Blood Bunny
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Plot Device Publishing

In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy

Book 18: Blood Bunny

Liam Gibbs

IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWRY book 18: BLOOD BUNNY
Copyright (c) 2021 Liam Gibbs
All rights reserved.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

As awesome as this book is, it’s a work of fiction. I know, I know. We were all hoping, but it just ain’t gonna be. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s freaky imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely bonkers and coincidental. In other words, sadly you can’t get Schizophrenic’s autograph.

ISBN 13: 978-1777638610
First printing: April 2021

{ PLOT DEVICE PUBLISHING }

Available on the Author’s Super-Awesome Site

This stupendous, amazing, spectacular, not-at-all-overhyped comedy/science-fiction series can be found in the following parts:

Book 1: Serial Fiction Sideshow

Book 2: Home Sweet Home Invasion

Book 3: Technophobia

Book 4: Armageddon Trigger Finger

Book 5: The Genetic Equation

Book 6: Power Tool

Book 7: The Lesser of Two Egos

Book 8: Untitled of Attitude Adjustments

Book 9: Those We Left Behind

Book 10: Metaphor for Life

Book 11: Oh, Crock, Here Comes a Meteor!

Book 12: His Kingdom Come

Book 13: A Wolf in Sheep’s Armor

Book 14: Man Versus Machine Part 1 of 1

Book 15: Our New Hiring Policy

Book 16: Life like Broken Glass

Book 17: The Church of Steeple

Book 18: Blood Bunny

Book 19: Disease of Behavior

Book 20: The Paper Tiger’s Yardstick

Book 21: This One Has a Dancing Gibbon

Book 22: My Brother’s Captor

Book 23: Marching Orders, coming May 2021

Book 24: To Wake the Deactivated, coming July 2021

Book 0: The Story So Far

Please visit the In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy site for all these free e-books and more information.

Other Stuff the Author Spewed Out

Maybe check out these other things ’cause they’re superfine too!

Not So Superpowered, available at tiny.cc/nssuperpowered

Three Flash Fictions, available upon request from the author

Random limericks, available in bathroom stalls

Your Favorite Table of Contents

Book 18: Blood Bunny

Chapter One: Forecast Calls for Stupid

Chapter Two: The Power Plant Hat Trick

Chapter Three: Everyone Joins the Party

Chapter Four: In Plain Sight

Chapter Five: Fine Detective Work, Lou

Chapter Six: Calling All Irrationality

Chapter Seven: Hot on the Trail

Chapter Eight: The Insatiable Belly of the Beast

Chapter Nine: Tastes like Street Chicken

Chapter Ten: Ready, Set, Go!

Chapter Eleven: The Stupidest-Laid Plans

Chapter Twelve: Like Grocery Shopping

Chapter Thirteen: What Doesn’t Die

Chapter Fourteen: I, Rabbit

Chapter Fifteen: Commence Bowel Contraction

Chapter Sixteen: Also without the Fancy-Shmancy Novocain

Chapter Seventeen: Pardon the Intrusion

Chapter Eighteen: How to Feed and Care for Your New Pet

Chapter Nineteen: What Happens in Goat Vegas

Chapter Twenty: Mobilize

Appendices

About That Guy Whose Book You Read Once

Connect with the Series

This Isn’t Even My Final Form!

The following story ain’t professionally edited. I know, I know, why am I inflicting this on you?

For cool reasons.

Professional editing, covers, and the whole shebang takes money. And creating appendix material takes time. The In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy series has been steadily seeing new releases, but they’re release at the rate of one per year, while they’re written at a rate of one every nine months or so. Do the math. The series will never catch up.

The author, awesome brain that he has, only ever wanted to share these stories with the world.

Money wasn’t ever a goal. I know by offering these books for free—professionally packaged or not—I’ll be losing money. I honestly don’t care. Since releasing the books free of charge yet without the “professional” look, I’ve found the stress of running this whole series has gotten much manageable. This leaves me with more time to do what I set out to do: write the stories and share them.

I still attend trade shows and comic conventions and sell the books there. Each book will, eventually, be given the professional touch. But, while we’re waiting, all I want to do is share these.

If you see something ain’t right, or something you want to comment on, please feel free. Think of yourself as a beta-reader: a pre-reader of something unreleased. Voice your thoughts at liamgibbs@inagalaxyfarfarawry.com. Until the book gets professionally released, I consider it a work in progress.

So what you’re reading here is the book without the professional touches. I’ve edited this book a dozen times or more, and so I believe it’s as polished as I can get it. I feel comfortable letting you see it. It will one day be professionally edited. One day. But until then, know that you’re reading what I believe to be as polished as I myself can get it.

Enjoy!

Or don’t. I really have no control.

Chapter One: It All Started with a Bang...

February 26, 9110. 3:32 a.m. (Galactic Standard Time).

Cambriod Ubetrixa coughed into a calloused fist. The worst thing about a work day was waiting for public transit on this smog-choked street with assembly-line buildings. He knew it. Felt it. Smelled it like he smelled this oncoming drench of rain. Lived it every day he woke up at half past red-eye o’clock to lurch to the machinery plant by five, his work stint crammed somewhere between the graveyard shift and breakfast. Especially on this cold crocking morning. He spent most of his shift clearing the white dump from the crows that infested the plant grounds the day before. At least he’d fixed the high-powered sweeper hose. Still, if his nose was right and the reports were true, Weatherman Jones up there planned to drench cats and dogs all over this city. Like what usually happened at animal shelters just before an inventory period ended.

Well, Weatherman Jones could suck it. After work, Cambriod would invest in a portable heat vest, one that wouldn’t smoke every time he dialed it past room temperature. Carrying a scent of waste, a wind intruded underneath his tattered, double-layered jacket. It stank like sheared metal and chemicals, carried the rank of this city. He hugged himself. His public transport, that mass-tran, was scheduled to grumble up in thirteen minutes, but it couldn’t come soon enough. Cambriod nudged away a cockroach who’d scuttled over to say hello, and then he stepped back, deeper into the shadows of a storefront where—

Whoa-what-the-crock! Cambriod jerked back, felt something at his feet. Not a friendly cockroach this time, unless they came in furry balls. Which they sometimes did. He checked his heel for whatever stuffed animal some kid forgot—

A bunny? A bunny. It sat at the curbside as if waiting for the same mass-tran, peering up Cambriod’s pant leg with begging eyes and pupils that shimmered like reflections of harvest moons on water. It squeaked at something in the polar wind. Cute as a crocking button, but as out of place on this industrial strip as a conversation between mimes or a nice word from his wife.

“What the piss are you doing here, cottontail?” Cambriod squatted and combed his fingers through the bunny’s fur. Like silk to his leathery digits. Nice to touch something that, for once, didn’t feel like trash. He peeked west along the military procession of shops and businesses that flanked the grungy street, neon signs proclaiming weird junk in every language but English and some stuff that looked like just a bunch of come-ons. He checked east. Same blah-blah of shops and businesses. No pet store or cosmetics-testing factory from where this bunny would have escaped. Cambriod placed his bet on the Haralsian bistro. Or was that a metal shop? People of the Haralsian race paired up the weirdest crap. Place was called Machine Canteen. Name didn’t offer an ounce of help.

Cambriod palmed the bunny’s belly and scooped him up. Or her, since he couldn’t find the bunny’s how-do-you-do hidden down there. He stretched his back, unkinked all the kinks, and stared into the bunny’s eyes as if he and the bunny held some psychic conversation other than “Bunny, don’t you dare piss right now” and “Gotcha, friend.”

Not at all damp in this heavy air threatening to break open with a downpour, the rabbit twitched its nose. Cambriod tilted his head, a quizzical gesture to figure this thing out. “Might skip work, bring ya home to the girls. I’ll score some points. They’ve been begging me for a cat. You’d scratch up the furniture less.” Cambriod massaged the soft spot under the bunny’s chin, a stroke into which the bunny bowed and purred. Bunnies purred? They certainly spat up soggy hairballs all over double-layered jackets. Nice job, bunny.

Crack! A spotlight clapped on, jolting the static of wind away. The acute echo whacked the mechanized walls of the alley like a fat man plowing through the lineup at a brunch to reach the tater tots. The muted colors of the narrow backstreet washed out into pastel blobs. Cambriod blinked up at the spotlight but scrunched his eyes to slits before they caught fire from the freaking domineering glow. Muffled color returned. The lights blinded brighter than a crocking dealership’s! “Shut off—”

A tune honkytonked out from behind the spotlight, like a short theme song from a rusty loudspeaker. A voice like female thunder crackled out from that spotlight. “CITIZEN, YOU ARE NOW UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE VIGILANTE TEAM BLOWTORCH. STEP AWAY FROM THE ASWANG.” The engine snore of a small transport pillowed Cambriod’s ears like cotton plugs. The transport’s engine choked as if it were snoring off to sleep but snorted awake a second later. This starship coped with flight as well as a one-armed kid treading water. Cambriod never wished more for a kid to drown.

“Only nasty dude I know is the crocker who squeezed my wallet dry to fix my toilet!” Cambriod yelled. Plumbers gouged way too much for ten minutes of tightening a pipe and an hour of crack-scratching and whining about the Yurts’ starting lineup between burps as filthy as kerosene.

The woman’s voice again, nasal and high pitched like a Gharalgian’s. Enjoying party balloons a little too much in that ride? “CITIZEN, AGAIN, PLEASE STEP AWAY FROM THE ASWANG.”

