by Wayne Hill
Splinter holds his bottle of Scotch in the air, eliciting a cheer from the conscious. He feels his pain subsiding now, like a behemoth returning to the oceanic depths. He takes several fiery swigs of liquid relief, his eyes shut, his fist returning to his mouth to wipe away spillages, and to cork whatever decides it might want to come back up.
“Splinter!” hails Hector, from the back of the room. “Gi’z another recitation!” Hector has a strange bandana on his head.
Splinter closes his eyes, looking to the ceiling, and waves his arm-cannon placatingly, “Okay, okay.”
The drunken patrons slowly hush, awaiting another Splinter recitation with barely contained excitement. Splinter's eyes snap open and, looking each man in his eye, he speaks; his voice starting hoarse, low and slow and then gaining momentum and volume until, by the last sentence, he is shouting.
“These — in the day when heaven was falling; the hour when Earth’s foundations fled — followed their piratical calling, took their swag and are dead. Their shoulders held the sky suspended; they stood, and Earth’s foundations stay. What God abandoned, these defended and saved the sum of things for pay. Patrons, eternal happy hour awaits!”
The space pirates roar and Splinter laughs into the wall of sound.
Jonesy nudges him. “They didn’t follow you, did they?”
Splinter beckons Jonesy away from the cheering gang, who are becoming rowdier by the second.
“I jumped off Miser’s Point,” says Splinter, looking to see that no one would overhear them. “My arm-cannon powered me to the Forever Stairs. I dug in for most of the morning, watching, waiting for those nightmares to show their vile faces.”
Splinter takes a large swig of whisky, coughs a bit, and then chases it down with some more. “I never made it twenty meters down the tunnels, Jonesy. There were thousands of them. Thousands, Jonesy. It’s an army!”
Splinter’s eyes look distant and Jonesy tries to reassure him.
“Well, son, these creatures have been here a long time and th—”
“Damn it!” Splinter shouts, “There were armour lizards, Jonesy!”
“Whoa there,” Jonesy says, patting Splinter consolingly on the shoulder, and subtly trying to see if anyone noticed Splinter’s outburst. “Now, you need to control yourself. These monsters need slaying, true enough, but there’s a time and place for all this warring and the thing that concerns me is tha—”
“They must have had a breeding frenzy last summer,” says Splinter, almost constantly swigging from his bottle between sentences. “There were too many. Too fucking many! There were fucking military monsters, too, Jonesy! Military. Military-looking lizard-monster-lizards and military-looking monster-crab-lizards ... with fucking tentacles!”
Splinter takes another gulp from the half-empty bottle of scotch before going into a coughing fit.
Jonesy belts Splinter’s back a few times.
“Get a hold of it, man. Hock it. Take your time, son.”
Splinter hawks up a lump of blue gunk, spits it on to the floor and grimaces at it before carrying on.
“Once I was sure that they thought that I was dead, and were not searching for me, I walked the perimeter wall to the eastern blockade facing the Barrens. At this stage, I have an epiphany and I improved our defences. I modified an old force shield I installed decades ago.”
Splinter pats himself down searching for his herbal smokes, but just pulls damp seaweed from his pouch and pockets. Sitting on the table to the side of him, there is a younger version of himself. Cigarette in mouth, the young doppelganger looks smashed out of his mind on the blue stuff.
“Got a bine?” Splinter asks him.
“Sure, I don’t smoke anyway,” says the kid, handing Splinter his last cigarette.
“Thanks, kid, at least someone around here has style.”
Splinter looks at the kid. The kid’s boots look remarkably like his own blast boots and his dreadlocked hair sports Splinter Salem stripes of blue. He even has the shit tattoo on his biceps saying DoNt!
“Look at this guy, Jonesy. Good work, but are you a monster killer? That’s the most important question.”
The kid is about to answer but Splinter pats him on the head, slaps his face and wanders outside. Jonesy follows trying to assuage some of his concerns.
“They could still have followed you, Splinter. And, if the Dehas get in here ... well, it doesn’t bear thinking about. It’d be a hellish nightmare the likes of which ... not even with all our crew.... I-I-I don’t even want to consider it ...because it’s ... it's unimaginable!”
