MARVEL's Avengers: Infinity War: Thanos

by Barry Lyga

  “Pyro-danger!” the ship’s artificial intelligence cried out. “Pyro-danger!”

  Thanos bellowed in pain as he moved even farther to give Cha a better angle. The ax, still stuck in him, bit deeper into his flesh with every motion, no matter how small.

  Cha fired again. Kebbi did at the same time. The Asgardian was caught in the cross fire, and she screamed, her space suit now in flames from the heat of the blasts. The ship’s voice became more panicked, and suddenly vents opened and there was a loud hiss of an invisible gas.

  And the ramp, Thanos noticed through pain-blurred eyes, was closing. The ship’s protocol was to protect itself and its cargo. It would seal the exit and flood itself with nitrogen gas to extinguish the fire.

  Thanos could survive on pure nitrogen for a time; Titan’s atmosphere was thick with the stuff. He didn’t know about Cha or Kebbi… or the Asgardian, for that matter.

  With all his strength and with a cry of pain, Thanos forced himself to his feet. The air stank of flame and blood, charred meat and ozone. He could barely see through the haze of smoke.

  With an effort that surpassed everything he believed about his own limits, Thanos reached behind himself and took the handle of the ax in his free hand. Screaming into the smoke, he wrenched the blade free. A moment of singular bliss and no pain was immediately consumed by a successive moment of torment that refused to go away. His body felt as on fire metaphorically as the Asgardian was literally.

  Barely able to stand, he clutched the ax as blood streamed from his shoulder, running down his arm, slickening the handle. As he watched, the Asgardian’s flames died and then snuffed entirely. The nitrogen had done its job. The fire was out, and the ship was re-oxygenating.

  She stood tall and proud still, her space suit now a melted second skin. He could not imagine the sheer agony she must be feeling, and yet the only spark in her eyes was one of anger and revenge.

  “By… Freya’s beauty,” she said, her voice low and halting as she took shallow breaths, “I’ll… have your… balls… for this.”

  Cha struggled to his feet next to Thanos. Kebbi came up to his side. They outnumbered her three to one, and yet they were the ones frightened and unsure. The Asgardian slapped her hands together, and the plasma knuckles she wore on each hand sparked to life, sheathing her fists in a bleakly yellow coruscating light.

  “Stand down,” Thanos told her, his voice shaking. He fought to steady himself, but it was all for naught. He was grievously wounded and couldn’t pretend otherwise. “You’re hurt. You can’t win.”

  “You’re hurt, too,” she said. “I’ve sung my battle-song on the frozen wastelands of Jotunheim. I’ve breathed hotter fires on the lava shores of Muspelheim. I fear no man, god, or beast. I am Yrsa, daughter of Jorund and Gorm.” Her lips curled into a cruel, knowing smile. “You are mortal dung to be scraped off my boot. Yield and your deaths will be honorable.”

  Before Thanos could respond, Kebbi swore a vile curse and threw herself at Yrsa, who batted her away with a plasma-powered fist. Kebbi reeled off to one side and collided with a series of switches and buttons.

  “Damage threshold exceeded,” the ship reported. “Prepare for emergency evacuation.”

  In an instant, the ship’s thrusters engaged. Thanos was tossed back against the bulkhead from the momentum of the sudden takeoff. Yrsa jerked to one side but grabbed a nearby handhold and kept her feet under her. Cha crumpled to the floor, and Kebbi went stumbling across the chamber to collapse into a chair.

  The force of the impact against the wall sent a blistering red shockwave of agony through Thanos, starting at the site of his injury and radiating outward. He dropped the ax and swooned with pain.

  Through lidded eyes, he watched as Yrsa strode over to Cha, her fists alight with power. Her stance was wobbly, her movement stiff from the melted space suit, but she was confident and vigorous as she raised a fist.

  But before she could bring that powered blow down upon Cha’s unprotected skull, Kebbi pounced on her from behind, wrapping her arms around Yrsa’s throat, keening at the top of her lungs. She bit down on the Asgardian’s head with that wide maw, her needlelike teeth ripping away the space suit and the flesh beneath it. Specks of blood spattered against the wall.

