Rampage

The inland sea, north-central Russia.


Tightening down on his spear, Krang inched forward in the dark.

His night vision was keen like all Skrag’s, but this stygian abyss was really putting it to the test. Not even the icy walls that comprised the cave helped illuminate it. He squinted as if it would help – it didn’t – and crept onward, listening to a rhythmic drip of meltwater from deeper in, taking care not to step on any loose plates of ice. One wrong sound could doom them all.

Elsewhere in the gradually descending cave were three other Skrag warriors, all of the Laash tribe. Balsk, the hunt leader, was somewhere ahead of Krang and the other two, battle-sisters named Galash and Krulash; all wore thick many-layered clothing shorn from woolly mammoth skins and fur, sporting scrimshawed tusks out the front of their hoods to intimidate and threaten. They certainly were a frightening-looking bunch, but they would pale in comparison to what lay in the frozen recesses of this coastal cave.

As dangerous as this hunt was, the Laash tribe was no stranger to it. Every year on this date the same place was visited, the exact same animal was hunted, and the same results were achieved with little deviation. They had boiled it down to something of a science; it had become predictable for them, tedious, a chore.

Brutish and cruel to outsiders, the Laash tribe didn’t have much in the way of friends. They were a poor tribe who scrounged off the land and gained exotic goods through trade or plunder, preferably the latter; to them, bartering was little different than staging a nighttime raid on a passing freighter. The most valuable things they owned were a few coilguns bought off of Empire-allied Skrag traders, which they stashed in their village in case their raiding victims ever decided to take revenge. Despite their seemingly perpetual state of poverty they were tight-knit and resourceful, taking strength in their family and their friendships to survive in a place where Skrag were never meant to live…and what a place it was.

Russia was among the nations worst affected by The Cycle. The once-great country was now a shadow of its former self, a dwindling relic brought low by outdated practices and a catastrophic world war. The nation’s inhabitants had recoiled away from its wild center and from where the Tyloban habitation ship crashed at the climax of the Titanomachy, leaving its easternmost reaches to rot, its inhabitants alone and barely able to defend themselves; for this there was already talk of secession within the borders of Vladivostok, eastern Russia’s largest city. The land itself had been altered as well, cracked and forced down until it flooded over and formed an inland sea in its northern territory, just northwest of the mighty Urals. Where there was once taiga and conifer trees there was now only water and ice, great thundering bergs floating high above flooded and half-frozen forests where kelp and other, stranger organisms took root in the murk. In places there were patches of snow stained blood-red by a toxic alga, deadly to any animal that foolishly ingested it. Razor-like fields of pack ice jutted out from frozen lakes and streams. Deafening gales howled over glaciers and icebergs, while towering forests of seracs stood tall against rain and storms, sculpted by the wind into cruel and foreboding shapes. Occasionally the bodies of mammoths and other beasts that died in the winter were recovered from the snow, frozen solid and perfectly preserved – a find of a lifetime for the scientifically minded, and a welcomed feast for the desperate. Along the coasts there stood clusters of strange crystalline lifeforms, Tyloban imports whose veins pumped with saltwater, their white trunks covered in whistling hair-thin nettles. The waters that fed them were frigid almost beyond belief, but far beneath them coursed strange superheated currents whose sources remained undiscovered.

As for the sea itself, no one had ever named this strangely squarish body of water. No one bothered to. It had once been the Kara Sea, but nobody used that name anymore; it had changed so much that the old name simply didn’t seem relevant. That was a name given to it by Russians, but these days their opinions regarding the sea were unimportant. This land now belonged to the Yakuts and other native peoples, who lived in them much as they had been for thousands of years. Practices foreign to them were adopted for better adapting to their post-Cycle world; limited access to the Internet brought new ideas into their societies, ideas of igloos and dog sleds, both beneficial and soon made widely popular. This was the land of the herdsman, the trader, the seaman, the hunter, and the nomad.

Though reptilian the various Skrag tribes who had taken up residence here were faring pretty well, readily adopting the human practice of fur coats and boots to combat the biting cold. Being warm-blooded like their mammalian neighbors didn’t hurt, either. There were many tribes scattered around the rim of the inland sea, fishing and mining and occasionally trading with each other as well as with humans. Most tribes were tolerant of their neighbors while others, like the Laash, were…less so.

