Hardcore - 03 (54 page)

To die.

For months, she had never considered the concept. Even during her extensive Biohell adventures, she had never once stopped to think about the risks of her actions, the possibilities of death in the violent environment in which she operated. But now, when she thought about it, thought about death, she wondered what would be in store for her.

After all, was there a God for eight-foot transmogrified mutant zombies?

Was there some kind of flesh-hanging, pus-ridden, brain-eating deity?

Did zombies have a heaven? A place where the flesh was always rotten, the brains always ripe and chilled, and people didn't run screaming the first second they laid eyes upon you?

I'm delirious, thought Mel. It must be the battering. And the loss of blood. And the loss of... Franco.

Dear, sweet Franco. Didn't he see? Didn't he realise? She had divorced him
for his own sake!
She had killed their marriage because, despite loving him to bits, she knew in her heart of hearts that a fine strapping squaddie like Franco couldn't possibly spend the rest of his life married to an eight-foot monstrosity, with breath like a fetid corpse and who got slick every time he took off his hat and exposed the pulsing beat at his temple.

Brains, y'see? thought a dazed Mel. It all came down to the brains.

Man brains, woman brains, kiddie brains; hell, even fish brains. It was all the same bucket of mush to her. They were sweet, they smelled sweet and by God they tasted finer than any vintage Champagne. Mel would swim an ocean for a platter of raw brains, she would climb a volcano, crawl across a continent of broken glass, abseil the world!

And sex? Zombies alive! Don't get Mel started on sex!

As a woman, Mel had contained a healthy sexual appetite. But as a zombie? Mel didn't understand the exact biological workings of a zombie, but by everything that was holy, her libido had increased to the extent she was milking Franco like an over-milked goat. The poor, bleating, deflated little bugger.

And now. Here. Trapped.

Trapped under a collapsed hospital. Waiting to die.

Tears formed in Mel's tiny black zombie eyes and, gathering her strength - which was considerable - she heaved at the bricks and steel around her. Muscles squirmed up and down her arms and shoulders, but nothing shifted and Mel released a pent-up breath of anger and frustration. Dust trickled over her face, and made her cough.

Entombed, she thought sombrely.

Buried alive.

How long would it take a super-strength super-zombie to die from starvation? Then a horrible thought bit her.
What if
she couldn't die from starvation? What if, being a zombie, that sort of long-drawn out agonising death was denied her? What
if
she was tougher than tough, tougher than
death
. And she would have to spend years, decades, trapped down there beneath the rubble?

"Grwll grwll mrwl brdwll," she growled, and heaved and heaved, muscles bulging, eyes bulging, heaving and straining and straining and heaving, but the steel stanchions would not shift, the rubble barely creaked, and Mel, after perhaps twenty minutes fighting her entombment, slumped back into her tiny cubby hole, shaped in a random scatter of chaos to cruelly preserve her life.

Bugger, she thought.

And wished Franco was there...

Distantly, something made a grinding sound. The ground beneath, and indeed
around,
Mel shook. Stones started to vibrate, dust trickled and blinded her. As she blinked it free the grinding accelerated into a
clanking,
a deeply-throbbing mechanical sound like some great and titanic form of earth-moving equipment.

A pounding began, and scatters of sound which thudded through the earth and hurt Mel's ears. There were scrapes and bangs, metallic squeals and Mel, with a feeling of elation, suddenly realised somebody was
digging.

Rescue! Franco had come to rescue her!

Franco, Pippa, Betezh, Olga, they had seen her buried in the rubble of the collapsing hospital and dug out some earth-moving equipment and they were attempting to free her from imprisonment. The joy! The elation! Oh how she'd give Franco the fucking of his life for this! She'd ride him till he bled, in a simple appreciation at his loyalty, at his unstinting belief in her failure to be squashed.

The pounding and grinding continued, and through vibrations she felt the digger getting closer and closer. Then a horrible thought occurred. What if the digger
dug
through her? After all, those huge bucket teeth were savage and made no distinction between flesh and brick!

