Hyena growls at him.
“You’ve wasted my time,” she says.
She pushes him out of her way.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asks.
“I’m going to save my sisters the only way I know how,” Hyena says. Then she looks back at Swaggat. “I’m going to kill the creature that’s controlling them.”
Before she continues forward, several bladed tentacles block her path.
“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that,” Swaggat tells her. “The sea mothers are vital to our society. I can’t allow you to kill any of them.”
“Then you’re going to have to stop me,” Hyena says.
Swaggat raises his hands. “You don’t have to do this. Forget about those infected bitches. You should stay here and become the general of my new army. You brought me to power. You deserve to rule this land at my side.”
“Like a faithful guard dog?” Hyena asks. “Fuck you.”
Swaggat sighs. “Fine. If you’re going to act like a child we’ll punish you like a child.”
Hyena shoves the Zoners back with her spear and spins the blade around her head.
“Kill her!” Swaggat says, falling back behind his soldiers.
As the soldiers close in, Bunny yells out, “Stop!”
When Swaggat turns to the wolf girl and sees what she is doing, he agrees with her.
“Stop,” Swaggat tells his men. “Don’t move.”
Bunny is holding the flame-saw to her side. The chainsaw blades are on fire. She dangles it over the railing, above the pit.
“If anyone moves I’m dropping it,” Bunny says, “and we’ll all go boom.”
“Nobody move,” Swaggat says, waving at his men to lower their arms.
“Hyena,” Bunny says. “Take a boat and get back to Slayer. Let her know what has to be done. I’ll hold the Meat here.”
“You can’t kill the sea mother,” Swaggat tells Hyena. “Both of our peoples need them to survive. Isn’t it worth sacrificing a few women’s lives in order to keep your entire civilization running?”
“Isn’t it worth sacrificing one of your sea mothers in order to keep your life?” Hyena says. “It would be a shame for you to die the same day you finally rose to power.”
He doesn’t respond.
She looks at Bunny, “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”
“You know me,” Bunny says. “I’m invincible.”
Hyena’s whiskers tickle her temple as she curls one side of her mouth into a smirk. Then she turns to leave. None of the Zoners get in her way as she crosses the platform and takes one of the motor boats out to sea.
As she drives the boat back to the beach, an explosion rumbles the water around her. She turns back to see a cloud of flames where the oil rig once stood. Her eyes quiver and turn back to the beach, keeping her sight on task. She doesn’t want to think about what could have happened. She guesses the Zoners probably tried to grab the flame-saw away from Bunny and it was fumbled into the oil. Or, more likely, Bunny tossed it into the oil pit just to see the look on Swaggat’s face before they all went up in flames. Either way, they’re all likely dead.
When Hyena gets back to the beach, the Green Fish are staring out at the flaming island on the sea with confused and scared expressions peeking out from their shadowy hoods. Slayer and Vermin are standing amongst them. They don’t realize the Green Fish are now their enemies.
Hyena hops out of her boat and takes Slayer and Vermin aside.
“Where’s Bunny?” Slayer asks.
Hyena shakes her head. Then she tells them what happened. She tells them about Bunny, Swaggat’s betrayal, and the truth behind the sea mothers.
“So we’re back where we started,” Hyena says. “We have to figure out which sea creature is the one that has control of Talon and the others. Then kill it.”
“What if we can’t figure out which one we need to kill?”
“Then we kill all of them,” Slayer says.
Feeding time is coming and infected animals are beginning to arrive at the shore. The wolf women keep an eye out for elk and deer, but the infected animals are mostly small: wild cats, squirrels, snakes, quail, coyotes.
A buzzing engine sound grows in the distance. It’s coming from over the hills, heading toward them. Hyena recognizes that sound. It’s not a truck engine. It is a Warrior motorcycle.
Vyra zooms over the hill, leaping into the air at top speed. She nearly drives right into the water as she brakes her bike and skids across the sand. Toy must have gotten the fifth motorcycle up and running and sent Vyra out with it.
