Hard Luck Hank: Basketful of Crap

by Steven Campbell

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  CHAPTER 72

  CHAPTER 73

  CHAPTER 74

  CHAPTER 75

  CHAPTER 76

  CHAPTER 77

  CHAPTER 78

  CHAPTER 79

  CHAPTER 80

  CHAPTER 81

  EPILOGUE

  BACK COVER

  HARD LUCK HANK

  BASKETFUL OF CRAP

  by

  Steven Campbell

  http://www.belvaille.com

  Cover Art by Tariq Raheem

  All images and content Copyright © 2014 Steven Campbell

  All rights reserved.

  This is dedicated to all aspiring writers. You don’t stop being a writer unless you stop writing.

  CHAPTER 1

  There was a corpse on the stairs outside my apartment. This was disturbing since I didn’t put it there.

  He was a dumpy little fellow, as corpses go. He had kind of a bulbous nose, a plump face, and a tangled mass of long black hair. His eyes were frozen in a half-closed daze as if death was a particularly boring school lecture. He was short and wore baggy clothes, perhaps to conceal in life what I guessed was a not-too-amazing physique.

  I saw no obvious signs of violence. No blood. No puncture wounds. No gross discolorations. Did he have a heart attack? Did he drug himself to death?

  I didn’t recognize the man, which made this very odd. I was the only person who lived in this building. I was even the only person who lived on this entire block. My street was quite creatively, and officially, labeled “Hank Block.”

  It was weird to think of someone dying outside my front door while I was asleep. Or maybe I had been in the shower. Or eating lunch. He certainly wasn’t here when I came home last night.

  I looked up and down the road for some reason. As if I expected to see the Corpse Delivery Man making his rounds. But the block was empty as always.

  This was the space station Belvaille. And while a dead body at my front door gave me pause, it was not entirely remarkable.

  I walked down the street and headed for the train. I wanted to get to my job early as I had been told my boss was coming into work today.

  On the way I passed the usual gray-silver metal buildings that were designed in some form of rectangle to maximize real estate. The whole space station was an exact square, fifteen miles by fifteen miles, with trains bisecting it regularly.

  Thousands of feet above, there was a latticework of supports that controlled the environment, kept our atmosphere in place, and provided artificial illumination.

  I was a doorman at the Yeolenz Flame casino in north Belvaille. Outside, my two co-workers were already waiting.

  Balday-yow was a tall blonde man who wore thick prescription goggles because of his terrible eyesight. These made his eyes look large and somewhat crooked. He had been on Belvaille for maybe twenty years working for various gangs, mostly as a courier.

  At the casino door, Balday-yow manned a heavy machine gun that was mounted on a stand. This weapon could probably cut down people at 1300 yards, but because of the way it was positioned, it only had a field of view of fifty feet, making it mostly for show.

  My other co-worker was Cad. He was very short, coming up to about my waist. He was a mutant like me and his body was so different that he breathed and ate and drank through his skin. His mouth was just for talking and had no teeth; they had fallen out when he was young, presumably from disuse. When he did his equivalent of a sneeze, his flesh rippled and it made the oddest sound.

  Cad’s job at the door was to control his large pet. It was a trained Mallute: three hundred pounds of fur and teeth and muscle on four legs. He named it Sassy, I think to be cute. It was generally a very pleasant, if slobbery, animal. But if Cad commanded it to attack, it could tear someone to pieces.

  Then there was me.

  I had a four-barreled sawed-off shotgun I holstered under my jacket. I kept it despite my growing sense it was becoming less and less viable as a weapon. Most people on Belvaille, if they were in the security business, wore some kind of body armor. Cad and Balday-yow had armored vests and I doubt my shotgun could penetrate them even at close range.

  All this protection for one casino was pretty standard. Folks wouldn’t even step foot inside a building unless there was at least this much gear outside. The city was simply too violent nowadays to have anything less.

  “How’s it going?” I asked the guys as I took up my post in front of the door.

  “Hank,” they acknowledged, already sounding tired.

  Sassy came over and bit me on the shin like he usually did.

  “Sassy! No.” Cad pulled on the leash but the animal outweighed him maybe threefold so we had to wait for Sassy to give up.

  I absently looked down at the creature.

  “Sorry, Hank,” Cad apologized.

  It was only a minor annoyance. Sassy couldn’t hurt me.