Today, the Laash tribe hunters were after a targ. But not just any targ; they were after a young one, an orphan who they found isolated from its family sixteen years ago. Perhaps it had been sick, or it’d simply gotten lost, but either way the creature had been abandoned to the elements, where it grew tough outside the protection of a family unit. It now lived in the cave Krang and his brethren were infiltrating, deep in the back where its ammoniac stink was ripe; they must be getting close.

In any other situation, targs were not beasts to be toyed with. Even the hatchlings could maim a Skrag, while the kaiju-sized adults could level a small city without even trying. The blind, ill-tempered brutes were territorial but thankfully rare, their physiologies forcing them to stay close to the cooling waters of the sea. Their elusiveness made them impractical to hunt, but whenever a dead one turned up on the shore it was quickly set upon by scavenging tribes. Only the young were ever hunted directly but, when the Laash found this one frightened and alone in the back of a cave, they took an odd form of pity on it. Instead of killing it then and there they spared it, knowing it could prove useful in the years to come. The only reason the young targ hadn’t been killed by other tribes yet was because its lair hadn’t been found – the Laash went out of their way to make sure their “pet” was safely hidden. They even bribed it with food to ensure it didn’t leave its lair at inopportune times.

Fiddling with a turning dial on his spear, Krang watched as Balsk raised an arm to halt the group, his blunt head on a swivel. He’d heard something…something deeper down, something close. Krang listened in; he heard it too, soft, rhythmic…breathing. The beast was near. The battle-sisters at the back hissed almost in unison, anticipating. They too carried spears, each outfitted like Krang’s with a turning dial and a small gas container at the rear end; although blind a targ could still feel the heat of fire, so when found it would be chased from its cave at the end of flaming spears, right into the arms of the drivers outside.

A veteran of three raids, Krang remembered this last stretch of the cave well; an antechamber, it was a tight fit even for the Skrag, ensuring that if attacked early the hunters would have nowhere to run. But, as they squeezed through the icy corridor, its walls stained with rusty drips, its floor littered with bones, no such attack came. They were safe this time…last time’s hunters hadn’t been so lucky.

There. Something in the final amphitheatre-sized chamber had just moved, shuddered ever so slightly. Its shadowed bulk blended in well with the deep blue ice, almost too well – Krang had a hard time making out where targ ended and wall began. But it was most certainly, most definitely there. The chamber reeked of its kills and its excrement, and the floor and lower walls were smeared with both. The coppery richness of the air hinted at a recent and filling meal. Grimacing, Balsk took the lead and carefully approached, the sixteen-foot-tall Skrag dwarfed by the house-sized mound. It shuddered again; he froze. Whether it smelled them or heard them or whatever the hunters didn’t know, but somewhere in the primitive part of its brain it knew it had company. Targs did not like company.

Some horrid organ inside the targ began to gurgle and groan, the ice trembling as the animal began rolling to its heavy feet, six nostrils flaring to take in the invaders’ scent. It recognized them as the little reptiles who treated it with duality, the ones who saved it and sometimes fed it but also frightened it and drove it at the end of sharp sticks, forcing it into an arena where they battled it for entertainment. Shuffling upright, joints grinding, the young targ flexed its claws and moved to evict its unwelcome visitors.

Even to a veteran Laash driver the creature that stood before them was a frightening monstrosity. A whitish hut-sized hulk of muscle and chitin, the ape-like invertebrate reared back to flash hinged arms ending in three scything claws apiece, each long enough to skewer a Skrag should the beast get a chance. A blind and bulbous head undulated a sharp scissoring beak out from its front, snapping and gnashing in primitive anger. Six nostrils arranged along its throat blasted a honking roar in stereo, rattling the icy cavern and threatening to dislodge the meter-long icicles above. Its fat belly was caked in gore and stuck with the bones of slept-on corpses like piercings, while its skin was stained with the blood of victims it had clumsily been rolling in. Cauterized wounds from previous drives peppered its thick legs and backside. It reached back and threw one of its more recent kills – the mangled corpse of a megaloceros buck – at the invaders, forcing them to scatter. But this panned out in their favor; they began to encircle the targ, raising their spears and giving it only one direction of escape: outside.

