Toxicity (22 page)

~ * ~

RANDY
STARED IN the mirror. Normally, at this time, he would be applying a thick pink
ointment to his face in order to “iron out those little creases of accelerated
decrepitude” and “banish those nasty wrinkles which creep up on a man as he
progresses through life” and “moisturise your male skin with our Male Man’s Man
Moisturiser™, we fight the TOX! so you don’t have to!!” He’d put Moose’s
Magical Mousse into his hair and scrunch it with the ends of his fingertips. He’d
apply a light touch of kohl around his eyes to give them that deep, brooding,
menacing, meaningful air. And finally, Randy would apply a delicate gloss lip
balm to accentuate the natural curve and pout of his full, generous lips. Lips
which, many ladies had told him, were very fine for kissing.

Randy stared into the mirror.

He couldn’t do
that
anymore.
Because he had no lips.

No lips, no cheeks, no eyelids.

Hell. No fucking
face.

The surgeons had performed an
emergency medical rush job in order to save his life. A kind of Fast Food Face
Surgery for the Needy. The blast that ripped off Randy’s face with sheer
unadulterated
force
had also popped three fingers from their sockets. He’d
been holding a gun, which had wrenched his hand apart. And his fingers had been
lost in the mud, despite the best efforts of the search team. What had they
called
that,
he wondered, hysterical giggles rising in his throat as he
studied his destroyed visage. The
Find Randy’s Lost Fingers Search Party?
“Here
sir, I’ve found one!
I
Which one is it, son?
I
It’s Randy’s
middle finger, raised just for you...”

Yes, the surgeons had done the
best they could in the short time available. And the problem was, here on
Amaranth - on the Toxic World - the medical profession was incredibly and
suitably
awesome
when it came to skin diseases, toxic poisoning cases,
radiation poisoning, mutating genetics - any and every condition relating to
the excess of toxic shit pumped into land, air and sea by The Company and its
affiliates. What it
did not
specialise in was
plastic surgery.

Randy stared at a face created by
Frankenstein. A monster stared back.

What once were lips were now
bulging flaps of skin which did not quite connect properly to the rest of his
face, but that was irrelevant because the rest of his face looked like a patchwork
quilt of sewed-together skin panels with, it had to be said, some very untidy
stitching. Skin had been grafted from his thighs, arse and back, and they’d
rebuilt his face with all the expertise of a DIY motorcycle mechanic. He still
had no eyelids, and his eyes were wide and bulbous, as if he was in a permanent
state of shock. His nose was a flat blob of a thing, twisted and constantly
leaking blood and snot. His lips did not fit his face properly, and he
permanently showed his teeth. The blast had knocked quite a few teeth out, and
for reasons unknown to Randy as he lay in a pit of pain and incomprehension,
they had fitted new steel teeth straight into his jawbone. When he smiled,
which was not often now, they’d made him look like some torture-victim doll; he
looked like an advert for plate steel. He had burnt tufts for eyebrows, and
annoyingly, random tufts of beard seemed to grow in tiny patches all over his
face, thick wiry spider hair like nothing he’d ever cultivated before. And his
curls! His glorious curls! Burnt, gone, massacred. Now, random knots of hair
sprouted from his head like the leafy stalks of a carrot; the rest of his head
was bald, and scarred, and blackened by fire and pressure into coal-black
blotches that would not come off. The fire had tattooed him with its
permanence.

In total, Randy was a fucking
mess.

He stared at himself in the
mirror, because he had to stare, he could not close his eyes.
Ironic, isn’t
it, that now I don’t want to fucking look at myself and yet am forced to do so,
constantly. In every puddle of water, every plate glass window, every piece of
polished silverware, every passing mirror. And all for what? All so Jenny and
her ECO scum friends could blow up another fucking factory and save the fucking
planet. Oh, well, my heart bleeds for them, and their impending pain. But not
much.

I have suffered, and they will
suffer. Jenny will suffer. She will tell me everything. Everything I need to
know. And then I will continue, I will torture her until there’s nothing left.
For she has taken my face away. She has created a monster. And I’d like to
repay her the fucking favour...

Randy smiled, but it hurt him too
much. So he satisfied himself with imagining what he would do to Jenny, and the
other captured members of Impurity5. He imagined their pain, with the pleasure
of knowing it would soon become reality.

She’s going to sing for me,
he thought.

Sing like a pop star.

~ * ~

JENNY
XI FLOATED on waves of pleasure. Not sexual ecstasy, no, for that would be too
intense; that would have been an overloading of joy; no. This was a gentle
lulling, like a babe being smothered by love in a mother’s arms; like a
half-sleep of post-hedonistic satisfaction; like soft warm bed covers after
total exhaustion. Jenny floated, and her fingers and toes tingled, and
everything in the world was
good
and it was
right.

Eventually, she awoke. Sunlight
beamed bright behind gauze curtains, which rippled gently in a summer breeze.
She climbed from the bed wearing nothing but soft, silk pyjamas. In bare feet,
she padded across a wooden floor, pushed aside the gauze, and stared out into
paradise. A turquoise ocean lapped against white sand beaches that curved off
around a distant archipelago. White foam breakers eased up the beach, and palm
trees stood, scattered in random phalanxes, their fronds waving and dipping.
Jenny breathed deep the smell of the ocean, and she could smell salt, and the
sea, and it was pure, and natural, and perfect.

