by Aaron Crash
The gunny sat down next to his sister. She was sipping on a dirty martini, so filthy it was mostly olive juice and adultery. She stared off into the distance, gazing into her implants. She was probably using her display to check on the asteroid belt, or where the asteroid belt had once been. Their battle with Panashoat had changed Jupiter’s moon situation dramatically, and the solar system had lost billions of tons of space rock.
Earth’s orbit had changed, and the oh-no-we’re-all-gonna-die situation totally happened. Massive storms, earthquakes, solar fried chicken, dogs living with hamsters, the apocalypse.
Until the cats came out.
Blaze sat and sipped, then pulled a Cohiba from its titanium tube. He hadn’t brought his ax, no need. He scratched a wooden match on the bar and lit up. He got it going and let the smoke drift through his mouth.
Damn, but few things beat a good Cohiba. Or a breakfast burrito made by someone’s abuela, full of an embarrassing amount of chorizo.
Blaze caught his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. His facial scar was back, cutting down his face. Ironic, his sister had healed it away, and then she’d given it back to him.
Elle continued to stare into her implants.
Blaze finally said, “It’s been four months, Elle. They’re gone. Lizzie, Trina, Cali, they’re not coming back.”
“I know.” His sister sighed. “I just keep hoping for some kind of miracle.”
Speaking of miracles, Raziel wandered out from under a booth’s table and leapt up onto the bar. Corwin wasn’t around, and so Blaze and Elle let her sniff and wander in her cat way.
“I’ll tell you what would be miraculous,” Blaze said. “If I had a bed, like a real bed, that would be a pinche miracle.”
Elle laughed. “You don’t like your cot? I like my cot. And the outdoor shower isn’t so bad.”
“Yeah, it’s June,” Blaze said. “Remember back in March?”
Elle shivered. “Don’t remind me.” She paused. “We’re almost out of money. I’m thinking of selling a fusion pistol. Might keep us going for a bit more.”
Blaze thought about their home, an old airplane hangar in what used to be the McCook Ben Nelson Regional Airport back when Lynyrd Skynyrd had first started singing about simple kind of men. Now, it was ruins, though it did have electricity and a toilet and a sink. No showers. Bill had rigged up an outside shower, which kept them clean. Ling had his tower gardens and he slept on a shelf high above them, eating leaves and caterpillars, but only on Sundays.
The Clicker brothers had puked up their hexagonal home-away-from-homes and slept curled up together in a hive.
Crazy pinche bugs.
Blaze and Elle got the cots in rooms that didn’t have walls, but long red curtains Elle had picked up at a thrift store.
Randi knew a guy who knew a girl who knew a Clicker that had invested in junk real estate on Earth. And so, they stayed there, not paying much rent, but when you’re broke, any rent was a lot of rent.
“I’ve been looking for bounties here on Earth, but it’s not like the IPC’s most wanted hang out in such a backwater place like this.” Blaze breathed out smoke.
Raziel sank down right in the middle of the bar between them and regarded both the gunny and the former witch with cool yellow eyes.
“It’s been quiet,” Elle said. “I needed the quiet.”
And it had done her a world of good. She had the occasional dirty, dirty, dirty martini, but she wasn’t guzzling booze, slamming heroine, or juicing up on Onyx. Not a lot of Onyx left to be had.
Elle had found a quiet comfort in McCook. Even found a sweet little honey down in Hays, and another bigger, brawnier chica in Kearney. Evelyn was cornfed and mean, but Elle sometimes liked them mean. The Hays woman, though, was sweet like honeysuckle. Blaze had thought about making a play for her to try to steal her away like Elle had stolen away so many of his own girlfriends.
But that was Nauzea talking. Both he and Elle could feel that archduchess of torture rattling around in their skulls. Without the Onyx, she was mostly gone and easy to ignore. Like Ling would say, she was just more nonsense thinking that had nothing to do with the eternal now.
“So, we need a ship that can actually fly and a job,” Elle said. “Get us some cash, get us a ship, and get back on the road doing what we do best. Hunting. I’d love to collect on the Gorebacks.”
