by Ben Bequer
I lifted him off the ground, letting his momentum arch him backwards so he released me and threw his hands up, thinking I was going to hurl him to the ground behind me. Instead, I stopped his motion backwards, and propelling him forward and into the ground. I didn’t let go of his leg, throwing all my force into the motion.
He crashed into the ground in an explosion of dirt and grass, with a low groan, but I wasn’t done. I ripped him up, tearing the strakes on the back of his armor out of the ground, raining dirt all over myself and him. I reared him back and readied to toss him forward again as he grabbed and tore at my back.
This time I hurled myself into the air, getting some surprising hang time. Maybe this place had reduced gravity, or perhaps my strength was growing to a level I had never expected, but I flew almost thirty feet in the air. Carried high into the sky, I spun him around as we dropped so he would not land in a hard crunch, but also benefit from the centrifugal force of the rotation. I roared in anger, spending myself on the maneuver, using every muscle in my body to add to the impact.
When we crashed to the ground, the thud from his impact echoed across the plain.
I landed atop of him and kicked the sword from his hands, surprisingly still in his grasp. The creature was dead, with thick blackish blood surrounding its head on the ground, and I was victorious.
His warriors howled, angered and horrified that their leader was down. One charged his worm/skink mount towards me, the lizard’s body churning the ground as he covered the distance between us in seconds.
Then I heard the pop-pop whirring sound of a minigun, and tearing up the ground around the rider. Bullets tore into the earth, the mount, and the rider above it, crashing into a mass of flesh and armor.
Haha ran towards me, firing his weapons at the other riders, who were following the dead one in a charge against me.
I picked up the big sword and readied myself for the inevitable charge, but instead of a dozen riders there were only eight, thanks to Haha’s deadly aim. Moments later Apogee reduced their number by one more, charging another rider and running right through it, her speed and power so vast that the skink mount exploded into a liquid pulp, flinging the rider through the air. A figure blurred past a pair of the closer riders and they suddenly slowed, so their motion was more akin to speed of a horse in a merry-go-around. Cool Hand ran back next to me, forming more bubbles and winding up for another throw.
“Making you look good is hard work,” he said, fired another volley of bubbles and ran off.
The slowed riders didn’t realize their dilemma, because they continued towards us, blocking the path of their faster companions. I charged forward and did some dirty work with the sword, killing beast and man alike with some clumsy strokes.
Behind me, another was closing but the mount exploded in a plasmaic mist of blood and flesh as Haha fired his weapons.
The rider landed on his feet, and charged me with a shield and a strange looking axe. His helm fell off, revealing his features, brown mottled skin and red glowing eyes. His face was like a cross between a pig and a gorilla, if such a monstrosity could even be possible, with a low forehead and small eyes, leading to an extended snout with jutting, twisted tusks. Now closer to the creature, I could see it had no arms in the traditional sense, but a mass of wet tentacles, strong enough to wield weapon and shield without trouble. The axe head was a thing of wonder, sharpened and floating, unattached to the haft of the weapon. It glowed with power, trailing miniscule particles wherever it moved but the most interesting part, was the material the axe head was made of.
It was the same stuff as Gentleman Shivver’s dagger.
The pigrilla swung his axe widely, forcing me to commit my sword to parry, before revealing his true intentions, to slam his shield right in my midsection and face.
It was bigger than I, and much stronger, stronger even than the first alien I defeated, but undisciplined, wielding more raw power than technique. The blow threw me back, reeling, giving him the advantage that he needed.
He swung his axe again, this time a short controlled motion that I was only able to get my left hand up to defend, but the blow struck me squarely in the leg, in an explosion of blood and pain.
I howled in agony, but anger welled within me. Instead of surrendering to his upcoming killing blow, I did the same as I had done against his leader; I stepped in against him, reaching out for his head. I grabbed at his bony skull, getting a good handhold and hurled my right knee into his face. I felt bones collapsing under the thunderous blow, his face turning into a bloody mess that stained my pant leg.
I dropped the dying alien to the ground, the leg and arm tentacles writhing so intensely, I had to step away.
Another circled around behind me, this one a fellow from the second group, riding an ostrich-like mount. It came towards me at high speed, leveling a lance to skewer me. I picked up the shield in time to fight off the blow, and as the ostrich rolled past, I picked up the axe.
The weapon was a thing of beauty, thrumming with power that was technological instead of magical. I could see switches and settings on the hilt.
In the few seconds I had as the rider turned to charge me again, I scanned the battlefield to see how my companions were doing.
Cool Hand was sitting atop a slow moving worm, the last one remaining of its kind, astride behind the rider, beating his head in with the softball bat. His arms were a blur, and the rider’s head was a slow motion eruption of crimson and bone. Apogee was like a pinball, bouncing between three dismounted riders and one angry skink, hitting each three or four times per second, and moments away from leveling them all. Mr. Haha had turned his attention to the one or two ostrich riders that remained (other than the one that was fighting) who rode away at full speed from his whirring double minigun action. Zundergrub was nowhere in sight.
