Biohell

by Andy Remic

  Cam, dripping hot runs of melted sharpwire, had reached a safe spot across the No Man’s Land leading to the organotower. Keenan and Franco, running low and with weapons ready, set off across rough ground; a few steps behind, still wary of the destroyed biological menace, Xakus followed.

  They stopped at the base of the tower. Cam positively glowed with pride.

  “I bet they know we’re here,” said Franco, one Kekra against his cheek, his eyes scanning the seemingly deserted ground before him. Distantly, seen through a haze of debris and darkness and barricades, deviated humans patrolled with an almost clockwork rhythm.

  “I guarantee it,” growled Keenan. “After all, it was a polite invite.” He took free his cigarette case, took a moment to roll some Widow Maker, then lit the bedraggled cigarette, breathing deep on fresh pollutant.

  “Isn’t this an inopportune moment for a smoke?” suggested Xakus, glancing up the sheer wall of the tower which rose, undulating, above them. Something was happening above. Slick orifices were beginning to open high up on the vegetative walls; Franco pulled a face of pure disgust.

  “I’m facing the possibility of extinction,” said Keenan. His face was grim, now. Set. “I can’t think of a better time for a smoke.”

  “How do we get in?” said Franco, eyeing the puckering orifices high up the slick oily wall. They were making tiny slurping, kissing sounds.

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  Franco eyed Xakus, his face narrowing. “No more damn arse pipes, I hope.”

  “Not... exactly,” whispered Xakus.

  The orifices above suddenly disgorged huge, tuber-like limbs which thumped down with terrific force on the ground the group had recently crossed. They were long, slick, black, gleaming, narrow-stemmed appendages ending in flared, pulsing snouts, raw pink and sphincter-like in appearance. The limbs emerged with a sudden bursting energy, three, five, ten of them, flailing out above the group in apparent randomness like some panic-stricken octopus, before flopping through the air and slamming down against the earth with heavy, sodden booms.

  Franco, covering his head, screeched, “What the hell’s going on?”

  “Cam destroyed the sharpwire. He’s triggered the organotower’s natural vegetative defence mechanism.”

  A limb flailed past, a breeze of proximity causing Franco’s beard to ruffle. He scowled, aware he was within inches of having his head knocked clean off. “You call that a defence mechanism?”

  “Looks pretty good to me,” snarled Keenan. He turned to Xakus. “We climbing inside one?”

  “You catch on fast,” said Xakus.

  “Hey, hang on a minute!” said Franco, “I ain’t climbing up no more tubes, pipes, snouts or anal passageways. Are we clear on that? A man can only take so much anal abusage.”

  “Well stay here then, and let Mel suffer.”

  Keenan, with head low but eyes lifted, eased forward. Above, the limbs flailed. Xakus joined him, and pointed to where one swinging, flailing limb emerged from a puckering, sphincter mouth in the tower wall. “You see the bulge, high up? It’s a nerve centre. Put a bullet in there and it’ll be paralysed for a few moments. Enough time for us to climb in, I think. The limbs are hollow.”

  Keenan nodded and sighted down the MPK. A single shot cracked, and the limb fell to earth with a dull thud. Keenan bared his teeth, staring at the quivering, twitching mass of pink lips; it looked like an electrocuted vagina.

  “After you, Professor.”

  Xakus crawled with care to the stunned vegetable flesh, and with slurps and squelches, eased back layers of what appeared to be human skin. Franco shivered, close beside Keenan.

  “A man shouldn’t have to go through this.”

  “What?”

  “All this crawling around in tubes and stuff. A man has his dignity, y’know?”

  “I thought you lost all your dignity back in the whorehouses, the bars and the prisons?”

  Franco puffed out his chest. “What? Me? Listen, they don’t call me Mr Franco ‘Moral Fibre’ Haggis for nothing, pal. A man has his morals, right? His standards. A man has his, y’know,” he twitched, “sanity to think about. And crawling around in anal pipes and suchforth is just too much like a dodgy pulp SF novel. I shall complain, I shall.”

