“It means you still got a lot of work to do, Major. You found the aliens. Now you gotta find a way to stop ’em.”
“But how, Cookie? How?”
Cookie tapped his temple. “You just gotta use your head.”
“My head is fucked up,” Karnage said. “I still see things, Cookie. Things from—” Karnage cut himself short before he could finish the thought.
“It’s okay,” Cookie said. “You can say it here. The War.”
Karnage cringed, ready for the visions to explode in his head. But nothing happened. No fire. No chaos. No pain. Just peace. He nearly wept.
“You’re not crazy, Major,” Cookie said. “You got a good handle on things. Better than any of ’em would have thought. But you’re not done yet. You still got a ways to go.” The squiggles on Cookie’s arms grew brighter and hotter. They twined around Karnage’s fists, now so hot they burned his skin. He tried to pull away, but they wouldn’t let go. They twined up his arms.
“What’s happenin’, Cookie?”
“It’s time for you to go, Major.”
“Go where?”
“You’ll see.” The squiggles grew brighter. They washed everything out into a fierce, pulsing green. The squiggles pulled Karnage’s hands from Cookie’s arms, and Karnage tumbled backwards, falling through the ever thickening tangle of squiggles. As he fell, Cookie’s voice floated down to him through the distance:
“We’re with you, Major. Every one of us. We’re with you….”
CHAPTER TWO
Karnage slowly drifted up into consciousness.
His entire body felt weightless. He waited for the dream-like feeling to dissipate.
It didn’t.
The burning stench of pinkstink and hoverballs filled his nostrils. He opened his eyes. They were met with a stinging yellow mist. Karnage gasped and coughed, struggling to breathe the toxic air. He could barely see his hand in front of his face. He reached out. His fingers hit a smooth concave surface. He ran his hands across, feeling out how the surface arched and curved around him, enveloping him in a compact sphere. He felt like he was trapped inside a hoverball.
Karnage punched the walls of the sphere. His Sanity Patch buzzed “Frothy Cream” as the entire sphere rocked forward, tilting and listing. Karnage braced his hands and feet against the walls of the sphere, trying to right himself. The sphere stopped listing. Bracing with his other limbs, Karnage lifted a foot and kicked hard into the sphere. Cracks bloomed out under his boot and the sphere jerked down. His Sanity Patch crooned “Sandy Dreams.” He lifted his leg, and kicked into the cracks. His foot smashed through. The yellow smoke poured out through the hole, and the sphere plummeted.
It crashed into a hard surface, shattering everywhere. Karnage coughed as thick plumes of yellow smoke puffed out of his lungs. It tasted worse than it smelled. He retched and gagged until nothing but spit came out. Throat raw and nostrils burning, he felt like he’d been breathing hot ash. He lay against the floor trying to catch his breath and draw in clean air, but the stench lingered. Finally, he pulled himself to his feet.
He stood in a gleaming metal chamber that was all angles. Thick translucent tubes wound across the walls, creating squiggling patterns. Green light flowed through the tubes with the occasional blip of white streaked through the green. The lights pulsed and flowed like blood pumping through veins. Karnage touched one of the squiggles. The white bursts spun around his fingers a moment, as if scanning them, then sped off. He felt the heat of each green pulse. This is it, he thought. The belly of the beast.
The path of the squiggles was interrupted by an arched doorway large enough to fit a commuter train. The door looked to be made of a spiral of roughly hewn blades. The squiggles cut a path around the door, collecting around a nodule of translucent spheres that throbbed and fluttered in time with the light passing through it. Support beams in the shape of talons flowed up the walls into the curved ceiling. Pearl-coloured spheres hovered above him, nestled together in the apex of the ceiling’s curvature.
As light glowed fiercely around the door and collected in the nodule, the blades of the door spiralled open. Karnage pressed himself up against the wall. His heart beat in his chest. He was about to get his first glimpse of an alien. Another pearl-coloured sphere floated into the room, and the door closed behind it. The sphere began to rise towards the ceiling. As it did so, a dark shape floated down against the side of the sphere. It was human. Karnage awkwardly made a grab at the sphere, pulling it back down so he could peer inside. The human shape touched the side of the sphere, and Karnage saw the face of the person inside. It was Sydney. Her eyes were closed. Her knees were curled up to her chest, her arms gently wrapped around them. She looked like she was sleeping.
Karnage braced the sphere on the floor and banged on it with his fists. “Captain! Captain, can you hear me?!”
She didn’t respond.
Karnage heard a crack-hiss behind him. He turned and saw a wooden matchstick floating before the door, its freshly struck flame flickering. Above the match and to its right floated an unlit cigar. The match rose up, and kissed the end of the cigar. The end glowed to life as unseen lungs inhaled. Grey curls of smoke blew out around the cigar, as an explosion of colours flowed and poured like liquid across an unfamiliar silhouette.
The colours settled and receded to reveal a seven-foot-tall insect with a squid for a head. The cigar sat nestled in a quivering fringe of small tentacles that covered its mouth. A pair of longer tentacles hung from the creature’s temples like sidecurls. One of the side tentacles held the lit match, which shook it out. Its bony arms clutched a gnarled spear with a surface covered in squiggly carvings. Green energy pulsed along the grooves.
Karnage’s body tingled. Here he was: finally face to face with an alien! It was more alien than Karnage could have imagined. Squigglier than he could possibly have imagined. He did his best to suppress a gleeful grin. “Well, ain’t you one ugly lookin’ squidbug,” The squidbug turned an eye towards Karnage as it puffed on its cigar. Its pupil was a long squiggle smeared across a mottled eyeball. It took a drag on its cigar, plucked it out of its mouth with a side tentacle, and tossed it away. It flicked the wrists of its bony claws, and the spear glowed. Green energy crackled across its surface, collecting around the bulbous head. The squidbug’s skin darkened to a deep crimson, and it thrust the spear forward. A sizzling ball of green shot out at Karnage.
Karnage side-stepped the blast. He could feel its electric charge pull at the hairs on his skin. The ball collided with the wall and disappeared, leaving a smoking black crater. Karnage dove forward and grabbed the shaft of the squidbug’s spear. He slammed it up into the squidbug’s mouth. It made a loud clack on impact. The squidbug lost its grip on the spear as it staggered back. Karnage’s neck buzzed as the Sanity Patch upgraded to Daffodil.
The squidbug let out an indignant screech. It pressed itself against the wall. Its skin changed colour, pulsing and flowing through different shades and patterns until it had blended perfectly into the wall, disappearing from view.
Karnage charged with the spear as the squidbug vanished, hitting nothing but wall and nearly jarring the spear out of his hands. The Sanity Patch crooned “Citrus Blast” as he stumbled backward. Somewhere behind him he heard a squiggly screech that sounded far too much like laughter for his liking. He spun around and squinted his eyes, trying to catch any hint of the beast. CRACK! A tentacle shot out and caught Karnage across the jaw.