"Come on!" roared Olga, hopping from one great foot to the other, as Fizzy and Shazza hovered, fingers on the D button.
"He's not going to make it!" snapped Shazza.
"Heee
eeelp!"
shrieked Franco, as another shock made him jump two feet in the air, legs still pumping, goatee beard standing out on end with surplus static like an electrocuted ginger porcupine.
"Over my dead body," snapped Olga, and grabbing a D5 from Fizzy she strode out, a shotgun in each huge paw, and started firing into the throng, her face gurning with concentration. Shells howled and whistled. A Convulser was punched back from its feet, and skidded back across the floor, a huge hole disintegrating the corner of its head. Another was caught in the kneecaps, devastating its legs, and it went down causing others to trip and stumble in a tangled heap of fizzing electricity and leaking battery acid. Olga aimed, quite a feat in the flickering gloom, and shot the battery in the mouth of a fallen Convulser; there was a modest
boom
and the battery exploded, taking with it the Convulser's head and three of his fellow freaks.
"Aha!" nodded Olga, settling on a system. She levelled both shotguns, blasted at kneecaps with crunches of smashing flesh and bone. Then, as the Convulsers failed and paddled uselessly on the floor, she sent more shells whistling into battery packs, exploding heads in all directions and turning the long room into an acidic charnel house...
Franco arrived, panting, and looked back, eyes wide.
"Thanks!"
"Get in the lift."
He touched Olga's arm. "No. Really, Olga. Thanks."
She gave him a smile, and backed into the lift as the remaining Convulsers, growling but wary after seeing ten freaky companions head-detonated, advanced in a slow-moving line.
Shazza hit the D button. The lift doors closed.
They descended, a rhythm of lights and floors replacing the horror of the nightmare flight. Music played, a happy little ditty by Elvis the Fifth, called
Baby, Baby Baby Suck My Balls (Ooh Yeah, Baby, That's Kinda Right!)
.
Without thinking, Franco started to tap his foot. The one without a sandal.
Olga turned, handed Fizzy her shotgun, sheathed her own on her back, and grasped Franco's cheeks between two huge hands. She planted a kiss on him, long and lingering and ignoring his frantic struggles and kicking legs. She pulled away, beaming.
"What was that for?"
"When Princess rescue Prince, she always kiss him to turn him from a frog."
"
What?"
"My reward. For saving your life."
"Yeah. Well. Just as long as that's the
only
liberty you're going to take. They don't call me Franco 'Shy and Demure' Haggis for nothing, you know, girl. I am modest, by nature. I am a New Man. I have my high-fibre moral diet to be thinking about, capiche?"
"Ha! Rot and ze poppycock! I saw you lusting after Fizzy and Shazza before they told you they were ze carpet munchers, no-offence-meant. I know you still ze old priapic Franco I know and love." She beamed, showing missing teeth, gold teeth, and a tongue that could wrestle an octopus.
"Carpet-" snapped Shazza, eyes wide. "Hey, listen love, don't knock it till you've tried it." She glanced at Franco. "Acquainting
so many
specimens of the male of the species, makes us awesomely glad we chose the Way of the Lesbian. It's like the Way of the Samurai, only with more loving." She smiled, winked, and linked arms with Fizzy, who reached over and gave her a long, lingering, and generously erotic kiss.
Franco turned away, face like thunder, brows furrowed. "It's just not right," he muttered. "Just obscene. A waste, by gods, of far too many fine sockets!"
The service elevator descended for a long time. Through the little meshed window they saw an endless stream of deserted corridors, filled with overturned trolleys, abandoned wheelchairs, smashed waiting-room furniture, broken boxes savaged of their contents.
"I didn't realise it was so big," said Franco.
"Must go for
kilometres
under the ground," said Fizzy.
"They could have a million soldiers down here," laughed Franco, uneasily.
"Well, we're about to find out," said Fizzy. She smiled, and squeezed Franco's arm. "Don't mind Shazza. She's a bit of a tough-nut. You're doing a great job here, you know? We're finding out stuff. Just like in our QGM mission remit. You said this was a lame gig, but somehow I had a feeling being around you could never be dull."
