by Hunter Blain
Smoothly operating as a team and making their way down the hall, Hayley stood in front of Ludvig and manifested a shield of air and unseen energy in front of them. Ludvig was several inches taller than his wife and had a clear line of sight as he stood one step back and to the side. He brought up a suppressed Sig MPX, letting the considerably smaller H&K variant attach to a magnet system inside his coat. The midsize Sig rifle was connected by a one-point sling over a shoulder and was also chambered in 9mm. It was then I noticed all his weapons used the same rounds, which made sense in regard to traveling efficiently with the minimum amount of ammo.
“Moving,” Ludvig issued the command, and the pair started advancing together.
“I’ll get the right. You get the left,” I said, striding toward the closest door. Even with how sizable the hallway was, I had to give the big man some space.
“Copy,” Ludvig replied as he moved to the first door on the left, which was across the hall from the one I was heading to.
“Ladies first,” I said with a slight bow.
With an eye roll, Warden Broadway barked a command word, and her air shield slammed into the wooden door. It exploded in a shower of toothpicks as Hayley quickly brought her shield back to a defensive position.
“Hmm, neat,” I admired. Hayley and I were getting increasingly creative with how we did our missions. It was partly due to how boring it was to be just so feck’n badass that barely anything could hurt us, and partly to see who could show the other one up the most.
“My turn,” I said as I stood in front of my door as the pair did a standard clean sweep of the room behind me. “Hmm.” I thought for a moment before an idea came to me. Raising my hand, I knocked on the door while doing a David Spade impression...of...of an impression. “Housekeeping.” I was ready to do the whole bit about the chocolate on the pillow and finishing with the cherry on top when the door just up and exploded in front of me. It was the darndest thing.
I flew back into the room that my allies had finished clearing and smashed into the concrete wall, sending a spiderweb of cracks from ceiling to floor as I became a permanent fixture on the wall.
“I get it,” I squeaked out, coughing from the cascading concrete dust. “David Spade’s quotes aren’t the same without someone doing Chris Farley’s part...”
An arc of purple-and-green electricity lanced from the other room, slamming into where my sweet, sweet ass had pushed into the wall as if it were nothing more than a soft sand dune at the beach.
“HAY-LEEEEEEEEEEEY!” I screamed as lightning danced over my body. A part of me wondered how these bastards had figured out a way to mitigate some of the pendants’ protection that Father Thomes had given me. I mean, I could tell they were working, but where they had once felt like brand-spanking-new brakes on your car—ultrasensitive to the touch—they now felt worn down. Maybe I would see about getting them replaced once our mission was complete.
While I was being continuously electrocuted, Hayley strolled over to me with her hands behind her back and a “Who, me?” look on her face.
Being me, I focused my will and lashed out a hand to grab hold of her arm so that she, too, might get to enjoy bathing in electricity powered by Hell.
Ludvig strode forward and intercepted the arc of lightning with his massive forearm, allowing me to plop free from the wall and collapse to the ground where Warden Broadway gave me a full-blown soccer kick to my side as I attempted to get to my hands and knees. Like, she did a little jump and everything while letting a massive muscular leg cock backward as if she were attempting to kick the back of her head before releasing the powerful strike that I was pretty sure broke the sound barrier.
Air whooshed out of me, and I collapsed to the ground as Hayley rushed to where Ludvig was containing the attack with his hands now. He seemed to be fairing considerably better than I had, even with my celestial armor and silver crucifixes.
Veins bulged in my head and neck as I weakly pushed myself back onto my hands and knees, pain pulsating from where I was absolutely sure that the warden’s toes had tickled my liver.
Hayley came up behind her husband and extended her wand past his right shoulder, pointing the glowing tip in the direction of the lightning.
There was a whoomp and a change in air pressure as a torrent of flame rocketed forward and splashed into the other room, bathing everything in it with a voracious fire. I think there might have been a single scream, but it was cut off before a full second had passed.
