When they exit the village, they smell salt water in the air.
“We’re here,” Hyena says. The other girls don’t recognize that ocean smell, but Hyena does. “The coast should be just ahead.”
“What’s the game plan?” Bunny says. “Are we just going to follow these infected until we see the creature, then kill it?”
Slayer squints her eyes at Hyena, as if asking for advice.
Hyena says, “Last time, as soon as we attacked the creature, all of the infected animals went back into rabid mode. This time, there’s just too many of the infected. We can’t fight them all. We need a plan.”
Slayer looks away, bites on her lower lip ring.
Then she says, “We wait for the creature to eat all of these infected ones. Then we kill it.”
Hyena says, “Last time, the creature puked all of the infected up so they could attack us.”
“Then we go in hard and fast. Kill it before it has a chance to puke anything up.”
Hyena looks around at the infected people surrounding them. “You know, we can save all of these people if we kill that thing before it eats them. None of them have to die. They’ll be cured.”
Slayer looks at them briefly and shakes her head.
“They aren’t our sisters,” she says. “They don’t matter.”
As they go around a hill, they see a stretch of beach and the great blue ocean beyond it. Other than Hyena and Bunny, the wolf women pause, staring out at the enormous body of water. None of them have ever seen anything like it in their lives. The young girls had never even seen pictures of the ocean before, and Vermin had never even heard the word until a few days ago.
There are already hundreds of infected animals on the beach. Hundreds more come in. The wolf girls separate from the horde and push their bikes up the nearest hill, to get a good look at what they’re dealing with.
In the center of the beach, twenty men in red robes stand in a circle. Around them, there are ten more men in blue robes, but these men are twice as large as the others, over ten feet high. In the center there is a man in a yellow robe, holding a pearl scepter. He appears to be their leader. None of them appear to be infected.
“Who are they?” Marrow asks.
“Must be the Zoners,” Bunny says.
Although they can’t see the Zoners’ faces, they can see their hands sticking out of their robes as they raise them toward the sea. Their hands are greenish-blue, scaled with long reptilian claws. Some of them have tentacles for arms. Some of their robes are bulged in odd places, on their backs and shoulders.
“They’re cultists,” Hyena says. “They must worship the sea creature like a god.”
“How come they’re not infected?” Slayer asks.
“Perhaps they’re immune, like Bunny,” Hyena says.
“We might have to kill them as well,” Slayer says.
“They’re unarmed,” Hyena says. “It shouldn’t be a problem.”
Baretta begins to feel sick and pukes over the side of the hill. She clutches her stomach and squeezes her fuzzy eyelids. Pieces of yellow slime dangle from her whiskers.
“Are you okay?” Slayer asks.
“I’m infected,” Baretta whines. “You have to save me.”
The girl pukes again. Marrow and Bunny are also looking sick.
Slayer examines the puke. “There aren’t any worms in it.”
“Don’t let me get eaten,” Baretta says.
“You’re not infected,” Slayer tells her. “You just ate bad meat.”
Baretta has an attack of diarrhea. She pushes her way to the back of the pack, just a few feet from Nova, and relieves herself.
“She’s right,” Bunny says. “I’m feeling kind of sick, too. Parasites wouldn’t make me feel this way.”
“You should have listened to me when I said not to eat the infected meat,” Slayer says. “Even you, Bunny. The parasites can control an animal even after it’s dead. The meat you ate was probably from a long dead animal. Its meat was already rotten.”
Bunny looks down at her greasy fingernails.
“Are you going to be able to fight or are all of you useless to me now?”
“I can fight,” Bunny says.
Slayer looks at Marrow.
“It’s not that bad,” Marrow says. “I’ll be fine.”
When Slayer asks Baretta, the young girl can’t even respond as she continues to be violently ill. Her wolf tail is drenched in yellow diarrhea. Marrow and Bunny are not as sick because they are more wolf-like than Baretta. Their wolf stomachs are stronger than a human’s. Bacteria doesn’t affect them as much, they can digest raw or even some rotten meat.
