by Jake Bible
Max Rage: Intergalactic Badass!
In:
Twelve Punches To Mars!
by
JAKE BIBLE
www.severedpress.com
Copyright 2018 by Jake Bible
One
“Junior! You moron! MOVE!”
Junior did not move.
Rage stood there, fuming, his dual plasma, laser-guided hot rocket launching, never-empty Axis combat rifle held in one hand, the butt resting on his hip, as he waited for the idiot to get out of the line of fire.
“I swear to every alien god, you little shit, I’ll fucking shoot you in the ass if you don’t move!” Rage roared.
Max Rage.
Built like someone had carved the man straight from a hunk of granite, Rage stood over six feet tall with muscles upon his muscles. Genetically engineered to be a superior physical specimen over normal space-faring humans, Rage’s physique was barely contained within his black T-shirt and jeans.
If it wasn’t for modern space-age polymers, he would have torn that T-shirt to shreds. Not that replacing it would be a problem. He had plenty in his apartment. An apartment that was situated above Crater Ray’s Hot Spot and Bar Place, the hottest dive bar in all of Greenville, South Carolina. Where Rage worked as a bouncer.
At the moment, he was trying to complete a side gig for his boss, Mascholine, the owner of Crater Ray’s and his casual, more than part-time lover. Completing the side gig would be so much easier if Mascholine’s idiot of a son would just get out of Rage’s way.
“I can’t move, Rage!” Junior cried, his entire body wrapped in tentacles except for his eyes, a tuft of green hair, and one hand that was busy waving frantically at Rage. “This thing has me in its grip! Do something, Rage! That’s what you’re paid for!”
“I’m being paid to clear this nest of diggle squids, so some rich fuck doesn’t have to bother with the approval paperwork to move a protected species!” Rage shouted. “Just bite the damn thing and it’ll let you go!”
Diggle squids. All tentacles, all the time. Nasty bastards. Rage really wanted to shoot the damn thing, but Junior was not making it easy for him.
“We,” a woman’s voice echoed in the comms unit in Rage’s ear. “We are being paid, Rage.”
“To-mato, to-fucking don’t care, Mascholine,” Rage replied. “You just watch the radar so no more of these bastards come for us.”
“Oh, they’re coming, Rage,” Mascholine said. “Which is something I’d like to enjoy later with a bottle of whiskey, so how about we get a move on?”
“Tell your son to stop fucking around,” Rage snapped, so bored with it all.
He’d once been a part of Earth Corp’s elite fighting forces. Heavy-grav combat armor. All the weapons he could want. All the aliens he could kill. It was the life.
Then some bureaucratic jackholes decided that air support was too expensive and let Rage’s entire squad die at the hands, well, claws, of the giant cockroach alien scum race known as the Scritch. Rage, being Rage, killed the Scritch, then took the drop ship back up to the Earth Corp fleet ship Hanskui and murdered the entire command crew. Because the bastards had it coming.
Did he receive a court-martial? You betcha. But, someone pulled strings and Rage was only sentenced to five years of hard labor, which he served without killing too many of the other laborers, then he was set free to become Crater Ray’s bouncer.
It wasn’t a bad gig. Three shots and Mascholine’s twat were all he needed.
After the Great Flattening of 2271, when an alien race that no one could describe suddenly laid waste to every major city on Earth then just as suddenly left without even saying why they came or sorry for the mess, the smaller bergs grew in importance and influence.
Suddenly on the intergalactic radar, Earth was swarmed by curious alien races. Only a couple of races were antagonistic, but the other aliens kept the troublemakers in check. For one reason: Earth had a knack for creating dive bars that both attracted and repulsed their customers. Apparently, dive bars were a uniquely Earth phenomenon. And the aliens loved them!
Now it was 2502 and Greenville had become the Mecca for those humans and aliens that wanted watered-down well drinks, flat beer made from questionable ingredients (urine, mostly urine), and bowls of peanuts from last century (still in their shells). And of the many dive bars that littered the cityscape, Crater Ray’s Hot Spot and Bar Place was the sanitarily challenged hole in the wall that topped them all.
