by Brandon Getz
Fish was cowering, and beside him, Jay took a sip of the boozy tea. She licked her lips, black tongue snaking around from chin to nose and back again. It wasn’t enough. In the blacklight, the spatter glowed white on her face.
The trolls raised their rifles.
“You’re under arrest,” one said. “We don’t countenance murders on this spinner. Not even to quench biological thirsts. It ain’t sanitary.”
Jay set the drink and the box on the bar. Her long, white thumb rubbed the corner of her lips, and her firework eyes narrowed into a glare Lars had only seen in apex predators. It was the death stare of a hunter. She was going to eat those motherfuckers.
One of the trolls dangled a set of magnetic shackles. “If you could, uh, please put these on.”
Sinews tensed under scarred white skin.
“Jay—” Lars started.
Then she pounced.
Concussion slugs thudded against the walls and ceiling. Bar patrons shrieked. One troll tottered backward, shouting for backup. The other couldn’t scream—his flabby throat was between Jay’s teeth. Rigor mortis had his fat finger squeezing the rifle’s trigger, arm bouncing with each burst. More StatSec boots were marching down the corridor, and the living troll was finding his aim. The rifle sight burned red on Jay’s cheek—before Lars kicked the gun out of the guard’s hands. Another boot to the troll’s wobbling face, and he fell back, KO’ed, like a tumorous ragdoll.
“Jay, cosmic fuck, you gave me a verbal flogging over blasting that smuggler back at V’s Halo. This is a fucking StatSec guard! How is that laying low? We already have a bounty chasing us from that airlock you burst. You want every bounty hunter in this sector on our asses?”
She looked up, fangs bloodstained and frightening. She wiped the troll’s green blood from her mouth with her palm. “I’ve been holding back for days,” she said. “I’m hungry.”
“Cosmic fucking Christ.” Lars grabbed one of the rifles just as the first of the cops’ backup rounded the corner to the saloon. Klaxons blared. The wolfman fired a round into the guard’s forehead, just under the helmet, and she fell in a heap beside her bleeding colleague.
“Where’s Fishman?” Jay said behind him. “Where’s my fucking box?”
Lars turned. Amphibian and devil-box were gone, disappeared into thin air like the barkeep’s fart smell. The bartender was hiding behind the cart of kegs. One of its clouded eyes hovered cautiously above the barrels, watching the destruction.
“Can’t have gone far,” Lars said. “This spinner’s the size of rat turd.”
Jay’s long knife glinted in the flashing lights. “He’s fucking sushi.”
Another StatSec guard stormed in, frozen for a moment as it realized Jay’s blade had severed its head from its body. Then both head and body crumpled, and blood sprayed the ceiling like a garden hose. Jay stepped over the spurting corpse, disappearing into the corridor, the church across the way gone dark. The hologram of the Cosmic Messiah had powered down when the alarms sounded—danger and salvation apparently mutually exclusive.
As he followed Jay’s footsteps over the StatSec dead, the bartender’s meek cloud-voice came from its hiding place, Can I still mark your tab for ten kegs?
The corridor was awash with StatSec blood. Body parts littered the steel parquet, each piece bearing some insignia or accoutrement of the rent-a-cop confederation of Station Security. The truckers and travelers had all apparently taken shelter in their ships or behind the merchandise racks of the duty-free. Lars saw no bystander corpses. A few stray station cats lapped at the warm blood, translucent skin flashing red in the lights of the alarms.
As he passed the dim entrance to the Church of the Hot Cosmic Jeezus Christ, he heard the unmistakable click of a gun behind him. Even in the dark, the diamond pistol gleamed.
“Sorry, Lars,” came Fish’s voice from the shadows. “You’re a nice guy, I think. A little lewd for my taste, and kind of stupid. And that hyper-masculine air you put on has to be compensation for—”
“Ain’t compensating for anything,” Lars growled. “I’m a goddamned werewolf badass. And werewolves are awesome—extremely awesome—as sure as shit stinks and beer is better cold.”
“I can’t let her do it,” the amphibian continued. “I can’t let her end the universe. She might be telling the truth about her family, her mission of justice and vengeance, I don’t know. But if there’s even a chance this box will flip the universe inside out and upside down, I can’t let anyone have it.” Fish sighed. “Throw your keys in the offering bowl. I need your starship.”
