“Mr. Wolfgang!”
Thoonk!
The hatch slams just. I jerk awake. Ripped from sleep like a bad scab. Alive. Ready to fight.
“What?! What?! What?!”
Roger’s headlight eyes brighten the darkness under the dome like … two headlights. On a car. I rub a little sleep from my crusty eyes.
“You were right…” he beeps.
Groooogh! Another peal of thunder roars outside the dome.
“Oh. Yeah. I told you: my gut’s always right.”
Pink.
“What was that?” I ask.
Pink. Pink. Pink. Pipipipiiiksshhh!
“Rain.”
“What?!” I yell over the furious slaps against the outside of the adamantium dome.
“Rain!” yells Roger.
“Space rain?!”
“Yes!!”
The slaps of rain grow fiercer and more deafening. The storm has arrived in all its wrath.
“Well!” I yell. “I guess we’ll just ride things out now!”
“What?!”
“I guess we’ll just ride things out now!”
“You should have built a quieter shelter!”
“I was in a hurry! Wasn’t thinking!”
Roger looks down at his feet. His headlight eyes blink.
“I am sorry!” he yells.
“For what?!”
Groooogh! Groooogh! More and more thunder.
“We’ll talk later!” I yell as I grab him and hunker down.
A trickle of fear courses through my alien veins; I don’t know what to expect. I’ve never been in a space storm before. Have I?
It’s not really rain. It’s more like a cloud, but it swirls like a maelstrom. The rain out there: it’s not falling, but blowing, droplets caught in a violent swirl of wind.
Lightning. Static electricity builds up in clouds. Ripped open by the charge, they drop their payload on the world. But this isn’t normal lightning. Normal lightning is white. This lightning is pink because—
“Roger!”
“Yes?”
“Something psychic is out there!”
“You can sense it?!”
“Yes! And it’s mad!”
“You could not sense it before?!”
“I think I could, but I didn’t know what it—”
Reeeegh!
Oh, shit!
“What?!”
“Didn’t know what it was! It’s those bat … mantis … things!”
Reeeegh! Reeeegh! Reeeegh!
“A lot of them!” I yell after their piercing psychic screams rush through my mind again. I shiver with memories of fear, but deep inside, deep in my monstrous hearts, I come alive with a hunger for violence.
Roger darts his eyes to the safe. The weapons. He wrestles free from grasp and tinks over, throwing the safe open. He whips out a Tommy gun and starts loading it, his little robo-hands moving as fast as they can. An ounce of pride swells into a pint inside me.
I start grabbing guns and loading them, too.
Bam! BAM!
Something hammers the outside of the dome. Something that isn’t rain.
“They are here!” cries Roger. “They are here! They are here!”
Reeeegh! Reeeegh!
BAM!
“Keep loading!” I yell, fumbling to load at least a dozen guns, bullets slipping from my tendrils. While I’m working, management of my multitude of tendrils becoming more and more natural, I reach for the crystarium.
Grenades.
I imagine a bundle of Mk 2 grenades. Pineapples.
No! Bigger. Meaner.
I dig through my memories, real or not, searching for something deadlier. Stronger.
Space grenades! Come on! Space grenades!
Madness. Hundreds of possibilities fill my head as if they’re being broadcast in there.
What is this?! What are these?! How do I know all of this?!
Panic grabs me like its jaws like a lion leaping for a kill.
Roger was right. I am going mad!
No! I’m Jack Wolfgang. I’ve always been Jack Wolfgang! This is just weird space nonsense. Get a grip!
I steel my nerves and thumb through the ideas like I’m flipping through a catalog. They’re all feasible to me, but none of them are familiar enough to actualize quickly and consistently.
Then I remember.
Sgt. Sigrid! The Vulfos! They had grenades. I’ll make some like those.
I recall the image of the wolf-knights lobbing their charges down the dim, blue-lit corridor of the ship. I gather my psychic energy. I focus.
Reeeegh!
BAM! BAM!
I transmute.