So why was Rage currently clearing a nest of diggle squids from a small island on some backwater planet instead of scanning IDs and taking cover charges from frat boys and six-headed monstrosities?
Mascholine thought it’d be a good idea to branch out and take jobs that put Rage’s combat skills to use. Plus, she loved watching him work. It made her yellow skin glow with desire. And Rage wasn’t going to argue with anything that made Mascholine glow like that. Not to mention it broke up the monotony of scanning IDs and taking cover charges from frat boys and six-headed monstrosities. Even putting an end to the ubiquitous bar fights had become routine.
So, side gig…
And an idiot still in the clutches of a diggle squid.
“Hold still,” Rage said, putting the butt of his dual plasma, laser-guided hot rocket launching, never-empty Axis combat rifle to his shoulder. “Don’t fucking move, Junior.”
“You just got done shouting at me to move, Rage!” Junior shrieked. “Make up your muscle-bound mind!”
“My mind doesn’t have muscles, Junior,” Rage said, taking careful aim. “It is muscle!”
“I… I don’t know what that means!” Junior shouted just as Rage squeezed the trigger.
Diggle squid went everywhere.
Junior collapsed to the ground, intact and unharmed, but coated in neon orange diggle squid blood. His terrified eyes blinked up at Rage.
“You’re welcome,” Rage said.
“Got a dozen incoming, Rage,” Mascholine called over the comm. “Right behind you.”
“On my six,” Rage corrected. “When you have something behind you, it’s on your six.”
“I’ll be having you on my six later, tough guy,” Mascholine cooed.
“Ugh! I can hear you, Mom!” Junior complained as he fruitlessly tried to wipe the diggle squid blood from his body. The more he wiped, the more blood seemed to coat him. “Is there more? Why is there more? Where is it coming from?”
“Diggle squid blood pulls the moisture from your body,” Rage said. “You’re gonna be a dry husk in about thirty minutes.”
“What?” Junior screeched. “MOM!”
“Is that true, Rage?” Mascholine asked.
“Nah, I’m fucking with the twerp,” Rage replied. “The blood isn’t increasing, Junior’s just smearing it over his eyes. Idiot.”
“Junior!” Mascholine shouted. “Stop smearing the blood!”
“But it’s icky, Mom!” Junior whined. “Get it off! Get it off!”
“I’ll let you two deal with that. I’ll deal with the reason we’re here,” Rage said.
Rage turned around and closed his left eye, bringing up a targeting vid pushed straight from his rifle’s scope. He zoomed in until he could see the incoming diggle squid posse. So many tentacles.
The targeting protocol in his implant went to work, zeroing in on the weak points of each squid. Rage waited, watching the squid posse get closer and closer.
“Rage? Cutting it a little close there,” Mascholine said. “This rental ship doesn’t have weapons. I can’t cover you from up here.”
“What about me, huh?” Junior screeched.
“You’re already covered,” Rage said. “In diggle squid gunk. Deal, you litt
le shit.”
Rage squeezed the trigger and held it in place as his rifle powered up and opened fire on the diggle squid posse. Neon orange blood exploded everywhere. Like water balloons popping mid-air, the squids’ bodies burst wide, coating the surroundings for meters.
The wind shifted and Rage caught a couple of droplets across his cheek. He let go of the trigger, lowered the rifle, and wiped the droplets away. He slowly walked over to the deflated corpses and nudged one with his toe.
“Calamari, anyone?” Rage asked. He put the barrel of the rifle to a still-squirming squid and fired. It shuddered and went still. “It’s already fried.”
“No time for puns, Rage,” Mascholine said. “We have six more nests to hit. We need to hurry before the planet’s authorities arrive.”
“I thought the client bribed them,” Rage said.
“The client did,” Mascholine said. “You ever know someone that can be bribed not wanting more?”
