"Pick up your guns," growled Pippa.
The nurse walked forward, as if all her limbs belonged to different people. She was gangly, despite her fat; disjointed, despite her womanhood, and she leered down at the three little humans, grinning through bad make-up.
"You've come to play, little people?" she slurred, as if drunk. Her head swayed left, then right, as if attached by loose ball-bearings. "You come to my morgue to pay your last respects?" She giggled, coquettishly, and stared down at the Combat-K soldiers, apparently unperturbed by their guns.
"Let's take her," whispered Franco... as more squeaking and grinding noises filled the air. To their horror, hundreds of corpse drawers began to slide from the rusted metal wall. They slid free, squeaking open, and in panic Combat K's gun-lights roved along the wall for as far as the human eye could see... and for as far as the human eye could see the wall began to disgorge corpses, some male, some female, some tall and short and wide and thin and ugly and ugly and ugly and Franco felt a scream welling in his throat because he knew, knew as hundreds of feet with hundreds of toe-tags slapped the tiny white tiles, he knew there were way too many to take out -
"Which way?" snapped Keenan.
Pippa pointed, and they began to run but the corpses moved like a
wave,
moved like a
tide,
two or three hundred flowing across the tiled floor and squatting, hands touching the floor, suddenly motionless and with every set of dead eyes in gradually decomposing faces fixed on Combat K.
"The avatar said this was a test of aggression," said Pippa, motionless, her eyes raking the wall of animated corpses.
"Maybe it was a double bluff," said Keenan.
"I don't think we have a choice," said Pippa.
The wall of dead grey bodies shifted, undulated, like grass in a breeze. And from their midst came the ten foot nurse they'd first seen, with her blonde hair and cherry lips. She approached Combat K, hips moving seductively, and her large naked feet slapped on the tiles and she stopped, ten feet away, swaying. Behind her, hundreds of corpses growled a long, low growl, like a guard dog baring its fangs.
Franco gulped.
Keenan stepped forward, with Pippa at his shoulder. Franco, cowering behind, decided what they really needed right now was a brave rearward guard.
"Let us pass," said Keenan.
"No."
"Why not?"
"None living shall enter."
"We seek VOLOS."
The dead nurse smiled then, and Keenan caught the cunning in her eyes, in her dead eyes, rimed with treacle mascara. "Nobody shall meet with VOLOS. That is the privilege of the dead."
"Why so?"
"I say so, because I am the Morgue Matron, this is my bridge, my passage, my domain."
Keenan lifted his gun. "Then I will kill you."
"You think others have not tried? You think thousands haven't fallen screaming into the void, worms in their hair, ash on their tongues? You petty fucking mortals, I despise you, you, the living, the sane, the arrogant, the superior, I despise you all. You shall die."
She lifted her arm, and smiled.
Her arm dropped.
"Attack!" she screamed... and the corpse-horde surged forward.
Guns screamed, but the corpses were on them...
Keenan discharged his machine gun in a grey twisted face, and brains and skull shards exploded from the back of its head in a shower of gore. He twisted as a savage punch whirred past his face, knuckles scraping his cheek, and rolled, rising in the path of another corpse which lunged at him. He slammed a right straight, dropped and swept the undead's legs away. Hands grasped at him, and something whacked the back of his head. He felt himself go under, and heard a
boom
as a marionette accelerated above him in a tangle of naked green limbs, toe-tag flapping. Pippa was there, and she helped him rise. He'd lost his gun.
"This is chaos!" she screamed, and Keenan nodded, drawing a knife from his boot and stabbing a corpse in the eye. The eyeball popped free to dangle against the creature's cheek, but still it came on, grey spittle raging on lips and Pippa and Keenan kicked apart, Pippa's shotgun blasting a head from shoulders as she back-peddled and looked crazily about. They were a swarm, a horde, an army, and she saw Keenan back away, knife slashing out to open a throat in what should have been a shower of arcing blood, but no blood emerged. The corpse was necrotic; and more importantly, rigor mortis had set in.
