Darren glanced at the officers, who had that dazed look as they shook their heads, their attention totally elsewhere. After all, falling megastructures had that effect on people…
The Chinese teen looked up from his video, frowning a little, and opened his mouth, but Sunny made a sharp gesture against her throat.
Darren didn’t see it—he had his back to the kid, glaring at Sunny. “I was talking about the squid, dumbass.”
Sunny blinked and glanced blankly down at the octopus, limp and squishy in her hand. “Oh. This. I stopped for sushi.”
Darren snorted, then turned to look at the wrecked Interchange. “We’re outta time.” He pulled both guns from over his shoulders, wrapped the straps around his biceps and one-handed each of them like a pro. “There’ll be a full investigation later, Day,” he said. “Everyone stand back,” he said, turning towards the oncoming rumble. “Time to let a professional take care of this.”
He looked her shotgun over and made a derisive sound. “Birdshot? Really?”
Sunny shrugged. “It packs a punch.”
He snorted. “Have fun hunting geese. I’ll be up front, killing the monster.”
“Sounds good to me,” Sunny said.
The officers stepped obediently aside, making way for the big guy with guns. “Yes sir.” They didn’t even bother to check his ID as they lifted the hazard tape for him.
Apparently he looks the part, Sunny thought bitterly.
The Chinese teen’s frown deepened and he opened his mouth. “But—”
Sunny grabbed Sheng and backed him away from the doomed maniac with the guns.
“Let the meat shield do his job, Sheng,” Sunny said, patting his shoulder. “We’ll just wait for him to piss it off, then step in and save the day.” She hefted her shotgun and grinned at him. “How’s that sound?”
“Oh yeah, that’s great,” Sheng swept the camera back and forth between Sunny and the elderly badass with guns, looking like he was in the middle of a nerdy wet dream.
The sound of the Megarail was almost a thunder, now.
“Here we go,” Sunny said, tensing. Indeed, as the rail approached, she could see that the octopus was sprawled across the front of the lead car like an alien face-hugger clinging to a blonde twenty-something redshirt in short-shorts. She was pretty sure the impact of getting crushed between a seventy story granite skyscraper and a nine-story, hundred-foot-wide Megarail engine going two hundred miles an hour would be enough force to squish it, but there was always Plan B.
That’s right, you child-murdering piece of shit, she thought, watching the train approach down the rail. She tensed, getting a good grip on her gun. Her bandage-wrapped elbow throbbed in response. You’re about to be between a rock and a million tons of hard place…
“Heads up, guys!” one of the firemen shouted, starting to back away. “This is gonna su—”
The train came careening over the gap. It almost made it to the rail on the other side, but instead hit the concrete and broken rebar with its octopus-covered nose and crumpled the track ahead of it. Then the back end of the car, which still had momentum, carried forward, end-over-end, directly into the building built around the Megarail.
Twenty feet in front of her, Darren let out a high-pitched, crazed “Yeeeee-haaww !” as the massive train slammed into the skyscraper, tearing its base out from under it in a screech of metal and stone. In the next forty-five seconds of rumbling, ear-ripping shatter of stone and metal, the entire structure came down in a massive avalanche of crumbling granite and debris that leveled an entire city block and sent up a gout of rock dust reminiscent of a volcanic eruption that simultaneously swept outward, blasting down 6th Avenue in a sandstorm of particles of powdered granite, sheetrock, and wood. Seeing the wall of dust rushing at them, the remaining people at the barricade broke and ran. Sunny, not having that option, held up her squid to shield her face from the stinging debris, and beside her, teenage Sheng finally stopped filming to duck.
The deep, unearthly churning continued for several minutes as the chunks of rock and rubble came pounding down around the busted Megarail, creating a mountain of wreckage that towered over the road.
By the time the dust settled, the road around Sunny was abandoned except for her, Sheng, and Darren. Looking a little shellshocked, Sheng blew dust from the camera lens and started filming again. Up ahead, the jarhead was dust-covered and cackling. “Come and get me, Dortez!” Darren screamed, wiping dust from his eyes and nose. “Come and get me, you tentacled freak!” He fired a few shots into the air. “Come on!” He started jogging towards the debris pile. More gunfire as he climbed the mound. “Yeah !”
