by Aaron Crash
From above, the Lizzie Borden fired three fusion torpedoes into the energy shields and glass covering the Promenade. The defenses were weakened, and that allowed the starship to come blasting through the gorgeous dome.
The winds of the depressurizing Promenade whipped up a storm of swirling cyclonic power spinning upward toward the ceiling. They still had air for the moment, but it wouldn’t be long before the artificial atmosphere would be gone. For the time being, they had other things to worry about. Like being inside of a tornado. Stalls were picked up like they were matchstick houses. The escaping air plucked thousands of caterpillars off the ground, buildings, and trees while thousands stayed hooked to whatever they could grasp.
Konobi spun chains out of brutalized hands to catch hold of tree limbs or hook onto whatever they could. Other Konobi used the opportunity to throw their abattoir chains at the few untortured, living people who were also spinning through the air. A bluetrooper was seized by one of the wired, evil Humans, a mummy in gray cable. The Konobi took her hook and slammed the point through the trooper’s helmet and into his eye socket and into his brain.
Kosnowski himself was caught by five different abattoir chains, one in each leg, a hook in each arm, and one hook through the back of his neck. He was pulled apart in the maelstrom.
Another trooper found himself in the grips of a caterpillar who cradled him in its thoracic legs and chewed out his brains using its formidable mandibles.
Elle and Bill were back to fighting, though they spent most of the time trying to maneuver through the winds.
Ling had given up on his nunchakus and was using his plasma bow to send arrows into the caterpillars or Konobi threatening the living.
Cali had been entangled in dozens of abattoir chains and wrestled against them. Her fusion claws had lost their power, and Trina was doing her best to help free the werewolf. But Cali wasn’t showing her any gratitude. When Trina came close, Cali either clawed her or bit her. Trina’s mojo was falling fast from healing the many wounds she was receiving.
Fernando had wrapped himself around the demon generator, holding it to his chest with all four of his arms, though the pressure against the spikes impaling him must’ve hurt like hell.
As for the civilians with them, Charles was hit by a flying tree branch, and the Clicker was knocked unconscious. The IPC security director and the ambassador were also pounded by debris. Charles, Denning, and Randi drifted dangerously close to caterpillars. Grasping head tentacles ensnared Randi’s legs and pulled her toward the razor-sharp mandibles.
Ian and his werewolves twisted and turned in the cyclone, finding a way to move through the air away from Arlo. They’d given up on that prey.
Arlo had made himself comfortable. The old man sat back on a cushion of air, flicked away the butt of his cheroot, then took a precious sip from his bottle. He’d dropped his baseball bat. His .38 was still tucked in the front of his jeans. What the hell? Why wasn’t he using his pinche pistol?
Nauzea alone remained unaffected by the whirlwinds sweeping them up toward the vacuum of space. She laughed as the last of the bluetroopers died and the rest were sent upward.
Blaze tried to swim through the air, toward her, toward the demon generator, but the corpses—Meelah, bluetrooper, caterpillars, Konobi—kept getting in the way. He finally grabbed a length of abattoir chain and created a lasso. He sent it flying through the air, and it wrapped around Fernando’s head. He pulled the Clicker doctor to him along with the demon generator. He still might be able to save Randi from being eaten, feet first.
Bill took a swipe at Elle, but then the Clicker engineer paused to watch the Lizzie Borden come sweeping down. But the ship was changing, transforming, into a humanoid robot shape. The main torpedo tube became her left arm while her right arm was a collection of all the plasma cannons. Her torso was the bridge, and her back the cargo bay. The various rooms shifted around to become legs. She was headless, but of course, with all of her sensors, the Lizzie Borden could see just fine.
Blaze took a second to be completely amazed. Elle had thought Lizzie’s necrotechnological powers had been lost along with most of Xerxes’s mind, but it seemed the demon ship still had a few tricks left in her.
And of course, her main desire was clear. “Bill! Come back to us! Don’t let that fucking pinche puta bitch take you away from me!”
Bill clicked happily at the sight of his beloved spaceship. Elle was forgotten.
The werewolves went for the transformed Lizzie, but she socked Ian away, sending him spiraling from the force of the blow. She then pounded back Jared and Logan with her plasma gun. Needles and molten silver went flying.
