Biohell (38 page)

“I suppose not,” muttered Franco,
feeling like a naive little boy.

“Could you stop this large-scale
mutation?” asked Keenan, head tilted to one side, eyes fixed on Xakus.
Suddenly, a crazy plan started to form in his whirling brain—a plan which would
no doubt be incredibly, awesomely, frighteningly dangerous... but which could,
if it worked, put a stop to this insanity. Once and for all. “After all, you
helped design the biomods.”

“Not these incarnations,” said
Xakus. “But... yes, technically, I know how to shut them down.”

“You mean you can switch them
off?” blurted Franco.

The professor smiled. “Nanobots
are machines, Francis. Like any other machine, they can be powered down.”

“But it’s not easy, right? Or
NanoTek would have pulled the plug.”

Xakus nodded. “Or maybe NanoTek
have been shut down by the biomods—the zombies—themselves? Maybe the machines
became self-aware; maybe the monster turned on its maker?”

“More and more questions seem to
lead to NanoTek. I assume they have a HQ?”

Xakus nodded, as another
boom
rattled
the building. Franco’s nostrils twitched as he recognised the scent of
explosive; Knuckles turned, heading off to get a look at the situation outside.

“Yes. The Black Rose Citadel. A
fortress island. Impregnable. Anti-aircraft. Anti-nuke. The NanoTek HQ descends
beneath the island, and beneath the ocean for two or three kilometres.”

“You think the zombies have taken
control?”

“A possibility,” said Xakus,
licking his lips. “It is the logical source from which this flood of deviancy
poured. It is there NanoTek have the GreenSource Mainframe. Without that, so I
believe, the biomods would not function. NanoTek would have pulled the plug by
now if they could. And the zombies outside... well, they just wouldn’t work without
GreenSource.”

Keenan rubbed his temples, then
turned to Franco. “Listen mate, if we can get Mel and Xakus to the NanoTek HQ,
there’s a chance we can do something—not just for Melanie, but for all those
poor bastards out there. Otherwise...” He shrugged. “We sit here and twiddle
our thumbs.”

“I thought you were here to
decode the Sin-Script?”

Keenan shook his head. “It’s all
fucked up, Franco. All connected—somehow. I’m just trying to work out the
puzzle; but this shit going down here in The City, the biomods, the zombie
deviations— they’re linked to the junks and the invasion of Galhari.” He
grimaced. “I can feel it in my fucking
bones.
”

Franco gestured to Keenan, and
they moved away from the group. Again, a detonation rocked the Great Malkovitch
Library. More books toppled from shelves. Tutting and clucking like mother
hens, the aged academics started picking the tomes from the ground as if they
were rare and expensive crystal.

“Listen,” said Franco, out the
corner of his mouth, “he said
that name.
The bad one. The one we agreed
never to discuss.”

Keenan nodded, eyes locked on
Franco’s. “Xakus said the junks are the servants of Leviathan. But we killed
it. Didn’t we? We blew the singularity chains—watched it annihilated by the
black fire, then sucked into that bastard black hole.”

“We didn’t see shit,” said
Franco. “Did we really understand what was going on—on that screwed-up world?
Teller’s World—the devourer of millions? It was alien to us, Keenan. Truly
alien.”

The two men were discussing their
last, and most devastating, adventure. Keenan, tortured by the memories of his
murdered wife and children, had taken a mission to locate and steal a fabled
artefact called The Fractured Emerald—which could prophesise the future, but
also see into the past. Keenan was promised the name of the killer who murdered
his family in return. Only The Fractured Emerald turned out not to be a jewel,
but instead, a woman— or at least, a
female.
An alien female named
Emerald, from an age-old extinct race—the
Kabirrim.
Emerald wanted to go
home, to be strong again, so that she could finally elect to die—to discover
ultimate peace. Keenan, Franco and Pippa had escorted her to the dangerous and
prohibited planet of Teller’s World, a barren desolate ball of soul-devouring
rock. However, travelling far beneath the world, towards its core, Combat K
soon discovered the world was far from conventional, and was in fact a
prison-sphere holding an incarcerated
being
in the cage of a stabilised
singularity. The alien being was Leviathan, classified a GODRACE, one of the
original Five Great Creators. Only, Leviathan had gone bad, turned sour, become
The Eater, The Devourer of Worlds. Unwittingly, Combat K helped Emerald to free
him from his chains; only to swiftly put a spanner in the gears of the plan,
detonating the prison cage—and Teller’s World in its entirety—and consigning
Leviathan to a bleak and final extinction. Or so they had believed.

Now, it would seem, Leviathan’s
slaves were expanding, invading, conquering. That could only be a
bad
thing.

“We saw him crushed in that black
hole,” said Keenan.

“No. That’s what we wanted to
see. Pippa pulled that illegal K Jump and we got the hell out. To see Leviathan
drawn down into that place...” Franco smiled, and it was cold, twisted and
angular on his face. “Well, to see that through to its finale, Keenan, we’d
have to have joined him.”

“What now?” Keenan took a deep
breath. “If Leviathan exists...”

“One step at a time, compadre.”
Franco patted him on the back. “We’re not supermen! Well, at least you’re not.
First we sort out Mel, and this SinScript. Hopefully it will tell us what we
need to know about the junks. Maybe they have nothing to do with Leviathan.
Maybe they fancy a bit of conquering all on their own. When we decode the
SinScript, then we’ll see what threat lies beyond.”

“Yes.”

