"Indeed it is, my dear! Ya, haha, daarling!" Bleasedale grinned from behind her purple facial burn scar. She removed her small peaked white cap, ran a hand through short curly hair, then replaced the cap. She still wore a starched white doctor's uniform and high leather boots. She still carried her short black stick, which she
whacked
across Betezh's head with a crack.
"Ow!" he said, rubbing his head with jelly-manacled hands.
"I should have you instantly minced!"
"Oh yeah?" snarled Betezh. "How the hell you gonna do that?"
Bleasedale pointed with the stick. "I have an industrial Becker & Harris Limb Mincer in the corner. There. You see? The big stainless steel box."
"You mean a lamb mincer," said Betezh.
"No no, a
limb
mincer." She smiled. "Used after
amputations
to dispose of the waste. I am reliably informed it takes a whole human carcass. Whether it be dead, or," she savoured the word, "living."
"That's sick," said Betezh. "You mean you'd mince someone alive?"
"Oh yes," smiled Bleasedale. "And we have done so, on... what would you say the Mince Count is so far? About seventy-six Stringers? Is that right, Glob?"
"Yeah yeah yeah," growled Glob in a husky voice, hopping from one military-shined boot to the other, and for the first time Pippa and Betezh focused on one of their diminutive captors without the disability of jelly-gunge in their eyes.
"Holy shit," said Betezh.
"He's like a fucking Oompa-Loompa!" snapped Pippa.
"Hey!" growled Glob, "less of the insults. I'm part of a refined and cultured culture, I am. So cut it out with the crap. No, I haven't seen Snow White. I haven't worked in a chocolate factory. And I'm
not
the bearded bloody brother of Gimli. Right? I'm a Porter."
"A Porter?" Pippa frowned. "Like, in a hotel?"
"No, you slack-fanny mop-bucket, like in a
hospital.
We, you know, take patients to and from the wards, down to theatre, help out, jip about, have a fag, mince and moan, that sort of thing." He stared hard at Pippa, and she couldn't help but notice his face was a flurry of open sores. She shuddered. Glob winked.
"How about it, chicken?" he said.
"Um, I don't really
fancy
any chicken right now, thank you, on account of being bound and incarcerated by a raving lunatic with a Nazi-uniform fetish."
The Porter moved close, his eyes widening amidst his horrific facial sores. Pippa caught a whiff of putrefaction, and noted some of the Porter's wounds were heavily infected, tinged with green and black. She half-imagined she saw the curl of a maggot's tail in one wound. She shuddered.
"I was calling
you
a chicken," breathed Glob, heavily. It was the laboured breathing of the rapist.
"You mean, what, no way mate, you mean that was a fucking
line?"
"Hey, us Porters are renowned for being sex on a stick. Bulging in the bean-pack. Ferrets in the sack."
"I don't want a ferret in the sack. I want a man whose face isn't entirely made up of necrotic tissue."
Glob leant close, almost conspiratorially. He nudged Pippa in the ribs. "Look around you love, babe, chick. I'm the prettiest one here! A pretty boy, for sure." He beamed, showing black teeth. "It's been clinically proven a hospital porter is
the
most sexually active creature ever created. A true sexual athlete, for sure. It's also been proven we can
pull anything.
Oh yes. You'll be coming to me soon enough. And coming on me, if I'm not mistaken. I can tell. You're begging for it, right now, here and now. Gagging for it. Let me put something huge and wholesome in your mouth babe-chick."
"Over my dead body!" snapped Pippa, looking sideways at the freak.
"If that's the way you want it," smiled Glob. "Living, comatose or dead, I'll pork anything that moves. Or doesn't. Takes more than a stiff to scare away my, err, stiff."
Glob wandered off, presumably on an important mission, and Pippa did indeed stare at the other porters, and did indeed note that Glob was, indeed, the prettiest pretty boy of the bunch. In their manic Brownian-motion trajectories, it was hard to spot their disease-laden faces at first; but then Pippa's eyes focused, and locked, and she noted how the Porters carried facial sores like a badge of rank, or something to be proud of. Many had faces that were, simply put, one huge open necrotic wound, with eyes peering out from peeling reddened pus-green flesh like dinner-plates floating on a murky shit-swamp. Many Porters sported lumps and bumps on heads, necks and arms, but it was faces that drew Pippa's horrified vision back time and time again. Sores, incisions, boils, warts, scattered and layered, sores on warts, boils on sores, pus leaking from burst spots and all filling happy little sexually-leering faces like a chameleon cloak of putrefaction. Pippa shuddered, watching the Porters' many pointless activities. They seemed, like many an office worker, to have perfected the art of doing absolutely fuck-all.
