Rescue From Planet Pleasure (20 page)

Chapter Thirty-four

Toby stayed by my side, his face fixed into a scowl that looked defiant enough for the both of us. Jolie herded the other chalices out of the kitchen and into the dining room.

A hum echoed in my brain. Phaedra was trying to put the whammy on me.

Carmen staggered against the sink counter. Her complexion curdled into a sickly green pallor, and her eyes dimmed behind a nauseous haze. She and Phaedra were in a knock-down psychic brawl, invisible to the rest of us, and my friend looked to be getting the worst of it.

I started to wrap my arm around Carmen’s waist until she raised a hand to reassure me. Her fingers and lips trembled. Her eyes were red with strain. She swallowed again, held her belly as if tortured by cramps, and took baby steps toward the dining room.

Another blast shook the building. The explosion reverberated through my feet and up my legs. Pots and pans clanged and clattered to the kitchen floor. Wine bottles tumbled out of the rack and shattered against the floor, spraying glass fragments and vino.

That had been the third suicide-bomber vampire. Three remained. How far had Phaedra and crew advanced into the facility? Were they in the bedroom or had they already made it to the hallway?

I heard something scramble against the wall between the kitchen and the hall.
Question answered.

Toby shouted, “A bomber! A bomber!”

I fired twice at the sound and punched two bullet holes through the wall.

Someone dropped to the floor with a loud thump.

I was about to congratulate Toby for his quick action when another thunderclap shook the world into a blur. A wave of smoke clotted my throat and pricked my eyes. Debris whipped against our bodies and ricocheted off the ceiling and walls. Smoke twisted through a ragged hole about a foot square at the bottom of the wall.

My ears ringing from the blast, I ordered, “Fall back before the next bomber strikes.”

We had to retreat past the dining room, through the den and to the patio. That would put three walls and their locked doors between us and Phaedra, which was one more than the two bombers she had left. Hopefully this meant that her plan was unraveling, and that we might have a chance of surviving.

I nudged Toby to stay behind me, and we shuffled backwards to the threshold, my pistol trained in the direction of the attack. Light from the overhead panels diffused through the twisting fumes, and shadows comingled in the smelly murk. A shape darkened the bomb hole, and it could only be another vampire crawling through.

“Back, back,” I shouted. We crowded against Carmen.

“No time for that, mate,” Toby replied. He stepped around me and lunged forward.

I had a split-second to decide: grab him or push Carmen back.

I straight-armed her into the den and was reaching for Toby just as he rushed at the vampire.

Who exploded.

The air flashed hot as dragon’s breath. One moment I was in the kitchen and the next, I found myself in the dining room, heaped on top of Carmen. Smoke wafted from our clothes. My skull rang like a bronze bell smacked by a wrecking ball.

Jolie hurdled over us, a .45 in each hand, and emptied her magazines into the sooty vapor, screaming, pistols blazing. Spent cartridges rained on me, the hot brass prickled my skin. No sounds got past the numbing static in my ears.

Pain filled the moment, the hurt surging over me, then diminishing, surging again, then diminishing, every cycle weakening like waves retreating at ebb tide.

I rolled to my feet and helped Carmen up. Toby was gone, blasted to bits of gore. His sacrifice had saved us.

The door to the kitchen closed behind us and shrank. Carmen tore loose from my grip. Her eyes crinkled with hate. She mouthed a command to the others and gestured that we continue to the patio.

Pistols reloaded, Jolie covered our withdrawal. I staggered behind Carmen. Juanita waited outside.

After I had set foot on the patio, I took a moment to gather myself and let my hearing come back. I took stock of the patio, the pond, the garden, and the surrounding walls, seeing it not as landscape but as military terrain. We could take positions in the garden at the left and right of the pond and catch Phaedra and her surviving minions in a crossfire.

But what if we were playing into her hands? Her attack had methodically pushed us farther and farther back, so maybe it was her plan to corner us by the pond.

I scanned upward in the hopes that Blossom was coming to our rescue, but the sky was clear of spaceships.

We were trapped. If we scaled the walls and made it to open ground, Phaedra would pick us off one by one. With no good choices, our predicament made my chest tighten until it ached.

Carmen plopped into a patio chair. Her normal color had returned and her face appeared relieved. Phaedra must’ve backed off the psychic attack. She, like us, needed to regroup after this last skirmish.

Carmen’s eyes lifted to me and she offered a haggard smile. “You okay?” Her voice sounded like it came from the far end of a long tunnel.

“I’ve been better.”

