Asskickers of the Fantastic Read online

He unzipped his windbreaker and wrapped it around the shivering girl.

  “It’s all right. You’re safe now. These men won’t be bothering you anymore.”

  Crayon looked surprised. “That’s what he said.”

  “Who?”

  “That big guy… in the black leather coat. He saved my life. You must have seen him. He walked right past you.”

  She pointed to the stairway. Chaney looked to the others for confirmation, but got only shrugs in response. He turned to a SWAT officer standing near the door.

  “Check outside. Find him.”

  The officer turned and ran up the steps.

  Meanwhile, Theilen had pulled the masks off the bodies of the Power Drill and Oxyacetylene Maniacs. He looked at Chaney.

  “There’s no doubt, Jack. It’s the Aldente Clan. That anonymous tip paid off. Looks like these cannibals have enjoyed their last entree.”

  Chaney turned back to the girl.

  “You seem like a smart girl, Crayon. How could you jump into a pickup with these mouth-breathers?”

  “They said they were concert promoters. They told me they could get me Justin Bieber tickets.”

  Chaney frowned. Certainly no one was that fucking stupid.

  “Okay, okay, the bloodstains on their leather aprons should've been a huge red flag,” she continued, looking embarrassed. “But do you know what Justin Bieber tickets cost?”

  He was wrong. There was at least one person that fucking stupid. He waved over the female cop.

  “Get her out of here, willya? The cold is icing up her brain.”

  She collected the girl, and moved her toward the stairway.

  “C'mon, darling. Let's get some coffee.”

  At the stairway, Crayon turned back to Chaney.

  “Hey Chaney… if you go through their pockets and find any concert tickets, they're mine, okay?”

  “Scram!” said Chaney.

  “God, just askin'.”

  She headed up the stairs with the cop.

  Chaney turned his attention to the bent chainsaw on the floor. He pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and wrapped it around the saw’s handle. Lifting the heavy chainsaw into the light, he examined the impressions squeezed into the bent blade.

  “Jesus. Are those fingerprints?” he said, almost inaudibly.

  Theilen returned, holding the head of the Chainsaw Maniac in his hands.

  “Jack, look at this.” He held up the head to Chaney, who grimaced.

  “Come on, Tom. Leave that stuff for forensics.”

  “No, seriously. There’s some kind of mark pressed into his forehead. From the heel of a boot, maybe.”

  Chaney, not hiding his disgust, pulled a pair of glasses from an inside jacket pocket and put them on.

  Theilen continued: “It’s some kind of symbol… looks like a butt with a boot print on it. And some words…”

  Chaney peered closer at the mark, reading the words aloud.

  “Asskickers… of the… Fantastic.”

  Then he groaned, visibly pained.

  “Mean something to you?” Theilen asked.

  Chaney sighed deeply.

  “It means my past has caught up with me.”

  Chapter 2

  “Papa Zomba kill you soon!”

  It was after midnight by the time Rex Havoc returned to the city. He parked his car, a black 1951 Studebaker Commander Land Cruiser, outside his Midtown apartment building, and then walked across the street to the corner newsstand for his daily stack of reading material.

  Rex distrusted the mainstream newspapers – convinced they were all published by a cabal of wealthy devil worshippers and filled with Satan’s lies – preferring instead to buy the weekly tabloids, written by hard-hitting journalists who told the unvarnished truth about Bigfoot sightings and the shocking upsurge of extraterrestrial colonoscopies in the Louisiana swamplands. The tabloids were lined along a table in front of the newsstand, with headlines blaring:

  "BIGFOOT WEDS MAFIA PRINCESS"

  "WEREWOLVES INVADE GIRLS' DORMITORY"

  "UFOs TERRORIZE BIGFOOT WEDDING"

  Rex moved down the row of tabloids, gathering them up in his arms as he went. He had quite a stack of them by the time he got to the cash register. Benny, the crusty old vendor, looked up from the copy of Tiger Beat he was reading and smiled at him.

  “Fellow looking for you earlier, Mr. Havoc. Black gentleman, blank stare, no shirt, walkin' like he had a lot of starch in his underwear.”

