by Brandon Getz
Lars snarled. Here, under these moons, the wolf bristled just under the surface of his skin. It wanted to claw its way out—and through Patches’ smarmy-ass face. He fumbled in his shredded pocket for the singing angel gun that had turned Quillian to mercury, but the fancy little pistol had gotten lost in transit. Hard to keep track of shit across dimensions. He still had knives, though. Lots of knives. He flipped one up from its sheath and leveled its blade at the pilot’s blotchy, scarred nose. Frank loomed behind him. The pilot’s eyes went wide.
“Yo, it’s cool—don’t get all alien aggro. I’ll take you to Fish’s place.” Patches cashed his pipe and tucked it back into its pocket. “If they’ll let us in. Guy’s got, like, his own army.”
“He’ll let us in.”
Patches shrugged again, then turned and opened the scarab’s passenger compartment. “All aboard.”
Tight fit, Lars thought—Frank’ll have to crawl in like an alleycat. The tremuloid climbed in as best he could, crunching against the door frame and trailing a mess of twigs and loose leaves. Lars waved branches out of his face and stepped in. The scarab rumbled as its engine powered up. Auntie Hand stood on the platform, robes whipping in the wind, as clouds of electric flashed by and took her shape.
“Auntie,” Lars called, “Let’s go.”
“It’s all changed,” said the witch.
“No shit,” he said. “It’s been two hundred million years or whatever. Don’t get hung up on it. Let’s just find Jay. Whole mission’s a bust without the princess.”
“Don’t lecture me, beast.” She looked again at the sprawl of the city. “I’ve broken the laws of time and space to return a monarch to her throne. The throne of what, a city of pathetic peasants grown fat on pigs’ blood? It sickens me.”
The old woman glanced once more at the skyline, sneered, and hobbled into the compartment, the door closing behind her. Inside, Lars heard the unmistakable snap of a poptab can. Frank had his prehensile branch coiled around a tallboy, his roots jammed up against a six-pack cooler. The wolfman held out his hand—the universal sign for Beer Me—and soon he had a cold one snapping open, frothing at its mouth. It was a bitter, metallic brew, but godsdamn and Cosmic Christ he sat back and savored every sip as Patches lifted off, and the city was beneath them again, this time safely beyond the walls and windows of the scarab—everything awash in twilight and moonbeam, the haze of dusk, every chance patch of white glowing like his sheets under a black light from the Negastar’s ultraviolet.
Chapter XLVI
The scarab kept low over the city, swerving around other insectoid aircraft and flocks of corpse birds and shadow creatures on black, smoking wings. Auntie Hand huddled in her clanking robes, whispering things even the translator chips wouldn’t render intelligible, her mechanized hand moving as if on its own. Frank’s sucking limb was polishing off his third brew, and Lars was nursing his, thinking of Sheila and Budge and Jay and the transdimensional clusterfuck he’d gotten himself into. Swallow the sun and moon . . .
Patches jerked the scarab around a cluster of dark towers, and Lars almost choked on his borrowed beer: Ahead, glowing in strange light, was a castle. Even in the context of that city, it was menacing—polished red stone smashed together in beautiful chaos, as jagged as flowers made of ribs and teeth, or a bloody growth of ice.
“Fuck is that?” Lars said, tapping the window glass.
Frank’s trunk creaked as he managed a wooden shrug.
“Home,” said the witch.
“Cosmic Christ. Looks like Dracula’s ski lodge.”
“Sangre City,” Auntie Hand said. “Imperial seat of the royal family for over a thousand years. See that tower, the one like a mouth? That was mine.” The old witch grinned, showing her sharpened fangs.
“Maybe Jay headed there. Stroll through the old homestead.”
“Not without us,” said the Hand, coins and bones jangling on her robes as she gestured toward Lars. “Not without her living weapon.”
“Ah,” Lars said, “there in the spooky castle lies the locus of righteous vengeance. Of fucking course.”
Neon spilled through the windows, flashing across the witch’s eyes. “She’s lost out there among slaves and gutter trash, searching. I kept her away too long, she doesn’t know her ass from a paper bag in this city. Your friend had better know where to find her.”
Lars gulped his metallic brew. “Fish ain’t much of a friend. Tried to take my ship, the little gremlin. But if anybody knows something, it’d be Fishman. He’s a wily son of a bitch.”