Seemingly ignored for a moment, Betezh and Pippa gazed around the Bridge. They were on the SLAM Cruiser's main control deck, a wide, flat, open room stacked around the edges with complex computing containing clocks and dials and pumps and gauges, some dribbling steam, and many used for controlling the vintage spacecraft. One huge curved wall was flex-window, showing the ever-increasing snowy wilderness outside. Even as Combat-K watched, the trees dropped down a long flowing slope to the sea, and they powered out over a choppy, violent ocean.
"Where are we going?" asked Betezh.
"To battle, daarling!" Dr. Bleasedale turned, tapping her stick into the palm of her free hand. She seemed heavily preoccupied, and ignored the scampering capering little Porters who seemed to be running around on a million pointless missions, criss-crossing and jumping over one another, some pushing rattling trolleys with a dicky wheel, some empty wheelchairs, many just lounging and smoking and leering.
"What kind of battle?" asked Betezh suspiciously.
Bleasedale leant close, her breath bad like used alcohol cotton swabs. "A battle between continents! We are at war, you hopeless ignorant fool. Sick World is a battleground! And we will be victorious! We will quell our enemies!"
"What enemies?" scowled Betezh.
"
Our
enemies!" screeched Bleasedale, gesturing wildly with an arm in the vague direction of the ocean. "We have been at war for hundreds of years, ya? The three continents, Yax, Kludek and Second Djio. Sometimes, we conduct raids, either by ocean or air. Sometimes we organise pitched battles to settle the score - once and for all."
"And that's what this is?" said Pippa.
"Yes! We will win! We will crush the enemy! Storm their trenches! Take down their machine gun nests! Conquer and slay and maim and kill!" She stared hard at Pippa. "Why the hell do you think we're short of organs, daarling?"
Pippa shook her head.
"It's our Bullet-Wound Guarantee Replacement, Standard Policy v4.7. If you get more than two rounds in an organ we replace it, ya? After you pay your voluntary excess, of course. And providing you have some No Claim Discount."
"Your soldiers have their organs insured?"
"Standard Kludek Guts Policy. After all, we
are
specialists in Medical and Surgical Care, and Rehabilitation Treatments for our lucky, lucky patients. Aren't we?"
Pippa caught Betezh's eye, and gave a little shake of her head as thoughts rioted through her skull. Battles? A war? What the hell was going on across Sick World? A war of dominance and power between deformed and deviated doctors and nurses? What kind of sick world was this? She spotted the global joke. She couldn't bring herself to laugh.
Huge engines throbbed in the bowels of the SLAM Cruiser, and Pippa and Betezh found themselves increasingly to the rear of activity as hundreds of Porters flooded the Bridge and went about spinning dials and valves, turning wheels, pressing buttons, tapping on keyboards and pushing the odd wounded doctor across the platform in a wheelchair, usually with a comedy leg stuck horizontal and banging into things with comedy yelps.
WHACK! "
Sorry!" the Porter would say, his sore-ridden face all screwed up and panting pus.
WHACK! "
Sorry!
Sorreeeee!" WHACK WHACK CLANG!
"We've got to get out of here," whispered Pippa, shuffling closer to Betezh.
"Yep. And kill Dr. Bleasedale."
"Why is that a priority?"
"Because it is," said Betezh, scowling. "Some life-forms just don't deserve to exist."
"They'll be distracted when they go into battle," said Pippa. "Wait for my signal, then we'll kick-off royally. You think you can reach the yukana sheathed on my back?"
"Only if you get down on your knees."
"Yeah. Right. Just don't get any ideas."
"Wouldn't dream of it, Pippa. After all, I ain't a pretty boy, like these around us."
