Love in the Underground, Chapter Two

Phoenix Prime’s wings were the only source of illumination in a compact cave, where the tunnel through which the girls and Kral-it-Gor had entered branched off ahead into two. For some minutes the party had held still, until they were certain from the surrounding hush that they had not been followed.

“I’m becoming quite thankful you decided to join us,” Phoenix Prime remarked to her clone. “How do you come to know so much about this terrain?”

“Once as a child I was lost down ’ere, though it feels a lifetime ago,” Phoenix explained. “Not zat I see any way my knowledge can ’elp us now.”

“That must be the route around you mentioned,” said Phoenix Prime, indicating the larger of the two passages. “But it’s no use to us, of course, because those monsters are already ahead of us on that road. What about the other one, then?”

“It also leads to ze cave-exit by ze castle,” Phoenix replied. “But it is twice as long.”

She spoke in tones devoid of hope, and grimly Phoenix Prime nodded once, for she understood the reason why.

“The creatures have revealed their presence to us, and we got away from them,” she declared, putting it into words. “So they won’t bother with the merry chase of trying to hunt us down. They’ll head straight for the exit and wait for us, starving us out. We might have made it through the robots, but a horde like that…the most we could do is delay them.”

Kral-it-Gor turned to the wider tunnelmouth. “Then, Great Leader, it is clear what must be done,” were his rumbling words.

He was not quite correct at first. Only when Phoenix and Phoenix Prime looked on the upraised edge of his stone broadsword, and his shield-arm likewise bracing itself, and perhaps even some indefinable look of resolution that had fallen across the expressionless visage, did Kral-it-Gor’s meaning become clear to them too. He intended to be the delay. He was going to occupy Mucidor and his mob for as long as he was able, buying the girls time enough to evacuate via the long way around. And Kral-it-Gor fully apprehended all that that entailed.

“No,” said Phoenix Prime.

Within that single whispered word were more depths of emotion than Phoenix had known in the sum total of every other utterance that had issued from Phoenix Prime in her presence thus far. Gone at the same stroke were familiar scientific exactitude and bursts of raging passion, to make room for the anguished helplessness that had taken their place. All at once Phoenix realised that through Phoenix Prime’s long lonely years out in the cold she had encountered just one other sentient being she might have called friend. Now suddenly they found themselves living their last moments together.

Kral-it-Gor looked to Phoenix Prime, and if ever gentleness had been detectable in the voice of a rock-man, it was surely when next he spoke.

“This is our way, Great Leader. Or, it once was. Since the Retrograde Bomb, each rock-man fears he will age and wither. But before that blight, none of my nation doubted he would know his time when it came. I know that this is mine.”

Kral-it-Gor had to pause for several seconds. Philosophical treatises were not a rock-man speciality.

“This is our way,” he finally repeated, more slowly this time. “But perhaps, Great Leader, you dwelled too long among my race. To know only war, and to know it as both life and death… for a time, you believed that was your way too. But I do not think it ever was. Yours is a way that others must teach you now.”

And the eyes of stone rolled briefly to Phoenix, as if acknowledging her existence for the very first time. That one gazed back.

“Monsieur Kral-it-Gor, you do understand,” she breathed to him in awe.

One last commanding look from the stern face of stone fell upon Kral-it-Gor’s companions. Then he turned, and set off along the path he had chosen.

Scalding tears were streaming down Phoenix Prime’s cheeks and dropping with a steady hiss upon the sandy floor below. Phoenix in that moment was all but ready to take in her arms the one who previously had been determined on nothing short of her doom, but before she could move nearer to Phoenix Prime the latter looked fiercely up, shaking away the sizzling droplets that continued to flow. What blazed from the teeming eyes was an eloquent enough reminder for Phoenix that those who were left had a route to follow too, and time was everything now. Phoenix Prime’s hands gripped Carrie yet more tightly, as originator and clone made haste into the smaller tunnel together.

Mucidor and his fiends were slouching to the cave-exit when they heard the footfall boom out behind them. They turned, and there stood the hero of stone, sword and shield in hand and fearsome defiance etched in the very grain of him.

