by Aaron Crash
Blaze finished coordinating. “The rest of us are going to go for Elle. And I hate to say it, but we have to shoot to kill.”
“Then let’s get it the fuck over with!” Cali screamed through tears. She ran toward the Onyx goddess, and Blaze opened her bracelets.
Elle couldn’t carry that many handcuffs in her purse. And if she was out of stasis spell components, she had a werewolf to deal with.
The Onyx goddess slammed Cali down into the ground with a telekinesis spell, snapping Cali’s bones and grinding her flesh into the rocks. She then hit Trina with a barrage of Onyx missiles that dropped her, slashing off limbs and knocking the Irish vampire to her knees. Her eyes and most of her skull was gone.
Blaze, Ling, Fernando, and Bill sped forward, though the gunny knew there was no way they were ever going to reach Elle.
Arlo hung back, muttering something, uncapping and recapping the bottle, totally useless. No surprise there. The pinche old man had picked the wrong time to get sober.
Fernando threw aragonite crystals out and snarled in Onyx speak. A red shield appeared in front of them, but this time, the Clicker witch doctor had concentrated all of his magic in front of them, preparing for a full assault.
An Onyx fireball exploded against his shield, but Fernando’s magic held. Blaze and the remnants of his crew reached the ship and leapt onto a wing, up another arm, and while the gunny, Ling, and Fernando reached the top, Bill dove through an open hatch and into the Lizzie. That engineer better work overtime because they needed the starship up and running.
Ling, the fastest, charged Elle with his fusion nunchakus glowing, but he bounced off her shield. He hit the top of the ship and moaned in pain.
Fernando tossed a red silk bag with black embroidery. Blaze knew it was filled with pig lard and gunpowder. A syllable of Onyx speak later, and Elle’s shield vanished. Dispel Onyx magic was big time mojo, and Fernando had already been casting beyond his limits. The witch doctor went down, wheezing.
“Blaze,” Fernando gasped, “I can’t hurt Elle. But you must. Please. Do it.”
Blaze raised an arm gun and with microbursts hit Elle’s bandolier, severing it and blasting through pouches and pockets. She went to grab another component, but Blaze had disarmed her.
She seized her katana, and he blew it out of her ten-fingered hideous hand. His arm gun clicked empty. He raised his ax to cut his sister in half.
But at the last minute, he realized he couldn’t. They’d made it to her, all of his team was down, it was up to him, and he couldn’t do it. He deactivated the fusion blades.
Blaze laughed at his own weakness and the love he felt for the troubled woman in front of him. All along, he’d been the big bad marine, taking out villains and killing loved ones when they turned. He’d had to kill his own commanding officer, one of the best men he’d ever known. And over the years, he’d killed fellow hunters who’d gotten bit by werewolves, turned by vampires, or infected with any number of Onyx diseases.
And yet, with the universe on the line, with the biggest, baddest villain of all forming in a bizarre mixture of ectoplasm and Etrusca armor, he couldn’t make the kill shot.
And Elle saw it. She punched through Blaze’s visor. The cold shook him, and his nose gushed blood. In the shock and surprise, he went down. Elle plucked his ax out of his hand and triggered the weapon.
The nanotech sealed his visor, but that wouldn’t matter when his sister cut off his head.
He gazed up at his death.
Elle cackled. Needles pushed out of her cheeks, her forehead, her throat. Nauzea’s needles. Even her eyeballs sprouted needles, which meant she couldn’t close her eyes. Two big nails emerged out of her throat. A spike shot out of her skull like a single, awful horn.
And she thought she could control me, Nauzea’s voice whispered. She thought she could consume me and keep me away. But I am pain. Life is suffering and always will be. Rejoice in the agony, now and forever.
Nauzea cut through Blaze’s face, but not into his head. In seconds, she’d recreated the scar Elle had healed. His flesh sizzled from his forehead, across an eyebrow, and down to his chin.
The burn of the wound on his face almost knocked him out, but he clung to his wits. He didn’t want to die passed out. He wanted to explore death fully conscious. And if he could, reach his sister before she killed them all.
