Scum of the Universe Read online

  “But why?” he sobbed, feeling absolutely betrayed. “Why would you let it attack me like that?”

  Ruska checked his bruises again. The Military-grade regen salve was doing its job. Bob would be almost as good as new in a couple of hours. Ruska sighed, and there was a faraway look in her eyes as she resumed stroking her son's hair.

  “You know I don't talk about lab where I born.”

  Bob looked up in surprise. This topic was always off-limits, even to him. His mouth turned into an O shape again, but this time it wasn't due to stingers in his ribcage. Ruska went on without needed a prompt.

  “I was not only one of my kind. In lab, they grow eighteen of us from same genetic material, but we all different. Niska was spliced with reptiles and had a poison spike on her tongue. Jan had a set of feathered wings that almost worked. Jon was part insect, and had six arms and no legs...but the one thing we all have in common is claws. These.” Ruska extended and retracted her talons as emphasis. “But many were not lucky enough to be as normal as me, and were shaped in ways that make your little eyes hurt and make you feel big sick in your stomach. Cruel, horrible experiments that not work properly.” Ruska took some time, still playing with Bob's hair as she stared into the heat distortion. “We all born on same day and spend all our time together in big white room, so we become like family, like close sibling. We grow up together, and we only leave room when they sedate us with gas and take us away for tests that we can never remember afterwards.”

  Bob gave her time to mull this over. He'd always wondered about his Mum's origins, and he didn't want to do anything to spoil this rare chance. His Dad would be so jealous! He'd been trying to get this sort of stuff out of Ruska for over nine years.

  “And then, one day, they separate us.” Ruska growled. “Something changed. We don't know what, or why, or how, or anything. Maybe funding cuts, maybe had been planned whole time? Anyway, all we know is that a scientist on a big screen explain that it is our ninth birthdays today, and that means it is time for our Excruciating.”

  Bob looked up again. Ruska didn't need to see his expression to know his obvious question. Multiple syllables weren't Bob's strong suite.

  “So then I wake up by myself, in very small room.” Ruska's voice shook a little at the memory. “And when I stand up and look around, I not know what is going on. Remember that I haven't known anything except that large area I share with my brothers and sisters, and for the first time I can remember...I am all alone. But not for long.

  “The far wall slid up to the ceiling, and beyond, it is very dark. But I can smell something I don't recognise, hear something unfamiliar. So, after a life with no danger, I am complacent. Sloppy. Stupid. I step forward and try to see what is there, just in case it is one of my siblings wearing some stinky chemical or something, and I wave and say hello. Because of this idiocy, I almost die one second later when a huge blur charges me from the shadows like a bull wearing red contact lenses. It slammed me into the wall with the worst pain I ever know. I can hear my own skeleton snap in a dozen places and feel my organs burst like bubbles. Creature has pinned me to wall and is biting me everywhere at once, tearing shreds from my body with what seemed like a hundred mouths. Stuck against wall, I react without thinking, and my enhancements suddenly work for the first time. So, I spit acid right in its face, and then my claws pop out of my fingertips so I can cut its fegging throat open. Creature not like this, of course, and it drop me and back off for a moment.”

  Ruska paused. Bob was so riveted by the story that he had to resist the urge to hurry his Mum along.

  “Now, I finally get good look at this thing: is obviously an experiment, like me, but it is like...like dinosaur, like raptor from old time movie...I no remember name...and even though I have torn out one throat and burnt a second face into charcoal, it still have another seven heads...and they all hissing and weaving and lunging for me straight away.

  “I was critically wounded, I knew this, but somehow my body understood what to do all on its own, almost as though my muscles had been programmed how to react to danger, to go on automatic when things become deadly. I never feel anything like it before, and I suddenly have no control over my violence.” Ruska smiled. “Even with horrible internal bleeding and all my limbs broken, I still pull apart their lab-made Hydra one head at a time, and stomp it so bad that it finally stop the twitch. It was my first kill.” She blinked, wearing an odd expression. “That fight with the Hydra...it made me who I am today.”

