CHAPTER 25: ONE MEAN PUSSY

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, Mandy thought, as she stumbled again, her body not working as well as she was used to it working. And she was dizzy. That too. But it was the apocalypse and she wasn’t dying in bed so fuck it. She took a deep breath of the frosty air, steadied herself, and kept going. The Ranger and his beefy Marine buddy had moved all the vehicles they could move away from the boulder and the buildings and the potential of landslides, just in case of another earthquake, and getting to them with a throbbing leg and approximately four pints of blood loss was slowing her down more than she thought it would.

Or maybe that was the concussion. She tried to remember whether or not disorientation and a rosily-positive view of one’s own physical abilities in times of dire medical distress and end-of-the-world earth changes were signs of brain damage.

Actually, now that she thought about it, she was pretty sure they were signs of brain damage…

Oh well. At least she was going down on her feet. Screw that liquids and bed-rest stuff. That was for chumps.

Mandy found the three Hummers and six SUVs parked out on a lonely, flat-topped hill in the middle of nowhere about ten minutes’ walk from the lodge. It had started out snowing lightly, the flakes getting bigger as she went, until she was finding it harder to see more than a hundred feet in front of her.

Decorated Martial Artist Freezes to Death in Blizzard Two Hundred Feet from Shelter, Mandy thought, writing her own headline. Mimoto was advised by the doctor to stay indoors—went mountain-climbing instead. Memorial will be held at the Hatcher’s Pass Ski Resort, Cabin #8. Organizers have requested that visitors please donate all funds for would-be flowers to charity, in respect for the intense allergies of the corpse in life.

Just thinking of flowers was making her nose itch. Or was that the cold? Or brain damage? Mandy squinted at the sky again. At least it was snow and not ash. Ash brought with it maggots. Snow was just liquid life. Damn, she was thirsty again. She should’ve grabbed that pitcher of water as she was stumbling past the blind twink, but she’d been pretty worried he would try to stop her, so she wanted to keep her undamaged hand free as she slipped past him.

Was suspicion and paranoia a sign of brain damage, too?

She glanced down at her fucked-up fist, now wrapped in gauze and antibiotic ointments. The doc had looked her in the eyes and said she’d need surgery or amputation. She’d looked him in the eyes and told him she’d put her hand through his abdomen and tear out his spleen if he tried. She couldn’t, of course, but modern-day anime and superhero movies had done an awesome job of putting the fear of martial arts in the minds of white and blue-collar crackers everywhere.

Hell, even if it healed into a claw, she wasn’t cutting it off. Claws were cool. Scars were cool. They reminded badass Rangers that their baddass Ranger buddy died trying to fuck her.

Take that, female spiders. All she needed now was to get caught eating the guy and all those white pretty boys would really give her a wide berth—hell, maybe that big dumb beefcake would even shit his pants enough to let her fuck him for fun now and then. She’d always wondered what it would be like to ride a pole like that. Sheeeit, it was probably at least a foot long, judging by the bulge he didn’t bother trying to hide. Or maybe it was elephantiasis of the balls. She’d seen that. Not a pretty sight.

Was she brain damaged? She was definitely a little light-headed.

Spider. That was a cool name. Since it was the Apocalypse and she could call herself anything she wanted, why not Spider? Or Black Widow? Well, aside from the obvious fact that she was olive, not black, but who cared about that? She could wear black combat gear and black boots, maybe even a cute little black skullcap…

Local Martial Artist Becomes Hero of the Apocalypse. There could even be a little picture of her side-kicking some six-foot dude in the chin. Maybe that Ranger dude.

Mandy realized she’d been standing next to the Humvees for several minutes, thoroughly engaged in imagining herself a black-clad badass with a red hourglass emblazoned on her black leather jacket, fighting aliens and vanquishing evil in the apocalypse, and sheepishly realized that was probably Bad.

Maybe that doctor knew what he was talking about, she thought, considering it carefully.

Then she discarded it. Everyone else had died—why not her?

