by Aaron Crash
The Lizzie Borden spun around and fired plasma bolts into the tentacles holding Ling. Blaze wasn’t sure who was shooting, but the precision was as amazing as the piloting. Once Ling was free, the starship also collected him into the cargo bay, magically spinning so the Meelah floated right inside.
Blaze realized it was Lizzie that was running and gunning that starship with such expertise, blowing up the bad guys and saving his crew. Maybe this whole Xerxes/Lizzie thing was gonna work out after all.
An ectoplasm tentacle reached from above and tried to grab the Lizzie, but she blasted out and away. She maneuvered through both Etrusca and ectoplasm tentacles and dodged the last of the IPC ships, undead space dragons, and ghost ships. The liquid Onyx ocean was protecting them all from the meteoroids.
“We’re coming back for you,” Fernando said through comms.
“No, you’re not,” Blaze said. “There is no way you’ll make it out from under the ectoplasm ocean in time. You’re going to have to leave me.”
“Fucking just leave you?” Fernando erupted uncharacteristically, though in times of high stress, the Clicker doctor was known to curse. “What massive amounts of bullshit are you spouting, Gunny? We will not leave you behind!”
“You have to. I can’t order you to, Fernando, since we’re family. But I can ask you to respect my decision. If we’re brothers in arms, do this for me,” Blaze said, nodding. Yeah, this was the right thing to do. No use risking his ship and his crew for one last suicide mission. The ectoplasm, in some places, was only fifty feet above the Etrusca ruin.
Fernando didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, he sighed. “Gunny, I’m sorry. We thought we’d accurately predicted the geometry of the space between the ectoplasm and the Etrusca structure, the physics of all the objects, both living and dead, but it seems we made a mistake in our calculations.”
Bill clicked mournfully.
Fernando translated. “Bill apologizes. He says he hates you, he won’t mourn you, but he will regret his poor math for at least a week. You know my brother, he takes his arithmetic very seriously.”
“Are Trina, Cali, and Ling safe?” Blaze asked.
“They are,” Fernando said.
“Then that’s good enough. Keep in comms range. I’ll get the coordinates for the Onyx Gate and send it to you.”
“Goodbye, my friend.”
Blaze smiled sadly. “Yeah, Fernando, goodbye to you as well. Give my love to…” His voice broke. He laughed at himself. “Yeah, tell them all I love ’em. Go get Elle and get the hell out of here. I’ll get the coordinates from Chthonic or Granny, one way or another.”
“Yes, Gunny. Fernando out.”
Blaze was left alone on the uneven plane. A few zombies managed to rip their arms out of rock and they reached pathetically for him. Chthonic’s intestine whip was being chewed on by two undead mouths now.
A small photon dragon, buried deep among the planetary debris, let loose a breath of dark liquid but its head was held in place by another dragon skull and a hunk of rock. It only could breathe in one direction…straight up. It was like an Onyx geyser. Every so often, streams of black destructive energy would spout up from the rocks.
Chthonic had pulled himself together, so to speak, and stood with the flail extending from his hand sphincter. “Even if you win, Blaze, surely you know you will die in the end. I will have you. If not today, then perhaps by cancer when you are fifty, heart disease when you are sixty, a stroke at seventy, dementia at eighty. That is why I can be so patient. Close the Onyx Gate. Win your little victories. I own life, and I own death. And all will come to me in the end.”
Blaze walked over and picked up Ugly Betty. Luckily, the tentacle hadn’t crushed it. “Today, I’m alive. Today, I’m gonna win.” He grinned against the pain of his wounds, against the ectoplasm ocean being pulled down into the Etrusca ruin, against ultimate defeat.
He jacked a fresh shell into his shotgun. “This moment, this minute, is mine. And you can’t touch it.” Blaze fired and blew the flail out of Chthonic’s sphincter hand. The blast turned one side of the villain’s “body” to charred meat.
Chthonic screamed in either frustration or pain. Either way, it didn’t matter. But rocks on the ground split, and a little kid’s arm rose from the ground and slammed into the muck of Chthonic’s shoulder joint. A wide swath of dragon hide whipped up from the plateau and covered some of the archduke’s exposed organs. He was rebuilding his body using the organic materials around them. Xerxes had done it with tech, so it made sense Chthonic could do it with meat.
