Gord Zajac - Major Karnage

Karnage braced the sphere on the floor and banged on it with his fists. “Captain! Captain, can you hear me?!”

She didn’t respond.

Karnage heard a crack-hiss behind him. He turned and saw a wooden matchstick floating before the door, its freshly struck flame flickering. Above the match and to its right floated an unlit cigar. The match rose up, and kissed the end of the cigar. The end glowed to life as unseen lungs inhaled. Grey curls of smoke blew out around the cigar, as an explosion of colours flowed and poured like liquid across an unfamiliar silhouette.

The colours settled and receded to reveal a seven-foot-tall insect with a squid for a head. The cigar sat nestled in a quivering fringe of small tentacles that covered its mouth. A pair of longer tentacles hung from the creature’s temples like sidecurls. One of the side tentacles held the lit match, which shook it out. Its bony arms clutched a gnarled spear with a surface covered in squiggly carvings. Green energy pulsed along the grooves.

Karnage’s body tingled. Here he was: finally face to face with an alien! It was more alien than Karnage could have imagined. Squigglier than he could possibly have imagined. He did his best to suppress a gleeful grin. “Well, ain’t you one ugly lookin’ squidbug,” The squidbug turned an eye towards Karnage as it puffed on its cigar. Its pupil was a long squiggle smeared across a mottled eyeball. It took a drag on its cigar, plucked it out of its mouth with a side tentacle, and tossed it away. It flicked the wrists of its bony claws, and the spear glowed. Green energy crackled across its surface, collecting around the bulbous head. The squidbug’s skin darkened to a deep crimson, and it thrust the spear forward. A sizzling ball of green shot out at Karnage.

Karnage side-stepped the blast. He could feel its electric charge pull at the hairs on his skin. The ball collided with the wall and disappeared, leaving a smoking black crater. Karnage dove forward and grabbed the shaft of the squidbug’s spear. He slammed it up into the squidbug’s mouth. It made a loud clack on impact. The squidbug lost its grip on the spear as it staggered back. Karnage’s neck buzzed as the Sanity Patch upgraded to Daffodil.

The squidbug let out an indignant screech. It pressed itself against the wall. Its skin changed colour, pulsing and flowing through different shades and patterns until it had blended perfectly into the wall, disappearing from view.

Karnage charged with the spear as the squidbug vanished, hitting nothing but wall and nearly jarring the spear out of his hands. The Sanity Patch crooned “Citrus Blast” as he stumbled backward. Somewhere behind him he heard a squiggly screech that sounded far too much like laughter for his liking. He spun around and squinted his eyes, trying to catch any hint of the beast. CRACK! A tentacle shot out and caught Karnage across the jaw.

He lost his grip on the spear and it clattered to the ground. “Son of a—”

CRACK! Another tentacle clocked him from the other side, knocking him away from the spear.

“—bitch!”

Karnage staggered back. He turned in the direction of the last hit.

CRACK! A third blow caught him in the back of the head. He stumbled forward, stars shooting across his vision.

“Monkey—”

CRACK! Another blow caught him across the face. Karnage grabbed the tentacle before it could recoil. He yanked it hard towards him, throwing a punch along its length.

“—FUCKER!”

His fist sank deep into soft flesh. There was a terrible squeal, and the squidbug appeared in a flash of cycling colours. It fell to the ground, lying limp on the floor as all the coloured drained out of its skin, leaving it an insipid grey. Karnage’s neck buzzed. “Warning. Sanity Level upgraded to Peachy Keen. Please refrain from violent behaviour.”

Karnage grabbed the spear and used it to fish Sydney’s sphere down from the ceiling. He braced it against the wall with his foot and stabbed it with the spear, cracking open the shell. He tore it apart with his hands as his Sanity Patch upgraded from Peachy Keen to Tangy Orange to Sharp Cheddar.

Sydney lay on the floor, coughing and gasping. Yellow smoke poured from her lungs. Karnage threw her over his shoulder and headed to the closed door. He tried pressing on the nodules beside it. The green lights seemed to ignore him. A sliver of white flowed down into the nodule, stopped, and circled around Karnage’s hand. White slivers started flowing down into the nodule from the surrounding tubes, and it soon filled with white. The door spiralled open, and Karnage stepped through it.

Karnage walked down the dimly lit corridor. Giant doors lined either side. Soft green pulses of light flowed through the squiggles along the walls. Karnage felt like he was walking through Cookie’s forearms. The occasional line of white light would stop, bunch up into a hovering ball as he walked past it, then streak off again, lost in the green mass.

Karnage felt a strange tingle at the base of his neck. Suddenly he lost all feeling in his body and he fell to the ground. “Right, mate,” Sydney said. “Now we do it my way.”

“Captain, it’s me,” Karnage gasped. “Major Karnage.”

“I know who you are,” Sydney said. Karnage heard the familiar jangle of handcuffs.

“What the hell are you doing?!”

“Arresting you,” Sydney replied, as she snapped the cuffs on Karnage’s wrists.

“Goddammit, Captain, this is neither the time nor the place! Look around you! Do you have any idea where we are?”

Sydney looked around. “Dimly lit corridor. Probably somewhere underground.”

“UNDERGROUND?!”

“We’ll find our way out, though, no worries.”

“Are you outta your mind?! We are deep inside an alien ship! Hurtling across space! Probably halfway across the damn galaxy by now!”

“Sounds like you’re the one out of your mind.” A finger touched Karnage’s neck, and he could move again. Sydney pulled him to his feet. She thrust a pinky in his face. “No funny business or I cart you out of here like a sack of potatoes.”

Sydney jerked Karnage forward. “For god’s sake, Captain, how can you not believe me? Didn’t you see that ship come hurtlin’ outta the sky? How the hell do you think we got here?!”

She frowned in reply. “I can’t remember, exactly. My head’s still fuzzy. I remember the sky went dark, like a freak thunderstorm or something—”

“That was no thunderstorm! That was a goddamn unidentified flying object of DEATH! It opened up one monkeyfucker of a death ray on us, and here we are!”

“Sounds like it’s not a very good death ray. Come on, keep moving. We need to find our way out of here.”

“This is a hell of a way to treat your rescuer! They had you all trussed up in a big hoverball thing. I had to break you out. I saved you from bein’ bottled up like… like a goddamn pickle in a mason jar!”

“A hoverball, huh? Then that proves it. We’re not on an alien spacecraft.”

“What?!”

“Come on, Major. Hoverballs? That’s not exactly alien technology. This probably has something to do with the Dabney Corporation. Probably some top secret operation. We just need to find somebody in charge—”

“Captain, did you miss the part where I told you they had you locked up?!”

Sydney stopped walking, and looked at Karnage. “You really think we’re on an alien spacecraft?”

“YES!”

Sydney looked around, and shook her head. “I’m not convinced.”

“Open your eyes, Captain! What the hell more proof do you need?”

“Some aliens would be a nice start.”

“Oh there are aliens, all right. I’ve seen ’em with my own eyes! They’re giant squidbuggy things with squiddy heads atop of buggy bodies with eyes like… like…”