She carefully—because, while she was probably dying of a brain hemorrhage like her rapist friend, who was even now buried in a snowbank, she didn’t have to hurt while doing it—hauled herself into one of the Humvees one-handed and yanked the door shut, favoring her stitched-up side. She began warming the glow plugs as she sat there, thinking. Spider had a cool sound to it, kinda like something out of a comic book. She’d always loved comic books as a kid, regardless of how much her parents hated them and thought of them as wastes of valuable productive childhood free time that should instead be used to practice karate and prove to the world that Japanese really were better at their own art form.

Sigh. She started the engine, thinking she actually did like the name. Spider Mimoto. Kinda had a ring to it. She turned on the lights, which blazed into the falling snow, and was just putting the vehicle into reverse when something dark flashed across her headlights, headed down the hill.

For a moment, she thought maybe she’d mis-seen something. She was alone out here on the slopes. Big animals usually didn’t wander this high in the winter—nothing for them to eat. Unless maybe that earthquake had shaken a bear out of hibernation…

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Or maybe it was the girl!

Mandy—Spider?—rolled down the window and leaned out. “Hey Kelsey?” she called into the drifting snow. “You out there?”

Nothing. Not even the wind broke the diesel rumble of the Hummer.

“Kelsey!” she called. “You find your cat?” She thought she’d told the girl to go down the mountain, not up the mountain, but maybe wires had somehow gotten crossed in the middle of bleeding to death. She certainly felt a little loopy. She wondered if the doc had slipped her a drug or three while she wasn’t paying attention.

When the girl didn’t respond, Mandy considered turning off the vehicle, going through the effort of climbing out and trudging through the snow to go check it out in person.

Too much effort, she thought. Despite common misconceptions, gravely-wounded five-foot Asian chicks weren’t compelled to get out of warm, safe military vehicles on the off-chance she had just seen a cute little girl, completely ignoring the higher chance that she’d just seen some unpleasant incarnation of an alien space-maggot. Thus, she had pulled herself back inside and was in the middle of rolling up her window when the gunmetal-blue, two-and-a-half-foot-long thing launched itself at her from the ground, scrabbled up the Humvee door, and got stuck in her window, four toothy jaws gnashing at the air inches above her scalp.

“Shit!” Mandy shouted, automatically smacking at it with a gloved hand. It bit her hand, ripped the glove off, and shook it like a rag doll before eating it, polyester and all.

Seeing that, Mandy had a moment of double-take, then her fuzzy mind snapped into focus. One Handed Martial Artist Loses Second Hand to Alien Grub, Learns to Eat with Feet. Beside the headline, she got a picture of herself holding up a cereal bowl with both feet and smiling cheerfully for the camera, a clawed hand tight in withered atrophy on the left and a hook on the right.

Plan B.

Mandy yanked out the knife that the Ranger had given her off his dead buddy—instead of a gun, she noted—and started stabbing the squirming thing between the beady blue eyes.

It was the wrong move.

No sooner had she stabbed it than it started draining purple-white fluids all over the window, door, and driver’s side of the car, setting the glass, upholstery, and steel on fire.

Seeing her blade dissolve in her hands, her eyes went wide and she dropped it. “Holy—” Then that honed reporter instinct kicked in and Mandy lunged to the opposite side of the vehicle and rolled to the ground, bumping, shredding, and grinding every wound she had in her tumble out the other side. The creature, however, was already falling through the former floor of the vehicle, dying, but leaving a swath of melted metals in its wake. It hit the ground writhing, then, like a bug that had been pinned to a wall, went still.

Very slowly, heart hammering like a jackhammer, Mandy worked her way around the ruined Hummer to get a better look at what had just tried to eat her. The driver’s side of the vehicle dripped melting metals that were even then re-hardening into little patties on the ground around the boiling puddle of alien burning a hole into the ground.