“Can’t say that I have,” Rage replied. He walked over to Junior and grabbed the guy by his orange-colored shoulder. “Come on, bait. We got work to do.”
“What? Mom!” Junior cried
“Oh, shut up and go with Rage, boy. We all have our parts to play in this job,” Mascholine replied.
“And your part is idiot,” Rage said to Junior. “How’s it feel to be typecast?”
“Mom! You always let him call me an idiot!” Junior complained.
“Stop being one and I’ll stop letting Rage call you one,” Mascholine replied.
The comms channel switched to private and Rage groaned.
“What?” he asked.
“Maybe lay off the kid for the rest of the job?” Mascholine suggested. “He is still my son.”
“Idiot son,” Rage said.
“Still…”
Rage growled then nodded. “Fine. But no promises if he does something really stupid.”
“Uh, Rage?” Junior said.
Rage turned to look at Junior and sighed. Junior was up to his neck in swamp water with several floppy black fins circling him.
“Like right now,” Rage said. “Son of a bitch…”
Two
“What the hell happened to my bar?” Mascholine shouted as she, Rage, and Junior walked into Crater Ray’s. “Grup! What did you do?”
“Oh, hey there, guys,” Grup replied from on top of the bar.
Where he was tied into about a dozen knots.
Grup was a Clickelack, a race of stick-like aliens from halfway across the galaxy. They found Earth back in 2353 and took such a liking that they systematically moved half their species to the planet within a century, making Clickelacks close to humans in population.
Purple with five arms and three legs. That was Grup.
“Could I get a little help?” Grup asked, his eyes blinking with panic and pain. “I think the circulation is gone in my fourth arm. I hope it doesn’t fall off.”
“I’m going to have Rage rip it off if you don’t tell me what happened,” Mascholine snarled.
She stood in the center of her bar, turning in a slow circle, her eyes taking in the destruction. The booths were scorched and melted piles of vinyl and steel. Every table and every chair, including the bar stools, were nothing but splinters. The dance floor was carved up like a gigantic cat had sharpened its claws right there. The stage where some of the best worst bands in the country played was nothing but debris.
“No, really, guys, I can’t feel my fourth arm. Or my second arm,” Grup whined. “Or my third leg.”
Rage took a deep breath in through his nose and grimaced.
“I smell douchebags,” Rage said. “You catch that?”
“No,” Mascholine said. “All I smell is a huge repair bill.”
“That’s not douchebags, Rage,” Junior said. He’d already climbed into his usual corner booth and was slumped low so only the top of his head and his eyes could be seen. Somehow, that booth was almost unharmed. “That’s Wirez body spray.”
“Exactly,” Rage said “Douchebags.”
Rage crossed to Grup, lifted the knotted alien up off the bar, sorted out his many limbs, then let him fall into a puddle of what was obviously vomit. Human vomit, by the look. Being a professional bouncer, Rage knew his vomits.
“Talk, Grup,” Rage said. He rounded the end of the bar and grabbed a bottle of whiskey, pouring hefty shots into two tumblers. He held one out and Mascholine grabbed it without taking her eyes off the destruction. “Grup? Five seconds to spill or I throw you across Highway 25.”
“Come on, Rage, we’re pals,” Grup said, getting up onto his three shaky legs. He was coated in vomit and one arm hung limp at his side, a very wrong color of purple. A color that did not match Grup’s normal purple hue. “Look at me, man. I’m the injured one here. Last time you threw me across the highway, I was stuck in one of the trash dumpsters behind Joan’s Carpet Haven and Taxidermy Spa for like a week.”
“It was only three days,” Rage said.
“No, that was the time before that,” Grup said. “Last time was a week because of the long holiday and Joan was gone on vacation to visit her brother in—”
Grup’s voice was cut off as Mascholine whirled around and grabbed him by the neck, lifting the alien up off his feet. She pulled him in close, turned her head from the smell, then extended him at arm’s length.
“Talk. Now,” she snapped.
Rage downed his whiskey and poured more, a satisfied smile on his face.