Lars snarled. He felt the twitch in his fingerbones.
“Don’t,” Fish said. “You might. You might take me. But I know this pistol. Hair trigger, laser-accurate. I sold it to Quillian last year. Even odds you end up with a diamond bullet in your wolf brain, and neither of us want that, okay?”
“You can’t hold me up and abscond with Sheila. I gave you my booze, man.”
“You also destroyed everything that mattered to me in this universe and delivered weapons of mass destruction to a crazed bloodsucker. Now, please. The keys.”
Lars dug the pink rabbit’s foot from his fatigues and dropped it into the offering bowl, the key singing as it hit the curve of the brass. “I’m going to have to kill you for this, Fish. If she doesn’t get you first. Nobody takes Sheila from me.”
Fish stepped into the stroboscopic alarm light. The big diamond pistol never wavered in its aim. Lars stared past the barrel, into the amphibian’s big, shining eyes. Fish’s webbed hand swiped the rabbit’s foot from the bowl, and the key—Sheila’s key—dangled from his fingers as he walked backward into the flashing darkness of the spinner’s main corridor, never turning his back on Lars. The moment Fish disappeared around the curve of the wall, Lars felt the wolf surge in his blood. His bones began to break and reform, growing. It hurt like hell, draining his blood of the last remnants of the water planet’s lunar juice. His veins burned. But fuck it. He had to get that key back. Nobody space-jacked Sheila. Nobody.
Chapter XVI
The wolf stalked the flashing red corridor. No sign of Fish, but Lars could smell him—that polyester-and-clam stink, faint with the musk and ball-sweat of the rabbit’s foot. They were circling the spinner opposite Jay’s carnage. Pretty soon he’d run into the bloodsucking alien princess—he hoped he found Fish before then.
Every second in his wolf skin this far away from a moon, not even a half-dead lunar battery strapped to his back, burned inside his bones, but the thought of losing Sheila burned worse. He thought of the amphibian swaggering into Sheila like he owned her. Rummaging through his porn stash. Making off with his lunar batteries. Fucking up the perfect butt-divots in the pilot seat that had taken him years to get exactly, comfortably right. Lars breathed the landscape of scent: Fish, blood, recycled air. He dropped to all fours and galloped, claws scraping the metal floor.
A clattering in one of the duty-frees, and the wolf stopped, sniffed, and snarled. From behind a shelf of brightly foiled snacks, an Y’klarian trucker stumbled out, all four of her furry wings in the air.
“He went that way, man,” the trucker stuttered. “Waving his gun around like a magic wand or some shit.”
“Yeah,” Lars growled, “he’s Mister fucking Wizard.”
Gunshots. Two. One whizzing over his shoulder, the other biting into the flesh of his thigh. Lars howled. The trucker beat her wings and found cover in the rafters. Shrugging off the pain—it was only a flesh wound—Lars tore down the corridor, zagging wall to wall as bullets ricocheted off the chrome floor. Then the diamond pistol was clicking empty, and Lars stood over the cowering amphibian. Fish had his back to a docking airlock, but the slip was empty—nothing but big fat space beyond its thick porthole. He dropped the pistol, which gleamed and clattered, and raised his webbed hands.
“You got me,” he said. “I admit it, bad idea trying to steal your ship, et cetera, but that woman
? The so-called princess? She’s murderous. She’s off her rocker. You’ll be complicit in the end of the universe, maybe. Or worse. We don’t even know what this thing does.”
“You shot me.”
“I know, I know. Sorry about that. No hard feelings, right? I mean, it was out of necessity, and maybe a little bit out of fear, too. You are a vicious animal four times my size and you did just threaten to kill me.”
“Keys,” said the werewolf.
Fish fumbled for the rabbit’s foot, which dangled like a charm from his vest. He tossed it underhand, and Lars caught it on one black claw, Sheila’s key swinging on its chain.
“Box.”
The werewolf could hear the erratic thump of Fish’s protean heart. Gills fluttered wildly on the fish-man’s neck. From another pocket in his vest, he pulled the ornate box, the still-pulsing alarm lights making it flash red and menacing.
