Free Monsters Win Wars: A Novella by Edward Punales Page B

around. He hadn’t
heard it as it’d touched onto the ground, hadn’t heard as it snuck
up behind him. It stood seven feet tall, and was clad in all black.
Its long arms and legs stuck out from a small torso. It had the
physique of an acrobat; gangly limbs on a skinny body. A thick
carbon-fiber helmet with a black visor covered its head.
    The only part of its body that wasn’t covered
was its hands. They were green and scaly, with three long, twelve
inch digits that ended in curved lizard claws that had been stained
with blood.
    The solider looked down at the thing’s hands
in horror. He lifted his rifle as he began to walk backwards.
Before his finger could squeeze the trigger, he slipped on the
spilled intestine of one of his comrades. The world fell out from
under him and he fell onto his back on the blood-soaked ground.
    The monster clad in black bent down, moving
faster than anything Henry had ever seen. It grabbed him by his
collar and lifted him in the air. Once the soldier’s feet had left
the ground, the creature slashed the man across the belly. Three
horizontal gashes appeared, and the solider screamed as he watched
his guts tumble to the ground. The beast quickly threw him at the
wall, where he collided headfirst, and broke his neck. His limp
bleeding body fell to the ground, where it lay like a misshapen
ragdoll.
    The monster then turned to Henry, who’d been
watching this scene from the staircase. It slowly made its way to
the foot of the stairs, and began to ascend to Henry’s position.
The rebel leader was horrified by what he’d seen, but not scared.
He felt he was too close to death for that, and didn’t mind the
strange and deadly apparition that approached him.
    The creature reached the step just below
Henry, and the faceless helmet looked down at the wound on his
belly. It pressed its hand to the side of its helmet, and Henry
could hear the static of a radio. He guessed it was coming from
inside the thing’s helmet.
    Muffled behind the black visor, Henry could
hear it speaking in a language he’d never heard before. When it
finished, it removed its scaly palm from the helmet, and gently
helped Henry onto his feet. The rebel leader immediately felt
dizzy, and collapsed onto the black-clad figure’s acrobatic body.
His could feel scaly skin under the hard, thick material that made
up the creature’s suit. He slid off the creature’s body, and began
to fall down the stairs, when the creature caught him by his
shoulders. It then picked him up, and held him in his arms, like a
groom carrying his bride across the threshold.
    In his dazed state, losing consciousness
quickly, Henry looked up at the veiled face of this mysterious
attacker.
    “Are you death?” he asked, his weak voice
barely audible, even to himself.
    “No.” The thing responded, as it descended
the stairs. It spoke English with an accent that Henry couldn’t
place. “I’m something worse.”
    Henry couldn’t remember much after that.
     
    For the first few seconds after Henry woke
up, he’d completely forgotten what had happened. It wasn’t until he
noticed the IV drip hooked up to his arm, feeding him blood from a
bag that hung onto a metal pole that sat next to his bed, that he
was able to remember. His shirt had been lifted, and he could see
the stitches that zigzagged through the plasma wound on his
stomach. He looked around, recognized the bluish-green colored rock
that made up the walls and ceiling, and realized he was back in his
rebel base under the surface of the Saturnian moon Titan.
Specifically, he was in the makeshift infirmary; a long hallway,
with yellow neon torches nailed to the wall providing the only
source of light. Of the twenty-two beds in the infirmary, his was
the only one that was occupied.
    His head ached, and he tried to remember how
he’d gotten back there. The last thing he remembered was being in
that villa on Mars, lying half dead on the stairwell. He could
recall brief flashes of a skinny