by Aaron Crash
Goddamn, that cat, she was going to save the day when nothing else could.
Elle paused. “Raziel. I can’t. No. He can’t.”
Blaze drove himself to his feet, and though he was about to lose consciousness, he wasn’t going to die on his knees. He’d go out standing tall in his boots.
Elle’s face went from half scabby to normal. The nails in her skull were sucked back inside. The spike as well. She looked normal for a moment, other than the fact she was standing on an asteroid held by a planet-sized pig skeleton in tentacle armor.
That was odd.
Blaze grinned at her. “Come on, Elle. Let’s go fight the bad guys. We have one big pinche pendejo that needs us to kick him in the ass.”
“The big-ass skeleton-pig-demon-god thing?” Elle asked.
Raziel meowed in annoyance. She wanted them to go get Panashoat. Or she might’ve had a hankering for some tuna. Either way…
Elle fixed Blaze’s armor and he was ready to go again, ax in his hands and his arm gun fully loaded.
“Are you done being evil?” Blaze asked her.
The Onyx goddess shook her head. “No. What’s your capacity for evil, Blaze? What darkness lies in your heart?”
Blaze smiled, so tired, but so ready to figure out a way to kick the shit out of Panashoat and get the Lizzie Borden back in the air so they could close the Onyx Gate. “I’m a cliché, Elle, like you said before. I like chorizo, cigars, and women. I want to do the right thing. I want to take care of my family, and I don’t want to be like Arlo. Other than that, I’m as corruptible as any fucker I suppose.”
Elle glanced down at Raziel and then back to Blaze. It was like she and the cat were communing.
“There is comfort in the clichés,” Elle whispered. “Your simplicity just might save us all. Be simple, Blaze. Be a simple man.”
Holy crap, was she referencing ancient classical music? Was that Lynyrd Skynyrd?
“Hurry, assholes!” Granny screamed. “I can’t keep the shield spell going for very much longer! And Panashoat is trying to get in at us!”
Everyone conscious chanted out the name three times:
“Panashoat! Panashoat! Panashoat!”
Tentacles covered every inch of the half-circle shield above them. Between the coils, crabs scritched and scratched here and there. Lobster tails were pushed against the invisible barrier. Crayfish antennae lay like tendrils of hair pushed down against the shield.
Elle took out a piece of honeycomb from a hidden pocket. It was for a healing spell. Only, it wasn’t. Something about the way she paused and held it.
“Take this, all of you, and eat it,” Elle whispered.
“Hey, don’t go pissing off the Catholics…” Blaze started.
Elle tossed honeycomb to him, and he caught it in his left hand. In his right was his ax.
And then his sister healed but didn’t heal him—she poured Onyx into his cells and he doubled in size.
Lizzie’s hull groaned under his weight.
Blaze stepped away and landed on the ground. And then doubled in size again. As did his ax.
Elle was transferring every bit of Onyx in her into him…every last part of Nauzea…and when she ran low, she threw out human teeth to cast a consume spell. The Onyx energy pouring out of the gate filled her first and then she transferred that energy into him.
Blaze grew through the shield and it collapsed. The tentacles grabbed him, but he slashed them away with his ax. A lobster snipped at his neck, and Blaze used his arm gun to blow it to pieces. Then he was too big for that shit to matter.
Every one of the starships was covered with Etrusca creatures, and they were digging through the hulls with their metal pinchers. Through windows, Blaze saw weapons fire flashing as the Clickers, Meelah, and Humans inside used small arms to fight the swarm.
There were plenty of creatures to fight. IPC wasps fired plasma bolts through a shark to get a dozen lobsters behind it. An Etrusca octopus covered another drone and used its metal tentacles to pull off the dangling engines and guns on the wasp. But then a theta-particle beam destroyed both the octopus and the wasp and twenty other sea creatures. It was a full-on battle and both sides were taking casualties.
The Relentless was torn in half by a tentacle from the ass-end of Panashoat’s armor. The Humans fleeing in gunships from the sphere-shaped ship were attacked by crayfish who pinched through the windshields and into the people inside.
The Adamant had launched its own gunships and blasted through the crayfish, getting revenge on the monsters for destroying the other Cavalier.