  Ruska finally looked down at Bob. There were tears in her eyes, which was something he'd never seen before. Sure, Jim Tuesday could potentially start sobbing if his coffee was weak or the sand was too hot on his bare feet, but Ruska had always seemed to have only two emotional settings: simian rage, or painful affection.

  “I so happy I kill that thing, even though my body is shattered and dying, all I can think is how much I look forward to telling all the others about what had happen. They then gas me again, and when I wake up, I am healed and back in the room I grow up in.” Ruska shed a tear. It rolled over her hamburger lips and into Bob's knotted hair. “But same man as before appear on screen again, his face even more emotionless and uncaring than last time, and he tell me that I was the only one of my batch to survive my Excruciating, and that all the others have been recycled into genetic paste for next generation.” Ruska's claws extended and retracted fitfully. This was a sure sign that she was feeling something besides rage or love. “I then begin my real training for fifteen years, and in that time I learn to be better killing machine, but my Excruciating was when I truly began to be who I am now. And so, knowing that you would soon be same age as I was when I became myself, I knew that...”

  Ruska's words ceased sharply as her head snapped towards the far horizon. Her ears twitched, as though she could hear something, and her eyes narrowed. Bob turned his head to take a look at whatever had distracted his Mum, but it appeared to be nothing more than a small dust cloud. His eyes couldn't penetrate the heat distortion any better than that, but it certainly seemed as though his Mum's enhanced senses had detected something.

  Ruska tossed Bob onto her shoulders with one mighty arm without a further word and knuckled for home at full speed. Bob's complaints and questions went unanswered.

  *

  Ernest Fell, a Very Bad Man, was reclining on a leather lounge in the back of an Imperator-model limosine. The Imperator, the most luxurious of its line, was more like a mobile palace than a simple car. It provided every conceivable kind of amenity a professional businessman-on-the-go would need to conduct his affairs, such as a full-sized hot-tub, a well-stocked bar, a soundproofed meeting room for fifteen, and a revolving Emperor-sized bed with spotless polysilk sheets. Unlike your average businessman, at one point or another Ernest had drowned rivals in the spa, held cocktail parties for gangland serial killers and Mafia dons in the bar, tortured police informants with dental tools in the soundproofed meeting room, and entertained stunning Bollywood starlets in bed (his record in a single encounter was twenty-eight).

  Sipping his perfectly-mixed Manhattan, Ernest judged the Mojave desert through a panorama of bulletproof windows. It was ugly, barren and dry, just like his first wife, and under normal circumstances Ernest wouldn't deign to look at this waste on a map, let alone come out in person. But, as always, this was for the sake of business, and sometimes business meant visiting a hellhole rad-waste that no sane person should ever choose to drive through.

  Ernest had invested in an automated drug still out here years ago, as this desolate pit was so isolated that it was the perfect location to secretly create the first batch of an all-new recreational substance known as Blink. While most modern narcotics were bad news, Blink was in a class of its own, the kind of drug that Jim Morrison would politely refuse, the sort that would blast holes in your brain like firecrackers and turn you into an blithering imbecile. The true beauty of Blink was that repeat use would lead to an exponential tolerance in every case. So, although on
e hit of Blink would be so awesome that it would make you believe in Heaven itself, the second go would need two tabs...then your third time would require four to get the same effect...then eight...then sixteen...

  Ernest smiled at the thought. He was an avid fan of hurting people, and if there was also some way to make money off the brutality, well, then the whole process was even sweeter. And while this first lab was only a small-scale beta-test leading up to the galaxy-wide horror Ernest and his many bank accounts had planned for all of humanity, this minor facility would be enough to ruin Los Angeles within a matter of six months. Once the Blink addiction cycle had been proven to work as designed, there were many, many other worlds out there ready to be sucked dry.