Normally, Blaze and Elle couldn’t be possessed by demons because of their Eye of Horus tattoos, but in this case, Elle had consumed the archduchess, and so all bets were off on how all that evil shit worked.
“Elle!” Blaze shouted. “Elle, if you’re in there…”
That cliché??? Nauzea shrieked. Do you really expect that cliché to work?
A voice behind them somehow cut through the scant atmosphere covering the asteroid. “Listen, bitch, you keep saying cliché like it’s a bad thing. But I love a cliché. It’s a truth, so cheap and overused we can laugh at it. And I’d rather laugh at a worn truth than cry over a hurtful one.”
Granny stood there, ready to kick ass. She was in her black dress because it was Saturday night somewhere. Her snowy white hair tumbled around her face, which was ageless, timeless, and yet so careworn and weary. She was in her stiletto heels and in her hand was a silver cross.
Granny grinned. “You want to rejoice, you sadistic twat? Rejoice in this.” She threw the cross and screamed in Latin.
Exorcizamus te, omnis immunde spiritus…et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…the Latin exorcism spell tumbled from her lips.
The needles exploded from Elle’s skin and she screamed. A familiar scabby faced robed figure appeared around Elle.
While the Onyx goddess and the archduchess of torture fought over who owned the body they shared, the next wave of monsters hit them.
Above, the Clicker and Union ships couldn’t hold back the swarm of Etrusca creatures. Crabs, lobsters, crayfish, all with claws snapping, hit Blaze and his crew like an ocean of living, snapping, cutting, screaming metal.
Each had the face of an alien, slits for a nose, and a slit for a mouth, curled into an O shape, screaming one word over and over:
Panashoat! Panashoat! Panashoat!
And swimming in their ranks were two werewolves, Jared and Logan, one covered in dripping silver and the other full of needles.
Goddamn, but needles were cheap on that asteroid.
Crabs and lobsters and crayfish scuttled over Blaze, snapping at his nanotech, bashing his visor, covering him in long legs and writhing bodies.
Ling got to his feet and whirled his nunchakus, keeping himself and Fernando clear. Elle was lost, as were Granny and Arlo. Blaze couldn’t see a thing in the darkness of the sea-creature swarm. He blinked, and the swarm cleared for a minute. Something was happening. The whole rocky plane swayed.
A hand—was it a hand? It was hard to tell with how pinche big it was—came and gripped the asteroid Blaze and his crew were on. The hand shook them all around and lifted them up in front of a face.
Blaze grabbed his ax from Elle’s grip, hacked through a crab on his leg, another on his arm, and then jacked in a fresh spell and cleared himself of the Etrusca crustaceans.
He turned and stared into a skeleton’s skull so wide his mind got stuck trying to take it all in. Inside the tentacles of the Etrusca armor was a skeleton, some dead thing. The ectoplasm had ossified into bone.
But that skull, it wasn’t Human. No, it had an elongated snout and tusks curved back from the teeth. It was a pig’s skull.
All hail the All-Pig!
A Marvel comic book, a reissue of a reissue of a reissue, came back to Blaze. It was of a being called Galactus, a being who could eat planets. This thing, this Panashoat, was an undead, piggish version of that, but completely different and in black living metal tentacled armor.
The All-Pig opened its mouth. It took seconds, maybe it took months, for it to do it.
A quiet voice reached Blaze, though that should’ve been impossible. “So, these are the demo
n hunters and their god, their goddess, and their cat. I am patient. I will watch. Then I will devour you. I will devour all worlds. For I have come from the past to eat the future. Minutes will be my breakfast, I will lunch on hours, and my dinner will be the years that make up your reality. I will be fed. At long last, the father of hunger will find satisfaction in a meal that encompasses all life and all of existence.”
This thing, this Panashoat, was a patient thing. Blaze could feel that. And it could be. It was dead and hungry and lorded over the pain in the world, the technology, the death—all life and all living things would find a final home in the insatiable belly of the All-Pig.
It knew about the cat, Raziel, but was that a good thing? God and goddess? Arlo and Granny? What in the Nombre de Dios did that mean? And had it come from the past? Too much going on to consider such questions.
Behind the All-Pig, a hole opened in space, a black hole, but it glowed red around the edges. It wasn’t sucking anything in but pushing out Onyx energy.