“Would you believe it, I got lost?” Fish said. “Trying to find which dock we were hitched to. I was peeking through the windows, but they all looked the same. Then I figured if I kept going that way, she’d get me first. And she wouldn’t hesitate.” Fish turned the box over in his fingers. “Just snikt, and I’d be the Headless Fishman.”
“You’re absolutely right.”
Fish’s eyes ballooned, and in their silvery reflection was Jay, blood-soaked and tendrils wild. She was standing legs spread, shoulders hunched, the knife in her fist dripping gore on the metal floor.
“Throw me the box,” she said.
“Jay,” Lars muttered, “what—the fuck. This is a mess.”
“When I want to hear your tongue, I’ll cut it out and listen to it fall on the ground.”
The wolf flashed his fangs, and a low growl boiled in his throat. Who the fuck did she think she was? A spinner full of amputated StatSec, blood all over the place. The shootout in Canal City. One snafu after another. Her mission of righteous vengeance had so far been a mission of epic clusterfucks, and Lars was getting tired of having to claw his way out.
Jay stepped forward; Lars blocked her path, filling the whole of the dock-tube with his frame.
“Don’t make me cut off something you’d rather keep,” she said. Her teeth gritted, blood still oozing from her mouth.
“Just take it. No need to kill him.”
From behind him, barely more than a whisper, he heard Fish say, “I’m sorry, Lars.” And then the wrenching of the dock’s emergency open latch, the alarm lights switching from red to blue, a pre-recorded message blaring Warning: Depressurized Hull, Warning: Depressurized Hull, and the airlock was opening, its gears unwinding, its seams screaming with the rush of air surging to fill the vacuum of space.
Lars would have killed him. If he could have caught the amphibian, he would’ve clawed his heart out as they both choked and froze to death in orbit of the spinner. But Fish was sucked out first and fast—the door buckling under the pressure. Lars braced against the doorframe with his boot, pain screaming through his bones as he put all his weight on his wounded leg. He caught a pipe in the rafters with one hand, and with the other, clutched Jay’s ankle as she soared headfirst and determined toward the void.
“Let me go!” she said “I have to get him! I need the box!”
“Fuck the box.”
Body parts whipped past them, leaving streaks of blood on the floor and walls. In the space beyond the open airlock, Fish tumbled, the box frozen in his fist. From the ragged wounds of hacked-off limbs, long tangles of bloodrope swirled through the black, Jay’s magic reaching for the amphibian, failing, dissolving into clouds of gore. Lars felt his leg beginning to buckle, the gunshot burning white-hot, his grip loosening, and Jay kicking, trying to wrench free. Fish was screaming, frog lips mouthing Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck, and with the crackle of burning fire, space itself seemed to rip open, a mist of blue light melting in from some pocket of netherspace, unzippering of the seams of the universe, the light circling a portal in the void.
“That’s it!” Jay shouted “He opened it! We have to go!”
Lars’ claws dug into the meat of her ankle as she kicked. “We’re not jumping into fucking space.”
The princess howled. Another lasso of blood snaked across space, but it still wasn’t enough. The blue portal—the throat of the Frog Mother, for all Lars knew—swallowed Fishman and the stray StatSec body parts and the puzzle box. It swallowed the nearest ship that’d docked on the spinner, too, and then, as quickly as it had opened, it swallowed itself, closing up into a pinpoint of light, and then into nothing, with no sign left of anything it had taken. Whole torsos were sucking past them now, trailing guts, thumping into them with lifeless disregard. A steel helmet with a head still in it slammed into Lars’ knuckles, and his hand opened reflexively, losing its grip on the pipe, and he knew he was going out—out into the empty, with no hole in the universe to swallow him up and save him.
Chapter XVII
Get your head outta the lilacs, Breaxface. Budge was always saying bullshit like that. Lars could hear the old minotaur’s voice now, vivid thunder in the clouds of his memory. Hexed tattoos had only been the first step. Without meditation, Lars would’ve just been a beast with new ink. In the glow of his campfire, the aurochs-headed witch-monk would sit, chanting, preparing the enchanted ink that would save Lars from himself, symbols as fail-safes on the werewolf’s scarred skin. Here, floating outside the spinner, the stars weren’t much different from those Lars had meditated under in the black mountains; only the patterns were different, the spaces between them seeming further, infinite, like the space between his hand and the open door of the airlock. Get your head outta the lilacs, he could hear the monk say again, and somebody was screaming, maybe him, muffled in the vacuum of space. Echoes of Earth’s orbit and the capsule and the smiling wolfish skull. He was still gripping Jay’s ankle, the two of them about to die in the fading ether of Fish’s transdimensional getaway. Ice crystals hardened on Jay’s bootlaces, on the fringe of his fur, on his tongue and in his lungs, burning. Get your head outta the lilacs, Breaxface. He wondered what Budge would’ve made of the Frog Mother, of the open maw of the universe swallowing a man.
