“Ih—” she said, but couldn’t continue.
Her face was red and she was gasping for air.
“A corporation gave it to me,” I explained. I felt she was being childish.
She waved for me to stop and was shaking her head as if I were torturing her.
“It—” she tried again, but got no further.
Every time she looked up at me she returned to uncontrollable mirthfulness. Weren’t people supposedly scared of me? I had two plumbers giving me free maintenance work not a handful of hours ago.
Tejj-jo took a seat across from me and was wiping her eyes with a handkerchief. I think her body was simply unable to sustain any more laughter. Pointing at my cap she said:
“That’s a diaper!” And lost control again.
“It’s a cap,” I disagreed. Looking around to see if anyone heard her.
Through her tears, she shook her head.
“That’s from my birth world. Look inside. There will be three blue squares and a red triangle.”
I took it off and looked. There were two blue squares and a red triangle under what I thought was the band. She saw the marks.
“Or two squares. It’s been a long time,” she acknowledged.
“What? I mean, how did…” I stammered.
“That’s a diaper for upper class families. That’s what the marks indicate. I remember my nieces and nephews wearing them.”
I quietly folded the ornate diaper, trying to make it as small as possible.
“Someone must have been playing a joke on you,” she said.
I nodded with a fake smile, but couldn’t bring myself to look her in the eye.
So. I’ve been walking around for months wearing a diaper on my head. Okay. Fine. I can live with that.
Naked Guy didn’t exactly strike me as a prankster. But we’ll talk again at some point I’m sure. I’ll just table this discussion until then.
“Right. So what I wanted to talk to you about,” I started, but I saw she couldn’t focus while the diaper was in view. I put it on the seat next to me. “Have you seen any of these women? I believe they might be in some of the same cliques you’re in.”
I gave her the documents and she looked them over carefully. She lifted her face and addressed me seriously.
“I’m sorry for laughing at you earlier. I had heard about it, but I was just really surprised.”
“Myah,” I mumbled.
Going back to the documents she made the connection.
“This one isn’t using that name. But I recognize her. She is new to the station. She’s dating Zadeck,” she said.
“He’s straight?” I was surprised.
“I don’t think he’s dating her that way.”
I rolled my eyes. I guess that was the life of a courtesan.
“This other woman I believe is an escort. You might contact Leeny and see if she works for him. But people come and go.”
“Thanks. Hey. Can I ask why you decided to come meet me when I called?” I was wondering what tips for dating beautiful women I might have inadvertently learned.
“I thought it was prudent to visit you instead of risking you coming for me. I heard you were walking around barefoot, killing people, leaving their bodies all over the city, while wearing a diaper.”
CHAPTER 31
Leeny was basically a pimp. A city-wide pimp. But not very pimpy. He was fatherly from what I understood and didn’t abuse his workers. He also owned a number of apartments and hotels.
As I was heading to his office, I exited one street and casually looked to my right to see if there was any traffic.
Sitting there, two blocks away, was a tank.
I paused.
That was a tank. Not an APC. It was not facing me. It was fully in profile and stationary. The corporate pattern painted on the vehicle was black with white circles and words written in yellow. I didn’t know it.
I squinted, looking at its armament closer. I recognized it. It was the same gun I currently had on my back.
“Hmm.”
I heard a loud electric whirring noise and saw the turret that contained the cannon was swiveling in my direction.
I turned and headed back to the street I just left, going as quickly as I could.
At this point, I was sure it was the same gun as mine because it fired at me. Though it was modified because instead of firing one round, it fired what must have been two shots every second!
Those guys also must not have listened to Delovoa because they were clearly shooting high-explosive shells. I could hear them hitting the buildings down the street from me and exploding.
The cannon was loud from the shooting side, but over here on the receiving end, with pounds of explosives detonating, I was completely deafened.
But they missed with all their shots, and missed far. I guessed they had gotten off eight before I made it out of sight.
Ahead of me was a full block of apartments with no side ways or alleys. If this tank chose to follow me, there was no way I could outrun it.
My heart was racing. I took out my own autocannon and secured it on my vest.
I heard the engine of the tank. It was unmistakably loud, as it had to push twenty-five tons of steel and weapons.