The warden dropped her elemental fire attack and grabbed Ludvig by the shoulders, forcing him to turn around and face her. She feverishly inspected every inch of his body, while I, on the other hand, crawled to the wall in order to climb back to my feet.
“Stupid freaking warlocks with their stupid freaking Hell magic,” I lamented as I waited for my body to slowly heal from the only source of magic that could effectively counter my healing factor...oh, and Hayley’s freaking sonic boom attack.
“Boy, if it weren’t for that armor and cross thingies, your bitch ass would have been dead long ago,” Hayley helpfully commented.
“I bet you peruse social media comments and troll people for fun, don’t you?”
“I ain’t tell’n’ if I do.” It was weird to me that, now that the warden and I were—for lack of a better word—comfortable around one another, I noticed that she slid into an almost sort of Ebonics cadence when flustered.
“Listen here, LaFreckles,” I started with palms up, calling her by my made-up ghetto name which was waaaaay better than the one she had come up for me, mind you. “You’re coming to a boil. So why don’t you simmer down now...you’re comin’ to ah boil...simmah...down...nah.”
“You bes’ shut yo ass, Quinoa,” she countered with an aggressive head bob, pronouncing the word Qwe-no-ah, “less I shove my wand up there and send you to outer space.”
“I mispronounced quinoa wrong one freaking time,” I muttered, placing my hands on my lower back and attempting to straighten myself. Despite what you may have read online, crashing into stone walls did not feel as enticing as one might have been led to believe. The same could be said for soccer kicks from a chick with quads bigger than most dudes.
There was a murmur from down the hallway and a rush of stomping feet. I couldn’t tell how many of them there were, but it was more than a handful.
Straightening, I saw Ludvig and Hayley glancing nervously at one another, considering we were all confined to a single room with only one exit.
“I got this,” I confidently assured them as I closed my eyes and focused on where the approaching sound was coming from, picturing the layout of the facility in my mind.
Then I grabbed the air and shifted into the middle of a freaking pack of men.
Screams of confusion and agony fought for dominance in the air as my own body sent a red alert that something was terribly, horribly wrong.
Looking down, I saw moving lumps sticking through my clothes. Near my stomach, hands that were not mine poked out from under my shirt and were frantically opening and closing while whoever the arms were attached to attempted to pull them through my guts—which, let me tell you, felt wonderful.
My eyes went wide as my own trembling hands grabbed the bottom of my shirt and slowly started lifting. Oh dear, sweet, merciful Lord, I wish I hadn’t done that.
The top part of a head was sticking out, complete with wild eyes that animatedly shifted between scowling and apparent screaming. I could feel something moving inside my chest where the mouth must have been.
Gasps filled the air as the warlocks who had been running ahead turned and saw the monstrosity that could have starred in the next The Fly movie. I had fused with one of the warlocks!
“Oh...my...Lilith...I’m gonna be sick,” I gagged while bringing a fist up to my mouth. I noticed one warlock bringing up his glowing wand before another quickly grabbed his wrist and gestured at their friend sticking out of my chest.
I moved to place a hand on the wall—as I was becoming dizzy wit
h everything that was happening—and noticed the floor was wet and sticky.
Looking down and behind to where I had been standing, I saw a growing pool of blood spurting from the bottom half of a man. The warlock’s robes and flesh had been neatly severed as if by a laser.
Craning my neck, I looked behind me to see that my coat was unaffected.
A sickening idea came to me, and I moved my coat out of the way to feel my back. There were writhing lumps under my shirt, and I lifted it to see a spine that wasn’t mine pushing through the skin and gyrating as if trying to flee.
“OH GODAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!” I puked, feeling my torso constrict, which further outlined the man inside my body. “Fucking GROSSAAAAAAHHHH!” I threw up again.
The man inside my chest, who only had hands and eyes poking through my skin, began to turn blue, and then purple.
“He...he-he-he can’t breathe!” one of the warlocks called out in French.
“Cut him open!” another one suggested as he pulled out a silver ceremonial knife. That caught my attention.
