Toxicity (32 page)

“Did you tell them what you did
know?” asked one young man with wide, horrified eyes.

Jabez explained, then, how he had
told his diseased, decadent tormentors
everything.
He had screamed
answers, told them anything and everything whether he thought it was relevant
or not. When he realised they would not stop, and he did not have their
answers, he had made up things... but this was worse, for they went away, and
checked his lies, and came back with triple the fury, triple the ingenuity.

Exhausted, of answers, of energy,
of strength, and tip-toeing along a razor-edge of sanity, he had finally
thought they had finished with him. Left him broken and massacred. But that had
just been the start... that was when they began to remove his internal organs
before his very eyes, replacing them with artificial units and force-feeding
him his own liver, and kidneys, and spleen, and heart...

Now, every word Jabez had spoken
came back to Jenny with chilling clarity.
But that had been the junks,
right? The most despised and evil race in the whole of the Four Galaxies. They
hated all life, hated all love, and simply existed to spread their toxic
existence, their organic pestilence, their festering disease to every other
living organism in totality. What they didn’t infect, they sought to destroy.
Surely, surely a human being couldn’t do that sort of thing to another human
being? Surely this Vasta was simply boasting of her talents in order to crack
Jenny before the real pain began... hence the hour in which to make her
decision. Psychological torture. Present you with some facts and leave you for
the longest hour of your life to make a decision.
But a streak of
stubbornness ran through Jenny Xi a mile wide, a lodestone of strength born of
her father, broken and destroyed by the destruction of the planet he loved; and
a belief, a true, pure belief, that what she did was right. Not just for
herself, or her family, or the human beings on the planet; but for the planet
itself. For the good of the World.

~ * ~

TIME
CRAWLED BY. Jenny tried not to think about her future. Instead, she regressed,
and thought about the happy moments in her childhood. Eventually, through
exhaustion and fear, she drifted off into sleep. She slept lightly, dreaming
about meadows filled with flowers back when Amaranth was a place of joy and
warmth. Before Greenstar moved in. Before the pollution began.

She awoke to a tiny
click
and
saw a table had been erected, just at the periphery of her vision. On the table
was a small black case, like a briefcase, matt in finish, terrible in its
sinister implications.

“Welcome back to reality,” said
Vasta, smiling in a friendly manner as she moved into Jenny’s view. “You’ve had
your hour, my sweetie. Have you decided whether you will answer my questions?”

Jenny considered this. “I’d
rather fuck myself with a chainsaw,” she said.

Vasta’s smile widened. “That can
be arranged,” she said. “Okay, then. So be it. You have made your decision and
now we must play the game. I apologise in advance for the agony I’m going to
put you through. But, hell, I just work here, right? And somebody has to do the
job I do - to make the world a safer place.”

~ * ~

“TELL
ME ABOUT your family,” she said.

“No.”

“Tell me about your family,
Jenny. What have you got to lose? I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to
take this gently heating needle and push it through your eyeball. But I will.”

It wasn’t fear of pain or torture
or death that started Jenny talking. It was a regression, from this bad place
into
that
bad place. A stepping back through time to
remember.

“I had a brother. Called Saul. We
grew up together, had a happy family time together... until Dad died, of
course. I suppose there were cracks in Saul’s character even back then, for
father had become a very heavy drinker and these things always rub off. We’re
influenced by our parents, right?” Jenny gave a small laugh. “But as time went
on, he showed his true colours. The true nature of the beast. Always small,
petty things that took away from the nobility of his humanity.”

“Such as?”

“Saul would never help people.
Not even with the smallest thing. He’d sit by and watch somebody struggle, or
suffer, and never lift a finger to help. At the time I told myself it was
because he didn’t notice these things; he was just being vague, you know, being
Saul. After a while you accept him for that, accept the lack of a present or
card, accept the lack of a thank you, accept his miserly nature. ‘Oh, that’s
okay, it’s just Saul.’ But in truth he was a tight motherfucker, not just in
monetary terms, but in human terms. He didn’t have it in him to
give.
He
didn’t have it in him to
share.
Most people enjoy watching other people
have pleasure; so by giving, you also receive. Not my brother. His mind
mechanics were wrong. Fucked up. He was not a very nice person.”

“Is he part of the Impurity
Movement?” Vasta’s words were a soft winter chill.

Information. That’s all this game
is about. Information on Impurity. Well, tell the fuckers nothing... because to
tell them anything is to betray the cause, betray your friends, betray your
brothers - your real brothers, not the fake fucking water-for-blood decrepit
family flesh that should be buried six feet under...

But what if I crack under the
pressure? The pain?

You must not tell them
anything... they are The Company! If they close down Impurity, then Amaranth is
doomed...

I
don’t know enough,
realised
Jenny. A kind of horror took hold of her then, freezing a rictus grin to her
face. Even if she’d wanted to talk, what did she
truly
know? She was a
cog deep in the machine. She was simply a tool used to do a specific job. Yes,
she came up with ideas, came up with targets; but those above her were the ones
truly in control...

Jenny felt her eyes narrow, then
she relaxed. There came a gentle
hissing
sound which she suspected was
the heating of the needle.

“No. We argued. He left. He was
a... spineless man.”

“Where did he go?”

