by Aaron Crash
“Probably,” Ling said. “If not, we’ll deal with any problems during the moment we encounter them.” He climbed up to his shelf using pegs and then curled up in a ball of black and white fur and went to sleep.
Blaze climbed between the itchy wool blankets. They smelled like home—slightly dusty, autumn odors of storage and dried leaves.
On his back, looking up, he watched fuzzy green Meelah caterpillars chewing big green Meelah leaves, spinning webs for cocoons, or crawling here and there on the towers. The worms were cute in a fuzzy wormy sort of way.
And both the caterpillars and the leaves were the reason why the Meelah had evolved as they did. Unlike Humans, the Meelah hadn’t had any natural predators on their home world. The marsupials, much like in Australia back on Earth, had evolved in a vacuum. The real threat to their survival had been their own physiology. Millions of years before, Meelah couldn’t eat anything but leaves and the worms, and as chance would have it, both were rare.
Instead of fighting over the scarcity of food, the Meelah had worked together, exploring the planet, finding where the leaves and the worms were, and then created a peaceful agrarian society. Yet things didn’t go as planned, and after a series of droughts, insect plagues, and famine, the Meelah were forced to get more and more creative. This drove their sentience until they perfected space travel.
As a society of explorers and negotiators, they took to the stars. Living short lives also had affected their culture, and so they were willing to take risks and live on the edge. They had a word for “war,” but the connotations were all food related. As in, it’s a battle to get dinner, or we have to fight the weather to grow our leaves.
Modern-day Meelah could eat a varied diet, but that was after a millennia of space travel. It was similar to the evolutionary process in Humans that allowed them to digest cow’s milk.
Interestingly enough, the Meelah had beaten both Humans and the Clickers to the stars. If the space sloths had been more of a warrior race, they might’ve carved out an empire, but instead, they avoided both species, since both were far too savage and warlike.
Blaze drifted off, thinking about Ling and his people.
But the leaves he slept on, the musty smell of the blankets, and the feel of the itchy wool on his skin brought back too many memories for his sleep to be serene.
He’d had visions twice before, both during their battles with archdukes. He felt this third vision grab him, but this one was part memory and part nightmare.
He was in McCook again. He and Arlo had just moved there, on edges of Colobraska, after spending the summer in Dakotasota. Blaze knew he wouldn’t be around for very long, they never were, but like always, Arlo enrolled him in some crappy middle school and told him to get a goddamn girlfriend. He wanted Blaze to be a man and screw his way through his teenage years like Arlo had.
Blaze was thirteen, in the seventh grade, at McCook Middle School, and back then, he hadn’t been named Blaze. No, he was Ramon Ramirez, an orphan, living with his foster father, Arlo, in a moldy trailer behind a flophouse on the outskirts of town.
Arlo would drink and hunt—mostly drink—and when he brought home some skank from the local dive bar, Ramon would go out to the creek and walk the trails under the cottonwoods. The crunch of the dead leaves under his boots was so satisfying. The fall colors of the Great Plains of Colobraska were so beautiful. The air was cool, trying its hardest to be cold.
Ramon didn’t go for the girls, not then, partly because he wanted to rebel against Arlo, but partly because he had no idea how to talk to a girl. His life was running drills, training, shooting, and learning how to fight with dangerous fusion weapons. More than once, Ramon had burned himself with a bad maneuver. Fusion energy was very unforgiving. Arlo didn’t believe in using practice shells ’cause every battle should be the real thing. Every second alive was training for the hunt. Might as well get used to the pain.
Instead of being a ladies’ man, Ramon looked for the weaker kids, who were being bullied, and went after the bullies.
That was how it started with Little Angelo, a kid on crutches from a spinal deformity. Angelo was funny, wicked smart, and when he started insulting you, he wouldn’t quit. His sister Cynthia was as quiet as Angelo was loud.
The Crayton boys were a set of twin seventh graders and their huge, slow eighth-grade brother. Three big hulking bruisers from a bad family that lived in a hotel near the regional airport. Word around town said the Craytons had money from running drugs and protection scams.
Ramon did what he always did. He befriended Little Angelo by telling the kid he’d stop the Crayton boys from messing with him.
That first afternoon, he did. Twin One and Twin Two came busting down the trail next to the creek, to steal Little Angelo’s money. Even in his dream, Blaze couldn’t remember names.
