Being a railgun operator wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sure, I had the great honor of firing off the most powerful gun humanity has ever created in the auspicious year of 2018. The pay was decent for government work. I received free laundry service, it came with a hydrocar paid for in full by the USAS, and the benefits were second to none. But at the end of the day, I was still little more than an upjumped garbage man.

  Seated at my desk, I checked the waterfall gauge for only the second time in the seven hours I’d been on duty. Watching that little gauge and finding creative ways to hide my day drinking made up the vast majority of my work. When it ticked over the ninety-five percent mark, I was supposed to hit the big red “launch” button. This would happen about twice per week on my shift, three times if I was lucky. In response to that trigger, the garbage capsule would be sealed off at its top and loaded into firing position. Another button press would make a big hammer whack the explosive flux compression charge at the base, and then the magic happened. The charge would explode, generating an EMP, and this energy would be transmitted directly into the rails which held the capsule. Just like that, the gigantic, sealed can of garbage would be fired off into space on a degrading orbit into the sun.

  Technically it was a weapon of war. The railgun itself was mounted atop a huge gimbal mount, which allowed it to maintain constant aim on a proper trajectory toward the sun. If some fool managed to park something in orbit which needed taking care of, I had a separate button to load a tungsteel penetrator, and a sophisticated targeting computer to change the enormous device’s aim. In that case, I would have an extra few buttons to press. Select my target, confirm that yes, I really wanted that thing dead, and then, finally, punch the firing button. This was why they needed a veteran of the Third Indonesian Police Action to man it. Not any ol’ schmuck could be trusted with access to this much firepower.

  I took another sip from my rum and coke.

  Despite that the railgun represented a thousand times more power than I had ever had at my disposal as a gunnery sergeant, it was about that much less useful for actually destroying anything. Nobody else on the planet had the authorization, ability, know-how, or sheer balls-out insanity to even try to launch something into space, much less threaten the American Sovereignty, and anyone who did was swiftly gifted with a faceful of atomic hellfire and a hot, heaping helping of marines dropping from space to break shit, steal all the liquor in sight, and burn down every research facility and library in a five hundred kilometer radius. I should know; That had once been my job before I was sidelined by injury.

  Nearly all of my favorite memories were of blowing things up, burning down small towns, and getting drunk off my face with my buddies, typically not in that order. Us drop marines were the very best of the very best, a tiny brotherhood. Though we all trained hard and observed formalities on base, when the the time came to kick ass and take names that rigidity would be cast aside, and only the unthinking ferocity of our training would remain. Sadly, it had all come to an end the night I got myself grievously wounded. It hadn’t even been a good fight. All I’d done was step on a little improvised mine, possibly the most boring way to be taken out of an active fire zone. Doing nothing more than walking through the thick jungle that seemed to stretch ceaselessly over the whole indo theater, my foot had dropped through the forest floor without warning. That was the last thing I could recall before waking up in the hospital, strapped to a clean white bed, a half dozen cords and wires hooked into my flesh, covered in stitches from the neck down, missing my left leg from the knee down, and one testicle.

  Honestly, the leg hadn’t been a huge deal. I had required only about six months’ time to perfect my stride with the new prosthetic, but my left nut? I still haven’t forgiven whichever rat bastard had planted that mine, and I sincerely hope that the low-yield airburst A-bomb my guys called in on the little rebel village they found in the jungle caught him unawares and converted him permanently into a shadow. Better yet, I hope it didn’t, and he was treated to the prolonged agony of a lethal dose of gamma radiation.

  A beeping noise brought me out of my reminiscing, and my gaze snapped down to the console I sat before.

  ORBITAL ENTRY DETECTED

  It was an alert I’d never seen before. I raised an eyebrow and pulled my lunchbox off the glass face of the targeting computer to drop it beside me, activating the display with the tap of a finger. In an instant a query showed me an object hurtling through Earth’s atmosphere. It was merely a hunk of rock, only a couple hundred feet wide, rapidly breaking up and falling apart. The computer said that it would be rendered harmless by atmospheric friction before it hit the ground, and though I wanted to target it and obliterate it for fun, the munitions would come out of my pension if I wasted them.

  Instead, I marked it as unimportant after confirming what the computer had told me and leaned back in my chair. I had two hours left on-shift and a goodly portion of chilled rum and soda remaining in a two liter bottle. I intended to drain the latter so that the former would pass faster.

  - - -

  That night, as most nights, I found myself at Lefty’s, my favorite little pub. Though at first their name had irritated me given my unique circumstances, the owner was a fellow veteran who granted me a huge discount on my drinks. The inside was smoky, with a low ceiling, dark wood paneling covering nearly every surface, and quiet music drifting through the air. It was some poppy tune, popular with the college kids in the little town next to my railgun. I didn’t recognize it, but it wasn’t actively offensive to listen to.

