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  Most of them wiggled about aimlessly, but one had found him, and it pressed a shiny, orange head against his flesh, and a split appeared in that orange carapace, and then there was a searing pain in his side.

  It was burrowing into him.

  Perry screamed. Or tried to. It came out like a wheeze that he couldn’t even hear over the female’s shrieking and cursing, but he felt the vibration in his throat.

  Another voice joined in the screaming. Perry’s eyes shot away from the burrowing larva—just long enough to see the Wasp-Man skittering into the room, his own, more slender abdomen raised, stinger up over his head.

  In that precise moment, what the hell the Wasp-Man was going to do was not even in Perry’s universe of worries. It seemed that his entire attention was with one, foot-long maggot, attempting to get inside of him.

  Chaos and screaming outside that shimmering barrier.

  Inside of it, Perry, gasping his half-paralytic breaths, his voice starting to return, but oh-so-slowly.

  Around the perimeter of the energy shield, the Wasp-Man pranced back and forth as though he thought he might find an opening through which he might jab Perry again with that vicious stinging end of his.

  The female screamed accusations now: “You said he was safe! You said he didn’t have it!”

  “Would you shut up!” the Wasp-Man screeched. “I’m trying to—”

  His head exploded.

  The dome of mud shook with the thunder of a single, high-caliber report, and Perry’s energy shield rippled where the projectile had passed through the Wasp-Man’s head and impacted.

  Perry dragged his head to the side—still sluggish—his heart leaping inside of him, expecting to see Stuber…

  A third figure now occupied the room, but it wasn’t Stuber.

  All Perry saw of it was the twirling of a dark brown duster, and a matching leather hat pulled so low that Perry couldn’t see the face, and in each gloved hand, what appeared to be a revolver so enormous that Perry couldn’t see how the bearer could possibly manipulate them.

  But manipulate them he did. With shocking speed.

  The one revolver with the smoking barrel twirled back in the mysterious newcomer’s left hand, leaving a ribbon of gray fumes in the wake of its ported muzzle, spinning like it weighed nothing at all.

  The other revolver came up, quick as a flash, the muzzle nearly touching the female as she tried to recoil away...

  The hammer dropped. Another enormous explosion, like a cannon going off, shaking the mud hovel so that the ceiling of it cracked. Headless, the female’s body slumped over itself, stilled in an instant.

  The first revolver now completed its spin, and when it came to rest back in the grip of that gloved hand, Perry saw that the hammer was back.

  In a similar flourish, the right-handed revolver spun and came back up cocked.

  The figure in the duster did one slow turn around the room, the tails of the body length coat swishing in a graceful circle.

  None of this did anything for the fact that there was still something trying to gnaw its way inside of Perry.

  “Help!” he tried to scream out, but managed only a gurgle.

  But it was his voice.

  The figure in the duster stopped, facing Perry. The collar of the duster was upturned, and the wide brim of the hat was low, so that all that Perry saw beyond those leather walls was a shadow, and the glimmer of two eyes taking him in with cool aplomb.

  “Goodsir,” came a pleasant voice with an accent that Perry had never heard before. “You appear to have an unwanted guest attempting to make entry into your chest cavity. If you would be so good as to extinguish your shield, perhaps I can be of some assistance.”

  “Gah!” Perry responded, as he felt a piece of his flesh get torn away.

  Extinguish! Extinguish! Perry demanded, and then recalled that all he had to do was pull back.

  The air between him and the man in the duster gave up a slight pop, and then cleared.

  The man in the duster stepped forward and for one horrific moment Perry thought that he was going to fire that gargantuan weapon of his, and probably obliterate Perry’s ribcage in the process.

  But the man simply stuck his boot—a leather, pointed-toe boot—up under the fleshy white thing and gave it a little flip.

  The thing rolled away, curling up on itself as though offended, and emitting a high-pitched squeal.

  The man in the duster brought the heel of his boot down sharply, crushing the head in a splatter of ochre goo. “Most unpleasant,” the man observed. “And there are several more scurrying about, so perhaps we should leave these environs, posthaste.”

