by Logan Hunder
With lab paraphernalia strewn all over the floor and all cupboards within reach thoroughly emptied, she had run out of excuses not to face her companions. Upon turning around, it was apparent that Donald was trying his hardest to pretend he hadn’t listened and was failing miserably. After pulling a few more bottles off shelves without even reading their labels, he abandoned the charade altogether when she turned around and he caught her eye.
“Hey, don’t look at me, I didn’t ask,” he said defensively.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” She folded her arms and turned away, slouching against a wall. Dredging up feelings was somehow more tiring than skulking around a giant space station looking for acid to steal while under constant threat of discovery. Perhaps not physically, but at very least mentally. It seemed at least one of her companions agreed.
“Whisper? Are you . . . crying?”
The pilot started upon being addressed. With her head bowed and her face obscured with her hair, she wiped the lone tear from her cheek.
I . . . no!
Kim nodded.
“I’m convinced.”
“Alright, fine,” Whisper grumbled, wiping away another. “I don’t even know why, though. I can’t even tell if that story is sad or happy. It’s . . . sappy? Is that where that word comes from?”
“I dunno. Why don’t you ask college boy over there?” Kim joked as she stepped back into the hallway.
“Hey, I did take etymology as an elective, you know.”
“Well then, where does that word come from?”
“I dunno . . . We had only got to the M’s when I was kicked out.”
“Greetings, wary strangers wandering around making messes!”
The warm greeting ripped through the trio like a frustrated roar coming from a simultaneously hungry and horny hippo. For one brief smidge of a moment, all the blood flowing in Kim’s veins turned to fire and lightning and Red Bull. In this adrenaline-fuelled frenzy, she raised her gun hand at superhuman speed, making it all the more painful to Donald when she accidentally pistol-whipped him across the face. He broke into a cursing fit, stumbling about all the while. He flailed his head around in pain as he did, narrowly missing striking his younger coworker before coming to a rest with it against a wall.
“My apologies,”the small, dusky newcomer offered through his short but thick facial hair. “That looked very painful.” Those were his last words before a laser shot rang out and a streak of red light sent him sizzling to the floor. Even in surprise, even in death, one couldn’t deny he was a handsome bastard.
“Yeah, you’re tellin’ me . . .” Kim mumbled through a mouthful of her bruised fingers. “Oh, holy shit, he’s dead.” Trying to nurse his way through the beginnings of a second blackened eye, Donald was predictably ambivalent. However, Whisper, in an uncharacteristic display of concern, rushed to the downed man’s side and gasped over his body. Several times, she reached down to touch him, only to get grossed out and retract the hand.
“KIM!” She yelped. “You shot Zayn Malik!!”
“That’s Joseph Stalin, Whisper—”
“Who?”
“—and I didn’t shoot him! I don’t even have a blaster.”
The pilot did not respond. Something behind Kim seemed to have stolen her attention. Given the way she clutched her hands to her chest and took trembling footsteps backwards, whoever she was staring at probably was not good looking enough for her to desire their attention. Either that or they had the blaster in question. Or perhaps even both.
Kim began to turn but froze upon being addressed.
“No, no, no, I’m not dealing with your crap again. Put the explosion-making thing down, kick it away, hands on your head, all the usual shit.”
It wasn’t often she would willingly allow herself to be bullied into submission. Obeying the orders and surrendering her only line of defense came as a slight blow to her pride. However, there was no other recourse worth pursuing. She didn’t need to turn around to know who owned a voice so dull and slogging that he probably couldn’t even talk about his great-grandchildren without sounding disgusted.
19.
THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY . . .
GETS ASSESSED USING THE EXACT SAME CRITERIA
I EMPLOY TO DETERMINE MY OPINION OF
LITERALLY EVERY OTHER PERSON THAT I MEET.
