Barbarian Beast Bitches of the Badlands

by Carlton Mellick III

  “Are you sure they will fight?” Slayer asks.

  “They are afraid of the Rashers,” Swaggat says. “They’ll need to see some of them fall before they will fight.”

  “Then let’s make sure to kill them as quickly as we can,” Hyena says.

  Swaggat wets his lips. “There’s on more thing.”

  Hyena is worried by the tone of his voice. “What’s wrong?”

  “Two of your friends have been taken prisoner,” Swaggat says.

  “Bunny and Zizzy?” Slayer asks.

  “They’re going to be fed to the sea mothers within the hour,” he says.

  Slayer jumps to her feet and grabs her machine gun.

  “Then we’re going now,” she says. “Where are they?”

  “On the beach,” Swaggat says. “I don’t think we’ll reach them in time.”

  “We’ll reach them,” Slayer says.

  “We’re leaving,” Hyena tells Nova.

  Nova is masturbating furiously. She looks up at Hyena and growls, jerking her entire body in a frenzy. Hyena hardly recognizes her. Nova now has so much hair on her body that very little naked human skin can be seen. She looks more like a taller, bony version of Slayer. Her eyes are wild. It’s as if she’s already about to turn.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Hyena says. “We need to go. They’re going to kill Bunny and Zizzy.”

  Nova can’t hear her. She howls. It is more animal than human.

  “Come on!”

  The aphrodisiac in the air hits Hyena hard. Watching Nova masturbate, Hyena’s muscles quiver, dying to join Nova in a masturbation frenzy. The sexual frustration becomes too much for her and she explodes. But she releases the sexual tension into anger.

  Hyena kicks Nova over, tosses her in the air, and slams her back against the wall. The bricks crumble into Nova’s fur as Hyena pins her arms above her head and growls in her face.

  Nova thrashes and barks, biting the air at her. She wraps herself around Hyena and humps her leg.

  “Snap out of it.” Hyena head butts Nova, but she doesn’t stop snarling and barking.

  Hyena head butts her again and Nova’s eyes roll to the ground. She calms and breathes heavily. When Slayer enters the room, Hyena drops her. Nova shakes and twitches on the floor.

  Slayer goes to the wild girl. Nova’s gone through so many changes in such a short period of time that it’s beginning to affect her mind.

  “Cut this out,” Slayer says, locking eyes with her.

  Nova cowers beneath the alpha wolf.

  “We need you today,” she continues. “You just have to last long enough to complete the mission. Then I’ll let you turn.”

  “I can’t take it anymore,” Nova says.

  Hyena can hardly believe she’s still able to speak after going through such a big change. With longer teeth and a new dog tongue in her mouth, her words are like muffled growls. Nova begins to cry.

  She says, “Why couldn’t I be with him? Why did I have to fuck it up?”

  Hyena isn’t sure who she’s talking about.

  “I forgot him after the first few changes,” she says. “Why can’t I forget him now? No matter how many times I change he’s all I can think about.”

  “Who?” Slayer asks. “The Meat you took from Pippi?”

  Nova nods.

  “With every change I feel a section of my memory disappear,” she says. “But he stays. He refuses to leave my head.”

  Nova feels the fur on her face. “What if I can’t ever forget him? Even if I completely turn, what if his face is still in my mind? I’d roam the wilderness as a giant wolf, with no recollection of my humanity, except for my love of that fucking worthless asshole.”

  “Then here’s what you do,” Slayer says, grabbing Nova by the jaw. “If you still have him in your head after you become a big sister, you find his scent. You track him down and you eat him. Then you’ll be able to get him out of your head.”

  Nova says, “I don’t want to eat him. I just want to forget him.”

  “You’re a predator,” Slayer says. “Start acting like one.”

  Slayer steps away from her and turns to Hyena. “We leave in three minutes. Make sure she’s ready to fight.” Then she leaves the room.

  Hyena watches Nova as she scratches her new furry parts. Hair always itches when it first comes in. Nova tries to put on her spiked metal bikini, but it doesn’t fit anymore. Her body has grown too much. She tosses it aside and grabs her weapons.

