The Siege Against Tolkeen

The man sat in a hard plastic chair, which was wet with a strange, sticky stuff he prayed was merely water. He inserted a large coin into a slot in the wall in front of him, causing a metal plate to slide up. It exposed a window of thick bulletproof glass, and showed the man what lay behind the wall.

Half a dozen strange, tentacled creatures writhed and gyrated for his viewing pleasure, totally devoid of any clothing. They pressed their bodies up to the glass, showing him their strange, grey-green sexual organs. A piping, monotonous flute solo began to play over cheap loudspeakers in the room.

"The human's back," one of the D-Bee women whispered to the others, in a dialect of Dragonese.

"Weirdo," said one of the others in the same language, while shaking her tentacles towards the window of a customer of her species. The women were all aliens known as Gergelleg, and the club tended to attract Gergelleg men. The only non-Gergellegs who had ever come in were a couple of dwarves who had thought that the place was a bar and promptly left, and the human, who came in about once a month.

The human began to move his lips, but no sound came out. He looked up at the women with a strange type of hunger and hate. They dance with the devil, he thought to himself. Satan lives inside their hideous heads, and tells them what they want. He tells them to destroy God's Chosen.

"You want some of this, honey?" one of the Gergellegs said, writhing in front of the human's window. He stared at her, at her hypnotic movements and rhythm, while the maddening flute played in the background. Then, his time expired, and the metal plate slid down.

The human walked out of the club and into the filth-ridden streets outside, where a dirty rain was falling. He reached inside a pocket of his baggy raincoat, and closed his hand around the handle of a vibro-knife. Adjusting his hood and sunglasses, he walked around into a side alley, and stood by the back entrance. The door was locked, but the human easily pulled the flimsy doorknob off.

I must rid Earth of Satan, the man thought, as he stepped inside. He yanked the shiv out of its holster, feeling it shake in his hands. This is my duty, he thought.

An oversexed Gergelleg male walked into the club about two hours later. He took a moment of brush the rain off of his cloak, and then sat down in one of the chairs. It was dark, so he didn't notice the blood stains on the walls, or the shattered glass and tiny gobbets of grey-green flesh on the floor. He merely inserted his coin and watched the metal plate glide up, as he had done dozens of times.

But inside, behind the wall, he saw a scene of horror previously unimaginable to him. Blood lay in puddles on the floor, and the dancers lay strewn about the room, in unidentifiable chunks and pieces of flesh and bone. And the man found himself unable to do anything but scream.

Hearing distant screams, Perrin strode among the ruins of Chi-Town. Corpses of women and children were everywhere, strewn over chunks or rubble, their poor bodies broken and shattered. An eclipse devoured the sun, and billowing grey clouds of mist absorbed all warmth. Perrin found himself trapped in a cold, dark wasteland.

"Oh, God, please help us!" shrieked a familiar female voice. Jack turned and saw his wife, alive again! She and Kerner and all his friends from the old mechanized squad were there, but something was not right. They were running. They were afraid.

"What is it, honey?" Perrin asked, sprinting towards his wife, with something in his gut telling him that something was terribly wrong and evil. Then, he saw them. Demons. There were about sixteen of them, but it was hard to count them. Jack's brain seemed to be filled with a strange mental static, making it impossible to remember much or think much.

The hideous monsters swooped in on black wings of horrific, rotting leather, hairy arms outstretched, claws dripping with venom. Their faces were the worst of all, horrid parodies of human faces, with blackened, rotting skin barely covering twisted and gnarled skulls. Two of Perrin's fleeing friends were caught, pulled up into the air, and pulled apart.

Dozens more of the monsters began swooping in, screaming harsh, grating war-cries. They surrounded Perrin and his friends, circling in the air, or walking towards them on the ground, leering and laughing.

"Stay the fuck away!" screamed Perrin. But the monsters did not heed his cry. They attacked, a mad horde of evil and magic. The air was filled with their bestial screams of triumph as they tore apart Jack's friends, claws rending flesh or pulling off limbs. Strangely enough, none of them went after Perrin.

