by Darrell Pitt
Over the course of his career, he ran every kind of scam you can imagine. His speciality in the early days was selling the Brooklyn Bridge. So many people eventually believed they were the rightful owners of the bridge that a brawl erupted on the bridge during a public meeting. The bridge was destroyed in the ensuing battle.
Smith moved on to bigger and better things, selling moons, planets and even a few stars.
On the run from the authorities, he started inventing his own religions. These hinged on the fact that doomsday was around the corner and only one person held the key to salvation—Quasido Smith.
‘So,’ Nicki said, trying to make sense of all this, ‘your ancestors moved down here because…?’
‘Quasido Smith said it would save us,’ Gastanon said, ‘from the end of the world.’
‘Well,’ Astrid said. ‘You must be pleased that the world still exists.’
Still exists.
The words echoed around the interior of the cavern.
Gastanon spoke slowly, struggling to piece together the puzzle. ‘You’re saying Quasido Smith was a conman and everything is fine up above.’
‘I wouldn’t exactly say fine,’ Blake said.
‘Oh,’ Gastanon said, looking relieved.
‘But pretty good.’
Nicki and Astrid agreed.
‘You’re saying everything is okay.’ Gastanon looked out at the crowd in dismay. ‘We’ve slaved away for two centuries to build Perfection and you’re saying it’s built on a lie. That the deprivation, pain, humiliation and daily torment we’ve suffered is…okay?’
‘Um…well…’ Blake said.
Astrid chimed up. ‘You should be proud of yourselves,’ she said. ‘You’re living here in peace and harmony. You’re living here in…Perfection.’
‘Perfection?’ Gastanon’s face twitched. ‘We’re living in a hole in the ground. A dirty, grubby underground bunker.’ He spun around, wildly. ‘Do you know how many people I’ve wanted to punch in the face?’ He pointed at a man in the audience. ‘Starting with you!’ He picked up the microphone stand and hurled it. ‘You never take out the rubbish on time—and I’m sick of it!’
The microphone stand hit the stranger in the head and rebounded into someone else’s face. They punched someone who had nothing to do with anything. Another person grabbed the stand and started stabbing people at random.
‘Kill you!’ Gastanon screamed. ‘I’m going to kill—’
Whatever else he had to say was stifled as he leapt into the crowd.
Within seconds the audience was involved in the biggest brawl since the riots of 2309. Knives were produced, gardening implements were raised and axes thrown. Blood and body parts began to fly.
‘I think we should go,’ Blake said.
‘No arguments here,’ Astrid said.
They pushed through the crowd, carving their way to an exit. Within minutes they had reached the elevator, where Nicki made a pleasant discovery.
‘Look,’ she said, pointing down. ‘There’s a button with a sign above it.’
‘What’s it say?’ Blake asked.
‘Push to reinitialise elevator.’
She pushed the button, the doors opened wide and they slipped in. The sound of screaming and fighting died away as the doors slid shut.
Nicki shook her head. ‘Eternal peace,’ she said, as she pushed Up. ‘It never lasts.’
15
‘What do you want now?’ Bartholomew Badde asked.
‘A Game Prism would be a good start,’ Lisa said. ‘And a bag of bacon-flavoured chips. Oh, and a bottle of Hypergo.’
‘You’re too young to be drinking Hypergo.’
‘Who are you? My mother?’
‘I’m just saying—’
‘And it’s waaay too dark in here,’ Lisa said, peering about. ‘Really unpleasant.’
The jail looked like something from olden times. Maybe even ancient Rome. The cell had only one window—a small, barred frame set high on the other side of the room—and contained a bunk bed and a chair.
The only modern thing in the room, unfortunately, was the triple-digitised combination lock attached to the bars. Lisa thought she could crack it if she tried every single combination, but that would probably take about 7,000,000 years.
Badde himself was thin and bald, with a neat black moustache. The wrinkles around his eyes made him look like he was sixty, but he moved like a man half that age. He wore a plain grey suit, white button-down shirt and black shoes.