  I was a level-four mutant and in consequence my body was incredibly dense and heavy. I could pull out my shotgun and shoot myself in the chest and it wouldn’t hurt—much. And on the rare occasions when I did get hurt, my body healed much more rapidly than a normal Colmarian. I had even regrown my finger once when it had been cut off. My only permanent injuries were a slight limp, and some dully-glowing green scars on my face and hand from when my old plasma pistol had exploded.

  Still, we were required to wear a certain set of clothes when we stood at the door and Sassy kept forcing me to buy new pants. I now owned like ten pairs of slacks with one leg shredded to ribbons. Which wouldn’t be so bad but the intriguing world of doormen didn’t pay that much. I couldn’t get too upset at Cad however, he really didn’t have much going for him other than Sassy.

  “Boss,” Ba
lday-yow said discreetly.

  We all stood up straighter and looked unbelievably focused as a dark car parked in front of the club. Even Sassy stopped chewing my leg and sat upright. The driver hopped out quickly and opened the back door of the car.

  Out of the rear stepped the illustrious owner of the club, Xominion. He wore a tailored suit, jewelry, and had his face and hair in the wet look. Water was pumped continuously through tiny hoses secreted around the top of his head. To me it looked like he was really sweaty, but it was fashionable now.

  We all dutifully said our welcomes and he dutifully ignored us and entered the casino.

  After a brief pause the driver gave us all a nod, which we returned, and he drove off.

  “Hey, guys, you know how to get rid of a corpse?” I asked.

  “You mean hide it?” Cad questioned.

  “No, just get rid of it. There’s a dead body outside my apartment.”

  “Who’d you kill?” Balday-yow asked offhandedly.

  “No one, it was just there when I came out today.”

  “Then what do you care? No one can pin it on you,” Balday-yow said.

  “I’m not worried about it, it’s just…I mean, shouldn’t I move it?” I looked between the two men, but they seemed to have already lost interest.

  “Oh, great, it’s the furniture,” Cad said, motioning with his head down the street.

  I stepped out of the doorway to see better and yup, here they came.

  Gandrine.

  Gandrine were a completely different empire from Colmarians. The Colmarian Confederation was by far the most populated and largest empire. It housed maybe 90% of the known species in the galaxy. We were also the least intimidating and most poorly managed by a long shot.

  Gandrine were basically a mineral race. They looked like enormous piles of multicolored shale rock. They had arms and legs, a torso, and something that was head-like. But other than that they were rocks. They wore no clothes, had no discernable genders. If one leaned against a mountain and didn’t move, you would never know not to drill for gold in it.

  There were two of them on Belvaille at the moment. They had come maybe a year ago. There had been a lot of chatter about it and speculation. I had been particularly worried. My whole thing was I was big, strong, and hard to hurt. These things were bigger, stronger, and while I didn’t know rock, I couldn’t imagine stabbing one with a knife was going to do much.

  For weeks I would walk by their apartment to see what they were up to. They sat out on their front steps. Day and night. They didn’t eat, they didn’t drink. I had only met one Gandrine before, an ambassador, and he could speak—albeit incredibly loudly—so I knew the race wasn’t mute, but these two never made a sound. We didn’t even know if they were dead. After two weeks of them not moving, I realized the Gandrine posed as much danger to the natural order of Belvaille as any rocks posed to the natural order of Belvaille.

  The only problem was a few months ago they had somehow learned of this casino. And instead of sitting on their front stairs, they decided to sit in here.

  It’s not as if they caused problems. Once seated, they never moved. One of the cleaning ladies actually climbed over them trying to dust because she thought they were sculptures. But they made people uncomfortable and took up space. Because of that, the boss told us to not let them inside.

  Yeah. We’ll totally do that. We’ll stand in front of this avalanche hoping it will turn around. Our job was security, not suicide.

  I was slow. That was a side-effect of my mutation. My strength did not increase in proportion to my density. My power-to-weight ratio was pretty bad. But the Gandrine made me look like the galaxy’s fastest sprinter by comparison.

  They dragged their feet along the road as they walked and it made this horrible grinding noise.

  It took the Gandrine about five minutes to walk through the door. That’s how sluggish they were. When they were finally in, we all relaxed and Balday-yow began telling us about a woman he fancied that was working at a crosstown disco.

