by Lee Bond
“Don’t know who this guy is, but I ain’t leaving my girl out there alone with Thumpy.” Eddard rose from his hiding spot. He felt Elton stir from his tree as well.
“How he’s holding his own against two of ours is beyond me.” Elton jerked his chin at the path as if to say ‘well, go on then’, and waited for Eddard to put left in front of right. “You go up the middle as your ladyfriend and Thumper are duking out with this stranger. I’ll come up the left hand side.”
Eddard wrinkled his aquiline nose Elton’s plan, but really, there wasn’t anything else that could be done: the whole thing had gone down the bog hole. Bloody Shooty Bloody Jane better be ready to start plinking away if they lost another crewmember to the ‘apprentice’ “Fine. Don’t turn those nasty things of yours on till the last minute. Noisy as Thumpy after a spicy meal, them.”
But Elton was already gone.
***
Garth took a knife in the forearm and a jolting streak of pain rattled his calm. It was so hard to stay calm, fighting Emmy and Thumper. They were just as fast as he was, and Thumper, well, Thumper was stronger. Skipping back to avoid disembowelment from a hooked blade that Emmy produced from somewhere on her person, Garth tried to dig the knife free from his arm, another jolt –this one producing red and black popskull flashes in his peripheral vision- almost making him gag with suppressed rage.
He couldn’t lose his cool. He couldn’t. Kingsblood was flowing through him, prompting anger, summoning rage, evoking psychosis. Desperate, Garth switched his internal soundtrack from Avenged Sevenfold to the slightly more chill Nine Inch Nails, and bluntly ripped the knife out of his forearm. He whirled to throw the knife at Thumper, who had to be getting sick and tired of being a damn pincushion by now.
The brutish gearhead slammed into Garth with Nature’s fury, a mobile avalanche of meat, metal and muscle; a tortured wheeze of air exploded out of Garth and as he tried to gasp for more, Thumper gathered him up in a bear hug, wrapping his tremendous arms around his body.
Then Thumper started squeezing, a jubilant grin on his face. Emmy came up, limping, still cradling the one arm that’d been broken early on, also smiling. She caught sight of Eddard coming up the road and slowed, waiting for her lover to come to her; off to the left, Elton came into sight, but it was his nasty buzzsaw sabers chortling and warbling that she’d heard well in advance.
Garth kicked and flailed his legs, trying to find a way out of Thumper’s inexorable embrace. He … he couldn’t get loose. Couldn’t, because the peculiarities of Dark Iron had given Thumper the strength of a Titan and the mind of a child. Thumper was one of the strongest monstrosities in the Unreal Universe, and he was caught in a grasp that could crush worlds.
Hot metal filled his mouth and this hiss of nothingness started filling his ears.
“Let me go.” Garth heard himself pleading, even as he continued struggling, both to win his freedom and maintain a level of calm. “Please. I won’t … I won’t kill you. I … I promise. Just… let me go!”
The gear tattoos along his arms, up his neck and around his glistening DarkEye started burning. Thumper’s nose wrinkled, smelling the smell of hot metal on metal, but the stupid gearhead dismissed it, instead redoubling his efforts.
“Well, well, well,” Eddard said jovially, arm draped around Emmy’s lovely shoulders as they walked up to the scene, “not so tough now, hey?”
Eddard planted a kiss on his lovely girl’s bloody lips and they both turned to watch the events unfold as Nature and King demanded.
***
Marc stifled a shout as he surveyed the scene through his field glasses. The looker was mighty pleased Thumper’d caught Nickels in that hug; he’d sent Shooty Jane off to find a better place to fill their quarry full of bullets should his daring two-on-one standoff continue for much longer, but had been worried that wounds caused by a long-range weapon such as hers might destroy whatever miraculous gadgets lurked under the man’s skin.
“Ain’t got nothing to worry about now, hey?” Mental Marc couldn’t resist. He gave out a little cheer and did a happy little dance anyways. The pistons in his head picked up the merriment, and for once, Marc didn’t mind the gouts of steam shooting out his nose.
This went on for thirty seconds before the looker realized he wasn’t alone in their little clearing.
