Scum of the Universe Page 4

  “They're clothes,” Ruska hinted.

  Bob only looked more confused at this detail.

  “But...” he began.

  Bob looked down at the dirty loincloth he'd worn for every moment of his life (besides for the annual Laundry Day, of course), then at the padded weapon belt and the six orange tools he prized above everything else, and then finally at his often-patched moleskin shoes. Bob finally looked back up at his Mum again, but it still didn't compute.

  “But I already have clothes.” Bob explained. “I'm not naked, see?”

  Ruska smiled at her son's confusion. Her long, sharp teeth gleamed in the afternoon sun.

  “Well, now you have two sets.”

  Bob's face had disbelief tattooed all over it. Ruska ran the blunt side of a retractable claw up the side of his face in a way that always made him feel loved and special, and ruffled his considerable mass of matted hair.

  “Happy ninth birthday, sweet one.” Ruska purred. “Now put the leathers on, and then we can get to your next present.”

  Bob froze. Two meals in one day, new clothes, and there was still another present to come? Wow! His family much have got rich all of a sudden!

  Dropping the stinking loincloth and fur belt around his ankles without a gram of shame, Bob slipped into the unbending full-body leather suit and Ruska helpfully tied it off with straps built into the limbs and trunk of the armour. It was by far the nicest, most comfortable leathercraft Jim Tuesday had ever made, but the sheer weight of the outfit became obvious as soon as Bob took a step. He worried for a moment that living a life of such unknown luxury had instantly spoiled him.

  Ruska interrupted Bob’s train of thought by giving him a bear hug so big that an actual bear would have trouble matching it.

  “Now, is time to go into desert.” Ruska announced.

  “But I’m not hungry, Mum!” Bob grumbled. “And I don’t want to hunt stupid little lizards and mouses and cocky-roachers anymore. I'm a big kid now, and they're no challenge.”

  Ruska smiled again.

  “Come, sweet one. This will be fun.”

  *

  Bob had often accompanied his Mum into the deeper wastes from the time he was barely five so he could gather insects, small rodents, lizards, flowers, berries, cacti, bark and anything else that was theoretically chewable while Ruska did her best hunting dog impersonation. So far, the various contents of Bob’s “desert salads” hadn’t killed any of them yet, and seeing as though the local background glow of the Mojave could wildly mutate anything that moved, this was quite an accomplishment.

  As usual, Bob saw the dunes pass by from atop his mother's enormous shoulders as she knuckled across the sand on all four of her long limbs. Although the up-down motion would make most people violently sick, Bob was used to the rocking and was able to kick back and appreciate how the patches of glassed, glittering sand would reflect the high-noon sunlight.

  Bob knew something was up as his Mum carried him beyond their usual stalking grounds. She carried him over unfamiliar dry streams full of desiccated fish bones, dodged through graveyards of grey, petrified cacti, and well into unknown territory.

  Still, Ruska didn’t stop.

  By the time Bob disembarked from his hairy steed twenty minutes later, Ruska had taken him four times as far as he'd ever been in his life. Holding an unwashed hand above his eyes to block out the vicious glare of Sol during the living nightmare known as midday, Bob scoped out his surroundings: no plants, no water, no cacti, no life of any kind, and not so much as a corroded orange chunk of metal to show that mankind had ever been here. Thick salt crunched beneath Bob’s moleskin boots with each step, and the air was metallic with the stench of burning sodium. This place was a wasteland beyond anything he knew, and if Bob knew a lot about one topic, is was wastelands. It wouldn’t surprise him one bit if this was the most worthless acre of the entire planet, and even if mankind immediately disappeared from the planet and nature was left to its own devices for a thousand years, this place would still never see so much as the bloom of the smallest, driest peyote, let alone anything that moved.

  Now, while hanging out in a useless salt plain in temperatures that had more in common with a pressure cooker than a climate within the survivable range of a human body wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, Bob was expecting a fricking birthday present, and it was pretty obvious that this place was the exact opposite of something anybody would want.