Gleeful reactions were immediate and unanimous. One of the Earthlings had been fool enough to come to them! In a dark flock the creatures doubled back, and seconds later Kral-it-Gor was at the centre of a ring made up of wicked hooded eyes that hungrily peered, and lolling mouths from which licked and flickered slimy tendril-tongues. The hulking shoulders of two of the beasts parted briefly to admit into the deadly arena their lord Mucidor, who stalked purposefully toward Kral-it-Gor with all three necks snaking. The two gladiators began to circle.

One of the heads shot out. Kral-it-Gor was faster and rounded its chops with the flat of his shield, buffeting it aside, but this left him unguarded against a second head that darted forth with eyes bulging and mouth agape. The lips locked down on Kral-it-Gor’s torso and sharp fangs gnashed furiously against rocky skin, but finding nothing that could be chewed or punctured the head darted back before Kral-it-Gor could get his broadsword to it. Mucidor hissed through all three mouths, coiling his necks, and swiftly adopted an alternative strategy.

His sinewy bulk of intertwined roots and creepers simply blew apart in a cloud of rancid spore. Before Kral-it-Gor could muster a response these grotesque tentacles had arced through the cavern airspace and converged again upon his frame, wrapping viciously fast about his stone biceps and calves and waist and armpits then wasting no time in setting down to the final crush. Kral-it-Gor gasped and sank to his knees, hearing and feeling stress-fractures cracking out a dozen faults along his hide. Mucidor, standing tall and cruel at the other end of the murderous vines, was gurgling three different gloats through his bobbing jabbering mouths. Without mercy the tendrils bore down, cutting into the ravines they had opened that they splintered and shattered ever wider, such that Kral-it-Gor’s stony musculature was on the verge of breaking apart.

Mucidor knew the laws of nature were working for him. His breed, through time and persistence and the steady implementation of decay, had always triumphed over Kral-it-Gor’s kind in the past.

This, however, was the first time a proponent of such fungal ideologies encountered a stone that fought back.

Summoning up the last of the strength that was in him, Kral-it-Gor threw himself lunging forward. Suddenly Mucidor’s outstretched tendrils were no longer taking the strain, but falling slack as a massive body rising upright sank into their mesh. Then before the mushroom-monster knew what had hit him, a knee like a small boulder drove several feet deep into the fleshy epidermis of his belly.

Explosions of putrid breath wheezed in triplicate from Mucidor’s mouths as he creased double. Kral-it-Gor wasted no time, and though his mighty sword-arm was now wracked with crevasses it was equal to bearing the keen-edged granite slab aloft, as its wielder turned in a roundhouse swing and clobbered one of the three heads clean from its stem.

Out of the truncated tube spurted a frothing geyser of vile greenish-yellow gunk, which as the neck thrashed and flapped its fatal convulsions turned into an out-of-control high-pressure hose, splattering Kral-it-Gor and the watching demons, daubing the cavern walls. Screams and shrieks more appalling than any that had yet resounded on Planet Earth were issuing from the two mouths that remained, and the tentacles rushed madly at Kral-it-Gor again, this time plunging their tips into the wounds they had already opened then bulging to twice their girth inside the rock-man. This time jagged shards and rainfalls of gravel were loosed, and Kral-it-Gor threw back his head, knowing there was nothing that could heal him after such agonies as these. But once again he came on, this time with the sword level in both hands, though it could not but tremble a little by now. Its point thrust through Mucidor’s chest and out the other side as the twain drew together in a terminal clinch, Kral-it-Gor’s stumbling weight pushing the writhing Mucidor back against the cave wall. And when the rough circular plane of the rock-man’s shield hammered that same craggy surface to absorb the impact of his tonnage, Kral-it-Gor made certain another of Mucidor’s heads was in its way. With a moist popping bang, brains and goo redecorated the cliff-face over a six-foot radius.

The ululating screeches were by now chokes and rasps from the one remaining head as Mucidor slid down the sword-blade and buckled to the ground, kicking and spitting and spurting out slime. Kral-it-Gor, weary, battle-ravaged, whirled his sword round and about once, twice, and then dropped to a kneel for the last time. His weapon speared Mucidor through the third and final face to embed itself in the floor behind, and thus Kral-it-Gor pinned the convulsing bawling frenzy of mycological death-throes until at long last all was still.

