Space Junk

by Andrew Bixler

  “This is kind of scary,” she tells her fans, laughing nervously. “I’m glad you guys are here to keep me company.”

  She slows her pace and squeezes her phone closer. Something clinks behind her, and she spins around. “Who’s there?”

  She holds her breath and listens, but all she can hear is the wind whistling as it slips between the giant spacecraft.

  “The sc-c-cariest place in the universe,” Pants whispers into her phone, “is Howard’s Horror Planet. Mention this ad for ten percent off your first terrifying visit.”

  Something scuffs the dirt, and she turns toward the noise. As she whips her head around, a figure leaps out of the shadows, and she trips back onto the ground. In a panic, she screams and kicks, and her foot makes contact with something soft.

  “Urghh,” The One groans. “What’d you do that for?”

  “I thought you were a monster!” Pants shouts.

  “What are you yelling about?” Beer asks, appearing from between the ships.

  “Did you find it?” Horton calls as he steps into the aisle.

  “Pants kicked me in the nards,” The One says, holding onto his crotch.

  “It was an accident,” she says. “You shouldn’t have jumped out at me like that. I’m an expert in Pants fu.”

  “Urghh,” The One continues to groan. “The pain is excruciating.”

  “Chut up,” Beer says. “Do you hear that?”

  Voices from somewhere nearby echo across the lot, and the team scrambles down the aisle, The One lagging behind. When they reach the source of the conversation, they duck behind an old junker, and Pants peeks around the side.

  “There it is, you guys,” she whispers. “We found the Asteroid Jones II!”

  The sun is nearing the horizon, and the air is warm and thick with the scent of stale garbage as Daizy and Adam stroll down the warped boardwalk, away from The Big Guy’s gaudy white house.

  Daizy glances at the cube jutting from Adam’s pocket. “I can’t believe he just gave it to you.”

  “I don’t think he knew what he had,” Adam says.

  “But you knew.” She thinks about hugging him and then lightly punches his arm. “Thanks for sticking up for me back there.”

  “It’s no big deal,” he says.

  “I wonder what all the fuss is about, though. Why does everyone want that thing? Is it some sort of universe-destroying weapon?”

  “I don’t know, but I know why I want it.” Adam grins and pats his pocket. “With this baby I can finally afford to quit scrapping. I’ll be able to do whatever I want and go wherever I want, whenever I want.”

  “Can’t you already do those things?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s basically how you’re living now,” she says. “You don’t need that thing to be able to do what you want.”

  “You don’t understand,” Adam says. “It’s about security, and ownership.”

  When they reach the end of the pier, they turn onto Blart Road, and the wind picks up, enveloping them in a fog of dust. Daizy can feel the dirt coating her tongue, and she tries to spit, but it’s useless.

  “It seems like you’re doing all right to me,” she says. “You’ve seen how far these guys are willing to go for that thing. Is it really worth losing everything you already have?”

  “Hey, I found it fair and square,” Adam says. “If they want it, they’re going to have to pay up or pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”

  “Something tells me that won’t be much of a problem,” she says.

  He smirks, ineffectively brushing the dirt off his clothes. “It also happens to be your only hope of getting a new ship.”

  “At this point I’d settle for a new shirt.” She sniffs her armpit and sighs. “So, what do we do now?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I guess we could take it back to Ferd’s. Maybe he can figure out a way to sell it outside the system, so The Foreman won’t find out…”

  “If we even make it that far,” Daizy says. “The Ears will be out looking for you everywhere.”

  He throws his hands up. “Well I don’t know what else to do.”

  She kicks a small mound of dirt, and the gray dust plumes up and sticks to her ankles. “There’s the parking lot,” she says, pointing.

  Adam rips his keys out of his pocket, and they sullenly trudge toward the lifeless plot of dirt to search for his ship.

  “Maybe you could talk to The Foreman again,” Daizy suggests. “I’m sure she’s still interested.”

  “I already tried that,” Adam says. “She strong-armed me.” He stops walking, and his eyes narrow. “Wait a second. How do you know The Foreman is a she?”