“Catching Humans, even those clown-worshipping cannibal psychopaths, is going to be so boring now,” Blaze complained. “But we have to pay the bills. Speaking of bills, Bill might be giving up on the Ted Bundy.”
“We were never going to call it that,” Elle said. “I will not name our ships after serial killers. The Lizzie Borden was a one-time thing, and there’s a good chance Lizzie was innocent.”
“Which is why we found her ghost slaughtering people centuries later,” Blaze said.
“Sometimes evil can be innocent,” Elle countered. “I was. In my own way.”
“Tried to murder us all, remember?” Blaze motioned with his cigar. “No innocence in that. Just evil.”
Elle sipped her drink. “Anyway, Bill might never finish that DIY starship he bought off that traveling snake-oil salesman. He’s heartbroken over losing Lizzie.”
Blaze closed his eyes. “Yeah, so we have an engineer who doesn’t engineer. And we have an Onyx witch who can’t magic. And I’m losing my mind. If only I had a bed, like an actual bed…remember my bedroom on the Lizzie? Damn, but we were flush for a bit, and I got that self-adjustable purple bed thing. It was so comfortable. I never liked the bed in the library, but then, Trina and I didn’t do much sleeping on it.”
He paused. And winced. Losing Trina had been hard. He’d hooked up with some of the local girls Elle had struck out with, but whenever he found himself alone, afterward, it made losing Trina harder. He’d given up on sex and started going on long runs and hitting the gym. He was lonely, but he was shredded. He was down to nine percent body fat and working on finding those last two beers in his eight-pack.
“You miss her,” Elle said. “And I miss Cali. I keep remembering her whining before she threw me out of the Lizzie. That whine, that lick…even as a werewolf, she loved me. It was something. We were something.”
Blaze nodded. Cali had been incredible: a paradox on paws, so sweet and gentle and sensitive. “But you’re happy here, Elle. Ling would be happy buried alive in a coffin as long as he could breathe and eat his goddamn leaves, and Fernando is happy because…why is Fernando happy? He doesn’t seem bored or restless or anything. Is it because he’s a bug and gets to eat his daily fungus and yahoo for that?”
Elle took in a deep breath, held it, and let it out slowly.
Blaze’s heart fell. “No, Elle, no…”
“Yes, Blaze, yes.” Elle grinned. “It, um, well, you know me and tequila. I kind of lost it here at Corwin’s Cinco de Mayo party. So, yeah, one thing led to another, and Fernando always wanted an encore, so, um, yeah. Tequila. I blame that.”
“He’s never going to get over you now,” Blaze moaned.
“It was kind of freaky, but it was kind of good,” Elle said shamelessly. “You know, the first time, it was awkward because I knew as a Phasmida, he didn’t have a sex drive, but the second time, it was clear he was getting off on it. Which kind of got me hot.”
“No, no, we are not talking about this, Elle. You’re my sister, this is weird, and he’s a goddamn bug. And you might be okay with a cross-species polyamory thing, but it can’t end well for any of us. We need a purpose. Damn, but we need a purpose.”
“Yeah, you need to bang Ambassador Randi, and I mean, like yesterday. That chica is smoking hot, but straight like Granny’s razor.”
Raziel stood up, stretched, and then raced across the room to stand by the door, gazing up at the glass.
“Someone’s coming,” Blaze said.
“Yeah, and it’s someone Raziel likes, since she’s not freaking out,” Elle said. “Our little angel cat.”
Blaze co
uldn’t quite remember all the godlike thoughts he’d had when he’d been a deity, but he remembered knowing Raziel’s true nature, a force of good in the universe, to balance out all the bad. He’d told Elle as much as he could recall, which wasn’t all that much. For example, he had no clue who Granny and Arlo were or where they’d gone.
“You think God could be a cat?” Elle asked.
“Aloof but loving, purring when things are good, napping when things are bad, following rules all of his own? Sure, I can see it,” Blaze said.
“Following rules all her own.” Elle smiled. “That cat thing on Earth was wild, wasn’t it?”
