Asskickers of the Fantastic

by Jim Stenstrum

  A few minutes later, Rex set aside his werewolf notes. He promised himself to visit Portland as soon as possible to investigate this troubling new outbreak of lycanthropy. This was a port city, after all; perhaps the werewolves arrived on ships, hiding below in the holds with the other vermin.

  He returned to more pressing matters. On his desk were two folders that interested him in particular: one titled BIGFOOT, and the other titled THE COLONY (1883). He opened the file on Bigfoot first.

  What intrigued him about Bigfoot was a 1950 report by the prestigious Bigfoot Foundation of America, which had kept scrupulous population records of the brutish creatures over the years. Hundreds of years ago, tens of thousands of the gentle Bigfoot roamed freely throughout western Canada, feeding on leaves and berries and the occasional wagon train, and peacefully sharing the territory with the aboriginal tribes in that area, the Chipewyan and the Western Cree. The report detailed the shocking decline in the Bigfoot population in Alberta and the Northwest Territories from the late 1600s to 1950, by which time they had become virtually extinct.

  No one knew what caused the Great Bigfoot Extinction. Some scientists suggested they were killed off by hunters to feed the Eskimo workers who were building the Trans-Arctic railroad. Others thought the creatures had simply evolved into birds, specifically the Woolly Claw Duck of British Columbia. But Rex had another theory.

  Across the room, Crayon sang to herself softly. Rex looked up and saw she was sewing the sleeve of his coat. She was doing an expert job by the look of it, matching the thread color and making the repair look as inconspicuous as possible.

  He got up from the desk and walked into the bedroom. Moments later he returned with a blanket and a pillow, and plopped them down next to her on the couch. She looked up from her sewing and smiled.

  “Tomorrow we’ll go out and buy you some new clothes,” he said. “And maybe we can get some food you like.”

  “That’d be great,” she said, gratefully.

  He returned to his desk and opened the file titled THE COLONY. Inside the folder were some very old photos and a news article from 1883, concerning a secret community of people who lived in a remote, largely unpopulated region of northwest Canada. They called themselves the Colony, and had kept themselves closed off from the rest of civilization for many generations, possibly for hundreds of years. A religious cult, perhaps, but one which apparently did not solicit new members.

  Normally Rex would not bother keeping track of cults and secret societies — unless they practiced black magic, of course – but there was something about this particular commune and its proximity to the Great Bigfoot Extinction that troubled him.

  He looked at an 1883 newspaper article detailing a tense confrontation between Canadian officials and some Colony members outside the front gate of their compound. The local government did not recognize the Colony’s right to the land they were occupying, calling them squatters, and had brought in the North-West Mounted Police to evict them.

  An old photo of the incident showed the police aiming rifles and a large cannon at members of the Colony, who were completely unarmed. This standoff could have ended with a lot of bloodshed, but instead the police and officials abruptly changed their minds and rode away peacefully. No one could explain how it all happened, but the next week the deed to the land was personally delivered to the Elders by the Commissioner of the North-West Mounted Police himself, with a letter of apology from the Prime Minister.

  Rex looked closely at the photo with a magnifying glass. The woman in the photo, standing alongside the Elders to form a human barricade outside the compound gate, was incredibly — yet unmistakably — the very woman he had fought on the bus. And behind her stood the same man and woman in the bus cam video, the pair who had killed all the passengers.

  How these same people were all together in a photo from 1883, Rex could only speculate. He worked until 2am, and then he looked up to see Crayon asleep on the couch, the blanket pulled up to her chin. Rex turned off the desk lamp and walked across the room, where he saw his repaired coat draped over the back of a chair. It was perfect, impossible to see where it had been damaged at all, and he smiled.

  Then he went to bed and prepared for the nightmares.

  Chapter 11

  “Oh baby, are we not having fun?”

  Danny Decay had the world by the balls.

  At 437 years old, he was about to conquer the entire world, and not even the combined armies of the human race could stop him. Fort Knox could be his by knocking on the front door, and he could be President of the United States just by asking for it.

