leapt back, landing in a fighting stance and, in a well practiced move, drew and unfolded my zoon stick, my tazer equipped boomerang, and hit the charge button. The little chirp told me it was full.
He pocketed his hand again and, ignoring me, looked back down. “They hit us here, six nights ago. We weren’t even doing nothing. We were just hanging out, talking about the centaur races and counting our winnings, well, the guys were counting their winnings anyway, when they come down on us. Hit us fast and hit us hard.”
His tone drew me closer, though I’d made a mental note of where my gun lay and kept the ‘rang at the ready. “Who hit you? Hit you with what?”
The big oaf looked away from the apparently distressing stains and took in a really deep breath. “I don’t know. Monsters I think, like nothing I’d ever saw— big, empty eyes, long snouts, hissing breath. They were in some kind of armor…maybe, or really hard scales, black as ink. They had bad weapons, like I’d never seen before. Tore the guys up, like paper through a shredder. Blood and guts went everywhere.”
Paper, shredder, and ink were old Earth terms, not something a citizen of the inter-dimensionally merged worlds of Mirth would normally know about. “You said they were monsters.”
“Maybe, yeah…I dunno,” he said and took a few steps away from me. The clangs of his metal foot echoed in the narrow, and seeming to grow darker, alley. But the accident that claimed my color vision had also given me some things; one was the ability to see in all but total darkness.
“Monsters isn’t a term monsters use to describe themselves.”
In a rush of fur, fangs, and fury Mickey spun and charged me. I’d let my guard down like a punk-ass amateur. Before I could raise the zoom stick he grabbed me in two unbelievably strong hands, ripped me off my feet and shoved me into the mallow-made wall behind me.
“I am not a monster!” he roared in my face and his breath smelled even worse than his body. Spit flew in a gale and splattered my face. His bared fangs and the down swept cut of his mouth were a portrait of anger, but the raise of his eyes and the tears rolling down his hairy face were nothing short of sorrow. “Why do you keep saying it?” he screamed, shaking me like an insolent child. “Why do you keep angering me? Why did you…” Either he’d burned through his anger or run out of breath (he’d been screaming the whole time) or both, but his words just faded out. His thick lips dropped back over his teeth, and, for a long, awkward moment, he just stared at me—no, stared into me.
I already had a thumb depressing the safety switch on the side of my pointer finger, and was ready to depress the trigger hidden in the palm of my glove that would send a ballistic knife blade shooting into this lug’s abdomen. But something in his eyes stopped me, though I’d be loathed to admit it and ruin my ‘trigger happy’ reputation. Mostly I was glad that he’d stopped shaking me.
He dropped me and, stumbling a little over his fake foot, backed away. “—why’d you have to shoot off my foot like that?”
I answered him the only way I knew how. I look a long step, leapt, tucked into a roll, and came up with my revolver cocked and aimed at his head.
He hadn’t budged.
Strange.
But I hadn’t shot.
Even stranger.
“I’m from Earth,” he said, “like you.”
I reacted in the absolute oddest, most out of character way I could have; I lowered the gun. About a quadrillion questions ran though my mind. I’d long ago given up on finding anyone or anything that still remembered the Earth of old, my Earth. And yet I was looking at a seven-foot, eight-hundred pound beast that stank like hell and was part of Boss Geeter’s monster mob. Everything about him screamed vile creature of evil to me, except that he bled red, disliked pain, and cried real tears.
“You speak monster.”
“I speak Cheyenne.”
Again, of Earth.
I looked down at the black blood stains. I’d made a lot of these myself over the years. I’d made some terrible messes out of monster parts, so what was it about that particular mess that was bothering me?
In the black, there were some faint traces of footprints; claws and hooves, most likely goblins and cud demons, Boss Geeter’s minions of choice. But there were a couple of others, boot prints, big boots with a coarse tread, but a small gait and a familiar fighting stance, kung-fu, southern, short-fist style. No one’s practiced such arts since the ID war, and since the continent of Asia was turned into a gigantic-monster sanctuary. For some reason bigger-than-a-building-sized creatures prefer Asia.
I moved to the blood-stained wall. These magical constructions were as hard as stone, but this one was riddled with numerous holes. My shadow sight caught. I drew one of the darts from my sleeve. Mickey lurched back, reflexively clasping the hole I’d stuck in his paw. “Relax,” I said, moved to the wall, and used the dart to dig a small hunk of good old fashioned steel out of the wall. I held the thimble-sized chunk of metal between a finger and thumb up to the light of Mirth’s twin moons.
Mickey leaned in for a closer look, and his great brow wrinkled with curiosity. “What is it?”
I was so surprised by what I was seeing that it took me a minute to get the word into my mouth. “Bullet, it’s a bullet,” I said at last and squeezed it in my gloved fist. “A kind of projectile weapon, one that, as far as I knew up until now, I was the only one still using.” I opened my hand and glanced at the metal in my palm. “This one’s a steel jacketed hollow point, very nasty bit of work, very capable of tearing monsters up like paper through a shredder.”
I stuck the bullet in my jacket pocket and looked over the damage in the wall. “This attack was brutal and devastating; so how did you survive?”
He looked away and his voice quavered a bit. “Dunno. I hit one of ‘em—like punching a rock titian. It shot some kind of perfume at me, made me go all woozie headed. I couldn’t hardly move. I just laid there watch’n the guys get torn up.” He looked down at the ground and sniffled hard through his gigantic nostrils. Back in the day they’d call it survivor guilt, but monsters don’t feel guilt. Yeah, yeah, I was in denial.
I was armed to the teeth, but, at the moment, what I really needed were tools suited to investigation instead of extermination.
“All right, sasquatch, we’re going to my office.” I turned and marched back to the glidesport. “And I’m driving this time.”
“Call me, Mickey,” the dope following me said.