  “One more battle,” Nova says. “Then I’m done.”

  Hyena rides with Nova, Swaggat, and four other Zoners in Swaggat’s truck. They head for the beach where Bunny and Zizzy will be sacrificed to the sea mothers.

  In the back seat, Nova is drunk on the Zoners’ scent. She sniffs the robe of one of the Zoners sitting next to her. She smells his shoulders and head, taking quick dog-sniffs. She opens his robe and presses her nose up and down his chest. Her hands grab him, pulling him closer as she inhales the scent deeply.

  Nova crawls on top of the man’s lap and wraps her fur around his small body. Then she pulls him inside of her. The man politely gives in to Nova’s advances. As she fucks him, he expresses awkwardness and discomfort, but he tolerates the act. He reacts as if he’s stuck in a boring conversation with a stranger who insists on making small talk. He’s just nodding his head politely, hoping it’s over soon.

  “Is it safe for my friend to have sex with him?” Hyena asks Swaggat. “Won’t she get infected with his worms?”

  Swaggat shakes his head. “His worms are dormant like mine. Very few Green Fish are connected to the sea mothers.”

  Hyena looks down at her stomach and feels the worms crawling through her abdomen. “Nova, you should stop. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  Swaggat puts his tentacle hand on Hyena’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. The sea worms will make her stronger. She won’t fall so easily in battle.”

  Nova orgasms twice against the man, digging her claws into his neck. When he goes limp, she crawls across the seat to the next man. She’s drunk on the drug they release. She can’t get enough.

  “Don’t go too far,” Hyena tells her.

  Nova licks her plump black nose at the hyena woman, but doesn’t stop.

  They drive into a village, down a street lined with purple and blue cone shell buildings. The place looks deserted.

  “Where is everyone?” Hyena asks Swaggat.

  Swaggat looks around, scanning through the windows.

  “They must be on the beach,” Swaggat says.

  Just outside of the village, they pull over and open the backs of their trucks. Inside there is an assortment of weapons. All of them are from the old world. Lots of ancient rusted pistols and rifles.

  “We don’t know how to use them,” Swaggat says. “We were hoping you could show us.”

  Hyena pulls out an old shotgun. When she pumps it, the barrel breaks off.

  “These are worthless,” Hyena says.

  “What do you mean?” Swaggat says. “We’ve been saving them for generations, just for this day. They have to work.”

  Slayer comes over to their vehicle.

  “None of them work?” Slayer asks.

  Hyena digs through the old guns. “I don’t think so.”

  Out of the dozens of guns in the truck, only four seem like they could possibly work. And even those are most likely too dangerous to operate. There is very little ammo and most of it is the wrong caliber.

  “I don’t think you should bother using these,” Slayer says.

  “But four of them work,” Swaggat says.

  “They’re just going to blow up in your face. What else have you got?”

  Swaggat frowns at her and goes to the back of the next truck. “We’ve got plenty of spear guns and flame-saws.”

  Hyena examines a flame-saw. It is some kind of strange mix of chainsaw and flame-thrower. The chainsaw blade stretches about five feet, like a long sword. Swaggat takes one o
f them and straps it on.

  “We invented these flame-saws in secret,” he says. “But we’ve never actually used them in battle before.”

  “It looks deadly,” Hyena says.

  “Hopefully it’s as deadly as it looks,” Swaggat says.

  Slayer pulls a blanket off of a large machine behind the spear guns. It is an enormous double-barreled Gatling gun.

  “What is this?” she asks.

  Swaggat says, “We have no idea. Some kind of weapon that was built by revolutionaries long ago. They died before it was ever put to use.”

  Hyena examines it. “It’s not that old. I think it’ll still work.”

  She inspects the ammunition. There is plenty of it. The bullets are enormous. Just one could barely fit inside a tin can. They must be 180 caliber. The thing wasn’t designed to shoot people. It was designed to shoot tanks.

  “The thing must weigh a ton,” Hyena says. “I don’t know how we’ll be able to carry it. Maybe if we had three wolf women holding it as one fired.”

  “We can fire it from the back of the truck,” Slayer says.