Ramon put both twins on their asses. Fighting seventh graders was so much easier than taking on a level-two imp with a prehensile tail and two sets of fangs.
Little Angelo was thrilled. Cynthia started talking to Ramon the next day. And for a minute, Ramon thought he would not only get a real friend, but a girlfriend as well.
The next afternoon, on the way home from school, Twin One and Twin Two brought along Brother Bruiser. He’d been harder to take. He should’ve been a sophomore in high school, but Brother Bruiser had been more interested in lifting weights than studying. Hence, it was the eighth grade for that son of a bitch.
Ramon got a broken nose and two black eyes, but he managed to sucker punch Brother Bruiser down into the mud. And then he’d smashed the eighth grader’s face into the banks of the creek, over and over. Ramon had already put the beatdown on the twins. They lay bleeding and moaning in the shallow creek.
Ramon really had figured that was the end of it. Angelo and Cynthia had taken him home to dress his wounds, and they gave him real Coke with real sugar and some homemade buttered popcorn with lots of salt. When Little Angelo wasn’t looking, Cynthia had kissed him, right on his lips.
And Ramon remembered thinking that it was good Brother Bruiser had only broken his nose and blackened his eyes but left his lips alone.
For a first kiss, it was wonderful and soft and didn’t hurt at all. No split lip. Cynthia had smelled like perfume and popcorn.
The third day, the Crayton boys brought Daddy Crayton. He’d done time in the federal penitentiary in Florence. Done hard time. He was a middle-aged asshole, and the years had only made him meaner. He was nearly seven feet tall, bald, scarred, and a good two hundred and seventy-five pounds of muscle and fuck you.
And the first thing he did was push Angelo off his crutches. Daddy Crayton then said shit to Cynthia that grown men shouldn’t say to fifteen-year-old girls.
And Ramon was going to stop him. The Twins and the Bruiser went to hold Ramon down, but Daddy Crayton waved them off. He put up his dukes. And drove punch after punch into Ramon until the seventh grader went down.
But Ramon got up. Spit blood out of his mouth, wiped his nose, and attacked Daddy Crayton, until the dark-hearted convict put him down again.
By this this time, Angelo, Cynthia, hell, even the Twins and the Bruiser were begging him to stay down.
No, Ramon wouldn’t, couldn’t, not ever. This was an evil monster, and like Arlo, Ramon wasn’t going to stop. Not ever. If he was conscious, Ramon would fight on.
Daddy Crayton finally beat him senseless.
Ramon lost consciousness from the pounding.
He woke to find himself being dragged by Angelo and Cynthia. They took him to the trailer behind the flophouse, worried Ramon was going to die.
Arlo took one look at him, at his friends, and shook his head. And smiled. “Did he get any good licks on the other guy?”
“He was in his forties, ex-con, it was totally unfair,” Angelo had insisted.
Arlo grunted, spit, and then smiled with stained yellow teeth from home-rolled cigarettes, sometimes tobacco, sometimes not. “Which meant the convict was old and slow
. Ramon should’ve kicked his ass. Instead, he got ninety percent of his ass kicked. Well, I’ll kick the rest of that ten percent for an even one hundred.”
Angelo and Cynthia, his friend and his girlfriend, stood back in horror as Arlo picked up a stick and slammed it across Ramon’s back. “You can’t lose, Ramon. You can’t lose. Ever. If you lose, we all lose. If you win, we all win. Do you get me? It’s the fate of the fucking galaxy. At some point, the entire universe will be in your pinche hands, you weak-ass pendejo!”
Ramon couldn’t talk. Couldn’t cry. All he could do was take the beating. What hurt worse was the embarrassment of having his friends watch. He didn’t care when Arlo snapped his arm. Other things inside of him hurt far more.
Arlo finally got tired and stormed back into the trailer, which squeaked and shook from his footsteps.
Angelo and Cynthia tried to help him, but Ramon couldn’t have that. He ran from them. Well, limped away as fast as he could, which wasn’t all that fast. That night, he didn’t go back to the trailer until Arlo was passed out. He found a blanket and slept in a culvert by the stream, arm broken, cold, but not feeling it. A part of him went numb that night, and sometimes, numb is just all right.
