by J. S. Volpe
* * *
The four gorgim, fifty feet behind John Grommet, had also witnessed the fate of the Zombie Hill Boys.
“This treasure is well-guarded,” General Blood said in a low, unhappy voice.
“How the buggering fuck are we gonna get past that thing?” asked Slobog.
General Blood pondered this for a long while. Finally he looked up at Gojan.
“What’s the range of your atomic breath?”
Gojan shrugged his huge scaly green shoulders.
“I dunno. Fifteen feet or so, I guess.”
“Hm. That seems to be about the range of the robot’s arms as well. Could your breath melt those metal blades at the ends of its arms?”
“Probably, but it might take a second or two.”
“We’d need something to distract it for those couple of seconds.”
“Not one of us, surely,” Hetchiglingum said. “You saw what that thing did to those stupid humans. A couple of seconds means death.”
General Blood nodded. “I know, I know. There has to be another way.”
“We could throw rocks at it,” Slobog offered.
“It’d just shrug those off. Besides, I suspect we’ll need something it’ll see as a threat to the building’s security…”
His gaze fell on Daddy Vermin’s corpse.
He smiled.