I thought about Toby. I supposed this was the second time he wanted to die here. But this time he was a hero, and for that, I was grateful.

I let the sadness wash though me. A eulogy would have to wait. Our best memorial to him would be to kill Phaedra.

Jolie stared at the door leading into the patio. “Phaedra came here for a fight, let’s push it back in her face.” Jolie glanced at Carmen. “Are you up for a counter attack?”

Carmen rose from her chair. “I’ll do what I can.”

Jolie and I faced the patio door. I topped off the revolver with the speed loader in my other pocket. Guns ready, we both advanced, one resolute step at a time. All we needed were jangling spurs and a soundtrack from a Sergio Leone spaghetti western.

The plan wasn’t sophisticated. Carmen would run interference with a mind shield while Jolie and I moved into firing position.

Once through the door and into the den, Jolie and I separated to advance in alternating bounds toward the dining room. Our fangs and talons extended to combat length. I had my pistol up, finger on the trigger. Jolie held both pistols before her like the pincers of a scorpion.

Foreign thoughts pierced my mind. Phaedra trying to harpoon our psyches.

Hold her off, Carmen.

I covered Jolie when she proceeded through the door into the dining room. Then it was her turn to cover me. A strange quiet filled the space. The
scritch
of our shoes on the floor and the rustle of our clothes sounded loud as a garbage truck emptying a dumpster.

A deafening crackle ripped the silence. My arm hairs tingled from a rush of static electricity, and my nostrils twitched at the acrid smell of ozone.

We halted at the threshold to the kitchen and the door opened to let us see inside. The crackling noise grated my ears.

A white flame, bright as the sun, waggled along the wall beside the far door, gushing smoke and leaving a smoldering gap snaking behind it. The flame circumscribed a rough semi-circle around the hole the suicide bomber had made earlier. The flame reached the floor and the section of wall fell toward us with a
smash
and a cascade of smoke.

A vampire marched through the opening and into the kitchen, a female holding one of the Nancharm’s lightning bolt tridents. Her hands smoldered where she clasped the weapon, sparks crackling around her fingers from the intense electrical discharge that charred her flesh. Jaw clenched, she strained to keep from dropping the trident. Phaedra must’ve had a vice-grip on her will. Phaedra didn’t need suicide bombers to smash through the walls. She was saving her last pair of explosive-laden stooges to use as two-legged precision-guided artillery.

A green glow suffused the kitchen’s smoky pall. Phaedra’s bubble tractor rolled behind this vampire. The second vampire waited inside the bubble.

I stared, transfixed by this spectacle of both nightmarish and supernatural beauty. My kundalini noir quivered like the tail of a rattlesnake. My fangs pushed to such lengths they pinched my gums. I slipped into a feral, murderous trance. I would empty the Colt magnum at Phaedra and charge forward to shred with tooth and claw.

A keening sound echoed in my head and I couldn’t pull the trigger.

Give it up, Felix. There’s only one way this will end. Me … using your skull for a soup bowl.

Jolie knocked me aside and trained her .45 at Phaedra. But the vampire with the trident leaned into the bullet.

I ducked behind the doorway and covered my ears. The vampire exploded and I bounced on the floor. Dust choked the air. Jolie lay sprawled on the debris-covered carpet. She blinked, coughed smoke, and shouted, “Take the shot. Take the motherfucking shot!”

I rose to a knee and aimed the revolver. The circumference of Phaedra’s bubble sharpened in the clearing dust. I aligned the pistol at its center, but the keening sound returned to lash my nerves, becoming louder, louder, louder until I fought to keep from tossing the gun aside and grabbing my ears and screaming in pain.

Someone bounded over me, heading toward Phaedra.

It was Irsan, a lit Molotov cocktail in each hand. He cocked one back. It arced from his hand and splattered against the green bubble, exploding. He was drawing his other hand back to hurl when the tractor lurched forward. At the instant the bubble force field touched Irsan, he screamed and his body sizzled, crumbling into burning pieces.

His death had bought time for Jolie to seize my collar and yank me to my feet. Her tortured grimace mirrored mine as Phaedra flayed us with a bullwhip of psychic juju.

We stumbled back through the den and emerged onto the back patio, smoke and dust sloughing from our bodies.

Juanita and Cassie had Carmen’s arms hoisted across their shoulders. She stood weak-kneed between them. A sheen of sweat glistened on her brow. Her normally full lips had thinned to a pale rind around her mouth. Veins pulsed on her temple and neck. I feared that Phaedra would make Carmen’s head blow apart like a watermelon stuffed with TNT.

