Monster tossed the battle tank away. He took Carnifex’s hood between the clawed tips of thumb and forefinger and plucked him off.
Dangling mere meters before that vast, hideous face, in the full smokestack blast of his polluted breath, Carnifex shook his fists in defiance.
“Go ahead and swallow me, scumbag!” he yelled. “I’ll chimney up your throat, punch through the roof of your mouth, and eat your fucking brain!”
Monster studied him a moment more. Then he flipped him away.
His impertinent foe already forgotten, Monster surveyed the scene. There were broken and burning tanks everywhere. Nobody was shooting at him anymore. He was out of victims.
He raised his claws to the cloudy heavens and roared in disappointed rage. The lust in his loins had not been slaked. He had a world of hurt yet to inflict before he could find release.
Then something caught his yellow eye, a kilometer or so beyond the trees, in the midst of an expanse of cultivated fields. A tiny hamlet, dark, surrounded by its little bamboo fence.
Innocence. Helplessness. They drew him like a magnet. His cock pulsating with excitement and need, he lumbered toward the village.
He had almost reached it when a voice spoke in his head: “Wait.”
He stopped, growling resentment at the intrusion. The massive horned head swiveled left and right, looking for the source of the irritation. Fury beyond fury piled upon the anger that blazed within him. No one told him to wait.
“This isn’t you. I know it’s not.”
He raised clawed hands, roared a shattering wordless affirmation: IamIII!
“No. You aren’t. You’re an illusion, an aberration. I’m speaking to the real you. That which is buried deep inside. That which is … good.”
Monster shook his head, as if to cast forth the insistent voice. He hated the voice. He wanted to find where it came from, and smash, and kill. It said things that must never be said to him.
“Isis … Moonchild. It’s me, Eric. Your love.”
NO! Negation erupted from the molten core of him.
“Yes.” Images flooded his mind: Isis and Eric, holding hands by candlelight, walking out along the paddy dikes beneath the moon’s benevolent face. Gentle; loving.
Monster pummeled his face with the heels of his hands. He would not see these things. He must not.
“Isis. You’re still in there. Come out. Fight the evil. You can defeat it, send it back where it came from.”
Monster was out of control, reeling blindly in agony. In fear.
Fear fed the anger. As it always does. It was not right that he should fear. He was the mightiest of beings; His will be done, on Earth as it was in Hell.
He looked around, desperate. And there was the village, still dark, still silent, still virginal, nearby.
He would slay. He would rape. He would wade in horror to the sac of his gravid balls. And that awful voice would bother him no more.
“‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,’” J. Robert Belew quoted aloud, not without relishing the taste of it, “’than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”
Orbiting the looming horror at what he guessed was a safe distance, Belew drew a deep sigh. His ammunition cans were empty, his bombs and rockets spent. The monster had been acting crazy for a moment there, but it had pulled itself together. Now it was going to lay waste to the helpless village.
He couldn’t let that happen. At least, not without a fight.
J. Bob Belew considered himself a hard man, and generally lived up to his own expectations. But he had a weakness. He thought of himself as a white knight, sans peur et sans reproche. All of the things he had done — even the hard things, the repugnant things — had been done out of an unshakable sense of Right. And a white knight didn’t let dragons slaughter defenseless peasants.
Even if it cost him his life.
“‘Lord, what fools these mortals be,’” Belew said sadly, speaking of himself “And worse, what mortals be these fools.” He soared high, savoring a last moment of ecstasy, of flight and power. Then he nosed over and went at the creature’s back in a full-power dive.
Monster strode toward the village. His cock throbbed with need. There were women in the village, and children. He wanted to hear them scream as he plucked them to pieces.
The village showed no signs of life. The occupants were all hunkered down in the illegal bunkers beneath their hootches, waiting for the storm to pass. But this storm would not pass. Not until it had dug them out and devoured them all.
His feet were at the fence. Behind him he heard the scream of a tortured engine. He paid no attention; that wasn’t the kind of screaming he yearned to hear. He stretched out a hand.
An image burst like a bomb in his mind: himself, poised to give pain. And then, looming over him, a dozen times greater, a hundred, was Moonchild in her black and silver. And at her side stood Cap’n Trips, resplendent in his purple suit, and J. J. Flash, and Cosmic Traveler, and Aquarius — and, yes, the blond one, the dead one, and a legion of others the Monster did not know.
He raised his fists to defy them. It was a dream, a lie! The others weren’t bigger than he. They were weak, they were small. He was big. He was greater than anything.
“All you need,” the voice said, “is love.”
He roared his contempt. And the giant faces gazed down upon him, and love flowed out.
It burned him like napalm. Like Crypt Kicker’s acid. He screamed.
He tried to force the image from his mind. He failed. His dream self lashed out against all those other selves, the soft, self-righteous selves. They would not raise hands in return. They only … loved.
J. Robert Belew held the helicopter that was himself in its suicide dive. The green-black mass of corruption filled the flat windscreen. He braced for impact, and grinned at his own futility.
“So long, Ma,” he said. “You were right all along: I’m coming to no good end.”
And the monster blew up in his face.
The excess mass the Monster had drawn into himself in his moment of borning let go in a flash and mighty blast.
Then there was nothing but a village blown down above the heads of its inhabitants — terrified but safe in their bunkers — and a wounded helicopter auto-rotating to a hard landing back among the trees, and Mark Meadows lying in a fetal ball among bean plants, weeping and vomiting.
And then a great wave of calm passed over him. He rolled onto his back and gazed up at the skies.
The stars gazed back. Wouldn’t you know it, he thought. Yet they held no terror for him anymore. They were just … stars.
… He felt the presence of Starshine, joined with his comrades for the fight of all their lives, going away from him. He felt sorrow well up within him. “Wait!” he cried, “don’t go!”
“Don’t mourn,” Starshine’s voice said, “organize.” And he was gone, and Mark knew he’d never come again.
He blinked the tears from his eyes. The time would come when he would mourn that other self. And then he would be whole, and he would go on, to wherever it was he was heading.
And another voice in his head: “Isis. Is he — is it — did we win?”
“Eric!” It was his lips, but Moonchild’s voice.
“He’s still alive,” he said in his own voice. “We gotta help him!”
He picked himself up and headed back for the clearing at a stumbling run.
Chapter Fifty-one