Major Karnage (34 page)

There was no band around his leg.

“Monkeyfucking squidbugs!” Karnage screamed. He writhed on
the ground in agony. Squiggles danced across his vision as the alien
DNA took over his body.

Karnage watched in horror as his younger self writhed in agony
beneath the flightpack. A second set of arms shot out from the kid’s
armpits. The straps of the flightpack snapped off as his body doubled
in size. The shoulder tentacles grabbed the mangled flightpack and
tossed it through a cloning tank. The Patricks scrambled off of
Karnage and backed away.

The young Karnage slowly rose to his feet. He was at least eight
feet tall. His shoulder tentacles waved violently above him. He
opened his eyes. His pupils had become long drawn-out squiggles.
His skin pulsed and flowed with colour like a squidbug. He looked
down at his four hands and the tentacles flowing from his back. His
clothes lay in tatters over his body. He locked his squiggly eyes on
Karnage. He pointed with one of his four arms at the flightpacks. He
opened his mouth to speak, straining to untangle his twin tongues
into a single coherent syllable:

“Go!”

Karnage nodded and ran for the flightpacks. The mutant
Karnage charged past him, his skin turning red as he let out a
squiggly scream.

The mutant Karnage swatted the charging Patricks aside like
flies. His open palms made loud scrunching noises when they
collided with the bodies of the Patricks. Tentacles grabbed a pair of
Patricks by their necks and whipped them back across the hangar.
There was a loud smash, and Mayhem screamed something about
the tanks, but Karnage couldn’t make out exactly what over the
mutant’s angry, defiant roar.

Karnage pulled a flightpack from the wall. Gunfire whizzed past
his head. He looped his arms through the straps. A Patrick tried to
pull him out, but a tentacle appeared out of nowhere and grabbed
the Patrick by his ankle and whipped him away. There was a painful
scream and something exploded.

Karnage hit the activators and rocketed up through the skylight.
He came out above a small abandoned airport nestled at the base of
a low ridge. He looked down at the hangar below and caught one last
glimpse of the young Karnage through the skylight. He was looming
over Mayhem, his tentacles quivering fiercely above him. Mayhem
lay in the corner, his wheelchair knocked over, surrounded by the
broken bodies of the Patricks. He shakily held a pistol up towards
the young Karnage’s chest, then smoke billowed out of the skylight,
and they disappeared from view.

Give him hell, kid,
Karnage thought.
Give him hell.

Karnage cleared the ridge and the flaming airport disappeared
behind him. Nothing was visible but a column of smoke growing
smaller in the distance as he sped away.
There’s your funeral pyre, kid.
Rest in peace.
Karnage closed his eyes and took a moment to mourn
his wasted youth.

There was a loud bang, and the flightpack bucked violently,
spinning out of control. Karnage’s eyes flashed open to see a giant
ball of pink goober growing out the side of one of his hoverballs. The
ground was quickly hurtling up towards him.

The controls fought him as Karnage struggled to pull the
flightpack out of its tailspin. He couldn’t keep it flying for much
longer. He aimed for a soft field of pinkstink nestled in a dry riverbed
surrounded by dunes of shifting sand, and brought the flightpack
down as gently as he could.

He bounced twice before finally skidding to a shuddering halt in
the middle of the field. The flightpack listed over and fell on its side,
taking Karnage with it. He fumbled with the straps, but the goober
had swelled over the buckle. He touched the hardened pink ball,
close to his head. Someone had taken a potshot at him. But who?

A loud squiggly screech ripped across the field. The ground shook
under Karnage’s feet as a horned worm lumbered over a sand dune
and down toward the riverbed.

Karnage yanked and pulled on the straps, trying to rip himself
free. A ball of goober shot out from the worm’s back, and hit Karnage
in the side, sticking him and the flightpack to the ground as it
swelled. He was held fast.

The worm crawled across the field toward him. Karnage spotted
a pair of tiny figures on the worm’s back, standing to either side of
the horn. They were human.

The worm stopped a few feet away. Karnage could see deep into
the worm’s mouth. Curls of yellow mist hugged the worm’s serrated
pallet.