I realized if I went into one of these buildings to hide, this tank could just autocannon HE rounds in there through the front door and windows until everything was dead. There were few back doors in Belvaille.
I loaded an armor piercing round and leaned against the wall closest to the direction the tank was coming. If it drove down the middle of the street, I was only going to get one shot before they took their turn.
The engine got louder and louder and I felt the vibrations in the metal sidewalk.
It was doing what I had hoped.
The front of the tank pushed past the corner and it was only ten feet away from me. It had cut the corner and was driving on the sidewalk of the cross street.
Delovoa said my gun could shoot through a tank. Now I was going to put that to the test.
Kachooom!
There was a horrible grinding noise after that. But my first concern was getting off my back and onto my feet.
The hearing in my right ear was totally gone. Firing that close to the wall the sound wave had bounced off and probably burst my eardrum.
I saw the twisted metal on the tank where I had hit it.
But it was moving!
It admittedly wasn’t moving as fast. I had deformed part of the guard that covers the tracks and they were scraping loudly.
Wait.
Delovoa said this gun could penetrate the weak side of a tank.
I kept as low as possible and moved forward to the tank.
I literally passed under its gun and around the wall to try and get behind it.
If it backed up, it would run me over.
I moved further away but I wasn’t sure how much time I had. It was going to look down the street and see I wasn’t there. Once that turret swiveled, it could shoot me wherever I was. Even if I was too low, it could hit the wall with HE shells and scatter shrapnel everywhere.
I was now about thirty feet away.
I reloaded my autocannon and adjusted the straps so they were secure.
The tank had just cleared the street and the gunner must have seen my slow ass wasn’t there and there was nowhere to go but behind it.
The cannon began to spin in my direction.
Kachooom!
BOOM!
I saw the tank jump two feet in the air when it exploded! This was a fraction of a second before I was cartwheeled down the street by the force of the detonation.
The ammo inside must have been destroyed.
I had a three inch chunk of steel in my left forearm, a two inch one in my right leg just above the knee, and a four inch piece in my lower right abdomen.
My autocannon was down the street, the steel cables having been snapped like cheap twine.
“There’s your diaper!” I taunted
the wreckage.
CHAPTER 32
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.”
CHAPTER 33
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!”
CHAPTER 34
“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.
I still didn’t fee
l the best, but I couldn’t afford to be in the hospital any longer. Especially if they were going to make me a drug addict.
Garm walked forward gingerly. She finally looked at me.
“A toilet?”
“I have a better one inside. Your trash people suck,” I spat.
I unlocked my apartment and went in.
“Oh.”
Garm came in behind me and also stopped.
“Garm, these are my employers. But I take it you all know each other.”
The pale sisters stood facing us. Garm flashed some hand gestures to them, they flashed some back.
Then Garm took out her pistol, dove to the side, and fired at them!
“Huh?” I pronounced.
The pale sisters twirled away, each bouncing off a different wall and drawing their weapons.
What happened next I wasn’t exactly sure, because I couldn’t quite see it.
There was a huge blur of movement as Garm displayed herself to be as fast as the pale women.
It took me about a minute of watching, but I finally got the sense they weren’t happy to see each other. And in fact were trying to kill one another. Unless:
“Is this some kind of Quadrad greeting?”
No one acknowledged me. In fact my only presence in the fight was as an obstacle to be flipped over, spun around, and otherwise bypassed.
I saw flashing blades and gunshots, but they seemed no closer to hitting one another than I was to winning Little Miss Belvaille beauty pageant.
“I just got out of the hospital, guys. I really don’t need this,” I grumbled.
If I felt Garm was in danger, I would have been a lot more concerned. But I was partially drugged, very tired, and this merely felt like a gymnastic opera. And opera was boring.
I walked through my living room, women springboarding off my back, and using my torso to hide behind.
I looked down the hall to my bathroom. My shiny new bathroom. I just had that toilet fixed!
See, this was why I needed a shotgun. What was I going to say, “Everyone stop fighting or I’ll kill everyone in the room with my autocannon?”
I walked back to the door. Picked up my autocannon and secured it to my vest.
“Everyone stop fighting or I’ll kill everyone in the room!”
Hard Luck Hank: Basketful of Crap Page 13