Jenny shrugged. Something glowing
flickered past her vision, and she caught just a momentary glimpse of the
red-hot needle. Then it was gone, leaving bright after-images burned into her
retina; for a little while. She smiled. Just a tease. A prick-tease. Lest she
forget...

“Like I said, he was a weak,
spineless creature. After our father died, he met a woman. Chelle. They seemed
good together, for a long time. I always found her cold, distant; she’d brought
up two children on her own and managed to turn them into criminals. Bank
robbers, they were, although she absolved herself of all blame. She called it
bad
blood
from the father’s side, ha, anything but take some parental
responsibility. Anyway, Chelle cheated on my brother, repeatedly, fucking other
men whenever she got the opportunity. Not only that, but she started to clean
him out financially as well, holding back money, squirreling it away. He knew
it was going on; hell, he told me about it often, about his snooping around
after her, checking her underwear for guilty signs, following her car, checking
her mobile when she was on the toilet. Chelle had got rid of all his friends,
forced them away, one way or another.” Jenny laughed. “There was a time, they
were out with his best friend, Kramien, and Kramien’s wife. They all got drunk,
had a great time. But afterwards Chelle said Kramien had made a pass at her,
and persuaded Saul to dump his mate... and Saul, being a spineless fuck, never
said anything. Just cut Kramien out of his life like a cancerous growth. Cut
out his best mate like a loop of necrotic bowel. Chelle got what she wanted -
an ever-tightening stranglehold. Saul got good sex. It was as open a trade as
prostitution.”

Vasta came into view, then. She
held no implements of torture, but she did not have to. Jenny was talking,
rambling, her mind in a different place, a different world. Jenny suddenly came
into focus, like a manual camera lens being adjusted. She coughed, almost
selfconsciously.

“How would you feel if I told you
that Saul Xi is a member of the Impurity Movement?”

Jenny stared at Vasta for a long
time, their gazes locked.

“I’d say you were a liar,” she
said, eventually.

“Nevertheless, it is true. A
Squad Leader. Just like you.”

“Impossible.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t have it in him, the
shitty, spineless little gimp. He let Chelle walk all over him. She was sucking
dick like it was going out of fashion, and he stood there and looked on and
took it up the arse as if he was enjoying it. When the private investigator he
hired finally got video proof of Chelle down in the woods, fucking Smark E.
Smarks in the back of his Land Rover Psycho, Saul decided to
do the right
thing
and forgive her; you know, take her back, gloss over all her
indiscretions - both financial and otherwise - and you know who he turned his
anger and frustration and drug-paranoia on then?
Me.
It became
my
fucking
fault, because he had Chelle’s poison tongue whispering and plotting in his
spineless ear, just like she’d always done before, and now, to her,
I
was
the enemy because I knew everything. Her halo had slipped. She was no longer
the angel but the comedy humping bike of Kookash-ka. I knew everything, and
would forget nothing, and she knew it. She said so herself. She said she could
never, ever face me again. Because of her shame, and her horror, and her
gutless, poisonous back-stabbing nature. So she had my pathetic, useless, weak,
spineless, gutless, jellyfish of a brother cut me off. His own sister. After
all we’d been through with my father. After all we’d been through together - in
life.
Well, it was a fucking disgrace, he was a fucking snake, and he
hasn’t got the bottle to lift a rifle, never mind command a terrorist cell!”

Vasta perched on the edge of the
bed. She was smiling, and her hands were empty. “We have him here. We captured
him after he tried to detonate a Greenstar Shuttle bringing nuclear waste from
Praxa 6. His three comrades were fried by an Ankle Wire, and Saul Xi was
brought down with a StubGun bullet to the back of the head from a Greenstar
ProtectSniper.”

Jenny shook her head. “Impossible.”

“But true,” said Vasta.

“I don’t believe you.”

“You’ll believe this.”

There came the sound of a
trolley, and Randy Zaglax appeared with his destroyed face and weeping scars,
the pain in his eyes an ever-present testament to the horror he was enduring.
Randy was pushing an alloy trolley like Jenny had seen in a million anonymous
hospitals. One wheel squeaked. On the trolley lay a figure, strapped down like
her. Randy spun the trolley around, with its
squeak-squeak-squeak,
and
then Jenny was able to make eye contact with...

“I don’t believe it,” she said.

“Hello, Jen,” said Saul Xi.

“How’s Chelle?” Jenny’s smile was
narrow, bloodless, frosty.

“Dead,” said Saul, softly.

“Good. The dead bitch. Did you
kill her like you said you would, in one of your drug-fuelled rants? I believe
you told me you’d slit her throat, but then you welcomed her back into your
groping arms with her pussy full of another’s man’s juice.”

“Let it go,” said Saul, voice
grim, eyes haunted. “Yeah, I blamed you. Yeah, she was bad for me. But now she’s
dead. Let her rest in peace.”

“Fuck her,” snarled Jenny. “Everyone
else did.”

“There’s more important things at
stake here,” said Saul, eyes angry, and she saw that petty anger and hatred
rise rise rise so fast within him; he’d always had a bad temper. Jenny
remembered his fists.

“They say you’re part of
Impurity. How come I didn’t know?”

“You’re a baby terrorist,” said
Saul, smiling then. “Let’s say you’re not far enough up the cell chain to have
that kind of information. We call them cells for a reason, you know.”