James A. Hunter
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Wasteland Warlords Episode 5: Chapter 6 - Here Comes the Cavalry
🕑 Added 2023-09-21 17:00:56 +0000 UTCClay jumped when the klaxons started going off. He had hoped his Beguiling Whisper had gotten out, but so long had passed since he sent the message that he was starting to wonder. Either it had worked and Alex and Joe were on their way in or this was one hell of a coincidence.
Boots and clicking chitinous feet thundered by on the ground level of the tower.
“Surround the tower.” Clay recognized the voice of the Big Pharma scientist. “Protecting the research is the number one priority.”
A man’s voice snapped back, “Wrong. Protecting the test subjects is the number one priority. You can always run more tests; it would take decades to collect this many sets of powers under one roof again, and there’s no guarantee we’d get the same quality.”
“I don’t tell you people how to run your abominable experiments,” rumbled a deep bass voice that made Clay’s skin crawl. “Don’t tell me how to run my dungeon.”
Down in the basement, Jeremy chortled, obviously eavesdropping as intently as Clay. “Yeah, you tell those disgusting humes, Warden.”
Upstairs, the Warden’s voice rose as he addressed his ICSOs.
“The raiders are inside our gates.” His rumbling voice shook the walls of the Supermax, somehow magically broadcast to every inch of the place. Clay covered his ears, trying to preserve some small amount of his hearing in case he lived to want it later. “You will not allow them to make it through Level One alive. Every available mob and overseer to Cellblock One.”
“Do what you want,” the scientist snapped. “I’m calling in backup.”
With a rumbling grunt, the Warden and his human critics moved off.
“A-hole,” Jeremy muttered. Then on second thought, “CIA-hole. Heh. Genius.”
Clay took a quick check of his Magicka. The little bit he’d needed for Beguiling Whisper hadn’t regenerated. Shifty’s twig could let him use some magic, but apparently it couldn’t overcome the curses that blocked the arcane energies from flowing. Luckily, he’d spent a decent amount of time before he became an Incant slinging spells on a shoestring magical budget. He knew exactly how far he could push himself.
Saying another quick prayer, he concentrated on the red and green lights outside his cell. With Control Lights, he could brighten, dim, or change the color of any existing light within a thirty-foot radius.
The Magicka in his vial dropped again as he shut off the green light and turned on the red. Now he just had to hope Jeremy the passive-aggressive anemone would notice the color shift before the cantrip’s one-minute time limit ran out.
He didn’t have to wait long.
“What the crap?” Jeremy mumbled.
Switches clicked. Jeremy was trying the old turn-it-off-then-on-again trick.
Clay felt the lights over his cell fight to change back, but he pumped another dose of Control into them, dropping his Magicka again. The red light stayed on.
“Oh, perfect. Of course a containment chain goes offline in the middle of a dungeon raid.” A radio crackled. “Hey, Frank, can you send somebody to the Hole? We’ve got a curse chain malfunction on One.”
Feedback squalled in the radio before Frank yelled, “Handle it yourself! It’s all hands on deck up here, I can’t spare anybody!”
The crackling cut off as the connection ended.
“Handle it yourself,” Jeremy mimicked. “Like I don’t have enough to do. Probably one of you dumb jerks got something stuck in the latch again. But whatever, let’s leave it to Jeremy, he’ll fix everything. Again.”
The grate over Clay’s head buzzed open. There was a sticky pop like pulling a suction cup off a window. A second later, a boot thumped on concrete, followed by the slap of meat and a scrape like stone on stone.
Clay pressed his back against the wall, giving himself all the space his tiny cell would allow.
He wasn’t sure how this was going to work with an anemone—he hadn’t even realized anemones could move from place to place—but he was going to have to play the cards he’d been dealt. Alex, Joe, Bacon Bits, and Chonk were out there being overrun by prison guards and whatever the hell that Warden was; they didn’t have the luxury of coming up with a new plan right then. The good news was, from the sound of the scrapes, thumps, and slaps headed this way, Jeremy wasn’t setting any land speed records.
The tentacled top of the anemone leaned over the open grate, one human leg and one human arm levering its hard central column of coral closer. The longest tentacle waved a sparking baton in Clay’s direction. Just out of reach.
Clay jumped, kicking off the wall in front of him, and grabbed hold of the baton-wielding tentacle just below its…wrist?
“Hey!” Jeremy yelled.
The anemone leaned back, trying to attach himself to the concrete floor, but Clay yanked, dropping his full body weight on the tentacle.
It snapped in half like a rubber band. Clay fell back into the cell, but the electrical baton came with him.