  Thanos fought through the pain. He felt around blindly for the ax; his fingers found it and needed two tries to close around its handle. With a growl, he rose to his feet and staggered to where Yrsa was thrashing about the cabin, twisting and turning and trying to land a punch on Kebbi, who clung tightly and kept tearing away hunks of skin and material with her teeth.

  Cha got to his feet, bracing himself against the wall. “Be careful!” he cried. “Don’t hit Kebbi!”

  In that moment, though, all Thanos cared about was killing the Asgardian witch who stood between him and the end of this madness. He hefted the ax over his head, bellowed with the pain that burst from his shoulder, then brought it down. Hard.

  And missed.

  At the last moment, Yrsa clumsily danced to one side, still swatting at Kebbi. Thanos’s ax crashed into a control panel, spraying steel and wiring in every direction. A panel exploded off and spun wildly through the air, smacking into Cha and knocking him out cold.

  “Damage assessment: mortal!” the ship announced. “Executing retreat protocol!”

  “Don’t you dare!” Yrsa cried out, finally finding the leverage she needed to flip Kebbi off her. Kebbi landed on her back, and Yrsa stomped once on her head, then kicked her in the face. Kebbi slid across the floor, perfectly still. “Keep us here!” Yrsa yelled to the ship.

  “Override,” the system said. “Retreating.”

  With a speed that impressed and terrified, Yrsa ran to Thanos’s side and kneed him in the gut, then spun him around and punched him in the gash she’d axed into him. He roared in pain and struck her with his fist, sending her sprawling back across the cabin.

  “I’ll say this for Asgard,” Thanos hissed, “they breed their women strong.”

  Yrsa responded with a string of invective so vulgar that Thanos had never even heard a third of the words before.

  “This ship is retreating to Asgard,” Thanos said, laughing through his pain. Blood welled up between his lips, and he spat a mouthful. “Which is precisely where we want to go. You’ve failed.”

  “You slew my boon companions,” she snarled. “There is no force in the universe that can keep me from killing you.”

  “Your boon companions were weak,” Thanos told her. Darkness had begun to creep in around the edges of his sight. Kebbi was dead. Cha was unconscious. “We are strong. Like you. Join us. We’re going to save lives.”

  “By killing people?”

  “Yes. Precisely.”

  She let loose a mighty yawp and leaped at him. Thanos fell back, knowing that he had no defense—

  And Kebbi collided with Yrsa, crashing the two of them into the control panel again. The ship lurched in space. A klaxon rang out, and a new voice warned, “Off course! Off course!”

  Kebbi’s face was a mash of blood and hanging scales. She could barely move her mouth, but she managed to hook her lower teeth into the skin of Yrsa’s jaw… and dragged up, raking furrows into the Asgardian’s face, shredding the skin of her cheek to reveal the inside of her mouth. Her tongue flapped madly as she keened and howled like a gutted wolf.

  Kebbi dragged herself off the Asgardian and over to Thanos, who sank to the floor and cradled her in his arms. Her left eye hung loose from its orbit, and her skull was caved in on one side.

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  “Told you before…” she slurred. “Meant it before. When said loved you. Meant it.”

  “You did?”

  “No, you naïve, clueless…!” she remonstrated, and died in his arms.

  Thanos gritted his teeth. He let Kebbi slip from his arms and, bracing himself against the wall, forced himself to stand. Across the cabin, Yrsa held one hand over her ravaged, bleeding face; with the other she ra
n fingers over the ship’s controls. Competing voices called out:

  “Override!”

  “Controls locked out!”

  “Götterdämmerung protocol!”

  And over and over.

  He made himself walk to her. He stumbled at the last moment and collided with her, knocking them both to the floor.

  “You damned fool!” she said, blood spraying in every direction from her mouth and through her cheek. “We’re not—”

  “You killed my boon companion,” Thanos told her, groaning with pain. The blackness was almost entirely across his field of vision now, but he could still see her, could see the sudden terror in her eyes. “There is no force in the universe that can keep me from killing you.”

