3.
The abominations scuttled and slithered and hopped toward me. I held the boombox over my head, and empowered each wave, turning the high-pressure fronts of the sound waves into advancing walls, solid surfaces for the abominations to press against.
Each time one took a step closer, the wall of sound would shatter against it, pushing it back. It wasn't enough to halt them—they merely advanced slowly.
I retreated from them, as Ashley circled around, heading towards the gatecrasher.
One of the abominations neared me. It looked like a soccer ball wrapped in elephant skin, with an eyeless face on it. Apparently, it was small and dense enough that my barriers had no effect.
It rolled closer, and began to bounce. With each bounce, it opened its mouth impossibly wide, showing giant, crooked teeth—there was no way the thing had a digestive system, or a brain. It seemed to be wholly mouth.
Raising my gun, I shot twice. The first one missed, and the second one caused it to deflate, as if it contained nothing but air.
Another shambled closer, pulling itself along the ground. It seemed to have the torso and head of a young woman, but its arms and legs each split into a dozen long, rope-like tentacles, each terminating in something not unlike a fingernail.
Rearing up, its stringy hair fell away, revealing a face composed solely of mismatched eyes. I could see its ribcage moving as if breathing, but I could not see how it drew in air.
In all honesty, I really didn't want to know. But the mind is a tricky thing to control, sometimes.
I adjusted the volume on my boombox, and put a round square in the woman-thing's head. She slumped down, and began twitching, the walls of noise pushing the body away.
Ashley was nearing the gatecrasher. Watching her work was interesting, really. Both awe-inspiring and nauseating.
She pulled off her right glove, and stuck her hand out. She'd learned this trick recently: her hand spread out and flattened, the flesh peeling back from the bone. Muscles reforming into a configuration never found in nature, as the bones fused into a toothy disk.
Her hand became a living buzzsaw made of bone and muscle. It whined and spun. She ducked inside the orbit of the black tetrahedrons, and set to work. She cut through its left hind leg at the knee, turning its flesh into pulped meat, and its bone into splintered shards of ivory.
I blinked: something about the angle of it looked wrong. She normally cut at a shallower incline than that, to cut the nerves.
It began to thrash around, both the rooted leg and the orphaned stump.
Crying out, it kicked. The stump connected with her temple, and sent her sprawling, the buzzsaw turning back into a human hand—small, pale, fragile.
Now, we were in trouble.
I backpedaled, away from the abominations, circling the battlefield toward where she had fallen.
One of them seemed to swim through the air toward me. Its head was a skull of liquid black metal, but it trailed a serpentine body—a complex corkscrew of spiderweb and soap-bubbles that seemed to twist through the air as it came closer and closer.
The skull's teeth chattered, and then a seam appeared down the middle of it, revealing a pink mouth ringed with perfectly human teeth, and a tongue on either side. In the back of it was a cue ball-sized baby-blue eye.
I felt like vomiting in my gas mask.
Raising my gun, I centered the sight on the eye, and pulled the trigger. The helix dissolved, popping in a bloody mess, and the skull-halves fell to the ground, smoking.
I reached Ashley and knelt by her. Opening up my boombox, I reached into my pocket, and pulled out my only other CD. A mixed compilation of some louder, harsher sounds than the Johnny Cash album.
Popping it in, I turned up the sound, and tried to shake Ashley awake. Nothing. Her right goggle was spider-webbed.
“C'mon, Ash. Wake up. Get it together. I can't kill it without you.”
A pair of alabaster feet appeared in the top of my vision, and I glanced up.
The abomination looked like a statue of a cupid that had been eroded to near featurelessness. Its face was preserved, and its eyes were two impossibly deep black pools.
It raised its hand, and its mouth opened, peeling back away from an impossible black nothing.
I raised my gun and shot the little bastard in the head; the skull shattered, and a black, greasy smoke issued forth.
Looking down at Ashley, I didn't notice the smoke coiling around my gun. I did hear my gun getting crushed, though. Tossing it aside, I dragged Ashley away from the now-immobile statue and its cloud of smoke.
“Wake up. There's no way I can handle this without you, dammit. Come on.”
She didn't respond. I hoped she's breathing. I was screwed if she wasn't breathing.
I guessed that I was going to die alone. Though, I suppose there's no other way to go about it.
That pain in my head was getting worse.
Why was it getting worse?
I pulled Ashley's gun from its holster, and put three more rounds into the cupid, shattering it completely.
