“We couldn’t do that to her,” said Loren.
“It’d just be cruel,” said Cal. “If she cared. Which I don’t think she does. But if she did… It’d just be cruel.”
Silence fell in the gulf between them. Elsewhere, diners chatted and laughed, glasses clinked, cutlery clacked, and some sultry space jazz filled in all the remaining gaps.
Cal knew he should say something, but no matter how desperately he grasped for a conversation starter, he came back empty. This was unusual for him. He’d always considered his ability to just talk as one of his core skills. No matter the company, no matter the situation, he’d always been able to find something to say.
Granted, much of it was nonsense, and the actual words that came out of his mouth often resulted in him being beaten or chased, but it had always been one of his defining qualities.
Now, though, words deserted him.
That, however, was all about to change.
“Jesus!” he gasped, recoiling. “What the fonk is that smell?”
Loren sniffed. “What smell?”
“That smell!” Cal yelped, covering his mouth and nose with one hand. “Can’t you smell that?”
The look on Loren’s face told him that yes, she could, while also telling him that he should shut the fonk up right now. Unfortunately, he failed to pick up on that second part.
“It smells like Irritable Bowel Syndrome just shizzed out a sewer system,” Cal continued. He gagged into his hand a few times, before swallowing something down. “I mean… Christ. It’s like a skunk had a rectal prolapse then died.”
Loren’s eyes flicked very deliberately to something behind Cal. Something quite large, judging by her gaze’s upward trajectory. Cal’s own eyes were watering so badly, though, that he didn’t pick up on it.
“It’s like Detroit farted and followed through,” he continued.
“Cal,” said Loren.
“It’s like someone tried to put out a dumpster fire with cat vomit.”
Loren tried again, more firmly this time. “Cal.”
Cal gagged again, blinked away his tears, and finally met Loren’s gaze. It took him a moment, but then he understood the significance of the way her eyes kept flicking up somewhere above his head.
Waaaaaay above his head.
“And yet,” he said, wafting a hand in front of his face and pretending to inhale. “It is not without a certain robust charm.”
A hand was placed on his shoulder. It was a big hand, and so heavy that it almost toppled him out of his chair. The smell that emanated from the bristly black fur assaulted him, easily violating the nostrils he had been attempting to clench tightly shut.
It was fish heads in the sun. Month-old garbage. The hotdog he’d eaten in Mumbai which, upon closer inspection some twenty minutes later, turned out not to have been a hot dog at all, except perhaps in the most literal sense.
“You say something?” grunted a voice from up high.
“It’s fine,” said Loren. “He didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I’ll decide if it’s fine,” the voice retorted. The weight on Cal’s shoulder increased as the unseen person leaned down until his face was close to Cal’s ear. “And it ain’t fine.”
Cal retched. He tried to do it as subtly and as quietly as possible, but successfully achieved neither of these objectives.
“Cal, this is a Narlup,” Loren explained, not taking her eyes off the thing behind him. “Their odors are of great personal importance to them. They take pride in their… scent.”
“Right. Right. It’s just… It’s so musky,” Cal coughed. “It took me by surprise, that’s all.”
Steeling himself, he turned to face the foul-smelling creature. The voice was male, but the face was decidedly ambiguous. It was flat and wide, with leathery patches on the cheeks and chin, eyes that slanted up at forty-five degree angles, and a nose so small and insignificant that it needn’t really have bothered showing up.
The rest of the head was a blend of short black and gray fur, with a couple of fleshy ears flopping outward like overripe bananas at the sides, all sickly-yellow and patches of brown.
And it was big, as heads went. Bigger than Mech’s, Cal calculated, and that guy had a sizeable fonking head.
Cal’s initial reaction was to punch the face as hard as he could and then run away screaming, but he forced himself to remain seated and rustled up an expression that he hoped came across as suitably friendly.
“Look, how about I buy you a drink as way of an apology?” he suggested. “I hear this place does a great putrid…” He snapped his fingers a few times. “Loren?”
