Crosspoints Christmas Carol

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Crosspoints Christmas Carol

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

CROSSPOINTS CHRISTMAS CAROL
A Merry Messy MABRT Misadventure



Miskatonic Meadows, Massachusetts
1500 Hours


It was a cold and snowy day. Snowflakes drifted in the gentle wind as they came down to settle on the ground, on the pine trees and on the road. It was an idyllic sight, a winter wonderland disturbed only by a pickup truck rushing by.

Joe Piper was getting all mighty crotchety. The road was all blanketed in white and Mr. Plow had forgotten to come by to get rid of the stuff with his truck-mounted snowplow, making navigation all the more harder. So hard that it took all of Joe’s skill with the wheel to keep his pickup from sliding off the road and slamming into a tree and it didn’t help that he had forgotten to chain his tires, which was definitely not good with the roads being all icy and slippery slick. He knew it wasn’t smart, but decided to step on the accelerator a bit faster anyhow, since he also knew that he had a schedule to keep and a deadline to meet.

All in all, Joe gave himself a fifty-fifty chance of inadvertently killing himself on his way to work. Not too shabby.

See, Ms. Lewyn’s water heater had broken down and since Joe was the cheapest plumber in the block she immediately called him to do an emergency fix-it. On Joe’s part, he could hardly refuse since there was the Christmas Spirit to consider and his wife’s recent Yuletide’s spending spree to take note of as well. He needed the money, needed it quick, if he didn’t want to end up selling his soul to some red-handed loan shark or something.

Needless to say, this wasn’t how Joe intended to spend his Christmas Eve. He turned on the radio and tried to ease himself with whatever the stations were playing. They mostly played happy little Christmas songs round this time, but Joe guessed that he needed some of those anyway. His pickup’s el-cheapo radio began playing some good old tunes.

“I'm dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know
Where the treetops glisten
And children listen, to hear – ”


Joe heard shrieking, really loud shrieking, and looked up out his windshield to see something silvery streak through the sky. The strange sight transfixed him for but a moment before disappearing from view and he was about to utter some kind of appropriately amazed profanity when something else came into view, not up in the sky but on the road dead ahead of him just seconds away from being roadkilled.

“Shit Jesus!” he spun the wheel and swerved the truck off the slick snow-covered road and into the trees. With the accumulated snow off the roadside helping slow his slide, he stomped on the brakes as hard as he could and tried his best to save himself from having to claim car crash insurance. The tailspin stopped right at the nick of time and he sighed in relief, looking out the window and seeing just how close he was to hitting the trees.

Slowly, he unfastened his seatbelt – thankful that he wasn’t stupid enough to forget buckling up – and opened the door. As he got out, the edge of the door hit the nearest tree and caused the snow on its branches to fall down right on him.

“Fuck!”

He wiped the snow off his parka and put on his cap, protecting his bald skinhead from the harsh elements, and treaded back to the road in a steady and measured pace to see what it was that nearly killed him – sinking his legs deep in the snow with each and every miserable step as he did so. He knew he wouldn’t like what he’d see.

He didn’t like what he saw. Not one bit.

“Jesus Christ!” he shouted, not liking what he saw not one bit. There was a person sitting in the middle of the road, just squatting on the snow. A man or a woman, Joe really couldn’t tell, right out there on the pavement. “You nearly darned fucking killed me, you goddamned sumbitch!”

No response. The person didn’t even move.

“What the hell?” he shouted some more. “Can you hear me, asshole? What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get up, goddamn it!”

Joe walked over to the person, just waiting for the chance to kick the shit out of him or her, kept on shouting as loudly as he could as he went along. But he became quiet when he noticed red liquid pooling slowly beneath the person. Joe could tell that the man or woman was bleeding badly, as the flow of warm blood began to quicken, making that crimson pool grow, making the snow melt slowly around it.

“Jesus,” Joe gasped as he quickly went around to face the person and knelt down to help him. “What the hell happened?”

The man, as Joe could now see, didn’t answer – didn’t even look at him or anything. He just sat there as the pool of blood expanded outwards, little by little, just squatted there as he continued to bleed.

“Let’s get you to a doctor. Come on,” Joe grabbed the man’s arm and pulled him up gently. Surprisingly, the man got up easily.

Then his guts spilled out from underneath him, coils of intestines spooling on the snow with a big wet slop.

Joe screamed.

“I'm dreaming of a white Christmas
With every Christmas card I write
May your days be merry and bright
And may all your Christmases be white.”




Dunwich City, Massachusetts
1800 Hours


The snowy suburb was rife with bright decorations and ornamentations, looking very much like a festive constellation of flickering stars from afar. Christmas lights blinked and twinkled around windows and on trees out on gardens, sometimes spelling out holiday’s greetings, while star-shaped lanterns hanged out of porches and on verandas for all to see. On the rooftops of the more ostentatious homes were shiny neon Santa Clauses, whipping glowing reindeers with lashes of electric light as the Rudolfs’ noses flashed red.

One home wasn’t quite as shiny as its neighbors though. It had a little star-lantern hanging on its porch and a couple of shrubs haphazardly wrapped in some lights, but it wasn’t the kind of house that really needed tastelessly gaudy ornaments all over it. It was quite quaint, and did have a nice rotund snowman standing by at the lawn, complete with a bitten carrot on its nose, twigs for arms and empty black coals for eyes. On the door was a set of Christmas lights, arranged to alternatingly spell the words ‘Maligayang Pasko!’ and ‘Feliz Navidad!’ as they flickered.

“Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock
Jingle bells swing and jingle bells ring
Snowing and blowing up bushels of fun
Now the jingle hop has begun”


Karen Salinas nodded her head in approval as she amped the volume of her shiny new MP5 media player. Presents weren’t supposed to be opened until the morning of Christmas Day, but since she bought it as a gift for herself, she didn’t bother with wrapping it up and placing it under the tree. Instead, she was seeing (or hearing) if the gadget actually did contain the hundreds of free Christmas songs and carols the store person had claimed it had inside it. So far, so good – a whole buncha free songs with terabytes of free space too, so it really was a bargain!

“Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock…” she sang off-key as she bounced into the living room. She hadn’t uploaded any other songs yet, but she was pretty alright with all the Christmas ones so far. It was Christmas after all, and things were actually going great for her. No school, no classes, no horrible classmates, none of the crazy death-defying extracurricular activities that came after it, and – most importantly - no homework! “… jingle bell chime in jingle bell time.”

In the living room, Mom was struggling with a rather large present an auntie had sent, trying to place it under the Christmas tree without crushing all the other smaller presents under it, but she just couldn’t and ended up heaving the oversized thing onto the couch instead. Karen couldn’t hear what Mom said afterwards, but Mom ended up sprawled on the other couch anyway, so it was alright. Karen smiled at Mom and she smiled back tiredly and said something that sounded like ‘dining room’ while pointing at the direction of the dining room, so Karen just nodded her head and went over to the dining room.

“Dancing and prancing in Jingle Bell Square, in the frosty air…” Karen went on as she went over to the dining room. It was on the other side of the house and she wasn’t in a hurry, but as she neared she could smell the aroma of various foods and it made her tummy grumble. She turned off her MP5 and went over to find Dad arranging various plates and pots around a rather large something that looked rather like an entire fat brown-roasted stuck pig at the center of the table. “Daddy… what on Earth is that?”

“Oh, Karen,” Dad took off his oven mitts and turned to look at her looking at the brown-roasted stuck pig at the center of the table. “That’s a lechon, a native Filipino delicacy!”

Karen gasped. It was really hueg, easily the size of a small person, and its smooth skin was really brown and oily, its ears were all pointy and its snout was all snouty and its face was grimaced as if it had been cooked alive and squealing and its mouth was wide open, with its tongue and teeth clearly visible. If Karen was squeamish, which she was before seeing far worse things in the ‘line of duty’, she would’ve been a little bit more appalled. But still. It was a lechon. “It’s a what?”

Daddy replied by breaking a piece of the ‘lechon’ thing’s skin with an audible carapace-crack and placing it in Karen’s wide open mouth in one smooth, lechon-breaking, mouth-placing motion.

“Da-?!” Karen tried to protest, but it turned out that the piece of broken off pig-skin was surprisingly really ridiculously crispy, like the porky equivalent of fried chicken’s skin combined with some kind of thin-slice potato chip, and the fats under it added to the strangely tasty taste. Karen’s eyes widened. “Hey, that was pretty tasty. I want some more!”

“Now, now, Karen,” Dad said, taking a small piece of lechon skin with his fingers and eating it before wagging his oily index at her. “We’ve got to save some for the guests. Speaking of which, why don’t you check if they’re here?”

Just then, the doorbell rang and Karen skedaddled out of the dining room, quickly going over to the door to answer whoever was on the other side. She didn’t even bother to see who it was before opening the door.

“KAREN!” a high-pitched voice squealed and before Karen knew it, she was nearly tackled to the ground when a very fast female form came bum-rushing over to glomp her in a maneuver that looked like an all-out football tackle crossed with a bear hug. “Cousin, I missed yous!”

“Vivian!” Karen’s voice was a mixture of pleasant surprise and annoyance, since she was both really happy to see her cousin and a little bit not-happy at the arms constricting her. She made feeble attempts to pry herself free of them. “You… you made it!”

“Yes I have!”

“Uh, Vi…?”

“Oh! Letting go now.” Vivian eventually released her hug-hold and stepped back to smile – nay – beam at Karen. On her part, Karen re-expanded her lungs as she looked over the taller (and thinner) girl’s shoulders to see who else was there, to see if Vivian had walked all the way from Portharbor, Skyhaven over to Dunwich, Massachusetts all by herself through the snow and all, or if she had come with her family. In a car. Knowing her, the former was just as likely as the latter, if not more so (not really, but yeah). Crazy cousins.

Behind Vivian was her twin brother Basilio, who was smiling (at them). Karen waved Bas hi and stepped aside to let Vivi and her brother in. Behind them were their parents, Karen’s Uncle and Auntie, but they were still in their station wagon (which had real wood) trying to park without hitting the snowman on the lawn. They saw Karen by the door and waved at her and she waved back as they finally managed to park their wagon. They got out and quickly made their way in, not wanting to stay out in the cold any longer than necessary. As they came in, Karen took Uncle’s right hand and placed it on her forehead in some gesture of familial filial piety and respect Mom and Dad told her to do whenever she was around relatives. She did it for Auntie too, and both of them looked pleasantly surprised. Karen, on her part, smiled and gave an awkward shrug.

“Hi Karen. How are your parents?” Auntie asked.

“They’re alright,” Karen replied as she turned to lead them into the house. “Come on, dinner’s ready!”

They came in just as Dad finished readying the dinner, and he went over to clap Uncle in the back, congratulating him for making it just in time rather than in ‘Filipino Time’. Mom, being the gracious host, was multitasking by chatting away animatedly with Auntie while showing everyone their seats and complimenting both Vivi and Bas on how they’ve grown and so on and so forth. Vivi and Bas did the same hand-to-forehead thing Karen did, but to Mom and Dad, and then they went over and sat themselves near Karen and began rapid-firing her with so many questions that she could barely answer them in time. She tried to counter her long-lost cousins with questions on her own, barely managing beyond ‘What’s up?’ and ‘How’s school?’, but the cousins were just as eager to prattle on about how life was like in Skyhaven and so on and such, and Vivi was as much a fan of Wayward Son as Karen, though Bas preferred Nathan Blitz for some reason. Then Dad decided to go on to serious business. He was hungry, and Karen sure was too.

“Karen, will you say grace?” he asked, and Karen obliged – if a bit reluctantly. She said grace, forgetting to cross herself (though no one noticed), and when she was done everyone began filling their plates with all the foods they wanted, but in a slow and polite manner of course. Dad bragged about his scallop soup while filling his plate with rice. “Try my scallop soup,” he said. “It’s pretty good.”

The scallops were pretty good, Dad always made good scallops, but Karen had her attention on the pieces of pork on her plate, which she ended up forking into her mouth. Unlike the skin, which was totally crispy and tasty with its thin underlayer of fats, the meats were actually really soft and succulent and moist and also very tasty. Karen knew she needed more, and promptly got the knife and carved herself another piece from the lechon at the table’s center. Basilio tried to reach for some, but he was too far away.

“Help me. Need… more…” Karen’s cousin said in a feeble begging voice, to which she laughed and obliged, giving him some crunchies from the lechon-pig’s leg. Bas thanked her with his mouth full. “Thanks!”

“No problem,” Karen replied with a smile. Then Dad asked her to pass him the scallops, and so she did, passing it to Vivi, who passed it to Auntie, who passed it to Mom, who passed it to Bas, who passed it to Dad, who then passed it to Uncle with much encouragement and bragging about his home cooking. Karen couldn’t help but smile at how they were totally arranged in no particular order, then she frowned. She had forgotten the sauce for her spring rolls “Vivi, can you pass the sauce?”

“Sure, here,” Vivi said, and then she went: “Hey, Karen, I heard you got a new boyfriend.”

“Wha-?” Karen nearly choked herself on a spring roll, totally not expecting the unexpected question. “Uh, no. Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Oh, nothing,” Vivi beamed at her, and Karen gave her an odd look, but then Vivi shrugged and prattled on about ‘Life in Skyhaven’.

Karen listened on intently as her cousins described the place they lived in, that strange little nation known as Skyhaven, a tiny ahistorical blip on the American West Coast renowned for its… eccentricities. Swashbuckling citizens, supervillain mayors, Howard Huges and Spruce Mooses, homebuilt ornithopter kits and all sorts of crazy stories that went well with Karen’s thorough mastication of the various delicious foods mixed in her mouth. Every time Karen ate something else, Vivi and Bas seemed to move on to another interestingly strange tale from their place of origin, like rocketeers and robots from the future. Not that Karen minded, as she chewed and mused on what life must be like in Portharbor, Skyhaven, with its vigilante teams and roach coaches and libertarians. She decided that she had her fair share of the strange stuff in Dunwich, and that enough was enough for the meanwhile. She was enjoying the lechon and the lack of excitement in her vacation.

Meanwhile, Dad and Uncle and Auntie were conversing nostalgically over the very thoroughly eaten lechon at the table’s center while Mom listened intently. Karen wasn’t really listening to them, since she was busy chewing and listening to Bas go on about how awesome that new Hivemaster movie was, and how it was based on a true story of some Skyhavenite super in the 60s, but the grown ups were musing about the Old Country and how it was practically sinking into the ocean due to its sad state of affairs. Then they cheered up, since the currency exchange rate meant that if they ever decided to vacation in the Philippines to see distant family and enjoy the quiet country life, then they would end up living like royalty as long they didn’t buy any of the overpriced Rey Quirino branded stuff, whatever a Rey Quirino was. Mom made a quip about how nice having a summer shopping spree in her husband’s homeland would be, since she had never been there before (being as American as apple-pie), and it caught Karen’s ear. Vivi was complaining about how Bas’ girlfriend ran her foot over with her robot wheelchair.

“Wait, you have a girlfriend?”

“Yeah,” Bas blushed, his flushing face a stark contrast to the white piece of lechon meat. “She’s really cute!”

Karen congratulated her cousin while Vivi mumbled something about wheels while trying Dad’s scallops. Mom opened the Coca-Cola bottle and poured everyone drinks.

“Alright, who wants dessert?” Mom asked. Dad was slightly disappointed that his scallops got overshadowed by the large mail-ordered lechon, but he was too fat and full of food to really mind. Mom, on the other hand, had prepared the fruit salad and had stowed ice creams in the freezer and was just about ready to break them out.

