Karate Masters vs the Invaders From Outer Space Read online

  KARATE MASTERS

  VS. THE INVADERS FROM OUTER SPACE

  By

  Barbara Hambly

  Published by Barbara Hambly at Amazon

  Copyright 2017 Barbara Hambly

  Kindle Edition, License Notes

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  Table of Contents

  Karate Masters Vs. The Invaders from Outer Space

  About the Author

  KARATE MASTERS

  VS. THE INVADERS FROM OUTER SPACE

  “Oh, Dirk,” whispered Joanna Sheraton, “oh, my God, do you know what it’s like for a woman to hunger for real meat, as I’ve hungered for yours?” Soft reflections of flame from the bedroom fireplace slid over the black satin of the waterbed’s sheets, the polished carving of the headboard… the man’s blonde hair, chiseled muscle, and gold neck-chains. The scent of incense made her giddy.

  “Give it to me… I’m begging you, Dirk. Give it to me hard…”

  “Do people in this universe really say that in bed?” Antryg Windrose, lurking on the sidelines, sunk his voice down under Angel Valentine’s passionate contralto as she repeated – to Dirk (whose real name was Wally Bickle) – Joanna’s sotto voce prompts.

  “They do if you pay them,” responded Matt Davidson, part-owner of the North Hollywood residence in which this tender encounter was taking place. The master bedroom of the ranch-style home was roughly the size of a small restaurant, which was fortunate, considering the amount of camera equipment and lights currently crammed into it. Through an archway in a tiled alcove, a Jacuzzi bubbled seductively, and in the yard beyond the artfully-curtained sliding doors, subdued floodlights outlined groves of bamboo and hibiscus.

  “They’d have to pay me an awful lot,” grumbled Joanna, and Bill Podmore – director, producer, and writer of Dragon Fist – gestured impatiently for everyone to be quiet.

  “Dirk!” gasped Angel realistically, as those sinewy arms clasped the creamy amplitude of her negligeéd charms. “Oh, my God, DIRK—!”

  Right on cue, ninja came slashing through the curtains from the yard.

  Ed Ashmead, although he had only recently attained second kyu, led the pack owing to the fact that he was the most physically impressive man in the dojo: not quite as tall as Antryg at six feet two, he was heavily muscled and frighteningly tattooed. In a black gi, with his graying hair dyed black at Bill Podmore’s insistence (“You can’t have a forty-year-old old ninja!” “Fuck you, Bill…”), and his blue eyes gleaming through the eye-holes in a mask and swinging a katana in one hand and a wakazashi in the other, he looked every inch a villainous henchman.

  Of the two actual black-belts who followed him – Daryl Winchester and Lee Martinez – neither was as scary-looking, and Joanna, backing behind the cameras with her prompt-script and first-aid kit, figured the audience probably wouldn’t notice the difference in technique. The other two brown-belts who constituted the Second Wave, goldenly handsome Shane Grell and prematurely balding Curtis Fennel (known in the dojo as Spacecookie), were overacting terribly and although their swords were, of course, unsharpened, Joanna braced herself to take care of at least a couple of injuries in the ensuing fight.

  Antryg, ridiculously tall and gawky with a pair of fearsome-looking outer-space goggles over his mask to conceal his glasses, brought up the rear.

  Angel screamed in terror, Daryl and Lee leaped up onto the waterbed in a great flashing of sword-blades (and an amazing demonstration of balance), and Bill Podmore yelled “Great! Fantastic!” and made everybody go back out into the garden and attack again.

  And again.

  Joanna had learned, when green-belt Matt had propositioned half the senior iaido class at the Genki-do dojo into being in his friend Bill’s “karate movie,” that filming a movie – even a direct-to-video schlockfest – entailed an awful lot of going back out into the garden and coming back again and again.

  On the other hand, it was a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend a May evening in the late spring of 1988.

