Lars Breaxface- Werewolf in Space

by Brandon Getz

  “Fuck,” he said aloud—why not? No one else was there in the blackness. No one alive. He smelled the putrid air again and didn’t have to see to know where he was, what the swamp sucking at his feet was made of. He’d relived that nightmare enough times to recognize the reek. It was a swamp of gore: blood and bile, shredded flesh, gnawed organs, splinters of bone. Here and there, tatters of uniforms with Dys-7 patches on their sleeves. He held his breath and kept trudging, no particular direction, the darkness flattened by the overwhelming rot.

  Where the fuck was Jay? Frank? Was this the pocket universe they were bouncing all over outer space to unlock? Some bullshit fucking ‘verse it was. Maybe he was in hell. Real, legit hell. He didn’t believe in hell, hadn’t since he was eight years old and the foreman of the flood crew raped Jenny Song and hid her body in the bogs and came to the church, high on its stilts overlooking the flood plains and the green storms, and praised Jeezus and asked forgiveness and the preacher gave it, she gave him absolution, and told the congregation he was saved from hell because he’d said he was oh so sorry to the Cosmic Christ, whose third eye saw all and knew his heart was true. Lars remembered Jenny’s laugh, when they’d sneak into the darker corners of the library to find things the town had forgotten, how she’d stutter and snort, and he’d liked that.

  The wolfman growled a string of half-audible obscenities, shrugging off the memory. That was what coming face-to-face with your sins did to you—made you think too fucking much. Hell was a heady place. Like some cold Tibetan mountain in reverse: a hot, dark cave in the middle of nothing.

  Lars kicked through meat and bone, heading whichever way was forward. He should’ve walked into one of the city’s clawed walls by now, or at least a busted-up vehicle. The landscape of carnage was burned into his dream-memory; he knew it intuitively. I did this. He felt the stew of the dead slosh around his legs. I did this. And this is what Jay wants on her home planet—a massacre-swamp dressed up as retribution. Lars spat into the darkness, tasting vomit. If this is hell, I deserve it. I deserve all of it.

  The wolfman stopped, breathed. The smell wasn’t so bad now. It almost smelled like dinner. If he got hungry. If he stayed there long enough. Eyes closed, he exhaled long and deep, the way you’d let go of a bong hit, and when he opened his eyes again, he was looking at a wall. A flat, steel wall—embedded with the standard blade-sphincter doorway they had on all those backspace spinners. Soft blue light emanated from divots in the wall, and, looking down, he saw he was

  standing only in mud, the regular marshland muck of the floodyards, splashed black and brown all the way up to his furry knees. The smell of death lingered, more like a memory than something rotting real-time.

  “Note to self,” he said through gritted teeth, “no more transdimensional polka.”

  The door dilated open, and Lars stepped out of the swamp onto the side of a mountain. Black snowcapped crags rose like monster teeth in the distance; stars peppered the whole bowl of sky as bright and diamond-like as if he were sailing space in Sheila’s pilot seat. He shook his big canine head, knowing exactly what forest moon the magic door had sent him to, exactly which mountain, and exactly whose campfire he was smelling, with the bitter zest of roasted vegetables in the smoke. Never any meat—Budge wasn’t the carnivorous type.

  Lars stalked the trail, legs still covered in swamp shmutz and starting to itch. The fire wasn’t far. Budge’s mat was laid out beside it, and the old aurochs-headed witch-monk sat cross-legged on its frayed embroidery looking at the stars.

  “Budge,” Lars called. The minotaur turned. “Are you real?”

  “Real as a solid gold asshole.”

  Sounded real enough. Sure as shit seemed real—the monk’s heart was beating, stomachs gurgling. A familiar smell clung to his inked skin: barnyard and sandalwood. Budge was there all right, in the flesh, on that magic moon mountain, just like Lars had found him years ago, meditating as spiders wove webs between his horns. The hulking monk’s gray-blue skin was covered every inch with black tattoos, binding designs that matched those he’d woven into Lars, but whatever inner beast the old shaman was holding back, he never said.

  “Is this—?” Lars stumbled; his voice wasn’t its ragged werewolf croak. It was human. He looked at his hands—still wolf claws.

