“THAT BITCH!” I screamed, aiming my gun at Greta. “I KNEW IT!…Wait?”
I looked down. My hands were empty. And semi-transparent.
And identical to those that belonged to the other Terry lying unconscious on the ground beside me. No. Not unconscious.
Dead.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuck,” I groaned. “Again? How?!”
“Terry?” I turned towards the voice. Like with me, there were two Gregors. One already going cold on the ground, and another standing, staring down at his semi-transparent body, confused. The edges of his image were shimmering with silver veins, as if the nanites were trying to keep his very soul from breaking apart and going to Martial Arts Heaven or whatever. The fighter reached out with a degrading hand towards me. “Are w-we dead?” he asked with an uncharacteristic tremor in his voice.
“Apparently, kid,” I said, glowering past Greta, at Baba Yaga. The ancient witch was making some grand speech as she conjured up creatures of night and winter to be her audience. Greta stood nearby, a suit of blackest armor having manifested around her body. The bitch even had the gull to hold the enchanted axe that Lyriana had made for her-
Lyriana!
I stepped forward, pieces of myself breaking off as I moved. The girl had fallen onto her side. The knife in her gut had frozen the wound over, caking her stomach in frost and making icy veins spread across her body, freezing her from the inside out. Damn. What a way to go. Say what you will about fire, but eventually, after all the nerves in the body are charred, it’s a generally pain-free way to die.
I frowned at the corpse, confused. Gregor and I had manifested phantoms after…Well, I still wasn’t sure how we’ddied. But she was clearly dead and yet there wasn’t a ghostly Lyriana in sight.
“Terry!” Gregor bellowed. I turned back. By this point there was little more than his face and random sections of his arms and chest left. He used a floating, dismembered finger to point. “Burin?!”
No, I thought, gritting the dissolving teeth in my mouth. That idiot!
The last time I’d seen him, the dwarf had headbutted Emily and carried my daughter off to safety, back to the hut. Or maybe to try and get out of the hut now that Baba Yaga had betrayed us. Once she woke up, Emily could summon Persephone and the three of them could…I don’t know. Go back to Melos, try and make a truce with Hercules and Hecate? Or maybe use the magic mirror to contact Lyriana’s dad. Again, I don’t know, I’m just spit balling here!
But no! The dwarf was back. Dragon wings out, he flew over Lyriana’s body and swung his frost-covered axe at Greta. “SHE LOVED YOU!”
The winter wolf just barely managed to get her own axe up in time. The echoing clang of metal striking metal, along with blue-tinged sparks, filled the air as the two weapons clashed. Baba Yaga’s creatures screamed in alarm and rage, but the old witch raised her saggy, wrinkly, probably smelly arm. Her eyes were alight with cruel amusement as she allowed the show to unfold. Maybe she was testing Greta’s resolve?
Well that resolve remained firm as Greta pushed back at Burin, her mouth warped into a fang-filled snarl. “Traitor!” she bellowed. She jumped back, ducked under a swing from Burin’s axe, and slashed upwards with her. The cut wasn’t deep, but a line of blood seeped from the dwarf’s left side. “You’re the one who made the deal!”
“FOR MY SOUL!” Burin roared with as much ferocity as a dragon. “NOT THE LITTLE GIRL’S!”
He released a hand from his axe and used it to shoot a spray of color at Greta. Greta threw her axe up into the air and changed, becoming a giant wolf. The wolf leapt sideways, avoiding the spray. She dug her teeth into the dwarf’s calf, knocking him onto his back. Then, before he could recover, she changed back, caught her axe, and rammed it straight down into his chest. After kicking his axe out of his hand for good measure, Greta leaned in whispered breathlessly to Burin, “Baba Yaga always gets what she’s owed. And right now, she’s owed one lost princess.”
She tore the axe out of him with a meaty squelch. As Burin’s eyes rolled back into his head, she nodded to Baba Yaga. “I promise you, Mistress, that I will find Emily Guiser.”
“See that you do,” the ancient witch replied. “She still has a very important, very tasty part to play.”
“I’m going to kill you!” I screamed, leaping at her. She glanced towards me, seeing me, and then lazily flicked a gnarled finger…
…And someone started whistling.
I opened my eyes and was instantly bombarded with the grinding of rusted gears. But unlike the whistling, the grinding was coming from inside my head. But that didn’t make sense. I glanced down at myself, and everything started making even less sense! First of all, I’d gone from being a ghost to being a crippled automaton! My body was made of bronzed metal. Both of my arms and legs were missing. I was lying on my side in debris-covered dirt. The gears in my head and my chest kept on grinding as I tried to turn myself over.
And then the whistling stopped, and a man’s voice commented, “Ooh! Great! Another robot.”
