Kung Fu Factory

by Crimefactory

  “Well? This is the part where you let me go again? Let me lead you to the next blown well and the next empty cornfield? Again?” Laughing through it like it was a good joke.

  29 sneered, aimed his sword for Hutter’s mouth, double-handed it, and drove it down. If it had gone right, the blade would’ve punctured right through to the ground. But this blade was less blade and more yardstick. It shoved Hutter’s tongue to the back of his throat. 29 kept stabbing, feeling flesh give way a little at a time while Hutter gargled the blood spurting from his tongue. He finally choked on it, and 29 pulled the blade away, slung the spit and mucus off, and shouted victory, last man standing.

  Except that he wasn’t. There was one more, a Whipper, answering 29’s shout with a louder one.

  “Seeeeeeeeaaaaaaa Baaaaaassssssss!”

  Looked over his shoulder. So it had come to this. 29 face to face with the guy who had the iron rod in his head.

  They circled each other cautiously, stepping over and on top of their fallen brothers. Ever closer. 29 worked his blade in loops and swirls like bad guys from Indiana Jones movies. Smiling all toothy.

  Ratchit lifted his hand to his head, grabbed one end of the iron bar, and yanked on it until it started to slide from his head, the sound like gravel pouring. Blood leaked out of the entry hole. Ratchit shook his head, blinked, and lifted that iron bar like a sword.

  29 charged. Swung.

  Rathcit blocked it with the bar. Strong fucking bar. It held the blade in mid-air. No one was going anywhere unless the other backed off.

  29 leapt back first, taking his time in looking for a second swing. Ratchit’s ear was so fucked, and one if his eyes red like it was filled with blood. Maybe that side. Maybe he was blind on that side.

  29 came in with a low swing, arching upward, trying take off Ratchit’s right arm. But Ratchit caught the blade, held it in his armpit, arm clutched tight to his side. Gave it a pull and the sword came free of 29’s hand like it was made of Jell-o.

  Ratchit dropped the iron rod and took the sword. Admired it. Posed with it, doing Conan the Barbarian moves. Nodded. “I like this.”

  “It’s yours. Take it. Let me go, and you can have it, I swear.”

  Ratchit ran his fingers over the edge of the blade. “Dull as dogshit, though. You didn’t sharpen it?”

  “I bought it last week.”

  “And?”

  29 shook his head. “Never used it before.”

  Ratchit dropped the sword, picked up the iron rod, and walked over to 29, inches from his face. At first, 29 thought Ratchit was taller than he looked far off, but then he realized the crazy bastard was standing on the back of a dead Fire Breather.

  A staredown.

  29 wasn’t going to beg for his life. He remembered what Cho had taught him, about what to do when standing so close to an opponent: Balls. You go for the balls. You grab them in your claw and yank them like they are fresh plums on a tree.

  So 29 curled his fingers like an Eagle’s talon and struck the man’s crotch. Only to find nothing there to grab onto. He patted around, thinking maybe they were dangling real low or something. Maybe up tight. Maybe Ratchit was wearing a fucking cup.

  Ratchit smiled. “Lost my junk to a shark in the Gulf of Mexico.”

  With that, Ratchit punctured the soft part under 29’s chin with the iron rod, right up through the roof of his mouth, into his sinuses, and that was enough. Ratchit then rammed the heel of his hand into 29’s nose, shattered it all sorts of ways, and shoved it right through to his cerebrum. His eyes rolled up and he fell backwards like a mighty oak.

  No one else left to kill.

  Ratchit pulled the rod from 29’s head, looked it over, and gave it a lick. Then he fit it back into the entry hole, pushed it back into place through the skull, and felt immediate peace, love, and understanding for all animalkind.

  He headed off towards the line of Fire Breather motorbikes, picking out the one that was painted to look the fastest, and went looking for some prairie dogs to kill for supper.

  mr. brass and the seven plagues of the devil

  by joshua Reynolds

  It was 1906 and the world had come undone. Flames clawed at the filth-choked skies of San Francisco and the ground made its discontent plain, even in the aftermath. Somewhere, a horse was shrieking.

