Chapter 14

Drinks and food were found and gleefully consumed, and the exhausted and emotionally drained refugees began to relax enough to shut their eyes and join our tired knights and centaurs in an increasingly deep slumber. Barry grabbed his Grendel and a light pack with just a canteen and a dozen extra spare magazines, along with a few Russian export quality frag grenades. I was happy with my ‘Precious’, the barrel of which was still gently warm to my loving touch, and we marched off to the west, with the bear off in front of us leading the way. The goat remained behind and was well on his way to finishing a second Grey Goose bottle. None of us missed his bleary presence.

As the trustworthy bear said, the cave of the oracle, Teddy Rugburn wasn’t that far away, but with constant delays to snipe at or blast with my Mossburg, at dozens or more foul sorts of indistinguishable things, it took us nearly an hour. The woods here were packed with former people or creatures that kept popping out of the nearby brush just itching to be filled full of buckshot. They died without any fuss when hit by Barry’s mixed metal bullets or my lead shot, and we could steadily hear the sounds of regular explosions not far ahead of us, perhaps over the very next hill. Almost immediately, we could see some member of the heroic rear guard making a retreat up the sides of the hill before us, cresting its top to once more make a holding defense.

Strawberry, seemingly a youngish cartoonish appearing child, was dressed in a rather old fashioned sort of manner, complete with an old grannie cap on top of her strawberry red hair and she wore an apron. Blood and gore covered her from head to toe and she turned back for a moment to smile at us, waving her flaming magic sword above her head as she bid her strawberry spotted little pony to charge back down the hill to face her foes. Once more into the breech! Crazy little thing of a girl, but she had balls!

Her companion, a weedy looking blonde in a short skirt, a crop-cut tank top, and the wildest rainbow colored thigh length stockings I’d ever seen. She smiled at us too with her crazy, crazy eyes and lit the fuse on another seemingly endless bundle of dynamite, and tossed it casually down the far slope of the hill, towards the oncoming horde. A cloud of smoke and blown up body parts sailed up into the air and she giggled ... utterly insanely.

Even Barry had the good sense to avoid talking to either of them, and we coasted around the bottom side of hill to evade them, and whatever unwholesome things were chasing up after them. Shit was just everywhere ... crawling, hopping and slithering ... and in all the fucking colors of the rainbow.

Riding upon a giant gold and jewel encrusted palanquin was the big blue blueberry himself, the Brain the Blue Snurf, surrounded by his rebels. The valley was filled with lots of Larks, Lurks, Snarfs, Snerfs, Snorks, and other assorted what-the-fucks. Since we gave none, fucks that is, it was time to lock and load.

Barry loaded up a grenade round into his under mount M203, and popped it low and right for a ball. About twenty thingamabobs exploded nicely but not their leader. His second round was right on target, falling right into the surprised blue brain’s small lap. He disintegrated nicely into blue jelly and that took most of the starch out of his horde of rebels. The anthropomorphic animated black cat holding up the flayed remains of a duck in a sailor’s suit on a pole stopped and paused ... and for a moment too long, before the third M203 grenade redecorated his innards pretty much all over the valley.

The remaining rebels with any sense all turned and ran for their lives. A few tried to charge us, deciding that a hundred or so of them outnumbered the three of us. After I shot the first two dozen into chum with my shotgun, most of the rest decided to let someone else die for their rebellion instead. A bit too late ... Barry could just ping them all off one by one, firing single shots from his thirty-round magazine. Ursine Bear made himself useful too with a Thompson Machinegun firing dum-dum rounds. He fired nice controlled short bursts too.

To our right flank, Strawberry and Rainbow were both now on the offensive too, and by the time the cloud of smoke from the explosives, grenades and gunfire had blown the air clear, naught was left but the dead and the dying.

The wounded things mostly avoided us and we charged on up the next hill and we only needed a slightly warm volley of gunfire to clear off the entrance to the oracle’s cave. The bear had done his job and with a mutter prayer for our good health and mental sanity, he fled back to our camp as fast as his short furry legs would carry him.