“What’s an aswang?”

“DEMONIC NASTINESS, THAT’S WHAT IT IS.”

Cambriod rethought that plumber crack: guy had a point about the Yurts’ defensive line. Plumber crack. Heh. No pun intended, but pun enjoyed.

This time a man’s voice emerged from behind that spotlight that made Cambriod’s next optometrist appointment more a surgery than a checkup. “YTRIL, TRY TO MAKE PEOPLE UNDERSTAND YOU, DUDE. TIP: STOP REFERRING TO EVERYONE AS ‘CITIZEN.’ LAST TIME, PEOPLE THOUGHT YOU WERE CAMPAIGNING FOR OFFICE. THEY VOTED YOU MAYOR.” The man, whose voice sounded even-pitched and thick like a Terran’s, spoke now to Cambriod. “EXCUSE HER, DUDE. SHE’S NOT ACCUSTOMED TO BEING IN PUBLIC. OR COMING UP WITH A TEAM NAME BETTER THAN BLOWTORCH. OR WALKING A STRAIGHT LINE, BUT THAT’S MORE OF A YOU-GOTTA-SEE-IT-TO-BELIEVE-IT THING.”

“I’m telling you, there ain’t no demonic nasty down here.” Cambriod stepped away from the shadow of the storefront, cradling the bunny protectively. “More cockroaches than a street should have, but they ain’t demonic. Technically.” Cambriod checked a cockroach to make sure. “Stop staring at me,” he said to it. It twiddled its antennae in disagreement.

The starship’s horn honkytonked again, a shrill repeat.

“YTRIL, PEOPLE MIGHT TAKE US MORE SERIOUSLY IF YOU DIDN’T LEAN ON THE HORN. WHILE YOU’RE AT IT, I SUGGEST RHINOPLASTY.” The Terran man addressed Cambriod through the loudspeaker again. “DUDE ON THE GROUND, TAKE A LOOK AT WHAT YOU’RE HOLDING.”

“A bunny. I’m holding a pissin—What the flammable crockity?” Cambriod threw his hands away from the bunny—Thing wasn’t a bunny anymore! Where the crock did the doe eyes go?

“YUP, THERE IT IS. LESS FLUFFY-CUTEY AND MORE DEADLY-KILLY NOW, RIGHT? WE KILLED IT...WHAT...FOUR HOURS AGO. AND IT’S BACK AT FULL VOLUME. EVERY TIME WE KILL IT, IT TAKES A NEW FORM, ONLY FATTER. REMINDS ME OF BULLET’S EX-HUSBAND.”

“AT LEAST MY EX DOESN’T SLAUGHTER THE LOCALS,” the female said behind the veil of her nasal voice.

The was-a-bunny looked as if an unholy creation had burst through the rabbit’s form. It had developed maize eyes that serrated Cambriod’s soul with a glance, one eye larger than the other, its smaller one jutting out with a blunt end. Its front teeth were now crescent fangs that reached under its chin. Its hunched back, once smothered with a silken fleece of fur, now sported bristles of blood-matted razor whiskers. Its claws, formerly modest mitts, were now swollen, coiled, and gray. A ravenous snarl now replaced its purr. Pink lumps riddled its fur like deposits of tumors.

It lunged with a predatory paw. Cambriod ducked and tripped aside. Talons sliced through a greasy lamppost, no resistance. The lamppost bowed across the street and shattered against a brick storefront.

“NOW YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT WE MEAN BY ASWANG. WHILE YOU’RE DOWN THERE, YOU MIND GRABBING A CROISSANT FROM THE METAL SHOP, DUDE? BEST BREAD IN THE CITY.”

The aswang swung again, but someone aboard that starship directed the spotlight at it. It reacted allergically to the flood, hissed, dodged away, eyes retreating to dots inside its cushion of a face.

Cambriod stumbled off the curb, backbone ablaze as it cracked against the chipped sidewalk. Where the crock was that mass-tran, what was this thing, looked as hairy as his mother-in-law, had she caught all his jabs at her cooking these last few years, was that his sanity curling into the fetal position, the aswang reached out with an appendage as bloated and leathery as a baseball glove, claws carved divots into the pavement with a mere stroke, the aswang never broke its glare with Cambriod, slurped a tongue along lips caked in gore, holy crock! Cambriod kicked his feet to grip the ground, retreated against the steps behind him. He threw his hands in front of his face. Forget raining cats and dogs. The clouds were sending mutated rabbits! “What’s the animal shelter doing with strays nowadays?”

“WOULDN’T BLAME ANY ANIMAL SHELTERS ON THIS DUDE. WE GOT OUR LEADER FROM ONE, AND SHE TURNED OUT TOLERABLE AFTER SHE STUDIED UP ON DEODORANT. NOW, SCARED DUDE, SCUTTLE BACK A FEW FEET SO OUR STARSHIP CHUG HERE CAN CRACK OPEN HER NEW MISSILE SYSTEMS AT THAT THING. IF YOU SO PLEASE. DUDE.”

No argument here! Cambriod retreated further—wiped the panicky sweat from his face because maybe that explained why he saw a monster instead of a bunny. Nope. The aswang had swelled into a seven-foot brute, its tail as lifeless and frayed as an unraveled ball of yarn, its nose almost melting off its face. “Get that thing away from me! Is that blood or pus dripping out its eyes? Somehow it’s both colors!”

“YOU KNOW WHAT? FORGET THE CROISSANTS, DUDE,” the Terran said, probably kicking his feet up. “GRAB ME A SCONE. HEARD GOOD THINGS ABOUT THEIR SCONES. HOLD ON.” He directed his voice away from the loudspeaker. “What was that?” A moment later, “OKAY, DOUBLE THAT ORDER. WE’RE GONNA NEED A DEUCE OF SCONES.”

Cambriod choked on spit. “A scone, a croissant, a muffin, a crocking chain of bakeries. Just kill that thing!”

“DEAL.”

Several cables slapped the ground. One carried a gray-skinned beefcake, a member of the Logistican species armed to the teeth, literally considering his gold-tooth grenades. His oversized, shoeless feet smacked the ground. Surely the pavement felt the impact more. The grizzled Logistican, muscle packed over muscle, clomped forward, a rifle as thick as a cannon slung over one shoulder and an Autoling pistol wielded in the opposite hand. He puffed a cigar. Weren’t those outlawed? A glyphic tattoo slithered along his left arm, crawled up his neck, and ended with inked tines circling his left eye. “How many times do we have to kill you?” he said, a scrape in his voice. His aggression the rabbit back: it recoiled but bared its teeth.

On the other four cables descended other members of this psychotic aswang-hunting clan: a Terran wearing sunglasses in this predawn morning, a Gharalgian with blindingly orange skin and a nose like a goiter, a creature composed entirely of shimmering water in the shape of a Terran, and another Terran who wore blonde hair to the ground. Then, in a moment’s delay, a high-pitched howl halfway between a battle roar and a giggle, swelled from a distant stifle to the whine of a balloon’s pinched spout. It preceded the rapid plummet of a three-foot, red-skinned Raestagean who smacked the ground and bounced off in unpredictable ricochets that sent it in every catastrophic trajectory except a useful one.

Each member of this ludicrous army posed as if flaunting for the debut cover of a comic book. The big-nosed Gharalgian and the blonde Terran both jabbed their fingers forward in strained stances with forced facial expressions. This compelled the Gharalgian to jab the Terran. “The finger thing is my pose, Also Sediment. Come up with your own—”

“Give it a rest. It’s a natural stance!” responded this Also Sediment. “You don’t even like your hyperability.” She prodded back, and soon a shoving fight ensued between the two women. “And my name is Sediment. Not Also Sediment. Just—Sediment.” She craned away from the shoving.

“You’re legally not allowed to use that name in public!” The orange-skinned Gharalgian reared back for a punch. “We don’t need another infringement lawsuit!” Even the rabbit didn’t risk getting between these two.

“Ladies, ladies. Not around guests.” The sunglasses-wearing Terran elbowed between the women using arms that stretched out disproportionately to the rest of his body. To Cambriod, he said, “Never mind them. They have what you can describe only as a sisterly love, which is boy-driven competitiveness and screaming matches over who gets the shower next. Odds are they’re endearing once you get to know them. For instance, Ytril recently had an epiphany about shaving her armpits, and Lacey here freaking loves dogs.”

“I freaking love dogs.” Also Sediment stamped a boot.

“She owns three versions of Dogs Playing Poker: pregame, midgame, and after one of the dogs is accused of loading the deck. Used to own a Schnauzer/miniature Schnauzer mix. Anyway, down to business. Maul, if you’ll please greet our aswang guest. In other words, destroy public property.” The Terran’s arms—no, his whole body from knees to neck—extended, yawned out toward Cambriod to create a barrier between him and the aswang rabbit. Cambriod wanted to stuff the elasticized arms away from his face.

The gray-skinned beefcake spat. Not saliva. Four grenades flew at the aswang, enthusiastic for violence. The aswang swatted them away with a diseased paw. The grenades clattered into a Squabster garbage receptacle—“Squabsters are heavy duty enough to take the brunt of war,” the receptacle’s jingle sang—and washed the trash with an explosion. The Squabster coughed.

“Pacey, if you will...” The Terran stuffed his rubbery arm against Cambriod’s face. He winked at Cambriod. “Don’t inhale. Pacey’s seepage scrambles your brain. Burns enough when it comes in contact with your skin.”

