by Ben Stevens
If this doesn’t work the way we think it will, I won’t ever need them again.
Jon took two more determined steps. His eyes began to adjust, allowing him to see the tired, starving demon rise in anticipation of its next, much-needed meal. Jon assumed that the creature must take him for a fool and appeared in no way to be suspicious.
Perhaps, he thought, there were religious fanatics that have been here before and offered themselves so easily and willingly to this thing.
As he took one more slow step closer, the beast nearly tore some of its appendages off as it snapped at Jon, straining against the chains that bound it.
Or maybe it’s just really, really hungry.
Jon paused, as the next step would put him in range of the creature’s bite. He held his hands out to his sides, opening his chest up and creating an inviting gesture. A mass of tentacles writhed and reached as hard as they could, their mouths opening and closing in a dying, gasping-for-air kind of way.
Jon steadied his face and pulled it back slightly as one does who is repulsed by what they see. The flashing needles blurred in and out of the gasping circular tube mouths, nearly pricking Jon’s skin, so close were they. The slithering sound coming from the hundred mouths was nearly deafening at this range. Jon’s heart began to race again. A bead of salty, nervous sweat rolled down and over his flaring nostril.
“You want this, you son of a bitch? Huh? You want this?” Jon taunted, more to help stave off his nervous tension than out of bravado. If the urchin heard or understood him, it gave no sign. It simply continued to pull against the chains and flash its hundred needles in Jon’s face. Jon closed his eyes and time seemed to stop. He lifted his head up to the dark ceiling, opening his core up more to the urchin and hoping to avoid any needles in the eyes. One last deep breath, and then Jon took a half step forward, placing himself into the sea of hungry tentacles.
They accepted his flesh ravenously. The tube mouths latched on to him all over his body and lifted him off the ground. Fortunately for him, the saliva in the tube mouths acted as a mild neurotoxin and numbed Jon’s flesh to the needles’ rapid and repeated penetration. Once each mouth-spot had been pierced a couple of dozen times—which took a matter of seconds—and the blood was good and flowing, the tubes began to suck the life out of Jon’s body, which was exactly what he wanted.
Feeling no pain, only a high-like sensation that increased moment by moment, Jon maintained his arms-wide-open, head-held-high pose and let the urchin drink him. He only hoped that it wouldn’t drink him dry before…
Due to the numbing effect, Jon couldn’t feel the flow of blood slow as the creature quit sucking and only held him there, his blood flowing naturally from the needle wounds, but he did notice the growing euphoric sensation stabilize. He kept his eyes closed but did exhale a half laugh and mutter, “Got you, bloodsucker.” The demon-urchin more spat him out than threw him. He found his body to be considerably weaker than usual as he crashed into the stone bricks of the chamber’s interior walls and then fell limply to the floor.
He lay there and chuckled weakly. He couldn’t stand up if he’d wanted to, but he did manage to roll his head up and watched as the demon-urchin begin to glow with the now rapidly reproducing serum-enhanced blood cells in its alien body.
“Burn, baby, burn.”
Unable to watch what was sure to come next, Maya closed her eyes just as Don Luis Fernando grabbed the side of Lucy’s expressionless face.
We’ve failed! To come this far—Warbak, Home—only to fail now! It’s not right!
The plaza had grown so quiet, the goddess could hear the sound of her heart breaking. She wondered for a second about Carbine. Would he get away? She wondered a second longer about Jon. Had he already met the fate that was about to befall Lucy, with Ratt and herself soon to follow?
Interrupting the measured beats of her pounding heart and ringing ears, Maya heard a gasp.
Afraid of what she knew she would see, yet moving like a marionette, she opened her eyes.
“It worked! Our plan worked! Jon did it!” Ratt called out.
A second gasp, smaller than the first, full of surprise and hope, leapt from Maya’s tight throat.
Don Luis had relaxed his grip on Lucy’s head and taken a step backward. He held both of his hands palm up and was studying them. Then, with a jerking spasm, he turned his surprised gaze to Maya.
