Lars Breaxface- Werewolf in Space

by Brandon Getz

  “My legs! My fucking legs!”

  Lars tossed the prosthetics aside as Fish still slashed. The giant dildo laser chainsaw found its way under the wolfman’s arm, cutting deep into the side of his ribs. Even with his lunar healing factor, the pain made him howl. A claw wrapped around the fish-man’s throat, just above the collar of the paisley armor. Gills, struggling to breath, tickled the werewolf’s palm. Fear spread across Fish’s face. The chainsaw fell limp, its laser blade sheathing.

  “You’re making a huge mistake, Lars,” Fish said. “They’re using you. And when they’re done with you, you’ll be nothing but an animal. A pet.”

  “I’m nobody’s pet,” Lars growled.

  The amphibian’s breathing was growing shallow. The last of the sex toy attack drones were falling, exploding in small bursts of sparks and fire. Fish still in hand, Lars stalked to one of the couches, sat the legless cyborg upright, and let him go. Fishman sighed, sucking breath.

  “Lars,” he said. “Lars . . . if you go . . . if you find a way back . . . take me home.”

  “Sure,” the wolfman grumbled, already beginning to snap back to human self. “Now—where’s the bar?”

  Chapter XLIX

  Vampire utopia. A planet federated and cooperative, where the basic needs of every space vamp were met. Even if tensions were rising between councils, that was still a hell of an accomplishment for the last two hundred years. They’d killed the monarchs and thrown off their chains. Jay’s family had been tyrants, and she was the last scion to the bloodline of the vamp-king dynasty. As they made their way back through the party, Patches confirmed everything Fish had said, right down to the red castle being a crusty old museum.

  “Liberation Day, they end the Freedom parades at the big front gates and everybody yells anti-imperialist stuff at the windows,” the pilot said. “Scary place, dude. Lots of weird shit in there.”

  The witch said nothing. Her wounds were healing slowly after the run-in with the sexual drones, but even without the cuts, she’d have looked like death. Frank had a slime drink in each branch, already tottering. At the stained-glass door, a few straggler guards had raised their swords, but a word from Fish made them stand down. They’d gone muttering into the wrecked room to assist their broken employer, glaring through reflective lenses as Lars and crew found the bar and loaded up. The partygoers kept their distance, and that was fine with the werewolf. He’d had enough of vampires. Enough of this whole damn planet-slash-universe.

  “What kind of weird shit?” Lars said. “Any puzzle boxes that look like they could open the gates to hell?”

  Patches shrugged and drank something cold and bloody. “No idea. I don’t do museums. Too many ghosts—I’m a big avoider of ghosts and haunted things.”

  “Zoinks, Shaggy. Me too.”

  The pilot gave him a quizzical look, but Lars was in no mood to discuss cartoons.

  “Auntie,” he said, “what happened to the key Jay used? You think she still has it? Fishman lost his in dimensional transit.”

  The witch scowled, a mustache of blood shining on her lip. “If I didn’t need you, I would drain your veins right now till your heart shriveled like a raisin. You disgust me.” She waved the drink in her diviner hand, spilling a little of the black liquid as she did. “All this lot, these vermin, these slaves disgust me. They should be on their knees in my presence.”

  “Slow it down, grandma.” Lars sipped at his own drink—more of the thick green stuff. Glass to his face, it smelled strong and earthy, and the finish reminded him of fermented meat. “You’re gonna get us all thrown in some Commie Council dungeon. If they’re not already on their way. As much as I want to blackout on this slime and dance the Transylvanian Twist with one of these fish-finned lovelies, I think it’s best if we roll out of here. We find Jay, we grab the key if she’s got it, I say toodles to all of you and fuck off back to the big ol' universe I’m used to. Auntie: you, Frank, and Jay can do whatever the hell you want—retake the thrown, eat everybody in the city, I don’t give a shit anymore. I’m tired. I’m hungry. And I still haven’t gotten my rocks off since the princess cock-blocked me on my shore leave. I’m done. Now let’s find Jay and the key, then I’m going home.”