  He was omnipotent, he was indestructible, and he had a super-hot girlfriend who looked like Kate Upton. Best of all, he was still in the prime of his life, with thousands of good years ahead of him to have fun with the planet Earth.

  It had been nearly 400 years since he and a few thousand members of his alien race escaped certain annihilation by transporting to Earth just before their home world was destroyed in a collision with a rogue planet. The survivors of this cosmic catastrophe settled in northwest Canada in 1618 and created a refuge for themselves far from human civilization.

  The Apex, as they were called, were virtually immortal and fed solely on the energy supplied by bears, wolves, and other advanced mammals found in the Canadian wilderness. The only creature the Elders expressly forbade contact with were human beings, who along with dolphins and Border Collies were considered the dominant form of life on this planet, and never to be molested. Members of the Colony were also forbidden to leave the compound for any reason,

  mainly to prevent accidental cross-pollination of the species, i.e., screwing the hot native girls.

  These restrictions rankled many of the colonists, but no one dared to defy the Elders, who were known to deal mercilessly with dissent. The penalty for insurrection was particularly nasty, and involved a humiliating public apology, a hefty fine, followed by the agitator being blasted to subatomic particles. This proved to be an effective deterrent, and things stayed fairly tranquil inside the Colony for hundreds of years.

  Until 2014 that is, when Danny Decay and a few of the younger colonists mounted a rebellion, vowing to overthrow the Elders and proclaim themselves rulers of the Earth. In the end, the rebellion was crushed and the rebels were blasted to subatomic particles, except for Danny, who had escaped with his girlfriend to the United States.

  Over the next few weeks, Danny Decay and Naomi Rotts left a trail of withered corpses from Montana to Pennsylvania, finally bringing their special brand of killing to New York City.

  Danny had determined that his conquest of the Earth would begin here, in the Bronx, in this decrepit tenement he’d just taken away from some silly drug dealers. It was a dump, but at least nobody would be looking for them here.

  His plan was breathtaking, both in its scope and its simplicity. In two weeks, Danny would make mind slaves out of the General Assembly of the United Nations, and command the members to spread chaos across the globe. In a month, World War III would erupt, and Danny and Naomi would be there to pick up the pieces. In a month plus one day, the Earth would officially be renamed Danny and Naomi’s Planet, and the great Apex race would have a new home world.

  Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

  But first Danny would have to deal with the Elders, who would certainly try to kill him and Naomi. Once the Elders were destroyed, there would be no power on earth that could stop him.

  No doubt about it. The future looked very, very bright for Danny Decay. In fact, in all the universe, there was only one thing that could unravel his master plan, and it wasn’t the Elders or aircraft carriers or even nuclear war. It was:

  “Danny, when are we getting married?”

  Her shrill voice was like a cloud of panicked mosquitos in his ear.

  “Did you hear me, Danny? When are we getting married?” repeated Naomi.

  “Soon, baby. Very soon,” said Danny, not very convincingly.

  “You said tha
t fifty years ago. You said that a hundred years ago.”

  “Goddamn it, baby. You’re suffocating me.”

  “It’s just, we’ve been going together for 349 years now, and I’d like to get married while my parents are still around.”

  “Baby, sweetie, why do you want to ruin a good thing? I don’t understand the rush.”

  “I thought it would be nice, you know? We can get married, kill everybody in New York, and then move into the Plaza. Seems like that would be a really nice way to start this next chapter in our lives.”

  As Danny pretended to listen, he shuffled about the lobby, kicking mindlessly at some of the shriveled carcasses littering the floor. The room was quite a mess, with bullet holes everywhere and exploded heads and the walls splattered with blood and gore. Most of the drug dealers were ex-military and put up quite a struggle, but he and Naomi had dispatched them with very little effort.

  “You promised we were going to have fun,” Naomi continued. “But instead, here we are in the shittiest shithole in Shittown.”

  Danny stopped kicking bodies and gave her an injured look.

