by James Maxey
“Get them!” I yelled at the rhino guy. He lowered his head and charged, smashing his horn into the torso of one of the leaping raptors. The other landed on his back, stripping away flesh with its razor claws, until the lion guy grabbed it, wrestling it away.
I ran past this fighting to the double doors. I couldn’t find a handle or any sign of a control that opened it, so I jammed the steel spike into the hair-thin gap and threw my weight into it, forcing a gap big enough to get my fingers into. I strained until I felt things popping inside me, then strained a little more. Something went CRACK inside the walls and the steel panels slipped open freely, revealing stairs carved directly into the stone foundation of the place. I raced down them, building enough momentum that when I reached another set of doors at the bottom it was too late for me to stop. I turned my shoulder into the impact, hoped for the best, and got it. The doors crumpled like tin and I tumbled into the room beyond.
I rose to find myself in a room that looked like it had been built out of surplus props from a James Bond movie. Control panels everywhere, blinking lights along the walls, and a walkway in front of a computer monitor the size of a movie screen. In front of this monitor stood Technosaur, wearing some sort of big exoskeleton that left her standing nearly as tall as me. She stood with one arm around her hostage, and her other hand holding some sort of laser pistol with glass tubes along the length, glowing red.
“Take one more step and I’ll blow her head off,” growled Technosaur.
I couldn’t help but grin. Partly from the corny dialogue. Mostly because the hostage Technosaur threatened was Sasha.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Love Me Crazy
HI, SASHA,” I SAID, as casually as I could manage.
“I tried to stop her!” she said, sounding panicked. I saw that Technosaur had shackled her arms together with coils of heavy steel cable.
“In less than three minutes, the countdown will be complete,” said Technosaur. “The virus will rid this world of those accursed hairless apes!”
“No skin off my nose,” I said, cracking my knuckles. I glanced over her exoskeleton. I saw a dozen gaps where I could get my fingers in to peel her out. “While we wait, I’m going to beat you to a pulp to let off some steam if that’s okay by you.”
“Are you mad?” Technosaur squawked. “Take another step and I’ll kill your mate!”
I took a step forward. I’m no good at reading the expressions of big featherless chicken-lizards, but I took the narrowing of her eyes as an indication of bewilderment.
“I’ll do it!” she screamed.
I kept walking.
She didn’t do it. I don’t know why Technosaur didn’t follow through with her threat, but she decided instead to push Sasha away and turn her laser pistol toward me. Getting the barrel aimed directly at me had been more or less my goal since entering the room. As Technosaur aimed, I drew back the metal spike I still carried and hurled it. Because I’m awesome, the spike made a direct hit right down the center of the laser barrel. The gun flew apart in a zillion little pieces. Technosaur yelped and waved her gun hand rapidly, trying to shake free all the tiny embedded fragments of glass and copper.
“Wait!” she cried, her eyes wide with fear.
I didn’t wait. I leapt up and gave her a double-heel kick right to the guts of her exoskeleton. The armor protected her from the direct force of the blow, but the impact bent her double, which couldn’t have been easy on her spine. Before she could straighten up I gave her a sharp, fast elbow to the back of her head, shattering the dome that protected her skull. She fell to the ground. I dropped to my knees and yanked and ripped at any piece of metal I could get my fingers around. Sparks flew everywhere.
“Y-you don’t understand!” she shouted. “If you kill me, this whole citadel will explode!”
I grabbed her by the throat and turned her chicken face toward me. “Explain.”
“I feared treachery from Dr. Moreau! As protection, I’ve planted bombs all through the compound. If my heart stops beating, every building on this mountaintop will explode!”
“Which means that whatever computer you have controlling the virus release is going to be destroyed,” I said, tightening my grip. “Excellent!”
“No!” she squeaked. “They’ll go off unless I give the override code.”
“I think we have the makings of a bargain here,” I said. “Tell me the override code and I’ll let you live.”
“Why do you care about the humans?” she gasped. “You aren’t one of them!”
