Major Karnage (21 page)

Oh no.

Sudsy was pouring out over the outside of the tanker. It coated
the exterior monitors with a greasy smear. The tanker suddenly
bucked and spun as the Sudsy hit one of the treads. It soon soaked
the other and the tanker slid out of control. The monitors showed
brief flashing blurs of the worm behind her also spinning wildly,
squidbugs desperately clinging to its back. There was nothing left
for Sydney to do but brace for impact.

The impact never came. She caught a white blur in her monitors
and saw a grate on the floor open in front of the tanker. The tanker
dropped through.

Sydney was jarred as the tanker collided with the wall of the
chute. The tanker slid down the pipe toward a T-junction. White
light collected in a ring around one of the openings and it slammed
shut. The tanker bounced off its cover grate and slid down the other
corridor.

Sydney shut her eyes. She felt like she was riding a tilt-a-whirl
careening down a rocky mountainside. The tanker was being rocked
and buffeted through the innards of the ship. She felt a huge lurch,
and wasn’t sure whether it was the tanker or the ship that tilted
down.

She opened her eyes again. Where she expected the salvific white
light, instead, she saw flashes of blue at the end of the black tunnel.
These turned to blue and beige as the tanker flew out of the belly of
the ship and plummeted towards the desert floor.

When Karnage came to, he was hanging upside down in a mangled
cockpit. Sydney stood beside him on the ceiling, right side up.
“What happened?” Karnage asked.

“We escaped from the alien ship.”

“How?”

Sydney frowned. “It’s . . . kind of complicated.”

“Try me.”

“I think we had help.”

“Why can’t I move?” he asked, tentatively testing out his frozen
muscles.

“That was me.” Sydney rubbed her throat. “You sorta . . . tried to
kill me back there.”

“Oh.” The memories of what happened came flooding back to
him: his fist squeezing her trachea. The shocked, terrified look in
her eyes. The explosions, the smoke, and the flames, and then . . .

Karnage looked away, ashamed. “I lost it, didn’t I?”

“Yeah,” Sydney answered. “You did.”

“I’m . . . I’m not always right in the head.”

“Apparently,” she snorted. “So how are you feeling now?”

“A little better.”

“Only a little?”

“A lot.”

“Okay.” Sydney gave him a suspicious look. “But the next time
you try something like that, I might not go so easy on you.” Sydney
pressed a finger against Karnage’s earlobe. He felt the warmth flow
back into his tingling limbs. She unstrapped him from his seat, and
helped him drop down to the ceiling. His legs felt like rubber.

“Where are we?”

Sydney jerked a thumb to the mangled hatch that hung open in
the wall. “I think you should see for yourself.”

They were resting in the bottom of a smooth crater. Just visible
above the edges of the crater were the mile-high walls of the WTF.

“What the fuck?” Karnage said.

“My thoughts exactly,” Sydney replied with a smirk.

“How did we end up exactly where we started?”

“Like I said before. I think we had help.”

Karnage climbed out of the hatch and immediately set to work
scaling the walls of the crater. “But who? Who would have helped
us?” As he reached the top, he looked up into the sky, squinting
into the blue. There was no sign of the aliens. It was as if they had
never been there. Except for the smoking crater, and that lingering
feeling. . . .

“We’re with you, Major. Every one of us. We’re with you. . . .”

He whipped around. “Cookie! It must have been!”

“Who’s Cookie?”

“One of my troopers. Former Communications engineer. He was
already interceptin’ the alien communications before they struck.
Maybe he finally cracked ’em! Maybe he hacked into the alien ship.
Maybe that’s what he meant when he said they were with us. Like
the French resistance! Maybe—”

An invisible fist smashed into the back of Karnage’s shoulder,
spinning him back around. He heard the echo of the gunshot
seconds later.

Karnage stumbled forward. Blood welled from his shoulder. He
turned back to see Sydney charging up the crater’s wall.

“No!” He barked. “Stay there! It’s a sniper!”

“You’re bleeding! I can’t leave you out there!”