She saw in his pale red eyes complete and utter bewilderment, which twisted and melted into dread understanding, followed by panic.
“You have played me!” he screeched, his voice cracking.
A light, not dissimilar to the one that had glowed beneath Jon’s skin when pushed to his limits, began to grow within Don Luis.
He held his hands back up to his face and studied the growing glow inside his doomed body.
Then, like the crucial piece of burning kindling carefully placed under the tinder, his glow seemed to spread to the other vampires in the plaza—for while the urchin was his progenitor, he was, in turn, the father of all New Puebla’s privileged class.
Maya didn’t even flinch when he began to scream. The heat and brightness coming from within him was so intense at this moment that she couldn’t even make out the outline of his body, only light, as bright, blinding, and hot as the sun. The same thing was happening to the other vampires in the plaza for only a second, and then the light became so bright as to blind her completely.
Relieved, knowing that they had beaten the devil, Maya succumbed to her exhaustion, drained from the trauma of the night's events and from pushing herself beyond her normal Strange-shaping abilities. She crumpled to the ground and passed out before her head came to a stop.
A moment later, Don Luis Fernando, along with every single vampire in New Puebla, was no more than ashes drifting through the night on a slight breeze.
When Jon limped into the plaza, dragging his hammer behind him, the human population of New Puebla was still in shock, doing nothing more than standing around and mumbling to each other. No one moved to help or harm Lucy and Maya, both of whom lay on the stone floor amidst small piles of ash and black scorch marks. Likewise, no one accosted, questioned, or otherwise did anything to Jon except step out of his way and stare at him.
He looked as much of a mess as the stage and plaza. His wounds had stopped bleeding—the serum brought rapid cell regeneration along with its death sentence—but he was shirtless and dirty, his flesh caked with dried blood from head to toe, his dark fatigues and boots obscuring his lower wounds. He looked tired, yet still menacing enough to cause even the surviving human sentries to grant him a wide berth. Jon looked over them with his head drooping low, his eyes peering up from under his brow.
“It worked, Jon. It worked.” Ratt sounded more surprised than happy. Jon glanced at him and saw that he had been wounded badly in the shoulder and ankle. The kid's jacket was torn, and half his torso was wet with dark blood. He stood mostly on one foot, the other held up like a cat’s paw.
“Lucy,” Jon muttered.
Ratt swallowed hard and nodded, half shuffling, half jumping over to the fallen warrior’s body. Jon dropped the handle of his hammer and fell to his knees. He reached down and gathered Maya into his arms. In his embrace, she looked like no more than a sleeping child, at peace. A fear deeper than that he had experienced in the dungeons of the palace penetrated his heart.
Please, no.
Jon held his breath, choking back the flood of emotion threatening to drown him.
Then, appearing to him like a lighthouse beacon to a lost and storm-harried ship, Jon saw Maya’s eyelids flutter to life.
He raised her small frame closer to his massive one, crushing her in an embrace. Through a few tears of joy, he smiled over to Ratt and saw the boy had opened a storage compartment in Lucy’s thigh and was injecting himself with a hypodermic shot of medical nanobots.
The surviving citizens of New Puebla, who had either not been in the plaza or had run from it when the shit hit the fan,
began to return out of curiosity and concern, and soon a crowd had gathered around the goddess and her guardians.
A couple of brave ones had stepped in a little closer than the others with the clear intent of approaching Jon and Maya, when Lucy came alive and sprang to her feet. Ratt smiled and leaned back on his haunches, satisfied that he had executed a successful full reboot of the ninja girl, and shut down the dreadful sequence she had been running out of desperation.
“Not a step closer, hombre,” Lucy menaced.
Even without her Macuahuitls or pistol, she was an intimidating figure. Many of the gathered humans present, including the two currently probing the strangers’ personal space, had seen what the cyborg had done, what she could do, and with Sofia and Don Fernando gone, they wanted no part of that. Nevertheless, she quickly located and picked up her BFG and then strode into the gathered crowd. With each step forward she took, the crowd took two back. Within seconds, she had found the resting place of her sword-club, picked it up, and sheathed it.