“This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve acted against my own self-interest,” I explained. “Which is why I promise not to snap your neck if you give me the code. Is there a keypad you need, or…”
“Never!” she hissed.
I squeezed her neck a little tighter. She struggled, clawing at my hand with her pathetic chicken fingers. It was one of those moments in life when the question, “What would Chopper do?” is the right question to ask. So with my free hand, I grabbed a couple of her less important looking fingers and bent them backward until they snapped.
She shrieked at a pitch that made my teeth ache.
“Ready with that code?” I asked.
Technosaur clucked out a string of nonsense syllables. I sighed, figuring I’d burst a blood vessel in her brain and given her a stroke. Instead, the clucking must have been some ancient dinosaur language, and the computers were voice controlled. On the panels around me, the flashing lights went dark.
“It’s done,” she gasped. “I’ve stopped the release. Spare me!”
“How do I know you’re not bluffing?”
“Unlike you, I don’t act against my own self-interest!”
I nodded, believing her. I let her go. She rolled to her side, clutching her broken fingers, making choked noises that might have been sobs. I couldn’t stand to look at her. Even though I’d just prevented the extinction of the human race, I took no satisfaction in her pain, and felt a little sick to my stomach at what I’d done to stop her.
I knelt in front of Sasha.
“You were going to let her kill me,” she whispered, her eyes full of pain.
“Nah,” I said. “She was bluffing. I’ve got a vibe for this kind of thing.” I figured this was a more diplomatic answer than, “Damn straight.”
I paused, wondering if I should leave her tied up, but decided this wasn’t the time to burn bridges. I was still trapped in the middle of the jungle and Sasha might be my best hope of getting out of here alive. I untied her hands. She rose, rubbing her wrists. Then her eyes went wide. In the darkness of her eyes, I saw the reflection of Technosaur, now free of her broken exoskeleton, drawing up to her full four feet of height. In her unbroken hand was a knife, or maybe a raptor claw. It’s hard to tell in a tiny eyeball reflection.
I could have turned and knocked her blade away. Instead, I dove aside as Sasha lunged toward Technosaur. I confess, I kind of hoped she’d get stabbed instead of me. Instead, Sasha swatted the knife away, grabbed Technosaur’s chicken beak with both hands, and gave a hard, sharp twist.
I winced. “Bombs tied to heartbeat, remember?”
She dropped the corpse at her feet. “She was bluffing,” she whispered. “I have a vibe for these things.”
The whole room shuddered and a sound like low thunder rattled the walls. Lights burst high overhead, filling the room with a shower of hot glass shards. Sasha turned toward me, her eyes wet with tears. “You… you wanted me dead,” she whispered. She fixed her gaze upon me, her face a mask of pain. “You don’t love me!”
“This isn’t a great time to discuss this,” I said, moving toward the door. She moved to place herself in my path.
“I gave you my body,” she whispered. “I gave you my innocence!”
“Look, it was just a one night thing,” I said.
“I gave you my heart!” she screamed, balling her fists. “I gave you everything! I killed my mother to be with you!”
“Yeah,”
I said. “Because you’re fucking crazy.”
“I’ll show you crazy!” she screamed, charging at me.
I met her attack with my best punch, BAM, right between the eyes. It would have dropped an elephant, but apparently gorilla girls hopped up on rage and broken hearts are made of sterner stuff. She pushed me back, her claws digging into my trachea. I fell down and she landed on top of me, snarling as she sank her fangs into my eyebrow. I gave a guttural bellow of pain and boxed her ears as hard as I could, the blow only driving her teeth deeper into me. I hit her again and her teeth tore free, taking a good sized chunk of my eyebrow with it. Before she could get her teeth into me again, I summoned the power of ape-fu and sank my teeth into her, biting down on her ear with a force that even Mike Tyson would have found excessive. She gave out a series of short, sharp pants as she twisted one way, then another. At some point I’d managed to grab both her wrists. I don’t even know when or how, but it gave me leverage. I rolled her over, forcing her onto her back, my teeth tearing free of her ruined ear. She continued to pant, her breath hot as molten metal against my face as she tried to wrestle free and I tried to keep her pinned.