A pair of hands grabbed my by the shoulders and dragged me over to a large pile of mismatched slabs of metal, propping me up. The hands’ owner then hunkered next to me. He was a stocky man wearing a long, brown coat and big goggles on his forehead. As his coat moved, I spotted metal sections across his torso.
“You seem to be working,” he said with a noticeable accent. He reached into his coat and produced a small oil can. Without asking for my permission, he started lubricating my joints. He then touched my neck, forcing my head slightly to the side. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get my jaw to move. There was an odd sensation as he pressed a gloved finger into an indention in my neck, as if he were inspecting a wound.
“Ah. The key’s missing.”
With a look of determination, he ventured off. Now that I was upright, I could see that this whole world was just a giant junk heap. I spotted literal mountains of scrap metal off in the distance. The sky was dark yellow, as if filled with poisonous gas.
“Here we go!” the man laughed, running back over. He held up a clockwork key and then inserted it into my neck. Can’t believe I’m saying this, but it was better than any cup off coffee I’d ever had. The gears in my body turned double-time, including the ones in my neck and face.
“Uh,” I grunted, my voice echoing as if funneled through a metal tube. “Thanks?” I sighed, shaking my head. “This must be Hell. Sorry you got dragged into it, man.”
“Not Hell, I zink,” the man chuckled, using the oil can to lubricate my joints again. “More like a bad dream.”
“If the dead can dream, then yeah, I guess.”
“Well, I am not dead,” the man replied. “I was asleep.” He gestured to himself. “And now here I am.” He shrugged. “Must have walked into someone’s dream.”
I looked him over. His clothing reminded me of the type of stuff we saw back in the dream version of Lyriana’s home. A pang of remorse and rage filled up my clockwork heart as I recalled the sight of her frozen corpse. “Are you an O’Halloran or something?” I asked. “My friend could do dream stuff like that-Why are you laughing?”
“O’Halloran?” the man giggled, giving me the side-eye. “Surely you jest. I am no character from comic book. You are eizer wizard or inventor. Not both!”
It was my turn to give him the side-eye. “What the hell’s a comic book?”
The man set down the can. “Book with pictures,” he told me. “Nobody stays dead. Ze heroes always win.” He made a face. “Which I zink is bullshit.”
I laughed bitterly. “Well, not in this comic book. We won…But also lost. Bad.”
“I also know such experience,” said the man. “Let me find a seat and I shall hear your troubles.” He pulled over a discarded, eroded metal cube and took a seat. He gestured to himself again. “Tell Dr. Hertz.”
“Terry Guiser.” Instead of pouring my heart out, I asked, “This comic book stuff. If I’m just a character in one of those, does that mean that my life…everything I did, everything I went through, doesn’t matter?”
Hertz leaned back on his hands, looking thoughtful. “You must understand. There are many worlds. So many. Incan gods come from different worlds, and I beat zem up. And then I go to other world and beat up Vikings.” He made a scribbling gesture with his hand. “So, for all we know, your world is just a different world, and someone has the sight to write down your story.”
“So,” I said carefully, “by that logic, you’d be a ‘comic book’ character to me?”
“Is possible,” Hertz conceded. “Are you aware of String Theory?”
“Yes. But explain it to me anyway so that I know that you’re not wrong.”
He then rambled on and on, using big words and terms I’d never heard before. But, eventually, I cobbled enough of it together for it to jog a memory. “Oh, like that show on the magic mirror…Sliders? Watched some of while I repainted Zues with-”I jolted forward, nearly toppling onto my face. “EMILY!”
“Emily?” Hertz glanced around. “Zere is no one else here-”
“She’s my daughter,” I growled. “The dwarf messed up. Made some kind of deal. And now…now that bitch Greta’s after my daughter!”
I glanced down at my broken body. My metal shoulders sagged. “But I’m dead,” I whispered. I looked at Hertz. “And you can’t help her because when you wake up, you’re just gonna think that all of this was either a dream or comic book.”
He had the audacity to laugh. “If I remember at all.”
I looked him over. “You got kids, Hertz?”
“Doctor Hertz,” he corrected. And then, “No.”
“Wife?”
He considered it. “I got a woman…Let us say ‘accidental slave.’” He held up his hands. “It was eizer be claimed by me, or Viking rape.”
“At least you weren’t blackmailed into kidnapping a princess,” I said dryly.
“Who blackmailed you?”
“That same princess…And now I lost her. Again.”
Ah,” Hertz said, nodding. “Classic videogame blunder. You must always know where a princess is. Or she might be in another castle.”
“Sometimes I kind of wish she would have been in another castle,” I retorted darkly. “For her sake.”
“But zen you would have no daughter to raise together,” Hertz pointed out.