  “Another one, Melvin?” the bartender asked. I nodded.

  “You know me so well, Chad,” I responded. The bartender was a short, stocky man, built like a fireplug. He was easily the strongest man I’d ever met, and among the ugliest, but he was also one of my best friends. He’d finished his own stint with the drop marines a few months after I’d been medically forced out, and a short few weeks after his return, his uncle had kicked the bucket and left him the little hole-in-the-wall. One night while we were drinking, he came up with the new name for the establishment. “in honor of you, my seminally challenged friend,” he’d told me.

  “Hey, that gal at the end of the bar is making all sorts of eyes at you,” he said to me in a voice somewhat lowered. I glanced around, trying not to be obvious, to get a look at the woman. I nearly did a double take. She was gorgeous. Short, blonde, and fit, but not so much that it took away from her curves, which were of the highest quality, taut but not unwelcoming. I could have bounced a quarter off of her ass and gotten a silver dollar and three nickels back for my trouble.

  “Well, get her a drink on me!” I said with a chuckle. I started toward her, but after a few steps she turned and gave me a wide smile. Seeing her face from the front, I could tell that she was no older than twenty five. She was probably a college girl, which gave me pause, but only for a split second. This was one of the college kids’ bars, but I wasn’t too worried. The students could be upset, but making too much trouble for a decorated member of the USAS armed forces was often a great way to earn a trip straight to a labor camp for six months.

  “Hey, big guy. How you doing?” she asked before I could so much as open my mouth.

  “Better now that I’m talking to a pretty thing like you. What’re you doing in a hole like this?”

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  “Looking to see if I could meet anyone interesting, and you wanna know something?”

  “Shoot,” I said, taking a swig of my beer and meeting her mischievous green eyes.

  “I think I found someone very interesting,” she said, taking a little step closer to me.

  Now, I may not be the brightest guy, but I know a signal when I see one, and she was firing them out like a double barrel loaded with flares. To make a long story short, we had a pretty good night, and she showed me exactly how interesting she found me.

  - - -

  Some time later, I awoke feeling a weight on my groin and a veritable fountain of vomit welling up within me. My eyes flew open, and I looked up. The girl was straddling me, and as much as I would have liked to go another round, my gut demanded to be vacated. She seemed surprised by my sudden liveliness, but I didn’t have time to spare. I tossed her off of me, pulled myself out of the bed and ran to the bathroom. Before the inevitable could happen and ruin my bath mat, I dropped to my knees before the porcelain throne and began to upchuck the whole contents of my stomach.

  Never in my life up to that point had I ever vomited so. It seemed like everything in my guts came up, but just as I thought the onslaught was at its end, something caught in my throat. It was huge and solid, and my esophagus burned with agony as my convulsions forced it up. I couldn’t remember what the hell I had eaten, but whatever it was, it must have congealed into a singular thick and rubbery mass. My eyes watered, my body shook, and I gripped the toilet, white-knuckled, as I heaved and retched. Finally, through tears and snot and the pounding in my head, I could feel it pushing up into my mouth.

  Reaching in, my fingers probing wildly, I grabbed at the rubbery thing with my hand repeatedly, my grip slipping on its squishy mass before I got a firm hold of it and yanked in a growing mix of desperation and horror. The worry struck me that my clogged throat would come up with the mass, but something in me was certain that I needed to have this thing out of my body. What seemed like a horrible tug of war ensued.

  It felt as if, deep down in my esophagus there was something latched onto the inside of my guts, refusing to let itself be expelled from me. I was the stronger of us, though, and its grip eventually slipped and let free, letting me reel it out until I had what looked like a purplish squid, small, disgusting, and with tentacles, still slightly wriggling on either side of its body. It’d become sticky in contact with the air, and as soon as I could make out its form in my watery-eyed delirium I shook it loose from my hand, tossing it into the toilet to swirl among the rest of my projected bile.

  “What the actual fuck,” I coughed out, pulling myself, with shaky legs, to my feet. “You’ve got to be pissing into my-” I was cut off by the sound of a mournful shriek and a sharp pain in the back of my head, accompanied by the sound of something shattering.

  “Agh!” I shouted as I spun around and delivered a backhand with all two meters of height and one hundred and twenty five kilograms behind it. The blow caught the girl in the side of the mouth, tossing her to the ground. “That lamp was an heirloom!” I shouted at her, but she lay limp on the floor and didn’t respond. She seemed good and stunned, so I left her there.

  I’ve been clubbed over the back of the head once or twice, so I’m something of an expert in being conked on the noggin. This was a good, solid whack, but definitely not a professional one. Still, I knew that I probably had a decent gash in the back of my head, and I’d have a good headache going when I was a bit more sober. The real insult was my poor lamp, my favorite one, which had never hurt anybody, and was an innocent in whatever fight I’d gotten myself into. Feeling a warm flow of blood down my neck, I stumbled to the kitchen in search of my medical kit. I rummaged around in the cabinet until my hand closed on it, but before I could pull it out I heard the sound of bare feet clapping on my wood floors.

