by Zack Archer
“Anyone call for a hero?” I said.
Liberty and Lyric suppressed smiles and pointed to the Fodder who were firing their weapons at us.
I moved slowly forward, flicking the gavel left and right, acting as a human shield for Liberty and Lyric, deflecting the incoming rounds from the bad guys, including a flurry of energized darts.
I smacked away the last dart and threw the gavel nearly side-arm like I was tossing a slider back on the JV baseball team in high school.
The gavel rocketed forward and then curled around on an angle, hammering into the Fodder.
The gang members were swatted down as if by a giant hand, their bodies lying bent and broken, scattered across the ground.
The gavel snapped back into my hand, and I did a little dance move while twirling the gavel like a six-shooter, blowing imaginary smoke from its end.
There was no time to enjoy the moment, however, because Splinter, Kaptain Khaos, and Atlas were still under attack.
Gavel in hand and taking in the sight of the Fodder we’d defeated, newfound courage gripped me. I waved at Liberty and Lyric and urged them to follow me.
Using our boots, we ran at a blistering pace over the pumice which was blackened by the balls of plasma that the two sides were throwing at each other.
We picked up speed and I drew up by Atlas, who had a wild look in his eyes. He was like a cornered animal, striking out at anything that moved.
He threw an uppercut that knocked four Fodder back before squaring up on The Showstopper, who’d alighted onto a rocky protrusion.
The villain flapped his arms, creating a violent dust devil that he heaved at us.
We dropped to the ground as the cyclone roared over our heads. Then Atlas fired his fist at The Showstopper who dove out of the way seconds before it cratered his head, vanishing from sight behind the protrusion.
Beyond us, Splinter and Kaptain Khaos were trading fire with the Fodder while fighting to avoid a series of firebombs that Dolly Dagger was flinging at them.
There were a series of massive explosions, and then the bad guys just disappeared.
We ran forward, up onto a berm, and saw that the villains and Fodder were indeed withdrawing, pulling back across the Empty Quarter.
A cheer rose up from me and some of the others.
We’d actually done it.
We’d driven the Morningstars and their army off the battlefield!
I cheered while waving the gavel.
That’s when I noticed Atlas wasn’t cheering.
“What?” I asked. “What the hell’s wrong?”
He responded by pointing, and I turned back and noticed that it wasn’t necessarily that the bad guys had been defeated.
It was more like they were staging a tactical withdrawal.
They were retreating, heading back across the Empty Quarter, but they’d left Big Dread and Dolly Dagger behind.
The bravado of moments past instantly vanishes, replaced by a ripple of dread.
Why was Big Dread hovering in the air?
And why was she grinning hugely, like she’d just won a prize?
The air shimmered near her black boots and her breasts swelled as she extended her arms.
She looked down at Dolly Dagger and the two women exchanged some words that we weren’t privy to.
Next came a sound.
A sharp inhale.
Followed by a drumming note.
Big Dread screamed, “A RIGHTEOUS FIRE BURNS ALL!”
Before I could fire the gavel at the villain, the ground vibrated and everything in front of us vanished in an eruption of flames as the air itself caught fire.
43
Jets of fire roared all around, quickly surrounding us.
We had seconds to act before the fire consumed us.
“We need to jump over it!” Liberty screamed.
But the wall of fire was too tall.
“Go under it!” Lyric offered.
Splinter jogged ten feet toward the fire and dug down into the grit with both hands, only to see that the flames extended well into the ground.
The villains had thought of everything.
The fire crept toward us, moving like a living thing. The heat was soon unbearable and I wondered how much longer we’d be able to last.
“Fire up the biggest ball of plasma you can, Quincy!” Atlas said.
“What the hell for?”
“We’re fighting fire with fire!”
I dropped the gavel and felt an inner stillness come over me. I crafted a ball of energy that Atlas grabbed and held like a balloon. My eyes went wide as the big guy blew with all of his might, causing the ball to expand to five times its original size.
The fire roared like a freight train to hell, sweeping across the Empty Quarter like a curtain.
“Stand next to each other!” Atlas shouted.
We did, and he joined us before throwing the energy ball into the air.
The ball fell and suctioned onto us, acting as a shield as the fire crashed down over everything.
The heat from the flames was intense, but the shield was holding…for the moment.
“Now what?!” I shouted over the din.
Atlas looked at me. “This was as far as I got with the plan.”
Shit!
I kicked at the soft ground, retrieving the gavel, and that’s when I realized our only hope lay beneath us. If the fire was filling the sky, we needed to go down.
Way, way down!
“Down!” I shouted. “We need to go down!”
Recognition washed over Kaptain Khaos. “Already on it!”
We moved to the outer edges of the shield as the Kaptain, who could create geological upheavals, dropped low and tapped on his Amphion tattoos, the ones with the embedded music. The old Queen song “Under Pressure” began playing from the microscopic, magnetic speakers implanted under his skin. He brought his hands together as if he was offering a prayer or doing a pose in some yoga studio and the ground began to rumble.