Anyway, everyone raised their hands, absolutely ready to continue the pigging out - Auntie, Uncle, and the Cousins understandably so since they had just traveled long and far for food. Karen herself was absolutely relishing the gluttony of the season, all the great foods and the fruitcake and the candy canes and the milk and cookies and the enormous roasted pigs and homemade scallops and bubba gump, and Dad shared her enthusiasm – being a self-styled amateur chef and all that, complete with a mail-order grill advertised by some washed-out retired boxer on TV, and he always said that a good chef always enjoyed his own food to the point of overeating (and maybe obesity). Karen was slightly worried about growing fat though, and how she might end up putting it all on her hips, but she remembered that as soon as the Christmas Break was over, she’d end up burning it all away anyway on the various gruesome physical ordeals she’d end up undertaking. There was PE, and she was in the track team after all… but it sure beat the debate team, and she was sure she would’ve been dead if she had joined the debate team instead of the track team.

Karen got up and helped Mom, going over to the refrigeron and helping her haul the gallon containers of Cookies and Cream, Rocky Road, Chunky Monkey, and a few others all belonging to the allegedly 31 flavors of ice cream. She grabbed two of the gallon cans and went back over to the table.

“Ta-da!” Karen declared as she delivered the ice creams and got back to her seat, right beside Vivi.

“Is that a new MP4.5 player?” Vivi asked as she noticed the little gizmo poking out of Karen’s breast pocket.

“No, it’s an MP5,” Karen replied casually, putting it on the table for Vivi to examine. “It’s not as fancy as one of them iBrains, or even a FLAC, but it came with free Christmas songs though.”

“What Christmas songs?”

“All of them, I think,” Karen shrugged. “I bought it this afternoon. It’s a gift for myself, so I didn’t bother wrapping it up and placing it under a tree.”

Suddenly, Vivi’s mouth gaped open (wider than usual), and everyone ended up looking at her. And Karen. Even Mom stopped scooping ice cream into glasses.

“What?” Karen asked nervously, looking around at everyone looking at her (and Vivi).

“Mom!” Vivi cried in apparent alarm. “We left the gifts in the car!”

Auntie gasped and tried her best not to look embarrassed. She looked around, face all red, and promptly got up, intent on going out into the snow to get the gifts.

“Stay. Eat,” Mom handed Auntie a cup of ice cream. “We can do our gift giving later. Right, hon?”

“Right,” Dad agreed, turning to Auntie and Uncle. “There’s something I really got to show you later. I placed these new Christmas lights on the roof, and they’ll light up like a whole bunch of stars. It’ll be great, better than those Santa Clauses and Rudolfs everyone else has on their roofs every year. Yeah, that’ll show those Joneses. We can all go out and look at it, and we can do our gift-giving out there under the lights.”

“But we’ll do that after dessert,” Mom smiled. “Why don’t you pass some ice cream to Vivi, dear?”

Karen was distracted by the whole conversation nearly becoming serious business and was relieved when Mom defused it, so she got a cup of ice cream and passed it on to Vivi.

“I’m so sorry for forgetting about your presents, Karen.” Vivi apologized profusely.

“It’s okay…” Karen handed her a cup and Vivi gladly took it and began spooning the Oreo-ingrained vanilla ice cream into her mouth. She was eating the ice cream really quick, since she was still a little bit embarrassed and Karen kept looking at her funny. But Karen wasn’t really looking at her. “It’s… fine… Vivi.”

She was actually looking through Vivi and at the window. Its view of the outside world, so snowy and full of other houses with Christmas lights, had been replaced by an unexpected sight, a scene strangely surreal yet all too familiar to Karen. Out there where the station wagon was supposedly parked was a swirling portal, bright and blue and eerily hypnotic – like a silent whirlpool of light that silhouetted the snowman on the lawn. The snowman wasn’t alone though, as there was something out there with it, another shadowy figure that was moving towards the window.

It was the thing – the Gatekeeper - a malformed creature whose face was a single unblinking eye, whose right arm was in the shape, form and likeness of a gnashing jaw filled with fangs, and with brown chitinous carapace covering the entirety of its misshapen form. It leaned forward, touching the window with its jaw-hand, and then it said something. Despite the glass separating them, Karen could still hear it make its cryptic proclamations in her mind’s ear.

“Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. This one is the Gatekeeper. Watch, little one. Watch...”

The portal opened like the iris of some great cyclopean eye, and Karen could see through the window a sky eye’s view of a vast and desolate landscape – a frostbitten forest covered in snow, and an empty road that ran across it like a black artery. Then Karen blinked and she saw houses with rooftops covered in snow, and porches decked in decorations, and she realized that they were her neighbors’. The Gatekeeper was gone, the snowman was alone and the window was no longer a gateway to another world.

“Here’s one for you, Karen,” Vivi smiled, apparently not noticing the expression on Karen’s face, and handed her a cup of ice cream.

Karen got the cup of ice cream and began spooning the cold contents into her mouth. Cookies and Cream, her favorite.

“Dear, don’t eat the ice cream too fast, you’ll get -” Mom tried to warn her, but it was too late.

Karen clutched the back of her head and screamed in pain. Or at least she tried to, as the cold cream and Oreo bits nearly froze her brains and she ended up coughing and dropping her cup on the table.

“-brain freeze,” Karen muttered, trying her best not to use profanity in front of the family as she got up and excused herself, heading over to the bathroom to presumably freshen up. She got to the bathroom and freshened up, splashing cold water on her face, and then she locked the door and pulled out her cellphone. She couldn’t use it in the dining room, that would’ve been impolite and Mom would’ve mentioned it sometime later, but now in the privacy of the bathroom Karen sat herself on the toilet and dialed a ‘special number’. She heard the dial tone, then the strange ringing sound that came with quantum-locked signal encryption, and she didn’t have to wait for long before her call was answered.

She took a deep breath and sighed. There went Christmas.

“Hello, Ms. Lewyn?”

“Yes,” a familiar female voice replied. “I’m here.”

“This is Karen… I had a sighting,” Karen said reluctantly, omitting the part where she was having dinner with her family. “I saw a Crosspoint. There must’ve been an incursion, but I’m not sure where or when. All I saw was sky…”

“I know,” Ms. Lewyn, the guidance counselor at school, answered with an understanding voice.

“Wait, what? How?”

“We’re heading there right now.”

“There? Where there?” Karen asked, confused.

“There, we’re on our way to pick you up. Karen, we know there’s been an incursion and we’re going to need your help to stop it.”

“But ma’am, with all due respect… I’m having Christmas dinner with my family!” Karen protested. They couldn’t do this to her!

“No buts, Karen. I’m sorry.”

“But how’ll I explain this to them? How on Earth can I possibly - ?!”

“Just leave it to me. Max and Kenny are already with me, so you better get gear up and get your kit ready. We’ll be there in a while.”

The transmission ended abruptly and Karen ended up slouching on the toilet, brooding and loathing the untimely interruption to such a perfect night, a perfectly normal night. Christmas Eve, no less! Her vacation was now totally ruined and she had no idea how she’d explain it to Mom and Dad, or to Uncle and Auntie and Vivi and Bas. She had no idea how she – a fourteen year old girl in high school trying to fit in and not be abnormal – got into this whole mess. Screw great power and great responsibility. Karen got off the toilet and kicked seat up.

“Goddamn it!”

She went to her room to get her special knapsack, which she hid under the bed, and went back downstairs to fetch her parka and put on her boots. Then the doorbell rang.

“That’s quick,” as Karen went over to answer the door, she noted how they hadn’t even given her time to say goodbye to her family. She tried to get there as quick as she could, before they’d ring again and bother everyone else, but –

“Karen!” Mom had gotten there first. “There’s someone here to see you!”

“Who is it?” Karen asked, pretending not to know while heading for the door as fast as she could while struggling with her parka. “Mom?”

“It’s Ms. Lewyn, from school,” Mom shouted, not knowing that Karen was already right behind her. She turned around and noticed, and placed an arm around Karen and gave her a warm reassuring smile. “Oh, there you are.”

All the while, standing there in the doorway right before them was a tall blonde woman attired in dark winter clothing. It was Clarisse Lewyn, officially the school’s guidance counselor and unofficially the handler of Karen’s secret missions. She was also wearing a Santa hat, its red and white matching her black clothing and fair hair.

“Good evening, Karen.” Clarisse greeted and smiled. It was a reluctant one, and from Karen’s point of view it came off as rather cold… But maybe that was just the snowy draft coming from the still-open door. She closed the door and things got a bit less chilly. “Merry Christmas.”

“Hi, Ms. Lewyn,” Karen replied, looking alternatively at her mom and her handler with uncertainty. She had no idea what was going to happen next since her parents didn’t know what was up, so she eyed Clarisse curiously and wondered what she would tell her parents. “What’s up?”

“Ms. Lewyn tells me that you’re supposed to go caroling this evening,” Mom said, letting go of Karen so she could lead their new guest into the house. “We just finished dinner, but we still have lots of dessert. Fruit salad and ice cream, would you like some?”

“No thanks, I’m good. We just had our own party a while ago with the school staff,” Clarisse politely declined. “Anyway, I hope I’m not intruding or…”

“Oh, it’s okay,” Mom went on. “I think it’s really great, having the children go around caroling and singing songs. It is Christmas, after all.”

Karen scowled and muttered something beneath her breath, and Clarisse looked at her with an expression that was hard to discern.

“Hey, what’s going on?” it was Dad, emerging from the dining room with Uncle and Auntie and the Cousins behind him. He saw Clarisse and gave Karen and Mom a questioning look. “Welcome, Ms…?”

“Lewyn,” Clarisse offered her hand and Dad shook it. “Clarisse Lewyn, I’m Karen’s guidance counselor from school.”

“I see,” Dad rubbed his chin. Karen took a peek at the dining room and noted that they had broken out the red wine. Dad saw Karen looking and he smiled. “It’s a little late for a parent-teacher conference, isn’t it?”

“They’re going caroling,” Mom piped in. “Karen’s classmates are in the school bus outside all ready to go around singing ‘Merry Christmas’ door-to-door and Ms. Lewyn’s here to pick Karen up.”

“Just Clarisse is okay. I’m responsible for the school’s extracurricular activities,” Karen’s handler and school guidance counselor said helpfully. “Is it alright if Karen comes caroling with us, Mr. Salinas?”

“Well, that really depends on how long you intend to go around with the kids, singing songs in front of houses…” Dad gave it some thought.

“It shouldn’t take too long,” Clarisse offered. “Just a couple of hours, and Karen should be back home before eleven o’ clock.”

“I guess that’s okay,” Dad rubbed his chin. “We’ll wait for Karen and hold off on the fun stuff until she gets back. Right, guys?”

Vivi and Bas nodded empathetically and Karen smiled weakly and went on to get her boots. Afterwards, they followed her out to the lawn and gathered by the snowman to send her off. Mom patted her on the head and told her how it was so nice to go around caroling, which was what she did when she was young, and she also told her to be a good girl. Dad warned her about catching frostbite from the wind chill.

“Well,” Karen sighed. “This is it.”

“Don’t worry. We won’t start exchanging gifts without yous, cousin!” Vivi said cheerfully.

“Yeah,” Bas added helpfully. “We’ll wait for you. There’s still plenty of dessert left.”

“Thanks,” Karen put on her thermal earmuffs and adjusted her parka by putting the hood over her head. Meanwhile, Clarisse was signaling the school bus to come by. Since Karen wasn’t looking at the bus and was facing her gathered family, she didn’t notice the two people coming out of the big yellow vehicle.

“Hey, who are those?” Bas asked.

“Huh?” Karen turned around and saw the two heading towards them. The one leading at the front was a tubby short kid in glasses wearing a bright orange down jacket that looked like a personal floatation device. It was Kenny, Kendrik Heimstein, walking fast with an arm raised to shield himself from the cold wind. Whereas the one who trailing at the back, walking in a more measured pace despite the cold, was a tall Asian teen with short dark hair wearing a spiffy black jacket and a stoic expression on his face that seemed to show an utter indifference to temperature and climate. “Max?”

“Is he your boyfriend?” Vivi asked innocently. Bas tried to stifle a laugh from behind her.

“What? No!” Karen sputtered, before composing herself as her two partners in crime arrived. “Of course not.”

“Happy Hallmark Hanukkah Holidays!” Kenny greeted her with a goofy grin. “It’s the alliteration that keeps on greeting, and it upsets the anti-secularists War on Christmas Truthers and the Kazakhstani anti-Semites, so yeah. Hey Karen.”

“Merry Christmas to you too,” Karen replied. Then she turned to the taller of the two, Maximus Li. “Hi Max.”

“Hi Karen,” he waved back at her with his right hand. She noted that he was placing his left hand behind him, out of view. She also noticed how he looked like he totally didn’t mind the cold, and his Mr. Spock-ness seemed to suggest that his body was no longer bothering with keeping warm and had instead just matched the frigid ambient temperature, like a proverbial iceman. But she wondered how much of it was really so, and if he would be just as frigid-looking if she invited him over into the house and handed him a thermos full of hot choco. That was a funny thought. “How’s Christmas?”

“It was okay,” she answered. Mom and Dad had just finished talking to Clarisse, while Uncle and Auntie and the Cousins stood by the sideline. For some reason, Kenny was examining the snowman, presumably using it as cover from the wind. She turned back to Max and sighed, making mist in the cold air. “Dinner was great.”

“That’s good. I hope you’re ready to go,” he said and Karen saw that Clarisse and Kenny were heading back to the bus. “Ms. Lewyn.”

“Max,” Clarisse acknowledged. As she passed by, Karen could see how she was that much taller than Max, and everyone else for that matter. “Karen, Kenny. Shall we?”

“Yeah,” Karen shrugged as she turned around to face her family. She waved at them and they all waved back, and then she went inside the school bus. “Let’s get this over with.”

“That was one nice snowman,” Kenny mentioned as he followed her. “Did you make it? The carrot on his nose was -”

“Yeah, I know.”

Back indoors, Mom and Dad and Uncle and Auntie continued their previous conversation while Vivi and Bas regarded one another. With their cousin gone, they no longer had anyone to talk with aimlessly and were now stuck with one another, with nothing else to do but eat dessert while waiting for their cousin’s return. Then Vivi noticed Karen’s MP5 music player and picked it up, placing an earphone in her ear. She handed the other phone to Bas and pressed the play button.

“What a bright time, it's the right time
To rock the night away
Jingle bell time is a swell time
To go gliding in a one-horse sleigh

Giddy-up jingle horse, pick up your feet
Jingle around the clock
Mix and a-mingle in the jingling feet
That's the jingle bell,
That's the jingle bell,
That's the jingle bell rock.”




Dunwich Academy School Bus, In Transit
2029 Hours


The headlights stabbed through the dark night, lighting up the black road and the falling snow as the school bus drove on as fast as the slick pavement could allow. Still, it was dark. The trees by the road could barely be seen. There were no other cars, no light posts or reflective signs, neither the festive decorations nor neon that were so omnipresent throughout the city. They were in the dark, heading for uncharted territory.

Karen tried to gauge the distance they had traveled, counting the passing trees to know how far they had gone from the city. But it was so dark that she could barely see the trees, and even if she got a good look at them, they all looked the same anyway, so it was totally useless. Instead of counting the miles they had traveled, she decided to start brooding. Which was what her age group specialized in.

She cursed her Pointwatcher senses, the ability to feel interdimensional rifts and tears in reality that allowed shitty Shoggoths and other existential horrors to spill into the real world. She cursed the Blacksuits who had drafted her into their war on whatever monstrosities came forth from the Dreamlands on a seemingly weekly basis, and how her conscription into their cause had totally ruined her social life. Now they had just reached a new low, they had just stolen her Christmas, and she seethed in silent contempt.

