PeeDee3 Intergalactic Insectiod Assassin in: Gravy Day (season 1 episode 8)

Intergalactic, Insectiod Assassin in:

  Gravy Day

  season one, episode eight

  RyFT

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to

  persons living or dead are purely coincidental.

  Copyright 2012

  Cover Painting by:

  Lisa Marie Raezer

  Gravy Day

  RyFT

  It had been a day just like any other. I can’t imagine why they’d, meaning the big, whoever’s in charge of limbo, kahunas, would want me to relive this moment from my long and violent life. Seems pointless, but I don’t get a say in things. The sooner I start the sooner it’s over.

  I was raining. It was dark. I was hanging out in my office and I was bored. Bored and PeeDee3 never mixed well, the results were usually explosive.

  I needed a Coffee, something strong, like a Barkhouse extra bold pure caffeine with caffeine boosted caffeine syrup—hell, maybe I’ll have them toss in a dash of coffee just for good measure. No mealworm larvae, I mean it this time. I see one squiggling worm anywhere in the cup and someone’s getting hurt.

  Squiggling worm, huh?

  All right, I’d convinced myself, a scoop of mealworm larvae too.

  I stood the hat rack back up and removed my quadra-sleeved trench coat, then I started digging through the rubble that had been the inside of my office until I found my fedora. I dusted it off against my leg’s exoskeleton and, sliding my antennae through their respective holes, set it on my head.

  Now I just had to find my credit stick. Last I’d seen it had been in my desk drawer, but the drawers, the desk, the chairs, everything right down to the fruit and cherub wallpaper, had been turned into a mess of burnt rubble.

  This kind of mass renovation seemed to happen to my office every year right around tax time. In fact I was pretty sure that whatever was left of the tax collector was in there somewhere as well. A lot of beings might get upset about this level of damage and its impact on said being’s income. Me it didn’t bother, for one, I had plenty of insurance, no self-respecting business-bug, especially one who caused as much damage as me, would operate without it. Secondly, I’d established a limited corporation, PeeDee3, LLC, (Lotts’a Luck Chump) so that the families of the beings I’d hit, and the owners of the stuff I damaged in pursuit of said hit, couldn’t sue me personally.

  Hey, I know it sounds unethical, but it’s totally legal. Economists even have a name for it, the High-Card approach; though most no-brains like me just call it Dadonalding. Best thing is, if you do get sued, you just bankrupt the business and you don’t have to pay your bills, hell, you don’t even have to pay your coffee tab.

  Maybe I didn’t need my credit stick after all.

  Now I was deadly accurate with a weapon of any flavor in my claw, but I couldn’t drive a nail straight or tell you which end of the squid-driver was up. That didn’t bother me either because I had these three guys coming over to fix the place up. I could rest easy and enjoy my caffeine.

  Someone rapped, Shave and a Haircut, on the frame of my broken door. In a dozen peripheral retinas I could see three Knuckleheads, dressed in paint-stained coveralls, waiting.

  “It’s obviously open,” I croaked.

  They swung the tiny piece of door still clinging to a hinge open then, carrying buckets, brooms, pails, and a ladder, all tried to squeeze through at once. They tumbled inside spilling paint, nails, tools, and suffering an apparent wealth of pain in the process.

  Accompanied by a crescendo of crashing metal, they stumbled to their feet; one tugging a mislaid bucket off of his head. Scowling, the one in the middle, with the salad bowl haircut, thumped the chubby bald one and the one with bushy clown hair on their heads, which rang like a couple of hollow coconuts, and said, “Anna-canna-sana-pah.”

  The two ‘smackees’ cried out and held their pain racked heads. Knuckleheads ain’t a pretty race, especially with those squinty eyes and puckery mouths in the folds of their knobby heads. Well, the chubby one stuck his tongue out and the dope in the middle swiped the extended organ with a wet paint brush.

  “Ahhhh,” squealing like a stuck swine, the chubby one started running in a small circle as he squeegeed his now orange tongue with an extended finger.