  She pummeled him with both fists until the power in her plasma knuckles went dead. Thanos didn’t budge. He lay atop her, holding her down, and he took her head between his massive hands and he closed his useless eyes and squeezed and asked fate or the universe or whatever powers there might be for just this one favor.

  The Blood Edda tumbled through space, its engines misfiring, its guidance system damaged by the conflict that had raged within. Its protocols demanded that it gain entrance to the Bifrost and return to Asgard, but those protocols had been countermanded by its commander, who had, in her confusion and pain, entered conflicting orders into the control system. Safeguards had been damaged or deactivated in the fight, and now the Blood Edda was firing its thrusters in competing directions, trying desperately to comply with all its orders, no matter how mutually exclusive.

  It approached the wormhole near Alfheim, tried to course-correct away. Couldn’t.

  The Blood Edda hit the wormhole at a sharp angle and vanished.

  Thanos woke to red lights flashing and the voice of the ship’s computer screaming warnings, alarms, alerts. He could barely move.

  “Thanos! Thanos!”

  It was Cha. He’d awakened and was strapped into an emergency crash-couch. “Get up!” Cha screamed. “You have to get up and get to a—”

  Cha’s words were swallowed by a burst of sound and light the likes of which Thanos had never heard or seen before. Without proper calculations or protections, they’d hit the wormhole. The Blood Edda was now in gate-space, hurtling through the universe with no direction, no course, no safety measures engaged.

  Thanos, blissfully, passed out again.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  HE DREAMED.

  He dreamed of her.

  Gwinth reached out to him. Her skin sloughed off her hand like a rotting glove.

  Not yet, she said. Not yet.

  He opened his eyes. Smoke purled before him. He felt fire nearby.

  He could breathe. Barely. Racked by a spasm of coughing from the fumes, his body protested with great agony. The ax. He was damned near cut to pieces.

  The smoke parted for a moment, and he saw something loom over him. Standing on two legs, its skin was gray, with a hard shell covering that was blackish green and shiny.

  It reached out for him with hands that had too many thumbs, and he sank into the black again.

  The next time he awoke, it was for good. He lay in a cocoon of some viscous substance, a white, sticky webbing that wound around his upper body. It smelled slightly of sulfur and bitumen. When he tried to raise a hand, he found that he was bound up in the stuff and couldn’t move. He fought against it, and a few strands broke.

  “Whoa! Whoa! Don’t!” a familiar voice called. Thanos craned his head to the left and saw Cha limping toward him, a similar web wound around his left leg like a cast. “Don’t do that!”

  “Cha…” Thanos’s voice was weak, his throat raw and unslaked. “What’s happened to us?”

  Cha approached the edge of Thanos’s cocoon. It was suspended from the ceiling of what appeared to be a dank cavern that smelled of rot and old food. It swayed slightly when Thanos moved.

  “This is a healing mesh,” Cha explained. “You’ve been cocooned for medical reasons. They’re healing you.”

  “Where is Kebbi?” Thanos demanded, though he knew the answer.

  “Dead. The Asgardian, too.”

  Thanos could not spare the energy to sigh. He’d hoped that in the smoke and confusion and pain of the battle with Yrsa, his assessment of Kebbi’s injuries had been off.

  “I was in a crash-couch,” Cha went on, “so I survived the impact. You…”

  “I am not yet ready to die. I am—”

  “You are alive by great fortune, Thanos. Even you must see that now.”

  “Luck applied unequally cannot be truly great,” he said, thinking. “If the universe were the fair and equitable place you like to imagine it is, Kebbi would still be alive. And I would not be this misshapen wretch you see before you, and you would not be tethered to me, made to suffer.”

  “I suffered before I met you. Kidnapped by His Lordship. Taken from everything I knew. You are a blessing, not a curse, Thanos. And I am grateful they saw fit to save you from the wreckage of the ship.”

  “Who are they?” Thanos asked.

  Cha hesitated a moment. “They are called the Chitauri.”

  CHAPTER XXVII

  IT TOOK MONTHS IN THE HEALING COCOON BEFORE THANOS could support himself again, much less walk. A year and then some passed before he stood on his own two feet and emerged from what he had initially thought to be a cavern.

