Lars Breaxface- Werewolf in Space

by Brandon Getz

  The android grabbed Frank’s chopped limb with its grip-arm and held it against the sap-seeping wound in the tremuloid’s upper foliage. Frank didn’t move, but his eyes took on a shade of embarrassment, and Lars felt sorry for the arboreal bastard. Frank kept getting the worst of the battle damage, and the big guy never even complained. No wonder he drank so much.

  “Steady it, Boris,” the witch said. “Can’t see as well as I used to.”

  The wooden hand twitched, fingers moving like insects as the gears buzzed. Sap crawled up Frank’s bark-skin. It sucked into the wound and wrapped around the area of cleavage like a poultice, hardened, the severed branch re-attached where the time-scorpion had cut it, the scar almost invisible. The witch moved her magic hand down the length of Frank’s trunk, and as she did, the scorpion’s green blood dissipated and the tremuloid’s wounds and scars dissolved. Even his eyes looked less yellow.

  “Jay,” Lars whispered, “the fuck is all this? This witch your granny?”

  “My teacher,” Jay said. “The one who saved me.”

  It was only then that either the witch or the robot seemed to notice him. The robot’s eyes flashed, and its cannon charged audibly, the wide barrel aimed at the wolfman’s face.

  “Pathogen detected,” the bot said. “Recommend immediate termination.”

  Lars spat in the dust. Robots, man. They all had that stupid robot voice, like some ancient recording played through static on a shortwave radio. A concussion blast was swelling inside the barrel—he could hear the contralto thrum of it. He raised the revolvers, one each for the robot’s eyes.

  “Check again, Iron Giant,” Lars said. “It’s not fucking contagious.”

  The old witch was doing her squint thing, looking him up and down. She walked close to him; small pieces of bone and burnished coins hanging from her robes rattled as she moved. Lars swung one of the revolvers to meet her. The android twitched.

  “Lars, don’t,” Jay muttered.

  “Don’t what? Piss off the Tin Man and the Wicked Witch? I don’t much care for blasters getting waved in my mug.”

  As he spoke, the witch waved her hand like she was swatting a fly, and he felt his heart slow, blood thicken inside his veins. He felt suddenly heavy, as if the gravity had shifted, the planet ballooning beneath him. He dropped the guns.

  “It’s all right, Boris,” the witch said. “Our princess has herself a pet.”

  She leaned closer, and he could smell her worse than he could before—dried blood, dust, dead animal, the overwhelming reek of patchouli. Some things were constant no matter what corner of the universe. The witch parted her parched lips, and a long black tongue stretched over her fangs—licking his cheek. He couldn’t move. The scorpion’s blood was drying on his skin and it started to itch. The old woman’s eyes shimmered beneath her lenses. Dirty old bag, he thought, at least buy me a drink first.

  He felt the weight in his veins deflate—back to normal, more or less.

  The witch’s face cracked into a reptile grin. “The beast.”

  “He’s what you said we needed. A wolf,” Jay said. “We can finally go home. Crush the rebellion.”

  “Always with crushing the rebellion, my little bug.” The old woman shook her head and began walking toward the hut. She held up her clockwork hand, and the scorpion blood on Jay and Lars fell away like dust. “Come on. Bring your pets. This heat is making my tits sweat.”

  Lars shook the last of the green blood-dust from his beard. The android—Boris—was already following its master. “Charming old bitch.”

  “You don’t know that half of it.” Jay kept her eyes on the receding figures, tall and hunched. Frank stood at her shoulder. He seemed in good spirits, ready to party. Lars wouldn’t have minded heading back to the cruiser and toasting Frank’s health with a pint or two, but he could tell that wasn’t on the docket—they were on the mission, and the witch was part of it. She and her weird junkyard robot.

  Jay started for the silver dome, Frank following lockstep. Lars pocketed his revolvers and hauled ass to catch up, the dead husk of the scorpion behind them beginning to stink in the heat.

  Chapter XXV

  Auntie Hand had been old since before Jay was born. Last scion of an ancient family of conjurers and hexsmiths, court witch and arcane advisor since the alien princess’s great-grandmother’s reign. Not even royals called her by the name on her skin. She was the Hand, as much in name as in practice: The Left Hand of the Throne. She was also the royal preceptor of blood magic and hex arts—and the one who’d saved Jay from the execution squad the rebellion had sent for her family, finding a whole new macrocosmos in which to hide the young sovereign.