  Rex handed the newspapers to Benny.

  “One of Papa's boys. Wonder how he found out where

  I live.”

  Benny shrugged and tallied up the newspapers.

  “I saw you on ‘Jerry Warmouth,’ talking about the monster epidemic. Terrible thing. Every night they're hangin' around my newsstand, readin' my books and never buying anything. Teenage werewolves slobbering on my hot rod magazines… zombies dropping limbs all over the place. And the Invisible Man is the worst – he just steals everything. I hate monsters, I just hate 'em!” Benny placed the newspapers on the counter. “That’ll be twelve and a quarter today, Mr. Havoc.”

  Rex paid the vendor and tucked the newspapers under his arm. But as he turned to walk away, Benny snagged him by a sleeve.

  “You'll get 'em for us, won't you, Mr. Havoc? You won't let monsters take over everything?”

  Rex narrowed his eyes and became darkly serious.

  “Goddamn right I won’t,” he said with a certainty even an atomic clock could not guarantee.

  As Rex walked out of earshot, Benny bragged up his acquaintance to a young couple coming up with magazines.

  “That's Rex Havoc, the monster killer. He buys magazines here all the time. He lives right across the street!”

  The traffic light changed and Rex stepped into the intersection, heading back to his apartment. As he crossed the street, he saw a freaky-looking headbanger walking his way. The man had tight leather pants, chains, body piercings, and sported a Technicolor mohawk. Rex could hear the heavy metal music blaring through the man’s earbuds from ten feet away.

  Both men glowered at each other as they drew closer, neither one of them knowing what to make of the other. Rex balled his fist as the two men passed, but then he relaxed, opting in that split second to spare the man’s life.

  Not one of Cthulhu’s disciples, Rex concluded. Just fucking weird.

  Rex walked to the entrance of his apartment building, an inconspicuous three story corner brownstone in an unremarkable neighborhood. He ascended the steps to his private entrance, stopped to get his mail, and then turned to open the door. There, nailed to the door, he saw a voodoo doll crudely crafted in his own image, complete with a long scar atop its head, a scruff of black hair, and an angry scowl that was admittedly pretty authentic. Pinned to the doll was a note scrawled in chicken blood, gauging by the feathers still stuck to it.

  The note warned:

  PAPA ZOMBA KILL YOU SOON!

  He crumpled the note, yanked the doll off the door, and slid a queer-looking skeleton key into the lock. As he opened the door, a weird array of lethal devices pulled away from the narrow staircase. Mechanical stake plunger, buzzsaw, flamethrower, lethal syringe device, razor-sharp pendulum — all retracted noisily into the walls. Rex climbed the stairs, on which every riser had a variety of religious and pagan symbols inscribed on them, intended to ward off the powers of darkness.

  At the top of the stairs, many more safeguards against evil adorned the doorway to his apartment. A hex sign was painted over the threshold; garlic was strung in abundance; and a huge crucifix was fastened to the door itself. He unlocked the door and entered his apartment.

  Rex hit a switch, lighting up a sizable apartment, crowded with strange artifacts, occult curios, and books, lots of books, jammed into every square inch of the place. Trophies from some of his extraordinary adventures were also on view: a grotesque metal mask with spikes on the inside; a walking stick decorated with a silver wolf’s head; a
mysterious puzzle box made of human fat and bone; the actual skull of Count Yorga; and a great many more items, all haphazardly displayed. The place looked like the Ackermansion, except all these items were not movie props, but the genuine articles.

  He tossed the voodoo doll into a cardboard box in the corner containing a dozen more Rex Havoc dolls. As he laid the mail and the stack of tabloids on a table, he noticed the ripped sleeve of his coat. He pulled off the coat, laid it on a chair, and walked over to the answering machine.

  There were two messages on the machine. He pressed the button to listen.

  “Mr. Havoc, my name is Mel Lubitsch. I represent the six members of The Church of Satanic Arts and Sciences you brutally assaulted on ‘The Jerry Warmouth Show’ earlier today, and —”

  Rex pushed the delete message button.