A third figure moved forward, stopping at the tip of the worm’s
head. Karnage made out the outline of a rifle in its hands. A glint of
sunlight reflected off of a scope as the rifle pointed towards him. A
familiar voice called down to him.

“Don’t move, pal. Not unless you want a face full of goober.”

“Stumpy?” Karnage shouted. “Is that you?”

The figure lowered its rifle. “Major?” He motioned behind him, and a rope ladder rolled down the worm’s flank. The figure
disappeared from the head, and reappeared climbing down the
ladder.

It was Stumpy all right. He wore a loud Hawaiian shirt with
charcoal grey dress pants tucked into combat boots. The goober
rifle was strapped to his stump. It had been heavily modified with
an extra-long barrel made from some kind of iron pipe. The scope
looked like it had been pieced together from a pair of binoculars.

Stumpy walked over to Karnage and looked down at him with a
huge grin. “It’s you,” he said. “It’s really you.”

Karnage motioned with his head to Stumpy’s rifle. “You shoot
me outta the sky with that thing?”

Stumpy looked at his rifle, and his face went red. “Aw, gee, Major.
I didn’t know it was you. I thought—well, if I had known, I wouldn’t
have . . . I mean . . .”

Karnage smiled. “That was some shot, Corporal. Shame that
kind of marksmanship got wasted in the C&E. You’d have made one
hell of a sharpshooter.”

Stumpy grinned. “It’s good to see you again, Major.”

“You, too,” Karnage said. “You got some solvent to get me outta
this thing?”

Stumpy turned to the figures on the worm and shouted. “Get me
some solvent!”

“Is it him?” a voice shouted back excitedly. “Is it the Lightbringer?”

“Yes,” Stumpy shouted.

“The Lightbringer! The Lightbringer has returned!” The worm
riders jumped up and down excitedly, then disappeared from view
as they ran down its flank.

“Lightbringer?”
Karnage
said.
He
eyed
Stumpy’s
clothes
suspiciously. “What the hell, Stumpy? Have you hooked up with
them Spragmites?”

Stumpy watched the figures coming down the ladder. He leaned
in to Karnage. “I’ll tell you about it, later, Major. On the way back to
the compound.”

“Compound? What compound? What the fuck is going on!?”

Stumpy looked up at the figures running towards them. He
waved and smiled at them, and spoke out of the side of his mouth at
Karnage. “I’ll tell you later, Major. Trust me, it’s all right. I’m workin’
with Tristan. She explained it all to me. I’m on her side.”

“And who’s side is she on?” Karnage said.

Stumpy gave Karnage a startled look. His mouth opened to say
something, but the bounding figures of the two Spragmites coming
within earshot forced his mouth shut again. They stopped before
Karnage, eyes wide and blazing, and dropped to their knees to bow.
“Ma-ma-oo-pow-pow,” they chanted.

They freed Karnage from the goober, and the Spragmites led
Karnage and Stumpy back up the rope ladder onto the worm, all the
while chanting, “Ma-ma-oo-pow-pow.”

A pair of tents had been erected on the worm’s back, tied to the
worm’s hairs. Stumpy led Karnage into one of the tents while the
Spragmites lowered a rope to bring up his flightpack.

The worm’s body ebbed and flowed beneath Karnage’s feet.
Stumpy walked across the worm effortlessly, his legs adjusting to
every roll. “You get used to it after a while,” he said. “You just need
to get your worm legs.” He sat in an armchair beside a coffee table,
and motioned for Karnage to take the chair on the other side. The
table was covered in bits of technology. It rolled back and forth on
the table as the worm’s body moved beneath it. A lip running around
the edge of the table prevented any of it from falling off.

“This is too weird.” Karnage sat down. “Last time I was on one
of these things, it was trying to kill me. Hell, every time I’ve seen a
worm it’s tried to kill me. And yet here we are, riding on the back of
one like it’s a goddamn elephant. How’d you figure it out?”

Stumpy grinned. “That was me. Once Tristan explained how
things went down in the WTF, it got me to thinking. Seemed kind
of stupid to have a horn on your head that’ll kill you if it breaks
off. Unless it was bred that way on purpose.” Stumpy grew excited
and leaned forward. “The horn’s like a steering column. Lean on it
to urge the worm forward, pull back to get it to slow down, push
left and right to get it to turn. And if the worm’s getting a little too
ornery for your liking, you just give it a good hard yank and it snaps
off, and the worm dies. Like a kill switch, or a self-destruct. Works
like a charm.”