“Best do what the woman says, Grup,” Rage said. “She left you in charge to watch over the place.”
Grup gasped and coughed.
“Mascholine?” Rage said. “Hard to understand him when you’re choking the shit out of the guy.”
Mascholine let the alien drop back into the vomit. She skirted the puddle and hopped up onto the bar, grabbing the bottle of whiskey as she crossed her legs and glared down at Grup.
“Junior,” she said without taking her eyes off the alien. “Get the bot and start cleaning up.”
“Me? Have Rage do it,” Junior complained. “He’s the hired help.”
“I may need Rage to tear this fucking Clickelack limb from limb,” Mascholine replied. “So get the bot and start cleaning up.”
A sad beeping and booping came from the back of the bar.
“Is that the bot?” Mascholine asked.
“Yes…?” Grup replied. He scooted across the floor, putting as much space between himself and Mascholine as possible.
“Bot!” Mascholine called then let out a loud whistle. More beeping and booping, but the bot didn’t appear. “Where is it?”
“In a bucket,” Grup said. “Well, three buckets. They broke him when he tried to help me. It was really sad, guys. Like really sad. He cried as they tore him up into little bot parts.”
“Jesus Christ,” Rage said. He downed a shot then gave Mascholine’s hip a squeeze. “I’ll go check on him while you get the story out of Grup.”
Rage walked off into the back of the bar, shoving open a door into a hallway that was for employees only. There, sitting in three buckets, were the remains of Crater Ray’s bot that was used for everything from maintenance to fry cook. The only identifiable piece of the bot was its head which was missing one eye while the other sparked and rolled over and over and over in its head.
“Damn,” Rage said. “They fucked you up, boy.”
The bot let out a sad little trill of a beep.
“I hear ya, pal,” Rage said. He grabbed up the buckets and hauled them back out into the main room of the bar. “Add this to the repair cost.”
Rage set the buckets on the bar then noticed that Grup was no longer in the bar.
“Where’s stickman?” Rage asked.
“Tossed him across the highway,” Mascholine said.
“You did? Didn’t think you had the strength to do that,” Rage said.
“I didn’t throw him far. He slammed into a hover car in the fourth lane,” Mascholine said.
“Yep.”
Rage shrugged. “Street cleaner will suck him up in the morning. He tell you what happened?”
“Frat boys,” Mascholine said.
“Of course.”
“Came in here last night drunk and kept drinking.”
“Sounds like frat boys. Human?”
“Yeah. They were looking for someone, but were so drunk they couldn’t tell Grup the guy’s name. They destroyed the place when Grup wouldn’t tell them if the guy was here or not.”
“Even though they weren’t able to give him a name. That’s so frat boy.” Rage grimaced. “So, why’d you toss Grup across the highway? Or try to, at least.”
“Because he served the fuckers,” Mascholine snapped. “You don’t serve drunk frat boys, you bounce them.”
“But the bouncer wasn’t on duty!” Junior yelled from his booth. A phone rang. “Gotta take this.”
“What you gotta do is clean this mess up,” Mascholine shouted. Junior held up a finger with one hand and pressed a finger to his ear with the other. “Little shit…”
“I’ll call bot repair then get started on the mess,” Rage said.
“You will?” Mascholine responded. “That’s uncharacteristically nice.”
“Oh, there’s a price,” Rage said with a smile.
“What’s the price?”
“You know that thing you won’t do except for holidays?”
“That’s the price?”
“That’s the price. Every night for a week.”
“Done.”
Rage frowned. “That was too easy.”
“I like doing that thing. I only make you wait for holidays because it’s fun to watch your face when I tell you it’s gonna happen.”
“We could be doing that every night? Damn…”
“Get to cleaning and I’ll go take a shower and a nap,” Mascholine said. “How long will you be?”
“Four or five hours,” Rage said.
“Perfect. Gotta rest up. And stretch. A lot of stretching.”
Mascholine leaned across the bar and grabbed Rage by the back of the head. She kissed him hard then pulled back and took a deep breath.