Upon inspection, Mandy saw it wasn’t maggot, like the others had claimed they’d seen. It had legs and a head, and its skull was shaped like that dagger that the doctor said was some sort of alien radio, long and narrow, coming to a sort of arrowhead where it connected to the spine, with Triceratops-like ridges splayed out and back to protect the neck.

Even then, the entire body was starting to sink into the ground, melting the snow and earth around it in a wave of purple fire.

Reporter Destroys Only Vehicle In Apocalypse, Is Shunned By Society.

Seeing her only proof that she didn’t do something stupid like blow up the gas tank was going to sink out of sight, Mandy hastily grabbed the first solid thing she could find from the back of the Humvee—the tire iron—and went back and quickly flipped the skull out of the melted pit the bleeding body was making and onto the ground, where it smoked in the snow. The blue-black skin around it had started to lose its luster and melt away, leaving the same translucent crystal that she had seen in the ‘dagger’ back at the cabin.

Eventually, once they stopped smoking, she nudged them with her boot, then, when her boot didn’t melt or catch fire, she gingerly picked one up.

It was a jawbone, sure as shit.

So they really were dealing with baby dragons. That was cool. And scary. She wondered if she could catch one when it was small, raise it, train it, and ride it around like Daenerys Stormborn.

Why the hell not, right?

Local Beastmaster Lives the Targaryen Dream. A picture of her posing with one foot up on the leg of a placid silver dragon, looking cool for the camera.

Maybe she could name him Duke, get him one of those cool spike collars. Or make one. She’d probably have to make one.

Sniffing, Mandy glanced around her at the falling snow, saw no other darkened shapes slithering out in the drifts, and picked up the translucent pieces of bone. They clinked like crystal when they tapped each other, but didn’t shatter when she threw them haphazardly into the passenger seat of the second Humvee.

Climbing in after them, she got her wounded body situated as best as she could, then started the vehicle and headed down the hill to look for the wayward brat.

By this time, the still-warm bones of a baby dragon riding in her passenger seat, Mandy didn’t really expect the kid to be alive, so she was shocked when she got close to the jumbled mass of flotsam and heard screaming. She quickly shut off the engine and grabbed the Triceratops skull, thinking to use it as a fireproof beat-stick.

“Mean, no!” Kelsey was shouting, waving a broken stick at something just out of sight over the hump of debris. “Leave it! Leave! Bad kitty! Bad!”

Thinking she definitely had this, Mandy threw open the Humvee door and went charging up the helter-skelter jumble of tsunami trash to save the little girl’s kitten from the alien space maggot. She rushed past the little girl, thinking to stab the eeeebil bug and prove herself a hero…

…when a twelve-foot lizard lifted its head over the heap to greet her, jaws wide in a lung-rumbling roar of pain, a striped brown tabby cat glued to the space between its eyes like a demonic beanie.

Mandy stumbled back down the pile of debris, dropping down beside a frozen dead guy, heart hammering about a million beats per second.

That’s a dragon, she thought, blinking blindly at the Humvee as she re-evaluated her life.

“Here,” the little girl said, hastily handing her a broken stick. “You’ve gotta save my cat!”

Mandy looked at the stick, which had obviously been woodchipped by something larger than a saber-toothed cat, then up at the girl holding it out to her expectantly. Reporter Goes Toe-to-Toe with Dragonling, Dies Spectacularly… “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“But Mean’s gonna die,” the girl whimpered. And it was really pitiful, too, kind of heartbreaking in a way. Mandy tentatively glanced back over the edge of the debris to where the dragonling and the cat were still duking it out in a screaming hail of thrashing wood and splinters.

She looked back at the girl’s stick, then down at the pointy fireproof skullcap in her hand. “I guess I could try making a spear…”

It occurred to her that that was probably the brain damage talking. Then she saw the headline. Local Martial Artist Bravely Annihilates Dragon With Spear…

Oh fuck yes. That shit was happening! Still a little dizzy with blood-loss, Mandy yanked the chewed-up stick from the girl’s hand and went looking for some rope…