by Michael Todd
Pandora nodded. “He touched them a lot. And then there was fire and screaming and ashes, and then POOF! They were charred bones.”
Ormund stared at them for a moment. “So he tried to take the Sword of the Morning Star?”
Pandora nodded. “Yes, but fortunately for us and unfortunately for him, he didn’t make it past the door handles. Trust me, it was a flaming horrible end to his life.”
Ormund let out a deep breath. “Good, then justice has been served.”
Katie put up her hand nervously. “Ormund, one more thing. On our journey, our friend here, Juntto, was injured very badly. Do you think that you could help him?”
Ormund stared down at him for a moment and looked at one of his soldiers. He didn’t say a word, just nodded. The soldier reached into a pack around his waist and pulled out a small vial of blue liquid. He walked over and knelt next to Juntto. Juntto tried to lift his chin, but he was too weak.
Pandora looked up at Ormund. “You think that’ll be enough? He’s kind of a big guy.”
Ormund grinned. “That is a very powerful serum. It was pulled from special flowers in the jungle I am pretty sure you went through. It has incredible healing abilities.”
The soldier lifted Juntto’s head and opened his mouth, pouring the blue goop into it. He shut his jaw and held his nose, forcing Juntto to swallow. You could see the liquid glowing as it went down his throat. As soon as it disappeared, his color began to return, and his eyes opened wide.
He smacked his lips together and grimaced. “That was not Hygge. That was the worst thing I have ever tasted.”
Pandora shook her head. “And you would drink it again if you needed to live, wouldn’t you? I promise you, death isn’t Hygge either.”
Katie and Pandora leaned down and grabbed Juntto under the arms, dragging him to his feet. He wobbled for a moment and then stopped, letting out a deep breath. “I feel much better. Thank you. Now, can you two get me the fuck out of this place, please?”
Katie looked at Ormund and smiled. “Thank you for your help.”
Ormund nodded and turned, walking through the soldiers and out into the ruins of Atlantis. Pandora looked at Katie. “I think I agree with Juntto. I need to get the fuck out of this bitch right about now. I am itching for fresh air, which is nowhere near here.”
Katie took a deep breath. “I am right there with you. We need to get back to our ship and get the hell out of Dodge.”
Pandora turned to face the Atlantean troops, who were standing uncomfortably staring at her. She curtseyed and began speaking to them in a language that not a single one of them understood. She smiled widely and put her arms out. The soldiers smiled back, unsure what was going on.
She bowed one last time. “Thank you for your kindness, cousin-fuckers. Now, which way back to our boat?”
They all nodded, and Katie burst into laughter as she took Juntto by the arm. “Come on, Frosty, let’s get out of here so we can get you back to Angie.”
Juntto nodded. “And Hygge.”
24
Baal opened a portal and stepped out, looking at the base in Nevada. He smiled and stretched his arms wide as demons crawled out behind him. “Ah, we have made it. To show Beelzebub I have the balls to do something that Mania couldn’t do, we are going to take these fuckers down once and for all.”
He turned to the horde of demons behind him and dropped his arms. He realized quickly they weren’t listening to anything other than the mouth-breathing of their closest neighbor. He rolled his eyes and swished his arm. “Onward, beasts. Kill everything you get your hands on!”
The group of demons went rushing toward the wall of the base, howling and slobbering as they pushed through the sand. Baal cackled, watching them go. “Oh, yes. This is going to be fucking good.”
Eddie sat in the living room with his feet propped on the ottoman. He sipped his hot cocoa, catching up on the soaps he had missed recently. Suddenly a loud alarm sounded, and the lights over the doorways began flashing red. He jumped up, spilling hot chocolate down his shirt. “Fuck. Hot.”
He put the cup on the table and stopped, lifting it and wiping the ring off the wood. He knew that, incursion or not, Stephanie would kick his ass for putting a mug down without a coaster. He hurried into the kitchen and put it on the counter before racing out the door.