“She’s not going to be able to help us,” Slayer says. “We’ll have to leave her behind.”
An electrical buzzing sound pulses out of the leader’s scepter as he raises it over his head, then a red light beams out of it into the sky.
The ocean water bubbles and foams as the sound reverberates along the coast. When the sea creature emerges from the depths, it towers so high that it casts a wide shadow across the crowd of infected. Its tentacles whip in the breeze like medusa snakes as it makes its way up toward the beach, inching through the shallows.
The Zoners back away from the beach, making more room for the infected to step forward. As the creature opens its mouth, a mob of empty-eyed people step within the deep chasm. Thick black oils drip onto their heads from the roof of its mouth, covering them like fudge on a McDonald’s sundae. When its mouth is full, it slides its rubbery folds closed and gulps them down. Then its lips widen for more.
“Here’s the plan,” Slayer tells her wolf sisters. “As soon as the last group of infected animals enter its mouth, we ride in. Half of us will go after the creature, the other half will take on the Zoners.”
She points at Marrow and Nova. “You flank the Zoners on the right.” She points at Bunny. “You go through the middle and try to get them to scatter.”
Baretta is lying in the dirt behind them. Slayer looks back at her. “I want you to stay back and cover them from up here. Do you think you can handle that?”
Baretta nods.
“Your goal isn’t to kill the Zoners. It would be best to just scare them into retreating. If you can get them to run away, then help us with the monster. Whatever you do, don’t let them interfere with our attack.”
Bunny and Marrow nod at her. Slayer turns to Hyena.
“The two of us will ride right down the middle.” Slayer points at the creature as it feasts. “Do you see that soft spot on the side of its head? I want you to target that.”
As Hyena examines the weak spot on the creature, she sees movement in the water behind it. The ocean is bubbling fiercely. Giant waves crash against the beach as if an earthquake is breaking out beneath the surface.
Slayer’s words drop off as she sees them emerge from the sea. The creature is not the only one of its kind. Dozens of them surface, some even larger than the first. Then, in the distance, even more surface. The wolf women stare in shock. There has to be nearly a hundred of the monsters out there.
“We’ll never be able to kill all of those things,” Hyena says. “Just one was going to be difficult enough.”
“We don’t necessarily have to kill them all,” Bunny says. “We just have to kill the one that controls the parasites that infected Talon and the others.”
“But how will we know which one it is?” Hyena says.
The girls watch the monsters as they come up to the beach and open their mouths wide. The thousands of infected animals march forward, feeding themselves to the sea beasts in an organized, casual fashion. It seems to be a daily occurrence for these creatures.
“Find the group of animals that attacked our camp,” Slayer says. “Look for deer and elk. Look for claw marks or bullet wounds on their bodies. Whichever creature they go toward will be the one that we need to kill.”
The women scan the beach, but they don’t see any deer or elk among the animals out
there.
“We rode faster than the deer,” Hyena says. “They won’t be here yet. It could even be days before we see them.”
Slayer presses her tongue against one of her fangs and thinks.
“We’ll have to hide out in this area and wait for them to come,” Slayer says. “It’s our only chance.”
The other girls agree.
“We’ll need to find some kind of shelter,” Hyena says. “Maybe those shacks we passed earlier.”
Slayer nods. “Let’s pull out.”
As the wolf women roll their bikes back down the hill, Marrow locks eyes with one of the creatures. Hyena glances back at her, wondering what she’s looking at.
“It’s staring at us,” she says.
The creature out in the waves, waiting in line to feast, has all of its eyes on the wolf women. It opens its mouth, salivates at them. Then it lets out a gooey roar.
The infected humans surrounding the hill turn around and look up at them. With widening filmy eyes, they transform from their docile, submissive state into rabid-mode. They open their wormy mouths and snarl at the wolf women, then race up the hill to attack.
Baretta opens fire with her submachine gun.
“Don’t shoot,” Slayer says, but it’s too late.
The Zoners on the beach turn to them and their leader points his scepter in their direction.
“Outsiders,” cries the head cultist.