“Acclusian Noribenger.”
“That. Yes. Thank you,” said Cal. “We could buy you one of those, put all this unpleasantness behind us, and go about our business happier, wiser, and—I’m going to go right ahead and say what we’re all thinking—better people than we were before. What do you say?”
The Narlup said nothing. Instead, a dozen or so little holes opened like tiny anuses in his fur. A smell hit Cal like a bomb-blast to the olfactory centers of his brain. He didn’t so much recoil as physically shrink, every part of him tightening and constricting as his lungs and airways went into lock-down, and the rest of his body joined in to show its moral support.
The smell wasn’t just bad, it was somehow insulting. It was an affront to all other smells that Cal had ever smelled. Even Paris.
OK, maybe not Paris, but every other smell.
Cal tried to wheeze an, “Oh well, another time, maybe,” but his mouth remained firmly shut and his breathing apparatus was still firmly opting out. Despite this, the smell was still finding its way through. He could feel it filling him up, permeating all his permeable parts, and almost certainly riddling him with cancer.
“Let him go. Now.”
Cal looked across at the blurry shape that he guessed was Loren. It was hard to make her out properly, thanks to the way his eyes were watering. He was also fairly certain that the left eye was in the process of melting, which wasn’t exactly helping matters.
He tried to tell Loren that he was fine, and that he was more than capable of standing up for himself, but only made it as far as, “I’m f—” before projectile vomiting into the Narlup’s face.
Cal gurgled, coughed, and gasped all at the same time. He covered his mouth with a hand. “Oh, God! I am so sorr—” he began, before another eruption of barf blasted through the gaps between his fingers, applying a glossy topcoat to the already well-covered face of the Narlup.
The Narlup blinked several times, each time more slowly than the one before. Vomit clagged in his fur and dribbled down his chin.
Cal took a moment to compose himself and make sure he wasn’t going to throw-up a third time, then quietly cleared his throat.
“So,” he said. His voice was a whisper, but silence had fallen across the restaurant now, and it seemed to echo around the room. “What happens now?”
“Now?” said the Narlup.
His grip tightened on Cal’s shoulder. There was a moment of pain, a sensation of weightlessness, and then there was a table. It was not his and Loren’s table, but another table that was much larger and farther away.
He hit it with quite considerable force, smiled apologetically as he skidded through several delicious-looking dinners, then his face got acquainted with the lap of an elderly woman who winked salaciously at him when he looked up.
The Narlup’s voice boomed in the hush that followed.
“Now, I kill you.”
Two
Cal wasn’t a fan of fighting. Which was ironic, really, considering how often he found himself involved in one.
It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy being punched in the face. He didn’t, obviously, but that wasn’t the main reason for his dislike of violence. Similarly, while he wasn’t the world’s biggest fan of being kicked in the nuts, elbowed in the kidneys, or thrown ass-first through a wall, none of these were the main issue he had with violence.<
br />
The main reason he wasn’t a fan of fighting was that he didn’t actually like hitting people. Yes, he accepted that it was often a necessary evil, and that some people occasionally needed to find themselves on the receiving end of a solid punch to the face, but enjoy it? No.
He especially didn’t enjoy hitting people who smelled like a corpse’s diarrhea and were dripping vomit all over the floor. He’d go so far as to say he actively disliked that, in fact.
And yet, here they were.
The Narlup was, to Cal’s relief, not quite as solid as he looked. Punching him still felt like driving a fist into a bag of cement, granted, but it wasn’t the brick wall Cal had been bracing himself for. In fact, the Narlup’s torso was soft and pliable enough that Cal decided he might even punch him again, just as soon as the bones in his hands had knitted back together and he’d stopped crying.
Before either of these things could happen, the Narlup hit him back. The force of it flipped Cal two-thirds of the way through what would’ve been a textbook backflip, before the top of his skull found the edge of a table and the whole maneuver just sort of folded to an untidy end.
