Monster Girl Base

by Logan Jacobs

  Floppy blatted out a sad little trumpet and started to lumber back toward the bungalow. The poor mammoth’s fur was even more puffed up than it had been during the first storm, and he looked like a balloon of greasy mammoth hair with his long, thin tail for a string.

  “We passed through a storm like this just before the lawnmower chased us,” Fela growled. Her tail stuck up straight as she strode after Floppy. “This is not a good sign.”

  “Hey Emma, what usually happens during these storms?” I asked. “Like, how bad do they get? How long do they last?”

  “Well, it’s mostly just a lot of this, but more…” Emma’s voice trailed off as her hair settled down around her shoulders and her fingers stopped sparking. “Well, that was certainly a quick one.”

  The prickling sensation faded from my fingers and toes as the light dimmed back to its normal clarity, but my head still felt a little tingly, as though it had just been massaged by hundreds of ants.

  “Are you sure we’re not just in the eye of the storm or something?” I peered at the trees to see if there was any hint of a yellow glow around their branches.

  “Please tell me that storms on your world cannot see,” Fela growled. “They are already dangerous enough!”

  “I certainly hope they can’t see,” Emma remarked. “No, they usually just hover around a bit until they discharge or just fade out. I suppose this one couldn’t sustain its charge, which I frankly much prefer to the other option.”

  “So that means it’s safe to stay out?” I asked. “Or do we need to wait?”

  “This one’s passed,” Emma shrugged. She turned back toward downtown. “It was so short, I don’t imagine there’s much danger of another any time soon, but they do seem to be happening more often. I wonder what it means?”

  “Probably nothing good,” I grunted.

  As if I needed another reason to think that Emma’s version of Earth was dying.

  The first stop on our tour of Farmington’s dilapidated downtown was Henry Lee’s Harness Shop. The wooden front doors were pretty wide, so it was easy to drag out the one intact wooden cart that we found in the back room and position its steel wheels on the street. The cart was only about six feet wide by eight feet long, but it was much better than nothing.

  “This place was a Lebanese restaurant in my world,” I said as we searched among the ruins of the store for harness parts that would fit Floppy. “They had all these cool decorated swords on the walls. And they had this super creamy garlic dip that would burn the skin right off your mouth--sorry, Fela, you would hate it. But you would have loved their lamb fattoush. Lots of rich gamey meat and tons of mint.”

  “Do not make me hungry again.” Fela picked up a metal harness and inspected it. “I have made leather nets to hang over Floppy so that I could have him carry things, but I do not know if he will appreciate having this contraption on him. It is hard and heavy.”

  “We can at least try it,” Emma said. She slung some chains over her shoulder and started toward the street where the carriage sat.

  Floppy flapped his ears and swung his trunk as we fitted the harness on him, but once the little mammoth shrugged his shoulders and stamped his feet he looked like he was much more comfortable in his new accessory. He gave the cart an experimental pull once Emma hooked it up to the harness with the chains, and the decisive way he started pulling the whole assemblage down the road seemed to suggest that he was enjoying the challenge.

  “Look at him go!” Emma cheered as the little mammoth lumbered slowly around a corner. “It’s like he was made to fit the harness.”

  “Floppy enjoys being useful,” Fela said. She shaded her eyes with her hand as her pet started to gallop down the road with his trunk flapping wildly up and down in front of his face. “Floppy! Stop! Come back here!”

  Floppy skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust. He looked back behind his hairy shoulder, bobbed his head as he turned himself around, then started to gallop back. His cart tilted on two wheels as he tugged it toward Fela, rocked back and forth as he picked up speed, then rattled down the road behind the little mammoth as he sped toward his mistress. Floppy skidded to a halt again in front of Fela, but his cart rolled on and bumped him in the hindquarters. The little mammoth flared out his ears, flung up his trunk, and let out a squawking blat of a trumpet.

  “Good Floppy, it’s alright.” Fela stroked her mammoth’s trunk. “Be careful with the carriage. The wheels make it easy for you to pull it, but sometimes they will make it move on its own a little.”