The twelve-foot-tall men in blue robes glare up at them with glowing green eyes. Then they charge.
“Let’s get out of here,” Slayer calls, getting on top of her bike and firing down at the rabid men.
The wolf women rev their motorcycle engines and ride into the horde. Slayer shoots open a hole in the crowd for them to get through. They ride east, away from the horde into a new region of the Forbidden Zone. Hyena slashes with her spear and decapitates a rabid woman as she crosses in front of her bike. Vermin hits one of them with a poison dart.
Once they reach a dirt road, the only infected animals they come across are in docile mode. They are able to ride around them without incident. Up ahead, a new village comes into view. This one is larger, with many blue cone shell towers. The structures are slightly less dilapidated, but still look abandoned. The streets are empty, coated in blood-red weeds. A quiet breeze rustles through ancient metal wind chimes.
Far behind, the giant blue-robed cultists are chasing after them. They move as if flying, their heads leaning forward.
“They’re fast,” Vermin says.
When Hyena looks back, she notices that these large Zoners are gaining on them quickly. They run even faster than their motorcycles. From beneath their robes, strong muscular scaly legs can be seen, pumping through the dirt, leaving dust clouds in their wake.
As the wolf women reach the village, the cultists catch up. Half of them spread out, running behind the shell-shaped buildings to flank them.
In the back, Marrow fires her shotgun behind her shoulder as they approach, the blast speckles their robes with tiny holes but does not slow them down. On her bike, Nova sits calmly, staring forward, off into the distance, thinking about something else.
One of the blue-robed men comes from the side, leaps from a rooftop and slams into Bunny’s motorcycle. Baretta’s sidecar breaks off as Bunny’s bike rolls across the street. The rabbit girl finds herself pinned beneath the large man, her neck squeezed between his scaly claws.
“Fucking Meat . . .” Bunny wheezes at the creature, trying to breathe in his grasp, trying to reach her chainsaw weapon down by her feet.
Slayer lets Zizzy off of her bike, turns around, and rides directly at the attacker. When she opens fire, his robe shreds open. The Zoner releases Bunny from his grasp.
He turns to Slayer, throws open his shredded robe and reveals his mutant body. He is not human. His head is that of a shark’s, with a wide jaw filled with rows of pointed teeth. His arms and back are covered in large muscled lumps. His flesh is scaled and covered in tiny metal spikes. His eyes glow green like radioactive waste.
He goes for Slayer. Bunny grabs her chainsaw-boomerang and flips it on. Slayer opens fire on the shark man as Bunny cuts into his leg. It slows the creature down, but he keeps going. When he punches Slayer in the chest, her body is tossed across the street and slams through the door of a nearby tower. Then the rest of the mutant Zoners attack.
Hyena, Vermin, Marrow, and Nova get down from their bikes and engage the enemy. As they approach, the creatures remove their robes and open their fleshy jaws wide. Dozens of rows of knife-sized teeth chew the air toward them.
Marrow aims for the legs of a shark man coming at her and blows off his foot. A pump of the shotgun and another shot, blows off his knee. The shark man goes down. As his head hits the dirt, she drops her gun to his forehead and blows his cartilage skull into a spiral of stripped fish skin. Marrow smiles wide at her sisters.
“They’re easy,” Marrow says. “We can take them.”
Hyena backs off and points the head of her spear at their open mouths as they growl around them. She looks back at Slayer as she picks herself off the ground, retrieving her weapon. Bunny holds out her chainsaw-boomerang at the creatures. Nova pulls out her sickle-shaped sword and rubs the blade down her thigh.
“Let’s kill these ugly fuckers,” Marrow says, then calmly raises her shotgun and opens fire.
Marrow’s torso explodes and her insides shower the air in wet stringy chunks. It happens so fast, the other wolf women hardly know what’s happening. One of the shark men lunged at Marrow as she fired, breaking the barrel of her gun in half with one hand and slashing at her with the other. His claw entered through her belly and ripped up her chest through her head, pulverizing the upper half of her body in one swipe.
As Marrow’s body falls to the ground, Slayer yells, “Retreat.”
