Lars Breaxface- Werewolf in Space Read online

  Praise for Lars Breaxface: Werewolf in Space:

  “You gotta love a novel that opens with ‘Chapter One: A werewolf walks into a bar.’ Lars Breaxface: Werewolf in Space is a galaxian romp. Beautiful vampire witches, a werewolf space pilot who is a heroic puncher of chins, washing down cat with quaffs of ale from his on-board keg-rack, sword-winged Fishman, a mirrored villain, and Frank the tree—they all take off on a tale of planetary revenge. I love the language and wordplay of this story, (something may not be ‘superstitious’ but it could be a ‘littlestitious’) never explained, you just get it and flip pages as it rockets you from a cantina bar fight to an epic library blood-wall battle and into far away subspace on a ride in a ship called Sheila. Sheila roars like a souped up ‘67 Chevy when a rabbit-foot chained key fires up her engines. And she keeps you cozy on light-speed auto pilot in her custom flame-painted body, with Death Metal tunes blasting from her speakers. I can’t wait to see the movie. Hell, I want to be in it.”

  - Tom Atkins, actor, Night of the Creeps

  “There’s high concept, and then there’s high concept with monsters, space opera, and a throwback to all those awesome nostalgic memories you have from the ‘80s and ‘90s. That’s what Lars Breaxface has in spades. Featuring a vibrant band of ragtag heroes, this is one incredible ride through the recesses of time and space, as werewolves, witches, and other beasties chew up scenery and pursue every adventure they come across (and then some). Perfect for those who love their science fiction with a shot of pure adrenaline and fun, Lars Breaxface: Werewolf in Space is a rhapsodic good time.”

  - Gwendolyn Kiste, author, The Rust Maidens

  “How to describe something like Lars Breaxface?! Lars is like a punk Han Solo adventuring through the sleazy space underground, trafficking in the occult and supercharged with gore. It’s as colorful as The Fifth Element but mixed with the gritty irreverence of Heavy Metal; it’s a teeth-gnashing action throwback; it’s grind house science fiction.”

  - Tom Sweterlitsch, author, The Gone World

  “This is the book you find in the far corner of the used bookstore where the lights flicker and the employees refuse to go. This is the book you find under your older sibling’s mattress and when your parents catch you reading it they send you to military school on the other side of the country. This book is Lars Breaxface: Werewolf in Space and it’s the new gold standard for cult classics.”

  - Seth Fried, author, The Great Frustration

  “Lars the space-faring werewolf is a mercenary asshole whose obsession with getting drunk, paid, and laid makes him the galaxy’s one and only misanthrope lycanthrope. He’s the kind of person whose arrival at the party means it’s time for you to leave (unless you want blood and vomit on your shoes). And frankly, I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun following someone around the chaos of their own narrative. Lars and his posse of increasingly outlandish clients and hangers-on barrel through alien cities, backwater space stations, blood-splattered churches, and even the naked vacuum of space itself in pursuit of their goals. These places and their residents are rendered with prose so deft and loving that the only thing I want more than to live in these spaces is for Lars to take a shower and a nap.”

  - Angela Quinton, editor, Werewolves Versus

  Lars Breaxface

  Werewolf in Space

  Brandon Getz

  Denver, Colorado

  Published in the United States by:

  Spaceboy Books LLC

  1627 Vine Street

  Denver, CO 80206

  www.readspaceboy.com

  Text copyright © 2019 Brandon Getz

  Artwork copyright © 2019 Contributing Artists, Spaceboy Books LLC

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, copied, transmitted or stored at any time by any means mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior, written permission of the publisher.

  First printed October 2019

  ISBN: 978-1-951393-75-5

  For Benji

  and Hillary

  Awooo!

  PART I

  A Werewolf Walks into a Bar . . .