Also Sediment scrambled forward, and from every pore of exposed skin, a thin mist seeped. Smelled like cumin, felt like damp mildew inside a museum long abandoned. It scratched Cambriod, made him lethargic, clouded his thoughts, blurred his vision, felt like ants gnawing his skin. He sneezed, coughed, but the dust had already settled in his throat. Now Cambriod wished the stretching man’s elongated limbs cocooned him more tightly. The aswang rabbit reacted: it hissed and drew back, yellow eyes watering and inflamed. Eyelids twitched.

“Taste what Trump Card’s cooking up for dinner: your face.” The Logistican wielded the Autoling forward at the beast and pumped a trio of shots that crackled into its face, embedding what looked like slow-burn flares in its matted cheeks and forehead.

The Gharalgian joined in on the act. She pointed her orange fingers forward—all sixteen of them!—and fired a barrage of fingernails that regrew as fast as she let loose. The fingernails cut into the rabbit’s fur and the skin underneath. The aswang only grimaced, reacting as if the Logistican and the Gharalgian had spritzed water in its face as though it were a bad kitty that had climbed onto the furniture. It opened its legendary throat, a blood-red tunnel wide enough for spelunkers to explore. A hollow, moldy howl escaped it like a tortured moan breathing from the guts of Hell. A fly buzzed out, a toad followed.

The Raestagean zoomed past in another unpredictable bounce. “Whoo hoo!”

“Holy crock, save me, save me, save me.” Cambriod trembled harder, squeezed himself against that storefront. “Promise I’ll be a better person. I’ll be nicer, I’ll join a church, I’ll join a church choir, I’ll tip minimum two percent. Just don’t let me die.”

“We’ll try not,” the Terran replied. “The paperwork on that is a crock, and we’d lose our vigilante permit if we didn’t file a collateral death. Also don’t wet yourself, dude. We ran out of emergency guest pants when the aswang attacked that bladder-control support group. So, you know...” He squirted a raspberry out of the side of his mouth. “...plan accordingly.”

“JEFF,” said an aged, fragile voice from the starship’s loudspeaker, “CHUG’S NAVIGATIONAL COMPUTER IS FAILING AGAIN.”

“Oh, is that why she U-turned us into that milk truck? Sly move, Chug. And here I thought you were scoring a date. You chubby chaser. Turns out you’re sick in the head.”

“Trump Card’s not doing the job this time.” The Logistican spat out his cigar and threw back the Autoling. He rolled the rifle over his shoulder and aimed with a shrug, peering through a targeting sight. A flower of black blood blossomed on the aswang’s cheek immediately under the blunt-pointed eye. Another light-bullet bit into its shielding arm. A third cracked open a window behind it.

“C’mon, Maul, we’re hyperabilitied vigilantes. You can muster better property damage than that.” The sunglasses-wearing Terran looked disappointed.

“Let me at the aswang spawn.” The Gharalgian leapt at the rabbit, a long-bladed knife tucked in her hand. She slashed the rabbit’s face and then used her momentum to propel herself away: a hit-and-run tactic.

The monstrous rabbit thing peered up at the moon and—what in all of crock—bounded up. Escaped the confines of this alley and its flanks of soulless copycat buildings. Soared into the spit-polished sky above the city of Ratfink Pest Control, smashed the starship with its paw as it passed.

Cambriod fought his breath as if it had run away. He stared up at the spot in the mooned sky where the rabbit had disappeared. He didn’t break eye contact even when the meaty Logistican retrieved his Autoling and checked it over. “That’s my girl.” He kissed its shaft. Twice. Then winked at it and coddled it to his cheek. “Love you, too.”

The spotlight clacked off. Cambriod’s eyes adjusted quickly thanks to the intermediary moonlight. The Terran’s rope arms slid away from Cambriod, slithered back into normal proportions at his sides. Eyes up at the night sky where the aswang had escaped through the lazy smog, the Terran strolled up. “You’re safe now, dude. Not a bad way to start the day.” Why was he wearing sunglasses at five in the morning?

The Raestagean zoomed past in another blinding rebound. “I’m full of sugar, and I’m super-duper awesome!”

Cambriod tore his gaze away from the sky. “Wh-what-what was—”

The Terran finally looked at Cambriod. “That, my friend, is what we call an engineered aswang weapon, an ERW or ear-ow for short because we’re a gang that loves pronounceable acronyms. Or PAs. Pas. We also love making up acronyms on the spot.” He flicked a business card out of a pocket and handed it to Cambriod, who took it with a feathery grip. The rigid, two-by-one-inch datasheet read, “PUTTYMAN, STARSHIP MECHANIC AND ALL-’ROUND ROCKING DUDE. BLOWTORCH.”

“I’m the PSMARRG on the business card. The peesmar...peesmayr...pees—Okay, some acronyms can’t be pronounced.” The Terran hooked his sunglasses halfway down his nose. “Anyway, media name’s Puttyman. And, for being nice enough to live and save us the paperwork, please accept this complementary Werther’s Original.” He handed Cambriod a gold-wrapped candy. “So...how about those scones?”

“I’m a Danish man myself,” the Logistican said. He had propped his rifle’s barrel on the ground, the butt in both hands so he could use his boot to ratchet the loading mechanism along a groove. “Stop your whining, Business End.” Was he talking to the weapon?

“Danishes it is,” Puttyman said. “Can’t deny a man whose only crime is anthropomorphizing his guns and all the illegal stuff he does with them.” Another ratchet. “He’s not licensed, by the way.”

Chapter Two: The Power Plant Hat Trick

Good Guy field leader Pincushion hopped off the Fireball military transport’s debarking ramp here in the hangar of Good Guy headquarters Station One. His feet found hard pavement and whatever that orange thing with tentacles was. He’d seen it try to escape the food court. Looked as though it had finally made its getaway only to end up under Pincushion’s boot. Next chance he got, Pincushion would give it a shoebox burial.

The Good Guys’ alpha team—Pincushion, Power Plant, Organism, Incendiary, and some version of Franchise he’d rather forget existed—returned from a mission in which they’d stopped Bad Guy leader Master Asinine from using a giant chocolate fondue fountain as a swimming pool. The diners at La crasse du société had not appreciated his backstroke. They’d laughed at his diving attempts, though, especially after the maître d’ told him that was the shallow end of the fountain. They still ate the chocolate despite the “warm patches” Asinine left. But he had given diners fair warning.

Four recent events twisted Pincushion’s mouth into an annoyed moue, made him roll back on his heels. Number one: the aforementioned version of the Good Guys’ self-multiplier Franchise. Apparently their prankster Power Plant had grown bored of topping his mischief in this timeline, so he’d bought a multiverse gateway from a bargain store and now caused havoc in as many parallel timelines as humanly possible. His latest scheme had swapped this timeline’s Franchise for one from a timeline reigned by animals. Now the Good Guys’ membership included a goat version of their pilot Franchise, the real Franchise trapped in some other plane of existence they had yet to pinpoint. This made Franchise the universe’s most successful hide-and-seek player. Intergalactic Protection, the Good Guys’ parent military organization, capitalized on Goat Franchise by opening a petting zoo of its duplicates, complete with grain pellets from a pay dispenser. Naturally, the goats ignored the pellets in favor of the wood chips scattered across the petting zoo’s floor and the fresh laser-paint from the fences.

Number two: the weather that Power Plant had unleashed upon Station One last week had so battered the Fireball hangar’s bay doors that they no longer worked. Their cybernetic agent Ace Spandex had set about the repair job with wrenches and cutting torches, but he soon discovered it came down to a heated negotiation with Janice over date night. Oh, yeah. Janice was the station’s haunt control, computer software that took action dictated by users’ verbal commands, so called because their automation made things seem creepy and haunted. A bug in Janice’s software now convinced her that she and Ace were dating. And Ace’s heated negotiations had ceased when Janice’s demands weren’t met. Quoting Ace, “No crocking way am I fanning Janice with novelty palm leaves because the idea is too ridiculous.” Pincushion’s policy was not to take sides in domestic quarrels after the food fight at his old precinct’s policeman’s ball. So now he had to park their ride outdoors until Legion called in a couples’ counselor.

Number three: public schooling.

Number four: Pincushion couldn’t figure out what was rotting in his living quarters. He blamed Power Plant because Power Plant’s mishaps came in threes. Why not make this a clean sweep?

A siege of voices billowed from both sides of a mob-made aisle that led from the Fireball to the lobby doors. Cheering from the left, sneering from the right. Good news first: the supporters on Pincushion’s left that swamped Station One. These last two weeks, this was routine thanks to the Good Guys’ role in stopping Bad-Guy-turned- galactic-conqueror Mechanism’s genocide a few weeks ago. Also thanks to Intergalactic Protection’s new line of Good Guy lampshades featuring Ace Spandex, Mabel, and Organism in an assortment of vivid and splendiferous colors. Why in—Nope. Pincushion vowed never to explore IP’s mindset after they had appointed a coffeepot as their on-site daycare coordinator.

Bad news on the right: Mechanism’s supporters. How a deluded would-be exterminator accumulated a following escaped Pincushion, but anyone could accumulate some group of sickos no matter how polluted that person’s morality. These supporters booed and hissed, some dressed in plastic costume armor made to look like the body armor of Mechanism’s underlings, his Mechaknights. They assaulted the alpha team with thrown rocks but dared not tread past an invisible line to attack personally.

