by Aaron Crash
The vampire whirled and blew off the top of the crane. Both starcycles fell to the ground, but the auto-engines clicked on, preventing them from cracking apart on the asphalt. Their blue-fire engines glowed in the gloom.
“Elle,” Blaze said. “Gonna need a little help.”
His sister cast the telekinesis spell followed by a scattering of teeth, a consume spell. A ton of Onyx energy filled her cells.
Granny cackled. “Oh, I’d forgotten the Human teeth thing. Eat up, girl, and let’s get to fighting. I’m so proud of you!”
Elle blushed at the praise. She used her telekinesis powers to bring the starcycles up from the ground.
Blaze leapt for one as the dragon shook off the stasis spell. Granny and Elle, on the bar’s crumbling floor, were shoved into the dragon’s mouth. The ragged wings of the beast beat up a hurricane breeze of stink and rot.
Damn, Granny and Elle, eaten! Holy shit!
One starcycle stayed floating near the dragon’s head.
Blaze, on the other bike, dropped to the ground, his heart in his throat. At the last second, he gunned the horizontal thrusters to avoid a crash, then spun the starcycle around to see if he could help Elle.
No need.
A ball of fire fried the beast’s snout—a spell no doubt, cast from inside the creature. Granny and Elle floated out of the thing’s cooked nose. They were held aloft by telekinetic magic. The obsidian dragon vomited zombies at them, but the corpses struck the shield spell and were sent plummeting to the ground. The bodies hit the hard earth in slaps and gushes.
Blaze was on the starcycle with functioning guns. He fired a fusion blast from the central cannon on the starcycle into the leg of the beast. The decayed skin and yellow bone went up in a smoking explosion of star fire.
The gunny followed up the fusion charge with pounding plasma bolts from his guns and severed the leg before zooming around the monster. The tri-sword tail flopped through a trailer and then whirled, sending a motorhome bouncing across the muddy landscape.
Blaze glanced up. Elle had caught the other starcycle and zoomed to safety while Granny levitated in front of the monster. Black nails of her Onyx energy ripped into the throat of the dragon as ghosts whirled around them. Somehow, Granny pushed them back and continue to batter the dragon with red spell missiles.
Blaze zoomed across one of the strange lakes he’d seen before. Below him wasn’t water, but what was it? He thought it would matter, eventually, but he was in the middle of a fight. No time to ponder that crap.
Or the yellow-dress girl, who was surrounded by zombies, playing her church and steeple games. The zombies were queued up behind the dragon, all trying to crawl into the orifices surrounding the dragon’s tail. Through the bones, Blaze could see the animated corpses creeping and crawling up the intestines of the beast toward the glowing stomach. He felt his own stomach lurch.
The dragon sent a wet gagging stomach full of zombies first at Granny, who flew to the side to avoid the sickening spew, then at Elle, who was speeding away. The zombie-stomach-acid mix struck the back of her bike, knocking out the starcycle’s blue-fire engine for a minute before it winked back on. She was thrown onto the highway, and hundreds of zombies came shambling toward her.
The corpses that had come barfing out of the dragon also crawled across the highway toward her.
The undead dragon continued to shriek.
Elle threw more teeth, drew in the Onyx from the zombies, and her mojo spun dangerously close to a hundred percent. She cast multiple fireball spells, burning zombies and blasting out their brains.
The dragon lurched on its ruined leg toward her and vomited more of the undead onto the highway.
But this time, the crane truck drove up. Patsy had to be driving because Ling was on top of the cab, his plasma bow firing into the zombies trying to get to Elle. Each glowing arrow pierced a skull. Ling never missed.
When he was close enough, he flipped off the crane truck’s cab, and out came the nunchakus as he cut through skulls and killed zombies in never-ending arcs of fusion death. Elle was up on her feet, casting spells.
Between them, they kept the undead horde back while Trina continued to protect the crane truck with the minigun.
But it was only a matter of time before the obsidian dragon turned its zombie-acid breath on the crane truck. Blaze wasn’t about to lose their ride. He had to get to the dragon’s glowing black heart, but it was so far above him, and he couldn’t fly his starcycle up to its chest. No vertical thrusters.
