Night Terror & Fialux (Book 3): Villains Don't Train Heroes!

by Archer, Mia

  I held my breath. And then realized that I was being presented with an opportunity here. This fucker was strong on the outside, impermeable to my weapons even, but on the inside…

  “Come on you fucker!” I yelled, doing my best impression of a damsel in distress being assaulted by a giant monster.

  Sure this was a lizard and not a giant ape and it probably wasn’t even capable of any emotion other than anger, but if I could rile it up enough it might forget to bite down when it tossed me in its mouth.

  “That’s right! Eat me!”

  26

  Eat Me

  Oh my how context makes things different. Like, for example, I’d said the same thing to Fialux not twelve hours earlier when we were having some fun in the lab and…

  Y’know what? Let’s just not go over that right now. That wasn’t the sort of thing I should be thinking about when I was about to be devoured by a giant lizard, but then again they do say your life flashes before your eyes before your potential death.

  I guess my brain was just giving me the highlight reel.

  “That’s it you fucker! Eat me! Eat me!”

  I glanced around. Drones hovered all around, though they all seemed to be hovering at what I could only assume was a safe distance. One moved just a little too close and then did a swan dive. Like the localized radiation this lizard was giving off was too much for an unhardened drone to handle.

  Great. Really fucking great. This thing had to be off the charts and I was about to go on a journey to the center of its digestive system.

  Fucking wonderful.

  Darkness surrounded me. I felt something smashing down and I was surrounded by warm moisture. Not pleasant.

  Though there was one good thing about the whole experience. Consider that the standard unit of measure for, say, a Tyrannosaur’s bite capacity is a full grown lawyer on the shitter. It looks impressive on the screen watching someone get devoured whole like that, but if you’ve ever been to, say, the Field Museum to get a good look at SUE you’ll quickly realize moviemakers are huge fans of fudging the actual bite capacity in the interest of getting an interesting shot.

  That wasn’t the case here. This thing’s mouth was huge. Its teeth were razor sharp. The only problem was its mouth was also large enough to comfortably fit a car, and that meant I could easily roll around and avoid those teeth.

  What I couldn’t avoid was the unpleasant feeling of its mouth slamming down around me as I found myself falling down a disgusting warm mess. I caught bits of cars and at least a couple of things that I was pretty sure had been poor bastards unlucky enough to get hit by the thing’s teeth on their way down, this thing must’ve been busy while I was distracted fighting Dr. Lana, but I had more pressing concerns than the remains of people who’d been stupid enough to get caught out when there was a giant lizard attacking the city.

  Honestly I had no sympathy. Apathetic bloody Starlight City residents. I imagined a disembodied hand with a touch of flannel and an expensive smartwatch had belonged to some hipster who decided it would be fun to sit the attack out at one of the many “disaster parties” that popped up on top of buildings when shit was going down in Starlight City.

  The price they paid was there was always at least one of those parties that wound up destroyed by whatever was attacking the city.

  Then I was through the gullet and falling. I turned my lights on full blast and didn’t like what I saw there. There were a couple of islands in what looked like a sea of acid.

  The fall alone would’ve been enough to kill anyone unfortunate enough to make it down the thing’s throat, but even if some poor bastard managed to survive that fall they’d still find themselves on the business end of radioactive stomach acid that would’ve killed them even if they’d managed to improbably survive everything else.

  Judging from what I saw down there no one had been that lucky. They didn’t have antigrav tech though.

  I came to a stop and got my bearings. Then I decided that the floodlights weren’t enough so I fired off a quick phosphor blast that attached itself to the top lining of the monster’s stomach. It’d give the bastard a hell of a case of indigestion, but I figured the thing deserved it.

  The stomach walls contracted in protest, but its stomach walls were so huge that they couldn’t really contract around me as long as I kept moving. It was so big I figured the only thing missing was a toymaker, his talking puppet, and cat in a boat floating on the acid.

  Not that a little wooden boy or a little wooden boat would last all that long with the radioactive stomach acid this thing was kicking out.

  The whole world shifted around me. I looked at the feed coming in from some of the drones in the area and saw that the monstrosity was ripping into buildings and leaving death and destruction behind it. Something had to be done about this fucker, and soon.

  Not to mention Fialux was still out there duking it out with Dr. Lana. Either Dr. Lana was losing some steam or Fialux was doing better than I ever would’ve expected now that she had some training under her belt.

  I looked back to the monster stomach around me. I tried to ignore the smell. An old line about thinking something smelled bad on the outside came to mind.

  The thing couldn’t be killed from the outside. Not with my equipment. Its skin was hardened to the point that nothing short of a nuclear blast was going to take it out, and maybe not even then. The problem with using nukes on a giant lizard that ate up radiation was using more radiation on the a big angry radioactive lizard tended to make them bigger and angrier and more radioactive.

  I sighed. Held out my hand to materialize an explosive from the lab. Then frowned as I realized nothing was happening. I held my hand out again, figuring it was just the stupid computer I was forced to work with in CORVAC’s absence not realizing what it was I wanted.

