Ravenous

by West, Terry M.

  He scratched the back of his furry blonde skull with the chunky metal fingers of his robotic right arm. Fashioned from sturdy Trastorian metal and synched directly to the remaining nerves in his shoulder, it felt and acted just like a real arm, only about a hundred times stronger. Time was, back in his glory days, he’d be visiting an establishment such as this for the sole purpose of working off the strain of a long day spent doing battle with hordes of alien beasts. For Brax VaGhuul, the fighting was saved for out there – on the flaming ramparts of a siege tower in Raksatan, on the smoking bridge of a Blandarian Mothership, shoulder-to-shoulder with his brothers and sisters in the thick of a melee in Gregorovitch Canyon on the wind-scorched planet Selena. And afterwards… then came the rewards of the flesh.

  Now here he was in a miserable whorehouse on an insignificant planet called Earth, in the strangest company he’d ever known, not to fuck but to fight! Life’s a twisty-turny bitch, that’s for sure. He glanced sideways at the woman on his right. She was alright to look at, at least, but only if she didn’t catch him. The sleek, rippling muscles of a jungle cat combined with the curvaceous hips and bust of the pleasure-wenches from the Gryphon Club on Trastor. Perhaps, when the mission at hand is taken care of, she could be persuaded to give up her womanly pleasures? Brax’s face, tough and pitted as a burnt steak, split into a wolfish grin at the thought.

  Ferrez felt Brax’s eyes on her like hot little seeds burning into her flesh. The big, blonde bastard had been eye-fucking her since they’d been brought together by the secret government agency S.H.A.D.O.W to fight the forces of evil. ‘Project Kill-Shot’; that’s the name S.H.A.D.O.W had given to their little ragtag group of superpowered misfits. Brax had a different name for them; the Face-Punchers. Ferrez would never admit it to Brax’s face, but she kinda thought ‘the Face-Punchers’ had a nicer ring to it.

  “What in fuck’s name are ya doin’, Anthea?” barked her father’s voice in her head. “Throwin’ yer lot in with this no-good bunch a sumbitches! Ya know ya cain’t trust anyone but ya self! And ya dear ol’ pa, o’ course.”

  “I know it ain’t ideal, daddy,” she muttered, low enough so’s the others couldn’t hear her. “But last time I checked, I ain’t got no way of gettin’ back to my own time. My kids are growed and dead now, an’ I’m stuck here for better or worse! I might as well try’n kill some bad guys while I’m here.”

  “Who are you talking to?” It was Druid. He was a young, scrawny nineteen-year-old with a long, boyish face and a lanky mop of dangling brown hair that he was constantly brushing away from intense, intellectual turquoise eyes.

  “Ain’t no concern of yours,” she snapped, cheeks reddening despite her best intentions to keep them neutral. “You reckon you can see your way to mindin’ your own fuckin’ business?”

  Druid ran a pale hand through his unruly hair. “I… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “’S alright,” she mumbled, feeling guilt at her outburst and anger at her own guilt.

  “Can I say something, though?” he ventured. Ferrez narrowed her eyes and nodded. “I know how you must be feeling. Y’know… thrust into this new world that you don’t understand, not really knowing where you fit in. I felt the same way when I escaped from MiracleWare’s lab after they’d experimented on me.” He took a deep breath, his narrow chest expanding like a bellows. “I wasn’t sure if there was a place for me in this world. Everything else was the same but I… I was different. That’s not a nice feeling. It makes you queasy in the pit of your stomach, like you want to vomit but there’s nothing left inside you but a hollow ball of ice.”

  Strangely enough, Ferrez found herself agreeing with everything the boy was saying. She hadn’t been able to shake that feeling of lonesomeness, that feeling of not-belonging, ever since she’d awoken in S.H.A.D.O.W’s underground base and learnt that her children, her home and her life were far behind her.

  “So, I just wanted to say that, y’know… I can relate,” Druid continued. “And I hope it doesn’t sound too cheesy, but… it gets easier to cope. It really does.”

  “How?” Her voice came out a hoarse croak. She cleared her throat and tried again. “How do you cope?”

