The Ardoon King

by Samuel Fort

  Chapter 35: Cash Carnage

  An hour later, with a Peth on either side of her, Fiela walked into the black temple and again inspected the walls. What was up with all the black paint, she wondered? It looked creepy enough, which was probably the desired effect, but so what? Surely the builders knew the world was collapsing around them. Did they not wonder who would be left alive to view that morbid structure when the collapse finally came? Why had they murdered the news crew?

  She decided the paint must serve a purpose. She withdrew one of her birthday daggers and scratched lightly at the black surface. As the paint fell away, she saw that beneath it were multicolored inscriptions. Lines – hundreds of them in just a small area. She recognized them immediately. These were the same types of inscriptions as she had seen on her husband’s tablets. Glyphs.

  Excited at her discovery, she rubbed away still more of the paint, thinking to take a digital photograph that she could carry back for Ben to study. A blue spark from the wall interrupted her thought process. It jumped from the inscription to her dagger and sent an unpleasant shock up her arm.

  “Ouch!” she exclaimed, flexing the affected arm to shake off the effect.

  “Are you okay, Annasa?” asked Bavenmore.

  “Yes. Static electricity, that’s all.”

  “Very –argh!”

  Fiela turned to see him backing away from the wall. “You, too?”

  “I don’t think that is static, Annasa.”

  Hundreds of tiny sparks began jumping from the wall to the ground and the dome. There was a curious smell in the air.

  “Smells like rain is coming,” Fiela said.

  “Annasa, I think we should leave this place.”

  “Just one second.” The girl pulled a smartphone from her pocket. It was worthless now in almost all ways, except that it could still take and display pictures. She aimed the lens at the inscriptions. Before she could tap the screen to take the picture, a spark leapt from the wall to the phone and the screen went black.

  “Damn it!” she screamed.

  “Annasa, please!”

  The sparks were growing larger and more prevalent and the ozone smell overwhelming. There was also an odd sound coming from somewhere in the room. Then came the deafening roar they had heard earlier – but now it was in the room, with them.

  “Alright, let’s go,” she said.

  Outside, the squadron of Peth formed a perimeter around the temple and marveled at the light show visible through its still opened doors. In a way, it was beautiful, in the same way that a mushroom cloud was beautiful. It was a terrifying beauty.

  “Fall back,” shouted Bavenmore. “Put distance between yourselves in the temple. Seek cover. Reserves, take shelter in those buildings, there!”

  Fiela stood motionless, watching the light show while the Peth gave orders. Though she was the senior Peth onsite, she was an assassin, not a field soldier. She had no experience leading troops. While she understood basic formations, assaults, and defensive strategies, most of that knowledge was abstract and based on books she had studied while training at the academy. She was glad that a seasoned leader like Bavenmore was present to do what she could not.

  A growl could be heard from within the temple, and then a roar. A horrible, ear-splitting roar. Just like everyone around her, Fiela recoiled.

  Then the thing emerged.

  The carnage in Cash was unbelievable. Fiela had never seen such a creature and fought to rectify what her eyes reported and what her brain insisted could not be. The giant ribbed beast had emerged from the black temple and within twenty minutes wiped out half her squadron. Bullets seemed to have no effect on it, nor grenades. There simply was not enough of ‘it’ to hurt. It was all razor-sharp ribs and gooey flesh, except for the tentacles, shell, and bladder at the top of the thing. Even the theoretical weaknesses appeared to be immune to bullets.

  Captain Bavenmore had died trying to save a fallen Peth. His executive officer, Lieutenant Callis, ordered the surviving Peth to barricade themselves in nearby concrete buildings. While concrete and rebar structures were not immune to the beast’s constrictions, they did take longer to destroy, which afforded their inhabitants time to escape to some other shelter.

  The ground was littered with body parts. Fiela had seen death before, but never like this. Even after the worst battles, the bodies of the dead were largely intact. Here, in Cash, there were no bodies. There were just bits and pieces of what had once been bodies, as if all the corpses had been run through a giant meat grinder.

  The temple monster was more than a weapon. It was an instrument of terror.

  Still, it was an organic creature. It might have arrived in Cash by something approximating magic, but the thing did not appear to have magical properties. It was flesh and blood - or rather, flesh and bone. If the bowling ball shaped thing that was attached to the underside of its highest rib was hardened, whatever was inside it had to be weak; a brain, almost certainly, or an organ approximating a heart.

  She needed to gain access to that shell and pry it open or cut it off.

  How to do that, though?

  The thing primarily killed by contracting its ribs and snapping things in two. So, item one: Do not get trapped between the ribs.

  Item two: Do not underestimate its speed. Though it crawled slowly, it could jump tremendous distances and fall atop its victims like a locomotive dropped from the sky.

  Would slicing open the bladder matter? She wasn’t sure. She thought the bladder’s only purpose might be to allow the monster to roar, since it only inflated before that event. The roar might actually be how the thing exhaled. There was no way to know for sure.

  She heard another man scream in the distance.

  Okay, Fiela, time to get off your sexy ass…