Mel's teeth started to gnash and gnaw in frustration. It would be a savage and unfair death! Rescued, but murdered in the process! Oh how the God of Zombie Comedy liked his little japes! The bastard.

Suddenly, bricks and steel shifted above her, the whole world seemed to tilt and wobble and move, and a grim dull daylight flooded in. Mel realised it was evening, turning to darkness. Green tinged the bricks, and the huge shape of the digger with its seven mechanical arms, caterpillar tracks, and four huge hydraulic legs which were currently lifted above it, giving the whole giant machine the appearance of some kind of deformed robotic spider-octopus hybrid.

Quad engines droned and roared, exhaust fumes plumed, and the digger dropped again, grasping a H-section of steel weighing perhaps eight-hundred tonnes and tossing it aside easily. Mel shrugged free of her imprisoning bricks and started to wave her arms. Spotlights strobed across the scene.

"Grwll grwl!" she shouted, as the digger turned and whirled, caterpillars crushing bricks into dust. It spun again, many arms flipping and flopping, great steel limbs which suddenly dropped towards her. She ducked, to avoid decapitation, and the machine dug out another scoop of bricks.

Mel scrambled quickly up the mound of debris, waving her brown mottled arms and screeching a high-pitched zombie screech she knew might attract the driver's attention over the roar of engines. "Dwn herww!" she shouted. "Dwn herww!"

The digger whirled over her head, trailing bricks.

One bounced off Mel's domed skull, and spun off into the pit from which she'd emerged. Mel scowled, and her lower jaw moved out with
cracks
of annoyance and twisted tendon.

Suddenly, the digger quietened and spotlights swivelled on ball-joints to focus on Mel, standing atop the pile of bricks. She shielded her eyes from bright light, piercing in the fast-falling gloom of late evening, and breathed deep on engine fumes as the digger, motionless now, filled her with a sudden, quiet, dread.

"Hello?" shouted a voice.

Who was it? Betezh? Franco? Keenan?

"Grwll, grwl grwl grwwwll!" bellowed Mel.

She sensed, more than heard, the driver's uneasiness. "Oh, I'm terribly sorry, there's been a terrible misunderstanding. I saw you buried, but now I realise... I thought you were somebody else."

Thought you were somebody else?
Mel was an eight-foot super-soldier, a man-made zombie creation with mottled pus-oozing skin and a head like a football on a long, corrugated neck that wouldn't have been out of place as roofing material. Who the hell had he mistaken her for? How many zombies roamed
Sick World
?

"Grwll?" she said, and little linguistic clues clicked to form a whole. She recognised the voice. She recognised the shape in the digger's cab. Oh damn, she thought. Oh hell. It was Miller. Miller the Health and Safety Officer. Miller, the turncoat.

"Just climb back down in the 'ole, there's a good girl," Miller was shouting from the high cab. "I'll pile in a few hundred tonnes of bricks and we won't say anything else about this matter, aha haha."

Mel growled, and took a threatening step forward...

"Or maybe not," said Miller, and the digger sprang into action. Arms with teeth and buckets whirled over Mel's head, and she leapt, narrowly missing being cut in half. Despite the digger's sheer size and weight, it could move fast, and was surprisingly nimble for something weighing in at eight thousand tonnes. Caterpillar tracks crushed bricks, quad engines throbbed and Mel landed on a slope, rolling down in a tangle of bruised limbs.

The digger pursued, rumbling, and Miller shouted, "I really am sorry about this, Melanie old girl. But it seems you contravene Health and Safety regulations. You stink, a bit, you see. And you're a bit of an abomination against humanity. Ha ha!"

A spike slammed towards her, and Mel skipped sideways, arms stretching out and encircling the huge steel point. She was hoisted high into the air, the digger's arm crackling and surging, Mel's legs dangling at crazy angles as she was hurled through the green-tinged evening. She screamed, as much as a zombie could scream, and heard Miller cackling within the safety of his cockpit pod. She glimpsed his face, a demonic mask through spider-webs of cracked glass, and it was the
glee
in his face that rankled Mel more than anything and sent her surging into a bizarre zombie berserker rage.