  Jay spat into the dust as they walked through the stick-forest of windmills. “She’s all I have left,” the princess added. “The only person from my world in this entire universe. And you’re exactly right—she’s a raging bitch.”

  If Auntie Hand, shuffling ahead with her Franken-bot, heard Jay’s whisper, the old woman made no sign. She didn’t lose a step. The silver hut was further than it looked, and bigger. Once they passed into the rocky clearing beyond the witch’s windmills, Lars saw that the hut rose out of the cracked earth like liquid, a mound of mercury molded roughly into building shape almost twice the size of Sheila. Walls shifted texture and shade, liquid and stirring. Windows swallowed themselves and opened again in random blooms of light.

  “Quicksilver ants,” Hand said by way of explanation. “Domesticated, with a little drone spell to keep them sedate. Not much timber on this rock to go building cabins and cathedrals.”

  “Why not go down into the ruins? Dryslug cities? I thought they were a billion strong before the blight. Could live in castles down there.” Lars pictured epic underground cities of hardened slime, decaying metropolises choked with the bones of the blighted Cairnish—and packed to the stalactites with black-market valuables and museum-quality trash. Jay’s mission promised a fat paycheck, but she hadn’t paid up yet, and Lars was getting antsy for some scrip. The buried Cairnish treasure got him jonesing to channel his inner Indiana.

  “Too dark,” said the witch. “Those filthy grubs look like they enjoy suntans? I like it up here, out in the open, you can see what’s coming. You have to watch, in open desert though. Crust of this planet is a hollowed out, tunnels everywhere. Bugs don’t get you, cave-ins will. Fall so far into the planet nobody’d hear you splat.”

  When they reached the hut, Boris turned, taking a sentry post, its red eyes scanning the desert behind them. Auntie Hand waved her wooden appendage, and a large hole opened up in the hut’s outer wall. The old woman led them into the main room, which was cluttered with scavenged junk: bones and black stumps and bleached, smiling skulls. Chrono-carapaces, scraped clean, forming bowls for everything from rusted bolts to slime shards. Broken machinery from a dozen different planets stacked shoulder high, wires and tubes and semi-organic arteries hanging loose from their panels like trophy scalps. The witch nodded to a table—a big, burnished slab of Cairnish hardslime—at the far end of the room. Beside it was an electric stove, wires snaking directly into the churning liquid wall.

  Robes rattling, the witch busied herself with a percolator near the stove. “Generator’s out back. All those mills—plenty of power, especially when the westerly kicks up. Not like it used to be, when we were huddling around hex fires in a river cave, eh, little bug?”

  “No,” Jay said, looking away. “It isn’t.”

  The princess sat at the hardslime table, taking the seat nearest the witch’s stove. Frank hunched in the closed-in space of the hut, foliage curled down as much as possible. Even then, the tremuloid’s uppermost branches scraped ants and ceiling, dropping bits of liquid silver to the swept dirt floor. Lars looked around for a wineskin or a beer fridge. A fight always made him thirsty—hell, everything did. And hungry. In every corner of the hut, all he saw was junk and bone. The whole scene creeped him out a little. Like some mad scientist’s lab.

  “Sorry,
uh, Auntie,” Lars called to the witch, “you got any chow? Fresh meat? I been eating canned for weeks.”

  Auntie Hand turned, her face flaming orange in the glow of the stove coils. A window opened, spotlighting the table and throwing the witch into shadow. “Fresh kill outside, I believe,” she said with a razor-toothed grin. “Go crack yourself off a claw.”

  Some fucking host.

  On the stove, the percolator whistled steam. Hand quieted it with her wood claw, bringing it—and a rattling tray of hollowed-out hardslime cups—to the slab of table. “We don’t need food here. Boris doesn’t eat. Me—I find what I need. And I need it rarely. Not like little bug.” With a wooden finger, the witch pushed her glasses up to the bridge of her nose. “She’s thirsty. I can see it in her eyes.”

  “I drink when I have to,” said Jay.

  “A queen drinks when she wants to.”

  “I don’t plan to be that kind of queen.”