Stephanie ran up next to him. “What took you so long?”
Eddie sighed and raced up the steps to the door on the roof. The other snipers were already up there, ready and aimed at the demons heading toward the base. One of them handed Eddie his gun, and he caught his breath. “Thanks, dude.”
He stepped forward with wide eyes, watching big, medium, and small demons racing toward them. “Take them out!”
One of the snipers looked at him. “Which ones?”
Eddie waved his hand. “Uh, the big ones!”
Immediately all of the snipers began to fire on the beasts below. They focused on the biggest demons they could find, ignoring a very tiny but feisty little Chihuahua-looking demon that was bouncing through the sand. He swerved in and out of the other demons’ feet, sometimes stopping to nip at their heels. Sand blew over him, but he merely shook it off, yipping quietly.
The beast bounced up out of a pile of sand, its body glowing with energy. It ran forward between the other demons, not watching where it was going. As it bounced from between two lunging feet, it tripped over a small rock and tumbled down the side of a low dune. It looked like a glowing blue ball as it tumbled, coming to a stop an inch from another rock. It teetered back and forth and fell to the side, tapping the boulder.
Suddenly it exploded in another EMP.
Timothy whistled as he pushed back and forth in his chair, watching the signal on the screen. At the same time, he was finally getting all his equipment back up. The computers and systems had all been checked and double-checked; he had been relieved to know that the EMP hadn’t been strong enough to wipe any of the drives that time.
Still, he had to get the weapons systems rebooted, and no time was better than the present with the current attack going on right outside the building. He typed quickly on the keyboard, pulling up screen after screen and reloading the weapons systems. One after another they finished the reboot and popped back online.
He pulled the tablet off the holder and turned it on, opening the control panel. He sent a message to the guard station that the weapons were back online and maneuverable. He flipped on the motion sensors for them and could hear the roar of their bullets in the comm room.
Timothy stood up and stretched his arms high up into the air. “That was good work, if I do say so myself. Now to kick these demons back to hell and put up some future safeguards.”
Suddenly the lights flickered, and everything went down. Timothy stood there with a straight face listening to the wind-down of the system. As it grew absolutely silent in the room, he jumped up and down in a temper tantrum, throwing his fists around.
“FUCK. FUCK. FUCK!”
Katie, Pandora, and Juntto came running down the tunnel back out into the opening where they had left the submarine. The ground rippled beneath their feet, and water washed over their ankles. All three stopped and put their hands on their knees, trying to catch their breath. Katie nodded at the sub. “We gotta get the fuck out of here. I don’t want the Atlanteans changing their minds.”
Pandora put her arms out as the ground shook again. “Or this Leviathan, for that matter.”
Katie looked up at her with wide eyes. “Yeah, I don’t know where we are in this thing, but I don’t want it deciding it’s time for a snack on land. Let’s get what we need to get out of here and bolt.”
Juntto walked over and opened the hatch into the sub. He reached inside and pulled out the box of explosives that Alice had sent with them. Katie nodded with a smile. “Alice always has our backs, even this far down in the ocean inside a Leviathan.”
Pandora grabbed the box and ran over to the side of Baylahn’s throat. “Can you
stop daydreaming about Alice for a minute and help me get these bitches in place? We want to make sure they go all the way through. We don’t want to end up with blowing it and nothing happening but pissing the fucker off.”
They lined Baylahn’s throat with explosives and tossed the box to the side. Katie wiped the front of her helmet off and looked at the timer. “Okay, everyone shut up. I am going to arm this timer for thirty seconds. That means when I say go, you haul ass and get inside of that sub. As soon as it blows, we should be flooded with water and we can get the sub out of here. We want to be fast in case Baylahn feels it and starts to move around. I don’t want to have survived this just to drown.”
Pandora shrugged. “The pressure would crush you before you had a chance to drown.”
Katie stared at Pandora for a moment. “Thank you for that. Are you ready?”