Pincushion massaged a hand over his face. “I thought security kept these crowds secured inside the food court and preselected wrestling rings.”

“Ain’t nothin’ doin’s!” Power Plant scampered up from behind, leapt, and slapped Pincushion across the back. Pincushion’s hypermutation had given him spiky extensions of his bones, so Power Plant paid for the slap with pinpricks slashing his palm. “Ah-cha-cha, ya back’s like a crockin’ knifes set!” He recoiled, nursing his hand.

“Serves you right for the stench in my living quarters, brother.” Pincushion dodged the flecks of blood Power Plant whipped around in agony. “Goat Franchise, don’t lick the wound. That’s disgusting.” Goat Franchise responded with something that sounded like a four-letter whinny.

“Protestors and fans,” the haunt control—excuse the mistake—Janice announced over the battling dialogue from opposing sides, “check out the great deals at our shopping district’s new body shop, Gentle as Crock. Swing by for our store-opening steals.” Then she giggled. In public. Ace Spandex really should dial back her personality.

“This is new,” Organism said, his doughy shyness unmistakable behind Pincushion. Organism had the hyperability to manipulate his elastic body into any shape. He surmised the battling sides and picked up one of Mabel’s cats that had purred into the lot. It nestled against his solid chest as he stroked its back.

“The crowds showed up not long after Ace readjusted the weather function. They’re just hard to notice if you don’t come out to the main lot.” Pincushion’s spiky arm deflated a water balloon that slapped it. The rubber clung there. “Hey, didn’t you apply for a field position with us?” he asked the assaulter.

Power Plant saluted the detractors. With his backside, of course. Pincushion shrugged. When in Rome...

Seconds later, he zipped back up to spot a woman on the devotees’ side foist a baby at Organism to sign. This made as much sense as another of Intergalactic Protection’s recent product commissions: pasting their hunchback Scapegoat’s image all over a driving instruction academy.

Pincushion raised both hands to assuage the crowds. Didn’t work. A rotten egg struck one of his palms. If the detractors were throwing stuff, at least throw stuff less gooey. A chair walloped his face. Be careful what you wished for.

Power Plant rewarded the guy two points. Pincushion knew from his customary signal: the middle finger. “Lemme sign that crockin’ chair.” Sigh. And Power Plant had a new pension for swearing, something adopted on their last mission to Master Asinine’s pub-dart challenge night. Organism had missed and hit the obese Bad Guy anger-bomb Multipurpose, deflating a pocket of fat trapped inside another pocket of fat. The rest was history. Organism was also doomed to repeat that history four minutes later.

Pincushion wiped two fingers over his bleeding brows and hoped his grunt of pain didn’t rise above the armies of clashing voices that somehow had reduced to a combat of “Tastes great!” and “Less filling!” These shouts referred to IP’s latest food perks, mustard cakes, offered from Cakes for All Bakes, the catering truck half a block up the lot. Their specialty was urinal cakes.

“J...e...f...another f...an’ another f...” Power Plant was still spelling his name on that chair. “An’ sometimes y.”

“Jeff, stop autographing lawn furniture. And before our next mission, you’re getting that haircut.”

“Crock that noise. I gettin’s my haircut over your deads body.”

“Okay, but it better be at least two inches shorter.” Pincushion winced at the rodeo of hair atop Power Plant’s disheveled head. He nudged his way through the thick crowds that enveloped his path to the lobby door. Voices and laser pens battled for autographs. “Pincushion, autograph my poster!” “Power Plant, autograph the bloodstain on that guy’s chair!” “Organism, autograph my mustard cake!” “Goat Franchise, autograph this autograph!” “Pincushion, autograph Goat Franchise’s autograph on that guy’s autograph!” “Goat Franchise, autograph Pincushion!” Goat Franchise did nothing of the sort. Goat Franchise instead was eating the pocket lining out of someone’s pants.

Pincushion swatted Goat Franchise’s next attempt at making a meal of another pocket, to which the animal brayed in hungry exasperation. “Okay, you guys enjoy the crowds.” Power Plant didn’t need the prompting, having already deemed it necessary to sign someone’s wig and then wear it and dart off. “I’m heading inside to debrief Legion on the fondue mission.” He took Goat Franchise by the leash to keep it from grazing the fake grass on the station’s soccer field.

* * *

Catastrophe swung into Good Guy leader Lieutenant Colonel Matross Legion’s office with a cheery lilt on his heels and that greasy atmosphere about him. As always, he’d brought his reek of styling gel along for the ride. Legion was Trioxidillian, and Trioxidillians were allergic to gel. Okay, maybe not, but it still stung their nostrils. Legion didn’t mind the lilt, but he took issue with Catastrophe whipping the sunglasses off his overtanned face and proclaiming, “Today is a good day for a marketing campaign. First stop, this office!” He was one of the Good Guys’ newest recruits with a past as a failed actor, and he lived up to that past. He threw a few packaged goodies to a crowd that existed only in his mind. Must he flirtatiously finger-click a few fans in that imaginary crowd? Legion got caught in the crossfire, and now he felt he needed several showers.

Catastrophe and his single stud earring had finally landed a role in some made-for-public-broadcast movie people either didn’t know about or didn’t care about. Oh, and with chances at a sequel. Legion still couldn’t keep the name straight. Something smacked of desperation about a movie whose title rambled fourteen words long with a Roman numeral tacked on.

Catastrophe tried to pin a marketing keepsake on the lapel of Legion’s uniform. With a green-skinned hand, Legion swatted him away, his Alaphan necklace dancing around his chest. Alaphus, his deity, help him, he needed Catastrophe to stop. One day. “Okay, Catastrophe, congrats. Now, stop pinning marketing souvenirs on me. You already invalidated my life insurance once. Pincushion is coming up for debriefing, and I’d appreciate if your souvenirs didn’t make him a literal pincushion.” Debrief nothing. Recent events had demoted that debrief to second priority. Something more urgent took top slot: replacing Station One’s security software with something not programmed on a Super Nintendo.

“My career needs this. I could be starring next to Hunnygrange. Yes, the single-named Hunnygrange.” Catastrophe winked. He affixed a poster onto the latent-technology window in Legion’s office. L-tech was a technology that allowed objects to be stored in and called from computer memory. Legion hated the stuff—it was buggy and untrustworthy—but it had caught on so much that it appeared everywhere. A leadership shuffle while Legion was in a coma had replaced a lot of things on Station One with l-tech, but Legion was finally ridding the station of that technology. Unfortunately that didn’t yet include this l-window.

As if floating on a cloudburst, Catastrophe fluttered by on blissful feet to stab a button on a wall. The wall wasn’t having any of that and spat the button back at Catastrophe. It hit him in the eye.

“Entity Legion.” Janice giggled. At least she’d recently shed a game-show personality, but that had only brought out her airheaded qualities. “Entities Pincushion and Goat Franchise have arrived.”

Ugh. Legion thudded a fist on his desk. Pincushion had brought the new team mascot/epicure of fine cotton. Oh, well. Leashing Goat Franchise kept it from tearing angrily through the food court again: it had recently discovered what went into the shawarmas. “Janice, acknowledge. Unlock closest door before entity Goat Franchise licks off enough paint to get high again.” Lead-based products did that to you.

The door slid aside to reveal a frame of hallway with Pincushion and Goat Franchise, the goat battering a light panel with its hooves. Why did Franchise have to trade places with one of the most easily provoked animals ever to sprout from Alaphus’s evolutionary chain? At least it wasn’t Gnawl Franchise, or that light panel wouldn’t stand a chance.

Pincushion goaded Goat Franchise into the office as gently as a swift kick could. “Legion, ETA on finding the real Franchise, brother?”

“I’m working on it!” bellowed Ace Spandex, who crouched by a six-foot-tall multiverse gateway in the far corner of Legion’s office. He fit a wrench over a bolt and cranked.

“He’s working on it.” Legion jerked a leg back from Goat Franchise, who’d decided his pants material seemed interesting enough for a taste. Catastrophe distracted it by trying to fasten a piece of “movie history” to it. The goat responded with a well-placed double-kick to Catastrophe’s groin. Catastrophe collapsed onto the carpet in what he would later probably call a planned consciousness break.

“Is Jeff getting that haircut?” Ace asked in midcrank.

“He’s working on it,” Pincushion called back.

Legion sat at his datasheet-cluttered desk and gestured at the guest chair across his. It used to be an l-chair. An argument between Legion and Janice over Ace Spandex’s salary now made it an l-toilet. “Take a seat, Abioye.” He shrugged at Pincushion. “I know I invited you here for a debrief, but that can wait. Something more urgent came up.”

“But we have a lot to cover. Five minutes into the mission, Jeff hotwired a tank turret.” Pincushion scratched his nose. “He usually takes ten.”

“Jeff’s public tendencies notwithstanding, this is pressing.” Legion felt a neigh moisten his antenna with damp air. “Goat Franchise agrees.”

“Then what’s so urgent?” Pincushion folded his arms and leaned back on the toilet.

“Intergalactic Protection received a really...violent...transmission from Gaia. The police force in Ratfink Pest Control, Fissure Coast, is investigating some recent slaughters. They’re confused, something we’ve known since their last Scared Straight campaign.”

“Slaughters?” Pincushion propped himself forward on the toilet seat. The porcelain creaked. “But Fissure Coast has a low murder rate. Their citizens are too into holiday caroling to bother with slaughters.” A stray cat hopped onto the tank and started licking itself. “Unless it comes to ‘O Holy Night.’ They have a weird relationship with that song.”