All of them fall back except for Nova, who stares down the group of shark men with yellow violent eyes, growling under her breath.
“Nova,” Slayer yells, but the girl doesn’t listen. She’s in her own world.
“She’s trying to kill herself,” Hyena says.
Slayer runs back for Nova as the creatures close in. Nova slices through a shark man’s chest, but three of them slam into her, throw her to the ground. She goes unconscious as her head bangs into the dirt. Slayer charges in and opens fire at one, pointblank range in the mouth. His teeth shatter against the bullets and blood-bubbles pop in the back of his throat. Bunny tosses her chainsaw boomerang into one of them. It cuts off an arm and returns to her.
Slayer’s gun bursts in her hands as a mutant claws it in half. She steps back.
“Get out of here,” she tells the others.
When she opens her mouth to yell at them again, a shark man bites into her ribcage. It picks her up from the ground and thrashes her body in the air. Blood rains across the street, splashing onto Nova’s coffee-colored skin. The smell of blood causes the other sharks to frenzy.
Before the wolf women can retreat, the sharks fly at them. Only Vermin gets away, dodging into the shadows and creeping into a small crack in the foundation of an old building. Baretta screams and breaks away from Zizzy, running for a motorcycle.
With no one watching her back, a shark comes up behind Zizzy and rips off one of her arms with its teeth. It’s so fast that she doesn’t even notice as it happens. Zizzy looks down at the stump where her arm used to be. A hollow, confused look spreads across her pale face as blood spurts across her white fur.
As Baretta runs off, two more shark men chase her down the street. She gets out of view by the time they catch up to her. All they hear are her screams echoing through the village.
Hyena looks at Zizzy as the young white wolf tries to find her missing severed arm. She’s in too much shock to scream.
“Get her out of here,” Hyena tells Bunny.
The rabbit girl nods and goes for the young wolf woman. She slashes a chainsaw blade at the shark with Zizzy’s arm in its mouth. Its throat opens u
p and blood sprays across Bunny’s face. Zizzy’s breaths are frantic as Bunny grabs her, careful not to infect her with parasites, and pulls her out of the fight.
Hyena gets between them and an approaching shark, pointing her spearhead at it.
“I’m not leaving without Slayer,” Hyena says.
Bunny nods as she gets on her bike. Then she rides off, with Zizzy on her back. The young girl is several inches away from the infected wolf girl, but looks ready to collapse onto her back and take in the parasites at any moment. When they ride off down the street, they pass Baretta’s body as it is torn to shreds by two ravenous shark men. One of the shark men leaves the body and chases after the motorcycle. Hyena watches them as they leave. With one of them wounded, the two wolf women will be easy prey.
Hyena is now alone. With Nova out cold in the street and Slayer dangling from a shark’s mouth, she’s the only warrior left facing the beasts.
Before the war, Hyena was never considered one of the best fighters in the Warrior army. She was competent, loyal, brave, respected, and was even one of the fastest and most athletic. But nobody thought of her as in the same league with Talon, Slayer, Casper, Bunny, or even Pippi. She just wasn’t anything special.
But she became one of the main knights of the tribe because Talon knew something about her that nobody else knew. Hyena was a very strong fighter when she fought alone.
When she’s alone, her mind is clear and at ease. She’s able to focus. She’s able to use act on instincts. When others fight beside her they become distractions. They make her nervous and her brain becomes jumbled with too many thoughts. She fights at only a third of her abilities.
Now that she’s all alone on the battlefield with these shark men, she’s able to begin fighting for real.
Hyena charges the shark holding Slayer in its mouth, her spear guiding her as she runs. As another shark comes in to intercept her, she squats down, bending her ankles back. Then, like a grasshopper, she launches into the air. Using the force of her jump, the blade of her spear cuts the shark man’s ribcage in half as she goes up. Her body soars above their heads, somersaulting through the blood of her victim. When she comes down, Hyena dives spear-first at the shark chewing on Slayer, driving it through his chest.
Barbarian Beast Bitches of the Badlands Page 17
