Lars Breaxface- Werewolf in Space

by Brandon Getz

  Chapter VIII

  The red triangle of Jay’s gunsight glowed and refracted on the gangster’s silver throat.

  “Emporium’s closed,” she spat. “This is a private meeting.”

  Quillian’s sharp cheekbones shifted, an expression that passed for a smile. “If it isn’t Lars Breakfast, asshole from space,” came the gangster’s ethereal voice. The silver gangster spoke without a mouth, but his sense-language translated like any other. “I don’t think your friend likes me.”

  Jay’s head swinging to stare down Lars was the only movement in the room. Even the gimp masks on display seemed to be frozen on a particular devil-horned hologram. “You know this guy?”

  “I told you we shouldn’t come here.” Lars was watching the debris-men for movement. “This is Quillian Nine, a genuine silver-plated piece of whale shit. It’s Lars Breaxface, you tinfoil bastard. How’d you tail me? You got eyes in the algae now?”

  “Things have changed.” The shifting cheekbones again, the invisible smile. “You’re a wanted man. Bounty Guild is beaming your mug all over Federation space and beyond. Something about a bunch of dead StatSec. I didn’t sweat the details.”

  It was sticky in the shop, the city’s humidity seeping in even with the A/C running. Lars scratched idly at the back of his neck. He grumbled a little, watching Quillian’s enforcers for any sign of movement. Shit. Now they had a bounty on their asses. He didn’t figure it could pay much—who gave a fuck about some far-flung rent-a-cops? But Quillian, he knew, wasn’t in it for the paycheck.

  “Please, Mr. Quillian,” squeaked Fish from behind a display case, “I don’t know these guys. I thought they were customers. They said they wanted rubber, I told them I don’t know rubber, I don’t even have rubber, right? No rubber in this place, that floppy piece over there, it’s not even rubber, it’s just rubber-like. Rubber-ish.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Fishman,” Quillian said. “They’ll be leaving momentarily.”

  “We’ve got business here,” said Lars.

  Quillian raised his arms, and under the cuffs of his sleeves, Lars glimpsed heavy bands of metal circling each wrist, both flashing with circuitry.

  “Like I said, things have changed. There is no business in this neighborhood unless I say there is.” The gangster moved his hands, and behind him, the golems of sea-trash each lifted their own deadly fists. “And I say your business is done.”

  Fat stone and coral feet stepped forward in a lumbering march. Lars had seen the destruction the gangster’s golems could do, had watched them splatter the enforcers of a rival family with one hammering punch. Quillian could only puppet two at a time, that’s as far as the hex would work, but most of the time, two were enough. He saw Frank move to shield Jay, felt the pull of the planet’s moons. Lunar power, stored and throbbing in the virus in his blood. His eyes narrowed on the approaching debris-men. And then Jay fired the blaster, and his shoulder burned hot white fire.

  “Fuck, Jay, what was that? Shoot the goddamn bad guys!” Lars shouted, reaching to put pressure on the sizzling wound. Hot cosmic Christ did it hurt. Like fire ants eating the muscle from the inside.

  “Move your hand,” Jay yelled back, firing at the approaching golems.

  Wood splintered as a stone fist slammed into Frank’s trunk. The tremuloid had prehensile branches snaked and squeezing around the stone golem’s neck and left arm, roots coiling around its knees, but the golem’s free hand was pounding through hard bark to the fresh white flesh of Frank’s outermost rings. The other golem was crashing through Fishman’s displays, heading straight for Jay. Bursts of black energy exploded from her blaster, chipping shards of coral from the golem’s shoulder. With her free hand, the space princess worked a mystical hand jive. Lars felt the tug inside his veins, his blood being pulled through the shoulder wound. As the golem neared striking distance, ropes of blood lassoed its ankles, and it crashed in an avalanche that sent Fish’s sex toys tumbling from their shelves. She kept blasting. Bits of calcium carbonate broke from the hulk as it struggled to its feet. It burst through the bloodrope, splashing whatever coital enhancements hadn’t yet been shattered. Blood kept pulling from Lars’s shoulder. He felt heavy, woozy. Quillian hadn’t moved, just stood mirror-faced and placid as his golems pursued their carnage. Frank, his side looking like a lumberjack had taken an axe to it, had captured his attacker’s punching fist, but the coiled branches were creaking ominously, threatening to break. Blood wrapped the conch-shell head of the other golem. Blood bound its hands. Black energy chipped away its driftwood skeleton, and each time it kept coming. Fish had disappeared, and Jay was backing further and further into the store. There was almost nowhere left to go.