Barnabas flashed Mental Marcus a quick, dirty smile. “You have quite a bit to worry about, Marcus.” The blacksmith jerked a thumb towards his compound. “My friend down there hasn’t even begun to fight. Hasn’t even lost his temper … yet. When he loses his temper, oh, that’s the thing to see, yes, yes it is.”
“What’re you …” Marc straightened his spine, held his chin high. “Get out of here, blacksmith, or I’ll do for you. You ain’t never sipped the drippy-drop, you can’t stand against me, no matter how strong you look.”
A bemused, patronizing smile crossed Barnabas’ seamed face. “Try me.”
***
Desperation filled Garth. There was no choice. He couldn’t die, not in here, not in Arcade City, not with the fate of the Unreal Universe resting in the balance. He needed to live, to find Dark Iron King Blake, needed to end the threat his Kingsblood nanotech threat presented.
Playing dead wouldn’t work. Just dangling his arms and legs and lolling his head back like Thumper had squeezed the life out of him wouldn’t fool a five year old.
“It’s clobberin’ time.” Garth whispered, voice so full of emotion that Emmy and Eddard took a step back, nasty jeers dying on their lips.
It was time to give in.
Hopefully he wouldn’t fall all the way down the rabbit hole.
Garth shut his eye and reached backwards inside, to that place he’d worked so long and so hard to ignore. Naoko’s kind words, the soft winds of her gaze, the gentle smell of her perfume, all of that had helped bandage psychic wounds deeper than the Marianas Trench… There, just behind all that… a spot of memories labeled ‘here be dragons’, there.
The old anger, the old arrogance, the monster he’d become and worked even harder to kill for Naoko’s sake, smiled a bloodthirsty, rakish smile and stepped forward, ready as ever to do things as they should’ve been done in the first place.
“You die now.” Thumper insisted, redoubling his efforts, arms trembling.
“No.” Specter pulled his head back as far as it could go. “You die now.”
And then he beaned poor old Thumper in the forehead, angling the attack so the unbreakable glass lens of a Gearman’s horse crunched noisily through bone. The result was instantaneous; Thumper’s grip on Specter loosened, the much larger behemoth bellowing in anger like a shocked bull and toppling backwards, gracelessly collapsing onto smoldering logs.
Specter instinctively fell to his stomach, feeling Rabid Elton’s stuttering buzzsabres whistling scant millimeters from his back. He rolled to one side and grabbed handfuls of still-smoldering embers then leaped to his feet as Emmy swooped in with some honest-to-gosh sai in her hands. Ignoring the sizzling flesh of his bare hands, Specter flicked the red hot cinders into the lovely girl’s eyes, jabbed her in the throat with a rigid strike from the side of a palm, and then danced away, cackling like a maniac.
DarkEye was coming online, filling his peripheral and heads up with flickering static.
Eddard rushed Nickels, roaring incoherent worry at Emmy even as he did so. There was something different about the apprentice now, some … dark glimmer rising up out of the man’s skin, almost as if the Vicious Elixir was glowing. No matter. He swept Specter’s legs.
Specter lifted one foot as soon as he saw Eddard’s planned sweep in action, slamming it down on the man’s calf, grinding and twisting the heel to snap the bone. Grabbing the pale man by the collar with one hand, Specter watched tiny black liquid metal … fronds of kinked metal gears too miniscule to be real … whisper out of his knuckles. His other hand grabbed hold of his victim’s dominant arm and twisted it around until the joint popped. “This will hurt.”
Eddard tried to scramble out of the way of the black metal worms, intuitively knowing something wasn’t right with them, not knowing what could hurt worse than a shattered leg and a dislocated shoulder that the apprentice kept jerking back and forth. He hammered at Specter’s face and neck with his free arm and legs, revolted, desperate.
And then one of the inky whorls touched his cheek, and the skin and muscle just … sloughed … off. Eddard howled then, as scintillating agony shredded through him. The rests of the living tattoos made short work of his face. Eddard gave a weak cough of disbelief e’en as he felt a curious … depletion.
Specter shrugged. “Sorry pal. You brought this on yourself.” He dropped Eddard, contemplated the mess at his feet, and then shrugged a second time. He slammed his feet repeatedly down on the wetly gasping gearhead, ignoring the weak and growing weaker pleas for leniency.