"Yeah," grumbled Franco, face downcast. "I attract trouble like a dog attracts fleas."
"Still, chin up," smiled Fizzy, and slapped his PVC-clad arse. "It could be worse. Those Convulsers could have taken you back to the Weird Nurse Porn Studio; next time, we might not be in time."
"Ouch," said Franco, rubbing at his scorched and wounded buttocks. "Please. I'm tenderer than a prime BBQ steak. Those Convulsers sure fried the hell out of
my
rump."
"
You're doing well; my son,"
said Father Callaghan, Franco's Temple Pill throbbing a little.
"Oh yeah? When did you decide to put
your
bloody yellow squawking feathered head above the parapet?"
"
What is, that supposed to mean, my son?"
"You kept a damn low profile beneath your own flopping cassock when I was in the shit, didn't you lad? No advice from Callaghan, oh no!"
"
I dispute that accusation,"
said Father Callaghan.
"I believe you, did just fine on your, own. My son. Amen."
He seemed to think about this. "
And I didn't believe you needed, any spiritual, enlightenment at that particular time. You always admitted to being a hedonist; I thought you were! relishing the experience."
"Yeah, right, either that or you were pissed on Communion wine. My son." Franco's sarcastic tone did not go unnoticed. "Listen Callaghan, in the future, just keep your religic borrocks to yourself, reet?"
"
I am aggrieved you feel that way
[ching]
. That is $49.99 charged to your account."
"What?" screeched Franco, internally.
"
You signed the contrac'
," said Callaghan. A touch smugly, Franco thought. "
That's the charge. For my advice. On; shall we say, an omnisciently agreed, rolling contrac'. $49.99 every ten minutes' religious, advice and, attempted spiritual uplifting. Cheap at half; the price. Bargin'. Cheap as; chips. Etcetera."
"I've been conned," said Franco.
"
Indeed, it is not the first time
," said Callaghan, the religious AI rip-off merchant.
"Where's that scalpel," muttered Franco.
Father Callaghan shut up.
The lift chimed
bing
and came to a grinding, juddering halt. They peered out of the window, but could see only darkness. Shazza and Fizzy pulled free HighBeams and the lift door shuddered open, revealing a dark, narrow tunnel filled with six inches of water. A stench filled the lift, like a kiss from the mouth of Beelzebub.
Coughing, the group waded out, and moved along between rough-hewn walls. The darkness crowded in, threatening some interesting nightmares.
Things
in the water bobbed against their ankles, and Franco called a quick halt. "Wait," he said, almost choking at the evil stench, "hold on. This ain't water!"
"What is it?"
Franco peered down. "That," he said, pointing, "looks like a kidney."
"And that's definitely a heart," said Fizzy, nudging it with the barrel of her gun.
"There's a foot," said Franco, his hairs standing on end. "Girls, it would seem we're in a pit of medical waste."
"Great," said Shazza. She'd covered her mouth with her little nurse hat. "Let's get the hell out of here."
They waded along to the steps, climbed them and glanced up. Above, stretching up for as far as the HighBeams would reach, pipes led out of the mammoth wall of towering brickwork. This was obviously some kind of overflow sluice. Water dribbled from a hundred different orifices. Occasionally, something larger went
plop.
There was a door, and Franco opened it to stare suddenly into the distorted, twisted, deformed face of a man, his head almost an arch, one eye above the other on the curve of his face, his nose a tiny little flap with teeth which clacked, his mouth a foul-breathing slot in a face straight out of horror - even after emerging from an organ sluice. Franco's own lips flapped open and closed, for he didn't quite know what to say, caught, as it were, with his ASDA underpants round his ankles. The man, dressed in a red velvet tunic, had three arms but, thankfully, only the normal quota of legs. His baggy pants were of the same red velvet, and as Franco stared at the jelly-bean shaped head, the vertically stacked eyes blinked at him and the mouth twisted in what Franco assumed was a malformed smile.