  “Well…” Druid tapped his chin with a single, slender finger. “You learn to look at the positive side of your situation. For example; yes, I was horribly tortured for three weeks in a sterile laboratory, every lobe and neuron of my brain prodded and pierced for the enjoyment of my captors. But on the plus side, I can do this.” He waved his hand and the wall to their right disappeared, revealing a darkened room with a filthy mattress on which a naked man in a cowboy hat kneeled between the legs of a raven-haired hooker, bony hips pumping vigorously, lips pulled back in a pained pleasure-sneer. His eyes sprung open and he noticed the small crowd of people watching him from the hallway.

  “Hey, get the hell outta here!” he yelled, swatting them away with his cowboy hat while his pale buttocks flexed and clenched.

  Druid waved his hand again and the wall reappeared, blocking their view of the cowboy and his conquest. In spite of herself, Ferrez felt her lips twitching into a rare smile. Druid grinned and tapped the center of his forehead with a faint, metallic clinking sound.

  “You’re not the only one who hears voices in their head,” he whispered, and he wandered ahead of her at an unhurried pace, hands buried in his pockets.

  Ferrez blinked and watched him go. He’s a young’un, but he speaks with the wisdom and compassion of one far beyond his meagre years. Perhaps he has Injun blood in his veins? She glanced over her shoulder to see Brax staring at her backside, a big dumb grin lighting up his scarred nightmare of a face.

  “Hey, shit-licker!” she barked. Brax looked up quickly, eyes swimming with guilt. “You’d do well to keep your eyes off my ass and your mind on the mission!”

  With a shrug of his massive shoulders, he flashed her one of his trademark cocky grins. “Could you blame a man for appreciating an original Sidowski?” he rumbled.

  Ferrez peered at him, confused. “What the fuck you talkin’ about?”

  “Sidowski. You don’t know Sidowski? He’s a legendary artist back in my home galaxy. He painted ‘Bloodshed at the Battle of Broken Spear’ with the sewn-together skin of a thousand slaughtered Viluvians for his canvas and a hundred gallons of their blood for his paint. It is truly a work of beauty. Gorgeous brush-work.”

  Ferrez’s knuckles whitened on the hilt of the gleaming sickle dangling from her belt. “If you got no value for that tiny prick danglin’ between your legs, by all means, keep on talkin’.”

  Brax gulped, his grin faltering slightly. “See, that’s what I like about you, Ferrez,” he muttered nervously. “You’re feisty. Keeps things from getting boring.”

  ***

  They came at last to a plain wooden door at the end of the hallway, nothing special to mark it out from all the other doors they had passed on their travels through the brothel. Special Agent Callahan stopped, his booted feet sending up a cloud of filthy dust from the carpeted floor.

  “Signal’s coming from in there,” he whispered, checking the beeping console in his hand.

  Special Agent Ryan Callahan was a deeply-tanned man in his early forties. He had the tall, compact build of a soldier, a full head of springy, oil-black hair and an easy smile that turned his sun-browned face into a map of creases. Right now, he didn’t feel much like smiling. He’d been a S.H.A.D.O.W agent, security level H, for the majority of his life, but the thought of what might be behind that door still scared the shit out of him. The Paranometer – the high-tech gadget clutched in his right hand that detected waves of paranormal energy – was pinging off the radar. Something big was lurking in that room, and they didn’t know if it was hostile or benign. Either way, the instructions from Chief Whittinoom were clear; find it, detain it, bring it back to base for testing and classification.

  Of course, this unidentified paranormal force could prove to be too much for their specially-designed w
eapons. Hence why ‘Project Kill-Shot’ had been called in.

  Callahan had laughed out loud when Chief Whittinoom first stepped into his office and suggested creating a strike force of the most powerful and deadly human beings the universe had ever known. He stopped laughing when the chief told him he wanted Callahan to head the unit.

  “Guns at the ready, boys,” he commanded. The S.H.A.D.O.W agents, clad in sleek, bulletproof armour, prepped their weapons and aimed at the door. “On three,” said Callahan. “One…”

  “Three!” roared Brax, barreling shoulder-first into the door and blowing it off its hinges in an explosion of splintered wood.

  “Goddammit!” Callahan blurted. “Follow that big ape!”

