Bill 5 - on the Planet of Zombie Vampires (4 page)

Labored breathing!? His heart began to pound like a trip-hammer, so loud he knew that the creature of evil out there could hear it!

He stopped, his crutch an inch away from swinging the locker door open, his wrench at the ready in his other right hand. He held his breath and the soft, muffled labored breathing stopped. He exhaled and it started again. An echo? Once more he held his breath. This time the breathing got louder, became a growl.

Suddenly the locker door burst open and something wet and slimy covered his face, blinding him. He was knocked backwards by a huge, crushing weight. A horrible rotting smell engulfed him.

“Help!” he yelled, smothering in slime. “I'm a goner!”

“Bill found the dog!” cried Larry, Moe, or Curly. “Boy, does he stink!”

“Dog?” said Bill, wiping dog slobber from his eyes. “Dog?”

“We tried to get a ship's cat,” said Rambette, “but all the cats were checked out and this is what they stuck us with. Barfer is an awful dog.”

Bill sat up and stared into the baleful eyes of an oversized sheepdog kind of a mongrel. His multicolored, hyenalike fur was coming out in mangy handfuls. The creature had a stupid, grinning expression and his huge tongue was lolling out of the side of his mouth, dripping copious amounts of dog slobber. He gave Bill another big lick across his forehead, wagging his tail happily.

“Barfer likes you,” said the large black man, giving Bill a hand and helping him to his feet. "That makes you a majority of one, on account of none of us can stand to be around him. My name's Uhuru, and I'm pleased to meet you. Looks like you got yourself a dog.

“I what?” said Bill.

“He stays your side of da room,” Bruiser snarled, leaning on Slasher. “I find him on my bunk, chop his smelly legs off. Then start on yours.”

“He does kind of stink,” Bill admitted. “Thanks for the offer — but I don't need a dog.”

“He needs you, and that is a law of nature that cannot be changed,” a short and zoftig woman intoned ominously. “It is also Barfer's nature to roll around in the compost bin in the captain's okra room. We can't keep him out of there. Maybe you'll have better luck.”

“Thanks,” said Bill. “What's your name?”

“Tootsie, big boy. And what's yours?” She ran delicate fingers through her short-cropped blond hair and took a deep breath that impressed Bill immensely. She didn't look like a dangerous criminal, not in the slightest.

“Bill. With two L's. The same as the officers spell it.” Then he remembered the call of duty. “What are you in for?” he asked, putting on his serious MP face.

“They say I deserted. Went AWOL. Over the hill. Hit the road.”

“Did you?”

“Of course not. My time card got demagnetized by a broken drink machine so it didn't register. I was at my desk the whole time.”

Duty still called, like it or not. He forced his attention away from Tootsie.

“And you, Uhuru. What did you do to get stuck here?”

“They charged me with blowing up an orphanage,” he said with a wide grin. “I'm a big fan of gunpowder.”

“Gunpowder?” asked Bill, staring at the heavily muscled arms of the huge man. “Orphanage? Little kids and all that?”

“I was framed,” said Uhuru. “All I really did was accidentally drop a homemade firecracker down the officer's latrine. It made a big bang, but there weren't no orphans in sight, just a lot of exploded waste products and a very nervous lieutenant.”

“Rambette?”

“They say I have a violent personality, believe it or not. And all on account of a little misunderstanding.”

“Misunderstanding?”

“A corporal took me out to dinner. How romantic, I thought, I was so young and innocent. He embraced me, rained kisses on my fresh lips, ran his fingers down my ... that kind of thing. Filled with fear and trepidation I threatened to cut one of them off for him and he got a little upset. But would not desist. In self-defense I rejected his advances. He was out of his cast inside two months. I didn't do anything but protect myself. It was nothing to get all excited about.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Bill adjudicated. “Larry?”

“Ask Moe.”

“Moe?”

“Ask Curly.”

“Curly?”

“I don't know nothing. And if I did know something, I'd blame it on Larry. Or maybe Moe. As far as I know, we are all innocent, just victims of a passing bad time. Of course, I can only speak for myself. I can't remember the last time we three agreed on anything. Larry's dumb as a rock, and Moe's a blight on the family tree.”

“All these sound like minor infractions,” said Bill. “Or maybe no infractions at all. I don't think we'll have any trouble this trip. All we've got to do is keep our noses clean until we get to Beta Draconis. That sounds pretty simple.”