Pandora nodded and stood back. Katie set the timer and looked back before pressing the On switch. She dropped it and raced behind Pandora and Juntto, pushing them into the sub. As they closed the hatch, the explosives went off, creating a ball of fire that rolled forward and shook the sub. Water flooded the throat and filled the cavity to the ceiling.
As soon as they were completely submerged, Katie started the engine and let the force suck them out into the ocean. Bubbles flooded everywhere, and the submarine rocked wildly.
From a distance, though, it didn’t seem to be as chaotic as it was to the three of them inside it. From a distance, given Baylahn’s enormous body, all you could see was a tiny poof of bubbles and a small pebble of a machine push through and out into the open sea.
Inside the turbulence of the submarine, Katie and the others braced their hands on the ceiling as their bodies were tossed around. Katie gripped the side of the chair and dragged herself into it. She pulled the seatbelt over her but decided strapping herself into a tin can was probably not the brightest idea she had ever had.
The submarine leaned to the right, then to the left, creaking at the very seams that held it together. Pandora grabbed the back of Katie’s seat. “You need to pressurize!”
Katie looked at the panel in front of her, completely panicking. “I don’t know how to drive a motherfucking submarine.”
Pandora looked up. “The pressure is too much. It’s going to crush us into something the size of a sardine can. I would really like to not be in here for that.”
Katie shook her head, pressing different buttons. “We drove this thing in here fine. We should be able to drive it back out. I just don’t know how to get all the systems up and running.”
Juntto put his hand up as the top of the sub dented inward. “Katie, the pressure might be too much. We might have passed the moment where we needed to stabilize the submarine. It may be too late to fix it.”
Juntto suddenly shrank down, back up again, and then stabilized at the size of a normal man. Katie and Pandora looked at him wildly. He shrugged. “I guess my powers are back now that I’m outside of Baylahn. I think I had some sort of backup from trying so hard inside of him.”
Katie and Pandora snapped their heads toward each other. “If his power is back, ours must be too.”
Pandora waved her hand around in a circle. “Good! Fucking portal us the fuck out of this bitch before it blows!”
Katie looked up as the ceiling creaked and dented inward, cracking a seam. She jumped out of her seat and closed her eyes, feeling the energy pulsating through her chest. She let out a deep breath. “Thank God.”
Pandora snapped her fingers. “Thank Him later, bitch. I don’t want wet hair!”
Katie waved her hands in the air, and the three of them jumped through the portal she created. As the portal closed behind them, the sub sank back into the grasp of Baylahn and the hidden world under the sea.
Katie, Pandora, and Juntto fell through the portal and out onto the sandy ground of a desert. A small wave flowed out behind them as the portal snapped closed. Katie put her forehead down in the sand, waiting for Pandora to get off her. “Oh my God. I don’t know what dimension this is, but I have never been happier to fucking be here.”
Pandora groaned as she pulled herself up, reaching down and helping Katie to her feet. They pulled off their helmets and took a deep breath of the hot desert air. Juntto stood up and raised his arms high, jumping up and down. “Finally! I am free from the belly of the beast!”
Pandora chuckled. “Someone’s feeling better.”
Katie grimaced, pointing at the splatter of some sort of crushed purple animal beneath Juntto’s boot. “They’ve probably seen better days.”
Juntto lifted his shoulders and tiptoed off the smashed bug. “Sorry. And yeah, between whatever they gave me and my regeneration ability, I feel fucking amazing.”
Katie chuckled as she opened another portal. “Good. Let’s get back to our dimension before whatever lives here hunts us down because Juntto just smashed their queen.”
Pandora smirked. “Leave it to Frosty to destroy everything he lands on.”
Juntto followed them through the new portal. “Hey, I can’t help it if my people are big-boned. We are all very large beings. It is a sign of beauty where I am from.”
The three of them stumbled through the portal out onto the base, and everyone stopped and stared at them. They had portaled straight into the comm room, and the sonar had a beeping sound coming from it. One of the techs stood up and pointed to the blinking dot and then to Katie, Pandora, and Juntto. “Uh, how are you here, and that is supposed to be the submarine.”
