Karate Masters vs the Invaders From Outer Space

by Barbara Hambly

  “At least it isn’t hot,” remarked Dana, crossing with Joanna to Shane’s emerald-green Cadillac – the Titanic, it was referred to in the dojo – to get bottles of Gatorade from the ice-chest in its capacious trunk. “When I came to California I thought it was always about a hundred and fifty degrees out in the desert, even in the middle of winter.”

  Joanna squinted up at the thin gray overcast of the sky. “It’s actually not going to get really hot until July. And the overcast helps.”

  “It’ll sure make lighting easier.” The tall Korean girl shaded her eyes as she scanned the landscape, barren in the distance to the south and east but thick on the scrubby hillslopes with cholla and beavertail, and dotted now with bright flashes of yellow, magenta, and white. “The wildflowers make it look almost too cheerful. Bill’ll have to shoot around them.”

  “Pity he couldn’t have gotten a couple of big, mean-looking dogs.”

  “He did think of that.” Dana grinned with affection for her boss. “But even if we could find a couple, he said it would probably be too hard on the dogs.”

  Everybody got into their gis – Ross Ventura, into a crimson gi top and a black hakama, as befit his rank as Master of Evil (“Samurai really wore these sissy-lookin’ things?”). Wally Bickle, resplendent in gold neck-chains and a white gi, had his bloody forehead-gash re-installed (over the wrong eye, as it turned out when they finally saw the dailies), and the carnage commenced.

  *

  “What is it?” Joanna walked up the dark slope of the main tunnel – through shifting slabs of shadow as Rob, Bill, and Dana moved the lights around in the dungeon where Angel was chained (they’d had to bring their own chains, plus a couple of Western Costume iron staples which were inconspicuously duct-taped to the wall) – and found Antryg standing in the doorway of the tower, looking uneasily out at the soft uniform grayness of the afternoon.

  He shook his head. He’d participated enthusiastically in the running battle in the tunnels, and along the colonnade (where he’d been killed – once in the master-shot and three times in close-ups); a few smears of fake blood still decorated his cheekbones and nose. Mask and goggles were pushed up on his forehead into the unruly fluff of his graying curls. His eyes had returned to their ‘wizard’ look. He had, Joanna noticed, replaced the unsharpened training katana in his sash with his real one. She had noticed, as they’d shifted gear from her own car to the van in the dojo parking lot early that morning, that he’d brought along hers as well.

  “Whatever it is,” he said softly, “it seems to be connected with the filming.” His sparse eyebrows pulled down over the splendid beak of his nose. “I didn’t sense this… this nearness… all week; not even when I broke into Avram’s house.”

  Antryg, you’re going to get yourself into real trouble some day…

  “But now it’s back.”

  Joanna wound her own tousled blond lions-mane into a pony-tail and looked up at him worriedly. “Nearness of what?”

  “Nearness of something in the Void. Something seeking a way through.” He produced a yo-yo from somewhere within his sinister-looking black gi, and made a couple of practice passes with it, watching it spin with a kind of bonkers intensity. “I think we need to get out of here fairly soon.”

  Joanna glanced back at the entrance to the tunnel. Bill’s voice echoed forth, “Can we get a little more play on that chain, Rob?” and Teddy asked, “Should we all be waiting in the tunnel?”

  “It’ll show when we move the camera…”

  “How much ceiling clearance do we have?”

  The fight in the dungeon – with the increasingly-disrobed Angel clutching Dirk’s gi-top (largely unsuccessfully) against her palpitating assets – was going to be, as folks in The Industry liked to call it, the Money Shot.

  “You need a hand, baby?” inquired Spacecookie eagerly.

  Joanna looked back up at Antryg. “Good luck with that. Podmore’s not going to head back to LA until he’s finished… What the hell time is it, anyway?” She looked at her watch.

  Its neat, square face was blank.

  Antryg held out his hand. A moment later, a flickering ball of blue-white flame appeared above his palm.

  Joanna said, “Oh, shit.”

