Bad Timing

by Rebecca Levene

  Very gently, Durham Red walked towards her fallen comrade, meaning to grab hold of her somehow and haul her out of the room and away from further trouble.

  She really did mean to do that. But when she got closer to the other woman, she saw the delicate trickle of blood which was oozing from an impact wound on the back of her head to puddle on the floor near her feet.

  And she felt an overwhelming hunger of her own.

  She shook her head, trying to banish these traitorous thoughts, knowing that feeding now could only lead to trouble. And, anyway, she ought to be feeding on the enemy, not on one of her own.

  Except the enemy was a robot. There'd be no blood to take from him. Everything else on this planet moved too damn fast to hunt. Which meant the only thing edible within several hundred kilometres was lying, helpless, on the floor before her.

  Before she knew it, she was kneeling at the other woman's feet, licking the blood from the floor, licking back along its path towards the wound that was oozing this amazing, life-giving substance. It was wonderful. It was like the first meal after a ten day fast. But it wasn't enough.

  She looked at the Blimp's white, unprotected neck. Just one little sip, she told herself. Just one. Before she could change her mind, she plunged her vampire-sharp teeth into the other woman's flesh and began to drink.

  Five seconds later, she was still drinking.

  And five seconds after that, she was torn away from the other woman and flung against the far wall to land with a dizzying thump. She looked up through blurry eyes to see the furious face of Middenface McNulty glaring down at her. "Ye wiggy wee scunner!" he shouted, then launched himself at her, fists pummelling.

  Dazed, trying to defend herself, Red grabbed his arms. He tore one free, but she managed to trip him, flinging him to the floor beside her. He bit the other arm with which she was holding him. She pulled it back, crying out in pain, but lashed out again, scratching her long nails across his face. He pulled back, narrowly avoiding losing an eye, and took the opportunity to launch another punch at her stomach.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Red could see One-Eyed Jack leaning against the open door frame, watching their fight with undisguised amusement.

  Then, just as Middenface had rolled on top of her, his hands round her throat, squeezing the life out of her, oblivious to the blows she was raining on his body, a dark-haired figure pushed into the room and tore Middenface away from her.

  "What the hell's going on here?" Johnny roared.

  Red tried to speak, but her throat was too bruised, and she ended up curling into a ball, coughing breath painfully back into her lungs.

  "That dirty nyaff was drinking frae Rose!" he said. "One more minute an' she would ha' killed her!"

  Johnny let go of his partner's arm and turned to glare at Red as she rose shakily to her feet. The other Strontium Dogs had arrived by now to witness the proceedings. "Is this true?" he asked her.

  Red felt hot with shame, but she'd eat her own tongue before she admitted that to Johnny. "I didn't knock her out," she protested. "She'd been eating all the food and one of the natives must have attacked her. She was unconscious when I got here."

  "So you thought you'd take her blood while she was down?" Johnny asked, his voice as cold and sharp as an icicle.

  Red opened her mouth to protest, to explain that she'd only wanted one sip, that she had needs, hungers, that it was her mutation, that it wasn't her fault. But at that moment, everything went dark.

  9 / NO SMOKE

  There was instant panic. Someone screamed - Johnny thought it was Enigma - and from the far side of the room came a low groan followed by a mumbled, "Oh God, help me, I've gone blind." The Blimp, it seemed, had woken up.

  "What's happening?" he heard Middenface ask from somewhere to his left. His sense of hearing sharpening in the absence of other sensory input, he could make out the sound of the Scottish mutant shuffling backwards through the rush-strewn floor, and then a soft thump as his back hit one wall of the building. Johnny smiled grimly. Middenface, at least, could be trusted to behave rationally in a situation like this. He'd positioned himself where no one could use the cover of the dark to sneak up behind him, and where he'd have a clear shot to anywhere in the room. Nearby, Johnny also thought he could hear the sound of Red dropping to her knees, steadying her aim and making herself as small a target as possible.

