Two Red Knights fly after her. They are much more proficient at riding the stingrays than she is. They catch up to her quickly.
On each side of her, they whip their blades at her. She dodges as they strike. Their tentacles clink together. Her stingray nearly knocks her off when her foot goes out of position. She fires a spear at one of them and the knight knocks it away.
She goes down low to the water, between the sea mothers, in hopes that the knights won’t dare to follow. The knights hesitate only for a moment, then they follow her.
They catch up to her again. A sharp pain up her back as a blade catches a patch of her spotted fur, cutting a deep gash. She focuses her attention on one of them, giving the knight behind her another free swipe at her back. She tries to slash at the knight’s stingray, but he catches her spear with all six of his tentacles and pulls her spear up, away from his mount. With her other hand she aims the spear gun at him and fires. The flaming spear goes through his foot and through the stingray. He goes down.
Hyena pushes her foot down on the stingray and speeds up, dodging another attack from the second knight. She turns around and heads back toward the beach, leading him down through the maze of tentacles and hungry gaping mouths.
She loads her three spear guns and fires one of them back at the knight. He cuts the spear in half. She fires again. He catches it in midair and drops it into the sea. No matter how much she weaves through the army of sea beasts, he stays locked on her trail.
With the last spear, Hyena lights it on fire. She points it back at the knight. He swings his tentacles around, ready for her. As she flies past a sea mother, opening her mouth wide to swallow the wolf girl, Hyena changes her aim. She points the spear gun into the sea mother’s mouth and fires as she passes it by.
When the Red Knight crosses the sea mother’s face, the creature explodes. The knight is caught in the blast. When Hyena looks back, she sees his body falling into the sea in three flaming pieces.
Up ahead, she sees Swaggat on the beach. The man’s robe is black and parts of his body are burned, but he has survived the explosion on the oil rig. The fact that he’s still alive means that Bunny probably wasn’t so lucky. She wouldn’t have let him leave the rig unless she was dead.
Swaggat is facing off against Nova. His flame-saw is on, revving it up, ready to cut the werewolf down to defend his people. Hyena flies toward him, coming at him from behind. Wolf-Nova charges him.
He holds his ground as the two wolf women close in on him from two directions. As Nova roars and leaps into the air at him, Swaggat whips out Vinson’s scepter. A blast of red light sends the werewolf flying across the beach.
As Hyena dives toward him, her spear pointed at him like a jousting knight, Swaggat turns around and hits her with light. Her body is ripped from the stingray, tossed through the air, then she slams down hard into the sand.
With the wind knocked out of her, she has a hard time getting up. Swaggat steps up to her and points the scepter at her face. The red light pushes her head back into the sand.
“You don’t understand the damage you’ve caused,” Swaggat says. A tear slips down his eye. “Our mothers are precious to us. More precious than our own children.”
Hyena tries to pull herself up. She resists the light’s power and gets three inches off the ground. Swaggat steps closer, points the scepter two feet away from her face. The strength of the beam increases and Hyena is forced back into the sand with twice as much pressure.
“Now you will die,” Swaggat says. “All of you will die.”
A noise distracts both Swaggat and Hyena. It is a loud booming sound. Hyena shifts her eyes to the shore and sees a dozen sea mothers with their mouths wide open. They are regurgitating animals onto the beach. Hyena remembers back to when they originally fought one of the sea mothers. The creature spit up several half-digested rabid animals, wolves, and mutant men that attacked them. This is happening again. But this time there is a dozen of those creatures, which means they’ll be attacked by twelve times as many creatures.
The bodies pile out of the mouths of the creatures. Hundreds of them in large bloody stacks along the shore. The melting figures stand up and stretch out their limbs. They search for the wolf women with rabid eyes. Then attack.
“See,” Swaggat says. “You don’t stand a chance. You will all die here today.”
But Hyena isn’t listening to him. Something else has grabbed her attention. Standing up out of the pile of regurgitated animals, Hyena recognizes one of the figures. Her eyes shake and water as she sees Talon. Her wolf sister was partially digested. Half of her face is melted off, revealing part of her wolf skull, including the bones in her snout. One eyeball is hanging from her head. Her knuckle bones are sticking out of her bloody hands. Behind her, two other wolf sisters stand there with crazed looks in their eyes.
Hyena chokes on her tears, cursing herself. They were too late. Talon had made it to the beach before them, probably during the night when Hyena was planning a revolution with that traitor, Swaggat. Her beloved leader had already been eaten and has now joined the ranks of their enemy.
Swaggat was right, Hyena thinks. They are going to die this day.
Just as Hyena is about to give up and allow Swaggat his victory, something happens. She sees the other wolf women. None of them are giving up. Vyra and Zizzy ride their motorcycles, shooting flaming spears at the wolf mothers. Vermin blows darts into infected animals. Nova continues her rampage of raping and devouring everything in her path. And most of all, Slayer doesn’t give up, even as she sees her leader in the half-digested rabid state.
