Hard Luck Hank: Prince of Suck

by Steven Campbell

  The Therezian wore black. A vest, aged and torn. Shorts that might have once been longer pants. Bare feet. Bare arms. Therezians only had three fingers and no joints on them. The species were sexless from what I had seen in the past, but they had overall masculine physiques—just blown up to gargantuan size.

  I heard an electric whirring beside me and Zadeck, in his golden wheelchair, drove out in the street in front of me. What was he doing?

  “Wallow?” Zadeck creaked.

  No! It couldn’t be. Wallow was never that big. Wallow was sucked out into space seventy-eight years ago. It couldn’t possibly be him.

  “Zadeck,” the Therezian boomed.

  That voice had given me ten thousand nightmares. It was him!

  “Wallow!” Zadeck repeated, full of emotion. “You’ve returned! I-I missed you. Everything has changed. But you’re back!”

  He was still more than two blocks away.

  Wallow had grown somehow. I remember him being maybe thirty-five feet tall. Was it just perspective? No, he was definitely larger. His arms were bigger. His legs. That ugly, rotten face with its ridges and bones. Had he only been a child when he was here before?

  Zadeck had been Wallow’s old boss—more than that. Wallow was almost a pet of Zadeck’s. And now Wallow was back. Zadeck was the King of Belvaille.

  Garm might reign in City Hall, surrounded by her fortress, but Wallow could knock it all down like it was tinfoil. Governor, City Council, Supreme Kommilaire, all that stuff was meaningless now that Zadeck had Wallow again.

  Guess I’d be retiring sooner than I thought.

  I turned back and saw the street was indeed clear except for a few reporters, Rendrae, and—

  “Why are you still here?” I asked Valia.

  “Because you are,” she said calmly.

  “Get out of here. That thing is a psychopath.”

  “I’m not scared,” Valia said defiantly.

  “Then you’re stupid. I’m scared. Now go.”

  “Boss,” Wallow said. Yet there was something about his tone.

  He took what looked like a half-dozen steps, and jumped into the sky!

  I had never seen Wallow jump before. I had to crane my head back as far as it would go to follow him.

  BAM!

  Wallow came down with a crash and the shockwave flung me back onto the bare metal road.

  All the roads in Belvaille were sprayed with a tacky substance to provide grip and compression. When it got damaged, we simply sprayed more. Wallow’s splashdown ripped up the entire road and flung it against the buildings where it collected in heaps.

  I managed to look back and see Valia land about twenty feet behind me. She scrambled to her feet and ran like she was custom built for running. I’d never seen anyone sprint so fast.

  Zadeck.

  Wallow slowly straightened and I realized he had landed on his former boss. There wasn’t the smallest sign of him left. Whether he was stuck to the bottom of Wallow’s feet or crushed into a black hole, I didn’t know.

  The monster was ten feet away from me and I was prone on my back. I couldn’t get up, let alone run away. And even if I could, Wallow was faster than anything on this station.

  Wallow stared at me, slowly cocking his head.

  “Hank,” he said.

  Wallow had loved Zadeck and now Zadeck was reduced to atoms.

  Wallow had always hated me.

  I think I was hyperventilating. And my age, my illness, my prostate, my fear, all joined forces and decided to be super helpful: I peed my pants. At least I’d get Wallow’s feet smelly when he squashed me.

  Wallow pushed his face closer to my helpless form. He had to put two fists on the ground beside me to lean so low.

  His face. It must have been around seven feet tall. Every two inches or so was some scar. A pockmark. A cut. A crater. A gash. Burns.

  Wallow didn’t have so much as a blemish when he was on Belvaille before.

  This was a creature who had been fighting for seven decades. Warring for seven decades. Who must have confronted everything a galactic civil war could throw at him.

  And he was still here.

  “You look fat,” Wallow said. “And old.”

  I wanted to say something. To not die just sitting here in a puddle of piss. But I couldn’t talk. I don’t think it was a heart attack. I was just really really frightened.