“Jailbreak underway in Solitary!” Jeremy yelled, his boot and hand thumping and slapping as he scraped his unwieldly body back toward the toggles.
Clay shoved the baton into his jumpsuit, then jumped and grabbed the metal lip around the cell. Heaving himself up onto the concrete took some doing—he hadn’t done a pullup in years—but Jeremy’s lack of speed was turning out to be a major bonus to this plan.
As soon as he got a leg under him, Clay took off like a shot. He tackled the panicking anemone to the ground. It felt like falling on a pile of broken glass and gravel.
“Help!” Jeremy howled as he rolled and flailed his arm, leg, and tentacles. “Jailbreak in Solitary! Deadly force necessary! Somebody help!”
Tentacles smacked Clay’s bare skin, and needles of stinging venom burned. Not like a hand on a hot stove burner, though. More like a sunburn.
[You have been poisoned with Venomone (Weak). Take 2 points Uncomfortable Damage per second for nine seconds.]
That must be the reason Jeremy was relegated to guarding the least likely to escape inmates. Eighteen points wasn’t going to break Clay’s Health bank now that he was an Incant, but with the fuss Jeremy was raising, he didn’t want to waste time until somebody bigger and stronger came running.
Ignoring the tentacles to the face and neck, Clay wrapped his arms around Jeremy and hefted the thrashing sea creature-human hybrid into the open cell. While the anemone scraped around down below, trying to climb out, Clay sprinted to the toggles and threw the switch he’d seen Jeremy use to activate his cell.
The grate buzzed and clanged shut on the still-shouting guard.
Clay breathed a sigh of relief, then toggled through the rest of the individual switches until he found the ones that opened Griff’s, Shifty’s, and Herman’s cells.
The tree druid’s arms and legs lengthened until he could pull himself up out of the hole, and the Marine got himself out in much the same way Clay had.
“I need a hand, lad,” Griff called up from his cell. When Clay had pulled him up, the old weed dusted off his jumpsuit and muttered gruffly, “Thanks. Turns out, I’m not as young as I used to be.”
Herman posted up by the stairs. “Well, we’re out of the hole, and the world’s on fire.” He looked up toward ground level. “Now what?”
“Is there a control room or something around here?” Clay asked. “Maybe we can cut off some of their forces before they get to Alex and Joe—or at least slow them down. Lock some doors, unlock some cells, cut out the lights, that sort of thing?”
Shifty grinned. “Criminal mischief? Love it. I know just where we need to be. Follow me, pals.”
***
Alex’s thurible cracked through the sparkling stardust buzz saw of the helicoprion shark prison guard trying to slice her in half with its bladed snout.
And we have a new winner for far and away the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen, she thought as she dodged the shrapnel from the smashed sawblade, chips of stardust-colored bone flying off at all angles. A blast from the Mossberg finished off the prehistoric monster.
It also emptied the shotgun of its last shell.
Reloading would have to wait until she had a second to breathe. If they ever got a second to breathe. She shoved the Mossberg into its modified leg sheath and focused on the whipping chain weapon in her hands. Between Clay’s Weaponsmith ability and Joe’s Arcane Engineering, she’d been able to merge her trusty kusarigama and priestly thurible into one new ultimate weapon. One end of the chain still had the sickle blade, while the other boasted the heavy metal thurible head, built to dispense plague-spreading incense.
She whipped the sickle forward with a flick of her wrist, and the chain wrapped effortlessly around a crackling nightstick. Yanking hard, she jerked the nightstick wielder off-balance and chopped him in the back of the neck with a hammerfist, just behind the dorsal fin. She earned a Critical Hit with the blow and the guard went down like a sack of concrete, but even more of the deformed crustaceous guards were rushing toward them. It wasn’t looking like they’d get that breather anytime soon.
“As you can see, faithful Lumberheads,” Joe panted while he swung Bertha at the guards surrounding him, “we’re fighting some kind of weird outer-space fish jerks.” Bertha whined and fish guts splattered in colorful arcs. “Can you believe this grade-A load of horse crap? The big bad government won’t even come fight us themselves. Comment below if you want to see Lumberjack Joe fight a top-secret CIA super soldier, mano-y-mano!”
Alex, Joe, Bacon Bits, and Chonk had managed the push to the front door of this insane prison, but no farther before they were embroiled in a no-holds-barred battle royale. They were surrounded and being overrun from all directions by human-sea creature-cosmic hybrids. And for every guard they took out, two or three more flooded in to fill the breach. Either this place was totally overstaffed, or the Dungeon Lord could pump out fresh minions by the gross.