“Now!”, bellowed Balsk in his native tongue, “Strike now!”

Their whoops and yells echoed off the cavern walls, disorienting the eyeless monster and drawing it near panic, while their unlit spears jabbed and pierced at its hide, driving it mad. It reared to slam its fists down, smashing foot-thick ice with every blow, but the four hunters dodged and evaded it, ducking around to stab at it in the rump and thighs, pushing it forward. The targ howled and dropped onto its knuckles, cracking ice, thundering for the exit; its bulk crashed into the ice and forced its way through the antechamber, thick hide grinding against the walls as it went. The hunters carefully followed it out, stepping over cracked and jagged ice as they set their spears to ignite, further fueling the young targ’s rage. Its thudding body dropped bones and slices of cold rock from its hide as it charged, barreling violently through ice formations thick enough to withstand a car crash, crumpling man-sized chunks against the floor and the walls. The hunters kept up but at a safe distance, the glow of their spears guiding them upward through the frigid darkness, following the trail of ice and wreckage left in the frightened beast’s wake.

A hundred yards outside the cave’s entrance sat a dozen Skrag drivers, each thickly clad and sitting quiet in the soft white drifts, all but invisible in the ongoing snowfall. They moved only when they heard it, and they heard it long before they saw it: a cracking, rumbling sound of hard muscle grinding against even harder ice. They suddenly sprang to their feet and raised their spears, each igniting their metal tip into a cauterizing torch. It was time.

Exploding out into the last vestiges of evening light, the targ burst from its cave in a shower of ice and stony fragments, its enormous arms tossing a smothering snowbank at the driver that waved his burning spear in its face, startling it with a croak. It was only here in the open and in the torches’ light that its size could really be appreciated – a terrible colossus, it stood nearly forty feet tall on all fours, utterly dwarfing the Skrag who scattered through the drifts before it. But even it was slowed by the deep snow, slogging through and clinging to the hard bedrock underneath. Its fitful passage tossed aside two-ton Skrag as if they were paperweights, slapping away spears to be put out in the cold sea of snow. A furrow in the snow twenty feet deep was left in its wake, the remainder trampled into a hard path underfoot. The drivers soon fell in line behind the targ, jabbing and whooping and antagonizing it until it turned in the right direction; even the Skrag who’d been buried had dug himself free and joined in. The four hunters soon emerged from the cave and, seeing the procession already on its way, whooped and ran to join it.

Splitting off from the group, the battle-sister Krulash took her spear and waved it up and down a nearby conifer tree, gradually setting the entire tree ablaze. Its oily light would be seen through the snowfall for dozens of miles around, though only her tribe knew what the signal meant.

The chase was on.

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Slowly, the targ was directed onto the usual path.

Though it could not have recognized it, for the beast had no functioning eyes, this trail was one it had ventured down many a time before, and always at the ends of the Laash tribe’s pointed spears. The destination was a rough volcanic pit roughly five acres across and about three miles away, its rim lined with crudely carved seating and its floor littered with discarded weapons and broken bones. Lovers of violence and spectacle, the Laash people herded this monster here once every year, using it in their celebration for the young Skrag who were coming into adulthood, pitting them against this greatest of beasts to prove their strength and courage in battle. While lethal wounds were not allowed against the targ it in turn felt no such compunctions for the Skrag it would be fighting, and many a youth had been torn in half or trampled into a paste while in the arena; even getting the beast there was fraught with peril, for the trail was harsh and along the way they had to skirt another tribe’s territory. But the Skrag were confident, for they had done this many a time before…what could possibly go wrong?

Plenty, it seemed.

Something was wrong with the targ, the Skrag drivers soon realized. Steering it was becoming more and more difficult, and even the flaming heads of their spears weren’t altering its course. The beast trumpeted, its nostrils flaring, and threw up its arms to toss snowy drifts out of its way, burying a Skrag as it forced itself further and further to the right. Shrugging off the jab of the spears it veered, smashing through trees, leaving the trail set out for it and forcing confused Skrag lying in wait up ahead to abandon their posts and join the pursuit, the fear of losing their prized beast looming ever higher. Soon the targ left the woodlands entirely, and down the slopes and into the lowlands it went, pursued by a candlelit horde of frantic tribal Skrag.

