Major Karnage (18 page)

Karnage slowly drifted up into consciousness.

His entire body felt weightless. He waited for the dream-like
feeling to dissipate.

It didn’t.

The burning stench of pinkstink and hoverballs filled his
nostrils. He opened his eyes. They were met with a stinging yellow
mist. Karnage gasped and coughed, struggling to breathe the toxic
air. He could barely see his hand in front of his face. He reached
out. His fingers hit a smooth concave surface. He ran his hands
across, feeling out how the surface arched and curved around him,
enveloping him in a compact sphere. He felt like he was trapped
inside a hoverball.

Karnage punched the walls of the sphere. His Sanity Patch buzzed
“Frothy Cream” as the entire sphere rocked forward, tilting and
listing. Karnage braced his hands and feet against the walls of the
sphere, trying to right himself. The sphere stopped listing. Bracing
with his other limbs, Karnage lifted a foot and kicked hard into the
sphere. Cracks bloomed out under his boot and the sphere jerked
down. His Sanity Patch crooned “Sandy Dreams.” He lifted his leg,
and kicked into the cracks. His foot smashed through. The yellow
smoke poured out through the hole, and the sphere plummeted.

It crashed into a hard surface, shattering everywhere. Karnage
coughed as thick plumes of yellow smoke puffed out of his lungs. It
tasted worse than it smelled. He retched and gagged until nothing
but spit came out. Throat raw and nostrils burning, he felt like he’d
been breathing hot ash. He lay against the floor trying to catch his
breath and draw in clean air, but the stench lingered. Finally, he
pulled himself to his feet.

He stood in a gleaming metal chamber that was all angles. Thick
translucent tubes wound across the walls, creating squiggling
patterns. Green light flowed through the tubes with the occasional
blip of white streaked through the green. The lights pulsed and
flowed like blood pumping through veins. Karnage touched one of
the squiggles. The white bursts spun around his fingers a moment,
as if scanning them, then sped off. He felt the heat of each green
pulse.
This is it,
he thought.
The belly of the beast.

The path of the squiggles was interrupted by an arched doorway
large enough to fit a commuter train. The door looked to be made
of a spiral of roughly hewn blades. The squiggles cut a path around
the door, collecting around a nodule of translucent spheres that
throbbed and fluttered in time with the light passing through it.
Support beams in the shape of talons flowed up the walls into the
curved ceiling. Pearl-coloured spheres hovered above him, nestled
together in the apex of the ceiling’s curvature.

As light glowed fiercely around the door and collected in the
nodule, the blades of the door spiralled open. Karnage pressed
himself up against the wall. His heart beat in his chest. He was
about to get his first glimpse of an alien.
Another pearl-coloured sphere floated into the room, and the
door closed behind it. The sphere began to rise towards the ceiling.
As it did so, a dark shape floated down against the side of the sphere.
It was human. Karnage awkwardly made a grab at the sphere, pulling
it back down so he could peer inside. The human shape touched the
side of the sphere, and Karnage saw the face of the person inside.
It was Sydney. Her eyes were closed. Her knees were curled up to
her chest, her arms gently wrapped around them. She looked like
she was sleeping.

Karnage braced the sphere on the floor and banged on it with his
fists. “Captain! Captain, can you hear me?!”

She didn’t respond.

Karnage heard a
crack-hiss
behind him. He turned and saw a
wooden matchstick floating before the door, its freshly struck flame
flickering. Above the match and to its right floated an unlit cigar.
The match rose up, and kissed the end of the cigar. The end glowed
to life as unseen lungs inhaled. Grey curls of smoke blew out around
the cigar, as an explosion of colours flowed and poured like liquid
across an unfamiliar silhouette.

The colours settled and receded to reveal a seven-foot-tall
insect with a squid for a head. The cigar sat nestled in a quivering
fringe of small tentacles that covered its mouth. A pair of longer
tentacles hung from the creature’s temples like sidecurls. One of the
side tentacles held the lit match, which shook it out. Its bony arms
clutched a gnarled spear with a surface covered in squiggly carvings.
Green energy pulsed along the grooves.