  Of course, such a scheme would be punishable by Death By Power Sander (perhaps even Death By Pigeon if you had a nasty enough prosecutor), so to the untrained eye it may make little sense why somebody as financially colossal as Ernest would bother risking a torturous end when his funds were bordering on basically unlimited. His wealth could really not be overstated: in his brief time in this galaxy, Ernest had packed multiple bank vaults solid with Amerikan pounds, Scandinavian lira, German yen, the freshly-harvested souls of virgins, blocks of freeze-dried stem cells, lead-skinned plutonium rods, vacuum-sealed antimatter spheres and a bunch of alien currencies that would send most people insane with one glance. However, simple currency ceased to have any real value to Ernest once he'd begun to crave something that was far more difficult to attain than money, and more valuable than anything else: Face.

  Within the all-spanning underweb that connected together every godforsaken nest of human depravity, cash was nothing more than a by-product, something to be used for your groceries, or to tip your concierge when you had a holiday to the surface of the Sun. Money was something that literally anybody could get. For instance, there were countless heirs and heiresses out there who would inherit family fortunes they'd done did nothing to earn, that they didn't deserve, and would likely fritter away on sandpits made of cocaine and jewelled handbags for holding their teacup Chihuahuas. For crying out loud, any clot-headed sex-conceived reject could win the Lotto just by buying a ticket!

  Money, while nice in its own way, was common. But Face...no, Face was a commodity unlike any other. It made The Spice look like stale oregano, the finest diamonds like Taiwanese plastic. Face was beyond mere cash, beyond trinkets and toys and paper. Face was an actual quantifiable measure of the exact level of respect Ernest had earned from his almost-as-evil peers. To outsiders, it may seem like nothing more than respect in a numerical form. But within the underweb that extended across the Galactic plane, it was the most important thing in life. Its worth went beyond anything a Black Accountant could tally up in their coded books of unspeakable horror. For Ernest, gaining just one extra point had resulted in weeks of parties so lavish and decadent that Caligula himself would have winced and reached for the aspirin. Losing a point usually resulted in a number of unsolved gangland slayings.

  Face was everything.

  In his century-long drive to stockpile more Face than any other crimelord who'd ever lived, Ernest had become supremely feared by any outlaw who had more intelligence than a soft-boiled egg. After all, as common as money was, it sure could buy a lot of bullets. If somebody got a whiff that Ernest Fell had the slightest interest in a clandestine deal or had some personal opinion on gangland politics, every scofflaw within the state would flee without packing so much as a toothbrush first. Simply hearing Ernest's name had caused hardened thugs to soil themselves. His methods went beyond efficiency, beyond professionalism, and into the territory of pure evil and sickness. He was a monster among monsters.

  Ernest placed his empty high-ball glass on a coaster, adjusted an exquisite Versace-Armani suit with slim, manicured hands, and looked towards the distant front of the Imperator. In a beautiful display of intuitive AI, the limo interpreted Ernest's body language into what he really wanted without needing him to say one word.

  A holographic lightscreen faded into existence, and it displayed a face that resembled two badly-mortared bricks. It was the sort of face that broke fists, a countenance that caused lesser men to look intently at their shoes and keep walking as fast as they could in the opposite direction. It bared a row of even white teeth in a practised, professional smile. For some reason, his teeth were covered by a thin, transparent guard.

  “Yessir, Mister Fell?” the driver gravelled.

  “Jeeves, we are lagging,” Ernest noted in a voice that had been cultured by the sounds of classical opera and automatic weapons. “My genitals cannot be expected to tolerate such radiation exposure indefinitely. I would prefer to be there and back again before my mutated sperm begin to fight an armed battle within my scrotum.”

  Jeeves expression didn't change in the slightest. He nodded curtly.

  “Yessir, Mister Fell.”