With the Nancharm all but vanquished, Toby and Irsan dead and Carmen on the ropes, we were riding the express elevator to hell.

***

Chapter Thirty-five

I surveyed our tiny perimeter and calculated our odds.

Not good.

I reflected on all the soldiers sent to fight on faraway lands never to return. Fallen souls swept into the gutter of history. Spartan hoplites. Roman legionnaires. Viking raiders. French Foreign Legion paratroopers. My army comrades who died in ones and twos in the tumbled, back alleys of Iraq.

The sky above D-Galtha receded to infinity, reminding me that I was so very far from home. Should Phaedra win and I find myself at the veterans’ reunion in Valhalla, when the toastmaster asks who came the longest distance, I was sure I’d win that prize.

A wash of bitter bile soured my mouth. I ground my teeth to fight the rancid taste.

The battle wasn’t over yet. I still hadn’t fallen. If I had to die, I’d perish gloating over Phaedra’s corpse. Somehow. Some way. I clenched the revolver. To paraphrase Charlton Heston:
From my cold, undead hands.

Though my mind was free of psychic probing, I knew it was because Phaedra was biding her time, husbanding her strength, studying the angles, honing her scheme. She had one suicide-bomber vampire left. And she could manipulate him to use whatever Nancharm weapons remained handy before ordering him to charge and blow himself up.

Juanita and Cassie huddled together like chickens waiting to get quartered and shrink wrapped. Jolie’s eyes scrunched in bitter defiance. Carmen …

Carmen … I wasn’t sure what I saw in her expression. Confusion? Anger?

A surge of bubbles in the pond tore my attention from Carmen. The water agitated and a yellow metallic cylinder wide enough to park a VW Beetle broke through the rippling surface. The cylinder was sheathed with rectangular windows and it extended to a height of thirty feet. Our sanity had been so mangled by Phaedra’s manic assault that none of us acted surprised.

A door in the cylinder swung open and a flat beam of light connected the threshold to the edge of the pond. Moots appeared, and she slid from the cylinder across the bridge of light. She carried a brassy contraption that looked like a cross between a pistol and a bugle. If it was a weapon, I hoped it was at least the Nancharm version of a Desert Eagle .50 caliber. Then again, Phaedra had wiped out their flying saucers so Moots’ gun may have been nothing more than a lucky rabbit’s foot.

When she reached solid ground she panned the bell-shaped muzzle of the pistol across us vampires. We appeared to be outgunned so Jolie and I lowered our weapons.

Carmen glowered at Moots. “What’s this about?”

Moots pointed to the cylinder. “Inside.”

“Sounds like a damn good idea,” I said. “And about time.”

“Quickly,” Moots added. “Before you escape.”

I was about to summon the chalices when I froze in mid-cue. “Before we escape? I thought we were escaping.”

“I mean escape off the planet,” Moots replied.

The hairs on my arms tingled again, and my shoulders clenched for another psychic attack. Inexplicably, the air darkened, then turned into a deepening shadow, and I sensed a new threat, from something huge looming above. All of us, Moots included, tilted our heads back to see.

A flying saucer descended toward us, a wide flat circle a hundred meters wide that seemed to fill the sky. My bewilderment congealed into one big
Huh?

Phaedra interrupted our gawking by unleashing a psychic attack. The keening noise returned and it lanced through my head from ear to ear. My mind wobbled and my knees buckled, but I managed to keep from falling. Jolie and Carmen staggered in place. Moots let her pistol drop and clang on the patio pavement. It rolled into the pond and sank. She put both hands on her chest—where her brain was—and pressed against the carapace. Her head tendrils writhed like the tentacles of a spastic octopus.

The saucer kept descending, slowly until it touched the top of the yellow cylinder. The disk continued to lower and the cylinder crunched and crumpled beneath its great weight.

Fearing the saucer would squash me, I tried to run for cover but the keening had short-circuited my legs. The chalices, unaffected by the psychic barrage, rushed to drag us vampires out of the way.

Carmen brushed them aside. She tightened her jaw to keep her face set and rigid, then stood proud. The keening softened to a dull hum, and my body managed to relax. Moots’ tendrils settled around the back of her head.

The disk was right over us, as close as the ceiling in a house. A long rectangle glowed on the disk’s belly, outlining a ramp that lowered to the patio. None of us were certain who the ship belonged to—Blossom?—but it represented our only chance to escape. We hustled toward the ramp.