  Perry goggled up at the figure, his mouth hanging open. Even if he’d been able to talk, he would’ve drawn a blank.

  “Ah, yes. You are paralyzed. Forgive me.” The two massive revolvers came together in the center of the man’s torso where his duster hung open and he used the butts of them to sweep the coat back. The revolvers spun in his hands and deposited themselves into two holsters at his side. “I believe I have something that might help you.”

  The man in the duster swooped to Perry’s side, his right hand reaching back behind him and under his coat. When it emerged a second later, it bore an ampoule, which he held up for Perry’s inspection. “Polymorphs. Dreadful creatures. But we know their tricks. Shall I administer the antidote? You may blink your eyes twice for ‘yes.’”

  Perry squeezed his eyes shut twice in exaggerated fashion. He didn’t want there to be any misunderstandings here. He wanted the godsdamned antidote.

  “Very well.” The man’s hand flashed out and stuck the ampoule into Perry’s stomach, a few inches from the small, bleeding crater where the larva had been chewing.

  There was a brief moment—merely the span of three thunderous heartbeats—where Perry thought he was going to die. The pain was so sudden, and so complete, and so all-encompassing, that he was unable to imagine how it could end in any other way besides him dying.

  And then, by the fourth heartbeat, it was gone.

  A sensation like emerging from a hot bath into ice-cold wind struck him, and he began to shake violently, but all at once his faculties returned to him. Trembling, he sat up and shoved himself backwards into the mud wall of the room. He gulped air and let out a stream of words all in one breath.

  “Gods in the skies what the fuck was that who are you what happened what the fuck are those things?!”

  The man kneeling before him straightened and reached up with a single forefinger, which he used to tip the brim of his hat back a few inches. The shadows dissipated, revealing a face with a bit of stubble and a long, waxed mustache the color of copper. The eyes seemed friendly though. And somewhat amused.

  “My apologies for the somewhat tardy entrance. Also, please do not hold it against me for not warning you about the horrendous momentary pain caused by the antidote—I feared it might deter you in your desire to be whole again.”

  There came then a very familiar sound, one that bore roots into Perry’s consciousness and it simultaneously made him nervous, and also extremely glad.

  It was the chatter of a Roq-11 .458 rifle.

  The man registered the noise as well with an upward twitch of his lips. He stood, and extended a hand down to Perry. “Ah, yes. That would be your venerable travelling companions. Who appear to be in somewhat of a disagreement with the rest of the polymorphs. Shall we join them?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WHIMSBY

  Perry emerged from the mud cave, leaving the mess of bodies and still-squirming larvae behind him, and entered a tube made of the same, smoothly-rendered dirt.

  “What the hell is this place?” Perry asked, having to dip his head as they moved along the tunnel. Which meant that the man in the duster, who was of normal height, had to stoop into a crouch.

  “We call them The Warrens,” the man said lightly. “But as to what they are…well, they’re nests, I suppose. Nests and tunnels.”

&n
bsp; Perry hadn’t had a whole lot of time between the disintegration of his captors’ heads and that particular moment, to really consider what the hell was happening, but it hit him then, as he followed someone he’d never met before in his life.

  “Who are you? And how’d you find me?”

  “Whimsby,” the man said without looking around. His right hand swept back into his open duster and appeared again with one of his revolvers. “And finding people happens to be my job.”

  Perry had the sudden instinct to grind in his heels, but the chatter of automatic gunfire was getting nearer.

  “Can you give me one of your revolvers?” Perry asked, thinking that this would be a good test to see if Whimsby was really on his side or not.

  At this question, Whimsby slowed, and cast Perry a look over his shoulder, his eyes twinkling with merriment. “No offense intended, goodsir, but considering the size and heft of them, I’m not entirely certain you’d be able to make much use of one.”

  Perry had considered the size and heft of them. They looked like he would struggle to aim it, even if he used both hands. But then how the hell did Whimsby manipulate them so fiercely?

