Wade held his breath in the sweltering darkness, his back pressed against the gnarled hide of an ogrish tree, his heart thrashing inside of him like a panicked animal. He clutched his laser rifle to his chest the way he used to clutch his mother’s leg when he was scared, scared of the monsters his older brother Casey used to fill his head with; champing ripping monsters that infested the greasy darkness beneath his bed and filled his walls like liquified black mold.
When he saw the creatures charging towards him in his incapacitated Crab through the long grass below, concealed by the deep shadows of a thin pair of moons overhead, it was already too late. Synapses snapped and he cut through the Stygian night with twin gamma ray lasers, beams of invisible death reaching out and tracing lines of sublime plasma and violent fluorescence where they fell. The night danced and flickered as hellish witchlights blazed.
Still they came.
Mere animals would have fled no matter how dire their hearts. Glittering death, the smell of incinerated brethren, snuffed screams of annihilation; these sensations reach into the deepest parts of all living things and roar a single, overwhelming word: flee.
But these creatures were driven by more than animal impulse. Their eyes blazed with a hideous animus mere lasers could never imitate. With concentrated fire, his weapons could decapitate an Atlas, one of the most heavily armored ‘mech’s in the Inner Sphere, in a single burst. Yet still this was little more than a wan ray of the cruelty, hatred, and sadistic glee in these creatures’ eyes, malevolence drawn up in thick currents from a black, primordial ocean that filled these creatures, dragged them forwards through millions of years of predatory evolution to Wade’s present hell.
They swarmed him. They climbed the shattered legs of his Crab, his beloved and deadly Omorfo Agori, “Pretty Boy”, as if it were a child’s playground. He saw them in his viewscreens, hulking humanoids clad in reptilian scales, mouths bursting with hollow fangs, each of their four upper limbs ending in an array of talons that curved and glinted like the sacrificial daggers of the cults of old Terra. Where his lurking gladiatorial opponent had slashed open his armor with its myriad medium lasers, the monsters reached in and tore clots of muscle and wiring free, slick with his dying ‘mech’s blood and vital fluids, and tossed the gobbets away over their shoulders.
One by one video feeds winked out as electronic eyes were torn out. Blinded, he could only listen to the Omorfo’s agonal gasps, rocking and shuddering as its tendons were slashed and its legs were hacked apart between rents in its armored hide. He felt the life draining from the machine beneath him. He felt darkness soaking into his mind, constricting his vision, clotting his lungs and squeezing his heart, waiting in the blackened forest beyond, a hulking Komodo with ten glinting, butchering eyes, drinking in the carnage that unfolded.
And then, sliding silently into the corridor of light issuing forth from his cockpit into the greasy nocturnal world, the demon host presented itself. Each head a horror, oversized, bulbous yet formless with scales that seemed to warp in shape and color, distorting the things’ outlines, melting them into clouds of nightmarish shadows surrounding nothing more than glinting eyes set above a maw of fangs wide enough to snap away a man’s head with room to chew.
Thunder fell on the armored bulkhead behind him as ten rivers of emerald hate reached out from the forest again and cut his right arm away like hot wires dragged through packing foam.
His alarms screamed, and though they were shrill, deafening, there was a louder sound, one that boomed and rang through his body, through his life, digging into his tender childhood and echoing out from beneath his bed and from the inky depths of his closet, like a voice, a choir of voices, sibilant and hoarse, “we are coming for you, little Wade…we are going to tear you to little pieces, little Wade, we are going to paint your room with your hot, sticky blood, little Wade, and when we finish with you…”
Talons raked across the transparent armor before him as the sound of reptilian fists, each a tangle of mangling claws, armor-piercing, irresistible, inevitable, pounded and tore wildly at his cockpit hatch, desperate to rip him to giblets, pass him between venomous teeth and to fill black bellies with his insides, congealed the stifling air of his cockpit…
When Wade punched out of his mech and watched it drop away beneath a tail of smoke and flame, he saw it sag and collapse onto its own right hip as Danielle Arrogo in her Violet Komodo, reached out from the nearby woods and finished it off, lines of light cutting through its pock-marked and scorched torso as if slashing through tofu.
Adrenaline, fear, and rage, saturated his body and vibrated his bones as his ejector seat arced through the frigid night toward the tree line on the far side of the clearing. He overrode the automatic canopy deployment, pushing for a more distant landing. Every foot between his landing site and those creatures was an extra millisecond to prepare the feast that the devils truly deserved.
He delayed his ‘chute’s deployment until the very last second, and when his command couch smashed into the earth he felt the impact sing up his spine, felt osseous structures chip and buckle. Fight now, pay later. ****** the pain. Ride the adrenaline. ****** move!
He unbuckled himself, reached behind his seat, and slung a large pack and rifle over his shoulder with a single deft motion, guided by some spiritual embodiment of the final rites of battle. Ejection and rearmament, flight and redemption, defeat and vengeance, death and reincarnation…rituals repeated since mankind’s first taste of violence. Wade rolled away and sprinted into the shadow-drowned concealment of the nearby forest, the eldritch lair of the devils that even now sprinted towards him with supernatural speed.
He ripped through his field kit and made his preparations, stuffing grenades into his pockets and preparing his ambush as an eternity passed, each thunderous thump of his beating heart marking an epoch that flitted past like bird shadows.
The distant Crab blazed like an effigy, a pillar of metal-doped iridescent flame that stabbed hatefully into the heavens like a heretic put to the torch. What, moments ago, had been the Scourge of the Eterniopolis Sprawl, the dreaded and beloved Omorfo Agori, was now little more than a pillar of flame, cursed to light it’s master’s final moments, to bear witness to Wade Buchannan’s Last Stand.
Wade watched them coming for him.
Kneeling, shuddering, rifle shouldered, foregrip braced on the back of his left hand which held the clacker to one of his zweihander directional anti-personnel mine. The devils moved fearlessly in straight lines, eyes lit with savage gluttony. They knew nothing of pain. They knew nothing of death. With what little time remained him in this stinking midnight vale, Wade swore to make their educations swift and brutal. His finger tightened around the trigger.
My god were they fast.
(Originally posted at my blog:
www.GodsparGames.com)