  He looked at me a long time. His eyeballs were gigantic. You could bowl someone down with one. Why was I thinking that?

  He suddenly stood up. He walked past me a few steps and stopped.

  “Is that grain storage still in the northeast?” he asked me.

  I spun myself around so I could see him.

  “Uh, n-no, it’s not. Been gone a while,” I answered, anxious to be helpful.

  I noticed that Wallow no longer spoke in halting, guttural Colmarian.

  Wallow turned away and began walking. Some suicidal instinct gripped me.

  “Wallow! Hey! Do you want a job?”

  Why did I call out to him? He was leaving!

  Wallow turned back around and I saw his face, which looked perpetually angry, look even angrier.

  “I don’t work for anyone anymore!” Then his voice dropped to merely a semi-deafening roar, “I’m…tired.”

  Wallow continued onward and it slowly dawned on me that I wasn’t about to die.

  Though it would be just like Wallow to come running back around the corner and step on me right when I had my hopes up.

  http://www.belvaille.com/hlh3/wallow.gif

  CHAPTER 43

  I had my Stair Boys discreetly check on Wallow, who was in the northeast, standing in the middle of a street. I didn’t know if that was how he slept or if Therezians slept at all.

  But I knew no one was going to bother him.

  Zadeck had told me they eat very little in relation to their size. They really got every single good attribute a species could get. Except finger joints.

  I finally decided I had to go and see him because I didn’t want him to get hungry and start raiding the city for food. Not when we would be more than happy to give it to him.

  I made it clear that I wasn’t looking to give him a job. I just wanted to know if he wanted food or water.

  He said yes. Each meal was maybe the equivalent of three of mine and a lot of water. We set up a schedule and I tasked various businesses with providing the supplies. Normally I expected them to push back on this demand of their resources, but no one blinked.

  It wasn’t that much food, they preferred it to a hungry Therezian, and I said they could advertise themselves as an “Official Feeder of Wallow.” In the end they probably came out net-positive.

  Though it was still pretty frightening pushing a wheelbarrow full of food up to a fifty-foot giant.

  I sent some couriers to Garm, hoping they knew some secret way inside her fortress. They all came back and said they couldn’t deliver.

  “Who is Garm, anyway?” Valia asked.

  We were sitting in my apartment, having dinner. I had often eaten with MTB, but with him self-transferred, I was talking to Valia more often. She was considerably better to look at.

  “Garm is our boss. In a way. She owns the city.”

  “How can anyone own Belvaille? It’s so disorganized.”

  “She bought it long ago, which allowed us to expand, and she has control of all the major systems.”

  “So then what would the Governor and City Council be to her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And why is she maybe trying to kill you? But then fires the judge who was barely even bothering you?”

  “I don’t know,” I sulked.

  “But you know her, right?”

  “Oh, yeah. We used to date! I mean, for like a month or so. Few months. I can’t remember. But we worked together a lot. I thought we were good friends. Then she just kind of disappeared from public life and locked herself away.”

  “And you took over publ
ic life?”

  “Me? I’m hardly public. It’s just a job.”

  “Are you kidding? I heard about you where I grew up. And that was before I even knew about this part of the galaxy.”

  “Well, as you can see, not all the fairy tales are true.”

  “Honestly, you’re almost exactly like what the stories say about you. Just a lot slower.”

  “Where did you grow up, anyway?” I asked.

  Valia had been drinking some wine and was getting looser. I liked her this way, she seemed more vulnerable. Less like she had a chip on her shoulder. Like she wasn’t trying so hard.

  I didn’t get drunk often. Delovoa’s crazy brews could get me there but I always ended up regretting it. I had thought about taking drugs to unwind, but I had enough health problems.

  “I grew up in the North Reach Cluster of the old empire. It had been colonized by Colmarians instead of being an existing species that had been taken over by Colmarians. So it was only a few thousand years old. It was clean,” she said, smiling.

