by Aaron Crash
“Ling, buddy, I don’t want to discuss the finer points of the Human language with you. What happened when all those ghosts grabbed you?” Blaze asked.
Ling shrugged. “Oh, they tried to convince me to do a number of horrendous things. I must say, I was tempted by all the insanity, for as you know, it makes perfect sense at the time. But it’s all just voices. It’s the chattering of drunk monkeys. I have practiced for years in ignoring the chatter. It seems my practice has paid off.”
Blaze smiled at his friend. “Damn, but that’s awesome. It took a bit though, right?”
“I had to rescue Elle,” Ling said. “Only, I didn’t. The ectoplasm let her go.”
Elle straightened and took a deep breath. “I managed to cast a shield spell so I wouldn’t suffocate, but I lost my bandolier and Granny’s purse, so I couldn’t cast any more spells. But Ling is right. He ran over to help me but couldn’t swim through the ectoplasm. And then, for some odd reason, I was spit out of the basement of the church. The ghosts as well most of the ectoplasm was just…suddenly…gone. We found the purse and my pouches nearby. Lucky for us.”
“How long ago was this?” Blaze asked.
“About twenty minutes, maybe,” Elle said. She glanced around. “By the way, where’s Granny?”
That might’ve been right around the time Chthonic had possessed the inflatable Borzor clown. Maybe that bastard was leaving town and taking his Onyx shit with him.
Trina emerged from the destroyed hangar and joined Blaze, his sister, Ling, and the frozen Cali on the tarmac of the airfield surrounded by the junked spacecraft.
In her arms, the vampire carried the lifeless corpse of the strange and beautiful but troubled woman, wrapped in a sheet.
Elle gasped and put a hand over her mouth. “Granny. She’s…she’s…dead.”
Trina, wordless, laid Granny’s body down reverently on the ground. She undid the sheet a bit, to reveal the woman’s face and torn throat.
Elle fell to her knees, weeping. “I can’t believe it… That bitch was like a mother to me… I can’t believe she’s gone.”
Blaze knelt next to his sister and put his hand on her back. “Elle, she might’ve been like a mother, but she wasn’t your mother. Remember all the crazy stuff she did to you? And then she just left. No, Elle, you can cry a little over her, but not too much.”
Elle whirled on him. “Fuck you, Blaze. It’s not just losing her…again…that hurts. But now she can’t tell us where the Onyx Gate will be on March sixteenth. We’ve missed our chance. She’s dead. I can’t believe she’s dead.” His sister sobbed over the body. “I don’t have a spell to talk with the dead.”
“Maybe we can bring her back,” Trina said.
There was blood around the mouth of the vampire and her fingers were also gory. When Blaze noticed, Trina sucked the red stains off her fingers.
“No, you can’t turn her once she’s been dead a while,” Blaze said. “And you didn’t, like, you know…”
“No,” Trina said harshly. “I found some leftovers in the hangar. Had me a little snacky poo. I wasn’t going to…you know…eat Granny.”
Blaze nodded. “Okay, so we can’t turn her vampire. You’re thinking what I’m thinking, aren’t you?”
“Yep,” Trina said.
Elle stemmed her tears. “What are you guys talking about?”
Blaze spoke. “Chthonic can bring her back. He was in the planet, trying to get to you, when he left it. That’s why the Onyx levels are dropping, and the ectoplasm is following him into space. He’s no longer inside the planet. Nope, he’s inside an inflatable effigy of Borzor the Harlequin.”
“Chthonic can bring people back from the dead,” Trina said.
Elle curled up her nose at them. “What are you talking about? Borzor the Harlequin is some stupid clown god the Gorebacks worship. It probably doesn’t exist. And it can’t bring people back from the dead.”
“Right,” Blaze said. “Borzor is stupid. But Chthonic is the lord of the dead, and we watched him resurrect Auntie Lips. He also brought back Uncle Upchuck after I cut off his head. I’m telling you, Elle, we get to Borzor, we can bring back Granny. Then she can give us the coordinates.”
Elle closed her eyes. “No, it’s over. We’re screwed. How can we get off the planet?”