  Others were not so composed. Before Johnny had a chance to take any defensive measures himself, he felt someone grab his arm from one side, then another person from the other. One of the two people was crying, loud wracking sobs that would reveal their position, and Johnny's too, to anyone who cared to listen.

  He shook his arms impatiently, trying to free them to reach for his weapon. The grips were too tight though, one of them clawing in so deeply it was close to drawing blood. He risked a low hiss. "Let go!"

  One set of hands dropped from his arm, allowing him at last to grab for his blaster. He was forced to use his left hand, though, with its weaker grip and less sure aim. The other pair of hands remained firmly clinging to his arm. "Help me," their owner said. "I'm scared." Johnny realised that it must be Woman Man reverted to her female form again.

  He cursed softly, straining to see anything in the darkness, but it was black as space. He might as well be blind. Still, there had been no sign of an attack, no noise except that made by the ramshackle team of Strontium Dogs. If only he could see what was going on. He realised suddenly, he didn't need eyes for that. In his head he still had a clear image of the layout of the room, and of his position in it. And, most importantly, he remembered where the fireplace was, loaded with coals waiting to be lit.

  He took aim three and a half metres to his left and a little in front of him. Then, hoping that no one was standing between him and his target - but knowing that it was a risk he had to take - he softly instructed his weapon's voice-activation unit, "Number three cartridge," and launched a heat beam into the heart of the coals.

  A burning red beam shot out from the tip of the blaster, a beam that illuminated the room but blinded its occupants with its intensity after long minutes in the dark. There was a sharp spitting sound, a shower of sparks, and the fuel in the fireplace blazed up with a warm red-yellow glow.

  The scene it illuminated was a curiously calm one. Middenface was indeed backed against one wall, his blaster and eyes scanning the room. Red was kneeling not far from Johnny, still shielding her eyes from the flare of the incendiary round. The Blimp had dragged herself to her feet, and was holding a hand to the tooth-wounds in her neck. She looked puzzled, as if wondering how she'd managed to injure herself there in her fall. The rest were scattered around the room in varying poses of readiness or panic.

  There was no one else. No threat. No explanation for why everything had suddenly gone dark.

  "Holly Hamish!" Middenface suddenly exclaimed. "Where the hell did they come from?"

  He was staring at the opposite wall. Set into it were three beds, one above the other. And lying on two of the beds were a young woman and an older man, very human-looking and both seemingly fast asleep. Johnny had a sudden, absurd flash of the story of the Three Bears, with Middenface playing Goldilocks.

  By now, the others had spotted the newcomers too. The Sloth, who was nearest, took a step towards them. As he did, Johnny suddenly became aware of that familiar, neck-prickling sense of motion, of activity taking place just beyond the threshold of his awareness. And he realised why there were only two people in the beds, and why they were able to sleep without fear of the strangers in their midst.

  They had left a guard, a watcher. Now, as if his alpha rays were able to see this sentinel, to look into his mind, Johnny felt the watcher's attention shift to the hairy mutant. He felt a sudden, strong sense of threat.

  "Stop!" he shouted out to the Sloth. He wanted to run to the other, to grab hold of him, but he was afraid that any movement on his part might provoke the guardian further.

  Fortunately, the Sloth wa
s living up to his name, moving so slowly that the motion was all but undetectable to Johnny's eyes, let alone to someone whose normal frame of reference was nearly four-hundred times faster than his. Slowly, very slowly, the Sloth turned his head to look at Johnny. "What's up?" he asked in his low, growly voice.

  "We're not alone."

  Red rose awkwardly to her feet. "Give the man a cigar."

  "Not them," Johnny said impatiently. "There's someone else here."

  He felt a current of unease run through the room. Enigma flicked her head quickly to one side, spooked by a ghost noise, her long hair swirling round her face and catching in her mouth. Woman Man - who was, indeed, a woman again - had opened her eyes so wide with fear that they looked in danger of falling out of her face.

  "How do ye ken that?" Middenface asked. He was frowning at Johnny, puzzled rather than challenging. "I thought yer eyes couldnae see these wee gowks?"

