GALACTIC BADLANDS

  By

  Zachariah Dracoulis

  Galactic Badlands Copyright © 2018 by Zachariah Dracoulis. All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Cover designed by Flame Croowz

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-13 978-1719998048

  ASIN- B07H12H3XQ

  For Rikki,

  You saved this book from a stupid title, thank you

  1

  Mariachi music.

  That was the first thing I heard when I opened my eyes.

  Cheerful mariachi music.

  I didn’t mind it, I actually kind of liked it, but at the same time it was distracting me from the issue at hand, that being the fact that I had absolutely no goddamn clue how I ended up on my back staring up at a single faded cloud in an otherwise unmarked baby blue sky.

  It was like I’d blinked in one place and then was somewhere else, but the thing was I didn’t actually have any memory of that first place, I just knew I’d been there.

  I vaguely remembered a spaceman and a clown followed by the color red, but other than that I was clueless.

  My brain was pudding, pudding that just wanted to enjoy that dying cloud and the mariachi music.

  Turns out my throat had other plans.

  Well, more specifically the lump that had gotten caught in there.

  Even more specifically, the lump which was moving.

  I tried coughing to clear it, but it turns out it’s bloody difficult to cough while lying flat on your back.

  So, begrudgingly, I sat up and starting coughing into my balled fist, feeling whatever it was that had trapped itself in there lurching towards my mouth with each dry hack.

  Whatever it was wanted to stay though, its toothpick-like feet trying and failing to scurry along my tongue and back into the warm, dark safety of my esophagus.

  My lungs were too strong though, and, with one final hard cough, triumphed, expelling the tiny creature onto my hand.

  It was a scorpion, a small brown thing with a nasty looking tail, and it was definitely more scared of me than I was of it.

  “That’s what you want…” I muttered with a weak chuckle before setting my hand on the cracked white dirt and letting the terrified arachnid climb off and run away into the endless desert to my right.

  For a while I just watched it run, but eventually I decided to go ahead and pan my vision across the horizon in search of something.

  Anything.

  I had no such luck, and when I finally reached the point where I couldn’t look any further to my left I came to a slightly disturbing realization.

  There was no mariachi band.

  Naturally, this concerned me some.

  Nobody was telling me to kill anyone or anything, but I figured that a non-diegetic mariachi band wasn’t exactly the best sign of a healthy mind.

  Although, it wasn’t like I was panicking or anything, I was just sort of concerned.

  That concern disappeared pretty damn quickly once I got to my feet and noticed something odd though, a sound that didn’t normally happen when I got up, a sound like jangling keys coming from my feet.

  Cowboy boots.

  I was wearing honest-to-God cowboy boots.

  Brown leather, steel capped, pointed, spur-having cowboy boots, along with a pair of brown pants and a simple, washed-out, long-sleeved button up. Hell, if I didn’t know any better I’d have said I’d just fallen out of the set of one of those westerns I’d loved watching with my dad growing up.

  Not being one to enjoy having my forearms covered, I went to start rolling up my sleeves but was stopped by what sounded like a vacuum with a bunch of cellophane stuck in the nozzle coming up behind me, but as I turned around it became pretty damn clear that it wasn’t.

  No, it was a car.

  A chrome car.

  A hover car.

  Due to its distracting shine and ability to fly, I didn’t manage to get out of the way until the last possible second, the vehicle just barely missing my feet as I dove to the right, landing hard on the dirt and knocking the wind out of myself.

  I figured the driver must’ve just been distracted, but then I heard something that can only be described as an auto tuned flat tire and saw that the car was turning around a couple hundred feet or so away and coming in for another swipe.

  Without wasting a second, I scrambled to my feet and got ready to dive out of the way again, stopping only when I noticed the semi-transparent 3D words which had just appeared about a foot in front of me.

  Remember to use your weapons!

  For a second there I was concerned by the apparent addition of visual hallucinations to my mariachi mania, although with chrome-plated death hammering towards me I figured it was in my best interests to just assume it was being helpful.

  “What weapon?” I asked heatedly, looking around and noting that the words were fixed as I did, “C’mon, what weapon?”

  I was about to give up hope and accept that I was crazy and as good as dead, but then a handgun flashed into existence under the hint.

  Well, at that point I assumed it was a handgun, for all I knew it could’ve been a bulbous, purple, semi-cube-shaped spray bottle.

  There wasn’t a ton of time to question what it was though, seeing as the car had gotten a little too close for comfort, spurring me to snatch the ‘gun’ out of the air and dive to the left as it smashed into the words and made them disappear.

  I was ready to jump that time though and was able to roll and jump back to my feet with ease, at which point I saw that some new, smaller words had popped up above my newly acquired weapon.

  PLP-19

  Level 1 Handgun

  “Right then…” I muttered as I started to put the pieces together in my head, but that was before noticing the car was coming for me again and accepting that that was where my focus needed to be.