The crippled Chase, a massive wound in his thigh, one of his knife hands chopped away, pathetically tried to stab the ship with his other butcher knife. Lizzie kicked him away into a collection of caterpillars, who latched onto the werewolf, holding him down.
Chase always was such a dickweed.
Blaze pulled himself along the chain lassoed around Fernando’s neck. That Clicker witch doctor was holding the demon generator, and the gunny aimed to get it. Fernando turned on him, but Blaze yanked on the chain. Fernando choked and blinked but didn’t have enough oxygen to fight back.
Blaze pulled Fernando close. He then triggered his ax and brought it down on the flashing lights and rough metal edges of the demon generator.
His ax chopped through the Onyx tech. It exploded in a flash of dark green light that blinded everyone. The Meelah worms immediately shrank to two-inch-long caterpillars, completely harmless.
Randi was saved. But so was Chase.
And they all continued to be thrashed around by the currents of air sucking the atmosphere out of the Promenade. But they’d just halved the number of enemies they were fighting. Buildings, stalls, uprooted trees, corpses, all burst out of the hole Lizzie had made in the ceiling and were sucked out into space. That would soon be their fate.
Blaze had lost his helmet, and the civilians didn’t have spacesuits. They’d die immediately.
In the end, though, death through asphyxiation would be better than death by Nauzea. Her infinite demonic power could not be stopped.
TWENTY-FIVE_
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A dark wave of Onyx energy burst from Nauzea’s naked, tormented flesh and it swept through them all. Blaze felt the pain of every trauma, the sharp memories of Arlo’s abuse, the loss of his father and then his mother, every bit of agony he’d ever known, the countless battles, the countless wounds, the ever-present disappointments.
“Not this time, torture whore!” Elle screamed. When Bill had stopped fighting her, she had swum through the air to get to Denning. Blood covered his chin. For a second, Blaze didn’t know why.
Then he saw it. Elle had ripped out the security director’s front teeth, and she held them in the air. Using her other hand, she slammed the last of Granny’s syringes into her thigh. Her nanotech armor exploded off her body, leaving her in a black dress showing the red and black tattoos across the left side of her body. Her red-and-black hair flowed around her face like a dark, bloody halo.
Both her Onyx levels and her VHI errored out in seconds. The Onyx witch had become an Onyx goddess. And the spell she cast?
A consume spell.
The scabs covering Nauzea’s eyes broke open wide. Pus like tears streamed down her face. No, not pus, actual tears mixed with blood. “No! I am a primal evil uncreated and eternal! I am the daughter of the All-Pig! No!”
Out of all the pain crashing through Blaze’s mind, watching his sister sacrifice her sanity by relapsing hurt the worst. This war with evil would kill them, but it wouldn’t do it cleanly. It would be a piecemeal slide into madness and then prayers for death.
Nauzea’s pale, tortured flesh shivered and shook, the needles, pins, and nails wiggling and dancing in her meat.
Elle floated above her. A nail shot out from Nauzea and hit Elle in her chest. It stuck there, piercing the Onyx goddess’s dress and skin
. Then a handful of pins, a whole sewing kit of needles, all streaked out of Nauzea’s meat and into Elle. Before long, Elle had been impaled by all of the metal. Her face twisted in pain.
What was happening?
Nauzea was left with only her skin, muscle, and bone for a moment. Then, her fingers were ripped from her hands and smacked into Elle’s hand. She arched her twenty fingers, some smooth brown skin, some desiccated flesh, pale and infected. The toes were next. Elle’s feet were bare, so they all watched as ten toes joined her existing ten.
Elle ripped Nauzea’s forearms from her elbows, shins from knees, and they struck Elle’s shoulders and hips. The arm stumps sprouted from her back like bizarre stubby wings. The legs stumps hit her hips, and it was as if she’d grown two tails. The upper part of the arms and legs joined them, and two tails became four, two wings became four.
Ian whirled in the air, going for Elle. The red of his exposed muscles seemed so bright. Lizzie must’ve seen it. She pounded him down into the floor below with a great sweep of her left arm.
Jared and Logan swam like running dogs toward the Onyx goddess, and Lizzie hit them with a fusion torpedo. The explosion slammed them against the wall.
