Chapter 11: One on One
Paulie narrowly dodged to the side again, laughing as he did so. Not because the situation was funny, it wasn’t. But because it was just so absurd. In front of him, hissing and spitting vitriol in its fury, was the biggest damn bug he had ever seen. Alien, whatever.
The thing was the size of a damn pickup truck. At least three times longer than he was tall, it had so many legs he had lost count at thirty. Ten chiton-covered arms grasped at the air in front of it as it stared at him with large yellow eyes like those of some monstrous fly. Its nearly featureless face was taken up by those great eyes and the large plates of chiton that seemed to cover where he suspected its mouth was.
He shook his head as the creature thumped its chest again in challenge with three arms.
“You fear to face me, welp?”
Paulie snorted, his eyes searching the room for his fallen weapon. “Yeah, of course I do. I mean, have you seen yourself man? You are built like a Ford pickup and move twice as fast. Hell.. I only barely managed to dodge that last rush.” He waved a hand past as if in imitation of his narrow escape.
The alien snarled, their eyes unchanging but their temper even fouler than it had been before. “I will ssee you hanged and ssskinned alive for those wordss!”
Paulie shook his head, there was just no breaking through to some people.
The alien rushed at him again and this time they came in low on all ten arms and many more legs, their centipede-shaped body whipping towards him faster than anything that large had the right to move. His body reacted before his brain even had the time to realise he was moving, diving to the side he tucked into a roll and counterpushed off the far wall with a yell. He propelled himself directly at the alien, leg sweeping wide into a low kick that he planted right into the thing’s lower midsection with a solid thud as it swept by at speed.
Part of him expected the alien to just burst apart right then and there. Or at the very least he might have expected the kick to send the freaky creature flying through the far wall and into the street below.
Neither of these outcomes happened. Instead the alien seemed to grunt as the kick barely moved it, the sound of air escaping multiple holes in its sides as others simultaneously gasped in. Of course the damned thing had to have multiple lungs or something. His attack would have at least winded another human, but for the big bug it seemed to only succeed in pissing it off even more. Shit, the damn thing must weigh half a tonne. It didn’t even bother turning to face him as the rear of its body lifted and kicked out towards his face.
Paulie instinctively covered his face and in that bare moment the beast changed the direction of the feint, its leggy tail slamming into his midsection with far more devastating effect.
Paulie found himself once more airborne. He had just a moment to realise his predicament when his vision flashed dark and he impacted the far wall with enough violence to be thrown through the wall completely. He landed on his back amid a tangle of limbs and crushed debris as the remains of the wall crashed down all around him.
He lay there stunned. In pain and still trying to process what the hell had just happened to him. At least it seemed like his armour had absorbed most of the blow, or he would have been spitting up chunks of his internal organs by now. As he rolled over, coughing and hacking from the dust in his lungs, he heard a noise from the doorway beside him. He raised a hand in a semi-defensive posture as he climbed to his feet.
“Had enough? Aww, that iss too bad. I wass just ssstarting to have a good time.” The hissing taunts of the cultist wounded his pride still farther. Paulie just turned his head and spat onto the ground. It was red, dark and full of the gritty dust that still filled his mouth.
He didn't want to answer, it hurt to move.. It hurt to talk.. Hell it was even hurting his eyes just to look around the damn room. He waved an arm slowly and gestured to the carnage they had already caused.
The alien didn’t even have to turn its head. Its compound eyes allowing it to instead see the majority of the room all at once. He clenched his hand and tried to think of something he could do to save himself, maybe some last clever trick he could pull before it was too late.
But he was out of ideas and out of steam. Paulie closed his eyes briefly as the alien hissed again, this time when it spoke there was almost a note of respect in its slithery speech.
“I musst ssay, I am impressed with your fortitude, urrenian. Mosst would have ssucummbed to their woundss far ssooner than that. You are indeed a ressiliant species, it was my honor to fight you. But my orderss are clear. You don’t leave here. Goodbye.”
