Color Me Gone
Prologue: No Easy Journeys
Script by Jack Hazard
Copyright © 2022 Jack Hazard All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
Prologue
A
TITLES: FARFALLEN
C-CLASS DESERT WORLD, LAWLESS
INT. AN ABANDONED HOTEL IN FARFALLEN PRIME - NIGHT
It’s pouring rain through the partially missing roof and floors of an old burnt up hotel tower. A strong light slowly sweeps through the dark corridor from above, coming up behind the draped silhouette of LEO, cloaked in his seven foot trench coat, suppressed long gun in hand at his right side. He’s moving slowly, avoiding holes in the floor, but outpacing the spotlight as he approaches a covered part of the hallway, near an open room door with a pulsing blue neon glow, not very far from the doorway at the end of the hall. He finds cover under the remnants of the ceiling and pauses. A hallway light flickers beside him revealing his wet face with water running down the widow’s peak of his soaked, dark brown hair to his long sharp eyebrows and rolling off his camel color trench coat protecting his three-piece suit. One of his eyes is covered with a small, ear-mounted scope with a red lens.
The hall light goes back out, and Leo is back in silhouette. A ghostly looking android woman appears from the light behind him walking quickly in his direction, unnoticed, without a sound. A disembodied voice seems to call out from all around him, filling the hall.
CARNIVÉAN (VO)
Leo, oh Leeeoo.
Soft shrieks and whales seem to echo off the walls and through the rain. Leo raises the Effin H 7 bull-pup battle rifle to his shoulder with one arm. The pale apparition walks past him, catching his attention, turning to wink as she goes - her eyes intricately mechanical, the irises apertured in red.
She pirouettes perfectly, then leans in toward him. As he takes a step back and aims at her, her right eye starts to bulge. It’s forced out to the sound of a spring, dangling from a tangled weave of nerves and wires, spraying blood and sparks in his face. He covers his face with his free hand, but feels nothing and finds no blood on it, and the ghost is gone.
However, more fill the hallway in its stead. Animated spectral toys, corrupted automatons, and necrotic cyborgs coming out of the walls, floors, and crumbling ceiling gathered around a hulking, smoldering figure in the final doorway, humanoid but alien.
Leo covers his scoped eye for a fraction of a second, and, for that brief instant, half of the apparitions vanish and the central figure ceases to burn. He then blinks his unaided eye, causing his surroundings to take on a red hue, and the other half of the monsters to disappear. For that moment, the alien in the doorway transforms into a fiery black devil of shadow and blue smoke and eyes, glowing blue eyes all over it, and all around it, and all-around Leo.
Leo rips the scope from his head, tossing it into the wall, doing away with the hacked illusions, leaving only the worrisome hallucinations and hulking monstrosity from which they seem to emit, which he cuts loose into with a three-round burst from the battle rifle in his right hand.
The shots deflect off of the alien’s force fields, in flashes of fire, as he dashes out of sight.
LEO
Damn. Passive shields. Extech.
CARNIVÉAN (VO)
Hahahahaha. You’re the one called Casper, aren’t you? Well, a sporting word of advice, Mr. Friendly Ghost, you better find your mean side, or I’m gonna murder you.
LEO
Seven, burn ‘em.
His rifle ejects a round, which he catches. He takes a bladed stance, and shoulders the gun properly with both hands.
The wall right next to him bursts open, and a huge six fingered blue hand wraps around the gun, its grimy black nails digging into the metal.
CARNIVÉAN (VO)
HAH!
The gun is slammed into the wall, smashing Leo’s right hand. He rips his scarred hand free, bloodied, as he hops back away from the wall, into the glowing room across the hall, with his left hand already in his coat pocket. The blue hand drops the gun and tears back through the wall.
CARNIVÉAN (VO CONT)
You? Hunt me? CARNIVÉAN. Hahahaha!
