Lars Breaxface- Werewolf in Space

by Brandon Getz

The PortSec jerked back a gloved thumb. “Head left, follow the numbers. Not too far.”

  

  Sheila rose into the dark sky. Below him, through the side windows in cockpit, Lars could see smoke in Canal City, fires burning around the terminal. Bubbles of light floated among the clouds, small beads of yellow popping in the altitude.

  Chapter XIII

  Rock and roll. Cold beer. The synthetic gravy-sodden goodness of a vat-grown protein MRE. Beasting gave him a hunger like nothing else, and Lars was slurping the only meat he had on hand, chugging the chow straight from the can and wiping the gravy from his lips with his tattooed forearm. They were putting distance between themselves and the water planet, roaring through the black big empty on cruise control. Jay hadn’t yet told him the next destination, and Lars hadn’t asked. After the clusterfuck in Canal City, he was content to eat, drink, and ride, the piercing silence of space drowned out by the wails of heavy metal.

  Once they’d reached open space, Jay had locked herself in his sleeping bunk with one of the weapons bags, hadn’t been out since. In the cargo bay, Frank was sitting among his own trash, roots splayed, with his branch in a beer. The tremuloid looked melancholy and brutalized. He sagged a little to the left where the stone golem had beaten his side to splinters. Fish huddled in a far corner of the hold, half hidden by a crate of canned rations. He hiccupped and belched, telltale signs of space sickness or at least indigestion. Amphibian probably’d never been offworld, at least not anytime recent. It was always rough, that first zip into the black, the artificial gravity not quite like the real planet-heavy thing.

  “You gotta drink it away, Fishman,” Lars said. “Booze through the queasiness. You get drunk enough, you’ll forget you’re a bazillion miles from solid ground. Frank,” the tremuloid raised his myriad eyes, “grab Fish an oat soda before he retches on my trash heap.”

  Leaves rustled as Frank reached a branch toward the fridge.

  “No thanks,” Fish said. “Beer is for degenerates and lowlifes. And thieves, apparently.”

  “Nobody’d planned to bust and plunder your shop, man. Far as I can tell, Jay wanted to buy your merch. And not the artisanal anal beads. I don’t know her well, but I do know she doesn’t like the word ‘no.’ Isn’t that right, Frank?” The tremuloid, taking Fish’s beer for himself, seemed to shrug. “Then fucking Quillian shows up? Just a run of bad fortune, that was. Maelstrom of shit luck. You should be toasting we got out with our balls still under our willies.”

  “You’re not familiar with amphibious anatomy, are you, Mr. Breakfast?”

  “You saying fish-guys don’t have dicks? Tough break.” Lars swigged from his bottle. “And it’s Breaks-face. Lars Breaxface, independent contractor slash adventurer. Breaker of faces. Giving Tree over there is Frank. Chatty Cathy, that one. Never shuts up.”

  “I’ve seen his kind before,” Fish said. “What are you? Some kind of bear wearing a skin suit?”

  “Werewolf.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “One and only in the universe,” Lars said, beard framing a big grin.

  Fish raised a scaly brow. “Yeah? You have to let me take some casts, couple of pictures. I could sell the heck out of a one-and-only-in-the-universe cock prosthetic. Connoisseurs would go nuts.”

  “One, no casts of my junk. Wolfman’s got nards, but if somebody wants a peek, they come sweet talk the real thing. Two, newsflash, there’s no shop to sell it in. No molds, no workshop, no jellied lube. I’m sorry, man. That’s the new normal. It’s all fucked.”

  The brief excitement over Lars’ werewolf penis faded from Fish’s face. The amphibian drooped. “What am I supposed to do? Start over on some other backward nowhere planet? Someplace Quillian can’t find me? I don’t have anything. I don’t even have a change of underwear.”

  Tears welled in Fish’s dinner-plate eyeballs. They rolled big and wet over the scales of his cheeks as he sobbed, and Lars was embarrassed for him. Somewhere in a soft corner of himself, he felt a little guilty, too, for his part in demolishing the shop and stealing the hardware. He rooted around in the stores of MREs and freeze-dried foodstuffs for the bottle of grain alcohol he’d gotten as a bonus on a bootlegging run. The run had been just shy of twelve parsecs, and Sheila had made it in under a day. The hooch-sellers had been pleased.

