Toxicity (16 page)

Lumar approached the beast,
rolled it to the side, put her boot on its torso and jerked free her spear. She
gazed down at the creature; it was
almost
like any normal jungle cat,
except its maroon fur looked unnatural, as if it had been glued on in segments.
Its head was too large, with eyes at different levels and long yellow fangs,
crooked and bent, in a mouth that didn’t close properly. It was a truly
terrifying sight.

“What the fuck is that?” squawked
Svool.

“No idea,” said Lumar, her voice
cracked. “But there’s more of them. And they’re coming.”

Svool scrambled to his feet, and
started running again.

He realised, then, it was going to
be a very long night...

~ * ~

DAWN
WAS BREAKING as they emerged onto a beach. This was a different beach from the
one on which they were washed ashore after the crash. The surface was a huge
stretch of grey sand, the sweep broken in parts by violent upthrustings of
black square rocks at regular intervals. Svool was unbelievably grateful for
the softness and coolness of that sand under his scorched feet.

They padded across the sweep of
grey, away from the jungle now, and Lumar guided them to a large section of
rocks, rounded and squared, which sat in staggered sizes like a disjointed
cluster of scattered dominoes.

Reaching the rocks, Lumar stopped
and surveyed their back-trail. The jungle was silent; unmoving, except from
some huge fronds that wavered in the gentle breeze skimming in off the sea.

Svoolzard Koolimax XXIV sank
gratefully to his knees, and pressed his forearms against a great grey slab,
and sighed into his arms as his head rested down and he seemed to almost
deflate.

“Thank Mother Manna,” he wept,
kissing his own arms, his feet burning, his back burning, his arse burning, and
all the while a cool breeze chilling the rest of him so that he felt almost
like a vessel filled with fire and ice.

“Don’t get too comfortable,”
growled Lumar, crouching beside him, her eyes still on the jungle.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re still coming.”

“What are?”

“Those fucking spotted cats, you
dickweed.”

“But... no, surely, we lost them!
In the jungle!”

Lumar started laughing, a sound
of genuine humour pealing across the grey sand. “What? On a straight trail? Don’t
be a moron. They’re just playing with us. Tailing us. I killed one, and that
made them wary. Now they’re being careful. They know we’re not muppets.” She
stared at Svool. “Well, they know
I’m
not a muppet.”

Svool didn’t care for her
insults. It no longer mattered. He was so exhausted it was untrue; a feeling he
had never, ever before experienced; well, not like this! He thought, when he’d
had all-night sexual relations with the Saucy Sally Sluts, all eighteen of them
- that had been true exhaustion. But that held little to what he now suffered,
and was still suffering. Every muscle was a cramp. Every blood-vessel was
filled with horror. Pain was his mistress, agony his mother, mockery his father.
His feet were stumps of severance. His fire-raw back and bottom felt as if they’d
been grated by a particularly vigorous foul-mouthed chef. Surely, his life
couldn’t possibly get any worse?

“Don’t get too close to the sand,”
said Lumar.

“Eh?”

“The sand,” she said, glancing
down, where it was smeared over Svool’s legs, and arms, and damn, he even had
it on his face. How had he done that? “Don’t get it on you.”

“You can’t say that!” he snapped,
fuelled by pain. “You can’t let me fucking roll naked in it, then nonchalantly
enunciate,
oh, don’t touch it.
Why ever the hell not?”

“I worked out where we are,” said
Lumar, voice level, eyes still scanning the expanse of jungle fringe. Behind
her, the sea rolled and sloshed up the sand. The sun had started creeping up
the sky, bringing with it welcome green light and warmth and hope.

“So? Where are we?”

“That, in which we crashed,” said
Lumar, pointing out over the rolling waters, “is The Sea of Heavy Metal.
Polluted to the fucking gills, Svool. I don’t know how much of that toxic shit
we swallowed when we crashed, but I’m pretty sure we’ll be on the toilet for a
month. Shitting out our internal organs, if we’re lucky.”

“Polluted? With what?”

“Hah! Everything from magnesium,
potassium, strontium, cerium, barium, neodymium, promethium - those have what
is considered
low
toxicity; but then we get onto the real
gems.
Beryllium,
cadmium, cobalt, copper, palladium, polonium, radium, niobium, osmium,
tantalum, uranium... shit, it’s a toxic cocktail, a radioactive soup. I’m
surprised it even looks like water!”

“Er. Are all those things bad?”

“Pretty bad, and in the
quantities found in
that
sea, I’m only surprised we can’t walk on the
waves.”

“How do you know all this?” said
Svool, frowning, and tenderly touching his feet.

“I’m a chemist. I have degrees in
biological chemistry, pure maths and environmental chemistry,” said Lumar,
staring at Svool with her cool green eyes.

“So... so you’re
educated?”

“Yes.”

“I never knew that.”

“You never asked. You were too
busy groping my tits.”

“But... but... where were you
educated?”

“Quad-Gal Royal University.”

“I am... stunned!” said Svool,
who really was.

Lumar smiled. “Don’t worry.
Events and reality rather ran away from me. When they took my sister. When the
ganga gangs fucked up my life. But then, that’s what it is to be a kroona. We’re
ranked lower than the fucking androids.”

“That is disgraceful,” said
Svool. Then, suddenly looking up, “So... what’s wrong with the sand?”