  “Oh, you shall, shall you?”

  Xakus’s kicking feet disappeared. The lips of the vegetative tube squelched shut. Jelly glistened. The flaps quivered like an epileptic vulva. Keenan nudged Franco. “This is us.”

  “Bugger!”

  “Just imagine something erotic.” Keenan grinned with his teeth. “After all, some of the shit you programmed in Immersion Consoles defies belief.”

  “Pippa went wild, didn’t she?”

  Keenan nodded. Sighed. “Yeah mate. She did.” He shook his head. “Come on. Mel is waiting. I’m sure she won’t mind you molesting a giant alien vegetable suction dildo in the name of true love.”

  Keenan parted the lips, and a stench of rotting cabbage washed over him. He nearly gagged; holding his breath, he took the weight of the heavy flaps and crawled inside.

  Franco, kneeling, ducked as another live limb whooshed over his head. He stared around, eyes wide in disbelief, as distant machine gun chatter sang a metal symphony. “How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice? Huh?” He pulled free a small white tub, popped the cap, and eyed the rainbow pill. He pushed it into his mouth, where it sat under his tongue, slowly dissolving.

  “Into the Lion’s Pussy,” he whispered, and lifting the cabbage-reeking flaps, he held his breath, squinted his eyes, tensed his muscles, and slipped, and struggled, inside.

  ~ * ~

  For a few moments Franco fought with slippery veg flesh. He kicked and scrambled, clawed and fought his way into a tight black pouch. He glanced up—at where Keenan, with a tiny torch, grinned down at him. “I thought this would be right up your particular back alley.”

  “Get to fuck, Keenan.”

  They climbed, using ridges of vegetable-strand muscle as handholds. The tube was greasy to the touch, like a slick, ribbed onion, like crawling inside a hollowed leek. It was dark, despite the needle beams from torches, and the tentacle gave regular shudders as if threatening a revival that would surely kill them.

  Franco tried hard not to vomit as he climbed. It wasn’t just the stench, but the globs of purple jelly which rolled down the interior of the tubular walls, sliming over his hands and face, pooling on his shaved head and in his beard, covering him with an afterbirth of vegetable semen. But, to Franco, most disgustingly of all, the jelly pooled over his hairy, sandaled feet, squelched between his toes, tickling the undersides of his paws and making him slip and slide within the violated sanctuary of his own footwear. Franco hated his feet being touched, tickled or mauled. Not by human, not by alien, and certainly not by drooling vegetable pus.

  They climbed; for what seemed an eternity.

  It was a very long way up.

  Franco mumbled profanity all the way.

  With a final, tremendous grunt, which came not without sexual comedy merit, Franco slopped over what appeared to be a tiny volcanic mound and onto a rib- and muscle-ringed floor. It was pink, with gnarled green crusty knobbles, all gleaming. Franco lay, panting, shining under his coating of jelly and staring about with undisguised raw hatred.

  “Damn that vegetable spunk slime,” said Franco, face puckered, voice forlorn.

  “Come on,” snapped Keenan. “We’ve got a job to do.” His weapon was slimed, his War Suit also slimed; damn, even his EBH was coated with natural vegetable gunk.

  Xakus, by some unwritten agreement, led the way. Unarmed, however. Keenan stayed by his shoulder, Techrim in one fist, MPK in the other, face grim. Franco, as ever, took the rear and squelched along miserably muttering obscenity after profanity after obscenity in the hope of a vegetable exorcism.

  Xakus paused, dropping to one knee.

  “Everything good?”

  “Yes. These lower tunnels and caverns ar
e the organotower’s foundation structure; what gives it the ability to grow and regenerate, and also support the heavy bone tower chassis above.”

  “You sound like you know the place well,” muttered Franco.