  I fired at roughly where I figured the driver was, the minimal kickback from the bubble gun-looking pistol encouraging me to shoot as many times as my itchy trigger finger would allow.

  Neither the car nor the driver were fazed by my assault though, brushing off the green energy that was splattering across the vehicle’s shiny body like it would gnats and continuing to hammer towards me as another message appeared in the car’s dust trail just in time for me to dive out of the way.

  Remember that some weapons can be overcharged!

  “Remember?” I scoffed after getting back to my feet for the third time, “That usually entails you telling me first.”

  The words, unsurprisingly, didn’t respond and instead faded away with the dust they’d been created with.

  In a moment that made me feel slightly less concerned about my sanity, I decided I wasn’t about to argue with disappearing words and turned my attention back to the car which was once again hurtling towards me.

  “You just don’t let up, do you?” I asked amusedly before taking aim once more and holding the trigger in, causing what had been as good as a toy up until that point to heat up and vibrate.

  I wasn’t going to let off the shot though, not until I was absolutely positive that I was going to hit the bastard because, as stupid as it sounds, I was done rolling around in the desert.

  The gun was reaching a near-unbearable heat, the vibrations were filling my forearms with pins and needles, and fight or flight had kicked in, and let me tell you, I ain’t one to back down from a fight.

  Granted, going toe-to-toe with a flying car probably wasn’t the best time to have ‘fight’ be my default, but there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about my internal programming at that point.

  Then, at the exact moment my instincts told me to, I let go of the trigger, the charged shot providing enough kickback to make me spin around and my shoulder to pop slightly as the overheated weapon attempted to both go to space and rip past my arm simultaneously.

  Now, I didn’t quite register it in the moment what with the fact that I was mostly trying to act like the music and the words were just my brain’s way of dealing with a new and unfamiliar situation, but I did see something appear above the car for a second after I turned around.

  It was a semi-vibrant red ‘+10’ along with some other excitingly displayed words and numbers I couldn’t make out, although they were quickly overshadowed when I, like an idiot, had forgotten to jump out of the way of the still moving car and, as a result, was hit.

  Fun little tidbit here; getting hit by a car sucks balls.

  Seriously, it didn’t matter that I’d been lucky enough to shoot the driver well before he reached me, the car was going too fast and managed to hit me with enough force to send my ragdoll-like body rolling up and over the roof and dump my stupid ass on the dirt which really knocked the air out of me.

  “Mother Mary and Joseph…” I groaned before turning my head to look as the hover car slowed down and drifted at a slight angle, causing it to briefly bury its side into the dirt as it came to a complete stop.


  Suddenly, with the threat neutralized, I was in this sort of scan mode in my brain, something that I’d done my entire life, and started going through each of the elements of my body that could’ve been injured.

  My legs were good and, by extension, so was my spine, but one deep breath revealed that I’d at least cracked one of my ribs in the fall.

  I could work with a cracked rib though, I’d done it before.

  Wasn’t sure when I’d done it before, given the fact that my memories were still a bit hazy, but I knew for a fact that even a few cracked ribs was far from the kind of thing that put me out of the game.

  So, with no small amount of difficulty, I got to my feet, ignoring the sharp pain that shot up through my left thigh as I did so, and started steadily limping towards the parked vehicle.

  I was confident I’d killed the driver, although I couldn’t safely say for sure if he’d had passengers nor if they were the kind of passengers that would seek revenge.

  They weren’t.

  Well, she wasn’t.

  The one passenger in that car was a wailing girl in her late teens judging from both the pitch and the way she was blubbering over the guy I’d killed, and I was confident that she wasn’t the type that was going to shoot me as I got close enough to lean on the mid-sized car.

  The metal was weirdly cool considering the fact that it had been out in the sun all day, and a quick look over revealed that my muscular, 180 pound body hadn’t left so much as a dent in the bodywork.

  “Open up,” I said calmly yet firmly as I finally managed to regulate my breathing, “I’m done hangin’ around in the sun.”

  The girl stopped wailing almost as soon as I started talking, but it quickly became clear that she wasn’t able to hold back her sobs.

  “C’mon, I promise I’m not goin’ to hurt you, alright?” I continued with the hope that if I said enough words she’d feel safe, “I mean, it’s not like you had your hands on the wheel, right?”

  Again, no response.

  “Look, I don’t want to have to start shootin’, but I-”

  “No!” the girl called out, “I… I just… Just give me a second, please?”

  There was a small part of me that wanted to put the screws to her, not because I wanted to freak her out or anything, but because I figured that that would be the only way to keep her grounded.

  However, I managed to keep that urge under control and, after a painful few seconds, had to step back as the door opened upward in a sort of wing-like fashion.

