Arabella Grimsbro, Warlord of Mars: Arabella Grimsbro, #2

By Matt Youngmark

From the whimsical land of Oz to the barren wastelands of Mars

Arabella Grimsbro is a 15-year-old girl with a foul mouth and an attitude to match. When she walks into a cheesy mall store promising virtual reality tours of public domain classics, the last thing she expects is to find herself stuck in one.

But if she thought Oz was bad, she's in for a surprise when she trades beloved children's literature for manly pulp adventure. Giant green monsters! Sword fights to the death! The healing power of toxic masculinity! Welcome to Barsoom, where everything has extra limbs and nobody wears clothes.

Also, the only way out is pretty much death. So... hooray?

--- PLEASE NOTE ---
This book has cursing, and lot's of it. Plot-wise, it's perfectly suitable for teens, but if harsh language is not your cup of tea, Arabella Grimsbro won't be either.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atherton Haight
• Release date: Aug 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781393240341

Book preview

INTRODUCTION.

In Edgar Rice Burroughs’s intro to A Princess of Mars, he does this whole thing where he pretends to be the nephew of his main character, John Carter. And of course John Carter used to visit the old family plantation before the Civil War, and he was super duper manly, and the best at riding horses, and even the slaves thought he was great. Like, the author makes a specific point to mention that John Carter was beloved by his family’s slaves. Yeah. Edgar Rice Burroughs was the fucking worst. So here’s my version of the self-gratifying wank fest that was the original introduction to this book:

Oh, hello. My name’s Coco and I live in the future, and when I was a little girl an old woman named Arabella Grimsbro used to visit my family for some reason. She taught me how to curse and utterly loathed every single thing in the entire world. We didn’t own any slaves, of course, since it was not the Deep South or the 18 fucking 60s, but if we had, Old Lady Grimsbro would have helped them rise up and massacre us in our sleep. Because, you know. Don’t own slaves.

When I knew her, Old Lady G. was working on her memoirs, as she called them, which meant she was either senile as balls or had lived a very interesting life. They were basically just old, out-of-copyright novels rewritten with her as the lead character and the word fuck three times in every paragraph. I remember very clearly what she told me when she finished the second volume.

Coco, she said, "this story is stupid, and you don’t need to bother reading it. I learned nothing from the experience, except that, despite earlier concerns, I was in no danger of becoming a mind-controlled KGB assassin. I stabbed like a million aliens to death in this book, and even though it was kind of fun at first, unless you are a psychopath, stabbing things to death gets pretty old pretty fast.

"You’re not a psychopath, are you, Coco? OK, good.

"The thing is, the first story I was trapped in was a children’s book, which means it was written for 8-year-old girls. This one, however, was a men’s adventure novel, which means it was written for 14-year-old boys. I’m not saying it’s charmless, but if I thought adventuring through Oz was awful, I was in for the shock of a motherfucking lifetime when I landed in Barsoom.

It did have another dog, though. Sort of. So that part was okay.

Old Lady G. went on to write between one and six hundred more books before dying mysteriously in her sleep and leaving me, Coco, her entire fortune, which was exactly zero dollars, because apparently rewriting public domain literature with more swear words wasn’t the goldmine we all assumed it was.

The end.

Utterly and sincerely yours,

COCO WHATEVER,

THE FUTURE

PROLOGUE.

Our Story Thus Far.

Okay, a lot of you have probably already read the first entry in this series, in which case feel free to skip ahead. But if you’re primarily interested in half-naked space ladies, or whatever, and have zero fucks to give about the magical land of Oz, here’s everything you need to know so you don’t have to go back and read a whole other book before getting to whatever you imagine the good stuff here is going to be.

My name’s Arabella, I’m fifteen, and I probably hate you. No offense—I pretty much hate everyone, except for my Mom (who was born in Peru and is awesome) and my best friend Madeline (who is the reason I wound up in this whole mess to begin with). I was at the mall waiting on Madeline’s goofy, love-struck ass when I wandered into a shop called Voyages Through Literature. A slightly desperate saleslady there bribed me with twenty bucks to be part of what she called market research, but I would have called kidnapping and child endangerment.

They only had ancient, public domain literature voyages to choose from, so I wound up in the land of Oz, playing the part of Dorothy (keep in mind that this was the book version rather than the movie version, which meant there was way less singing and significantly more casual wolf murder).