From his left coat pocket Leo produces a short-barreled black and stainless Telos Tengu 12 ga. pump shotgun. He leaps back into a roll, springs up out of it, and immediately fires three explosive slugs into and around the hole in the wall, KDOOM-KADOOM-KADOOM, to devastating effect.
In the aftermath of the explosions, he sees nothing from the hall but smoke wafting into the remains of the room and hears wood and rubble falling, and the sound of the rain intensifies.
Leo quickly crosses the room, nudging open doors, looking for an exit, while keeping an eye on the smoking corridor. There’s access to a fire-escape through the window in an empty bedroom, which he makes for the second he sees it.
CARNIVÉAN (VO)
Lleeeo. Llleeeeeeooo. I ssseeee you.
Nearly an entire wall of the room shifts into the deep browed, sharp toothed, near noseless, face of the Roknol alien, Carnivéan.
CARNIVÉAN (CONT)
Tell me Leo. Does anyone know where you are? Any of your friends? Your family? You don’t want to wind up like that brother of yours, do you?
Leo raises an eyebrow towards it, before spitting through it.
CARNIVÉAN (CONT)
How rude.
The hologram sinks back into the wall. The red eyed ghostly android walks into the doorway behind Leo, eyes intact, without a sound. An imp with mechanical wings flaps down through the ceiling carrying a box, which it drops, and Leo watches as it attempts to clean the wall. The android girl continues to approach unnoticed, and the jack-in-the-box the imp dropped springs open with bottle rockets and Roman candles going off, whizzing past Leo.
He ignores them, as best as he can, and nears the window, but Carnivéan breaks through it and rushes towards him, then over him, and nothing happens. The window is fine.
LEO
Sshhhhtt!
RED
Hello!
He quickly turns to find the red eyed android right beside him. Before he can finish rolling his eyes, she plunges her sharp nails under his coat through his vest into his abdomen.
He grabs her wrist with his free hand and attempts to raise his shotgun with his other, but she kicks it away. He seizes this opportunity to trip her, kicking her leg out from under her and removing her fingertips from his bloodstained vest. She’s extremely agile, however, and spins enough in the air to land on her feet, ready to pounce.
Then, in a flash, Leo kicks her head through the wall, and draws his large Effin HFP sidearm from under his left shoulder. DOOMDOOMDOOM-DOOM Four shots erupt from it and the android is blown into two burning halves.
He holsters his pistol and picks up his shotgun and opens the window.
CARNIVÉAN
RED was one of my favorites.
Leo turns to find the monstrous pirate now standing in the doorway, whom again rushes him, but Leo, with a fresh wound in his side and without a moment’s hesitation, taking no chances, fires the explosive slugs into the floor in front of the alien, blowing it out from under him and bringing the ceiling down on top of him. Debris bounces off his coat and fire singes his hair as Leo hurries out the window, back into the rain.
EXT. THE HOTEL’S FIRE ESCAPE - NIGHT
The rickety fire-escape immediately starts to collapse under Leo’s full weight. Bracing himself on the roof ladder, he pockets the shotgun and pushes down on the ladder below. It doesn’t budge, so he hooks his arm and stomps on the thing. That brings it pretty much all down, leaving him swinging up to the wet ladder trying to get his footing.
LEO
Shhhtt! Brilliant.
His scarred, bloody hand slips on the wet curved rail atop the rusty ladder, and for a few seconds there’s no sign of him on the roof, but the hand eventually reappears grabbing hold of the roof itself and he makes it up without further incident.
A tri-fan tilt-rotor copter spotlights him, and Leo shakes his head no and gives a thumbs-down. The light moves on back to the rest of the building, and Leo loads the Tengu.
Then, without warning, the copter explodes.
CARNIVÉAN (VO)
Nowhere to run to, pirate hunter.
The giant alien floats up slowly through a smoking hole in the roof, seemingly untouchable by the rain, as fiery debris falls all around him and Leo looks on in terror.
CARNIVÉAN (CONT)
Nowhere to hide. What tricks will you play now, worm?