Woosh!
A blast of cold wind and rain hits me like an ice bath. The adamantium dome flies away in the gale. I stare into the face of my enemy. Hideous mantis eyes. I fire.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Blam!
The .38 Special rips through the fiend’s face, exploding its head in a wild green burst. The slurry splatters on me, mixing with the furious, cold rain.
Behind me.
Blam!
I fire without turning. I’ve learned to switch focus between my eyes, giving me constant peripheral vision in all directions. I don’t waste time watching the second fiend’s head explode before I fire on another to my right.
Blam!
Ratatatatat! rages the Tommy gun as Roger sends his hate to a host of the bastards, shredding them with all of Thompson’s fury.
Blam! Blam! Blam!
I blast through three more, watching the storm’s pink lightning rip through the storm behind them.
CRAgroooogh! screams the thunder, like an evil crowd cheering on our war against the hellions. I have my own roar with which I answer: I lob the black Vulfosi charge into another host of fiends.
KraBoom! roars the grenade with a brilliant flash of blue plasma, shredding and incinerating the fiends. Drawing from the ether of scientific knowledge that has flowed into my mind and my dreamy visions of the battles in the starship’s corridors, I realized that the charges used by Sigrid and her men were made for internal defense. They were weaker. Didn’t want to blow holes in the ship.
I lob another grenade and fire behind me.
Blam!
KraBoom!
The charges I made? Fully powered.
Ratatatatat!
There’s no reason to hold back—
KraBoom!
Ratatatatat!
Blam! Blam! Blam!
—against demons in space.
REEEEEEEEEGGGHHHH!
“Damn!” I yell between the cacophony of psychic screams, gunfire, and roars of thunder.
“What?”
Blam! Blam! Blam!
“A big one.”
Ratatatatat!
“Where?”
Ratatatatat!
Blam! Blam! Blam!
REEEEEEEEEGGGHHHH!
“Out there. Somewhere.”
Blam! Blam! Blam!
REEEEEEEEEGGGHHHH!
Blam! Blam! Blam!
Ratatatatat!
“It’s screaming. I feel it.”
CRAgroooogh!
Lightning rips through the sky again in another pink flash. The swarm of fiends circles around us, each monster looking for its opening. We give them none. Through gale and rain and thunder, we fight. We fire. We kill. We give the beasts no mercy; we know we’d receive none.
Blam! Blam! Blam!
Ratatatatat!
The storm.
Blam! Blam! Blam!
Ratatatatat!
It’s psychic.
Blam! Blam! Blam!
Ratatatatat!
“The big one is making the storm, Roger.”
Ratatatatat!
Blam! Blam! Blam!
“Find it! Kill it!” squeals Roger.
Ratatatatat!
“That’s the plan!” I yell, snatching up Roger and strapping him to my back with my tendrils before I shloop off the rock. The cold rain batters us as I chase the trail my gut has drawn toward the mighty psychic foe.
Ratatatatat!
Blam! Blam! Blam!
Reeeegh!
A throng of fiends flies toward us, devilish eyes bright with feral hunger, insectoid maws gaping and drooling, claws reaching to—
KraBoom!
Ree—
The blue-white blast of the Vulfosi charge shreds and incinerates the terrors. I can’t help but chuckle with delight as the few neon green-wheeping remains are swept up in the storm’s cold gale.
Blam! Blam! Blam!
Ratatatatat!
“Reloading!” cries Roger.
“Covered!” I yell back, holding revolvers on either side of his head and an eyestalk over top of him.
Blam! Blam!
Ratatatatat!
The tin can reloads his Thompson faster than any soldier I’ve ever seen, sending his hate once again to the host of fiends on our tail.
Where? Where? Where?
My thoughts race in my mind like a hungry wolf launching after a wild hare.
“There!” yells Roger.
Ratatatatatatatatatat!
REEEEEEEEEGGGHHHH!