“Yes you can! I won’t let that monkeyfucker take us both down.
You stay where you are, Captain. Wait for your opportunity. Find a
moment to strike!”

Sydney nodded, and disappeared behind the darkened hulk of
the Sudsy tanker. Karnage suddenly felt light-headed and fell to his
knees. Karnage looked at his shoulder. Blood welled from a jagged
wound the size of a baseball.
Thank god. It went right through.
He
clamped his hand over it, trying to stem the flow. Blood poured
through his fingers. He squeezed harder, did his best to shut out the
pain, and looked across the arena for signs of the sniper.

Walking across the torn landscape was a slim dark figure.

Karnage squinted, trying to make out the details through the
desert haze. It was a man with a sharp military brace. Calm. Selfassured. Like he didn’t have a care in the world. Karnage thought he
could make out a uniform of some kind.

An Uncle Stanley uniform!
His heart thudded in his chest and
the blood spurted from his shoulder at a quicker pace. It was an
enemy officer all right, emerging from his nightmares, coming to
finish him off once and for all! Karnage watched his Angel of Death
approach, preparing himself for the end.

But as the stranger approached, Karnage saw that it wasn’t an
Uncle Stanley officer at all. It was a man in a crisp black chauffeur’s
uniform.

Even though it only took a few minutes, it felt like hours before
the chauffeur closed the gap between them. Karnage couldn’t
hear anything above the sound of his own breathing. He thought
he heard some rustling behind him that might have been Sydney
moving for cover, but it also might have just been the sound of his
own blood spilling out his back. He felt relief again at the gaping
wound in his shoulder. Thank god the bullet hadn’t played pinball
with his internal organs. He might live through this yet.

His vision was slowly whiting out—his blood pressure was
dropping fast. The pain began to ease. It felt like it was being pulled
from his body with the blood that was passing through his fingers.

The chauffeur stopped a few feet in front of him. His fingers
twitched with energy. He knelt down in front of Karnage, his face
practically beaming. “Hello, you,” he said.

Karnage looked at the chauffeur’s gun. “Spragmos X-75?”

“It is.”

Karnage tried to focus on the Observation deck in the distance.
“How far away were you when you took that shot?”

“Hundred and fifty metres, give or take.”

Karnage tried to nod. Pain exploded through his neck.
Bad idea.
Blood spurted through his fingers. He clamped his hand tighter on
the wound. “Sloppy,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“I said sloppy.” Karnage tried to sit up, realized that was a
mistake, and dropped to his side. “Your aim was off. You should have
been able to hit me square in the chest from that distance.”

The chauffeur cocked his head, a bemused smile on his face.
“That is just so you, isn’t it? Look at you. Still putting on a brave
face, even now, when there’s no one here to see it. I’m not even sure
it’s an act, to be honest. Not with your reputation. You must have
been quite the sight to behold on the battlefield.”

“What do you know about any of that?”

“Oh, I know everything—absolutely everything—about you,
Major. And may I say, it is an absolute pleasure to make your
acquaintance.”

“It is?”

“It is. Believe me, it is. I’ve been waiting my whole life for this
moment.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“My name is Patrick. That’s really all you need to know for now.
Perhaps we can catch up later. Oh, I sincerely wish it hadn’t had to
happen quite like this.”

“Like what?”

“Me nicking you like that from afar. It was a potshot, really. Not
very sporting at all.”

“No,” Karnage muttered. “It wasn’t.”

“I would have loved to have settled this in a fair fight. To see how
good you really are. Still, orders are orders, and I must carry them
out as directed.”

“You’re not supposed to kill me?”

Patrick looked at him with genuine affection. “Now why would
anyone want to do a silly thing like that? Look at you. You’re simply
. . . brilliant.” Patrick stood and started to remove his gloves. “I’m
going to take a look at that wound, now. Don’t want you bleeding out
on me until I deliver you to my employer. You’re not planning to give
me any trouble, are you?”

“No,” Karnage said.

“But I will,” came another voice.

Patrick looked up, and a ball of goober struck him in the chest,
knocking him to the ground and instantly swelling up to cover his
arms and head.