For the first time since he was less than five minutes old, Blaze was seeing the 0n1x singularity, also known as the Onyx Gate. They had fifteen minutes to close it. That’s what Arlo had said, and they believed him.
The swarm of Etrusca crustaceans hit them again. Black living metal pinchers snipped at Blaze, and he chopped them off. Mouth slits mouthed PANASHOAT over and over, and Blaze melted away the mouths with micro bursts of fusion energy.
Ling fought on, but Fernando was still down, his yellow-green face pale and his mouth hanging open. Getting through Elle’s shields and wiping away her magic for a second might have killed the poor Clicker.
Granny shook away any crab that got close, and the sheer force of her exorcism spell was keeping both Elle and the Nauzea entity in her free of the creatures. Elle and Nauzea continued to battle. Needles appeared and disappeared as did scabs and wounds.
Everyone else was swamped. Until plasma fire erupted around them, clearing the creatures. A theta-particle beam fried through dozens of the crabs.
Unbelievably, appearing from over the shoulder of the undead giant thing in armor, Security Directory Alvin Denning, his Paladin, the two Cavaliers, and fifty Vespula flew into the battle. Each Vespula had a hundred drones. That was five thousand wasps, wings whirring. Blue-fire engines dangled behind them, and plasma guns acted like arms. The drones struck the cloud of Etrusca crabs, lobsters, and crayfish like a righteous wind.
Theta-particle beams sizzled from the round Cavaliers. And the various cannons and guns on board the clipped Paladin opened fire. The final Clicker ships and Union ships were saved. And from the other shoulder came a legion of Meelah exploration vessels. But they’d been converted into gunships. Welded onto the smooth metal of their big-headed ships were plasma cannons and missile launchers.
They joined the fight clearing the swarm and firing on tentacles that reached for Clicker, Union, and IPC ships.
A drone flew overhead and blasted through five crabs flying at Blaze. He turned.
Jared and Logan struck him. They’d made it down from space onto the asteroid Panashoat held in his huge fist. Or was that just two of his fingers? It was hard to tell with how big, how armored, how tentacled the All-Pig’s suit of living metal was.
Tendrils from the demon king’s armor swirled down and grabbed Logan, crushing him, but Jared was on Blaze. Blaze bashed away Jared and melted more of his needles with his fusion ax. Wrong setting. Damn. He deactivated the blades and snapped open the silver spikes.
A tentacle grabbed Jared, and then another plucked the ax out of Blaze’s hands and it was lost in the madness. A crab slammed onto his back and then another and then another. His arm gun was empty. No more shells in the clip under his tricep.
Blaze was pushed down to his knees.
There might’ve been five thousand wasp drones in the fight, but there were millions of the Etrusca creatures. And not all were crustaceans. What looked like a shark swam through the air, but it didn’t have teeth, only the alien face, chanting that word over and over. A school of alien-faced tuna drifted by. Again, no real threat there. It seemed the crustaceans were the fighters. The other fish were just mindless spawn.
Blaze hurled a crab from him. He tried to reload his arm gun with a new shell, but the crabs kept biting at him, and he had to keep punching them away. And it was only a matter of time before the werewolves got free and attacked him.
Arlo, with his .38, was crouched down. He fired at Jared. Missed. His hands were shaking too much for him to be effective. He fished into his pocket for the last of the bullets. Stupid asshole and his superstitions.
“Dammit, Arlo!”
Ian had pulled Chase’s corpse off the spear Fernando had used to pin the dead dickhead to the asteroid. The lead werewolf bounded onto the ship with Chase’s frozen body flopping behind him attached to him by the silver cable. The harpoon was still in Ian’s guts, but that didn’t slow him down. He’d already been skinned, and Blaze could see every muscle flex and every sinew pull.
Logan slipped free from the tentacle, healing as he hit the ground, and dodged another tentacle. Jared also tore loose and went for Blaze. The gunny, weaponless, was about to be ripped apart by the last three werewolves.
“Arlo!” Blaze called.