Then the rock-man, crumbling and fissured but with sword still in hand, slowly rose to his full height again and turned to the watching demon-horde.

They looked back on him, and even monstrosities such as they found they had reason to pause. The superior contempt they had felt before the battle was gone now. Thus far they had been content to assume that everything on this strange distant world was soft and weak. Not once had Mucidor’s huntsmen supposed they would find a worthy adversary here. Now however, as they gazed upon Kral-it-Gor broken-bodied but unbowed, the denizens of The Back Garden knew there was as least one creature on Planet Earth as terrible as they.

It was therefore in a spirit of respect and brotherhood, such as demons seldom feel, that they surged on him as one.

Kral-it-Gor gave voice to a battle-cry that would split mountainsides, and with sword upraised laid into the legions as the tide crashed home. Severed claws and heads flew to every corner of the cavern while the backs of the beasts jostled for a place at the vanguard, gradually diminishing the circle in which Kral-it-Gor warred, carrying unto him the shadow that was part of the foe themselves. Dust thrown up by this stampede was rising, shrouding the scene as if in banks of cloud, until finally, inevitably, cloud and shadow and jostling backs were all that was left of the world.

And so it came to pass that there, in the caves far beneath the city of Nottingham, did the last warrior of the rock-men die.

The airborne galleon Henry Martin was standing off above a district of dilapidated warehouses. By the carved wooden railing stood Carmilla Neetkins, beautiful in her figure-hugging Four Heroes costume, and the many-armed orange-skinned cyclops Degris whose psychic powers were steering the sky-ship. The two friends had forged their way through the Future Fighter breach to bring much-needed aid to the City Centre, whereupon Degris’s attention was alerted by a telepathic signal that the darkness of night could not obscure.

“Caught a glimpse of them when they passed under that one lamppost that’s still working,” he said to Carmilla. “Definitely Flashtease, though I’d already sensed that. But this time I saw the other guy too. Same lightning-bolt uniform, and Flashtease was helping him. So we might as well put aside those hopes we had for a nice unambiguous kidnapping.”

Carmilla’s silence told Degris she had resigned herself to as much already. He put one of his numerous hands on her shoulder.

“We saw in the very first skirmish that Flashtease’s people had joined the Solidity,” Degris reminded her gently. “Probably ought to have taken a minute right there to stop and think what that meant for his loyalties, not that we had much chance. And we didn’t even know what we later learned from Steam, about just how much the kid had already been through by then. The minute I detected him and his buddy together, I think you and I both knew what this really was.”

Carmilla gave a strange smile. Strange, because there was nothing but sadness in it.

“I so wanted this to be about swooping heroically in to pluck our little friend’s yellow pants out of the bad guy’s clutches,” she declared. “Long ago, we wouldn’t have hesitated to do just that. But there’s nothing in this situation that necessarily makes us the heroes anymore.”

“Planet Earth doesn’t get to cite saving Flashtease from himself,” Degris agreed solemnly. “That’s a privilege Gala robbed us of.”

His companion looked sadder still. “There’s something else you and I both know, Degris,” she went on. “This isn’t as simple as blaming ourselves because we’re not able to give him a proper send-off. We’re at war. We can’t let one of our side go over to theirs, knowing everything he knows about us. If this really is what it looks like, then it’s just become our duty to stop Flashtease in the name of the Collective and our mission.”

“Here was I thinking I couldn’t feel any lousier than I did just now,” stated the other.

“Tell me about it,” Carmilla replied. “I’m so sick of war, Degris. That sweet, brave little boy, who did so much for us…and now, just as a finishing touch to the warm welcome our world gave him in return, we’re wrapping up with betrayal from the ones he used to call his friends.”

As there was no rejoinder to this that Degris or any of their faction could rightfully supply, he glanced beyond the prow and announced instead:

“Those warehouse roofs don’t look like they’d bear the Henry Martin. We’ll need a minute to find somewhere else to set down…so however we’re going to play this, we have to agree on it now.”

Carmilla turned to him. She took a deep breath.

END OF CHAPTER TWO