Knuckles appeared at the top of
the slope leading down from the higher tiers of the library’s unconventional
internal structure. “Keenan!” he shouted, voice just a little too high, tinged
with panic.

“Yeah lad?”

“You’d better come and see this.”

“Is it important?”

“It’s the zombies. They’ve
brought tanks.”

~ * ~

Keenan,
Franco, Olga and Xakus ran after Knuckles up the ramp, which sprung softly
under pounding boots. They were followed by a straggled line of limping,
geriatric academics brandishing a bristling array of weaponry that would make
any platoon weep with promise of wargasm.

Knuckles led, and Keenan,
sprinting, soon felt the effects of too much booze, too many cigarettes, and a
few years of gross physical abuse. He was tired. Exhausted. Filled with pain,
and taunted by angst. As Franco would say, this gig was turning into
a
proper hell mission from hell!

They reached the fourth floor,
and Knuckles powered ahead, out under an ornate archway with a thousand
intricacies of gothic carving, across fake alloy-stone flags to a curled
balcony. Outside, the flames had died down, the zombies presumably having
either exhausted their fuel, or readying themselves for another stage of
onslaught.

“There.” Knuckles pointed.

Keenan reached the balcony, with
Franco, Olga and Xakus. Heavy smoke filled the air, along with an acidic stench
of fire. The balcony stone beneath their hands was hot. Embers glittered in the
dark like fireflies. Keenan squinted.

Below, the zombie warhost stood
arraigned in eerie silence. Many heads were turned, staring back across the
once picturesque plaza. They started to part, shambling aside as deep, booming
engines revved and a massive tank came belching from the rear, down a narrow
street between towering black skyscrapers. It had a 45-degree sloping glacis
leading to a flat hull top. Twin 250mm canons stared with evil, oval eyes.

“That’s a Mammoth Mk13,” said
Franco, voice quiet, reverent, almost unheard over the still crackling fire
below.

Keenan nodded. “No flesh shall be
spared,” he said. “That’s some damn hardware.”

Belching thick smoke, the tank
thundered from the street, engine reverberations booming between towering
blocks. Quad tracks ate rubble, mounted a ground car and crushed it easily into
a pancaked bean tin with organic squeals.

“The thing is, can it get through
the armoured doors below?” said Franco.

“Maybe not on its own,” said
Keenan. “But look.”

As the Mammoth Mk13 rumbled onto
the plaza, churning plastic grass and mowing down small trees, from the smoke
of its inelegant wake came another Mammoth, then another, another, until six
units spread out and halted, rumbling, twelve guns pointing directly at The
Great Malkovitch Library.

“Haha,” said Franco, without a
smile. “I think it was time we made a sharp exit.”

“How the hell did zombies learn
to drive tanks?”

“Remembered genetics?” said
Franco.

Keenan looked at him sideways. “That’s
quite good. For you.”

“Hey, I’m not just some uncouth,
misogynistic, beer-drinking, heterosexual power-house, with no appreciation of
the finer points of science, literature and art.” He farted. “Am I?”

“You could have fooled me,” said
Keenan, eyeing the tanks. He glanced at Xakus. “You mentioned a back door? A
way out?”

The tanks revved, and suddenly
one fired, rocking on heavy suspension. Twin booms filled the plaza, and 250mm
armour-piercing shells slammed across the clearing and connected with the
library. The building shook. High up, stones detached from roof ledges and
clattered like cobble rain around the group. They sprinted back to the
sanctuary of the interior, and Xakus nodded as more shells smacked the library
and the world was filled with noise and violence and heavy metal aggression.

“It’s not exactly a back door,”
shouted Xakus over the screams of fire and detonation. “But MICHELLE
will
help
us escape.”

“Who’s Michelle?” shouted Franco.

“You’ll see!”

The library was in chaos, pounded
by the six tanks. The front of the building was crumbling, disintegrating under
a howling onslaught. Outside, zombies were clawing at the rubble... a little
too eagerly, for the tanks continued to fire and many zombies were blasted to
merge with stones and marble. As the group sped back down ramps to ground level
where the main doors—incredibly— were still holding, although battered and limp
and allowing flames to lick through, so more explosions rocked the building and
several flaming zombies were catapulted through gaps leaving flaming trails
through the air to connect with walls, limp and bloody, and rolling to a stop
where they set scattered books alight. The group of aged academics had a quick
conference, leaning on shotguns, and Keenan glanced from the old men to Xakus.

“What’s going on? We need to
move.”

“They will not leave.”

“That’s crazy,” snapped Keenan. “This
place is about to be overrun!” Even as he spoke, they could hear zombies
dragging at the flaming debris stacked against the building. Many zombies
caught fire, and blazed merrily through the gaps in the armoured doors. Not one
screamed.

One old man, with wispy white
hair and watery, rheumy old eyes, glared at Keenan. He loaded a D4 shotgun with
liver-spotted hands, and grinned with a mouth of missing teeth. “Just because
we’re old, doesn’t mean we don’t still have fire! You young ‘uns get gone,
MICHELLE couldn’t carry us all anyway... we will stay here, protect the
library... protect the books.” He looked incredibly sad, for a moment. “We won’t
let those bastards burn ‘em. This ain’t nineteen-forty-four.”

Keenan nodded, filled with a
sadness and respect as the old academics formed a shuffling line and readied
themselves for the zombie charge. Again, bombs rocked the building. Debris
smashed and splattered from armoured doors, revealing widening gaps through which
the zombies started to squeeze, grey-flesh hands brandishing machine guns and
pistols. The line of old academics opened fire, decimating the first row of
snarling zombies...