“TK us up out of here along with the starcycles. Come on, Elle, don’t give up on me now.”
Ling touched Elle’s hair and drew it back from her sweaty face. “I find this an intriguing plan. And we can’t stay here. More and more meteorites are falling, and the end of this planet is near. And who knows, the Lizzie Borden might find us. Anything is possible.”
Trina was next. “Come on, Elle. I want to have sex with Blaze before I die. And if he’s terrible in bed, you’re next on my list.”
Elle laughed at that.
Blaze frowned. “That’s it. Trina, once we get out of this, I’m going to bring my A game. And I’ll try and forget the sounds you made slurping down those poor bastards in the freezer ship.”
Elle whipped out a thread-covered magnet. “You’re not serious, are you, Trina?”
“Probably not.” But then the vampire smiled mysteriously. “Get us out of here and find out.”
Cali let out a snarl and moved a claw toward them. The stasis spell was about to end.
Blaze grew dizzy. The drugs the Gorebacks had given him were wearing off. He stumbled, but Elle caught him. She smiled. “Let me help fix you up. If we’re going to save the day again, you need to be at your best.”
“Before you heal me, the Gorebacks put a zapper in my chest. Can you take it out?” Blaze asked.
Elle squinted, tossed a magnet wrapped in thread into the air, and cast a TK spell. Using the magic, she ripped the zapper out of him. It clattered onto the ground.
Blaze screamed in pain, “Dammit, Elle, easy!”
“No time for easy.” She pressed honeycomb onto his neck and growled a healing spell. Blaze was back to a hundred percent.
“You still have that last snare sphere?” Blaze asked.
“I do,” Elle said. “Not sure I can use it on Chthonic, but I’d like to try stuffing his stupid ass into it, nuts first.”
“That’s my sister.” Blaze grinned
“I still have my TK going,” Elle said. “So let’s go!”
All of them, except for Cali, were lifted off the ground along with the starcycles. They rose above the lights of the airfield even as dozens more meteorites plunged into the hangar, the ships on the airfield, and the fields surrounding the base.
Blaze had to dodge a few smoking rocks of debris, as did the others. One struck Trina. She grunted as it caved in her chest. A little vampiric healing later and she was back to floating into the cold.
Elle had enough aragonite crystals that she could cast a shield spell to protect them from further meteorites and to ensure their safe ascent into space.
Ling, Blaze, and Elle all triggered their helmets to avoid freezing to death. Their oxygen units wheezed to life and they continued to breathe. Ice soon covered Trina, but being undead, she was fine.
The ectoplasm gushed off the planet in the distance as they emerged from the atmosphere and into open space. The massive river of liquid Onyx coming from the planet splashed into space, pooling here and there, coming apart, bubbling, and coming together again.
The undead of the world were everywhere, mouths moving, the water in them freezing, but somehow, they continued to move. Billions of zombies, of all shapes and sizes, flooded out around them.
And they were clawing through space to get to them. How they could move, Blaze had no idea. Chthonic was using Onyx, no doubt.
But space debris, large and small, was coming in fast. Elle’s shield spell would eventually fail.
From the collision point streamed solar flares, which had smashed apart the first three planets of Hutchinson Prime’s system into fragments. Those fragments had been knocked away and were speeding toward them, thrown by the apoc
alyptic energy from the stars and drawn to the planet by Hutchinson Prime’s own gravitational force. It all came blasting in, tearing through some of the zombies and disrupting the pools of ectoplasm. The yellow sun and the neutron star had come together, and while the neutron star kept its round shape the yellow sun had splintered into a half-spherical melting blob of dying energy.
And in the midst of the rocks and smashed-up planet pieces were dragons, the same dragons Blaze and his crew had fought before. But these had been torn apart, killed, their hearts stilled by Cali and her fusion claws.
The photon dragons, the acid dragons, the huge obsidian alpha dragon and its beta, all were back, but undead and lifeless. Some were nothing but bones in space, their hearts, stomachs, and flesh gone. Others had sacks of rotting meat around them. Many were missing limbs, including their tails. In whatever shape, the unimaginably diabolic power of Chthonic was animating the dragons they’d killed before and even the ones that Cali had torn apart. The archduke really was the lord of the dead and master of haunts.