  “Alright, let’s do this methodically.” I rubbed my hands together and glanced around the street. “We don’t want to tire out Floppy by having him pull the carriage all around the place, so I think we should go up one side of the street and then down the other. We’ll get a bunch of stuff and then head back to Emma’s house, but we’ll have to remember to leave space for her pickle jars, seeds, books, and whatever else we want to take from her house.”

  “Perfect,” Emma nodded. “We’ll need some boxes or bags or something like that, won’t we?”

  “Post office, right there.” I pointed to the small brick building that stood on the northwest corner of the intersection. “Then we can proceed to the Korner Barber.”

  The post office was full of wooden crates that hadn’t yet rotted and linen mailbags that were neatly folded on the shelves. It didn’t take long to stack two-foot-wide crates into the cart and grab armfuls of bags, but I lingered for a few depressing moments as I gazed at the bags stuffed full of letters and packages that would never be opened or delivered. In another world, the letters had been read, the packages had been opened, and life had gone humming along with Edison’s hand at the electric wheel instead of Nikola Tesla’s.

  The Korner Barber’s red and blue candy-striped pole hung askew on the crumbling red brick of the building next to the surprisingly intact plate glass windows. The dusty mirrors, ancient wooden paneling, and metal barbershop chairs looked like the same ones from my world and didn’t look much cleaner or well-maintained, either. The barbershop had never been full when I’d passed it, and I’d always wondered if it was secretly a front.

  “This should be great, we’ll get razors and scissors and all kinds of useful things to cut with,” I said. “Plus, y’know, combs. I didn’t bring a comb and my hair’s going to get pretty wild soon.”

  “I like the way your hair feels,” Fela murmured. “It is soft and curly like the fleece of a bighorn sheep.”

  “Well, thanks.” I patted my mop of curls as I tugged at the tarnished brass doorknob of the barbershop’s front door, stumbled backward a little as the door swung open, and jumped back as a rusty pair of scissors snapped against the hard toe of my Red Wing boot. “What the fuck?”

  The sound of sharp metal against metal filled the air as a flock of scissors and a few old-fashioned straight razors sliced their way out of the open door of the barbershop. The pitted blades of the implements scissored back and forth as they jerked and stabbed their way down the stone steps.

  I shoved my shoulder against the door, but the rusty hinges stuck, and I couldn't stem the tide of blades as they snipped their way down the stone steps and out onto the road. I stomped on the handles of a few scissors, but their blades just kept opening and closing under my boot.

  “Oh, my goodness!” Emma picked up her skirts and started to kick the rogue scissors away from Floppy’s feet as the little mammoth shuffled backward to avoid the sharp tools.

  “Get away!” Fela used the end of her spear like a hockey stick to knock the scissors up the street even as she jumped and leapt around their snapping blades. “Foul lightning-tools!”

  I finally slammed the door shut, kicked the last few pairs of animated scissors northwest up Grand River Avenue toward the rest, scanned the road to make sure we hadn’t missed any, and watched as the rusty flock sliced jerkily down the street away from us.

  “This town is full of traps,” Fela growled as we left the barbershop and passed the po
ol hall. “We will need to be more careful going into these caves.”

  “This hardware store ought to be safer for us, or it was the first time I checked.” Emma jerked her thumb sideways at Day Dickerson’s Hardware, then pushed the door open.

  The inside of the hardware store smelled a little stale, but it was dusty and dry instead of moldy and damp. Black iron and gray steel gleamed from every wooden shelf and bin.

  “Jackpot.” I grinned. “We can load up on tools and building stuff. It looks like barely anything has rusted in here.”

  “We will need to be careful about what we choose to bring.” Fela lifted a length of steel pipe and weighed it in her hands. “These all look like things we can use, but they are almost as heavy as stone. Floppy is strong, but he can only carry so much.”

  We filled one crate with tools, another with pipes, and another with chains, then distributed bags of iron nails on top of the crates.

  “That is a lot of weight,” Fela frowned. She patted Floppy on the hindquarters. “Forward, Floppy. Let us see how well you can pull these tools first.”

  Floppy took a few steps forward, then stopped just as the steel wheels of the cart started to roll.