  “I’ve seen the genetic blueprints,” said Xakus curtly. “Taking this tower from its homeworld was not something with which I ethically agreed. I have a moral standpoint, you understand?”

  Franco nodded, shuddering.

  They moved on, through endless quivering tunnels which sometimes spilled into large caverns filled with slime and slop. On several occasions all three men retched, kneeling in the corridor and vomiting so hard they cried as blasts and waves of thick cabbage odour swamped them with a semi-poisonous gassing.

  “Nice place you brought us to, Keenan.”

  “You’ve got sick in your beard.”

  “Damn and bloody blast!”

  “Anyway, we’re here to rescue your fiancée. It could be argued it’s your damn fault.”

  “Have a heart!” said Franco, but Keenan was being sick again and Franco soon joined him.

  Gradually, they left the lower bowels of the organotower and climbed a series of spiral staircases made of what appeared human, or animal, bone. Franco halted, halfway up, and fingered the smooth ivory surface.

  “Definitely feels like bone to me,” he announced. “How the hell does a vegetable grow bones?”

  Xakus smiled a sick smile. “The organotower is a kind of alien genetic construction; and just because it’s vegetable, doesn’t mean it’s a herbivore.”

  Franco stared hard. Realisation dripped like honey into his pill-addled brain. “You mean... you mean it eats people?”

  “Digests is a better word. It has no mouth.”

  “And you brought us inside, you madman?”

  “I was under the impression,” said Xakus, voice tight, black features scowling in the eerie gloom, “that you brought me here; that you needed my help. I’m just a guide. A translator. A decoder. For the good of mankind, right? Help the war effort against the junks?” He laughed. “Damn that bastard Steinhauer. He’s got me by the balls.”

  “I never did ask why you were helping,” said Keenan, watching Xakus in the limited light provided by torches. Around them, organic walls filled with strips of muscle pulsated. Beneath their boots sat the reconstituted bone of the digested unfortunate.

  “Let’s just say I owe Steinhauer my life. He stopped NanoTek from... well, that’s another story. A story of betrayal, blackmail and espionage.” Xakus laughed. It was filled with bitterness. “You’ve always got to ask yourself the question, Keenan. Who do you trust?”

  “I trust no man.”

  “I learnt that lesson the hard way. Come on. It gets more civilised above. Unfortunately, that also means we’ll have company.”

  “The Syndicate?”

  Xakus smiled. “That would be a reasonable assumption. And they’ll be armed.”

  Franco cocked his Kekras. “Good. I’m sick of killing unfortunate accidents whose only crime was sucking the wrong pill at the wrong time. I want me some real payback.”

  “You know where they’ll be keeping Mel?”

  “Where else? Voloshko’s Bedroom.”

  “Bedroom?” Franco frowned. “What do you mean, his bedroom? I don’t like the sound of that!”

  Xakus scratched at his matted hair. “Let’s just say Voloshko is renowned for his... esoteric tastes.”

  ~ * ~

  Keenan and Franco crouched, waiting. The heat had increased to furnace level, and sweat poured from the men mingled with vegetable juice and dribbles of hardening vomit. There came a heavy, rhythmical bass sound from up ahead.

  Cam disappeared, scouting ahead in an attempt to find Voloshko and “to assess the level of threat for purposes of health and safety”.

  Xakus, who had called the halt, back-tracked to Combat K. He was shaking his head. “We can’t go on.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Nothing’s too dangerous for the men of Combat K!” beamed Franco. He pushed forward, eager. “Let me see!”

  With Keenan by his elbow, Franco advanced. The floor was slippery with green jelly and a slime of organic dribble. Suddenly, the floor fell away into a large cavern supported by huge bones—what looked like giant ribs. However, it was the sight below that churned their stomachs.

  “Is that what I think it is?” said Keenan softly.

  Franco nodded. “It is.” He blinked. Shivered. “It’s... It’s a... it’s a fucking disco.”