"Get the hell away from me!" howled Perrin, running back and forth and gesturing madly at the demons, trying to chase them away. This time, the creatures obliged him, leaping backwards away from him. They stared at him confidently, laughing and screaming, as jack stared at his dying friends. He cradled his disemboweled wife in his hands as the creatures began moving in again to finish their grisly work.

Suddenly, the air was filled with lasers. The demons were caught in beams of red laser and atomized, their molecules scattered to the wind. Mini-missiles began bursting in the air, taking out dozens of flying demons. And a horde of spindly, ebony skeletons began to move in, eyes glowing red. Their toothy mouths grinned with malicious pleasure as they attacked.

A grid of laser beams cut through the air, some of them finding demons, some of them finding Perrin's friends, and some of them finding nothing. Humans and demons alike were slain by the gunfire. Elizabeth Perrin was knocked out of her husband's arms by a rail gun burst.

"What are you doing?" yelped Perrin as the skeleton warriors swooped over the demons, killing man and beast alike with vibro-swords and laser pistols. Before Jack even knew what was happening, he was the only one left. One of the skeleton raiders knocked him to the ground, and held a humming vibro-knife to his throat. The killer pulled off his helmet, to reveal the man beneath.

And Perrin found himself staring into his own maddened eyes.

He woke up screaming, bathed in his own sweat.

Perrin realized that he was in a clean bed with sheets and a fluffy pillow, instead of in the torture chamber he thought that he would be in. His head was bound tightly with a bandage, and a network of IV lines slowly pumped murky fluids into his right forearm. His vision was much better, although he was still a little dizzy.

A few men stood by his bedside. They were clearly not his doctors, though. One of them was an extremely large man, over seven feet in height, and as bulky as a football player. One of his arms was bionic, and a handful of wires and plugs were interspersed around his head, like a crown of thorns. He stood by the door with a bulky particle beam rifle cradled in his arms.

Another was a slim, diminutive man with crazed eyes and a shaved head. He wore a tight white T-Shirt and baggy blue jeans with a pair of shoulder holsters. "The guy's up," grunted the skinhead.

"Yeah," agreed a third man, a slim, bespectacled fellow with a wild mane of blond hair. This man had no weapon save for a throwing knife holstered on his belt. He wore a suit and carried a leather briefcase, and seemed like an oddity next to two headhunters.

Suddenly, a hand came up from the side to adjust the IV line. Perrin turned his head and saw an elderly, balding man in a white lab coat crouched at the bedside, using one hand to adjust the tubing and another to hold a soda can. He interrupted his work for a moment to take a drink.

"Did I say you could drink, you old shit!" thundered the skinhead, kicking the soda out of the old man's hand. The punk pulled out one of his holstered automatic pistols, and held it to the doctor's forehead. "Next time you stop working on this guy, I'm going to blow your fucking brains out."

Perrin looked up at the other two men, hoping that they would say or do something to stop the maniac. Instead, they laughed. Perrin felt his blood boiling, and for a moment pondered the irrational action of trying to grab the skinhead's other gun.

"Where the hell am I?" asked Perrin, as the whimpering old man got back to work. "Who are you guys?"

"We're members of the Human Freedom Association," explained the man in glasses. "It's basically the local resistance movement. We were VERY excited when we heard about your...arrival in Tolkeen."

"Why?" asked Perrin, utterly bewildered.

"You're with the Coalition, of course! You can be our liaison with them, tell us what Emperor Prosek wishes for us to do."

"You're out of luck, buddy. I don't even know how I can contact those bozos anymore, let alone get orders from them."

The skinhead leaned over Jack, fury beginning to cloud the young punk's face. "Wrong answer," he growled, his warm, fetid breath crawling into Perrin's nostrils. "Because if you can't help us, then we've no reason to let you live."

The other two suddenly aimed their weapons at the thug. "Back off, Tommy," said the large man, in a voice like glass being crushed. "Freedom's the only one who can make that decision, and you know it." The skinhead realized that he was outgunned, and grudgingly walked to the other side of the small hospital room.

"Now, what about the burster?" asked Perrin. "He's the one who saved me."

Next Chapter

By David Haendler.

Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998 David Haendler. All Rights Reserved.

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