“Something’s wrong,” Hyena says to Slayer, as Vyra frantically jumps from the bike and rushes over to them.
“I’ve been looking for you all day,” she says.
She leans over, catching her breath.
“What is it?” Slayer asks.
“It’s Talon,” she says. “Soon after you left, she turned and immediately broke out of the cage. We were able to stop Kimmy and Celia, but Talon, Likki, and Hunter got away. They’re on their way here.”
“How long do we have?” Slayer asks.
Vyra says, “They could be here any minute.”
Slayer nods and turns to Hyena. “Then we’ve got to kill the creature before she gets here.”
Slayer has a plan. She wants them to fight off every sea creature that comes near the shore. As soon as they see Talon, they will all focus their attacks on whichever creature she goes toward.
“What about Zizzy?” Hyena asks, pointing at their infected sister tied up across the beach.
“We’ll save her as well,” Slayer says, “but the creature that controls Talon is more important.”
As the beach fills with infected animals, it also fills with Zoners. Green Fish and Red Fish have banded together and seem to be planning a way to get out to the island to help any survivors who might be trapped out there. But they also seem hesitant to go out on the sea. It must be dangerous to be in the water during the sea mothers’ feeding time.
The fire seems to be dying down in the distance. Hyena wonders if some of the surviving Yellow Fish were able to get it under control. Or if the entire rig burned up and fell into the ocean.
Slayer has Vermin and Vyra retrieve their motorcycles from the nearby Village. The bikes still lay in the streets where they had fought the Rashers. She collects spear guns and a couple of flame-saws from dead Zoners and passes them out to her sisters. When the two girls return with the bikes, all four women carry the enormous double-barreled Gatling gun to the center of the beach. Even though Nova was able to carry the thing over her head all by herself, these four women together can hardly get it three inches off the ground.
The sea mothers surface in the distance, swimming to shore. One creature leads the way. It is an enormous one. Twice the size of the one Hyena fought years ago with Talon and Apple.
“Wait until it gets closer,” Slayer says, standing behind Hyena and Vermin as they aim the giant machine gun at the waves.
The animals gather close to the shore, waiting patiently to sacrifice themselves. When the creature crawls up out of the waves onto the beach, its tentacles spread out, weaving through the infected. Zizzy goes nuts behind them. She thrashes at her ropes, rolling in the dirt to get free.
“That’s the one controlling Zizzy,” Slayer says, pointing up at the creature as it casts an enormous shadow down the beach.
The monster leans in, its eyes widening, as if it is more interested in the wolf women than it is its food. Its goopy mouth drops open and coughs a splatter of black oily mucus across the beach at them.
“Now?” Hyena asks.
“Not yet,” Slayer says.
The creature crawls out of the water more, its tentacles pulling it up the beach as it towers over them, investigating them.
“Now?” Hyena asks.
The creature leans in. Its many eyes blinking slowly at them, examining them. It must not be used to seeing wolf women in these parts.
“Now,” Slayer says.
When Hyena pulls the trigger, the sea mother shrieks and recoils as the enormous bullets rip through her flesh. Blood and eyeball jelly explode her face. Her tentacles flap around the beach, oil splashes across the infected animals standing motionless beneath its chin. They continue firing the weapon into the sea creature until the bullets run out.
When the gun goes silent, so does the sea beast. Hyena lets go of the trigger and stands up to get a better look. The creature is hunched over. Blood leaks out of its crater-sized wounds and fills the sea water. Then the creature snaps back into life and swings a tentacle at them. Hyena leaps into the air as the tentacle smashes the gun across the sand. She looks back at the other wolf girls. Two of them are still on their feet. Vermin is lying face down in the sand, as if she ducked under the tentacle attack rather than jumping over it.
“Now what?” Vyra says in a high-pitched squeal.
“Run,” Slayer says.
They back away from their position as the sea beast’s tentacles swing at them. As a tentacle hits the sand next to Vyra, it sounds as if a bomb had gone off. A cloud of sand explodes off of the beach and covers their fur.