  Bill, Joanna gathered, had been skirmishing around the frontiers of “the industry” (as its practitioners like to refer to their chosen métier) since the 1950s, making epics with titles like Shoot-Out on the Pecos and Hep-Cat Girls. He’d switched to direct-to-video horror and semi-soft porn the moment video technology became affordable, and didn’t seem to mind in the least that his opuses (opi?) never went anywhere. Watching him now, as he broke the master-shot down into close-ups, two-shots, and reverses, she had to smile at his laid-back mellow charm. He was careful to ask who were the best swordsmen of his crew of Evil Henchmen (all of whom were being paid in pizza and Budweiser), was gentle and respectful even the fifteenth time he had to remove Matt’s roommate’s cat Jeeves from the set, and followed the instructions of Teddy Nuvo – the senior student instructor at Genki-do – as to how Wally could most convincingly defend himself against three sword-wielding baddies while fighting on a waterbed.

  “Hey, honey, weren’t you in Bride in Chains?” asked Spacecookie, sidling up to Ms. Valentine with manufactured casualness. “Did you really get it on with all those guys? That was a great scene!”

  “Thank you,” said Ms. Valentine, and looked around for a bathrobe.

  She was more or less rescued by Podmore, who called her back to the camera at that point to be carried off screaming. “I’ll do it, I’ll do it!” volunteered Spacecookie (Angel was scheduled to lose most of her negligee in the abduction), but the chore was delegated to Ed, with Antryg covering his retreat. Shane, Lee, and Spacecookie had already been killed, haemhorraging medically unlikely quantities of fake blood into Matt’s bedroom carpet. “Where’s Antryg?” asked Podmore, looking around.

  Joanna found him in the garden, sitting on the edge of the hot tub. He’d pushed up his goggles and taken off his mask – the night, though cloudy as usual in Southern California in May, was warm – and he was frowning worriedly into the darkness. As Joanna approached from the house she saw him hold out his left hand, palm up, the way he did sometimes at night, when he didn’t think she was looking.

  The way he did when he was trying to summon magic.

  Even a little magic.

  Even though he knew it didn’t work in this universe.

  He dreamed, she knew, that he was still able to use it. For most of his life, he had been one of the most powerful mages in his own world: magic was not something he did, it was what he was. It was the breath in his lungs, the marrow of his bones. Joanna sometimes tried to imagine what her own mind, her own heart, would be like, if something had sponged away the ability to solve equations, the portion of her mind that instinctively knew, from half a lifetime of experience, how systems and interfaces were set up in hard drives and software: What if I suddenly forgot how to write code?

  If I knew it was still there, somewhere, but my mind just sort of blanked it out, the way it blanks out when Todd Eastman tries to explain to me about balancing carbohydrates against chi energy fluctuation?

  In being exiled from his own world – his own universe – Antryg had in many ways been exiled from himself. From the part of himself most deeply rooted in his soul.

  His natural scatterbrained curiosity about the world in which he found himself stranded – about everything from nuclear physics to Spiderman’s metabolic rate – stood
him in good stead, and he was very good at pretending the wound in his heart didn’t still bleed. But sometimes at night she’d see him, trying to summon a ball of light to his palm, or a flame to a candle – the simplest forms of magic, he had told her – concentrating for hours before coming at last, defeated, to bed.

  And she’d hear the words he sometimes cried out in his dreams.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked softly.

  He glanced around at her, touched his lips for silence, nodded across the swimming-pool in the direction towards which he’d been staring. She looked, and by the reflected glow from the house saw Jeeves, and Matt’s roommate’s smaller cat Genji…

  “What are they doing?” she whispered.

  They were attacking – chasing – something. Leaping, batting, then suddenly cringing away with irises shrunk to thin rims of gold around black mirrors, ears flattened, backs arched.

  Sometimes Joanna could almost see what they were after.

  And then she couldn’t.

  “It’s mummages,” murmured Antryg. “Ragamummages – they come through the Void when it’s opened.”

  “What… Here?” Joanna looked again. Antryg had spoken of such creatures before, and on occasion – when she had crossed with him through the Void that separated the many worlds of the universe – she had even seen them: invisible most of the time, or appearing as a faint glitter in the corner of one’s eye. Harmless, flickering, a fleeting impression of a myriad of stiff buzzing wings and dangling feet…

  “What are they doing here?”

  The wizard rose, removed his glasses to pull down his mask, then replaced the glasses over it. “That,” he said, and fitted the goggles over the glasses, “is what I’m wondering as well.”