  Chapter I

  The bar he’d slunk into was a grungy space saloon called the Pickled Quasar. The kind of place where cantina jazz played loud so you couldn’t hear the guy next to you and the lights were kept low to keep you from seeing the critters belly-up in your cocktail. A dice game went sour, some Siskelian asteroid smuggler muttered a crack about Mrs. Breaxface, his sainted mother, and Lars growled like a rabid moondog, faraway lunar juice pulsing in his veins. He tossed his pint of purple toward the dim light of the rafters, punching that smuggler and each of his crew in the chin before the glass crashed and shattered and purple mixed with bloodspatter on the chockablock steel floor of the bar. Because that’s what Lars Breaxface does. That’s who Lars Breaxface is: He is a puncher of chins.

  The one-eyed bartender had a tentacle around the trigger of a blaster, and everybody, even the reptilian barbacks, gawked at the thick-necked, tattooed Earthman surrounded on all sides by unconscious Siskelians.

  “Fuck off to some other gin joint,” the bartender spat, spraying the bar with its mouthfoam. “We don’t truck with brawlers. It’s bad for our insurance premiums.”

  Lars shrugged heavy, hirsute shoulders and tossed a couple of coins on the table for the spilled pint.

  “They started it,” he grumbled. “I just finished it.”

  “Insults don’t break my furniture.” The bartender motioned toward the entry tube with the nose of its gun. “Now get the fuck out. I see your ugly puss in here again, I call StatSec, and those greasers drop you out an airlock.”

  A couple of the smugglers were moving now, groaning. It was easy to hear them—even the music had stopped in the Quasar. You could hear a tremuloid flex its root system in that kind of silence. And one did, in a corner, a prehensile branch wrapped around a bucket of chlorogin. Its leaves sagged with inebriation, and it watched Lars through the myriad, yellowed eyes in its trunk, giving the wolfman the willies, even more than the rifle aimed at his big, pulsing throat.

  “Backspace shithole,” Lars said, almost loud enough for the bartender to hear. He maneuvered his large frame toward the sphincter of the entry tube, the multi-hued crowd parting to give him a wide berth. The sphincter dilated as he neared it, and he stepped into the blue neon of the tube, shuffling toward the main hub of the waystation, hoping there was someplace to get a shave and a blowjob, not necessarily in that order.

  ❍

  Neon and trid flashed everywhere: an unbridled space disco selling everything from dick to dried vegetables. Victor’s Halo was the biggest little shithole waystation in that sector, spinning right on the border between Federation space and the wide-open final frontier. Anyone passing through that far-flung corner of the galaxy had to stop there for snacks and fuel and sundries before a psychedelic jaunt through subspace. What Lars needed was to ice his hand and slap uglies with somebody decent-looking and humanoid. He passed a greasy vendor selling t-shirts that said I went to Victor’s Halo and all I got was Cock Rot and eyed the hookers in the red-lit archways, looking for a biped or at least some species that wouldn’t require too much creativity. He’d been in the black for weeks after his last gig, jetting FTL in his cruiser from one backspace fuel station to another, jerking off so much his sock drawer looked like a hive of tube worms. He was smiling at a feline pygmy with a big wet mouth when he felt a tongue on his ear. He turned to see the proboscis of one of the escorts extending three feet between the cavity in her chest and the silver rings in his earlobe. She batted the lashes on all of her eyes, and he was almost convinced. She sm
elled like wildflowers, some kind of cheap duty-free perfume. Then the scent in the air turned suddenly sickeningly sweet, like rotting fruit, and he felt a shadow on his back. Flies buzzed around his shoulders.

  “You lost?” Lars didn’t even turn around. He knew the smell. Proboscis girl slunk back into her archway, swinging her protrusion toward another customer. “There isn’t a forest within ten lightyears of this spinner. Maybe you oughta fuck off back to the land of Oz.”

  Something hard and wooden crunched. Leaves rustled.

  Lars turned. “Speak an actual language,” he said, tapping the silver chip pinned to his collar. “This baby’ll translate.”

  The tremuloid towered over him, sagging heavily, eyes bloodshot and reptilian. Deep cuts scarred its trunk, and some of the eye sockets were hollow, grayed. Bark flaked away as it moved its branches to shrug.