  The bushy-haired one, apparently upset with the treatment of his friend, tugged the bowl-haired guy’s sleeve and shouted, “Eena-peena!” In response bowl-hair tore out a handful of those bushy curls, setting him up on his toes and his face into a tight grimace of pain, and then let them fall to the floor.

  Bushy-hair dropped to his knees, and, lamenting loudly, began gathering the hair and pressing it back to his head.

  Painting on a smile, bowl-hair strutted over to me and said, “Canna-anna-seena.”

  Apparently, despite the long hours I’d spent watching the cautionary documentaries, I’d made the classic mistake of hiring stooges, and I didn’t speak a lick of Knucklehead. However there was a common language we could share, it seemed we all spoke violence, so I offered him the customary salutation—I opened a claw and slapped him across the face. He shook his head, his eyes narrowed, and he showed me his teeth. But then he smirked, shrugged it off and held up his fingers. I know this one, pick two. Fine, I’ll play, but I’ve got a lot of retinas. No way that five fingered jerk could hit them all, and then It would be my turn. “Those two,” I said pointing.

  His smile darkened into an angry grimace as his hand split open and several dozen mechanical tentacles sprang out and stuck in my eyes.

  “Ahhh.” I stumbled around the cluttered room, blind. Damn it, these Knuckleheads had mechanical augments. I focused all my attention on my ear holes. A rush of approaching wind, something headed my way. I spun around and opened my ocellus, the simple eye in the back of my head, just in time to catch a vanilla-crème pie in the eye. Apparently they also had built in weaponry.

  I needed to end this conversation fast or I’d literally be talked to death.

  I heard them chuckling and nuyking in delight. Enjoy it while it lasts jerks. I can use my weapons blind. I grabbed the tuba blaster, spun the dial down to its lowest setting, aimed the horn at the back of my head and fired. The sub-contra, low E sonic wave was just strong enough to blow the delicious crème filling from my ocellus. Committing their positions to memory, I spun around and, dialing the volume back up, pulled the trigger. My complex eyes were recovering, but what I saw filled me with disappointment. Those three morons shot up and out of harm’s way on telescoping robotic leg extensions with Chuck Tailor high-top floor grippers. All the blast managed to do was run down my battery and blow a hole straight through my wall, my neighbor’s wall, their neighbor’s wall, and the wall to the zeppelin repair shop across the street.

  The explosion surprised me. I didn’t know they were still filling those things with flatulence.

  Catching your neighbors in a compromising position in the middle of the day is an unpleasant experience under normal circumstances. Now imagine if your neighbors are a school of spawning salmonites.

  Need I say yuck?

  The knuckleheads, still at ceiling height, extended their robotic arms and were slapping, poking, and bonking me from multiple directions.

  I’d had enough of that Hanna the Barbarian type violence. I liked my violence bloody, painful, and to end in a death—so call me old fashioned.

  With my complex eyes seeing clearly again, I focused on the six hands coming my way. With Kacekan speed and coordination, I gathered them up in my four claws and reeled those knuckleheads in like kites
. Trapping their mechanical arms between my thorax and my lower left arm, I slapped them with the remaining three claws.

  Then I grabbed the outer two Knucklehead’s skulls and banged all three of them together with a hollow coconut bonk in triplet. With a cry of pain their non-robotic heads went dizzy and I shoved them back against the wall.

  “Hey, cut it out!” the chubby one shouted in a high register and waved me off with an expressive hand.

  I straightened up to my full seven foot seven inch height. If my exoskeletonized face could have shown expression, it would have looked surprised. “You speak Convenientish?”

  “Why certainly, nuyk, nuyk,” he chuckled. “I grad-e-ated from Universally Convenient for Writers University.” Seemingly from nowhere, he produced a diploma, but this one was a PHD in Psychology from the Harvard dimension. “I also sell plot-hole spackle by the bagful, but you have to promise not to tell.”

  The