Karen glared at her handler. Clarisse Lewyn was not the archetypical woman in black. Aside from serving a shadow government organization, she also worked full-time as Dunwich Academy’s guidance counselor. It wasn’t just a cover, and that was what struck Karen the most when she learned the truth about, well, everything. In school Clarisse worked with students, helped children cope with their myriad problems at home and school, while at the same time she was the one who sent the Blacksuits’ under-aged field agents out on dangerous missions because the organization was too under-funded to afford proper manpower. They simply handed them guns and had them do their literal dirty work.

Karen then glanced at the two seated beside her, Kenny and Max. They were also there when she made her discovery, or rather when they made theirs. They were the ones who found her when her Tracker abilities had first manifested, when she went into a dream-trance and sleepwalked to a Dreamlands portal in the middle of the subway. They saved her from what came from beyond that portal and brought her to Clarisse, not knowing what to do with her. They were her classmates, and they were Blacksuits agents.

Afterwards, Karen became an agent too. She joined the Miskatonic Area Blacksuit Response Team, the MABRT, and her life changed forever.

But still, that didn’t give any of them the right to steal her Christmas, goddamn it! If only her parents had refused to send her out ‘caroling’, had firmly said no right in front of Clarisse’s face, told her to take her ‘caroling’ and -

“Is there something wrong, Karen?” the question totally caught Karen off-guard. Clarisse was seated in front of her, and Karen suddenly wondered if the window had reflected her scowling visage for the Blacksuit to see.

“I was just thinking,” Karen muttered. “How did you get my parents to let me go out caroling? You didn’t use the Hypnotic Memory Wiper on them, did you?”

“I didn’t have to. They already knew ahead of time that we were coming,” Clarisse explained, not noticing the suspicious look Karen was giving her from behind her seat. “The PTA sent notification letters a few days ago, asking if students could come caroling tonight.”

“Oh,” Karen crossed her arms and grumbled something about how it was too bad that only three students could’ve made it.

Clarisse turned around to look at her with concern. “Karen, I know you would rather be with your family right now, but you’re not the only one who’s missing out on Christmas Eve. Kenny and Max had to leave their families in the middle of Christmas dinner too, but this is very important. We’re going to need everyone in on this mission.”

“Right,” Karen sighed. She looked at Kenny and Max. Kenny was intently looking for something in the satchel bag he had slung across his gut. Max, on the other hand, was watching her as she spoke with Clarisse. Karen wondered what was up with that. “I understand.”

“I agree,” Kenny leaned over towards them and held out a brick-sized piece of foil-wrapped fruitcake. “My mom told me to bring some fruitcake with me. It’s got all the necessary Flintstones vitamins and minerals, since it’s got fruit and cake. Like an eggplant. Do any of you want some?”

“I just had dinner,” Karen declined. “But thanks anyway.”

Kenny shrugged and offered some to Clarisse and she took it graciously, opening the tinfoil wrapping and taking a small bite, and then a larger one after she found its taste agreeable. The Blacksuit Area Administrator hadn’t had dinner yet and fruitcakes barely constituted as such, being just desserts. Kenny pulled out another piece of fruitcake and offered it to his buddy and Max accepted it, pocketing it for future consumption. Karen just shook her head.

“If this mission is so important, then maybe you could tell us what’s going on. How long do we have to wait before we get briefed on what we’re supposed to do?” she asked impatiently.

“Just wait,” Clarisse said as she finished her fruitcake. “I’ll show you what’s going on. Are we there yet, Matt?”

“Almost there, Ms. Lewyn,” replied Muttley, their Blacksuit Infrastructure and Logistics Backroom Operator (BILBO) and interim bus driver. He looked back and gave them a thumbs up sign. “Should be just a short while.”

“Good,” Clarisse got up and went over to the front of the bus, near the driver’s seat, and threw the fruitcake’s foil into the waste bin. “I’m glad that you were able to pick us up on such short notice, I really appreciate it.”

“It’s no problem, ma’am,” Muttley went on, trying not to look slightly embarrassed. “After all, this is what we do, right? Rain or shine, snow or stuff, won’t stop the Blacksuits coming.”

“Quite,” Clarisse smiled and nodded her head before returning back to Karen, Kenny and Max. “Shouldn’t take too long,” she reassured them as she sat down. “We should be there any minute now.”

Karen muttered something about how that’s what she said thirty minutes ago.

“We’re here,” Muttley announced as he eased on the brakes carefully. The bus decelerated slowly and eventually stopped completely. Then with a pull of a lever, the doors opened and an influx of cold air rushed into the already cool interiors of the un-heated bus.

Without further ado, Karen got off her seat and went out of the bus, muttering something like ‘about time’ and ‘what was that all about?’, giving Muttley the bus driver a weird look on her way out. Kenny and Max followed suit, minus the muttering and the weird looks, and got out of the bus as well. Clarisse was the last one to leave.

“Ma’am, what do I do now?” Muttley asked.

“Take the bus back to the school and meet us at the rendezvous point afterwards,” Clarisse answered. “Bring whatever you can get from the armory. We might need some additional firepower.”

“Will do, ma’am.” Muttley moved to pull the door-close lever, but stopped himself. “Ma’am?”

“Yes?”

“Good luck,” he said as he pulled the lever and closed the doors shut.



Miskatonic Meadows, Massachusetts
2035 Hours


“Who was that?” Karen asked no-one in particular. “I never saw him before.”

“They call him Muttley,” Max said indifferently. “New guy, just came in last month. Makes supply runs with a motorbike.”

“Muttley?” Karen raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” Kenny replied. “Like that dog from the Whacky Races and Catch the Pigeon, with Dick Dastardly. Muttley, do something! Anything! Then he’d snicker and get a medal for doing nothing. Did you know that Muttley used to deliver pizza? Not the dog, I mean, but the guy. Muttley. He kind of reminds me of Otto, the bus driver from the -”

“Uh-huh,” Karen tried to raise her eyebrow a little bit higher but found out that she couldn’t, so she didn’t. “Right. Now where on Earth are we?”

“We’re on a road that goes through Miskatonic Meadows,” Clarisse said as she joined them. The bus had just left, leaving behind a trail of condensing vapor from its hydrogen exhaust pipe, and as it got further the illumination from its lights grew dimmer and dimmer. Eventually, they were all alone in the dark and Clarisse pulled out a flashlight, lit it, and pointed it down at the snowy ground. “Follow me.”

They did, Karen trailing a little back as she took the time to survey her surroundings. Devoid of any illumination sans Clarisse’s flashlight, the place was practically pitch black. So Karen decided to pull her own flashlight out of her knapsack. She turned it on, but that didn’t make it any better, made it worse in fact. The beam of light lit only a scant portion of what was around her, and everything the light didn’t touch remained in the black. From what she could see, there was nothing but snow and trees and the shadows behind them, and beyond that there was nothing. Then she realized that in the dark her flashlight wasn’t just visible to her alone, but to anyone and anything else out there in the night as well.

Karen turned it off and trudged on by the black asphalt road, and she quickly found walking in the snow to be a great effort, sinking each foot in before pulling it out with each and every step forward. The cold didn’t make it better, with foggy mist coming with every breath. Soon she was winded, and she paused for a while to rest.

She looked around again and found that her eyes had acclimated themselves to the dark. The white snow reflected light from the sky, which in turn was reflecting the city lights, so she was not in total darkness as she had previously thought. She scanned her surroundings, with her eyes and ears. It was pretty quiet. Almost too quiet.

Since Kenny, Max and Clarisse were nowhere to be seen or heard.

Karen cursed and went off after them, trying to find them in the dark, scurrying as fast as she could. Trying not to stumble in the dark was hard, with the snow and the tree roots everywhere, and trying to remember which way they went was just as difficult. Karen hoped they hadn’t gone too far, and hoped that she could see the light from Clarisse’s flashlight, but -

Something grabbed her in the arm and she nearly screamed. But she didn’t. Instead of screaming, she spun around and smashed her flashlight against whatever it was that was trying to kill her.

“Karen -”

Her flashlight hit Max, hard. He had brought his left hand up to shield himself and her flashlight had connected with it audibly. Now he was clutching it with his right and was grimacing in visible pain, something of a rare sight coming from their own Kid Spock.

“Oh shit,” Karen uttered, not quite sure as to what to do. “Max, I’m sorry! Are you okay? I didn’t mean to -”

“I’m fine,” he replied tersely, still holding his hand and trying to control his pain. His left hand was larger than his right, courtesy of an interdimensional incident a long time ago. It wasn’t quite an injury or a deformity, but more like a mixed blessing. “I’ll be fine.”

“Let me look at that,” Karen approached him. The symbiotic creature that had merged with his left hand was concealed in a large glove, resembling those big Styrofoam ones at football games. She hoped the glove had protected it from the impact.

“No, it’s okay,” Max replied, his grimace gone and replaced by his perpetual poker face. That stoic indifferent look was partly due to the alterations in body chemistry caused by his alien hand, which he affectionately referred to as Lefty. “I was looking for you, we thought you were lost or something.”

“I…” Karen hesitated, unsure if he was angry at her or if he was still in pain, something she sometimes doubted he was capable of feeling. She looked at him, trying to discern what subtle signs of human emotion she could see in his face, but even in broad daylight it was a difficult task. He didn’t look angry, and if he wasn’t hurting anymore, then that meant Lefty was alright and was back dosing him with whatever Prozium alien symbiotes regularly prescribed to their hosts, and that meant that he was back to normal. As normal as things could be, anyway. Karen exhaled, forming a cloud of mist in the cold air. “You could have said something before grabbing me like that, you know.”

Max nodded, showing no trace of what had just happened. Then he beckoned her. “Come on. We found something.”

“Oh, the weather outside is frightful,
But the fire is so delightful,
And since we've no place to go,
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

It doesn't show signs of stopping,
And I brought some corn for popping;
The lights are turned way down low,
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”


There was an abandoned pickup truck by the road, it was covered in snow and had one of its doors open. As they passed by, Karen noticed that its radio was still on, playing Christmas songs for no one to hear. For all she knew, the radio could have been playing there for who knows how many hours, days, or even weeks. Playing until it drained the truck’s power cell completely. It was a rather perturbing thought.

“Is that what Clarisse was looking for?”

“No,” Max replied indifferently.

“What was she looking for, then?”

“The driver.”

After the pickup truck, Max led Karen to the middle of the road. Clarisse and Kenny were standing in front of a snowy protrusion on the pavement, which Karen reasoned was what caused the pickup truck to go off the road and nearly plow into the trees. She was half right.

She looked at Max and looked at the bump on the pavement and realized that it was a human-shaped bump on the road. She examined it closely and found out that under the snow were clothes and shoes, and in those clothes and shoes was…

“Joe Piper,” Clarisse said, identifying the body for their benefit. “He was on his way to work when he got sidetracked. Probably by him,” Clarisse pointed back to something and Karen saw another human-shaped bump down the road. “Maybe he tried to help, but it was too late. He tried to run, but he couldn’t make it. He didn’t make his appointment.”

“What happened to them?” Kenny asked, studying the corpse curiously. It was unnerving for Karen to see the tubby Jew kid so intently focused on one subject when in any remotely normal circumstance, he would’ve been hyperactively blathering on and on about something inane before changing topic to something even more inaner. Especially when the subject on hand he was focusing on was a dead person. It was morbid and creepifying, to say the least. “No discernable bite marks, all his limbs are intact, no gunshot wounds, visible injuries… he looks like he froze to death. Like a dead body turned icicle. A corpsicle,” Kenny knelt down, examining the body further and brushing off some of the snow that had accumulated over it. “But then what’s with all this blood?”

“Don’t get too close to it, Kenny,” Max cautioned him.

“Oh, don’t worry. I’m pretty sure that he’s pretty dead,” Kenny replied, his eyeglasses ominously reflecting the light from Clarisse’s flashlight. “As pretty as dead could be, anyway.”

Karen shook her head, not for the first time that night. Things had become far more disturbing than Christmas Eve had any right to be and she blamed the Blacksuits for that, goddamn them. She turned around and tried to put some distance between herself and Kenny’s corpsicle. Not too far to get herself lost again, though. She didn’t want to accidentally whack Max with her flashlight for a second time, damn it.

But she was far enough for Kenny’s corpsicle scene investigation to become mostly inaudible and unnoticeable. Alone now, she surveyed her environs once more. It was a cold and snowy night, snowflakes drifting gently in the wind as they made their descent to earth, the trees still despite the wind, the chilling breeze flowing through the clearing of the road blowing at her parka. Karen shivered and placed her arms around her body as she looked up into the sky. Disturbing was the word of the night, and she felt something strange in the pit of her stomach. An unsettling realization that she had been in this strange place before, like déjà vu, that she had somehow seen it -

There was a startled shout and Karen turned just in time to see Kenny jumping back from Joe Piper’s corpsicle. He fell on his ass and started crawling back before regaining enough sense to get back up on his feet.

By then, Karen had drawn her sidearm – a six-shot .410 Custom Blacksuit Revolver loaded full of special shotgun slug-shells. Apparently, Max and Clarisse were way quicker in the uptake, as their weapons were already leveled at Joe Piper. A 33-round Glock 18 semi-automatic and a Berretta M92F 9mm respectively. As Kenny stumbled back upright, he joined them by producing a tri-barreled .16 gauge pepperbox shotgun pistol from his satchel bag.

They all looked at him.

“It moved,” Kenny said simply.

“It can’t move,” Karen snapped back, pissed off at him for giving her such a scare. She wondered why he couldn’t go back to his old abnormal self again and why this night was so crapped up and what was up with the frostbitten dead dude. “It’s dead.”

“I saw it move,” Kenny repeated himself.

“It can’t move,” Karen answered back. Then, with some hesitation: “Can it?”

“Maybe,” Clarisse said. “Kenny, what did you see?”

“That,” with his free hand, Kenny pointed at the erstwhile Joe Piper. “I saw that.”

They all looked at where he was pointing at and saw how Joe Piper really was moving. Or, rather, how there was something inside of him that was moving. Something making its way up his neck, making a visible bulge on his throat as it went to the back of his mouth. There was a sick scraping sound as it, whatever it was, cleared his frozen pharynx and entered his oral cavity. Joe looked like he was gagging even though he was no longer capable of producing such a reflex. Then something came out of his mouth, a thin silvery thing that gleamed in the moonlight. It was a hook, latching on to Joe’s cheek, pulling and cutting his frozen flesh. Another hook came, latched on to his lip, and pulled, and another hook and another, until it finally emerged – showing itself for everyone to see.

It was silvery and metallic, as were its long hook-like appendages, and in form it was vaguely insectile though its body had more divisions than mere head, thorax and abdomen, thus also resembling a centipede by way of its many segmentations. It seemed to know that it was being watched, though it had no visible eyes or other sensory apparatus, and it regarded the four humans surrounding it one at a time.

“Holy cow,” Kenny gaped. He quickly covered his mouth as he remembered where the thing had just come from.

“What the hell is that?!” Karen asked, training her big and heavy pistol at it. It was hard to aim at, but it was on Joe Piper’s face, and that was an easy enough target. “What do we do? Should we kill it?”

“Ms. Lewyn?” Max asked, inquiring for instructions as he switched the safeties off his Glock. Despite holding it with one hand, his right, he did not waver in his aim.

“This is just what I thought,” Clarisse said to herself. Karen afforded a glance and saw that she was holding her gun one-handed as well, using her free hand to reach into her pocket. “Nobody fire until I say so.”