  He felt it first, as always, in his hands.

  Time slowed. He could almost pick the debris from the air, shards of glass and metal from exploding sex toys. His knuckles arched and cracked, claws climbing under the skin. He could smell the change in his own flesh. Raw and animal. His knees buckled; his jaws wrenched forward, dripping. Ribs broke and widened, bones fused in new shapes, and muscle and organs swelled to fit. Hair turned thick and coarse and gray, black around his throat and shoulders. His shirt stretched and burst. Tail, blooming, punched through his fatigues, and his boots were left ragged. As Jay landed a shot square in the golem’s chest, Lars stood hunched and snarling, werewolf of mass destruction, swelling with a thirst for ultraviolence.

  He went for Jay’s golem first, tackling it into a rack of zentai suits. Beast and puppet tangled in shiny fabric, shredding it. Jay shouted something, but it was lost in the crash and growl of brawl. The werewolf ripped at the coral man. The golem thrashed. Its craggy fists thumped against his ribs, but the wolf kept tearing until, defying the force of its creation, one of the golem’s arms was wrenched off, dropping in a pile of rubble. Lars howled. Fur and muscle met coral and shell, and the two were rolling, the puppet holding its own even minus an arm. Then the werewolf was airborne—a crash, another display case shattered, the wolf back on all fours in a moment, the coral automaton already marching forward with its only arm swinging like a great calcified club.

  Lars hauled back his wolf-fist, felt moon power pulse through his veins, and did what he always did when some wily son of a bitch didn’t know when to stay down: He punched it in the chin.

  The golem’s face rippled and cracked from chin to crown, bursting in a rain of shell shards. The rest of Quillian’s enforcer fell into a heap of dead coral in the middle of Arcturus Fishman’s Fucktoy Emporium.

  “Lars,” Jay was shouting, it was hard to know how long she’d been yelling for him. She was behind the cash register, her own black blood coiling across the room from a cut on her palm. The blaster was discarded, empty. “Lars, get Frank!”

  Frank was surrounded by splinters and loose leaves. Two of his branches had been ripped away. They lay like dead worms on the store’s polished floor. The tremuloid’s wounds were still oozing. The golem he’d been fighting had lost one of its fists, the shit-spattered stones scattered among the wood. It was covered in Jay’s blood. Bloodropes twisted around its neck, trying to cut through its impossible throat. The werewolf hefted one of the coral golem’s driftwood arms, shouldering it like a baseball bat, and thundered toward Frank’s attacker.

  “Frank,” Lars growled, “duck.”

  The tremuloid untwined his branches, falling back, and the golem was momentarily free. As it spun to ready its heavy fists for Lars, the wolf leapt off a dildo display and soared, bringing the thick chunk of driftwood around in a wild arc. Wood cracked as it made contact, and the golem’s stone head rocketed from its shoulders, crashing through the shop’s front window in a hail of glass. The debris-man’s body fell into a heap of boulders. The wolf, still holding the cracked driftwood, sneezed at the cloud of stone dust. He dropped the wood and snarled through the haze. Hackles bristled on his neck.

  Quillian still stood under the arch of the door. He was clapping his silver hands.

  “Wonderful,�
�� said the gangster. “Just what I’d always wanted to see. The legendary space werewolf. One and only in the universe. It’s what I paid for, Breaxface.”

  “You wanted,” Lars said, “a massacre.”

  “Stop pretending,” said Quillian, “that you have some kind of moral high ground. Your reputation preceded you. It’s why I hired you in the first place. You’re a killer, Breaxface. Murderer of so many I bet you’ve lost count. What was one more family? Mama, papa, couple of kiddo snacks . . . Beast like you could’ve done it blindfolded.”