Barfer the dog leaned heavily against Bill's good leg and farted. Bill, unthinkingly, scratched the creature's smelly head — then drew his hand away and wiped his fingers on his pants leg.

“Me,” said Bruiser. “You forget me.”

“Just coming to you, good buddy,” Bill smarmed. “What did you really do?”

“Cut legs off MP,” grinned Bruiser. “Me and Slasher did right fine job.”

Bill swallowed hard and smiled ingratiatingly.

“But I had good reason,” leered Bruiser, hefting Slasher up to his shoulder.

“I'm sure you did,” said Bill with relief.

“Bowb made me mad,” smiled Bruiser. “And he had smelly, ugly dog.”

Bill stirred the last of his steamed okra around on his plate. It was cold, and had the consistency of month-old celery that had been cooked in a nuclear reactor and then left in the desert sun to decompose.

Five weeks of okra so far, and no end in sight! Bill shuddered. He would even have welcomed some loathsome Trooper chow as a change of pace. The only consolation was that his foot bud was finally beginning to grow out. That was the good news; the bad news was that it was growing out a little strange. For starters, so far it was gray in color, rather than a healthy pink. And there wasn't the hint of a toe yet; just a gray lump a little smaller than his fist. But at least it was long enough so that he could stumble on it, and he had packed away his crutches, hopefully forever. He'd give it time. One thing the military had was plenty of time.

“So how is the crew, Trooper?” asked Captain Blight, greedily downing a porkuswine chop.

“All in order, sir,” lied Bill.

He'd learned another lesson: don't rock the boat. Only last week he had tremblingly brought the captain the crew's demands that a change of diet could possibly be in order. The end result of that fiasco had been the withholding of Bill's jelly doughnut for three meals and an imposed day of fasting for the crew. The whole episode had done nothing to improve anyone's morale.

The truth was the crew was getting angry, hot-tempered, short-fused, balky, and sullen. That was on even-numbered days. On odd-numbered days they were obstinate and grouchy and testy. At the best of times they were simply cranky. Bill was caught in the middle and blamed it on bad vibrations, the okra — and their criminal records.

Bill slid the last spoonful of slime into his pocket. Just about the only good thing about his new dog was that Barfer liked okra, loved it, drooled and slobbered over it in a disgusting manner. He was, besides Christianson and Caine, the only creature aboard who could stand the stuff. Of course, Christianson would eat anything, and the reliability of Caine's android taste buds, if he even had any, were open to question.

A dog was the last thing Bill wanted or needed, but he was stuck with Barfer, at least for the duration of the trip. No one else would have anything to do with him. The only saving grace was that the beast had just enough residual sense of survival to stay on Bill's side of the room. Bruiser tended to sit, fondling his axe and glaring at the sordid hound. A steady vegetable diet had done nothing to improve Bruiser's state of mind.

“Aphids,” said Caine as the jelly doughnuts were being distributed. “And little green caterpillars, too. Sorry, Captain.”

“Say what!” yelled Blight. “Not again!”

“It's a natural progression in a closed environment such as we have aboard ship,” said Caine. “They have no predators to kill them off.”

“I've got a whole ship full of predators,” said Blight, taking a second doughnut. “Bill, get another bug-picking crew together.”

“Pepper,” suggested Bill. “Back on the farm we used to use a mixture of soap and pepper to control pests. It's easier than picking them off one by one. That's the way we did it when I was young....”

“Enough of your sickening bucolic memoirs,” sneered Blight. “Easier! Who said anything about wanting it easier? Prisoners aren't supposed to have it easy. There is crime, therefore punishment.”

“It's ecologically sound and mostly organic,” said Bill hopefully. There was a very real possibility the crew might string him up if he had them picking bugs again.

“I do not wish to have pepper sprayed on my plants,” said the captain. “It would destroy their tender and delicate flavor.”

Bill refrained from mentioning the obvious: that Blight never ate okra and wouldn't have the faintest idea what it tasted like. The addition of copious amounts of pepper could only improve its palatability. Even the soap would help.

Bill was proved right. The crew frothed with anger when he told them they were pulling bug-picking duty. The only thing that saved him this time was the captain's threat of solitary confinement for malingerers, lasting for the rest of the trip with nothing but watered-down okra juice for sustenance, plus a doubling of any protester's prison sentence.