The scarab began to descend, the neon-gilded facades of spiked towers rising quickly beyond the windows. The craft slowed, twisted, darted, and came to a stop midair as outside a trid billboard, floating on its own tachyonic motor, blinked an ad for a space dildo.
Lars crushed his can and tossed it with the others. “I think we’re here.”
Patches’ muffled voice filtered through from the cockpit, followed by the fuzz and static of a radio. Then the scarab was moving again, into a tunnel of neon and trid, holographic sex toys reaching for them like hungry serpents.
Everyone waved them through. From the landing pad, full of fancy hoverships and scarabcraft, to the mansion’s cathedral doors and into the loud and buzzing party, vampires in security armor told them to keep going, Mr. Fishman was expecting them.
“This is so weird, bro,” Patches muttered as party lights played across his round goggle lenses.
Lars burped in the direction of one of the security guards. “Sorry about the beer.”
“One love,” the pilot said nervously. “You dudes needed it more than I did. Just, you know, no need to wave any more hardware around, yeah?”
Fish’s mansion seemed to exist both in and outside the city, occupying a sharp rock formation not far from the red castle. It was built into, and from, the rock, a gothic cathedral of dark stone at once dwarfed on all sides by towers and looking down imperially on the city’s labyrinthine streets far below. It was exactly the type of garbage house Lars would’ve expected a Bizarro Fish to have, the anti-Emporium for the Fucktoy King. But the sounds of partying—music, voices, glass clinking—gave him some hope that if he couldn’t finish his mission or get back to his universe, maybe he could at least get shithouse-drunk and cuddle up with some vampy hanger-on in Fish’s richboy entourage. The amphibious fucker’d tried to ship-nap Sheila and had spaced him almost to death, but for a good lay and never-ending booze, he might be willing to let bygones and all that.
Partygoers stared and parted as Lars made his way through the crowd, followed by Patches, Frank, and the hobbling Hand. Lars almost expected a record scratch, everyone to stop frozen like he’d blasted them with a Medusa beam. Holographic portraits of alien genitalia shimmered on the stone walls, and the DJ kept to an unholy mashup of trance and chamber music, the industrial beats sending waves through the light of the holograms. Most of the partygoers were Jay and Hand’s species, in varying shades of paleness, wraith-thin to grossly fat, and with head tendrils tied and clipped in their own fashionable ways. A few, though, were marked with dark gray tattoos instead of scars, and in place of tendrils their heads were mohawked with fishlike fins. Among them mingled other species, stranger, composed of red mud or white light or green, iridescent plantflesh. Lars guessed they were other dimensional immigrants, though who knew what happened in pocket universes. That shit was beyond the physics they’d taught in his little stilt-school on Terra. Hell, he hadn’t made it past basic algebra.
“Where’s the bar?” Lars asked one of the finned vampires.
Before she could answer, an armored guard gestured toward a stained-glass door. “He’s waiting. Mr. Fishman doesn’t like to wait.”
“Tell him to hold onto his space dildo,” Lars spat. “It’s been a long day.”
The guard, eyes hidden by reflective glass, said nothing.
Lars looked back at his companions. They were a sad-looking bunch: the mottled pilot, the batt
le-ravaged tremuloid, the ancient witch. He’d been happy on his own, hadn’t he? Jetting galaxy to galaxy, wolfing out and getting paid. Universe’s ultimate lone wolf. It said so on his business cards. But since taking on Jay’s righteous mission, he’d been a lot less lone. Whether he wanted to or not, he’d accepted them as his pack, covering their asses when a true lone wolf would’ve tucked tail and bailed. Now he found himself the drunk uncle in a family of space monsters and nowhere near drunk enough to play the part. He grabbed a glass out of a partygoer’s hand, ignored her gasp, and sucked down the thick green booze.
“You guys wait here, grab yourselves a drink,” he said, wiping the liquid from his beard. “I’ll ask the fish where Jay is.”
As he pushed through the crowd, the stained-glass door began to open, nothing but shadows visible inside.
Chapter XLVII
For all the theatrics, Fish’s office wasn’t the fucktoy emperor bondage chamber Lars had been expecting. It was just a room, with bland antique furniture and giant pop-art portraits of the dildo king, broken only by the wall of TV screens opposite the door. Fish stood facing the screens, his back to Lars and crew. Gas lamps and blue screen-glow lit the room.