The Scarecrow was creepy-looking as hell, the Tin Woodsman was weirdly hot, and the Cowardly Lion straight-up tried to maul us when we first met him. The actual Wizard turned out to be a 40-something neckbeard who had been trapped there since he got abducted himself at a mall in the 1980s. I never did figure out if I was actually, like, FOR REAL in a magical fantasy land or if it was all some kind of hallucination or computer trickery. Eventually I decided that even if it was a simulation, it was such a convincing one that the point was moot. Whatever it was, it was Oz, and I was in it.

So I killed the Wicked Witch (who was THE WORST), and the Wizard sailed off in his stupid balloon, just like in the movie I had seen a billion times. But the thing just wouldn’t end, and this was the part where I genuinely started to worry that I had lost my goddamned mind. We had to keep traipsing around the countryside looking at a bunch of half-baked China Doll Countries and whatnot until L. Frank Baum finally met his word count goal and sent Dorothy to the sweet relief of Depression-era Kansas.

But I wanted to be trapped there even less than I wanted to be trapped in the Emerald City, so I used the magic slippers to teleport me back to the Wizard, and discovered him still in his balloon, dodging tornadoes and frothing at the mouth about whatever conspiracy dumped us both in Oz to begin with. So I made WHAT I THOUGHT was a climactic, character-defining decision to choose my normal teenage life in Calabasas, California, over finding out what the hell had even happened to me. Except I didn’t even get that. Instead, I woke up in a desert of red sand under two moons with a giant, green, four-armed monster poking a spear at me. So there you go. You’re all caught up.

Enjoy the boobies.

Chapter I.

My Advent on Mars.

When you spend weeks sleeping in a gross forest or a tiny, cramped Munchkin bed or whatever, waking up in an unexpected place eventually loses its shock value. There are only so many times you can do the whole holy balls, it wasn’t a dream schtick before you just kind of groan, accept that your life is shit now, and get on with your day. So even though I had hoped to see a mall interior when I regained consciousness, I was prepared to accept the red desert and two giant moons in the late afternoon sky at face value.

Giant green monsters, however, still packed a bit of a punch. So I screamed (shut up—you would have, too).

When I say giant, I’m not messing around, either. The thing must have been fifteen feet tall. And I need you to understand how big fifteen feet is. A regulation basketball hoop is ten feet. The very biggest elephant is maybe thirteen feet. I’m five-foot-four in my sneakers, so if you had one Arabella standing up straight, then put another Arabella on her shoulders, and a third Arabella on her shoulders, this fucking thing would still be a foot taller than all of us combined. And have almost as may arms. And probably more teeth.

Okay, I was too busy freaking the hell out to count its teeth, but it seemed like it had a lot, two of which were massive, razor-sharp tusks. It was hunched over snarling, with one bug-eye fixed on me and the other rotating to scan the horizon. Its nose slits were flared, and its antennae-ear things were… well, just kind of there, but definitely adding to the whole terrifying effect. When it poked at me with a ginormous spear, I jumped about nine feet into the air.

That part is not hyperbole. In my instinctual, desperate attempt to get on my feet, I found myself sailing into the air, and landed unceremoniously on my ass a short distance away. What the actual fuck? Apparently it wasn’t the kind of thing people normally did around these parts, because Greenzo Four Arms looked every bit as surprised as I was. I experimented with another hop, and bounded even farther away, this time managing to keep my balance as I landed. So I just kept on leaping, like some sort of really stupid superhero. I wound up sprawled on my face or back maybe one out of every four jumps, but nevertheless made good time, and soon the monster disappeared over the horizon behind me.

Once I got the hang of landing it might have been kind of fun, if I wasn’t so completely and utterly pissed. I had finished the damned book! I was supposed to be safe in my own bed at this very moment, surrounded by loved ones gaslighting me with their assurances that I had dreamed the entire thing.

But instead I was… shit, where was I, anyway? The whole place was so much more barren and half-assed than Oz had been. Had I slipped into some kind of holding area in between voyages where they kept the leftover giant nightmare monsters? Something about the red sand, the two moons, and that bug-eyed creature screamed alien landscape to me, though. I’m not sure how, but I knew in my gut, as sure as I’d ever been about anything in my life, that I was on the planet fucking Mars.

This must be some shitty, hundred-year-old science fiction novel. Did they even have science fiction a hundred years ago? Did they even have science?

Oh, crap. Suddenly I realized that, assuming I had been dumped into a whole new story, there was no movie version of this one. I had constantly second guessed myself in Oz, but at least I had some beloved-ass childhood memories of Judy Garland to clue me in on the book’s general plot. Now I didn’t even know what the book was. And if I was supposed to escape this Martian hellscape by completing the story, I’d have no way to be sure if I was right on track or going wildly off script. For all I knew, at that very moment I was supposed to be back over the horizon fighting that alien behemoth. Or making friends with it. Or baking it goddamned fudge brownies or whatever.