  He found it, a brown bottle with a thick cork in its mouth, and handed it to the blubbering amphibian. “Take the medicine, Fishman. Doctor Werewolf’s orders.”

  

  By the time Jay came out of the bunk, they were all piss-drunk. Frank had passed out, his sucking branch still in a can. Lars and Fish were playing a made-up game with the empty cans, throwing them toward an open crate on the far wall and inventing rules as they went along. Fish was telling sex toy stories, the funniest and most horrifying custom jobs he’d fashioned over the years.

  “Six feet long,” the amphibian was saying, “Like a—like a cat o’ nine tails. Gelatinous. I had to rig a secretion feature, make it ooze from its pustule knobs.” He gagged, showing his black tongue, and waved the nearly empty brown bottle in the air. “But, baby, what a paycheck. I did it. I made it all work. Because I—I was an artist. Am—

  an artist.”

  Lars nodded seriously. He’d been shotgunning MREs, and there were globs of gravy in his beard. “I hear you, man. I fucking hear you. Art. Big oozing dick art, man. Fuckin’ A.”

  At the entrance to the cargo bay, silhouetted in the blue light of the corridor, Jay cleared her throat. “We’re going to Cairn. We have someone else to pick up.”

  “Cairn?” Lars scoffed. “Wasteland. Nothing there but bugs and rocks. Can’t get drunk on rocks.”

  “You kidnapped me,” Fish slurred. “Fishnapped.” He started laughing, suddenly hiccupped, then laughed again.

  “Why Fish, anyway?” Lars said. “Arms dealers all over the whatsit—the galaxy. Secret ones, right? Clandestine outfits, out there on empty moons, orbiting quasars. Why this guy’s gun bits? Why me? Why Frank? With that—that nega-stuff, negativium, you could buy a whole army.”

  Jay made her way to the fridge and popped the tab on the last beer. “An army would be more trouble than it’s worth. And anyway, my plan isn’t war—it’s Ragnarok.”

  “Ragna-rock-n-roll,” Lars cheered. He burped, tossed his empty at the crate. It bounced and rattled. “Fuck yeah.”

  “I don’t need an army. I need a wolf. Apparently, you’re the only one in this universe,” Jay said. “And I don’t need Mr. Fishman’s ‘gun bits.’”

  “But my,” Fish hiccupped, “my shop, my life. You took all of my things.”

  Jay smirked, her amethyst eyes flickering, and pulled a tube of negativium from her pocket. Just like the one she’d flashed back at the cat-infested bar where she’d drafted Lars into her mission of vengeance. The wolfman squinted at the vial.

  “Hey now, princess. How do I know that isn’t my loot?” he said. “You could be playing us both with the one stash.”

  From the same pocket, she pulled out a second tube. Both held the substance so dark it was almost shadow—a crystallized absence. “Mr. Fishman, you can get off at the next spinner we come across. We’ll leave you with whatever you have in your pockets, and you can hitch a ride back to Canal City and reclaim whatever is left of your obscene little store. Or you can come with us for just a little while and get paid more than your whole shop was ever worth.”

  “What,” hiccup, “do I want with rocket fuel? Some of those pieces were p-priceless. Handmade. I’d been running that store half my life.”

  “Fishy. F-F-Fishman,” Lars said. “You know fences, right? Dealers? Big wigs? Sell that much neg, you could have an emporium franchise in every system. Be the real king of the fucktoys. Emperor, more like. Emperor of the emporium empire.”

  The amphibian contemplated the empty bottle in his webbed hands. “Emperor of the Fucktoy Empire.” He turned his wide eyes to Jay. “Not much choice, is there? If I get off, where would I go
?”

  Hairy, gravy-stained face grinning, Lars clapped Fish on the back—the amphibian nearly toppling on impact—and said, “All right, Fish! Official member of the team. Oh-Fish-al.” He laughed too loudly at that, even with the volume of the rock ‘n’ roll. “Get you the decoder ring and whistle in the morning.”

  “Lars,” Jay said, “head to the cockpit and set course for Cairn. Subspace—we need to make up time. And Mr. Fishman,” she added. From some other pocket on her fatigues, she pulled the puzzle box, its esoteric etchings dark and menacing on its gilded surface. “Tell me everything you can about this box.”

