The Giants of Shattered Swamp

by Eddie Patin

  Then, he reached up for his home key, struggling to force his hand up the front of his chest against the constricting grip of the stomach-thing that held him. When he finally found his collar, he was getting woozy and his diaphragm was heaving involuntarily, desperate for air...

  He fumbled for his necklace, but it was buried under the collar of his armor and under his t-shirt...

  Back when he'd first started experimenting with rifting, Jason had tried to rift with nothing at all; no focus key, no OCS. He'd attempted to find his way to the Wilderlands from the hiking trail behind his house using nothing but his imagination and his strange, alien instinct for reaching out beyond his own universe and dimensions. Back then, it felt like trying to move an incomprehensively heavy weight. He'd felt, at the time, that he might be able to do it one day, but at the time, he was far from it.

  With the panic now flowing through his mind and the adrenaline cooking his system—he was almost out of oxygen—Jason knew that today wouldn't be that day either.

  He regretted not practicing with that more.

  Jason thought about the Spare Air canister hooked to the left side of his backpack. It had saved his ass before when he was near-drowning in that beer ocean, but reaching it now would be out of the question.

  He was going to pass out.

  Oh God—he was going to pass out and take a deep breath of those acidic digestive juices. He'd drown and be eaten and dissolved by some weird monster that he didn't even see!

  Jason thought back to Maze World, back when he and Riley and Gliath had found Riley's hunter friends dead in their tent, murdered by the Nothrix Reapers. The two men had been consumed by the slimes of that world during the night. He'd found them collapsed in their tent with slimes enveloping their heads and other parts of their bodies; huge clear globs suckling at the bones of their gleaming skulls. That's how Jason would turn out now: a gleaming, grinning skeleton dressed in Merc armor and strapped with gear.

  His mind reeled with the horror of the idea.

  Numbness started creeping in around the edges of things. Jason felt his joints buzzing. His mind felt light and airy. He was seeing spots burst and zip around in his dim, pink-hazed vision...

  Squirming weakly against the weird, flexing walls pressing in at him from all around, Jason forced his right arm back down to his side. Focusing as intently as he could manage, he reached for his lightning gun, unsnapped the holster, and groaned as he struggled to pull it free.

  He'd zap the monster. He'd zap himself too, but fuck it. If he had to die, he'd take that fucker with him. It was the only thing he could do.

  But it's not lightning, he thought. It only looks like lightning.

  Fuck it. He had to. He had to do something. Anything...

  Jason made sure that the muzzle was aiming down his right leg and away from his body. It was hard to tell. He was dizzy. The world around him—encapsulated by the monster's stomach or gullet or whatever-the-fuck—was spinning around him. Jason had no idea which way was up or down, so he simply tried to avoid aiming at himself as best he could...

  He fired.

  There was an explosion along his right side and a flash of light. He felt tremendous heat and feared that he was burning.

  The dark and hot world around him swung around. It moved. It freaking moved! It reacted!

  He fired again.

  That time, there was another huge burst of light; blue light like an explosive surge of electricity coursing all around him from his right knee. There was a lot of pain and burning. Jason's surroundings were filled with dazzling daylight! He felt himself pitching to his left, saw the bright, white cloudy sky unfurling before him as if he was being born.

  Jason was belched out of the beast.

  He and his AK-47 spilled forth from acidic doom, falling through space for a moment then landing soundly onto a surface that felt a lot like the spongy bog. The smell of sulfur hit Jason in a wave and he found himself coughing and gasping.

  Something was moving and thrashing next to him.

  His hands were numb and prickling, but he knew that they were empty. He'd dropped his lightning gun.

  Listening to his animal brain, Jason scrambled away from the large, moving thing on his hands and knees, his rifle getting in the way as it dug into the mud here and there and stabbed him in the belly and legs as he fled.

  Jason was disoriented and covered in transparent, orange goo, but gradually became aware of the ground, then the trees, then the partly covered sky.