Katie chuckled nervously. “Yeah, about that. I’m sorry, but you won’t be getting that sub back unless you want to dive down and have a conversation with Baylahn. And it’s a safe bet that anyone trying to retrieve it will end up down the rabbit hole.”
Pandora shook her head. “Trust us when we tell you that you do not want to go down that one. Not the same happy ending as the Disney version. Just sayin’.”
General Brushwood came running through the comm room’s doors, splashing his coffee everywhere. “You are back. Holy fucking shit, you’re back! Why are you covered in sand?”
Katie shook her head as Juntto rubbed his boot on the floor, smearing purple goo on it. “Portal-hopping issues. You know how it goes.”
The general shook his head. “No, but I’ll take your word for it. Did you get to Wilson?”
Katie nodded. “Yeah, and he didn’t succeed at his plan. Also, he won’t be going after any more devious plans in the future. Neither will his redheaded freak.”
The general furrowed his brow. “How do you know?”
Pandora smiled. “Because they are piles of ash and bone. And no, neither of us touched them. They fucked that poodle on their own.”
The general let out a deep sigh. “Good. I want to hear all about it, but there’s an emergency, Katie.”
Katie groaned. “I just got back. I—”
The general cut her off. “Your base is under attack for the second time, and they just went dark. I don’t know if there was enough time between battles for them to get their shit back together and be prepared for this. It was a pretty big portal.”
Katie shook her head and put up her hand. “Dark?”
The general nodded. “Let’s just say that communications between all of us have been really bad. There is a new type of demon that sends out EMPs, the whole nine yards. Timothy is doing his best to keep things rebooted, but they aren’t stopping. This time they didn’t wait. They struck when they knew your base was weak.”
Pandora pounded her fist into her palm. “EMP demons, huh? That sounds like some Frankenstein shit that Lucifer would have made up. I might regret not bringing Morning Star back so I could chop his fucking head off.”
The general tilted his head. “Morning what?”
Pandora waved her hands, mouthing the word, “Nothing.”
Katie clenched her fists and narrowed her eyes. She was very tired of them fucking with her team.
Baal tilted his head, watching the first round
of demons bursting into dust. He was pretty stoked the EMPFOL chihuahua had done its job, but that didn’t seem to be slowing down the meatsacks in the least. He clapped his hands and turned to the group of demons standing behind him. They were all bigger than the last bunch and much more bloodthirsty. They were the standbys, the demons that weren’t fed and tortured almost every minute of the day. They were lethal and rabid, and pretty hard to knock down with a single bullet.
He put his hand in the air and waved them toward the base. “Get them! Fuck up their shit.”
Brock and Stephanie stood at the edge of the training grounds watching demons fall from sniper shots. Stephanie narrowed her eyes as the sand blew to the side in the distance. “What the fuck are those?”
Brock followed her gaze, looking at tall demons with large muscles running on two legs and barking loudly. “They look like werewolves on steroids with no fur.”
Stephanie wrinkled her nose, pulling out her daggers. “Well, I don’t appreciate the whole ‘do your balls hang low’ thing on my base.”
Brock chuckled and pulled his sword from its sheath. “I completely agree.”
The two took off across the sand, running straight at the demons. They both leapt and came down hard, swinging their blades and tearing through demon flesh.
Out by the portal Baal skipped around in a circle, stopping and rubbing his hands together wildly.
He laughed like a maniac. “This shit is so fucking easy. I should have done this a long time ago and saved everyone in hell a whole lot of time. But no, I was too busy following morons around.”
He chuckled and turned to the side, doing a double-take. As the sand blew wildly around, three figures emerged from a portal. Baal narrowed his eyes and began to step closer as the figures moved. The clouds cleared for a moment, and the desert floor glowed. He stopped in his tracks, and his knees began to shake.