  Ignoring it all, Mr. Brass stalked through the ruined streets of Chinatown, hunting demons, a devil by his side. Limbs composed of clicking gears, steel wires and brass rods propelled him along with inhuman precision. The lithe man trotting beside him moved like water given shape, all flowing motions and easy grace.

  Brass wore a gray suit tailored to fit his insect-thin frame, the coat and trousers smudged with ash. Beneath the coat hung a holster containing the heavy shape of a Tesla turbo-pistol. On his head, the traditional bowler hat of the Pinkerton Detective Agency cast shade over a too-handsome face made from hundreds of flexible leaves of flattened brass.

  In contrast, his companion wore loose black clothing, the serpentine shape of a dragon picked out in gold thread along one side of his shirt. In addition, he wore a tooled leather twin shoulder holster openly over said shirt, and the polished ivory butts of two revolvers extended from beneath his arms.

  Behind them came an assortment of hatchet-men and dacoits, clad in silk and dull colors and armed for war, and one Dutchman, drunk on gin and God’s fury. The dacoits were eleven in number, and profoundly unhappy about that fact, though a look from the man in black stilled their mutters.

  Brass stopped, joints humming as he turned and pinned the Dutchman in place with crimson eyes.

  “Professor Van Helsing?” he said, his voice sounding like a flight of angry wasps. The Dutchman said nothing, looking around at the devastation with weary eyes. He was broadly built, but old, with a face like that of an ancient hawk.

  The man in black gestured with two fingers, and a dacoit prodded Van Helsing with the haft of a hatchet, sending him stumbling. Brass caught him with absurd gentleness. He looked at the man in black.

  “Do it again, and I’ll end this truce now, Lung.”

  “As if I care, automaton,” Lung said airily. “Personally I do not see what use a guilao and a ni bu shu ren are. I should dispose of you now and be done with it.” Quick fingers tapped out a tattoo on the butts of his pistols for emphasis.

  “You don’t dare, though, do you, Lung?” Brass said, ignoring the insult, and the implication that he could be dealt with so easily. “The Devil Doctor would be quite upset with you.”

  A muscle in Lung’s cheek jumped. “My father’s ways are mysterious,” he said, after a moment.

  Brass said nothing. He knew the truth of Lung’s words better than most. After all, hadn’t it been the Devil Doctor who, under pretense of benevolence, had crafted his form in order to house the still-living brain of a dead man in a bid for revenge against a common enemy? And hadn’t it been that same terrible claimant to the title of ‘Manchu’ who had attempted to destroy Brass only a year previous in London?

  Lung turned away from Brass’ unblinking gaze, twitching only slightly. Quong Lung, like Brass, was his father’s handiwork through and through, though in less obvious ways. A killer with a soul of black ice and the green eyes of a cat, the Devil’s Son was the undisputed king of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Or, he had been until his father had arrived, fleeing from the London debacle.

  And now, the Doctor’s holdings were again under assault, though not by any earthly agency. Chinatown had taken a beating in the earthquake, worse even than the damage done during the Martian War of 1888. Buildings slumped like drunks, their upper stories sliding towards the ground. The Street of Gamblers was chaos, and there was debris everywhere. Chickens ran squawking, pursued by dogs. The soft glow of hidden flames lit up the few unbroken windows and the air was full of smoke and screams.

  And amidst it all, seven demons had been set free to ravage among the people of Chinatown, and the city beyond. Seven plagues, released to afflict the D
evil himself.

  Brass looked down at Van Helsing. He had met the old man once before, in London just prior to the War. He had been hunting a murderer named Morris, who had proven to be something other than human, and difficult to handle, even by Brass’ standards. Now Morris’ ashes were mingled with the red sands of Mars, and Van Helsing was here, a prisoner of the See Yup Tong.

  Granted, so was Brass, theoretically. He had come to San Francisco on the trail of another of the Devil Doctor’s servants, only to fall afoul of a trap that confounded even his abilities.

  Then, if it weren’t for Van Helsing, Brass could have easily escaped by now. But he owed the professor better than a grisly death at the axes of the Tong.

  Too, there was the reason that Van Helsing had been kidnapped from his visit to Occidental College to begin with-namely the string of strange deaths that had been plaguing the See Yup Tong.