  He finished his drink in one swig and tossed his glass to the barkeep. He was halfway toward the front door when he realized no one was following him. Growling, Lars stalked back to the bar—where Patches was talking to a pretty little vamp with bleached head-tendrils and purple freckles on her shoulders. Frank and the Hand were nowhere in sight.

  “Patches, the fuck? I thought we were all rolling.”

  The pilot shrugged. “Oh, nah, bro. I’m good here. Best party I’ve been to in months.”

  Lars grabbed the sleeve of the lanky vampire’s flight suit. “How am I supposed to get around this city,” he growled, “hitchhike?”

  Patches’ eyes were still hidden behind the goggles, but Lars could see fear on his splotchy face. “Yo, dude, I don’t know.” He fumbled in his pockets, and keys jangled. “Here, here, take the scarab—just, like, don’t crash it. I only have liability insurance.”

  Lars took the keys. They felt strange without a rabbit’s foot dangling from them. He missed Sheila. “Where’d the tree and the old lady go?”

  “Slunk off, man. You know, into the shadows. Like ninjas.”

  “A gigantic walking tree and a hobbling old woman slunk off like ninjas?”

  “She’s got that black magic, right? ‘Imperial hexsmith.’ That lady’s the boogeyman. Wander too far into the dark and Auntie Hand’ll get you . . . That’s what they’d tell us when we were kids. Who knows what ninja-type stuff she can do.”

  Lars scratched his nuts and sniffed the crowd, searching for the familiar stenches of tree sap and patchouli. The stink was there, but it was everywhere, dissipated and lost in the smell of the mob, no distinct trail left to follow. Cosmic Christ, he thought. Now he’d lost the whole damn crew. He was trapped in this little nightmare universe with no way home. He didn’t even have a change of socks. The girl with the bleached tendrils had disappeared, and Lars almost felt sorry for interrupting Patches’ schmooze. He shoved the keys into the pocket of his fatigues.

  “Party on, Patch,” he said. “Thanks for the wings.”

  

  The office was still a disaster zone of broken sex toys and TV screens, but somehow Fish had reattached his legs and was walking among the rubble. A guard tried to block Lars from entering; the werewolf snarled.

  “It’s okay,” Fish said. His metamorphic paisley suit had resumed its three-piece double-breasted shape, complete with titanium bowtie. But Fishman looked haggard, defeated, like someone had just kicked his ass. Lars reminded himself that he was the one who’d done the kicking.

  “Hey, Fish,” the wolfman said. “You still want to save this shithole planet and go home?”

  The amphibian jerked his prosthetic hand, and the laser chainsaw blade snapped out, blazing orange. “What’s the plan?”

  Chapter L

  Up close, Sangre City was twice as menacing as it had been from the air. The castle’s walls and turrets jutted from the grounds like the bones of some eviscerated demon, crystalline crags of red translucent heartstone pulsing inside with shadows of swirling darkness. Even with the museum’s pixelated trid billboard projecting over the gates and the plastic pocket of brochures bolted to the wall, the castle still looked like a place where you went to die, screaming, in a dungeon lousy with rusty chains. A thermal-scan padlock hung heavily on the front gates, where, Lars imagined, Patches and the rest of the city had their Two Minutes Hate at their former monarchs every Liberation Day.

  The werewolf turned to Fish. “You want to pop those knife wings and leap this? Or should we just bust through like the wrecking balls we are?”

  Fish had been a different creature since they’d made for the scarab. Less the hellbent-for-vengeance killer cyborg, more the eager dildo-fisted sidekick. The possibility of a way back home had thawed
him, at least on Lars. He still wanted to laser chainsaw Jay into space-vampire sushi, but the plan Lars had outlined was simple: If Jay had made it through with her key intact, grab the puzzle box and skedaddle through the time warp back to Universe Prime. If she lost it or had gotten herself perished, find the Hand and figure some other avenue through the spooky breach. As they set Patches’ scarab down in the museum’s tourist lot, parking in a handicapped zone to be closer in the event a quick escape was necessary, Lars had made the amphibian promise to keep a sheath on his chainsaw if Jay appeared, at least until they had their ticket home. Fish had reluctantly agreed.