Hyena doesn’t run. She jumps over a tentacle and dashes toward the sea mother, grabbing a spear gun and a flame-saw along the way. She gets close up to its face and drops to the ground. A tentacle swoops over her head. She douses a spear head with gas from the flame-saw. Sand and salt water explode into her face. She sparks up the flame-saw and catches the spear head on fire.
A smack to her side and she splashes into a wave. The taste of blood and sand in her mouth, she finds herself being picked up into the air, upside-down. A tentacle squeezes tightly around her ankle. Facing the wrong way, she looks at an upside-down Vermin down the beach. The scraggly girl desperately shoots poison darts at the mammoth creature to no effect.
Hot breath on Hyena’s back as she feels the sea mother’s mouth widening, pulling her closer. Hyena bends backward to see the black hole coming toward her. She aims the flaming spear gun forward and fires into the depths of its gullet.
First there is a spark of fire in the sludgy dark. Then a great ball of flame. Hyena flies across the beach as the sea mother explodes. Tentacles and large chunks of gray squid meat scatter into the air and land with loud plops against the sand. Hyena rolls over, squishing her singed ass-fur into the wet sand. When she looks back at the sea mother, all that is left is a pile of blackened strips of flesh and a small fire.
The other wolf girls go to her.
“How did you do that?” Vyra asks.
“Their bellies are full of crude oil,” Hyena says. “Highly flammable stuff.”
“Now we know how to kill them,” Slayer says.
Hyena nods, then hands her the spear gun and a few extra spears.
Zizzy awakes confused and stunned, as parasites crawl out of her flesh and die in the sand.
“You’ll be okay,” Slayer tells her.
As they untie the girl and get her to her feet, a crowd of angry Zoners surround them. After killing one of their sacred sea mothers, the wolf women have made enemies of all Zoners. Green Fish and Red Fish unite against them.
The Zoners circle around them, pointing spear guns at their heads. The wolf women go back to back. They don’t surrender and drop their weapons, but they are horribly outnumbered.
Just as the Zoners are about to fire, a loud howl echoes across the beach. The Zoners turn their attention on something else. Hyena smells her on the air before she comes into view. It’s Nova. She appears at the top of the hill.
“She did it,” Hyena says. “She turned.”
Standing on four legs, Nova is now a massive bear-sized black werewolf. There is no humanity left in her eyes. There is only the beast. There is only a carnal hunger. The great wolf charges down the hill toward the Zoners. The robed fish men scatter. Some of them hold their ground and fire their spears at her, but they’ve only got one shot each. Nova weaves in and out as projectiles come at her. When she barrels into the crowd, several fish men are thrown to the ground.
Throats are slashed open. Stomachs are torn out. A face is bitten off. Nova growls viciously as she rips through their flesh, going from man to man. But it isn’t her stomach that she aims to feed. She pins one of the men to the ground with his throat in her enormous jaws. Then she rapes him. She violently shoves her crotch into his pelvis, slamming his body into the sand. When he doesn’t get an erection, Nova rips out his throat and chases down another one.
With wolf-Nova handling the Zoners, Slayer gets her women back on track, “Let’s move.”
They remove the lighting mechanisms from the flame-saws, strap several spear guns to their backs with extra spears, all of them tipped with gasoline. Then they go to their motorcycles. Vermin and Slayer take a bike. Vyra takes her own bike. And because Zizzy is immune to the worms, she rides with Hyena.
“Think you can ride with one arm?” Hyena asks the young wolf woman.
“Hell yeah,” Zizzy says. “It’s just a fucking arm anyway.”
“Good,” Hyena says. “I want you to ride while I shoot.”
The women tear across the sand as the army of sea creatures pull themselves onto the shore. They weave through hundreds of tentacles and infected creatures as the sea monsters roar at them. Large slimy heads with gaping mouths tower over them, swiping at their bikes. Sand clouds explode around them as the tentacles attack, barely missing them.
Then the wolf women attack back. They launch flaming spears into the mouths as they ride. Three of the sea creatures explode and litter the beach with their oily flesh.
