PeeDee3, Intergalactic, Insectiod Assassin in: Gut Feeling (Season 1, Episode 1)

always evacuate before they run, or if they think they may have to run. Since they can store waste for as long as three years they had developed the foul habit to lighten the load. Anyone dumb enough to kill me had better plan on some serious running.

  I figured I was looking for a jealous Hasenpfeffer, with a taste for antiseptic beverages and a Teenie Titmouse girlfriend. I checked the time down on the upper wrist—less than eight bitty-bits left. I hoped I had figured right.

  I was headed for Swalla’s, the third in a long list of juice-joints I used to frequent. The going was slow because the left leg had gone completely stiff; I knew I shouldn’t have sat on that last bar stool so long. I needed to keep moving, needed to stay loose.

  I walked with a rocking sway, like I had one leg and one pogo stick. The shadow of doom was creeping up on me; I could feel its icy fingers pulling on my back. I needed a lucky break, but I guess you could say that wasn’t my lucky day.

  I dragged the stiff leg through the door and looked around, keeping my mug concealed inside the hood. I crept up to the bar, Misshell, a Crustaceaon, was on duty. Not good. She’d hated me ever since I had her family over for dinner.

  They were delicious.

  “What’a ya have pal?” she clicked out clasping a soiled rag in a large, blue claw.

  “Nothing,” I hissed.

  “Everyone has something—”

  She caught my face and an abrupt gasp cut her demand short. So, she knew something and I was eager to learn.

  “What’a ya know Shelly baby?” I asked.

  Her mouth gate hung open, her eye stalks bugged straight out. If her bright, red shell could have gone white it would have.

  “No…nothing PeeDee3; same old, same old.”

  She was stare’n, both her beady black eyes trained on my hard-plated profile, the claw nervously polishing the same spot over and over.

  “What’s a matter sweetie? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  I think she shrugged, hard to tell with Crustaceaons. “No, it’s just …well, I heard…”

  “Heard I was dead? Well I am, that auda make you happy.”

  “Sure,” she said on the next beat. “So how about a last drink, on me?”

  “Forget it; death kinda takes away your thirst.” Then I slapped my credit stick on the bar.

  “What’s that for?” she asked turning one eye to the stick.

  “That’s the accumulated wealth of a scoundrel; a hundred and seven years of busting brain casings for cash.” I slid it closer to her. “It’s yours if you want it.”

  “What do you want?” she asked like she didn’t know.

  “A name.”

  “Don’t know a name.”

  I wondered if she was more scared than greedy. I doubted it and covered the stick with my claw. “What do you know?”

  Looking from the door to the credit stick her eye-stalks were shifting back and forth like astroshield wipers, and her smaller claw clicked open and closed greedily. Eventually her beady eyes settled on the dough. “Haul your corpse over to Joe’s. I think you’ll find what you’re look’n for.”

  I slid off the stool and started limping away.

  “Hey PeeDee3,” she called. “You forgot something.”

  I turned and dragged myself back, picked up the claw lying there, and gave her a salute with the detached digit. “Thanks doll, you’re all sugar ya know that?”

  She ignored me, already checking my credit balance on the register. She’d be rich, but what did I care?

  I struggled my way up the street as if I was up to my mandibles in cat’s feet custard; my favorite flavor but damn hard to walk through. I pulled and pushed off street signs, parking meters, overflowing garbage cans, and old blue-haired broads waiting for the octo-bus. The other leg was going stiff and I was down to two useable weapon hands. I pulled the detached claw out of my cloak pocket and checked the count-down timer still on the wrist, eighteen-thirty micro-bits left. Not much, but maybe enough.

  At last I spotted Joe’s, worst dump in town. I spied a Weaselarian hauling out the garbage. I followed him inside and entered the bar from the kitchen. I planted myself in a shadow, bouncing up and down, trying to keep enough juice in my limbs to get the job done. The place was dark and dank, reeked of smoke and dirty fryer oil, and had blood stains on the floor; my kind of place.

  It wasn’t long before I spotted her, the Teenie Titmouse. She whirred around the dance floor, giving every Tumn, Dikkvor, and Harry that pranced by a twirl. She was barely dressed, flaunting those big, round, sexy ears, sultrily stroking the scarlet bow atop her giant head, tickling the jerk’s legs with her tail…used to be a sight like that would make me nuts, make me lose control; seemed that my libido had gone numb too.