  “Oh baby, are we not having fun? Didn’t we kill a whole bunch of people just an hour ago? Wasn’t that fun?”

  “I guess…”

  “I told you we have to lie low for a while. The Elders will be looking for us and we need to prepare. Once we destroy them, we can go anywhere we want. But you’ve got to trust me on this, okay?”

  “Sure, okay. I’m sorry. It’s just, you’ve been so busy lately, and…”

  “What, baby? What is it?”

  Naomi was pouting now. “I bet you even forgot it’s our sesquarcentennial anniversary tomorrow.”

  “Don’t be silly, baby. How could I possibly forget the day we fell in love? It was the most important day of my life.”

  “Really? This isn’t just more of your bullshit?”

  Actually, Danny had been dreading this day for fifty years, ever since their tercentenary anniversary, because he never knew what to give her. He loved Naomi with all his heart, but goddamn it, she needed a lot of maintenance.

  And what was the proper gift for a 350th anniversary anyway? Platinum? Uranium? Adamantium? He had run out of ideas, and quickly pulled something very large out of his ass.

  “Okay, okay. I wanted it to be a surprise, but for our anniversary gift, I’m giving you… Tiffany’s.”

  “Really? Tiffany’s? The whole store?”

  “That’s right. I was going to spring it on you tomorrow, but now you’ve gone and ruined the surprise. There. Are you happy now?”

  “Oh Danny, you’re the best!”

  She leaped on him happily and gave him kisses all over his face. Danny laughed.

  “Ah me. Even after three hundred and fifty years, the spark is still there.”

  From upstairs came the sound of a window breaking, followed by a desperate voice crying out for help.

  “Hmph, guess we missed one,” said Danny. “What do you say we go upstairs and have some fun?”

  Naomi shook her head happily. As they walked up the stairs, they passed Joey Clawhammer’s shriveled body impaled in the wall with a gold machete. Without slowing, Danny pulled out the machete and Joey’s body slumped forward and fell down the steps.

  Danny rested the bloody machete on his shoulder and held hands with Naomi as they continued upstairs.

  Chapter 12

  Vargos Spiderback

  As with most nights, Rex’s sleep was fitful and terrifying, and his dreams frequently brought him back to Romania. It was 2009 again, and he was with the Asskickers on that fateful mission to destroy the monstrous evil that had been unwittingly released after the fall of the Ceausescu regime, twenty years before.

  As Lars explained the matter, during the 1970s the brutal dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had built a secret fortress in the Carpathian Mountains to serve as a sanctuary should his ungrateful countrymen one day turn against him. And within this fortress, many believed, Ceausescu had stashed the gold he had stolen from the Romanian treasury during his long and terrible reign.

  But in 1989, all these extraordinary measures could not save Ceausescu, who was overthrown in a coup and captured before he could flee the capital, and he was promptly executed along with his wife by a firing squad.

  Within hours of the execution, the Romanian military moved to locate the stolen gold, and a search of the People’s Palace turned up some items that were particularly intriguing: a map to the secret fortress, which was near Moartea, a small village thirty kilometers southwest of the Borgo Pass; an ancient key of strange and intricate design; and Nicolae Ceausescu’s personal journal, which spoke at length about the hidden gold.

  The journal also contained several pages of religious incantations and told of a great demon entombed in the fortress, a horrific creature that would be unleashed upon the Romanian countryside should Nicolae Ceausescu ever be killed – a kind of doomsday weapon in the form of a supernatural monster.

  A company of seventy soldiers, commanded by Captain Arisztid Olt, was quickly dispatched to Moartea to recover the gold. On the insistence of church leaders, the soldiers were accompanied by a priest, Father Blaskó, whose presence was required to read the incantations before the vault was opened.

  The map led the soldiers to Castle Spiderback, a 12th century castle destroyed during the war with the Turks in 1462. Beneath the castle ruins, the men found ancient catacombs, housing the remains of many generations of the Spiderback royal family. Beyond these tombs was the entrance to a vast underground complex – a bunker, really – containing spacious living quarters and food enough to last for years. The bunker was bombproof and built to withstand a full scale invasion, yet curiously only a few weapons could be found to defend the place.