My eyes strayed to the outer edge of the shield which was bubbling as the energy, the plasma, burned off; the fire hungry to devour us.
“It’s not gonna hold for much longer!” I yelled.
“Hold your horses! If I do this thing right, it won’t kill any of us!” the Kaptain screamed.
I looked at him. “‘If?’”
“First time I’ve ever done it!” he replied.
I grabbed Liberty’s and Lyric’s hands as the Kaptain’s head angled back. Steam escaped from his nostrils and he squawked, “BURNING!”
A few seconds of silence followed and then the ground shook with an ominous rumble.
Then a depression formed in the pumice between us.
This was followed by a whirlpool in the grit as the ground opened up and the loose material began sliding down into the hole in a clockwise movement.
The shield failed at the moment the ground fully opened up below us.
Our screams were drowned out by a cacophonous BOOM!
We fell straight down just as the fire overwhelmed our position.
Debris waterfalled over us as we dropped down into an earthen tube.
My head slammed back and I looked up to see a fireball, what was left of the wall of flames from the Empty Quarter, descending on me!
I screamed and somebody clamped my leg and then I was off, sliding down the tube, barely avoiding the flames that licked my prior position.
The walls of the tube whipped past as I picked up speed, listening to the distant sound of the Kaptain’s tunes as they bounced off the walls of the tubes.
I also heard the cries of the others and I realized they were sliding down below me. With much effort, I torqued my head up and felt a change in the quality of the air. I could see my breath and noted that the interior of the tube had changed.
It was lighter in color and slicked with ice and then—
I shot out of the tube and fell through an enormous space that resembled an icy cathedral.
Bluish-white glacial columns with fifty-inch circumferences rose from the floor to the ceiling of the cave.
I landed and fell face first across an apron of ice, following the path of the others who were slipping down into yet another hole.
It was suddenly so cold that white vapor rose from my mouth as my hands went out. I searched for purchase, but there were no handholds, no way to stop my forward progress.
To make matters worse, the flames created by the villains had continued to follow us down. I could see the orange-red glow inside the tube, the fire roaring down over the ground we’d just covered.
The flames seemed to have a mind of their own, and that mind was telling them to follow us like a fucking heat-seeking missile.
Thankfully, the hole in the ice came up fast and I fell into it as—
The flames burst into the cathedral, roaring across the ice as I slid down, a kaleidoscope of colors greeting me.
I belly-surfed, flying through the icy chute at an alarming rate of speed.
The chute was barely big enough to contain me but was so damn slippery that there was no way I’d be able to stop my descent—which I was fine with anyway. After all, my choices were stark: face the unknown beneath me, or, if I chose to stop myself with the aid of the gavel, certain death from the flames above.
Ice good.
Fire bad.
Fire very bad.
I rocketed through the semi-darkness, following the curves of the chute as it swerved to the left, then the right, then finally plunged straight down into an opening and—
Then there was nothing under me.
Not a fucking thing.
I was falling through the air, legs bicycling, head canted back so that I could see the flames jetting out of the hole I’d just fallen through.
A hole in what looked like the underside of a glacier.
I looked down and that’s when I saw it.
What appeared to be the surface of a frozen lake.
Maybe thirty feet below me.
The one that I would soon be crashing into.
44
I still had The Barrister’s gavel in hand and instinctively I brought it around, firing the hammer down at the ice which shattered seconds before my boots met it.
The water in the lake was so cold that it felt like a million frozen needles had been inserted, all at once, into every neuron in my body.
My body heat just didn’t leach away, it was instantly vaporized.
It was as if the water, which hit me like an ax blade to the face, had numbed my marrow causing my muscles to seize like the gears on a rusted engine.
I sank down through the water, my testicles burrowing up somewhere below my ribcage as I struggled for air.
My face was numb, mouth wrenched open so that the frozen water was funneling down my throat. The flesh on my hands was rapidly turning blue and my teeth began to chatter like tiny jackhammers.
I would’ve already been dead without my protective singlet, that much was certain.
It was only a question of how much longer I could hold out.
The gavel was nowhere in sight, and so much of the icy venom had been figuratively injected into my veins that I couldn’t even move my arms.
I was locked in place as if some invisible straight-jacket constrained my upper body.
I was also unable to swim or conjure up energy or plasma.
In short, I was completely and absolutely fucked.
Looking back, I think the worst part about being on death’s doorstep is that it forces you to confront the insignificance of your life. What I mean is, drifting down in the water, all the moments of my life flashed before me as if they were scenes from a movie placed on fast forward.
It wasn’t worth watching.
Sure, I’d had some good times, but if I’m being completely honest, my life up to that point hadn’t amounted to anything consequential. I made a silent vow to myself that if I could find a way to get out, I’d do something real, something significant.