  The agents flooded through the doorway, followed closely by Ferrez and Druid. Brax picked himself off the ground, brushing scraps of broken wood from his chest with his robot arm, and grinned. If Brax VaGhuul had one motto in life, it was this: “Always make an epic entrance.”

  He glanced around the shadowy room; rumpled mattress, soggy moonlight seeping in through grimy drapes drawn across a small square window. Beneath the window, cloaked in shadow, sat a figure – a man, based on his height and bulk. His posture was relaxed and comfortable; one arm hooked over the back of the armchair, one leg propped on the knee of the other. In his hands he held a very large and very ancient-looking book. As Brax watched, the stranger licked the tip of his finger with a parched rasping sound like sandpaper rubbing on old, dead wood, and turned a page with a dry crackle like stepping on dead leaves.

  “Drop the book and get up slowly!” Callahan barked, hovering the gun’s electronic green sight on the seated man’s chest.

  The shadowy figure closed the book with a gentle thump and lowered it to the floor before slowly rising to his feet.

  “You make any sudden movements and I tear you fifty new assholes!” Callahan warned.

  The tall stranger raised both hands into the air and stepped forward into the milky moonlight. Brax stifled a gag as the man’s hideously disfigured face fell into view. It looked like a rotten slab of meat that had been run over by a fleet of Mack trucks. Pale maggots fell from a ragged hole in his left cheek and his eyes were glistening, lidless orbs. He grinned, releasing a torrent of squirming maggots and revealing a mouth full of black, shark-like teeth.

  “Evenin’, Anthea,” he said.

  Brax spun to face Ferrez. “You know this freak-show?” he blurted.

  Angry red heat coursed through Ferrez’s coiled veins. Her fists clenched, so tight her blunt fingernails carved crescent moons in the leathery palms of her hands. “Catscratch Moynihan,” she seethed, her hatred etched into every pore of her face.

  “Well ain’t this cute!” Catscratch crowed. “Ya got yerself a merry band of super-friends! Strange, I never took you for a team player, Anthea.”

  Brax thumped his chest with his Trastorian steel fist. “We’re the Face-Punchers! Here to kick some ass and punch some faces!”

  Catscratch immediately broke into a peal of cold, jagged laughter. “Oh, this is just too much!” he spluttered, wiping mirthful tears from his bulging eyes. “The Face-Punchers! Please, you’ll give me a heart attack!”

  “Cut the bullshit, Catscratch,” Ferrez snarled. “The fuck you doin’ in the twenty-first century? Last time we met, I exploded your head.”

  “Yes, you did,” Catscratch conceded. “But you know the way a roach’ll piece itself back together when stomped with a boot? Well, so it is with ol’ Catscratch here. And I’ve come a long way since those old days.”

  “You’re just as ugly as I remember.”

  He flashed her a twisted grin. “True. But I have powers I never dreamed of back then. You’re no longer lookin’ at Catscratch Moynihan; undead pirate of the railroads. You’re now restin’ those pretty little eyes on Catscratch Moynihan; all-powerful sorcerer and conjurer of darkness!”

  Druid’s intense blue eyes narrowed at the mention of the word ‘sorcerer’.

  “Listen, man,” he began. “I got no idea who you are, other than the unholy love-child of Freddy Krueger and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, but I do know that messing around with black magic is never a walk in the park with an ice-cream sundae. You touch the darkness and the darkness touches you back, man!”

  Catscratch’s globular eyes swiveled disconcertingly in their frayed sockets to rest on the young man’s earnest face. “Oh, but the darkness has done so much more than merely touch me, m’boy,” he whispered, almost reverentially. “The darkness has reached out its delicate, sensuous fingers and caressed my rotten soul. It has whispered to me of black deeds, of terror-screams and torture-pain. It gave me the tools with which to bring about the total destruction of the world, including those who would foolishly try to protect it.”

  Brax jerked a steel thumb at Catscratch. “Only tool around here is this asshole, amiright?” That got a few chuckles from the surrounding S.H.A.D.O.W agents, who still had their weapons trained on Catscratch’s bulky figure.

  “Tools? What tools?” said Druid, ignoring Brax’s comment.

  “Certain… reading material.” His bulbous eyes flicked towards the leatherbound book discarded on the floor by the chair.

  Druid’s eyes widened with horrified understanding. “The book, it’s a grimoire!” he shouted. “Nobody let him touch it!”

