erratic, bile rising kind of way. With a slap of big, bare feet against the floor he landed right beside the robot with a remote programmer in one hand and a laser decapitator in the other. After a flutter he folded the creepy wings against his back. Yuck.
“Hey PeeDee3, how ya been?” he asked through two inch long incisors.
I glanced sideways at the one robot army to my left. “Same old frass, Westy. How’s business?”
As his six-inch long binocufocals whirred in and out, self-adjusting their focus, he tipped his head toward the spreading fire and simultaneously scratched under his belly armor with an adept foot. “It was better before you started wrecking the joint.”
“Hey, that’s what insurance is for,” I said as if I cared.
He let out a loud laugh garnished with ape-like hooping and wooping. “You got that right, buggy-boy.”
Westy Ward, a dangerous assassin who happened to be a Batarangutan, a legally blind race of intelligent primates. He was covered head to toe with hair as black as my blood except for his neat, orange posterior. His proportionately (dare I say ridiculously) long, muscular arms stuck out from the Nettonic body armor with inertial dampers that covered his torso and abdomen. Two huge ears stood straight up from his head, and, despite their absurd appearance, were the receivers for his sonar screech, an echolocation system that very nearly matched my complex eyes’ ability to see in multiple directions. When first starting out, we’d done several hits together, but such partnerships rarely lasted in this business.
“Nice place,” I said keeping half of my retinas on the robot, and the other half on my old pal, Westy. “I’d heard you’d gone legit.”
Stretching out his normally bent legs, Westy leaned in close and met me binocufocaled eye to complex eye. “No, this was a great place, number one in sales three years running, and I am legit,” he said stabbing a lanky thumb in his own direction.
“Really? Then why take a crack at me? Hey, can I still get the free brain sauce?”
“No coupon, then you pay,” he grumbled, settling back down. “And the big puss put a price on your head so delicious that I couldn’t resist no matter how legit I’d gone.”
“What?” I shouted with a loud click of my mandibles. “Galactipus Caesar, ruthless ruler of the galaxy, lord of all it surveys, who’s got its greedy tentacles in every government, scheme, and shoplift from wormhole to shining wormhole, put a hit out on me?” It wasn’t like me, but I have to admit, I’d lost my composure for a moment there. Then common sense regained control. “Why would the grand old puss want to hit a no-bug like me?”
The ape shrugged, then picked a bug from his hair and ate it. “Beats me.”
I felt my antennae droop. “It doesn’t make any sense. You’re lying.”
Westy, with the weapons still in his hands, used a free foot to pick a folded paper out of his pocket and passed it to me. “See for yourself, Larva Nine Six-nine Seven.”
I shuttered. No being had called me by that juvenile nickname in six decades; I had no choice but to let it slide…for the moment. I unfolded the paper. It was covered with nothing but little bumps. I held it close to the thick lenses in his binocufocals. “Be serious, I can’t read brail.”
The monkey shrugged and blinked, his eyes looked huge and wet through the six-inch long spectacles. “Well trust me, that’s a reward for your head signed by the galactic puss itself.”
“Well I don’t.”
“Well you should.”
“Trust you,” I said in my most condescending of tones. “Hell, you blasted your own partner back there.”
Westy laughed. “You mean Eel-Lectra? She wasn’t my partner, and I didn’t bowl her on purpose, the decadroid’s past its calibration period.” He shook the remote for emphasis. “She was another hit-being out to collect on fifty-one percent of PeeDee3.”
“I still don’t believe you.”
The ape stuck a rolled up leaf in its mouth and set fire to the end of it. He blew out smoke that reeked like last week’s kitty litter. “I know you don’t, but it don’t matter none. I’m going to collect anyway.”
Just then my lower abdominal nerve plexus gave my upper plexus a metaphorical tap on the shoulder. At last my claw had found what I was looking for. I gripped the thick, rubber cord between its pinchers but kept the monkey distracted with what primates love most, nonsensical talking.
“Come on, Westy, you and me, we go way back.”
The ape fluttered its wings, giving me the shivers, then folded them again, leaned an elbow against a shelf, and took a long draw from the burning leaves. “Yeah, that we do, that we do,” he said in a cloud of smoke. He looked lost in thought as he sucked in more smoke.
