by Andy Remic
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.
"Just fix these round your waists, girls," said Paddy, grinning from his lopsided head like a jelly monster from the darkest corner of gelatine hell. "Then, Zegg will have the guys haul you up."
As Paddy reached around Franco to grab a rope, he bumped his jelly-bean head into Franco's fake chest and one of the eyes looked up and closed, then opened. With heart-stopping revulsion Franco realised Paddy was actually actually fucking winking at him.
"Like the beard," said Paddy, nose teeth clicking. "Gives a guy something to, y'know, hang on to."
"Argh," said Franco, as the ropes went taut.
Swiftly, Combat K were hauled into the sky and the hell of medically-engineered deformity fell away. Now, they witnessed the bustle of activity in the mammoth chamber, as all around airships were being loaded in a likewise manner, some using ropes, many using ladders up which deformed nurse and doctor and patient squaddies attempted to climb. It was like some mammoth freakshow circus act. To one side, two of the zeppelins had peeled away and were making their way silently through the vastness of the cavern. The noise also dropped away and Franco glanced up to where some kind of mechanical winches were clicking at high speed, winding the ropes into slots above black iron cages.
"This is weird," said Fizzy, breathless in the cold air as they rose.
"This is hell," snapped Shazza.
"But at least that weirdo pervert Paddy isn't coming," said Franco, with a shudder which ended in the unconvincing wobble of his fake boobs.
"I think he take liking to you, fat man!" chuckled Olga, her little piggy eyes sparkling. "I think Franco a stud in this place, Franco a little pot-bellied gigolo in this place! Har har! You could settle down! Get yourself a deformo harem! Raise yourself some genetic mutations and play football with them at ze weekends. Many will have four or five legs, no? Great footballers! Yes, what is ze saying? Franco could have 2.4 freaks, har har har."
"Yeah yeah, laugh it up on your mush, Olga. How do you know there's not some huge monstrosity waiting for you on this airship? Eh? Eh? Maybe you're the one who's about to fall in love."
"Impossible," said Olga, smiling at Franco toothily. "I'm already in love."
Ropes slowed in their ascent, and Combat-K touched boots (or in Franco's case, one bare foot, one sandal) to the metal cage platform. They undid their ropes, and climbed the steps to find - row after row after row of seated soldiers, all wearing backless gowns, all bearing long slim guns, all wearing odd heads and too many limbs.
Franco glanced around, his practised eye taking in the Zeppelin3's weaponry. At the nose, there were four huge barrels attached by braided hoses to tanks which fell away beneath the airship. He nudged Shazza. "You see those?"
"What about them?"
"Military flamethrowers. Roasters. They call them Gordons."
"Gordons what?"
"Just Gordons."
"What, and they have them stashed just below fifty trillion tonnes of explosive gas?"
Franco considered this. "Dumb," he agreed. Then he nudged Shazza again. "And you see down there?"
She followed his pointing stubby finger, to where the airship carried long finned slots. "Go on, genius, what are they?"
"Kekra Mini-Halo Missiles."
"They're awesome," butt in Fizzy. "I've seen them in action! They were banned, weren't they?"
"Highly unstable," said Franco, nodding. "It's the T6 explosive, needs to be kept quite warm. Drop it below a certain temp and kaboom." He waggled his eyebrows.
"Kaboom?"
"Big bad badda boom," he said, straight-faced.
"So, for example, taking them out into an icy wasteland?"
"Bad move," said Franco.
Up at the head of the pew-like rows filled with deformed squaddies was a kind of open cockpit, and they could see a small, pot-bellied man standing there in an emerald green uniform, waving to the four "nurses" to join him.
The squad picked their way between the hundreds and hundreds of seated soldiers, tense and wary, feeling as if they were walking deeper into the lion's den, and subtly aware of eyes, far too many eyes, sometimes far too many eyes on the same face, all watching their tight-clad arses. There was a distinct atmosphere of happy misogyny.
As they approached, each Combat-K member was thinking, this is it, the test. Could they pass as a crack medical nurse squad? Or would they be immediately rumbled and mown down in a hail of bullets? Franco didn't have much faith.
"Hello!" roared the little man, belly pouch bouncing, holding his hand out in greeting. Above his unusually normal quota of limbs sat a tall head which was kind of curved, and bent, with a fat top-knot nipple. The arcing head was yellow, and looked just a little bit like a banana. At school, his nickname would have had to have been banana-head. Kids were cruel like that. "I'm Zegg, I'm the Para-Medic in charge of Zeppelin3. Welcome to my Air Ambulance! You nurses with rumpy pumpy arses are much welcome!"
"Thank you," said Franco, affecting a completely unbelievable high-pitched female squeak. "It's, um, good to be here."
Zegg eyed the four nurses, his banana-head tilting at a curious angle. It's like he's wearing a fruit-salad mask, thought Franco, and snorted, almost bursting into a panicked and hysterical laughter. He clamped his tongue between his teeth and bit until he could taste blood. Now was not the time for la
ughter. Now was a time to die.
"Who was your Mentor?" asked Zegg, slowly.
Franco flapped, his eyes growing wide, and he became solidly aware of the D5 in his hands. Blow Zegg's head off, grab the controls of the zeppelin, and send it careering for the ground. That would be their only chance at escape when rumbled...
Shazza stepped forward and smiled. "It was Sabrina," she said, smoothly, eyeing Franco with a calm-down-you-idiot stare.
"Ahh," said Zegg, relaxing, "from the Porn Squad. That's great." He eyed the four unlikely nurses up and down, then gave a large, leering grin. "You should happily be up for entertaining the troops during the flight to the battleground," he said, nodding approvingly. "Some of the lads are a bit nervous. They could do with some fun sexual relief."
Slowly, Franco, Olga, Fizzy and Shazza stared back at the hundreds of deformed mutations. Franco coughed, and glanced at Zegg, who was once again staring intently at Franco's bosom like a sniffer-dog worrying a bag of dope.
"I've got to say, girls, Dr. Bleasedale did a fine job on you."
"How so?" squeaked Franco, in his unbelievable falsetto voce.
Zegg nodded, as if in appreciation of fine art or a priceless sculpture. "Wow. She really went to work on you four; you're the most freakish, twisted and deviated surgical mutations I've ever, ever seen!"
Turning back to the controls, the Zeppelin3 began to rise, a pebble in the vastness of the cavern, its nose turning and following the first two vacating airships. Franco glanced at Olga, and gave a weak smile.
"At least it can't get any worse," muttered the ginger-bearded nurse squaddie.
"Hello hello again!" came a voice, and down the gantries strode the red-velvet figure of Paddy, his vertical stacked eyes blinking, his nose teeth clacking. He stopped alongside Combat K. "Thought I'd hitch a lift to battle along with this crew, hope you don't mind Zegg, old chum?"
"No problem Paddy! The more the merrier! We all love to build bridges around here! Ah har ha ha!" They laughed, a comedy duo of freaks in a not-very-funny situation, linked in a deviant union by sick medical mutation. Whoever said plastic surgeons didn't have a sense of humour?