The floor beneath us lurched as shockwaves from the upper level ran through the bedrock. Dust and grit showered down with each rumble of distant explosions. Sparks flew from the control panels all around us, and suddenly we were fighting in utter darkness as the power died. We were God knows how far underground, in a crumbling rock box that would soon be our tomb. With a hard jerk and a twist she broke her right wrist free of my grip. She cried, “Ha!” and the next thing I knew her arm was wrapped around my back, pulling me tightly against her. I thought at first she was trying to break my spine with a one-handed bear hug, then realized she kept raising her hips, grinding her crotch against mine.
“You’re completely insane!” I grumbled, trying to pin her arm again, finally succeeding, but not before she’d pulled my damn pants halfway down my thighs. And when the hell had her tights gotten pushed down around her ankles?
“You love me crazy,” she whispered, her voice balanced between mania and despair. “You love me crazy!” She stopped fighting. “You love me,” she whispered, pressing her crotch against an erection I hadn’t even been aware of until that second. “You love me crazy,” she said again, followed by a noise that might have been a giggle, or might have been a sob.
Then she was kissing me, and I was inside her, and the room was filling with smoke as loud thuds sounded all around us. It sounded as if the whole mountain was coming down on us. A chunk of stone the size of a fist bounced off my lower spine and I cried out as she writhed beneath me, panting like an animal. I collapsed atop her, completely limp, my heart pounding like a jackhammer, her heart beating in perfect rhythm with my own.
She cooed as she kissed my face, her fingers stroking my back, my neck, my cheeks. “You love me,” she whispered. “You love me.”
I rolled off her, overwhelmed with shame. What the hell had I just done? What the hell could I possibly say to her now?
“I don’t love you,” I said, quietly, my voice solemn and serious. I owed her the truth. It was the only thing I could give her. “I’ll never love you. This was all a big mistake. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t say anything. I knew she was still beside me. I could smell her, hear her ragged breath, feel the heat coming off her skin. I waited for her to say anything, to make some sort of move. Had she even heard me? Was she even capable of grasping what I was telling her?
I realized that I hadn’t heard any explosions in several minutes. Slowly, the darkness around us took on a dull gray hue, then a lighter gray hue, as daylight filtered down the stairs, setting the dust and smoke softly aglow.
I looked over at Sasha. Her eyes were locked on my face, blinking slowly. She no longer looked angry. She looked calm, even peaceful, like she was on the verge of sleep.
I sat up. In her hand closest to me, she held the knife Technosaur had used for her sneak attack. I tensed up, ready to defend myself. But the knife only rested in her palm. Her fingers held it with the lightest of grips.
As my eyes adjusted further to the pale light, I finally saw all the blood on the other side of her body. Her wrist was sliced open in three long, parallel gashes.
“Sasha,” I whispered.
“If I can’t love you,” she said, without turning her face, “I’ll settle… for haunting… you…”
Her eyes closed as her last breath faded away.
I turned away without bothering to see if she could still be saved. She’d chosen her way out. I was choosing mine, as I crawled toward the steps and the distant light above.
I came out onto a surface that looked like the moon, assuming the moon was covered in the still burning bodies of animal men. All the vegetation was gone, and nothing remained in any direction other than ash and dust and smoking craters. The air stank with a burning dumpster stench that scoured my lungs and all but blinded me as it seared my eyes.
I staggered forward, hot cinders scourging my feet. I traced a drunken, random path through the rubble. After ten minutes the smoke lessened enough for me to keep my eyes open for more than half a second at a time. This proved fortuitous, since when my vision cleared I found myself about two feet away from the lip of a cliff. I leaned out, allowing the moist, warm air rising along the cliff to wash over my face, carrying away the stinging fumes of the hellscape behind me. Below me stretched the jungle primeval, looking as it must have looked a million years ago, save for a more or less straight line of gaps in the trees. That had to be the road where we’d left the pterosaurs, which meant that the elevator shaft had to be around here somewhere. Climbing down it seemed less risky than trying to climb down the cliff in my current shabby state. My hands were still blistered, my feet were scorched after walking across the hot ash, my eyebrow where Sasha had bitten me had swollen so much I was half blind, every muscle and joint ached, and, somehow I’d forgotten to grab my pants when I’d crawled away from Sasha.