Blaze saw an old tractor trailer lying on the side of the road. He fired his fusion cannon and used his plasma guns to clear a path to the trailer. The plasma burned through rotted faces, leaving baseball-sized holes in skulls. His fusion cannon left only body parts behind. A screeching teenage girl ghost reached for him, and he ducked the phantom hand.
Couldn’t get touched by a ghost, or he’d lose it, and no way was he going to go insane now.
He’d lost sight of Granny and the others, but the dragon was his main concern.
He whipped the starcycle around, got it going to a good eighty miles an hour, and hit the tilted tractor trailer. The improvised jump sent him soaring through the air. The dragon’s wings were back and its chest was out as it took in another great breath. Seconds later, it vomited up the grisly contents of its stomach and shot zombie-acid puke out its fanged mouth with incredible velocity.
Blaze hit the top of his ascent and triggered the cannon. It blew a huge hole in the dragon’s chest. Then the gunny had to concentrate. He was going to come down hard.
He fired the horizontal thrusters at just the right time, and the impact jarred him, almost sent him flying off, but the nanotech gripped his legs and kept him on. The dragon’s tail swords whirled overhead. Blaze ducked them, then skidded back around on the shore of the strange pond that he’d crossed before.
The dragon turned. Damn. Blaze had missed the heart. The left lung deflated for a bit, but then the eyes of the dragon flashed and a hundred zombies on the ground near it fell lifeless. The dragon fixed his lung by taking Onyx from the undead and using that energy to heal its internal organs. And the leg Blaze had shot off.
This wasn’t like the obsidian dragons they’d fought near the suns. This thing was something else, maybe Chthonic himself.
The dragon roared, and the zombie horde around them roared with it. All those voices, a cacophonous undead howl of fury and victory. The ghosts in the air shrieked. It was deafening. It left Blaze’s ears ringing.
The yellow-dress ghost’s whisper, though, seemed as loud or louder. “Here’s the church, here’s the steeple…”
Blaze slammed back the throttle and took off because he didn’t need to hear some ghost’s rhyme. He needed to take down that dragon, Chthonic or not. It was spewing forth more acid-zombie soup. Elle must’ve used another TK spell because she was using her mind to push the corpses and puke away from the crane truck. It was a close miss. The drops of acid that did strike the crane truck sizzled through the metal. Hopefully that wouldn’t mess with the structural integrity of the truck or damage the engine.
Blaze raced the starcycle over the pond and back around to within about a hundred yards of the tilted tractor trailer. He was going to take another shot at the dragon. But this time, he was going to try and aim with something other than the starcycle’s fusion cannon.
A hurricane wind rose up, and a full-on tornado spun across the muddy fields, whipping up zombies in the cyclone and flinging body parts, chopping up the horde in five-hundred-mile-an-hour winds. The clouds above, the rain, all were sucked into the wind.
The tornado ate through the asphalt like it was cotton candy. It picked up trailers, motor homes, and anything else in its path. Several dozen full-size cottonwood trees were ripped out by their roots. The cyclone was heading toward the dragon.
Dude, that was Granny. Elle didn’t have the power to cast a goddamn tornado spell. The amount of Onyx energy required made him dizzy.
&n
bsp; And there was Granny, standing on the highway, her dress drenched. Ha, the ageless woman was sipping a beer and smoking that damn cigar that the rain couldn’t touch. Wait, no, the rain was hitting her shield spell, keeping her dry and the Cohiba lit. Nice.
Goddamn woman was smiling.
Blaze paused. If the tornado hit the dragon, it would end the monster. Its heart would be chopped, sliced, diced, and made into tornado sushi.
The dark eyes of the beast flashed. The tornado came apart, dropping trailers, vehicles, and cottonwoods down around them. A 2167 Impala bounced off Granny’s shield. She lost her smile.
It was Blaze’s turn. He gunned the starcycle and screamed down the highway, hit his ramp, and once again floated above the gnashing teeth and endless hunger of the zombie horde below.
At the summit of his desperate jump, Blaze plucked his shotgun off his back and aimed Ugly Betty at the pulsating abyss of the obsidian dragon’s heart.