They pass Nova on her rampage of rape and slaughter. She ravages the men, fucking them and eating them at the same time. She no longer understands the difference. All she wants is to feed her hunger. She wants to grow larger and wilder.
Two more sea mothers explode. The wolf women are now so coated in gore and fishy meat that they hardly recognize one another. Their fur is wet and flat to their bodies. The smell of blood electrifies the animals in them.
There are several red dots in the sky, heading toward them. They are Red Knights riding flying stingrays, coming to protect their sacred mothers of the sea. And emerging from the water, the last five Rashers step onto the beach, their flesh charred from the rig fire. Their eyes wild with anger.
The Rashers charge first, leaping over tentacles, their teeth chomping at the air as they run. On the back of Slayer’s motorcycle, Vermin blows a dart at a Rasher’s leg. It does nothing at first but then the shark man cries out. As he runs, the flesh from his leg melts like acid. At his speed, the fleshless bone breaks in half and he tumbles into the sand, rolling in agony.
Vermin winks back at Hyena as she loads another dart. The ratty wolf girl said she was going to make her poison more potent. But Hyena had no idea she was able to make them that potent.
The Red Knights soar across the beach and dive down at the wolf women. One of them goes straight for Slayer. The wolf woman pays him no mind. She lets off a quick burst of machine gun fire, aiming for the stingray. The Red Knight falls into the sand, but flips back onto his feet the second he hits.
Slayer’s bike flies into the air, as the knight slashes her back tire in half with his bladed tentacle. Vermin and Slayer hit the mud. A wave comes in, splashing them off balance, keeping them off their feet. Vermin’s blow gun is carried on the wave up the beach.
As Hyena and Zizzy ride by, they see Slayer falling back into the water as her machine gun is chopped in half by a tentacle blade.
A Red Knight flies after Hyena and Zizzy. It swoops in, following behind them as they weave through the tentacles. Hyena stands up on the back of the bike and swings her spear in circles. As the Red Knight flies at their bike, Hyena drives her spear into the knight’s belly.
She falls from the bike, pulled up into the air. The knight is still alive. His tentacles coil around the spear, holding it in place as his stingray flies higher into the
air. Hyena climbs up her spear onto the stingray. The knight slashes her with a tentacle blade, grazing her chest. The man is too weak to cause more than a small cut across her nipple.
Balancing on the stingray, she lets go of the spear. Her claws dig into his temples. Then she snaps his neck. The spear slides easily out of his limp body. She kicks him over the side, into the ocean of massive beasts.
Her feet on top of the stingray, she tries to figure out how to control the flying creature. Like a surfboard, she puts one foot in front and one in back. A puffy section of flesh near the back of animal’s neck seems to be the key to controlling it. She places her foot on this section of its body. The flesh is cool and soft against the bottom of Hyena’s foot. If she pushes down on it with the ball of her foot it dives toward the ocean. If she curls her toes around the puffy flesh it slows down. If she arches her foot to the right it goes right, arches left it goes left.
As Hyena surfs through the sky, circling the beach, she sees Vermin down there, firing poison darts into Rasher throats. The necks of the shark men melt down their chests before they can attack her.
Nearby, Slayer is shooting at the Red Knight with her sidearm, but the knight can block the bullets with his spinning tentacle blades. Her pistol runs out of bullets. She drops the gun and charges the man. He charges her as well, spinning his bladed tentacles in a circle. As they are about to collide, Slayer pulls back. Instead of striking him, she swipes his leg outs out from under him. With his bladed tentacles swinging in circles, he gets knocked off balance and decapitates himself.
Hyena raises her spear at Slayer in a salute, as she soars overhead. The hyena girl turns her attention back at the sea, toward the sea mothers.
Riding the stingray, Hyena swoops down toward the water. Tentacles splash out of the waves, curling in the air, as she flies through. She pulls the spear guns off of her back and lights their tips. The sea creatures explode around her as she fires into their mouths.
She flies from one sea mother to the next, firing flaming spears down their throats as they open wide to devour her.
Barbarian Beast Bitches of the Badlands Page 23