  There was something in Catscratch’s grotesque, veiny eyes that was almost approaching… pity. He shook his head slowly, tutting quietly under his breath. “I’m afraid it’s already too late for that.”

  Every man and woman in the room became aware of it at the same time. A subtle shift in the vibration of the air. Something vaguely unsettling, like noticing the outline of a g-string beneath the seat of your mother’s jeans.

  “Catscratch…” said Ferrez through grinding teeth. “What the fuck’ve you done?”

  Catscratch’s smile was beyond sinister. It was completely and utterly evil. “Think of it as a challenge, my dear. Do you believe your newfound team is strong enough to punch the face of the darkness itself?”

  A cold gust of wind blew through the cracks in the walls of reality, and something began to manifest in the center of the room. The wet, yellow stench of a thousand curry-farts assaulted Ferrez’s nostrils, and a huge and terrifying creature suddenly erupted into existence – a whirling, thrashing monstrosity of gnashing teeth and swiping claws. Smoldering eyes, like flaming balls of hate, peered from the recesses of its shadowy face – or the spinning blender of murder-sharp teeth where its face should have been. Catscratch’s mocking laughter filled the air.

  “Behold the unstoppable power of the Carnivore from the Nexus!” he roared over the staccato beat of gunfire and the otherworldly growling of the monster. “Or the Car Nex, as she likes to be called.”

  Like a spinning top made out of daggers and glass-shards, the Car Nex careened around the room, chomping and slashing its way through the smorgasbord of S.H.A.D.O.W agents with the gusto of a starving zombie at an all-you-can-eat brains buffet. Wet chunks of gore sprayed across the room, splatting against the wall and dripping to the floor in glistening rivulets.

  Ferrez’s eyes narrowed as she tried to assess the creature’s weak spots, but it was difficult to get a clear glimpse of the thing; to look upon the Car Nex was to look into the heart of a whirling maelstrom. The best you could do was cower in a corner and hope for a pleasant outcome. Unluckily for the Car Nex, Ferrez had never been what you might call a quitter. She reached for the stock of her rifle, but before she could take action, Brax gave a bloody-red roar of primal fury and leapt into the air, swinging his mighty weapons in what looked to be a killing blow. With a ringing clang of steel meeting armored flesh, Brax’s swords rebounded off the beast’s stony hide and he was sent pinwheeling across the room, only stopping when he smacked face-first into the far wall with a sickening crunch of broken face-bones.

  Ferrez sighed and shook her head. Goddamn space-warrior. All boast but no bang. I’ll show that bra
gging fucker how we get it done in the West! Her loaded Springfield rifle leapt into her hand, the smooth-as-bone steel caressing her calloused fingers, begging to be fired. Willingly, she obliged her old friend; squeezing the trigger again and again, hungry tongues of flame erupting from the muzzle of the rifle, Ferrez’s shoulder bucking with the recoil. Ping, ping, ping – the bullets bounced off the spinning monstrosity, as useless as grains of sand against a plummeting meteor. Her hand flew to the grip of the sickle at her belt.

  “You fuckin’ crazy, Anthea?” her father’s voice chided. “That puny blade ain’t gonna do shit! You saw what happened to that dumb, blonde bastard, didn’tcha? You wanna be the next one droolin’ blood onto the carpet?”

  With a reluctant grunt, she released her hand from the sickle’s hilt. “Druid!” she barked. “Can’t you do somethin’? Use your magic to make this fuckin’ thing disappear?”

  “I’m trying…” Druid’s hand was raised, palm-outwards, his brow furrowed in intense concentration. As she watched, a sliver of black blood trickled from his right nostril. “I can’t!” he gasped, his hand falling limply to his side. “It’s surrounded by the darkest magic I’ve ever seen. It’s too powerful!”

  With a final, deafening screech of animal fury, the Car Nex smashed through a wall and vanished into the hallway, showering the strewn and splattered corpses of its victims with dust and scraps of debris. Catscratch favored them all with one final, revolting grin, before turning away and hurrying through the Car Nex-shaped hole in the wall. Brax sat up, wincing as he snapped his wonky nose back into place.

  “You alright, man?” said Druid, offering his hand to the sitting giant.