Behind us screams the alien queen, Roger’s .45 rounds deflecting off her psychic barriers. Hulking, she has all the hideous features of the fiends: batlike wings, a mantis face with a lolling tongue, a wasp’s stinger, and demonic talons, but she is as bloated and hulking as the queen of an anthill.
Seeing Roger’s burst gain no purchase, I turn. I charge, straight to the queen’s mandibles, straight to the jaws of death.
“Mr. Wolfgang!” cries Roger as the cold rain stings my face. “What are you doing?!”
“Killing the storm!”
Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!
I unload—
Click. Click. Click. Click.
—the last of my .38 Specials. A few of them slip through, burying themselves in the queen’s bloated body. Her neon blood bursts from her hideous gray flesh.
REEEEEEEEEGGGHHHH! REEEEEEEEEGGGHHHH! she howls, rattling every cell in my body with psychic fear, churning my stomach.
“Kyrie eleison!” I cry back, nothing else coming to mind. The fear melts in the inferno of courage that wells inside me.
I snatch the Thompson from Roger. I squeeze the trigger with all the fury I can muster.
Ratatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatat!
“Named Technique #1,” I cry as the rounds burst from the barrel of the gun in a fiery scream of war. White electricity webs and leaps across my purple hide.
REEEEEEEEEGGGHHHH! screams the queen, a dozen bolts of pink psychic lightning shooting from her hulking body.
I catch them on my tendrils. At first, they singe and burn my body, but my psychic will bends and breaks them. I draw them in. I feed on their power.
“White Lightning Strike!” I cry as I turn her own attack on her and throw my last three Vulfosi charges all at once.
Sheeew—KRABOOM!
My ears ring. I am deafened. My eyes widen. I am awestruck, shivering as the cold wind stills and the biting rain stops.
The blue-white blast almost blinds me as it rips through the gray flesh of the queen. A spray of neon green blood splatters across me. My lightning, a bolt larger than I ever could have imagined, finishes the job, rending all the organic matter of the yog smoldering like the ashes of a bonfire.
Kill, the only thought that courses through my mind, and I am tickled with delight to know our battle isn’t over.
Reeeegh! Reeeegh!
Reeeegh!
The fiends screech with violent malice as they charge us, all care for preservation ripped from their minds and scattered in the four winds. Hatred consumes them. I can feel it.
I thought there were hundreds of them, but now I wonder if there aren’t thousands. A smirk stretches across my face as I pass the Thompson back to Roger.
“Last drum!” he cries as he reloads.
“Make it count!” I yell back as I charge straight toward the thick of the alien throng.
Before, my psychic blades were useless against the fiends. Now, I am stronger. Fiercer. Driven not by the alien hearts beating within my body, but by the human spirit coursing through my very essence. The spirit of courage. The spirit of life.
I hurl the largest blade I can muster toward the swarming cloud of fiends. As it flies out, it stretches to a hundred yards or more of slicing psychic energy, humming as it sails.
I waste no time throwing another. And another. And another. I hold nothing back, unleashing all the psychic fury I can muster in a second, and I know that even a dozen of these blades would not save us from the swarm of aliens that surrounds us.
Ratatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatat!
Roger makes it count. The .45 ACP rounds shred dozens of the hungry yog.
“Named Technique #1: White Lightning Strike!” I howl, throwing the bolt not at my enemies, but at my own humming pink scythes.
The lightning catches up to the first blade just as it reaches the swarm and begins bisecting the screaming yog. I chain it between all the blades, watching it rip through the aliens, a white blade carving a neon green path of violence.
The space air cracks with thunder. The white lightning jumps from fiend to fiend, surrounding Roger and me not with a cloud of swarming enemies, but with a shroud of white, flashing death as the horrors scream and burn by my psychic weapons.
“You okay, tin can?” I ask, watching the yogs’ green blood seep out between the stars.
Here's looking at you!
Goals:
336 of 500 Followers - Bonus Chapter
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61 of 100 Favorites - Bonus Chapter
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17 of 20 Reviews - Bonus Chapter
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