  Bob pouted, kicking at the ground. His shoe slammed into a pile of white crystals that had almost perfectly formed what appeared to be the letters V and U. Obviously, they dissipated after being booted.

  “Great present, Mum.”

  Bob’s hackles raised when Ruska chuckled at his disappointment. Although her unique genetics hadn’t been passed along to him, Bob could really follow in his Mum’s pawprints when he felt he’d been insulted.

  “Why are we here?” Bob snapped.

  “Patience.” Ruska purred.

  “Patience?” Bob repeated, growling. “How’s this for patience?”

  Slamming his boot into another hump of sand as hard as he could, Bob discovered that the individual grains had been hardened into a crude patch of glass by the sunlight at some point, and they crackled on impact. This sort of weirdness would be more at home on bloody Venus, and Bob knew it.

  Still without a clue as to what was going on, Bob wiped his wet brow with a matted chunk of his own greasy hair and hunkered down. The insane heat and lack of humidity was only getting more oppressive by the second, and Bob could feel rivulets of sweat working their way out of his scalp, armpits, and crotch. After another minute every inch of his skin was slippery, and if it wasn’t for the straps that held his new clothes in place Bob’s leathers would be sliding about all over the place. His boots squelched wetly with each step.

  “Well?” Bob finally demanded, extending his arms to each side. He glared into heat distortion so severe that it was like somebody had defaced a wet oil painting. “Is my present dying of heatstroke? Sweating until my balls pop out of my pores? Turning into Bob-flavoured jerky? Well?”

  “It will be here soon.” Ruska said cryptically, watching the Sun like it was the ticking hands of a clock.

  Bob turned sharply on the spot to regard his Mum. His weapon belt of corroded orange metal rattled and clunked against his heavy leathers.

  “It? It what?”

  “Your present.” Ruska’s eyes flicked down to regard something directly behind him. Her mouth quirked just as Bob detected a soft noise that was a combination of moving sand and metallic rattling. “You may want to pay more attention to your surroundings, sweet one.”

  Even without Ruska's obvious warning, Bob had already detected there was something behind him purely from the vibrations in the soles of his footwear. Most small children would freeze on the spot like prey at a time like this; however, staying still in the presence of a half-decent predator is generally as useless as a crepe paper condom. Due to the fact his instincts had been tempered by the wastes like he was a glowing sword in a forge, Bob turned and rolled to the side in one smooth motion. Something sharp flicked over his left ear halfway through the tumble, cleanly slicing away a knotted chunk of his hair, but as far as Bob could tell it had failed to score his skin.

  Whatever the thing was, it had rattled on the way past.

  Bob kept moving at top speed in unexpected ways. This meant all his attention was kept on hitting the sand gently and immediately rolling into his next position, rather than figuring out what the hell he was up against. He felt the rattling thing flick past his face again, and as Bob skidded across the fickle, salted ground in a burst of crumbs he drew his crude sword in one hand, his hook in the other, and turned to finally get a look at his enemy.

  It was worse than he could have guessed.

  The creature was a black mass of eight long prehensile insectoid tails, each of them tipped with stingers that ranged in shape from barbs to fishing hooks to corkscrews. The writhing
tails were the sort you saw on scorpions, but Bob had never encountered a scorpion bigger than a Tonka truck, let alone one that weighed twice as much as he did. The tips were dripping some kind of perfectly clear liquid that hissed on the sand, and Bob was pretty sure it wasn’t Mount Franklin Spring Water.

  The monster immediately registered as something his Mum had once told him about in his smaller years, a phantasm that his four-year-old self had insisted couldn’t possibly be real, even though he didn’t know the definition of the words “register” or “insist,” let alone “phantasm.” If a word wasn’t capable of offending somebody, it wasn’t the sort that Bob would know.