“This slaughter is animal related. Security cameras haven’t caught any footage of the animal, but its victims were dismembered, bearing teeth and claw marks. And pelletlike droppings were found all over the abrasions. Forensics tests came back showing this thing has some weird rabbit DNA. The cops think it’s a hyperperson who mutates into a rabbit”—crack, crack—“or a rabbit that mutates into a jerk. And it doesn’t kill its victims per se. It feasts on them. Also those droppings snarled at the forensics team during lab tests”—crack, crack—“and what is that sound? Is Goat Franchise cracking its hooves like they’re knuckles?”—crack—“How is that even possible? And why didn’t it stop at four?”

“Okay, as disturbing as snarling rabbit feces sounds, what does this have to do with us? We were founded to counter the Bad Guys, not woodland massacres.”

“Ratfink Pest Control is desperate. The perpetrator’s likely a hyperperson, and their hyperability division consists of a guy who speed-reads and his sock puppet lieutenant. Intergalactic Protection thinks lending a hand would be good for our public image. And they want Ratfink Pest Control’s sponsorship contract, so they’re ordering us in.”

“It never stops with them.” Pincushion heeled the base of the toilet. “Last time, they ordered us to investigate a valium cartel in an asylum, and we spent most of our time keeping Jeff from messing with the night-terror patients.”

Legion tilted his head understandingly. “Goat Franchise, bring up the news footage please.”

Goat Franchise trotted over, mounted Legion’s desk, shoved a scatter of paper-thin datasheets computers aside with a slide of a hoof, and tapped a succession of icons. A viewscreen blipped out from the ether, sprouting into Pincushion and bumping his chocolate-colored arm. Pincushion angled his toilet aside and at the footage that showed on the viewscreen. A series of still shots started at a grisly sequence that began with two bloody corpses wrenched limb from limb, guts strewn like a bowl of spaghetti that wolves had fought over. The footage then flipped through its montage of madness while a newscaster, hired straight from an art-show report, described the scene as “wanton,” “grisly,” and “a sophistication of light and shadow.” Legion paid little attention to the specifics of her words, barely able to bear the sight of the morbid parade of barbarisms.

Legion scratched their new animal Franchise behind the ear. “Good goat. Thank you for bringing up the viewscreen. Now, what have we discussed about pets and furniture?” Goat Franchise hopped off the desk, splashing more datasheets over the floor. This version of Franchise treated house rules with more respect than the regular Franchise. At least this version kept the seat of Legion’s office toilet down after finishing its business.

Legion checked Pincushion’s expression, a mix of repulsion and anger knotting his cheek. His mouth puckered as if to exhale a “wow” but still unable to issue the word. Finally something more than a shocked interjection came out. “How long has this been happening?” He looked unsettled, rising to a half-standing position as if to pace this nightmare off but reluctant to leave the security of the toilet.

“Not sure,” Legion said. Goat Franchise hoofed up and swatted an ear in Legion’s face. Legion brushed it aside but got some loose fur in his lipless mouth. “Police forensics—” He spat out the fur. “Police forensics first realized they had a serial murderer four days ago and backtracked the earliest slaughter to February the eighteenth. That’s a guess. They’re crossmatching this with other serial deaths, and this rabbit, which has only one slaughter so far, seems to copycat the other animals. This is the fourth one we’ve seen. The previous one had the claw marks of a chipmunk. But a really angry chipmunk.” Legion’s cheek twitched. “Okay, sometimes our job isn’t glamorous.” He detected a hint of sulfur sneak around the room. “And sometimes we get to clean up Goat Franchise’s bowel movements.”

Legion rifled through his datasheets, some red and limp with deactivation and some white and rigid with activation—and a napping cat buried underneath some—and recognized the datasheet he wanted. This he handed to Pincushion. “Intergalactic Protection is forcing us to help immediately. They’re threatening to send me samples of a new line of lit fuses from their newest cake sponsors if I don’t follow orders. So I’m following orders: these lit fuses are attached to icing dynamite. Anyway, you have all the pertinent information in there.” Legion tapped the datasheet. He bent sideways behind his desk and then stood, an aluminum bucket in hand. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a dookie to clean.”

Chapter Three: Everyone Joins the Party

Master Asinine, Bad Guy leader and cool guy extraordinaire, rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Okay, not as much thoughtfully as it was to alleviate a persistent itch due to that skin graft from the cuttlefish. Last time he’d accept help from a marine animal. Unless it was a dolphin offering a ride to the park.

And speaking of animals, he’d just watched the news footage of some downright gruesome—and, in his opinion, ketchuppy—murder deaths. The kind of murder deaths that left your psyche trembling with the lights off. The last frame of the footage, a stark shot of a disemboweled and disemheaded corpse spotlighted behind police tape, sat frozen in time on the viewscreen. Clippy had emerged from hiding to ask, “Looks like you’re interested in bloody homicide. Would you like me to notify the whitecoats?” Clippy should die in a farm accident, but unfortunately that wasn’t a choice he offered.

Enjoying the sophomoric musical effort of Love-Airstrike Lasses, some not wholly unpleasant quartet from the Scottish culture, Master Asinine sat here in his Being Dastardly Room, his main hangout. He leaned forward at a table, the room’s primary viewscreen propped on its top. He straightened his back in this l-recliner, which was the least ergonomic thing on Station Zilcho, Bad Guy headquarters. And that included the Judas chair in the torture chamber/tea room. Also in this room: an opening to the balcony that overlooked the main parking area, an oven, a bookcase stuffed with novelty knickknacks but nothing that constituted reading material, and a brussels sprout that had rolled off his plate in July but he never bothered to pick up. The brussels sprout had passed through several evolutionary cycles since then.

Near the opening to the balcony stood his trusted second-in-command, Lieutenant IQ 23, and his mute bodyguard, Braindead. As always, IQ 23 balanced on his heels, ready to pounce at the call of any misguided command Master Asinine shouted at him. Braindead, as always, just hung around for reasons unknown because of the mute thing he was being.

“Lieutenant, come here.” Asinine waved his hand furiously. Sick curiosity kept his eyes transfixed on that one frame painted top to bottom with feral carnage. “Get a cram load of this.”

Never one to complain about a queasy stomach, IQ 23 moved closer. “Ah. Our last trip to the transport wash, sir.”

Asinine tilted his head to the left. “Not quite. This revolting display was put on by either a small woodland creature, a large one, or one that has nothing to do with woodlands. Maybe a city-folk creature. And, speaking of either/ors, I have an idea that’s either genius or categorically stupid. Or both.”

Lieutenant IQ 23 leaned away from the viewscreen. “Remember our talks about mutual exclusivity, sir? Genius and stupid fit that concept.”

“Reminds me of a recipe I was in once,” the brussels sprout chimed in.

“Me, too,” Asinine said.

The Love-Airstrike Lasses switched tracks to air-raid with something that angrily mixed bagpipes into their repertoire. Sounded like a power ballad.

“I’m betting on a creature of the woodland affiliation, Lieutenant. And this footage gives me an idea.” Asinine rubbed his chin again. That itch wouldn’t relent. Apparently he was allergic to cuttlefish skin, so time to get his mad scientist Brainiac to reverse the graft. Asinine tiled the viewscreen clockwise. “Oh, it does look like the transport wash.”

“I sense something harmful coming on, sir.”

“Like bad gas.” Asinine stood. This idea required pacing and not looking where he was going. “Lieutenant, what if we convinced this woodland individual who likes people’s guts a little much to join us against the Good Guys? What if we persuaded him over to our little party? This woodlandian would be very advantageous for us indeed.” He banged his head into a low-hanging light panel and ended up on the floor. Great. Another skin graft was in his future. “For crock’s sake, that stings!”

Lieutenant IQ 23 took Asinine’s arm and helped him to his feet. “Sir, I have to warn you against this idea. This individual might be unpredictable, perhaps suffering from a savage mindset.”

“Lieutenant, savage is what we’re looking for.” Rubbing his forehead, Asinine continued his pacing.

“I remember your birthday wish list.” Lieutenant IQ 23 leaned over to the viewscreen. “But, sir, this doesn’t look like the work of a woodland creature. So we won’t cross off the woodland bingo square just yet.”

The Love-Airstrike Lasses careened headlong into their next love song, something about the devotion a girl feels for hummus. Quick turnaround. These Scottish wails for romance lasted about fifteen seconds.

“Lieutenant, this creature would make a better pet than Appetite. I’m sick of that eating engine devouring our bubblegum dispenser while somehow ignoring the bubblegum. Unilateral decision made: Lieutenant, gather the others for a field trip. We’re tracking this beast down, cornering it, shouting loud noises at it, and making it feel threatened. That’s the best way to interact with a wild creature we know nothing about.”

“Sir, yes, sir. I’ll ask Schizophrenic to bring his butterfly nets.” Lieutenant IQ hopped into step to pace behind Asinine.

“Let’s get moving. But first, I need to stop by my room and assemble a visually offending outfit.” Asinine strode past IQ 23 on his way to the door, his lieutenant and Braindead following. “On the way, we’ll swing through a convenience store and grab some rotten hot dogs for snacks.”

This gave IQ 23 pause. “Must they always be rotten, sir?”

“It’s not like the convenience stores offer fresh ones.” Asinine threw his body in the brussels sprout’s direction. “And no wild parties while we’re away!” With that, he thunder-stomped to the door.