  The werewolf stepped forward, but something grabbed his leg. He looked down. Several space dildos clutched his ankle, each gripping like a finger in a chrome hand. Pieces of bondage gear—steel spreader bars, titanium cuffs, straps and whips and hogtie sets fashioned from alien substances—began to fit themselves together into an arm, a shoulder, a ramshackle set of sex toy ribs. Behind him, the toys rose, debris pulling together through its own gravity, a hulking monster of nipple clamps and polished cock-knobs and alien-proboscis ball gags. On its gag-and-collar neck it wore one of the holographic gimp masks. The mask was still frozen on the devil setting. Pixilated horns of red translucent light curled from its head. It lifted Lars by his ankle, and he fell hard on his wounded shoulder before dangling in the air, the gimp golem’s hand squeezing like a vice on his leg. He worried his bones might break. The werewolf kicked and clawed at the air, reaching for the golem. It lifted him higher, looking on with blank black eyes, and its zipper-mouth curled into a ragged smile.

  Chapter IX

  The last time Lars had been choked by a sex toy, he’d been in a brothel called Orion’s Belt. He’d seen stars and visions and came like an eight-legged Asgardian god-horse, but the vicious look on the reptilian domme had scared him and he’d sworn off the whole asphyxiation thing, at least temporarily, though you never could tell what you might be up for when some big-tittied hotness was tickling your short-and-curlies.

  The gimp golem’s look, hollow and hideous, scared him more than the domme’s.

  Its vibrator hand was a vice around his wolf throat, and it was still smiling its mask smile. The orange horn holograms lowed and menaced as it choked him. Frank’s limbs were around the golem, prying it, like a great arboreal octopus. The tremuloid might’ve loosed the golem’s toy-flesh, given time, but Lars didn’t have time. He was fading. Bloodropes wound the golem’s legs and neck. Jay had pulled her long knife, but she held it more like a talisman than a weapon. She didn’t seem to know where to strike.

  “Ki—” Lars gasped, “Ki—Quill—ian.”

  On some arcane wavelength, Quillian Nine beamed his golemological mojo into the ersatz skulls of his debris-men, made them move and grip and kill, and since the two he’d been pulling strings on had just been separated soundly from their head regions, the gangster’s hex was reaching to anthropomorphize some new trash. Quillian’s blank, pocked face wore its invisible smile as he watched Lars choke and squirm.

  “Quillian—” he managed again, “Quillian—is—controlling—it.”

  Jay heard him. Her dark blood splashed across the floor planks as she dropped the bloodropes and ran for the gangster with her terrifying knife. Quillian pulled his diamond-plated pistol-cannon from his vest, lifted its wide, gleaming muzzle, and let loose a volley. The cut on Jay’s hand bloomed with blood, a shield instantly rippled with halted rounds. She dropped blood and bullets and leapt, body spring-loaded from a ninja crouch, blade arcing forward. The knife clashed with the pistol, Quillian wielding it now as a jeweled bludgeon, and the pistol, glitzing in the shop light, flew and clattered under the feet of the golem. Jay whirled and brought the blade into the gangster’s side, biting an inch into his mineral flesh. Quillian laughed.

  “Not a bleeder, sweetheart.”

  He wrenched at the knife with one hand. With the other, he punched her square in the face. She reeled, blinked and glared, fangs showing in her clenched mouth. Lars’ vision was tunneling. Darkness licked at his periphery, shadow flames. He couldn’t see Jay anymore. Only the gimp face. Zipper mouth. Brand-new shining chrome, the interlocking teeth of his nightmares. From now on, he’d only wear pants with buttons. And then: a singing column of laser-green light, and the gimp golem was headless, crumpling, no more zipper, no more holo-horns, just mangled sex toys falling around him and Frank in a heap. The collar, where the mask had rested, burned with green flame.

  Lars barely registered his fall. His snout sucked breath as he watched Fish, still wearing his shopkeeper smock, step out from the hidden back room of the emporium with a big fucking gun on his scrawny shoulder. The gun was some kind of cannon, a sleek matte-

  black cylinder with fancy gizmos all over it.

  “Nice shot, Fishman!” Lars roared. The werewolf pushed himself up to stand, and Frank reached a limb to steady him.

