by Archer, Mia
“Come on you great beast,” I growled. “Time for you to go for a little flight.”
This might not be a good idea, but I couldn’t stop myself. I knew it was a potentially bad idea, but a little voice told me to go ahead and do it. That it’d be fun. So I started spinning the thing around. It was slow going at first, but it didn’t take too terribly long for me to really get things up to speed. Before long it was going so fast that my surroundings were a blur.
I grinned and threw my head back for a good old fashioned laugh. After all, this was the kind of fun I couldn’t have back on earth where there were suburbs on the outskirts of Starlight City that meant tossing a giant monster like this would probably result in knocking down some overpriced two thousand square foot ranch houses.
Here in this city, though? It was a completely different ballgame. There was nothing but desert all around, and I figured that meant if I let go of this thing’s tail then it would be flying out to a spot where the worst that could happen was I disturbed the resting place of one of those Yorp things and gave it a little irradiated snack to enjoy.
Yeah, somehow that didn’t seem like much of a tragedy at all. I didn’t care if those oversized things were endangered on this world. As far as I was concerned I’d be taking care of two giant monsters with one toss if I did manage to hit one.
I let go. Watched the thing go flying, confident that there was nothing beyond the city limits but purple desert for the giant lizard to hit.
Unless, that is, the thing went flying towards a giant volcano off in the distance that rumbled with a dull red glow and had smoke lazily floating off the top of the thing.
“Oh shit,” I said.
“What?” Sabine said. “If you’re swearing then it has to be…”
Her gaze was drawn by my cursing. She got a good look at exactly where the lizard’s trajectory would take it. Her eyes went wide.
“Oh. Shit!”
26
Hole in One
“Of all the places you could throw that thing you had to toss it into my lair?” Sabine shouted.
She was loud enough that I would’ve been able to hear her even without the connection. I winced at her shout.
“Maybe it won’t hit,” I said. “That’s a pretty big distance, after all.”
“Yeah, and you’re punching so far above your weight class that there’s no doubt you can toss something that big that far,” she said. “I can’t believe you did that!”
I couldn’t believe I did it either. That was like a one in a million shot right there.
“I really didn’t mean to do it!” I said.
The lizard flew towards the volcano in a long lazy arc. A lazy arc that, to be fair, didn’t end with the lizard landing in the lava part of the volcano. No, it ended with the lizard landing on the side of the volcano.
Unfortunately the giant lizard was so oversized and it was traveling at such a high speed that it turns out landing on the side of the volcano was just as bad as landing in the lava hole part of the thing. The caldera. I think that’s what Sabine called it.
It smashed a hole in the side of the volcano, and a moment later a plume of ash followed by an eruption of lava came crashing out.
“You just slammed that thing right through the side of my lair!” Sabine shouted.
I looked down to where she was staring at a screen in horror. No doubt she was watching her precious lair being reduced to nothing by a giant lizard crashing into the thing.
“You threw that thing in there and it crashed right through to the central lava chamber,” she said.
“Huh,” I said. “Well at least the rest of the place isn’t that bad, right?”
“Isn’t that bad? There’s lava going through the whole damn thing right now because that damned lizard isn’t dead and its thrashing around in the caldera like a fat woman who got in a hot tub that’s a little too toasty for her comfort!”
“Sounds like that’s one hot tub soak that lizard isn’t going to be recovering from any time soon,” I said, grinning like an idiot.
“If that’s supposed to be funny…” Sabine said.
“I mean I’m missing the sunglasses that really tie that quip together, but yeah. I think it’s pretty damn funny,” I said. “Besides. Volcano lairs were played out the moment Mike Myers made fun of them in Austin Powers.”
“Whatever,” Sabine grumbled. “Volcano lairs will never go out of style.”
The volcano continued to erupt in the distance. I figured it probably wouldn’t be in good taste to mention that volcano lairs might not go out of style, but it was clear that her volcano lair was going to have some cleanup required by the time she got back to the thing.
Considering the mood she was in that seemed like the sort of thing that might have her pulling out the oversized blaster at her side and trying to use it on me.
I floated down to her. With a sigh she turned and got back to work on whatever it was she’d been doing before.
“I want you to know that I’m not happy with you,” she said.
“Hey, you said you wanted that thing out of your hair. Well it’s out of your hair now, so I don’t see what the big deal is,” I said.
She slammed her hands down on the console and turned to give me a piece of her mind. The only problem with that plan was the moment her hands made contact with the console everything around us started to rumble and shake. Her eyes went wide, clearly she was a little surprised, and she looked down at her balled up fists as though she was seriously wondering whether or not she’d done that.
“What the…”
“Is it another giant monster?” I asked, looking around and to see if there was something coming for us.
“No,” Sabine breathed.