‘It’s supposed to be unpleasant,’ Badde said. ‘You’re a hostage, and I’m the greatest diabolical genius in history, responsible for crimes across the galaxy. My name will go down in history with—’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Lisa said. ‘Yada, yada, yada.’
‘Yada—what?’
‘Yada—as in, I’ve heard it all before.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Evil criminal geniuses are always doing nasty things. That’s how they’re programmed.’
‘But I am the most evil genius in history.’
‘I know, and it’s nice to have goals, but you need to be ready for when things go wrong.’
‘Things won’t go wrong.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ Lisa said, patiently. ‘But there’s always that part of the movie where the evil genius says, “Okay, Mr Jones, I’ve got to leave now to bake some cookies while you’re slowly lowered into a vat of bubbling acid.” The villain leaves, and the hero uses his absence to escape.’
‘But your name isn’t Jones and I don’t have a vat of bubbling acid,’ Badde said, frowning. ‘Mind you, it’s not a bad idea…’
‘But you see what I mean,’ Lisa said. ‘And besides, you don’t want damaged goods.’
‘I don’t?’
‘I’m worth money. Lots of money. But hostage negotiations can take forever. I might be here for years.’
‘You won’t be here for years. Once I get those Brady Bunch episodes underway—’
‘I’ll admit they’re pretty revolting,’ Lisa said. It was in fact the worst television show she’d ever seen. ‘But don’t you know a happy hostage is a compliant hostage?’
Badde considered this. ‘I suppose I can turn on the lights,’ he said. ‘That’s easy.’
‘And I need Chuckie’s Chicken.’
‘Whose chicken?’
Lisa Carter looked at Badde as if he’d grown a second head.
Zeeb says:
You may have seen my documentary, The Spontaneous Generation of Second Heads on Delorius Prime. The whole issue is really quite disconcerting. It makes you wonder why anyone lives there. One second you’re eating breakfast with your partner, the next they have another head protruding from their shoulder.
No one has ever come up with an explanation for the heads, who have no memory of previous lives. Most are quite pleasant, however, working with their newly acquired bodies to make Delorius Prime a better world, proving that two heads really are better than one.
‘You’ve never heard of Chuckie’s Chicken!’ Lisa exclaimed. ‘Where have you been living?’
Badde folded his arms. ‘I’ve been busy.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Oh, the usual evil things. Robberies, forgeries assaults.’
Lisa sighed. ‘Anyway, I’ll have the Chuckie Two Pack with chips,’ she said. ‘Extra chocolate salt on the chips, and don’t forget my bottle of Hypergo.’
When Badde left, Lisa stood in the centre of the cell for another moment before carefully stepping backwards and falling onto her bed.
At last. Now she could relax.
Despite her bravado, her heart had been pounding the whole time she was talking to Badde. She had gotten the upper hand—for now—but she wasn’t sure how long that would last. It looked like he had turned nasty into an art form.
And I’m his canvas, she thought.
Lisa’s heart eventually stopped thudding. The room had gone quiet, apart from the occasional wheeze of an i
nterplanetary shuttle passing by, or the shudder of an orbital lift carrying people into space. Both were close by, but they gave no clue as to her location.
She had been walking home from the 704th level Super-Mall when a shadowy figure had stepped from a dark alley and shot her with a stun gun. Her next conscious thought had been when she woke up in this mangy cell with a killer headache.
‘Sprot,’ she said. ‘And double sprot.’
According to Badde, her father had to retrieve the Maria virus or she would be made to pay. Lisa wondered how he was doing. She had not spoken to him in years, but once or twice she thought she’d spotted him lurking outside her school. Not talking to him all this time had hurt her, but she hurt even more when she thought about her birthday party.
It had been the most embarrassing day of her life. She had promised all the girls that he was going to make an amazing appearance—maybe skydiving in from the edge of space or teleporting into the middle of the living room. Instead he had surprised her by not turning up at all.