  “We can’t take the trucks on the beach,” Swaggat says. “The wheels will get stuck in the sand.”

  “And they’ll hear us coming,” Vermin says, peeking over Hyena’s shoulder.

  “We’ll leave it for now,” Slayer says. “If we run into trouble we’ll retreat here. We can use it for defense.”

  The others agree. The Zoners take spear guns, axes, flame-saws, and pitchforks. Then they head up the hills toward the beach.

  When they arrive, the beach is empty. They see no one for miles, not even infected animals coming to feed themselves to the sea beasts.

  “Where are they?” Slayer asks Swaggat. “You said they’d be here.”

  Hyena squints her eyes at something down the beach, near the water. It looks a bit like a large dead animal that has washed up on the shore.

  “What’s that?” she asks them.

  After staring for a while, they discover that it is two women, tied back to back. Bunny and Zizzy. They are still alive. There is also a group of eight Red Fish coming down the beach toward their prisoners.

  “Let’s go,” Slayer says.

  Slayer leads the charge, sprinting down the beach. She fires her machine gun, taking three Red Fish down. Spear guns are fired. The Zoner cultists go down without a fight. None of them even try to run away. Once the last of them falls, Slayer goes to Bunny and Zizzy. Bunny has a bloody nose and black eye showing through her fur, but otherwise she’s fine. Zizzy, on the other had, snarls and snaps at Slayer as she approaches her. Worms crawl in and out of her face.

  “She’s infected,” Bunny says to Slayer. “Stay back.”

  Swaggat examines the bodies of the dead Zoners. He says, “These aren’t Red Fish.” He points to the bonds around their wrists. “They’re my people, in disguise.”

  “It’s a trap,” Slayer says, as an army of shark men emerges from the sea.

  At the sight of the massive army of shark men, many of the Zoners panic and flee for their lives. Even Nova and Vermin flee. Those who remain to fight against the Rashers only do so because it is too late for them to get away.

  “One of your friends sold you out,” Slayer tells Swaggat.

  The fish man ignores her, fidgeting with his flame-saw in a panic. It doesn’t seem to be working.

  Hyena cuts Bunny free of her ropes, but leaves Zizzy tied up. The young girl thrashes on the ground with her ankles tied to her one remaining arm.

  As Bunny gets to her feet, Slayer tosses her a pistol from her side holster. Then they all stand back to back as the Rashers surround them. Just three wolf women and five Zoners against the horde of shark soldiers.

  As Hyena spins her spear at them, Bunny speaks over her shoulder. “Some rescue.”

  “We just need to kill some of them,” Hyena says. “Once the other villagers see that they can be killed, they will join the fight.” Then she looks at Swaggat. “Right?”

  Swaggat looks at her. His panicked face shows more than just doubt. His followers are probably so far gone that they won’t be able to see any of the Rashers fall. Without answering, he returns to his weapon. The chainsaw motor isn’t working. The machine slides around in his sweaty tentacles.

  They open fire on the Rashers. Bunny and Slayer focus their fire on one of them at a time. They aim for the face and neck. Red bubbles pop from fishy flesh as the bullets hit. It takes twelve rounds to the head before the first one goes down. The Zoners shoot them with their spear guns, but the spears don’t go very deep and it takes them several minutes to reload between shots. Swaggat still tries to get his weapon to work.

  Hyena isn’t able to fight at her full potential with the others around, but she does her best. She runs at one of the Rashers spear-first. As he swings a claw at her, she drops to the ground and drives the blade of her spear through his crotch. It cuts into his pelvis. But it doesn’t kill him. The Rasher stomps down on Hyena’s chest so hard she hears a crack in her ribs and all of the air is crushed out of her lungs. She twists the spear inside of his pelvis, digging it deeper into his abdomen, cutting through his entrails. The Rasher only puts more weight on his foot, grinding her body into the sand.

  Three Rashers charge the main group, trampling Bunny down. They grab two Green Fish and rip their chests open, biting through bones like french fries. One of the Green Fish is picked up over a Rasher’s head and then torn in half.