I turned to face my attacker and readied the shield for the charge. The rider was cocky, howling a battle cry and the ostrich stabbed at the ground, like a bull ready for the charge. I banged the axe into the shield, noticing a splashing of blood from the weapon, my blood. I was about to look down at my leg wound, but the rider charged at that very moment, bearing down at me with his lance.
Instead of standing there and receiving his charge, I howled back and charged him right back, holding the shield as straight as I could with a bloody hand. My leg was on fire, blood staining my leg and making my charge more like an angry limp. We crossed distance between us in an instant, and the moment before he was about to strike me, I threw the axe at him. The weapon was in his face in a second, forcing him to dodge and raising the point of the lance. The ostrich mount continued bearing towards me, so I threw all my force forward, leaving my feet like a linebacker hitting a running back, and slammed the shield into its chest.
The impact was brutal, knocking the ostrich and the rider to the ground in a violent blur of feathers, dirt and blood. The mount had bounced off my shield, its chest caved in mortally, and legs broken in odd angles. It thrashed, trying to get up and run, but all it managed to do was spray its white-pink blood all over.
Disentangling myself from the dying beast, I stumbled to my feet and managed to move back a few steps as the rider came to his feet. He was as dazed as I, so I didn’t give him a chance to recover and jumped him. I tackled him to the ground, straddling him, and lay into his face and chest with a flurry of savage blows that he was helpless against. He tried to push me back with his mangled tentacles, but I reared back and threw one last punch right into his forehead that ended all his struggles. Breathless, I pulled myself off the dead rider and saw my pant leg drenched in red. The injury was deep.
Stopping for the first time since the fight began, I felt the adrenaline rush quickly fade, and a wave of dizziness start to hit me. My vision blurred and ground danced under me, as if my feet were toying with me.
“Guys,” I tried to shout, but it was only a whimper as darkness overtook me and I collapsed on the grassy plain.
Chapter 19
> I saw flashes wrapped in darkness and there was no way to tell what was real and what wasn’t. I felt nothing as I drifted along with the wind, like a feather floating in the breeze.
Cool Hand spoke to me, but his lips weren’t in sync with his voice, which was otherwise unintelligible. I faded while he was talking. Then something touched my face and struck it several times, but instead of waking me, the blows ushered me deeper into the dark. Despite how far I fell, I could still feel movement around me and I danced on the breeze like a butterfly, surrounded by strange creatures, viscous and purple, powdery and blue, fluid and orange.
Nothing made sense.
Eyes were on me, literally on me, while others gazed from afar. They surrounded me, their curiosity like a wave of oppression that was both accusing and forgiving.
I was gone again, then back. I saw Apogee, whether she was real or a vision I couldn’t tell. Her face had a bloody smudge, and her hair framed it. She had the same problem with her mouth as Cool Hand, though she made for a lovelier view and she was far above me, rising farther and farther. Before I knew it, she was gone, replaced by the grimacing Dr. Zundergrub.
The doctor didn’t speak, but his eyes told me all I needed to know. They were wrapped in murder and tendrils of night. Perhaps he was affecting me like he had Apogee.
I faded again, but his eyes lingered.
* * *
It was Zundergrub I saw first, still hovering over me, with something next to him I couldn’t identify. It was transparent, round, and bulbous, and despite looking at it intently, I had no idea what it was. Two eyes glowed inside the body and followed my every move. A host of tentacles whirled beneath the creature as it hovered above the ground.
“He is waking,” Zundergrub said, shouting for some reason. His companion spoke as well, but it was a gurgling, popping sound, accompanied by a flying trail of bubbles. As they popped in the air, the bubbles added to the original sounds, this time with a high pitched whistle, with the tonal variety of a Mozart piano concerto.
“That’s cool,” I said, but speaking was a big mistake. It irritated my throat and stomach and it took all my concentration and strength to keep from vomiting.
Trying to get up was also a stupid thing to do as the alien streamed a flow of angry bubbles into my chest. The sounds from the popping bubbles pinned me like a strong arm across my body, laying me flat across a mound of reddish dirt that smelled like sulfur and ozone. I could throw a car across a lake, and defeat the leader of the manta-ray people in single combat, but this alien’s means of communicating bypassed all my defenses.
“I would stay down if I were you,” Zundergrub said, then spoke to the creature softly in either Hindi or Persian. It could have been the same variety of English Cool Hand Luke had spoken to me before for all I knew. Yet the hovering gas bag and Zundergrub understood each other and bowed simultaneously, our new alien friend floated out of the room.
They had brought me to a small one-room shack, with an entrance so narrow that leaving would be a contortionist’s challenge. Others things were in here, small beings I first confused for Zundergrub’s imps, but soon recognized as a host of strange beings chitinous, gelatinous, and powdery. They clambered over themselves, like a crowd at the ball park trying to catch a foul ball, but instead they were crawling over each other to see me. They crawled, scurried and fluttered over my arms and legs, my injured one in particular, and I felt the tickle as their arms, tendrils, antennae and pseudo pods danced over my wound. Either the creatures were some sort of alien medicine, in which case they were curing me, or they were going to kill me, and I wouldn’t feel anything else in a few moments. Or maybe Zee was trying to bump me off using these creatures, then would pass it off to the others as “alien medicine gone wrong.”