  “Oh, uh,” Daizy stares off into the hazy gray sky. “You get around, you hear things. There’s your ship.” She points to his battered junker and shoves him toward it.

  “Hey, look at this,” Adam says, holding up his phone. “I finally got a bar… and about a hundred messages. That’s weird.” He taps the screen, and they start to play.

  “Uh yeah, ahoy! This is The Foreman,” the message starts, and Daizy gasps. “I have your grandfather. If you ever want to see him again, you will deliver the black gold to me—” Adam skips to the next message. “Ahoy, this is The Foreman, again…”

  “Son of a perch.” He sighs. “I guess she’s going to win after all.”

  When they reach the ship, there are dozens of little slips of virtual paper flapping against its hull. Adam looks at them critically and rips one off.

  “This is bullchit!” he announces. “There’s gotta be a thousand crits worth of parking tickets here.” Reading one of them, his eyes grow wide, and he quickly checks his phone. “They already charged me!” He furiously tears through the imaginary sheets and tosses the scraps into the dirt, where they fade out of existence. “Let’s get the fish off this stinking heap.”

  As Adam fumbles with his keys, Daizy hears a faint shuffling coming from somewhere nearby, and she glances around the empty lot. “What is that?”

  “What is what?” Adam asks.

  “Listen…”

  The sound grows closer, and soon a pair of long, shifting shadows stretch across the dirt in front of them. Adam frantically unlocks his ship, but before he can wrench the door open, a couple weasily men in dingy black and white jumpsuits step into the aisle. The grimy Ears unholster their space guns, confidently sneering at their good fortune.

  “Adam Jones, I presume,” the slimier one of the pair says, running his hand through his greasy cowlick. “The UE’s number one most wanted. Looks like it’s our lucky day, Uggh.”

  “Lucky day, Clunk-eth,” Uggh says.

  “Come on, guys,” Adam tells them. “I’m sure we can work this out.”

  “Yer right about that,” Clunk-eth says. “Things is gonna work out perfect – fer us.”

  Adam slowly moves in front of Daizy, flinching as Uggh haphazardly waves his space gun. “How do you know I’m the guy you’re looking for?”

  Clunk-eth sticks his thumb up at the writing on the side of Adam’s ship. “It’s kinda hard tuh miss.”

  “That’s really starting to become a liability,” Adam says.

  “Put up yer hands, and step over here,” Clunk-eth says.

  “Yeah, step over here,” Uggh repeats.

  Adam nervously glances back at Daizy, and they begin marching toward their soon-to-be captors.

  “Please, guys,” Adam says. “You’ve heard of The Foreman, right? I have something she wants. If you let us go, there’ll be a big reward in it for you.”

  “She?” Clunk-eth throws his head back and laughs. “Now I know yer lyin’. The Foreman’s no woman.” He forces Adam’s wrists together and wraps his hands in putty-cuffs.

  “You don’t have to do this.” Daizy places her hand on Clunk-eth’s arm, gazing into his eyes. “You can let us go. We’re innocent people. Do you follow every order, even if it means hurting people?”

  “Only if it pays,” C
lunk-eth says, and he yanks her arm away.

  “What are you going to do with us?” Adam asks.

  “Yer goin’ straight to the vice admiral,” Clunk-eth says. “As fer yer little friend here, I’m sure we can fig’er out somethin’ to do with her.” He looks Daizy up and down and grins wide.

  “Somethin’…” Uggh grabs Daizy’s arms, twisting her skin as he wraps her hands in stiff putty.

  “Ow!” she screams.

  “Quiet,” Clunk-eth says, shoving her forward. “We’re gonna git promoted fer this, Uggh.”

  “Uggh,” Uggh groans.

  “That’s right, we’re— Hey!” Clunk-eth cries out.

  Daizy hears a loud groan, and she turns to see Uggh lying in the dirt, panting and holding his head. A small Earth boy with thick plastic glasses is standing over him, wielding a rusty metal bar.

  “What the fish?” Clunk-eth yells, as his partner rolls in the dirt. “Get up, Uggh.”

  Clunk-eth leans down to help Uggh off the ground when a small girl with pink pigtails runs up behind him and kicks him in the backside, sending him sprawling head first into the dust beside his partner.