  He then found himself on his feet and turned on shaky, numb legs to face whatever the hell had just spat him out...

  Fifteen feet away, tethered to a huge root structure, was a monstrous plant-creature surrounded by thick, dark growths and vines as thick as Jason's legs that were entwined with the mangrove-like network growing around the colossal tree trunk. The entire thing was colored like charcoal and the same brown color as the root system, save for a large central pod, which was a dull shade of dark red, quivering, and smoking. The pod was partly shriveled like a gigantic raisin, and a good deal larger than Jason himself.

  As he stared at it, Jason made out several very thin strands—tentacles—waving angrily in the air around the plant-monster. They were long and whipped around violently, easily long enough to catch him again.

  The big pod then separated vertically from top to bottom, and the gap spread open lazily, revealing a dark interior thick with the same orange goo that was all over Jason now. The stuff oozed out of the plant as the pod-lips quivered. Jason felt a wave of revulsion. The image of the goo-dripping opening in the monster seemed weirdly vulvic and terrible and completely wrong.

  "Fuck..." he muttered, spitting more of the fermented orange juice taste out of his mouth.

  He sighted his lightning gun on the ground five feet away from him in a puddle of orange slime, so he leapt for it, grabbed it, aimed at the middle of the pod, and shot the disgusting, wicked thing again.

  A zig-zagging particle beam that looked like a lightning strike snapped against the pod with a crack, lighting up the swamp and splattering a large chunk of its wet, shriveled meat. A gout of black smoke poured into the air from the wound.

  The plant-monster didn't scream. It didn't hiss or growl. But it did lash out with one of its whipping tentacles with a whup sound. Jason barely dodged out of the way.

  He suddenly felt furious.

  The monster then somehow unanchored itself from the root structure, pulling its many thick cords and vines and dark, curving limbs out of the gaps.

  It began rolling slowly toward Jason along the ground like a goddamn Lovecraftian horror...

  Without another wasted movement, Jason touched his lava key and opened a horizontal rift to Hell right under the son of a bitch. As soon as his orange fire snapped and illuminated the swamp—the instant the portal began to unfurl—the heavy mass of tentacles and creeping plant-stuff and the red and gaping pod—yearning for Jason with its quivering lips—suddenly dropped down out of sight.

  Jason felt a blast of heat as the membrane to the other universe was broken. He shielded his face as something flared loudly out of sight below the whirling and sputtering rim of the rift. He heard the popping and spitting of something burning in the magma; the hissing and crackling as it fried on the molten surface that moved as liquid but was as dense as stone.

  Before the sound of the burning monster died down, Jason released the rift and the gateway to lava world collapsed in on itself with a pop.

  Jason was left in relative silence, staring at where his rift had disappeared.

  He took a breath.

  He looked down at his lightning gun. It was covered in orange goo. Then, he looked all over himself. His entire body was coated in the nasty stuff. His face tingled. Things were different on his right side where he'd fired the electron particle pistol while inside the pod. There, he saw orange goo coating him just like everywhere else, but his armor was blackened and he saw gooey resin baked onto his leg from the heat of
his gun.

  Thankfully, he hadn't fried himself. His leg was hot and angry, but it might be a first degree burn at the worst. Riley did mention that their Merc suits were somewhat resistant to energy weapons.

  Jason sighed.

  He took another look around himself, making sure that no ettins or other horrific plant-creatures were coming at him.

  Then he sat down.

  "Shit..." Jason said to himself. He was still a little dizzy. Reaching for his CamelBak's bite valve, he lifted the tube, put it in his mouth, then frowned and spit out a glob of fermented-OJ-stuff that had been on it. "Fucking gross!"

  Jason took several long, cleansing drinks.

  That thing had totally taken him by surprise.

  Now, he felt totally turned around. He'd been ... heading for the village? Which way was south?

