Toxicity Read Online Free PDF Page A

she asked, eyes
narrowed. And he saw her claws had emerged. Wow. She has claws. Like a cat!
If only I’d known that during our sex games, I could have used them...
     
    “I’ll, er, I’ll...” The claws
were glinting in the green sunlight, each one an inch of razor-sharp
wickedness.
     
    “You could write a fucking poem
about it,” she mocked, and the barb flew straight to his heart, sharper and
more deadly than any intrusion of serrated steel.
     
    Svool deflated. “That’s a
little... unfair. Okay. Okay. You win. I won’t do anything. I just... find it
hard to understand, hard to comprehend this sudden change.” He realised his
voice had emerged as a squeak. He felt tears at the corners of his eyes. He
would have dabbed at them theatrically, only his cuffs were made of chipped
glass-shard.
     
    “Your company bought me. And I
played their game. But now? Now we’re on our own.” She gave a nasty little
smile. “You are on your own.”
     
    “Er,” said Svoolzard.
     
    Lumar retracted her claws and
looked around, and then at the jungle that was swaying... oddly. She
pointed. “That way is north. If I’m right, this place is Jusko, the largest
island of the archipelago into which we have plunged. It has a trading port,
which means people and ships. But there are bad things out in the jungle,
Svool. Real bad things. So be careful, yeah, mate?” She winked. “Be
careful, lover.”
     
    “Be careful?” he echoed, stricken
with horror as her words sunk into his detoxing brain.
     
    “And goodbye.”
     
    She started crunching up the
green pebble beach and suddenly, as if lurching onto this side of reality,
Svool realised the beach wasn’t green pebbles but green bottles and
many still had part-faded jagged plasti-labels, which read things like Arthur’s
Piss Whiskey Gin and Puke Puke Tonic and Raw Sewage Alky - Great
For All You Cheap & Nasty Drunkers.
     
    What? What the hell is this? He stared at the ground as if it
had betrayed him. I don’t get it. And distant words drifted to
him, words spoken by a machine in a soft lilting female voice. The planet of
Amaranth in the Zynaps System is run by The Greenstar Recycling Company,
sometimes referred to planetside simply as The Company. The Greenstar Recycling
Company recycles the majority of Manna’s waste, leaving the rest of the galaxy
free to pursue its Heavenly Pursuits.
     
    Svool stared at the quite
obviously non-recycled waste under his glossy boots. Then up towards the
jungle, and the athletically disappearing figure of Lumar. Within the blink of
an eye she had vanished, and Svool realised he was alone. Alone, with no bodyguards,
on an uncultured world fondly referred to by the locals as Toxic World. Tox
World. Toxicity. Or even just Shit City.
     
    “Great,” he muttered, and drawing
his jewelled sword, more for his own morale than as any real form of
protection, he started awkwardly up the bottle beach, his glass suit prickling
him all over and his heels playing havoc with the slippery glass underfoot.
     
    What I’d give for some fresh
drugs, he
sulked.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    SVOOLZARD
HUNG UPSIDE-DOWN from a tree, twine cutting into his ankles and giving him a
particularly intense new type of agony, as he watched the collection of short,
waddling, hairy men and short, waddling, bare-breasted hairy women with weary,
cold-turkey eyes. He wondered how his life had gone from damn-near-perfect-with-a-thousand-whores-on-tap to sucking-on-the-lollipop-of-imminent-death in such a short period
of time.
     
    “Shit,” he said. He coughed, and
spat, which is harder than it sounds if you’re upside down.
     
    “Ug!” said one hairy beastman,
and waved a stick at Svool. Svool paled, noting the stripped human skull
adorning the top of the stick like some grotesque totem. It still had a small
patch of scalp and hair attached, as if the face and head had been peeled like
a fruit leaving a hairy summit, then shrunken, then stuck on a pointy stick,
then waved at