LITTLE-KNOWN FACT ABOUT MISTER Banks: he wasn’t a fan of being ejected off ships against his will. It wasn’t a very unique or surprising fact, but it was still little-known, because the man had virtually no friends he shared pet peeves with. A slightly better-known fact was the man’s impressive work ethic. Skill in one’s field, no matter how remarkable, was never worth much when imbued in one without the will to exercise it.
Nearly universally known fact about Mister Banks: Dude was old, yo.
As bodies withered, it often became essential to turn to the mind in order to compensate. A strong will might not necessarily be enough to make a gymnast out of a Viking or a surgeon out of a Parkinson’s patient, but when one’s job was a tennis match of pointing guns at people and dealing with enormous amounts of retaliatory punishment, the stuff went a long way. Over the years, he had been shot, stabbed, burnt, bludgeoned, trapped with snakes, trapped with a particularly ornery goose, aggressively tickled, yelled at very loudly, forced to smell chocolate chip cookies but never get to eat them, and a multitude of other passion-fuelled acts of vengeance. What made him such an asset was not the fact that he had the meanest swing or the sharpest aim, but rather the fact he could shrug off nearly anything thrown at him like some kind ofself-driven space Rasputin. Whatever the job, he prided himself on getting it done.
At first, he was a bit salty after being foiled by the old “trap-the-bad-guy-in-an-escape-pod” gag. Partially, it was the imprisonment, naturally, but in all honesty, the shame of falling for it wore on him the most. The countless ensuing hours of being trapped in a room full of floating teenaged-girl accoutrements barely illuminated by emergency power theoretically should have fermented his misgivings. However, while the treatment was anything but ideal, over time, he couldn’t help but come to appreciate the concerted effort made to spare his life. It was a practice that he himself had reciprocated, so perhaps they didn’t deserve any more additional slack. But in this business, fairness was a nigh-unheard-of commodity.
By the time the miniature vessel was picked up by a passing peacekeeper frigate, he had calmed down considerably. Not enough that he felt fine to wash his hands of the whole thing, mind you, just enough to re-evaluate his approach to his mission objective. However, it needed to be put on hold until after he dealt with his arrest after being recognized. He could say what he wanted about living in Whisper’s bedroom, but it was more comfortable than a ship cell devoid of all stimuli. The regular deliveries of food were nice, but at least the old place had a preponderance of vapid teen-oriented media to peruse. Hard to say whether boredom or hunger was the more unpleasant feeling, as anyone experiencing one would quickly volunteer to trade it for the other.
Thankfully, his notoriety among the multitude of Earth military forces was sufficient to expedite his apprehension. Anyone who showed up on more than five “most-wanted” lists had reached drop-everything-and-deal-with-him status. Since the hard part, getting him into the holding cell, was already completed, all that was left was to transport him to his final destination.
Another widely known fact: there is a special place in space whose sole purpose is to house the most dangerous people in the system.
“NOW BEFORE EVERYBODY GETS their panties in a twist . . .” The old man droned to the group. “I want to clarify I’m not here to kill you. If I wanted to, I could’ve done it a hundred times already. Now, that being said, what are you going to do if I lower my gun?”
Kim scowled back at him.
“I’ll probably run over there and punch you in the gut so hard your colostomy bag explodes.”
“Classy. Except I’m pretty sure colostomies haven’t been don
e in around two-hundred years.”
“Well, I guess that gives me an indication of how old you are, then!”
Banks rolled his eyes and exhaled air in a way that was part sigh and part grunt.
“This is not a bad start at all.”
“How did you even know we would be here!?” She demanded, stepping towards him. “Or are you just here to pick up an order and happened to bump into us?”
A slight twitch of the gun let her know that her subtle advance had not gone unnoticed. As she stepped back, the old man let out another one of those rumbling grunts. At first, they seemed to indicate agitation, but it was starting to appear he simply might not be in complete control of all the gasses his body emitted.