Blaze worked the action and put another fusion bolt through the walking douchebag of guts and decay. “You’re either going to resurrect Granny or you’re going to tell me where the Onyx Gate is going to be on March sixteenth.”
More flesh and damaged skin rose from the ground, even half of a head, all joined in rebuilding the patchwork body. “I will do nothing of the kind,” Chthonic hissed. “My lord and master told me you were coming. He is wrong to fear you. Look how easily I’ve dealt with you.”
Blaze worked the action of his shotgun and blew off the archduke’s left arm of icy, gory intestine with the sphincter grip. A fat man’s meaty arm broke loose from the ground and replaced the lost limb.
Still, Chthonic stumbled backward toward the photon dragon geyser.
“Get to talking, pendejo,” Blaze said, continuing to force the archduke to retreat. “I got plenty of ammo, but I reckon you’ll run out of meat at some point.”
Chthonic laughed. “You say you own this minute. You can have it. I will shed this body. I will disappear into the beautiful ocean above us and whisk my wobbling belly of death and decay across the cosmos.”
Chthonic tripped over a dragon claw reaching up from the rock. He was right near the geyser. And he was getting even more chatty. “When my lord and master returns, all of time and space will be his. And I will be seated at the right hand of the father. I will come again in glory to devour the living and the dead!”
“That’s not how that goes!” Elle shrieked. She came blasting through the ectoplasm ocean, through miles and miles and miles of the toxic acidic evil ichor. Her shield spell had kept her safe or maybe her continual consume spell had merely drained the liquid Onyx into her own cells. No way to know and it didn’t matter. She was there.
Her eyes glowed red, and her hands were lost in the crimson shadows of the Onyx energy coalescing around her fingers. The Onyx around her fingers swirled like bits of fragmented, bloody midnight. She wasn’t in her armor anymore but stood in her black dress, the left side of her body covered with red and black tattoos.
Chthonic took a gory step back. His one eye, held in a hand sticking up from his horrendous body, was clearly shocked at her power. The mouth in another hand trembled. The lord of death, master of haunts, was totally intimidated by the Onyx witch.
Elle laughed. “I have come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. And my kingdom will have no end.”
“You tell him, sister.” Blaze stormed forward and drove Ugly Betty’s stock into the ice-skin of the bundle of guts, dragon skin, and dead people’s arms. Chthonic went sprawling into the blast of Onyx breath as the photon dragon let out a shriek.
The powerful black breath evaporated the body, reducing skin, limbs, and organs into their component parts. But at the same time, Chthonic drew in other dead bodies from the ground, causing an earthquake of zombies and undead dragons rising from the miles of rock and filth under them. He was creating a new body, a bigger body, with every kind of limb, wing, hand, leg, heart, brain, head, and tri-sword tail. Even as the Onyx breath tore away the flesh, he added new pieces. The archduke also pulled down half-digested bodies from above them in the ectoplasm. All that decayed meat smacked wetly into his growing, disgusting form.
Elle didn’t give a fuck. She cast out a silver cross. She growled out Onyx speak and then spoke in a stream of Latin.
Exorcizamus te, omnis immunde spiritus, omni satan
ica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica, in nomini et virtute Domini nostri Jesu Christi, eradicare et effugare a Dei Ecclesia, ab animabus ad imaginem Dei conditis ac pretioso divini Agni sanguini redemptis
Chthonic’s growing collection of dead parts spasmed in the deadly shower of Onyx breath from the dragon below. Rivers of fingers, toes, knees, elbows, butts, backbones, all those things and more streamed into the archduke’s body, but Elle was pulling the thing’s true body from the slaughterhouse golem.
A spectral hooded figure emerged, faint at first, but growing clearer as Elle cast her exorcism spell. Blaze couldn’t believe it, but it was the grim reaper’s visage appearing out of all that flesh.
