by Archer, Mia
And if anything it filled me with determination. The assholes who’d fired on me that first day had learned what a bad idea it was to mess with me. The giant endangered monster eating monstrosity that’d tried to devour me had learned what a bad idea it was to mess with me that day.
It was time for this queen bitch to learn what a bad idea it was to mess with me. To hell with collateral damage. There wasn’t anything but alien worms in that dust cloud down below.
“Okay you bitch,” I growled, not feeling like myself at all. “If you want to do this then I guess we’re gonna do this.”
Maybe there was something to what Sabine said. Maybe this was a bad idea. It’d be destructive, but there was a part of me that wanted to be destructive. I was frustrated and annoyed and what I wanted more than anything was to break something. To get revenge against the hive mind for its crimes.
Inside I was at war with myself. I wanted to do the right thing, but there was that little whisper. The same as when I’d tossed the giant irradiated monster into the volcano. That voice told me how much fun it would be to give in. Really wreck shit down there, including the hive mind.
I flew down into the cloud of dust. I angled ever so slightly. I felt little puffs of something hitting me and realized it was my body slamming into the bits of building that were still sticking up out of the ground.
I couldn’t see any of them because the dust was so thick. I held my breath, but I figured it was only going to be a moment before I was out of here. At least if everything went to plan then it was only going to be a moment before I was out of here.
I moved faster. Faster. I felt the familiar pop that meant the sound barrier was being broken somewhere in my vicinity, but of course there was no one around to hear it.
No, they were all dead. This thing had killed all of them when it decided killing Sabine was preferable to letting us go through with whatever plan we’d hatched.
Well I wasn’t going to let this thing get away with it. Not a chance.
I moved faster and faster. I couldn’t even feel the wind at this point I was moving so fast. It was like there was a solid wall all around my body. It felt like one of Natalie’s forcefields that had moved in close around my skin.
And still I went faster. Faster. Until things started to clear up around me. Though even with the dust clearing around me I couldn’t see much of anything.
The world was clearing around me, but that only meant that I was seeing a spinning blur. Which is to say there wasn’t much to see here either.
I flew up. I was moving so fast now that heat surrounded me. I’m sure if Natalie was here to see this she’d say I was moving through the air so fast that the air in front of me was superheating or something.
I smiled. I knew what I was doing. I was fucking on fire, and I had something in mind that I was going to burn to a nice wormy crisp before this was all said and done.
I flew higher and higher. The wind whipped around me as the firestorm created by my flight moved up right along with me. Worms were pulled up into that firestorm and there was no way they were going to get away from me. The ones that managed to escape were getting sucked into the fire tornado.
Sure there were worms in the middle of the fire tornado I was creating who were probably living to tell the tale, but there were a lot of them around the edges that were getting burnt to a crisp.
“I’d like to see you reform from this!” I shouted.
A tornado of superheated air with me at the front moved up and out of the city. Sure I was taking some of the city with me, but I was past the point of caring. The queen bitch had already taken out most of this part of the city and killed most every alien down there.
I was just doing cleanup.
I moved up and over the city in an arc, sucking the worms along with me and moving them away from the city and towards Sabine’s lair.
When I finally finished the tornado still raged behind me. The firestorm was still there and it was sucking up more and more air as it sucked up the worms. All I could hope was that I’d moved high enough over the city that some of the stuff down there wasn’t going to catch fire and suddenly start doing a reenactment of Dresden or Tokyo circa 1945.
And Natalie thought I never paid attention to historical type stuff.
Worms flew through the air. They landed all around me and they were mostly charred. It looked like I’d taken care of a good chunk of the little bastards.
“Re-form from that!” I shouted at nothing in particular.
Sure there were still worms raining down around me, but I got the feeling they couldn’t really hear and understand what I was saying if they weren’t part of that giant monstrous whole.
I dusted my hands off. Talk about a job well done. Talk about something that’d been a lot more fun than I thought it’d be.
“What did you do?” Sabine asked.
I glanced over my shoulder. She hovered there looking at my handiwork in pure astonishment. I guess she wasn’t expecting something like that from the goody two-shoes.
Well I’d shown her.
“Taking care of business,” I said. “You said that monster could recover from hits, so I figured I’d incinerate the hive.”
Sabine rolled her eyes. Not the response I was hoping for.
“Um. This is the point where you’re supposed to tell me I did a good job. That I took care of the bad guy and you’re very thankful that I took care of your problem,” I said.
“Yeah, the only problem with that is from where I’m floating it looks like the only thing you did was take the giant monster that was attacking us and turn it into a giant burning monster that’s attacking us.”
“What are you…”
Something lurched out of the haze in the distance. The dust and smoke was even worse now than it’d been moments ago. Now there was a flame tornado raging out of control to go along with all the collapsed material from the queen kaiju thingy attacking that building.
