Toxicity (46 page)

They moved on, Herbert’s
plate-hooves clipping and clopping. Eventually, Lumar whirled on him. “Oy!
Useless bastard who’s going to get us all killed! Haven’t you got a stealth
mode or something?”

“I could, neigh, perhaps walk on
my tippy toes?”

Lumar stared at him, then rubbed
at her forehead. It was getting too much: everything, just creeping up on her a
bit at a time. She wasn’t built for this; this wasn’t her goal. To be
surrounded by idiots! All the time!

“Okay,” she said, voice a low
growl. “You walk on your tippy toes. That’ll be great.”

They drifted down silent, ghostly
corridors. For Lumar, rather than the corridors adding to a sense of normality
- compared with the rough-hewn rocky walls of the mines - instead, it seemed to
add to her tension.

Lumar stopped. Her nostrils
twitched. Something felt wrong. Her eyes narrowed, and up ahead, from the
towering stacks of raw metal, stepped a child. She was small, and huddled under
the rags that served as clothing. Her hair was long and matted, and her face
was simply a mass of sores and open, weeping wounds.

“Urgh,” said Svool.

Lumar turned, and kicked him in
the balls. As Svool hit the ground and lay foetal, Lumar holstered her pistol
and moved forward with hands spread out, a loving smile on her face, hoping to
instil some kind of trust in the desolate little girl...

“It’s okay,” said the child.

“You’re not frightened?” said
Lumar.

“No. I’ve been following you.
Watching you.”

“Yes.” Lumar nodded, and smiled
again. “Are you okay? Do you need help?”

“No. This is where I live. This
is where
we
all live.”

Svool, grunting on the ground,
rolled over and tapped Lumar on the calf muscle.

“Not now,” she snapped, then back
to the girl. “What’s your name, child?”

“I am Chorzaranalista. Welcome to
my home.”

“Is she diseased?” wheezed Svool,
managing to crawl to his knees. “Ask her, ask her if she’s diseased. We don’t
want to” - he stared at her disfigured face with a shudder - “catch anything.”

Chorzaranalista smiled. “No. I am
not diseased,” she said, and her great large eyes looked incredibly sad. “Come
with me. I’ll show you our home. Maybe then you’ll understand.”

She moved away, almost drifting,
a tattered shawl around her shoulders. She moved like a ghost.

Svool got to his feet, hanging on
to Herbert for support. He grimaced at Lumar. “What you fucking go and do that
for?”

Lumar stared at him, and a tear
rolled down her cheek. “Have you no soul?” she said, then whirled about and
followed the girl down the corridor of metal slabs.

Svool stared after her, then back
at Herbert. “Huh?”

“Don’t look at me, buster. I just
work here.”

He spread his hands. “What did I
do wrong? That deserved a kick in the balls?”

Herbert looked down his rusted
equine nose at Svool, then shook his head. “I thought you had an imagination?”

“I do!”

“Well, use it,” said Herbert, and
clattered off after Lumar. Angelina sauntered over, offered her buttocks in
Svool’s direction, and emitted a long dribbling shit of black oil filled with
metal shavings. Then she, too, followed the disfigured little girl.

Svool made a clucking noise, and
fell in behind, trying to work out what he’d done wrong. He walked fast, and
soon caught up with Angelina, but her huge swaying horse buttocks stopped him
from passing in the relatively narrow confines of the corridor. He tried -
unsuccessfully - to squeeze past her a few times, but always, strangely, she would
sway one way or the other, and her great metal arse would whack him into the
wall.

The journey lasted perhaps half
an hour, through endless corridors of metal slabs and always heading gently
downwards. Eventually they emerged by the banks of the lirridium river, only
here there seemed to be some kind of mesh gate, a filtration pool of some kind;
and rather than the still waters they’d seen before, it was a quagmire of crap,
a giant lake of almost solid effluence, detritus, junk and garbage, which here
went through some kind of filtration process and then carried on, beyond the
gate, beyond the mesh, as pure, unsullied, de-chunked lirridium. Or its
unrefined form.

Svool held his nose as he
stumbled into the group once more, and holding his nose, he said, “By the Gods
of Fuck, this surely stinks like a ten-week-dead whore after the rats have
built nests inside her.”

Chorzaranalista looked down at
the ground; at her holed shoes, scuffed and battered and colourless. “This is
my home,” she said.

“You might have tidied up a bit,
girl!” said Svool, looking around once more. “I mean, look at the mess!”

Chorzaranalista shrugged. “This
is where I live. This is where I was born.” Then she stared at Svool and his
mouth clacked shut. She pointed, out over the gently bubbling lake of-
whatever
it was.
Decades of filth had been filtered here, clogging back for God only
knew how far inside the mountain. “I was born in there.”

“Where?” said Svool, shading his
eyes to take a closer look.

“In there.”

“In that?”

“Yes.”

“In that shit pit?”

“If that’s what you want to call
it.”

“But it’s a shit pit! How could
you be born there?”

Zoot appeared, slamming from the
darkness and braking with a hiss of superheated air. He spun, seemingly
agitated. “Ah!” he said. “So. You found her. The girl, I mean. She’s not human!
Watch out! She’s very, er, dangerous.”