  Fish grabbed the thermal lock with his cybernetic hand, and the device beeped with some technological whizbang. A second later, it slipped free from the black gates, thudding on the concrete. The fish-man grinned. “Perks of being half android.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Lars muttered, “you’re fucking useful for something.”

  The castle’s doors, arched slabs of more blood-red heartstone, hung open just wide enough for someone smaller than a werewolf to slip through. Lars grabbed a door in each hand and wrenched them wider, the giant hinges creaking with the movement. Inside, the castle was too polished and well-curated to be a fortress of nightmares. Holographic gaslight lanterns glowed white-hot in the carved bone sconces, the skull-and-steel chandeliers. The kitsch of vampire history occupied every available space along the red crystal walls, shimmering under security force fields and labeled each with its own informational plaque that Lars couldn’t be bothered to read. Viewing screens framed in faux-tarnished bone played lookingweed footage, just like Patches had said: Vamps in rags swarming the hallways of the castle, falling on shadowed guards and gilded royals like locusts. In the walkway between the exhibits, chevrons of red light blinked the direction of the path.

  “It’s all here,” Fish said soberly. “The whole bloody history, if you feel like reading the plaques. Jay’s family terrorized this world for a thousand years. She would restore that. With you as a weapon, her dog on a leash, she’d take back the throne.”

  Lars barked a laugh. “Cosmic Christ, Fishman,” he said, “I know I’m a big scary monster. One and only wolfman in this universe or the next. But how exactly would Miss Princess plant her flag on this whole world with just me as her attack dog? Even Frank’s knocked me on my ass. I know these councils have gone all hippie-dippie co-op and shit, but any army would kill me.” He nodded his beard toward the nearest screen. “Those slaves took down an army. They’d have my head on a spit in ten seconds flat.”

  “Then why did you take the princess’s contract? Why agree to her mission?”

  “Something to do, Fish,” Lars said with an overdramatic shrug, “something to do. She was flashing a lot of cheese. Might’ve been only pennies to her, but that much neg would’ve been a lot to me. Retirement, the good life on some paradise rock. Figured I’d think of something along the way. Or that she’d get sweet on me.” He scratched his groin absently. “Anyway, I don’t fucking know. And I don’t know Jay’s plan. It was just ‘vengeance this’ and ‘Ragnarok that.’ She didn’t get real specific.”

  “I don’t know, either,” Fish admitted. “But I do know that the witch you had with you is very dangerous. And powerful.” The amphibian looked around the polished heartstone room with his dinnerplate eyes. “And that this is a bad place.”

  Lars felt a tingle in his fur, and the virus in his blood swirled like the darkness in the walls. A chill scraped down his back from hindbrain to tailbone. “Fuckin’ A, Fish. Grayskull, Hell House, and the Temple of Doom all wrapped up in one sealed and holo-labeled package. Rebels should’ve burnt this place to the ground and pissed on its ashes.”

  A sound like metal scraping stone echoed through the hallway from some further chamber. Lars fumbled in his torn fatigues for the hardware Fish had given him back at the mansion—a couple of sawed-off silver-slug repeater shotguns, dozen shots each barrel. Knives and concussion pistols were strapped to each leg, in case of emergency. The wolfman jerked the guns, both cocking with a heavy click.

  “Either the janitor’s dusting the crown jewels,” he said, “or the party’s about to get started.”

  Fish nodded, smiled a lizard smile, and unsheathed his laser chainsaw. The chevrons blinked a path toward the sound—and the duo followed.

  Chapter LI

  The scraping continued to echo as Lars and Fish followed the blinking chevrons, the horror of the deposed royals and the glory of the revolution shouting at them from every exhibit and artifact, until finally they came to a wide atrium ceilinged in glass. Beyond its dusty panes, the planet’s three moons shone in their dissimilar phases alongside the purple-black sun. In the room, two rows of shadow armor, still smoking with hexed shade after more than two centuries, lined the walls under half-burned banners that Lars assumed were the royals’ coat of arms: Three white circles in the mouth of a black serpent against a field of crimson.