The bones of Chthonic’s ghostly form were as white as funeral napkins. The fabric of his hood was the color of an endless night trapped inside a coffin, buried alive. He raised arms that were the rusted metal of scythes left out in the rain during a plague.
Blaze had to glance away. He couldn’t look at the thing appearing from out of the Onyx geyser because he knew it would drive him insane. Seeing guts walking around was one thing. Seeing death itself take shape was another.
He watched his sister instead—hands raised, chapped lips moving, her entire body lit up with a spectral crimson light. Her teeth were as black as ink at that moment, and her eyes were so red they looked like freshly oxygenated blood.
No, it wasn’t the red of blood. It was the scarlet of an endless fire.
“Anything!” Chthonic wept. “Anything for you!” The hands holding up its eye, mouth, and brain all fell from the sky and landed on the sheet covering Granny. Those hands all glowed with a dark power, and Granny gasped in a breath. Though there was nothing to breathe.
“Oh, it is far too late for that, you ridiculous thing.” Elle tossed out that one last critical snare sphere, an orb about the size of a softball, with glittering green lights around it. She also flung a bit of spiderweb while growling in Onyx speak.
The snare sphere’s lights turned to red as the archduke was pulled down into the sphere, to be trapped forever inside it.
A last howl echoed across the grisly plateau. Blaze, despite his helmet and the vacuum of space, heard the gush of the guts and other gross crap slap down onto the rock covering that section of the Etrusca ruin.
Elle bent and picked up the smoking snare sphere, sticking it in a pouch on her bandolier.
Blaze’s mouth dropped open. “How in the hell could you trap it? We tried to catch Xerxes a dozen times with a snare sphere, and it never worked.”
Elle ignored him and turned her eyes on Granny. The strange ageless witch rose from her sheet and floated there, her white hair floating around her head. Her throat was whole again, and she was breathing. Not sure how, since there wasn’t any oxygen.
She was in her black dress and black stilettos. Her oddly gorgeous dark eyes opened. It seemed, like Ling, Granny could survive the touch of thousands of ghosts as easily as she’d survived the Gorebacks. And though a werewolf had killed her, here Granny was, back to life, somehow breathing in the vacuum of space.
“The Onyx Gate!” Blaze yelled at the woman. “Where is it going to be on March sixteenth?”
Granny grinned and settled down in front of Elle. Compared to his sister, the ageless woman seemed rather frumpy and kind of worse for the wear.
Granny reached out a hand.
Elle growled, “Touch me and die, old woman.”
Whatever strange magic or energy gave the Etrusca ruin its gravity seemed to have an effect on soundwaves. Elle and Granny could talk like they were in a living room.
Granny chuckled. “Oh, and I’m so very old. I remember the smell of the desert when I was a little girl. I remember cooking fish brought to me by a messiah. And I remember kisses, and donkeys, and dusty cities owned by a great empire. And I remember his blood and the whips and falling, three times.”
“Tell us what we need to know,” Elle said in a thunderous voice.
An ectoplasm tentacle reached for her and she blew it away with a burst of Onyx from her eyes. It shriveled and turned to dust.
The ocean was twenty feet above them and continuing to drop, though the tendrils had become more reticent in trying to get them. Even that evil ocean of supernatural fluid was wary of the goddess his sister had become.
“You won’t last until March,” Granny said. “Trapping Chthonic was a mistake, and what you’re doing with Xerxes on your ship is a special stupid kind of dumb. And you haven’t even met Nauzea, who is already salivating over you. Xerxes was a punk-ass bitch, and Chthonic was a scared little pussy compared to her. No, the sooner you get to the Onyx Gate, the better. I can tell you where. Arlo can tell you when, and I don’t mean in March.”
Granny leaned in and whispered something to Elle. Granny then leaned back, and the strange ageless woman blinked tears from her eyes. “I loved my son, Elle, and I loved you, though you were never meant to be my daughter. But what a daughter you have become…wonderful, mighty, everlasting, a princess. You were my princess though I was never a very good queen even at my best. Goodbye, Elle.”
Granny vanished. Didn’t even cast a spell. She was just…gone.
Blaze blinked. “Why did you trap Chthonic, Elle? Why didn’t you kill him?”