Humans in spacesuits fought crabs clustering around gun towers on top of the Paladin. The retrofitted Meelah explorer sent missiles exploding through Etrusca whales with razor-sharp spikes on their fins. Their huge alien faces continued to chant Panashoat, as did the other millions of creatures.
It was chaos.
But Blaze quickly outgrew the space battle.
He was getting bigger, his armor was getting bigger, the hydrogen shells, everything. The Onyx was enhancing not only his own cells, but they were somehow transforming the microscopic robots, so Blaze’s armor grew with him.
He felt the pain of Nauzea fill him, and the needles pierced his insides, his outsides, every part of him full of spikes and agony. But they’d learned from Ling that though pain is a part of life, it’s not what life is about.
There was so much power flowing into him, from his sister, from the Onyx Gate, that it was easy to squash down the endless prattle of Nauzea, tempting him to feel guilty about his past sins and his future transgressions. It was all just blather.
Panashoat’s quiet, calm voice hit his ears. “So, your little goddess sister is giving me something else to eat. I will enjoy eating you, Mr. Ramirez.”
“Ain’t enough beer in the universe for that,” Blaze said. Though he was only half the size of the All-Pig, he drove his ax into the chest of the thing. “And it’s Gunny Ramirez, motherfucker.”
Panashoat crushed the asteroid in his grip and then drove a fist into Blaze’s visor.
Blaze was thrown back.
No way could he fight the All-Pig. But he was going to. Just like he fought big Daddy Crayton in McCook back on Earth. Just another bully. Just another underdog fight. And if there was one thing that Arlo had taught him, it was how to take a punch.
Blaze lost track of Elle and his family, but she was still alive, because he continued to grow until he was the same size as the All-Pig. Now, the Etrusca sea creatures fighting the starships looked pitiful and small, like colorful gnats surrounding his midsection.
The Onyx Gate might as well have been a toilet overflowing. The red energy streamed from its sides, and Blaze understood it now. Not only was his body growing, but his soul and understanding were as well. He slowed time down with a thought. He was tired of the apocalyptic timer ticking down.
He’d deal with the All-Pig, and then he’d worry about the Onyx Gate.
The gateway wasn’t a portal to an evil hellish dimension, it was a gateway into the past. It was a time portal. And the Onyx speak Elle, Granny, and Fernando used to cast spells was the Etrusca language. They’d been demons…the Etrusca…demons every last pinche one of them.
Tentacles from the armor wrapped around Blaze, and Panashoat drew him closer. Blaze outgrew the tentacles and latched onto the All-Pig. He threw that pendejo away from the space battle going on underneath him. Time was of the essence. And Blaze had no way of knowing what kind of drama was going on with Bill and his demon/spaceship girlfriend. Or if Lizzie was dead.
Panashoat went soaring away from the Clicker, Union, and IPC ships fighting the sea creatures. The troops on the top of Marcus Aurelius had lost the fight. The Paladin was black with the crabs, lobsters, and crayfish. Its gun towers no longer flashed plasma bolts. It looked dead in space. Not a second later, escape pods left the doomed ship. The creatures continued to besiege the ship, like flies on a dead sea lion.
Blaze went after the All-P
ig. Both soared toward Jupiter and its many moons in the distance.
The power filling Blaze was making it hard to think. It was demonic energy feeding his cells, and that energy wanted him to do all sorts of crazy shit now that he was the size of Earth’s moon. He wanted to eat the American continent and see if he could taste the tacos there. He wanted to shrink himself down and see how many men he could kill on Earth, how many women he could bang, how much chorizo he could eat. He wanted to rip that armor off Panashoat and do terrible, terrible things to that demon pig’s skeleton.
He’d become a god. He could go anywhere, do anything, and yeah, Elle was powering him, but he saw that he could re-form himself into something that could eat the Onyx, absorb it like a tree absorbs sunlight. He truly was unstoppable. Every whim could become a command, and the universe would bow to his will.
It was tempting.
But then he thought of Ian, Tanner, Chase, Jacob, Jared, and Logan. Those pinche pendejos had been shown the evil in the universe and they had chosen to join it to get what they wanted and then were hypocrites enough to come after him.
