by Curtis Hox
He realized he should have reviewed the critiques of Howard’s work, the accusation of blatant sexism, overt racism, the stereotyping of characters and nationalities, based especially on—what was the term, he tried to remember as he argued that Howard’s central character was noble and honorable—Orientalism, the negative characterization of Middle Eastern culture as exotic. He tried to suggest that Howard’s use was creative, but couldn’t remember the author’s name or the particulars of this social critique.
The drugs he’d taken today to keep the voices at bay had also dulled his mind.
Corbin paused for a moment, staring at the audience, most of whom were glaring, especially six individuals in the third row he assumed must be women’s studies students because they looked pissed off, and underdressed.
Normally, he’d have told them all to go to hell, that Hexcom United’s walls were lined with books about barbarians who kill and plunder and the women who love them. His own failed fiction had attempted to work in the same vein, but the times had changed, as Hattie Sterling had insisted.
Fuck ‘em, Francis. Time for the real show.
“I want to end with a bit of theater.” Corbin stood, his right hand in his pocket. He triggered the device. Two minutes, that’s all it’ll take …
His heart began to thump in his chest, and he pretended to cough.
“Sorry, something caught in my throat.” Corbin harrumphed again. “Theater, as you know, is queen of the fine arts.” He rounded the table and stood in front of it. “But in today’s world, theater has been eclipsed by novels, film, computer games. And even VR environments. It’s often so difficult to tell the real from the unreal. Hexcom offers you something revolutionary.”
He glanced at the curtain and signaled.
Then Corbin returned to his seat and waited, while Dr. Ross said a few words. An unwitting graduate student assigned to assist the panel pulled on a long cord that ushered the curtain aside.
Standing upright in the middle of the stage was the tall, black box. Hattie grabbed her timer and waited while Corbin whispered in her ear how it all would now be settled.
A shift of the box was the first sign it had begun.
Hattie and Corbin watched the lid bounce open slightly, then close again.
The crowd pointed and chuckled.
The panel all smiled innocently, hoping for some good fun.
Then the lid burst open, and Riodola changed forever.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Reports, of course, were conflicted. All agreed, though, that something awful happened that day at Riodola University.
Dr. Ross couldn’t believe the audacity of Lyell, who had offended most of the audience as an intellectual imposture, not to mention his lack of sensitivity in presenting sexist and racist material. Naked women being manhandled? What a fool. Dr. Ross had listened just to feel superior, even though he wouldn’t have admitted it. The man was obviously still a joke, a rich one, and probably one with a few cracks in his skull.
When the presentation ended and the dramatic performance began (something that took Dr. Ross by surprise—he had only been told that Lyell would use a prop during his presentation), Dr. Ross withdrew a digital camera to capture this foolishness as proof of Lyell’s incompetence.
When the lid opened and Dr. Ross saw what was inside, he smiled at the sophistication of the actor and his costume.
Not to be a poor sport, Dr. Ross stood walked forward, camera in hand.
He bent down on one knee, brought the camera to his eye, and clicked.
* * *
The flash spooked the barbarian. Memories rushed into his mind: the chamber, the food he’d eaten, falling asleep. Rage filled him at the thought of being summoned by unholy magic to a prison world. He had been comfortably …
Where? A tavern, hungover, somewhere near the frontier of Aquilonia, scouting Picts. Then, waking up somewhere else.
When he’d awoken in the box, he’d tried to adjust his eyes. He pushed outward. The lid opened and bright light blinded him. He felt heavy steel leaning against his thigh and belly. His left hand found the leather-strapped hilt.
Just as his eyes adjusted to a world he’d never known, he saw a small man with a strange device … the flash, like lightning, triggered an animal instinct in him.
* * *
Hattie watched Stephan on one knee, even as she fumbled with her timer. She wanted to warn him, but she nearly dropped the thing, and then cranked it too far. It started ticking at sixty-seconds. Way too much time! She had to rewind it all the way to the beginning again.
When she looked up, she saw a flash from the camera.
No, Stephan.
Hattie had only a half second to see the tall barbarian in the prime of his life awaken. She had studied enough of Corbin’s obsession to know that the battle-scarred warrior he’d summoned could have walked straight from Frank Frazetta’s iconic The Barbarian painting, only better armored.
The powerful shoulders and barrel torso, the long arms and massive hands, muscles that looked denser than they should. A necklace of animal canines and bone hung around his neck. Then she spotted the sword. Corbin had armed him. The figure seemed to flicker once, as if not fully there. Then, it returned to full flesh.
Run, Stephan.
Hattie glanced down as her timer began and the barbarian bleedover thing launched itself in the air, its weapon forming an arc behind it.
* * *
Later, when the investigation petered to a halt with no firm understanding of what happened, and when the journalists and scholars had stopped trying to piece the events together into something comprehendible, the horrific death of Dr. Stephan Ross entered pop culture in the most tasteless of ways. The word ‘CleftN2’ popped up in comedy routines, in songs, even during news pundit shows. It was used when one opponent so utterly destroys another there can be no recovery.
The audience watched as the actor jumped into action and pretended to strike Dr. Ross. For only a split second, it looked like a well-rehearsed scene. Then, the unthinkable.