  The Hand let out a laugh, a dark, ugly sound, like scraping barbed wire over hollow teeth. “My little bug. Bleeding heart as ever.” Hand lifted herself onto the slime bench and sipped at her tea.

  “Auntie . . .” Jay began.

  “Yes, bug, I know. It is time to go back.” The cup shook a little in the old woman’s hand. “I knew as soon as I saw you. You said you wouldn’t come back—not until you’d found what we needed. The key, the beast. And now you’re here, and that fat worm above us is cheering in her hideous nest at the thought of poor little me finally leaving this forsaken planet.”

  “Auntie . . . I lost the key.”

  The witch slammed her cup on the table, hissing Jay’s real name. A flash of blood-red light burned in the old woman’s eyes. Jay shrank from the glare—then gritted her teeth and stared back.

  “I’ll find another one,” said the princess. “I found that one, didn’t I?”

  A hole widened near the entryway, and Auntie Hand’s gaze shifted to the junk robot outside. Lars saw her face soften, a small smile tug at her pale lips. The kind of smile that made him wish he still had those revolvers in hand, and maybe a slug or two already brain-deep in the witch’s skull. The lady was bad news—you didn’t need hocus pocus to divine that.

  “Listen, Mizz Hand,” Lars said, “it wasn’t Jay’s fault. This skeezy little dildo salesman jumped out of an airlock with it and got himself portaled out of existence.”

  “A queen takes responsibility for her own mistakes,” said the Hand. “And a court witch always has a Plan B.”

  “A lot of royal folks raw-dog it, huh?” Lars asked.

  “Raw . . . dog?”

  “Lars,” Jay snapped, “shut up.” The princess stood up, hand on the pommel of her slug knife. “I’m going for some air. Auntie, we are leaving. We have to. We’ve already been here too long.”

  The Hand coughed, gripping the table with both hands. The kettle rattled. “Yes, bug. Perhaps you’re right.”

  Jay nodded and headed for an opening in the hut wall, disappearing into the desert sun. The witch watched her go then turned to Lars. “Tea?”

  “Nothing harder? Stone cold bitch like you, I’d wager you keep a decanter around.”

  At that, Frank seemed to perk up from his perch near the junk piles.

  The witch poured three cups of a thick blue-black tea. A thin eyelid slid over one of her cloudy eyes—a wink. “This’ll knock you on your ass, beast.”

  Lars took a cup. The dark liquid bubbled, and he thought of the fairytales his mother had told him when he was just a flood town urchin back on Terra, when witches were nothing but myths and nightmares. Those witches, you never ate or drank their shit—whether it was an apple, a house of candy, or a mug of grog, it was all potion and poison. Best case scenario, you’d wind up comatose till your true love date-raped you in your sleep. More likely, you were chopped, ziplocked, and stashed in the freezer next to the last jackass who drank the witch’s tea. Lars shot a glance at Frank, who was studying his own cup with every one of his yellow eyes. The wolfman pushed the tea aside.

  “No thanks, lady. My ass has been knocked enough.”

  “Suit yourself.” Hand downed her cup, then reached for Lars’ and downed that too, both still boiling hot.

  Lars stretched, joints cracking. He hadn’t had enough rest in weeks, not even with the post-spinner sleep and 3Flesh dreams. It was all right in the witch’s hut, hot but dry, and he didn’t mind sparring with the old bag. She reminded him of his own grandmother, another stone cold bitch in her own right, hardened by the heavy fists of two now-dead husbands and a lifetime of watching the world go to shit. Jay needed a minute, so he figured he’d buy her one, get the Hand yarning. “What’d you do to the Cairnish, they want you out of here so badly? Put curses on all their grandfathers? Make their dicks turn blue and crawl away?”

  “This,” she waved the wooden hand toward the stacks of junk, “it’s all holy relics to them. Right down to the ice trays and nipple clamps.” Another razor smile as she poured a third cup of the black tea. “Grubs can’t abide anyone setting foot on their Motherworld. It’s sacred, yadda-yadda, but more than that, they’re jealous—they can’t come down here, so why should we?”

  “Then why let you scuttle down here? Sweet talk?”