  Men had been found in the Street of Gamblers, drained of blood. And now, in the aftermath of the quake, strange shapes slid through the ruined streets, hungry ghosts thirsting for more life than Chinatown had left to give.

  Van Helsing shook himself. “I’m fine,” he said, patting Brass’ arm. “Fine. I just-all of this destruction-” He shook his shaggy head. “Monsters our quarry may be, but even their obscenities pale in comparison to this…”

  “Where are they, old man?” Lung snapped. Van Helsing fixed him with a glare, but looked away when Lung tapped the butt of his pistols again.

  “After I was-ah-invited to come, I calculated potential nesting sites, using the murders as compass points. I narrowed it down to one,” he said. “A theater on the Street of Gamblers.”

  “Ha!” Lung swept out a hand. “There are as many theaters on this street as I have fingers!”

  “But only one still stands,” Van Helsing said. His eyes went vague. “The oldest, the most strongly built. I read the old papers, the plans. It was built with seven walls, and in the cellar, below the stage and the auditorium, seven thresholds. To keep them in, you see. But something happened. Something set them loose. Maybe one of the smaller quakes that hit just before the big one.” He paused, shaking his head. “That’s where they’ll be.”

  “They’d better be, old man. Or-” Lung swiped his thumb across his throat. Brass tensed.

  “You’ll have to get past me, first.”

  “Easy enough. I broke many toys when I was a child. I can do it now, as well.” Lung smirked. If Brass had been capable of anything more passionate than irritation, he might have surrendered to the urge to strip that smirk from Lung’s skull. Instead, he started moving again.

  “We must get there before dark,” he said.

  “Frightened, metal man?” Lung said, following him, thumbs hooked through the straps of his holsters.

  “No,” Brass said. And he wasn’t. When the brain of the man he had been-a surge of red memory thrust through the psychic scar tissue, prompting an almost invisible shudder in his limbs-had been wrenched from its case of bone and flesh and transplanted into its current artificial chassis, he had lost all but the barest glimmer of what had made him human. Emotions were now only dull, distant tugs of memory for him now, like vague scents smelled through a handkerchief.

  He no longer missed them, in any event. Could barely recall the tang of fear, in fact. Brass, in fact as well as name, and metal felt nothing at all.

  “You should be,” Van Helsing said. “Both of you. Fear will keep you alive.”

  “I fear only the Lord of Strange Deaths,” Lung said. “I have seen him drawing delicate characters of acid upon the skins of those who failed him. What can these beasts do to me that is worse than that?”

  “Why not ask them?” Brass said. He pointed a gleaming finger. The bodies, wrapped as they were around the splintered remains of jutting roof timbers, had been hidden at first amongst the folds of hundreds of shredded silk flags. Amidst the forest of crawling Chinese characters, a legion of flies buzzed over the ruptured bodies, which had been pierced from rear to tongue by the makeshift wooden shafts.

  “A bramble of corpses,” Van Helsing said, with something approaching grim satisfaction. And it was such-bodies jutted from balconies and alleyways and gutters and windows down the Street of Gamblers, pierced, punctured and put on display, like Dante’s warning. Thin creeks of blood ran over the street in sideways patterns that hurt the eyes of any who looked too close.

  Lung hissed, and his fingers danced over his pistols. The hatchet-men murmured prayers and curses. There was a foul stink in the air, not just from the bodies. Brass couldn’t smell it, but he recognized it by the look on the faces of the others. He glanced at Van Helsing.

  “A nest. They are marking their territory,” the old man said, licking his lips. Birds rattled off hoarse cries and fought in the high bodies. “I need my tools. And take off these bindings.”

  Lung barked an order and a hatchet flashed. Van Helsing rubbed his wrists as the ropes dropped to the bloody street. The birds took to the air, shrieking.

  Brass started forward. The others followed, more slowly. Even Lung seemed subdued as they entered the forest of the dead. A thin whisper of sound, perhaps the creaking of wood or the gasp of escaping gases from the dangling bodies, slithered through the air. The sky, and the sun with it, was almost completely blocked out by the branches of the body-trees and the slopes of slouching buildings, and blood dripped down continuously.

  Lung cursed as blood spattered on his pigtail. He rubbed red fingers down the front of his shirt. “All this-by seven dead men.”