“Persephone-my wife, the princess-raised her. And my son, Toby.” I couldn’t stop the memories from coming back. But they were memories from before I’d “killed” Typhon. During our time on the farm. Or really… “I’m a murderer, Hertz-”
“Doctor Hertz”
“-not dad of the year. And eventually, once Toby came along, we had to settle down. My boss gave us a farm. Peaceful. Safe.” I hung my head. “Boring. Persephone wanted to be a hero, but she was okay with settling down up until the kids were old enough to adventure with us or go off on their own. But being on that farm was…I don’t know…like being in a giant, cozy coffin. All I had to relieve the boredom was tend to our goats,” I winced, “and chickens and work on my guns. I couldn’t shoot the guns ‘cause they’d make Toby cry. And Emily was so…girly. I lost count of how many times I had to stop myself from setting her dolls on fire after our play sessions…”
I leaned back against the heap, shaking my head. “When I was an assassin, I was out there. Making a difference. Or at least, it felt that way to me. Deciding which shitty people no longer deserved to live.” I scoffed. “How does that apply to raising kids? Look at me…I’m broken. And all I can do is hurt people with my pieces.”
Hertz shrugged. “It takes all kinds of aliens to invade. Sometimes you need hero to save everyone. Sometimes you need villain to kill alien. If you do not have heroes, you have no one to save, and why kill alien if there is no one to save. So what you must do, Terry, is find heroes and form symbiosis.
I considered his words. “That kind of make sense,” I conceded. “Me and Persephone did something like that…and we did okay. Let us survive against werewolves, vampires, and an angel’s cult at least.”
“See!” Hertz beamed, leaning in. “So you mention dwarf? Is he hero?”
“…………………………………………Yes.”
Hertz intertwined his fingers.
“So if you wish to save girl, you should find dwarf.”
I gritted my teeth with such force they cracked despite being made of metal. “.I really am in Hell,” I snarled. I rolled my eyes at Hertz. “But how am I supposed to do that?”
He stood up and gestured to all of me. “Well this is dream, so we really must find out how to wake you.”
I nodded down to where my legs should have been. “You think you can make something to give me the decency of being able to walk?”
He snapped his fingers. “I think I know just the thing!” He approached while reaching into his coat again. He then pulled out this glowing, green…thing. He hunkered down tore open a panel in my chest that I hadn’t noticed before. I spotted my metal heart and all of its whirring gears. “I must warn you,” Hertz said, prepared to drop the green thing into my body. “Zis is nuclear battery. And you appear…clockwork.”
Judging by his apologetic expression, I think I knew where he was going with this “So it’ll either fix me or blow me up?” I laughed humorlessly. “I’m already dead. I’m not even sure that you’re real, Hertz.”
“Doctor Hertz-”
“Hey, man. I got my PhD, too. So as a doctor, I don’t gotta call you doctor. Only basic people have to do that.”
He shot me an odd look. “I don’t zink zat’s how zat works.”
“Tough. Now shove it in me.”
Hertz did, slammed the panel shut, and immediately bolted for cover. I watched after him, unsure how to feel. I mean, I was already dead. Was there such a thing as “deader than dead?” Would I cease to exist from any and all planes of reality? Or-
Remember what I said about that key being better than any cup of coffee?
Scratch that.
Nuclear batteries are where it’s at!
Green energy surged into my metal body. Like a giant magnet, the energy pulled in random metal objects and bonded them to my stumps. And then a larger pieces attached itself to my chest. And then my head, creating a helm. But instead of being suffocating or blinding, I was suddenly able to see more clearly then ever before. The grinding gears in my head became a raging chorus. That chorus filled me with the strength to lurch forward, back onto brand new, shining feet.
With my newly improved (and green-tinged) sight, I became aware of movement all around me. But Hertz was gone. Maybe he’d finally woken up.
“Thanks, Doc,” I murmured. “If part of you can still hear me, try and remember this.” Green energy flowed into my back as metallic monstrosities rose all around me. They were big and ugly and here to keep the dead from waking up. “VIOLENCE SOLVES EVERYTHING!”
I flew up into the yellow sky, my arms turning into twin guns as I ascended. Green bullets burst from them, slamming into the monstrosities, making them go boom while I laughed maniacally! Boom! I wasn’t dead! BOOM! I was now more alive than I’d ever been! BOOM! A true machine of death! BOO-
So wake up, sleepy one. It’s time to save your world. You’re where the wild things are. Toy soldier off to war.
I bolted upright and immediately touched at my body. I wasn’t a ghost, or a robot. My super awesome Guns of Untold But Very Satisfying Destruction were gone! Replaced by dark-colored pajamas. I glanced around. Instead of an endless junkyard, I’d woken up whole and healed in a bed, in a room mostly made of polished steel. I say “mostly” because one wall was one giant window overlooking an endless black sky marred here and there with twinkling stars.
There was knock. I glanced over my shoulder at an oval-shaped door opposite the window.
“H-Hello?” I grunted, my mouth painfully dry.
And a frustratingly familiar, dwarfy voice called through the door, “Hello! Are you okay?”
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