"You were here, then?" said Betezh.
"Yes," nodded the cleaner. She looked off, lost in distant memories, and she pulled out a handkerchief and blew her nose with great noise and much gusto. Her nose came away from her face in her hanky, and carefully she cleaned out the nostrils, then slotted it back into place with a
click
. "It worked. For years it worked. We were all happy. But then the... problems began."
"Like?"
"Earthquakes, first. They destroyed several of the hospitals, and a number of patients and doctors died. It was terrifying, but eminent Quad-Gal geologists couldn't discover fault-lines to explain the destruction. They said the planet, Krakken IV, did not conform to normal geological models. It was unique. An anomaly. They were stumped."
"What happened next?" asked Pippa, D4 still trained on the cleaner. She seemed submissive, subdued, but Pippa had witnessed how fast she could accelerate into a deadly mode of attack. Pippa was taking no chances, no matter how feeble the cleaner appeared.
"Then came the
pulse,"
said the cleaner. She looked up, eyes bright, linking with Pippa. And in those eyes, those dark eyes, Pippa could read the freakish woman's
age,
an age which tumbled down through the centuries, long centuries of watching, of polishing, of cleaning the wards and the hospital floors... "The pulse
echoed
across the planet. That's the best way I can describe it. It destroyed
everything
electrical, across the whole world, and then people fell ill, I mean fast, within hours, and after six hours thousands were dying, vomiting blood and their own internal organs at their feet, huge sores spreading like an external cancer across their skin. Many thought it was some age-old virus, some ancient canker released to cleanse the planet. We sent out a Panic Pulse to Quad-Gal, and they sent in the ships on a one-hour drop-and-exit rescue band."
"You had one hour to reach the escape ships?"
"Yes." The cleaner nodded, deflating. "Many of us didn't make it; couldn't make it. There were sites, but millions of us were left behind."
"Doctors and nurses? Patients?"
"Yes," said the cleaner.
"Enough," said Miller.
Pippa turned, to see the Health and Safety Officer holding a Techrim 11mm pistol, aimed directly at the cleaner's head.
"Wait..." began Pippa, but Miller fired the weapon with a short bark, a bullet slapping through the air and entering the cleaner's face just above the nose, destroying an eye socket and ploughing on into the brain before exiting in a smash of mushrooming brain and skull shards. A splatter hit the wall. The cleaner stood for a moment, then one leg buckled and she hit the ground and Pippa moved and whirled fast, right hand smashing out to knock the gun from Miller's fist. It clattered down the sterile corridor, and Pippa leapt into the air, one boot catching Miller under the chin and slamming him back with a grunt and
crack
of damaged vertebrae. He landed, whimpering, and Pippa landed beside him in a crouch, the D4 shotgun pushed into his face.
Nobody else had moved.
Betezh stepped forward and squatted opposite Pippa. Slowly, he reached out and moved the barrel of the shotgun, meeting her gaze. "Don't kill him. Not yet." He transferred his gaze to Miller's scrunched and scowling face. "Now then, little man, what on earth did you go and do that for?"
"You're all going to die!" hissed Miller. "You shouldn't fucking
be here!
This is a sacred place. A holy place!"
"What are you talking about?" Pippa eased up, uncoiling from her crouch. Miller did not respond, and she stamped down, heel slamming Miller's sternum with a thud that made him gasp, doubling up, hands clutching his chest as he curled into a ball. Pippa grabbed him, hauling him whimpering to his feet. "Talk, motherfucker."
"Go to hell."
"Why are you here?"
"To make sure you die." Miller smiled then, blood on his teeth. "You couldn't do it, could you? You couldn't land the DropShip, take the rock and soil samples, then clear off. Oh no. Not Combat K, experts in shoving their noses into things that don't concern them! You had to poke about, had to try and uncover the secrets of Sick World... the secret of the
junks
..."
