Barbarian Beast Bitches of the Badlands

by Carlton Mellick III

  “There still has to be more somewhere else, right? It can’t be all gone.”

  “There’s probably more. Somewhere.”

  “There must be.”

  A roaring sound in the distance grabs their attention. The sound of an engine. A vehicle. All of their ears perk up at the same time.

  “Let’s go,” Slayer yells, and races off in the direction of the engine.

  They don’t see anything ahead. Just more dead pumps and abandoned machinery. They rev the gas and fly through the desert, large dust clouds rising in their wake.

  “Use my rifle,” Hyena yells at Vermin. “I want you to aim for their tires.”

  “I’ve never fired a gun,” Vermin yells in her ear.

  “What?”

  “I use my own weapons,” the ratty girl says.

  Hyena shakes her head. She’s annoyed, but not surprised. There were only so many guns available in their tribe. The guns and ammunition would always go to the more experienced fighters. The smaller, weaker sisters would never even get to hold a rifle like the one Hyena uses, let alone practice firing one. They were stuck with weapons they constructed themselves, such as spears, slings, and in Vermin’s case, blowguns.

  “Do your best,” Hyena says.

  When Vermin takes the weapon, she raises it high above her head to try to get the strap off of Hyena’s shoulder. She doesn’t see the arm of the pump as they pass underneath it. The gun slams hard against the metal, bending the barrel in half, and it flies out of her hand.

  “I dropped it,” Vermin says, casually. As if it were actually a normal mistake for a warrior knight to make.

  Hyena growls and speeds up.

  A highway comes into view as they pass through a wall of thorny yellow bushes. And on it, they see a white truck-like vehicle driving west, away from them. It is some kind of construction vehicle that looks like something between a crane and a fire truck.

  The second they get on the road, Slayer’s bike gurgles to a stop. She tries to start it again, but it stalls. She’s out of gas.

  As Hyena passes her, Slayer yells out, “Keep going. Get that thing!”

  Hyena and Vermin speed off toward the white vehicle. All they have is a blowgun with a handful of darts, a machete, and Hyena’s spear. She wishes Slayer would have recognized their situation and tossed them a gun or something.

  “Get your blowgun ready,” Hyena says. “You’re going to have to aim for the driver once we get close enough.”

  “Maybe we can just ask him for some gas?” Vermin says.

  “We can’t afford him saying no.”

  It takes four minutes to catch up to the vehicle, but it takes Vermin six minutes to screw her blowgun together and load it up.

  “Are you ready yet?” Hyena barks.

  “Just a minute,” she says. “I’ve never done this on the back of a bike before.”

  “Well, don’t drop it this time.”

  Hyena rides up to the driver’s side window.

  “Now,” Hyena yells, as she passes the window.

  “I can’t,” Vermin says.

  Hyena is ready to shove her off the bike for saying that. “Why?”

  Vermin points at the truck. “The window’s rolled up. It won’t go through.”

  The driver side window is coated in a greenish mud. Hyena can’t see anything inside. Not the driver. Nothing. The wheels look pretty strong. Too strong for Vermin to pierce with her machete.

  “What do we do?” Vermin asks.

  “I’ll handle it,” Hyena says.

  Hyena takes the spear from the side of the bike. Like a javelin, she throws it with all of her wolf strength. The blade of the spear breaks through the window, hitting the driver. The vehicle spins out of control. It goes off the road, slams into an oil pump, and flips up onto its side.

  They slow the bike down.

  “Keep your blowgun ready,” Hyena says as she steps off the bike. “If anything moves in there you shoot it.”

  “No need,” Vermin says.

  She points at the bodies hanging out of the truck. The driver and the passenger are already dead.

  When Slayer and Zizzy arrive to the vehicle, Hyena is already siphoning the gas from their tank.

  “Great choice of warrior,” Hyena says to Slayer.

  Slayer squints her eyes at her. “What’s the problem?”

  “Vermin,” Hyena says. “She was useless out there. She can’t shoot a gun or even hold on to one. She’s good with a dart gun, but has no idea how to use it on a bike. She’s not knight material. You should have left her back at camp.”

