Steven Campbell - Hard Luck Hank - Basketful of Crap

“I’m not firing that thing anymore. It will knock me down and then I can’t get up.”

The General handed me his plasma pistol!

Just like that.

“Wow,” Delovoa said, his eyes gleaming. “Let me see.”

He reached for it and I pulled it away.

“Thanks and all, but I didn’t tell you about this guy. I shot him at point blank range with a high-explosive shell and it did nothing. He’s like…thousands of years old,” I didn’t want to say billions because I didn’t think they would believe me. “He’s trying to start a galactic wide civil war.”

The soldiers all looked at me briefly. These were hard guys. Like Belvaille thugs, but not criminals. They probably dreamed of someone trying to start a galactic civil war.

“At our headquarters you’ll need to give a report,” he said.

“It’s not your headquarters,” Garm’s voice came from the back of the train.

The General was in charge.

Some members of the unions complained at the heavy-handed tactics of the Navy until they got a face full of rifle butt. They kept surprisingly quiet after that.

With his officers around him, I told them of my dealings with Naked Guy. Delovoa filled them in on the biological soldiers and what weaponry they possessed. Garm told them about what requests the corporations had made over the years and how that might play into the current situation.

Then there was the Gandrine, the Portal, and the Therezians.

“Return here at 017150 CST hours,” he said.

“I have no idea what that means,” I said.

“I can tell you,” Garm said, tugging on me.

“Let’s test the pistol,” Delovoa begged.

The three of us were alone in the elevator.

“I need to get in touch with your girlfriends. Sisters. Pals. Whatever.”

“Why?” Garm asked.

“Never mind why, I’m the Surrogate.”

“That doesn’t mean you can give orders, stupid. It just means you talk to the Surrogate for the Confederation.”

“Well, I’ll tell him you wouldn’t help me.”

“He does seem pretty mean,” Delovoa agreed.

“Fine.”

Garm and the pale sisters were involved in a very in-depth negotiation. It involved lots of gesturing and not a lot of talking.

“Help me take off these bandages,” I asked Delovoa, as we stood a comfortable distance away from the women.

“Let me see the gun first.”

“No. For the hundredth time. You’re going to do something dumb and kill us all like you always do.”

“When was the last time I ‘killed us all’?”

“How about when you released a giant robot named ZR3?” I asked.

He flinched and looked around. ZR3 had trapped Delovoa in his basement for a considerable period of time. After that the robot had gone berserk across the city. It had taken a level-ten mutant named Jyonal to even contain the machine. To this day it sat on its own block under a metal bubble twenty feet thick. Besides Zadeck Street that housed Wallow, that was the other block I was afraid of.

No one was allowed on the street and it wasn’t mentioned even in whispers. Not many people knew what was contained there, but they knew it was dangerous, so no one went.

I took off my own bandages.

The sisters and Garm approached.

“It’s worked out, they’re allowed to help us,” Garm said, unpleased.

The pale sisters jumped up and kissed me on the lips, one after the other. It was the least likely thing I was expecting except maybe for them to explode into a song and dance number.

I looked at Garm, who was still annoyed.

“Wait. What? Does that mean something in Quadrad? Are they going to stab me now?”

“Just ask them what you want,” Garm sulked.

“Your sister. She was looking for a man to kill. Was this guy…uh, naked?”

“He was responsible for the destruction of our companion’s home continent,” one of the pale sisters said.

Whoa. Killed a continent.

“Did he have a name? Or like, was he nameless?”

“Shle-nidu.”

“Oh.” That was definitely a name.

“You’re thinking he is the same guy who is running the corporation?” Garm asked.

“Who else could it be? How many continent-killers do we have on Belvaille?”

“He murdered the population of the continent. We were tasked with returning him to face trial. But she wanted to assassinate him. When she broke our orders, we changed our goal of finding him to finding her. Technically, we were still looking for a criminal.”

“Technically,” Garm mocked. And they went off on some non-verbal argument using their weird Quadrad language.

“Stop. Did the guy have black eyes?”

“We never saw him.”

“How were you going to find him? Did you think he would be bragging he killed a continent? Have it written on a t-shirt?”

“We were going to track his financial dealings, his subordinates, and use your knowledge of the city.”

“Did you do that stuff?”

“We were prevented because of our agreement with Garm.”

“How long would it take you if you started now?”

“Why do we want him, Hank? If it’s your guy, we already know where he is.”

“Just to make sure they’re the same one.”

“What’s that matter?” Garm asked.

“Because if she was going to try and disintegrate him, presumably she thought it would work. Did she know more about this guy than you two did?”

“Yes, we believe she used Quadrad resources to research him.”

“And then broke her contract,” Garm said.

“So you don’t know if this guy is really old and difficult to hurt?”

“We know nothing about him except his crimes. We filed all our information so we couldn’t access it until we reapplied to Garm’s territory.”

I considered this.

“Can you three Quadrad go to City Hall and keep an eye on the Navy? Assist them where you can, they’re the only thing that can even remotely stop the corporation at this point,” I said.

They didn’t seem happy to be working with one another, or the Navy, but that was too bad.

“Delovoa, you’re good with corpses, right?”

“This,” I said, “is Toby.”

“Who are these others?” Delovoa asked, pulling his shirt over his nose and mouth to try and mask the smell.

“I forget.”

The whole front of my old demolished apartment was very vomit-inducing. The corpses had not aged well. The mild humidity and small number of microorganisms had at last gotten to old Toby.

“You sure about this?” Delovoa asked.

“No. But come on.”

We started and stopped carrying the body a dozen times as each of us ran off to retch or was otherwise grossed-out.

Delovoa had it easy by lifting Toby’s legs from the bottom of the pants. But I couldn’t find a non-slimy holding spot. And then his jacket and shirt started to come off and things got even more disgusting.

“We could use shovels,” Delovoa said.

“Let’s just do this.”

We got Toby into a cart, his legs dangling over the side, and I pushed it to the train. It was either that or a multi-hour walk to Delovoa’s.

Anyone in our train compartments transferred quickly when they saw and smelled our cargo. I felt certain my reputation achieved a new low point.

When we got into Delovoa’s house I pushed the cart to the ramp and headed down into his basement. I had just reached the floor when a cacophony of sirens and alarms assaulted me. There were lights flashing from the ceilings. Was it a fire?

“Get out!” Delovoa urged.

“Why?”

“Get out, fool.”

We hurried outside, Delovoa proving remarkably spry.

“What was that?” I asked.