That hadn’t stopped Joe from streaming every second of it to his viewers, however.
“Have to say, if this is what alien life looks like, I take back what I said about wanting to make contact.” He spat, trying to clear his mouth of fish blood. “Ugh! These thangs are nas-tee, with a capital blech.”
“Actually, this is kind of making me hungry,” Alex said.
She pulled the chain in tight and drew the round thurible head into her chest. Alex slapped her palm against a glimmering sigil, activating the Scarlet Kiss poison Clay had brewed. She, Joe, and the others had all already taken the antidote, but the guards… not so much. With a vicious grin, she whipped the chain around in a sharp arc and renewed her relentless assault against the cosmic horror shows. The sickle blade left ruin in its wake even as the thurible began to vomit out a steady stream of choking red gas.
Scarlet Kiss was nasty stuff that dealt a hundred and fifty points of plague damage over ten seconds, while simultaneously afflicting its victims with the Internal Bleeding debuff for five minutes.
Smoke filled the yard as she spun and shot the thurible ball directly into the bulging eye of a killer prawn-star creature.
“Yeah, I could definitely go for some lobster,” she said as the creature fell, one human hand clutching its throat as it wheezed for air.
Chonk, riding by on the soft, slimy head of a blobfish, chittered in agreement as he sawed through the squishy flesh with his hedge-trimmer arm.
“Ew!” Joe wrinkled his nose and swapped Bertha for his arm cannon. “The cockroach of the ocean? No thanks.” He fired off a glowing red blast. “Hey, everybody, like and subscribe if you want to see Alex eat one of these gross-o’s.”
The hole his cannon blasted in the mass of oncoming guards was immediately filled by reinforcements.
“I’m not going to eat one of these things,” Alex snapped. “They’re sentient.”
“I like the uncooked fish you humans refer to as sushi, and I do not care whether they are sentient,” Bacon Bits said, soaring overhead. She opened her huge maw and showered the reinforcements with Acid Spray, then said, “I will eat one if we get a hundred Likes.”
“That’s the spirit, Bac-O!” Joe yelled.
A bobbing snakelike creature in the crowd unhinged its jaws and fired back at the Greater Blue Wyrm with a tinkling magical void. Bacon Bits dove, and the void crashed into a bank of floodlights, erasing them from reality like they’d never existed.
Alex swung the sickle, chain wrapping around the bobbing snake. With a yank, she disrupted the snake creature’s next void-shot and sent it skidding across the dirt. Chonk pounced on it like an angry mongoose.
Teeth as big as butcher knives sank into Alex’s shoulder. Putrid drool cascaded down her side. One of those damned Rabid Watchbeasts from Beyond the Stars picked her up and shook her like a rag doll.
[Congratulations, you are immune to Celestial Ultrarabies!]
“Thanks, Katotes. I owe you one,” Alex muttered. She gritted her teeth and chopped with her free arm, trying to catch the Beast in the throat with a ridge hand, but because of her position she couldn’t land a solid blow. Her hand glanced harmlessly off the bony plates protecting what passed for a neck. Still, the creature roared in anger and tossed her away.
In the tumble of scenery flashing past, she caught sight of a cosmic bullet shrimp on the roof of the prison. With a burst of its segmented body, it exploded out into the open air.
“Bacon Bits!” Alex shrieked, realizing too late where it was headed.
The shrimp slammed into the side of the Greater Blue Wyrm with a crack of breaking bones. Bacon Bits cried out, a gout of blue flame and blood puffing from her mouth as she fell.
A notice flashed before Alex’s eyes.
[An enemy has drawn blood from a member of your party. Bloodborne Frenzy activated.]
Red tinged her vision as the ability flooded her body with furious power. She whipped her head back, sprang to her feet, and charged the Watchbeast from Beyond the Stars. The creature squealed in surprise as Alex’s fist lashed out and caught the guard in the—apparently—sensitive snout with her boosted damage output. It stumbled back a step, reeling drunkenly on inhuman paws. The heartbeat of stillness was all Alex needed. She hooked the kama blade into the corner of the Beast’s bulging three-pupiled eye and tugged with all her inhuman strength.
The Beast’s mouth opened to howl in pain. Still running on the Frenzy’s speed and evasion boost, Alex ducked the Beast’s wildly snapping jaws and dug the sickle blade between its throat’s armor plates, ripping them open as she went.
Black blood sparkling with glittering stardust spurted from the wound.