“Don’t do this,” Moots shrieked at Carmen. “You were our last hope. Leave and you doom us … me … to extinction.” Our Nancharm minder had recovered her pistol and aimed it at us. She hollered, “Don’t do this!” I could hear tears in her voice. “Please. Don’t leave us.” She glided toward Carmen.

Jolie was first up the ramp and I tried to shepherd the chalices between us. But they stumbled from me, looking overcome with fright and confusion. Tears staining her eyes, Juanita dropped to her hands and knees and crawled beside Moots like a helpless puppy. Cassie waited on the edge of the ramp, trembling.

Carmen turned and faced Moots. “You kidnapped us. Kept us prisoners. You offered other chalices no relief from their misery so they had to kill themselves. And when you were done with us, we would’ve been exterminated.”

“Recycled,” corrected Moots.

Carmen motioned us to continue up the ramp.

Moots steadied her pistol. “I’ll kill you. Stop. Now.”

Cassie leapt and hooked her hands around Moot’s gun, angling it down. Juanita screamed, “Get up the ramp, Carmen! Get away.” She palmed the chef’s knife and jammed it into a gap of Moot’s segmented carapace.

Moots backed away, her tendrils quaking in a silent shriek. She knocked Cassie aside and brought the pistol up. Its muzzle strobed and a brilliant light dazzled my eyes.

“No. No,” I heard Carmen shout.

I smelled burnt meat. As I blinked my eyes back into focus, I saw swirls of sooty dust where the chalices used to be. Juanita and Cassie were gone.

“What have you done?” Carmen screamed.

Moots seemed taken aback by Carmen’s reaction. Moots waved her pistol erratically, like she wasn’t sure of what to do next.

But I was.

I aimed and fired once. The bullet knocked a neat hole in the upper center of her chest carapace. She quivered for a moment and then steadied the pistol.

Jolie pushed me aside. “Let’s finish this.” She blasted Moots with a barrage of .45 slugs. Moots staggered backwards and fell into the pond, splashing, a puss-yellow stain spreading from her many wounds.

Carmen tried to lunge past us. Jolie and I held her back. She shrieked, “Moots. Moots. Why did this have to happen?” She collapsed into our arms as if she’d taken one punch too many.

A light flashed in the distant sky, the light so bright it momentarily blanched everything to a dazzling white. My face felt a flare of heat. The light faded into an orange ball that corkscrewed upward into a mushroom cloud of fire and smoke. Had Phaedra gotten her hands on a nuke? The obscene growl of the explosion echoed to us. A gust of turbulence mussed our hair, made us wince, and rocked the saucer perched overhead.

Jolie and I dragged Carmen up the ramp. No time for reflecting on what had just happened. We had to get out of here now.

Once at the top of the ramp, we entered into a compartment similar to the one in the saucer Blossom had piloted from D-Galtha’s moon.

The ramp lifted, closing the opening, compressing the outside world into a narrowing slice. Moots floated face up in the pond. Her blank white eyes revealed nothing. The opening kept shrinking until she disappeared from view. The ramp closed with a hiss, and a hatch slid across the top to seal the floor. Overhead panels provided illumination.

Jolie and I rested for a moment, unsure of what to expect or that we weren’t in a bigger mess. I was still processing the loss of the four chalices. We were the badass vampires and yet they had saved us. Carmen sagged between us, limp, drained.

The light in the compartment dimmed, the saucer swayed and a lifting sensation pushed up through my guts. A door to our right opened. Green lights blinked along the floor, forming a trail that snaked out from the compartment.

Carmen found her strength, pulled loose from Jolie and me, and squared her shoulders “I’m all right.” She studied the trail of green lights. “Someone’s laid out the welcome mat.”

“Blossom?” I asked.

“Let’s hope so.” Carmen led us out the compartment, through a winding corridor lined with conduits and consoles until we reached another wide door. This door split down the middle and opened with an old-school
Star Trek
-like
shoosh
.

No surprise that Blossom waited on the other side, standing on all fours and beaming with enthusiastic cheer like a big, fat retriever. She wore a shiny, crinkly helmet. With her trunk curled to one side, she presented a toothy grin. “Welcome, welcome, dear friends.” She spoke through a translator box attached to the front of her harness. She shifted her weight onto her haunches to stand and crane her big head above ours. She beckoned with thick, bejeweled fingers that we enter the bridge. The door
shooshed
closed behind us. She acted oblivious to our guns.