Blaze had to nod. After Jupiter lost its moons and the asteroid belt vanished, Earth was thrown off kilter for exactly seven minutes and seventeen seconds. Then every cat on the planet had raced outside and meowed up at the sky. Earth righted itself, defying everything scientists thought they knew about astrophysics and felines. Once the storms stopped and the earthquakes subsided, the cats went back to doing unknowable cat things. The end.
“Angels, Elle.” Blaze smiled. “After all the shit we’ve seen, why shouldn’t cats be angels? And maybe Raziel is god herself.”
Elle nodded at his pronoun usage.
Ling, Fernando, and Bill banged through the doors and into the bar. Behind them flashed the running lights of the Ted Bundy. The name had started out as a bad joke. The Clickers hadn’t known the difference and the joke stuck. They’d parked the pinche starship, half-finished, in the parking lot. The local authorities would be pissed.
“Bill!” Blaze said happily. “You got Ted running?”
Bill clicked. Without Lizzie and the Onyx energy in the galaxy, his arms couldn’t be repaired after they’d been melted during the last fight on the asteroid. But his legs still worked. Bill had fashioned crude pinchers for his top left arm and a hook for his lower one.
Fernando gazed on Elle, speechless and obviously wicked in love.
Bill finally shoved his brother to get him to translate.
“Bill says he hates you—”
The gunny cut him off. “No, I heard Bill scream Lizzie. He speaks Human. And he better start speaking Human like right now. I’m done with you translating. And if we go hunting again, he’s going to need implants. This is bullshit.”
Bill fluttered his wings, cracked the joints on his right arms, and then clicked very slowly and very distinctly.
“Bill says he hates you,” Fernando said. “And he will not speak your primitive, slow, primate chatter ever. He can speak it but refuses to. His outburst at Lizzie’s righteous self-sacrifice was brought on by extreme emotional distress.”
Ling sped up to the bar and sipped from Elle’s glass. The Meelah made a face. “You do this because you enjoy it?”
Before she could answer, the Shaolin sloth whirled and plucked Blaze’s cigar from his mouth, puffed, choked, and turned green. He threw it back to the gunny. “And that is disgusting and strange. You are breathing in burning leaves, an activity which causes cancer.”
Ling grinned and turned to the Clicker brothers. “And Humans think they are an advanced species. Clearly, the hierarchy in the universe is the Meelah first, then the Phasmida, and then the Humans, who are little better than bacteria.” Ling grinned wider. “I’m practicing using insults as humor. It’s like sarcasm, but crueler. How am I doing?”
Blaze chuckled. “Good. You’re ready for the Astral Corps and a Saturday night at some crappy spaceport in the butt end of the universe. Like somewhere near Meelah space. Who goes there?”
“Who indeed,” Ling said, sobering. “Rebuilding GaMeSpa is going to take some time. But the IPC is funding much of the construction. Of course, they are rebuilding using their own overpriced vendors, and they are making palms oily.”
“You mean they are greasing palms,” Fernando said. “That is the idiom.”
Bill let out a frustrated clack and then clicked some more.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Fernando said. “Bill and I have some good news. And it’s not just about the Ted Bundy. We found Onyx energy signatures.”
Blaze and Elle exchanged glances.
“Perhaps good news isn’t the correct verbiage,” Ling said. “Exciting news is more appropriate. While I am happy eating my leaves and walking on this beautiful but troubled world, I know Blaze has been dissatisfied with our ultimate victory and a peaceful universe.”
The gunny had to nod. “Yeah, I like me a good war. But where is the Onyx coming from?”
Bill clicked, and Fernando answered. “It’s coming from an Etrusca ruin, deep in the heart of the Bermuda Expanse. It seems not all of the Etrusca ruins were created to be the armor of Panashoat.”
Everyone paused, trying not to repeat that word three times. Blaze didn’t want to, never had wanted to, and neither had Ling. But Elle, Fernando, even Bill? They had to fight the urge.
Corwin, in the back room, couldn’t hold back.