“You’re one resourceful trooper, Stumpy.”

Stumpy shrugged. “I just like to know how things work, that’s
all.”

The ground shifted and the worm’s undulations became more
pronounced.

“Feels like we’re on our way. Shouldn’t take us too long to get
back to the compound. You should see how fast these babies can go.
It’s something else. I haven’t had the guts to let one go full out. I
don’t know if I could hold on! But one day, maybe. One day . . .”

“How did you end up with the Spragmites?” Karnage said.

“Well, I did like you said,” Stumpy said. “I got the array up
and running, and, well, frankly, Major, I don’t know what that
array picked up, but the controls started goin’ crazy! Lots of weird
squiggling all over the monitors and—well, I don’t even know what
it was. But I just kept those dials hummin’ and that array going, like
you said. And then there was this blast of green light, and it all went
quiet. All of it. Not a peep. Nothin’. Dials were up, and the array
was still hummin’, but whatever had been sendin’ those signals was
gone. I couldn’t find ’em again.”

Karnage nodded. “Probably ultra-violent transmissions.”

Stumpy gave Karnage a funny look. “Ultra-what?”

“Never mind,” Karnage said. “Go on.”

“Well, anyway, I stayed holed up in there, and kept listenin’ for
anything goin’ on, and the next thing I know I hear this knockin’ on
the door! And I go and I peek out the window, see? And there’s this
woman standin’ there! And not just any woman. She was beautiful!
I’ve seen some lookers in my time, but this one . . . so graceful and
elegant. Anyway, she sees me lookin’ out at her, so I duck back inside.
And she starts talkin’ to me through the door. Askin’ me to let her
in. And I tell her I can’t, cuz I gave my word and . . .” Stumpy frowned,
puzzled.

“And what?”

Stumpy shook his head. “Well, I don’t know. I mean, she just
kept talkin’ to me, see, and I kept listenin’, and she said she knew
you! And the more we talked, the more it seemed like she knew
all about you—like I mean everything! Like stuff you wouldn’t be
able to guess, right? So I ask her if you told her the password, and
she said you did, but she got so scared that she forgot it—and she’s
tellin’ me all about the Spragmites and how she got roped into bein’
part of it all by this Melvern fella—he sounds like one right mean
sonofabitch, let me tell you. And so she tells me how you gave her
the strength to go on. How you helped her to stand up and fight back
and together the two of you knocked that Melvern bastard from his
pedestal, and brought him to his knees. But then that ship appeared
in the sky, and you told her to get away and find me, and so she ran
and then there was the green flash, and when she got up there was
nothing left of you but a giant smokin’ crater in the ground.

“She was sure you were dead, but I kept remembering what you’d
said about your troopers, and I figured whatever had happened to
them had happened to you. And if you had reason to believe they
were all right, then I figured you were probably all right, too. I just
had to find you!

“And then you know what she did? She turned you into like a
messiah for her people. The Lightbringer, she called it. And then she
put me in charge of tryin’ to find you! And that’s what I’ve been doin’
ever since. I been workin’ with this group—they call themselves the
Illuminati. They say it’s got something to do with light, but it just
sounds like a load of horseshit to me—and we’ve been lookin’ for
you. We were gettin’ reports of demons and the apocalypse from
some of our contacts in Dabneyville, then one of our members sends
us D-Pad footage of somebody in a hoverpack carryin’ you out of the
city. I hacked into the globesat network and traced the flight path,
and . . . well, here we are.”

“That’s one hell of a story,” Karnage said.

“It’s been a hell of a ride,” Stumpy smiled. “But it’s all workin’ out,
isn’t it? I actually found you. Tristan didn’t think I would. I could
tell. She was tryin’ to let me down easy, I suppose. But boy is she
gonna be surprised when we come walkin’ back into the compound.
I can’t wait to see the look on her face!”

“Yeah,” Karnage said uncomfortably, “that should be a sight to
see.”