Toxicity (29 page)

Oh, yes! I have escaped simply to
put myself in a position where I can go and get help. I will travel to the next
town and rouse the Law Makers of this toxic world, and then we will come back
in force and rescue Lumar! Hurrah!

She might be dead by then.

No, they wouldn’t kill her...

How do you know?

I just know!

How?

I fucking know, I’m telling you,
so shut up and let me get on with the rescue!

(yeah, a rescue from a distance
in two weeks’ time, you coward)

I am not a coward!

Oh, yes, you are.

Not!

Are.

Not!

Fucking are, you spineless,
jelly-brain, weak-kneed, yellow-belly turd.

I have done brave things!

Like what?

Like when I stood up on stage at
the Spingo University Academic Conference for Academics. That took a lot of
guts, a lot of bravery; there were five hundred of my peers there! It was most
traumatic!

And if you had done something
wrong, what was the worst that could happen?

I could have been... discredited!

(oooooh)

Laughed at!

(oh, dear, oh, dear)

Mocked! Mocked and berated!

(oh, you sad pathetic little
fizzle)

They might have stopped
publishing my work, stopped attending my lectures and poetry readings! I might
have lost my chance at being a movie star and rock star and poetry star all
rolled into one!

(ha and ha and fucking ho-ha)

Will you stop muttering in the
background, you fucking insane and separate part of my self-mocking brain? What
are you, anyway? Where did you come from?

I’ll tell you where I came from.
I came from the part of you that
knows.
I
came from the part of you that
understands.
Inside every
single one of us is a mechanism for comprehension; no matter how hard it gets,
no matter how bad it gets, no matter how fucked up you become, you fucking
know, deep down inside yourself, what you really are; you fucking
know
deep
in your heart whether you do the right or the wrong thing; and you fucking
better know in your soul whether you are worthy of that gift called life. When
some scumbag hits an old woman with an iron bar to steal her purse, that cunt knows
in his soul he’s done the wrong thing; the weak thing. He might blank it out
for a time, but trust me, it comes back to haunt a person. When that shitbag
coward fucking serial killer beats another woman with a hammer and buries her
out on the soothing singing sighing moors, the fucking weasel might have his
twisted reasoning, be able to quantify his actions in his own deviation soup;
but trust me, deep down in his soul, in his darkest place, in the fucking core
of his being, in the distillation of his humanity, he knows. He knows better.
There may be a Hell, Svool. There may be a place of Eternal Torture for those
who cannot bring themselves to do the Right Thing. Maybe not. Maybe that’s just
a bucket of pigshit. But what I’m telling you now is
you
have a choice.
Not everybody out there chooses the right path. But you need to, buddy, or I’ll
break your spine over my knee like kiln-dry tinder and cast you out to wriggle
with all the other maggots.

Svool sat there, mouth opening
and closing silently. The feeling, and the words, drifted away like smoke in
his brain.
So that’s what it’s come to? Being threatened by my own rambling
psychosis?

He stood up. The sun tickled him
with strands from the high canopy. His panting had stopped, and he lifted one
hand to his breast, and spread his fingers, and looked down at the dirt, and
the tears, and the snot. He took a deep breath, and lifted his head. His eyes
focussed.

How could he leave Lumar?

How could he run away?

Easy...
whispered a soothing nag at the
back of his brain.

No.

I must go back for her.

I must save her.

Svool looked down at the pistol.
It had a thick barrel, with chambers holding the bullets. Svool played with the
weapon for a few moments, found the switch, and there was a
click.
The
barrel swung out and with tinkling sounds seven bullets fell to the ground.
Svool dropped to his knees, cursing, and found the bullets - well, found six of
them - and he was cursing even louder. How could one have gone missing? They
were gold and bright and sparkling. How could he have
lost one already
?

That left him with six. Shit.
There were seven of those bad cowboy men.

Svool breathed deeply and took
his time, sliding the bullets back into the pistol and closing the barrel. He
spun it, and it went
clicka-clicka-clicka.
Svool grinned, and a kind of
light-headed feeling rushed over him.

Goddammit! He
was
going to
rescue Lumar!

For the first time in his life,
for the
first time
was going to do something completely selfless.

He was going to rescue her.

Or die trying.

And it felt
good.

~ * ~

SVOOL
CREPT FROM the broken jungle an
inch
at a time. He held the pistol in
both hands before him, and he was shaking, and the gun was shaking, and he
crept forward, imagining at any moment a gunshot would crash towards him from
some unseen location and he would be punched backwards off his feet, broken and
bloody and bleeding, and die right there in the dirt.

Finally free of his cover, he
stood there for a while, and when no murderous death came at him, he started to
walk back towards the scene of Lumar’s capture. Back in the jungle cover, when
he’d come to the realisation he would do the
right thing,
it had felt
good; better than any orgasm he’d ever experienced. But now doubts started to
creep through him, and obviously, because he was a genius with a genius
imagination, his inner TV screen started to air a thousand eventualities, where
in every single one he got shot and died and ended his budding silver screen
career.