“Panashoat! Panashoat! Panashoat!”
“Is fucking dead,” Blaze finished. “I made him eat himself. So, what do we think the other Etrusca ruins are?”
“Onyx generators,” Ling said. “Not unlike the demon generator that Bill and Fernando created on GaMeSpa. But these are on a massive scale. It could be that each one will turn on, which will again flood the universe with the evil Onyx energy.”
Blaze remembered his vision of ancient Etrusca, how the humanoid creatures had transcended their biology, worshipped strange evil gods, and created Onyx generators to power their insatiable lusts and their myriad of appetites. He put it together in his head. “So the Onyx Gate opens into the past, allows Panashoat and his kids to appear, but now that they are gone, maybe it triggered the long-dormant generators. Which means we have to destroy them, one by one.”
“And we have a ship to do it,” Elle said. “But we are changing her name. And it’s a her. Everyone knows spaceships are girls.”
Bill clicked. Fernando translated. “Bill hates your strange notions of gender. Spaceships are ‘its,’ to use the gender-neutral pronoun of your monkey chatter.”
A voice broke through their comms. “I am definitely a hhhim…and a hhher. But gender politics aside, we need your hhhelp. The Old Ones hhheld us. We escaped…and we can’t get hhhome. Not without your hhhelp.”
They paused. The voice was Lizzie, and it had come in faintly, full of static, but it had been there. Also, Lizzie had used the plural first person pronoun of “we.” As in Lizzie, Trina, Cali…
Blaze and Elle sprang off their barstools. They had a ship, however junky, half-finished, and poorly named. And they had a mission. Find the Lizzie Borden. Turn off the Onyx generator in the Bermuda Expanse. And get shit done.
The door swung open on its own and stayed open. Raziel stood in the twilight in front of the blinking lights of the starship, and she raised a paw and meowed.
Blaze took it as a call to arms. They were back in business.
╠═╦╬╧╪
Granny and Arlo walked into the main room of the Double Deuce. They’d come in through the back door, like in the lyrics of an old rock and roll song.
Granny had wanted to cut Corwin’s throat, but Arlo had stopped her. She put the bartender in a deep sleep with one of her waning Onyx spells. Then she grabbed a bottle of Fuck Off whiskey while he poured himself a huge cup of coffee in his stainless-steel mug.
Four months sober. It was a start.
They both went to the door of the dive bar to watch the starship take to the skies.
They held hands. Granny rested the bottle of whiskey on her thigh like it was a rifle. Arlo sipped the old coffee, as bitter as dirt, as sharp as a scorpion sting.
Granny’s eyes were soft, and she sighed and turned to look at Arlo. “They’re not bad for messiahs. I mean, we’ve seen worse.”
“We’ve been worse.” Arlo grinned. And wished for a smoke. But he was done with drinking and smoking for a bit. Just for that day. Maybe he’d get drunk and bang Granny the next day, but he
’d stay sober that one day.
“They’re going to lose at some point,” Granny said sadly.
“All the good ones fail,” Arlo said. “The best ones fail oh so dramatically and change the universe forever.”
He turned and put a song on the old jukebox, some kind of melody about love, a guy, his darling, and time going slow. It was good music, seven hundred years old, not like the shitty pop songs of the twenty-seventh century.
The two danced as the universe trembled at the coming of a new evil.
The universe could be such a nervous Nelly.
Blaze, Elle, and the rest of the Galactic Demon Hunters weren’t about to let anything happen to their little galaxy. They were messiahs, after all … troubled, conflicted, doomed, like the best messiahs are.
Books, Mailing List, and Reviews
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Other Works by Aaron Crash
War God’s Mantle: Ascension (Book 1)
Books from Shadow Alley Press
James A. Hunter
Strange Magic (Yancy Lazarus Episode One)
Cold Hearted (Yancy Lazarus Episode Two)
Flashback: Siren Song (Yancy Lazarus Episode 2.5)
Wendigo Rising (Yancy Lazarus Episode Three)
Flashback: The Morrigan (Yancy Lazarus Episode 3.5)