She’d mostly become used to being disappointed. After all, how many times could someone be let down before it became second nature? But Lisa couldn’t forget the look on Martha Farnworth’s face. The girl’s family was made of old money, earned seven centuries before by an ancestor who had owned a thimble factory.
‘Maybe your dad had to work,’ Martha had suggested. ‘There are lots of people who still do that.’
Martha wasn’t being intentionally cruel. She had looked concerned.
And that hurt.
Today Lisa had realised something she had forgotten. Despite his many failings, she still loved her father.
The cell seemed to close in around her. She tried to quell the quaking in her stomach. Her parents weren’t the sort to sit back and do nothing, and neither was she.
Bartholomew Badde might think he has the upper hand, she thought. But he doesn’t know what he’s letting himself in for.
16
Blake marvelled at his own stupidity. He had successfully landed himself in yet another dark and smelly place.
Why does this always happen to me?
This dark and smelly place, like so many others, was filled with strange sounds. They were made by rats—or Blake hoped they were.
The elevator had deposited the three of them in a tunnel that Nicki had quickly confirmed led to the Global Arms Defence Organisation. It had been a relief at first to be away from Perfection, but now Blake had the unpleasant feeling they were being followed.
He shone the torch behind them, cutting the gloom like a laser. The large tunnel had railway tracks, and disused pipes along the walls. It was obvious no one had been down here for years. Maybe centuries.
‘What is it?’ Astrid asked.
‘Just checking,’ Blake said.
‘Like hell. What’s back there?’
They all peered into the distance, a wall of solid black far beyond the range of the torch.
‘I can’t see anything,’ Blake said.
‘Me neither,’ Astrid said.
‘My eyes, despite their radiant beauty,’ Nicki said, ‘can’t make out anything either, though I can check my other sensors.’
As she held out an arm, a patch of golden skin slid sideways and a radar dish popped out. It spun around, beeped a few times and rapidly snapped back out of sight.
‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘that’s a worry. I’m getting unusually high levels of radiation.’
‘Radiation?’ Astrid said. ‘What’s that?’
‘Back in the 20th century,’ Nicki explained, ‘primitive humans had a brief and unsuccessful flirtation with nuclear energy.’
‘What sort of idiots were they?’
‘Well, on the Hopkins Chart of Idiot Behaviour, they ranked—’
‘Never mind,’ Blake interrupted. ‘Just tell us if we’re in any danger?’
‘That depends on your definition of we,’ Nicki said. ‘My deutronium skin is virtually indestructible, so I could live down here for centuries with no ill effects.’
‘And what about us?’
‘You’ll be fine, just as long as you don’t mind losing all your hair, your teeth falling out, and ending up looking like a prune—’
‘How long have we got?’
‘Your organs will suffer irreparable damage in about an hour,’ Nicki said. ‘After that you will both be reduced to melted bags of glow-in-the-dark goo.’
‘What a relief,’ Astrid said. ‘I thought we might be in trouble.’
‘My map shows that this tunnel reaches a junction in about a mile. The walls are reinforced there and should protect us.’
‘Then we’d better hurry,’ Blake said.
Doubling their speed, they rushed down the tunnel. They didn’t see the creature slithering after them. It had existed quite happily for hundreds of years without interference. But now it had been disturbed—and it didn’t like it.
Where it came from, or how it had come into being, was beyond the creature’s comprehension. All it knew was that it did not exist and then it did. There was the before and there was the after. Of the before, it knew nothing. In the after, it found itself surrounded by cold, moist blackness. Over time, it gradually came to realise that other living things also inhabited this strange ecosystem.
It also knew it was hungry.
Mostly, the creature was satisfied by a diet of rats and passing cockroaches. Once, many years before, a stray dog had fallen down an ancient ventilation shaft, landing only a few feet away.