The cave mouth was framed by a large pair of stone monoliths and the creepy darkness inside was quite enough to give anyone sensible the heebie-jeebies. Fortunately, I’ve never done sensible. I led the way with my Mossburg and we both turned on our weapon mounted flashlights. Barry turned on the short-range laser sight and clicked his distance setting to ‘Oh fuck!’. We both also had forehead mounted led-lights that we could have put on, but there was a dim satanic-red glowing up ahead of us and that would give us plenty of light to shoot anything needing urgent rehabilitation.

In a small chamber at the end of the cavern was the famous oracle, Teddy Rugburn, a large cheerful looking toy teddy bear sporting a bow tie and a happy talkative face, seated upon a child-sized stone throne. Unfortunately, we’d arrived too late and he was already quite possessed and gibbering utter madness. I had to admit that the way his eyes rolled up to show just the whites was a neat trick. The head spinning demonically, around and around in circles was more than little disturbing as well. On each side of the chamber walls were lined with rows of other smaller teddy bears, each mounted into the stone walls with a bleeding iron spike. They too murmured assorted profane truths and helpless cries of torment.

I raised my Mossburg to start cleaning house but Barry reached out to block the barrel of my shotgun. “This is all so absurd,” he giggled, “I remember having one of these toys when I was a kid! I feel like my entire childhood is being raped!”

“What with that saucy walk, it was asking for it!” I muttered. “So what is really happening here? Is this all some insidious plot to turn children’s toys into flesh-lights and bang them without mercy until they cry themselves to sleep alone and afraid?”

“Just for starters ... look at Teddy here, in the mundane world he was created to tell children stories and his jaws would move up and down while he talked. It was really just a teddy with a tape recorder build in. After I’d had mine for about a week, I realized that Teddy would play and talk or sing along to any cassette, not just the inane story tapes provided. Soon, I had him merrily regaling me with Slayer’s ‘Reign in Blood’ and Iron Maiden’s ‘666 is the Number of the Beast’, with his mechanical lips straining to catch up to the beat, a growing evil awareness dawning in his dead eyes. Great fun! Shitty tape recorder though, it crapped out and died after about a month of singing Metallica!”

“My love, you are deliciously sick and perverted ... and that is why I adore you!” I giggled, wandering over to listen more closely to what the seated Teddy Rugburn was blathering about. It didn’t improve, listening to the drivel at close range.

“It’s all Greek to me,” I eventually decided, “it sounds mostly like the Mel Gibson audio tape ... but not quite nearly enough ranting, raging, frothing, and screams of ‘THE JEWS DID 9/11’ along with a peppering of racial slurs.”

The mounted impaled teddy’s all began to wail louder and for a while, I thought we were listening to the breaking of the seals to the gates of hell invoked in Revelations, but with less emotional sincerity. I decided that the entire cacophony of sound was worse and far more messed up than Amateur BBW Norwegian Fart Fetish Porn.

A proper chamber of nightmarish horrors would have given us a wall of screaming, burbling, babbling electronic abortions, endlessly bellowing racist slurs and web image board memes, while flames danced in the background and children sobbed. In other words, the perfect real-life simulation of 4chan. I was more hoping for something less tawdry, perhaps wishing that one of the less humor-impaired Others could abuse this antiquated toy technology more effectively, like using more diabolical cassettes and programming to have these one hundred or more teddy’s all open their eyes and tell us the end is near and they’re coming for our souls. Instead, I think they were merely channeling bad street theater, and via a wonky AM radio connection.

We weren’t impressed, and we started to get impatient for something interesting to actually happen.

“Love, you’re a fairy now, right? One of the Fae, by adoption anyway, so can you magically sense the Goat and find something for me. Dads, my father’s old cassette case that I used to keep under the seat of the Little Red Roller Skate. For sentiment, I moved it under the driver’s seat of the Goat, right next to our CD cases. Can you sense and find it ... and bring it right here to us?”