  Whimsby continued on, ducking under a low section of ceiling and then making a right-hand turn at a fork in the tunnels. “It’s nothing personal, goodsir. These particular weapons have been in my hands nearly my entire life, so, if it’s all the same to you, I think that a more productive usage of them would be if I continued to wield both. But don’t worry, I believe your friend has been safeguarding your weapon.”

  Does he mean the longstaff?

  The sounds of gunfire were loud enough to cause dust to trickle from the ceiling. They had to be dead ahead. Any doubt as to who fired that .458 rifle dissipated as he heard a voice come tumbling down the tunnel at them.

  “Where’s that fucking freak show with the hat?” Stuber bellowed. “If he doesn’t show up in the next—”

  Whimsby and Perry erupted out of the tunnel and into a cavern, the muddy ceiling vaulting over their heads. Perry’s eyes took in everything at a single go, coursing from one side of the cavern to the other.

  First: His three friends, huddled close to the mouth of the tunnel out of which Perry and Whimsby had just exited. Stuber, with his rifle shouldered, his mouth still open from yelling, standing shoulder to shoulder with the others—Teran holding Perry’s longstaff, and Sagum standing with his arms spread out before him like he wasn’t quite sure what he should be doing in that moment.

  Second: All across the surface of this great domed cavern were holes that, if Perry were to make an educated guess, led to more tunnels. Or more specifically, where those tunnels emptied out into the cavern. And emptying out they were…

  Third: There was something in the neighborhood of a hundred Wasp-Men, crawling across every surface, growling, spitting, hissing, their abdomens wavering over their heads, pressing closer, their poisoned stingers jabbing at the air, seeking flesh.

  It appeared that Stuber had been doing work. The floor of the cavern was carpeted with twitching, mewling, pulsing, insectile bodies, and the air stank of spent propellant and an acrid, organic odor that Perry immediately associated with the orange and purple and white fluids that had come spurting out of the two dead “polymorphs” that Whimsby had left behind.

  Stuber’s fire-and-brimstone expression suddenly turned sunny as his eyes caught ahold of Perry and Whimsby. “Hey, there they are!” And then back to fire-and-brimstone. “You gonna help us or what?”

  Perry charged forward, slipping past Whimsby as the man produced his second revolver and, wielding them with impossible precision, began firing over the heads of Teran and Sagum, splattering two polymorphs with two shots.

  “Perry!” Teran shouted at him, her eyes wide. “Shield!”

  Perry skidded to a stop right in the middle of them, his mind dipping expertly, the fear gone, replaced with The Calm, the red blur—everything was okay now, he was back in his element now that he had possession of his body back.

  Perry registered the ugly sound of automatic gunfire coming to an abrupt stop.

  “Reloading!” Stuber bellowed.

  A polymorph charged, stinger lurching forward over his grimacing head.

  Perry’s shield erupted from him, creating a wall between them and the Wasp-Man.

  The polymorph’s stinger thrust itself into the shield and disintegrated in a gout of bloody steam, sending the creature reeling backwards and howling. Perry felt the slight dip in the energy—every impact cost him a fraction of the potential of his shield: too many impacts, and his shield became less and less effective.

  “Teran!” Perry yelled, thrusting his hand out to her. “Give it to me!”

  Teran shoved the longstaff into his hands, and as the faintly-warm metal touched his fingers, Perry felt the presence of the device in The Calm with him.

  Stuber slammed a fresh magazine into his rifle and sent the bolt home. “You sure you’re ready for that, Shortstack?”

  Perry leveled the muzzle of the longstaff, holding it in two hands now, and letting his mind sink into the device. “This isn’t lighting fires!”

  “Don’t blow us all up!”

  The shield had bisected the chamber. The humans on one side, the polymorphs on the other. They skittered and jigged at the edges of the shield, and the deluge of their spitting and screeching became a waterfall of vicious noise.

  Unfortunately, the shield worked both ways: they couldn’t fire on the polymorphs unless Perry let the shield down.