  Amazingly, the driver's name actually was Jeeves (Jeeves Butler, if you checked his not-quite-legitimate birth certificate). The most popular theory behind the brute's name was that Jeeves' mother had foolishly hoped that this sort of nobby handle might put her son on the highway to success. Instead, the inevitable had happened, as the demand for limousine drivers named Jeeves has to be witnessed to be believed.

  The zero-mass screen disappeared without a sound, and Jeeves resumed watching an eternity of dead sand pass soundlessly under the limousine. The Imperator left no trail, as its top-shelf (and not-quite-legal) antigrav wafers had been installed with the cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die promise that they'd leave no trace. After all, the location of this Blink lab was meant to be a secret, and carving a fiery path that any banger could follow to the prize would kind of negate the “secret” part.

  Grinding his mouth-guards together with a noise like flint being rasped against steel, more than two hundred kilograms of hired thug grasped the steering wheel so hard that its chromed steel warped beneath his fingers. Jeeves' arms tensed a little bit, and his tailored suit creaked under the strain of trying to hold back enough globular muscles to make up an entire WWF tagteam match. Jeeves burped, and his breath made the steering wheel sizzle.

  On the far horizon, through heat distortion so thick you could scoop it out of the air with your bare hands, a blob of orange corrosion appeared.

  Almost there.

  *

  As this was a weekday, Jim Tuesday was sure to wake up at the crack of noon. Stretching his scrawny body into a slouch, Jim strapped on his loincloth – which had pockets for a few basic tools – and he proceeded to root around in one of the more recent garage piles until he found one of his home-made peyote cigarettes. As the cartons of fancy tailor-mades with suck-burner auto-ignition tips had run out over six months ago, Jim's trusty Zippo lighter was put to good use on the fag. Thanks to some petrol he’d scavenged from a buried fuel bowser, the Zippo did its job admirably.

  Coughing and spluttering as the foul smog further blackened a set of lungs that had more in common with the cave floor of a bat colony than biological air pumps, Jim smacked his gummy mouth together and wandered to get his daily dose of vitamin D. Jim stood in direct sunlight for precisely thirty seconds until he could hear his skin audibly bubble, then immediately took refuge away from nasty old Sol.

  Jim rummaged in the shadows for a snack. To his fury, the missus and that bloody kid had demolished the rabbit and the weasel without bothering to wake him up.

  Typical.

  Examining a pile of old bones that a more imaginative mind may think resembled a secret graveyard of the very smallest pygmy elephants, Jim eventually found a juicy rat nose and happily crunched away on it. Jim may not be a connoisseur of anything that didn't cause a hangover, but he wondered how on Earth anybody could have thrown away such a delicacy.

  Jim did a few pull-ups on one of the beams until he realised he wasn't fooling anybody, and once he'd rubbed the splinters from his hands he sat in the shade to observe his wasteland for a while. As usual, there was nothing to see: a few cacti
, plenty of rocks, and the occasional two-headed scorpion were about it for today's not-quite-postcard-worthy panorama. There was also a bit of a dust storm on the far horizon, but that was probably...

  Jim's head snapped around so fast that he jarred his neck. A dust storm! With flying sand and bits of airborne rock trying to carve his eyes out? Besides the very real dangers of the storm itself, every creature in this godforsaken desert would come running straight to his service station for cover!

  Jim took five steps and went to perform a running leap into the closest dumpster, but something unfamiliar gave him pause. Non-defective people would describe it as “a conscience.” Jim froze on the spot as he briefly considered trying to find the others to warn them about the incoming dervish. Like all rodents, Jim's first, second and third priorities were his flea-ridden hide, his flea-ridden hide, and his flea-ridden hide (in that order). So if Ruska and Bob didn’t make it back in time and got flayed by a wall of razors, pah, it was their own fault. For more than nine bloody years now Jim had been a prisoner here, watching the sand roast and defrost in an endless cycle, wishing with every shred of his being that he could be somewhere – anywhere – else...