Read Cloneworld - 04 for Free Online Page A

almost whimpering like a naughty little schoolboy.
    "As much as you can spread across your mighty, hairy body!"
    "That'll do. I'm home, chicken, I'm home..."
    The three gangers led Franco under a dark archway, and into Van Gok's . The last one halted on the threshold, turned, and made eye contact with a woman across the street. She was tall, and thin, and gangly, and looked like a man. She wore simple black clothes and hair like a fused tangle of lightning-struck barbed-wire.
    Their eyes remained locked for a few moments, and the watching woman gave a nod, as if dismissing the ganger. The ganger promptly disappeared from sight, leaving an open archway: like a maw leading straight down into Hell.
    With a sound, the woman shifted, merged with the crowd, and disappeared into the heaving mass of Downtown Nechudnazzar.
     
    "And so you see, technically, I was simply walking down the street. Yes, I did get dragged drunkenly in Van Gok's weird and wonderful emporium, but then it went black, and that can't be my fault, right? I mean, how can it be my fault that everything went black? I'm just an honest geezer, a lad, a bloke, a dude, and I'm riding through life on the bubble of chance that is my existence. Yes, I'd had a few whiskies, but who doesn't? One certainly doesn't expect to be kidnapped and put into a kidnap situation and then brutally abused to the extent where you think, y'know, that your very existence is threatened and so you get a bit violent, in a purely self-defending kind of violent way, and Opera accidentally cuts off her own head in the kerfuffle and bam! You're in a cell with an enraged but deactivated org who thinks she's the shit, but, no offence meant, crone, she's not. Because she's been deactivated. Made safe. You see what I'm saying?"
    "Do you ever shut up?" said the old org who had, indeed, been deactivated. Yes, her lasers targeted, but there was no laser in the laser. It had been a very tense few moments when Franco Haggis had thought he was about to become a Franco Haggis kebab. But no lasers came. No burning red purification emerged, and the clanking old org had sighed and grumbled and muttered and consigned herself to the corner of the cell cube, as far away from Franco as she could get. Unfortunately for her, it wasn't far enough. Franco could talk for the Quad-Gal board. Or bored. He prided himself in it. He'd won medals. Or at least, time in the brig.
    "Actually, I have been known for my scintillating conversations," said Franco, primly, puffing out his chest, which was currently naked, as befitted his prisoner status. He had been allowed to wear only his Big White Asda Underpants (BWAUs). And flip flops.
    "You got any more gifts, wanker?"
    Franco completely ignored, or was simply oblivious to, any form of sarcasm. "Actually, yes. I am considered a sexual athlete." His eyes gleamed. Then they fell on the mechanised mess that was the old org. She was indeed an old model. One of the first. What flesh hadn't been replaced by metal and machine had been replaced with bad skin graft. She was like a merged explosion of car factory and female sex doll.
    "A sexual athlete?" She sounded interested.
    Uh-oh.
    "Er, ahem. I'm married, you know."
    "You look like the divorced sort, to me."
    Franco reddened. How did she know that? How could she know that? The bitch! The bugger! Franco was indeed divorced. He had married the girl of his dreams, but through a very strange set of esoteric circumstances, his bride-to-be had transmogrified into a kind of zombie genetic super-soldier - a one-way process, which left her eight feet in height, mucus of skin, disgusting of flesh, an eight foot monster who looked like she was inside-out. Doing the right thing, the best thing, the honourable thing, Franco had indeed married his betrothed - and gone through with the evil deed. Several times, if he remembered right. Often in his nightmares. However, after a further series of adventures, Mel - for thus was her name - had filed for