  "They can't. I just... know," Johnny said.

  That was enough for Middenface, but the others weren't so ready to take Johnny at his word.

  "Is the fool the man who speaks or the man who trusts the fool without knowledge?" Min Qi Man asked.

  To Johnny's surprise, it was One-Eyed Jack who came to his defence. "Alpha's right." He glared round at the others, his good eye a narrow blue slit of mean. "There is someone else here. I can feel them moving. You would too if you'd spare the time to listen to your ears rather than your fear. I say we get the hell out of here."

  "But what if they're waiting for us outside? What if this is all an ambush?" Woman Man said, her voice high and panicked.

  One-Eyed Jack shrugged. "What if they've surrounded the house already? What if they're about to set fire to it and us inside it?"

  Johnny could have kicked him. The panic which has subsided when they had finally been able to see where they were flared up again full force. Enigma let out a small eep of fear, and Min Qi Man leapt three metres in the air, spun round, landed on all fours and scampered in three circles before finally coming to rest on his haunches, looking, if Johnny was reading his animalistic face correctly, slightly embarrassed.

  One-Eyed Jack just laughed. Then he strode to the door, wrenched it open, and stepped outside.

  A strong, almost blinding beam of light blared in through the door. Johnny shielded his eyes, unwilling to step out into the blaze until they had adjusted. All around him, the others froze in place, waiting for the sound of gunfire, of screams, of any evidence that One-Eyed Jack had sprung a trap.

  There was nothing.

  And then there was the sound of One-Eyed Jack laughing. Unlike his earlier, mocking outburst, it sounded as if he was genuinely amused. Johnny, finally able to see a little in the glare, stepped outside.

  After a moment, he couldn't help laughing to. The reason for the sudden darkness which had descended on them was abundantly clear. And ridiculously simple. Over every window of the house, a thick, wooden blind had been fastened. Of course, Johnny suddenly realised. From the point of view of the house's inhabitants, the sun only set once a year. If they wanted a peaceful, unlit night's sleep, they would have to create their own artificial darkness.

  One by one, the other Strontium Dogs filed out and made the same realisation. Middenface shook his head. "What a bunch o' neep-heids we are."

  Johnny looked round at the assembly. "Any reason why we shouldn't get the hell out of here?" he asked.

  The Blimp, still slightly shaky on her feet, blinked round at her surroundings. "Well, I guess it is still possible O'Blarney's hiding out in a cow shed somewhere."

  There was relieved laughter from everyone. And then they turned their back on the village, set their sights on the mountains, hovering blue and white on the horizon, and got the hell out of there.

  Ladybird, who had managed to sneak out of bed to watch the Glass People roam through the town, watched them leave it now with a mixture of disappointment and relief. The disappointment seemed to be sitting somewhere near her heart, making it ache with a pain she had never before experienced. She knew that, if her father had his way, she would never see the love of her life again.

  And yet she also knew that if the visitors had not chosen to depart, had continued their exploration of the village, then her people would have had no choice but to kill them.

  They would have been the first murders in the recorded history of her village. Their holy book, the book handed down from the first settlers on this planet, the blessed Trevor's Travel Diary, explicitly forbade violence. As it said: "If you, like, hurt another person, then you're kind of hurting yourself if you look at it one way, you know what I mean?"

  But the building just to the left of the one the visitors had entered, the one that looked like little more than a cowshed, housed something more important even than their most revered scriptures. Inside it were the fruits of their co-operation with Bad Boy O'Blarney. And her people would kill - and worse - to protect them.

  Which meant that Ladybird was going to have be very careful indeed if she wanted to take it for herself.

  Outside the village, once they had left the farmland and orchards behind them, the Strontium Dogs found themselves back on the never-ending plain. Except that now, the end was finally in sight. The grassland was beginning to give way to scrub, stunted bushes and scraggly weeds dotted over an increasingly bare and hard-baked earth. The mountains were clearer now, their tops snow-capped, their bases obscured by the foothills whose gentle slopes began not many kilometres in front of the bounty hunters.