The thing saw Clarisse and its head snapped open like a flower of sharpened steel, emitting a sharp chittering sound as it did so. Its form became rigid, pointing upwards, and the chittering became painful to the ear – turning into an ear-piercing shriek of steel scraping steel.

There was a bright flash and a sound like oscillating thunder in the sky, and they all looked up and saw a whirlpool of rhythmic blue light amidst a halo of strange indescribable colors. From within that whirlpool, from the other end of reality, came forth a silver disc, and the portal opened to allow it passage into reality – dilating like an iris to birth it into another world.

Then the portal dissipated, evaporating into nothingness, and the silver saucer hovered in the black sky above them. From its center came a narrow beam of bright white light that touched the screeching steel insect and the corpse that was its pedestal. The light intensified and the steel insect became silent as it was lifted into the air and -

Clarisse gave the order and Max fired off a single shot. One shot was enough, as the round struck the steel insect and threw it out of the light, into the dark and into the snow.

The light from the saucer died, only to be replaced by many more, stabbing strobing beams that swept and scanned everything that was in its shadow.

“Get off the road!” Clarisse yelled as she grabbed Karen by the arm and ran into the trees, avoiding one of the lights just narrowly. Kenny and Max did the same, running off the road and into the tree line, away from the shadow of the saucer, away from its sweeping beams. They fled and hurled themselves into the snow.

“What the hell -” Karen was thrown under the trunk of a bent osteoporotic tree and Clarisse joined her shortly, one hand holding her handgun and the other her cell phone. Karen gave her a look of incomprehension.

“Not like your everyday mission, is it, kid?” Clarisse smiled sympathetically as she pocketed the phone. In that instant, the saucer’s strobe lights died once more, and then there was a deafening shriek as it flew away and disappeared into the night.

They waited there under the tree until the shrieking was gone, replaced by the quiet humming of noise-dampened propeller blades and the sound of disturbed wind blowing snow up into the air. Karen looked up into the distance only to realize that the Black Helicopter was right on top of them. The BH-53 ultratech-modded Pave Low had swooped down low, the panels of its hull flickering in a strange digitized effect as it deactivated its optic camouflage, passing over the trees before touching down on the road.

Autosensor-equipped miniguns scanned the landing zone, tracking Karen and Clarisse as they approached before identifying them as friendlies and moving on to other potential targets, this time Kenny and Max. The miniguns disengaged and the Black Helo welcomed them by opening its doors, temporarily blinding them with the light of its interior.

Clarisse holstered her weapon and was the first one in, grabbing hold of a handle bar and helping the others on board. Karen was last and she took Clarisse’s helping hand and stepped inside the Black Helicopter, following her handler in. As they disappeared into the light, the doors closed behind them and the Black Helo lifted off silently, its rotors noiseless and the panels of its armored hull flickering once more as it reactivated its optic camouflage. It vanished into the black night.

The only evidence of its passing was the air disturbed by its silent rotors, picking up the snow accumulating on Joe Piper’s abandoned pickup truck.

Its radio played on.

“When we finally say good night,
How I'll hate going out in the storm;
But if you really hold me tight,
All the way home I'll be warm.

The fire is slowly dying,
And, my dear, we're still good-bye-ing,
But as long as you love me so.
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”




BH-53 Black Helicopter, In Transit
2110 Hours


While outwardly identical to the MH-53 Pave Low, the Black Helicopter shared with it only superficial similarities. Full spectrum camouflage gave it a formidable stealth capability, making it invisible to the naked eye, and thanks to the wonders of compressed-space technology the Black Helo was actually bigger on the inside than it was on the outside; it had an internal volume that rivaled larger aircraft like the C-5 Galaxy, a cargo capacity limited only by how wide its doors could open, and enough room for all the equipment, sensors and weaponry needed by the Miskatonic Area Blacksuit Response Team. It was their invisible airmobile base of operations.

They were in the aircraft’s passenger compartment. It was a spacious area littered with equipment either bolted on the walls or shelved in electronics racks, with computers and communication contraptions connected by interweaving wires and cabling, and telescreen displays mounted on strategic locations near the passenger seats. It was all well-lit by fluorescent lights on the ceiling, and Karen let her eyes adjust to the brightness as she sat down on one of the uncomfortably utilitarian Kevlar-cushioned buckets. Beside her were Kenny and Max, and the former just could not stop going on about how close their encounter with the worst kind was. Max was just nodding politely when it was appropriate, understanding Kenny’s compulsion.

“That was a flying saucer,” Kenny began, starting by stating the obvious. “I can’t believe we got so close and made it out alive and intact – at least without being probed or something. We were totally lucky, if one of us got caught in those lights, it would’ve been game over man.”

“Game over?” unlike the two of them, who had considerably more experience than her in these kinds of things, this was Karen’s first contact with a saucer. Most of the time, her missions usually just involved pacifying (read: killing) interdimensional creatures that came through the Trans-Yuggothian portals, from shoggoths and nightgaunts to actual-factual jackalopes, those goddamn ferocious fuckers. “What would’ve happened if one of us got caught in those lights?”

“You saw what happened to the bug,” Kenny replied. “It was, like, floating into the air, levitating in the blue light while strange humming sounds were playing in the background.”

“Right before Max shot the shit out of it,” Karen said, noting what looked like subtle pride on Max’ face.

“Yeah, it was about to get beamed up by Scotty. If Max hadn’t shot it, it would’ve been gone and if any of those lights had touched us, we would’ve been gone too. And you know what happens when people get abducted by them, right?”

“Right,” Karen knew that the answer to Kenny’s rhetorical question was a simple but unpleasant one that no one wanted to know.

“We would’ve gotten ourselves anally probed so hard,” Kenny crossed his arms and shivered at the thought. “Man, no one knows why they do it – no one human, at least. Like, why do they like sticking things up people’s behinds? That’s totally weird. The original theories suggested that it was for science, but then the Dreamlander Greys don’t need to do coecentric colonoscopies and endoscopic enemas all the time. Right now, scientists just think they’re doing it for the hell of it, like as if that’s their sick equivalent of a good time. Like why they mutilate cows and make crop circles, which aren’t ‘Signs’ or anything, but just giant alien swearwords written on cornfields. Because they think it’s funny.”

“I already knew that,” Karen replied. “You didn’t have to tell us.”

“Again,” Max added helpfully.

“Sorry,” Kenny apologized. Like Karen, he also had a super special sixth sense. He was a Tracker, a person capable of feeling things out of place in reality. While Karen could feel Crosspoints, Kenny’s senses were attuned to the creatures that came out of the dimensional rifts, having described it as being ‘just like the motion sensor from Aliens’. And while the consequence of Karen’s Pointwatcher ability was the routine visitations from the Gatekeeper, that cyclopean xenomorphic Ghost of Christmas Future, Kenny’s was the further disruption of his already tenuous attention span. In the presence of interdimensional creatures, he could be such a total spaz. “I still have some fruitcake left, though. Does anyone want any?”

Karen’s stomach grumbled, so she took Kenny’s offered fruitcake, tore the wrapper open, and devoured the dessert food.

“We should figure out what they are up to,” Max said quietly. “This isn’t in line with the Greys’ normal modus operandi and that worries me.”

“Dreamlander Greys,” Kenny corrected him. “Greys come in two subspecies. The Orionian Greys, who come from the galaxy on Orion’s belt and are crazy over elephant seals, and the Dreamlander Greys, who come from the Dreamlands and are just crazy. They’re also called the Traumländergrau – which is German for Dreamlander Grey. Did you know that most extraterrestrial human populations speak Space German?”

“No, I honestly did not know that,” Karen sarcastically said, her mouth full as she finished her fruitcake and dropped its foil wrapper on the floor. “Maybe we should bring a German-English Dictionary?”

“Maybe we should focus on the task at hand,” Max commented dryly.

“And what’s that?” Karen asked. “We have no idea what’s going on, what the Greys, I mean, the Traumländergrau, are after, and what it’s got to do with Kenny’s corpsicles and that freaky deaky chrome centipede thing.”

“Clarisse knows something,” Max continued. “She sounded like she was expecting this, like she knew this was going to happen.”

“Yeah, well she’s still in the cockpit with Fred,” Karen retorted, referring to the guy who piloted their Black Helo. “And so far, we’ve got nothing but frostbite and fruitcake for Christmas.”

“We’ve got this,” Max said with an air of finality as he produced something from his pocket and placed it on the foldable table in front of them. Karen immediately knew what it was – the strange metallic insect that he had shot and apparently killed.

“Whatever that is,” she had absolutely no idea what it was, and neither did Kenny or Max, so it was still useless.

“I might have an idea what that is,” Clarisse said as she came out of the cockpit. She walked over to them and placed her coat on the bucket seat, revealing the black suit, white blouse and sensible skirt she was wearing underneath. With her Santa hat still on her head, she sat down and eyed the silvery specimen on the table. “Good job, Max.”

“Do you know what it is?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she answered him. “It’s something new courtesy of our little grey friends from the Dreamlands. Call it an automatic probe-drone; it’s devised to allow them to perform their favorite pastime from long distances and by remote control, without having to go through all the trouble of abducting not-so-willing test subjects. And the best part is that they can do it en masse.”

“Dog god,” Kenny gasped. “And what happened to poor Joe Piper’s corpsicle was… ?”

“Yes. It went in his -”

“And it came out of his mouth!” Karen squicked. “That’s sick! That’s… I can’t even describe it.”

“It is sick,” Clarisse agreed. “But that’s not the worst part.”

“Yeah, Max actually picked it up with his hand,” Karen commented. “That’s gross.”

“Not as gross as the time that nightgaunt almost got you,” Max shot back, dryly as ever. “Kenny shot it with his trigun and its bioluminescent guts got all over you, didn’t it?”

“Hey, I remember that!” Kenny laughed as he produced yet another piece of fruitcake. “Bioluminescent blood and guts, I wondered how you managed to get the glow-in-the-dark smell off you. Did your parents ever wonder why -”

Karen was about to scream something obscene when Clarisse cleared her throat and quieted them up. For the first time that night, Karen was thankful for the adult supervision.

“Maybe we should focus on the task at hand,” their handler said, but not without some amusement, which was quickly replaced by her usual professional demeanor.

“How did you find out what the probe-drone was?” Max asked. He looked to his side and saw Karen giving him a dirty look, but the fact that he looked like he didn’t mind at all only infuriated her further. “Did you compare it to the Blacksuit database?”

“It wasn’t in any of our records. I did, however, receive a communiqué from the EUFIXIT last week,” Clarisse clarified.

“The EUFIXIT?” Karen hadn’t heard that term before.

“The European Union Force for the Intervention of Extraterrestrial and Intergalactic Threats,” Kenny explained. “They have these cool indigo berets and coats and stuff, really spiffy uniforms, and Super Eurofighters. They’re like the EU’s version of the Blacksuits, or the North American Special Defense Initiative. I think they’re based in Denmark.”

“They sound like a bunch of handy men,” Karen quipped mischievously. One of Max’ nicknames at school was ‘Handy Man’, thanks to the weirdness of his left hand, and another one was ‘Hand Job’. If Max noticed the indirect jab, he didn’t show any sign it. “So, what do these guys know about our little bug?”

“They had a similar encounter earlier this month,” Clarisse continued. “There was an incursion by one or two Grey saucers on the outskirts of Eindhoven and Haarlemmermeer in Netherlands on December 5.”

“That’s a mouthful,” Karen quipped again, before covering her mouth when Clarisse gave her a disapproving look. “Sorry. Um, why December 5? And why Holland?”

“The Dutch celebrate Sinterklaas on the fifth of December,” Kenny went while he ate his own fruitcake. “Sinterklaas is like Santa, if Santa was an undead necromancer from Turkey, with a steamboat for a sleigh, a hidden Spanish fortress rather than a North Pole village, and an army enslaved Musselmen instead of elves. Also, he doesn’t give gifts. He and his evil Musselmen minions break into houses at night, while the naughty children are sleeping, so they can slit their – “

“The EUFIXIT report said that the Grey incursion was set to coincide with Sinterklaas,” Clarisse cut Kenny off before he could finish explaining the intricacies of the particular Yuletide occasion. “And the report said that the Greys visited more than a dozen houses, leaving behind presents in each home for the unknowing families to open. Each present was wrapped in silver foil, and each present contained at least five of those probe-drones. Fortunately, the EUFIXIT was able to stop the Greys from completing their plans, Eurofighters were able to send the saucers back to the Dreamlands. Unfortunately, they didn’t know what the Greys were doing, and they were unable to mobilize their ground teams until it was too late.”

“What happened?” Karen asked. She had a feeling that she wouldn’t like the answer.

“When the time came, the families opened their presents and had an unpleasant surprise,” Clarisse left it at that. “The Europeans were able to get a visual ID on the saucers, and one of them matches the profile of the one we just encountered. Today is Christmas Eve and they’re back. We can’t let them finish what they’ve started.”

Karen remembered the two bodies they had left in the snow and imagined the scores of families, parents and children in their own homes, opening their presents without knowing what was waiting for them. Then she realized that same thing was going to happen to her family too, if she didn’t do something to stop it.

“We have to stop them,” she said, looking Clarisse in the eye. “We can’t let them ruin Christmas.”

“Do we have a plan?” Max asked.

“Yes,” Clarisse answered them. “As a matter of fact, we do.”

“Then you guys and gals better hurry up,” Fred Wick, their pilot, announced over the intercom. “I’m tailing the saucer and it’s heading for some habitations. If they’re going to do what they’re going to do, then they’re going to do it soon. It’s time to roll out.”

“Aw yeah,” Kenny went on as he produced his triguns. “This stuff just got real.”

“Let’s go,” Clarisse said as she got up and took her coat.

They followed her out of the passenger’s compartment and into the Black Helicopter’s rear bay, which was where their ‘fast attack vehicle’ was stationed. By the walls alongside their assault vehicle were racks upon racks filled with guns – lots of them. Ammunition, tactical targeters and firearms, explosive ordinances, dimensional detection devices, it was a proverbial arsenal stacked side by side, weapon over weapon, arranged in smallest-to-largest order for quick and easy convenient access.

“Get the biggest ones you can find,” Clarisse said as she led them to a specific rack that carried surface-to-air missiles. She hefted one out of the stack, a particularly nasty-looking one that looked like a trident – complete with three-pronged submunitions – and looked at it approvingly. “Well, just these ones anyway.”

“What are those?” Karen asked as she followed her handler to the missile rack.

“Starstreak high velocity missiles,” Clarisse passed it over to Karen, who grabbed it and nearly fell with it. “Be careful and put it on the back rack of the cart.”

“This is heavy,” Karen grunted as she hauled it over to their fast attack vehicle. “What the hell is this? A pitchfork projectile?”

“It’s Blacksuit modified,” Clarisse said as she got another missile and slid it into a tubular launcher. “The submunitions are trinium-tipped armor piercing, made out of the same material as the hulls of those saucers. They can punch through saucers like tissue paper, if they don’t have their shields on, at least.”

“So, we’ll use these to take out the saucer?” Karen got another missile and hauled over to the back of their fast attack vehicle, and then she went back to Clarisse and got another one.

“Yes,” Clarisse loaded another launcher. “We’ll have three loaded launchers and three extra missiles. Six shots, more than enough to kill any UFO on Earth.”

“Good plan,” Karen commented as she placed the final missile on their ride and went over to help Clarisse with the loaded launchers. “But what about the probe-drones? We won’t use these on them, will we?”