On instinct, I willed my gladius back to life and began lopping off limbs, feeling the man inside my body with each movement. I might have thrown up two or three more times as I cut down the rest of the squad, only to lean against the wall and slide down to where a warlock had fallen on his side.
Looking down, I saw I was sitting on his hips and patted his leg a few times, silently thanking the man for giving me a place to sit. As I tried to breathe deeply, I only made matters worse, and saw that the eyes of the warlock I had fused with were now glassy and unfocused.
“Hay...Hayley!” I called out, still incredibly light-headed from what was happening.
A pair of footsteps ran toward me, with Ludvig’s being easy to distinguish with how heavy he was. He had lost some weight since we’d begun our mission, simply not being able to eat as much as when we were home, but he still had to tip the scales at 260 or so.
“MERLIN’S BEARD!” Hayley yelled a split second before Ludvig joined with, “ODIN’S BEARD!”
“What...what’s with you guys and...and beards?” I drawled, trying not to pass out. “What do you guys think?” I asked as I took off my coat and lifted my shirt the rest of the way off my head. “Think I could be in the next Total Recall reboot?” I switched to the mutant’s voice from the original Arnold version. “Quaid. Start the reactor.”
“Okay, that gets the Movie Reference of the Year award,” Hayley confessed with wide eyes. “You know what? Fuck it. Of the Decade.”
“Dedication is key.” I chuckled before pointing at the man poking from my flesh. “Can you...like...do something?”
“Do something? Do what, my man? I don’t think Hallmark makes a card for something like this.”
“How is dis happening?” Ludvig asked in a professional tone.
“I...I think I teleported on top of this dude,” I said, gesturing down with my drunken gaze.
Ludvig bent down while keeping his game face on, calling over his shoulder, “Watch our six.”
“Got it,” Hayley answered as she set up a defensive perimeter behind us.
Ludvig first examined the head that was sticking through my chest at my sternum, and then the hands that were near my belly button. Even with the red goggles on, I could see him examining the Fae-made clothes that King Taylor had made for me, paying special attention to my coat. Reaching out, he let a gloved hand glide over where my shirt and trench rested on the ground before glancing at the oozing legs behind me, making humming noises as he put the pieces of the deformed puzzle together.
Then he pulled out a silver knife and brought it down toward my chest.
“Whoa-ho-hooo there, big guy,” I called out as my full celestial armor shimmered to life. I noticed there was a bump over the hands and chest, which meant the armor saw the fused warlock as a part of me. “Oh man, that’s bad.”
“I need to remove the foreign tissue,” Ludvig explained from where he was crouching, resting his forearms on his thighs.
“I mean...what’s the worst that could happen?”
“You’d probably be extremely uncomfortable while de corpse rotted away under your skin. Dere would be gas expansion, puss, not to mention—”
“Okay, okay, okay! Just...just make it quick,” I hissed, willing my armor to shimmer away.
Ludvig placed one gloved hand on my chest near the skull while the other lowered the blade to my skin. I felt pressure and closed my eyes, expecting indescribable pain to lance through me...but nothing happened.
“Huh?” I let out my breath and looked down to see Ludvig try again, but the silver wouldn’t pierce my flesh.
Then something clicked into place, and I shook my head at how much what I was about to do would suck.
I willed a gauntlet into existence and then grabbed it with my other hand, taking in a deep breath as I did. Lifting the armor off, the set was no longer whole, and Ludvig’s knife dove down to the hilt in an instant.
“Shit!” he barked, slowly pulling the knife back out.
I don’t remember what happened after that as blackness swirled in my vision before yanking me beneath the stream of consciousness.
2
After an indeterminate amount of time floating in the black abyss of nothingness, I began to come to, noticing I was staring up at the ceiling through a pinprick...that I could only see through another pinprick.
“Okay, cauterize here and here, please,” Ludvig’s unmistakable voice instructed.
“Like that?”
“Yes. Okay, now we cut here.”