Two other Wah-zhim crewmembers straddled the couches facing the controls. An animated display of D-Galtha, its moon and the crisscrossing orbits of numerous spaceships filled the forward control panel. The two Wah-zhim were busy adjusting levers, twisting knobs, and swiping small panels, and their frenzied motions mirrored the chaos engulfing the planet. All that was Phaedra’s doing?

Blossom clapped her hands. Our host’s sunny mood was the opposite of our gloomy wariness and the loss of the chalices. “It’s a great day in the Wah-zhim continuum,” she said. “The Nancharm are done. Finished. Dead as desiccated bung worms.” She twisted a heel against the deck. “Your Earth friend has done the impossible. She so dis—”

“Earth friend?” I interrupted.

“Yes. Phaedra,” Blossom replied, sounding surprised by my question. “She so disrupted the Nancharm defenses on D-Galtha that they panicked and diverted forces to contain her attack. And then we struck.” Blossom pounded a fist into her other hand, jangling her many bracelets. “No mercy was ever shown by them. And no mercy given. We caught them bare assed with their skirts up. Like this …” She reached for the hem of her skirt and started to lift when I grasped her wrist.

No way did I want to see her voluminous junk. “That’s fine. I get the idea.”

“Wait a minute,” Carmen said. “What’s this scheme with Phaedra?”

Blossom became quiet, sullen. She then squeaked out her trunk. One of her co-pilots glanced at her and squeaked back.

“Uh … well … uh.” Blossom brought her hands together and tapped the fingertips. “She contacted me and we made a deal.”

“Contacted you how? What deal?” Carmen asked.

I slyly cocked back the hammer of my revolver. Our escape from D-Galtha might not be an escape at all.

“She didn’t contact me exactly.” Blossom caressed her foil cap. “It was a scientist working in our psychotronic intelligence unit. Phaedra used her mind connection or whatever you call it. Since I knew you best, I was ordered to find you and …”

“Narc our location to Phaedra,” I said.

Blossom wrung her hands, her bracelets ringing like jingle bells. “Something like that.”

Jolie tensed, ready to shoot. I glanced about the cockpit to decide how to unload my magnum.

Carmen sensed our tension. She put her hands on ours, gesturing that we remain calm. “Phaedra had us cornered. Why did you rescue us? What’s this deal that you made?”

“Even if Phaedra found you, she couldn’t get to you without help,” Blossom said. “She used a wormhole to travel to Star B-43, where another Wah-zhim ship picked her and her minions up, and then she used another wormhole to arrive on D-Galtha.”

“And you guys provided the bubble tractor?” I asked.

“Bubble tractor?” Blossom replied, bewildered. “Ah yes, the Iron Fist Assault Penetrator. She needed that to breach the Nancharm defenses.”

“You haven’t told us about the deal,” Carmen reminded.

Blossom cleared her throat. “Yes, that. In exchange for Phaedra helping us beat the Nancharm, we would let her kill you.”

Jolie and I brought our pistols up. Carmen tightened her hold on our wrists to keep us from shooting. She continued, “Is that what you’re doing?”

“That
was
the plan.” Blossom glanced at our guns and blew a dismissive snort out her trunk. “Put those away before you shoot yourselves.”

Carmen nodded, signaling that Jolie and I stow our pistols.

“But we’ve changed our minds. You three are headed to Wah-zhim.”

“For what purpose?” I asked.

Blossom laughed. “For making whoopie, what else? Oh Felix, you have so much to learn.”

My butt clenched and my pecker shriveled. I wanted no part of Wah-zhim whoopie.

She waddled to a couch mounted on a dais between us and the other two crewmembers. A control panel on a console stood at the front of the dais. She pivoted to face us and then planted her wide can on the couch.

“Is Moots dead?” Carmen asked.

“You tell me,” Blossom replied, a shrug evident in her tone, “you guys are the ones who shot her.” She reached for a tall cup resting in a holder attached to the console. She slipped the thick straw from the drink between her lips and slurped.

She touched buttons on the console. “Everything is under control.” A hologram appeared in a sizzle of lights in front of Carmen and me. The image sharpened and showed a green bubble rolling over a landscape dotted with wrecked buildings and burning saucers, an overhead view of a battle between Phaedra and the Nancharm on D-Galtha’s surface, the details rendered in small scale. Saucers in tight formations unleashed more destruction on the planet’s surface. “We’ll let your friend run amok for a bit to keep the Nancharm disorganized. In the centuries we lived under their lash, never did we imagine that our freedom would come from a young girl from such a backwater planet. I mean, really,
Earth
?”