An orb of fusion energy lit up the dragon’s chest, lighting up the skull, casting shadows across the frayed skin and dilapidated wings of the undead monster. Blaze slammed his shotgun into the nanotech sheath to his left. He landed the jump, kept control, and returned to the shore of the pond. Spinning in his seat, he saw that, once again, he’d missed. He’d blown through the shoulder of the dragon, and the left wing drooped, but the thing was still alive.
Blaze was back by the yellow-dress ghost girl, but she turned to mist as a wave of Onyx energy dispelled her spectral form. He wasn’t sure who’d cast the dispel Onyx spell, but the ghosts were pushed back into the rainstorm, and a quarter mile of the zombies dropped in every direction. The left wing of the dragon came loose, fluttered through the air like a lost sail on a Spanish conquistador’s galley, and slammed to the ground. The right wing and the hooked claws were still working, and zombies continued to crawl up into the rear orifices of the thing to refuel his awful stomach.
Sunlight broke from the sky, incinerating the clouds and striking the ground in a mile-wide circle of superheated energy. It was like a giant had taken a magnifying glass the size of a Hawaiian island and let the star’s energy shine through it. The circle of destructive sunlight annihilated everything in its path. It turned zombies into ash. It removed all plant life—anything not soil was instantly gone, turned to dust.
Zombies by the hundreds were gone in seconds as the circle of magnified light moved in an orbit around them until it finally moved around and toward the undead obsidian dragon. The dragon shrieked, its eyes flashed, and another of Granny’s ultra-powerful spells was shut down. Even though thousands upon thousands of the undead had been destroyed by the circle of sunlight, another million zombies came forward, and another million ghosts came screaming from the heavens.
The clouds closed in overhead, blocking out the suns, pouring rain down on the smoking ruins of blasted, burned dirt.
The dragon roared again in triumph, and it ended in what could only be described as laughter. The zombies chittered along and even the ghosts cackled maniacally. Blaze and his crew had an endless number of enemies to fight. They couldn’t win. Yeah, sure, whatever, they’d been there before. Same shit, different day.
But goddammit, Blaze wasn’t going to stop until they brought the dragon down. “No more Mr. Nice Guy,” he growled.
He gunned his engine and sped across the lake, going in for a third and final attempt at slaying the obsidian dragon. The walking dead lay in piles around them, mounds of dead bodies, brainless, headless, unmoving, either from their weapons or from Elle’s dispel Onyx magic. Blaze had to gun down another dozen, shooting off heads, pummeling dead flesh, removing them from his path.
He was going to hit the ramp at a more drastic angle and he wasn’t going to stay on the bike. Not this time. It was gonna be now or never, a suicide ride, kill or be killed. Which was how he liked it.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he prayed. “And I will again, without a doubt. But if you want me alive to fight Satan, help me now.”
He then opened comms and spoke to his sister. “Elle, if you can hear me, I’m gonna need you to catch me in a minute. If not, no matter what happens to me, you have to close the Onyx Gate. I love you, Elle. Don’t understand much, but I know that. You’re my sister, and we’re family forever.”
“Blaze, what are you planning?”
Instead of answering, he gripped the brakes and let the starcycle scream as its blue-fire engines ignited and tried to drive him forward, but he wasn’t going to let go until he was at maximum thrust. He redlined the bike, and before it exploded, he released the brakes. Without the nanotech holding him in place, he would’ve been sent sprawling off the bike from the breakneck torque, but he held on as the starcycle threw itself across the mud. The tractor trailer splintered when he hit it. The force, the speed, was too much for the old wood. But he was sent soaring into the air, going faster, but more importantly, going higher.
The obsidian dragon puked zombified acid at him. It missed. The deadly vomit rained down onto a field of undead, scorching their skin and eating through their skulls.
Blaze hit the emergency release option in his display, which released the nanotech gluing him to the bike. Armed with his ax, both blades glowing, and with Ugly Betty, he leapt from the bike and came crashing down against the chest of the dragon. The bike spiraled away.
Blaze drove his ax into the rib cage, bashing the haft into the cleaved bone so it would hold him in place. It was just like what he’d done during his fight in space against the photon dragons.