“Bugger,” he muttered, and as he
started to get close to the horseshoe of cars, he slowed his pace even more, if
that was possible. Svool wasn’t conscious he was taking shuffling, one-inch
footsteps, and if somebody had pointed it out to him he would have commented on
how ridiculous he was; but that’s what he was doing. Jungle snails were
overtaking him.

The cars were close now, close
enough for Svool to see whether the cowboys, or whatever the hell they were,
had gone.

Crawling into view, he realised
there was no sign of them.

Suddenly, he spotted Zoot on the
ground and stumbled forward towards the PopBot.

“Zoot!” he hissed. “Zoot, buddy,
are you okay?” But obviously the little PopBot was far from okay. Svool touched
the black casing and it was cool under his fingers. He scooped both hands under
the PopBot, obviously with the intention of lifting the tiny machine, but to
his very great surprise Zoot was too heavy to lift. He grunted and heaved and
strained for a moment, again with the curious sensation somebody was having a
laugh at his expense and would jump out with a full film crew, shove a boom mic
in his face and shout, “Svoolzard Koolimax, you’ve been
FUCKED! Ha-ha-ha!”
But
that didn’t happen and Svool found himself kneeling next to Zoot, and staring
around with nagging fear, and then eventually tapping the PopBot with his
knuckle.

“Zoot? Zoot! Wake up!” But the
machine continued to lie still, unmoving, without life. “Shit and buggery.”

Then, from the corner of his
peripheral vision, Svool caught a movement. Feeling the need for urgent
survival creep up over him, he made an effort to show no outward emotion or
indication that he’d noticed. He coughed, and rubbed his chin, and tossed back
his golden curls, and then at the very last moment - as he felt his nerves
jangling like runaway church bells -he leapt up and around with pistol
outstretched and shaking in both hands.

“A-ha!”

The metal horse was grazing just
off from the rusted car horseshoe. It lifted its big, sad, disjointed head and
stared at Svool and his shaking pistol, then lowered its head once again and
continued to crop at grass and ferns and indeed branches and stones, crunching
them to a pulverised dust between its metal teeth.

“Stand still!” commanded Svool.

The horse obeyed, for it was
already standing still.

“Don’t move!” he instructed.

And indeed, the horse obeyed,
since it took very little jaw movement to chew on grass.

Svool edged closer, finding new
bravery in this obedient metal beast doing what it was told even though he knew
deep down in his heart it was doing it anyway.

As he edged closer, he actually
looked properly at the horse. It was made from what appeared to be hand-beaten
panels of different kinds of metal. Some were silver and shining, but most
panels were a bronze or copper colour, and some showed streaks of rust. Each
panel was a different size and shape, and whereas a skilled engineer could have
made the horse look like a well-oiled, well-engineered, kickass fighting
machine, in this instance it looked more like it had been bolted and riveted
together in somebody’s garden shed.

“Look at you,” muttered Svool,
edging yet closer. His gun wavered, and he lowered it, for the horse was
obviously just a dumb beast, and not an enemy, and something which had been
left behind. Probably by the man whose leg Lumar had broken. Could you ride a
horse with a snapped kneecap? Probably not.

The horse lifted its head again
and regarded Svool.

Inside it, something went
clonk.

Svool looked around, to make sure
this whole thing wasn’t a set-up, to make sure he wasn’t about to get a bullet
in the back of the skull. Then he shuffled closer. The ugly metal horse lowered
its multi-panelled head, the head that looked as if a circus strongman had
taken a large sledgehammer to it for a good three or four hours. It was bent
and twisted and battered and dented, pitted and corrugated and welded and
rusted.

“Well, look at you,” said Svool,
and shuffled yet closer.

The horse lifted its head again.

“Neigh,” it said, in a gurgling,
gravelled voice, although the word was spoken as a human would speak it, not as
a horse would actually neigh. It wasn’t an animal sound; it was a word.

“Who’s a pretty boy, then?” said
Svool, for want of something better to say, and patted the metal horse’s neck.
There was a hollow reverberating sound, as if he was patting an empty oil tank.

Inside it, something went
clank.
Then there was a buzzing sound. Then a farting noise.

“They left you behind, have they,
boy? Hmm? Poor little old you.” Svool patted the horse’s neck some more, and
its head lowered and it chewed its way through a lump of granite with
cracks
and
bangs,
showering the dirt with ground stone dust.

In fascination, Svool walked
along the beast, trailing his hand over its high shoulder, along its flank, and
across its bottom. There was a tail there, made from rusted barbed wire. It
swished and flicked. Svool observed the huge, plate-sized hooves, then walked
up the other side of the horse, and patted its neck again.