He watched it raise one of its lower hands. He saw the gun it held in it, it looked like one of those plasma accelerators that Sasfren had warned him were an extremely painful way to die. He tensed, not knowing what he was doing but knowing that he had to do something. Time seemed to move in slow motion as his adrenaline kicked into overdrive and he made one single last herculean effort.
He couldn’t dodge out of the way fast enough or for long enough to survive, the alien was too fast. Faster even than he himself, and it knew it had him outclassed. But maybe that ego was the weakness that he had been needed. Maybe he could catch them off guard.
All these thoughts passed through his brain in less than a second. Before he was really even aware of what he was doing he found himself driving not away, but directly at the creature.
It hissed in surprise as it fired two shots of bright purple plasma that flashed overhead close enough to singe his hair. The sounds of the twin globs splashing against the wall sounded like the snaps of electrical components burning out. Like fuses popping followed by the hiss of bacon frying as the volatiles in the vaporised material cooked off from the heat of the attack. His madness had brought him to the front and just under the body of the shocked alien. He had only moments to react.
Paulie spun around on his back and planted his feet on the lower torso of the alien before pressing up and out with all the strength he had in his body. The beast’s mouthplates had only enough time to twitch as it made what he assumed was a shocked expression and then it was catapulted away and into the hallway through the wall behind it amid a cloud of dust and spinning debris.
“Holy…” He breathed out hoarsely before turning onto his hands and knees and scrambling for the other room where he had lost his gun. There was a loud yelling noise, a deep chittering roar that chilled him to the bone.
Paulie scrabbled in the chaos for his weapon, his eyes searching almost feverishly across the mess until at the last he spotted the barrel of his revolver peaking out from under the edge of a crushed desk near the doorway of the room.
Paulie leapt for it and smiled as his fingers closed on the cold steel. He pushed up from his hands and knees, one foot going under him even as he readjusted his grip on the gun in preparation to use it.
All at once he felt a heavy blow to the back. His armour hissing as it absorbed a shot from the alien’s plasma gun. The attack threw him forward with enough violence that he lost his grip on Nemesis again and with a mournful grunt of pain he slammed back onto the dirty carpet. The revolver spiraling from his grip like a toy tossed by an angry toddler.
He coughed and rolled over onto his back as the sound of approaching feet met him.
“Now.. you.. ssneaky little ssshitter.” His adversary panted, pushing through the original hole in the wall to stand in the space between Paulie and any hope of freedom or survival.
Paulie’s eyes flicked towards his gun, then back to the alien. He saw their antennae rise as if in a smile. Their long body shifted slightly on its many short, stabbing legs. That weapon in their hand never wavered though, almost as if they were daring him to try. They seemed to be a little tired though, their antennae drooping and their lower torso expanding as they took deep breaths.
Paulie grimaced, his back was getting uncomfortably warm. The plasma bolt had been absorbed by his armour, but not without dumping a significant amount of heat into the over-engineered material. He might just be able to survive though, if only he could keep the big bug talking.
He raised a hand and waved it as if trying to catch his breath. He shook his head a little as he pointed at the thing. “Okay, I have to know. Who are you? What are you? And most importantly, why do you all want me dead so damn much?”
The alien might have narrowed its eyes if they had the capacity to do so, instead their twin antennae just twitched and then lowered as they seemed to hiss in annoyance. “I am under no obligation to answer your questions, fleshbag.” The word was spat like a curse. It paused, head cocking slightly in a jerky manner as it seemed to consider it. “But, it is good for the dead to know whom they should sing the litanies of fear for in the darkness beyond. I am Crultishk, the great hunter of tribe chittering screech . And I am riiken, the great race superior.”
He nodded. A riiken, now he understood why people kept saying he was as fast as one. But it wasn’t true, he was not faster. In fact he wasn’t quite sure if there was a human on Earth that was quicker than this abomination before him.