“It’s sand made from toxic heavy
metal particles. As I said, cadmium, cobalt, polonium, niobium, uranium, lead.
And you’re smearing it all over your skin like mascara.”

“Is it dangerous?”

Lumar snorted. “Of course it’s
fucking dangerous! Heavy metals are much more dense than water, and your body cannot
metabolise the constituent particles; thus, the toxic shit accumulates inside
you. It affects your lungs, kidneys, nervous system, mental functions. Just don’t
fucking put it in your mouth, okay?”

“What about these rocks?” wailed
Svool.

“Look like weathered lead slabs
to me,” said Lumar, gaze sliding back to the jungle. Her green eyes narrowed,
and she took a tight hold on her sharpened staff. From the edges of the jungle
had stepped three of the maroon cats, with their odd fur slabs and yellow spots.
The wild cats stopped at the openness; at the daylight. Lumar saw their eyes
fall, as one, on her and Svool.

“I just don’t believe it,” moaned
Svool, “you let me walk across this, this, this
toxicity,
smear it all
over me like the sexual juices of the Humphammaraha Twins, then cry my tears
onto slabs of lead or
whatever the shit the shitty toxic shit really is,
and
then you calmly stand there telling me you’re a toxic chemist or whatever you
are, and you reel off all these bloody names and you
still
let me roll
around in the crap. Only at the end do you spill the beans that this can affect
my kidneys and spleen and mental conditions! You need to get your priorities
right, Lumar. Right, girl? Right?
I said...”

“Get up.”

“But what about my mental faculties?”

“You won’t
have
any mental
faculties if you don’t haul your arse out of that toxic sand, lover boy...”

Svool turned. And watched with
rising horror as the three huge cats, each one as big as a lion, made a
decision and, with disjointed heads swinging to glance up and down the beach,
started towards them with long, loping strides...

“Get up!” screamed Lumar. “I can’t
kill all three on my own!”

Svool scrambled up, wincing at
his burns, and then scrabbled at his jewelled sword. Lumar was already moving
away from him, putting distance between the two in order to split up the huge
cats.

“What shall I do?” bubbled Svool.

Lumar gave him a nasty glance. “I
sure hope you can use that pretty little fucking sword.”

“But! It was a present! From the
Galactic Council’s Chief Royal Emerald President, Googall von Suckerberger,
after I performed a particularly fine evening of poetry, music and dance at the
Galactic Palaces of Suckerberger and Suckerberger.” He fumbled again with the
weapon, until, finally, he was holding it the right way round.

The cats accelerated, leaving
deep pawprints in the sand.

Svool felt suddenly numb. Numb,
and lost, and very, very frightened.

“Is there nobody to help us?” he
wailed, swishing his sword from side to side.

“We have to help ourselves,”
growled Lumar, eyes narrowed, taut body tensed as the cats separated, two
peeling away to focus on Lumar - whilst the third, the largest and most
ferocious looking, swung its massive shaggy disjointed head, with maroon ears
and square patches of tufted fur, towards Svool.

The creature advanced.

Svool urinated on the sand, and
waved his glittering, jewelled sword. As the beast approached, the weapon
looked suddenly ridiculous, even to his own eyes. Like a golden toothpick. Or a
diamond knitting needle. It didn’t appear as the sort of weapon that could take
down five hundred kilograms of rancid jungle cat...

“Oooooh,” said Svool.

The cat roared, and a fetid stink
of rotting meat blasted over Svool as, drawing closer, its charge accelerated with
massive power and a bunching of steel muscles...

With a roar the great cat leapt.

Svool stumbled back, squealing
like a pig on a stick, his bare feet pedalling in the grey sand, his arms
frantically waving his glittering sword bauble at the mammoth beast rearing
over him.

Lumar had her own problems as the
two large cats split, circling her, and she knew with dreaded certainty that
she could maybe pull off her trick where the animal leapt onto her spear and
impaled itself; but it would only work once. If she was
lucky.

Son of a bitch! Why did I have to
get lumbered on this stinking shit-hole with a useless poetry-reciting
narcissist? Why couldn’t he have been some kind of military action hero with a
machine gun? Then I wouldn’t be having this problem!

The cats rumbled, circling her.
They were more intelligent than she gave them credit for. They had seen her
handiwork on the cat back on the trail; and they wouldn’t let such a simple
trick work again.

One cat feinted, and Lumar jabbed
out with the stick. The other was behind her now, and it, also, darted forward.
With a howl Lumar spun, the sharpened stick catching the beast across the
muzzle with a whack and knocking free a long, curved silver fang.

The cat took a step back and
fixed her with a cool, levelled gaze that sent a chill through her soul. The
intelligence glittering in those feral eyes reminded her of a human opponent...

“Svool!” she shrieked.

There was no answer.

As the cat leapt at Svool, he
screamed like a girl, wailed like a massacred nun, caterwauled like a fighting
feline, brayed like a horse in a mincer; he closed his eyes, the sword slashing
and swishing before him as he stumbled frantically backwards and tripped, just
as the cat landed above him and the sword carved a long groove above the beast’s
eyes. Blood flushed from it as if Svool had yanked a toilet chain. The cat, in
turn, screeched and back-pedalled as Svool continued to waggle his tool.