There was something about the terror in her voice that got my attention. That was the tone of a woman who was terrified of whatever she thought was coming for us, and she’d been on this world a heck of a lot longer than me so I figured anything she was terrified of should be something I was at least worried about.
“What is it?” I asked. “Is there a way for them to get the giant Yorps to come after us?”
“Nothing like that,” she said. “She’s here.”
I was still peering around and trying to get an idea of what the heck it could be when I noticed a shadow looming over both of us. Which was odd, because we were on the top of the tallest building in the city. There shouldn’t be anything casting a shadow on us because any building that could possibly cast that shadow would, by definition, be smaller than the tallest building in the city.
“There’s something behind us, isn’t there?” I asked.
“Yup,” Sabine said.
“I’m going to regret turning around and getting a good look at it, aren’t I?” I asked.
“Probably,” Sabine said.
“Whatever the heck that is really terrifies you, doesn’t it?”
“Words can’t describe,” she said.
“Dang it,” I said.
If my time in the hero business had taught me anything, it was that avoiding something unpleasant wasn’t going to make that something unpleasant go away. I’d learned that the hard way when I tried to run from the fact that I’d been stripped of my powers, and I wasn’t going to run ever again.
I turned around, and found myself facing a monstrosity that was more horrifying than anything I’d seen since I came to this world.
Which I figured was saying something since after coming to this world I’d been swallowed by a giant local monster and then kicked around a few times by the local military and a few giant monsters that’d been imported from earth.
“Holy crap,” I said.
“Holy crap is right,” Sabine said. “I give you the physical embodiment of the alien queen that controls this city.”
“She’s kind of big,” I said.
Though as I looked a little closer I realized the giant thing that towered over the tallest building in the city wasn’t made out of one pi
ece. No, the whole thing was moving. As though there were millions of wriggling tiny parts making up the whole.
“Is that thing made up of…”
“Yup,” Sabine said. “Told you it wasn’t going to be pleasant.”
“Dang,” I said.
“Looks like she’s summoned just about every worm that isn’t being used to control the cats. I think she keeps a lot of them hidden away around the city waiting for last ditch moments like this when all her other defenses have crapped out on her.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Let’s just say the two of us have gone toe to toe before, and I learned the hard way that you do not want her to activate her last ditch defenses,” she said.
She gave an involuntary shudder. Sure her voice sounded as confident as she ever did, but there was something about the way she carried herself that said she was more than a little terrified by this whole thing.
“Okay, so what do we do about this?” I asked.
“I honestly don’t know,” she said. “The only plan I’ve ever come up with when it comes to dealing with her when she gets like this is running.”
“Well we’re not running,” I said. I frowned at this giant representation of everything that was wrong with this world. This thing that had enslaved an entire world and would so casually throw away the lives of the aliens on this world because she thought it would get me to stop attacking her.
Well it was time to show her just what it meant to be attacked by Fialux in her full fury. I let out a scream and threw myself at the creature.
“No!” Sabine shouted. “She’ll envelop you and…”
Whatever she was about to say was cut off as I flew into the mass of worms. I had a moment to hear the sound barrier breaking around me and then I was surrounded by worms on all sides.
I had a moment to worry about whether or not those worms could get inside me, but it turned out to be a moot point because no sooner had I crashed into the thing than I was out on the other side with worms blasting out all around me and falling to the ground below.
They were small enough that I got the feeling they wouldn’t be falling to their deaths. More’s the pity.
“It’s not going to do you any good,” Sabine said, her voice clear in my ears. “The thing is made up of a bunch of little worms. No matter how many times you punch a hole in the thing more come along to fill it in, and they’re small enough that any that fall to the ground just rejoin the thing.”
“Dang it,” I said, looking the monstrosity up and down.
Sure enough as soon as I was through the massive hole the thing started to form back up like something out of a creepy scifi movie or something. For some reason I thought of the football coach from The Faculty who had that whole intense old guy thing going for him.
I shook my head. Now was not the time to think about bit players in one of the few movies Natalie and I had been able to agree on. Her because of the alien invasion angle and me because late ‘90s Jordana Brewster and Famke Janssen were yummy.
Okay, so maybe we’d both been in agreement that the girls in that movie were all yummy in a retro late ‘90s sort of way. Whatever.
The point is right now I was fighting off an alien invasion of my own, and something told me there wasn’t going to be any magical drug substitute that was going to dry up this bitch.
“Um, so do you have any ideas about how we can fight this thing off?” I asked.
“I was being totally serious when I said most of my plans if I ever ran up against this bitch again involved running and screaming like a terrified little girl,” she said.
I nodded. That seemed like as good a plan as any. The only problem was I wasn’t really afraid of this thing. I was afraid of what it could do, but I wasn’t afraid of what it could do to me, if that made sense.