Laugh at me, will you?

Laugh at my pus and deformities?

I'll show
you!

She climbed up the vibrating, swinging mechanical arm like Spider-man, and leapt with a feat of great agility onto the rolling cab of the digger. Miller heard the thud, and glanced up, scowling. One of the bucket arms swung towards the cab, and Mel ducked as it hissed overhead, bent, then slammed her claws through steel and peeled back the lid like the lid from a baked-bean tin.

"Argh!" squawked Miller in disbelief, and lost control of the awesome machine for just a few moments. Mel reached in, gripped him by the throat with one set of claws, and hoisted him out, dangling like a rubber rag-doll.

"Frwlcker," she growled, and shook him.

Miller did a hangman jiggle, hands clawing at Mel's muscles as he turned slowly blue. Eventually, she released him, and dropped him back into the cab where he spluttered and choked. She squeezed in beside him, and draped one arm over his shoulders in a moment of intimacy.

"Wherww werww thrww shrpwss grwing?"

"Eh?"

Mel gave him a backhand slap, the kind of lazy backhand slap which could remove a head from shoulders. Miller's spit and blood decorated the inside of the cab, and he held his hands up before his face, squeaking.

"No no no! Not the face! I wouldn't like to get, um, deformed." He stared hard at Mel's disfigured image. "No offence meant." He watched the glint in her eye, and caught on fast. "OK, OK, you want to know where your friends have gone? That's easy! Easy peasy! Look, I have this tracker." He pulled out a small black bauble, with a flashing blue light. "We can track them with this! It's linked to their spinal-implanted... logic... cubes."

He faltered to a halt, aware he'd made a huge mistake. "Um," he said. His voice dropped, low, so it could only just be heard above the rumble of quad engines. "It was given to me. By Quad-Gal Military. So I could, y'know, keep an eye on you lot. Make sure you didn't... find... anything."

Mel took the tracker, scowled, and put the digger in gear. Pulling on levers, she retracted the many arms and spikes and buckets, and then roared over a mound of bricks scattering debris and steel and the remains of the collapsed, quake-ravaged hospital...

"'Ranco," she said, eyes moist. "I'rm crumming frw youww!"

The digger rumbled over hill and down dale. The landscape, Mel soon realised, even under the light of the green moon, was doing strange things. Things a landscape shouldn't be doing.

It was moving, for a start.

"Well look at that!" said Miller, leaning forward to peer through the cracked windshield. "That forest over there is running like water!" And it was; the trees flowed across the landscape, branches and leaves wavering, as if washed away in a mudslide - only the ground was solid, liquid solid, and shifting uneasily like a cunning sort of quicksand.

"Don't be driving in that!" said Miller, urgent now. "We'll bloody sink!" He thought for a moment. "This landscape contravenes Health and Safety guidelines, Section 15B of the
Guidelines for a Safe Landscape
pamphlet, you know. Any landscape should be a stable landscape, and trees should not move around in case they hurt people, or affect their health, or their safety." He seemed quite happy about this. He felt like he was doing his duty. Like a good and efficient Health and Safety Officer should.

"Grwl," said Mel. As an abomination, she had a pretty poor view of Health and Safety Officers, and Health and Safety in general. After all, her very
existence
went against everything Health, and everything Safety. She killed people and ate their brains, for a start.

"What's that?" shrieked Miller.

"Grwl?"

"It's the river! It's solid! But it was sunny today! How can it be solid?"

And Miller was right. The river, despite moving like a river, was sluggish, a kind of liquid solid, and quite disconcerting to watch. Mel rumbled to a stop beside the embankment and one of the digger's arms reached forward and prodded the river. It glooped in a dangerous sort of manner.

"That," began Miller, and Mel smacked him. "OK," he said. "Be like that. I was only going to point out..." She smacked him again. One of his teeth rattled against the cockpit windshield, and he grabbed at his face with injured hands and injured pride.