  As horror bulged in the amphibian’s eyes, Lars stood up, swaying a little, and said, “One problem with your course, princess.” He jerked his chin toward the can in her other hand. “We’re out of beer.”

  Chapter XIV

  From his stool in the spinner’s only pub, Lars could see the flashing neon altar of the Church of the Hot Cosmic Jeezus Christ. A hologram of the Cosmic Messiah gave passersby a beatific smile, a miniature blue galaxy swirling around their third eye. Lars watched the trid flicker and thought of the clapboard church he’d gone to as a kid, balanced on stilts between the twin bell towers of a submerged Spanish cathedral. She’s got the whole world in her hands and so forth, a bunch of dirty flood-worker families in their shabbiest shabbos best singing off-key over the diluvial landscape. Gods had a tendency to spread faster than the clap in the answer-hungry cosmos, half a hundred hollow deities for every charted star in the Universe. A couple of pilgrims with faces painted blue knelt beneath the neon and waved their prayers at the hologram, and Lars chugged the beer in his hand, waving the barkeep for another.

  The first spinner they’d come to was a far-flung relay station halfway between Canal City and fuck-all. He’d barely seen it from Sheila’s windows: a little steel-plated hemorrhoid donut with a couple of freighters docked on its rim, dim beacon lights blinking yellow in the black Big Empty. Compared to the Victor’s Halo, this station was a hole in the wall—a blip in the void—one bar, one church, a fueling station, a couple of poorly stocked duty-free shops. That was the beauty of space: You could set up shop just about anywhere. No running out of real estate in the black. And if you were selling something people wanted—fuel, food, fornication—sooner or later, they’d find you.

  By the time they’d docked, Lars had more or less sobered up. Frank was still passed out in the cargo bay, not even a solid kick to the trunk could rouse him. They decided to lock up, let the old tree sleep it off. Lars followed Jay into the station, Fish keeping to the rear, away from the princess. The amphibian still looked sick and skittish, rattled by the puzzle box Jay had waved under his gills. He’d promised to tell her all about it—after the beer run. She’d pressed him, even waved her scary knife a little bit, but by that time, Lars was docking at the little spinner, and the princess had given up, shoved the box into a pocket, figuring—Lars guessed—that she had Fish by the short-and-scalies so what was another hour. She would get what she wanted.

  “You religious, Fish?” Lars felt beer foam on his beard and left it there, breathing in the floral bitterness of it.

  Fish hunched over an untouched tumbler of fermented tea. Gill flaps quivered around his shirt collar as he sighed. “Holy Frog Mother, from whose pond we all have sprung, in whose mouth we shall all be swallowed.”

  “That’s some dark shit,” Lars said. “Getting eaten by your mother.”

  Jay had stepped away into the station, the stool next to Lars still warm from her ass. He looked for her in the thin crowd—a handful of truckers and freight crew, the pilgrims on their way to distant holy lands. No sign of the purple tendrils. Probably taking a leak. Or woman things. He didn’t know jack shit about what those might be.

  “It’s a metaphor,” said Fish, “cycle of life. Birth and death. The Mother is everything, Alpha and Omega. Beginning and end.”

  “I heard a similar thing. As a kid. The old preacher giving us her best fire and brimstone.” The hologram across the way flickered again. Its third eye seemed to look everywhere and nowhere. A clever

  trick of programming. “That line sort of loses its punch when you’re already swimming in the waters of Armageddon. I never had much use.”

  “You don’t believe?”

  Lars shrugged. “Believe what? Cosmic Christ, Frog Mother? Throw your lot with one, you’re atheist and infidel to the rest of the pantheon. I just take it a step further. Believe in what I see, hear, smell, and fuck.” Sipped his beer for dramatic effect. It’d been a while since he waxed philosophic. Too much time cruising alone and beating off. “Fish,” he said, “the fuck is that box Jay’s carrying around? Some kind of super-nuke? Planet-buster? I’m not so sure I want it bouncing around Sheila, getting her all exploded and such.”

  Scaly eyelids closed over Fish’s big eyeballs, opened slowly. “I don’t know. A scavenger came around a few years back—maybe a decade, even—mumbling about mining artifacts between universes, negative space. Pickpocketing the seams of the nether-verses, he said. He had one of them, said it was a powerful weapon, and he was willing to take trade in dildos. I just liked its look—spooky, right? All those notches and runes? I figured someone would come through and know what to do with it.”

