Toxicity (14 page)

And yet it made it
interesting.

Horace moved his head left, then
right, releasing cracks of tension, and lifted his fists. His T5 9mm was in his
pocket; not enough time for that.

“Who sent you?”

No answer. They launched at him,
silent, professional. He dodged various punches and over-athletic high kicks,
then dropped and slammed sideways, sweeping the feet of the first attacker. She
hit the carpet with an “umph” and Horace grabbed the knife in her chest and
wrenched it sideways. There came a flush of blood, and the woman seemed to
deflate. She sighed. Horace rammed the knife into her eyeball with such power
it drove through eye, brain and skull, and pinned her head to the floorboards
beneath. She lay, body spasming and twitching, head pinned in place.

Horace rolled, came up, and
looked down the twin barrels of a D4 shotgun. He slammed left as the
boom
deafened
him, making his ear ring, and something cut a searing hot line over his right
shoulder. He dived into his pocket, T5 in his hand, and was shooting through
the fabric even as he rolled and hit the wall with a slap. Bullets fizzed and
whined, ruining the cut of his mud-splattered suit. Another shadow passed the
doorway.

A third attacker.

Horace clenched his jaw, pulled
out the T5, and put ten rounds through the wall. There came a
thump.
He
smiled. Horace had been conned like that before.

He scanned the sudden bleak
darkness; an awesome, deafening silence.

Rain battered against the
windows. Gun smoke hung heavy in the air, shimmering in twisting slow-mo coils

Horace eased himself upright, T5
tracking the gloom. He knew his bald head shone under any form of light, and it
was moments like this he cursed his baldness with a wry irony.
Oh, to be
killed by his bald head!
That would be a great line for the stand-ups.

Lowering himself to the carpet
again, on his belly, Horace scanned the room. There. At the head of the bed.
Slowly, he extended his T5 and aimed, waiting, breath held, body rigid. And
then the feet were gone, and Horace rolled as a D4
boom
spat fire and
ferocity at the point where he’d lain. The T5 gave a
crack
and he heard
the splatter of blood on wallpaper. Still tracking, he fired again, blind but
precise. Another
crack.
Another splatter. There was a thud as the
shotgun hit the carpet, and Horace stood. He moved through the gloom to the
shotgun, picked it up, checked it was still loaded. Then he stepped backwards
and to the side, poking his head out into the hall. Another woman, lying on the
patterned carpet, face screwed in silent agony, clutching three bullet holes in
her belly. Horace gave a nod, and moved back in. The attacker who’d taken two
rounds was crawling towards the wall -and God only knew what. There was no
escape there. But maybe... were they here to protect the Greenstar director, or
to kill him? It was unlikely both were true. So which was it?

Horace walked forward, wary of
more attackers leaping on him from the dark. He hated that. Hated it with a
vengeance.
Horace liked to be in control. Horace liked to be calling the winning shots.
Horace liked to be the one behind the pistol. Like... now.

He knelt on the shot woman,
feeling blood pump from her wounds as he did so. She groaned, and Horace put
the T5 against her lips.

“Who sent you?”

“Fuck off.”

“You’re an android, right?”

“Fuck you.”

“So this isn’t murder, my
beautiful little sweetie pie. When I merge your teeth with your brain with the
carpet, it’s just a retirement, as the old cops used to say. A put down. A meat
wrap. And, I might add from a personal viewpoint, a fucking
pleasure.
”

“Go. To. Hell.”

“I doubt it,” said Horace, and
grabbed her hair, dragging her kicking and groaning across the carpet and out
into the hall. The second attacker was still clutching her stomach, and Horace’s
eyes narrowed as he made a shrewd judgement. Which one would last the longest?
Which would talk the most? The prettier one would probably have more self
confidence, but then with these fucking androids it was all a sham anyway. He
smiled at the irony. To think like the killer. To hunt like the predator. To
retire an android with complete understanding.

Horace
did
so like his
work.

“Who talks first? The one who
talks, lives.”

The two women, side by side now,
glanced at one another uneasily. “Don’t tell him
anything,”
snarled the
T5-wounded android. Horace knelt on her, his knees compressing her small, pert
breasts. Again, he put the gun against her lips and glanced to the android with
triple stomach wounds.

“Talk, or I kill her.”

“No.”

“Talk.”

“Fuck you.”

Horace shot the android through
the mouth; through her clenched teeth. Broken teeth and the bullet mashed into
her brain, pulping the innards, before exiting into the floorboards. The
android went limp, slack, dead. Blood flooded out in a large black pool.

“You next,” said Horace, T5
turned on her. And he knew; deep in his heart he
knew
she wouldn’t
speak, wouldn’t blab, wouldn’t sing like a canary. Because
that
was the
way she was created. Engineered. Unless... unless she had the dreams, the
visions, the longing for humanity that so many androids seemed to capture like
a particularly nasty virus. The plague of the engineered human. A need to
be
human.

Horace spat to the side.

“There’s no heaven for you,
bitch. You’re a created thing. A fucking machine. When you die, you’ll fade into
dust. Your memory will be as nothing when the valves stop working.”

“What’s your name?” she
whispered.

Horace tilted his head.
Interesting.