“Sir, remember to put on pants before we leave the house. Over your underwear this time.”

Asinine snapped his fingers and whirled back to where he’d left them. “Right.”

Chapter Four: In Plain Sight

Organism was the first aboard F-Kestrel, even before Pincushion, the field leader. He didn’t want to leave again after having just returned from the previous mission. He couldn’t put himself through this, constantly being “on” around everyone. He examined himself in the reflective surface of the starship’s windshield. Constantly pretending.

He extracted a photograph from his pocket, one of him and Dad...and Mom. The photo was taken a little more than seven years ago, from before. Before...this.

Him in the photo...this was him. The real him. Before Dad had propelled him into this hyperperson lifestyle. Away from Mom. He glanced up at the starship and all its Good Guy encumbrances, including the goat Taser that IP had gifted to them.

Before all this.

Chapter Five: Fine Detective Work, Lou

Puttyman crouched at the curbside where the aswang had tried to slaughter that dude a half hour ago. You see, the street, as constricted as a back alley—evidently not full of early risers because nobody opened for business even with the sun now awake—remained unpopulated except for a fat, robotic chef who flapped the dust out of a rug. The chef’s rusty gears screeched through the corridor of businesses.

A chilly wind curlicued through the air. Distant noises visited the street fleetingly. Aside from the copper scent here, the only remarkable aroma wafted from the bread warming in the bakery from where that chef dude had clanked.

Under the sentinel eye of an overhead lamp that welcomed patrons to a backwater law firm called Padre and Hermanos—“We Specialize in Cases We’re Sure We’ll Win”—Puttyman rolled some gray strands of fur between two fingers. Sniffed them. Handed them behind himself to Maul, who was the only one willing to lick them, as if that helped trace this bastard creation. If you could believe that. Hint: you couldn’t. Don’t bother trying.

“Tastes like death,” Maul said, hoisting Bruised Ego over his shoulder and onto his back next to Trump Card, his rifle. Bruised Ego’s light-bullet belts rippled down Maul’s back, disturbed by the shrug. “And cinnamon.”

“Bake it into a pie, dude. But it won’t help us find where the aswang flew off to this time.” Puttyman stood, checked the bloodstained pavement, and curled a hand to his chin. “Before you do, know that you can’t use aswang fur as a pie ingredient.” Maul raised a finger and inhaled to speak, but Puttyman cut him off. “No, not even in pecan pie. Please tell me you’re listening.”

Maul threw a hand at Puttyman. “Bah. What do you know about baking? You burn potatoes in the microwave.”

“And you never learned how to raise your eyebrows. So what?”

“Hey, you know that’s a touchy subject!” Maul knotted his forehead. He was giving the eyebrow thing the ol’ college try again. A sincere struggle that would end in frustration.

The chef dude had beaten that rug senseless and ducked back inside. Too bad, since that stifled the scents of fresh fruit and baked dough. Now only the scents of dust and copper pranced sickeningly through the air. Oh, and H2O’s salty musk. Yeah, exactly like you’d expect: yum. H2O, Puttyman’s Terran best friend with a body composed of water, stood half a block west, guarding against the aswang dude’s possible return. Also Sediment guarded east. Bullet and Pacemaker remained aboard the starship, punching mission data into Chug’s computer. Speed Line did the same with information that made random sense. Or maybe he was back in his coloring books that, for some reason, offered pictures of nothing but zebras, piano keys, and Reversi tokens.

Puttyman sheltered his eyes from Chug’s dim lights. “We’re coming up with nothing but fur down here!” he called up. The starship’s laborious choke, like a geezer wheezing through phlegm, picked up volume as she bowed and grunted to the ground. She settled, and by that, Puttyman meant she stubbed her toe on the curb and cracked a knee against a lamppost. This would be the part you’d wince with her, not at her. But she was a transport. So you wouldn’t.

Puttyman waited for the dust to settle and Chug’s metal to cool, and then he gave a loving rub to Chug’s flank. “Better landing than the one at the farmer’s market.” Chug belched. “I stand corrected, pumpkin: the pile of kindling that used to look like a farmer’s market.”

Chug’s port slid aside in fits and pitches. Finally, with great effort, it cleared. Bullet stormed down the three-step ramp and clomped over to Puttyman. She wore a baseball glove about five feet wide, like novelty memorabilia that somehow didn’t slip off her hand. “You’re coming up with nothing? At all? But Maul shot it—”

“Trump Card shot it,” Maul said. The dude’s red tattoo looked as if it glowed ember orange.

“—and we have nothing but fur?” Bullet puffed out a tired pant and angled a shout at Maul. “Stop naming your—”

“Don’t waste your breath,” Puttyman advised. Bullet wouldn’t listen. And now Speed Line had emerged, peering around with the glances of an infant tracking jittery sounds. He whooped into the alley, and the wind carried the echo away.

“At least stop smoking cigars in the cockpit.” Bullet stomped a foot at Maul.

Maul was still struggling with his eyebrows. Dude tried hard, you had to give him that. “It used to be the smoking lounge.”

“It was never the smoking lounge.”

“I said don’t waste your breath, dude,” Puttyman said. Told you she wouldn’t listen.

“We found something? Did we find something?” Speed Line was a Raesetagian. Raestagians were bright red, averaged somewhere around four feet tall, and resembled dimpled spheres with stubby arms and legs. Their elbows and knees looked like skin-covered knobs. Similar to gangly superballs, they bounced. Everywhere. The icing on this sugar-rush cake was that they were infinitely excitable about anything and everything. “A clue? A clue? Did we find a clue?” He never frowned, wore a permanent smile. He revved up his bouncing, which rocketed from two feet high—boing, boing—to three stories—BOING—in a vertigo-inducing fifteen seconds. “Tell me we found something—woohoo—Dad, Dad, look at me, look how high I bounce, look up here, Dad, Dad!” Oh, and he referred to Puttyman as Dad. Puttyman couldn’t break him of the habit, so he went with it. Even measured Speed Line’s height against Chug’s central support post every first of the month. But H2O was Mom, so this cloud had a hilarious silver lining. “Dad, up here, look how high I bounce, look at me, look at me!”

Bullet bent over to examine where Puttyman had discovered the fur. “This...this...horrible butcher”—she gripped her knife more tightly at the risk of slicing open her palm—“kills and kills and kills and kills and never offers anything to society.”

“Its blood is a universal match.” Puttyman shrugged. Glass half full, would you agree?

“Jeff, stop splitting hairs,” Bullet said. Was that a pun? Had she made a joke? Finally cracking that humorless shell. This argument promised to be one of Puttyman’s favorites. You know it wouldn’t end well. Puttyman didn’t blame Bullet’s attitude, though. She despised that aswang, not for what it was, but for what it represented: an affront to her daughter’s sacrifice. Well, also for what it was.

“Argh!” Maul flung Bruised Ego into the night. It crashed through a window. “Crocking eyebrow muscles!”

Everyone on the team had his or her reason for dogging this aswang. It had nearly killed Pacemaker, eviscerated and tore him apart to the point where those cybernetic augmentations were necessary to keep him alive. Also Sediment, a near-rape victim, grew sick of the whiners in her support group, became a vigilante to protect other women, and wound up with this troop. Puttyman and H2O were adventurers, and chasing this aswang was the most excitement they’d had since their recharge station blew up two Julys ago. Maul wanted to prove to IP that his people, the Logisticans, weren’t all bad. He wanted to prevent a war. As far as Puttyman knew, Speed Line had no clue why he was here. But Bullet’s reason...Bullet’s reason was the blackest of all. It was about family. It was personal.

Anyway, back to this spat, which, if you remember, ranked among Puttyman’s top-tier entertainment. Bullet’s face deepened several shades of orange. She pointed at the ground with her inflated baseball glove and stomped a foot. “We’ve run into this thing eight times this month alone, and every time we kill it, it returns hours later in some other form. And I’ve had enough!” Speed Line whizzed past behind her.

Also Sediment wandered closer. “Keep it down. You’re probably waking the neighbors.”

“Also Sediment, I don’t have time to concern myself with the locals and their sleep schedule. Besides, they’re likely to sleep the day away.”

“How many ti—” Also Sediment pinched the bridge of her nose to defuse her anger. “My name is Sediment, not Also Sediment.”

“No, it’s not. So says the cease-and-desist from the Sediment who registered the name before you could.”

Also Sediment flung her hand from her nose. “I was using that name publicly way before that two-bit hack marched into the registrar’s office.” She stamped forward, all womanly scorn without even a hint of the motherly instinct she showed for the team. Her dusty discharge seeped out her pores, same as whenever she got angry or distracted.

Speed Line hit an awning and ricocheted through a store window—“Dad, Dad, Dad, look at me, look at me, I’m bouncing high, am I bouncing high, look how high I bounce”—and whizzed back out at an angle that sent him reeling through another window over H2O on the opposite side of the street. “Mom, can I eat doughnuts for breakfast? And lunch and dinner?”

Bullet didn’t react to the damage Speed Line inflicted, typical defender of the public that she was. “Jeff, on our last three encounters, you’ve come up with no new leads. Now all we can do is sit on our crocks and wait for the next time the aswang strikes. What kind of team investigator are you? Also, you forgot to take out the recycling yesterday.”