The dog’s name was Casper and he had broken one of his legs. Whimpering, he had limped about in the dark. There was a strange smell down here, Casper thought. A cheesy smell.
Then Casper stepped onto something spongy and warm. Before he could react, Casper was abruptly folded in half, chopped into multiple pieces, sucked down a six-inch digestive tract and reduced to acidic sludge.
Zeeb says:
Did I mention there’d be yucky bits?
The creature still remembered the taste of the dog, often recalling its demise with great pleasure. Or what passed for pleasure. It remembered the myriad scents it had picked up from the dog before its death—strange, tantalising odours that teased it with hints of another world.
The creature had often wondered about that world.
Today, some of it had intruded into its domain.
It had begun with:
Clang. Clang. Clang.
Then—
‘You’re on my foot!’
‘You weigh a ton!’
‘Get off my hand!’
The sounds had meant little to the creature, but the scents had piqued its interest. One of the newcomers held no more appeal than a brick, but the other two were positively…desirable. They could be its best meal in two centuries.
‘Garrrfffff,’ it said.
The cry carried down the long tunnel to where Blake had just climbed over a rockfall where the ceiling had collapsed.
‘Did you hear that?’
‘I did,’ Nicki said. ‘I think we’re being followed.’
‘By what?’ Blake asked.
‘Well, it’s a thing.’
‘A thing?’ Blake stared at her. ‘An IQ of 30,000,000 and the best you can come up with is It’s a thing?’
‘Okay.’ Nicki paused. ‘It’s a really big thing.’
‘Let’s just get moving,’ Astrid said. ‘Whatever it is, we should keep our distance.’
They hurried down the tunnel, but the sound of slithering, accompanied by a wheezing growl, grew closer.
‘We haven’t known each other long,’ Nicki said to the others. ‘But I’ve grown quite fond of you.’
‘Thank you, Nicki,’ Astrid said.
‘I’d hate to see you devoured by an underground monster.’
‘Nice of you to say,’ Blake said.
‘To see you torn limb from limb,’ Nicki continued. ‘To see your eyes sucked from their sockets, to see your headless corpses—’
‘We get
the idea.’
‘Uh oh,’ Astrid said.
‘Uh oh—what?’ Blake asked.
But in the next instant he knew. The tunnel abruptly ended at a concrete wall.
‘What the sprot is this?’ Blake said.
‘Oh dear,’ Nicki said. ‘The maps haven’t been updated.’
Zeeb says:
This is not unusual in Neo City. Possibly the most bizarre case of poor planning by the Neo City Council occurred when they fought for three years to have an old building demolished, only to discover it was its own council building.
Only a flurry of last-minute letters submitted in triplicate, a petition signed by 1,000,000 voters and a personal plea from the Earth’s president saved it from demolition.
‘I think it’s a sewerage pipe,’ Nicki said. ‘Breaking through would flood the tunnel. I’d be fine, but those of us who need oxygen would have problems.’
Another growl rolled down the tunnel from behind.
‘That sounds closer,’ Astrid said.
‘It is.’ Nicki studied her datapad. ‘This is interesting. The thing, uh, the really big thing, is a result of radioactive waste.’ She did a double take. ‘That’s very odd.’
Before Nicki could define very odd, Astrid raised a shaking arm and pointed to the rockfall they had crossed only a minute before. Something had filled the gap above it.
Something dark. Something large.
The creature slithered resolutely over the obstacle, raised what passed for a head and sniffed the air with what could optimistically be called a nose.
Blake froze. Would their blasters work on the creature?
He made a tiny hand motion to the others to remain still. Maybe if the creature didn’t see them, it would assume it had lost its prey and slither back to whatever hellhole it called home. Its ‘head’ moved about like a slug testing the air.
The creature seemed frustrated, as if sensing it had lost the trail, and slowly began to turn around.
It’s working! Blake thought. It’s—
‘Yippee!’ Nicki screamed. ‘Come and get us, you sprot eater!’