  “Is it too heavy?” Fela asked.

  Floppy shook his head, flapped out his big bat-wing ears, and raised his trunk up like a periscope. His long proboscis turned to the left and the right as he sniffed at the air, and then he started to back up quickly.

  “What is wrong?” Fela asked as she followed him back. “Floppy?”

  I could hear the faint but unmistakable sound of electric zaps, so I turned to Emma to see if she’d started to buzz for some reason, but the black-haired girl was gazing attentively at Floppy as he backed up. I turned to look down the street past the mammoth. My heart slammed against my rib cage as I realized what Floppy had been afraid of.

  The last half-dozen feral dogs strolled out from between two shops. Their fur bristled with static and their fangs glittered with electric sparks, but their ferocious teeth and electrical field wasn’t the scariest thing about the feral dog pack this time. Six sets of scissors floated in the air in front of the pack with their looped handles opening and shutting just inches from each dog’s nose.

  The pack had found the snapping scissors to control, one to a dog.

  Chapter 15

  “They’re back,” Emma whispered as the snarling dogs advanced on us from the southeast. “And they’ve found weapons.”

  “How?” I whispered back. I pulled my Glock from my holster, held my finger over the trigger guard, and aimed at the slowly stalking dogs. I knew I only had five bullets left in the Glock after I’d used four on the dogs yesterday. I had enough bullets to get all the dogs, but I would have to use them wisely, especially since reloading during a fight could take precious seconds.

  “Just because you chase something away from your territory does not mean they will not come back,” Fela growled as she stood in front of Floppy and held her spear crosswise across her body. “The only sure way to eradicate a threat is to kill them all.”

  “If only we could tell them that we’re going to leave soon,” Emma murmured as she backed away from the dogs, grabbed a wooden-handled shovel from the cart, and held it over her shoulder like a baseball bat. “They’ll have the town to themselves in just a day.”

  “I don’t think they’re going to listen, so get ready to fight.” I picked the biggest dog with the pointiest ears, aimed at its head, and pulled the trigger.

  The dog yelped and collapsed to the ground in a spray of red blood, but my bullet had connected with the scissors as well as the dog’s head. The metal blades spun up in the air, hung for a moment as they sliced open and closed, and fell in front of the black dog’s smaller, equally pointy companion. The smaller dog gnashed its teeth as the scissors spun into position in front of its nose, and before I knew it the dog and both pairs of scissors were zooming straight toward me.

  “Whoa!” I yelled as I threw myself to the side to avoid the snapping blades. I could hear them whiz past me as I hit the ground, but at least I didn’t feel their sharp points slice through my skin. I looked up to see the pointy-eared dog’s sharp fangs flashing with sparks as it raced toward me, and I scrambled to get a good grip on my Glock, but the electric buzz that started to prickle over my skin made it hard for my twitching fingers to curl around the trigger.

  The dog’s eyes started to glow as it covered the last few yards of ground toward me. It opened its fanged red mouth in a bark, but the rough sound of its woof was interrupted by a deafening zap. Its limbs skittered and scrabbled over the gritted surface of the road as blue bolts of lightning played around its head like a halo, and it finally collapsed to the ground as its sparking white teeth snapped together just inches away from my nose.

  The buzzing on my skin abruptly stopped, and I finally managed to stagger to my feet.

  Emma stood next to the cart with the shovel in her hands and held the metal head out toward the dog she’d just zapped for me. Bolts of her trademark blue lighting arced from her fingers to the blade. One zapped toward the dog’s corpse and made it jump, but the black-haired girl’s attention was focused on the four dogs left alive.

  All four dogs had started to gallop toward us at top canine speed, with two dogs in front and two behind. Sparks flew from their claws and fangs as they ran, and the snapping scissors were blurs of silver in front of their noses.

  Two of the dogs headed straight toward Floppy and the cart, where Fela stood tall with her spear held across her body.