“Guess we just have to take out most of his organs, huh?”
“Yes.”
That’s about the time I passed out again.
I don’t know how long I was out, but I started coming to and let my head roll to the side. Ludvig was using a corpse’s robes to clean off his blood-covered silver knife.
Letting my head roll a few degrees more, dreary eyes saw a mass of flesh lying a few feet away. It had bones and odd-looking sacks of meat attached to it. It took a few moments to notice how they resembled organs...my organs. I’d recognize my babies anywhere; I had seen them so many damn times.
I tried to cry out, “Oh Lilith,” but was unable to get any air to cross over my vocal cords. Summoning all of my strength, I raised my head and saw why I couldn’t speak.
Most of my torso was gone. I could see the concrete floor through the giant hole in my stomach, and briefly wondered how dirty it must be. The air was filled with the distinct aroma of charred flesh. And to finish things off, I couldn’t move or even feel my darn legs.
Hayley kneeled down next to me and grabbed my naked hand, sliding the gauntlet over it and completing the armor once again.
A rush of energy came through me as my healing factor tsked in my head several times before getting to work.
“You’re sure this’ll heal?” Hayley asked from somewhere far away as my head spun.
“No. It’s only a guess. But silver didn’t affect him when I first tried to cut.”
“Ah, I see. You think the armor will negate the effects of silver and heal him.”
“I hope it will.”
Closing my eyes, I focused on letting the fully charged armor and my preternatural healing do their thing and regrow my missing...well...torso and everything inside.
Wait! I screamed internally at my healing factor. Can we save the spine for last? I had already been subjected to the spinal column growing first and letting me feel every nerve as it reattached and the flesh grew. It hurt. Like, you know when you watch a kid fall down and skin their little knee, and then they scream like it is the worst thing that has ever happened and no amount of pain could even be remotely compared to the sheer agony they feel at that moment...it was like how they thought they felt...times infinity...plus one.
My body apparently didn’t take requests and continued to first heal the framework to which all other organs connected.
I watched in terror as my spine
grew, reaching for my pelvis with a creepy, almost gleeful determination.
“Awesome,” Hayley said as she pulled up her phone to record. “Oh shit! I should have gotten video of the chestburster inside him. Damn it!”
Oh, Hayley. Sweet, funny Hayley. I was going to remember this.
My spine reconnected and the nerves started growing, bringing forward a tsunami of agony that made my entire body seize as if being electrocuted by a nuclear-powered taser.
I felt tears pooling in my sockets as my teeth popped from how hard I was clenching my jaw.
The first wave of agony ceased as the muscles grew over the nerves, then the organs followed suit, trailed closely by skin.
As if on cue, my body said, “Round Two: FIGHT!” as the nerves under my dermis grew before the outer layer of skin could cover them, making my whole body buck and thrash.
Once I was fully healed, I collapsed in a heap and let a few sobs rack my body for a moment.
My body was trying to explain to my reeling mind that something seriously fudged up had just happened, and that it was not happy about it at all. It felt wrong. I could spend an entire month locked in a room with the sole purpose of trying to adequately explain what it felt like to have your core regrow after surgically removing half of an adult man, but I’d still fall short of how messed up it was.
Closing her camera, Hayley extended her hand down to help me up. A part of me wanted to ask why she was being helpful all of a sudden, but I could probably guess it had something to do with watching me try not to cry. I mean, there was funny hurt and not-so-funny hurt. When a skateboarder is grinding down a rail and slips only to land on his balls, that’s funny hurt. When the same skateboarder snaps a leg backward and shrieks in such a way that would break glass, that’s not so funny.
Getting to my feet, I grabbed Hayley’s shoulder with one hand to steady myself, feeling my stomach threaten to expel the nothing it contained inside.
Careful to make sure I didn’t fall over, she slowly leaned down and retrieved my shirt and coat before helping me dress.
She guided me to what looked like a break room complete with kitchen appliances, cabinets, and long plastic tables with the bench seats attached.