Suddenly, the corridor shook as pulses slammed through the building. Lights swung frantically against the ceiling and a window cracked, then splintered, glass flying out across the corridor in lethal knife shards. A sound seemed to roar from nowhere, filling the world with a cacophony of rumbling white noise as the whole world shook and the building shook and the word
earthquake
came to Pippa's dry, fear-lined mouth, and for a moment she released her grip on Miller -
Who ran for it, sprinting away down the corridor, boots pounding and head low.
Pippa's shotgun boomed, shells whistling past Miller's head, nicking his ear. Pippa dropped to one knee to steady herself against the undulating floor. She aimed again as Betezh grabbed the Techrim and pumped bullets after the fleeing figure of Miller; but he whirled madly into an adjacent corridor, and was gone.
"Shall we go after him?" shouted Betezh.
"We've got more important problems!" screamed Pippa, and turned back, glancing at Mel. "Come on! We have to get out of here!"
They ran down the corridor, the floor tilting and sending them all crashing into a wall lined with windows. Outside, they saw, or thought they saw, the reason for the quake. There were ten huge SLAM Cruisers parked, old ones, the original Mk Is, and six of them were lifting into the air, huge black bodies reminiscent of insect-shells, mammoth oil-fuelled jets pounding the concrete and landscape into a blackened choking mash of scorched fumes. Fires roared across hospital walls, smashing windows. The whole hospital was buckling to one side, and Pippa saw walls collapsing like falling dominoes.
"They've landed too close!" she screamed. "The land is unstable! Everything's going to collapse! They're
causing
the damn quake!"
"We've got to get out of the hospital," panted Betezh. A wall of fire roared towards them as a SLAM Cruiser banked and they ducked as flames slammed through skewed windows above their heads, spraying them with hot shattered glass. They crawled below the fire, then got up and ran again, sliding along more corridors and into an abandoned ward. Beds had been tossed around like confetti, and they sprinted, hurdling fallen chairs and desks, upturned beds and a slurry of twisted sheets and scattered bedpans. The hospital was twisting and rocking, and Pippa realised it couldn't be the SLAM Cruisers causing the upheaval - they just didn't have the power... this was an earthquake, a real old-fashioned nasty Miss Nature showing the world what She was capable of bastard. The SLAM Cruisers were
running away...
they were evacuating the area. They were clearing the hospital of deviants, of nurses and doctors, of patients and aliens...
Pippa grabbed Betezh, intuition flooding her. "We've got to get on one of those ships."
"Why?" snarled Betezh, face blackened and shaggy eyebrows singed from a close encounter with fire.
"What that cleaner said, about the planet destroying the hospitals, as if something ancient was trying to rid Sick World of its parasite. Maybe
we're
the new parasite... maybe the planet wants rid of us?"
"So they're running away?"
"Yeah!"
"Let's run away with them!" snarled Betezh.
They sprinted, Mel pounding along behind, claws gouging hospital tiles, pus drooling from disjointed fangs. Through more destroyed wards they careered, reckless now, filled with panic as the rumbling went on and on and on. To one side, a whole wall of the hospital disintegrated, falling away in a tumble of bricks and a mushroom cloud of dust, roaring, roaring like a vast dying animal and allowing cool air to rush in, smacking the Combat-K squaddies with
threat.
Betezh grabbed Pippa's arm, pointing above the deafening noise. "Stairs," he mouthed. They turned, fighting the slew of the listing hospital building. Behind them, through the now-open wall, five or six storeys of height fell away.
Pippa ran, her boots starting to slide with the tilt of the building. It was like being in a jug, fighting against being tipped free to fall a hundred feet to an instant and crushing death. Grinding her teeth, sweat stinging her eyes, Pippa pushed on, reaching the head of the stairs. There came a clang, and inches beside Pippa something huge and vast and metal slammed through the wall trailing wrist-thick cables, howled across the floor in showers of sparks and disappeared from the building-sized window. Cables whipped and snapped around her head, lacerating her face, and Pippa cowered, Betezh and Mel cowering with her, until the cables had vanished with a final
twang.
"What the hell was that?" she panted.
"Service elevator," panted Betezh, eyes wide in awe. "It nearly took your whole head off!"
