Biohell (79 page)

Frigate legs clanged, cracking
the highway. After engines had died to a muted after-roar, the Frigate’s belly
opened and Combat K stared out into a new, rising dawn.

“Wow,” breathed Franco, hopping
down the buckled, lava-scorched ramp, and out into a fresh new world. “It’s
beautiful!”

“QGM are on the ground at last,”
came Slick’s voice over the ScreamSpeaker, as he checked his scanners and PAD. “They
finally thought it was time to restore order! Bastards. Maybe it had something
to do with Steinhauer’s Panic Burst, hey? Shit. What a mess.”

Keenan nodded, and followed
Franco outside, boots clumping on the smashed, rubble-strewn highway. He
glanced down, at the decimation of The City stretching away for as far as the
eye could see. Fires burned, barricades smouldered, but he could identify no
signs of the zombies which had infected the planet like a plague. “Beautiful?”
Keenan laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far, Franco,” he said, surveying the
aftermath of an atomic blast.

“But we’re
alive!”
beamed
Franco, and did a little dance, sandals flapping.

“Only just.”

“You’re missing the point!”

“Am I?”

“Yeah. We always pull through! We
always surge ahead. After all, we’re Combat K... we’re the
smarty party!”
He
did another little shuffle, then punched the air in glee.

Pippa emerged, holding onto her
tightly bandaged side. Her clothes were in tatters, the gleam of her white,
neat, tightly-bandaged flank somehow at odds with the desecration of her
current wardrobe.

“Franco’s right. It is beautiful.”

Keenan grunted, and turned as the
Marine Frigate disgorged its crew. Knuckles ran forward, and gave Franco and
Keenan a big hug. Behind him strode Olga, freshly attired, beaming with a
face-wide smile and licking her lips in anticipation of meeting a
still-breathing Franco. Finally came Slick, followed by a motley crew of
rag-tag ex-Combat K men.

Keenan shook Slick’s hand. “It’s
good to see you, mate.”

“And you.”

Keenan grinned past Slick. “I see
you there, Chicken. And Clinty Eastwood! I thought you died five years ago?
Still smoking those cigars? And you Bob Bob, you wily old bastard.” Bob Bob
grinned at Keenan, and rubbed at a custard stain which marked his worn and
faded combats.

“We have a stowaway,” said Cam,
emerging on a stream of ionised air. His battered shell spun, lights flickering.
He looked far from being the polished, immaculate PopBot of a few days earlier.

“Oh yeah?” said Keenan.

“Steinhauer. But he’s nearly
dead.”

“He saved my life,” said Pippa. “He
must have crawled up the ramp during the fight!”

The Combat K men carried the
battered, unconscious shell of Steinhauer from his hiding place in the SLAM
Cruiser, and away to the medical deck of the Marine Frigate which towered above
them on their vantage point across the elevated, curved highway.

“That bastard has a lot to answer
for,” snarled Keenan. “He played us as pawns. Do you believe we’ve got logic
cubes in our spines? That we are
required
to cooperate?”

“I’ve got the feeling it was
true,” said Pippa, voice hushed.

“Well, we’ll find out what he
wants, soon enough. When the bastard awakes.” Distantly, as if in a dream, he
could hear Franco trying to push Olga away.

“One kiss,” she was saying. “For
little Olgy Wolgy.”

“No! No! Listen, the missus is
asleep in there, and I’m warning you, she’s an eight-foot deviant with a love
of fresh brains! You’d better be careful! She’ll not like you mauling me! I’m
an honourable man, I am. I am betrothed to be married!”

“Ahh, for you, Franco, I would
battle all ze deviants in Hell itself!”

Keenan strode to the edge of the
freeway, and leant on the bounce barrier. He patted at his battered WarSuit,
dipped his hand inside, and pulled free a buckled, battered, but miraculously
intact tin of Widow Maker tobacco. He balanced the tin on the barrier, and
started to roll a cigarette. A cool breeze ruffled his hair. Distantly, the
destroyed crater of NanoTek rumbled.

Knuckles moved to him. “Did you
destroy the GreenSource Mainframe entirely?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I can feel it. Up here.” He
tapped his skull. “Back on Ket, when the Fractured Emerald alien entered me,
she left me with a gift. She gave me an ability to...
see
certain
things. Unwittingly, the GreenSource unleashed this ability—freed me of a
mental restriction. Now, I can feel it... feel
her.
She is crushed down
there, under a million tonnes of shit. Exactly what she deserved.”

“Listen. Something’s happened to
the zombies.” Knuckles rubbed his hands together, then one strayed to the
velvet bag at his waist. “When you blew the SPIRAL dock, when you pulped
GreenSource, all the zombies lay down in the street. As if going to sleep. Slick
has received intel from QGM; apparently, very slowly, the zombies are changing
back!”

“Into people?”

Knuckles nodded. “Yeah. It’s a
miracle!”

“Not a miracle,” snorted Keenan. “A
function of technology. The biomods, without instruction or command, are
reverting that which they deviated. GreenSource told me NanoTek were
experimenting on the whole damned city; the whole planet was a testing ground
for zombies and their different deviated definitions. The aim was to create and
select the strongest and most lethal forms of toxic killer. GreenSource was
building a new junk army.” He laughed. He sounded bitter. “A new pestilence to
replace the old, and powered by a deviant microscopic technology that would
spread like bacteria across a million conquered worlds! I just love science. It’s
so clinically amoral.”