Oops. I totally hadn’t intended to do that. Maybe Sabine had been right about that plan not being the best one, but I’d been so ticked off!
“Huh,” I said. “That looks like it’s really starting to rage out of control.”
“Yeah, and there’s a giant pissed off queen kaiju in there who’s on fire now,” Sabine said. “We still need to get the hell out of here. You’re ruining everything!”
“What are you even talking about?” I asked, turning to face her.
More rending and tearing pulled my attention away from her though. I looked into the distance and sure enough there was the giant monstrosity, and sure enough there were massive parts of the thing that were on fire.
Not good. Still…
“That’s fucking awesome,” I said.
“What? Are you serious?” Sabine asked. “And since when do you curse?”
“Since I saw something that looks fucking awesome,” I said, though it was odd. A giant burning monster wasn’t usually the kind of thing I thought of as awesome, but I looked at that burning monstrosity and it was poetry. “That looks like something that’d be on the cover of a really bitching record or something back in the good old days when they made bitching record covers.”
“You’re crazy,” Sabine said. “And that bitching record cover is coming for us. Come on!”
She was right, of course. The queen lurched towards us. The worms fell forward and then it was slinking across the desert sand. The flames went out where worm met sand and the queen started twisting the hive around to put out the fires in the galaxy’s biggest and weirdest example of stop, drop, and roll ever.
“Come on!” Sabine said, dragging me along.
I went along with her, even though I wasn’t sure exactly why we were retreating towards her volcano lair considering the place was currently being ripped to pieces by a big scary monster.
It was something to do, at least, and it didn’t strike me as any worse than any of the other plans we’d come up with that hadn’t panned out.
28
Expeditious Retreat
“I just want you to know that if I die out here, I don’t like anything you’ve done to my world!” Sabine shouted.
“Your world?” I shouted. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about how I was perfectly fine in my volcano lair until you came along and screwed everything up!” she said. “I had a happy life being a thorn in the side of the Silvani Collective, and then you had to come along and screw it all up!”
“I’ll remind you that you were on a world that’s been enslaved by alien worms! What kind of life is that?”
“The kind of life where I had a totally fucking awesome volcano lair that didn’t have a giant irradiated monster from earth in it fucking everything up!” she screamed back at me.
Boy did she seem angry. Sure some of that shouting might’ve been because she had the wind whipping around her and she was talking loud enough to be heard over that wind, but I didn’t think that told the whole story.
After all, we were still patched into each other. I could hear her just fine over the wind because she had a direct line into my ears. No, she was pissed.
“Now you’ve even destroyed the city I was hoping to rule someday, and there’s not going to be anyplace for me to steal alien tech from!” she shouted.
“Well excuse me for coming along and trying to make this world a better place,” I shouted back at her. “It’s not like I asked to be tossed here!”
“It’s not like I asked to be tossed here either, or are you forgetting that we both got shoved through a portal by that bitch?”
I shrugged. She did have a point there. Peas in a pod and all that.
“Look. I’ll be the first to admit that maybe we haven’t done the best job of working together since I got here,” I said. “Maybe our backgrounds are just too different for us to make a great team.”
It was enough to make me wonder if I’d been crazy thinking me and Natalie were making a great team. Back before I got shoved through a portal to a world ruled by damned dirty blue aliens who were in turn ruled by damned dirty cats who were in turn ruled by damned dirty worms.
I wondered how much of that was the blush of a new relationship covering up differences that might’ve eventually ruined what we had.
I suppose one good thing about being flung to the far reaches of the universe was I didn’t have to worry about those answers right at this moment, at least. Not when there were far more pressing issues.
Like the fact that there was an unearthly wail somewhere behind us.
I mean I guess the fact that it was a wail that was happening on this world meant it was unearthly by definition.
Though when I thought about it that wasn’t exactly right either. Those giant lizards that’d been transplanted to this world were from earth, after all. So I suppose any wails they made that didn’t sound like something from earth would be an unearthly wail. Which meant any wail they made on this world would also, by definition…
“What the hell are you doing?” Sabine asked.
That snapped me out of the funk I’d been falling into. Hey, what can I say? I was the kind of girl who lost herself in language and other word problems on a good day, and today was far from a good day.
Words were my refuge from the world when it went to shit. I was an English major with a journalism specialization, after all.
“Sorry,” I said. “Was thinking about something important.”
“Something more important than the giant monster coming at us?” she asked, incredulous.
“I mean…”
Another roar that was, by definition, unearthly. It looked like the giant alien monstrosity wasn’t done for quite yet. Well shit. It reared up taller than some of the buildings, so much for incinerating the thing, and turned towards us.
I know the thing didn’t exactly have eyes or ears to make an expression, but it was pretty clear it was really pissed off. And I was numero uno on the thing’s shitlist right about now. Great.