  *

  Joanna made an excuse to linger at Matt’s after the shoot finished at midnight (and the beer-and-pizza orgy wrapped at three), so that Antryg could have a thorough prowl around the dark yard without constant interruptions by ninja or by Bill’s two lights-and-camera assistants, but it was to little avail. It was also murderously counterproductive, given her Monday deadline on a new software installation for the offices of Starburst Fixtures Systems, which sold toilets and bath-tubs from seven stores and three warehouses in the San Fernando Valley. (She ended up sleeping most of Saturday and then pulling an all-nighter Sunday to make up for it).

  She suspected that during the course of the following week, Antryg biked over to North Hollywood one morning, climbed the Davidson fence, and had another look while the genial librarian and his fussbudget roommate were at work: she only hoped her own erratic roommate hadn’t tried to break into the house. He came back late in the afternoon looking worried, and spent a good portion of the evening and the next day re-adjusting the odd maze of pinwheels, half-buried Coke-bottles, stones and wind-chimes in the back yard of their down-at-heels Craftsman bungalow in Granada Hills, like a sailor adrift far out to sea watching the weather.

  “The Void opened somewhere,” he said on Thursday evening, after aikido class at the dojo and a late dinner of leftover pad thai on the bungalow’s upstairs sleeping-porch. The bungalow was the last on Porson Avenue, so from the sleeping-porch they could look down in one direction to the modest little ‘sixties ranch-houses – most lights out, or else large rectangles of flickering, spooky gray-blue where fans of David Letterman and Jeopardy re-runs sat half-hypnotized in the dark. Somewhere, someone was playing Def Leopard, the throb of bass attenuated with distance. From the dark hills that rose in the other direction the smells of dust and sage breathed disturbingly, a reminder of a more ancient world.

  “I’ve felt movement in it for some weeks,” he went on after a time, and behind the Coke-bottle lenses of his glasses his gray eyes were no longer those of a gravely daft hippie, but the eyes of a wizard, a shift which always scared the hell out of Joanna. “Movement close to here, I mean.”

  “Do you think it’s someone coming to find you?” The Council of Wizards in his own universe had, on a couple of terrifying occasions, come after him before.

  He had sworn, the last time, that if it happened again he would flee Los Angeles, as much to keep Joanna out of the line of fire than for his own safety. She lived with the fear that she would one day wake up, or come home some afternoon, to find him gone – forever. And would never know if they’d caught him and killed him, if they’d tortured him again (and how badly), if they’d bricked him up in some magic-proof dungeon… or if he’d somehow managed to get away…

  The thought of living without him was like the thought of losing a hand, or her sight, or the ability to dream. She congratulated herself, obliquely, that she’d managed to keep her voice steady when she’d asked.

  “I don’t know.” He nipped the fragment of shrimp from his chopsticks and put his arm around her shoulders, and tried to sound reassuring. “It could have nothing to do with me, you know. There’s always movement somewhere in the Void. It’s a big place.” He frowned. “Except of course when it isn’t.”

  “When a gate is opened,” said Joanna, recollecting what she’d learned from him by rather horrifying association, “you’ve said the universe sort of flaws along a fault-line, and things can fall through. Could the mummages you saw Friday night have been just that?”

  “It could,” he agreed. “But that of course leaves the issue of what else might have come through. It may be a good idea to keep a closer eye on the bulletin boards for a week or so – and perhaps to consult Mr. Parker as well.”

  Joanna rolled her eyes at this suggestion. Their neighbor, Ike Parker – in addition to keeping in his back-yard eight sheds full of old newspapers and books, rusted ammunition and jerry-cans of water, the rotting corpses of six Volkswagens and two school-busses and God only knew what else (the inside of his house was supposedly worse) – was a gold-mine of conspiracy theories extending back to the Teapot Dome Scandal and could be counted upon to know if anyone in the surrounding three states had seen lights in the sky or nameless things creeping about in the darkness. “You can do that,” she offered, and Antryg grinned toothily.

  “The problem about Mr. Parker,” he said, raising one crooked finger—

  “There is,” interrupted Joanna, “more than one problem about Mr. Parker.”