  “Get your head outta the lilacs, Breaxface,” Budge said, shifting on his mat. “Usual laws of what's what don’t apply in this place.”

  “This isn’t Jay’s pocket vampire universe,” Lars said. “It ain’t hell either.”

  The big ox-headed monk flipped the yams and rockbeets burning on the fire’s coals. “Sure as shit is not. This is somewhere else.”

  “Where’s Jay? Rest of the crew, the Library, my ship? Puzzle box busts out a laser light show, not even a little Pink Floyd to go along with the pyrotechnics, and I end up slogging pitch-black and taking a doorway to Nowhere. Did I miss the detour to the vamp dimension? That shit under construction?”

  The monk speared a beet and inspected its center. He shrugged and left it burning. “There’s this legend—this shit goes back a dozen ages, before your species even got the idea to stand up straight, but a version of it cropped up on your planet, too, eventually. Every system’s got a take—in space, gods spread faster than the clap.”

  “That’s my line.”

  “You stole it from me,” Budge said. He started moving the veggies from the fire, one by one, to a terra cotta plate. “Legend goes, when a world is at its end, the stars will disappear from the sky and the Big Bad Wolf will come along and huff and puff and open his snout far as his jaws will crank it and swallow the sun and moon. Trees will burst, mountains will melt, and all binds will snap. All binds, wolfman. The wolf will stalk forth all the way to grandma’s house with his mouth open wide, his upper jaw tearing the sky and his lower jaw the earth, and flames will burn from his eyes. The Big Bad Wolf will pluck the gods from their nosebleed seats and eat them too, and great serpents will chow down on the rest until nothing’s left but darkness.”

  The monk sat dead-still with his bull eyes on Lars. Then, with a fat hand, he swiped a beet from the plate and began to chew.

  “What the hell’s that mean?” Lars said. “I’m gonna fucking eat the moon?”

  “Means that vampire princess of yours thinks she’s just unleashing vengeance. She isn’t. This will be the end of that world and of you, wolfman. Everything will perish but the beast, and eventually that tiny bubble of universe will pop and cease to be, its energy the catalyst for another universe and another.”

  “Cosmic Christ, Budge,” Lars said, offering his arms, “give me better tats. Hyper-hoodoo legend-proof ink. Bind me.”

  Budge snacked on another beet and talked with his mouth full. “You already got my best work.”

  Lars watched the old monk nosh his charred dinner. Swallow the sun and moon, eat the gods . . . The fuck? He put as much stock in ancient prophecy as he did the various pantheons of the cosmos, which is to say nearly zero. Nearly. There was always that niggling suspicion, that thorny superstitious what if. Well, not superstitious. Just a littlestitious.

  “Budge,” he said to the minotaur, “how the hell do I get out of this place? Legend or no, I got shit to do.”

  The old monk dropped a yam rind and stood. His bull-headed shadow fell on Lars as he rose. Budge was massive, and all power inside that tattooed flesh. Pale horns carved with intricate runes curled a full head above Lars’ twitching wolf ears, and the ornate silver ring in the monk’s nostrils shook as he said, “It’s just a jump to the left.”

  Lars looked left; over the cliffside, there was nothing but a dense, empty darkness. “Budge—”

  “And then a step to the right.”

  “A spinner door, another portal, whatever it is—”

  The minotaur’s arms flexed as he rested his giant hands on his belt. “With your hands on your hips . . .”

  The campfire crackled, burning brighter, a little blue.

  “ . . . You bri
ng your knees in tight.”

  Then the monk pelvic-thrusted with so much force, a supersonic wave of bull-penis witch mojo sent the werewolf reeling over the cliff’s edge, scraping at sheer rock with his claws, Budge’s great bull head craning over the edge, above him, growing smaller as Lars tumbled into the void below.

  Chapter XLI

  Netherspace shat them out, with all the cyanoscopic pyrotechnics and transdimensional whizbang of departure, onto a cold blue beach. Sand sprayed as Lars landed shoulder-first, rolling into a thatch of black seaweed. He heard the witch nearby, coughing and rasping obscenities that would’ve made a Nevada floodworker blush, but he didn’t care, couldn’t care, too far down the rabbit hole of space-time mindfuckery. He lay face down on the cobalt sand, shrinking and cracking back to his human self. He’d trudged the genocide of Dys-7, Budge had launched him off a cliff, and now he was—where? Jay’s homeworld?—as if all that shit was just a bad acid trip.