  “You figured you’d hock it and make a dime.”

  “I’m a businessman,” Fish shrugged. “The look in your friend’s eyes, though. She knows something. She knows what it does, or where it’s from. And if the scav was telling the truth, if it has something to do with realities outside this universe, then I’m terrified, Breaxface. Start messing with the fabric of existence and you could short-circuit the whole thing, unravel space and time. Shove the whole cosmos down the Frog Mother’s throat.”

  Lars started to sing, “She’s got the whole world in her throat . . .”

  “What?”

  “Forget it. You said you’d tell her what was what post-beer run. What’re you gonna say? That it’s a bauble from the seams of the universe? Fuck does that even mean?”

  Fish hung his head. “I’ll think of something. Maybe she’ll forget it by the time we reach Cairn.”

  “Or she’ll have some new enforcer who ain’t pleasant like me and Frank to knock you around till you tell her which buttons to press. We don’t know what’s on Cairn. Could be anything.” Lars finished his beer, and the bartender floated over, its cloud language taking a moment to translate.

  Another brewski, hair-person? it said.

  “Nah,” Lars told it, “but I gotta make a to-go order. Ten kegs, all varieties. Surprise me.”

  The barkeep nodded its appendage and drifted into the pub’s back room.

  A shape obscured the church’s neon, and Lars looked up to see Jay coming out of the azure church, wiping her mouth with shred of blue cloth. She saw the two of them still sitting at the bar and seemed to smile.

  “Drink?” Lars said as she made her way across the corridor.

  “No, thanks,” she said. “I’m good. We ready?”

  “Keep’s rolling out the keg order now. Should be set till Cairn, at least. Unless Frank gets his noodle plugged into them.”

  “Don’t worry about Frank. He’s sober when he needs to be.” She took a stool and turned toward Fish. “Now,” she said. “about my box.”

  Of course, Lars had to fucking laugh.

  Chapter XV

  Fish and Jay stared as his giggle fit devolved into beer hiccups.

  “Forget it,” Lars said, choking back a hiccup. “Lost in translation.”

  The other two blinked. The brimstone stink of a fart clouded the bar, followed by the return of the bartender. Its appendage was twisted around the handle of a pushcart laden with kegs.

  Where you want these? it said.

  “Shit, uh,” Lars scratched behind his ear, “Give us a minute. We’re hashing out the check.”

  The barkeep’s cloud-shoulders gave the distinct impression of a shrug. It’s all good, man-of-the-fur. Pay when you’re
ready.

  The puzzle box was suddenly in Jay’s long, pale fingers, its arcane etchings like the art project of some cubist hellbeast. Jay thrust it toward Fishman. “Tell me how to open it. Where’s the lock? The triggering rune?”

  The sex-toy salesman shrugged his skinny, scaled shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know the ins and outs and whats-its of the thing—I’m not versed in esoteric curios. I’m a retailer and an engineer, but my passion is erotics. I sold the hardware to make ends meet. Weapon sales kept the emporium out of the red, okay?”

  “What he means is,” Lars said, clearing his throat, “is that he’s no expert on arcane hoodoo shit. But he’s heard stories. He knows things.”

  Jay raised a scar-perforated brow. “Knows things? I know things. What do you know, Mr. Fishman?”

  “I know—” Fish started, reaching for the box.

  Alarms. A lazy klaxon sounded in the corridor, red trid flashing in meandering pixels around the ceiling: Lockdown. A pair of lumpy space-trolls in ill-fitting StatSec blues lurched into the saloon, concussion rifles at the ready. More rent-a-cops, Lars thought. Just what we fucking need.

  “Keep calm,” the fatter troll said. “Nothing to worry about. Just a little exsanguination over at the chapel.” He nodded behind him, helmet flopping between his ear cavities. “Color me surprised, a cult founded on eating bodies and drinking blood has a few nutzos who take the preaching literally.”

  The other troll waved a blacklight. “We just gotta check everybody for fluids. Mouths or other ingestion orifices-slash-appendages. Painless, unless you’re UV sensitive. In which case, lodge an official complaint.”

  Lars started to stand. The first troll whipped his rifle, sight leveled on the wolfman’s chest. “Easy, Tiny,” the troll muttered. “Just let us do our job.”