There came a rustle of guns behind him.
"At last!" said the deformed man, nose teeth clacking. "We wondered where you'd got to. They're waiting for you on the Zeppelin3. You'll need to hurry, Zegg will be hugely and mightily annoyed if you're late. You know they can't leave without the onboard medical team!"
The man ushered the four Combat-K squaddies out of the effluence organ overflow tunnel, and Franco glanced down at his badly fitting nurse's uniform. Ahh, he thought. Ahh. They think we're nurses. They think we're a medical team for the Zeppelin3. Ahh.
Ahh! Ahh?
Do we really want to fly on Zeppelin3?
Is that a good thing... or a bad thing?
Soldiers arrived, a squad of twenty, all wearing green backless gowns revealing a quite atrocious grouping of deformed and hairy buttocks. Many of the soldiers had three arms bearing three guns, and quite a few had twisted features, deformed heads, some even with their heads split in two and metal plates keeping both halves separate. Some had two miniature shrunken heads, like little voodoo totems, yet others had four heads, one mounted on each shoulder like really crap designer shoulder pads, with the fourth head located in the groin area, skin stretched out to merge with thighs and stomach, so that when they spoke they really did ejaculate bollocks.
Combat K were ushered along by the red velvet jacket-wearing jelly-bean head, who introduced himself as Paddy. Paddy "to his few important friends" Pudson, failed SF comic book author, and freak-extraordinaire. Franco waddled along in his tight uniform, feeling suddenly ridiculous. He wished he hadn't picked such a tight skirt. He felt like a cheap tart. He looked like a cheap tart. He rubbed his beard, grimacing huskily, and had to admit it to himself. He was a cheap tart.
The cavern reared around the group, too massive to be real, too huge to comprehend. Above hung ten airships now, vast and eerie and silent. Seen from ground level, the world inside the cavern was a bustle of military madness. None of the soldiers were "normal" in what Franco would consider to be "normal", although to be fair, only a few limited members of the entire human species would consider Franco to be in any way "normal". Which should have made him feel right at home.
Soldiers were still running around the track, singing their little training songs. But now Combat-K saw many had three legs, a fact lost when they had peered out from upon high at the mass. Yet other soldiers had been... blended. Some were joined sideways at the hips, and ran in curious waddling gaits, all four legs finding a curious rhythm which meant the twin-bodied soldier could ambulate with terrific and horrifying speed.
"It's REC," hissed Fizzy, jogging alongside Franco. Paddy was marching them along in a hurried deformed-arse waddle. There seemed to be some urgency.
"Wassat?" snapped Franco. He had just been distracted by a soldier who was simply four legs, joined at the hips and bent into an arch, like an upturned soup bowl, without any actual body carcass or visible heads. The four legs scampered around, like a strange white spider with human feet, all wearing different boots. Franco nearly threw up.
"REC," persisted Fizzy, face drawn and white and gaunt. "The REC Centre. Research, experimentation and confinement. These were the freaks left behind when Sick World was evacuated; these are the deviant experiments of sick sick sick medical minds. These were the bastards which needed to be
confined.
The dangerous ones. The killers."
Franco nodded, eyes on Paddy's fine red velvet. They were approaching a dangle of ropes, and Franco's eyes were scanning fast, looking for some obvious path of escape. After all, once they were up high on an airship they were effectively prisoners.
"We have to get on," said Shazza, smiling a Big Smile through gritted teeth. "If we run now, there are thousands of the bastards to gun us down. We'll have to bide our time. Pick our moment. Wait till Paddy here is bumming his mother, who's also his sister, uncle and youngest daughter. Or something."
"If we get on, we're trapped," said Franco.
"We'll just have to play the game."
"Nobody," hissed Franco, "is going to believe we're damn and bloody nurses! Look at us! We're as convincing as fake tits."
"
But they are buying it!"
snapped Shazza.
They stopped by the tangle of ropes, and Combat-K followed them with their eyes, all the way up to a zeppelin hanging immobile and silent, like a huge war blancmange.