Toxicity (23 page)

“Jenny,” said the monster through
mashed lips and steel teeth. His face wobbled as he spoke, as if the rough-sewn
skin panels weren’t properly attached to the subframe and might go tumbling to
the floor at any minute with a sodden squelch.

Jenny opened her mouth in
question, then closed it again. Distant recognition filtered into her brain,
but she was tired, deathly tired, and lethargic, and aching herself from, from...
from the
bomb
blast. The world came tumbling back, upside down and in
reverse. Her mouth was suddenly dry and a million images from the previous year
flickered like a black and white horror movie through her spasming mind. The
stance. The tilt of the head. The angle of the arms. It was...

“Randy?”
she said, frowning, voice soft,
Vasta forgotten.

“Ahh! You recognise me! Thank
god. I thought maybe I’d changed a little
too
much.”

Jenny stared hard at the
disfigured horror before her.
Holy fuck, what’s happened to his face?
screamed
her brain, but of course she knew. The pressure blast from the bomb,
her
bomb,
hell,
his
bomb, had quite literally ripped his face clean off.

“You betrayed us,” said Jenny,
eyes going hard.

“You betrayed yourself!” snapped Randy,
moving forward and placing both hands on the bed slab. The gun went
clack.
Jenny
noted Randy had three fingers missing, and was holding the gun in his left
hand. Which meant... he wouldn’t fire too straight.

Jenny shifted forward, subtly, as
she spoke. “We trusted you, we embraced you into our organisation, and at the
last minute you turned out to be a traitor to our cause.”

“That’s the problem,
Jenny Xi,
it’s
your
cause. You have your fucking focus set straight, thinking
only of yourself.
Look what your fucking bomb did to me!
I didn’t
deserve this, woman. You’re a fucking terrorist, there’s no other way to
describe you. Yeah, we all have our causes, all have our own personal honour;
but at the end of the day you pick soft fucking targets to make your point. You
call yourself soldiers, but I’d like to see you go up against the real
military. They’d chew you up and spit you out like the fucking detritus you
are. The
shit
you are.”

“We only attack installations,”
hissed Jenny, eyes angry now. She moved yet closer to Randy. “Never people.”

“Yeah, but look at the collateral
damage,” snapped Randy. His eyes, one weeping more than the other, were hard
and unforgiving and riddled with pain and angst. He was hurting, not just in
the flesh, but deep inside. Jenny could see that, and a tiny part of her heart
went out to Randy; no person deserved to have his face ripped free. But then,
this was business. Business was business.

“There are always casualties in
war,” said Jenny, voice hard.

“So I deserved this?
FUCKING
LOOK AT ME! YOU TOOK AWAY MY FUCKING FACE!”

Jenny stared at the monster
before her. She had never seen something so ugly and badly put together. It was
as if the surgeons, knowing how incredibly handsome Randy had been before the
detonation, had addressed the imbalance and made him hideous now. Behind
cackling fingers they’d brought forward scalpels and scissors and knitting
needles, and put together a shock-horror black-comedy B-movie horror face from
a low-budget indie production. Randy looked like a bad special effect.

“I’m sorry about that,” said
Jenny, softer now, stepping even closer to Randy. She could see the agony in
his eyes. In his stance. The gun on the slab was pushed to one side, in his
fury, in his torture, and it was a few tantalising inches away. Jenny could
sense Vasta shifting, maybe realising the danger, maybe reacting to Jenny’s
proximity to the gun. She only had seconds. She would have to move fast, make
this count...

Jenny surged forward, slamming a
right straight to Randy’s ruined nose and scooping up the pistol in her left
hand. With a cry, the mutilated dandy staggered back, one whole hand, one
mangled hand coming up to his face as tears streamed down his stitched,
swollen, jagged cheeks.

Jenny pointed the gun at him. Behind
Randy, Vasta had relaxed into a combat stance. She was special, Jenny could see
that. She
was
the real danger in the room.

“You bitch,” hissed Randy,
cradling his face. A line of stitches had broken open and blood ran down his
cheek. It dripped to the floor with a slow, steady rhythm.

“I’m sorry, Randy,” said Jenny,
gun pointing at his head, and then, with a subtle shift, transferring to Vasta
over his shoulder. “You. Fucker. Open the door.”

“No.”

“One last chance. Open the door.”

“She can’t open the door,”
snapped Randy. “It’s externally controlled.”

The gun cracked, and Randy
staggered back with a bullet in his shoulder. “You hear me?” shouted Jenny. “Next
bullet goes in his head, and then I start on the pretty little daddy’s girl.
What do you say you simply open the door?”

Randy, holding his shoulder,
holding the bullet wound, said, “Yes. She’s ready.”

Jenny frowned, and was suddenly
struck. It was like a lightning bolt, only made from water. It came from above,
hitting Jenny in the chest, flinging her to the ground, vibrating in shock. The
gun clattered off across the cold stone floor. And Vasta was above her,
kneeling on her arms, and Jenny was trembling with a taste of copper in her
mouth and none of her limbs working properly. Her fingers were shaking and
twitching uncontrollably. A smell rose to her nose and she realised she’d
pissed herself.