Knuckles shivered. “That’s bad,
Keenan.” He leapt up to sit on the barrier, and glanced off over the ruins,
hair in disarray, eyes sparkling. He kicked his red gloss boots against the
barrier with
thumps.

Keenan sighed. “Anyway, how are
you doing, lad? I’m here moaning like a geriatric with back pain.”

“It’s been... an adventure! And I’ve
learnt a lot of lessons in the last few days.”

“Haven’t we all?”

“Are you referring to Pippa? I
thought you two were enemies? Ready to kill each other the instant you met? I
just watched you talking. You could not mistake the body-language.” Knuckles
gave a cheeky grin, but his eyes were old; older than
death.

Keenan stared at Knuckles for a
long time. Then he ran his hand through matted hair, took a long drag on his
smoke, and sighed. “I think I never truly wanted her dead. I loved her... once.
Hell, I still love her. But I can’t forgive her. And here? Well, she came good
in the end. Combat K were forced into a reunion; and it looks like for the
immediate future we have no choice in the matter. Without Pippa,” Keenan
gestured across The City, “well, all those people out there, they would still
be deviants. Walking dead-meat. She played her part.” His eyes were filled with
pain. And confusion.

“I believe you don’t really know
how you feel.” Knuckles’s voice was gentle. He was still rubbing at the velvet
bag, hung at his waist.

“Maybe you’re right, lad. I’ll
think on it.” He laughed. “Anyway, that bag you carry. We made a deal, didn’t
we? Although you were right. We never did change Mel back to human.”

“You decoded the SinScript?”

“Yes. I used GreenSource.”

“And what does it say?”

Keenan grimaced. “Destroy
Quad-Gal.”

“That’s...
bad,
Keenan.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Hey, he’ll be OK, Knuckles,”
said Pippa, approaching to place a hand on Keenan’s arm. She forced a smile to
her mouth, although her eyes were still dark, hooded, the eyes of an unreadable
killer. “We’ll look after him now.”

“I can’t even look after myself.”

“So, go on, what’s in the bag?”
said Pippa.

“The knuckle bones of my parents.
They were killed three years ago. That’s why I live on the streets. I keep them
as... a reminder. One day, I will find my parents’ killers. I will exact a
terrible revenge!” His eyes shone, full of unshed tears. “And I will never
forget my friends, Little Megan, and the others; all those killed by The Hammer
Syndicate.” He eyed Keenan thoughtfully. “I have a lot of revenge left in me.”

Keenan nodded, and smoked.

Knuckles moved off, filled with
melancholy. Olga, tired with Franco’s rejection, gave the lad a bosom-engulfing
hug.

“Sounds like he has the perfect
family history to join Combat K!” said Pippa, shaking her head.

“Yeah, well, the lad came good in
the end. Who knows what the future has in store for him.”

“We’re a brutal species.”

“It’s in our nature,” said
Keenan.

“Yeah, but one day, maybe, we’ll
change.”

Keenan eyed her warily. “I doubt
it,” he said.

Franco arrived, rubbing at his
bristling beard. He patted Keenan on the back, and the three of them stood
there, Combat K, together, watching the destroyed world of The City through
cynical eyes.

Keenan leant over the barrier,
staring at the vast scene of total desolation. “There’s a war coming,” he said,
voice barely above a whisper. He turned, stared at Franco and Pippa. “When we
unleashed Leviathan, on Teller’s World, we thought we’d put it back in the
cage. But we didn’t, did we? We failed.”

Pippa’s eyes were glittering. She
took a deep breath. “We need to put this thing right,” she said.

Keenan nodded, turning to stare
back over The City.

“Yeah, but how do we do that?”
said Franco. “After all, there are so many pubs to visit? And I’ve got a
wedding to go to!” He beamed. “I’m the groom!”

“Yeah mate, well, you better get
married fast. We have to stop the junks,” said Keenan, smoke drifting from him
like ribbons. “And they know it.”

“But
how do we do that?”
said
Franco.

Keenan looked at him, laughed,
and slapped him on the back. “We have to find out where they come from. What
spawned them. Where they’ve been hiding. Where they were
born.
And more
importantly, how to stop them. Only then can we tackle Leviathan.”

“Where they were born?”

“Yeah,” said Keenan. “And I know
where to start. I’ve seen it. In a dream.” He laughed. “An alien dream.”

“Where’s that?”

“Sick World,” said Keenan, and
flicked his smoke into the fresh ripening dawn.

~ * ~

“And
here on City Newsnight, I’d like to welcome English Teacher Ellie Midget,
formerly of POSH Town’s
Blessed Hilda’s Perfect Educational Emporium
and,
apparently, formerly a reconstituted mutation
zombie!
Please, can we
give Ellie a huge round of applause.”

[Studio audience: applause].

“Actually, I’d just like to point
out I was the
Head
of English at
Blessed Hilda’s Perfect Educational
Emporium,”
said Ellie, face compact, voice somewhat stiff.

“Well, many apologies for
that
monumental coooooooock up!.”