  For a few minutes, Jason rested, pulled the orange gunk out of his hair and rubbing it off of his face. He cleaned his face and eyes and hands with water from his CamelBak, then cleaned off his AK. As it turned out, he'd shot through an entire thirty-round magazine inside the monster. Apparently, he hadn't hit anything important.

  "Gonna have to shower with everything on again," he said to himself with a frown.

  He looked down at his minotaur-hide jacket. Everything was slimed.

  Jason changed rifle mags then started thinking about standing up again.

  Save your friends, he thought.

  It was hard to get moving. His whole body felt sore and numb after that crazy ordeal. He made himself think about their faces: Morgana, Riley, and Gliath. He'd gone back in time, and had managed to stay on the same universe. He had to go on. He might not get another chance like this...

  Jason stood, pulled up his OCS, and cleaned it off with a towel from his backpack.

  "Always remember where your towel is," he said to himself with a chuckle as he located south with the device's compass. "Rule number one of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

  Composing himself, Jason continued toward the village.

  Fucking crazy, he thought.

  "Almost got ate by a plant monster," he muttered, kicking a clump of red algae strands in his path.

  Jason tried not to think about all of the things that had tried to kill or consume him in these last few weeks. A month of surviving the Wilderlands, then bounty hunting the omniverse, had felt like a freaking year.

  He needed to rescue his friends then get some damned R&R.

  "We were supposed to be on R&R," he said to himself as he continued south, his rifle shouldered but muzzle low. "Just a single troll's head. How hard can it be? Back to barbeques and shopping and shooting for fun and vigorous love-making in no time, eh?" Jason scoffed and laughed.

  He trudged through a muddy pool, dragging strands of red algae along with him, then adjusted his path to stay on the moist but drier boggy parts. The smell of sour orange juice was starting to fade from his nose, replaced by the ever-present odor of sulfur that permeated the swamp.

  Before long, Jason sighted smoke from the village and the trees thinning out ahead.

  Finally.

  Almost immediately after, he saw billowy black vapor appear in the air coming from the same direction, overtaking the fire-smoke and riling up the air around him.

  A storm was coming; sweeping toward him from the same direction where Jason had seen the black horizon from above in the trees.

  Shit.

  Jason paused, hiding behind the root structure surrounding a great tree, and watched. He took several compulsive drinks of water, double-checked that his AK was ready to rock, and tightened down all of his straps.

  The maelstrom tore through the village then continued straight into Jason, roaring with violent gusts of wind that carried bits of mud and algae, throwing pieces of the world around. He hunkered down against the massive tumor of roots growing around the tree trunk. Looking into the dark recesses within the roots, Jason turned on his night vision for the duration of the storm, peering through the muddy, black depths and searching for giant centipede-things or anything else unpleasant that might try to eat him.

  Jason expected to be afraid, but he was merely annoyed.

  After being in the belly—or whatever a plant's equivalent was—of that nasty pod monster, Jason wasn't too worried about the giant bugs. He'd just shoot the shit out of anything that came out at him during the storm. Anything too big for his 7.62x39mm rounds would suffer the hellfire of his rifting powers. He'd send anything big and scary to lava world with the touch of his bracelet and the flick of his mind.

  Jason heard the shouts of ettins in the village ahead—grunting bellows that were too overwhelmed by the noise of the storm to understand—and he hoped that they wouldn't find him during the storm.

  Then again, if they did, he'd just fry them in lava, too.

  He wanted to catch up to his friends; desperately he did. He wanted to find them still alive and unbroken, then he wanted to kill that fucking giant that had taken them. He'd send Voro to lava world, too; god or no god!

  When the storm eventually faded and the air cleared, Jason wiped the sulfur-smelling mud from his face. He stood and continued on.

  He didn't see any ettins—not yet, anyway—but he still stalked toward the village low and quiet. Those ettins that had been yelling during the storm weren't yelling anymore. Maybe I was hearing things, Jason thought. His boots made sloppy sounds when he stepped through wet spots, so he tried to stick to spongier ground where he could move almost silently.