“He makes a good distraction,” Sunny said, watching.
Sheng nodded silently, filming the crazy from afar.
Indeed, after a few more taunts and bullets, the rubble behind Darren started to move …
“Oookay…” Sunny said, readying her gun and putting her squid-arm across Sheng’s chest. “Here we go. Don’t let those longer tentacles touch you—they kill.”
The interdimensional octopus began crawling out from the rubble and started to slide out into the road between Sunny and Darren. Darren went on shouting insults to the pile ahead of him, oblivious.
“I wonder if he’s deaf,” Sunny thought aloud. All that shouting and getting yelled at in the military…
“I saw a hearing aid,” the teenager offered.
Not good. Sunny dropped the squid and raised her gun to her shoulder, waiting for the eye or some other vulnerable part of the creature to show itself. “This is gonna get ugly…” she warned Sheng. To Darren, she willed, Just get him to come out a few more inches…
The massive tentacles dislodged a piece of rubble as they reached for Darren, however, and the old military man spun, cackling. “Got you, you piece of shi—”
The tentacle snatched him off the ground and shook him like a martini mixer, rifles going off until they got flung aside in a metal clatter, then it hurled him down the road to come to a limp stop against a fire truck a few feet from them, broken and bloody.
It had only taken seconds.
Seeing that, Sheng’s eyes went wide. He wasn’t grinning any more. He did, however, move closer to squat for an up-close view of Darren’s road burned face.
Instead of emerging the rest of the way, the tentacles started to retreat back into the rubble pile. Sunny lowered her gun with frustration. She glanced down at the grit-covered octopus, then at the vanishing monster.
In moments, it would be gone, just like last time.
Time for Plan B, she thought. “All right, fuck it.” She ducked to snatch the rubble-strewn octopus off the ground, ran her fingers down its drying-out skin trying to clean it off, then jogged forward.
“Hey Dortez!” Sunny shouted, holding up the limp octopus by a tentacle. “Remember this?!”
The tentacles stopped retreating and started re-emerging. She could see a moving, deeper darkness in the crack behind the rubble it was using as a shield.
“Yeah, that’s right. Your fucked up demon-spawn!” She shook it, jiggling the tiny corpse. “The BPI wanted to throw it in the trash, but you know what I think, Dortez?!” Sunny threw down her shotgun and took the tentacle by a second hand and stretched it tight. Then, looking the monster in its eye-hole, she bit a leg in half and started to chew the gritty, rock-crusted mass. “Tastes like chicken!”
The tentacle monster burst from the rocks with an ear-splitting shriek, flinging granite in all directions as it hurled itself at her. Not having time to spit, Sunny dropped the octopus and picked up her shotgun.
Stumbling backwards, she blasted the monster straight in its black, grasping beak.
Dortez went barreling over backwards, every tentacle coruscating with lightning. It curled into a house-sized ball, twitching and sizzling. The creature’s skin, which Sunny hadn’t realized had a dull luminescence to it, went dark, almost black.
“Heh,” Sunny chuckled, chambering another round. S
he spat out the grit-covered chunk of octopus and wiped her mouth.
“Holy shit that was amazing !” Sheng cried, running up to get a good pic of the twitching cephalopod. “Holy shit, holy shit !”
“Yeah,” Sunny said, casually throwing the gun over her shoulder. “All in the job description.” She checked Darren, found that he was still alive, dug around in her fanny pack for albuterol and some antihistamines, administered them, then stood and started strutting towards the creature. Sheng, who had gotten a good view of the dead creature, twisted to get a picture of her as she approached. She knew she probably would’ve looked better if her hair weren’t standing on end and she weren’t ghostly gray with powdered rock dust, but Sheng didn’t give her time to freshen up before he started with the questions.
“Holy crap, you just killed a monster ,” he babbled. “You’re working for the BPI, right? A secret agent? What’s your name?”