She stared up into Vasta’s face,
and the petite blonde woman was smiling. “Perfect,” she said, and pulled back
her fist.

Then the lights went out.

~ * ~

SIX

HORACE
STOPPED BY the open door and smelled the breeze. It smelled bad. It smelled
of... toxicity. He gazed down the hill, the sweep of Bacillus Port City before
him like some crazy electric network. Sirens howled through the rain, and the
city shimmered with a low-level haze of pollution. Blue and green stroboscopic
lights glittered against mist and rain and toxic clouds, and Horace’s eyes
narrowed in anticipation.

Why do I feel like I’ve been set
up? A pawn in another man’s game? And if there’s something I despise, it’s
being a tool when I haven’t given permission. Haven’t given the nod. Haven’t
given my android seal of approval.
He
smiled. Most androids felt inferior to the humans that created them, but he
knew
he was superior in every way.

He stepped out onto the gravel,
rolling his neck and shoulders. The T5 was in his hand, a cold, dark brother.
No
point running now. They know I’m here. Probably knew I was here before I got
here, but wanted to give enough time for me to be exterminated... then I’m just
another homicide, and when they find I’m an android, I’m not even a murder,
just the death of a machine, a tool, to be swept under the carpet at the Halls
of Justice. Industrial accident, that’s what they’ll call it.

Horace crunched out onto the
gravel drive and waited. There were five police cars. Their sirens bounced up
the long lane above the roar of engines. Horace’s nostrils twitched at the
smell of a distant fire. Rubber was burning, thick and black against the
darkened horizon. His keen eyes - far more keen than any merely augmented human
could ever hope to possess - picked out two passengers, two
Police Urban
Force officers -
per car. He could see their broad flat faces, some
stubbled, their eyes dark and serious. Their body language suggested they were
carrying long weapons, machine guns or, more probably, shotguns. Horace
approved. A shotgun was a good weapon to take down an android; the wide blast
to knock it from its feet, then twin or quad barrels in its mouth - and it was
game over, baby. But what they didn’t know (or maybe they did, whispered a
thrilling chill in his soul), and this made Horace smile for a moment, baring
perfect white teeth, was that he was an
Anarchy
model. If they did know,
they should have brought specialised capture and destroy equipment. If not...

You could run...

No.

Stubborn.

A perfectionist in search of the
truth.

Do you want to know the truth?

I always want to know the truth.

The first car crunched to a halt
on gravel twenty metres away, and Horace smiled as the T5 came up. He shot the
first PUF officer through the windshield, a hard
crack
and the body
slammed back, shards of nose protruding through the skin, tongue slack in
lolling jaws. His comrade was faster, rolling from the car with a D4 shotgun in
both hands, blood speckles of his friend and comrade on his cheek, a look of
shock raping his features. He hadn’t expected
that.
Not so fast. Not so
clean.

So they haven’t been told, then.

Yes.

Do you feel no remorse?

Never.

The others cars screeched to a
halt in an arc of blaring lights and flashing stroboscopes which momentarily
blinded him. He smiled. That was the idea, surely? Doors were slamming open,
PUF officers disgorging, and someone screamed through a megaphone “Get down on
the ground and put your hands over your head!”

And then Horace was moving, and
when Horace moved, Horace moved
fast.

He ran at the first car,
flinching left even before the D4 shotgun made a low, heavy
boom.
He
leapt onto the bonnet, T5 dropping low to punch a bullet through the officer’s
face. His hands twitched on the D4 as if playing the flute. Now Horace was on
the roof, leaping as guns rattled and cracked, knowing they were focused on his
last position. He landed in the mud and stones on his knees, rolling low and
shooting under the next car. Five bullets ripped out, killing two PUF officers,
who flopped back, still staring up towards the house and its haunting darkness.
Horace saw tongues loll out. Saw blood in eyes.

A
boom
crashed behind him
and stone rattled against his flank.
Clever. Swift. Almost good enough to be
an Anarchy Android.
Horace calculated the location by sound and the scatter
of stones, and the T5 fired backwards, blind, and punched a man through the
throat. Horace rolled onto his back and looked up through the rain and bright
lights. The man had dropped his shotgun and was clutching his windpipe. His
eyes were wide and pleading and filled with disbelief and despair. But that
didn’t matter to Horace. None of it mattered to Horace. He fired another shot,
and the officer’s brains mushroomed from the top of his skull. Then he crawled
forward and took the shotgun. It felt good in his hands. Cool and slick and
perfect.

Scattered images. Sounds.
Memories.

Guns cracking.

Lights flashing.

BACKUP, WE NEED BACKUP!

The boom of a shotgun.

The rattle of automatic fire.

The explosion of a car tyre, and
the car slumping down on one sagging corner.

The rain, falling, pattering in
puddles.

Bullets whining through the air
like insects.

The
wham-wham-wham
of
shells punching holes in car bodywork.

The splash of Horace’s boots
through the mud.

He strode the world like a
colossus, untouchable, bullets tearing into faces, the D4 shotgun booming in
his hands and sparking through the darkness, through the rain. One PUF officer
cowered behind the door of his squad car, and Horace shot him through the
metal, then leaping onto the roof of the car, shot him through the top of the
head.