Jenny sighed, at peace at last.
It had been a long, hard fight. It had taken decades to clean the evil from
Amaranth. But her fight, and the fight of her brothers and sisters in the
Impurity Movement, had been strong, from heart and soul; and they had been the
victors.

Jenny looked down at her wrinkled
hands, and welcomed old age. It was no great loss to her, for she had achieved
her life’s ambition - to rid Amaranth of the Greenstar Company, to cast out the
cancer which had infested the planet for decades, and to restore her world, her
family’s world, to its former glory. The clean-up operations had been like
nothing before ever seen; and the whole of Manna, hell, the whole of the
Quad-Galaxy
had got involved, such was the uproar at the scale of deviation carried out
by Greenstar Company...

And now.

Now.

Amaranth was returned to its
former glory. Through their acts of violence, Jenny and her comrades had
brought about a better world, a cleaner world, a world free of pollution and
filth and depravity and inhumanity.

“Save our world,” her father had
said, as they stood on the hilltop.

And she had.

~ * ~

JENNY
AWOKE, DISORIENTATED and happy, knowing she had
done the right thing.
Amaranth
was pure again. Amaranth was whole again. No longer the dumping ground for a
thousand human and alien civilisations; no. They had thrown off the shackles of
oppression, stood together and fought for freedom and justice and purity They
had saved the world.

Her eyes flicked open.

Gradually, as if awakening from a
drunken stupor, the pleasure and happiness fizzled and faded away, to be
replaced by a gradual awareness of reality and an internal pounding of body, of
flesh. Like she’d done ten rounds in a boxing ring. Twenty, even.

No,
she thought to herself, and tears
welled in her eyes.
No!
Because the dream had seemed so real, so true;
so solid she could reach out and touch it. It had been a dream not just of
belief, but of certainty. A vision of the future. Savagely, Jenny pushed back
her tears and focused and sat up.

She frowned.

Her body assailed her with aches
and a dull, throbbing agony.

She was seated on a bench like a
slab of obsidian, almost tomb-like in its structure. She turned, allowing her
legs to swing down. The room was reasonably large, and all four walls were
fashioned from glass. With a blink, Jenny realised she was under the sea. Light
came from far above, and the water shimmered a deep blue, sometimes green. It
was mostly murky, but occasionally light broke through. Jenny had a sudden
sense, an impression, of massive pressure, the weight of an ocean pressing down
on her. She shivered. If one of those glass walls gave way, Jenny would be
crushed quicker than the time it took to scream.

Jenny eased herself down from the
slab, and looked around, frowning. If this was a prison cell, it was the oddest
she’d ever encountered. In one corner there was a very narrow black door; she
padded over to it, looking down, realising she was dressed in a single white
cotton slip and soft white cotton slippers. Like a patient.
Odd.
She
crossed to the door and touched it, then recoiled with a yelp, leaving a patch
of skin. The alloy, whatever it was, was way,
way
below freezing. Jenny
gave an involuntary shiver, noting there was no door handle, then she moved
back to the centre of the chamber. She stopped, and calmed her breathing, and
listened.

Silence. But more, deeper than
silence, a sense of great
weight
and great
mass.
And a kind of
deep, bass
booming.
Like the ocean was talking to her in her glass cube.

She moved to one of the glass
walls and touched it. It was quite obviously massively thick in order to combat
the incredible pressures of the ocean. Just then, a shaft of sunlight broke
from far above and Jenny realised how deep she was. Light flashed through the
water, sparkling, dazzling, and seemed to light her face and give her warmth
and hope and promise...

She gasped.

“Don’t get too excited,” came a
voice. Feminine, husky.

Jenny turned and stared at a
petite woman, dressed all in black, with bright blonde hair tied back in a
ponytail. The woman smiled in a friendly manner, but Jenny could read her blue
eyes. They were hard; harder than flint. This woman was a killer. Jenny could
smell the stench of death a thousand miles away; the blood on her hands. The
souls on her conscience.

“Where am I?”

“You are a guest of Greenstar
Company.”

“If I am a guest, then I am
permitted to leave.”

“Not... yet. Let us say you are
here to help us with our enquiries.”

“Fuck you, sweetie,” said Jenny,
smiling and moving around the room, keeping an equal distance between herself
and this small, blonde woman. “What’s your name, then? I’m assuming you know
all about me?”

The woman gave a narrow smile. “I
am Vasta, Head of Security. And yes, we do know something of you, Jenny Xi.
Some of your history. And we know a lot about your ECO terrorist exploits and
your destruction of twenty-eight Greenstar facilities. We have much video
evidence, and of course, Randy Zaglax has been gathering intelligence for over
a year now...”

“So that’s his name? That
back-stabbing motherfucker.” Jenny’s eyes were angry now and she stopped her
pacing. “Let me out of this room.”

“You will help us with our
enquiries.”

Jenny was weighing the woman up.
Even if she attacked and beat the woman, which she knew she could, there was no
guarantee she could get out of the freezing door. Unless... she took her
hostage. But that was supposing Greenstar Company didn’t think of her as
expendable. And Jenny doubted that.

So... what to do?

Her immediate quandary was
answered by the black door opening and a figure stepping through. Again dressed
all in black, he was tall and slim and... and he had the face of a monster. A
patchwork quilt of bad surgery. He strode across the chamber and stood beside
the woman. He carried a pistol. Jenny felt her heart chill. Her lips compressed
and she relaxed herself, despite her many aches and pains. She made herself
ready for combat...