Slayer and Talon stand face-to-face on the beach. Slayer pants rapidly, holding two bladed tentacles she severed from a Red Knight. Talon glares at her, breathing deeply. Her melted chest expanding as she breathes, pieces of flesh dripping from her body. Slayer growls at her. A challenge to the alpha wolf. When Talon growls back, her dangling eyeball falls off and rolls down her breast.
Talon pulls her two axes from her back. Slayer swings the bladed tentacles in a circle. Then they charge each other.
As her two leaders battle each other on the beach, Hyena realizes that she can’t give up. Even with the odds stacked against them, she knows there’s always a way. Just as Slayer knows. Just as the younger, more optimistic wolf women know. The one positive side to Talon already being eaten is that they have now seen which creature controls her parasites.
She realizes what Slayer is doing. She is keeping Talon distracted so that Hyena can attack the sea beast and free her from the sea worms. Even though she is partially digested, she might still be able to pull through. Hyena realizes that it’s all up to her to save them.
When Swaggat squeezes the light tighter around Hyena’s throat, the wolf woman gives him a smile.
“What?” he says. “What are you smiling at?”
When she speaks, her words trickle out in muffled wheezes. “I thought of something funny.”
“Oh yeah?”
A chaos of bloody infected creatures run wild on the beach around them as they speak.
“I imaged what I will do to you once I get out of this thing.”
Swaggat laughs. “You’re not getting out of anything. The power of the scepter will crush the life out of you. There’s nothing you can do to—”
Before he finishes his sentence, Hyena breaks the scepter in half between the toes of her foot. The top of the scepter flies over her head, the red light spinning across the beach. Swaggat’s shocked to see her leg bent at such an inhuman angle, surprised that she was able to put so much power into her lower body while her upper body was frozen in place. With just half a stick left in his hand, he tosses it aside. His mouth wide open, he pulls out the blade of his flame-saw and tries to turn it on.
As he backs away, he can’t seem to get it to work. He tries to rev it. Nothing happens. He revs it again. The thing sparks for a second and burns his finger.
“Not very well constructed, is it?” Hyena says.
/> She smirks and looks over at the fight between Slayer and Talon. The younger wolf is holding her own against the mighty Talon. She whips the tentacles at Talon, slapping the axes away. Talon leaps into the air and sends an axe straight down toward Slayer’s head, but Slayer rolls out of the way. She hooks Talon’s leg with a tentacle and throws her down face-first into the sand.
As Swaggat gets the flame-saw going, Hyena attacks. She knocks the flame-saw blade out of her way and stabs him in the stomach. Swaggat steps back and coughs blood down his charred lips.
Hyena glances over at Slayer for a moment to see her stumbling backward. Talon has chopped one of her tentacles in half. There’s a freshly opened gash running down her thigh.
While she’s distracted, Swaggat swings his flame-saw at Hyena. She smells burnt hair first, then feels the pain as she looks down at her chest. One of her breasts has been cut in half, down the middle. Sea worms crawl out of the wound, down her stomach.
When he strikes again, she holds up her spear to defend. The chainsaw cuts through the staff and tears open her belly. Worms spill out onto the beach. With her spear broken in half she uses the bottom half like a wooden stake and drives it through his shoulder. He stumbles back. She slaps out the flames on her wound.
As Swaggat falls to one knee, Hyena points the blade half of her spear at him.
“I win,” Swaggat says.
Hyena cocks her head at him.
“Even if you kill me here now,” Swaggat says. “You’ll still die.”
He points at the worms coming out of her belly.
“I didn’t tell you the full truth about your worms,” he says. “They are dormant, yes, but they will awaken one day soon. I lied about my mother. She’s not dead. She is alive and well and only a few months away from becoming one of the sea mothers.”
Hyena pulls a handful of worms out of her belly and stares at them.
“And as soon as she becomes one of them she will have control of your parasites and control of you,” he says. “You will become her first meal.”
Hyena crushes the worms. “Then I will kill your mother after I kill you.”
Swaggat wags a finger at her. “Ah, but that too would mean your death. If my mother dies then so do the sea worms. And those worms inside of you are the only things keeping you alive right now.”
Hyena growls. She doesn’t know what else to do. If he’s telling the truth then she’s dead no matter what she does.
“You see,” he says. “I defeat you no matter what you do.”
She growls again. Then her growl becomes a smile. Her whiskers stand up high against her cheeks.
“Well, if I’m going to die either way,” she says. “Why not kill your mother? Sounds like a good last act before I die.”
The thought enrages Swaggat. He jumps to his feet and charges her. He raises his chainsaw and she drives the head of her spear into his stomach. By the time she realizes he let her stab him on purpose, it’s already too late. He saws her arm off at the elbow, then cuts her in half.