  “Um, where is my big explosive?” I asked.

  “Unable to comply,” the computer said.

  “What the hell do you mean unable to comply? I hold my hand out and that means I want a piece of high fucking explosives to materialize in my hands!”

  It was dumb AI in every sense of the word, but it looked like some of my sarcasm was rubbing off. One of the many blinking red indicator lights I’d been ignoring in my heads up display magnified.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  I was cut off from the teleporter signal in my lab.

  “Have you tried boosting the signal?” I asked.

  “Affirmative,” the computer said, and again I was struck with how it seemed to be just a little smug.

  “Is it active or passive scrambling?” I asked. “Like is this something Dr. Lana is pulling or are we talking something that’s a natural byproduct of all the radiation this lizard is putting off.”

  “Difficult to ascertain,” the computer said. Though I don’t know why I expected anything less from this idiotic bucket of bolts. “It is most likely active scrambling from an unknown source.”

  I glanced at one of the news feeds. Dr. Lana and Fialux were still duking it out, and I had a pretty good idea exactly where the interference was coming from even if my AI was too stupid to figure it out.

  “Right,” I said. “We’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. I suppose this interference means it’d also be a bad idea for me to try and teleport locally as well as long distance?”

  “Affirmative,” the computer said. “Unless you like the idea of finding your molecules fused with the insides of the active enemy target or a building.”

  Yeah, this AI was definitely picking up on some of my sarcastic tendencies. I only had myself to blame though. I wanted it to learn, and this was the example I provided.

  “Fine,” I growled.

  I’d have to do this the old fashioned way. Like we’re talking I was going to have to go seriously old school. Unpleasantly old school.

  I raised my wrist blaster and fired. It was gratifying to see the muscular insides of the monster’s stomach contracting around me as it tried t
o stop me from hurting it from the inside out.

  Well I was only just getting started with the hurting.

  I figured if I fired up I’d eventually find what I was looking for. The only problem was I had to continually dodge guts raining down on me. It was a happy discovery that my wrist blaster had no problem blasting through this thing’s more soft and chewy insides, but I could’ve done without those soft and chewy insides spewing all sorts of unpleasant muck and goo down on me every time I fired.

  I dodged, but it wasn’t enough. Thankfully I had my shields up which took care of most of the spatter.

  Whatever. I kept firing until I saw something beating in the muck. I grinned. If its heart was as soft and squishy as the rest of the creature’s insides then this was going to be a lot easier than I thought.

  I looked at the weapons I had at my disposal in the pattern buffer and frowned. Usually I didn’t carry the heavy artillery on my person. Not because I was worried about it going off or anything silly like that. When it was stored as scrambled molecules on my utility belt it was about as inert as a piece of explosives could get.

  No, mainly I never carried that stuff with me because there was never a use for it. I wasn’t going to set off high yield high explosives in the middle of a population center in the normal course of business, and I’d always figured that when I did need something with a little more bang I could have the computer teleport the stuff over.

  I never thought about going up against an enemy that might negate my ability to teleport ordinance across the city. Damn it.

  I chose the biggest bomb I had and pointed my wrist blaster up. Fired a couple of times. Explosives materialized and went flying off up. I heard a squishy noise as they rammed against the creature’s heart and I was treated to yet another of many disgusting incidents as some of the creature’s radioactive glowing blood rained down on me.

  It looked like I’d punched a couple of holes in the thing’s heart with those shots. Not that it was stopping the thing. The world lurched around me and the drone and news feeds from the outside showed the thing stumbling for some reason the news anchors couldn’t figure out in between eulogizing Night Terror who appeared to have been eaten by the giant lizard.

  I grinned. They were about to discover just how difficult it was to kill me. It’d be a good object lesson for all the assholes out there who thought they could come at me now that I’d softened up a little under Fialux’s influence.

  The only problem was I had to make it out of here first, and it wasn’t going to be pleasant. I figured I wasn’t going to be able to get out by climbing back out of the thing’s gullet. Trying to climb up its throat as it was trying to actively peristalsis me to death would mean putting myself about even with those explosions when they went off.

  Damn it. I wished I could use a remote to blow those fuckers, but I didn’t want to risk more interference leaving those things in place without blowing.

  I looked down. Saw the alternative escape. It wasn’t going to be pretty, but right now it was the only chance I had. So I dove down towards the exit where giant muscles were moving a steady stream of partially digested cars, tractor trailers, bits of building, and the occasional slop that had probably been people before the lizard got ahold of them.

  I turned my shields up on high and tapped a button on my pattern buffer inventory that brought up a rebreather. I said a quick prayer of thanks to any higher power that might be listening that Dr. Lana’s wide area teleportation disruptor didn’t seem to be enough to overcome the short distance more localized teleportation I used to get stuff out of my utility belt. I still wasn’t going to risk teleporting myself, but I hoped that jamming didn’t damage the rebreather.

  This would be a hell of a lot more disgusting if that was the case. I closed my eyes, held my wrist blaster up ahead of me, and started firing as I blasted my way through the single most disgusting escape I’d ever made in my career.