  At last the soldiers discovered a huge bank vault, made of modern metals and stainless steel, and strong enough to survive a direct missile hit.

  Captain Olt approached the vault door with his lieutenant, who carried Ceausescu’s journal with him and the curious key, which he kept tied to a lanyard around his neck. From the outside, the vault looked like an ordinary bank safe with a combination lock, but very large, obviously meant to secure something of great value – like gold bullion.

  The combination itself, found in the journal, was absurdly simple: 2 - 6 - 1 - 19 - 18, which stood for the 26th day of January, 1918, Nicolae Ceausescu’s birthday. Either Ceausescu truly believed no one would ever find this vault, or he didn’t care if they did.

  The lieutenant turned the tumbler, 2 - 6 - 1 - 19 - 18, but was interrupted before the handle could be turned. The priest spoke urgently to the captain.

  “Captain, I must read the incantations in the book before you open the vault,” said Father Blaskó.

  The captain looked peeved. “Magic words? We have no time for such nonsense.”

  “Captain, please. My instructions were very clear.”

  Grudgingly, the captain agreed to the ritual, and signaled the lieutenant to hand the journal to the priest.

  “Very well, priest,” said the captain. “Be quick about it. It’s hot, and the air down here stinks.”

  Father Blaskó opened the book and began to read the incantations. But after two minutes of listening to the priest recite page after page of ponderous Latin text, the captain snatched the book away from him.

  “Enough hocus pocus. This is a waste of time. Open the goddamn vault.”

  The lieutenant pushed past the indignant priest, and turned the handle of the great safe. The enormous door opened smoothly, despite weighing several tons. It was pitch black inside the vault, and the air reeked of vomit and rotten flesh. Flashlights held by the soldiers traced the contours of the vault, revealing an apparently empty room, until they found something extraordinary — a wretched, naked man standing in the center of the room, chained by his hands and feet to the metal floor.

  There were gasps from some of the soldiers as they filed cautiously into the vault. The chained man was filth
y and bearded, with long white hair that hung past his knees. His skin was nearly transparent, veins and emaciated muscles distinctly visible just beneath his cellophane-like flesh. Lesions and purple scabs covered the man from head to foot, perhaps the result of leprosy. He looked like a man who should be dead, or at least praying for death.

  Holding a handkerchief over his nose to ward off the terrible stench in this hot, airless room, the captain addressed the mysterious prisoner.

  “Who are you?” asked the captain, trying hard not to gag from the putrefaction.

  The chained man looked at him like a whipped dog.

  “I am… Vargos. I am the master of this castle.”

  “You are the master of a foul-smelling tomb. How did you get in here?”

  “I was imprisoned here many years ago by Nicolae Ceausescu.”

  The captain frowned, trying to make sense of this. He looked at the lieutenant, who tapped his temple, indicating that the man was obviously touched in the head.

  “Ceausescu and his bitch wife are dead,” the captain said to Vargos. “We have come for the gold.”

  Vargos straightened and raised his manacled hands.

  “Release me, and I will show you where it is.”

  The captain looked at Vargos suspiciously. His superiors had not prepared him for a naked man in chains, but he did not want to appear indecisive by requesting new orders. He wanted only to find the gold, and find it quickly, which would certainly earn him a promotion, and maybe even a share of the gold as a reward.

  “Surely one naked man cannot be a threat to so many soldiers,” said Vargos, who looked more likely to die soon from consumption than offer any trouble. He lifted his hands and presented the manacles again, gesturing to the lieutenant. “That is the key there, strung around the lieutenant’s neck.”

  There were ten soldiers with the captain inside the vault, and another sixty men stood just outside, all of them armed with rifles and machine guns. Still, the captain remained dubious.

  Abruptly, Vargos coughed up a large amount of blood. He began to teeter, as if about to collapse.