No, Blaze saw the interstellar evil and he was going to end it. For his father. For his mother. Hell, for Arlo.
Blaze’s focus sharpened. He’d been a god for a few seconds. Panashoat had a lot more practice, and this was going to be one son of a bitch of a fight.
Panashoat stopped himself from falling into Jupiter’s atmosphere. The All-Pig reached and grabbed a yellow-colored moon and bit through it with his ivory-colored teeth. That pendejo was eating Io. What a dick!
Blaze swung his fusion ax, which was now as bright as the sun in the far distance. No, his ax was far brighter, another sun in the solar system. Panashoat lifted an arm that caught the haft of the ax. Tentacles entwined the ax and pulled it from Blaze’s grip.
Panashoat slugged Blaze in his helmet, cracking his visor. The cold made Blaze gasp for a second. Then he realized, as a semi-divine entity, cold and skin and breathing were all so Human and not him anymore. He changed his physiology to not care about the cold.
A series of tentacles, miles long, grabbed another dappled moon, Callisto this time. The moon was huge, as big as they were, but Panashoat used Blaze’s ax to cut it in half and then in half again. He gulped down a quarter moon. He chuckled. He belched. Then he punched Blaze in his already burned face.
He hadn’t wanted to heal his wound. He liked the facial scar.
The gunny’s helmet went spinning away. The nanobots, now huge in comparison to what they had been, swarmed back into Blaze’s armor. Blaze’s head was bare. He didn’t care. Wasn’t that cold.
He raised his arm gun and blasted the pieces of Callisto out of Panashoat’s hand. The All-Pig turned and went to chop Blaze in half. The gunny used his arm gun to blast the ax back, fusion meeting fusion in solar-flare-sized explosions.
Panashoat swung a fist and took Blaze in the face again. Blood gushed in great seas down his face and into the atmosphere, becoming spheres of gore miles in diameter.
Blaze was stunned for a minute. Getting hit by a demon god millions of years old will do that to a guy. While he was stunned, the All-Pig sliced up Ganymede like it was an apple. Ganymede was the ninth largest object in the solar system, and Panashoat ate it up like it was snack time. He whirled and seized Europa to wash it down. The ice water of the moon would be a nice chaser.
The goddamn skeletal demon had eaten all four of Jupiter’s moons, the Galilean moons, while fighting Blaze.
Panashoat laughed quietly at Blaze’s surprise. “I am not only the father of hunger, I am hunger. I will eat the universe, galaxy by galaxy, until the end of time. Which of course will be my dessert.”
And the All-Pig was serious. It wanted to eat the universe, and with its power, it was pretty clear it could without a problem.
Only Blaze could stop it. First, he was given a brief history lesson of the Etrusca people, who had affected all of reality.
THIRTY-THREE_
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Panashoat floated in front of Jupiter. Had the bastard gotten bigger? It seemed so. That pig skull grinned at Blaze.
Before Blaze attacked, a mental image formed in his mind, a gift of the godlike powers Elle was giving him.
Godlike? Shit, no, not godlike, but a god’s true powers.
With the beast eating moons like pieces of popcorn, matter had become silly and time unnecessary. Blaze had slowed time, but still, the Onyx Gate would close in a few minutes regardless. However, the gunny knew in his current state he could find it again, close it, take a dump in it, whatever. It didn’t matter. Time and space didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Life was ridiculous and short. Most of the universe was dead space and cold rock and all the stars would eventually die. It was stupid. Creation was stupid.
But that’s not why Panashoat wanted to eat. The All-Pig was hunger.
Blaze saw a planet in another galaxy, a long time ago, the Etrusca home world. And on that planet was a humanoid people, with fingers, toes, descended from pigs, yet kind of Human as well. The pig people began to evolve ’cause that’s what pig people do.
Walking upright was cool. You could use tools while you padded along. And seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing, you could find good shit to eat that way. And consciousness, damn, but evolution loved consciousness. Get a bunch of sentient pigs together, and they’d convince each other that they could help them all eat and fuck better if they all worked together.