“No, we won’t,” Max answered coolly as he joined them. He was carrying a shotgun, a beefy one which Karen identified correctly as a SPAS-12. “We’ll use these, shotguns.”

“Looks more like an anti-aircraft gun to me,” she said, smiling when Max hefted the big gun and pumped it with Lefty. “What about Kenny?”

“I’m good,” he went over to them, holding an even larger shotgun than Max’. It was a Remington 11-87, the one with the three inch-long magnum rounds, plus a tactical flashlight and a digital reflex sight. “I got the depleted uranium rounds for us, Max. Do you know where the incendiary shells are? The ones that burninate things.”

“I have them,” Max replied, showing him a distinctly colored shotgun shell from his belt bag. Karen noticed that he had his Glock holstered on the belt too, though she wondered why she was looking at him in that area…

“I wonder if I can get a big gun too,” she blurted out loud.

“No, you can’t.” he answered.

“Why not?!” she whined.

“Because you’re too small, you can’t handle the recoil,” he put it as bluntly as he could. “You can’t use the missiles either.”

“Aw, why do you all get the cool stuff?” Karen protested. “It’s not fair.”

“Well, you can have this instead,” Clarisse said as she handed her something else. It wasn’t a shotgun, but a small submachine gun instead.

“An MP5,” Karen uttered, inspecting the weapon’s safeties first before working the bolt and chambering a round in it. It had two thirty round magazines, the second one clamped beside the first for easy access and quick reloading, and a retractable buttstock to make it fully compact. It also had a foregrip.

“It’s an MP5K actually,” Kenny added. “The K stands for Kurz, which means short in Germ -”

“I know,” Karen sighed. Kenny was getting more annoying than usual, which meant that they were close. “Do I get anything else?”

“Here,” Clarisse handed her something else. It resembled a pair of binoculars crossed with a big camera, like the ones with the long lenses used by professional photographers and celebrity-chasing paparazzi people.

“What is this?”

“It’s a tactical targeter and a dimension detection device all in one,” Clarisse elaborated. “We’ll need it to know if the saucer’s shields are on or off since our Starstreaks can’t do any damage with the shields up. The Starstreaks are also laser-guided, so if the shields are up, then they might not even hit the saucer even if it’s just floating around. You’ll have to be our eyes; we’ll need you to make sure our shots count.”

“Oh,” Karen placed the device in her knapsack. “Don’t worry. You can count on me.”

“I know,” Clarisse secured the last loaded launcher in place. “Are we all ready?”

“Yes ma’am,” Max affirmed, giving the thumbs up sign.

“This’ll be just like Earth versus the Flying Saucers!” Kenny exclaimed. “It’s Go Time!”

“We’re almost there guys,” Fred Wick announced again over the intercom. “So strap yourselves in, boys and girls, it’s just about time to go in heads up, feet-first, and stomachs inside-out.”

“Everybody get on your seats,” Karen said as she went over to the ‘fast attack vehicle’ and gestured everyone to get on. “I’m driving!”

“No, you’re not.” Clarisse preempted her.

“Why not?!”

“Because you don’t have a driver’s license yet,” Clarisse replied as she sat got on the driver’s seat. “And you’re not qualified to do high-speed drops from moving aircraft.”

“But I always drive,” Karen crossed her arms and pouted.

“Okay, maybe you can drive later,” Clarisse decided as she buckled up. “Now everyone on board.”

“I call grenade launcher,” Max announced as he sat himself beside Clarisse, on the front passenger seat with an automatic grenade launcher mounted in front of it.

As Karen grumbled and got on her seat in the back, she made a gesture that Max couldn’t see and Kenny had to restrain himself from laughing out loud.

“Here,” he chuckled as he handed her his last fruitcake.

Karen grabbed it and ripped the wrapper off before shoving a huge chunk into her mouth, giving each mouthful a thorough mastication before gulping it down hard. Kenny just watched her in fascination.

“Thanks,” she grumbled with her mouth full. “Do you have some eggnog to go with that?”



Dunwich City Outskirts, Massachusetts
2145 Hours


“Hark how the bells,
sweet silver bells,
all seem to say,
throw cares away

Christmas is here,
bringing good cheer,
to young and old,
meek and the bold.

Ding dong ding dong
that is their song
with joyful ring
all caroling.

One seems to hear
words of good cheer
from everywhere
filling the air – ”


The carolers ran for their lives, screaming, dispersing and ducking for cover as the night sky fell on them. Now visible for all to see and flee from, the Black Helicopter descended upon them, swooping down from the skies and going in hot – its noiseless rotors disturbing the air, blowing snow all around and causing a proverbial blizzard as it came in hard and fast.

“This is gonna be just like Chopper Dave!” Kenny laughed out loud as the telescreens displayed the outside world in a flurry of fuselage-mounted camera angles. “At day he flies a chopper, but at night he fights crime… as a werewolf!”

The tubby Jewish kid howled just like a wolf and Karen punched his arm in a non-verbal cue to shut up right as the Black Helo was rocked by turbulence. Just a little bit.

“We’re in for some chop,” Fred announced, though he sounded like he was having a pretty fun time. “Alright everyone, four minutes to drop off.”

“Four minutes,” Clarisse repeated.

“Four minutes,” Max turned around and told them.

“Four minutes!” Kenny held four fingers up for Karen to see.

“You don’t have to keep on saying it!” she snapped at him, brushing his hand away.

“It’s standard procedure to make sure – ”

“Commencing internal depressurization.” The lights turned yellow and they could all hear a slow beeping noise. “Equipment check. Arm point defense systems.”

“Alright, are we ready to go?” Clarisse asked through her microbead.

“Drop zone’s still showing a high pressure mass. CAVOK.” Cloud and visibility okay.

“Good, we’ve got high visibility,” Clarisse said to herself as another bout of turbulence rocked them a bit.

“Do we even know what we’re doing?” Karen gritted her teeth as the rocking and bouncing nudged Kenny at her, forcing her to brush him off.

“Approaching release point.” The beeping was louder and faster now. The turbulence subsided and Karen finished the rest of her fruitcake.

“Depressurization complete, two minutes to drop off.” The lights suddenly turned red and the beeping intensified. Karen threw the fruitcake’s foil wrapper away. “Opening rear hatch.”

The ramp began to lower with the sound of whining hydraulics and when it was low enough and the hatch wide enough, cold wind began blasting into the rear bay. They could see just how close the Black Helicopter’s extreme low altitude approach was, it was flying less than five feet off the ground and the only thing they could see was white.

“Snow,” Karen gasped.

“External temperature at minus fifteen degrees Celsius,” Fred announced. “One minute to drop off. Get ready.”

“We’ll be going in at more than forty kilometers per hour,” Clarisse warned. “Try not to get whiplash from the impact.”

“Half-minute to drop off.” The beeping was really loud now. “Thirty seconds.”

“This is one for the history books,” Clarisse commented as the wind blew a piece of foil wrapping under the fast attack vehicle’s front-left wheel. “The world’s first golf cart drop.”

“Ten seconds to go, standby. Status OK, all green.” The beeping stopped and the lights went from red to green. “Prepare for drop off. Countdown 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…”

“This is it,” Karen said as she held on to the roll cage tight.

“Rev your engines and go,” Fred said solemnly. “Good hunting.”

Clarisse keyed the ignition and floored the accelerator, and the ‘fast attack vehicle’ exploded out of the Black Helicopter’s backside like a golf cart from hell - a 4x4 grenade launcher-armed golf cart that flew five feet off the ground before disappearing in the total whiteout.

The Miskatonic Area Blacksuit Response Team touched down at forty kilometers per hour and the impact nearly threw them off their vehicle. Each bounce broke butts and vibrated vertebrae, made seatbelts tighten around waists and bellies just so recently filled from Christmas dinner – to the point where undigested fruitcake almost came out of them – and Karen’s face would’ve smacked the seat in front of her had it not bounced off Max’ shoulder instead. Their golf cart bounced too, just like her forehead, going momentarily airborne before landing back on terra firma and swerving in a full one-eighty.

Snow and soil flew all over as Clarisse spun the steering wheel as hard as she could. When the golf cart finally came to a halt, she flicked her radio on.

“Fred,” she said. “We’re here. What’s our heading?”

“West. The saucer made a couple of drops over two houses near your location, but now it’s heading for the city and I’m moving in. Engaging to harass and deter, over.”

“Good luck,” Clarisse flicked her radio off and turned to the rest of them. “We have to clear those houses. The Black Helo’s going to buy us some time – but it’s not gonna be much. When we’re done with the houses, Fred will try to bring the saucer to us and then he’ll disengage. After that, it’s going to be up to us to take them down.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” Karen asked. “Let’s go – ”

She didn’t get a chance to finish her statement as the golf cart’s electric engine made a mighty roar and went down the slick slippery asphalt at top speed. At least Fred had enough sense to deposit them on a road, rather than dropping them discreetly off-road and forcing them to slog through uneven ground. That would’ve slowed them down, like how the extra weight of the missile launchers and their adult driver was slowing them down right now.

“I can get out and walk faster than this,” Karen grumbled impatiently. They would’ve been faster if it were just the three of them MABRT kids on board. But still, they were getting there. “I can see a house, is that it?”

“That’s it,” Clarisse confirmed as she consulted the GPS on the golf cart’s dashboard. “We’ll split up into two teams, one for this house and the other one for the second house.”

“How can we know for sure if it’s the right one?” Karen asked. There it was, just right by the road, a very well decorated house with something on its porch, a Santa Claus thing, like the ones that jiggled their hips and made music when their proximity sensor-fuses were activated.

“You can use your tactical targeter, its dimensional detector can see the tachyonic - ” Clarisse’s explanation was cut short when the Santa Claus started jiggling its hips and a man flew out of the window. They were near enough to see that the running man was being assaulted by a shiny skittering slithering silvery thing. He tried to get it off him, stopped, dropped and rolled, but to no avail. The thing just crawled around all over him and they could see that his pants were already torn to tiny pieces. “Or that.”

“Help me! Somebody help me!” the man screamed. His mouth was wide open and the probe-drone tried to have a go at it, unsheathing its retractable hook-legs and giving him a nasty serrated facehug with ‘em. “No! Not in the face! Not in the face!”

“Kenny, the little hand says its time to rock and roll!” Clarisse said as she stomped on the brakes and got out of the cart.

“Bring out the noise!” Kenny quipped, enthusiastically pumping a round into his Remington and leaving Karen and Max back in the golf cart to sit on their asses.

“Jesus Christ!” the man screamed as Clarisse and Kenny converged on him. The damn probe-drone was right on his face, having extended its legs all the way round his head. He tried to pull it out but couldn’t, at least not without causing its legs to cut deep into his skull, so all he could do was scream and roll around in the snow, flopping around like a facehuggered fish out of water. “Get it off me! Get it off!”

“Sir, we’re here to help. Please be still.” Clarisse commanded. The guy complied and went still, and she pulled out her service pistol and shot him in the face. Not really in the face though, since she just shot the probe-drone, which exploded into countless razor-sharp fragments that ended up imbedding themselves into the poor guy’s face.

“My face!” he screamed as he writhed in the snow, clawing at his bloodied fragment-festooned face in a wretched attempt to remove the shrapnel. “My beautiful face!”

“Are there any more people in the house?” Clarisse asked him.

“Yes…” he answered feebly as he groaned and wallowed around and bled. “My face… it hurts…”

They left the nameless man there and went over to the house, hurrying when they heard screams coming from it.

“Ms. Lewyn, I’m going in!” Kenny shouted as he ran towards the house with his shotgun held in both hands, intending to breech the door. He pointed his gun at the doorknob and squeezed the trigger, obliterating it in an expanding cone of depleted uranium buckshots and blowing a chunk out of the door and its frame, sending wood and smashed steel scattering inwards. Clarisse followed up Kenny’s shot with two well-placed rounds of her own, one for each of the door’s hinges, and the effect was almost identical as the custom nine millimeters did disproportionate damage and blasted fist-sized holes through the wood. Then Kenny leapt into the air and gave the door a hard kick, sending it crashing down and sliding inside the house with him right on top of it – riding it like a surfboard. “Cowabunga!”

Clarisse followed suit, minus the unexpected door-boarding, and by the time the both of them were out of sight, Karen and Max were already on the move, heading towards the second house. Karen had taken the driver’s seat, not giving Max the chance to assume vehicular command, though he was pretty content with manning the automatic grenade launcher. Karen gave him a toothy grin.

“Both hands on the wheel,” she said, referencing to the first instructions given in driving school.

“Seatbelts,” Max said simply. He smirked (just a little bit) when Karen almost released her hold on the wheel to buckle herself up. “Safety first.”

“What’s so funny?” she growled as she finally managed to clip the belt on with one hand.

Before Max could say something else smart, more shots rang out from the house Kenny and Clarisse had just entered. Max flicked on his microbead. “Ms. Lewyn, Kenny, what’s your status?”

“It’s – ” Clarisse’s voice was cut out by more gunfire.

“They’re coming out of the walls!” Kenny interrupted. “They’re coming out of the goddamn walls!”

“Do you require assistance?” Max inquired.

“Don’t worry, we’ll catch up with you when we’re done,” Clarisse said calmly before a particularly loud bang made her yelp in surprise. “Kenny, don’t shoot too close to my ear!”

“Sorry ma’am.”

Max killed the radio.

“You think they’ll be alright?” Karen asked. She was worried about the other two. Though Kenny was much stronger than he looked and was practically a vet when compared to her, he was still a total spaz, and as for Clarisse, while she was a grownup and a fully fledged Blacksuit operative, she still spent most of her days away from the frontlines, in the guidance counselor’s office at school rather than out there on the field.

“They’ll be alright,” Max reassured her.

“Right,” Karen nodded. She glanced at him and knew that he was worried as well, even though he showed no sign of it. Kenny was his best friend and they were two of a kind, a very weird kind – both of them, the portly zero-attention-spanned tubby kid and the no-emotion tall guy, getting along like oil and vinegar. On the other hand, Clarisse was more like the closest thing he ever had to an older sister, having been there for him in the long time he was with the Blacksuits – no doubt helping him with the growing pains of having an alien organism latching onto his hand and giving him advice for his symbiotic relationship. For all his silent stoicism, Karen knew he was still capable of feeling anxiety, especially for the few people he cared about.

Anxiety was also what she was feeling right now too, since she was more concerned for her own safety than for Kenny’s or Clarisse’s. They could handle themselves just fine, she knew that, but she also knew that she was a rank amateur compared to them when it came to stuff like saving Christmas and beating off extradimensional horrors with stick and –

“We’ll be alright,” Max reassured her.

She looked at him with genuine surprise, not sure if she should thank him for his concern or brush him off with some kind of clever retort about how she was big enough to handle herself and perfectly capable of tying her own shoelaces, thank you very much.

“We have the grenade launcher.”

That was actually funny and Karen couldn’t help but laugh at the unexpected joke, which almost interfered with her ability to drive, threatening to make her lose control and send them plowing off the road. But that would’ve been funny too, sorta. In a ‘not really but yeah kind’ of way, and she laughed some more. For some reason, it seemed so funny when by all means it shouldn’t have, and she realized that she hadn’t laughed like this even when she was with her cousins a while ago, despite how they were such total goof offs.

Max just raised an eyebrow like Spock, and Karen found that amusing too. She smiled at him and he smiled back. Sorta.

“We’re here,” she sighed as she pulled the brakes and got off her seat reluctantly. They were there, down the snowy road where they couldn’t really see the other house anymore. The GPS told them that it was the right one, since it was the only other form of human habitation in the area, and she scanned the building with her tactical targeter-slash-dimensional detection device, and through its monochromatic filtered view she saw that it was lit up like a Christmas tree – in all sorts of colors, some of which she couldn’t even identify. “This is it.”