As he lay there, Cal reconsidered the reasons he didn’t enjoy fighting, and moved the ‘getting hit’ part up into the number one position. He also inserted it into positions two through nine, with the ‘hitting people back’ bit just hanging on in there and rounding out the top ten.
His head hurt. His back hurt. His fist hurt. The room swam in giddy circles around him, and he wasn’t entirely convinced that he still had a face. Not a functioning one, at least. Not one that wouldn’t make women scream and small boys gawp in mute, horrified wonder, at any rate.
Fortunately, he healed quickly.
Unfortunately, not quickly enough.
The Narlup’s grip tightened around his ankle. Cal screamed as he cartwheeled through the air like the throwing star of some giant ninja. He briefly locked eyes with Loren as he passed her, upside-down, then whanged against one of the ornate marble columns that stood spaced out around the restaurant.
The restaurant itself was pretty much empty now, most sensible people having made a break for it when the fighting kicked off.
The even more sensible ones had taken a moment to grab their dinner plates and whatever alcohol they could carry before fleeing the scene, safe in the knowledge that no one could possibly blame them for getting out of there without paying, given all the violence and wanton destruction that had been going on around them at the time.
Only a few stragglers remained. They lurked near the exits, watching the battle with a growing sense of fascination. Both combatants had things going for them. The Narlup was bigger, faster, and much stronger, but the human had a real talent for taking a punch. He could also scream in a surprisingly high register, and the sheer range of facial expressions he was demonstrating were, they all agreed, a genuine joy to behold.
No one was saying they were evenly balanced, of course, just that they both had their strengths.
Cal slid down the column, leaving a slug-trail of blood, snot, and tears on its otherwise pristine white stone. He sat down heavily on the floor, flopped backward, and spent a few seconds admiring some impressive ceiling cornicing before a foot stamped into his stomach, folding him up at the middle and ejecting the last remnants of air out of him at both ends.
WHUMF.
It was one indignity too far. His lungs declared themselves out. They’d had enough. He tried to stand, but his spine was refusing to carry the message to his legs, and it was all he could do to twitch.
His eyes were working, although he dearly wished that they weren’t, as they only served to afford him a clear, uninterrupted view of the Narlup’s foot raising again.
“Aw, Jesus,” he managed to mutter, then the Narlup hissed as Loren fired a kick into the knee of his supporting leg, and he was sent stumbling through a table.
“Stand down!” she warned, positioning herself between Cal and the Narlup. Her hands weren’t raised, but instead hung loosely by her sides. Cal knew this meant nothing. Unlike him, Loren enjoyed fighting. Probably because she was so damned good at it.
“Out of my way, you malodorous pair of teats,” the Narlup spat.
Loren’s eyebrows raised. “I’m sorry?”
Cal wheezed out a half-chuckle. “Teats,” he said.
The Narlup scowled. His face anuses—or fanuses, as Cal was choosing to call them, albeit only inside his head—opened and closed, parping out a chorus of toxic guffs.
Loren coughed once, but held her ground. Cal was impressed. He was farther away than she was, and it was all he could do not to cave in his own nose in a desperate attempt at self-preservation.
“You heard me, teats,” the Narlup said.
Loren’s arms no longer looked quite as relaxed as they had a moment ago. That was the first thing Cal noticed. The next thing he noticed was the leaping spinning kick, and the way the heel of Loren’s boot so firmly introduced itself to the side of the Narlup’s head.
After that, Cal mostly noticed the way the creature’s eye swelled up, and the expression of shocked outrage written all over its vomit-stained face.
Loren wasn’t really one for overt celebration, so she settled for a firm nod of triumph. “Now who’s a pair of—” she started to say, then a scything backhand from the Narlup caught her off guard. It lifted her off her feet, whistled her through the air, then wrapped her around another of the marble columns.
OK.
OK, that did it.
Groaning, Cal heaved himself into a standing position. This took quite a lot of effort, and he was forced to lean against the column for a few moments while he got his breath back. The Narlup, to his credit, waited.