“She figured out the puzzle box,” Fish said, turning. Even in the low light, Lars could see he was impeccably dressed in a shiny paisley three-piece laced through with silver thread. He was visibly older, his gills and scales shriveled and pale at the edges. One of his hands glinted—a chrome-plated prosthetic. Behind him, the screens played scenes of the coastline, of receding water and white beaches and the malevolent coils of serpents in the distance.
“Looks like you figured that one wrong, huh?” Lars said. “Universe didn’t unravel. Frog Mother didn’t swallow shit.” The wolfman plopped onto a snakeskin sofa and put his hands behind his head, admiring Fish’s wall of TVs. “Those are your eyes on that beach. Hope we put on a good show.”
Fish’s scaled lips parted in a grin. “Uppercutting a sea serpent,” he said, his voice turned gravel. “Impressive. And you don’t even seem drunk.”
“Give me a minute. I haven’t found the bar yet.”
Lars leaned forward. The sea monsters on the screens were making him uneasy. Tide was still rising.
“I just have one question, then I’ll be out of your scales,” he said. “With your web of eyes out there, you see what happened to Jay? Did she come through?”
Fish looked at his metal hand for a moment, some kind of fish-man emotion flashing across his face. “It was my idea, the lookingweed. Keep an eye on the breach, I said. The Council listened, and that was the first step.” It was clear the amphibian was about to launch into a speech, and Lars wished he had another drink. Make it a whole bottle. That vampire slime wasn’t half bad. “We have to watch for breachers, I told them, for aliens, the dangerous kind, the kind who destroy lives and worlds. The serpents had already taken an arm and both legs when they found me.” Fish knocked on his thighs, and each rang metal. “The box, too. Down the throat of some monster. But you know me, Lars—even just a glance at the Emporium in Canal City, you know I’m resourceful. I trained as an engineer once, specializing in erotic electroanatomy and weaponized biomachinery. Designed new limbs myself. The Council was so impressed, they gave me free reign, whatever I wanted. I rebuilt the Emporium, jellying local fruits for my line of artisanal lubes and examining the local anatomy to customize coital pleasure enhancements. In return for their aid, the Council asked for my help with prosthetic design, scientific enhancement, weapons engineering. From one Emporium, I built an empire.”
“An Emporium empire,” Lars said, yawning. “What’d I tell you, huh? Dream come true. You’re hot shit in vamp city. So just consult your creepy Big Brother eyeballs, tell me to find the princess, and we’ll fuck off to the red castle and leave you to your sex party and dildo empire.”
“The princess who wrecked my shop, kidnapped me, and chased me into open space?” Fish said. “Haven’t seen her. But I’ve learned a few things since I’ve been here, Breaxface. Your princess is from a family of killers. I mean nasty—the draconian iron-fist enslave-the-populace sort. The royal family glutted on the blood of slaves while the rest of the kingdom ferried to the Nega-sun and back, mining the star for negativium to fuel their war machines. She’s got fistfuls of the stuff, Breaxface. Those little vials she promised you and me, they’re nothing—she stole bricks of it when she and her witch escaped the revolutionary forces, the rebels who overthrew her family and established the councils. Since the Liberation, every citizen of the Council region has been taken care of—energy and profits from sun mining redistributed to everyone, universal basic income, universal healthcare, slavery and hierarchy abolished, peace established across the planet. For two centuries, negativium has powered art and science instead of war. Sure, a guy like me with some knowhow and lube-jellying expertise can amass extra wealth, but no one goes sick or hungry, and even with the rotating duties of public maintenance, everyone is free to pursue their dreams. What do you think your princess wants to do? Leave all of this as it is? Preserve the peace?”
Jay’s mission of righteous vengeance: Kill the killers who killed her family. It sounded noble enough. She’d been just a kid, would have been murdered herself if the witch hadn’t smuggled her out, if Hand’s story was to be believed. Witness to mother, father, brothers, sisters cut down by a horde of angry rebels. Wasn’t that still wrong? Didn’t she deserve her revenge?
Enter Fish’s history lesson. Vampire kings of Sangre City growing rich on the backs of slaves, literally bathing in their blood. Two hundred years of peace and prosperity with Jay’s family stone-dead and out of the way.
“Prove it,” Lars said.
“I don’t need to,” said Fish. “Ask anyone. Ask the old woman you’ve got following you. Go to the castle and see for yourself. It’s a museum now, with Imperial artifacts collecting dust, a whole tour with dioramas and holograms displaying the history of the rebellion. Original lookingweed footage from the storming of the castle showing the revolutionaries cutting through walls of blood to release slaves from their chains.”