  It was not a cavern. It was a creature, a living monstrosity unlike any he’d ever seen or even heard of. His hosts called it a Leviathan. Like them, it was part insect, part reptile, and part machine. Thanos had never encountered their like before, and he was both disgusted and astonished by them in equal measure.

  He had been suspended in the healing cocoon within the mouth of the Leviathan, recovering and slowly piecing himself back together. Now the teeth of the great creature parted, and he and Cha stepped out into the sun for the first time.

  The sun was disappointing, to say the least.

  A hard black disk in the sky, throwing off precious little light and heat. He understood suddenly why the Chitauri had merged their flesh with machines—insects and reptiles could not survive in such cold conditions, but by melding technology to their biology, they could compensate for their evolutionary weaknesses.

  Cha had explained something of the Chitauri to him as the long weeks became longer months in his cocoon. They were a caste-based society, with different social ranks for different assigned tasks. There was a domestic caste, which attended to the mundane tasks of reproduction and the tending of the hearth, while the science caste sought ways to improve the Chitauri biology and technology, securing through artificial means what nature had not deigned to give them.

  And there was a warrior caste, he learned, but that caste had accomplished little.

  “They share a hive mind,” Cha explained. He’d been ingratiating himself into the Chitauri’s good graces and learning about their culture while Thanos convalesced. “So there’s no superior thinker, no one who can develop tactics and strategy from the perspective of an outsider. They don’t know how to create. They have no art.”

  Thanos stood atop a bluff that overlooked the Chitauri central city, his hands clasped behind his back, Cha at his side. He had hiked up here as a way of testing himself, to see how much of him had survived the battle of the Blood Edda and the ensuing crash on the Chitauri homeworld.

  He was winded. He was weak. He was no good to anyone. Not now.

  “They need someone to guide them,” Thanos said, pursing his lips.

  “What are you thinking?” Cha asked.

  “I am thinking that only an egotist or a fool does not learn from failure. The egotist blames others, and the fool is not wise enough to assign blame at all.” He sat down and stared off into the distance.

  Cha sat next to him. The black sun dipped below the horizon, throwing its wavering purple light into the mountains. “You blame yourself for Kebbi’s death.”

  “I blame myself for much. If I learn from it, i
t will not be so bad. I’ve had a year to do nothing more than think. It’s been… instructive.”

  “And what have you learned?”

  Thanos considered. “My goal is grand. But perhaps it makes sense to accomplish it through intermediaries. Rather than exposing myself to harm. Perhaps if I’d warned Titan of its impending calamity through someone else, someone who did not wear this purple and distorted face, my people would have listened. And maybe if we had sent someone ahead to the outpost, Kebbi would still be alive.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “No. But look out there and understand, Cha.” He gestured out to the city. It was a conglomerate of Leviathans, all arranged around a central vessel called a mothership. It was orderly and distinct, like bees in a hive or ants in a hill. The Chitauri moved with precision, each one a part of a larger whole.

  “There is a perfect army here, if only someone could harness it. No need to risk myself or you.”

  Cha nodded slowly. “There’s someone you should meet,” he said.

  “Are you proposing to help me build an army?” Thanos was mildly amused by Cha’s sudden turn away from pacifism. “Did the battle with the Asgardian awaken your own Sirian brand of bloodlust?”

  “Hardly,” Cha sniffed. “Quite the opposite. But you’re trying to save lives on Titan. I believe in that cause. If an army is what it takes to make your people listen, then let’s have an army. Violence as a bulwark against greater violence may be ethical after all.”

  “You’re an insufferable optimist,” Thanos told him.

  “As are you, my friend.”

  “No. I’m a pragmatist.”

  Cha shrugged. “In this case, they are one and the same.”

  Together they entered a small Leviathan through its open mouth. Thanos had not yet become accustomed to the spongy surface of the beast’s tongue beneath his feet, and suspected he never would. The mouth was humid and dark, lit by a bioluminescent spittle that ran down the “walls.”