Ramon never went back to McCook Middle School.
The Craytons never bothered Angelo or Cynthia again. A week later, Daddy Crayton was sent back to the Florence penitentiary, and the foster care system took his sons. The end. Arlo had orchestrated all of that, as a way to try and apologize.
Then they were on to the next hunt, a poltergeist in a mansion on the outskirts of Chadron. Arlo seemed different after that, less likely to slap him, but he’d also talk about the McCook lesson. Ramon couldn’t lose a fight. Every fight was against the satanic Onyx energy, and one fight meant death for him and possibly the galaxy.
The dream turned from memory to vision, and Blaze was back in McCook, by the creek. Angelo was dead in the mud. His sister wept over his body. At first it was Cynthia, pretty looking at fifteen, and then it was Elle, and she was crying over Blaze’s dead body.
“Shouldn’t have lost that fight,” Arlo said next to him.
“Who did I lose to?” Blaze asked. He didn’t think it was to Daddy Crayton. And he was right.
“Who did you lose to?” His foster father pointed with a nicotine-yellow finger on a wrinkled hand. “You lost to that. And we all lost.”
A skeleton stood on the bank, a yellow-boned Human skeleton. At first, Blaze thought of Chthonic. No, this was something different.
The body on the bank was Angelo again, dead and small and pale. Cynthia turned, but she had Nauzea’s face—a scabbed wound for a mouth, scabs for eyes, two inflamed nostrils in a torn nose weeping pus.
“Panashoat,” she whispered.
“Panashoat,” the dead Angelo said as he lay in the mud.
“Panashoat.” The Crayton boys had appeared to say the word. Tears streamed down their dirty faces. Even Daddy Crayton was there, and he mournfully said, “Panashoat.”
They all chanted it. “Panashoat. Panashoat. Panashoat.”
“Watch now,” Arlo said. “Four of five will keep us alive. Five of five and we’ll all die.”
The skeleton walked toward Blaze while leaving perfect footprints behind in the mud.
Like horrid trees growing from seeds, figures rose from the muddy prints. Werewolves in cast-off Astral Corps armor—Ian, Tanner, Chase, Jared, and Logan—grew from the dirt to stand panting and gasping. Even Jacob, though it was clear he was dead and rotting. All of the werewolves had been tortured. Ian had been skinned and was walking around with his muscles and tissues visible. Tanner had nine-inch-long nails driven through his muzzle, giving him spikes instead of fangs in his maw. Chase’s hands had been removed, and he had steel daggers there instead. Jared’s fur had been replaced by needles. Every square inch of his skin bristled with metal. And Logan had been covered in molten silver. Patches of his fur smoked and spat while it still burned.
Seeing his old buddies so warped and evil hurt Blaze’s heart. They’d been his best friends, comrades to the end, and now, even mutilated as they were, the gunny knew they wanted him dead.
And still the skeleton walked toward Blaze. Fernando rose from one of the skeleton’s footprints. He was holding a snare sphere, glowing green, then glowing red, then glowing green. It finally turned a diseased dark color, and that inky darkness infected Fernando, crawling up his arm until he went from pale yellow-green to black. Then Bill emerged from a footprint. He had to limp because his prosthetic limbs had been turned in on him, piercing his thorax. Then Trina. Then Cali. Then Ling. Then Elle. Then a woman with dented, rusted metal skin. At first he didn’t know who she was, but then because of dream logic, he realized it was Lizzie in human form. It had to be. All rose from the footprints, following the skeleton as it walked toward Blaze.
All of them, Lizzie included, had been tortured, skinned, fingers hacked off, fingernails pulled off, burned, impaled. Yet they still walked, chanting, “Panashoat. Panashoat. Panashoat.” And they all had a murderous fury lighting up their eyes. They wanted Blaze dead. That was clear.
“Is this skeleton Panashoat?” Blaze asked. “Or is he someone or somewhere else?”
Lizzie echoed what she had said earlier on the bridge. “In the cellar, Gunny. We put her there, remember?”
But she said it wrong. Lizzie always overemphasized her Hs.
Having his old Astral Corps friends turn on him was one thing, but the crew of the Lizzie Borden was his family. The betrayal stabbed his heart like a knife made of ice.
“Rejoice in the agony,” Nauzea-Cynthia whispered. “All hail Panashoat. Rejoice in the agony. Embrace the hunger.”