“Time to knock on some doors,” Max said as he checked his shotgun. He had already chambered a round in it a while ago, back in the Black Helo, so he couldn’t pump it with Lefty again for added emphasis.

There was no jiggling Santa Claus to warn them of any people jumping out of windows while wrestling with wicked chrome steel insectile butt-plugs, but Karen wasn’t about to let that little thing catch her ass off-guard though. She checked her submachine gun’s safeties, extended its butt stock, and followed Max’ lead as he went over to the door and knocked on it a couple of times. There was no answer, so he kicked it open, though unlike Kenny he didn’t ride it like a surfboard or anything. He entered the house cautiously, knees bent and pointing his weapon at potential angles of attack. Karen followed him in just as carefully, MP5K shouldered, cocked, locked and ready to rock.

“There it is,” she pointed at the Christmas tree near the fireplace. Under the decorated dead pine tree was a box wrapped in strange silver metal. It was big too, more than large enough to accommodate a handful of those probe-drones. “It hasn’t opened yet.”

“Which means that the drones haven’t gone out yet…” Max observed. He gave Karen an uncertain look before he turned around just in time to catch a fist making intimate contact with his face. His already chinky eyes got a little squintier when the fist landed on his cheek and sent him down to the ground and out for the count.

“What the hell is going on?!” shouted the big middle-aged man in house clothes who owned the fist. He was apparently the person who lived in the house and apparently didn’t take too kindly to breaking-and-entering. “Who the fuck are you? What the fuck are you doing in my home?”

“Shit,” Karen cursed. They weren’t allowed to harm civilians in any way, and she wouldn’t have wanted to in any case, so she tried to hide her weapon behind her back and tried to think of something quick. “Uh… um…”

The big man glowered at her.

“Bobby Ray, now who are these people?” a woman stuck her head out of the dining room and into the living room, where they were at. “What’s with the commotion? What’s going on?”

“Get the kids upstairs, Martha,” Bobby Ray shouted back as he looked at Karen, sizing her up before looking down at the TKO’ed Max. He saw the shotgun and kicked it away before going over to grab Karen by her shoulders. “And call the cops!”

“Let go off me!” Karen cried.

“You were trying to rob us, weren’t you? On Christmas! You little who-” before Bobby Ray could complete that sentence, Karen rammed her elbow into his solar plexus and slipped away from his grasp. Max had taught her close-quarters-combat, for all the good it did him right there.

“Sir, we’re only trying to help,” Karen said as she tried to keep her cool. She stuck one hand into her knapsack, where she kept her MP5K. “Sir, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to calm down.”

“Why you…” Bobby saw her reach her hand into her bag and he looked at the shotgun he had kicked on the floor, but it was too far so he searched for something nearer instead. He reached for the chimney rod by the fireplace. “I’ll teach you some manners.”

Karen pulled out her last resort. A satellite-dish-looking thing with a pistol grip – the standard Blacksuit Hypnotic Memory Wiper. She pointed it at Bobby Ray’s disgruntled face and squeezed the trigger. “Neuralize this.”

“What the – ” his pupils dilated, his facial muscles loosened up and gave him a dumb lobotomized look, and the hand reaching for the chimney rod slackened and fell by his side. There was a faint nearly inaudible oscillating sound as the Hypno-gun shot fluctuating magnetic fields at the poor guy’s brain, basically giving him the amnesia. “Wha… uhh…”

“Bobby -” ‘Martha’ stuck her head in again and Karen zapped her too. Her eyes widened, just like Bobby’s, and she dropped the cordless phone she was holding. “Raayyhh….”

Satisfied with her work, Karen shoved her satellite-dish gun back in her knapsack and snapped her fingers in front of Martha’s face. “Get your kids and get them into the car,” she said, taking advantage of the short-term disorientation and cranial catatonic compliance magnetic hypnotism gave her. “Drive to your auntie’s place or something.”

“But my auntie is in Crowtalon…” Martha droned brainlessly.

“Then you better have a lot of rest breaks,” Karen quipped. “Now scram.”

“Ahuh…” Martha nodded as she went up to get her kids and went back down with them. They went out to the garage and got in the station wagon. Pretty soon, they were backing out of the driveway.

“You better go with them too,” Karen said to Bobby, who was still standing there with a dumb look on his face. Karen grinned, she had the situation under control and when Max got up… “Oh my god, Max!”

She realized that Max was still knocked out and that he might’ve been hurt, so she went over to him, knelt down beside him and rolled him over on his back. He was still unconscious and Karen began to wonder if he needed resuscitation or –

“What the fuck did you do to my brain?!” Bobby roared as he grabbed Karen by the arm and tossed her at the Christmas tree.

“Shit!” Karen cursed. The tree and all the precious presents under it had cushioned her fall, but still. Goddamn Bobby was one of those types unsusceptible to hypnotic suggestion – namely the dumb ones whose decreased brain activity made them thicker, and dumb. Goddamn thick thick-headed thickies.

“Where the hell are my wife and kids?!” Bobby went on as he went over to pick up that goddamn chimney rod. He got it and began waving it around. “What did you do to them?!”

Now Karen decided she had to use force, so she stuck her hand in her bag and tried to pull out her other weapon – the .410 Custom Blacksuit Revolver. If it was loaded with non-lethal rounds, then the tranquilizers would definitely put Bobby in a chemically-caused coma. The goddamn neurotoxins on those darts were rated for tranquing undersea mastodons. If not, then the non-non-lethal gyrojet shotgun slug rocketbullets would have to be good enough.

“Answer the goddamn ques-” Bobby didn’t get enough time to finish the goddamn question as his pupils dilated and his face went dumb again. He fell face first on the ground.

Standing behind him was Maximus Li. He had taken off that outrageous glove he was wearing over his left hand and Lefty, the symbiote creature on it, was plainly visible for all to see. It was one with his hand and resembled… a big hand, with three big fingers instead of five small ones, with three big claws sticking out of them. Also, the creature’s rearwards orifices were somewhere there too.

Yellow venom dripped from one of Lefty’s hypodermic barbs.

“You...” Karen uttered, realizing what he just did – what he had to do.

“Wasted him,” Max nodded. “He’ll have one hell of a hangover when he gets back up.”

“What?”

“My cousins dared me to drink a liter of Banner Spicks,” he explained, referring to a politically incorrect brand of tequila. “Lefty metabolized it.”

“Ah,” Karen got it. Aside from dosing him with Prozium, Lefty was also capable of detoxifying Max’ system of all kinds of crap and storing it for convenient future use. “After all, you drink antifreeze for fun, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Max shrugged as he offered his right hand to her. “You might want to get off of that.”

“Huh?” Karen looked down and saw that she was sitting on the Greys’ gift. She got off it as fast as she could, as if the thing was burning her bum. Which it wasn’t. “Oh shit.”

Max picked up his shotgun and trained it on the thing.

“Do you think I tripped it?” Karen asked.

“I don’t –” Max went on before the box started glowing and lines began etching themselves on its surface, running and intersecting and forming all sorts of figures as blue light came from between the lines themselves – like a bioluminescent egg hatching in geometric configuration. “Yes.”

Karen decided against cursing, since by this point it would already be redundant. Then she saw the two other boxes behind the first box, and she cursed anyway.

“Fuck.”

The box opened up like one of those xenomorph eggs Karen had seen in real life and clawed insectile legs began rising from inside it – just like those xenomorph eggs. Max didn’t wait for the thing to jump out at their faces to orally violate them with ovipositors; he pointed his shotgun at it and blew the thing to smithereens.

That started it. The other gift boxes opened faster now, and the things began coming out of them. Spider-like probe-drones tried to leap with their long lacerated legs, but Max laid down the law and the depleted uranium buckshots blew them half to hell. Karen thumbed her MP5K’s fire selector and began firing in bursts, decapitating and disamputating those bugs that were left half-alive by the buckshot brigade.

They aimed at the boxes’ openings and concentrated their fire at anything that got through, but unfortunately the boxes were bigger on the inside than they were outside – just like washing machines, Black Helos and Karen’s knapsack. And to make matters worse, their sides began opening up as well – all five sides of the boxes, minus the sixth that was on the ground – and steel insects began pouring out of them all.

The probe-drones retracted their claws and used their multi-segmented bodies to slither all over the ground and Karen shouted something profane as she staggered back and fired at the things as they came at her. But they didn’t all come at her, some of them went over at Max, who blasted them to pieces with his shotgun, but they didn’t all come at him either. They slithered and went under the carpet, got on the walls, crawled over and under furniture, and everything else. Then when they were in position, they ‘unsheathed’ their sharp limbs and converged at Karen and Max from all sides, angles, directions and trajectories, all at once.

“They really are coming from the walls!” Karen shouted as she fired her subgun at a bug coming at her face. The burst blew it to bits, scattering its pieces all over the place, but for every one that they killed, it seemed that one and a half took its place. Karen removed the clip and rammed in the second one, thanking Kenny’s dog god for those two-magazine clamps made for quick reloads. “Get down!”

Max instinctively ducked his head as one of those things tried to land on him from the ceiling. Karen ruined its shit with a precise burst, grimacing and gripping on to the foregrip as hard as she could to make sure she didn’t take Max’ head off with her shot. She didn’t, and the chrome pieces of pulverized probe-drone rained down on him and got on his hair, but he shrugged it off like it was nothing.

“So much for five bugs per box,” Max muttered as he got behind Karen and began reloading – shoving shells into the tube of his SPAS-12. “Cover.”

“You got it,” Karen gritted her teeth as she thumbed the fire-selector to full auto and began racking at the drones that had retracted their claws to slither at them from the floor. She fucked them up and their pieces flew all over the place like Technicolor thumbtacks, and she went on and began shooting at everything and anything that moved. A bug tried to claw her foot, but she football kicked it into the air and shot the shit out of it. A couple of them came from the ceiling and she killed them too, killing them and making the cheap ceiling fan nearby explode.

Not-so-evidently, a third bug was on the ceiling fan, so when the thing fell down, it took the opportunity to lunge at Karen from midair. It was too close and Karen didn’t have any time to level her gun at it as it came for her face, but then Max swatted it away, using his shotgun like a baseball bat. He worked the pump with Lefty and blew the little bugger to bloody shiny little pieces. He did it a couple more times to a couple more buggers.

“There’s too many of them,” Max said. “We have to fall back.”

“Shit, they’ve got Bob!” Karen shouted.

“Who’s Bob?” Max went, before going ‘oh’ when Karen pointed at the fellow sleeping on the floor. One of the drones had torn his pants open and was…

“Goddamn it, cover me!” Karen growled as she emptied her MP5K on the roof and the walls, destroying the bugs that were coming out of them. She discarded the subgun’s magazine and made her run for the unconscious man, kicking the bug off his butt when she reached him. There was no point in carrying him, all she could do was haul him by his ankles while trying not to look at the nasty sight where his ass used to be.

Max covered Karen as best he could, angling himself so he could fire on as much of the drones without putting Karen and the shitpiece she was hauling in the line of fire. He fired a couple of times, destroying a table and putting a hole through a nice couch and blenderized the bugs on ‘em, but it was totally pointless. If he didn’t do something fast, they’d still reach Karen and finish their work on Bobby Ray’s butt.

He worked the pump with Lefty and ejected an unused round from the chamber.

Then he shoved an incendiary shell in and chambered it. He aimed it at the largest aggregate mass of probe-drone bugs and unleashed hell – the SPAS-12 shotgun spewing out a big blast of burning buckshot, a pyrotechnic gout of incandescent fireworks some ten meters in length that burned hot enough to melt steel. When the bright lights wnt out, Max could see furniture on fire and puddles where the bugs used to be.

Yet the Christmas gifts were intact and unharmed. A clawy appendage came out of one of them, followed by the rest of the probe-drone, and two more bugs followed from the other boxes.

“A little help here?” Karen growled. Her hair was singed and she had flipped Bobby Ray back over on his back to avoid the revolting sight of his violated behind, leaving behind a trail of ummentionables as she literally hauled his ass. “Let’s blow this joint.”

“Right,” Max agreed as he grabbed their comatose cadaver by the arms while Karen had his ankles, and together they hauled him out of the house and threw him onto the backseat of their golf cart.

Karen shoved another clip in her submachine gun and let out a full automatic fusillade at the entrance, killing the drones trying to exit the building. “We can’t contain this. Max, get on the grenade launcher.”

“Way ahead of you,” Max quipped, already behind the mounted automatic grenade launcher and bringing it to bear on the house. “Get down.”

“Go!”

The automatic grenade launcher had a funny design. Of standard 40mm caliber, it had a rotary drum magazine and was belt-fed at the same time because of some crazy ammo-selection mechanism that didn’t make sense. Max selected ‘thermobaric’ on the settings and the drum magazine rotated to select the rounds, then he squeezed the trigger and there was a loud thumping sound, followed by many more as the belt began feeding it more and more grenades.

Then the house exploded. The fuel air explosives practically exploderized the entire Bobby Ray residence in a brilliant fireball that could be seen from far across the distance, leaving behind nothing but smoldering wreckage and no trace of the perverted probes or the goddamn Christmas boxes that spawned them. They were all dead. Terminated.

The only thing that stuck out of the flattened building was the burninated remains of the Christmas tree, smoking acridly as the melted remains of its leaves and branches and ornaments were blown by the wind. Then it crumbled into ash.

“Smells like victory,” Karen grinned with satisfaction. She felt like she needed to smoke a big Cuban cigar or something.

“What do we do with him?” Max asked, using Lefty’s ‘thumb’ to point back at the unconscious Bobby Ray.

“I don’t know,” Karen shrugged. “I wiped his wife and had her go to Crowtalon –”

They were suddenly lit up by headlights and Karen turned around to see a station wagon coming at them. A car stopped near their golf cart and a very distraught-looking woman came out of it.

“Oh my god, what happened to my house?!” Martha gasped.

“Gas leak,” Karen explained helpfully as she pulled out her Hypnotic Memory Wiper and scrubbed her brain again. “You’ve got to be more careful, especially with the fireplace on like that.”

“Here,” Max grunted as he hauled Bobby Ray over to Ms. Martha Bobby Ray. Karen helped him help her bring Bobby Ray into their station wagon and placed him in the backseat along with the kids, who asked them why daddy was sleeping and why he had funny-smelling ketchup all over him. Ms. Martha Bobby Ray, having not the faintest clue as to what the hell was going on, thanked both Karen and Max for being so helpful with hauling her husband. She wished them a Merry Christmas and drove off. Max waved her off and said: “Drive safe.”

“Well, that went well,” Karen said as she went closet to Max. “Better than I could have hoped.”

“It’s not over yet,” Max replied, flicking his microbead on. “Ms. Lewyn, Kenny?”

“Max,” came Clarisse’s voice. “We heard an explosion. What happened?”

“The situation’s secure,” Max answered. “We had to use the grenade launcher.”

“Oh, good. Kenny and I are just about done too. Can you come over and pick us up?”

“Sure,” Max nodded to Karen, who promptly got on the driver’s seat and keyed the ignition. “What’s Fred’s status?”

“He hasn’t radioed in yet -” Clarisse’s line was replaced by static.

Suddenly, there was a blinding flash of light followed by a deafening thunderclap as night was turned to day. Everyone took cover as actinic afterimages were burned into their eyes and all they could hear was a constant ringing, and even after these effects subsided they could still feel the pinprick sensation of electricity on their skin and smell the palpable scent of ozone reeking in the air. Resonant echoes rumbled in the air, preceded by the flickering of lightning.