  “Don’t make me-” I started, turning around and seeing that she had my pocket knife in one hand, raised over her head. There was a crazed look in her eyes that didn’t spell anything good for me. I shouted in surprise. Definitely not terror. It was a manly scream, perhaps a warrior’s yawp. Either way, instincts hard-won from years of fighting kicked in. I stepped forward, grabbed her wrist and twisted around to toss her over my shoulder. She was, generously, sixty kilos soaking wet, and I was still slightly drunk, so I tossed her a bit harder than intended. Like an oddly bony sack of potatoes, she sailed straight onto my dining room table, bouncing once and breaking the table’s legs beneath her, then rolled off, landing splayed on the floor unnaturally like a discarded doll.

  “What the hell’s got into you, you crazy bitch?” I raged at her, shooting her a hateful look. I’d thought we’d had a damned good night, and a man was allowed to drunkenly vomit in his own home if he damn well pleased.

  This time she started to recover much faster, raising her broken face toward me and steadying clumsily on her elbows. There was a feral look in her eyes as she started to pick herself up. One of her arms wasn’t working right and it took her some time to rise. As she pushed herself to her knees with one dislocated shoulder, I decided I didn’t want anything to do with her anymore. I grabbed my keys from a bowl on the kitchen counter and bolted out the back door towards my truck in the driveway.

  Turning the pickup on and throwing it in reverse, I reflected only briefly that perhaps driving in my current state of intoxication wasn’t the wisest decision. The alternative, however, was staying in the house with some knife wielding bar slut, so despite her great ass I floored it in reverse. My escape was short-lived. Fifteen feet down my driveway, I felt and heard a loud bang. With a heavy foot, I slammed on the brakes, bringing the truck to a screeching halt.

  “Oh, come on!” I groaned. The damned woman seemed to be doing her best to damage every last thing I owned. I grabbed a flashlight out of the dash, one of those big heavy ones that you could use to beat a horse to death with, and looked around briefly before I found what I was already grimly certain I was looking for.

  The girl was prostrate on the ground, face down, as dead as a stone. One of her legs appeared to be broken, or maybe both, along with a head that definitely wasn’t supposed to be twisted that way, and she wasn’t getting up. “Son of a bitch,” I muttered. “Hey, lady, you alright?” The woman, whose name I realized I couldn’t remember, didn’t stir, and that was an answer all its own. I went back to the house for my cell phone and some pants to keep my remaining ball from freezing off in the cold wind.

  In a flash of clarity I also grabbed my trusty shotgun. It had never been used against anything but the occasional duck or deer, but I figured it would serve me well enough in this instance. As I went back outside, I flipped my house’s front floodlights on to illuminate the yard. I was a good twelve acres from my nearest neighbor, so they wouldn’t mind the light. The woman was still there, now lying flat on her back, some blood seeping from the corner of her mouth. There was something wrong about that, but I couldn’t quite place it as I walked up to her.

  “Hey, I’m gonna check to see if you have a pulse,” I said, leaning over her. She probably wouldn’t mind one way or the other. It was a strange thing, checking the pulse of a woman with whom I’d been intimate just a few hours ago, but I tried not to let it bother me too much. After all, she’d tried to kill me. Fair was fair if she ended up dead.

  When I touched her neck I didn’t feel anything but cooling flesh. She was dead as a doorknob. I straightened up and fumbled my cell phone out of my pocket. Drunk as I was, it took me three tries to enter my password correctly, and I mumbled a curse each time as I failed. I managed to bypass the infernal lock screen but before I could dial the non-emergency police number the girl spasmed. I let out a little yelp and dropped my phone, my eyes widening in surprise.

  “Holy shit, you’re alive?” She didn’t respond, only convulsing again. “You’d better stay down. I swear I’ll shoot your head off.” I pointed my shotgun at the half-animated body, but she didn’t seem to mind that, if she even noticed it.

  When she jerked again, I realized something was strange about her motions. More strange than a dead person twitching, which was more common than most might think. It wasn’t a muscular twitch, rather, it was as if she was getting jabbed in the back. Then, something began to poke out of her belly, as if someone was pressing a finger to the inside of her stomach. I took a couple steps back, eyes widening in surprise and terror as I watched with perhaps more than a healthy amount of fascination. While I looked on, the skin pressed and stretched outward, her skin becoming strained and white as the protrusion grew.

  “Whatever the fuck your game is, I don’t like-” I began, when the skin of her belly split open and long, spindly tentacles began to reach from her cadaver. For the second time that night, an amazed, terrified scream escaped my lips as I watched the girl I’d been inside of a few hours ago burst open like an overfilled blood sausage.