“That’s right,” Sunny said. “My name’s Sunny Day and I’m here to—” Behind Sheng, she saw a now-black tentacle move. It wasn’t the spasm of a dying thing, but rather, seemed to be moving towards them with calculated slowness. She cut off with a frown and pulled the gun from her shoulder. “Fuck. I think we have a prob—”
The ebony tentacle hit Sheng from the side and barreled him into a wall hard enough to break his glasses, leaving slimy smears of smoking black across his chest. Then it hit Sunny and she went rolling like a soccer ball down 6th Avenue, cracking a few more ribs.
“Diiiiieeeeee!” Dortez shrieked, his oddly-dark body scrabbling and pulling itself after her.
Somehow, Sunny found her feet through the agony in her ribs, picked up her shotgun, and bolted before the monster reached her a second time. Her baby-chewed right arm, however, couldn’t hold onto the gun and, even as she ran, it slipped from her grip and tumbled to the side. She paused just long enough to see it hit the curb before it was engulfed in a wall of tentacles. The monster’s skin hadn’t regained its luminosity, and instead now seemed to eat the light. Almost like an inner fire had been extinguished, and all that was left was sheer, palpable evil.
…And now she had no gun.
“Shit!” she cried, turning to bolt again. Seeing that monster roiling down the road towards her like something out of an unholy bait box, instinct kicked in and she headed for what was familiar. She careened down 6th , towards the Dome Commission West Shore Seawall project, barely keeping ahead of the monster.
This is a dead end, she thought, remembering the massive wall that blocked her escape to the ocean. And even if she made it to the ocean, two hundred feet out, the water ended in Fabriglas.
I am so fucked , she thought. She was a rat trapped inside a bottle, running from a mountain lion.
“I’ll hollow you out and use your skin for my shell!” the monster shrieked. It was leaving a sticky black tarlike substance in its wake, one that sizzled on the asphalt, making it smoke.
She veered right and headed down K Street, the sound of meat slapping the ground right behind her the only indication she was still being followed.
Jeez, he’s close, she thought. Really close…
A tentacle hit her leg, just a brush, but Sunny felt the sting of a barb. When she looked down, it had left a black streak on her pants, like pitch. It started to get hot, then burn…
Shit ! She hoped the Benadryl she had taken was enough to keep her conscious until she had a chance to dive into a crack and escape.
Then she thought, Don’t octopuses hide in cracks?
Trying to go to ground in the blockyard wasn’t, she realized, going to work well in her favor. She was just about to veer left again, trying to lose him in one of the major Dome parking garages, but a tentacle slammed into her shoulder, raking a gash through her leather. She stumbled, face first, and was just about to hit the pavement when Sheng dropped expertly down in an open-air floater to catch her. Sunny barreled into the back seat and was just about to go out the other side when the driver yanked up, effectively crushing her body into the floater like an outfielder catching a ball, scraping her fractured ribs against her innards with the force of the maneuver.
She started to scream, however, when the motion of the floater shifted and it became centrifugal force that kept her body affixed to the vehicle.
He’s doing a circle , she thought, her stomach lurching as they spun up and around the blockyard, leaving the monster far below. He’s doing a goddamn circle.
And then they were behind the monster, riding up its ass. At the steering column of the skimmer, Sheng tossed her shotgun to her, grinning. “Go get it, Agent Day!” Somehow, through it all, he managed to keep the camera running.
Sunny, who felt like tossing her cookies all over the textured stainless steel interior, couldn’t get her injured arm up to catch the gun in time and only succeeded in knocking it into the foot space between the back seats, which he also got on camera.
Damn it, she thought. She held her breath and ducked to go digging for it, wincing at the pain in her ribs. She bet he was getting a great shot of her dusty ass…
“Agent Day, hurry!” Sheng cried.
Got it. When her hands found it and she stood up, chuckling, her glee was short-lived. The monster was rearing like an ebony wall of flexing round suckers in front of them and Sheng was staring up at it, mouth open. It looked like the embodiment of evil, like malignant tar given life. He dutifully raised his camera to get a better shot.
Sunny shoved him out of the way, wrenched the shotgun into a firing position—her elbow be damned—and fired at the gaping black mouth. “Fuck off and die! ” she screamed.