“They call me The Dentist,” he
said.

“I have heard of you.”

Ah! So, not here to eliminate
him. Or rather, if they were, they had no idea who they were dealing with.

“Were you sent to kill me? Or
were you just here to protect the Greenstar director?”

“To kill you,” she whispered, and
tears filled her eyes, bubbling up, spilling down her blood-speckled cheeks.

“Good girl,” he said, and eased
himself up from the dead meat on which he knelt.

“What’s your name?” asked the
crying android.

“The Dentist.”

“No.
No.
Your real name.”

Horace stepped over her, and
lowered himself to crouch above her. He stared down into her frightened eyes.
And that wasn’t right. There shouldn’t be fear there. After all, she wasn’t
human, and she knew it.

“Horace,” he said. “And you?”

“I am Michelle. Listen, Horace. I
don’t want to die, Horace.” Her hands clasped his legs, then. Clasped the fine
material of his suit, splattered with mud. He noted her hair was tied back in a
pony-tail. She was quite pretty, when her face wasn’t scrunched up in agony.

“Michelle, my sweet.
Nobody
wants
to die,” he smiled, and placed his T5 in his pocket.

“So you won’t kill me?”

Horace considered this, then
reached forward, took hold of her jaw with one hand, and with a wrench, pulled
her front tooth free with the other. Blood spurted and drooled down her shirt.
Michelle writhed. Horace’s eyes gleamed.

“Not yet,” he breathed, and
strange wild thoughts were flickering through his brain. “I have some more
questions.”

“I’ll talk!” hissed Michelle
through a mouthful of blood, spraying him with a fine mist. “You don’t need to
torture me! I will talk!”

“I know you will,” said Horace,
and pulling out a small, black pack from his inner suit pocket, he unrolled it
on the ground. It was full of gleaming silver instruments.

“Please don’t torture me,” wailed
Michelle.

“I must,” said Horace, with the
calmness of a surgeon.

“But why?”

Horace gave a comforting smile to
his patient, and the corner of his eye twitched. “Because I must,” he said.

~ * ~

IT
WAS OVER. Perhaps an hour had passed; maybe less. Horace sat with his back to
the wall, exhausted and fulfilled. Some people said alcoholic drink was the
best intoxication in the world. Others, a wild plethora of drugs which could
stimulate any variety of wild experience. Yet others voted for virtual
battlefields to get their milporn juices going, and others a rabid addiction to
sex and all its various deviations. But in Horace’s heart, in his soul, he knew
nothing touched perfection like the creation of true art.

Horace looked over at his true
art. She was dead now, of course. Her arms and legs were all broken and twisted
at savage, irregular angles. Well, he’d had to, hadn’t he? To stop her fighting
like that. He looked at her face, at the ring of her blood-sodden skull; her
beautiful, wounded, scalpel- and needle-destroyed face. She was no longer
Michelle, of course. No. Horace had taken that away from her, starting with her
teeth, one by one, each removal an exquisite pleasure, each snap and crack of
bone a shiver of ultimate arousing ecstasy. On one side, he had piled up the
teeth in a neat little pile, as Michelle fought and battled, struck at him,
cursed him and begged him, weeping and screaming in equal measures. That’s when
he broke her arms like brittle twigs. After all, he didn’t want her to tear his
suit.

The pile of teeth were perfect,
but Horace’s perfection, his dentistry, went further. He’d pulled out a
microfilament titanium saw, eyes gleaming with a light of - not insanity, but
something deeper, something dark; a chord in perfect tune with a demon’s soul.

“I’ll talk, I’ll tell you every
fucking thing!” screamed Michelle, her words deformed by her lack of teeth, her
mouth full of blood and saliva and vomit.

Horace held up a finger, as if
conducting an orchestra. This was the soundtrack of the doomed.

“Too late,” he said with wet
lips, and the saw went to work on Michelle’s jaw. Not to silence her, but to
complete the final pieces of The Dentist’s puzzle. A key opening a lock with a
snick.
A perfect symbiosis: of victim, and killer.

Now, he sat back. Exhausted.
Fulfilled. And his mind, his twisted, drifting mind, came back to the present
with a gentle
bump.

His mission was unfulfilled. But
more than that:
they
knew he was here.

They were trying to kill him. He
had competition. He had a fight.

Horace smiled, and placed his
tool roll in his pocket. Outside, dawn was daring to stroke the horizon.

Sirens drifted through the haze.

It was time to leave.

~ * ~

FOUR

WHEN
THEY CUT you down, you know what you have to do. You must fight, fight for your
life, fight with every tooth and claw and fang and fist and finger and boot,
kick and stomp and punch and slap and bite and elbow and knee and head-butt
until you’re free of these heathen peasant tribal bastards who seek to cook you
over the fire! You get it? You’d better fucking get it, because if you don’t,
then you’re gonna end up as pate in their bellies, as meat on their sticks, as
arse slabs of gristle on their little bark plates. They’ll use your eyeballs as
delicacies, your belly-fat as candle wax, your dried-out skin as clothing, and
your fucking scalp as a stick totem to wave at other captured unfortunates.
Understand, Svoolzard? This is it. Time to fight. Fight or die, like never
before!