Steven Campbell - Hard Luck Hank - Basketful of Crap

Adrenaline was an amazing thing.

I was certain that I could become a galactic cross-country champion if only I had an eight-headed slime monster chasing me the whole time.

Ten seconds ago I felt great. I had just destroyed a tank single-handedly!

Now I was lying on the ground bleeding from giant pieces of metal protruding from my body and overall I didn’t feel so hot.

Fortunately, I was a block from a train station and it was only one transfer to the hospital. If people thought I was scary before, those on the train were practically hiding under their seats as I bled all over the floor.

I managed to drag my autocannon with me, as anything that can blow up a tank deserves to not be abandoned.

I didn’t often have to visit the hospital. My mutation prevented most injuries and those I did experience I could heal away very rapidly.

But when I came here I was generally going to be hanging out for weeks.

The medical technician who met me was the one who always met me. He was an older gentleman named Devus Sorsha.

He was horribly incompetent.

I wasn’t sure if he always worked on me as a punishment by the rest of the hospital staff, or it was a reward. Belvaille clearly wasn’t going to have the best medical technicians in the galaxy. Such people would be working some place more prestigious—like a prison. We had to take what we could get.

Devus Sorsha straddled my leg as I lay on the hospital bed. He had a huge pair of bolt cutters and he was trying to pry one of the pieces of steel from my body.

“Hey,” I said. “Shouldn’t I be unconscious for this?” As it was excruciatingly painful.

“We can’t get an IV through your skin.”

“I have a mouth, you know.”

Another technician was messing with my ears. I think bandaging me. I couldn’t be sure, because several assistants were trying to hold me down to prevent me squirming. I tended to do that when someone twisted a knife inside me.

“Do oral sedatives work on you?” he asked, surprised.

Man, this guy was terrible.

“Sure. I still eat. And drink.”

“Which ones should I use? And what dosage?”

“How should I know?”

Another technician began pulling on a piece of metal stuck in my upper back. How it got there was a mystery. He had his foot against my shoulder and was yanking on the scrap with a pair of pliers like I was a broken motor.

Devus Sorsha came back and fed me three pills as his technician friend kept working. I found it very difficult to swallow in those circumstances.

The sheets weren’t all that bloody, because my body clots wounds almost immediately as it starts recovery.

They got additional people to try and pull on the metal and it was more painful than my original wounds.

Garm arrived shortly. To her credit she stood by me and gave what moral support she could. It was reassuring having her there. Because I knew that if these half-wits killed me, she would throw them out the air lock.

And they knew it too.

The drugs finally started to take hold and it was just pressure and absurd comedy.

They had to bring in machines to pry the shrapnel out. There was loading equipment from the docks in the hallway working on me. Cables were clamped to the pieces of shrapnel and the machines were trying to pull them out. My whole hospital bed was dragged to the hall until it hit the door and couldn’t go any further.

Wasn’t I too old for this?

The fact that I could see the farce of the whole experience in stark relief should be proof enough I had outlived Belvaille’s dubious charms.

How many more times could I reasonably survive such incidents?

I don’t even know why I was fighting a tank.

A tank!

Like that’s some normal thing that happens on Belvaille now.

How was your day? Fine. Just blew up a tank and got twenty pounds of twisted metal shoved into me.

I looked at Garm through all the people straining and hammering at my body. I remembered asking her, during our brief time dating, “Why do you keep doing it? You have more money than you could possibly spend in a lifetime.”

And her answer was, “I don’t know how to stop.”

I came to and Garm was sitting next to my bed like a concerned, and sexy, mother hen.

“How long this time?” I asked her.

“Three days,” she said, looking up from her tele.

Medical systems didn’t work on me for the most part. They couldn’t scan me. So I was just sitting in bed with a feeding tube in my nose. I picked it up and felt it was full of material. And it smelled like rubber.

“Yeah, you eat so much that the normal tubes were too small. They cut that from a fuel line.”

Just Belvaille…

Garm stood and pressed the technician button.

“Where’s my autocannon?”

“You’re lying in the hospital after fifty people were trying to pry molten metal from your body and you’re worried about your stupid gun? Bronze came by to visit.”

“Really? Anyone else?”

Garm looked a little guilty.

“That’s right, everyone else thinks I’m psychotic,” I pouted.

“Yeah, and who could imagine why?” she said, indicating my bedridden state.

Devus Sorsha came in after a moment.

“Ah, glad to see you’re awake, Hank. I put more sedatives into your food to help you recuperate, but I wasn’t sure how many to use. You might have a slight dependence. I’ll prescribe some lower doses so you can wean yourself off.”

I looked at Garm like, “How did we ever get such horrible people?”

“Also, I noticed something disturbing from your prior visits,” he continued. He put a tele in front of me and Garm came around to look also. I couldn’t make sense of it.

“As you know, you are extremely difficult to scan. Not without using a wavelength so narrow it would be dangerous to tissue and require a huge power supply. But I have seen that your skin and muscles around your wounds, when they heal, they almost double in cell density.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Almost like a scab, or inflammation, your mutation seems to be trying to protect you by hardening.”

“How long does it last?” Garm asked.

“That’s the thing. Unlike a scab, it appears to be permanent. The injuries he sustained years ago have resulted in his body overall becoming denser.”

“So I am getting slower,” I said. I mean, I knew I wasn’t getting any faster and I assumed it was just because I was old.

“Yes. Because you’re not getting any larger, you’re just packing more mass into the same space.”

“Am I eventually going to become a Gandrine?” I asked. “Not able to move more than a few steps a minute?”

“I think the real concern is if your organs are also responding this way. It’s one thing to be getting slower, as you say, but if your heart and lungs and other such organs are also thickening, there will be a point they simply can’t fuel your body or even move. You may have circulation issues and suffer a stroke or other serious condition.”

“Is that happening?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” he said. “We can’t scan you.”

Garm put her hand on my shoulder as we stood there quietly.

“I’ll just leave this here,” Devus Sorsha said, and he put a paper next to my bed.

I picked it up, supposing it would be technical information about what he had just said.

It was a bill for services.

“A hundred thousand credits!”

“People had said things, but I assumed they were just making it up,” Garm gasped.

“Oh. These are the Gandrine, Toby, Byo’lene, and someone else,” I said, introducing everyone on my front steps.