Nauzea was only a head and torso, screaming as every last scrap was ripped off. Pus and blood spouted from her eyes, mucus gushed from her nose, spittle wept from her mouth. The demon’s chest ripped open and entrails spilled out, but Elle drew them to her. They wrapped around her throat like a gory necklace. A heart, a liver, kidneys, and the sack of a stomach were like charms on that necklace. The ribs formed new armor for Elle.
Lastly, the Onyx goddess took the head. Elle had grown, had doubled in size, and her mouth was big enough that she popped in Nauzea’s head, chewed through the skull and brain, and swallowed it down. Wearing the pins, needles, and nails of the archduchess of torture, wearing her entrails around her neck, wearing her arms and legs and extra fingers and toes, scarlet Onyx energy poured off Elle. It swirled around her, and she reached out a crimson-shrouded hand. Fernando’s bandolier of spell components was ripped off his body.
She cast a shield spell and closed the breach in the ceiling above. Everything tumbled back to the ground. Trees smashed into the ground, cracking the marble. Stalls exploded on impact. Buildings hit like grenades, and a great cloud of dust boiled up around them.
With Nauzea gone, the Konobi that were still alive screamed and howled in agony. Mercifully, though, some died immediately from the pain and horror. Those that were still alive and screaming fell to the ground and struck the marble in wet sounds of pulpy destruction.
Other Konobi corpses rained down, as did the thousands of caterpillars. It was a bloody mess on the floor of the Promenade, painted red and green with blood.
Elle floated above the wreckage as did the Lizzie Borden, Blaze and his team, Arlo, the three civilian survivors, and the Astral Corps werewolves. Ian and his buddies tried to wrestle against the force holding them, but even their prodigious strength was no match for the Onyx goddess’s raw power.
All were caught in Elle’s telekinesis magic. But was she Elle or Nauzea? The bizarre configuration of Nauzea’s limbs attached to her body was unsettling. And all of those pins, needles, and nails piercing her…
Elle coughed out Onyx speak, raised her arms, and flashed crimson. The needles, the arm wings, the leg tails, all disappeared as she absorbed them into her body. But she still had the twenty fingers and twenty toes, all discolored.
Using telekinesis, Elle plucked the metal spikes out of Bill and Fernando. She then threw out two pieces of honeycomb to heal their wounds. Both of their VHIs were back at a hundred percent.
Cali snapped and clawed, not at the energy holding her aloft, but at Trina. Blaze found his Cali Bad Dog command and shut her bracelets. She went from snarling wolf to weeping girl in seconds.
Trina sighed. She held an abattoir chain with a Konobi attached. Pulling up the dead guy, she drank from his neck while he was still warm.
Elle, still huge, twenty feet tall, seemed to have retrieved a little of her sanity. But then she whispered, “Panashoat is coming. The father of Onyx. Hunger personified. Master of appetites.”
Blaze found he wanted to chant the name, Panashoat, over and over. But he stopped himself. As did Ling. As did Arlo. The rest of them, though, chanted out the name maniacally.
“Panashoat! Panashoat! Panashoat!”
They all realized what they were doing and stopped abruptly.
“Elle, you can kick the Onyx again,” Blaze said. “I can help.”
Elle laughed savagely. “Give this up? Never! Devouring Nauzea has given me a power and peace I’ve never known. I have usurped her, and I will serve the All-Pig forever! I will bathe the galaxy in blood and feed my father, my true father, whole star systems.”
Blaze, floating above the ground, shook his head. “Your father, your real father, was Miguel Antonio Ramirez, Ph.D., and he died the day the Onyx Gate opened. We need to close it, Elle, not just for him, but for everyone.”
Elle snarled, “Never! Without the Onyx Gate, I would go back to being an insipid little creature wasting my minutes until death stole me away. Never. I will never be Human again. I will never let you close the Onyx Gate. Never!”
“You’ll have to kill me then,” Blaze said.
Cali, now a shy Mormon girl, dirty and tired, reached out to Elle. “You’ll have to kill me too, Elle. Don’t do this.”
Bill clicked. With Nauzea gone, he and Fernando were back to their old selves.