  The ettins would probably try to attack him. Why wouldn't they? If he could sneak up until he had the attention of several, then he'd be able to open a rift to lava world, surprise and impress the hell out of them with his power, and have a few seconds to try and communicate ... right?

  Stupid plan, he thought.

  "What the hell else am I gonna do?" he muttered to himself.

  When Jason saw the first huge hut made of rough-hewn planks tied together and thatched with handmade rope, he felt a thrill of fear.

  He was just a small human. This wasn't going to work. If he was caught by the ettins, they'd eat him. They'd torture him to death; wrench his arms and legs out of their sockets before eating the pieces like big turkey legs...

  Jason stopped and pulled up his OCS. He set another bookmark, including the temporal dimensions, titled "Ettin Village".

  Then he continued, slowly approaching the big, crude hut, hoping that he could sneak around it until—

  "Hey!" a deep, buzzing voice called out from ahead. "A little man!"

  "Another one of those!" a smaller, obnoxious voice shouted. "Let's catch it!"

  Shit.

  Jason shouldered his rifle but saw nothing.

  Then a rock smashed into the mud near him.

  "Shit!" he exclaimed, running to the left.

  Jason quickly made out the form of an ettin past the first hut of the village, near another where the trees were cleared out. It was holding a spear, readying it to throw...

  He quickly changed direction and ran the other way just before the spear sailed through the air and sank into the ground where he would have been standing had he continued running the way he was. The point and a good foot or so of the shaft pierced the mud. The tip was no doubt poisoned just like the last one that had wounded him.

  Before the ettin could recover from his throw, Jason paused, took aim, held his breath to steady the wild rocking of his front sight, then squeezed off three quick rounds. All three hit the brute's massive chest. The giant fell to the ground with the smaller head screaming.

  Jason saw two more ettins run toward him from deeper inside the wide-open village.

  "Shit!" he repeated. "Maybe this isn't gonna work..."

  He wouldn't be able to impress or kill them with lava if they kept chucking rocks and spears at him from far away!

  Jason saw another ettin appear, emerging from a more distant hut.

  Then, he heard a whistling in the air and pitched himself to the rig
ht just before another spear lanced into the ground near him.

  "Goddamn it!" Jason muttered, almost not hearing the words over the pounding of his heart.

  This isn't gonna work, he thought.

  Running several more steps away toward the back of the first hut, Jason tried to get out of sight of the approaching ettins. Then, he stopped cold, realizing that one or two of those bastards might be running around the other side to intercept him. They could appear in front of him any moment...

  Lowering his rifle with disappointment heavy in his hammering heart, Jason reached up into his collar through the slime that was still sticky there. He grabbed his home key, and rifted home.

  Jason hurried through the bright, roaring rift, feeling like he'd failed.

  Chapter 21

  For Gliath, there was only darkness and the floating, tumbling edge of death.

  He slept without dreaming. The leopardwere did not dream of his home world like he often did, or of his first life before he was rescued by Ranaja and swore his oath. He lay in the mud broken and torn and nearly dead for an unknown amount of time before the odors of sulfur, blood, and swamp smells began their crawl into his battered senses. The Krulax existed in a pool of black numbness as his damaged body used every gram of fat he had on its once-powerful frame to slowly repair itself.

  As the scent of his bleeding body and the sulfur-thick bog began to tickle Gliath's foggy, nebulous mind, he slipped in and out of the vaporous void, drifting through slippery shadows as the pain slowly crept back in.

  A sound grabbed the leopardwere's wavering attention. There were many sounds slithering into his dumbly pricking ears from the swamp: the drone of the many hiding insects, the wind of a storm raging in the distance, the occasional bubble of sulfuric gasses appearing through the mud. But one sound stood out above them all. It was a high-pitched snickering sound. A smacking sound. There was the echo of something hard cutting through something soft and wet, sometimes glancing off of something else hard; like an Earth dog chewing on a stick.