Splinter looks in at O’Shea’s through a window at the swaying zombie drunks. He looks at the unconscious bodies littering the porch, the muddied grass, and lying half-in and half-out of nearby shacks. He looks back through the saloon doors at this ragged band and wonders, How many men have I lost over the last thirty years? How many are gone because they walked into certain death situations with me? And why do I keep surviving? What makes me so different? Certainly not luck. Life kicks me about; death smiles, waiting.
“This is a highly polished death machine, Jonesy,” protests Splinter gesturing to the Lanes. “Don’t you be fooled by Dutch bravado and drunken haberdashery.”
He throws his now empty scotch bottle at an unconscious pirate lying nearby and it smashes against the side of his head. The pirate does not stir.
“You’re a military death machine, Archie!” shouts Splinter to the recumbent figure. “Dehas coming! Incoming! Attack, Archie! Attack!”
Splinter watches intently as the unconscious man — called Mark — begins to snore.
“Playing dead, eh?” sniffs Splinter with an air of superiority. “It’s a solid tactic in some situations. I’d watch the snoring, though. Well done, Archie. As you were.”
Swaying, Splinter turns his attention to Jonesy’s worried expression. This makes him angry. He senses fear in Jonesy, and Splinter considers fear more dangerous than any monster. Shaking his head, he turns and belts the saloon doors open, marching through. Jonesy follows.
“Unimaginable, Jonesy? Ha! What would be more unimaginable would be for us all to stand by and do nothing while these monsters tear apart the innocent lives that arrive each day. Newbies have no chance against the Barrenites. They need help and I plan to help them. If these fuckers want a war, then they’ve got it! The boundary wall doesn’t keep them out, Jonesy, it keeps me in!”
Jonesy spins Splinter around, so they are facing each other, and clutches his shoulders.
“You can’t save everyone, laddie. She would of never ever wanted you to be hurting yourself like this, son,” says Jonesy calmly.
“How the fuck do you, or I, know what she wants?” spits Splinter. “She’s gone! She’s gone and I’m here. And, as long as there is breath in my body, my mission is to destroy every last one of those miserable bastards. Or die trying.”
“I’m just worried about you, son, that’s all,” says Jonesy. “You’ve spent this past month just training in the woods and warring with the Barrenites. People miss you. You have the chance for another life here,” Jonesy nods in the direction of Gert — who everyone knew was in love with Splinter — “another potential future.”
“Give it a rest, old fool,” Splinter says, ignoring another of Jonesy’s constant attempts to matchmake — they were getting more and more frequent these days. “Let me get you a drink. You’re going soft in your old age, you know that, right?”
“I’d still give you a hiding.”
“I know, Jonesy,” laughs Splinter. “I know, ya evil, old buzzard! You’d give the devil his own self a run for his money.”
Arms around one another’s shoulders, the two men head to the bar still chuckling.
(Gert smiles affectionately at them as they pass. Splinter catches her gaze for the briefest of moments in an intimate stare. It makes her cheeks flush and her heart flutter ... and then sink, as he looks away from her, his smile fading so fast it was almost as if she imagined it.)<
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At the bar with Jonesy, Splinter talks and drinks — drinks like the world is about to end.
OUTSIDE O’SHEA’S, DARK smoke drifts from the pub’s chimney. The smoke soars upwards ...up, up, up ... meandering, as if lost in a haze of thought.
Up, up it goes — and across.
The smoke lazily drifts, high over the many vibrant and inimitable shanty houses of the Lanes, where devoted families are thoughtfully preparing breakfast or drying clothes, and mixes with smoke from other houses.
Rising, up and over the giant surrounding wall, ghosts of communal scents gather and are concentrated into a cloud that sails out east over the Barrens and, chilled by the colder air coming from the sea, descends.
The cloud is whipped by winds over the protective assortment of twisted forms: spikes, wire, broken glass, and poisoned wooden barbs. This hellish assortment of piercing, slicing, and stabbing objects — arranged in front of the breached eastern barrier wall, and designed to make the trek to the Lanes an impossible ordeal — shred the cloud in to scent streams.
