Free Beyond the Veil by Tim Marquitz Page B

aimed the pistol in my left hand at his crotch and winked. He hunkered
down to cover his nuts with the armor and his hands, having seen what I’d done
to the last alien. That was fine since it was all a feint, anyway. I pressed my
other gun against the top of his head. This close, the helmet would need to be
made of Bill Clinton’s ego to shrug off the shot.
    It wasn’t.
    Steel warped and tore away, and the alien
slumped, a waterfall of brains and blood spurting downward to stain his chest. His
spear fell at his side, unused.
    A gunshot that wasn’t mine drew my focus
from the corpse. The big alien, more leopard than cuddly zebra, fired over the
crowd at Longinus. The ex-Anti-Christ cleaved through one of the others just
before the shot ripped into his arm. He hissed as the bullet cut a groove
across his biceps and careened off his ribs as he spun away. The look he gave
would have puckered assholes even in a bathhouse, but big boy must have been a
special kind of dense. He just giggled and stood there, at the rear of the
pack, cranking the lever of his gun back into place. Several of the little folks
leapt at Longinus while he was distracted. They hacked and slashed, yanking his
attention away from the gunner who hadn’t forgotten about Longinus. The alien clacked the chamber home and aimed. I
shot first…a couple of times.
    The rounds hit him square in the side and
knocked him over. He fell out of sight behind the others. His gun spit its smoking
wad into the air as he went, but I wasn’t given a chance to see if I’d killed
him. Another Felurian dove at me, trying to skewer me on his spear. He missed
by about a half inch. The sharpened point hissed by, and I locked my right elbow
over the shaft, pinning the weapon against my ribs. I grinned and shot him in
the shin. The Felurian screamed as I fired into his other leg. He dropped, and
I let his spear go, driving my knee into his chin, just below the facemask. The
alien grunted as he went out. I put a bullet in his neck to be sure and then
yanked the sword from my shoulder. It stung as it pulled free, but it wasn’t
too bad. With it out of the wound, I’d heal up quick enough. The skin already
tingling, I glanced over at Longinus.
    Bodies lay scattered all around him, but
there was something different about the way he fought. He’d leapt into the fray
quickly enough, even confidently, but I hadn’t noticed how sluggish he seemed
before. There should have been nothing but dripping corpses left by now, but
there were still a bunch of the enemy throwing themselves at him. A quick head
count told me the majority of the aliens had gone after him. He certainly
looked the scarier out of the two of us, but why would anyone leave the demon
with ranged weapons for last? It didn’t make sense.
    Or maybe it did.
    A light went off. As rough as the journey
to God’s plane was, Longinus had been protecting me. That was what the dread
fiend blood was for. He didn’t need it to power the gate, but had used it so he could use his own energies to
buffer the impact of the trip on me. Despite it, he was exhausted and drained
of his magic, and we weren’t getting shit from the Felurians in the way of soul
transfers. That’s when it hit me.
    Longinus had come here thinking we would be
dealing with demons and angels, magical snack packs he could use to refuel and
heal his wounds with, but we’d been dumped onto the barren planet of doom. These
folks we were fighting were nothing like Xyx. They were the indigenous species
of Feluris. They might as well be human for all the power they wielded. That’s
why Gorath was plundering the last of the magical resources.
    Weaker than Longinus before he’d come
through the gate, all that time spent in the containment case, he was probably
sucking wind. Longinus had to have thought of that and probably figured he’d
still be the stronger of the two even after all the mileage. It didn’t look
like he counted on Gorath having minions already.