  *

  It was, to the best of anyone’s calculations at the time in the dungeon, another three hours before the battle concluded with Wally and the gi-clutching Angel – now down to an exiguous black lace thong – leaping over six bleeding bodies and fleeing up the tunnel to the previously-shot combat (with the same six henchmen) in the colonnade.

  “It’s probably some kind of local magnetic field,” surmised Bill, frowning at his own stopped Timex. “Or maybe some kind of EMP pulse from the generator. We did have a kind of a weird fluctuation when we were setting up down here.”

  “Whaddaya know?” exclaimed Rob Tarvell as they emerged into the round ground-floor chamber of the tower. “Must not be as late as we think. It feels like we were down there forever.”

  The overcast sky outside had darkened slightly, but Joanna knew in her bones – not that her bones hadn’t been mistaken before – that it must be at least eight at night. Her glance crossed Antryg’s. He was looking very worried.

  “You know,” said Dana, “since it looks like it’s only – what, five o’clock, would you say?” Her watch had stopped, too. “—we can probably shoot the whole rape sequence here in the dungeon and save rental on the sound-stage.”

  “Sounds good to me!” piped up Spacecookie enthusiastically, despite the fact that only the handsome Mr. Ventura was slated to assault Angel. Nevertheless, hope sparkled eternal in his beady eyes. Ed gave him a look that would have skinned a wild boar.

  “I don’t know about anybody else,” announced Daryl, “but I don’t think I could take another set-up. I’m beat.”

  “And it’s probably going to be dark by the time we’re headed back,” pointed out Wally, sponging fake blood off his chest and neck. “You okay, Angel?”

  She’d paused uncertainly halfway to the oriental screens that hid everybody’s street-clothes, and glanced at Bill, who was, after all, the trail-boss of the expedition.

  In a jocular tone, Spacecookie chuckled, “You feel like getting raped this afternoon, baby?”

  Daryl put one hand on Ed’s arm and the other on Antryg’s, to prevent a completely unscheduled and un-filmed scene of mayhem, and said, “Don’t be a dick, Curtis.”

  “Hey, I was just kidding—”

  “You’re still a dick,” said Joanna.

  Bill smiled like a good scoutmaster and said, “Sounds like everybody’s pretty tired. The scene with Angel and Ross will look better in the bedroom set anyway, where we can control the lights. Let’s pack up.”

  Joanna looked around for Antryg, and finally located him out by Bill’s van, counting how many live katana they had. For the close-ups, to make the Evil Henchmen appear more Evil, those students who had possessed fully sharpened steel swords had brought them along, in violation of a number of San Bernardino County ordnances and the regulations of the Screen Actor’s Guild – to which Ross, Wally, Angel and Selena at least belonged. It was, in fact, one of Joanna’s duties as Script Girl (“Continuity Supervisor,” Dana corrected gently) was to make sure that no matter how many times the Henchmen had checked to make sure that the weapons they carried were the unsharpened training blades, she, personally, had a look at every katana and wakazashi before anybody yelled, “Action!”

  So she knew exactly how much live steel was on hand.

  Four.

  She asked softly, “What’s going on?”

  “We’ve been enclaved.” Antryg straightened up, and stepped aside to let Rob Tarvell and Lee Martinez start loading up the lights. He’d resumed the several strings of garish love-beads that he habitually wore, and the rhinestone spaceship earrings that were his current favorites, and looked more like a demented flower-child than either a mage or an Evil Henchman. “And I suspect it’s going to be physicall
y impossible for us to reach San Bernardino – probably we won’t make it as far as the highway. We’re in a sort of a… a goldfish-tank—” He formed his crooked hands demonstratively, as if he were holding a softball, “—that’s been separated out from your universe, where space will turn back on itself after a certain distance. Like a bubble in the Void.”

  “Why?”