The three-foot blade, held two-handed by a being with more functional strength than any other man on the planet, struck downward into Dr. Ross’s right trapezius. The blade sheared through the clavicle and the entire chest cavity at an angle, severing the spine at the L5/S1 vertebrae. The damage to the viscera and internal organs was so complete, the upper body actually slid off the trunk and plopped to the floor.
For a moment, the audience didn’t react, not until the multiple cuts erupted in jets of foamy blood. Panic sent the audience to its feet. People rushed to exit. Bernard Corrigan escaped into the hallway where he remained and continued to watch. Masumi ducked behind a chair and filmed.
Dr. Sterling caught a glimpse of Corbin’s diabolic smile. He looked like a father happy to see his son hit a home run.
The panel members all jumped to their feet. They stumbled over each other, backing up, until the deranged sword-wielding murderer finally looked their way. Then they ran off the stage like lemmings.
Max Siegen was the only man that day to have a weapon. Brad Dellis stood and stared, unable to believe what he’d just seen, even reaching for a holster that wasn’t there.
Siegen, though, knew his boss had said to remain “in case things get out of control.”
When Krall began to walk toward Mr. Lyell and Harriet Sterling, Siegen pushed his way to the front and withdrew his snub-nosed .38. He called out.
Krall didn’t respond.
Siegen shot once. The bullet punched a meaty hole into Krall’s right deltoid.
Krall roared and reacted so quickly Siegen missed his next three shots. He grabbed the panel table on the platform and easily tossed it at Siegen. Then he leapt from the stage. In one motion, he landed on the table, pinning Siegen underneath, driving his sword through both. Siegen, though, didn’t die right away. Instead, the screaming began. Krall yanked the sword out, kicked the table free and revealed the dull-eyed confusion on Siegen’s face as he
stared at the gaping hole in his belly.
Siegen dropped his gun and attempted to use his fingers to stop the blood flow.
Krall had seen enough of those wounds to know the man’s womanish yells would end soon. He turned back to the stage.
* * *
Dr. Sterling’s clock chimed as two brave but foolish campus security guards ran forward with Taser guns. They fired electric needles and wires.
These stuck in Krall’s back like little wasps. This enraged the barbarian, who had been flayed, crucified, flogged, and a number of other horrible things to demonstrate the depth of his stamina.
He scraped the needles from his skin and with a single stroke took the heads from both men.
Dr. Sterling turned away before the twin fountains gushed as if orchestrated by some twisted Disney imagineer.
Masumi managed to focus just in time to see the pulsing rivulets reach their zenith, then diminish as the bodies crumpled.
“Brad!” she yelled, as instructed. “Brad!” He hurried to her. “Over here!”
Brad knelt by her side, unable to do anything else.
Both Dr. Sterling and Corbin backed away, bumped into the side of the stage, then fell to their knees.
Hattie’s mind barely registered the truth of this deadly reality of bleedover. Even so, she was cognizant enough to know that Margery’s label for narrative seeping into the real world, bleedover, had never been so apposite. Hattie glazed her eyes so that she couldn’t see Stephan or the men on the floor.
She clutched her talisman.
Where? Where will it come from?
Hattie cowered, unable to move, but managed to create some distance between herself and Corbin.
A massive, twenty-foot tall female shape appeared on stage. Its head was almost in the ceiling joists. Glistening red skin rippled across its body. Six arms like Kali’s stretched from its torso. It wore human skulls in an iron necklace around its neck. Massive, full female breasts protruded from its chest. Its head was as big as a bull’s, horned, sublime. It roared once.
Krall reacted even before the thing could take a step forward.
Hattie glanced once at Corbin and felt foolish she cared about the outcome. She had her own wards of protection, reinforced three times over with Masumi’s valiant Equisaran Space Marine. This was a personal affair that had turned into a massacre because Corbin had armed the barbarian. Still, she wondered if she had underestimated him.
She knew her answer when Krall’s blade tore into her goddess’s chest up to the hilt. He hung on for a second before the massive she-thing flung him aside like a rag doll.
It roared its pain and indignation and thrashed about on stage, tearing the curtain from the ceiling, one arm smashing into unlit overhead lighting. It stepped forward, then fell to one knee. Krall regained his feet, dirk in hand, and pounced. He fought through the arms and managed several well-aimed strikes to the neck before he was lifted off his feet and flung across the room into a center aisle. That alone should have broken his back.
Instead, he kicked several of the ruined chairs free and stood.
The dirk was still in the thing’s neck, the sword sticking from its chest.
“Crom!” she heard him say.
Hattie’s poorly crafted red goddess crumpled to the floor, only seconds after it had coalesced.
So quickly … how could he kill her so quickly?
Hattie cranked her timer again to summon another.
She had no idea if it would work twice.
Krall rushed back, then withdrew his sword, sending crimson gobbets arching over the stage. Her goddess disappeared.
He turned to Hattie and Corbin.
* * *
Towns projected in his cocoon. They had moved him from the projection cylinder’s anteroom hours ago. He knew he’d been there at the beginning of the projection, even though at that point he was so heavily doped all he remembered was the flashing sequence of images and sounds of Krall the Destroyer. These were taken, first, from low-budget independent films, then from a series of detailed art stills that showed the character in all his glory.
