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The Fist of Vengeance
Posted By: mr_mcmurder<spamcan1980@yahoo.com>
Date: 27 June 2010, 4:10 am


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The blood was warm. As it sat in the Master Chief's stomach. He had drunk two lumpy purple gallons of it already, sluggish and his belly distended in the languishing drunkenness of victory. He got up from kneeling at the last carcass in the rubble of severed alien limbs and awful, and put his helmet back on, letting out a blurp he greedily swallowed back down with relish.

The handheld camera flash lit up the posed carcass of Sangheli Commandant . . . Patornix, if Cortana's translation was to be trusted, which it wasn't. The Master Chief had days ago sequestered her to a tiny corner of his mind, and she was too busy fighting off his horrific nightmares in her own private neural dungeon to have but fleeting moments of lucid communication. Most of her interaction was now a constant moaning interspersed with terrified mutterings at his mentally screamed commands, and that suited the Chief fine. He looked down at the scene he had wrought. How perfectly desecrating.

The Master Chief allowed himself a dark chuckle of satisfaction amid another blurp of purple blood into his mouth; he swallowed it like a special treat come back to visit him one more time, which it was. He lifted his visor screen, spat on the pile, and lowered it again with a click.

Two weeks later, an innocuous letter arrived at the residence drome of Commandant Patornix, through the slit in the front portal onto the floor, as is customary even on Earth. The Covenant Fleet was many slipspace days away from the Homeworld, and mail from the front was beginning to trickle back in.

The residence drome was dome-shaped and metal. From the outside a Sangheli passerby, perhaps on his way to deployment, would see white smoke sputtering from the top, and he would grow stern with determination with such a reminder of hearth and home the Elites he would journey to join held behind every thought of battle so far off across the galaxy.

Inside was a stench putrid to Earthly nostrils, but delicious to Sangheli face anuses (which also moonlighted as smell holes). In the back on the sloping dome wall was a fire pit, blazing, and a chimney running up the roof to the center. In the fire hung a pot of bubbling stew. No doubt something Covenant and disgusting.

Despite the odd appearance of the place, it clearly had the universal touch of a female, and Patronix's wife Gorgeli stood at the fire confirming those suspicions I know you didn't have but I did while I was imagining it. She was barefoot. And very pregnant, her slimy eggsack filling the entire space between her bowed legs, dragging on the ground as she slowly trundled around as best she could.

As the envelope hit the floor across from the kitchen space, Gorgeli saw it from the corner of her eye (they don't point sideways anymore) and turned, making a sound, not unlike the puke of a geriatric lion, which would roughly be translated to acknowledging new mail had arrived. She briefly gathered her strength to drag her massive fetus-infested bulk to the envelope, and slowly waddled over to it, careful not to rip open the sac on any protruding furniture. Oh, such suffering was Sangheli pregnancy. Patornix had better appreciate this brood he had foisted upon her just before he left. She was so far along they were due to hatch any day, whereupon like baby earth spiders they would skitter up her back in a squirming horde and suck mommy's blood till they were big and strong, like a huge parastitic rucksack of vampiric baby hobgoblins. She'd barely be able to stand, but it would be worth it. This brood would be their first, and the promise of younglings in the drome warmed her eleven-chambered heart. Patornix's tour was coming to an end, however, and he'd be back in a matter of only a few precious days. The hope had buoyed her soul, and with it, she knew that no hardship or loneliness in his absence could not be overcome. Not even pulling around a veiny 600-Earth-pound egg sac.

She examined the envelope. Strange. It was addressed to her, but in barely readable language, as if a child who didn't know how to write had simply drawn the letters, and poorly, at the direction of someone else. Perhaps the poor retarded Sangheli youngling that scrawled this should be reported to the central authority for euthanization. Anyway, that could wait. She slit the top open with a claw and pulled out a photograph. Gorgeli's tiny eyes grew wider in quivering terror.

It was a picture taken on a battlefield. Filling the frame, she didn't at first register it, but it was the body of her husband, a mighty Sangheli Commandant! NO!

A huge charred hole occupied the center of Patornix's chest, and the cavity within was blackened and empty like the inside of a walnut husk in the trash heap outside the den of a gluttonous groundhog. Shiny purple goo and blood oozed from the corner of Patornix's gaping mandibles, his head slumped slightly off the vertical and his face frozen in the terror of death and the split second humiliation of having a grunt femur with a plasma grenade stuck to the end plunged into his chest from a distance like a javelin. His corpse was leaned up against a pile of body parts so that he appeared to be almost standing. His armor breeches were pulled down and a grunt posed over his nethers, attached with a metal pole shoved through the both of them.

The unspeakable horror washed over the maternally corpulent Gorgeli like a suffocating, roiling wave. She fell back and regained her balance, bouncing on the eggsack. Her vision faded momentarily, the world became silent. Her vision returned. She felt her mouth already open, mandibles spread, bellowing the scream of her life.

A strange, dawning feeling of panic tickled up her back. Or was it . . . NO! Her apoplectic fit had elicited a catastrophic survival response. That was no tickle of panic, it was a baby nymph crawling up her back. They all were. She looked down and saw the egg sac looser, squirming with the unstoppable fetal jailbreak that was underway. In this state, they would suck as much blood as possible, her arousal state had biologically indicated she was in mortal peril. The prophecy was only too self-fulfilling.

She heaved forward with nausea, purple blood gushing from her egg sack, and more being sucked directly from her brain in the hatchling's panicked bloodsucking frenzy, and dropped the photo, and it flittered to the ground, landing face down. On the back, written in a purple, smeared scrawl, was more language in Sangheli: "Wish You Were Here! I'm going to enjoy barbecuing your husband, at least once he's done with the Grunt. Coming for you, signed, The Demon."

Gorgeli collapsed in a swarming, gurgling, bleeding heap.

The Master Chief had sent one more of the alien scum on their Great Journey.





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