They shouldn't be able to walk!
screamed her brain, as she tossed her D5 to Keenan. He caught the weapon and blew the knees from a corpse, which hit the ground on its face and continued crawling at him. Pippa drew both swords from sheaths behind her pack, and calmed her raging mind as the corpses meandered around her, towards her, arms stretching for her, and she felt herself slip into the
zone
and started to dance, slowly at first, swords a bright silver blur slashing left, right, in arcs, in circles, each yukana forming glittering webs and each stroke cutting free fingers and hands, arms and feet, knees and heads, and with each twirl there came a
thud
and a shudder but Pippa worked the jarring impacts into her dance, turned them into a beat, into a bass rhythm as she moved forward, before Keenan and Franco who were panting, drenched in sweat, faces lacerated from clutching fingers and old black claws...
Pippa moved with grace, a dancer, her face serene, her breathing rhythmic, and before her fell five, ten, twenty of the corpses, forming a waist-high mound over which more grey sagging monsters climbed to leap at her... and now she was retreating, away from the launch-pad of dismembered bodies, and Franco and Keenan moved back with her, boots thudding white tiles, Pippa their defender with her glittering web of lethally sharp yukana blades.
"Head back to the oxygen cylinders!"
"Why?" came Pippa's slow, lazy voice, and her voice was distant, dream-like as the lethal yukana blades whirled and corpses lost limbs and heads.
"Big Bangs!" said Franco, eyes gleaming bright.
They altered course, a tight unit of whirling death amidst a baying moaning crowd of grey-skinned undead. Flat feet slapped white tiles in an urgency to get at Combat K, to rip them apart, to tear the skin from their ripe skulls.
"Nearly there!" panted Franco, and fired off a few rounds over Pippa's shoulder, taking a corpse in the face, exploding skull into a mush of brain-shrapnel.
"What's the plan?" snapped Keenan.
"Watch," said Franco, and whirled, his body tense inside his tight-fitting PVC nurse uniform. He grabbed an oxygen cylinder, hoisted it over his head, and flung it into the horde of corpses. The cylinder thrummed overhead, through pools of green light, and Franco's Kekra snapped up and he aimed with the eagle-eye of the sniper.
Crack.
KABOOM! The oxygen cylinder exploded in a rage, and a bloom of fire and metal shrapnel savaged the corpses, slamming perhaps twenty to the ground in a mushed mushy-pea mess.
"Brilliant! I'll throw, you shoot," said Keenan, hoisting a cylinder. He launched the makeshift grenade, and Franco tracked it through the gloom. His gun cracked, and again fire ravaged the corpses. Several caught fire, their dry hair going up in streamers that made Pippa falter in her dance of sword death...
"Again," snapped Franco.
Again Keenan launched an ancient oxygen cylinder, and Franco tracked it with expert eye. He fired, and there came a
ping,
then the cylinder rattled off amongst slapping corpse feet. "It was a dud!" wailed Franco, and glanced behind. So much for his bright idea!
"It's like trying to hold back the ocean with a spade," said Keenan, a sheen of sweat on his battered face, dirt and oil smeared in his skin, but his eyes lizard-cool. Pippa leapt before him, swords hissing and thumping. "There's too many of them! We either need something far more lethal, or we need to find a way out of this shit-hole."
"If only I had my pack!" wailed Franco. "It had blocks of T7 and Tramp8 explosives; it'd make mincemeat of these dead suckers."
"Yeah, but it'd take us with them," said Keenan, coolly, brain ticking like clockwork. "What about that?"
"What?"
"The Leksell gamma-focus - around your hairy neck. Can you attach it to an oxygen cylinder? Will it focus and enhance the blast?"
"No." Franco's eyes gleamed. "I have a much better idea that that. PIPPA! BACK TO THE CANKER XRD ANALYTICAL X-RAY RESIDUAL GAMMA STRESS ANALYSER!"
They started to move, Pippa their shield. But she was tiring now, tiring fast, sweat soaking her, her movements blurring. She was lethal, she was deadly, she was a killer - however, she was ultimately human.
"You said the CANKER XRD can be used as a big bomb? That's no good," snapped Keenan, loosing off more rounds. Corpses slapped to the floor, to be trampled by their uncaring comrades. "It'll detonate us, as well. We'll never escape the blast. And if we run, we take the corpses with us."
