Neutron Dragon Attack

by Aaron Crash

  “It’s meteoroids, you ignorant bastard!” Blaze yelled.

  The barrels whirred as Calhoun unloaded old-timey lead bullets into the dead bodies while trying to blow Blaze apart. A round hit Blaze’s armor, and damn, it went through it and into his thigh. Another bullet blew his ax out of his hand. It went spinning across the frozen floor. The gunny went to grab his shotgun, but another barrage knocked it away.

  Weaponless, Blaze dove behind the frozen meat of bodies and the bullets riddled the corpses, bounced off the reinforced steel of the compartment, and ping-pang-ponged all around. Blaze grinned at the sound of the ricochets. It was like he was in a classic American action movie. Wow, lead, how barbaric. And damn, he forgot how much getting hit with actual metal hurt. But his nanotech could stem the bleeding by creating a temporary patch. It wouldn’t help with the pain, but he wouldn’t bleed to death.

  The smell of gunpowder and heated flesh made him grin.

  “Now that is a classic weapon you got there, Cal,” Blaze said. Something flashed in his display, not Cali, not Ling, but help was on the way. He could hardly believe it, but sometimes good shit happened to badass Marines.

  Calhoun let the gun spin down. “Aww, Blazer Boy, we can’t forget our roots now, can we? Tried to use the remote control to zap you, but seems like you pulled the zapper out and ruined our fun. Ain’t no party like a Goreback party ’cause a Goreback party don’t stop!”

  “How did you get arms and legs back?” Blaze asked.

  “Aw hell,” Calhoun cursed. “That goddamn Chthonic can bring the dead back to life. You think a little nerve damage is gonna get in his way? I have to say, never thought I’d be sporting so much multiracial meat.”

  Blaze risked a look and saw that Calhoun was shirtless, like always, and seamlessly, he had two long, heavily muscled arms, as dark brown as his chest was pale white. No doubt, under his jeans, he’d have dark, muscled legs. His mime makeup was back, plus sign and minus sign on each cheek. His hair was as greasy as it was colorful.

  “Where’d you get the spare parts?” Blaze asked.

  “Oh, we have a ton of meat on this ship, some of it hanging, some still bleeding out. Quite a banquet.” Calhoun laughed. “Now, let’s get back to the business of killing you.”

  Auntie Lips’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Hey, Cal, Dilly Donny and Uncle Upchuck are almost done cutting through the tentacles holding us down!” So, the Gorebacks were trying to free themselves. From above, Blaze hadn’t seen them under the ship. And the layer of meat and rock covering the tentacle forest below meant that other tentacles couldn’t stop Dilly and Upchuck from using plasma torches to cut through the metal.

  Mama Mayhem said, “You kill that Blazer Boy so we can eat ’em. I plans on eating his liver still warm from his gut, I’ll tell you what.”

  Calhoun laughed. “You heard ’em, Blazer Boy. Time to punch your clock and eat you up. While I ain’t no gay, I have to say, I’s gonna eat your Rocky Mountain oysters first.”

  “Being gay is the least of your fucking problems!” Blaze yelled.

  Trina came ripping through the ceiling with Blaze’s fusion flail. She dropped down. Hullfoam sealed the breach, so the entire compartment didn’t depressurize. She landed on the floor with her flail glowing.

  Like Ling’s nunchakus, the flail had a handle, but it had three fusion emitters on three lengths of chain. The balls of glowing light had melted the hull and there she stood, with a wicked weapon that could kill her easily when not much else could.

  Sunlight caused wounds a vampire couldn’t heal. Decapitation or a stake through the heart also ended them. But, as Trina proved, drop one into a lake of dragon acid and she’d come out just fine.

  However, something was different. Trina was bigger, thicker, the claws on her hands longer, and huge muscles twisted her arms and her legs. It was Trina the vampire on ultra-growth steroids. She stood in the tatters of her jeans and blouse, damn near naked, definitely barefoot, and kind of hot in a muscle-bound bodybuilder vampire kind of way.

  She deactivated the fusion flail and threw it to Blaze. He caught it and Trina marched toward Calhoun. He was already bringing up the M134 minigun, the barrels whirling. Round after round hit her, ripping up her flesh, but she healed it even as the bullets ripped through her. And she was growing taller, more muscled, laughing. Bullets tore through her brain, lungs, heart, and intestines, yet she kept on coming, getting bigger, her fingernails becoming six-inch-long claws.