Shit, Budge, the wolfman thought, gasping, ain’t smelled a lilac in years.
His wolf-self strained against the ink on his skin, virus fighting the hex to save itself, and Lars reached, expecting to scrape space, and clawed instead at the hard, knotted meat of a tree limb. He jerked to a stop, almost losing his grip on the vampire princess. The rough branch wound itself around the wolfman’s fist, and he looked back to see Frank in the doorway, bracing against the frame with every root and limb. The tremuloid pulled, reeling them in with his branches, wood-flesh straining beneath the cracks in his bark. Frank’s yellow eyes were all squinted, determined, and Lars almost felt like he wasn’t going to die in the next five seconds. He clung to Jay’s ankle so hard he thought he might break it, but he didn’t care. If she got out of this clusterfuck alive with only a broken bone and some scratches, he figured she was still ahead—and damn lucky. His chest heaved, lungs trying to breathe airless space and his wolf blood repairing fragile tissue even as it froze. No moons for probably light-years, lunar batteries back on Sheila in their neat little boxes, and he felt the last dregs of moon energy begin to fade from his body, Jay waving almost weightless in the void, howling, bloody, it’d be easy enough to let her go, climb back into the spinner, and set off in his cruiser for some vacation planet, forget the princess, her mission, the whole goddamn mess.
But if he dropped her, would Frank still yank him back from the black?
Fuck. Lars snarled, at Jay and the disappeared Fish and the whole spastic galaxy. Then he used the last of his strength to pull Jay toward Frank’s reaching limbs. The tremuloid wrapped a branch around her boot, and Lars climbed—with the help of Frank’s steadying limbs—back to the airlock. When he was behind Frank, the tree-man pulled Jay inside, and a couple of bulky truckers rolled a big steel table in front of the open airlock. Loose body part
s vacuum-sealed the seams around the table, making a wet, meaty sound as the universe sucked on them from the outside.
Lars sucked breath. The air was thin, half the spinner’s atmosphere reserves lost to the open slip. Jay, cradled in Frank’s branches, coughed and heaved, her alien anatomy craving whatever it was she needed from the air.
“What were you sons-of-bitches doing, suicide by airlock?” said one of the truckers.
All the moon gone from his cells, Lars didn’t have the energy to quip. His body broke, bent itself back into man-form. The spider-silk fatigues were still intact, if a little stretched around the seams. The boots were fucked. His toes stuck out the front of each like five-pronged tongues. Kicking off the boots, he pulled himself over to lean against the cold corridor wall, under one the flashing alarm lights, its brilliance bathing him in alternating black and blue.
He felt something soft in his hand. The rabbit’s foot. Keychain still circling his finger. He said a silent, half-hearted prayer to all the gods of space travel and pulled himself to his feet.
“Hey, Frank,” he said, “meet me back at Sheila. I need to get some shoes.”
When he got back to the cruiser, sporting fresh kicks and dragging the cart of kegs, Frank and Jay were in the hold. The tree stood upright and alert, all his eyes cleared of at least some of their fog. The princess hunched against a crate of canned meat. Lars thumped in, his new shoes squeaking slightly, and began to unload the kegs. He’d been lucky. One of the trucker shops kept a stock of top-shelf formtex shitkickers, with a pair in his size. Knee-high and matte black, guaranteed to form to any foot, man or beast.
In the spinner, he’d seen almost no one. The few truckers and pilgrims onboard had fled Jay’s rampage and the depressurization, and only the spinner’s android skeleton crew was left to clean up, starting with welding a plate over the open airlock. He’d twice slipped in blood. If any StatSec had been left alive, Lars and his two passengers would’ve been shot to death just to save the hassle of arrest. But Jay had been thorough.