  Bob cursed quietly. Yep, it was a Hydra all right. He didn’t know how, but somehow his Mum had found a species that only existed in ancient folk tales, and apparently she decided it would be a good idea to allow it to sneak up on her only son.

  Bob called out the most heroic thing he could manage at that point.

  “Mum!” he sobbed.

  “Happy birthday!” Ruska called unhelpfully.

  Bob gritted his brittle teeth. Great. She thinks facing me off against Hercules’ worst nightmare is a good thing. Obviously the Russian definition of the word “present” didn’t have much in common with the Unglish version.

  Sizing up his enemy, keeping a distance from the poisonous barbs as he paced a circle around the beast, Bob realised an important fact within a dozen steps. Although the stingers were able to flash out like fencing rapiers in the hand of an Olympic gold medallist, the thing’s body wasn’t able to move about all that well, and a simple glance at the ground explained why: the core point where those eight tails converged looked like an entire colony of scorpion torsos had been mashed into a single body, glued together with araldite and allowed to heal up all crooked. This badly deformed trunk sat atop at least fifty legs, and while a large number of these limbs were underdeveloped or otherwise crippled, the Hydra could move about well enough to get by. It wouldn’t be doing parkour backflips any time soon, but it was mobile enough to be a threat.

  The tails tracked Bob as he circled, rattling at him like wooden beads, and the two combatants examined the other for weaknesses. Unfortunately, all Bob saw was armoured chitin, sharpness and venom, while the Hydra was up against moist pink flesh armed with weapons so tarnished that they might as well be made out of dried mud. Suffice to say, the Hydra didn’t seem worried about the odds.

  Watching the tails weave about, occasionally darting back beyond the immediate range of eight poisoned stingers, Bob finally noticed something useful: the three tails on the Hydra’s left side were far more flexible and longer than the five on the right, as though the asymmetrical beast was a southpaw. Bob could also make out something pumping beneath the chitin of the Hydra at the base of its five lesser tails, almost like a heartbeat, and his brain mentally ticked the “weak point” box.

  Even though he was barely nine, Bob had been brought up by parents who never held back, never thought about things before doing them, who always leaped before they looked. His entire existence was because of bad judgement and impetuousness, and Bob was genetically hardwired to jump off any darkened cliff and simply hope for a feather mattress to miraculously appear to break his fall.

  So he attacked. It was in his nature.

  Faking out to the Hydra’s left, all three of the powerful tails whipped out at Bob like slingshots. The wildboy hurdled over them with ease and cartwheeled to the creature’s right. Wobbling off-balance as it did it best to turn its lumpy, misshapen body, the Hydra was unable to finish recoiling before Bob had planted his sword straight in the pulsating sack beneath the five baby tails. Accidentally snapping off the length of his blade once it had penetrated the target in a burst of green muck, Bob continued to spin away from the darting spikes. Falling just a metre short of where he’d intended to land, Bob’s mouth opened in a perfectly round O as all three of the Hydra’s strongest tails slammed into his back, piercing the leather over his upper spine, left kidney and liver, instantly proving without a doubt that Bob had badly, badly misjudged the monster’s speed. The combined impact of all three tails added together was on par with being hit by a fast-moving Volvo, and as Bob hit the ground with teeth-rattling force he was stunned so badly that he had no idea where he was, or even who he was. Bob felt one of the barbs lodge in his back and snap off, but as though witnessing it from a distance.

  Rolling over with a pitiful moan and trying not to cry snotty tears, Bob gagged at the overwhelming stink of corrosive venom sizzling on his clothing. The Hydra rattled its tails in a triumphant way as it reared up, preparing to feast on his meat. Blinking away the triple-vision, totally defenceless and probably seconds away from being eaten alive (if the poison didn’t kill him first), Bob's eyes finally focussed properly just in time to get a clear view of stingers darting for his face. As his very last act on this planet, Bob screwed up his mouth, hawked, and spat a phlegmy gob at the creature that was about to munch out on his warm organs.