  “One dead man nearly brought London to its knees,” Van Helsing said.

  “This is not London,” Brass said. “And this will not stand.” His fists clenched with a sound like gears clicking. “Is that the theater?”

  It was a chunk of dark wood, squatting at the end of the street of corpses. Orange lanterns dangled from the broken necks of two men lashed to the front columns, casting an ugly glow across the walls. The stench was worse here, and seemed to issue from the theater’s yawning doors, both of which hung from their hinges.

  “Burst from the inside,” Lung muttered.

  “Of course they were,” Van Helsing spat. “They came from in there, didn’t they? Fool.”

  “Old man-” Lung spat. Brass slapped his hands together, making a sound like a bell.

  “Enough. Professor?”

  “Jiang-shi,” the Dutchman grunted. He snatched a valise case from one of the dacoits and opened it. “Not quite the vyrdulak, but close enough for cows, yes?” He looked up, squinting. “They’ve blocked the light. Smart.”

  “The Seven Golden Plagues,” Lung said, pulling a pistol and checking its cylinder. “Brought here in 1421 by the Great Admiral, to leave them where they could no longer harm the people.”

  “Until now,” Brass said.

  “Until now,” Lung said, snapping the cylinder back in place. “Ha.”

  “Guns won’t work,” Van Helsing sniffed. Lung grinned.

  “My bullets were dipped in the blood of a black dog, old man. They’ll kill anything.”

  As one, the dead began to moan. Softly at first, so softly. Then louder. Groans of eternal pain. Words fell like rain, dropping onto the group. Brass slapped the empty holster beneath his coat. They had taken his gun, earlier. Now he had only himself.

  “What are they saying?” Brass said.

  “They’re welcoming us into their brotherhood,” Lung said, turning slowly, his face stiff.

  “They know we’re here,” Van Helsing said. He screwed a carved wooden spike onto the end of the collapsible staff he’d pulled from the bag and unfolded. Strange sigils and Dutch prayers decorated its length.

  “Then no need for subtlety,” Brass said. He charged up the steps of the theater, brass legs carrying him with inhuman speed, brass fists smashing the doors aside in an explosion of wood. He slid into the foyer, the doors to the auditorium only a few feet further.

  Internal gyroscopes spun as Brass crashed throug
h the auditorium doors. Then, just as swiftly, he was flying backwards, his mechanisms shuddering from the force of an unseen blow. He hit the floor and skidded in a shower of splinters. His fingers tore trenches in the floor as he slowed himself. Brass looked down.

  A single, black palm print was burnt into the material of his vest. He looked up.

  Something stood in the doorway, clad in rotting silk and rusting armor. Baleful black eyes observed him from behind the smooth beauty of a golden mask framed by a mane of lank white hair. A rotting jaw shifted, revealing a leech’s thicket of curved fangs.

  A bullet caromed off of the golden mask, and the thing staggered in surprise. Lung, a pistol in each hand, stepped past Brass, spitting curses and bullets.

  The creature crouched and leapt backwards. Lung looked down at Brass. “Up, toy. We have beasts to kill.”

  Van Helsing and the dacoits followed as Brass and Lung stepped into the auditorium. An audience of the dead waited for them, a corpse in almost every seat. Everything stank of blood and corruption. On the stage, seven performers waited.

  They stood stiff and regal. Seven golden masks, all clad in robes the color of night’s rainbow. Fourteen empty eyes glared at the group.

  Lung, pistols still extended, said, “What are they waiting for?”

  “Us,” Van Helsing hissed. He gripped the spear in both hands. “I have no talismans, no magic to make them sleep. We must hack them up. Render them harmless, if not exorcised.”

  The dacoits spread out at a word from Lung, shifting their weapons. Brass stepped forward.

  As one, the seven demons leapt. They fell upon the group like shrieking comets, clawed fingers spread wide like the talons of birds of prey.

  Brass raised a forearm, blocking a blow. He swept his arm around, trapping the hand as claws scrabbled across him like wriggling worms. Brass drove a fist into the creature’s shoulder, and felt ancient bone give. The arm flopped, gone liquid and loose. The creature twisted, driving an elbow into the side of his head, denting several of the disks of his face. Brass staggered, his eyes sweeping the room as they re-aligned.