"No no no," said Franco, rubbing his eyes. "Watch! And learn from the greatest detonations expert the Quad-Gal has ever known! They don't call me Franco 'Triple Bang' Haggis for nothing, y'know!"
They reached the huge X-RAY machine, and Franco ripped the Leksell gamma-focus from around his neck. He clambered up the front of the machine like a monkey on speed and, hanging from the huge head with its four flat circles, he screwed the Leksell into the centre, then gave it a pat.
He dropped to the ground, ran around the back of the CANKER, and leapt up onto the control plate. He looked like some dirty ginger big-gun operator, only wielding medical equipment instead of a weapon in his greasy hairy hands. He tugged on several levers, and there came a high-tension
whine.
The CANKER jerked, and the mechanical arm whirred into life with Franco at the controls. It moved, jerking, and aimed at the crowd of corpses...
He winked at Keenan, and hit the switch.
In the chamber, there came another, massive whine, and all the green lights went out leaving the vast space in a total, chilly darkness. A smell of ozone washed over Combat K. And the CANKER machine singularly failed to deliver its payload...
"Great," snapped Keenan, face contorted in the glow of his gun-light. "You're damn right they don't call you Franco 'Triple Bang' fucking Haggis for nothing, mate. They should call you Franco 'Limp Dick' Haggis, or maybe Franco 'Can't Get It Up' Haggis the complete dickhead!"
Franco jumped down from the useless CANKER X-RAY machine. He held up a hand. "Whoa, brother! Just needs more battery power!" He ran to another CANKER, this one in a greater state of rust and degeneration; he kicked open a dented panel, and pulled out what looked to Keenan suspiciously like a set of red and black jump leads, which he spooled across the floor to the first machine...
Pippa stumbled back, to stand with chest heaving beside Keenan and the CANKER XRD Analytical X-RAY Residual Gamma Stress Analyser. "I hope you've got a good plan," she wheezed, "because I'm all out of juice." Both yukanas touched the floor, and scratched the white tiles. Pippa was totally exhausted.
The corpses had fallen back, and were reforming lines with their ten-foot leader at the centre. Many were grinning, and they knew Combat-K were tiring fast; were finished, in fact. Eyes watched Franco clamber up onto the CANKER with interest, but no fear. After all, what damage could an X-RAY machine do? It took photographs of bones, right?
Again, Franco fired the Analyser with a
thump
and swung it down low, aiming at the corpses. They roared then, a sour ancient dead roar emerging from rotting stumps of smashed teeth as grey fingers flexed and gleaming eyes focused on the living... the living, soon to be dead.
"Duck!" screamed Franco, and hit the detonation button as he swung the Analyser from left to right in a quick, savage movement of mechanical joints. The CANKER whined, but did not fire, made no machine-gun rattles, no booms of explosion, just emitted a silent and deadly beam of concentrated gamma rays...
Before them, a line of a hundred corpses were sliced in two in a rapid and vaguely diagonal acceleration. Flesh slapped the tiles, corpse halves slapped the tiles and Franco, like a madman on a crazy gun-turret, lined the CANKER up again as the second row of dazed and confused corpses stared in confusion at their massacred comrades... again the machine
whined
as Franco slammed it along their ranks, and the wide-field surgical
gamma-knife
cut through another hundred corpses and left their coagulated remains slopping across the white tiles...
The rest turned and ran for it, toe-tags slapping all the way back to the safety of their drawers. All except -
The leader. The ten-foot nurse.
She grinned, through cherry lipstick. And leapt... Pippa launched herself forward, ducking a swipe of talons and ramming her first sword through the creature's heart. The Matron of the Morgue shuddered, then laughed a cold corpse laugh and reached down for Pippa, who sidestepped, the second yukana whistling as it cut free her head.
The headless corpse hit the tiles, and Pippa stood on her sternum as she pulled free the first weapon without a word.
"I don't get it," said Keenan, breathing deeply, face weary, exhaustion mastering him. "It's a fucking X-RAY machine. What did you do to it?"