  Vermin cowers at Hyena’s words, reacting as if her own mother had just told her she hated her guts.

  “She’s new at this,” Slayer says. “It’s going to take her time to get used to fighting as a knight.”

  “We don’t have time to get her used to fighting as a knight.”

  “That’s why Vermin and Zizzy are with us now,” Slayer says. “They need all the practice they can get before the real battle begins.”

  Hyena fills another gas canister.

  “Why did you have Vermin ride with me?” she says.

  Slayer rolls her bottom lip-piercing.

  Then she says, “Because you two make a perfect team.”

  When Slayer turns to the truck, Hyena growls under her breath. She knows the bitch said that just to piss her off.

  While Hyena finishes siphoning the gas, Slayer inspects the truck. The side of the vehicle has a number of storage compartments. When Slayer opens one, a strong fishy odor overtakes their senses. Inside the hold, there is a mass of green sludge. They are large round balls inside of some kind of syrupy goop.

  “What is it?” Hyena asks.

  Slayer closes up the container. “They smell like the yolk of rotten snake eggs.”

  “Do you think they eat that foul crap?”

  Slayer shrugs.

  “I would eat it,” says Vermin.

  Hyena bets she would.

  Then Slayer gets a better look at the driver of the truck.

  “Come take a look at this.” Slayer waves Hyena over, not taking her eyes off of the corpse. “It’s odd.”

  When Hyena gets up she knows exactly what Slayer is talking about. The man has scales growing down his neck, like the scales of a fish or reptile. The fingers on his right hand are fused together, webbed.

  “Are they mutants?” Zizzy asks. “Like the Meat back home?”

  “They could be,” Hyena says. “They traded food and supplies with the Outlanders. It’s possible they were infected with similar mutations.”

  “Do we get to eat them?” asks Vermin. “We shouldn’t waste the meat.”

  “No.” Slayer goes back to her bike, not taking her eyes off of the scaled men. “We need to get back to the others. We’ve still got a long way to go.”

  When they get back to the others, the four women are sitting around the fire, eating barbequed meat. Nova is a little further away from the others with her back turned, her pants are off and her bare butt is covered in dirt.

  Slayer hands off canisters of gasoline to Bunny as she steps off of her bike. Marrow gorges herself on a large piece of pig fat. When Hyena drops off gas cans by Marrow’s bike, she passes Nova and looks down at her. She’s not masturbating, but she is staring down at her vagina and poking it with a fingernail.

  “Something wrong?”

  Nova looks up at her, then back at her vagina. “It’s all swollen. It hurts.”

  Hyena looks at it. The inner part of her vagina is puffy and sticking out in such a way that it looks like a long dangling tongue.

  “You must have rubbed it raw,” Hyena says. “If there’s no lubrication don’t force it. You’ll only hurt yourself.”

  “I didn’t force it.”

  “Your fingers are too gritty then. It must be like sandpaper. You might have even given yourself an infection.”

  Nova winces and pokes at it some more.

  When Hyena goes back
to the others, they are being accosted by Slayer.

  “What the hell is this?” Slayer yells at them.

  She holds out a platter filled with the remains of dead metal worms. The platter was next to the remains of the wild pig they are eating.

  “Are you eating infected meat?” Slayer yells.

  “We couldn’t find anything else,” Marrow says. She doesn’t stop eating.

  “I told you to hunt down an animal that wasn’t infected,” Slayer says. “Did you all eat this?”

  “All of us except for Nova,” Baretta says, feeling ashamed rather than worried that she ate the meat.

  Bunny steps in. “I told them not to eat it. I’m immune, so I had no problem eating an infected animal, but Marrow was tired of hunting and decided to take the risk.”

  “The meat’s cooked,” Marrow says. “Bunny took out the parasites. We’ll be fine.”

  Slayer looks at Baretta, “I know Marrow’s an idiot, but why’d you eat the meat? I thought you’d be smarter than that.”