  The wizard shook his head. “They can occur naturally – and they can occur when someone creates an enclave elsewhere and the Void flaws, the way it flaws when a gate is opened. The ones that occur naturally don’t last long – they just fade back into their original universes, usually, though not invariably, at the same point in time they bubbled out—”

  “Oh, great,” whispered Joanna. “So we could suddenly find ourselves having to explain two vans and a Cadillac to a bunch of pissed-off Apache or troops from the Mexican War—”

  “Oh, not all the way out here, surely. There’s no water in a hundred miles. Apache wouldn’t be that silly. I can’t speak for American troops from the Mexican War. And in any case,” he added, “a natural occurrence – or even a flaw as the result of activity elsewhere – is extremely rare. I’m afraid it’s very much more likely—” He propped his glasses more firmly onto his long nose, and scanned the featureless overcast of the sky, “—that somebody did this on purpose.”

  “Why?”

  “Well—” He frowned back in the direction of the Fortress, where Teddy and Sherry, Shane and Wally were loading the second van and Shane’s Cadillac. “I’m sure we’re going to find that out.”

  When the cars were loaded and everyone got changed back into jeans and t-shirts (including Angel, to Spacecookie’s ‘jokingly’ crude disappointment), and the sky was still the dim gray of half-twilight, people were beginning to become uneasy. But nobody said anything – not wishing to run the risk of a) sounding like they were in an issue of EC Comics, or b) admitting that something weird was going on – and the four vehicles (nobody had volunteered to give Spacecookie a ride or to ride in his grody red Volkswagen with him) got under way.

  When they had driven for what felt like an hour and a half, and the sky had not further darkened, nor had they reached Highway 40 (seventy miles north of the Devil’s Fortress) Bill pulled over.

  “We can’t be on the wrong road,” said Teddy Nuvo, contemplating the map, his dark hair falling over his eyes. “I mean, there is no other road. There’s not a fork or a crossroad or nothing.”

  “Frequently the military deliberately mis-represents distances to their secret installations on maps,” pointed out Sherry. “As a security measure, you know.”

  “Yeah, but the distance wasn’t mis-represented on the way out,” said Joanna. “It took us almost exactly an hour. How much gas do we have?”

  Into the long silence which followed, Dana finally said, “I have no idea. The gas-gauge in the van is out. So’s the odometer. But it’s been more than an hour. Way more.”

  Cast and crew all looked at their frozen watches and traded glances (except for Selena Rider, who’d opened her second flask of vodka and was asleep in the back of the Titanic). Several people looked at the sky, but nobody, evidently, wanted to open that issue.

  Wally Bickle said, “We should head back to the Fortress.” He hadn’t had much to say on the drive, but he had, Joanna had noticed, leaned forward from his little jump-seat behind the driver to glance repeatedly at the dead gauges of the van’s dashboard, and his handsome face had a haunted look. Joanna wondered if he, too, was a regular reader of the Fortean Times.

  “What makes you think we can get back, man?” Shane’s voice had a slight edge of hysteria.

  “Oh, we can get back,” said Antryg, and the golden-haired brown-belt swung sharply around on him.

  “How the hell do you know?”

  “Well, I’m a wizard from another universe,” explained Antryg – not for the first time: he never made any secret of it. “And it looks as if—”

  Bill Podmore gasped, “What the hell is that?”

  And Spacecookie screamed.

  Joanna nearly did, because the thing that appeared – she had the impression of it dropping sideways out of some other reality – did so directly in front of them, at a distance of less than ten feet, squishy and chitenous at once, like a half-disemboweled cockroach except for those toothed, hose-like feeding-tubes that whipped out at them with a wet snap. Antryg grabbed Bill – who was closest to the thing – by the shoulders and whipped him out of its way as one of those limpet mouths ripped his arm. Antryg yelled, “Stay away from the cars!” and dragged Bill back as three other things – they were roughly the size and bulk of upright pigs, but very much lighter on their multiple feet – appeared out of someplace and lunged at them.

  Shane, who’d made a dive for the Caddy and brought out a sawed-off shotgun, nearly had his face taken off as a smaller creature – an orange agglomeration of warty bubbles – appeared inside the car and spit yellow goo at him, goo that smoked on the pavement and dissolved the skin on the back of his wrist where a droplet of it hit. Shane howled with pain and dropped the shotgun. Antryg shouted, “Don’t!” as Ross Ventura dived for it: “Don’t fire it! Get away from the cars!”