Karnage’s body tingled. Here he was: finally face to face with
an alien! It was more alien than Karnage could have imagined.
Squigglier than he could possibly have imagined. He did his best to
suppress a gleeful grin. “Well, ain’t you one ugly lookin’ squidbug,”
The squidbug turned an eye towards Karnage as it puffed on its
cigar. Its pupil was a long squiggle smeared across a mottled eyeball.
It took a drag on its cigar, plucked it out of its mouth with a side
tentacle, and tossed it away. It flicked the wrists of its bony claws,
and the spear glowed. Green energy crackled across its surface,
collecting around the bulbous head. The squidbug’s skin darkened
to a deep crimson, and it thrust the spear forward. A sizzling ball of
green shot out at Karnage.

Karnage side-stepped the blast. He could feel its electric charge
pull at the hairs on his skin. The ball collided with the wall and
disappeared, leaving a smoking black crater. Karnage dove forward
and grabbed the shaft of the squidbug’s spear. He slammed it up into
the squidbug’s mouth. It made a loud
clack
on impact. The squidbug
lost its grip on the spear as it staggered back. Karnage’s neck buzzed
as the Sanity Patch upgraded to Daffodil.

The squidbug let out an indignant screech. It pressed itself
against the wall. Its skin changed colour, pulsing and flowing
through different shades and patterns until it had blended perfectly
into the wall, disappearing from view.

Karnage charged with the spear as the squidbug vanished, hitting nothing but wall and nearly jarring the spear out of his
hands. The Sanity Patch crooned “Citrus Blast” as he stumbled
backward. Somewhere behind him he heard a squiggly screech that
sounded far too much like laughter for his liking. He spun around
and squinted his eyes, trying to catch any hint of the beast.
CRACK!
A tentacle shot out and caught Karnage across the jaw.

He lost his grip on the spear and it clattered to the ground.
“Son of a—”

CRACK!
Another tentacle clocked him from the other side,
knocking him away from the spear.

“—bitch!”

Karnage staggered back. He turned in the direction of the last
hit.

CRACK!
A third blow caught him in the back of the head. He
stumbled forward, stars shooting across his vision.

“Monkey—”

CRACK!
Another blow caught him across the face. Karnage
grabbed the tentacle before it could recoil. He yanked it hard towards
him, throwing a punch along its length.

“—FUCKER!”

His fist sank deep into soft flesh. There was a terrible squeal,
and the squidbug appeared in a flash of cycling colours. It fell to the
ground, lying limp on the floor as all the coloured drained out of its
skin, leaving it an insipid grey. Karnage’s neck buzzed.
“Warning. Sanity Level upgraded to Peachy Keen. Please refrain
from violent behaviour.”

Karnage grabbed the spear and used it to fish Sydney’s sphere
down from the ceiling. He braced it against the wall with his foot
and stabbed it with the spear, cracking open the shell. He tore it
apart with his hands as his Sanity Patch upgraded from Peachy Keen
to Tangy Orange to Sharp Cheddar.

Sydney lay on the floor, coughing and gasping. Yellow smoke
poured from her lungs. Karnage threw her over his shoulder and
headed to the closed door. He tried pressing on the nodules beside it.
The green lights seemed to ignore him. A sliver of white flowed down
into the nodule, stopped, and circled around Karnage’s hand. White
slivers started flowing down into the nodule from the surrounding
tubes, and it soon filled with white. The door spiralled open, and
Karnage stepped through it.

Karnage walked down the dimly lit corridor. Giant doors lined
either side. Soft green pulses of light flowed through the squiggles
along the walls. Karnage felt like he was walking through Cookie’s
forearms. The occasional line of white light would stop, bunch up
into a hovering ball as he walked past it, then streak off again, lost
in the green mass.

Karnage felt a strange tingle at the base of his neck. Suddenly he
lost all feeling in his body and he fell to the ground. “Right, mate,”
Sydney said. “Now we do it my way.”

“Captain, it’s me,” Karnage gasped. “Major Karnage.”

“I know who you are,” Sydney said. Karnage heard the familiar
jangle of handcuffs.

“What the hell are you doing?!”

“Arresting you,” Sydney replied, as she snapped the cuffs on
Karnage’s wrists.