  27

  Disgusting Escape

  Okay. So maybe I hadn’t thought this through. I looked at the countdown timer on those bombs and cursed myself for never stopping to think that maybe someday I’d want to be able to stop them from counting down.

  Then again I’d put in the failsafe that they didn’t stop their counting down after one particularly pesky hero who’d figured out how to disarm some of my stuff by manipulating the timer.

  That was the trouble with the villainy business. Sometimes you were damned if you did and damned if you didn’t. Only in this case it was starting to look like my paranoia was going to turn my insides into jelly from the blast wave even as the acid and other more unpleasant things lurking in the lower reaches of this monster’s intestines tried to turn me into digested jelly.

  I fired a couple of shots at another one of those skittering creatures that lurked in the monster’s intestines. Talk about an unpleasant surprise. I had my low light stuff on now and I was targeting and firing as quickly as I could, but they kept coming.

  One lurched at me, throwing itself through the wet darkness with an unholy screech. Great. Here I was the greatest villain in the world and my epitaph was going to read I died surrounded by giant lizard shit trying to fight off the mutated parasites that resided in its lower digestive track.

  What a way to go.

  It was right around that time that I heard the distinctive sound of high explosives going off somewhere way above me. I looked at the counter as I had a minor heart attack, and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the countdown for my own bombs still ticking away.

  Sure I only had about thirty seconds left to live, but I still figured that was better than being turned to liquid immediately.

  A glance at the news told me the government had decided to do their whole ineffective routine against the fucker, and I decided I just didn’t have enough time to do this the old fashioned way. So I pointed down and started firing at the floor.

  For the third time since this whole ordeal had started I found myself being covered in muck and goo, but I figured better being covered in muck and goo than having all my internal organs being turned to muck and goo as the pressure wave from all those bombs I’d just set hit me and overloaded all of my systems.

  A glance at the readout showed those systems weren’t doing so hot. The high levels of radiation on the insides of this thing just weren’t something I’d anticipated.

  Sure I had radiation shielding, what self-respecting villain didn’t? It’s just I’d never counted on facing the kind of radiation that could charitably be compared to standing next to the elephant’s foot in Chernobyl seconds after the meltdown started.

  Yeah, this was coming down to a hell of a race, and I wasn’t sure if it was a race I was going to win. I kept firing and stepped through the hole I made. Found myself one level lower, though the only way I could even determine whether or not I was going lower was by relying on gravity and turning off the antigrav for a moment.

  I kept firing. Goo kept flying at me. I was getting desperate here. I was not going to die in the digestive tract of this thing, damn it, I was not going to…

  My first hint that I was finally on the right track came when the goo I was firing at turned from the monster’s internal organs to something large, brown, and even smellier than anything I’d encountered so far.

  Disgusting, but as far as I was concerned I’d just hit brown gold. This meant I was in the right place. I’d finally blown through to the large intestine, which meant…

  Well I’m not going to say much about what I experienced in there. There are some things that are just too terrible to contemplate, even for a villain.

  Suffice it to say I discovered the one thing more horrifying than finding myself traveling down the gullet of a giant radioactive lizard was traveling down the other end of a giant radioactive lizard’s digestive system in an attempt to outrun an explosion that was hot on my heels.

  It wasn’t pleasant, but I figured if the thing’s hide was tough enough that I couldn’t blast t
hrough it on the outside then it’d be the same trying to blast through it from the inside. Which meant I had to escape through one of two openings on the fucker, and I had to go out the hole that was designed for getting things out of its body.

  The ticker reached zero. I flew out of the thing’s back end going as fast as I could, and even then the flames from the internal explosion were licking at my heels and giving my shields a run for their money.

  Talk about an explosive shit.

  I hit the ground and tumbled end over end. Came to rest against a city bus and looked up at the business end of the terrible radioactive thunder lizard that had been giving me so much trouble for the last…

  I glanced at the timer. I’d only been in there for ten minutes. Ten minutes that felt like an eternity in my own personal radioactive hell.

  Well, actually when you think about it I imagine suddenly finding fire coming out of your ass end, and not the kind that comes from chili, is probably a special brand of hell as well. The giant lizard was breathing fire from both ends thanks to the explosives I’d set off.

  Okay then. Maybe I’d gone for some overkill, but if I’d learned anything in my recent fights it was that there really was no kill like overkill when you got down to it.

  The lizard lurched forward a couple more steps. It paused and wavered for a moment, and then it fell to the side. Which meant it slammed into a couple of buildings and sent shockwaves running up the front face of a skyscraper that was mostly all glass.

  Well it was all glass until the lizard brushed against it, at least. After that it was all broken glass.

  Finally the thing came to rest on the street. I was left standing there wavering back and forth and feeling like disgusting shit. I looked down at myself. I was covered in disgusting shit. Literally.

  Hey, you try going on a fantastic voyage through the digestive tract of a monster like that and see if you smell like sunshine and rainbows when you come out the other side.