  “What, you lose your speaking bits? No wooden tongue in that trunk?”

  The eyes blinked. Lars had run into trems on a dozen different planets, usually minions and drudge workers—strong, not too bright, used to following orders. This one seemed dumber than the rest. Just a walking tree. He still felt the throb in his cock, and his knuckles ached from the chin-punching he’d done in the saloon. He needed a hooker and a bowl of ice—definitely in that order. He wondered what tricks that proboscis could do.

  “Unless you’re paying me by the hour, beat it. I’m on shore leave.”

  A thick branch around his arm stopped him from ducking through the red arch.

  “Fuck you doing, sticks? Didn’t you see the show back at the bar?”

  The branch tightened. Bark dug into flesh. It reminded Lars of the Indian burns his brothers used to give him, only a thousand times worse. With his free hand, he slugged the tree-alien’s trunk, thudding against living wood until his knuckles bled. The yellow eyes blinked at him heedlessly. The lights of the hub danced across its body, bright reds and blues and yellows: a haunted tree from a forest of nightmares. Lars put his hands up, and the tremuloid slackened its grip.

  “Take me to your leader,” he said. And the tremuloid shuffled its root system toward the opposite end of the hub.

  Chapter II

  The tremuloid sagged through neon and noise, parting the crowd with its branches. Lars scratched himself and inhaled the stink of the station: sweat and secretions, blood and slime, menstruation and ovulation, rotting flesh in the butchers’ stalls and overspiced goop simmering in streetfood carts. In odd corners, religious pilgrims in bright robes burned incense on their shaved heads, and buskers maneuvered unlikely instruments of chitin and brass as travelers and smugglers and soldiers on leave scattered coin at their feet.

  The tree-thing skulked into a swank, blue bar glowing with aquarium light, the trem’s top branches shedding leaves as it scraped against the archway. The place was full, as noisy as the hub outside. Slinking across the tables and bottle shelves, translucent station cats eyed the freakish fish in the aquariums, green musculature shifting beneath their skins. Lars salivated. The cats smelled like lunch.

  “If you want to take me to dinner, sticks, just be a gentleman and ask.”

  The tremuloid hobbled to the left, finding some chance vacancy in the crowd large enough to accommodate its foliage. At the table directly in front of him, Lars saw a gothic knockout of a woman who put to shame even his deepest spank-bank fantasies. She sat with legs crossed, a dark leatherette dress shrink-wrapped to her athletic alien body. Her skin, pale as death, was pocked and lined with ritual-

  istic scars like scriptures for the blind, radiating from a complex brand that bubbled in the flesh above her breasts. Where hair would’ve been on most humanoids, tendrils hung like living rubber tubes. Ornamented here and there with silver rings, the tendrils were nearly the same purple as the grog he’d swilled and spilled in the Pickled Quasar. Her eyes: translucent ovals of amethyst with disco balls inside, flashing at him. She reached for one of the cats, brought it toward her, caressed its sticky skin with a sharp purple-painted nail.

  She opened her mouth—a row of razor teeth behind black blowjob lips—and said, “You’re the wolf.”

  The tremuloid’s yellow eyes were watching. It had another cup of chlorogin glowing fluorescent green in its prehensile branch.

  “That your pimp?” Lars said. “Doesn’t say much. I like him.”

  The woman almost smiled. “You misunderstand,” she said. “You’re not buying me. I’m buying you.”

  “My lucky day. Been a while since I’ve been paid for it.” He pulled a chair from another table and slumped into it, leaning back. “This one of those DNA gigs? Impregnation from a stud with good genetic batter?”

  “I’m not buying your dick, wolf. If it even twitches in my direction—” This time she did smile, showing that mouthful of shark’s teeth, blazing white and dangerous. Lars winced instinctively. Even the cat skittered away, a waste of a good meal.