Get more and more sentient pigs together, and you could form civilizations and eventually internet porn and Taco Bell. Eating and sex, money and appetites, and stories about how it all mattered. Throw in a few religions and mega-economies and space travel and bam, the Etrusca empire spread across galaxies, eating and procreating, food and sex, creating more little humanoids. But at the heart of their culture was the Hunger, capital H, and feeding the big H. And these humanoids worshipped dark gods of Hunger, and while Panashoat was a true marvel, even the All-Pig prayed to something bigger and more awful than him.
It was why Chthonic had appeared as the Grim Reaper. It was why Xerxes had looked like a horned red-skinned demon. Even Nauzea hadn’t revealed her piggish features. They’d borrowed images of the dark gods they worshipped and wore them as masks. The iconic images must’ve been at the heart of conscious thought since Humans had incorporated each into their mythologies.
These ancient, evil gods gave Panashoat magic and technology that allowed Xerxes to create Onyx generators, though they didn’t call the strange evil energy Onyx. It was another word, but that word didn’t matter.
Panashoat’s hunger spread across the galaxy. His children, Xerxes, Chthonic, and Nauzea, worshipped his hunger and found appetites of their own.
They ate through their galaxy and went to other galaxies and to other galaxies until nothing was left. They had to wait. They had to wait for the grand spiraling galaxies of the universe to spin around, which meant the Etrusca ruins weren’t six million years old. They were older. Billions of years old.
The 0n1x singularity had been such a monster black hole, it bent time and space, and Panashoat had patiently nurtured the black hole from his dead space back billions of years ago. And then it exploded, pushing the Onyx energy out and paving his way, since Panashoat had needed the Onyx to survive at that point. He’d become such an aberration of nature, he was no longer even remotely biological.
Because of these old gods. Because of Xerxes’s necrotechnological genius and the Onyx generators he created.
And now, Panashoat was back to consume more galaxies with his endless hunger. Nature, life, nothing mattered except the All-Pig’s voracious, insatiable appetites.
The history blasted through Blaze in seconds. And he thought about joining Panashoat. But no, that was too complicated for a simple guy like him. He was a good guy, and this skeletal douchebag was the bad guy, and Blaze would end him. ’Cause that’s what good guys did.
While Panashoat started on the smaller moons of Ju
piter, Blaze vented his CO2 from his armor, which now could give a planetoid an atmosphere. He shot into Panashoat and both disappeared into the gaseous atmosphere of Jupiter. They went right into the red circle of hell, Jupiter’s swirling red eye of chaos and storms.
Blaze let the All-Pig grab him with his tentacles, and he heard the fucking demon pendejo huffing the gases around them. Panashoat was taking in big lungfuls of Jupiter’s atmosphere, filling his lungs like he was toking on a fat-ass joint full of the choicest KGB…as in killer green bud.
Given enough time, the All-Pig would’ve huffed up all of Jupiter’s atmosphere like a homeless guy sniffing through a tube of glue.
Not that the All-Pig had lungs, or a stomach. It was the CONSUMING that the demon king loved. Eating, smoking, fucking, it wasn’t about the biology of the act, it was about the selfish desire it filled, and that desire had destroyed galaxies and wanted to destroy the universe. He was dealing with an Onyx-powered toddler who wanted to eat creation like it was a bag of nacho cheese Doritos.
The immense pressure of Jupiter’s atmosphere was crushing the matter of their bodies, making them smaller and smaller as they went hurling through the storms and swirling mess of the gas giant’s butthole. They were only a fraction of their original size when they splashed down into the ocean of noxious liquid metallic hydrogen surrounding the rocky metal core. The soup of the ocean poured into both their mouths, and Blaze found himself choking. Not that he needed to breathe, but the Onyx Gate was a long way away. Elle’s power hitting him was waning. They were deep under the thick atmosphere and going farther and farther down to the bottom of 32,000 miles of liquid metallic hydrogen.
Talk about heavy metal. All that shit was cutting off their supply of Onyx. Panashoat began to struggle, and Blaze laughed at him.
The All-Pig wanted to live to eat. Blaze was just fine going out in a blaze of glory. Killing this thing would make it all worthwhile.
But both had too much power to simply die. Being at the bottom of the liquid hydrogen ocean hurt, and it was black and awful, the pressure, the pressure of the astrophysics, truly crushing.