“Thanks for the early warning,”
said Lumar, pushing past the spinning PopBot. “Some defence mechanism
you
turned
out to be!”

Chorzaranalista grinned suddenly,
and ran her hands through her tangled, matted hair. The closer Lumar got to
the. child, the more she realised it wasn’t actually hair. It looked more like
metal strands. Wires. Cables. Copper and iron.

Chorzaranalista looked at Svool. “To
answer your question, I was born in the tox. Of the tox.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Let me show you.”

Chorzaranalista moved to the edge
of the lake. She lifted her hands and chanted, and spoke, her words floating
back to Lumar and Svool, to Zoot, Herbert and Angelina. “All life is an
accident. Throughout the Quad-Gal Bubble, this has been demonstrated time and
time and time again. You, Svool, are of human descent; and yet all humans
evolved from a chemical soup. A soup of proteins and toxins and shit. Yes, that’s
right, Svool. You were born from shit.”

“Tush!” he said. Lumar presumed
he was disagreeing.

“And so were we,” she said, as
out of the toxic waste rose what appeared to be huts, tiny igloos of waste,
green and brown and putrid, a rotting organic slurry; slowly, the huts came to
rest on the surface of the waste pool and Lumar, standing by the edge, knelt
down. She reached forward, and her hand sank into the thick soupy substance. It
wasn’t solid, and yet the children who emerged from the small huts walked
across the surface as if by magic. There were about thirty of them, some male,
some female, each seemingly modelled on a human child and yet with subtle
differences; some had long tentacles drooping down from their faces, as if a
human face had merged with an octopus. Some had teeth made of glass, or an
elephant’s trunk for a nose, or ears like butterfly wings. And each one
appeared to be an open, festering toxic sore, a platter of pus and disease and
gangrenous, rotting matter.

“I think we should run,” muttered
Svool to Lumar.

“Shh!”

“Where would you run to?” said
Chorzaranalista. She was smiling, and it was a friendly smile, but Svool didn’t
trust anything that had more teeth than him. In fact, he didn’t trust anything
with less teeth than him. He basically trusted nobody but himself.

More toxic children - children
born of the toxicity -emerged from the corridors surrounding Svool, Lumar,
Zoot, Angelina and Herbert. Herbert started to issue a strange, fear-filled
braying.

And from the huge bubbling lake,
yet more pods began to rise. Ten at first, then twenty, then fifty. Then more
than Lumar could count. The entirety of the lake was filled with toxic huts,
and from them came a flood of diseased and deformed creatures that looked like
human children, but who smiled with black rubber teeth, and had old pieces of
car tyre welded into their skulls. Lumar and Svool saw fingers made from
pencils, faces inset with shards of glass, broken bottles, old alarm clocks;
bones from different creatures poking out at odd angles from their own flesh -
and they knew, knew that what walked and ambled before them was an army not of
human children, but of creatures, evolved beings made from the very toxic waste
itself...

The figures moved in tight, non-aggressive
but threatening them with their very natures. And Svool, Lumar, Herbert and
Angelina shuffled backwards in a rapidly shrinking circle. In an act of great
heroism, Zoot slammed off high into the air and disappeared amongst the columns
and corridors of slab metal.

“That’s right!” screamed Svool
suddenly, waving his fist. “You run away, you bloody PopBot coward! You’re
fired! You hear me? Bloody fired!”

“Shut up,” said Lumar through
clenched teeth. She held her pistol, but held it low, pointing at the ground.
After all, how many could she shoot before they overwhelmed her? Before they
put out her eyes, bit off her cheeks and ate her brains?

Suddenly, the advance seemed to
bubble to a halt. There were thousands of them.
Thousands
of the
children of the slime.

Chorzaranalista smiled as she
moved close to Lumar. So close, they could have kissed.

“We have seen you, Lumar. And
you, Svoolzard Koolimax XXIV. We have seen you in our dreams. We are the
psi-children of the Waste. We know your every thought and feeling, every dream
and emotion and memory. We have seen you. We have dreamed you. You have been in
our prayers.”

“You want us to do something?”
said Lumar.

“We need your help.”

“To do what?” whispered Svool,
face filled with fear.

“We want the Greenstar Factory
Hub. We’re going to drag it all the way down into our toxic world...”

~ * ~

FOURTEEN

JENNY
XI - NAKED, battered, torn, wounded, exhausted, frightened - crawled for hours,
and hours, and hours. The tubes were narrow and uncomfortable and sharp, and
kept nipping at her flesh, slicing her here, cutting her there, until she
screamed her frustration at their constant biting and fell onto her arms, onto
her stolen pistol, and slept.

~ * ~

RANDY
CRAWLED, BITTERNESS and hate in his mind. But that was not the only thing.

You’re slacking,
said Renazzi Lode, the Greenstar
Director. He had her with him. In his head. She could see what he saw, hear
what he heard, feel what he felt. It was a total mindfuck. An mRape, they
called it in the barracks. When he’d been a soldier. Before he became a spy.
Before he became the Governor of Internal Affairs. Back then, it had been a
simpler time. Before he had his
boss
in his head.

Yeah. Back then had been a much
better
time.