Blaze climbed onto a starcycle. Ling did the same. Trina attached Granny to the back of the bike, still wrapped in a sheet. Then she floated over to Elle.
“We’re so dead,” Elle said, gazing upon the storm about to hit them. Her shield spell flickered off.
“But what a sight we’ve been given to finish our lives with,” Ling sputtered happily. “Ectoplasm in space? Zombies and meteoroids floating about? And undead dragons? My friends, we certainly have had fantastic lives to end them with such a spectacle to greet us. And I’m sure, in death, we will continue our journey into the wonderful and strange.”
“But we aren’t going down without a fight, right Ling?” Blaze asked, triggering his fusion ax.
Ling ignited one of his fusion nunchakus in response.
Trina had one of Elle’s fusion katanas and a fusion pistol.
His sister had her spells. Her hands already glowed red.
Floating over the haunted world coming undone by the thousands of meteoroids battering it, Blaze on his starcycle, Ling on his own bike, Trina, and Ella all were ready as the hundreds of dragons, the thousands of meteoroids, and the billions of zombies raced toward them.
Even though the Gorebacks on their freezer freighter were nowhere to be seen, even though Granny was dead and all was lost, Blaze had never felt more alive.
And he was going to die with his friends and family, fighting evil.
What a way to go.
Fernando’s voice broke through comms. “Gunny! We are so happy to find you! Bill and his lover have fixed the ship. We’ve come to rescue you!”
Blaze’s combat display winked on, fully operational, with all his crew’s VHIs online. Cali rocketed toward them from the surface. Bad news there.
Good news? The best news?
The Gorebacks’ freighter, unmistakable by its long cigar-shape, had turned around and was heading back toward them.
There was still time to get Chthonic to bring Granny back from the dead.
But why had the clown-worshipping cannibals turned around?
No way to know.
And Blaze had bigger problems.
The huge, rotting obsidian dragon opened its mouth and puked up bones and undead dragonlings. The projectile vomit streaked toward them to blow their starcycle to bits and strip the flesh off their bodies.
No escape. The deadly breath would kill them and all their grand plans.
TWENTY-THREE_
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The Lizzie Borden came soaring into the whirling soup of meteoroids, burning pieces of star fire, billions of zombies in various states of fucked-up-ed-ness, and hundreds of undead dragons. Her blue-and-black triangle shape had been welded, re-welded, reinforced at times with duct tape, and now had wide swatches of it sealed shut with hullfoam. Hullfoam was spacer tech designed to fill cracks and seal off breaches. The entire lower deck shined a bright yellow, looking like the insulation of the four-hundred-year-old houses Blaze grew up in on Earth. That was where the weapons locker had been.
The Lizzie Borden’s shields deflected the alpha obsidian’s vomit while the forward plasma cannons pounded into the undead beast, blowing bones out of its rib cage, cauterizing closed some of the orifices on its backside, and sizzling off is tail. Other dead dragons, wet with slime, continued to worm their way into the beast to refuel it.
A fusion torpedo sparked out of the starship and hit two photon dragons coming in fast. Now that they were dead, they didn’t breathe powerful energy blasts but dark rays of pure Onyx energy. It was like they were exhaling streams of midnight.
The Lizzie had to pull up to avoid smashing into a hundred clustered zombies caked together in a ball of ice. Arms and legs wiggled pathetically and those unlucky pendejos couldn’t do much to them, but crashing into the awful undead planetoid could destroy the ship. The Lizzie then swerved to avoid a half-formed river of ectoplasm. Even though she’d dodged everything else, a meteoroid crashed through her shields and left a big dent in her already dimpled hull.
Blaze hit the throttle on his starcycle hard. Now that they were in space, the vertical thrusters were less important, and he could use a combination of the horizontal blue-fire engines, his weight, and blasts from his guns to maneuver around the ectoplasm bubbles, the zombies, and debris hurtling around.
Trina came smashing down next to him and burst through comms, “I’ll drive, you fight.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Blaze shifted back and let Trina take the handlebars. “How you feeling, anyway, darling?”