“Can't they at least turn down the lights while we're working in here?” asked Uhuru, who was stripped to the waist and sweating heavily.

“I talked to Caine about that,” said Bill. “He's willing, but the captain said changing the light cycle would ruin his experiment.”

“My back hurts,” moaned Tootsie, leaning over an okra bed to get to the aphids in the middle. “And if you want to know — I'm rooting for the bugs. They can have all this green gunk they want.”

“Be thankful we don't have an infestation of thrips,” Bill suggested. “Or white flies. They're so small we'd be picking them off with tweezers.”

“Aphids aren't exactly giant-sized,” said Larry or Moe or Curly. “They're hard to get a good grip on without bending the leaves.”

“Don't hurt the plants!” yelled Bill, remembering how a broken stem had brought fifty laps around B Deck with full packs.

“Quit complaining,” said a grinning Bruiser. “I like squashing bugs. It almost as much fun as bashing heads. I just wish caterpillars bigger; it hard to pull legs off these little bowbers.”

“We're supposed to be squashing, not torturing,” said Rambette.

“Each to his own,” Bruiser suggested sadistically, holding out a caterpillar and watching it squirm. “Wonder what they taste like.”

“Yuck!” said Tootsie. “Eating bugs?”

“It's all protein,” said Curly. Or maybe it was Larry. “They probably taste better than the okra.” On the other hand, it could have been Moe.

Bruiser started making a pile of smashed, legless bugs, chuckling gleefully to himself. Bill shuddered.

“This is no way to win a war,” said Rambette, dropping aphids into a jar. “I'd like to know what a bug hunt has to do with ridding the universe of those rotten Chinger lizards.”

“I'm with you,” said Uhuru, collecting caterpillars. “Sometimes I wish I hadn't set off that little explosion. Me, a trained Trooper, reduced to picking insects off plants! We should be fighting, not playing in a garden.”

“I don't know,” said Bill. “Maybe those Chingers aren't all that bad.”

“Are you kidding?” Tootsie said. “They're monsters. Chingers are blood-thirsty killing machines. They eat babies for breakfast. Raw. You going soft on us?”

“I just thought maybe we ought to try to understand them,” said Bill. “You know, open a meaningful dialogue or something.”

“Only thing I open their stinking lizard bellies,” snarled Bruiser. “Only good Chinger is dead Chinger.”

“Have you ever met one face-to-face?” Bill suggested hesitantly. “It's possible they're not as mean as we think.”

“I don't have to talk to them to know they're nothing but bad news,” said Uhuru. “Killing them from long distance is good enough for me. Hit 'em before they hit you, I always say.”

“I learned all I want to know about them in the training films,” said Tootsie. “Vermin like that ought to be exterminated.”

Bill sighed. It was clear the propaganda machine had done its work brainwashing the crew. He could hardly blame them, though, having thought the same way before he actually met one. Maybe he still did.

They labored on under the burning lights until one after another they moaned and dropped exhausted. “Time for a break,” Bill said. “Take ten.”

He needed a break himself. A stack of fertilizer sacks in the far corner made a shaded area that looked remarkably cozy. Bill stumbled over and sighed as he slumped into the relative coolth. His eyes closed, sleep descended — and something hot and heavy clutched him.

“Glumph!” he mumbled as something wet and burning sealed his mouth. He struggled free and scrambled back, looking up to see an angry Rambette standing over him.

“You don't like to be kissed, hmm? Maybe you don't like girls.”

“Sure I like girls. But it happened so quick —”

“No need to lie!” she whimpered, sitting beside him with a clash of knives. “You don't think I'm feminine, that's it. Just one more warrior girl good only for battle. Well, it wasn't always like that. I was not always as you see me. Oh, things would have been different if it hadn't been for the bats.”

“Bats?” Bill stuttered, batting his own eyes in confusion.

"Yes. If you let me hold your hand I'll tell you —

THE BATRIDER'S TALE

Ram-Bette set the gold-and-purple platinum band at her neck and slipped on her golden bracelets. Oh, this was to be a wondrous day when she and the other girls in Virgins Dorm Zash in the village of Smoosh on the shores of the Great Orgonne Sea — incidentally on the planet Ishus — at last had their Coming Out Party. After this day she would no longer be a simple simpering girl but a full-fledged and proud Ishian. Oh, what a wondrous wakening.