  “Listen, I’ve been in the black for a long time. Weeks, months. I’m just looking to get fucked, fed, and drunk. I’ve seen enough jobs to last me a decade in one of these shithole waystations. You hear about the Cacotopian civil war? Or that shit with the cyborgs on the metal planet out by Vega, the one whose name is in binary so you sound like an asshole rattling off all those zeroes? Been there and a hundred others—casino systems, outlaw moons, vagrant desert worlds, wherever somebody needs somebody like me to break somebody else.” Lars grabbed someone’s drink and chugged it, slapping it back on the adjacent table. “I don’t need your job. The dick, however—give that away free.”

  The tremuloid shifted beside him, and the woman’s tendrils twitched like snakes dreaming bad dreams. She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward. Tits bulged forward like halfmoons, making his blood uneasy.

  “Let’s start over,” she said. “My associate beside you is Frank. He can’t speak because of a blight he picked up from a flytrap whore, but he’s loyal. I’d tell you my name, but you wouldn’t be able to pronounce it with your primitive tongue. Call me Jay.”

  “Jay,” he said, liking the taste. “Lars.”

  “I know. Lars Breaxface—the werewolf in space.”

  “It’s got a ring to it.”

  “Show me.”

  Jay settled back into her chair, crossing her arms under her breasts. Sparks flashed inside her heliotropic eyes.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Lars said. “It’s the moons. Place like this, it isn’t even orbiting a planet, just some half-dead star. No moons out here.” He scratched his neck and smelled the cats and creatures pulsing in the corners of the room. He could smell the meats for sale in the hub, too, beckoning. Fuck, he was hungry. And horny. Sometimes it felt like the same thing. “I’ve got plenty of lunar batteries in my cruiser. Rig them up, I can turn even if I’m lightyears from moonscape. But they’re expensive—not wasted on demonstrations.”

  “Then how do I know what I’m getting?”

  Lars stood, hulking. “You sent sticks—Frank—here to find me. You came all the way out to this borderland spinner. You already know what you’re getting.”

  She cracked another smile. A cat rubbed viscously against her pale shoulder.

  “They say you’re quite the killer,” Jay said. “A wild animal with a massacre or two behind him. Might be that’s what I need.”

  Lars knew what she meant. Officially, Dys-7—a farming planet with delusions of independence—had succumbed to some exploding plague dug up from alien soil. But word gets around. Dys-7 had been a massacre, his only massacre. From before he’d learned to control the beast inside him. It still gave him nightmares when he went to sleep sober. He didn’t list it on his résumé. “You heard wrong. I’m a merc, lady. Soldier of fortune. Sellsword. Private contractor. Bodyguard. Et cetera, et cetera. Just happens to be I’m a bodyguard with some unique lupine attributes.”

  “I have a bodyguard,” said Jay, nodding toward the drunkard tree. “I need a monster.” She reached into the purple hive of tendrils and pulled ou
t a small cylinder. In the blue light, it took a moment for him to see what was inside: a solid black cube, enough negativium to power his cruiser till the next Big Bang. He could only sell half and still be disgustingly rich.

  “Jeezus butt-fucking Joseph,” he muttered.

  Jay closed her hand, and the cylinder was swallowed back into its hiding place in her living hair. “Payment. For the job and for transit. The route Frank and I took to this system is no longer viable. And we have a few more stops to make before we get where we’re going.” She stood, and the cat behind her hissed.

  “Where are we headed, then? You, me, and Treebeard over there.”

  “It’s not on any starmap. Not even backspace.”

  “You make it sound like Hell.”

  “Close,” she said. “Home.”

  Chapter III

  Tethered along the docks of the station were a hundred ships from every corner of the galaxy: chrome rockets and effervescent orbs, heavy cargo clunkers and thin starcruisers, a few clockwork gearships with foil solarsails folded like wings. And there among them, bright yellow flames painted along its nose, golden spoiler above its tachyon engine, Sheila in silver cursive beside the naked pinup girl on the fuselage, was his cruiser. Lars stared at it out through the bubbled porthole in the hub, some busker-wannabe beside him cranking an aluminum hand-horn.

  Where’s home? he’d asked.

  We’ll get there. Ran her black tongue across the points of her teeth. When it’s time.