“Holy crap!” Karen exclaimed. “The sky exploded!”

“ - the saucer has just engaged me,” came Fred’s familiar voice. “I repeat, the saucer just tried to take me down and now it’s tailing me.”

“What’s your status, Fred?” came Clarisse’s voice, crisp and calm as ever.

“The helo’s still alright but I’m getting a faint vibration from the tail area. The Greys nicked me, alright.”

“Can you lead them to us?” Clarisse asked. “Can you lead the saucer to our position?”

“I can try,” he replied. “So far, it’s just toying with me but I sure won’t want to be here when it stops humoring me, ma’am. I’ll lead it to your position before I break off and reactivate camouflage.”

“That’s all we need, Fred.” Clarisse said. “Max, are you still there?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Karen?”

“I’m here too,” Karen answered.

“Great. Now come on and pick us up, we still have a job to do.”

“Yes ma’am.” Karen said as she worked the clutch and stomped on the accelerator.

“Oh how they pound,
raising the sound,
o'er hill and dale,
telling their tale.

Gaily they ring
while people sing
songs of good cheer,
Christmas is here.

Merry, Merry, Merry, Merry Christmas,
Merry, Merry, Merry, Merry Christmas.

On on they send,
on without end,
their joyful tone
to every home.

Ding dong ding... dong!




Dunwich City, Massachusetts
2222 Hours


“Everyone get out of the way!” Karen screamed as the carolers ended up running for their lives again. For the second time that night they were screaming and scattering as the golf cart from hell came for them all - sliding and swerving down the slippery pavement as the MABRT kids and their adult supervisor desperately held on for dear life. The carolers fled, but one of them slipped and fell on his ass, getting caught in the headlights as the golf cart came closer and closer to roadkilling him while he gazed at it like a deer caught in the headlights

“Aw hell no,” the he cursed.

“Brace for impact!” Karen screamed as she pulled the handbrakes, causing the golf cart to jerk around and alter its terminal trajectory. They narrowly missed the caroler and ended up running over a snowman instead, its limp body bouncing off the cart’s hood and hitting the ground with a sick wet thud as they came skidding to a halt. “Everyone alright?”

“Yeah,” Kenny laughed. “Let’s do that again sometime. Not.”

“Definitely not,” Max groaned as he wiped snow off his face.

“Alright, everyone out of the cart,” Clarisse said as she removed her seatbelt and got out of the cart. “Let’s get these people out of here.”

They got out of the cart and went over to the caroler they nearly killed, who was coming over to them while screaming profanities and giving them the bird. Clarisse didn’t mind that as she pulled out her own Hypnotic Memory Wiper and zonked the man’s brain.

“You had an accident; you should go to the hospital to see if you’re okay,” Clarisse commanded.

“Need hip replacement…” the man uttered as he turned around and headed for the Miskatonic Medical Center.

“Hey, what’s going on?” asked another one of the carolers as he and his friends formed a curious crowd of onlookers, and a potential angry mob. “What’d you do to our lead singer?”

“These are not the droids you’re looking for,” Kenny said as he pulled out his own satellite-dish-pistol and began shooting the man’s brain with magnetic fields. “Move along now.”

Karen and Max followed suit and together, the four of them began wiping the whole group of Christmas carolers. One of them wasn’t susceptible though, so Max had to do his thang again.

“Your friend’s drunk,” Karen said to one of the zombified carolers. “You might want to drive him home.”

“Breathalyzer bad… designated driver good…” Karen’s new friend muttered as he picked the unconscious man up and hauled him away. It didn’t take long for the both of them to find their ride and head for home while the others just dispersed and went on their own way. Later on, when their brains unscrambled themselves, they would probably end up wondering why they were wandering in places like the dog pound or the planned parenthood clinic, or the local glue emporium. But at least they were out of harm’s way.

“Now what?” Karen asked as she watched the last of the cranially catatonic carolers go away.

“We wait,” Clarisse answered.

“Not for long,” Kenny said as he pointed at something in the sky. “Look!”

They followed his finger and saw the Black Helicopter coming in with something hot on its tail. In stark contrast to the near noiseless aircraft, the Grey saucer descended from the clouds like a screaming streak of silver and once more beams of bright white light came forth from it – sweeping the sky and just narrowly missing its intended target.

“He’s all over my ass,” came Fred Wick’s voice, carrying a discernible undertone of urgency. “Gotta shake him before I break off -”

The saucer accelerated with unnatural speed and was on the verge of hovering right above the Black Helo, the smaller craft struggling to weave and dodge the lights arcing from the saucer’s ventral side while simultaneously hugging the ground and dodging obstacles.

“If I pull the brakes, he’ll fly right past me!”

The Black Helicopter stopped, decelerating to a standstill while turning on a dime as the saucer shot right past it. It did a one-eighty to continue its evasion, but then the saucer reversed as well – and did so without turning around as it started to fly backwards.

“Not good!”

The saucer was once more on the verge of overshadowing the Black Helicopter and catching it in its lights when the Helo suddenly pulled up and climbed as fast as its rotors could take it. As it did so, it started launching countermeasures in the form of magnesium flares that burned bright yellow and obscured the chopper’s thermal signatures, along with chaff that interfered with electronic systems and scattered like reflective aluminum confetti, both of which formed a brilliantly blinding display, like that of New Year’s fireworks.

The saucer shot past under the Black Helicopter while the evading aircraft engaged its full spectrum camouflage and disappeared from sight. Now invisible, it banked low and flew past the golf cart on its way out of there, buzzing the kids and their handler before going as far away as it could from the saucer.

“Now he’s all ours,” Clarisse said as she looked up and waved the unseen Helo and its pilot.

Meanwhile, the saucer wavered uncertainly before it found another target. This time, it was the best decorated house in the block with the brightest Christmas lights. The saucer slowed down and the shriek noise of its unseen engines became an eerie oscillating hum as it very gracefully lowered itself and hovered above the fancy house. Whatever malignant and twisted alien intelligences there were in the space craft, they were no doubt very amused with their own shenanigans.

Clarisse led the kids back to the golf cart and pulled out one of the Starstreak missile launchers, and Kenny and Max followed her lead and got the remaining weapons. They left the extra missiles in the golf cart while Karen got her targeter.

“Don’t stay behind us or the blowback will blast you away,” Max advised her as they moved out, down the road and towards the house with the alien flying saucer hovering on top of it. They hunkered down in a snow fort by a not-so-nearby neighbor’s yard and Clarisse, Kenny and Max began shouldering their weapons.

“Wait for Karen’s signal before turning the lasers on,” Clarisse instructed as she looked at Karen and gave her a reassuring nod. “Use the targeter, if it’s lit up like a Christmas tree with all sorts of colors from outer space, then it’s activated its ray shields.”

“If it’s not lit up?” Karen asked.

“Then we take it down and call the EODs.” Clarisse answered, referring to the Extraterrestrial Organism Disposal teams – the cleanup crews. “Now come on, I have to take you kids back to your parents by eleven.”

“Right,” Karen nodded as she removed the targeter’s lens cap and turned it on. She peered into it, through the monochrome display, and saw that the usual one-colored-view was smeared with a whole slew of colors, just like last time.

“What do you see?” Kenny asked her, leaning over and trying to look through the targeter while she was using it.

“It’s activated its ray shields,” Karen muttered as she elbowed Kenny away. “It’s no good –”

She stopped when her targeter’s display went back to monochrome, devoid of all those nameless colors coming out of the saucer. Then the colors came back, but they were no longer radiating from the saucer’s hull and were instead focused at the beam coming out of its bottom side.

“Karen?” Clarisse asked concernedly.

“The saucer’s shields are down!” Karen announced. “It’s got no shields! No shields!”

“That’s it!” Clarisse shouted as she got up and activated the Starstreak’s laser designator. “Fire!”

Karen ducked her head as Max and Kenny joined in on lasing the saucer, converging their beams at the stationary spacecraft’s midsection. The designators locked on and the three of them fired as one in a chorus of high velocity missiles as the Starstreaks blasted out of their tubes with their first-stage rockets and accelerated to more than thrice the speed of sound with their second-stages, leaving behind contrails of grey smoke as they rode the laser beams and ripped through the air. They released their three-pronged submunitions when they were right at the saucer’s face and the trinium-tipped darts tore through its unshielded hull like switchblades through cardboard before detonating inside their target.

The saucer shuddered and the beam of light it projected flickered before going out completely. It wavered midair and the rhythmic hum of its unseen engines became an ear-splitting squeal, like nails scraping a chalkboard as it started going down. Its descent was slow like that of a sinking ship, but it was a steady one as well. The saucer tried to pull up, but it couldn’t, and its hull began crackling with electricity as it tried another tactic – desperately clawing at the walls of reality to find a way home, a way back to the Dreamlands. But the nine stab wounds on its hull had definitely hit something vital and it had no choice but to go down and die.

It disappeared behind the house and there was a resounding thud followed by a mild earthquake as it plowed itself into the ground.

“Ow! Crash and burn,” Kenny commented as he blew smoke off his launch tube.

“Good job, everyone,” Clarisse congratulated them as they returned to the golf cart. They placed the expended launchers in its back, on the open trunk where golfers would place their golf bags. But they weren’t golfers. “Now let’s secure the crash site while the cleanup crews come over, then we can all go home.”

“Right. Let’s get this over with,” Karen said as she got on the driver’s seat. She keyed the ignition, but stopped from stepping on the accelerator. Max was still riding shotgun, or grenade launcher in this case. “Seatbelts, Max.”

“Both hands on the wheel, Karen,” he replied as he tried to clip the seatbelt on with one hand.

“Here, let me help,” Karen offered as she leaned over and buckled him up nice and tight. A bit too tight, as Max had to loosen it a bit, but that was the point. “We better hurry up.”

She turned on the golf cart’s FM radio and stomped on the accelerator.

“Last Christmas, I gave you my heart
But the very next day, You gave it away
This year, to save me from tears
I'll give it to someone special

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart
But the very next day, You gave it away
This year, to save me from tears
I'll give it to someone special

Once bitten and twice shy
I keep my distance but you still catch my eye
Tell me baby do you recognise me?
Well it's been a year, it doesn't surprise me - ”


Karen’s cheeks flushed when she heard the lyrics and she promptly killed the radio. She turned to look at Max, who was busy fiddling with the fire-control settings of the grenade launcher with its crazy belt-fed rotary magazine thing, and he didn’t seem to notice the inappropriate background muzacks, thank goodness. Besides, they were there already, at the crash site, so there was totally no point in leaving the radio on. It would ruin the element of surprise. Yeah.

“Great ball, we gave you a kick and the very next day you’re rolling away…” Kenny sang to the music’s tune. “Hey, what happened to the muzaks?”

Karen pulled the brakes and they all got off the golf cart slowly and carefully. The ground was particularly slippery, as the snow had half-melted from the heat of the saucer’s hull and refrozen itself into a slick and smooth floor of ice, a bit like how asteroid craters glassed desert sand.

“Hey!” Kenny yelped as he slid precariously on the slippery surface. Max grabbed him and Kenny held on to him as they steadied one another. “It’s a bit like how asteroid craters glass desert sand.”

“Be careful,” Max said as he let him go. He pumped his shotgun with Lefty, chambering a fresh round of depleted uranium buckshots.

They went on and followed the saucer’s slippery skid mark, and eventually they neared the point of impact. It was obscured by steam, but the mist was dissipated by cold wind and the saucer resolved itself before them – half buried in the ground amidst melted snow and ice, with its hull ruined and a little bit deformed.

“Talk about crumple zones,” Kenny commented as he wiped the fog off his glasses. Something was piquing his Tracker senses. “We’ve got three Dreamlander creatures in the saucer.”

“Dead or alive?” Clarisse asked.

“Not sure. They could be half dead,” he said. “Or undead.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Karen shot back. “This isn’t Halloween, it’s Christmas. There are no zombies in Christmas.”

“Just Greys,” Max commented dryly.

“Yeah,” Karen muttered. “Just Greys.”

Traumländergrau,” Kenny corrected them.

“Oh please be-”

Karen’s clever comeback was interrupted when a symbol-inscribed hatch on the saucer’s hull opened with a sharp hiss. More mist came from inside the vessel, probably not from the vaporized snow but from whatever artificial alien atmosphere it was that the Greys used for life support. Or not, since most Dreamland creatures breathed Earth air just fine. Maybe it was smoke from fires fumigating the crashed ship’s interior.

A bony grey hand with the wrong number of fingers emerged from the hatch and then a most miserable-looking thing pulled itself out of its spaceship. It was a Grey alien, a Traumländergrau of short stature, half-obscured by the smoke billowing out of the breeched blowhole. It staggered about and when it finally came out of the concealing cloud, it was clear that the goddamn thing was on the verge of death anyway.

“That poor little Traumländergrau,” Karen gasped.

It had lost an arm, possibly because of the crash, and it had a gaping wound on its back badly bleeding bioluminescent blood. To make matters worse, there was something inside writhing beneath the flesh. Then the alien turned to face them and it opened its mouth as if to scream, but the noise that came out of it was unlike anything made by any living or dying creature on Earth or otherwise. It was more like digitized white noise than any sound a vocal cord could possibly produce.

The Traumländergrau collapsed to the ground and twitched a couple of times before going still.

They looked at it wordlessly, and then Karen let out a scream of abject horror as a probe-drone crawled out of the wound on the Grey’s back, emerging through the torn flesh like a gleaming bioluminescent blood-soaked spider of steel.

Clarisse pulled out her service pistol and made it explode, shattering it into countless shards of silvery metal. Then she holstered her sidearm coolly and brushed a stray lock of hair from her face, minding the Santa hat still on her head.

But Karen still had a bad feeling about this and she said so as she pulled out her MP5K and thumbed the selector to full-auto.

Turned out she was right.

First they heard a faint noise that gradually grew louder and louder until it resolved itself as something that wasn’t the sound of the saucer’s insides falling apart from damage. It was the sound of skittering, of countless tiny legs clanging and clawing inside the saucer as they headed out of the spacecraft in full force – hell bent on insinuating themselves inside the orifices of all organisms. An innumerable sum of probe-drones emerged and blanketed the icy floor in a crawling carpet of chrome.

By then, the MABRT kids and company were already running for their lives.

“We need chopper backup!” Clarisse shouted into her microbead. “Fred, we need a strafing run stat!”

“The grenade launcher’ll buy us some time,” Karen realized as she ditched her MP5K and ran for the golf cart. Being in the school track team, she was easily the fastest of the MABRT kids and she managed to reach the cart first. She jumped in and manned the automatic grenade launcher, selecting whatever munition was available as she swerved it on its mount and brought it to bear on the swarm of steel spiders. The rotary magazine began spinning and the belt-fed autoloader began jamming rounds inside it. “Say hello to my little friend!”

The launcher belched the selected projectiles in full automatic, and the thermobaric FAE grenades came down in parabolic arcs that passed over the two running teens and their adult handler. The warheads detonated amidst the innumerable probe-drones, airbursting above the skittering bugs and spreading inflammable aerosol all over the place before igniting and causing a massive explosion. The fireball vaporized the nearest bugs and turned more into mercurial globules, while the bigger blastwave shattered the whole lot of them into tiny shiny silvery shards.

But there were more of them, much more. Unbeknownst to the Blacksuits, the probe-drones weren’t running on remote control now, they were now running on a communal intelligence, autonomous and adaptive. They began flanking the fire angles of the grenade launcher, moving to engulf the golf cart and the humans taking refuge by it from all sides. Those with legs unsheathed skittered, and those with no legs or with legs retracted slithered on the smooth snow, while a few others crawled under the top layer of snow. They came. All of them.

