Toxicity Read Online Free PDF

him.
     
    It did not fill Svool with confidence
and hope.
     
    After all, he was used to more... sophistication than this. He was a respected academic, dammit!
     
    He was... a Poet.
     
    “Er, excuse me? Excuse me! Do you
know who I am? Do you realise who I am? Do you actually comprehend the
magnitude of your error? I ” - he puffed out his chest, which was quite a
feat when all the blood was in his skull - “am Svoolzard Koolimax XXIV, Third
Earl of Apobos, son of Svoolzard Koolimax XXIII, grandson of the great Svoolzard
Koolimax XXII, and seventh in line to the Throne of Apobos. I’m practically
royalty, I am!”
     
    “Ug.” Another wave. Another flash
of the quite terrifying shrunk-head totem.
     
    “Oh. I assume I don’t get a phone
call, then?”
     
    “UG!” The stick swished past his
nose.
     
    “Ahh. I’ll be quiet then, shall
I?”
     
    And that’s another thing, thought Svool morbidly as he
swung by the tight twine digging through and ruining the fine gloss
leather of his boots and now threatening to cut off the blood supply to his
toes. These trees. They’re not right. As he swung around aimlessly,
observing the trees, he tried to work out what was wrong with them. What exactly. The colouring was nearly right, but the trunks were made from a kind of
ribbed rubber. Like... like... like a stack of old tyres? he thought. Gods! And the massive, breeze-wafted fronds and leaves, although green as Nature
had intended, seemed to be made from...
     
    Green plastic bags.
     
    Like supermarket bags, folded
into leaf shapes.
     
    Is this for real?
     
    And then the beast-man wearing
naught but a loincloth poked Svool with the sharp end of his skull stick, and
grunted, “AG AG KAK!” and Svool realised it was definitely bloody real, and he’d
been caught as easy as a chicken in a sack, a fly in a web, a sexy starlet in his
own bed... and now he was to be...
     
    Well. Well?
     
    He eyed the fire they were
stoking in a circle of rocks, rocks that looked, to his untrained eye,
suspiciously like rectangular lumps of lead or some other heavy metal, and he
wondered uneasily exactly why they needed a fire. For warmth, maybe? But
it was already warm. Warm enough to make him sweat like a cooking pig.
     
    “I say,” he said.
     
    The hairy men and women, many of
whom, he now noticed, seemed to be wearing bones on strings around their necks
and - horror - pierced through their very flesh, continued to ignore him. As if
he was a chicken. Or a captured pig. Or throat-slit cattle hung up to bleed.
     
    More uneasy prickles ran up and
down his spine.
     
    Why do I feel like a chicken on a
spit?
     
    Why do I feel like a lamb joint
in the oven?
     
    Why do I feel like a beef carcass
in a warehouse?
     
    Svool had an unusual relationship
with food, indeed, as with sex. With sex, he’d fuck anything that couldn’t
crawl out of his bed. And with food, he’d spear and eat anything that couldn’t
make the leap from his plate.
     
    And here, and now, he suddenly
began to feel like food.
     
    It was a new one on him.
     
    A sarcastic part of his inner
psyche snarled, Write a poem about that, you fucker.
     
    He suppressed the urge to giggle.
     
    Svool swung gently, and watched
the fire being built higher and higher. Then he watched as some of the
-savages? indigenous peoples? cannibals? - erected a kind of spit with
good solid sturdy timber. The spit was a little over six feet long. Svool
anticipated it would take both his length, and his weight.
     
    “Er. Excuse me? Can you listen to
me for a moment, good peoples?”
     
    “Ug.”
     
    “Ag.”
     
    “Kak.”
     
    “Wok.”
     
    “Snuk.”
     
    “Snog.”
     
    “Dek.”
     
    “Fak.”
     
    “I say, I say, I am a very famous
poet, about to become a very famous film star, and I do believe I have
lots of money in a ggg Galactic Account which I could access for you if you
were to escort me, for example, to the nearest cash dispenser.”
     
    He looked on, hopefully.