  Scrape . . . scrape . . .

  “Ah, shit,” Lars muttered, shoving the shotguns back into the holsters on his belt.

  Against the furthest wall, carved into the heartstone with images of serpents and dragons and wolf-like beasts was a throne of crystal fangs—and Jay slumped across it with her stolen broadsword. She drew the blade idly across the vampiric canine between her knees. Black blood caked on her mouth and chin, and at the foot of the throne, tossed across the wide steps, was the corpse of a fellow vamp dressed in a red-paisley knockoff version of Fish’s three-piece suit. From the nametag under the pocket square, they figured him for the curator or a tour guide. What a mindfuck—eaten by a princess your whole museum says died two hundred years ago.

  Fish tensed. His gills fell flat on his scale-encrusted neck, and the orange laser-chain lashed.

  “Easy, Fishman,” Lars said. “Don’t make surf-and-turf the second course.”

  Fish lowered the saw, but the amphibian was still rattled. Hell, so was Lars. Jay looked every bit the evil villain, bloodspattered, black-clad, sitting in the stone maw of a wall-to-wall hellscape. She stopped scraping her sword and seemed to notice Lars for the first time.

  “Jay,” said the werewolf. “You okay? We’ve been out looking for you. Where’d the nether spit you out?”

  The princess shook her head, tendrils falling loose around her scarred face. “It’s all a lie.”

  Holding up three fingers, he said, “Scout’s honor. We even crashed this asshole’s party to get a bead on you.”

  “Not you,” said Jay, “my whole fucking life.”

  She stood up, and Lars could see that she’d strapped into one of the suits of shadow armor. It fit like a black, smoking glove. The movement of the shadows blurred her edges, and her body seemed to half fade into the dark inner swirls of the heartstone behind her. “I didn’t remember much. My mother singing in the gardens as my sisters and I poked at the lookingweed. My father riding a sky serpent back from a faraway battle, looking every bit a hero and a king. It was like some fairytale.” She spat, missing the corpse on the stairs by an inch. “It was a fairytale. She only let me remember those moments, and the blood as they were cut down. The ones who weren’t eaten were burned alive in the gardens. She told me my family had ruled with justice, compassion, that the rebels had been vicious barbarians jealous of our power. She said that without my family to rule, the world would be chaos, and the rebels would fashion themselves dictators, or fall on themselves in backbiting, and the people would suffer. She said my people needed me. That they thirsted for revenge just like I did—that I needed to avenge my family’s deaths not just for myself, but for the world.”

  Lars let his eyes fall onto the ornate carpet between himself and Jay. He couldn’t quite make out the pattern, something gothic and terrifying in its design. His own family had been dirt-poor refugees, tilling muck in the floodyards of the Sierra Coast. Most of them were probably dead by now from radiation wafting across the ocean, or from starvation, the yards never yielding quite enough. He had
n’t seen them since the Terran Security Council had banished his wolf ass for unknown contagion and the massacre of his crew. But it was what it was—he’d come from nothing, never been anyone, never felt the weight of having to answer to anyone but himself. Jay, the survivor princess, carried the weight of a planet—and it must’ve felt a lot heavier with Auntie Hand’s bullshit piled on top.

  “Look, Jay—” he started.

  “Have you seen all this?” she said, waving a hand. “They were killers. My father, my mother, my sisters . . . Behind that door is a big stone pool with an altar in the middle—they would hang the most beautiful slaves by their feet and cut them throat to groin, then swim in the guts and feast. Their own people.”

  Fish’s laser chainsaw pointed in the direction of the corpse, but Lars shot him a look. No use starting any arguments on moral relativity. They had a mission. Puzzle box, interdimensional chute-the-chute, then home free. They needed Jay’s key.