  “I pretty much grew up on Belvaille. I keep thinking where I’m going to go after here, but if I leave, I know I’ll be uncomfortable. It’s hard to change as you get older.”

  “Don’t leave. Belvaille is exciting. Trust me, I’ve been all around, and in this one city I’ve seen more than on whole planets.”

  “Yeah, but how many nude junkies do you really need to see?”

  “If you want quiet and boring, go pick a mountain somewhere, sit down, and wait to die.”

  “That doesn’t sound half bad. I’ve never seen a mountain. I haven’t seen just about anything except this space station.”

  “Here.”

  Valia dumped my container of oats on the table. She then pushed it all together between her hands, making a pile.

  “Picture that a million times bigger. That’s a mountain,” she said.

  She stared at it closely.

  “See how it doesn’t do anything? How no one is there? No Hobardi. Or Garm. Or Feral Kids. Just…nothing. It’s like outer space except you die slower.”

  “Alright. Alright. Put it back in the container, I’m going to eat that,” I complained. “So what about you? Do you think you’ll want to stay on as a Stair Boy? Maybe work with MTB when I’m dead.”

  “Probably not,” she said.

  “Wow, that was honest.”

  “I think you have to care to do this job. And right now I care. But I think it wears you out. When you care so long and get burnt so much, it’s easier to not care. And then you’re no good as a Kommilaire.”

  “Hmm. You think I still care?” I asked her, worried about her response.

  “Hank’s Butt,” she cried, blinking. “Of course you care! You’re dragging yourself around every single day, fussing about every little problem, about to keel over any minute.”

  I gave her a look.

  “What?” she asked. “You don’t think I can tell? Maybe you have everyone else fooled, but you’re unbelievably sick. I have no idea how you’re still alive.”

  “Thanks,” I grumbled.

  “I take it back. I know how you’re still alive: it’s you trying to help this city in spite of itself. If you go off to your mountain, I bet you’ll die the next day with nothing to keep you going.”

  “Maybe,” I said, pondering that. “So then what keeps you going?”

  “I’m young, I don’t need anything to keep me going. But I know I don’t want to waste all my tears on this city. It won’t notice when I’m gone.”

  “Oh, you never know. You might be Supreme Kommilaire one day and give this same speech to another kid.”

  “Seems like I’m already the one giving the speech, old man.”

  CHAPTER 44

  I got a confusing note from Hobardi. It said he was withdrawing from the race.

  That was it, just one sentence.

  I had already taken his entrance fee and I wasn’t going to refund it. But more importantly, I wasn’t going to cancel his candidacy based on a note. It could be, and likely was, a forgery.

  The Poop Wars were still going strong and getting worse. This was just the kind of thing I expected next, the candidates making fake claims on behalf of one another. I was going to have to put my foot down about this sooner or later.

  I wanted to talk to Hobardi. I had to confirm the withdrawal note was a fake and ask him about the clone Two Clem. I needed to know if Hobardi had been fooled or had known all along.

  There was a holiday going on today in Belvaille. With so many cultures and populations converging on the station in the past decades, it seemed the number of holidays we had was about three a day.

  Mother Madchay’s March was larger than most holidays. And I think it was originally created to commemorate some lady who had magically saved a village from…I don’t know, some terrible thing.

  Now, to the best of my understanding, the celebrants were required to get as drunk as possible and have sex with as many people as possible and to get in huge, drunken fights if they couldn’t find anyone to have sex with. Mother Madchay had become a belligerent, alcoholic slut.

  Most of my Stair Boys were covering that. More people died and were injured every year during the celebration than were probably saved in the original incident, which made it a rather inefficient and ironic miracle.

  I had Valia with me, because she had been helpful talking with Hobardi before, and five other Kommilaire, just in case we ran into some errant Marchers trying to celebrate each other to death.

  We indeed ran into several groups of people alternately vomiting, fighting, and making out.