“You might be surprised to know you’re not the only person worthy of getting sent to Guantanamo. You are, however, the only person I’ve ever met who owns an impossibly expensive piece of machinery that doubles as your house and sole method of transportation, yet who doesn’t bother to lock its doors when you leave.”
Whisper jolted.
“You were on the ship?!”
“ . . . Is she being sarcastic or is this a language barrier thing?”
“You’re one to talk,” Kim snapped. “So if you’ve been on our ship this whole time, then why are we only seeing you now?”
“Honestly, I am a little surprised you guys never noticed me,” he said, gesturing to the gun. “I guess you don’t take inventory much. I guess you don’t check your vents much either, even after leaving your spaceship unlocked outside the most dangerous prison known to man.”
“We were a little preoccupied with the whole being-ar-rested-and-then-free-falling-through-open-space thing. “ “Well, I’m a little preoccupied with the fact we’re standing in a hallway making small talk over a dead body. So how about we deal with it, then take this conversation into another one of the rooms you guys have been burgling.”
“You move him. You’re the one who murdered him.”
“It’s not murder; that thing is just some lab-grown . . . Just move it! Doesn’t anybody respect guns anymore?”
“Uhh . . .” Donald mumbled as he walked over to Stalin’s corpse. “What . . . What are we supposed to do with it?”
“Just throw it in a corner and stick a tree in front of it or something. Nobody’s gonna notice.”
AFTER DISPOSING OF THE body, something Kim hadn’t figured she would ever have to do again, they made their way into yet another adjacent room full of scientific regalia that was understood by none of them. The whole endeavour would have been a lost cause if not for the mandatory WHMIS training before setting space sail. The meagre instruction was just enough to teach them to look for that bright symbol of a test tube crying on a sizzling hand. How they planned to assess the strength of the acid from there once they found it was much farther down the process than any of their minds had reached. Indiscriminately pouring it on the goo until the goo looked dead seemed to be as good of a plan as any.
“What do you want?” The co-captain growled at him once they were inside. “If you’re looking for that thing you lost, we don’t have it.”
Banks shut the door behind them, then turned back and glowered at her through half-closed eyes. He moved with a deceptive slowness that, when combined with his drooping skin and protruding bottom lip, made it seem he would at any minute break into a rendition of “Hello! Ma Baby.” But when he finally opened his mouth, it was just more of the same boring deadpan.
“I know you have it. I find things; it’s what I do,” the geezer grumbled. Yet, despite the accusation, he still lowered his gun. “But it doesn’t matter. That thing gets stolen every damn weekend—and it’s always on the weekend for some reason. If not by you, then by somebody else.”
Wary glances flew about his audience, mostly in the direction of the only one brave enough to stand up to him.
“So . . . what’s your point?”
“The point is, you guys are the only ones besides my Martian overlords who don’t want to inflate it to the size of a space bus, then drop it on somebody. And I’m pretty sure it’s only a matter of time before they get orders as well.”
The meandering attempt to drive the point home was having little effect on their faces of incredulity. Whether it was due to lack of understanding or lack of acceptance was unclear, but either way, the lack of sway ushered Banks away from his stone tone and into a more earnest register.
“Look. I’m done getting beaten up trying to keep this thing out of bad guys’ hands, okay? I’m done with the hours of stakeouts, guns in my face, guns in my back, angry kids trying to avenge their fathers, and being woken up in the middle of the damn night, all because some new asshole wants to become a super villain. Your husband is right; it should be destroyed. So I’m here to help you.”
“ . . . Are you kidding me!? Why the hell didn’t you open with that?”
“I did open with that. I said ‘I’m not here to kill you.’ You didn’t believe me.”
“You had literally just shot someone!”
“I still think he was more of a something.”
“Stop yelling!” Whisper yelled. “Or more will come and he’ll shoot them too!”
“More of them?” Banks clarified. “That’s the least of your worries. There’s cavalry on the way much worse than them. That whole display at the prison pissed off a lot of people, and since your ship is the only one that got away, it makes you look real suspicious.”