  “I was aiming for you!” Fish shouted, cannon shaking in his webbed hands. “This boutique is the number one supplier of erotic appurtenance for twelve planetary systems. Do you understand the meticulous storage logic and polishing rhythms for each of these quality items? Are you aware of the precise lighting angles which optimize a space dildo for the perfect shimmer? Do you have any idea how long it takes to alphabetize Y’klarian cloacal stimulators, when the first half of every word in that language is the same six letters?”

  Fish fired again, and Frank pushed Lars onto the floor. The column of laser light singed bark from the tremuloid’s limb as it zapped across the shop. They heard, from no certain origin, Quillian’s sense-scream, and Lars jerked his head to see a perfect half-circle carved out of the gangster’s shoulder, tatters of his suit jacket burning neon green. Quillian dropped the long knife and fell to his knees with a hard clunk. Jay, wiping blood from her nose, stood over him, spat, and karate-kicked him in his chiseled chin. The silver gangster fell flat back against the door, unconscious. Above him, about shoulder-high, was a perfect round hole, smoldering.

  Jay’s blade scraped wood as she lifted it from the floor. She turned eyes and knife toward the laser-holding Arcturus Fishman. “You missed.”

  The fish-man dropped the canon and held up his hands. “The R-Rubber Room,” he stuttered. “Oh, fuck, just go, just fucking fuck everything. No way my insurance’ll cover this. Those philistines won’t know the true value of my lube stores or comprehend the artisanal craftsmanship of a hand-cut mooncrystal sex knob. I’m ruined. You’ve ruined me. Twelve systems,” Fish wept, “I was the galactic king of fucktoys.”

  Lars stretched and felt the claws on his fingers begin to sheath. Bones broke back into place, muscle and organs shrinking, snout receding into bearded human face. He lay shirtless and shoeless and in shredded pants in the middle of the remnants of the golem for a brief moment, until Jay nodded at Frank and said, “Help him up. We need him to carry a bag.”

  At the sales counter, she bent low to look Fish in the eye. “You ruined yourself, tadpole. You should’ve let me see the room as a paying customer. Now,” she brought the knife tip to the dry patch of scales on his throat, “I’m just going to take what I want.” As she disappeared into the back room, she called back, “Somebody pick up that cannon. I want that, too.”

  Chapter X

  The Rubber Room was just that: a whole second display room lined wall-and-ceiling with hard white formtex. Hooks and arcs of formed rubber curled from the walls, holding an armory of weaponry, everything from rifles and laser guns and plasma bombs to water lances, temporal whips, weird noodly stingers without apparent handles. Under a whole rack of plasma rifles, on a sphere of rubber molded to resemble a human skull, lay an intricately inscribed puzzle box that looked straight from the workshops of hell itself. Lars, again, saw contraptions and gadgetry he couldn’t comprehend, beads and spheres and hollow claw-shaped things that looked more like art than instruments of death.

  Jay shoved a couple of top-load duffle bags, military issue, at Frank and Lars.

  “Grab everything you can, and hurry,” she said, shoving the hel
l-cube into her pocket. “We don’t know how long that shiny motherfucker will be out, and who knows what other puppets he’ll throw at us. Cops might be on their way, too. The fish did shoot a hole through the neighborhood.”

  Stuffing his bag with big-ass blasters, Lars said, “Look at all this shit. Fishman’s Killtoy Emporium, more like. You could take over a planet with gear like this.”

  Jay’s galaxy eyes reflected in the circuited steel of a long, tech-laced broadsword. “That’s the idea.”

  Frank was moving slowly, sap and splinters stitching back together in his wide trunk wound. The wolf blood had healed Lars’ shoulder, protecting itself, but he could still feel the blaster’s burn. He filled a bag, found himself a set of spider-silk combat digs in the section of the room dedicated to armor and wearables, then stripped in the middle of the room, down to his skivvies with the big tail hole in the back through which a wedge of hairy asscrack was grossly visible. There was even a pair of boots, big stomping things crisscrossed with tech he couldn’t fathom. Dressed in black and cinching the boot straps—the pants, thankfully, button-fly—he called to Fish, who was muttering weakly at the Rubber Room’s entrance. “What tricks are these kicks packing, Fishman? Jetpacks? Super-speed?”