“This is not good, we have to fall back!” Max shouted into the microbead. There was no point in saying sentences stoically since no one could hear him over the constant thumping of the full-automatic grenade launcher, and no one could hear him if he shouted it either, so he had to use radio communication while shouting as loudly as he could. “We’ll be swarmed!”

“We can’t!” Karen shouted back. The FAEs were out and she switched over to something else instead, white phosphorus rounds – which wasn’t as dramatic, but the rounds were more than hot enough to melt the probe-drones’ endoskeletons. The willy petes exploded into fine clouds of snow white powder, which immediately burned upon exposure to air. The bugs and the trees, the soil and the snow, everything burned.

“She’s right,” Clarisse said as she reloaded her service pistol and worked to kill every last one of the bugs that made it through Karen and the kids’ phalanx of fire. “If we fall back then the bugs will find other targets, they’ll spread into the city instead of converging on us. We have to contain them!”

“Then we’ll contain them!” Kenny went as he blasted the bugs with the last of his 11-87’s magnum shotgun rounds, the incendiary rounds turning a wall of bugs coming from the left flank into steam. He threw his Remington away and pulled out his sidearms, dual tri-barreled .16 gauge shotgun-pistols. Reloading them would be a bitch, though. “But we need bigger booms!”

“Clarisse!” Max was also out of shells, so he used his SPAS-12 to smash a half-melted spider away from Clarisse, baseball batting it before he pulled out his Glock 18 and began blasting away with three-round bursts. He had magazines good for thirty three rounds, but he was practically one-handed. Pulling out and jamming in magazines with Lefty would be hard. Reloading would be a bitch.

“Thanks!” Clarisse returned a favor by making another bug explode before it could reach Max. She looked at him and noticed how all of them were now stuck with handguns, which significantly diminished their effective fighting range. Karen was also out of willy petes and was now resorting to bog-standard frag grenades. She cursed silently and reloaded her pistol with special Hiram rounds. She swung her M92F at the nearest group of drones and let loose a single shot, and the rune-inscribed round broke the bug and went through another one right behind it, and another one, going on in a curving path heedless of physical momentum. She fired another round and the curving bullet ripped through another line of bugs all around them. “Karen, pull the red lever on the dashboard! Everybody get down, cover your eyes!”

Karen didn’t bother questioning Clarisse’s command, she knew better. She pulled the lever and let out a surprised yelp as panels were blown out of the sides and rear of the golf cart. Multi-barreled dispensers popped out of the exposed paneling and began launching a proverbial flurry of fireworks – magnesium flares and electro-charged chaff, laser-ablating aerosol and white smoke, countermeasures of all pyrotechnic varieties were discharged in every direction. The sheer recoil rocked Karen in her seat and threatened to keel the golf cart over before it suddenly subsided in just a few seconds. Things became quiet.

“Let’s go,” Clarisse said, once more in a calm voice as she yanked Karen off the cart and led her and Kenny and Max away. The flares were still burning hot, dissuading the probe-drones from coming in, and the chaff interfered with their sensors and disoriented them, but the other countermeasures were not as useful. The bugs were still there, somewhere in the white smoke and ablative aerosol, and they still had to clear a path through them. Clarisse opened fire, and her rounds tore through the lines of drones effortlessly. “Keep going forward.”

“Whatever you do, don’t look down,” Kenny went on as he unleashed hell with his shotgun-pistols, leaving their path marked with the scattered remains of xeno-tech designed to violate human flesh. “Run Forrest, run!”

Karen just gritted her teeth as she followed them. Clarisse and Kenny had the most firepower, so they had the lead. Max was with her since he was busy reloading with Lefty, an agonizingly slow process that involved using the giant hand to pick up one of those long magazines and ramming it into the pistol before working the slide. But Max managed, without even having to work the slide, since he counted his shots and always reloaded before he ran out, making sure there was still an extra round in the chamber to prevent his Glock from locking open. If it locked open, then he would have had to work the slide, and that took time they didn’t have.

“Watch out,” Max yelled as a bug came out of the snow and lunged at Karen. He emptied his gun at it, blowing it to smithereens while his Glock locked open. He dropped the spent magazine, shoved a new round in with Lefty and tried to rack the slide. “Fuck.”

“I’ll cover for you,” Karen quipped as she shot another drone dead with her .410 revolver and followed it up by killing another one coming from the goddamn snow. She thanked the soft-recoil system for saving her wrists from the jetslug shotgun shells as the rocketbullets had crazy kickback. She heard more skittering from behind her and she spun and gave the pair of the chrome little critters a piece of her mind and a Frag-12 from her revolver-cannon, exploderizing them with the microgrenade. “Oh crap.”

She popped the cylinder open, not bothering to expel the spent cases since her rounds were caseless customs, and shoved another six rounds in with an oversized speedloader. While she was doing that, Max finally managed to rack his slide and he managed to frag a trio of incoming drones with a three-shot burst, one round for each bugger.

“Showoff,” Karen commented as they continued on and followed Clarisse and Kenny’s lead. The white smoke and ablative aerosol made it hard to really see them, but they could follow them by listening to the gunshots. Still, it wasn’t easy, not when they were being bogged down by a billion bugs. “We’ll lose them if we can’t see them.”

They almost did, but the wind did them a favor and blew the smoke and aerosol away. They could see that Kenny and Clarisse were less than ten meters away from them.

“No,” Karen gasped. “No, no, no…”

In between them and all around them was a mass of moving metal, more like a million probe-drones just slithering and skittering blindly in search for them, who were their sources of warm meat to cut through and nestle in. With the smoke and aerosol gone, and the floating confetti-like chaff blown away, now the terrible teeming things had no reason not to see them and disembowel them from the inside out.

“Game over man,” Karen gulped. “Game over.”

“No! Look up in the sky!” Kenny pointed up.

There in the sky, darker than the night, the stealthy silhouette of the BH-53 dived towards them like a black hole in the night sky. Silent, almost-invisible and wobbling slightly with its damaged tail rotor.

“Moving in on killbox one. Danger high,” came Fred Wick’s voice as the Black Helicopter came down hard and fast, blowing snow into the air as it banked and turned on a dime and flew sideways towards them, side doors sliding open to reveal auto-targeting miniguns while the back ramp lowered with a 40mm autocannon mounted on its lip. “Initiate strafing run.”

“Duck and cover!” Clarisse commanded as they all complied and threw themselves on the spots of snowy ground unoccupied by the many minute metal monstrosities.

The auto-targeters designated friendlies from foes, and the miniguns started by dropping the hammer and the autocannon finished by dispensing some indiscriminate justice. The gatling guns roared with obscene rates of fire, firing hundred-round bursts in sweeping sputtering arcs that lit the night up with luminescent tracers, making snow and soil explode and steel spiders blow up into chunky bits while the autocannon fired superheated saber rounds like a poor man’s plasma cannon. Everything the burning bullets touched turned into smoke and ash while some of the things it didn’t touch but just nearly missed merely boiled up into puddles of alien alloy. The big guns carved up the landscape in a seemingly random fashion, but their fire control systems were as precise as a surgeon’s scalpel cutting into a man’s corneas, each round fully accounted for and coming not an inch closer to the MABRT members than needed to kill as many of the probe-drones as possible.

Karen fell on her ass as the minigun rounds stitched the ground between her and Max, but he just stood there knowing that he would be left untouched like a Hebrew in a plague, which was really more appropriate for Kenny, who stood by with Clarisse while watching the carnage wrought on from above. Eventually, it subsided and they could see that the only undespoiled patches of ground there was were the undespoiled patches of ground they were standing on – that everything else was a pockmarked crater-scarred liquid metal-drenched wasteland. The liquid metal of melted drones didn’t even get a chance to ooze back together as the subzero temperatures just solidified them into ugly lumps of shiny things sticking out of the snow.

The Black Helicopter circled above them, before peeling off and launching a couple of missiles at something far off in the distance – perhaps another mass of drones that was not immediately prioritized as threats by the targeters due to their distance from the friendlies. The thermite-plasma warheads vaporized them all anyway.

“Nuke the site from orbit,” Kenny sighed as he wiped his brow. “It’s the only way to be sure.”

“Amen,” Karen agreed as she breathed deeply.

The Black Helicopter launched a third missile for extra measure before it finished its search-and-destroy mission and went back to fetch them. It touched down on its landing gear and the doors opened welcomingly.

“Come on, kids. It’s thirty past eleven and Ms. Lewyn told me that you all had to be back home earlier than that,” Fred Wick said as he came out, holding his helmet underarm and smiling at the haggard sight of them all.

“Man, my parents are gonna kill me,” Karen groaned. “Or I could tell them it’s all your fault, Ms. Lewyn.”

“What are they gonna do?” Clarisse asked with a tired grin on her face. “Write me an Angry Letter?”

Karen just laughed and her professionally-demeanored handler laughed with her too.

“Wait…” Kenny hushed them. “My spider sense is tingling…”

“What is it?” Max asked.

“Oh, come on!” Karen shook her head.

“I feel a disturbance in the Force, as if…” Kenny trailed off. “Fuck! Get down!”

The crimson laser beam would’ve cut them into cauterized halves had it not been for Kenny’s precognition. The tubby Jew kid tackled Max down while Clarisse pulled Karen and Fred out of the way as the line of blood light stabbed through the night, scything through the sky as it carved a smoldering swath through the nearby tree line and continued on straight over the visible horizon.

The beam originated from a tall and slender Traumländergrau attired in gleaming blue metallic cloth. It looked battered, angry, and in its hand was a weapon that looked like a derringer combined with a sharp serrated something that looked like it was used to induce abortion in radioactive mutants, like the thing Karen’s biology teacher once brought to class. The Traumländergrau gestured with his knife-pistol and hissed profanities in its unearthly inhuman tongue.

“Run!” Fred shouted. “Get to the chopper!”

The Traumländergrau jerked its head upon noticing the pilot’s sudden movement. It made a guttural sound as it brought its weapon to bear and –

kirri'k'narragh!” it screamed as its arm flew off cleanly, cauterized at the stump.

Clarisse then made first contact by pumping the thing full of lead. Each round blew a fist sized hole through the Grey’s chest and abdomen, riddling it with see-through holes before the muzzle rise of the Berretta introduced the bullets to the Traumländergrau’s face. Three consecutive rounds made its head explode and it staggered headlessly for a while before falling on the ground.

“Welcome to Earth,” the guidance counselor greeted the Grey’s carcass posthumously.



Dunwich City, Massachusetts
2350 Hours


I’m driving home for Christmas
Oh, I can’t wait to see those faces
I’m driving home for Christmas, yea
Well I’m moving down that line
And its been so long
But I will be there
I sing this song
To pass the time away
Driving in my car
Driving home for Christmas

It’s gonna take some time
But I’ll get there
Top to toe in tailbacks
Oh, I got red lights on the run
But soon there’ll be a freeway
Get my feet on holy ground

So I sing for you
Though you can’t hear me
When I get trough
And feel you near me
I am driving home for Christmas
Driving home for Christmas
With a thousand memories


Karen pulled the golf cart over by the driveway and turned to look at Max, and Kenny.

“Well guys, this is me,” she said as she got off the driver’s seat. Max was still riding grenade launcher and he looked like he was about to take the wheel. “Kenny, you’re the designated driver. Both hands on the wheel, Max.”

Kenny grinned as he got off the back and went over to the wheel while Max just smirked.

”Bye, guys,” Karen waved at them. “Have a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!”

“Bye Karen,” Kenny waved back.

“Bye,” Max did too, with Lefty.

Karen waved at them again before she turned around and went for the door. She wondered how she was going to explain her lateness to her parents, if they would be angry or worried or both, or worse yet, if they had gone on and did the gift-giving and all the other fun stuff without her. That would’ve been the worst case scenario. But still, she needed an alibi. Unlike Max or Kenny, whose parents actually knew a little of what they were up to, her own parents had no idea and were totally not ready for the truth. And hypno-wiping was totally out of the question, it just wasn’t right. She shook her head and tried to think up of something.

The bus broke down, or something, and they got delayed. Or there was traffic! Or… the Blacksuits were definitely going to make up a cover story for the crashed flying saucer and all the racket the full aerial bombardment made, so she could factor that into the big fat lie she was going to tell them. But she’d have to call Clarisse to make sure she got the right story, since she had no idea what tall tale the guidance counselor was going to use for her cover up.

“Man…” Karen whined as she reached the door. “What am I going to do?”

Her stomach replied by grumbling out loud. Man, she was totally hungry. She hoped they had some dessert left or something.

“Hey,” someone tapped her on the shoulder and she spun around to find Max standing there right behind her.

“Uh,” she wondered why he was standing there right behind her. “Hey.”

He handed her the foil-wrapped fruitcake he had pocketed earlier.

“What’s this?” Karen asked before a look of realization settled on her face. “Was my stomach that loud?!”

“Merry Christmas Karen,” Max said as he went back to the golf cart and rode grenade launcher. He waved at her with Lefty. “Have a Happy New Year.”

“Yeah, thanks.” Karen replied, rolling her eyes and, in the process of doing so, finding a mistletoe hanging over her from the porch’s little ceiling. She crossed her arms, because it was cold, and because it was silly and because Vivi and Bas probably planted it there or something. Mistletoes. “Heh, TOW missiles.”

“But Starstreaks are laser-guided,” Kenny said as he keyed the ignition and rode on off to the sunset with Max.

“Yeah,” Max shrugged as he reached for the cart radio and turned it on.

I take look at the driver next to me
He’s just the same
Just the same

Top to toe in tailbacks
Oh, I got red lights on the run
I’m driving home for Christmas, yea
Get my feet on holy ground
So I sing for you
Though you can’t hear me
When I get through
And feel you near me
Driving in my car
Driving home for Christmas
Driving home for Christmas
With a thousand memories.
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"Sometimes Shroomy I wonder if your imagination actually counts as some sort of war crime." - FROD
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Booted Vulture
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Re: Crosspoints Christmas Carol

Post by Booted Vulture »

Look, I'm very sorry Shroomz but this can't be right. MABRT are dead. Kamins said so
Ah Brother! It's been too long!
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Malchus
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Re: Crosspoints Christmas Carol

Post by Malchus »

Well, in that case, I'm glad to see the misadventures of the zombie MABRT. Wow, the way you depict them is just so.. alive! I dunno what to think about that.

Seriously, though, I'm glad to see this back up. It was always such a treat to read, and damn EPIC to boot. It deserves a place in this thread (though my pinion may be a touch biased :P ).
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I admire the man, he has a high tolerance for insanity (and inanity - which he generously contributed!). ~Shroom, on my wierdness tolerance.
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Ford Prefect
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Re: Crosspoints Christmas Carol

Post by Ford Prefect »

I swear, every second line in this is actually a one-liner from the 80s. :lol:
FEEL THESE GUNS ARCHWIND THESE ARE THE GUNS OF THE FLESHY MESSIAH THE TOOLS OF CREATION AND DESTRUCTION THAT WILL ENACT THE LAW OF MAN ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
Mobius 1
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Re: Crosspoints Christmas Carol

Post by Mobius 1 »

Ford is right. Those last few pages are epically drenched in manliness.
SHADOW TEMPEST BLACK || STB2: MIDNIGHT PARADOX
The day our skys fe||, the heavens split to create new skies.
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Siege
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Re: Crosspoints Christmas Carol

Post by Siege »

This is epic :D. Get to the chopper! Welcome to Earth!
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
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