  She lifted her hands and laughed. “Mama Mayhem is going to get really jealous of my pretty nails.”

  Her smile was blasted off her face in a fusillade of lead, and yet she just grew a new one.

  What was going on?

  Blaze hurled his fusion flail, and a glowing orb caught the minigun and melted the barrels. The next round exploded, throwing shards of metal back into Calhoun’s face. Blood flecked his pale chest and his dumb mime makeup.

  He stumbled backwards into the bridge. Trina, fully restored, seven feet tall and as wide as Blaze, smiled at the gunny. “Elle must’ve injected herself with her last Granny syringe. Your sister’s power is off the charts, and she’s feeding me Onyx. So these Gorebacks are in all kinds of trouble.” She blew him a kiss then sprinted onto the bridge.

  The gunny retrieved his ax and shotgun then limped after her. Elle’s power had saved them time and again, but this time, he didn’t think she’d ever agree to go back to being Human. If she went rogue, he’d have to put her down. According to his display, her mojo counter as well as her VHI were still errored out. She’d gone into goddess mode. Let the galaxy beware.

  Speaking of evil shit, Cali was coming. Metal shrieked down in the ship behind him. Another couple of minutes, and she’d be through the doors.

  Ling was almost there, flying down on his starcycle, even as the ocean of ectoplasm tentacles pulled itself down onto the forest of Etrusca tentacles. It was going to be a race to the finish, but both Ling and the Lizzie Borden were still alive and flying strong.

  Blaze burst onto the bridge of the freezer freighter. Trina had slashed open Auntie Lips again and was draining her dry. While in life, Lips had been a big woman, Trina was turning her into a shriveled dry husk. Damn, but it looked like Trina wasn’t just drinking her blood but sucking every bit of tissue out of the clown-worshipping psycho puta.

  Speeder Bob was at the controls, trying to fly the ship out of there. Mama Mayhem and Calhoun both had the fusion chainsaws spinning, but they weren’t advancing on Trina. No, they were flashing the spinning blades at the stumbling inflatable clown god, an effigy to Borzor the Harlequin, but really it was an inflatable clown possessed by an archduke of hell. Borzor probably didn’t exist. As for Chthonic, he was, without a doubt, inside the plastic stuffed with Human entrails.

  “Y’all want Mr. C, right?” Calhoun asked, that smug smile gone and fear in his eyes. “If we give you this dickweed, you’ll let us go, right?”

  Chthonic howled. “How dare you! I am a prince of evil! I lord over the rot and decay at the heart of the universe. I am the timeless god of coffin meat and maggot munch.”

  Pattie Cakes Goreback was painting her nails a cherry red. “More like a butt munch. Borzor wouldn’t piss twice on you, dickwad. You ain’t worthy of the gifts of his happy chaos.” She stretched out her fingers and admired her work.

  Chthonic inside the Borzor clown reached for Calhoun, and Calhoun sawed off one arm while Mama Mayhem used a small saw to buzz into the inflatable ball belly. The door was open, but an energy field kept the bridge pressurized.

  The putrefied guts in the clown slopped out, passing through the energy field and out the door. The punctured clown whistled as all the air left it until only white and gore-spattered plastic remained.

  Trina turned and leapt from the ship, through the energy field, pursuing the greasy slop Chthonic had turned into.

  Blaze hurried after her. It was like chasing living diarrhea. But before he left the bridge, he turned on the G
orebacks. “After I get done with the Onyx Gate, I’m coming for you fucks. And I won’t be taking you psychopaths in alive. You’ll go in pieces.”

  Calhoun gulped down a breath. Mama Mayhem burst into tears. Pattie Cakes tisked and said, “Hope you do me before you do me, Blazer Boy. I could get off boning a guy like you before you chopped me all up. Even thinking about it gets my engine goin’! Damn!”

  Over the freezer freighter’s comms, Uncle Upchuck yelled, “Tentacles is mostly cut through. Dilly and I is ready and inside. Hit her, Speeder Bob!”

  Blaze dove through the energy field covering the door as the freezer freighter launched itself away from the tentacles. At the same time, Cali came bursting through the hull, but Etrusca tentacles grabbed her—first one, then two, then a dozen. She wrestled against the tendrils of living metal.