Like a bug-zapped spider, the monster flexed and jerked, its oozing black tentacles tightening into a twitching ball, flinging sticky blackness in all directions as it convulsed. Knowing she didn’t have much time, Sunny jumped off the floater and bolted for the blockyard.
“What are you doing?!” Sheng cried.
“Get in the air!” Sunny said. “Stay out of reach!” She pulled up beside one of the seawall blocks—it had been abandoned in mid-transit, the moving clamps still in place. She grabbed the discarded remote control and powered up the bankstone. The granite started to levitate off the ground. Sunny kept spinning it up, using the same technique she would use to raise the block to the seawall.
Something meaty hit her from behind, slapping her forward and down, then grabbing her by a leg and hurling her deeper into the blockyard.
“I’ll take your skin !” the creature screamed, coming after her.
Bruised, beat to shit, her pant leg on fire, Sunny lurched back to her feet. She took two steps before Dortez hit her again, slapping her full-on into the side of a granite block. Sunny hit it hard, seeing stars, and dropped her gun.
She tried to duck to pick it up, but Dortez threw her again.
“You’re nothing but a shell to me!” he screamed as he followed her.
Sunny dazedly got back onto her feet and stumbled forward, just out of reach.
“That’s what I think of humans,” Dortez’s gigantic black beak snarled as he followed. “Good shells .”
Sunny wove drunkenly through the discarded blocks, ducked under the levitating block, picked up the remote she had dropped, and, lunging out of the way, cut power.
The levitating block fell on Dortez before he could roll away.
The monster screamed and, when an exhausted and battered Sunny glanced over her shoulder, she saw it was only trapped by six of its tentacles.
“Just die,” she moaned, rolling out of the way as one of the free ones reached for her, leaving a trail of smoking black slime. The longest tentacle got her by the burning leg anyway and started to drag her closer. “Oh my god just diiiieee.” She awkwardly yanked her machete off her hip with her left hand and hacked at it, but her left arm didn’t have the coordination or strength of her injured right.
Dortez shrieked and tightened his grip until Sunny couldn’t feel her foot. Already, she could feel it burning through the pants.
Sunny gritted her teeth, switched hands, and hoped she didn’t dislocate her wounded elbow as she hit it with everything she had. The blade plunged into tentacle holding her.
“Just die!” she screamed, as blue blood started splashing from the wound, smacking her in the face with every meaty hack. “Die, die, die…!”
The tentacle came off in a welling of cerulean fluid and the rest of the tarry blackness sloughed off, leaving a withered octopus arm in its wake.
“Ugh!” Sunny flopped onto her back, panting, throbbing all over, feeling her body fighting shock. Grunting, she lifted her head enough to pull an EpiPen out of her fanny pack and ram the needle into her leg.
“Uuuuuunnnngggh!” she groaned, feeling the adrenaline hit her system like a slap to the face. Suddenly, she understood Darren’s hillbilly “Yeehaw!” She literally felt like she could lift that block herself.
Then she saw the creature was lifting the block. The one unharmed, unhindered tentacle was prying at the ground while the rest pushed. She had a feeling that he would have simply disappeared if he could have, like he had with the shark hooks, but her efforts at Thunderbird were preventing it, and now he was forced to do things the hard way.
Guess he can’t escape as easily without his cheat pool, Sunny thought.
It was, however, slowly prying itself out from under the rock. Like an interdimensional cockroach.
Exhausted, her veins hot with adrenaline, Sunny rolled onto her hands and knees, then shoved herself to her feet using the machete as a third leg.
“All right you fucker,” she managed. “Let’s give you a haircut.” She waded into the writhing mass of tentacles and started hacking. Dortez screamed and tried to slap at her, but Sunny caught the tentacle with her machete and chopped it from the main body. It, too, fell to the ground and the inky blackness slid away in a smoking pool, revealing desiccated meat in its wake.
“You can’t kill me!” Dortez screamed. “I’m a god !”
“Somehow I doubt it,” Sunny said, chopping off another arm.
“The others will know it was you!” Dortez shrieked. “They’ll come for you!”
Sunny with a Chance of Monsters: An Urban Fantasy Action Adventure (Sunny Day, Paranormal Badass) Page 30