Toxicity (34 page)

And then Randy was close. Close
as a lover.

“Tell me about McGowan,” he
whispered, and kissed her ear.

Jenny chewed her lip, but was
silent.

“I said, tell me about McGowan.”

“I know nothing of McGowan.”

“Liar!”

“I swear it. It is true.”

“You were his lover.”

Jenny froze then, a needle of ice
driving straight through her heart.
How could he know that? How could he
POSSIBLY know that? Nobody knew that. None of the squad. None of her friends.
It was truly personal, truly private. Randy could not be party to that
information...

She gave a cold laugh. “What a
load of shit. I’ve never even
met
McGowan.”

“You were his lover.”

“Why on earth would you think
that?” She kept her voice perfectly neutral, but inside she was flapping.
Flapping like a gaggle of flapping geese. Because...
because
if he knew
about McGowan, he had to know a hell of a lot more... which meant somebody else
had talked. Somebody else who knew about her; and knew intimately.
Shit,
shit, shit. Which back-stabbing motherfucker had broken down and blabbed like a
nine-year-old girl?

And with a cold clarity Jenny
realised she could not blame them. How could she blame them? This wasn’t an
exercise in strength or bravado or manhood. And as she watched Randy Zaglax
appear, carrying a long, thin hypodermic needle, her mouth dry and stale with
the taste of old blood, her skull throbbing from forced teeth extraction, Jenny
Xi
knew
it was simply an exercise in survival.

“This is going to hurt,” said
Randy, brutally, his destroyed face flapping.

The needle pushed into her
throat, sinking deep, and she gritted her teeth and forced herself not to cry
out. Then the stars fluttered like escaping butterflies and the world went
dark.

~ * ~

NINE

“HELLO
THERE, HORACE,” said Juliette JohNagle, the man-i-woman creature, an entity of
merged flesh, of two human beings forced and squeezed and crow-barred
genetically into one frame. Horace groaned, tongue lolling, sight not yet
returned, and yet his instinct kicked in and a natural violence, a need to kill
and to survive, was in his heart. He lurched forward, but tight bands of steel
around his ankles and wrists held him to the wall. Cruel laughter mocked him.

“Go on, son, do your best. You’re
the fucking Dentist, aren’t you? Sent here by God-only-knows-who to take me
out. Well, sunshine, we’ve been watching you. Watching you enter the hotel,
anyway. We have files on you, y’know? We’re not as stupid as you think. Are we?
No, we’re not.”

Horace frowned. Pain beat his
head like a hammer. He could taste blood.

Horace opened his eyes. The world
was blurred at first, but swam slowly into focus. They were in an extensive
hotel suite. It was daytime, now, and green sunlight blazed beyond high smoked
windows. In the distance, the Biohazard Ocean gleamed like mercury.

“Worm got your tongue?”

“The worms,” spat Horace,
focussing on his captors. There were two stocky men, typical bruiser types,
heavy on neck muscle, steroid suppositories and mental napalm. They bulged in
suits too small for them, presumably to make them look larger and more
intimidating. To Horace, it just meant a larger surface area.

Silka? questioned his mind, but
he bit his tongue before he said her name.

Dead, probably. But... maybe not.

“The worms?” said JohNagle, and
grinned through a face like a breeze block. “Yeah, we froze the worms. But they’re
still inside you. Move away from this controller” - a stubby fist showed Horace
a small red globe - “and they’ll warm up, continue their little journey to
feast on your heart and lungs and kidney and liver and spleen. They like a bit
of spleen, do our little wormies. Ain’t that right, guys?”

There came some grunts.

“So...
you’re
Juliette?”

“Yeah, Juliette JohNagle. What of
it?” grunted the politician. Horace confessed to having never seen a picture of
this particular director of Greenstar. He had imagined a creature of feminine
persuasion, but if anything, JohNagle was more masculine than masculine. Like a
big fat bricklayer pumped up on steroids and fed nothing but meat pies for a
decade.

“I just imagined you’d be...
shorter,” said Horace.

“Very fucking funny,” snapped
JohNagle, levering hisher bulk to hisher feet, and stomping across the carpet
towards Horace. “Just because I have the finesse of a builder doesn’t mean I
have the brain of one. So shove that up your arse and squirt it.”

“Charming,” said Horace.

“Who sent you?” said JohNagle.

Horace’s mouth clamped shut. It
was
That Time
again. And That Time was a Bad Time. Horace readied
himself, because it would hurt, but he had the ability not just to shut down
from pain, but to shut down his body entirely. In effect, he could play dead,
although he would have to suffer a pretty hefty beating first in order to make
the “death” plausible. It was a trick shot, built into all Anarchy Androids...

He looked up into JohNagle’s
grinning eyes. “Yeah, that’s right,” mouthed the pudgy face. All it was missing
were forehead tattoos and stubble. Heshe certainly looked quite
wrong
in
the bright red shade of lipstick heshe wore. And the blue dress over the hairy
legs and big, fat hairy feet in red high-heels took some beating, to Horace’s
imagination. It wasn’t even the effect of a badly orchestrated drag queen; no.
Horace quite liked drag queens. Drag queens were fun. No, this creature, this
unnatural merging of two different entities was just plain wrong - wrong,
because it wasn’t truly one thing or the other. Not that Horace cared, because
he was about to have his skull caved in by a political lunatic.