These scent streams, undetectable by human noses, are taken prisoner by the breeze and are driven in swirling rivulets through the dark woods. This gaseous information ends its thoughtless flight on the tip of a sharp jutting tongue that flits in and out of a slobbering mouth, filled with black knife-like teeth. The end of one journey and the start of another. The invisible data also flows into a foul pig-like nose, that instantly belches them out in disgust. Then the invisible musk is sampled by another monster, and another. The air currents, pregnant with odours from the Lanes, informs the collection of monstrosities hiding in the woods. Monsters from the deep bowels of prison planet Earth. Each Barrenite captures the air in its own unique manner — moist cavities sorting each smell, categorising each scent, identifying origins, and constructing a mental picture of an unseen landscape.
The Barrenites have amassed in huge numbers under cover of the woods. Disturbed in their tunnels by a strange intruder’s fierce assault, their powerful Leader, Caelum has formed a war party. Even now, his three concubines, Funeralna, Tristitia, and Peur — the skilful generals of this ever-swelling army — were now emerging from the tree line. The beasts appear from the dark shadows of the forest — a bizarre and terrifying scene. Their egress only noted by giant black squirrels, who fearfully scramble to the highest branches of the trees, away from the swaths of monsters.
The Barrenite’s eyes, twisted with hate, were narrowed into evil slices. The morning light played over twisted, scaled, feathered, and blistered bodies. Altered beasts with ancient and evil forms that slithered, squirmed, marched or staggered. High in the trees above, just below the cowering squirrels, some even swing from branch to branch on tentacles or hooks.
A foul marauding pestilence spilling out on to this cursed Earth. Moving as one, following their abominable leaders into battle. Making haste on whatever foul appendages their gruesome genetics bestowed. In a clicking and burbling altered tongue, their leader bellows for them to continue their advance.
The morning light reveals still more vile creatures, all protruding bone blades, gleaming razor-sharp teeth, panting and drooling mouths, twisted horns and long claws. No crafted weapons are required, the Barrenites appear savagely designed for war. Built by nature, red in both tooth and claw, to deliver death. Battle-hardened skin, some covered with tough scales. Some are covered in black robes, tattered and stained with red clay. They brush past one another and the clay powder that is shaken free forms a light mist around the ambling figures. In the haze the twisted and twisting forms advance towards the lanes, the scent of their soon to be victims strong in their noses and other orifices — gifted to them by the prevailing westerly wind.
Caelum the Demiurge towers over the swarming Barrenites. He is their leader, their father ... their God. “Proficiscentur!” he bellows.
The first hate-filled wave of Barrenites explodes into action, rushing towards the field of twisted metal. A violet grid suddenly fizzes up in front of the onrushing throng, and Caelum screams for his creatures to halt.
Caelum tilts his massive darkly cloaked head to one side, and Funeralna, Tristitia and Puer appear at either side of him.
“Secratas’ little pet has some skills,” Puer says to Caelum, stroking the matted fur of a creature to her left. The creature resembles a werewolf. It growls, showing its teeth to her. She smiles back to it and, leaning down, kisses its head.
“He calls himself by another name now,” Tristitia says calmly. “Talon. They all call him Talon. They fear him ... but have abnormal courage when he greets them. They ... their minds are tangled. Hard to read”
“I will feast on their flesh,” says the werewolf-creature known as Hemlock.
“Caelum, they are different than the others,” says Trititia, ignoring the wolfman’s bravura. “Their thoughts are different ... they show little fear of anything.”
“They shall fear me,” growls Hemlock, teeth flashing with saliva.
Caelum drops his black hood down, revealing an impossibly handsome face, with emerald eyes framed by thick black eyelashes. He slowly turns and looks down at Hemlock with an inscrutable gaze. The Werewolf stares back at his master, whining.
Caelum’s face starts to ripple with activity. Lumps protrude at either side of his angular jaw and there is a ripping noise as his jaw elongates outwards and forwards. He twists his face sharply away from Hemlock, and looks into the sky, appearing to be fighting these unwanted effects. Those close to Caelum back away, but Hemlock, transfixed on this mesmerising contortion of the flesh, stays where he is. Caelum’s jaws snap out once more and then shrink back. His facial features slowly smooth to their previous perfection — but his eyes are different. Before they shone a brilliant emerald colour, now they burned with a hellfire yellow.