Letting your enemy live was the stupidest thing in the world, especially when everyone was your enemy.
Thumper appeared out of nowhere, mammoth hammer swinging at Specter’s midsection, mindless howling filling the air. It rammed into the smith’s side with pneumatic fury. The giant felt the plate click, felt the rush of Dark Iron driven mechanics add thousands and thousands of pounds of pressure to the blow, and grinned. When the momentary blindness –no more than a fraction of a second- that occurred every time he hit something passed, Thumper expected to see just a head a bit of legs attached to a metal-wrapped skeleton.
Specter couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt a pain quite as fresh and new as being hit with a pneumatic hammer that shouldn’t even work properly. No matter the curious new experience or how much it fucking hurt, he couldn’t let either affect him: he was in the grips of a Dark Iron rage. As the colossal surge of energy hammered through him, literally sending him flying, Specter reached out with a hand, neatly grabbing hold of the hammer’s head scant milliseconds before he flew too far away.
Dark Iron tendrils wrapped around the gleaming brass and iron hammer head, allowing Specter the luxury of aborting his upward journey to who-knew-where by swinging him violently back towards the ground. He reached out with his other hand and grasped the hammer fully. By the time his feet struck earth, Thumper had no control over what happened next.
Strength driven by rage –which Dark Iron obviously fed on in some fucking bizarre way-, Specter was now a match for Thumper. The Specter set his feet and pretended he was doing a caber toss. As this was happening in the space of ten seconds or less, poor Thumper’s sluggish mind hadn’t caught up to the present, so when Specter bunched his leg muscles, flexed his arms, and jerked the hammer for all he was worth straight up in the air, poor old Thumper found himself airborne.
Vibrating agony sizzled across Specter’s back as he watched the perfect arc described by Thumper’s howling trajectory.
Rabid Elton.
The Specter felt crudey-crude rush to the open wounds, filling the gashes with hot iron. The agony was oddly delicious, a sharp-edged whispered thrill of more to come.
Specter licked his lips. He could do this tango all day and all night.
Specter whirled to face Elton, bringing the hammer in his hands up to block a second double-sweep of the man’s devilish sabers. Both blades bounced off the thick metal shaft of Thumper’s weapon, sending the lithe gearhead stumbling backwards.
“Dunno how you’re doing this,” Elton started whirling and twirling his blades back and forth, up and down, around and around in a hypnotic pattern that many found mesmerizing, “but you ain’t gonna win against me, oh no you aren’t.”
Specter dropped the hammer, slick black tendrils flicking back into his hands with a queasily exciting grace. DarkEye started charting Elton’s pattern, relaying them to Specter in still photo form. “There’s this movie,” he said, swaying back and forth as he walked towards Elton, “where this guy is chasing some random dudes who’ve kidnapped his girlfriend. He comes across this big huge guy…”
Fresh Emmy picked herself up off the ground and hurled herself at Garth. Still half-blind and reeling from the white-hot cinders turning her backside into a mess of charred flesh and bubbling Kingsblood, she was off by nearly a foot. Specter caught her by the throat one-handed, felt the hungry tendrils of his Dark Iron slide into her neck. Felt the hot surge of reclaimed crudey-crude pulse through the connection, heard her death rattle.
Specter tossed the body aside. There’d be no coming back for her. At least, not for days. When he was done with all of Mental Marc’s crew, there’d be no coming back ever.
Elton rushed Garth, taking advantage of the other man’s momentary distraction. No one was fast enough to get out of the way of both blades when they were swinging this way. No one.
Specter let Elton push him around the camp, still swaying this way and that, matching the rhythm of the gearhead’s attack. DarkEye was almost done assessing. More information was spilling into the mechanics of the antiquated steampunk-inspired device with every passing second. Specter couldn’t make heads or tails of what DarkEye was trying to tell him yet, but that would come in time, he supposed.