  Clunk-eth rolls over, rubbing his eyes. “Yer gonna regret that,” he tells the little girl.

  “Nuh-uh,” the girl taunts and sticks out her tongue.

  “What the fish is going on?” Adam asks.

  “Got him!” Uggh grunts, wrapping his arms around the boy’s chest.

  Clunk-eth lunges toward the girl and grabs her sleeve. “Yer mine.”

  “Get away from me,” the girl shouts, struggling to get away.

  “Mine,” Uggh mumbles.

  “What do you s’pose we should do with ‘em, Uggh?” Clunk-eth says. “I got a friend who’ll pay top dollar fer a couple a tender kids like these.”

  “Top dollar,” Uggh says.

  “You’re not taking them anywhere!” Another boy runs out from between the ships, his stomach shaking and poking out from underneath his t-shirt. He swiftly darts at Clunk-eth and performs a surprisingly agile jumping-stomp onto the Ear’s foot.

  “ACK!” Clunk-eth shouts, dropping the girl.

  A third boy, small and pale, steps out of the shadows behind them and yanks on Uggh’s ears. “Put him down.”

  “It hurts!” Uggh howls. His grip loosens, and he drops the boy with the glasses.

  “So that’s Adam Jones,” the chubby boy says. “I imagined him being a lot more… brule.”

  “Yer in a universe full of trouble,” Clunk-eth says as he rocks back and forth in the dirt holding onto his foot.

  “Do you really think you’re in a position to be making threats?” the pale boy says.

  Looming over them, the chubby boy says, “You’re not gonna do chit.”

  “What should we do with them?” the boy with the glasses asks.

  While the kids are preoccupied, Daizy motions to Adam, and the two of them begin creeping toward his ship.

  Finally, the pale boy slathers putty around the Ears’ hands and feet and over their eyes. “We leave them here. Somebody will find them in a few hours. By then we’ll be long gone.”

  “This is getting exciting, you guys,” the girl tells her phone.

  Daizy and Adam duck around the back of the Asteroid Jones II and shuffle across the aisle, their hands still bound together with hard putty. As they’re running, Daizy glances back to see if they were followed, and her foot catches on something, propelling her face-first into the dirt. When she opens her eyes, the boy with the glasses is standing over her. He sprays something on her hands, and the putty locking them together loosens and drips away.

  When the rest of the kids catch up, Adam asks them, “Who are you guys?”

  “Pfff, well of course,” the girl says, her pink skirt flapping in the wind. “We’re the famous Pants Team Pink!”

  Zok sits on the edge of his plush hotel cot, sore and aching as he watches Adam Jones and a pack of Earth kids beat up on a pair of UE patrolmen. The men struggle to defend themselves as the lens violently bounces, spins, and finally freezes on gray sky.

  “So he’s on Earth,” Zok says.

  The video on the little glass screen is replaced by Admiral Glipp’s hard-lipped, craggy scowl. “Yeah,” he growls. “Only half a universe away from you!”

  “Sir, I assure you the situation is under control,” Zok says, rubbing a persistent sore spot on his neck where Pi pressed down a little too hard during their ill-considered ‘romantic’ encounter. “Very soon, Adam Jones will come crawling to us.”

  “And then what, Zok? Supposing he does show up, how are you planning to get out of there with the element? You think The Foreman is just going to hand it over?”

  “Well, no,” Zok says.

  “You’re awfully confident for someone in such a precarious position. This was supposed to be a simple mission – in and out. Instead, it’s turning into a political and logistical nightmare. I don’t know what’s going on out there, Zok. But I strongly suggest you quit boozing and chasing tail, and get this thing sorted out!” The admiral grunts and his feed cuts out.

  Zok glances up at his drooping reflection in the nightstand mirror; his face looks like it’s aged a decade since he left base.

  His knees crack and his lower back spasms as he pushes himself up off the bed and lumbers into the main cabin, where Steve and Dave are sprawled over the couches, moaning and wretching into trash buckets.

  “Ughhh,” Steve groans, rolling onto his back.