At last I found the shaft, surrounded by cinderblocks, all that remained of the structure that had once housed it. Peering down, I could see faint rays of daylight at the bottom of the shaft. The tracks the elevator had rode along looked intact, and seemed like good handholds. I grabbed hold and started down the shaft, not bothering to look back at the ruins of the supervillain empire I was leaving. It was time to go home, wherever the hell that might be.
The climb down took about ten minutes. The elevator had fallen below the exit doors that lead to the road. A slender gap in the doors let in daylight. I dug my nails in and pulled the door apart. Something caught the corner of my eye as sunlight filled the shaft. I turned to find Reverend Rifle’s Stetson laying on top of the elevator car. How it got there, I couldn’t guess. I had a faint flicker of hope that he might be alive until I picked up the hat and saw all the blood inside. Maybe one of the new-men took a fancy to the hat and hid it here when no one was looking.
I walked out onto the road, blinking in the bright sun, the hat still in my hand. At the top of the cliff, plumes of smoke and dust trailed off into the distance. In the jungle all around me were shards of glass, strips of metal, and pulverized plants that had been knocked over the edge of the cliff when the dome exploded. I took a few steps forward, watching the ground to avoid the bigger shards of glass, when I found a steel cross almost two feet high. I blinked, wondering why either Technosaur or Dr. Moreau would have such an artifact, before my brain finally figured out that I was looking at part of the dome’s frame, broken to look like a cross. I picked it up. It was lighter than it looked, lighter than aluminum even, but still felt pretty stiff.
Finding a perfect cross amid these ruins felt like a sign. I was too exhausted to rationalize away the discovery. All around the base of the cliff were big, flat slabs of stone that had sheared off over the years. I gathered up a dozen or so and buried the reverend’s hat beneath them. I might not have had his body, but I had his blood, at least, and maybe that was all h
e’d need for his Lord to find him. I jammed the cross into a gap I’d left in the stone. It stood perfectly straight, catching the light like it was made of silver.
I stepped back and stared at the cross for a long time. Was I to blame for him being here, so far from Texas? What did any of this have to do with him? If he’d never broken me out of jail back in LA, he’d be—
No. He alone had made the choice to rescue me. He’d been a soldier. He’d known for a long time that, one day, there’d be a mission he wouldn’t come back from. Still, getting mauled by a lovesick gorilla girl… I’m pretty sure he never saw that coming.
“Reverend,” I said, in the same tone I would have used if we’d been sitting across from each other in his kitchen, “You were one of a kind.” I took a long slow breath. “And… thanks. I know we didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of stuff, but I never doubted for a minute that you were one of the good guys. I never told you, but I think you were exactly who I needed to meet at this time in my life. You were right. I have to take my life more seriously. I’ll get there. You’ll get at least some of the credit.”
I looked up at the flickering rays of sunlight dancing through the dust high above.
“Lord,” I said. “He’s one of yours. Treat him well. Make sure his part of heaven looks like Texas.”
I looked back down, studying the grave, and found myself satisfied with my handiwork. Still, I felt like something hadn’t been done right. I turned to walk away, then figured it out. I turned my face toward the sky again. “Thanks for listening. And, amen.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Animal Up
NIGHT CAME ON FAST as I found the road, with the dense forest canopy swallowing the last rays of the evening sun. In the gloom, I couldn’t find the spot where we’d hidden the balled up pterosaurs. I had to double back to the cliff, dead on my feet, swatting my arms listlessly to chase away the rising clouds of insects. I was little more than a brainless zombie when I found myself back at the base of the cliff. I found a flat slab of rock big as a grand piano and crawled onto it. I rolled to my back, looking up through leaves at the distant stars.