Arlo snapped his revolver closed. He tore off the cap on his bottle, drank the rest of the Barf Baby, and then took a deep breath. The last of the alcohol steadied his hands. One shot and Logan dropped, a silver bullet in his heart. Arlo reloaded again in a flash of speed and brilliance. He aimed and took Jared down a second later. They went from tortured, tormented werewolf Konobi to humans.
So, Arlo had four bullets. Well, that was lucky.
Ian was the last of the werewolves still alive.
Blaze, you shouldn’t have killed Jameson. You should’ve joined him. We all could’ve served the All-Pig, from now until the end of time. Ian hurled himself at Blaze.
“I don’t serve pigs, motherfucker. I eat them.”
He slammed a shell into his arm gun, raised the barrel, and shot through the tentacle holding his ax. It fell into Blaze’s hand, and he buried a spike into Ian’s heart.
Granny screamed something in Onyx, and a shield spell rose up and pushed the metal tentacles and Etrusca crustaceans away from the Lizzie Borden and cleared their battlefield for a minute.
“Oh, the little god has cast another of her little spells,” Panashoat murmured. “But she is finding my daughter more difficult to deal with.”
She’s not letting me go! Nauzea cried out in pain. Elle, this witch, she’s not letting me go!
Elle floated above them, the right half of her body prickly with needles, while the left half, the red and black tattoos, were plain old Elle. Her right eye was a black scab, one nose closed by a crust, and the right half of her mouth was a rind of infected skin. The left side of her face was unscathed.
Granny was on one side of the starship, Arlo on the other. Both looked elderly now, pale, wrinkled, weak. Sweat shined on Granny’s face from the plasma fire of the IPC ships’ constant assault on the Etrusca creatures and tentacles.
“Bill, tell me you have the Lizzie up and running,” Blaze said through comms.
Bill answered in clicks, and while Fernando wasn’t around to translate, Blaze recognized the sounds. They weren’t words. Bill was weeping.
It could very well be that the Lizzie Borden was dead. The Onyx Gate would disappear in ten minutes.
THIRTY-TWO_
╠═╦╬╧╪
Ling was bloody inside his armor, clipped and snipped by crab claws. He limped up to Blaze. Both started once again toward Elle.
Above them was the swirl of fighting, IPC ships and drones firing on tentacles and sea creatures in a constant light show. A lobster crashed down on Granny’s shield and skittered off only to be destroyed by a wasp drone’s guns.
Elle raised her right fist, pierced and bleeding from needles stuck all the way through. That had ten fingers. Her other hand,
covered with the red pentagram tattoo, also made a fist but it only had five fingers.
“She’s fighting the exorcism, Blaze,” Granny screamed. “Tell her to stop. Tell her to let Nauzea go.”
Elle cackled. “And give up all my power? Nauzea thinks she is ruling me, but I am ruling her.” From a hidden pocket, the Onyx goddess tossed a rectangle of magnets wrapped in thread. She cast a telekinesis spell and flung Ling off the ship. She tossed Fernando’s body onto the Shaolin sloth, pinning both down. Trina and Cali were getting to their feet, but she crushed them down again.
Arlo, with the last of the Barf Baby in his system, charged up the spaceship. Elle sent him flying until he crashed against the inside of Granny’s shield.
Elle then turned her magic against Granny. The old woman fell to her knees, face twisted in pain. She wasn’t trying to exorcise Nauzea out of Elle anymore. Granny was struggling to keep the shields up so they wouldn’t be ripped apart by the tentacles or cut apart by the Etrusca sea creatures.
And still Panashoat’s pig skull gazed down with oceans of darkness in the caverns of his eyes.
Blaze ran for Elle. He had no plan. The closest thing he had to a strategy was maybe grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her back to her senses. Didn’t happen. She shoved him down to his knees. The force of her magic cracked open his nanotech armor, splitting it like it was old denim. He’d forgotten the burn on his face, and he felt the agony anew.
He raised a hand and watched the microscopic robots split to show his fingers. He lost respiration. He had about ten seconds before he lost consciousness and died.
From out of the Lizzie Borden, Raziel came purring.
The calico cat, as unaffected by space as Arlo and Granny (the god, the goddess, the cat), rubbed her body around Elle’s legs. When she approached any needles on the right side of Elle’s body, they retracted into the skin.