Maya was regaining consciousness and groaned into Jon’s chest. He relaxed his grip and smiled down at her. She blinked her eyes open, saw him, and frowned a little.
“Did it work?” she asked cautiously.
“Yeah, it worked. The serum worked its magic right after the thing began drinking my blood. I guess we were right about the vampires’ hyper-metabolism. The same power that allowed them to regenerate from our attacks caused the serum to work a hell of a lot faster than a year. The whole cycle from ingestion to ‘flame-on’ took less than a minute.”
Maya smiled. “And our theory about the demon had been right too.”
Jon nodded. Don Luis had inadvertently revealed his greatest weakness to Maya when he had slipped up and said that he “couldn’t kill” the demon-urchin. Later that night, after hearing the horrors that Ratt had witnessed, Maya had decided that they needed to do something about the evil that ruled New Puebla. Jon and Carbine had suffered through a grueling one-way conversation, listening to Maya, Ratt, and Lucy hypothesize as to what Don Luis Fernando had meant by his slip-up.
Did it mean the creature was literally and truly immortal? Or did it mean what they’d ended up gambling on: that the Drop-Beastie was the progenitor of the tainted line of victims, conveniently referred to as vampires, and that, if destroyed, then all those who carried its taint would also be destroyed?
It had been a heated discussion and Jon had been beyond frustrated that he couldn’t offer his opinion. What would it have mattered anyway? Deep down, he’d suspected that Ratt, the one who had made the first stab at what turned out to be the correct guess, was right. He hadn’t liked the plan because Maya would be, essentially, bait. But somehow, she’d survived; they had all survived, and the gambit had paid off.
Lucy snapped him out of his reverie when she placed her hand on his naked shoulder.
“The crowd is getting restless. It’s time.”
“Do you see Eduardo?” Maya asked.
“No, not yet,” Lucy replied.
Jon’s gaze left Maya’s smiling countenance and scanned the gathered crowd. They were anxious, yes, but not in a dangerous way. Some stared questioningly at him and his companions; some muttered to each other behind raised hands, obscuring their mouths. Some stood on tiptoes, trying to see what was going on. Some frowned. Some cried. Most looked confused and scared, like children, lost without their mothers and fathers.
“It’s okay. I’m okay,” Maya said quietly to Jon. “Help me up, please.”
He hesitated for a second, looked back down to her face, and, seeing all he needed there, nodded. He stood up, lifting her with him and releasing her once she was on her feet. She began to brush herself off. Jon reached a hand out to Ratt and helped him get to his feet as well.
“Come on,” Maya said to her guardians and began to slowly walk toward the ruined stage, still towering above the rest of the plaza. The sea of onlookers parted for them easily enough. Maya reached for and squeezed Jon’s hand before letting go of it. “It’s good to see you again.” She looked back over her shoulder, smiled, and winked at him.
“Likewise,” Jon said.
Maya walked onto the stage, Jon and Lucy flanking her. Ratt stayed on the steps.
Maya faced the crowd, just as she had done hours earlier. Then, they had been screaming with joy. Seeing a Lily Sapphire show would most likely be the highlight of the decade, if not their entire lives. Now she was greeted by hurt, confusion, worry, concern. Many humans had died in that battle—men who had families, wives, children; men who were needed at their homes and farms. Maya had never anticipated just how many people—human people—would fight to the death to protect their oppressors. She looked into the crowds across the plaza, women and men alike, and saw old and young crying over the bodies of human sentries that had met their fates on the edge of Lucy’s Macuahuitl. There was not enough left of those who had fallen to her pistol to identify, and this accounted for at least a percentage of the citizens walking around aimlessly, crying and confused.
Maya found herself momentarily at a loss for words. The sight of this suffering confused and frightened her.
“This wasn’t how it was supposed to be at all,” she mumbled to herself, her resolve evaporating. She opened her mouth to say something and stammered. A tidal wave of raw emotion came crashing in from nowhere, and she found herself choking up. A single burning hot tear blazed its way down her face and fell from her dirty chin to dampen her dress. Just as she was about to turn and run, she felt Jon’s hand take hers and squeeze again. She jerked her head and looked at him.