It was the classic dilemma of the heroine who didn’t really have any natural enemies out there. This thing couldn’t do anything to hurt me, and so my motivation was more about what she could do to other people than what she could do to me.
“What if I just flew around her real fast in a tornado or something and then pulled her up into the atmosphere?”
“What the hell are you going on about?” Sabine asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just spitballing here.”
“Well your spitballs are missing,” she said. “If you did manage to fly fast enough to work up a tornado that powerful you’d take out a good chunk of the city right along with you. Do you really want to do that, goodie-two-shoes?”
She had a point there. I sighed.
“So what do we…”
I guess the giant monster was getting tired of waiting on us to come to a decision. It flung its whole body around and slammed into the building Sabine was currently on top of. There was a massive crack that reverberated through the city and the whole building snapped in two and went flying down into other buildings around it.
Carrying Sabine right along with into a massive cloud of dust and alien worms. That alien queen was trying to kill my ride off this planet!
“Sabine!”
27
Firestorm
Okay, so holding my hand out and crying out Sabine’s name was probably a tad melodramatic. Especially considering it was only half a breath before she went rocketing up out of the giant cloud of dust and worms that were being kicked up.
She floated above the building and looked down. She also totally let loose with a string of curse words I’m not going to repeat because I don’t feel like they belong in polite conversation.
When she was done repeating the kind of words that would make a sailor blush she turned to look at me.
“We need to get out of here, now!” she screamed, looking more than a little terrified.
“But what about the signal?” I asked. “Won’t that disrupt her?”
Sabine floated over to me, dodging tendrils of worm bits that rose up out of the dust cloud below in an attempt to grab her and yank her down with them.
“No, that won’t do anything to stop this thing,” she said. “What you’re looking at down there is the alien queen on this world going into full kaiju mode to try and take us out. She only does that when she’s really pissed off.”
“But what about all that stuff Korval said about the alien worms not being able to function as intelligent creatures when they aren’t connected with the cats?”
“I don’t know what their scientists with their whole “my first alien invasion” science kits were able to come up with, but I’ve faced down this bitch when she’s doing the whole kaiju thing, and believe me she’s plenty intelligent when she gets all of her buddies together for a little fun.”
“Huh. So you’re saying these aliens don’t know everything about everything when it comes to these worms?”
“Not by a long shot,” she said. “Sounds like they had a few weeks, tops, before they were completely overrun. That’s nothing compared to the years I’ve spent studying them on this dusty rock.”
“Right,” I said. “So we’re getting out of here?”
“You bet your cute ass we are,” she said, glancing down. “Let’s get out of here before…”
A loud screech rose from the dust cloud. It sounded like millions of voices crying out in pain and terror and annoyance all at once. Then a bunch of the worms reared up out of the dust.
“Before that happens,” she said with a sigh. “Come on. We need to go!”
And with that she turned and flew as fast as whatever she was using to fly could take her. Like we’re talking she was really booking it. Right towards her big volcano lair that currently had a giant irradiated lizard in the middle of it presumably tossing lava around and really messing up the place.
Crapola. Was she seriously going back there when the place was being wrecked? There were giant monsters on both sides and no good choices no matter where we went.
“Sabine! Wait!”
I tried to fly after her, but
a massive tentacle of wriggling worms shot up out of the dust cloud as several more buildings collapsed beneath me. I tried to get away from the thing, but it kept dragging me down into the dust.
I didn’t want to go down into the middle of all that crap. I’d be coughing for the rest of the day. Yet more tentacles lashed out, and then the worms started running all over my body.
As though they were trying to do their best impression of the sort of Japanese cartoons it was better not to think about. I only knew about them because of a biology lecture once upon a time where a creepy grad assistant hadn’t realized what he’d left playing on his computer the last time he put it into sleep mode.
That’d been a heck of a surprise when he connected his laptop to the lecture hall’s projector. I hadn’t seen him after that.
Only I got a feeling this thing was going to try its best to take me over. Or whatever the heck it was alien worm monsters did to try and take over. The more I learned about these things and how little Korval and his buddies knew about them the less I was willing to take it on faith that the aliens couldn’t take me over if they managed to somehow make it into my brain.
“Oh no you don’t,” I shouted.
The roiling mass of worms seemed to create a face that looked sort of humanoid. Or maybe it looked sort of like the blue aliens that ran this world. Either way it was creepy seeing a face being created by millions of parasitic worms that were waiting to crawl up the back end of a bunch of cats so they could take over another world.
I really hoped nothing like that ever made it back to earth. Though I could take some comfort in knowing that any alien invasion that did make it back to earth would have Natalie to deal with.
The thing’s mouth opened and it looked for all the world like that Yorp creature that’d been doing its best to devour me before I ruined its day. I kicked and hit and tried to break free, but seeing that thing opening its mouth at me suddenly brought to mind that terrible day when I first arrived on this dusty pile of crap.