“This big bad dude,” he resumed, a small smile flitting across his lips as he saw that Elton’s furious but ultimately ineffectual press-attack had brought them back towards Quick Wit, who was –yes, yes he was, against all odds- stirring, “had a huge fucking sword. For the movie, he’d practiced all kinds of sword fighting, because in real life this guy was just some guy and he was gonna make this one moment, this one second of his life absolutely perfect. He got really good, practiced all the time, but the main actor guy was all business in this movie and was like ‘fuck that noise, I got a gun, he’s gonna swing that sword at me and I’m gonna be all ‘pew pew pew’ and it’s going to be funny’.”
“What,” Elton demanded raggedly, lungs aching from breathing heavily, “does this have to do with anything, you fucking coward. Stay still so I can grind you to bits.”
DarkEye flickered, replaying Elton’s entire repertoire like it was some kind of high-speed gag reel. Specter felt the data click. Then he flowed forward faster than anything Rabid Elton had ever seen, twisting and gyrating around and beside the blurring, buzzing blades, missing being shredded by less than a millimeter.
The last thing Elton felt before he went lifeless was three rigid fingers jabbing into his neck and a raging explosion of fire bursting through the veins in his head. He collapsed, sabers falling to the ground.
Specter stared at the lifeless corpse hanging from his extended arm like an oversized marionette that’d had its strings cut. Excited revulsion filled him as the Kingsblood pulled what it could from Rabid Elton.
“Are you fucking serious?” Specter flicked the corpse off his hands and hurried his silly ass out of the way as Thumper came barging at him like Juggernaut. “Why the fuck won’t you fucking die?”
Thumper was hurt worse than he’d ever been in his life. His insides were all broken up. Pulling himself off that tree had taken nearly everything he had, but he wasn’t going to let himself die until he’d pulled Specter’s neck from his head. Then he could die, and wait to come back. In the back of his dim mind, as he chased the apprentice around the circle of the camp, though, Thumper wondered why Shooty Jane hadn’t shot the man dead.
“Gonna kill you!” Thumper bellowed, slamming his fists together angrily.
***
Barnabas moved silently, quietly, invisible amidst the trees towards Shooty Jane. Bits of Mental Marc flickered and flared into nothingness around the elder blacksmith. A smile crossed his face as he heard someone’s tortured howl fill the night air.
Nickels was perfect. The most perfect thing under The Dome, excluding one other.
***
Shooty Jane had had enough. She knew Mental Marc wanted their target as undamaged as possible, but this was fucking ridiculous. The sniper hadn’t had the time –nor would she willing to spare a single second when she did have time- to process the gory, horrific mess going on do
wn there. She’d focused instead on wind patterns and maximum range and the million other things that you could use to occupy your time when you’re a shooter.
Through the scope, Thumper and Nickels were going toe to toe, head to head once more, though the immensely larger combatant was having an incredibly difficult time keeping up with his combatant. Jane didn’t know what all was going on down there because her scope lacked immaculate precision for small details at this distance, but it seemed like every time the apprentice struck Thumper, something else was happening.
Marc hadn’t given any signals, but Jane couldn’t watch her the last of her standing teammates suffer. She chambered a round. Waited until skill and feeling told her Nickels the blacksmith apprentice was going to be in the right spot … breathed in and slow like she’d been trained … and pulled the trigger.
Through the scope, Shooty Jane watched as Nickels’ hand flicked up, caught the bullet, and dropped it, gasping as the man kept on chasing Thumper back and forth as if nothing had happened.
Mind reeling, hands trembling, Jane slotted another round into the chamber. Fired. That same hand flicked up with the speed of a cobra, caught the spent bullet. Through the scope, Jane watched as Specter turned to seemingly stare right at her.
Fear blew through her as Jane realized Specter was staring right at her, that one big glass eye oozing darkness. He grinned, twitched a finger back and forth like a schoolteacher admonishing a bad pupil.
Thumper stood there, breathing like a bellows, wreathed in sweat, embarrassed he was happy for the moment of rest e’en though it was just a matter of time before they were all dead.
Jane tried to chamber another round but her hands were trembling too much. She’d never seen anyone catch a bullet. Plenty tried, because when you’re bored and had too much time on your hands and were guaranteed to heal from all wounds, you tried new things. Plenty could move fast enough to get a hand in front of the bullet as it flew at them, but not one of them, not the hardest, most Iron-filled gearhead could stop a bullet with enough skill to hold it up for the world to see.