  The Gorebacks in the freighter pulled loose from the two half-severed tentacles. The long freezer ship dodged both the ectoplasm and the Etrusca ruin until it flew past the Paladins, both hopelessly entangled in the tentacles. Fewer and fewer IPC drones fought a diminishing number of undead dragons. Most of the ghost ships had been destroyed, were trapped in the ectoplasm, or had lost whatever Onyx energy they’d had that allowed them to function.

  The Clicker frigate that had been the flagship driven by the colonel and his yellow-dressed daughter had met its fate in the coils of the Etrusca ruin. Blaze hoped that all the restless spirits found peace.

  The Lizzie Borden continued to fly through the battles, but Bill and Fernando were wisely letting the IPC and the ghost ships take out the last of the dragons. As for Elle, she was still above the ocean, fighting the last of the undead dragons. Or so it seemed.

  As for the Gorebacks, Speeder Bob had already calibrated their SWD engine, and on a wave of spacetime, the freezer freighter disappeared into the guts of the galaxy.

  Like before, the Etrusca ruin had an impossible gravity field. Blaze felt it pull him to the surface of the structure. A hundred yards away, tentacles flapped and lashed and flailed.

  Where he and Trina stood, the ground was an uneven collection of dead dragon, dead Human, and planet debris. A mud-encrusted eye blinked at him, and he walked over the dead woman’s face. A tattered dragon wing lifted from the layers of grossness. Blaze chopped it away.

  The pile of entrails, the final home of Chthonic, lord of the dead, master of haunts, rose into the air. Two sets of small intestines wrapped round and round themselves creating loops of entrails that acted as legs. Above the growing limbs, stomachs, livers, lungs, and hearts piled on to create a thorax of sorts, held together by raw Onyx energy. Arms, large intestines ending in colons and sphincters, emerged from the growing abdomen of guts. A hand popped out of the collection of hearts, and it held a brain. Another hand popped up and it held a single eyeball. A third hand held the remnants of a mouth, lips, teeth, and a tongue.

  Ice covered the collection of guts that formed Chthonic’s body, giving it a skin of frozen crystals. It was six feet and four inches of disgusting.

  Covered in ice crystals, the lips moved, the mouth spoke, and down between two misplaced kidneys, a set of vocal chords quivered. There was no sound in space, but, whatever, Blaze could hear Chthonic’s words. “I apologize for this form, but I have used all of my power to animate the dragons and corpses that even now will destroy your sister and your ship. Granny is gone, and your mission failed. You’ve come to kill me out of vengeance, I assume, but how can you kill something that is already dead?”

  From the sphincter of its right “arm,” the fusion flail slowly appeared. Once the chains of the fusion emitters were free of the orifice, the glowing orbs ignited.

  And the ocean of ectoplasm above continued to be pulled toward them by the Etrusca ruin’s tentacles.

  Blaze triggered his ax. How was he going to fight Chthonic without killing the damn thing? They still needed his majesty of grossness to resurrect Granny.

  TWENTY-SIX_

  ╠═╦╬╧╪

  Ling flew down on a starcycle, Granny on the back. He triggered the bike’s guns, and plasma fire chewed up flesh and rock as Ling tried to take out Chthonic.

  But that wasn’t the mission.

  “Ling, no,” Blaze started.

  But the archduke survived the attack. Chthonic spun the fusion balls on the flail in spinning arcs, creating a shield to protect him from the blasts. From the left sphincter on the end of his colon arms, the archduke released twenty feet of small intestine. The long length of gut lassoed the starcycle, and with a jerk the archduke sent the bike smashing into the uneven plane of rocks and meat where they stood. The starcycle rolled into a puddle of acid dragon puke. The starcycle sizzled and smoked as it disintegrated. There went their last bike! Damn!

  Ling, as fast and dexterous as ever, flipped back, grabbed Granny, and landed on the layer of debris covering the Etrusca ruin.

  But the archduke whipped the small intestine around and encircled Ling with it. With a flick of the ice-covered coil, Ling was sent flying back into an Etrusca tentacle. A metal tendril seized the stunned Meelah.

  At that moment, Cali bit through the last tentacle holding her and leapt free. She hit the ground and bounded toward Blaze. Blaze swung his shotgun to daze her for a second, but she dodged the attack and slipped around him. Before he could turn to face her, she dug her nails into his, piercing his armor. The pain was bright compared to the dull throb of his bullet wound.