Easier said than done, but as if in response—
Something exploded through the ice off to my left and a dark form appeared.
A ghostly form.
A lithe creature with the sleek outline of a seal, and the features of a woman, albeit one with the pointed ears of a fox.
I stared at the lissome thing with a mix of fascination and shock as it, she, kept her arms pinned to her side, propelling herself forward with powerful sweeps from her long legs.
I didn’t know if she was coming to save me or kill me and frankly it didn’t matter anyway.
I was as good as dead in a few seconds.
I breathed my last few breaths and then the creature grabbed my wrist and kicked her legs. We moved so quickly it was like being strapped to a rocket, cruising up toward the surface of the lake.
We breached the hole I’d originally caused with the gavel and I upchucked a mouthful of water, gasping for air like a dying man.
Powerful hands grabbed and pulled me back onto the ice.
I was dragged across the lake’s surface for several minutes before finally coming to a stop under an overhang of frozen rock.
I could barely make out the fox-like creature that stood over me.
She was unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
Given the lack of light, her face was partially obscured, but she was tall, nearly six feet in height, and covered from her neck to her ankles in what looked like body-hugging feathers that had a shiny, oily appearance.
She held up something in her hand.
What looked a large insect.
The creature glowed, casting off light that revealed the fox-creature’s form in full.
She had the fine-boned face of a beautiful woman, but when she leaned down toward me, I noticed her pupils. They were black until she blinked and a nearly imperceptible sheathe pulled back to reveal kind sapphire eyes.
Her head was crowned with a mane of sable hair that was slicked back, falling just below those pointed ears.
Without uttering a word, she tugged on her feathers and pulled them off.
I was shocked to see that she’d been wearing a protective exo-suit of some kind that folded to the size of an envelope as if an invisible sculptor was shaping it.
Under the exo-suit she wore only a form-fitting garment that showed off her athletic, sculpted physique, muscular legs and ass, ample breasts, and a three-foot tail that was orange with yellow stripes.
She threw back her head to shake the water from her hair and then dropped to her haunches to appraise me, her tailing curling up.
“How do you feel?” she asked, in an accented voice that I can only describe as sounding vaguely European.
“Like a bag of smashed assholes,” I replied, shocked that she spoke English.
She gave me the same kind of look a scientist does to a bug trapped under a glass. Then she leaned down and pressed her lips to mine and suctioned out the water that remained in my mouth. I didn’t fight her.
“I had something when I fell into the water,” I whispered after we unlocked lips. “A gavel.”
“Whatever you had is lost,” she replied.
“There were several others with me. Where are they?”
She pointed and I looked sideways to see Atlas, Liberty, Lyric, Kaptain Khaos, and Splinter. They were trudging over the edge of the lake toward me.
I swapped looks with her. “You saved them?”
She nodded.
“What’s your name?”
She clucked her tongue, making soft, melodic sounds.
“I’m sorry, I don’t–I don’t understand.”
“You must be from Earth.”
“How did you know?”
“You have a certain look. Besides, people from Earth rarely understanding anything of substance. My name translates to Kree. My people are the Honoria.”
“And I’m Quincy, but I go by Night Fire,” I replied. “I’m sort of a superhero.”
&nb
sp; “Well, I’m glad I could save your life, superhero,” she said with a slight smile, pulling me up to my feet.
I gave her the names of the others while surveying the area. It was dominated by the frozen lake that lay in a kind of basin, a low point hollowed out of an immense rock and ice cavern.
Niches and caves punctuated the cavern walls, everything glowing in a kind of bioluminescence cast from hundreds of small insect-like creatures (the same ones Kree had held up before) that dotted the ground and walls.
I waved at the others.
“Nice of you guys to join us.”
“Sorry, we were busy drowning,” Splinter replied.
I pointed up in the general direction of the hole we’d fallen through.
“What the hell happened?” I asked.
“We were nearly dead and now we’re alive,” Atlas replied. “That’s what happened.”
Kree moved out away from us, dropping again to her haunches, studying something that I couldn’t see.
“Is she friend or foe?” I whispered to the others, shivering.
“She saved our asses didn’t she?” Splinter asked.
“Besides, I kinda think I’m in love,” Kaptain Khaos said, admiring Kree whose tight ass was visible as she bent to retrieve something.
Suddenly, she stood up and faced the lake. Her ears had pressed against the side of her head and her tail danced like a charmed snake, stabbing at the lake.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Our time grows short,” Kree replied.
“How short?”
She tilted her head toward me. “That all depends. The intervals down here are measured differently from what you are likely used to. We don’t have a moon or a sun, so we calculate things in sleep cycles.”
“Whose sleep cycle?” Splinter asked.
Kree made another strange sound by clucking her tongue. Then she pointed to the lake. “That is the way the old ones said its name. The Grymworm.”
We all shared confused looks and then I lifted a hand. “Let me be the first to ask: what in the holy hell is a Grymworm?”