“Took you long enough to do something,” Karnage said.

“I had to wait until I had a clear shot.” Sydney holstered her
goober pistol.

“I thought he was gonna talk me to death.”

“I kept waiting for him to kiss you and get it over with. He
sounded like your biggest fan.”

“He had a helluva way of showing it.” Karnage winced as Sydney
pressed on the wound.

“You’re lucky,” she said. “Looks like the bullet passed right
through. Jesus, you’re bleeding pretty badly.”

“I know,” Karnage said. “I think I’m in big trouble here, Captain.”

“You’ll be all right,” Sydney said.

“Unless you’re a trained field medic,” Karnage said, “I’m in big
trouble.”

“You’re not gonna die. I won’t let you.”

“It’s all right, Captain.” The last of Karnage’s vision washed away.
He had to force his lips to form the words: “Promise me one thing.
Cookie. Velasquez. Heckler. Koch. Stumpy. Find ’em. Save ’em. Stop
the squidbugs.”

Sydney’s voice came from far away. “You won’t need me to do
that, Major. You’ll be able to do that yourself.”

He tried to answer but his mouth wouldn’t form the words.

Karnage strained his ears as Sydney’s voice faded away. “Don’t
give up on me yet, Major. I think I know someone who can . . .”

He passed out.

Karnage dreamed of squiggly beasts and black-clad men with pistols
for hands. The beasts lashed out with tentacles that sucked him
down and wrapped him in their grip. The man in black stood behind
the fray, at one moment wearing a chauffeur’s outfit, the next a
charcoal grey medal-laden Uncle Stanley uniform. Always smiling,
always the teeth flashing, telling him it’s his lucky day. Gloved
fingers pointed at him, the end of the fingers open and hollow like
a gun barrel. White hot muzzle flashes burst from the leatherclad digits. Squiggles shot out from the fingers, stabbing into his
shoulder, poking and prodding, searching and burrowing, leaving a
fiery trail of absolute agony in their wake.

The pain became more focused in his shoulder, and the squiggles
finally pulled away, leaving him alone in the darkness.

Karnage opened his eyes. A silvery sphere floated above him. A
giant lens sprouted from the ball, pointing down at his shoulder,
as long metal tendrils quivered below the lens, poking at bandages.
Karnage tried to scramble away, but he couldn’t move anything
below his neck.

“Get the fuck away from me, you squiggly bastard!”

The lens swivelled up and looked at Karnage. Its inner aperture
quickly irised shut and open again, as if it were blinking. A
mechanical voice crackled over a speaker. “Sydney, it seems your
comrade is awake.”

The sphere pulled up and away, and Sydney moved into Karnage’s
field of vision.

“Hello, Major,” she said.

“Captain, what the fuck is going on here?! What the hell was that
thing?! Where are we? Why the hell can’t I move?!”

“You were shot,” Sydney said. “You were in danger of bleeding to
death. So I brought you here.”

“Where the hell is here?!”

The sphere floated down again, and blinked its lens at Karnage.
“Here is home.”

Karnage craned his neck. He was lying in a rescue basket, a thin
sheet draped over him, the basket suspended from a complex grid
of scaffolding running across the arched ceiling. Floodlights dotted
the scaffolding. Just visible beyond the lights were more hoverballs
fixed with lenses and tentacles. They stared down at Karnage, the
lenses zooming in and out, changing focus as the spheres hovered
closer or farther away.

A pair of oval bay windows projected out from the wall, filtering
sunlight through the grime-streaked glass. Various bits of medical
equipment were pushed up against the walls.

“Home? Whose home? It sure as hell ain’t mine! And you still
haven’t told me why the hell I can’t move!”

“You can’t move because you’re a very uncooperative patient,”
Sydney replied. “I don’t need you pulling your stitches out. Not after
all of Uncle’s hard work. As for whose home this is, it belongs to
Uncle.”

One of the spheres dropped down from above. It placed a tentacle
on Sydney’s shoulder. “Don’t be so modest, dear. You know this home
is just as much yours as it is mine. If only you would visit more often.
And in less brutish company.”