  “Well, yes, I mean, other than the rats and the raccoons – he puts out food for them, you know – and the drums of gasoline in one of the sheds, and the – ah – persistent quality of his conversation… But one of the problems about Mr. Parker is that he’s perfectly correct about thirty percent of the time. It’s just that one never knows which thirty percent.”

  “Oi.” Joanna went back to her pad thai, and resigned herself to about three weeks of their neighbor’s unannounced and interminable visits, with stacks of ancient (and painstakingly annotated and cross-indexed) issues of the National Enquirer and the Fortean Times, which had followed the last time Antryg had gone to Parker for information…

  But in fact the question turned out to be moot.

  And within forty-eight hours, Joanna would have traded events for a week of their neighbor’s company, and been glad for the opportunity to make the exchange.

  *

  Dirk Longbow (a.k.a. Wally Bickle) drove grimly, eyes narrowed to slits of concentration and brow decorated with a long artificial gash which changed position several times when Joanna saw later takes, out to the desert hideout of his bride’s evil abductor. Podmore shot those scenes over two nights in the Angeles National Forest (which lay nowhere near any desert in California), and the ninja assembled bright and early at three o’clock Saturday morning at the dojo, to car-caravan out to the Devil’s Fortress, which lay in the deeps of San Bernardino County, miles south of I-40 and – opined Ed Ashmead, when they stopped at a Denny’s in San Bernardino at four for breakfast – about twenty miles east of Hell.

  Not being a hundred percent sure that Joanna’s battered blue Mustang would make it out to the middle of the Mojave Desert and back, Joanna and Antryg had hitched a ride
with Bill Podmore in the equipment van. Angel Valentine had offered to give up the only other actual seat – beside Bill – to Joanna, but Joanna settled in the back with Antryg and Wally and a neatly-packed plethora of light-meters, screens, water-jugs, Fisher cams, crates of tapes, a portable generator, spare batteries, and three folding director’s chairs. Angel and Joanna slept a good part of the way. Joanna woke periodically to hear bits of Wally’s non-stop monologue about his career in films, which seemed to include gigs as a rock-star with Urgency and as an extra on The Love Boat.

  They reached the Devil’s Fortress at five-thirty, a round stone tower and an arcaded colonnade which had once – according to Sherry Rubocalva, Shane Grell’s relentlessly informative girlfriend who had come along as assistant scene-setter and general gopher – been part of a Marine Corps testing-range, though the structures were clearly older than that. Joanna guessed that they’d been originally associated with a small gold-mine, since the small range of chewed-up looking hills against which they backed was riddled with tunnels. Some of these the Marine Corps had evidently enlarged, making for an interesting low-budget set. The second van of the caravan, driven by Bill’s cameraperson Rob Tarvell, was crammed with a table, some chairs, a couple of Chinatown screens, an elaborately-carved oriental chest and sufficient random electronics equipment to give the Golden Scorpion’s den the look of an actual hideout (although Joanna wondered where the Golden Scorpion – a.k.a. Ross Ventura, formerly seen on Passionate Hearts in the late ‘seventies – and his henchmen got their food from. “Does one of his ninja drive into Bakersfield every Saturday morning to grocery shop?”) (“Don’t ask, honey,” twinkled Podmore).

  While Rob Tarvell and Bill’s sound tech Dana Kim set up lights and camera, the ninja helped Sherry dress the sets, arranging chairs and screens and the oriental chest in such a way that they would cause the least damage when the fighting started. In addition to Sherry (whom Joanna suspected Shane had brought along mostly as a brag: she was easily the most beautiful woman Joanna had ever seen), Ross Ventura had brought a girlfriend as well, a boneless-looking brunette named Selena Rider. But while Sherry and Joanna set up the villain’s “computer room,” Selena remained in the lower floor of the tower with Angel, drinking vodka in Gatorade (Angel settled for Diet Coke) and chatting animatedly about how much each of them had made on her last job, and mutual acquaintances who’d had their boobs done. Spacecookie made three attempts to insinuate himself into the conversation before Ed Ashmead threatened to break his glasses for him.