While his aim had been crappy twice before, this time, he’d landed perfectly. Dangling from his ax buried into the ribs of the dragon, Blaze brought up his shotgun. He shoved the barrel into the dragon’s body, right above its pinche evil heart.
He pulled the trigger. The blast of fusion struck the obsidian dragon’s heart, and the entire monster exploded. The intestines, the stomach jammed with dead bodies, everything gushed out as did bone and the last bits of muscle and skin. Hunks of the dragon’s body bashed into his armor, and acid splashed across his chest as Blaze was sent sailing away from the volcano explosion of the dragon’s destroyed heart.
The sound, the pain, and the concussive force was causing Blaze to black out. He was losing consciousness as he flew through the air, the rain on his face, the smell of the fields in his nose, the victory song of adrenaline filing him with joy.
This was life, putas, beating the bad guy and saving the day.
This was life, and even if he’d cut it short by his death-defying jump onto the chest of the monster, well, he’d gone down fighting, and that thing had to have been Chthonic. Good, the archduke was dead. Now, they just had to figure a way off the haunted planet.
Wind whistled through his bleeding ears—the wind was cold, and when he hit the ground, he was going to hit it hard.
He felt the impossibly soft hands of a telekinesis spell first on his back, like how his mother used to hold him, then on his legs, his arms, and he was slowly, gently lowered to the ground. Long grasses tickled, and muddy water trickled into his ears and down his suit. It was chilly, but it felt great. He was alive and feeling anything was a bonus.
Elle had saved him once again.
He sat up. He didn’t remember holding onto his ax and Ugly Betty, but both weapons were within arm’s reach.
A kid walked up to him, looking perfectly Human at first. He wore a Kansas City Royals baseball cap, a Kansas City Chiefs jersey, and jeans. Not that those teams played on Earth any more. Intergalactic sport teams had taken over whole systems in the Americatus and Terran Quadrants but kept the classic names.
The kid was obviously a fan, blue-eyed, freckled, and grinning. At first.
But he was walking funny, pulling up his legs and then driving them down. When he finally walked up, Blaze knew why.
He didn’t have any feet. Someone had removed his smaller leg bones, the fibulas, and shaved his tibias into points. He had to pull the muddy bone spikes up from the
mud and then sink the next one. His arms were similarly pointed, made from a single bone, the radius whittled down to a spear point. The ulnas had been removed. The stench of decayed flesh hit Blaze, the stink of death and scabs.
The kid grinned. “Shucks, mister, that was a nice trick. Too bad no one alive was around to see it. You see, ain’t no one alive on Hutchinson Prime anymore except for the Gorebacks.”
The boy couldn’t be alive. But the way he moved, the spikes in the mud, his smell, the way he talked, he was there, right there in front of the gunnery sergeant. Wasn’t a ghost. And he wasn’t some moaning zombie.
“Chthonic,” Blaze said.
“You say that I am,” the kid said.
FIFTEEN_
╠═╦╬╧╪
Blaze heard his sister calling for him. Either comms were down or the archduke was jamming things. Either way…
The nine-year-old ghost zombie kid stood with his leg spikes stuck in the mud. He was still grinning like he’d just watched an old-timey Star Wars movie.
It had stopped raining, but a freezing wind came blowing out of the north. It didn’t touch the storm clouds blanketing the sky. It only lowered the temperature and brought in the stink of death on a massive scale. It was like the entire planet had become a slaughterhouse on a particularly humid August day.
The gunny moved a little toward his ax. His shotgun didn’t have a live shell in the chamber. His ax would work to put an end to this archduke. “Gotta say, Chthonic, I liked you better as the fetus. That whole pregnant thing was pretty messed up, but it was creative. Now, here you go, about to go off on how you’re evil, and we’re gonna die, and the grave is a cold, cold place but I will find comfort at last? Blah, blah, blah.”
The kid stiffened. His face lost all expression. His eyes filmed over and something black dropped from his mouth. It was his tongue, alive with maggots. “Death is purity. You will understand that when your heart stops beating and you embrace the silence. All is perfect in death. All is quiet, and all is perfect.”