Steadily walking my pinchers up the cord, I was reeling up slack as fast as I could. “Hey, remember that time we did the hit on the sentient twin nebulas?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” he said and laughed. “Remember you started a chain reaction, collapsing one nebula into a black hole!” He broke into near hysterics.
“Yeah, yeah,” I laughed to keep him laughing. “You were flying us out on that open top tandem trikeacellerator you’d hot-wired, but your pants got caught in the black hole’s gravitational pull and were ripped straight off!”
Westy laughed so hard he was doubling over. “Yeah that’s right, I remember—” He was chortling and, “Oo, oo, ooing,” so hard that he couldn’t finish his sentence.
“And when I insisted we stop for a celebratory drink, the Triggerpullhappy squad cornered us inside the space station. We managed to create a diversion and escape, but some tourist recorded your pantsless getaway and posted it on the public vid-casting channel. Your ass was shining like a bright orange moon.” That memory brought me to hysterics.
“Oh yeah, that’s right,” he said cracking up, then suddenly spat his burning leaves out, leapt at me and jammed the decapitator against the side of my head. “And my mother saw that video, disowned me, and has never spoken to me since,” he said then, showing me his fangs, began to growl. “And I really, really loved my mother you brood raised invertebrate.”
Just then the cord in my foot claw pulled tight. Time to dance. “I should have guessed it was you behind the robot, what with it carrying all my favorite weapons, except for the sibling simulator.”
A crooked smile slid onto the ape’s face. “Yeah, that was my special touch.” He began to flick a finger against the side of my head in time with the mechanical hand. “Just for you.”
“Ya know,” I said, lowering my voice to gather his attention. “Without that robot assassin, I’d kick your naked ass and have your brains for breakfast, and I’d be happy to pay for the sauce.”
The ape rotated the remote in the air. “Too bad you’ll never find out.”
That’s when I pulled the cord from the outlet. In an instant the robot’s arms and eyes dropped down limp with a descending whirr from a plethora of powering down systems.
Westy’s eyes and mouth popped open, and then his face began to tighten into a furious rage.
Ya know, he looked just the way I’d been picturing he’d look.
He pulled the trigger on the decapitator but I was way faster. I dodged back and with a flash of laser light the robot’s head slid off and crashed to the floor.
Judging by the deeply concerned aspect on Westy’s face I’d say he’d garnered that it was my turn and I wasn’t one to let an opportunity slip by. I curled up all four exoskeletonized claws and hit him with my one-two-three-four punch. Sadly, his armor’s inertial dampers absorbed most of the impact, but he grunted and slammed back into the display of cross-dimensional fuse caps. I heard the whine of his dampeners discharging energy.
He shook off the blow and raised the decapitator for a second shot. But I was already moving. I grabbed three of the robot’s arms and pulled whatever triggers I happened to have at claw. All at once a Hashwalla toad sticker, a tuba blaster, and a seventeen millimeter, six-point impact socket went off in the ape’s direction. B
ut Westy had anticipated my move. He reached those long arms of his high, grabbed hold of a shelf, and pulled himself up into a handstand well clear of the artificial lightning bolt and the powerful sonic wave. The impact wrench did nothing but make noise and reminded me that my mechanic always over tightens the lug-nuts on my astro-rover.
Westy was no dummy. He held the high ground, pulled himself onto the top of the shelving, and, with a flapping of his tissue-paper thin wings, sailed off across the room.
“Yuck,” I said and shivered involuntarily.
He was flapping all around, even more erratically than usual, giving me a poor target. That just meant I needed a bigger bullet.
I grabbed the headless robot and, with a great grunt, heaved it overhead with all four arms. I lugged it into the main aisle, and, keeping all of my retinas trained on the bat, threw. It rocketed away, dragging its long cord and plug across the floor, and slammed into the fleeing primate.
“Eeeeeee!” Westy screeched and, ape arms waving, went down like a player piano dropped from the fourth floor and made nearly as much noise.
I grabbed the nearest shopping cart and began to wander the aisles, browsing, comparison shopping, all while humming to the rhythm laid down by the sibling annoyance simulator. And I found the most amazing deals ever. Westy was right, he really did have the best prices, absolutely everything was free. What a great ape.
I pushed my cart of destruction over to the