Huuuuunnnnnnngggggrrrrrrryyyyyyyyy. The word was stretched from the mouth of the skeleton.
No, no, no, that skeleton was Panashoat. Blaze could feel it. Immediately, the gunny was famished. He had nothing to eat, and he dimly thought of eating the meat of his own hand.
The skeleton grew larger, larger, larger, and in dream time, Blaze found himself facing down a skeleton the size of planet. No, bigger, the thing, the bones, the skeleton, was the size of a galaxy, and Blaze had become a single cell next the creature. Not even a cell. Blaze was an organelle inside the cell.
Hungry. So hungry, full of a diabolical desire, not to eat, nothing simple, but to feed. Blaze wanted to feed on all of existence.
And still that chanting, but the chorus rose from all throats across the galaxy. Human, Meelah, and Phasmida alike.
Panashoat. Panashoat. Panashoat. All mysteries revealed. Hunger unleashed. Lust eternal. Panashoat.
A blink of the eye later, Blaze was thirteen, beaten, bloody, and exhausted, and Arlo stood over him with a stick in front of his friends. “You can’t lose this fight, Blaze. You win, we all win. You lose, we all lose!”
It was like before, seventeen years earlier, only this time, Arlo was weeping, red-eyed, snotty-nosed, and heartbroken.
The sight of Arlo weeping jerked Blaze awake.
Fernando stood above Blaze. The Clicker’s four hands gripped his fusion spear.
Ten inches of fusion energy burst from the tip of the spear.
FOURTEEN_
╠═╦╬╧╪
Blaze wasn’t in his armor. He had his ax, but Fernando had the drop on him. One more betrayal, but then, his dream had warned him. Though in the dream, Fernando hadn’t had his spear, but had been holding something else, something that felt important.
He did remember that Lizzie hadn’t said her Hs right.
Ling’s platform near the ceiling was empty. The Shaolin sloth wasn’t in the room. Though the garden towers were green and leafy, they weren’t wide enough to hide behind.
“Hey, Fernando,” the gunny said, smiling, “before you pin me to the floor, don’t suppose I can have one last smoke.”
“Chorizo,” Fernando clicked.
Wow, non sequitur. Como?
The Clicker doctor deactivated the spear and reached o
ut a hand. “Chorizo. In the galley. You should eat breakfast before we meet with Arlo. We’ll reach GaMeSpa soon. Ambassador Randi contacted us, and she has Arlo in her custody. It seems he is wanted by all three sentient species for various crimes.”
Blaze took the hand and was pulled up.
“What were you going to do with that spear, Fernando?” Blaze asked.
“I accidentally turned it on.” The Clicker clicked, and his implants blipped, beeped, and then went static. While only five words hit Blaze’s ears, Fernando had said a bunch more. After the static, Fernando clicked out the litany, “The queen, my mother, the source of all life, the one goddess eternal.”
“Who is your queen now?” Blaze asked.
Fernando’s insect face was inscrutable. “Elle, of course. Elle, made eternal, Elle made perfect, Elle, the queen, my mother, the source of all life, the one goddess eternal.”
“Then let’s go find her,” Blaze said. But first, he did stop in the galley for a breakfast burrito, full of chorizo. His crew, Fernando most of all, was losing it, and the gunny was having trouble trusting any of them.
Fernando had left with some lame excuse to talk to his brother in the engine room. No doubt the Clickers and their demon-possessed computer were plotting something. But what?
Blaze chewed down his burrito and headed for the bridge. Elle and Ling were there, and Blaze pulled them aside. He used old-fashioned paper and a pencil to have a quick discussion. Lizzie wasn’t Lizzie, Fernando was acting strangely, and Nauzea wasn’t as caged as she seemed to be.
Elle scrawled words, but in the end, she reminded him of their mission. Even if the Lizzie Borden and everyone on board had lost their shit, they had to get to Arlo and find out the timestamps of the locations Granny had given them. Then they could figure out what to do.
Elle was right, though Blaze hated the whole situation. He wanted her to Onyx up, cast an exorcism spell, or magic up a solution.
If Fernando hadn’t been acting so strange, Blaze would’ve asked him to do it, though the Clicker doctor didn’t have one-tenth of Elle’s power.