  The tails flashed…and stopped a centimetre short.

  Bob blinked. His entire scope of vision was made up of nothing but stingers, but no matter how badly the Hydra tried, it just couldn’t cover those last few millimetres. Crawling backwards like a crab on his palms and heels, knowing that he shouldn’t take this godsend for granted, Bob scurried well out of range before he stopped again. From his new, safer vantage point, Bob could see that the Hydra had a thick chain wrapped around its midsection. This leash led down into the sand where Bob assumed the Hydra had emerged.

  The green gunk pumping from where Bob had embedded his ruined sword in the creature's chitin was now haemorrhaging yellow, and the Hydra's struggles became weaker and weaker over the next thirty seconds until it gave up fighting and decided to take a nap. Bob was pretty sure he could hear it snoring.

  Puffing and panting, Bob’s relief instantly turned to panic again as he remembered he far from safe: judging from the size of those stingers, he probably had half a litre of mutant venom swimming about in his bloodstream right now, corkscrewing towards his heart with each beat, preparing to incinerate his entire circulatory system in a matter of moments…

  Bob somehow got back to his feet, limping and in awful pain, and started to untie the leather straps with clumsy fingers. The Hydra reared up at this motion, trying to get closer, but it was no dice for Mister Mutant Scorpion, and it curled up in resignation again.

  Sliding off his sweat-slicked gear and dropping it to the hot sand, Bob tried to reach around to the three soon-to-be-fatal wounds along his spine. Try as he might, his fingers just wouldn’t reach.

  Crap.

  Despite his panic, Bob knew that something wasn’t right about all this. He hurt all over, sure, but it was a blunt kind of pain, like being hit by a metal pipe, rather than the sharp pain of a horse hypodermic. He was missing something here, some factor...

  Taking a decent look at his discarded leather kit explained everything. Bob could instantly make out the trio of puncture wounds – the force of the impact had been so great that one of the barbs had actually snapped off on impact - but his flesh hadn't been stung. Not even a little bit. Patting around the punctures revealed that thin green slabs had been tied in place between layers of moleskin and coyote hide in order to serve as armour. The source of these life-saving slabs had obviously been arc-welded away from one of the army surplus crates stashed in Daddy’s Secret Basement That Bob Must Never Go Into Without Permission. Although dented and sizzling with venom, the ceramic plates had prevented Bob from getting perforated senseless.

  Now dressed only in his fur boots and weapon belt, Bob looked up at his Mum as she knuckled towards him with a smile the size of a crescent moon. Feeling a little hysterical, he matched her smile for exactly three seconds.

  And then he vomited, wet his pants, and passed out, in that order.

  *

  They remained in this hell-within-a-hell for a time. Ruska had bought along an assortment of salves stamped with Milit
ary symbols to rub into her son's bruises and scrapes, and then she stroked his hair and sung Russian nursery rhymes in a voice that was about as soothing as a power sander to the genitals.

  Bob shook uncontrollably in her gorilla arms for a time, trying not to cry any more tears today. Despite his mother's tenderness, it was kinda hard to ignore the fact that she'd almost gotten him viciously murdered by a freaking Hydra. So, Bob had things to say at this point, and he started with the most obvious one.

  “I didn't think Hydras were real.”

  Bob curled up closer to his furry Mum.

  “Was not real Hydra,” Ruska noted, continuing to stroke his hair. “I find badly mutated female scorpion one day, and she in middle of giving birth, so I watch for entertainment. Unfortunately, all the babies were...what is word...conjoined together into one body. They a horrible mass, twitching and fighting to go in different direction, and obviously in bad pain. But then I realise they here for reason, and I bring them where they are safe, and I help them grow. They live under sand there for three years, and I always bring them enough scraps to stay alive. In time, they learn to work together, and become strong. I pretty sure their brain stems have grown together and rewired themselves.” Ruska smiled. “I call it Shnookums, or Sknookie for short. Is...is pet, yes?”