The SLAM Cruiser groaned, engines droning and thrashing deep in the craft's bowels. They banked again, and a land mass hove into view, a jagged, fractured landscape of broken ice and snowy peaks. The SLAM lifted, clearing the mountains, then dropped towards a vast, endless ice-field and as they drew close, like a mammoth lens coming into focus, so the world and the battle preparations and the
armies
came sharply into view -
"Wow," said Pippa.
"Hell," said Betezh, and he was right; it was a vision of hell.
Two vast armies faced one another across the icy plateau. Each faction, separated by perhaps a kilometre of No Man's Land, numbered perhaps twenty or thirty thousand...
troops.
Only these weren't soldiers in the traditional sense, for these were legless nurses, straightjacketed mental patients, doctors with external organs, Porters with wheelchairs mounted with guns, and a whole host of deviants merged with alien and metal and implements and equipment. It was like a gathering of lunatics. It
was
a gathering of lunatics. They carried swords and spears and machine guns, which they brandished regularly like amateur fanatics, waving them above their heads and firing off rounds in a clatter. Edging closer, Pippa saw that vast trenches had been dug and carved out of the ice, facing one another ready for battle, and each army stood behind their trench in what could only have been described as the most pointless gathering of proposed trench warfare ever devised.
"What's the point of the trenches?" said Betezh, "if the whole damn army stands behind it, waiting to get shot?"
"It's idiotic," said Pippa.
Betezh nudged Pippa, and gestured towards Dr. Bleasedale. "Did you expect anything else?"
Outside, the SLAM Cruisers, which had picked up troops from the hospital prior to its earthquake bruising and subsequent collapse, were already disgorging their payloads at the back of the gathered army. Bleasedale's SLAM Cruiser slowed ever more so that it was practically hovering, and jagging left and right for stability, waiting for its turn to put down on the icy wilderness and unload its medically-themed battalions.
"Right!" Dr. Bleasedale turned, and placed her stick against her narrow lips. Her eyes gleamed. "You humiliated me back at the hospital. You practically refused my kind offer of replacement organs, and then you... then... you killed
Gerry."
"Gerry?" said Pippa.
"The decapus," whispered Betezh.
"Now." She smiled again. It looked wrong on her face. Just wrong. Like a dog with three dicks. "It's time to feed the army."
"Meaning?" snapped Pippa.
"They like sausages," said Dr. Bleasedale, moving closer. In her peripheral vision, Pippa noted a group of Porters had suddenly detached from their aimless melee and circled the two Combat-K captors, guns primed, sore-ridden faces gleeful. Nearly twenty guns were trained on Pippa and Betezh... nobody could outrun that many bullets.
Pippa stepped close to Bleasedale. "So what?"
"We need more sausage meat."
The Porters surged, grabbing Pippa and Betezh. Pippa's head slammed forward, breaking a sore-ridden nose in a splat of pus, and her legs shot out, snapping kneecaps with terrible crunches. Betezh used his elbows, whacking left and right with thuds and yelps and the dry-twig snapping of bones. There was a surge of activity, of sudden acceleration into violence and Dr. Bleasedale minced backwards, on tiptoes, fingers wiggling as if fearful of getting involved in this sudden drunken pub brawl.
It was Glob who brought Pippa down with a tackle and smack to the head. Pippa grunted, and through her dazed vision saw the Porter held a small lump-hammer. A swarm of Porters bore Betezh to the ground and started kicking him, viciously. He was lost under a flurry of scrunched-up, boiled-up leprosy faces.
Glob, aided and abetted by a few other stumpy Porters, half-dragged and half-carried a dazed Pippa to the base of the huge, stainless steel mincer, the Becker & Harris. Behind, there stood a robust set of steel steps leading to a kind of plank. It was the same set up pirates had used for a million years.
Pippa was manhandled, groaning and drooling blood and saliva, up the steps. Glob took the lead, dragging her along the narrow and treacherous steel plank above the Becker & Harris inlet, which was basically a huge cone filled with gears and half-moon knives and corkscrews of gleaming steel. As Pippa slumped down on the plank, Glob leering over her, the machine gave a jolt and gears meshed and the cone started to spin beneath the plank with a high-pitched whining, like a gauntlet across a chalkboard.