She falls back into the sand and looks up at him. Her severed hand is still holding the spear in his stomach. Her body from her breasts down is lying at his feet. Even though she’s no longer connected to most of her body, she still lives. The worms keep her alive.
With only one arm left, she pulls herself up the beach. Swaggat steps after her, chuckling.
“You won’t touch my mother,” he says. “She will become a beautiful goddess of the sea.”
As Hyena pulls herself away from him, using only five fingers, she loses hope again. The worms falling out of her flesh make her weak. There aren’t enough of them to keep her going.
She looks over at Slayer and Talon. Both of Slayer’s weapons are gone and it looks like she has several axe wounds covering her body. She staggers through the waves. Talon drops her axes and grabs her, picks her up into a bear hug. As she squeezes the wind out of Slayer, parasites crawl out of her fur. Slayer cries out as the worms burrow into her flesh.
Swaggat revs his flame-saw and fire shoots out of the blade like a dragon.
“Maybe I’ll let you live,” Swaggat says. “Maybe I’ll keep you alive until mother goes out to the sea. I’d love to watch you crawl across the beach to her mouth, using your one remaining arm.”
He looks down at her other arm.
“Or maybe I’ll cut this one off as well,” he says. “And let you roll your way down the beach.”
Hyena screams as he brings the chainsaw down on her last limb. She can smell her flesh burning against the flame as it saws through her shoulder bone.
As he leans in close enough, Hyena reaches out with the stump of her other arm and presses it against the other half still attached to the spear in Swaggat’s stomach. The worms fuse together and her arm becomes whole again. She feels her fingers wrapped around the top half of her spear.
When Swaggat cuts all the way through her limb, he looks back at her and laughs. Then she twists the spear inside of his belly and tears it out of him sideways. His shredded insides spill out of the hole.
Hyena releases her grip on the spear. As Swaggat staggers back, she pulls herself a couple feet further up the beach, digs her claw into the sand and pulls out the top half of Vinson’s scepter.
Swaggat gurgles blood at her as she puts all of her anger into the staff. The energy flows out of her, into the rod, and emerges as a beam of light that hits Swaggat in the chest. He is thrown across the beach, waving his flame-saw at his sides.
She pushes him all the way into the mouth of a sea mother that instinctively gulps him down. Once the flame-saw hits the oil in her belly, the sea mother explodes. Chunks of goo and squid flesh rain down on the beach.
Talon and Slayer fall into each others arms as the worms inside of them die. The other two infected wolf women also fall. Slayer regains consciousness and hugs Talon’s limp body to hers. Hyena watches without blinking. Slayer shakes Talon, trying to wake her up. Hyena shakes her head.
“We were too late,” she says. “Too late.”
Then Talon coughs out dead worms from her throat. She shakes the gore from her body and stands to her feet. Although much of her muscle tissue has been severely damaged and she’ll be horribly scarred for the rest of her life, she’ll survive. The other two infected wolf women stand, clutching their wounds.
Talon grabs her axes and hands one to Slayer. She nods at her two half-melted sisters. Then the four of them enter the battle.
As the worms slide out of her body, Hyena feels her consciousness fading. She knows she’s dying, but she’s at peace with that. They have accomplished their mission. Even though the women are now horribly deformed, they have been saved.
She watches Nova running off down the beach with half a man in her mouth. The girl got her wish. She has turned and left her old human life behind her. Now she can forget and join the big sisters in the wild.
She watches Vermin, Zizzy and Vyra. The three young warriors cut down infected mutants left and right. As she watches them, Hyena realizes Slayer was right about them. They truly are great warriors. In them is the future of their tribe.
Then, with the last of her energy, she rests her eyes on Slayer. Without any spears or fire left, the black wolf girl runs straight up to a sea beast and takes it on with only an axe. She climbs up a tentacle and chops out its eyes, then goes for the soft spot on the side of its head.
As Slayer chops up the creature two hundred times her size, Hyena smiles at her. She knows Slayer will make a great leader. She knows Slayer doesn’t need her as her right hand. She’ll do just fine on her own.
Hyena is the old guard. It’s time for the new. As she watches all of her sisters fighting in the battle, she knows they’ll do fine without her. She’s ready to die.
She smiles and closes her eyes.
Then she opens them again.
She scoops the worms back into her chest, grabs her severed arm and fuses it back to her stump, then crawls down the beach to the lower half of h
er body. Once the worms have fused her two halves together, she stands up.
“Maybe I’m not ready to die just yet,” Hyena says, brushing the blood from her spotted fur.
Then she picks up the head of her spear, raises it over her head, and charges into battle, to fight alongside her sisters one last time.
Road Warrior Werewolves versus McDonaldland Mutants... post-apocalyptic fiction has never been quite like this.
Table of Contents
Barbarian Beast Babes of the Badlands
Horrendous Horror of the Hateful Hamburglar
Ferocious Female Furries in the Forbidden Zone
Barbarian Beast Bitches of the Badlands Page 24
