Hard Luck Hank Screw the Galaxy(33)

Suddenly I got worried. What if he wasn’t here? What if—

“Hank!” Wallow was standing right in front of me.

I sighed. Glancing back, I saw the Dredel Led had not yet entered the street. I tried to collect myself as I looked up at Wallow. If this monstrosity could not kill the Dredel Led, I doubted anything on the station could. Or in the state of Ginland. The slight problem was convincing him to try.

“I’ve come here to settle the score, Wallow. I’m going to bust you up.”

Wallow’s face contorted into rage and that gigantic arm lifted back to smear me into the road. I have to work on my wording.

“Wait! Not me. I’m not going to fight you. My buddy is. He’s tougher than me and I hired him and he says you’re weak and stupid and-and ugly and fat,” I said, hoping at least one of those would register as an insult.

“Where is he?” Wallow barked in a challenge. His arm thankfully returned to his side, though it still ended in a clenched fist.

“He’s coming. Be here in a second. Gray jacket. Green pants. Kind of…no head.” I looked back up the street, as did Wallow.

I saw no silhouettes, heard no footsteps approaching.

“Yup. He should be coming really soon. Just up that street. Ready to fight you,” I sniffed a bit and absently dabbed at my contusions.

“He might have stopped for something to eat. He’s kind of—”

There was a sickening crunch and I saw blackness. I was on the ground and truly broken. My forehead rested against the road and I think I was on my stomach. I could feel my teeth were shattered but I couldn’t even purse my lips to spit out the debris.

There was blood everywhere. I could only keep one eye open and that one only barely. I could not tell you how many broken bones I had because I was unaware of how many existed in my body, but it was pretty close to a 1:1 correlation.

I could not take in more than the shallowest of breaths without acute pain, mildly coughing as blood gushed out of my mouth and nose.

Is there really such a thing as a good way to be murdered? I hadn’t thought about it before. But my one thought was that this wasn’t it.

Over what seemed like the unbelievably loud noise of me dying, I could remotely hear Wallow yelling about something. Probably how I had stained his knuckle with my viscera. This had not been, in retrospect, a good idea.

With every ounce of effort I had left, I turned my head to the side, mostly because I was tired of my broken nose mashing into the street.

In the distance. What seemed like a million miles away. I saw it. It was the Dredel Led. I think it had paused in its movement. Probably because it just spotted a pissed-off Therezian.

I would have given the last unbroken bone in my foot to know what that robot was thinking. I mean it was probably some gobbledygook that didn’t make any sense, but I could just see it going, “Wasn’t I just fighting someone a lot smaller?” Who would have thought the most useless space station at the edge of the most useless empire’s territory could put up such opposition?

Then I saw Wallow running towards the Dredel Led. I had never seen him run before. No wonder he got around so fast. Three steps and he had crossed the length of the block.

I wanted to move, to get the crap out of there. The battlefield of the gods was no place for a jaywalker. But I couldn’t. I was done. A little child could come by and poke me in the eye until I died and I wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing.

Worst of all, my body tormented me with consciousness. This time, I was absolutely happy to go to sleep. Even go to sleep and not wake up. But no. My body was like, “You didn’t listen to me before, so now you get to experience the joy of being a sack of wrecked meat.”

I couldn’t even close my eye, because then it just made me more aware of the pain. So I lay there like a bloody barnacle only semi-conscious of the battle in the distance.

I kind of hoped Wallow won.

But not entirely.





CHAPTER 13


I woke up at the hospital at one point and tasted wires. There were at least a dozen small ones in my mouth. So many I could barely move my tongue. There were several up my nose. I think there was one in my ear. I was literally plugged in.

The room had three technicians in it buzzing around. I turned my eyes and saw the medical machines were literally suspended from each other in mid-air. Interconnected cords ran through boxes of blinking lights and dials and buttons which were slanted and stacked in defiance of gravity. A tech was cursing at one when he saw my eyes open.

“Hank. Oh, we had to trick the instruments into thinking you were alive. This one—”

Good, I’m dead. Won’t have to put up with any more crap. I closed my eyes again and let the bastards have my carcass. Fat lot of use they’ll get out of it.