I was about to panic, but around me stood the rest of the group; Cool, Mr. Haha and Apogee, and their faces showed no worry. Had they been there the whole time and I not noticed?
Haha, stood over me, like one of those clay Chinese warriors watching their fallen emperor’s tombs. He seemed unconcerned at the host of small creatures around my legs which made me relax. Cool Hand chatted with Apogee. Her eyes were on the beasties slithering on my injury. I tried smiling at her, but she covered her mouth in horror and stormed out. As she stepped out, I noticed her uniform was caked in blood. She had no wounds, so it could only have come from one place.
It was my blood, splashed on her body as she had carried me into the alien village.
* * *
A loud bang brought me out of my slumber. I jumped up, smashing my head into the low thatch roof. Dust and debris rained on me.
I rolled out of the bed to my knees, knowing I couldn’t stand in the small hut. At my feet, a host of insects and snails picked at my tough skin to no avail. Stamping my feet was enough to crush a few dozen and send the rest scurrying under the dusty floor or into their lairs amidst the thatch.
There was only one way out of the hut; a tiny hole large enough to fit only a small child.
I wore the remnants of my clothes, more dirty rags than anything. My right pant leg was torn apart, revealing my muscled leg, but my wound, there was no sign save for the bloodstains on my clothing. The leg was pristine, and it felt twitchy but strong, even more so than the left. Testing it as much as I could, squatting under the low thatch, the leg held well. I shambled over to the small entrance and squatted to make my way out the hole. My knees and hips were stiff, but I knelt and managed to scurry out, the thatch ripping at my arms and shoulders.
Outside, lay one of the strangest and most memorable sights in my life. The alien village was no one thing, nor did any particular structure type dominate. It was a motley assembly of construction, and in fact, I struggled to find any one type that dominated. Instead, the place was a conglomeration of structures of all sorts. Some were clay huts while others were thatch and wood. There a floating beehive that danced around the village some thirty feet off the ground. I saw a group of light people, like fairies, floating around a pale column of crystal.
The creatures around me were as diverse, like a zoo where the keepers had left all the cages wide open. Except all the aliens regarded me with either mild curiosity or more often, ignored me altogether. To them, I was the alien, a unique and not particularly attractive breed.
I saw a cross of a leopard with a man, much like a mythical centaur, but with a cat-like body. It was a fierce beast, powerful and large but it strolled peacefully amongst smaller creatures one would imagine were his prey. Another was much like a hummingbird, but reptilian. Large, and full bodied, it saluted me by lowering its large maw and continued onward. A blob animal, ambling atop a pool of slime with three independent eyes on stalks watching in every direction at once was conversing with a mote of dancing lights in a gurgling language that caused its whole body to vibrate gently.
There was also trade and bustle, as a group of small humanoids, lacking legs and instead moving by bouncing about, trotted behind and atop a wooden wagon pulled by two large insects, similar to beetles save for a prickly coat of bristles much like a caterpillar would have. Each was as tall as I was at the shoulder, weighing probably a few tons each, yet they were as domesticated as a cow or oxen back on earth.
A small furry creature stood next to me, the only thing in the village that had taken serious notice of me. It was like a cute, overgrown anime teddy bear, about three and a half feet-tall, with a wide, smiling mouth, and small darling eyes, and thin, dainty arms that it had crossed over its chest. A long tail flowed back, of the same red/white fur as the rest of the body.
“Hey, buddy,” I said, hunching to its level and it started purring, its tail flashing to and fro. “You’re kind of cute,” I said, reaching out to pet the animal’s head.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Mr. Haha said, having snuck up behind me.
I recoiled from the furry cute animal as it spread its lips wide, displaying rows upon rows of three inch-long teeth, like the gaping mouth of a great white shark. The
purr grew into a growl and that was enough to get me to step away from the creature.
It continued onward, as if nothing had ever happened. I didn’t realize it until that moment, but I had stood in the guy’s way and it stopped, waiting for me to stand aside, unable to go around me, like an ant following a marked trail.
“How did you know?” I asked Mr. Haha once the dangerous creature had moved on.
“Didn’t your parents ever tell you not to talk to strangers?”
He laughed and patted me on the shoulder.
“Where are we?” I asked, getting a good look at the panorama. My hut was atop a hill and the village formed around it as far as the eye could see. From our vantage point we could see the far valley and the river that wound through it emptying into lake.
“As we approached the village,” Haha started, “Zundergrub and I postulated this was a war camp, and those warriors we fought their army or police force. But we have come to realize our mistake. This, Blackjack, is the equivalent of a concentration camp. The creatures here are prisoners, kept in place to some nefarious end which we have as of yet to determine.”
That explained why so many different species were gathered in one place. Some of the aliens, like that cheetah/centaur thing looked predatory, yet they didn’t attack others that seemed more like their prey. Those that came here had bigger monsters to fear.
“What happened to my leg? I remember some things crawling over-”
“You don’t want to know,” Haha interrupted. “Besides, now that you’re doing better, we have work to do.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, my dear Blackjack. We have a machine to build!” the robot said slapping my shoulder again.