Fernando translated for his brother. “Bill already hates you, but he will hate you even more if you kill him. However, he is ready to die.” The Clicker doctor paused. “As for me, I want you as my queen, my lover, the source of all life, the one goddess eternal. But if you can’t see how blind you are, you will break my heart, and I will die fighting you. The Onyx Gate must be closed.”
“Yes, it must,” Trina said. She dropped the Konobi, and the drained corpse went tumbling to the ground. “Come on, Elle. Please.”
Arlo remained quiet.
Ling floated in front of Elle. “Elle, this is not who you are or who you were meant to be. We will stop you. You know in your heart that you cannot stand against us. And if we die? We will get to explore death, and while I am looking forward to that journey, I would prefer that I get to live a bit longer.”
“You all are nothing but feed for the All-Pig!” Elle shrieked. And she disappeared. Where she had been, a round circle of darkness appeared. Ian and the other Astral Corps werewolves were pulled into that round circle of darkness and were gone as well.
Not only had her telekinesis spell ended, but her shield spell keeping the Promenade’s atmosphere contained ended as well.
Once again, hurricane winds swept up everything not nailed down. But Blaze and the rest of the living would hit the atmosphere first.
The Lizzie Borden leapt into action. The blue-fire engines on her feet fired and she opened the cargo bay doors on her back. She collected the people before they were sucked out into space. With perfect precision, she caught all of them.
And then, while Blaze found himself in a tangle of bodies on the floor of the cargo bay, she transformed back into a starship and zoomed out of the Promenade and into the debris field of bodies, buildings, and uprooted Meelah trees.
Everyone groaned and sighed. They were all going to be bruised after that little run. And Elle wouldn’t be around to heal them. Once again, she wasn’t on board his ship, and Blaze felt her absence keenly. It hurt.
Arlo’s bottle had survived the battle as well as Lizzie’s cargo bay grab. There might’ve been one swallow left of Barf Baby inside. Maybe.
The old man gave Blaze a weary look. Then he spoke to the computer. “Lizzie, does the Onyx Gate ever appear in the Terran System?”
“Yes, Arlo, and welcome aboard. Granny did give us the coordinates of all possible Onyx Gate locations.”
Arlo patted the pocket of his shirt and found a package of c
rinkled LeMac cigarettes. He drew one out along with a plastic lighter from someplace called Tommy Tata’s Tavern. He muttered, “In twelve hours. In the Terran system.”
“The Terran system? The Onyx Gate?” Blaze remembered the reporter talking about the Etrusca ruin slowly moving toward Earth.
Arlo stuck a cigarette into the corner of his mouth. “Yeah to both. In twelve hours, it’ll show up, 3:15 a.m. Coloraska time. Not sure about that Greenwich shit. Goddamn Brits and their goddamn fish and chips. Gives me gas. It’ll be gone by 3:30, mountain time. I like mountain time. Sounds like a song about drinking.” He sang in a terrible voice, “Forget your crimes, ditch the wife, get drunk ’cause it’s mountain time.”
The old man paused, then said, “Your sister’s gone dark side, Blaze. Sorry to say, but we’re gonna have to put her down.”
Blaze wanted to argue with his piece-of-shit foster father, but he couldn’t.
Elle had become the enemy. Panashoat was coming. And though Arlo knew when the Onyx Gate would appear, the idea of actually surviving long enough to close it seemed like the most impossible of dreams.
Arlo lit up his LeMac but a quick spray of compressed air from inside the cargo bay blew the glowing cherry out of the tip.
“Whathefuck?” Arlo blinked.
“No smoking inside me,” Lizzie said. “I hhhate cigarettes.”
“But Blaze smokes his cigars inside you!” Arlo yelled.
“Cigars are not cigarettes,” Lizzie qualified. “And I like Blaze.”
“Fucking demon motherfucking computer!”
Denning crawled to his feet, shaking. He went over and stuck out a hand to help Blaze up. The gunny took it.
Both men considered the other in silence, and then Denning spoke. “I’m sorry. For everything. It might mean my job, but I’m going to help you in any way I can.”
Blaze nodded and didn’t say a word. Good enough.
Then Denning broke down. With his teeth gone, he had a lisp. “You…we…those things, and werewolves, and then this thhip transformed into a robot? And then thpells, the demon archduchess thing…how…was that normal? And if that’s normal, how do you thurvive time and time again?”