  Drunks were hard to deal with. And if they’re drunk enough to be dry-humping electrical junction boxes in the middle of the street, you knew they were well beyond listening to any lecture on propriety you might give them.

  We had a good method for dealing with drunks provided there were few enough of them. We just blasted them with cold fire extinguishers for about twenty seconds.

  At first they would laugh. Then they would choke. Then they would feel their skin freezing. Your body is good at getting you undrunk really quick. Or at the least making you put your clothes back on and stop licking buildings.

  A few more interruptions and we were in the Sublime Order of Transcendence’s part of town and no one was having any fun. Maybe Hobardi wouldn’t be such a bad Governor after all. At least he kept things sedate. But I would look absurd wearing a toga and headdress.

  The sexy secretary told me Hobardi wasn’t seeing anyone. She took my inquiry as a request. I had not said it as such, however, and ignored her, walking past.

  She jumped up, pulled her miniskirt down with both hands, and scooted over to try and stop me from proceeding further.

  “The Grandmaster is not taking visitors,” she said firmly.

  Valia punched her in the nose, sending the woman sprawling across the floor.

  She saw my look and shrugged.

  “She annoyed me.”

  We wound through the compound looking for Hobardi.

  “Hank,” Valia said.

  I turned and saw the Order’s mutant. The tall, thin man wearing dark glasses and smelling of acid.

  “You are trespassing,” he said in a dead voice.

  “I need to talk to Hobardi. He sent me a message,” I said.

  “The Grandmaster is occupied with his meditations,” the mutant answered.

  “Is that a code for something? If he’s got diarrhea, I’m not going to embarrass him, it happens to us all. I just need to ask him a few questions.”

  The mutant put his fists on the sides of his temples and pushed inward.

  “What?” I asked.

  I looked at my Kommilaire. They didn’t know what he was doing either.

  He then grabbed his own neck with both hands and squeezed.

  “What’s he doing?” Valia asked.

  “Are you trying to tell me something? Is Hobardi sick?” I asked.

  “Maybe he’s sick?�
�� one of my Stair Boys said.

  The mutant stopped, pursed his lips, and then dug his fingers into his sides, under his ribs.

  “Are you alright?” I asked.

  “Maybe he can’t talk,” Valia whispered. “Are you saying ‘sides’?” she asked the mutant.

  “Skin?” a Stair Boy said.

  “Suicide?” another guessed.

  The mutant put his thumbs into his mouth and seemed to be biting them.

  “Uh, teeth. Tongue,” I blurted.

  “Thumbs. Like money? Do you want us to pay you?” Valia tried.

  The mutant stopped, looking annoyed. He then put his right hand to his side, made like he was lifting something and then held his finger and thumb out in an obvious display:

  “Gun! Pistol,” I said.

  I turned around to my Kommilaire to see if they agreed.

  They all had their pistols drawn with blank expressions.

  Hmm.

  The mutant held his hand forward and flexed his index finger.

  Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!

  All my Stair Boys shot me!

  “You know,” I said to the mutant, “I’m bulletproof, right? Those are just guns.”

  Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!

  “I mean, it’s annoying and all. But what do you hope to accomplish? Though it’s a cool mutation you have. What is it? Some kind of mind…mind-thing?”

  Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!

  “Right,” I sighed.

  I drew one of my rifles and cocked it.

  The mutant made a jerky series of motions with his fingers and I was suddenly being hit and kicked and grappled by my Kommilaire. All of whom weighed a tiny fraction of me.

  They were disturbing my hair and my clothes a bit, but that was it.

  Valia had her legs on my chest and was hanging off my gun, trying to wrench it away. She’d have an easier time trying to tow Belvaille with a space-donkey—if there was such a thing as space-donkeys.

  “I don’t want to shoot you, guy. Not many of us mutants left. But you’ve kind of mind controlled my Kommilaire and you’re wearing sunglasses inside, which is a pet peeve of mine.”

  He made the finger-pistol movement again.