  “Okay,” Sagum called out, his voice uncertain. “What do we do now?”

  Whimsby sidled up next to Perry’s right shoulder, his eyes taking in the hundreds of beings around them that wanted to rip them all limb from limb. “The choice is yours, of course. However, I might offer a recommendation.” As he spoke, his fingers flashed across the surfaces of first one revolver, and then the other, extracting empty cartridges and replacing them with spares from his gunbelt. Perry stared, disbelieving, at the speed at which his fingers worked. He had both revolvers fully loaded again by the time he finished the word “recommendation.”

  “Sure,” Perry said, tensely. “I’ll take a recommendation.”

  “You see that tunnel right there?”

  Perry’s eyes coursed over the walls. “Which one? There’s a fucking hundred of them!”

  “The one I’m gesturing to, goodsir.”

  Perry glanced sideways, realizing Whimsby had been pointing his right revolver at one tunnel in particular. This one was bigger than the others, and it gave Perry the sense that it was an artery moving through this hive, where the other tunnels were like small capillaries and veins.

  “Yeah, I see it.”

  “That would be the main corridor through which we can exit The Warrens. I recommend you extinguish your shield for a brief moment, and then we shoot our way out.”

  “Ha!” Stuber cackled. “I wasn’t sure about you at first, Wimbly, but I think we’ll be friends.”

  “It’s Whimsby.”

  “Right. Yeah. Weirdsby.”

  “Alright,” Perry took a deep, breath, filling his lungs with the stink of gunsmoke and insectile innards. “Are we ready to do this?”

  Stuber snugged into his rifle stock, angling to cover their left flank, while Whimsby turned and covered their rear. “On you, Shortstack.”

  Perry pulled his mind back from the clasp. The wall between them and the Wasp-Men disappeared.

  The polymorphs charged forward as one. Stuber’s rifle belched fire left and right, slamming into bodies and heads and sending them reeling through ribbons of their own fluids. Behind Perry, he heard the sound of the massive revolvers going off at a speed to match Stuber’s automatic fire.

  And Perry let loose. Not careful. Not controlled. As he’d said, he wasn’t lighting fire this time. It was like pushing all of his brain into a funnel, and it came out the other end supercharged, and high-pressure.

  The muzzle of the longstaff fla
red with green light. The polymorph directly in its path split into two, its midsection exploding out of its back and sending the upper and lower halves twirling.

  There was no reload time, no sense of having to reset a trigger, or build up another blast. Perry simply pressed again, and again, and again, the verdant fire roaring out of his longstaff at the speed of his thoughts. Swaths of polymorphs ruptured in mid-charge, creating a curtain of gore that seemed to hang in the air as Perry grit his teeth and swept the longstaff from left to right, never missing, because he couldn’t—there were too many targets.

  “Move to the tunnel!” Whimsby called out amidst the carnage.

  The revolvers seemed to never stop. Whimsby fired and reloaded at a pace that made it nearly impossible to detect a pause between volleys.

  “Perry!” Stuber roared, using his actual name for once. “I’m about to run dry!”

  Perry pivoted off his right foot, changing directions rapidly.

  He watched the bolt lock back on Stuber’s rifle.

  A polymorph lurched forward, its stinger arcing overhead, streaking towards Stuber’s head.

  Perry threw himself forward, wielding the longstaff two-handed like an axe, and bringing the curved sickle blade of the bayonet down on the polymorph’s abdomen. The blade crackled like a hot pan with fat thrown on it. The end of the stinger detached, still moving through midair…

  It struck Stuber in the spaulder, but the black point of it nicked his face, causing the man to wince as he rammed a fresh magazine into his rifle and spun around Perry, switching places with him.

  The polymorph fell, writhing and clutching its severed abdomen. Perry considered putting it out of its misery, but there were more pressing threats.

  The group moved, angling towards the tunnel that Whimsby promised was their way out. Guns blazed. Polymorphs wilted under the fire and the blasts of green energy, and the arc of Perry’s wild swings with the bayonet.