“Well then, all the more reason to hurry up and get this over with.” Kim patted her bag. “How’s the search going, guys? Have you found anything corrosive yet?”
Donald and Whisper looked at each other. They both stood cross-armed, leaning against a wall and conference table, waiting for their two chaperones to finish their grown-up talk. Around them were no shelves or cupboards of any sort, just a long mirror on the back wall with a refreshment stand under it and several large electric displays full of graphs and notes.
“Why would they keep any of that in here?” The older one asked, prompting Kim to take a first look around at the room’s contents.
“Jesus Christ,” she snapped, walking over and slapping a croissant out of Whisper’s hand. “Doesn’t anyone here know how to speak up? This isn’t a shopping trip; we’re on the clock, assholes. Next room, let’s go.”
Fine to lead by example, she stomped over to the door and gave it a shove. Following her agitated, open-hand punch, the door flew part-way open, whereupon it quickly abandoned that action with a hollow clunk and ricocheted back towards them. It was a defect that hadn’t presented during the apparatus’s initial use, and that aroused suspicion. Kim hoped it was simply debris that had fallen in the way, lest she have to issue a half-hearted apology to whatever manufactured pretty boy she’d just assaulted. A lean out the door and peek around the corner found a helmeted man shaking his head in a temporary daze. Figuring him for one of them Daft Punk guys, she grabbed his collar and hauled him into the room.
“What are you doing?!” Banks demanded, raising his blaster to take him out.
“What are you doing?!” She fired back.
“He’s a threat.”
“So what, you’re just going to shoot him?”
“This isn’t one of that lady’s boy toys! He’s got a blaster rifle and body armour; this guy is military!”
“ . . . That’s even less reason to shoot him! He’s probably got a wife and kids and shit.”
“Nah, these guys are married to their jobs. It’s fine.”
“No, please!” The prisoner whipped off his helmet, revealing a sweaty mop of hair and pleading eyes. “I do have a wife! And kids! And a dog! And he’s missing a leg!”
Banks coughed.
“I know that sounds convincing, but trust me, they all say that.”
“I’m not letting you shoot this man.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Uh . . .” The man raised his hand. “You could put me around that corner and ju
st let me sit this all out?”
“Shut up,” they both snapped at him.
“Why don’t you just knock him out?” Donald suggested. “Like they do in movies and stuff.”
“Knock him out?!” Banks repeated. “Who do you think I am? Earnie Shavers?”
“He means with your gun butt, idiot,” Kim sneered before relieving their captive of the rifle he possessed. “Let the lady show you how.”
Bringing both arms back for leverage like a woman about to dig a hole, she took a last breath, then hauled off and cracked him in the side of the head.
“OW! GOD! Jesus . . .”
As evidenced by the profane cries of pain, the strike seemed to wake him up more than anything else. With an expression of agony so convincing he needed no words to convey his state, he looked up at her with eyes that wordlessly asked why. It was a redundant unasked question; the reasoning behind the attack had been made rather clear. It was possible he may have been hoping its lack of effectiveness would spur her to pursue other solutions. But if she quit now, then all she did was hit him in the face for no reason. That wouldn’t do at all, and would be very unfair to him! So, with his wellbeing in mind, Kim raised the blaster and smoked him again.
“OW—COME ON!!”
This one knocked him clean over and worked as a double hit when his face slammed into the floor. Globules of spittle leaked from his twisted lips as he let out an involuntary groan.
“Hold him up,” Banks ordered. “Let me try.”
“Please . . . no—GAAH, CHRIST!”
“Don’t hit him in the forehead, you idiot!”
“Relax, would ya? I was aiming for his temple. Lemme try again.”
“AAAH! WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS!?”
“His temple?! What, are you trying to kill him?”
“Where else would I hit him?”
“If you want to knock someone out you hit them in the jaw. Like this; watch.”