Her translucent skin had a thin layer of ice as did her eyes, but she could blink that cold crust away. “Lucky I don’t have to breathe, but I am a little chilly. You’ll have to warm me up later.”
“Roger that.” Blaze stood on the stirrups located on the back of the seat and let the nanotech swirl around his legs to meld with his armor and hold him in place. He raised his fusion ax and shotgun as they barreled under the growing ocean of ectoplasm. “Trina, we have to get through these bastards and get to the Gorebacks. Their ship’s heading back our way. Not sure why. But we have to survive long enough to get to them and grab Chthonic.”
“Affirmative, Gunny,” Trina said. They raced underneath the undulating ectoplasm even as the tentacles of liquid reached for them. Like before, inside were pieces of Human anatomy and a whole range of offal, rotting and terrible. It was like a sea of headcheese, burbling around the edges as the vacuum of space tried to tear it apart.
The dim shapes of dragons, blurry above the ectoplasm, streaked over them. And then those monsters shot streams of black Onyx breath into the ectoplasm, blowing through it like compressed air shot through a puddle. The ectoplasm was sent bubbling out around them to dissipate into space.
The Onyx energy nearly caught them, but Trina swerved at the last minute, dipped down, and avoided a rolling meteoroid, and then they were back around the ocean and heading toward an acid dragon.
The thing’s eyes had been popped out of its skull and lay like basketballs tethered by nerves to a skull devoid of brains. From the claw and teeth marks, it was apparent that Cali had eaten the brains out of the car-sized head.
It still had its three-pronged tail, each prong as sharp as a sword. A stomach swayed under its rib cage. It opened its maw, most of its teeth gone, and expelled a mess of green fluid. Trina deftly avoided it, and Blaze hacked apart a meteoroid spinning toward his skull, then unloaded Ugly Betty into the remnants of the acid dragon’s skull.
The fusion energy ate up the bone in a flash of light. Headless, the dragon couldn’t see, but it was still alive and in the fight. Until it swam next to the ocean of ectoplasm. Tentacles latched onto it and pulled it inside, where it continued to struggle even as the powerful acid of the liquid began to dissolve its body.
The ectoplasm was eating away the flesh and bones of the dragon, adding to its fluid. It was literally turning the dragon bodies, zombies, and anything and everything else into more ectoplasm eve
n as more of the goo gushed from the planet’s surface. The whole star system would become one solid ocean of ectoplasm, held together by Chthonic’s mind-bending evil power.
Lord of the dead. Master of haunts.
Trina drove the starcycle away, but another stream of ectoplasm from the planet latched onto the bike. Blaze cut them loose with his ax as a softball-sized chunk of rock slammed into his chest. Without the nanotech holding him in place, it would’ve crushed his chest and flung him away. But both his armor and the starcycle’s modified seat kept him safe.
This whole scenario was so messed up. If they didn’t get moored in liquid Onyx, then they’d be ripped apart by zombie dragons. If they survived that, the amount of debris from the colliding stars and destroyed planets would pummel them to death. If they survived that, Human zombies could latch onto them and one lucky bite would infect them.
Speaking of which, a dead woman in a funeral dress broke her fingernails trying to scratch her way into Blaze’s armor.
Blaze jacked a fresh shell into his shotgun, drove the barrel into her chest, and pulled the trigger. The impact blew her into dust and charred flesh.
A dozen other undead managed to grab hold of the bike, slowing them down, until Blaze blew them away.
A meteoroid spun toward them. Trina hit the throttle at the last minute, getting out of the somersaulting hunk of space rock’s way.
But a ton more meteoroids were incoming.
Blaze saw a photon dragon, completely a skeleton, no flesh, drifting dead in space.
He had an idea. “Trina, maneuver us into that dragon’s rib cage.”
The vampire gave the engine a little juice, and they eased inside the cage-like bones of the dead monster. Then Blaze went through the settings on the starcycle and triggered an anchor subroutine. The nanotech of the seat shot out and seized the bones, connecting the bike to the rib cage.
“You drive,” Trina said. They switched places and Trina offered further stability by gripping one of the dragon’s exposed vertebrae.