  “Floppy, duck!” the cat-girl commanded as the gleaming scissors accelerated toward her pet. Her mammoth obeyed and collapsed to his front knees just as the scissors shot toward him and Fela, but Fela didn’t duck. She slammed the point of her stone spear forward against one of the pairs of scissors, then brought the tip around and pointed it toward the throat of the dog who’d flung the blades at her.

  Floppy blatted out a high-pitched frantic-sounding trumpet as the other pair of gleaming scissors shot past his ear. He tilted his head to the side as the dog who had thrown the blades galloped toward him, swung his head around as the dog prepared to leap, and speared the snarling canine with his tusks before its paws could leave the ground. The mammoth shook his head as the yelping canine spat showers of sparks toward his face, then ducked and scraped the dog’s twitching corpse off onto the ground as the yelping stopped.

  The other two dogs broke off and headed for me and Emma. Their tawny ears flopped up and down and their gleaming scissors blades snapped just inches in front of their noses as they silently ran.

  I aimed my Glock at the bigger dog as it streaked diagonally across the street toward me. Once I felt that I'd gotten a good bead on the dog’s trajectory I pulled the trigger, but the dog darted off toward Emma as my finger squeezed down. My bullet whizzed just behind the dog’s head and crackled with white lightning as it passed through the dog’s electrical aura.

  “Beasts!” Emma raised the shovel over her head and slung it toward the dogs like a javelin. Blue bolts of lightning arced from her hand and surrounded the shovel’s head with a halo of glowing electric power as the tool flew through the air.

  The tawny dog banked to avoid Emma's projectile, but the sharp blade of the shovel sliced along its side and tore a ragged red scratch in its body. The dog threw back its head as it skidded to the ground, howled as it landed on its wounded side, and rolled over onto its back with its legs up in the air. Its scissors shot along the ground toward Emma, but the black-haired girl jumped to the side to avoid the snapping blades.

  The last dog shot past Emma and left a little cloud of dust in its wake as it tore up the street, and I followed it with the barrel of my Glock as it ran. The dog looked like it might be trying to get away from us, and if that was true then I didn’t want to waste a bullet on it, but I remembered Fela’s warning about the dogs coming back.

  I followed the dog with my pistol as the feral canine banked into a curve, and b
efore it could head back toward us I squeezed the trigger.

  The dog’s body flew off toward the side, collapsed onto the street, and rolled with a slight white crackle before it came to rest in the dirt. Its scissors flew off toward the brick exterior of the Korner Barber, broke apart, fell to the ground, and did not move.

  “Is that all the dogs?” I lowered my pistol. “Please tell me that’s all the dogs. I don’t have many bullets left.”

  “I don’t hear any more, but I suppose it’s possible that they may have split up into two packs.” Emma said. She bent down to retrieve the shovel, then glanced around the street. “Although I don’t know if they’d be quite that clever. They’re only dogs, after all.”

  “You never know how smart an animal can be,” I muttered. I lowered my Glock and looked around as well, but I didn’t hear any other telltale zaps or see any more traces of animal-like movement. “I think we might be safe for now, but don’t let your guard down.”

  “Floppy is hurt!” Fela shouted.

  “Oh, shit!” I raced over to where Floppy was kneeling on the ground. I knew that if Floppy had been seriously injured, we definitely wouldn't be able to carry our loot back to the DEPP machine, and we might not even be able to get him back at all. I didn't want to leave Floppy or Fela behind in this terrifying world.

  “Look at his ear,” Fela groaned.

  Floppy blatted sadly and flapped his bat-wing ears out. There was a cut about an inch long in the bottom of his left ear and blood spattered in tiny droplets onto the ground as he waved his ear back and forth.

  “Aww, that’s not so bad, buddy.” I patted Floppy on the trunk. “I bet that stings pretty bad, but you can still walk around and stuff, right?”

  “Oh, you poor dear!” Emma exclaimed. She bustled over and stroked the little mammoth on the trunk. “I’m sure we can find some bandages in the doctor’s office across the street. We’ll get you patched up right away.”

  “I will stay with Floppy while you two find supplies.” Fela wrapped her arms around the mammoth’s trunk and laid her auburn head against the bridge of his nose. “It will be alright, Floppy. You are safe now. The dogs will not hurt you.”