  Swaggat gets his flame-saw going and revs the engine. The five-foot chainsaw blade roars as fire shoots out below the chain. He swings his flaming chainsaw at a rasher like a sword. The flame-saw only burns the Rasher, but it makes him recoil. Then Swaggat drives it into the shark man’s stomach and holds it there, cutting and burning at the same time.

  Hyena can’t stab the spear any further into the shark man’s abdomen. It’s caught on a bone somewhere inside of his body, and for some reason the shark is still fully alive. He stomps down on Hyena’s chest again and blood erupts from her throat into the air. He stomps again and several sea worms rise up into her mouth.

  As the spear slips from Hyena’s grasp, the shark man’s head explodes and he drops to the sand next to her.

  Nova and Vermin walk down the shore toward them. Hyena hardly recognizes Nova anymore. Her muscles are incredibly large, with a full wolf snout and blood in her eyes. She carries the massive double-Gatling gun over her head, like it’s only as heavy as a cinderblock. The gun probably weighs 800 pounds, but Nova has enough mass on her body now that she can lift it. She has the strength of ten werewolf women.

  She drops to her knees, holding the gun over one shoulder, and Vermin takes the controls. They fire the 180 caliber rounds at the crowd of Rashers. The thunderous, booming sounds of the bullets hammering out of the Gatling barrels are closer to that of an earthquake than a machine gun.

  Hyena stays on the ground, covering her head, as the shark men explode all around her. The bullets don’t pierce their flesh, they pulverize it. Like grenades going off beneath their skin, the Rashers’ torsos her blown in half. Their heads are blown from their necks. Their stomachs are split down the middle. Their limbs are shredded into confetti. Hyena looks up at the sky as blood rains down, chunks of meat splash into the water, and intestines spray across the beach like washed up seaweed.

  Then hundreds of villagers come over the hills with axes and pitchforks, to join Swaggat and the wolf women in the battle. They cry in hissing fish-like voices as they gang up on the Rashers and drive them back into the sea.

  As Swaggat drives his flaming chainsaw deeper into the Rasher, he hits a trigger that releases a spurt of gasoline which covers the shark. As he goes up in flames, Swaggat cuts him in half, and stands victorious over the mutant three times his size.

  The Green Fish cheer as the Rashers retreat. Only a handful of the shark men make it back into the water. The others splatter into messy pieces as they flee across the sand, not quick enough to get away from Nova�
�s colossal machine gun.

  When it is over, Nova drops the gun in the sand and walks away, over the hill, toward the village.

  When Vermin meets up with the others, Slayer asks her, “Where’s Nova going?”

  Vermin has no idea.

  As Hyena pulls her spear out of the Rasher corpse, she says, “She said she would leave as soon as the battle was over. That’s probably what she’s doing.”

  “But the battle isn’t over yet,” Slayer says.

  Swaggat brings them to a dock down the beach. Several motor boats are tied here.

  “We still need to take down Vinson,” he says.

  He points out to the sea.

  He says, “The ruling class lives on an island out there. He’ll be there.”

  The Green Fish load several spear guns into the motor boats.

  “We can only take you,” Swaggat says to Hyena. “The other women must stay.”

  “Why?” Slayer asks.

  He points to the waves. “The sea mothers will attack our boats if we have wormless humans on board. You have dormant worms, so we can only take you.”

  Bunny steps forward. “I’m immune. I can go as well.”

  Swaggat examines her. “Your worms aren’t dormant. Why are you able to control your own mind?”

  “I told you I’m immune,” she says.

  Swaggat shakes his head. “That’s impossible.”

  Hyena steps in. “Two years ago she was infected with the parasites, but we killed the sea creature that controlled her. She’s been immune ever since.”

  The Zoners are shocked by her words.

  “You killed a sea mother?” Swaggat asks. “Impossible.”

  He looks at Bunny. Bunny shrugs. The Zoners are disturbed and offended by this. These revolutionaries might be enemies of the Rashers, but the sea mothers are still sacred to them.

  “Fine, both of you will go,” Swaggat says, his eyes angry and suspicious at Bunny.

  “I’ll be right back,” Bunny says.

  She runs over the hill and several minutes later she returns on her motorcycle, holding her chainsaw-boomerang over her shoulder.