"Great," spat Pippa, and they leapt into the head of the stairwell through double-swinging doors which shrieked in protest, and the vision that met them induced instant vertigo. It was all wrong, all twisted, all corrupt. Originally a stairwell in a square shaft, steps leading progressively down, spiralling against all four walls, now it was buckled and broken, with some stairs on the walls, some walls now forming a death-slippery slope, some gaping holes like maws with brick teeth waiting to mash unwelcome bones, and twisted, broken iron railings sticking like splinters and spears throughout the whole mix. Below, a heavy dust pall floated, and somewhere fire roared.
"It's the only way," panted Betezh.
Outside, more jets screamed as Mk I SLAM Cruisers ignited engines and took to the air, fleeing the savage quake... and the quake itself, rather than abating, seemed to be rising in fury, getting into its stride, pounding the earth and the hospital with elemental fists that promised no release, no surrender, no escape until everything was crushed and broken and -
Dead.
"I'll go first," shouted Pippa over the roar.
"No. Let me." Betezh pushed ahead and, sheathing his weapons, started to descend the treacherous slope, grabbing twisted iron and buckled masonry that shook and trembled and broke under questing hands.
Pippa followed, and instantly realised her error but it was too late, she was on the jagged death-slope, fingers digging into broken brick cavities, boots slipping and sliding on walls and half-severed stairs. Shit, she thought. Mel was behind her. Above her. If Mel fell, she'd take Pippa and Betezh with her.
Pippa glanced up, to see Mel's huge bulk descending, hand and feet talons gouging brickwork and sending dust and stones rattling into the abyss below.
They hit a section of steps, and ran on the rectangular twisted platforms, but the steps soon fell away into a broken wall. Still the roaring of the quake filled them with terror and Pippa realised she wanted to cry because she always understood death would come, but not like this, not trapped in a thousand-year-old decrepit abandoned hospital before she had her chance to say her goodbyes to the people she loved...
Keenan. His face flashed into her mind, surprising her.
A bad taste filled her mouth. "Shit," she said, and almost cannoned into Betezh, knocking him into the chasm over which he loomed.
"Where now?" she said.
"Down," snapped Betezh. "We sit on our packs, and we slide."
Pippa squinted through the dust. "That must be four storeys, Betezh. Sixty or seventy feet. We'll break our legs!"
"Then we'll have to break our legs." Without waiting, Betezh sat on his pack and kicked free down the insanely steep slope. Cursing, Pippa pulled her pack around, sat on it, and kicked off into the gloom and the dust. The smell of fire filled her nostrils and she realised, above them, behind them, something was burning. She glanced back, to see something large, on fire, shrieking with flames, howling down towards all three as they slid into the gloomy shaft on their makeshift pack sleds...
"Shit!"
She saw Mel glance back as the object, massive, a section of torn building, bricks and protruding rods of galvanised steel, rolled and bounced and spat sparks from the shaft walls, disintegrating steps and masonry into dust as it filled the entire shaft with bulk, filled the world with its threatening looming shrieking mass. Grimly, Pippa realised it was accelerating towards them, and there was no chance it could miss. It would crush them, smash them all into a pulp, into grease stains at the base of the hospital stairwell -
Betezh looked back, shouted something, but above the screams and the noise Pippa failed to hear him. His face was demonic, stained red by flickering fires, his facial scars twisting into a horror deformation...
Pippa ducked her head, urged her pack to go faster -
But knew, ultimately, she was doomed.
Viewed from the safety of the lift, Franco's chase was like a bad comedy sketch. He pumped through the gloom in a badly fitting and
very
tight nurse uniform, the skirt riding impossibly - and rudely - high as through the gloom fast-ambled garish little men with putty heads, batteries in mouths disgorging thick black cables, their hands flickering and charging with jumps of electricity. Every few seconds there'd be a
zzap
and an arc of blue would either discharge on some metal furniture in a shower of sparks, or strike Franco on his largest presented body part - usually his arse.