  This last as Rob Tarvell whipped open the back doors of the second van and took refuge inside. Antryg snatched the shotgun from the actor’s hands and threw it into the shallow ditch at the side of the road; Joanna could hear Rob screaming inside the van and saw huge gouts of blood and goo on the inside of the windows in the moments before the gas-tank blew up. Angel, in the process of opening the nearest car-door (Spacecookie’s grody Volkswagen), sprang back, and it was a good thing she did. Tentacles whipped through the half-open window, wrapping around her arms and body. She slithered nimbly away, leaving her shirt in the creature’s grip, and fled with the others across the ditch. Antryg made a long, swooping gesture – a bit like an underhand cricket-pitch – and something like green fire flashed from his crooked fingers.

  The cockroach-oids, in the process of scuttling after the shocked and shaken fugitives, backed off, flaring their neck-shields and hissing horribly. Antryg made another pass – with his left hand, this time, and Joanna saw that his right hand had been burned by his own green fire – and one of the creatures exploded messily. The other two turned bright pink and kept on coming.

  Antryg said, “Bother,” then gestured again – the things were pretty close by this time – and they turned as one and attacked the warty orange goo-spitter that had by this time oozed out of Shane’s Cadillac and was headed in their direction – fast. Though slightly smaller than either of its attackers the goo-spitter simply vomited slime over them from its several mouths, and as they dissolved – slowly, shrieking – rolled over them and began to suck up the resultant pulp.

  “Oh, man—” said Dana, revolted.

  “Spread out away from me,” said Antryg, clutching his burned right hand in his left. “Magic doesn’t work here as it does in my world and I have no idea what’s going to happen with the next defense—”

  “What the hell is going on?” wailed Spacecookie, and Ed Ashmead replied,

  “Just off-hand I’d say we was bein’ attacked by monsters—”

  “Why us?” cried Sherry, and then, “Oh, my God…!” as the goo-spitter, now increased in size by about thirty percent, rolled toward them. At the same moment three other abominations appeared in the desert behind them, thick-bodied blue-gray ellipses that hovered in what looked like a cloud of oily heat-distortion and that stank with the most hideous reek Joanna had ever smelled, rotting half-digested flesh…

  At Antryg’s next summons the ground shook, and split – a crack about three feet wide by nearly ten deep – between himself and the prudently-retreating cast and crew, and Joanna thought she saw something moving in the curious dimness at the bottom of the chasm. “Watch out!” yelled Wally, as dust billowed from prints that crunched into the ground, huge five-toed tracks that seemed intermittently wreathed in shadow. Another sme
ll – worse – struck them all like a freight-train from that direction and the sagebrush curled and crackled as if withered in dry heat. Antryg swung around to face the invisible thing with his hands outstretched (And God knows what his strongest defense-spell is going to turn into, thought Joanna in terror – Or what we’re going to do when he’s either killed by those things or is hit by his own lightning…)

  The blue-gray things disappeared. The horror of the smell – the living malevolence of it – was suddenly gone, leaving only a fetid echo. Whirling, Joanna saw that the goo-spitter had vanished, too.

  Antryg stood with his crooked hands outstretched, looking – now that the danger was gone – slightly foolish.

  Angel was sobbing, “Oh, my God… oh my God…”

  “Stay here,” ordered Antryg, and, leaping over the chasm, headed back to the cars at a long-legged run, everybody else in the caravan at his heels. Stay here notwithstanding, none of them – certainly not Joanna – had any intention of letting the only magic-wielder in sight get away from them, even if the monsters had vanished…

  Lee Martinez whispered, “What the fuck just happened?”

  And Daryl Winchester said, his voice shaky, “I guess you weren’t kidding about being a wizard from another universe.”

  “Well, I told you I was.” Antryg gestured everyone back and pulled open the back door of Bill’s van, which contained no monsters… now, anyway. He tossed the sharpened katanas and wakazashi back to the others—