  Zok lights a cigarette and blows red smoke at the miserable pair. “I guess you two had a fun night. How about breakfast? I think there are some leftover prawns in the fridge. They smell a little funky, but I bet they’re still good.”

  Dave leans over the couch and heaves into his bucket. As he’s hurling, a grotesque blob of gunk on his shoulder, which Zok initially mistook for vomit, opens its toothless mouth and wails, “Gahhh…”

  The doors to the cabin suddenly crash open, and The Foreman tramps into the dim room, her dark lips stretched into a cruel grin. “Good morning, boys.”

  “Have you heard from Adam Jones?” Zok asks her.

  “You don’t waste any time,” she says. “I was hoping to flirt around it for a while, but the answer is no. I have received no communcation from Adam Jones.”

  “What do you plan to do if he doesn’t show,” Zok asks, “kill the old man?”

  “Space heavens no.” She gasps, unconvincingly. “I’ll put him to work sweeping the parking lot or shelling prawns. He will not go to waste. What about your patrol? They still haven’t located the Asteroid Jones II?”

  Zok takes a long drag off his cigarette and, glancing out the window, says, “No.”

  “Adam Jones is proving to be a formidable opponent.” Turning toward the ailing chidiots draped over the couches, she asks, “What’s with you two?”

  The bloated pair respond with a series of pained sobs.

  “I think they stumbled onto something they weren’t quite ready for,” Pi says. “At least someone around here is having a good time.”

  “If that’s what you call it,” Zok scoffs.

  She stares at him strangely, as if reading his thoughts. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, Zok. What exactly does the UE want with the black gold? They have one of their best men and, from what I can tell, a significant portion of their resources committed to finding it.”

  “Ah, I…” Zok stammers, stunned by her insolence. “That is strictly confidential! You have no business inquiring into—”

  “Okay, okay, don’t wrinkle your suit.”

  Stubbing out his cigarette on the window frame, he asks her, “Why are you after the element?”

  “I’ve pondered that question for a long time,” she says. “The truth is, I don’t know anymore. The endeavor is completely irrational, and yet I find myself wanting to believe that there is some mystery left in this universe. Plus, it’s something to do.”

  “It’s too bad we can’t split it.” This mis
sion has got Zok feeling so dejected, he actually means it.

  “Yes, too bad…” She looks at him with her gemstone eyes and presses her cold lips against his cheek. “Well, I just wanted to check in. It’s always lovely chatting with you, Zok. I’ll be sure to keep you apprised of any developments.” She waves at him, hips swaying as she glides out of the room and down the hallway.

  Zok waits until she’s out of sight and then marches in the opposite direction. He squeezes into an elevator packed with sweaty vacationers and patiently rides it down for what feels like a short lifetime. When he reaches the lobby, he shoves his way through the relentless flow of tourists and out the front door of the seemingly boundless, yet eminently claustrophobic pyramid.

  Pausing on the sidewalk to compose himself, he looks up at the stars and whispers to himself, “Space god, there’s a lot of them.”

  Ships hum and buzz overhead as he marches across the lot toward his enviable parking spot just outside the building’s entrance. He scowls at a utility cruiser parked crooked in the space next to his, its landing gear overlapping the white dividing line, and he makes a mental note of the ship’s license plate number.

  “Welcome back,” Stella greets him as he steps into the cockpit and slumps into the captain’s chair.

  He sighs. “It’s good to hear your voice.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asks. “You sound tired.”

  “It’s this whole mission. It’s starting to get to me.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Gazing out across the crowded parking lot, he says, “For the first time in my career, I’m uncertain. I don’t even know what I’m doing out here. I could really use an Ol’ Guard.”

  “Beer? Wouldn’t you rather have breakfast?” When he doesn’t answer, she says, “If you insist…”

  A can pops up into the cup holder of his armrest, and he eagerly chugs its frothy contents. “The admiral is right. Even if our ploy works and the element is brought to us, I’ll still have to figure out a way to wrest control of it away from The Foreman. I could try to intercept the Asteroid Jones II myself, but if I miscalculate the ship’s trajectory, Adam Jones could end up right in The Foreman’s lap…” he clears his throat, “so to speak.”