  Then I spotted the brand on her bottom. It was the custom; guys branded their personal stock so others knew to keep claws off. I never paid any attention to those kinds of things either. Guess this time it cost me.

  That’s when I saw him, watching her from the bar. Big, and lumpy, and gooey, with an indulgently distended abdomen and one big eye planted in the center of his sloppy forehead—a Hasenpfeffer. He started to sashay toward her, drink in hand, big smile on his soupy mug, not a care in the world.

  I drew my Hashwalla toad-sticker, it was small and easy to keep concealed, and started moving toward him, easy prey. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad day.

  Then I heard the barrels hit my exoskeleton.

  Frass.

  “Drop the toy,” a gurgling voice commanded from my back. I caught the strong scent of rotten rabbit and sour cream—they all smell the same. I opened my rear eye. Sure enough a big, angry looking Hasenpfeffer had a hi-fidelity, four-hundred decibel double-barreled sonic blaster stuck to my back; seemed that I was the one not paying attention. I was losing my touch. The whole being dead thing had started to bother me.

  “Drop the pistol crusty or I’m gonna kill you all over again.”

  Yeah, yeah, I was dead, so what did I have to loose?

  I spun on him, faster than he expected, but not fast enough. He fired and my left, lower was sliding across the filthy floor. Someone screamed and the music came to a crashing halt. His blaster packed a punch. I landed seven meters away, on my back, with a table on top of me, smoke pouring off the seared shoulder. Luckily I didn’t have to breathe anymore or I would have been fighting for air.

  He was strutting toward me, smiling a serrated-toothed smile and grandstanding for the gawkers that had gathered around the edge of the dance floor. The only thing hard about a Hasenpfeffer is their nearly indestructible chompers; that’s how he cut the lock to my flat. He shot his sweetheart a wink, the flapping lid flung a dribble of Hasenpfeffer sauce across the dance floor, then sauntered up to me, wearing his confidence like a medal.

  Each one of the onlooker’s faces came into focus in their own, individual retina, then began to duplicate again and again until my complex eyes were full of them. They taunted, and pointed, and laughed in a way they never would have when I was alive. Then they began to fade as my vision darkened, and, one by one, retinas began to burn out.

  “That’s PeeDee3,” someone said.

  Someone else laughed. “That bug’s toast, good riddance.”

  “Kick his crusty shell, Stuey!” a high-pitched voice shouted. I cringed and inadvertently shivered—like I said, I hated those high, squeaky voices.

  I kicked the table off with both legs. It hit him hard, forcing him back, then slurped down to the floor covered with gooey-grey bits. His scowling face was a little flatter; his big eye blinked open and closed as he shook the pain, and some of his gravy-like hair, off.

  I managed to grab a pole with the remaining claw and heaved myself up. As soon as I was upright I instinctively reached for the cannon. But I’d forgotten that the upper right was long gone. By the time I made the switch and reached with the other claw he’d recovered and fired.

  He nearly took off my head. He did manage to slice off one ant
enna completely and half of the other. I was still standing, but I’d dropped the cannon.

  He stabbed a drippy finger in my direction, laughing, showboating for the crowd. “Ladies, gentlemen, hermaphrodites, and artificials, may I present the badest of the bad, the infamous PeeDee3, scourge of the cosmos reduced, for your viewing pleasure, to a mere stub of a bug.” His gurgling voice grew loud and made him sound like he was under water. “And now, the coup da grace.”

  While he took a bow I bent over and grabbed the cannon. Something snapped, loud as a hypersonic-whip crack, and I couldn’t straighten up. He failed to anticipate this and his next shot went straight through where my head would have been if I had.

  I raised the cannon, hoping my last sight in life be the ball oozing through his ugly head. Bent nearly in half I tried to aim from the hip, but the cannon’s heavy. With a snap the shoulder separated and the arm thumped to the floor. Somebody dimmed the lights and the sounds muffled, like an opportunistic yuckster had stuffed safety plugs in my ear holes, but I could still faintly hear him laughing.

  He took slow aim with the blaster, sporting a huge, mocking grin—so much for last wishes.

  But he lowered the gun. “Nah, too easy. You’ve been a real thorn in my butt, bug. I’m gonna have to squash you like the pest you are.”

  I’d gone completely stiff; I was bent over, armless and helpless. The timer’s alarm rang in my pocket.

  He picked up the arm lying at his feet; the claw still clutched the toad sticker. He strolled up to me,