  The sky was dark, the shore drenched in moonlight. Above the water, three white moons hung in different phases—the smallest a full disc, the largest just a sliver—and beyond them, he saw the system’s sun burning purple-black, a negastar, creator and catalyzer of negativium. So that was where Jay had gotten her precious stash—her planet revolved around negative energy. Unlight gave her world life. Then he noticed the rest of the sky: black, blank. Not a single star or constellation, nothing at all beyond the dark sun and its satellites—a darkness not even seen at the furthest frontier edges of backspace. The negastar system whirled in a bubble that grew like a Cairnish tumor from the body of the universe, empty save for Jay’s world.

  Lars got to his feet. Around him, pieces of the Library scattered the beach: chunks of wall and ceiling, charred bits of cat, both halves of the stone table. The desiccated corpse of the Librarian Se’grob lay crumpled like a dead angel, his gnawed throat still leaking dust. Lars grabbed a blackened bit of cat and started munching. He looked around for any sign of Jay, of Frank—nothing. Hand rummaged through the weeds, cursing. Black waves lapped at the shoreline, where red bioluminescent tangles pulsed in the wet sand at the water's edge; along the intestinal strands, nodes of tentacles swirled around cloudy white eyeballs. The look of them made almost made him sick.

  “Maybe I made it to hell after all, Budge,” he muttered.

  Auntie Hand stumbled in the seaweed, and Lars reached to help the witch get her footing. She slapped his hand away. “You think I made it this far in my life by relying on men to steady me? Fuck off. And get your head out of the sand. Up and start walking. City’s over the wall.”

  She scowled at him, then past him, blinking behind her quartz eyeglasses, and gasped. “That’s new.”

  Lars turned. Behind him, the beach ended at the foot of a massive black wall, skyscraper-high and perforated with wide, dripping drainpipes.

  “How can that be new?” he said. “You guys have only been gone, what, a couple decades?” The wall stretched both ways down the beach for as far as the wolfman could see. At its top, the lights of a city glowed through the fog. “This must’ve taken a hundred years to build.”

  “It’s just higher is all. A lot higher,” Hand scoffed. Her eyes searched the upper reaches of the wall. “Decades . . .” she muttered. “Time doesn’t tick the same way this side of the breach. We’re not in your universe anymore.”

  “Speaking of ‘we,’” Lars said, “where is everyone else? Frank, Jay? And Jeezus, bolts going nova in the middle of a flock of Librarians. You set that rusty bastard to self-destruct. Why?”

  The witch shrugged and picked up a long piece of driftwood, leaning on it to test it with her weight. “Boris was a means to an end. Do you get weepy when your toaster breaks?”

  Then, as if just noticing the eyeball node near her feet, the witch stabbed the end of the wood into its milky iris, grinding until it popped. Tentacles twitched and fell limp. White slime oozed onto the wet sand.

  “Cosmic Christ,” Lars muttered. “That’s disgusting.”

  “Lookingweed,” said Hand. “It’s watching us.”

  “What’s it gonna do, stare us to death?”

  Lars scanned the beach. More of the creepy red eye-weed, still no trace of princess or tremuloid. Beyond the ring of Library debris, the sand was smooth. No prints, barely a splinter of driftwood. He sniffed—even with his wolf senses, he could smell nothing but himself, the witch, and the sea.

  “Look,” Lars said. “I just got knocked into oblivion by some inter-universe big dick energy. I want a couple of answers. Where are we? What the shit is lookingweed and what the fuck are we even doing here if we aren’t helping our vengeful warrior princess?”

  “Jay can handle herself,” said the Hand. “I’ve made sure of that.” She glanced at the black sea, then started to shuffle toward the high wall with her driftwood as an ersatz cane. “We arrived at low tide. The moons here wreak havoc on our oceans. We don’t have a lot of time to get past that tidal wall.”

  “Why don’t you just magic us over it?” Lars said, following her up the dunes. “Cast some flying hex or something. Float us up in a fart bubble.”