It took maybe fifteen minutes for the targ to reach the nearest seaside town. A small port and trading post, its population had no idea what was coming their way.

The targ hit the ramshackle little town like an avalanche. It crashed first through the wooden docks in the shallows, drenching the shoreline, tossing supplies and rowboats and barnacled planks in all directions, every strange sound and smell around it driving it into further frenzy. Huge limbs churned as it fought through the debris-choked shallows, hauling itself heavily onto land to the symphony of rifle fire and shouts in multiple languages. Bullets fired from frightened men’s guns did it no harm; most simply deflected off its chitinous hide, but the sound…the sound of gunfire infuriated it. What was merely “loud” to humans was a screeching, eardrum-shredding riot in the targ’s simple ears, ringing and bouncing around in its not-quite-a-skull. It tried its best at directing its fury at its attackers, taking clumsy swipes at nearby buildings, slashing open walls and shattering windows to let the frigid cold blustering in. The targ ignored the cold entirely, its attention directed towards the puny mammals who it thought were attacking it, but were in truth only defending themselves. It swept overhand one arm, then another, into the flanks of an old wooden warehouse, demolishing the structure before itself collapsing into it, crushing several falling men under its clumsy bulk. Those who weren’t trampled underfoot were simply slashed to ribbons.

The next warehouse the targ hit was reinforced by its proprietor – a tradesman made paranoid by years of dirty dealings – to withstand anything else short of a naval artillery strike, and withstand it the building did. Weight-bearing supports groaned as the targ bludgeoned the boxy structure, but it held out with minimal damage, forcing the irate monster to seek a less obstructed route. It plowed onward through the largely wooden maze its residents passed off as a town, exploding through a rundown bar, shattering dirty mugs and glasses, then a shanty, then another larger shanty, and then down a street crowded with grimy vendors who scrambled to get out of the way. The beast’s frightened warbles rang loud in the ears of those it unknowingly pursued, and its two-meter-long claws whistled through the streets to cleave and cut. Little survived in its wake.

A mob of close to twenty tribal Skrag rushed into the town not far behind the targ, trampling what little the beast had left standing. Food carts were kicked aside, spilling their contents into the streets, while trading posts and offices caved in as they stumbled through in pursuit of their prized animal, dodging periodic rifle fire from atop buildings and behind boarded-up windows. Their flaming spears waved and flickered in the frosty air, highlighting the Skrags’ path through the winding streets and avenues, swinging about with their owner’s erratic movements. Some flew far ahead, tossed forward to light the way and hopefully guide the rampaging targ, but most were splintered under its feet, ignored and ineffective.

Within seven minutes it was all over. The targ, bursting free through a warehouse, its hide flecked with snow and debris; the Skrag tribe, panting and wheezing as they struggled to keep up in the debris, staggering their way back into the open as they followed the targ’s destructive trail; and the residents of this nameless little town, in absolute ruin.

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Sunrise revealed the true scope of the targ’s destructive warpath. The beast had leveled nearly a third of the entire settlement – not damaged it, leveled it. Flattened, crushed, pulverized underfoot – the targ did not discriminate, for rich and poor alike had suffered under its passage, the structures they owned and lived in and worked in turned into snow-dusted kindling. The entire area was scattered with the monster’s coal-like droppings, each steaming black package the size of a small child. Though targ excrement was known to be a potent fertilizer, it was little consolation for the survivors of the attack.

The town’s leader – not quite a mayor, not quite a chief either – had rode it out in his private bunker, only to be bombarded with a different kind of assault once he exited. Those who had survived were raising questions. Lots of them. The angry throng spat queries and insults at him, demanding to be answered.

How could this have happened, they cried! Where has this beast been hiding, they demanded! What are you going to do about it, they roared!

The town leader held his hands up in a futile attempt to calm the crowd. He assured the townsfolk that, while a terrible and tragic loss, this affront could not go unavenged. He had many friends elsewhere in Russia, rich and powerful friends who would be plenty willing to lend their ears – and more importantly, their coffers – to the people’s cause. He would contact them soon, for he too had suffered greatly under the targ’s hooved feet…and like the rest of his village, he believed the Skrag they had seen responsible.