  The second message began with weird island music. There were drums and eerie singing, joined by a droning voice, which said:

  “Papa Zomba kill you soon…! Papa Zomba kill you soon…! Papa Zom—”

  He cut this message short and deleted it as well.

  “Papa Zomba, you're a fruitcake,” Rex said to the machine.

  Clearly, Papa Zomba and Rex Havoc had some history. Years ago, Rex and the Asskickers had shut down Papa’s very lucrative porta-potty factory in Haiti, where he had used zombie slaves as his sole, unpaid labor force. Since then, on a regular basis, Papa had threatened to turn Rex into one of his zombie slaves, and force him to make porta-potties in Port-au-Prince.

  Rex picked up a TV remote from a nearby table and pressed the power button. All at once, a dozen televisions, of various shapes and sizes, came to life. The televisions were everywhere – mounted on the wall, set inside bookcases, stacked on top of each other – each tuned to a different channel. He scanned the screens, alert for any “Breaking News” banners, and finding nothing put down the remote.

  He pulled off his shirt, revealing a muscular torso covered with an assortment of scars, burns and bite marks, as well as dozens of elaborate and cryptic tattoos. The largest tattoo, on his back and extending the length of his spine, was a vivid depiction of a witch being burned at the stake. Across his massive chest were scenes of armies fighting giant insects and firing rockets at Godzilla. His right bicep showed King Kong chained and helpless at Radio City Music Hall, and his left bicep depicted the Frankenstein monster trapped inside a burning windmill. And etched across any skin still available was a variety of weird symbols and phrases — written in Old English, Hebrew, Japanese, Egyptian, Sumerian, as well as in an alien language much older than the Earth itself — each tattoo intended to neutralize a very specific manifestation of evil.

  (Not on view at the moment was the Number of the Beast, “666.” This number was tattooed on Rex’s right ass cheek and was available for the Devil to kiss any time he wanted to stop by.)

  Rex unlaced and pulled off his black steel-toed boots. Engraved on the heel of each boot was a circular emblem showing a naked butt with a boot print on it. Inscribed around the butt were the words: ASSKICKERS OF THE FANTASTIC – printed backward, like a mirror image, ensuring the words would be clearly legible whenever Rex kicked a monster in the face or whatever the hell it called its posterior. This was Rex’s version of the “Have Gun, Will Travel” business card, and it was pretty darn memorable, particularly to any monster on the receiving end of one of his boots.

  He took another look at the TVs and, detecting no emergencies, walked into the bathroom and started the shower.

  Chapter 3

  The Monster Rights Bill

  In early 1986, when the catastrophic explosion at Germany’s Very Dangerous Research Laboratory outside of Vasaria accidentally blasted open the Monster Dimension and unleashed thousands of monsters into our dimension, the executives at VDR took quick and decisive action by claiming the accident never happened. Weeks later, after villagers in small towns across the country were torn limb from limb and their children were thrown into lakes, VDR admitted that perhaps a small breach had occurred and a few monsters did get loose, but were at the very worst only a minor threat to wildlife in the Black Forest. Two years later, monsters had infiltrated every corner of the planet, and VDR had nothing more to say on the matter, mainly because everybody at the laboratory had been killed by monsters.

  All the world’s scientists could not control the exploding monster population, and all the world’s armies could not destroy them. Attempts to send the monsters back to their own dimension failed repeatedly, and killing them just seemed to piss them off even more.

  By 1999, monsters had become so numerous that it was nearly impossible to go to the beach without swimming into the jaws of a Kraken, or go to a movie and not be molested by a Tingler or a Blob or some other kind of monstrosity. Worse yet, monsters were stealing our best minimum wage jobs and moving into our best shitty neighborhoods.

  Of course, monsters existed on the planet long before this disaster, but never in such numbers, and never so aggressive. It seemed, for the first time, that monsters were hell-bent on taking over the entire world and vanquishing the human infestation once and for all.

  Then, in 2012, things got seriously weird. Fed up with being treated like rabid lepers by the human populace, monsters in the United States did the unthinkable:

  They sued for their civil rights.