Thank the Lord for Katotes’s regeneration—already the ridiculously fast Ettin healing ability was stitching up the damage in her shoulder. With a glance at the quickly dropping timer on her Frenzy, she threw herself back into the melee with renewed fervor. She couldn’t afford to waste any advantage, no matter how small.
She smashed her way through the press of hostile bodies, swinging the twin wrecking balls of plague and bleeding damage. Shells cracked and slimy heads splattered as they tried to pile onto her. Arms, legs, fins, pinchers, and nightsticks were wrapped up and wrenched by the chain. Watchbeasts and sea creatures choked on the thurible’s crimson smoke trails.
She made it to where Bacon Bits had crash-landed. A group of bottom feeders had descended on the Greater Blue Wyrm and were busy trying to eat her alive like a bunch of piranhas on a beached whale. A lump formed in Alex’s throat as she batted them away from Bacon Bits’s torn and bloody body. The last of the Greater Blue Wyrm’s health drained out of her with the steady gush of blood, and she disappeared into a puff of aquamarine smoke.
The cutesy ZombiePop figurine took her place. It would take Clay to resummon her, and he couldn’t even do that until twenty-four hours had passed.
And that was assuming they ever got to Clay.
“Oh sure, dogpile on the guy killing you hand over fist,” Joe yelled, stumbling past with half a dozen creatures dangling from his mech armor. “Real mature!”
Most people Alex had known back in civilization had never faced head-on the realization that they were going to die. She had heard doctors say there was nothing else they could do for her. She had answered all the questions that came with “What happens when I’m not here anymore?” Clay hadn’t been able to accept that they were going to lose to something as small as an out-of-whack cell, but Alex had put her affairs in order. She’d told him “just in case,” when what she meant was, “I don’t want you to have to deal with this on top of the reality that we never had a chance,” because the one thing she couldn’t face was the thought that her death might leave Clay in a lurch he couldn’t get out of.
Say, locked in a Supermax prison, for example.
But it was looking like she wasn’t going to have much say in the matter.
Alex stood, bloody chains wrapped around her fists. If she was going down, she was taking all of these cosmic sea punks with her.
“Come on, motherfuckers!” She settled into a fighting stance, relaxed and ready to kick some final-stand ass. “Let’s dance!”
The wave of guards and Watchbeasts roared as they charged. She bared her teeth in an ugly grin and picked out the first target—the face of the crab man at the head of their line.
Then, just as suddenly, the charge faltered. Sea creatures scattered.
A dust devil kicked up in the prison yard, set into motion by the whupping blades of a helicopter hovering overhead.
A rope dropped, and humans in brightly colored spandex rappelled out.
Alex blinked—and not just to get the sand out of her eyes. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She and Clay had run through this plan a hundred times over, trying to figure out every possible deviation and wrinkle. Not once, in all their scheming, had this scenario come up…
Standing between them and the fish horde were four real-life, honest-to-God superheroes in full costume.
The Merciful Shepherd with his giant, enchanted crook and silver suit, embroidered with golden filigree. Wildflame, her hair burning with streaks of orange and gold fire while halos of blue energy wreathed her fists. Crawley, his skin a dark blue and covered with swirling green sigils of power. And, of course, the Dark Sentinel, leader of the Dellafide Crimefighting Unit.
Alex was flabbergasted. She could hardly form a thought, much less a word.
The DCU were a team of crime-fighting do-gooders who traveled around the country, serving up justice, helping out at natural disasters, and posing for pictures at 5Ks for sick kids and firefighters. Hell, there were at least a dozen cinematic blockbusters about them, not to mention all the spinoff series on Supernova Plus. They were among a handful of elite Incants who lived outside the containment wall, serving as the PR face for Dellafide Pharmaceuticals, who bankrolled their operation and a few others like it, scattered around the country—though none of other teams had the clout of the DCU.
Alex had always assumed they were actors or celebrities pretending to have Incant powers; she’d never actually thought they might show up smack in the middle of the IZ.
A little behind Alex, Joe let out a shrill “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeek!”
The fish who’d been clinging to him dropped off and scuttled away from the newly arrived DCU, sensing the deadly power rolling off of the heroes.
“The DCU is here to save us?” Joe minced up to the Dark Sentinel like the world’s biggest, hairiest, redneckest fangirl. “I can’t believe you’re here, Mr. Dark, sir. Or is it Mr. Sentinel? Well, anyway, I’ve got every DCU comic ever published. I loved your The Nightening storyline in issues twelve through seventeen! And what you guys did, saving those bank hostages back in January? That was amazing! Can I have your autograph?”
Instead of reaching for his custom obsidian pen, the Dark Sentinel reared back and punched Joe in the teeth.