Towns knew when the projection started because he could feel a shift in his mind.
The first few times, he’d been so overwhelmed with the near mystical experience, he’d thought he was dying. No fear, though, no horror, just a sense that his body had dissipated into nothingness, leaving only his mind and the projection. That lasted only a short time before the lights on his monitoring machine began to blink and distract him, reminding him of where he was and what he was doing. After the blinking came the blankness as he fell into a suspended state.
However, this time, he had a plan. And jamming the cocoon against the door was just the first step.
Towns watched as the mighty form came to be, felt the barbarian’s confusion, annoyance, anger, his curiosity. The language was foreign, but he could feel the questions. Something similar to where the fuck am I? How the hell did I get here?
The plate of food was irresistible, but the barbarian still didn’t eat for an hour. The heavy dosed sedative in the fried chicken eventually did its work.
Towns saw the monitor lights blink in his room and used a supreme effort of will to juggle the reality of his projection with the reality of his cocoon.
He knew from previous sessions, that blinking green on the monitoring and IV feed equipment meant blankness. Blue … he wanted to avoid blue. Near the end of each process, after he projected, the green lights came on, then he disappeared into the dark for hours. He’d awake later with the blue blinking and the nightmare experience roaring through a mind seeking rest. Blue always meant purging. But no rest, not with the fast blue blinking light that meant the tube in his arm was no longer his friend.
Before the machine switched and the green light flashed to send him into oblivion, he reached over and withdrew the IV from his arm. He didn’t want to go under this time. They hadn’t strapped him in yet. They had wheeled him back into his room because of the strength of his projection; it was strong enough that he didn’t even have to be in close proximity to the subject.
That was a big mistake.
The cocoon had wheels you could step on and lock. It was heavy. He barely managed to push it in place, jamming the door handle in such a way it wouldn’t turn, wouldn’t open the door.
Towns giggled to himself as the cocktail of opiates and psychotropics made him jump up and down. He spun around in circles. In one world, his mind extended outward; in the other he paced in his room and wondered if this was what it was like to become a god.
His reasoning had not left him, even though waves of intense pleasure made him want to lie down and dream. He resisted. He would not let the green drugs put him into a comatose state to dull his awareness of the projection. Instead, he was aware when the subject suddenly came to life in the darkened box at the symposium.
He felt the anger. The power. He actually roared in his recovery room loud enough to alert a nurse.
While the staff tried unsuccessfully to open the door to his room, he experienced what no puny, young man could ever know: the battle rage flowing through Krall’s veins triggered another growl in Towns.
Towns slashed down, as if holding a sword, knocking over a lamp. He felt the inertia of each swing. No fear tugged at his mind as he stared at the red giant dying at his feet, only an instinct for aggression and the will for survival.
* * *
Krall flickered once, but didn’t notice he was less than fully real. Everyone else who remained—Corbin, Dr. Sterling, Masumi, Brad, even Corrigan peeking in from across the amphitheater—saw the form stutter, almost as if it were a digital stream in need of buffering. Yet no one for a moment believed what they witnessed was virtual. The figure standing before Corbin and Dr. Sterling was as real as any other piece of matter in the room. And it carried a bloody sword; and it was advancing.
Krall felt an urge to flee, but the two individuals cowering only feet away required investigation. He f
elt assured that this strangely dressed old, feeble man with something close to adoration in his eyes was the cause of his problems.
The woman, though, trembled and feared for her life. He bent over her and with a bloody hand grabbed her chin. He looked into her eyes. He carelessly painted her face red. She did not resist.
Hattie sensed his curiosity rather than hostility. She was not surprised that her wards remained dormant. He meant her no harm. In fact, she felt a strange attraction to him, even in this most horrific of moments, as if she would gladly go wherever he wished, so long as he would protect her.
Such thoughts struck her, again, as clichéd and highly inappropriate. But still, she didn’t yank her chin away from his bloody hand even though the iron stink of it assaulted her nostrils. She looked once more in the face of this physical projection and saw intelligence, desire, and rage.
She mouthed, I’m sorry, even though she guessed he couldn’t understand her.
Then Krall turned to Corbin, who’d watched with fascination as his creation had studied her.
Corbin believed he had won, oh yes he had, his favorite character more than justifying every argument he had with her about the virility and prowess lacking in today’s feminized heroes.
He grabbed his cell phone to call and have Towns shut down; he noticed he had accidentally left the ringer off. He saw a slew of messages.
Towns is awake.
Corbin quickly fast-dialed a number. He should have done this earlier. All the technicians needed was a quick word and they could kill the projection by doping Towns.
Corbin didn’t resist when Krall grabbed the device and tossed it across the room, almost as if he knew what it was. Corbin reached out in a show of respect, hoping to demonstrate his good will, then felt a large hand wrap around the back of his neck.
He thought Krall meant to help him to his feet.
“Yes,” Corbin said, “thank you,” before his neck snapped.
He crumpled to the floor, unable to believe he had lost control of his body.