The alien raised the gun again. “Now you know who’s name to scream in the infernal dark, thank you for the fight. At least you did not come apart in my hands so easily, screaming and dissolving like wet clay.”
Paulie heard movement, a faint sound like the crunching of gravel or shifting of small stones. But he saw nothing. The rikken seemed to hear it too, their hearing must have been at least as good as Paulie’s to have picked it up.
Their head turned only slightly, insectoid eyes searching the place as their pseudo pupils contracted slightly. Their focus was now on the hallway behind themself. “Who goes there!” They hissed out loud, the gun in their hand unwavering on Paulie. At this range he wasn’t sure he would be able to effectively dodge a shot aimed at his head before it took him, so he waited for an opening. A mistake, anything.
His opening came in the form of a beam of light that seemed to materialise directly out of a shimmering patch of thin air in the opening of the hallway. The ghostly blue streak of light stabbed at the riiken and narrowly missed its head. Instead the shot impacted on the the edge of its shoulder on their carapace, the ghostly light carving a small hole right through them as if they were made of soft butter.
The alien screamed in pain or anger, Paulie wasn’t sure. And he wasn’t sticking around to find out which as he dove to the side in the direction his gun had fallen. He hit the ground with a soft thud, his body falling slower than it might have on earth. Almost dreamlike as he immediately scrambled to grab his revolver, two shots impacting the ground on either side of his head. The carpet and vinyl-like covering of the wall immediately burst into bright flame as the plasma dissipated its tremendous heat into the surface in an instant.
Two more blue beams of light stabbed out even as Paulie rolled through the burning craters. His greatcoat absorbed the majority of the heat but even so he winced as red-hot vapors stung his eyes and throat.
The riiken was screaming in earnest now. Bright streaks of light stabbing out from the hall even as it returned fire blindly in the direction of them. There was a yell, and Paulie recognised Jakiikii’s pained outcry. His blood turned to molten steel in his veins as his adrenaline spiked again and he stood to his feet with a bellow of righteous anger.
“Do not hurt her!”
He squeezed the trigger. He was standing a meter away from the alien, gun in hand and barrel pointed straight at its insectoid head. There was no way in hell he could miss, and he didn’t.
In a flash of light and thunderous roar, Nemesis spoke in the language of violence. And what it declared was death.
The alien’s upper body whipped to the side as its head nearly exploded from the sheer energy as the rocket propelled bullet slammed into and through its chitin-plated head. The shot entered through one of its large eyes, shattering it and spraying Paulie in gore and fragments as the meters-long alien’s corpse thrashed madly on the floor. Its long, leggy body flopped for another few seconds before lying still in an expanding pool of dark red blood.
Paulie’s finger was still clamped around the trigger of his gun, his grip shaking and his breathing heavy and near ragged. As the shock of the moment began to wear off he was hit with a tremendous wave of fatigue as damaged and battered muscles screamed for attention. But he was not done yet, he had some life left still.
“Jakiikii!” He croaked as he dragged himself over the dead riiken and into the hall where he saw her leaning against the wall holding her side. There was a small darker patch on her suit where it looked to have been burnt, but she was alive.
He rushed to her and she tried to fend him off for a split second before he wrapped his arms around her and pressed his face into the top of her head.
“Ough.. get off, I love you too but you are squeezing me too hard you big lump!” She cried out and he immediately released her with a hasty apology.
She grabbed his collar with two hands and pulled his face to hers before kissing him suddenly. As she pulled back he saw her eyes crinkle into pained smiles. “Yeah, I thought that would shut you up.”
Paulie grinned right back. He was a mess, how he must look to her. His greatcoat was ripped and smoldering in several places and he was still bleeding slowly from somewhere under his armour. He was covered in cuts, burns, bruises and scratches. His head was pounding and he might have a broken finger, but he was alive. And so was she.