I’d been slowly feeling my innate fairy powers starting to grow, but I hadn’t made any attempt yet to use them, except for hiding my wand and wings. It was a good of a time as any to try! I summoned my wand and concentrated ... swish and flick! Very Harry Potter, but in an instant it worked and the old beat-up plastic cassette case was here with us in Barry’s hands.

It was a challenge, I have to admit, to find something... appropriate, for Teddy to now play for us. His current mix tape was certainly a downer! Some choices even I had to reject, being too awful and terrible to be borne, even for the sake of a proper exorcism! It came down to choice of four; Barry Manilow, Neil Sedaka, Paul Anka, or (shudders) Donnie and Marie Osmund! We had rejected the Carpenters tapes as far too cruel and dehumanizing to subject any evil sentient creature to.

Barry wandered over to the throne to eject the existing tape and to load the tape from the hell siblings from Utah. Teddy’s eyes focused for a brief moment and he spat out a short warning.

“The western desert winds shall howl ever stronger, as if a thousand damned souls were shouting in anger. She, the blessed chosen one, shall look forth from her offering place, and behold a dark, foul thing of misshapen mouths, eyes of all sizes and wriggling mass of unknown flesh hovered above her, crying out in ultimate triumph! Your eyes shall widen and laughed in endless delirium, trapped in fear and madness the likes no man has suffered in eons; the thing shall open its thousands of hungry mouths, and sing the song that would end this World, opening the gates of the Ancient Ones. You shall fail to stop us, all of you, and the princesses shall fall in sacrifice to bring back the Ancient Ones and they shall feast forever on your souls!”

Now, that was much, much better! Just what you expect from an evil possessed toy! Barry pressed the play tape and the awful, unspeakable noises began. It hurt our ears too, but it was for the greater good.

As Donny and Marie sang, one awful saccharine pop song after another, the wall mounted teddy bears began to all smoke and then burst out in flame. Teddy Rugburn’s head was spinning so far that I thought he’d fly off of the throne entirely. Then, just when I thought we’d have to shut off the tape in the interest of our own self-preservation the stuffed toy emitted a cloud of smoke and electrical sparks as it short-circuited. Soon, the entire chamber was in darkness, the hundred or more spiked bears had all gone up in flames and Teddy’s eyes were dark and his lips silent.

We were about to leave when the oracle sprang back to life, with normal calm thoughtful eyes instead of his prior madness. Quietly in his own more rational voice it began to speak, but in short soft whispers.

“Go west, young heroes and cross the two island bridges into the Outer-lands and certain peril, but go there in great boldness, for I cannot there see your fates across that magically cursed land. Bringing lots of extra ammo is always a very sensible precaution. Go not any further to the north, to cross to the less defended ford for that valley is the abode of Disney ... and they have scary dangerous and humorless lawyers. Seek not also the company of ‘Eddie the Splooge’, a foul-mouthed, mangy, drug-addicted weasel, who admitted is one of the eldest creatures here, but the least wise. An abortion of fiction that predated another much more famous stuffed fictional bear by several months. Thankfully his stories didn’t really catch on though, as they were solely about how he’d blow his cod fishing pay cheques on cocaine, opium and underage hookers, and then had to explain to his wife back home in St. John’s why he couldn’t wire her any money that month, so she could feed her 17 children (some of them his). Oh ... if convenient and you have the time and hopefully a flame-thrower, stop though, if you will, just to the south, for the Furries there are pestilent and a very canker sore on the soul of this land. Hunt down the Furries and exterminate them with extreme prejudice, may their burning flesh be a sweet scent to Mother’s nostrils! The entire valley will smell the better for it. Go hence and shoot them, mount their heads on the wall and fumigate their yiffing nests with mustard gas and cyanide. Furries are a foul cancer eating away at the heart of the earth of our Good Goddess. Any action you have to take against them, however atrocious, however gratuitously violent, however destructive, brutal, murderous or otherwise enjoyable, is ultimately justified. That is all. Happy trails ... now leave me alone, for I have a splitting headache!”