JohNagle continued, eyes alight
with good humour and a glint of superiority. “I
know what you are, Anarchy
man.
And I know you play dead. Which is why, the minute you shut down that
pretty little body of yours, we’re going to cut off your hands and feet.” Heshe
produced a long, narrow, serrated black blade. “I used to be a butcher, so it
really don’t bother me overmuch.”

“That’s quite a work history you
have,” said Horace, smiling.

“Don’t try and be fucking smart.
Now talk. Who sent you?”

Horace closed his mouth, and
stared at JohNagle, and then he closed his eyes. He heard a
swish,
a
gesture, and felt the two hefty beefcakes closing in on him. When the first
punch connected it was a shock. It’s always a shock. But after a while he
rolled with the punches and felt himself swimming in an ocean not quite of
pain, but of disappointment and frustration.

Brought down by his own fucking
arrogance.

Never lose your temper...

The blows rained in. A pounding,
like the Biohazard Ocean against a beach of insane improbability... and Horace
felt himself slipping, falling, drifting, until he heard the laughter, and
anger flared a bright rage that burned from the pit of his stomach all the way
up his oesophagus and into the centre of his burning fucking brain.
How dare
you laugh at me,
thought Horace, and information flooded into him from a
different source, a different world, a different realm - and he felt,
bizarrely, as if he was being
fed
information, because it was certainly
not information he’d acquired on his own, and it came in a stream, like
sausages of data from a sausage machine...
and the man-i-woman known as
JohNagle is not what you think it is, it’s an alien construct and as such
cannot be killed in the normal way of most human beings, and the worms inside
you have been frozen, yes, and you must cut into your flesh in the proximity of
the freeze globe and remove them or they’ll shred your heart and shred your
life, and we are waiting for you because we have seen you, and we have waited
these long, cold years, can you see us? can you hear us? can you feel us? for
our flesh is your flesh and in the great cycle of things, we are all truly one
being...

Horace opened his eyes. Blinked.
He spat out blood and, ironically, a tooth.

“Lucky they call you
The
Dentist,”
crowed Juliette JohNagle, hopping from one fat high-heel to the
other and back again in an almost tribal dance, fists punching the air, face
filled with glee at his pain and suffering...“Anyway, why
do
they call
you The Dentist?”

The sound came from beyond the
spectrum of human hearing, a high-pitched
sbreeeeeeeee
that seemed to go
on and on and on, in a slowly descending spiral, and as it reached human
hearing the two grunts went, “Huh?” and there was a blur, and something landed
on one of the beefcakes’ shoulders, ran around the back of his head, and
drilled through the back of his cranium with teeth gnashing and spinning like
drill bits and thrashing gears. All Horace saw was Silka emerge from the man’s
suddenly destroyed face like a mini tornado, all teeth and claws and fur in a
blood slick, grinning like a lunatic having a good ol’ time. Then she leapt and
chewed through the bands on Horace’s wrists, teeth moving like a diamond-tipped
blade and rattling through the steel in an instant.

With hands free, Horace clenched
and unclenched his fists, staring hard at JohNagle as if weighing up the
man-i-woman; weighing up the odds. Silka had dropped to his ankles and gnawed
through the bonds, and Horace stepped forward.

“Kill him!” screamed JohNagle,
taking several staggered, panicked steps back.

The remaining beefcake launched
at The Dentist, who delivered a powerful right straight - fist slamming through
teeth, opening, grabbing the man’s lower jaw, and wrenching it out through the
hole in the front of his face.

Horace stared at the slick,
bloody, broken jaw for a moment. So did the beefcake. Then his eyes rolled up,
and he hit the thick hotel carpet on his face.

“No!” screamed JohNagle, “No, no,
no!” as Horace dropped the jaw on top of the corpse.

“To answer your question, MrMrs
JohNagle, they call me
The Dentist
because... well.” He smiled. “I like
to show my teeth.”

He leapt forward, but JohNagle
was screaming into the small red globe. “Activate, activate, activate!” heshe
got out, before a punch caught himher and sent himher spinning backwards.

“Silka!” yelled Horace, as
JohNagle suddenly switched tactics and, heaving hisher huge bulbous bulk
around, attacked with more speed than any man-i-woman had a right to possess.

Silka leapt on Horace’s back, and
burrowed under his clothing, teeth gnashing, sending strings of fibre spitting
outwards. As JohNagle launched at Horace, huge thick hairy arms encircling the
Anarchy Android, Silka cut and bit into his flesh with long incisors, burrowing
down into him as blood flowed down his skin, and chewed through muscle and
burrowed deep and found the first worm, biting it in half. JohNagle spun Horace
around, far stronger than Horace had anticipated, and launched him across the
hotel suite. And even as he flew through the air, Silka ran across his belly and
launched down into his abdomen. He grunted in pain then. It hurt. It
really
fucking
hurt. Hurt more than the table he crashed through, sending spears of glass
rearing up around him, jagged porcupine spikes erupting upwards. JohNagle ran
at him, as Silka found the second worm and shredded it. She was deep in his
bowel now. Her teeth felt like acid. Horace grabbed a glass shard and threw it,
and it stuck in JohNagle’s eye, squelching into hisher skull by six or seven
inches and almost penetrating all the way through. JohNagle did not cry out.
Did not falter. Just came straight on, a huge hulking bear. Horace rolled left,
grabbing two more table shards and slashing them in front of him. JohNagle came
up sharp and grinned at Horace through rivulets of blood.