“I’m not the team investigator dude. I’m the auto mechanic dude. And Cruftharzal”—he faced Speed Line’s direction—“I’m not your father, and Clip is definitely not your mother. Clip makes a nice woman, though.”

Bullet clenched her teeth. “Okay, Jeff, you’re now the team investigator. Now, as team leader, I’m telling you: come up with something. Or else. And take those sunglasses off. There’s no sun out here this early. You look silly.” She leaned with hostile eye contact, reaching out blindly with her baseball glove and—sock—catching Speed Line when the bouncy guy shot at them. “Cruftharzal, go wait in Chug and finish coloring your piano keys.”

Speed Line wiggled out of the baseball glove and bounded toward the ramp, hooting. He sang, “I’m getting dough-ough-nuts / I’m getting dough-ough-nuts / I’m gonna be full of shuu-uu-gar / it’s gonna make me baa-aa-arf.” Kids and their sugar, right? You’d agree.

“We didn’t say yes!” Puttyman called out. “Who am I kidding? He’ll end up with a baker’s dozen anyway. Look, Bullet, there’s nothing I can—”

Bullet scoffed.

“—nothing I can do. Seriously. Okay?” Puttyman leaned back. “Can’t wait till I lead my own team.”

“Lead your own team.” Bullet scoffed again. “You can’t lead Speed Line’s sugar intake.”

“Mark my words. I’ll lead the crock out of my own team by the time you shrink your nose to a reasonable size. Clip’s already in. Hey, Clip, you’re coming with me, right?” he yelled to H2O.

“We’re heading back to the robot diner already?” H2O called back.

“Yeah, he’s coming with me. But...” He returned to Bullet. “...I do have a surprise, dude. Maul?”

“You’ll thank us for this one.” Yikes! Surprise loud voice. Maul stood right behind Puttyman. His gruff voice, filtered through his cigar, stung Puttyman’s ear. Puttyman wrung a finger over the discomfort. “Trump Card here”—Maul slapped his rifle’s shaft, a vindictive gloat pasted on his smile through the clenched cigar—“wasn’t just loaded with poison flares. No, no, no. Trump Card’s a smart lad. He was loaded with tracer fluid. He embedded three of those crockster flares in that foul-toothed aswang’s face, leaking trackable isotopes into its tarry bloodstream. We’ll sniff out that aswang across the galaxy until it purges its blood.” As a triumphant period to his sentence, he removed the cigar and tapped off its ash.

“Gotta love this beautiful warmonger and his deranged love affair with instruments of death.” Puttyman slapped Maul’s back. The most emotionally twisted Logistican you could have around due to a wartime violation. He squeezed Maul’s cheek and jiggled it lovingly. Well, tried to. Weird. He pressed his fingers in. “Dude, your cheek feels like gristle.” Pressed harder.

“Tracer fluid?” Bullet waved away a puff of that sickening cigar smoke. Cherry scented. She sniffled.

Puttyman added, “And, if that doesn’t work, Clip’s working on something Maul calls Baby Blue.”

Bullet diverted herself. “Fine.” She looked everywhere but forward. “Apologies. To both of you. Now, let’s get back into Chug and locate that creature before it kills again. Got that?” She issued another threatening exhalation at Puttyman and then rounded her eyes at H2O—“Clip”—and Also Sediment—“Lacey, back aboard. While Maul works on locating that aswang, we need to grab a bite to eat that isn’t made by a bag of robobakery bolts. We’ll return. Later. Jeff, you can come, too...if you’re not busy dreaming about leading your own team.” A crash marked the death of something inside Chug. “Cruftharzal, I said ‘color,’ not ‘destroy another part of the starship.’”

Chapter Six: Calling All Irrationality

Legion’s day still reeled from Catastrophe’s campaign stop in his office. Also reeling from Goat Franchise using his garbage ionizer as a scratching post. Nothing like the perfume of scorched waste where you spent most of your day. Goat Franchise had fixed him a strawberry-and-banana smoothie, though. At least one Franchise knew how to use the blender for anything other than fending Power Plant off.

A lilting advertisement ding waved through the office. The byproduct of Janice succumbing to paid product placement from Chow Chasm, who claimed their salads now contained 50 percent fewer calories than the leading acid bath. Legion didn’t know acid baths contained calories, which led him to consider visiting the Gorging Court to pay Chow Chasm a “legally mandated health-and-safety review.” Out of curiosity, of course.

“Good evening, entity Legion”—it was still morning, but Legion would allow Janice a pass for no longer calling him entity Slave Driver Who Forced Acey to Work When Certain Haunt Controls Needed Him to Go Shoe Shopping With Her—“your flagged phrase ‘degenerate Master Asinine and his band of amoral pirates’ was flagged on a recent news report. Would you like to examine the report?”

Oh, and to make Legion’s day weirder, somehow Janice had found a way to get cuddly with Ace. Ace wasn’t impressed.

So, what was that waste of skin Lowensland, media-named Master Asinine, up to this time? Legion took a seat and massaged his clammy temples. Just when he was looking for something to ruin his day. Years ago, the two were best friends, military squaddies. But Lowensland had put a stop to that when he turned coat, murdered their mutual friend Sopher, and started with his ridiculous Asinine moniker. Now the gunshot that had killed Sopher sounded off in Legion’s head. “Janice, acknowledge. Examine flagged report.”

“Of course.” Janice giggled with such exertion that a snort punctuated her response. The snort shocked one of Mabel’s kittens awake, and the kitten cringed off into a dark hiding place under a chair. Another cat gave pause to its tongue bath, but it resumed licking its crotch a moment later. “Here you go.”

A viewscreen emerged as if sprouting from a microscopic world. A flicker of life lit it, and a Fleeson filled its display. Fleesons were a species that moved quickly, so within seconds, this Fleeson rolled her eyes to reveal her disdain for having to speak slowly for the benefit of her normal-speed audience. “And, in more comical news in a segment this reporter calls Why Degenerate Master Asinine and His Band of Amoral Pirates”—occasionally those weirdly specific flagged phrases paid off—“those aforementioned pirates were spotted today in low-planetary orbit approaching Gaia and merging into traffic like fools.” She scowled off camera and shuffled the datasheet she used as her cue. “Must we mention that? It’s a given. The only interesting part is the ‘Gut-Eating Woodland Creature, Climb Aboard for an Amazing Meal of Ground Meat Junk’ banner Asinine wrapped around his starship. Oh. That’s why they just robbed a slaughterhouse.”

The reporter located her camera again and resumed a journalistic narrative. “Another group of hyperpeople, now identified as vigilante group Blowtorch, was spotted in the vicinity the Bad Guys were approaching. Their involvement with the Bad Guys is under question. You may remember Blowtorch as the vigilante team claiming themselves as aswang hunters who recently made headlines in a trademark-infringement debacle.”

“Janice, acknowledge. Pause footage. Display footage location from the news report’s metadata.”

“Displaying location metadata.” Another snort from Janice, but at least the information in question filled the viewscreen’s bottom in a tickertape scroll. LOCATION: DESCENT TRAJECTORY ALTITUDE 140 KM, APPROACHING RATFINK PEST CONTROL, FISSURE COAST, NATION OF AMBILWAY, GAIA trudged across the black band.

Legion already had his finger to his antenna, that bud-sized communication device nestled in his antenna’s pinna. “Gabber, acknowledge. Contact entity Pincushion.”

“Contacting entity Pincushion. Seeking co—Connection attained.” The gabber extended its mouthpiece and earpiece from the gabber’s bud.

“Pincushion, what’s your situation?”

“Twenty minutes out from that latest slaughter sighting and hailing Ratfink Pest Control for entry, brother. And Jeff is—”

“Name’s Jeffy,” chirped that youthful voice over the—“Hey, Goat Jakey, stops trying to eats my shirt! Lunch is comin’!”

“—about to involuntarily feed Goat Franchise his media outfit.” Pincushion raised his voice over the urgent bleating in the background, which worsened into a series of squeals, baas, and whacks. “What’s up? Unrelated note: Goat Franchise piloted us here in half of regular Franchise’s best time, and my foot’s asleep.” A stifled thumping carried its way across the gabber. “It won’t wake—Oh, geez, I just pulled a hamstring.”

“Don’t get accustomed to the piloting. We’ll have to return Goat Franchise eventually.”

“I’m working on it!” Ace Spandex squatted by the multiverse gateway across the office.

“Well, don’t rush on my account, brother. At least the goat version knows how to merge into a traffic circle.”

“Anyway, looks like you’re pulling a dual investigation once that foot wakes up. I just received a notice from a news report. Lowensland was approaching Ratfink Pest Control on Gaia. Don’t know what he’s up to, but it’s not delivering presents to all the good little boys and girls.” Legion shrugged. “Or maybe it is. He has strange ideas about what constitutes a crime nowadays. I need you and your team to monitor the news for updates so you can intercept him. Side note: a vigilante group named Blowtorch was also sighted in the area, pursuing that rabbit IP drafted us to investigate. Not sure about their involvement, but you might deal with them, too. Other side note: Goat Franchise’s walkies time is in an hour.”

A grinding whir emanated from the multiverse gateway. Then smoke. And a small fire. Ace Spandex choked on the billows that puffed out.

“Entity Legion, I can download news updates based on your flagged phrases to entity Pincushion’s location. Arriba!”

Legion removed his finger from his gabber and swept his feet onto the floor. He stood. “Arriba?” he asked in Ace’s direction.