“Thanks,” Cal said, once he had finally summoned both the strength and the oxygen to speak. “Listen, pal, no one hits my…”
He jabbed a thumb in Loren’s direction as she flipped up onto her feet.
“…friend. Or, you know, whatever.”
Bending, Cal retrieved his jacket from where it lay on the floor. He had refused the restaurant’s offer to hang it up for him and had insisted on keeping it close at hand. Now, everyone would find out why.
He smiled as he bunched the brown leather into a ball. “You asked for this, you big smelly fonk,” he said, then he tossed the jacket in the Narlup’s direction. “Go get him, Splurt!”
The jacket hit the Narlup, bounced off, and landed in a heap on the floor. Cal eyed it eagerly. “Get him, buddy. Show this fonk who’s boss.”
The Narlup looked down at the jacket. He was about to step over it when Cal raised a hand. “Wait. Hold on,” Cal told him. He squinted down at the jacket, then prodded it with his foot. “Splurt? Is that you?”
The jacket offered nothing in response.
“Ah, shizz,” Cal groaned. He looked down at himself, then raised a foot and hopped on the spot as he undid the laces of his right boot. “Maybe he’s one of these.”
“You told him not to come,” Loren pointed out, hobbling up to stand at Cal’s side.
“I know I told him not to come, I always tell him not to come, but he comes anyway,” said Cal. “That’s, like, his thing. You say, ‘Please don’t come, Splurt,’ and he just ignores you and comes, regardless. If there’s one thing I can count on is for Splurt to come places I don’t want him to come. He just comes everywhere.”
“Children present,” called an indignant voice from over by the door.
Cal replayed his last few sentences in his head, then wheeled around to face the woman who had spoken. “Jesus, I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. He gestured to the two young children standing wide-eyed beside her. “And why are you even letting your kids watch this, anyway? Are you trying to desensitize them to violence or something? Because, if so—”
The Narlup punched him so hard on the back of the head he had to shut his eyes to prevent them from popping out. Because he had his eyes closed, the floor took him by surprise when he pendulumed
onto it, his feet remaining mostly fixed to the spot while the rest of him swung around them like a hinge.
Anger flooded through him. This had gone far enough.
Rolling onto his back, Cal attempted one of Loren’s martial arts-style ‘kip up’ moves. He’d always admired the way she could flip to a standing position from flat on her back, and reckoned he’d seen her do it enough times to have a pretty good idea how it was done.
He kicked his legs, made a, “Hrwaoaw!” noise he felt was positively Bruce Lee-esque, and managed to raise his shoulders a full three inches off the floor before thudding back onto it. Seen from above, he resembled a fish on the deck of a boat, frantically flailing and flopping around as it tried to figure out what the fonk just happened to the world, and why its eyeballs were drying out.
“Fonk, that’s harder than it looks,” Cal muttered.
The Narlup stood over him, watching in amusement. His arms were crossed across his broad chest, which Cal was pleased about. If his arms were crossed it meant he wasn’t using them to pummel Cal’s face into the floor.
Right now, he had to take the positives where he could find them.
“Looks like we’re pretty evenly matched, friend,” Cal ventured.
“No, it doesn’t,” the Narlup replied.
Cal nodded. “No. It doesn’t. Fine. You win. How about we call a truce?”
The Narlup raised an eyebrow, although you had to look very closely to see it, since most of him was basically eyebrow. He pursed his lips and sucked in air, then a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“Fine,” he said, unfolding his arms and reaching out a hand. “You can buy me that drink.”
“And you can call me an ambulance,” Cal said, returning the smile.
It was at this point that the edge of a flying metal drink tray whanged across the Narlup’s stubby nose, shattering the bone and ejecting a fountain of blood onto the floor. He staggered back, both huge hands covering his face, an involuntary wail of pain bursting from his lips.
Space Team- The Collected Adventures 4 Page 32