  In a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience, werewolves demanded the right to get a trim or a bikini wax at any Supercuts in the country, free from the indignity of visiting a pet groomer. Huge stony Golems refused to pay a surcharge for taking up three seats on an airplane. Zombies and ghouls sat at the lunch counters of vegan restaurants and refused to leave until they were served buckets of brains and raw flesh. And at city halls across the country, demons and humans protested the ban on mixed species marriages and applied for marriage certificates, even if it meant their children turned out looking like Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies.

  The lawsuit gained global attention. The ACLU and PETA rallied to the aid of the monsters, pushing hard for a Monster Rights bill. A famous Irish rock band took up their cause, singing heartbreaking songs about monsters being chased by villagers with torches and pitchforks. Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon as many A-list celebrities appeared in public service ads, bemoaning the awful plight of monsters worldwide and urging everyone to call Congress and demand legislation to end anti-monster bigotry.

  Then the video of Chucky the adorable homicidal doll getting chopped to pieces by an axe-wielding cop went viral, and public sympathy for monsters shot through the stratosphere and into the Oort Cloud.

  Suddenly, monsters became all the rage. Taylor Swift was out; the Incredible Two-Headed Transplant was in.

  And monsters everywhere began to call themselves “Fantastics,” as a way of making their unspeakable lifestyles more palatable to the general public.

  Rex Havoc had another name for them:

  Goners.

  Chapter 4

  Nocturnos, King of Witches

  After his shower, Rex toweled off and put on a black bathrobe that had a small Asskickers emblem tastefully embroidered above the heart. He brushed his teeth, and spotted more gray hairs coming in at the temples as he looked in the mirror. Then his image began to fade. Dropping the toothbrush, he looked at his hands, which had become nearly transparent. Rex squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his fists. He reached out to touch the mirror with his fingertips, and concentrated. When he opened his eyes and looked at the mirror again, sheer willpower had restored him to his normal solid state.

  He opened a prescription bottle sitting on the counter nearby, and noticed it was nearly empty. Rex tapped out two large white pills and swallowed them, and then took a deep breath. In a few days he’d have to make another trip to Hong Kong to refill his meds, but right now he had more important things to do.

  Rex walked into the front room, which served as both his living room and office. Occupying one corner of the room was a curious shrine dedicated to his famous an
cestor and hero of the Salem Witch Trials, Cotton Mather. There was an old painting on the wall showing Mather, the fanatical 17th century Puritan minister, wearing a powdered wig and a self-righteous scowl, clutching to his breast a copy of the notorious witchfinder’s bible, the Malleus Maleficarum. Beneath the painting was a priceless 1487 edition of the Malleus Maleficarum itself, opened and weirdly floating inside an airtight glass case.

  He struck a match and lit two candles on a shelf beneath the painting, then looked into the face of the intrepid witchfinder. He saw wisdom in those baleful eyes, and the strength to strangle convicted witches with those powerful hands. Rex was proud to be the descendant of such a visionary go-getter. Every time he looked upon that gray, wrathful face, it strengthened his resolve to kill monsters by the carload, every day and every night, even when he was exhausted and didn’t think he had the energy left to impale one more vampire, and even when the rest of the world thought he was batshit crazy.

  On his desk were piled papers and hastily scribbled notes, all having something to do with monsters and his efforts to kick their asses into next week. File cabinets behind his desk were filled with photos and reference on every monster threat ever discovered, and many more that existed in theory but hadn’t yet revealed themselves.

  To one side of the desk was a big white board propped on an easel, and at the top were the words: ASSES TO KICK. Below this was scrawled a list of monsters and villains currently considered priorities, and these were:

  (1) THE ALDENTE CLAN

  (2) THE KILLER SHREWS

  (3) THE ATROCIVORE

  (4) VERMITHRAX PEJORATIVE

  (5) CLINT EASTWOOD

  (6) THE SHUFFLING SLAUGHTERHOUSE

  (7) EEGAH

  (8) THE BRAIN TWISTERS

  (9) CTHULHU

  The last one was furiously circled in red and resided on a special area of the board:

  (10) VARGOS SPIDERBACK