Most of that would probably depend on what kind of book this was. With any luck, it would be another children’s story, because despite all the messed-up shit that happened in Oz, the bulk of it wound up being weirdly civilized, which had worked out nicely for me. But I remembered seeing Sense and Sensibility and all sorts of crap like that on the list back in the mall store, so this one could be just about anything. Did they even make any old-ass, beloved children’s books that were science fiction?

The Little Prince maybe—that kid flew around on asteroids and shit, right? Man, if I had to learn French for this stupid thing, I was going to be livid.

I landed on a patch of yellow moss, stared up at the sky, and screamed at the top of my lungs. FUCK THIS PLACE. And fuck the land of Oz, and fuck that stupid fucking mall store and that sexy librarian woman with her stupid fucking glasses and her stupid fucking lies. Fuck the fact that I played by the rules and still got shit on over and over again. And fuck the fact that I couldn’t even STOP playing by the rules, because now I didn’t even know WHAT THE RULES FUCKING WERE. I’d be better off leaping right back into the desert and letting that alien eat me, or run me through with his twenty-foot spear.

Just the thought of it gave me a chill. In Oz, I had found myself in genuine peril more than once, which got me wondering what would happen if I died in the book. If it was all some sort of hallucination, I might just wake up at the mall or a creepy laboratory somewhere back in the real world. That was a pretty big if, though. And I couldn’t do it. No matter how sucky things got, I couldn’t bring myself to take that risk.

Sigh. Okay, buck the fuck up, Arabella. I rose slowly to my feet and took stock of my surroundings. I had left the red sands behind, and was now on a plain of moss-covered hills, peppered with rocky outcroppings that sparkled in the late afternoon sun. There was no foliage to be seen, which meant the easy pickings of Oz’s fruit trees were off the table. And no water that I could see, either. Off in the distance, however, I spotted a low, walled structure. So I took a step toward it—and launched two feet into the air, completed a three-quarter somersault and landed flat on my back. Jesus Christ. As if to rub my face in the fact that I was starting from scratch, this book was going to make me LITERALLY LEARN HOW TO WALK AGAIN.

Ugh. Fine. I practiced taking tiny, careful steps, and by the time I reached the structure, I was beginning to get the hang of it. For those keeping score at home, Stupid Mars Book was officially the worst.

I didn’t spot any openings in the smooth, stone wall, but it was only about four feet tall so I peeked over it. Inside the enclosure was a round building with a glass roof that covered hundreds of smooth, white eggs that were bigger around than I was. A few of them had already hatched, and the goo-covered creatures clawing their way out of their shells were equal parts disgusting and ADORABLE.

They looked like infant versions of the creature I had encountered earlier, with scrawny bodies and big, giant bobble heads. They were blinking their googly eyes in the sunlight, and crawling around on all six limbs like gross alien baby lambs. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Now there was something I could imagine showing up in an out-of-copyright kid’s book. Of course, if this was some sort of sci-fi Goldilocks scenario, that would probably mean their mother was—

I heard a soft rattling behind me and turned around to discover TWENTY GIANT GREEN ALIENS MOUNTED ON EVEN LARGER ALIEN STEEDS.

Seriously, you would not think that was the kind of thing that could motherfucking sneak up on you. Their mounts each had eight massive legs—because, sure, why not throw even more limbs on there—smooth, gray skin, and padded feet that evidently made them quiet as hell. The rider in front was thrusting his spear right at me.

So I did pretty much the only thing I could do, which was to leap up to the top of the incubator building. Since I was still getting the hang of the gravity, though, I wound up clearing the entire structure and landing a hundred feet away on the opposite side. All of which seemed to impress the aliens. A handful of them rushed forward to make sure I hadn’t been messing with their offspring, and the others kind of just pointed at me and whispered to one another.

I guess it made sense that my mad jumping skills would impress them—if they grew up on Mars they would have Mars-muscles that were designed to walk normally in this screwed-up gravity, and not do Superman jumps like me. I considered trying to leap right the hell out of there, but took a closer look at my attackers and decided against it. For one thing, I had no way of knowing how fast their mounts could travel. But even if they couldn’t actually catch me, the Martians were armed with more than just spears. They also had extremely fancy rifle things. They were like ten feet long and had scopes, which made it look like their effective range was about a hundred fucking miles.

Looking at those rifles, my heart sank. They were intricately carved and lovingly, like, molded and shit. I don’t