The goddess Elle turned to look at him but didn’t answer his questions.
That pissed him off. “Get over yourself, Elle. I knew you when you were just some girl and not a goddess. Cut the crap.”
Nothing from his sister.
Blaze changed tactics. “Did you really get the coordinates from Granny?”
Elle finally spoke. “Yes. And I sent them to Lizzie, including the location on March sixteenth. But she didn’t just give us coordinates, she gave us an algorithm to create more coordinates, ever growing. She basically told us the Onyx Gate would be everywhere at some point. Arlo will give us the time of each location.”
Blaze rolled his eyes. “But she whispered in your ear for like five seconds. Whatever, Elle.”
“And in that five seconds she told me everything, about her, about the Onyx Gate, about myself.” Elle stepped back.
The ectoplasm ocean was so close Blaze could reach up and touch it. The Onyx geyser from the buried photon dragon hit it and blasted away the liquid until it hit a bundle of undead dragons wrapped around each other into a ball, slowly liquifying. The ectoplasm rippled forward and filled the hole.
“Are you going to get us out of here?” Blaze asked.
Elle didn’t respond. She just stood there, crackling with power. She stepped forward and pressed one of Granny’s stainless-steel syringes full of black inky Onyx mojo into Blaze’s hand. “For Trina.”
“She thought you used it,” Blaze said.
Elle sighed. “Clearly, I didn’t. Use it on her. She’ll need it. You’ll know when.”
Then his sister vanished as well, leaving Blaze alone.
He looked up, glanced around, put his shotgun on his shoulder, and shook his head. “Elle, are you messing with me?”
Nothing answered. He checked his display and there was no sign of Elle or the Lizzie Borden. The ectoplasm ocean must’ve still feared her since no other tentacles reached for him. But in the end, they didn’t need to. The fluid would eventually consume him and turn him into liquid Onyx.
He grinned. Damn, left to die by his sister. It hurt, but he wasn’t going to spend his last minutes alive feeling bad. No, they’d won. His crew had the coordinates. They’d done it.
“Mission accomplished.” He checked his shotgun. He was out of ammo. He laughed and said, “Rounds complete.”
His forgotten wounds reminded him he’d been shot and scratched, and he marveled at how adrenaline and battle were the ultimate painkillers. He limped over and shot the photon dragon and ended that Onyx geyser. That was how he wanted to go out, taking out the bad guys. He picked up the fallen fusion flail and circled back and got his ax from the tentacles. He had t
o use the fusion flail to chop off the grasping coils, but soon he had his ax back.
With his weapons in hand, he waited for the end. Being dissolved by ectoplasm seemed kinda anticlimactic after all the battles he’d been in, but it was probably better than running out of oxygen.
He wasn’t sure where Elle had gone or if she cared about closing the Onyx Gate, but he knew his crew wouldn’t rest until they saved the universe and ended the evil, even if that meant going up against Elle in her transformed state.
They had what they had come for, the location of the Onyx Gate on that single day in March. But Granny had been right. They couldn’t wait for March.
Arlo was somewhere in Meelah territory, according to Xerxes who was now Lizzie, though the archduke’s memory had pretty much been fried. Oh well. Finding a drunk prick like Arlo in Meelah space would be pretty easy. Hell, the Meelah would probably pay for them to remove that asshat from their space.
Etrusca tentacles were being sucked up into the ectoplasm, and already the six-million-year-old metal was flecking away as the liquid Onyx ate it, increasing the size of the ocean.
He thought about an old movie Arlo had made him watch about a blob thing. The stupid movie had been black-and-white boring, but the throbbing ectoplasm above did remind him of that old movie. How big could it get? Would it fill the quadrant?
Another mystery he probably wouldn’t be around to solve.
He chuckled again at what Chthonic had said. “Well, Mr. C, looks like you won’t have to wait for me to get throat cancer to come and get me. Yeah, there are definitely worse ways to die.”
Damn, but he wished he had a cigar for his final moments.
Oh well.
The ectoplasm hit the top of his helmet and the nanotech started to sizzle and pop as the microscopic robots dissolved away.