“I wonder how high this invisible shield reaches,” Caelum quietly wonders, turning his attention from Hemlock’s panting face to the eastern barrier of the Lanes.
“I think —” starts Hemlock, but further words are unheard as he unexpectedly zooms upwards.
Three hundred feet above, Hemlock’s body explodes against a visible section of a purple force field. Werewolf blood, bits of fur and fragments of bone rains down.
Caelum looks to Peur who is smirking slightly and licking her lips at the sight of blood.
“Probably too high to jump,” Caelum reasons out loud, as Peur slowly spins around, her face upturned to the red rain, like a child when it snows.
“Do that again, my love,” purrs Peur. Red blood droplets gleam, beaded on her shimmering, silver flesh. Her pupils dilate, and her hands work, smearing the blood up and down her naked, swaying body.
Caelum’s incandescent yellow eyes lock onto her black eyes, and the flame dancing there — from a place of unimaginable evil, a place where demons long to be fed — drifts into her.
A PURPLE LIGHT STARTS to flash on Splinter’s arm-cannon.
“Shit,” Splinter mutters, breaking off a conversation he is having with Jonesy.
“What is it, Son?” asks Jonesy — barely — before Gert runs back into the bar screaming “BARRENITES!”
At that moment, at the same time, everyone in the bar collapses — like puppets who have had their strings cut. Some vomit, all tremble ... apart from Splinter. Splinter’s eyes roll back in his head, but his vision soon corrects itself. The barroom is a mass of screams and moans, cries for help, and pleading to a God who does not seem to be interested.
Amidst the chaos in the bar, Splinter quietly sits on a stool, eating large handfuls of pig snacks from a turtle shell and pensively sipping his scotch. In his mind, he can feel the Barrenites growing restless.
(“Call him out,” Caelum says to the powerful telepath, Tristitia. “I wish to speak to Talon’s Splinter.”)
Splinter stuffs another handful of crunchy Oinkers-Rind into his mouth and chews slowly as horrific images play in his mind’s eye: Marie-Ann flyblown in a river; Marie-Ann’s screaming as she
burns up, under their tree, and dies; his mother crying, calling into the woods for her son, as Barrenites surround her; his father dying, his last whispered words ‘I’m sorry, son.’
Then ... nothing.
Splinter lets out a small, disappointed sound as a voice forces through the spider webs of his mind. Caelum wishes to physically meet you, human, whispers the insidious mind-voice. It is unwise to decline.
“No, I don’t think so,” says Splinter out loud, spraying pieces of pig snacks over the bar. “That’s a six-mile walk, lady, and I’ve already put-in my miles today.” Splinter knows he can merely think back to the telepath, but he does not truck with that nonsense.
In response, another torrent of images bombards him: his father passing away from a stress-induced heart attack; his mother’s death, some weeks later, from a broken heart; Barrenites feasting on their still-warm corpses.
Then ... nothing.
Splinter is now behind the bar, putting together an experimental cocktail. Splinter comes back out from around the bar, his new cocktail — which included multiple cherries and a pink, paper umbrella — in hand, narrowly misses crushing a pronate patron’s face with his blast boots.
“Sleeping on the job again, eh? You rancid fucking blancmange!” Splinter says to the twitching person, as he sits once more at the bar.
Come to us, Splinter, Tristitia whispers in Splinter’s mind, dark and venomous. Or else, I will annihilate your pathetic mind, as I have the rest of your clan.
“I don’t think so,” says Splinter, savouring the bouquet of his new concoction.
Why do you not suffer, human? Tristitia rages in his mind.
Splinter gets off his bar stool and lowers himself down next to Gert. He drags her onto his lap, cradling her in his arms, and wafts the cocktail under her nose. Her eyes flicker open, her face a swarm of black tentacles.
“Sure,” says Splinter, “of course it affects me. You’re showing me the most disgusting, depraved, hurtful scenes imaginable.”