“Can’t we fuck the cute ones first?” I asked, but Teddy had gone dead silent.

We had a little more difficulty getting back to our camp. The seemingly inexhaustible horde of rebels had regrouped just behind our hill but they tittered and held fast when their new leader, an overly cute pink cat, gestured frantically at them to charge us. It was a bit of long ranged shot, but Barry’s Grendel put her down for a long catnap with a round right between her eyes. They decided that we were too much trouble for just the few thousand of them ... but they’d pick a new rebel leader and get moving again west soon.

Oh ... if I had only brought my rocket launcher!

We crossed over the hills back to our resting place without having to shoot anyone or anything else. Exhaustion or not, we were all going to have to saddle up and get moving west. Oh, with perhaps a very slight detour to the south. We had lots and lots of weapons packed away in crates that needed sighting in and some trial firing. Furries would certainly make more than adequate test targets!

More stragglers and late arriving refugees had joined our camp and was with great reluctance that I had to warn the growing throng to get their tails moving east, because the Rainbows explosions were getting closer by the minute. We said our goodbyes to our cuddly animal friends and somehow managed to kick and prod the sleepy, still exhausted knights and centaurs to their feet. Barry used an old boot camp psychological warfare trick, where the sadistical DI tells you that you’ve had six or eight hours sleep, when in truth, they’d only had one or two, at most. That trick works, actually (as long as you don’t tell them the truth afterwards) ... and our cavalry rose up to their feet and made ready to ride again.

Dottie and Jack were seated down with a menagerie of wildly assorted, and weird looking, newcomers, their fur made of felt, as if they were ambulatory hand puppets. Jack was sharing a last swig of one of the Grey Goose bottles with a very green large frog and a rather annoyed looking female pig in a dress with pearls. Glad for their short respite, they led the exodus of the refugees further onwards towards the east.

Ursine, the bear leader gave us each a last friendly hug and he and the goat trotted off to join the frog and his rather strange, shambling group. It seemed like they were old friends. The goat wasted little time goosing the ass of the stout pig-lady and she decked him with a karate chop. Yeah ... old friends indeed!

The cheerful bear had confirmed what paths we should take, first south, and then to reach the river island bridges. Neither were more than a few miles away, but this great river marked the boundary between their domain, and the ruined lands of the Others, across those stone bridges. We found some frightened creatures along the way that had seen the terrible witch travel on through, very early that morning, with a small company of barbarians, maybe fifty or more, riding in her wake, along with about a dozen strangely dressed men with usual weapons. That sounded like the mundane mercenaries along with the usual barbarian rabble! They had also noted a small wagon, not bigger than a carriage, bearing three live humans, trussed up and with sacks tied over their heads. The captives seemed healthy enough, and for the first time in days I began to feel confident about our pursuit.

They were now just hours ahead of us ... so we couldn’t dawdle overly long dealing with the Furry infestation, so we made it short and sweet. We first sent the cavalry riding into their valley hell bent for leather, slicing and dicing everything that moved. Anything that kept moving received a 6.5mm slug or a blast of alternating 00 buckshot and deer slugs. The perverts tried to run, but their fur suits kept tripping them up and the cleansing went faster and easier than I planned. They yiffed for mercy but we gave them none. We then stacked their foul corpses deep and soaked the funeral mound with one of our extra cans of gasoline, and indeed, the smell of their burning flesh was most pleasant to our noses.

Unfortunately no, there were not really any cute ones. The best that this motley lot of perverts could manage was a shortish gal with a pinched nose and cheeks wearing a lamb suit. She seemed the entitled sort of young wanna-be mutton that probably never did other girls, even at college or if drunk ... not even kissing. The best that her sort of boyfriend could likely expect was to give her a few wine coolers and a cigarette and after you finger blast her she’ll might, if the stars were in alignment, let you use her sweet tiny titties as a canvas for your sock-seed. Or, in her present case, two rounds of buckshot ... well expended!