“I can’t help but notice that even the fire tornado I came up with hasn’t done much to stop this thing,” I said.
“I concur,” Sabine replied. “Now come on. We need to get back to my lair.”
“You mean the one that currently has a giant irradiated lizard ripping it to pieces?” I asked.
“Please stop reminding me of that,” Sabine said, her voice clearly strained.
“Whatever,” I said. “If you think I’m going to take care of that thing while we’re in there you have another thing coming. I’ve already taken out several of the things.”
“You won’t have to do anything if everything goes to plan,” she said. “You’ve already done enough by pissing that thing off to the point that it’s chasing after us.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Sure on the one hand having a giant monster chasing after us didn’t seem ideal. That seemed like something that should annoy Sabine.
Only she didn’t sound angry. No, she sounded like she was almost happy that the thing was chasing us.
This girl. The more I got to know her the more I realized that I knew absolutely nothing about her or the way her twisted mind worked.
I flew after her as fast as I could go. Which was considerably faster than she could move using whatever it was that she’d installed in her suit to give her the ability to fly in the first place. So I slowed it down a bit so she could keep pace with me.
She frowned, but otherwise didn’t comment on me slowing down for her. I’m sure she didn’t care for knowing she was second best when it came to speed, but whatever. It’s not like I could change who I was so I didn’t bruise her ego.
We landed on the landing ramp that led into her volcano lair. The only problem was the whole thing was a little more broken and torn than it’d been the last time we were here. The thing had opened about halfway and got stuck on a boulder that was one of many bits of rubble strewn about. Which probably had something to do with the giant irradiated lizard sized hole in the volcano a little way up.
It also didn’t help that there were obvious lava flows going down the side of the volcano and pouring over and into the ramp. Flowing out of the giant irradiated lizard sized hole I’d accidentally made in the side of her mountain.
Oops.
“Damn it,” she growled. “How am I supposed to get through a solid curtain of lava flowing down over my entrance?”
“I’ve got this,” I said, glancing over my shoulder to make sure the mass of giant worms coming for us was still good and far away.
It was. The thing was big, but it wasn’t fast. At least it wasn’t as fast as me flying at a slower than usual pace so Sabine could keep up with me, and that was going to have to do.
I floated over to the lava fall and put my hands up. The lava parted around me creating a hole just large enough for someone to fly through if they had a mind to do something stupid like that.
“There,” I said. “The lava isn’t going to hit you now, but I can’t do anything about convection.”
“My shields can stand up to it,” she said. “I was just griping.”
“I know you were,” I said. “I held you under this stuff the first time we met. Remember?”
Her glare told me she did remember. Dang. She was taking this whole loss of her volcano lair a heck of a lot more seriously than I would’ve figured.
Oh well. Not much I could do about that. The damage was already done.
Sabine’s mood got more and more dark as we flew deeper and deeper into the volcano. The walls looked like they were on the verge of falling down around us. Which wouldn’t be ideal for her.
Not for me either, really. I didn’t want to spend the time it would take to dig out of this place.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “I spent years putting this place together and now it’s finally happened.”
I eyed her askance. Again I was hit with how odd she sounded. Like on the one hand she was annoyed that this place looked
the way it did, but on the other hand she seemed excited. Like she was happy this had happened and her lair was being pulled down around her.
Even as the thought crossed my mind there was a loud thud from somewhere deep inside the mountain. The kind of thud that said there was still a giant irradiated lizard in there taking a bath in the middle of a lava pool and not enjoying it. The closer we got to the center the more pronounced the damage got.
“I seriously can’t believe this,” she said, looking around at the damage and shaking her head.
I put my hands on my hips. Looked down at the lava flowing along the floor. I wondered how long it would be before that started to be a problem for her. I wasn’t sure how good her shielding systems were. She was working with tech that was a strange mishmash of whatever Natalie had thrown together to protect her from that portal on the fateful day she was shoved through and local technology which didn’t seem to be all that great.
I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to stand up to the actual inside of a volcano for long. At least she wouldn’t be able to stand up to the interior of a volcano for long if her larger shielding system running inside her lair was knocked out.
“Is there a compelling reason we’re going deeper into your lair?” I asked. “Particularly when I’m pretty sure there’s a giant lizard splashing around in the lava down there?”
She hit me with another irritated glance. The kind of glance that said she would make me pay for doing this to her lair. If she could ever figure out a way to get to me. I wished her luck on that. Better villainous types than her and had tried, and failed.
Even Natalie had sort of cheated in the end to defeat me.
The weird thing was she did it again. That thing where irritation and jubilation seemed to be competing on her face. It was enough to make me wonder if I was dealing with a split personality here or something.
The only thing that stopped me from even considering that for long was a psychology course where the textbook had confidently proclaimed that multiple personality disorder was mostly an invention of Hollywood.
