with a grunt, levered at the locked and battling choppers. The barrel of
his gun groaned, then bent in a comedy U shape.

“Bastard. Bastard.”

Panting hard, and with the
temperature rising fast, in the gap between nose-cone and door-rim Franco could
see Keenan pumping round after round at the enemy Black Tiger through a funnel
of flames. He scrambled back, bottom sliding on the gore-slippery screen. With
both sandals, he slammed at the Apache’s nose cone. Again, and again, and
again.

As he kicked, grunting, sweating,
he made the mistake of looking down. Several zombie faces were pressed against
the underside of the battered cockpit, squashed and leering at him with lolling
tongues and the permanent inebriation of the alcoholic dead.

“Aaii,” said Franco, shuddering,
and with a final surge of sandalled feet, he disconnected the two combat
helicopters. There came a deep and heavy groan of stressed and twisting steel.
The two machines eased apart, and Franco punched the air several times.

“Yes! Yes YES!”

And then he realised.

He was
inside
the enemy
chopper, surfing a glass platter atop a sea of mulched zombie. The chopper was
on fire. And, quite possibly, about to explode.

“No! No NO!” he squeaked, and
ran, leaping from the buckled doorway to skydive towards his falling,
out-of-control Apache F52. Behind, there came a
click
of detonation. The
Black Tiger billowed into a raging howling screaming fireball, the nose turned
towards The City far below... and began to suddenly accelerate in a smoking,
fiery plummet. Straight at Franco.

Franco dived like an Olympic
athlete, but his body was far from aerodynamic. Below, inside the Apache, he
could see Keenan fighting to free himself from his harness. Franco gave a wave,
beard flapping in the wind, and watched Keenan return him a scowl of pure evil.

With a grunt, Franco landed on
the Apache’s buckled, battered nose cone, sandals slipping treacherously. “Yeah,
baby!” he cheered. His nostrils twitched. He could smell smoke. Beard snapping
violently, he glanced back. The fiery fireball of the burning detonated Black
Tiger was gaining. Inside its roaring shell, there came further
cracks
of
ignition as bullets exploded.

Franco screamed, clambered
through the cockpit hole and into the Apache, grabbed the controls and veered
them to the right and down, levelling out with a sudden thudding of rotors and
an instant rush of cool, rhythmical calm.

They hovered.

Behind, the flaming Black Tiger
disappeared to ground level and there came a
whumpf.
Flames roared a
hundred feet high, broiling. Franco sat, breathing deeply, eyes saucer wide. He
patted frantically at himself, to check he was still in one piece. Then he
turned and beamed at Keenan.

“Hey hey
hey!”

“You
dickhead.”

“What? I mean...
what?”

“You
utter
arsehole.”

“Hey, come on, admit it, that was
a serious bit of adventuring, right? Couldn’t have done it any better if I’d
been a stunt man in the movies.” He chuckled to himself. “Huh. I tell you
something, they should give me a job in Holy Hollywood!”

“Yes,” snarled Keenan, “as the
fucking
tea boy.
The other chopper’s coming round. Get us moving!”

“Right you are, boss.”

They cruised, low, at a slow and
manoeuvrable speed, waiting for the attack—which never came.

“We’ve lost him!” beamed Franco.

“Hmm,” said Keenan, and by the
look on his face it was clear he was unconvinced.

“Either that, or them damn
zombies recognised in me a superior flight commander. I tell you something,
Keenan, I would have made a great Luftwaffe pilot, I would! Untouchable! King
of the Skies! Fighter Pilot
supremo!”

“Have you finished?”