  Cali’s snarls filled comms. She was no longer muted.

  The werewolf lunged for his neck, to snap it, but Blaze whirled and fired Ugly Betty into Cali’s chest. The impact of the fusion blast lifted the werewolf off him, and that was when Trina sped forward.

  She grabbed both of Cali’s arms and headbutted her. Cali took the blow right on her noggin. Her fiery eyes went blank for a moment from the force. She raised her rear claws and raked them down Trina’s chest. Those claws opened Trina’s skin from chin to crotch and black blood splattered onto the ground due to the Etrusca ruin’s gravity.

  Blaze couldn’t see what happened next because Chthonic barreled toward him on the loops of his intestine legs. His right sphincter hand held the fusion flail while the left housed the ice-covered gut whip.

  Lord of gross, master of blech.

  But Blaze was going to have to get this pinche pendejo to resurrect Granny before Ling was squeezed to death or the ocean of ectoplasm was pulled down onto them.

  Blaze fired his shotgun at the whip and deflected the fusion spheres of the flail with his ax. Chthonic twirled both the whip and the flail around; the brain being held by the hand seemed pretty adept at fighting two-handed. The eye blinked. But Blaze figured all that was just window dressing. Chthonic had been a whole planet—manipulating two weapons would be easy for a thing like that.

  As for Blaze, he was fighting injured. His bullet wound made him feel woozy and his knees watery.

  Blaze growled, took ahold of his grit, and dropped Ugly Betty. With his ax in both hands, he feinted to the right. Chthonic took the bait, and the gunny hacked off the intestine whip. It struck the ground, and some zombie head, still animated, caught hold of it with his teeth, chewing on the icy bit of awful.

  The flail’s orbs whirled toward Blaze, but he ducked them, though one of the orbs came so close to his visor that it scorched the surface, blinding him for a minute. But then the nanotech reconfigured the visor and he could see again.

  The gunny caught the next attack with his ax and managed to kick a foot into the stomachs, kidneys, and hearts that made up Chthonic’s middle.

  Meanwhile, Trina latched onto Cali’s throat with her fangs and ripped away fur, since her fangs couldn’t pierce the werewolf’s skin. Only Terran silver could do that.

  But it kept Cali’s jaws from snapping off the vampire’s head, which would kill her. Trina shifted her grip. Her chest was healed, the skin whole, but her clothes were shredded, and damn if she wasn’t indecent.

  But Trina was tough enough to fight n
aked. That badass Irish vampire didn’t give a shit.

  Cali and Trina continued to battle. Blaze fought Chthonic in glowing arcs of star fire. Ax blade met fusion orb, and armor shrugged off burns even as ice protected organs.

  Blaze managed to shear off one of the orbs by hitting the chain with his ax. But then Chthonic caught the severed chain in his other sphincter and made a kind of fist by rupturing the tissue.

  Blaze whirled his ax high overhead and brought it down, severing the collection of entrails in half.

  But just as he delivered the mighty blow, Chthonic punched Blaze in the chest with the chain. The gunny went flying, rolling across the ground of meat and rock. His ax fell from his hand, and an Etrusca tentacle reached forward from the forest and seized it. Bad news there. Good news, Ling was still struggling, so the Meelah wasn’t dead yet.

  The ectoplasm ocean above was almost within reach of them. The fluidlike tentacles were already reaching out. They were running out of time.

  Chthonic, though, was stopped for a minute as he pulled the two halves of his body together by binding himself up with lengths of intestines.

  Blaze glanced up to see Trina give Cali another head bash. The vampire then took a fresh grip on the werewolf’s arms—no, Trina grabbed Cali’s wrists.

  And once the vampire covered the werewolf’s wrists with her own massive hands, Cali started to change. The fur was sucked back into her skin and she started to shrink. But without her werewolf abilities, Cali would be dead in seconds from exposure to the unforgiving vacuum of space.

  The Lizzie Borden whooshed in, spun itself around, and slammed both Trina and Cali into the cargo bay. While the doors had been ripped off by the acid dragon that had nearly killed them, an energy field appeared, keeping the bay pressurized. Cali would be fine if Trina kept her hands locked around the small woman’s moon-rock bracelets.