  The season had changed, too. Summer had been and gone while they walked the plains, and now the air was beginning to moisten with the first hint of autumn. The leaves were drooping on the trees and the animals that dotted the plain were wearing the thick body fat that must last them through the lean winter - which, on this world, would seem to them like four months of darkness.

  Woman Man was back in his male form, moodily chewing on a wad of tobacco and eyeing Enigma with thinly disguised desire, so Johnny was able to walk alone, lost in his own thoughts. He was on the left flank of the party, which was spread out in a rough wedge-shape in front of him. The point of the triangle was Red, who'd volunteered to take the lead and scout out the territory for the others. Johnny suspected that she really wanted an excuse to stay as far away from the Blimp as possible. It hadn't taken the other mutant long to figure out where those mysterious wounds in her neck had come from, and she'd been after some blood of her own when she realised what Red had done to her.

  Red, unusually for her, had apologised and had even sounded sincere, and the Blimp hadn't chosen to pursue it further. The blonde-haired bounty hunter seemed to Johnny to have her head screwed on in just about the right position. She knew that they needed to concentrate on O'Blarney for now. Any scores could be settled after they took him down. Still, if Johnny had been Red, he would have been watching his back.

  Middenface was walking beside the Blimp at the rear of the group. He was supposed to be on lookout, but as far as Johnny could see, his eyes never left the Blimp. Even from a distance of a hundred metres, Johnny could see that his partner's face was wearing an expression of puppy-like devotion with a hint of dog-like lust. That was Middenface all over. No half-measures. No caution. His affection, like his hatred, was strong and enduring. When he fell, he fell hard. It was one of the things Johnny valued about him. And also what often made him a pain in the arse and general liability.

  The remaining three members of Team X were walking together. Enigma was talking ostentatiously to the Sloth, seemingly oblivious to the glances Joe kept stealing at her. Johnny was damn sure she knew she was being watched, though. He'd already pegged her as the kind of woman who thrived on male attention, and took "hard to get" as a form of religion. The Sloth looked unhappy, obviously all too aware of the game that was going on between the woman beside him and the man who was sometimes the woman he loved.

  Johnny shook his head. Why did people have to make things so complicated for themselves?
He preferred simplicity. It was one reason he was so good at his job. Give him a mission, a bad guy to track down, and he was as happy as a pig in shit. It was all the other stuff life threw at you that he hated: the petty politics back at the Doghouse, the church that preached love and hated mutants, the people who weren't good or bad but somewhere in between...

  He felt his eyes drift back over to Red. He supposed, in a way, that was why Red bothered him so much. He couldn't fit her in a neat category, file her away as "friend" or "foe" or even "mutant". She didn't quite belong in any group, and where her loyalties really lay was anybody's guess. He wished, heartily, that she weren't on this already messed-up mission with him.

  He was broken out of his reverie by the sound of a twig snapping under a heavy boot beside him. It was One-Eyed Jack, sauntering up to match his stride to Johnny's. Johnny didn't acknowledge the other mutant, and he walked for a few minutes of silence beside him, so close that their shoulders almost brushed. Johnny didn't like that at all, it made him feel vulnerable. The other mutant's eye, the missing one that lived ten seconds in the future, would give him the advantage in any fight.

  As if sensing Johnny's thoughts, Jack suddenly said, "Don't like me much, do you?"

  Johnny gave him a long, considering look. "Don't know enough about you to like or dislike you. Don't know enough about you to trust you, either."

  "You've seen me around the Doghouse. You know my reputation, same as I know yours."

  "I know you've got one of the top kill rates in the Stronts," Johnny said calmly. "I know you're so good you've been hired at least twice to do secret work direct for the Office of the President."

  "So?" One-Eyed Jack said.

  "So even presidents get it wrong, sometimes. The only thing I set any store by is what I see with my own two eyes." He subtly emphasised the word two.