  Both men stared at the strange, sobering sight. Other than the encompassing bass rhythm it was a silent disco filled with ambling, bumping, aimlessly meandering zombies. Not hundreds of them, but thousands. They filled the chamber, packed tight, occasionally giving low moans as they squeezed past one another or nudged aimlessly and repeatedly at other zombies, or the walls, or the supporting bone columns. Above, coloured lights whirled and spun, strobe-lights giving short machine-gun bursts of white to turn the scene into a rave, man, a fuckin’ rave. Mad for it! Franco and Keenan stared at one another, then back down to the insane spectacle arraigned before them. Suddenly, there came a crackle as music blared out, reverberating deafeningly throughout the chamber. It was Ronan Keating’s Life is a Rollercoaster. Ronan was one of rock’s Eternals. Like Cliff Richard, and Elvis, he would never die, down and down through millennia, songs reissued, rerecorded, repackaged and supporting the H-section undercarriage of popular contemporary music. Franco groaned. “I tell you, Keenan, even in a zombie-infested pit-disco inside an anal vegetable bowel-pit, you can’t get away from Ronan.” Bizarrely, the zombies started to amble faster, a kind of enlarged version of Brownian motion jiggling in their disco squalor amidst millions of whirling, coloured lights and zaps from the starship-sized strobe flickers. Franco felt himself going light headed. Quite insane. But then again, that might have been the drugs. Or lack of.

  “What a hellzone,” said Franco, voice hushed in awe.

  “I don’t know, it looks quite interesting.”

  “What, the brain-dead living-dead rotting-dead bopping to an insane tune with no sense of style, rhythm or élan?” Franco considered this. “Actually mate, you might be right. What concerns me, however, is how we get across. Any ideas, bro’?”

  Keenan watched as a fight broke out, and three zombies bore another deformed biomod victim to the ground. They bit free his face, black blood arcing and dribbling, then fed on his brains until nothing more than a bone-ringed empty fruit-husk of a skull remained. The triumphant, and now partially-fed, zombies howled, lifting gnarled and broken hands in the air and drooling blood and mucus and gore. A cackle roared around the disco like discharging static, and several zombies attacked other zombies, feeding and drooling and caving in skulls to feed on the brains of their half-dead horribly deformed comrades.

  “I’m going to be sick,” said Franco.

  “Yeah,” nodded Keenan, “Ronan has that effect on me as well.”

  “There’s no way across,” said Xakus, appearing suddenly behind the two men and nearly getting a bullet in his brain for his trouble. He eyed the four barrels of Franco’s Kekra, an inch from his nose, thoughtfully. “Franco, tell me you’ve got the safety switch on?”

  “Nope. That would be silly.”

  “Doesn’t a Kekra have a hairline trigger?”

  “Yep.”

  “So you nearly blew my head clean off?”

  “Yep.” Franco leered at him. “So don’t fucking sneak up on me, OK? Or I’ll never find Mel, and brains are so damned hard to clean off the matt finish of a Kekra’s quad barrel. You have to scrub and scrub for ages. You have to use a pan-scrub, and detergent, and everything. OK?”

  “I hear you, Franco. Loud and clear.” He stared at the milling zombies. It could be argued their aimless movements were a close approximation of any disco atrocity. Only zombies had an excuse. They were brain-dead mutations.

  Xakus ran a hand throu
gh his white, frizzled hair. “This could explain why we’ve met so little resistance. I would suspect an organisation as powerful as The Hammer Syndicate of using biomods to enhance a lot of its employees. They certainly had the financial backing. So...”

  “So when the shit hit the fan, and the biomods deformed their hosts, the deviation took the majority of the Syndicate’s staff with it?” Keenan rubbed his stubbled chin. “Sounds possible. That’s if it was the biomods. But I thought Hammer had something to do with the cracking and pirating? Providing a service to the No-Creds of The City?”