The black smoke dissipated, but there were other problems.
A great winged shape descended towards us. I'd guess it was four meters from wingtip to wingtip. The rest of it was indistinct, maybe a little man-shaped. The whole of it was composed of that same liquid black metal as the skull-thing had been.
It had a single eye in its “head,” a pale, white orb that shone like a floodlight.
“I can't do this one. I just plain can't. Wake up!”
Its wings folded, and it began to pull itself along the ground toward us. Its limbs were long, but its body was no bigger than either of us.
Its head shot towards me, and I raised up my hand.
But I was not injured.
I was not consumed.
The pain in my head was terrible though, as if I'd been shot right between the eyes.
My numina—my power—allowed me to control waves. I'd forgotten some basic high school physics: the fact that all matter is both a particle and a wave, though the wavelength is so short it might as well not matter.
It turned into a cloud of vapor, and I began to laugh. In all honesty, though, that was a bad idea: every time I did, the knife in the center of my brain was twisted again.
I groaned and put a hand to my head, staggering a little.
My boombox shorted out, smashed by a thing that looked like an oak dinner table supported by four arms.
It skittered towards me on twenty fingers working like spider's legs.
My finger lined up between it and my eye, and the air along that line turned as hot as molten steel. The table-thing burst into flames.
I looked down at Ash. She was moving a little, her head slowly wagging in pain. Holstering her gun, I slung her over my shoulder, and began to walk toward the gatecrasher.
It still thrashed around, stabbing with one limb.
Circling, I put a hand on its opposite leg, and froze its surface solid, penetrating three centimeters into its flesh; the giant thing continued to thrash around, shattering its skin. Plates of frozen skin and muscle sloughed off.
Putting my hand to it again, I tried something else: I alternated hot and cold rapidly.
Freeze.
Boil.
Freeze.
Boil.
Freeze.
Boil.
It had the desired effect, and the gatecrasher began to dissolve, its flesh no longer able to hold together.
I snapped my fingers and held up my hand: the yellow tether appeared before my eyes. The only thing still holding the speculum open.
With Ash over my shoulder, I began to walk.
She regained a bit of consciousness, after a while.
“Leave me,” she rasped.
“What? Why?”
She didn't say anything.
“Why, Ashley?”
“Ya don' need me. 'M dinjeroz,” her words began to slur, though I'd never really been good at deciphering the Scottish accent. Or dialect. Whatever it is, really.
“Dangerous, how?” I asked, guessing.
“You an' me. We cause this.”
“What?”
“Thisiz our future. We mehk it thiz way.”
“But how is that you and me?”
“My noomin', it's spec-yulum 'nergy. My power makes me into 'n abomination. Your noomin' is the wehv, an' timiza wehv. You an me mehk thiz woorld.”
I kept walking, she tried to get out of my grip, but I held her fast.
“You know, I don't really understand what you're saying,” I informed her.
“Ye've gotta leave me, Yank. One ovus can't go back, and you're m're useful, now.”
“That. That right there. Crazy talk. Must be the stump-kick you got to the head.”
Though, thinking back on it, I'm not sure why I didn't. She'd always been a bit of a righteous bitch to me, and led the charge in getting me referred to as “Yank.” She took away my name, in some ways, and made me feel nigh-useless on missions. Here she was, ordering me to leave her behind, due to a theory that—admittedly—made a bit of sense.
Which is probably exactly why I kept my ear pressed to her hip and my arm wrapped around her waist, walking back toward the speculum. If she wasn't the most useful, now, and if that's how she saw the chain of command, then it really wasn't for her to decide anymore.
Besides, I kind of liked saying “no” to her.
“No.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Almost there.”
“You rn't guin' to leave me?”
“No.”
There was a long moment of silence.
“Thanks, J—”
“Save it,” I said, a little harsher than I intended. Then, with a moment of thought, I smiled, and added:
“and 'Yank' will do, Ashley.”
I don't know if she was right, that she and I cause the world that's on the other side of the specula. Perhaps. I can't really say.
In all honesty, I don't think so. Perhaps there's the potential for that to happen, but I doubt the two of us will do that—I mean, we wouldn't choose that. I know I wouldn't, and thus, it wouldn't happen like so: I would choose differently.
Unless I was trying to send a message or cause something. If that were the case, and if things had already gone pear-shaped, so to speak—
Wait.
I suppose I'm going to need to keep my eyes open.