Lars thought of the old witch, hissing through her teeth at the slaves and gutter trash. Didn’t matter to Hand whether the planet was all puppies and rainbows with Jay’s family in the grave. The witch wanted vengeance, with Jay on the throne. Everything in its proper place.
“Ain’t my problem, Fish. The vamps can sort it out when I’m back shaking my dick in my own universe. I just want my paycheck and my ride home.” Under the multicolored gaze of Fish’s pop-art likenesses, he felt the moon juice from the planet’s lunar trio buzzing in his veins. Electricity crackled between the fingers of the amphibian’s chrome hand.
“It doesn’t matter where the princess is,” Fish said finally. “None of you are leaving this party.”
Fish held up his prosthesis, and metal broke apart, transformed, re-building itself as a large, shining, humming dildo.
“You gonna fingerbang me to death?” Lars snarled. Fur bloomed across tattooed skin, knuckles cracked and lengthened into claws. Jaws lengthened into salivating snout. “Better get some of that sweet jellied lube.”
From Arcturus Fishman’s dildo-appendage, a rope of light lashed out, looping to become the chain of a laser chainsaw. Orange light reflected in the fish-man’s wide eyes, across the silver threads of his suit. Bursts of electricity coursed through the threads themselves, and the paisley suit sucked up into itself, forming a paisley-patterned armor chestplate, exposing Fish’s smooth cloacal groin and steel robotic legs. Out of each of his metallic thighs, crossbows emerged, loaded with barbed cock rings, and from the back of the paisley armor sword blades fanned out like wings. “I always wanted to be called Razor,” he said.
Lars hunched on all fours and howled, full wolf. “Okay, pal. Let’s lycanthroparty.”
Chapter XLVIII
Sex toys attacked from everywhere. Laser-blasting butt plugs, flying vibrator drones, fucktoys fashioned for fore
ign anatomy retrofitted with helicopter blades and automatic weapons. They came from the shadows, from hidden pockets and doorways in the walls of the office. At the center of them, slashing with his giant dildo laser chainsaw, was Arcturus Fishman, half amphibian, half Terminator. Lars could smell fluids on the sexual predator drones, a dozen different sources at least. What the hell, Fish, the werewolf thought, you couldn’t wash these things first?
He batted away a pair of strange waggly things wielding circular saws, took a laser beam to the tail, and smelled the burning of singed hair.
“You took everything from me!” Fish was shouting. “You destroyed my whole life! I lost my work, my home, my arm, my legs! And now you want to destroy this world.” He fired the cock rings from his thighs. “Not on my watch, Breaxface.”
Black blood splashed, shielding Lars from the razor-edged cock rings. Behind him, the stained-glass doors hung open on shattered hinges, and Auntie Hand stood in their rainbow light, the gears in her hand clicking. The witch’s diviner, the fish-man’s laser chainsaw: It was about to be a prosthesis-versus-prosthesis battle royale up in fucktoy emperor’s office. Back in the doorway, looming, Frank finished slamming two of Fish’s armored guards together and dropped them haphazardly to the floor. No sign of Patches, but Lars couldn’t blame him—this wasn’t his fight.
Fish hovered on his sword wings, shouting. “This is my house, bitches! You evil bastards! You world-ruiners! This is MY HOUSE.”
Dildo drones blitzed the witch, wolf, and tree. Blood shields rose and fell as the drones zigged and zagged, crashing into the solidified gore; blood ropes lassoed attacking dildo craft and yanked them out of the air. Long wooden limbs slapped at the swarm of sex toys as Frank joined the fight, foliage falling with the damaged drones. Cyborg Fish’s blade-wings rippled as he launched himself at the werewolf, laser-blade swinging. The robophibian soared, silhouetted by his bank of TV screens. Beneath him, Lars rolled forward, snatching Fish by both hydraulic ankles and hurling him into the wall of TVs. Even before Fish hit the screens, the wolfman was on him, claws tearing at the seams where fish-flesh met the metal of his legs. Wolf and frog crashed in a showering of sparks, and the screens went dark, the room now only lit by gaslight and laser beam. Fish’s gills fluttered as he screamed, and the dildo saw slashed at the wolfman’s back, burning fur and flesh. Fish screamed harder when his legs wrenched free of his pelvis, wires and bio-rigging dangling from the stumps.