  Baretta’s face flashes with worry, pointing at Marrow. “She pressured me. She said a real warrior wouldn’t be scared of eating it.”

  “I did not,” Marrow says, spitting a piece of bone into the fire.

  “You did!”

  Slayer slaps the meat out of Marrow’s hand. “You’re Warriors. Start acting like it.” She leans in close to Marrow’s face. “Follow my orders next time.” Then she leans in close to Baretta. “Have some backbone.”

  “I should abandon you both here,” Slayer says. “If you’re infected you’re a danger to us all.”

  “We’re not infected,” Marrow says.

  Slayer goes back to her bike and revs the engine. The girls start packing up their things, but Marrow still sits there, brooding.

  Hyena looks down on the insubordinate wolf woman and tells her, “You better not be.”

  Hyena asks Nova to keep a sharp eye on Marrow while they ride. If she actually is infected, the bitch could go rabid at any minute.

  Marrow has turned out to be quite a disappointment to Hyena. All of the new wolf women are turning out to be disappointments to Hyena. She knew there weren’t many options left, but she thought at least Marrow would have been a good choice. She can now see why Talon has never considered her for the knights in the past.

  The only thing Hyena really knows about Marrow is that she was loyal to her two younger sisters to the very end. When her youngest sister, Moon, was raped in McDonaldland as a teenager, Marrow decided to voluntarily go into exile herself so that she could protect her. She also convinced the middle sister, Lith, to exile herself so that the three of them could stick together.

  And stick together, they did. The three were inseparable. They went on hunts together, ate Meat together, slept together in the same tent, and rode into battle together in the same vehicle.

  Hyena saw it happen when Marrow’s two sisters were killed during the battle of McDonaldland. Their car was crushed underfoot by the great beast Kroger in the center of the battlefield. The three women were okay, but they no longer had a vehicle. They went out on foot. Marrow was pissed that their vehicle had been crushed, and wanted to take revenge on whoever was responsible. She wanted to kill Mayor McCheese, lord of the Outlanders, who was controlling the monstrous wolf, Kroger.

  The women attempted crawling up Kroger’s leg to get to the Mayor, but they couldn’t get very far. The first attempt nearly got Lith crushed, so they had to figure out another way to get the Mayor. Then they followed Kroger, hiding in its massive shadow, waiting for a moment to strike. When the beast broke through the wall into McDonaldland, the three sisters followed it. And when they saw Talon kicking the Mayor off of the great beast, they knew it was their chance to strike.

  The Mayor was shooting random innocent McDonaldland citizens when the three wolf women showed up.

  Marrow looked at him calmly with her shotgun leaning over her should. Then she said, “If you want a real fight we’ll give you one.”

  Mayor McCheese pulled out his sledgehammer and eyeballed them with his bulbous cartoonish eyes.

  “Come get some, bitches,” said the Mayor. “Your furry asses are mine!”

  The three girls went at him on all sides. Moon and Lith went in first. Lith attacked with her handmade broad sword and Moon with her trident. The two of them fought him well, or so it appeared. He couldn’t seem to break through their defenses and they very nearly got through his. Marrow didn’t rush into the fight right away because she was so proud of them. She admired what graceful warriors they had become.

  But it all changed once Marrow got into the mix. She was more threatening to the Mayor by bringing a shotgun into the fight. He could no longer play around with them. When Marrow raised her shotgun at the Mayor, he slammed his sledgehammer down into Moon’s knee, crushing her bone in two places, causing the girl to fall down directly into the line of fire. Moon acted as a human shield as Marrow fired, and the blast shredded half the flesh from her backside. She went down.

  As the Mayor went for Lith, Marrow froze up. She looked down at her sister. Moon raised her hand up, begging for help. Then the Mayor whipped out his own shotgun and blew Lith’s legs out from under her. As she fell, he a brought the sledgehammer down on her forehead and crushed her skull like a watermelon.