  We were pleasantly passing the time when Xominion stormed out of the casino, his face wet and angry, and approached me.

  “I thought I told you not to let those Gandrine in,” he accused. “They just tore up half the carpet.”

  “Boss, how can we stop them?” I said. I glanced back at the guys for them to support me, but they made like they didn’t hear our conversation.

  “You’re supposed to be a tough guy. That’s what everyone said. That’s why I hired you. Didn’t you fight Wallow?” Xominion demanded.

  I sighed. Having a reputation can be good and bad.

  Wallow was a Therezian, a thirty-five-foot monstrosity with a bad attitude. He was one of only a thousand in the galaxy who had been allowed to emigrate from their home planet because all the empires feared a war in which they were used as conscripts.

  It was true that Wallow had basically dropped his fist on me once. He also knocked out all my teeth, broke a sizeable number of my bones, and caused innumerable internal injuries. The fact I survived and recovered in a hospital over a month was enough to make me a celebrity bruiser.

  “What would you like me to do?” I asked.

  “Kick them out!”

  Again, I looked back to my comrades at the door but there was no help forthcoming. Every man for himself, I suppose.

  “No problem,” I said.

  I waited for Xominion to leave before I went into the casino.

  I saw the tracks of the Gandrine in the carpet, as if there was any doubt where they were. But they certainly hadn’t torn up half of it. There were just four long skid marks from where they had scooted along. They sat on the floor, no chairs being big enough or sturdy enough to hold them.

  Were they just people-watching? Did they feed off the emotions of drunkards and the whimsy of crooked games of chance? Why were they here other than to make my life difficult?

  I stood in front of the big boulders. If I had a sand blaster, I could possibly etch my name on one of their chests, but how was I going to kick them out?

  “So guys,” I began, smiling. “I know you’ve been coming around and staying a lot recently, but this is a place of business. We really need you to buy something or do a little gambling while you’re here.”

  I realized they had no clothes, pockets, and likely, money. Unless they had some internal caves. Or maybe buried treasure.

  I turned around and saw Xominion across the casino, eyeing my progress.

  I faced the Gandrine and began gesticulating wildly. I threw my arms up. I balled my fist at them. I swept my arms wide. Stomped my feet.

  “Blah blah blah blah!” I shouted at the Gandrine. I knew Xominion was too far away to hear me and I didn’t see the point in potentially pissing off the Gandrine so I just made an impressive pantomime of threatening them.

  I am not a good hand-to-hand combatant. I can push tons if I put my back into it but I can’t throw a one pound ball more than ten feet because I can’t accelerate my heavy arm fast enough. So when I “punched” the Gandrine as a finishing touch, it was more me trying to push its head with my fist. It didn’t move.

  I pointed my finger at each of them like I had made some grand statement and I walked back out to the front door.

  “How did it go?” Balday-yow asked.

  “How do you think?” I responded icily.

  I wasn’t sure what to do if Xominion came back, but I guess I could fake it.

  “Look,” I started, “those things aren’t going to leave. If the boss comes back, I’ll say they gave me some money to gamble on their behalf, since they’re too clumsy to do it themselves.”

  “That’s a great idea,” Cad said.

  “Yeah, well, you each need to pitch in some cash. Because you all let them in just as much as I did.”

  “How much?” Balday-yow asked, worriedly.

  “I figure fifty from each of us will at least keep Xominion off our backs for a bit,” I said. “You know they’re go
ing to be sitting there for another couple weeks.”

  “Can you float me?” Balday-yow asked Cad.

  “Man, why are you always broke?” Cad asked, annoyed.

  “I told you, I’m chasing that dancer. It’s not free.”

  “Do you have any idea what it costs to feed Sassy?”

  “I don’t know why. He eats all my pants,” I interjected without humor.

  A couple approached the door as we continued to argue. I checked the IDs, Sassy sniffed them a bit, and Balday-yow swiveled the machine gun a few inches just to be able to say he was contributing.

  A few hours passed and we were standing around doing nothing. The casino was not very busy today.

  A transport truck then slowly drove by us carrying maybe twenty troops in the open back. The soldiers were armored head-to-foot in the latest technological body armor, had full helmets with opaque visors, and carried some wicked submachine guns. A freight truck followed right after the transport, presumably with some newly-manufactured goods that were bound for proper Colmarian space.