“Goddammit, Captain, this is neither the time nor the place!
Look around you! Do you have any idea where we are?”

Sydney looked around. “Dimly lit corridor. Probably somewhere
underground.”

“UNDERGROUND?!”

“We’ll find our way out, though, no worries.”

“Are you outta your mind?! We are deep inside an alien ship!
Hurtling across space! Probably halfway across the damn galaxy by
now!”

“Sounds like you’re the one out of your mind.” A finger touched
Karnage’s neck, and he could move again. Sydney pulled him to his
feet. She thrust a pinky in his face. “No funny business or I cart you
out of here like a sack of potatoes.”

Sydney jerked Karnage forward. “For god’s sake, Captain, how
can you not believe me? Didn’t you see that ship come hurtlin’ outta
the sky? How the hell do you think we got here?!”

She frowned in reply. “I can’t remember, exactly. My head’s still
fuzzy. I remember the sky went dark, like a freak thunderstorm or
something—”

“That was no thunderstorm! That was a goddamn unidentified
flying object of DEATH! It opened up one monkeyfucker of a death
ray on us, and here we are!”

“Sounds like it’s not a very good death ray. Come on, keep moving.
We need to find our way out of here.”

“This is a hell of a way to treat your rescuer! They had you all
trussed up in a big hoverball thing. I had to break you out. I saved
you from bein’ bottled up like . . . like a goddamn pickle in a mason
jar!”

“A hoverball, huh? Then that proves it. We’re not on an alien
spacecraft.”

“What?!”

“Come on, Major. Hoverballs? That’s not exactly alien technology.
This probably has something to do with the Dabney Corporation.
Probably some top secret operation. We just need to find somebody
in charge—”

“Captain, did you miss the part where I told you they had you
locked up?!”

Sydney stopped walking, and looked at Karnage. “You really
think we’re on an alien spacecraft?”

“YES!”

Sydney looked around, and shook her head. “I’m not convinced.”

“Open your eyes, Captain! What the hell more proof do you
need?”

“Some aliens would be a nice start.”

“Oh there are aliens, all right. I’ve seen ’em with my own eyes!
They’re giant squidbuggy things with squiddy heads atop of buggy
bodies with eyes like . . . like . . .”

“Like squidbugs?”

“NO! Like squiggles! Squiggly like the walls! Squiggly like the
worms! Squiggly like the squiggles on Cookie’s arms! Goddammit,
Captain, can’t you see the connection? Its all fallin’ into place. They
got squiggly tentacles, too, and they shoot giant squiggly balls of
electricity from their squiggly spears and . . . quit lookin’ at me like
that! They’re here! I’ve seen ’em!”

“Where? Where are they? Where are these aliens?”

Karnage eyed every darkened corner suspiciously. “That’s just
it. They could be anywhere. All around us. Ready to attack at any
moment. Now get these cuffs off of me before they launch their
squiggly squidbug attack!”

“They could be anywhere?”

“That’s right. Anywhere. Just lurking, waiting for the right
moment to strike.”

“Where?”

“Where what?”

“Where are they hiding? Why can’t we see them?”

Karnage leaned in close and hissed. “That’s cuz they’re invisible.”

“Invisible?”

“Yes!”

“And you’ve
seen
these invisible aliens?”

“YES!”

“Are you seeing any right now?”

“No! They’re not actually invisible. It’s more like camouflage—
goddammit, Captain, get these handcuffs off of me!”

“So far, Major, you have said nothing to make me want to do
that.”

A squiggly squeal echoed in the distance. Sydney turned in its
direction. “What the hell was that?”

“That,” Karnage replied, “was a squidbug.”

Sydney backed down the corridor. “It sounded like a worm.”

“They all sound like that,” Karnage said.

Sydney rounded on Karnage, her eyes narrowed to suspicious
slits. “This is a military thing, isn’t it? That worm was some kind of
superweapon, wasn’t it? Some mutated superweapon grown out of
control—”

“Now who sounds ridiculous? Why can’t you accept the simple
fact that this is aliens?”

Sydney looked around. She shook her head. “That’s just so crazy.
I mean, this place doesn’t look that alien.”