  Before Marrow could react, the Fry Guy police force engaged him, shooting at him from multiple directions. When all the townspeople, Fry Guys, and other wolf women crowded around the Mayor to end his life, Marrow was in too much shock to join in the killing. Even after Moon died in front of her, Marrow couldn’t bring herself to avenge them. The lord of the Outlanders was killed at her feet, but she did not take part. The only life she took in the entire battle was her younger sister’s, the person she loved most in the world.

  Hyena could see it from the distance as she entered the city. She is likely the only wolf woman alive who knows what happened, aside form Marrow. After the battle, Marrow was silent for several hours. Once she started speaking again, she acted as if nothing had happened. As if her sisters were still alive, off hunting in the woods somewhere. But whenever Marrow goes quiet, everyone knows she’s thinking back to what happened that night, during the war. Her eyes begin to shake and her spine gets cold. She will be haunted by that memory until the day she dies.

  The number of infected animals they cross paths with, as they go through the Forbidden Zone, increases dramatically. The further they go, the more they find. After a couple of hours, they come to an army of infected beings. Hundreds of them, stretching as far as the eyes can see.

  Strangely, over half of the creatures are infected humans. Some are mutant Outlanders, most likely coming from the Outpost Bunny had described. But most of them were other humans. They were not Outlanders, nor Warriors, nor McDonaldland citizens. They were humans from some place else, from another civilization outside of both McDonaldland and the Forbidden Zone. Someplace to the east.

  “Let’s follow them the rest of the way,” Slayer says.

  Soon, more of the infected come in from behind them and they find themselves surrounded on all sides. They must now travel with the horde, rather than following behind it. After an hour, the crowd becomes so tightly packed that they have to get off of their motorcycles and walk their bikes the rest of the way.

  The younger wolf girls have nervous looks on their faces as the infected squeeze in around them. Their vicinity to these creatures might get them all infected.

  “Why aren’t they attacking?” Slayer asks.

  An infected woman with strange, foreign clothing gets too close to Baretta and the girl squeals.

  As Bunny pushes the infected woman away from Baretta with her bare hand, she says, “They aren’t in attack-mode right now. From what little I remember of being infected, the parasites have two commands they put into your mind. One: attack and infect every living being you can find. Two: return home. Right now, they are returning home.”

  Bunny moves around to the
other side of Hyena and shoves three infected cows that are getting too close to her bike.

  She continues, “The commands aren’t in words, but emotions. I remember being infected with an emotion, which was similar to that of home sickness, but more intense. I had the uncontrollable urge to return home. But the parasites changed my definition of home. I thought of home as one thing, and that was the belly of that horrible sea creature. Its belly was like a warm, welcoming, familiar, comfortable place, the only place I truly belonged. Like being reunited with your true family that you never knew you had.”

  She looks around at the people with dead expressions on their faces. “That’s what all these people are yearning for right now. They all want to go home. They have no idea that their minds are being warped, toyed with, to feed a monster.”

  Hyena looks at all of the animals and people surrounding them.

  She says, “It looks like this monster is about to have a good-sized feast.”

  The wolf women and the horde of the infected pass through an abandoned village. The houses are all spiral-shaped, like seashells, with greenish-blue paint. The structures are crumbling. Some are collapsed. Many are coated in red weeds that crawl up the structures like vines.

  “Are they from the old world?” Vermin asks, staring at the houses.

  Hyena examines them. “No. They are much more recent. Thirty years old, maybe? Zoners must have lived here at one point. Perhaps the infected got them.”

  Vermin grabs Hyena by the arm and yanks her.

  “Look, look!” Vermin says.

  When Hyena looks, Vermin is pointing at a cracked window.

  “What?” Hyena pulls the girl’s greasy hands away from her.

  “There was somebody in there,” Vermin says. “A boy.”

  Hyena looks carefully. Through the window, the insides of the building are rotten, empty. “There’s nobody there.”

  “There’s somebody else!” Vermin says, pointing at another structure. “People live in these houses.”

  Hyena looks, but that house is empty as well.

  “There’s nothing there,” Hyena says. “Nobody’s lived here for a long time.”