  It’s funny, ten-year-old me thought those were the coolest thing when I first saw Doc Brown climb out of his DeLorean in Back to the Future, but a few decades and some jading experiences had left me at the point where I just thought it was tacky.

  DeLoreans withstanding, of course.

  Anyway, I didn’t get a lot of time to focus on how stupid I thought the doors were before my nose guided my eyes to the source of the smell of melted plastic and sizzling flesh to find what was left of the driver’s face fused to his black headrest.

  “Damn,” I let out with a whistle as I looked at the mess I’d made, “didn’t expect that to happen.”

  “He was just messing around!” the blonde-haired girl practically shrieked, drawing my attention to her teary eyes, “He wasn’t going to hurt you!”

  “Provided I kept jumping out of the way, right?” I asked with a scoff before looking back at the skin and skull fragments that had dug their way in and bonded with the melted PVC, “Still though, tough break. How old was he?”

  The girl hesitated to respond then looked at who I could only guess was her former lover, “E-e-early twenties.”

  Initially, it seemed odd to me that she wouldn’t give me his exact age, but then I guessed why she would’ve been hesitant.

  She couldn’t have been older than seventeen, if that, and he… well, it was kind of hard to tell without a face, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if he was closer to thirty than twenty based on his build, the car, and her reluctance to give out his age freely to me, a complete stranger who had about as much of a right to judge as the newly silent mariachi band in my head.

  “Alright, jump on out.” I said before grabbing the dead driver by the collar of his brown leather jacket and pulling him off the seat, leaving behind more of his head than I’d have liked.

  “Y-you can’t be serious.” the girl sniffled out, “I-I-I’ll die out here.”

  “Well, try your best not to,” I grunted, the effort required to pull out my would-be hit and runner proving to be enough to cause my ribs to feel like they were cracking all over again, “I don’t need your death on my conscience.”

  I may seem cold there, but as far as I was concerned she was having plenty of fun with the guy I’d just dumped on the dirt like a sack of potatoes before I’d gone ahead and ganked him.

  “I… I have money!” the girl pleaded without moving from her seat, “I mean, my daddy has money.”

  “That’s nice,” I replied disinterestedly as I looked over the driver’s jacket, my eyes drawn to the metal-looking but clearly flexible pads over the shoulders, “but I can’t be bought, sweetheart, ‘specially not from people who just tried to run me down.”

  “That wasn’t me though!” the girl, having returned to blubbering, wailed, “Please don’t leave me out here!”

  “Alright,” I sighed before finally deciding to take the dead guy’s jacket, jerking his body around like it was some kind of floppy manikin, “I’m goin’ to go ahead and give you three seconds to get out of the car.”

  The girl seemed shocked by that, but didn’t move or speak.

  “One.” I said flatly as I pulled on the first sleeve.

  The girl didn’t move.

  “Two.” I sighed after getting the second sleeve on.

  Again, the girl did not move.

  “Thre-”

  “Please!” the girl shrieked, “I don’t deserve to die!”

  “Yeah,” I seethed, moving my head side-to-side like I was mulling what she’d cried out over, “but I’m pretty sure most folk don’t. So, thre-”

  “I’m getting out!” the girl shouted, any semblance of fear or sadness having disappeared and been replaced with anger and frustration, “Just wait until my father hears about this.”

  I shrugged at that and smirked, “He won’t be hearin’ anything from me, and seein’ as you’re so sure you’re going to die out here…”

  The newly angered girl didn’t have a response to that, instead opting to simply scowl at me while I climbed into the car, tears still streaming down her cheeks.

  Once I was in, I finally got a look at the melon-sized hole I’d blasted through the windshield, which appeared to be made of some blend of metal and glass.

  “Please don’t leave me out here,” the girl pleaded one last time through the open passenger door as I tossed my pistol onto the seat and peeled off my headrest, “I don’t want to die.”

  For a moment after chucking the gory headrest out all I did was look at her, struggling to ignore the small pangs of guilt that were going off in my brain, but I eventually mustered up a sigh, “Then don’t.”

  And, with that, I pressed the little green button on the center console which had what looked like a small imprint of a car with wings and watched as the car’s doors entombed me, the unmistakable sound of hydraulics hissing as they sealed.

  It wasn’t as dark as I was expecting, the soft interior lighting made sure of that along with the majority of the chrome exterior being more like a two-way mirror than anything else, allowing a small amount of tinted daylight in and for me to see just how devastated and scared the girl was.

  Every part of me was telling me that I needed to just drive away and leave her with the melted remains of the driver, but the truth was that I couldn’t leave some dumbass teenager in the desert because she’d made a few bad decisions.

  So, with a disappointed groan, I pressed the door button again, making the girl flinch, and scratched my brow with irritation, “Does this thing have a trunk?”

  “I…” the girl trailed off confusedly before nodding slowly, “Yes, there’s a button on the side of the driver’s seat.”