  The witch sighed. “There was a time, beast, that I could have pulled your blood through your eyes until you were a hollow bag of flesh and ridden that blood like a liquid dragon over the highest towers of the city. But I’m an old woman, and the sickness of your cancerous universe has yet to leave my guts. So, shut your fat stupid mouth and start walking.”

  “Lady, let me tell you stupid: Opening a dimensional breach in the middle of a fucking library. I told you and the princess to stick with the plan. Now we’ve got no cruiser, no weapons, no third key, no MREs. My beer and my ship are back on that spinning nerd cube. Every mouth-breather in the stacks is probably doing keg stands in my cargo hold. We ran around like assholes grabbing up gear, and for what? So, Jay could blast us to Vampire Planet without so much as a laser pocketknife?”

  He could see it now, all those winged sons of bitches drinking his booze and scratching Sheila’s paint and sitting in his fucking seat. The whole mission of vengeance had been one clusterfuck after another. Now the avenging prodigal daughter had disappeared, apparently spat into some other corner of the world by the hocus pocus of dimensional travel. He needed to see her, to tell her he was done. He’d be wingman to the vengeance part, help her kill her family’s killers. But that was it. No massacre, no counter-revolution. Then he’d take the first portal back to Universe Prime and get drunk enough to piss straight lager.

  Auntie Hand kept on hobbling. “We won’t need knives,” she said. “We just need the beast.”

  “The Big Bad Wolf,” Lars muttered, and aped sucking in a big breath. “Here to huff and puff and blow the house down.”

  “Something like that,” the witch said, as the black wall loomed larger with each step.

  Chapter XLII

  More tangles of lookingweed stretched in a red web across the wet face of the wall. A hundred milk-white eyes stared down from the black stone, tentacles flaring around them like breathing gills. The wall was punctuated by runoff pipes large enough to fly Sheila through with room to spare. Lars wished again that he had his cruiser and a cold beer, and while he was wishing, he figured it couldn’t hurt to add a hot lunch and a couple of young and willing bodies with tits like full moons. He smelled the salt of the sea and rot and slime in the drainpipes and the sweat and patchouli of the old witch and the dust of the Librarian’s corpse. He could smell the lookingweed, too, something completely alien, like burnt aluminum and wet wax and not really at all like either of those things. Fuck, Lars thought, just . . . fuck. He was down the fucking rabbit hole now. In Twilight Oz, Bloodsucker Wonderland, following an alien witch to the foot of an unscalable wall.

  Hand turned and rested on her driftwood cane, her prosthesis whirring.

  “What is that, anyway?” Lars said, nodding at the wood and metal hand. “Plenty of flesh-sculptors back in my ’verse. Why bumblefuck around with a subpar appendage? Sen
timental value?”

  A bolt of black blood arced between Auntie’s fake fingers. “It’s a diviner,” she said. “Got rid of the old one a long time ago.”

  “You fucking cut off your own hand?”

  “Without sacrifice,” said the witch, “there can be nothing gained. We all give a little something to get what we want.” Her crimson galaxy eyes darted toward the shore, widening. Something screeched in the distance. “Tide’s rising.”

  Lars looked back. The water had reached the debris they’d brought with them through the breach. Se’grob’s body had already washed away. In the purple half-light, he saw shapes breaking the waves further off the coast. Long, dark bodies coiling across the surface and slipping back into black water. Sharp silhouettes of fins.

  “Fuck was that?” Lars said. “Vampire sharks?”

  “Serpents,” Hand said.

  “Get the fuck out.”

  The witch blinked, her red lenses magnifying the gesture.

  Lars shook his hairy head. “That’s what he said. ‘Serpents will chow down on the rest.’ Figured it was fucking metaphor. Or nonsense.”

  Auntie Hand leaned forward on her cane. “What who said?”

  “Nobody,” he shrugged. “You see any weird shit in the breach? Sins come back to haunt you? My tumble down the rabbit hole got a little existential.”

  “I made my peace with sin a long time ago,” said Hand.

  “Some things there’s no peace to be made.” He looked at his arms, rubbed blue sand from his tattoos. “I got a visitation and a prophecy—another old witch saying I’d bring the Wolfpocalypse. That ‘swallow the sun and moon’ bit. He said serpents would finish the job.”