  “For all their posturing, grubs are a primitive lot. Not a hex-savvy worm in the brood. I had a little princess with me, remember. Wanted dead or alive across galaxies. What better place to keep her safe than the most jealously guarded planet in the universe? I made a deal with the Ambassador to get some things they wanted very badly. So, they’ve tolerated me. In their own way, I like to think they want me here. A custodian for this old rock. I keep it tidy.”

  “Yeah, real safe and tidy.” Lars sniffed. Goddamn he needed a beer. His stomach was lurching. His tongue felt like the floor. “Satellite-mounted lasers circling twenty-four-seven, monsters ambushing you from other dimensions. Fucking paradise. Can’t see why Jay would ever want to leave.”

  “Little bug . . .” The old witch seemed wistful, for a moment. Then she spat onto the stove coils, watched the black mucous sizzle. “She failed. She wouldn’t have lost that key if she’d continued training. Impatient, petulant. It’s the royal blood—royals never have patience for anything. All the spoiled princess knows are parlor tricks. If she didn’t have you, her rabid dog, the rebellion would eat her alive.”

  Blood ropes, blood walls, that sick shit she’d managed as they battled Quillian’s stone men—that all seemed like more than parlor tricks to Lars. But what did he know? The old woman could freeze his blood with a flick of a finger. Maybe if Jay had stayed to finish training with Witch-Yoda Hand, she’d be an unstoppable Blood Jedi.

  “I’ve been hearing all about this whole trip,” Lars said. “You don’t need an army, just yours truly, werewolf in space. And I have to tell you, it sounds like thirty-one flavors of bullshit. Nobody’s taking back a whole planet with just me, some blood magic, and that sober bastard over there from the Forest of Doom.”

  “If it were open battle,” the witch admitted, “you’re right. But that isn’t the plan.”

  Lars leaned back. “Then tell old Lars the plan. I’m all ears.”

  Auntie Hand snapped the fingers, and immediately Boris the junk-bot thumped into the hut. Jay crept in beside the mech, her purple tendril-hair tussled and dusty, in her hand a growler of ale from the Sheila’s hold. Lars felt himself salivate at the thought of a sudsy brew.

  “First,” said the witch, “we go home.”

  She held out her wooden prosthesis, and the black liquid in Boris’s glass chest began to bubble and part. A hole opened up in the ceiling of the hut, and a shaft of light slanted to illuminate what had been obscured in the black: another of the rune-riddled puzzle boxes. A hellion key identical to the one with which Fish absconded.

  “Auntie . . .” Jay sputtered. “What the fuck?”

  The old witch touched the old knot of scars on her chest and flashed a shark-toothed grin. Bowing slightly to her young mon
arch, she said, “Plan B.”

  Chapter XXVI

  The beer was piss-warm, but Lars didn’t care. After time scorpions and the old witch’s tea fumes and the concussive desert heat, it was nectar of the gods, and he savored every foamy mouthful before gulping it down. The sun was setting beyond the fork of the river, cooling the landscape and making thin silhouettes out of the field of windmills. The wolfman sat on an old chunk of hardslime and watched, tipping the growler occasionally to Frank’s sucking appendage. Frank seemed distressed in the presence of the witch, eyes spying every which way, foliage aflutter, and Lars couldn’t blame him. Hand gave him the heebie-jeebies too. The old lady had power—too much power. Especially over the ninja princess. Lars spat into the dust. Mommy issues, he figured. Some dangerous combo of guilt and loyalty. Old wise Auntie had Jay by the short-and-curlies.

  The robot, Boris, came stomping by, patrolling perimeter. Its red LED eyes burned above its fat bolted jaw. Lars jerked the growler away from Frank and offered it to the motley ‘droid.

  “Hey, bolts,” he said, “brewski?”

  The robot halted. “Term not defined in any known galactic dictionaries.”

  “Beer, Frankenstein. You want a sip?”

  Red eyes flashed. “Mark-III android models do not require fermented grain beverages.”

  “Me either, bolts. It’s a want not a need.” Lars swallowed another mouthful of the ale. It was going flat, but he still loved it. Who was he kidding? Mark-I werewolves did require fermented grain beverages. A whole fucking lot of them. He held the growler out for Frank, unwilling to let go of it. Yeah, he was bogarting the jug. So what? “Tell me a few things, huh? What are you and Broom-Hilda doing on this rock? Setting up a flea market for foxes?”