“It’s okay,” Jon said, gently nodding his head. “They need to hear from you, from Lily Sapphire.” She squeezed her eyes shut tight as Jon was squeezing her hand, pushing the tears that welled there out and down her cheeks—a wave of homesteaders following the first trailblazer.
Jon relaxed his grip, gave her one last little squeeze, and then released her hand. She was ready. Again she turned to face the free and broken people of the city-state.
“People of New Puebla. Please hear me.” Her voice came out amplified as if she was using a microphone. “You are now free. The monsters that have enslaved you have all been destroyed.”
Silence, at first. Confused silence. Then,
“Did we look enslaved?”
The question hit her like a slug of DU from Carbine’s railgun. She felt as if the air were knocked out of her lungs. Confusion followed the impact of the question, like the shockwave that followed the bullet. Jon glanced over at Maya, then to Lucy, looking as if he hadn’t heard the question correctly.
“Wha…what?” Maya managed, scanning the crowd, trying to find the asker of the question.
“I asked you if we looked enslaved. You killed the monsters, as you call them. Those so-called monsters were our government. Our protection, our military.” Maya now saw the speaker: a simple-looking farmer man, not a sentry. From the corner of her eye, she saw Lucy’s hands drift to the handles of her saddled war-clubs. Her Feroz Pantera would, of course, be more concerned with crowd control and her lady’s safety, and not the moral crisis developing here.
“What about Eduardo? The Munez family? Their father was murdered. They told us you couldn’t leave! That people disappear!”
“Ricardo Munez was a drunk!” someone shouted back.
“He probably abandoned them!” another voice cried.
Maya turned to Lucy, feeling sick to her stomach.
“Do you see them?” she asked. Lucy scanned the crowd, and with apprehension on her face, turned back to Maya and shook her head slowly side to side.
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing!” Jon exclaimed. “We risked our lives for you people!” He stepped forward and stood side by side with Maya. “Surely you people don’t think that you were better off with the vampires?” His brow creased, and his eyes flashed. Both of his hands turned palm-up in a demanding gesture.
The old farmer didn’t let up. “They were fair. Good rule
rs. Never hurt no one,” the old man shouted, this time louder. All four of the companions saw with trepidation the nods of approval that came from all corners of the gathered crowd. Jon squinted in revulsion and confusion.
Maya shook her head and blurted out, “But the blood tax?”
“Everyone has to pay tax.”
“It’s no big deal.”
“It’s for the greater good!”
New voices began to pop up here and there, bringing with them some scattered exclamations of “Yeah” and “That’s right.”
“No!” Maya’s confusion turned to hurt anger. “They eat you. They murder you. We’ve seen it!” She clenched her fists and stamped her foot down on the stage.
“Prove it!”
“Lies!”
Then came the worst one yet. From the old farmer, naturally, he who had clearly given up freedom for comfort long ago. “Even if that’s true, the ones they occasionally take is nothing compared to what would happen to all of us if they weren’t here to protect us from what comes out of the Drops!”
“The real monsters are out there! Demons!” shouted one.
“People like you! You killed my son!” shouted another.
“You killed my husband!” Now there were fists pumping the night air. Lucy flexed and crouched almost imperceptibly, ready for what might come next.
“That couldn’t be helped!” Maya cried, her tears making an encore performance. “Our fight was only with the creatures that enslaved you. We never meant to harm you. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” one haggard and very angry woman shouted as she stood over the top half of a fallen man’s body. The questions melted away into a mess of shouts. The crowd had turned into a mob in the blink of an eye.
“Don’t you see?” Maya’s voice, cracking with sorrow and tears, still boomed magically over the crowd’s roar. “You say the vampires provided you with a nice life, but you can still have that nice life without having to die or kneel or work twice as hard! Without them stealing and killing you! No more blood tax! You’re free!”