Ace strolled up to Legion. “Residual effects of something I tried: I played around with Janice’s language setting in an effort to fix her measurements system and to ignore when she’s mad at me. Didn’t work.” He held a fist-sized block of machinery with wires spilling out like arteries dangling from a heart. “She’s since named herself Lashawn, Johanna, Janina, Jeannette, Yana, and Aunt Jemima, although that last one technically isn’t a translation. Here.” He handed Legion the machinery block, arteries and all. “Hold this. Please.” Legion took it.

“Goat Jakey, stops eatin’ my shoe!” Power Plant was in the middle of a feeding crisis. “And stop tryings to chew through yours leash!”

An acerbic “maa-aa-aa-aa” followed.

Pincushion grunted to clear his throat. “Okay, so we’re locating this rabbit, the Bad Guys, and a vigilante group named Blowtorch. Got it. Send along the information, and we’ll see what we can do. Also, might want to spellcheck the briefing notes next time. It took me an hour and a half to convince Jeff we weren’t looking for a rabbi.”

“I’ll have Janice transmit the news footage to the briefing datasheet.”

“That can’t happen. Incendiary accidentally lit the briefer on fire.” Pincushion’s voice rose to a holler. “Jeff, stop trying to feed things to Goat Franchise. Goats don’t eat waffles.”

“Name’s Jeffy, and they eats waffles if them’s waffles is gluten free.”

“Ooookay, then I’ll send the information straight to the starship’s computer.” Another grinding whir caused Legion to stand straighter. “Ace, that’s the only multiverse gateway we have the budget for. Don’t kill it.”

Pincushion replied, “Thanks.”

“Wait. Thanks for what? Sorry. I’m a little distracted. Not sure if Ace is performing a fixit job or cardiovascular surgery”—Legion took what he estimated was a long sheath of cables that Ace handed over—“or a disembowelment.” He squinted into the sheath. “Ace, what was a toothbrush doing in the machinery?”

Pincushion said, “You’re sending me some news footage on Asinine—”

“Ah-ah-ah!” Power Plant’s tortured screech split Legion’s ear. “Get Goat Jakey offa me! He’s eatings my hair!”

“Then stop threatening him with the One True Ring!” Back to Legion. “Anyway, have to cut this short. Goat Franchise just multiplied himself, and now we have four of them to walk. And apparently I was wrong: goats eat waffles.”

Legion put up a hand in an understanding gesture Pincushion couldn’t see. “Say no more. Gabber, acknowledge. Cut connection.” A crackle of static concluded the conversation. Sigh.

He hunched over his desk, cupped his forehead in one hand, and drummed his fingers on his desktop. “Janice, acknowledge. I need the calltag of the closest animal-control service.” He felt bad about turning over the goat who’d managed to balance his checkbook.

“I’m working on it!” yelled Ace.

Chapter Seven: Hot on the Trail

“No idea about this tracing fluid. The aswang dude hasn’t shown up on any of Chug’s radars.” For emphasis, Puttyman tapped his finger on the viewscreen that depicted the data their new tracking experiment supplied. The reviews on the tracer fluid were in, and the reviews weren’t good.

As usual, Puttyman occupied Chug’s cockpit deck. Chug was his baby, and he her mechanic. While he wasn’t her navigator—that was H2O—or her pilot—that was Pacemaker when Pacemaker could bring himself to wake up—he still spent his time making sure they treated her right. She was dusty, she was cluttered, her diagnostic viewscreens clapped sparks, three-quarters of her buttons no longer lit, she was a whole lotta woman, and she hated Pacemaker’s plastic hula-dancing girl affixed to her dashboard, but Puttyman still loved her subtle charms. The ferocious slope of her cockpit ceiling caused him to stoop this close to the helm. Ferocious slope or not, you’d agree that a true father always loved his girl. Didn’t matter that they’d bought this particular girl at a police auction.

The aged cockpit smelled like milk spilled in a parking lot on a hot day and left to curdle. Her paint wasn’t flaking. It was more scratched than flaking, as if some taloned beast sought escape.

H2O sat in front of and to the right of Puttyman, not taking his eyes off the blue-and-red data scratching along the radar viewscreen in fits and starts. Acting as the team’s computing genius and prankster, he was composed of water. Legend had it—you’d have to know this “legend” was H2O’s own account—his body had slowly phased from solid to liquid after a near-drowning experience at a family camping trip when he was nine. Now he was clear water in the shape of a Terran dude. But a party Terran dude at that. You might remember him as the smarmy adventurer, like Puttyman. You’ll see more antics later on. Yeah, that type of party dude. Stay tuned.

Anyway, he wrapped a watery hand around a flight stick and guided Chug rightward to avoid a signal tower. But it was only a signal tower for Channel Five News Team, “where news is what our advertisers say it is.” They followed that slogan up with “Crockin’ right.” And then a fart.

Puttyman turned from Chug’s bulky mainframe computer. Sitting behind his pretty baby’s two helming chairs, the starship this team called home, he watched data tumble down, up, and sometimes sideways along her numerous viewscreens. He couldn’t make sense of it, but Pacemaker and H2O routinely parsed it into digestible chunks.

Pacemaker was the team’s Trioxidillian cyborg. Dude was eight hundred—literally—and held together with glue—literally. He had a few nuts and bolts loose—again, literally—but was still an upstanding dude even though he never shaved that raincloud beard that dipped below his waistline. A fake beard, too, considering he was Trioxidillian, a hairless race. H2O glued it there one day, and Pacemaker had forgotten he shouldn’t have it. He hadn’t even noticed the glitter glue someone had pasted on the contours of his mechanical limbs.

Puttyman whispered out the side of his mouth. “Dude, tell me that was you with the glitter glue.” Pacemaker was asleep again. Puttyman could have trumpeted that sentence.

H2O smiled. And snickered. And nudged Puttyman with an elbow. An elbow that splashed instead of nudged. “You know it.” He took a hand off the flight stick long enough to share a high-five with Puttyman. The high-five connected, which showered Puttyman with warm droplets. Puttyman wiped them off his sunglasses. “Had it coming since he sleeps fourteen hours a day. Wake up, Vintross.” He splashed a hand across Pacemaker’s face. “You’re supposed to pilot, help us avoid things, and make sure we don’t die. You’re also missing a great high-five session: two white guys connected.”

“What-what-what?” Pacemaker roused from slumberland. “Where am I?”

“In charge of not crashing a four-ton mechanical bird into a populated area, dude.” Puttyman shook his shoulder.

“Right.” Pacemaker leaned forward, plugged his fingertips into Chug’s interface outlets—literally—and veered her left.

Also Sediment wandered into the cockpit deck, holding a mug with a Rottweiler on it. Full of tea, the mug said, “The more Virillians I meet, the more I like conversations with my dog.” She bobbled the teabag up and down. “Pacemaker, you just tore the roof off a day care.”

“Are we financially liable for another roof?” Bullet emerged from the living quarters in Chug’s rear and pounded into the cockpit section. “And, Clip, enough with the glitter glue. It’s sputtering out Chug’s thrusters.” Bullet reared at H2O, the Clip in question, with suspicious eyes.

Puttyman whipped his head in an amazed double-take. “How can you hear the glitter-glue comment but we always have to repeat our lunch orders to you?” Selective listening. You’re with him on that.

“I always hear a rule break.” Bullet’s nose, like a balloon floating up from her face and shrouding her forehead, was a visual beacon. If Puttyman stuffed a lightbulb in there, she’d be a lamp. H2O would figure out how to do that one day. “Have you found the aswang yet?” She raised a knife blade to her mouth. On it was pierced the slice of an apple, which she engulfed.

“Don’t sweat her, Jeff. I injected that apple with hot sauce.” H2O clicked his tongue and winked at Bullet. You would recall that mention of antics? Yeah, antics like that.

“Is that why my apple tastes like the floor of a sports-pub bathroom?” Bullet spat out the apple flecks.

“Relax, Ytril. Your nose is throbbing.” H2O tapped a few buttons. “Nothing yet.” His voice, as usual, sounded like a babbling brook. Not far from the punny truth. He jostled Pacemaker, who’d fallen back asleep. “Vintross, either stay awake for the trip, or plug in for a recharge. Your battery’s running low.”

Pacemaker snorted awake. “Where am I?”

“Same place you were last time you woke up five seconds ago.” Puttyman stood and whirled around at Bullet. “Look, Ytril, dude, I know you’re hell-bent on destroying that aswang, but tracking takes patience. And more lunch orders.”

“How much more patience must I show?” Bullet’s face reared forward at Puttyman. Red blossomed on her bright orange cheeks.

“At least fifteen moolahs. That’s with the local exchange rate.”

Bullet stared at Puttyman around her gigantic nose and wiped her knife’s edge on her jean pant leg. Her business with the knife complete, she sheathed it and, from a pocket, produced a stubby cylinder of skin cream. This she unscrewed. She dabbed her forefingers in the cylinder and smeared the cream over the parched skin of her cheeks. The cream smelled like yard waste. Oddly enough, it was labeled as that scent. “Seriously. How much time will this fluid take?” She capped the cylinder and slid it back into her pocket.

Puttyman leading his own team couldn’t come soon enough. “Not my know-how, dude. Ask Clip.” Puttyman threw a thumb at H2O. “The tracer fluid was his idea.”

“Who knows?” H2O scuttled his chair around to Bullet, a triumphant feat for a liquid dude on an uncarpeted floor. Chug sprouted a SLIPPERY WHEN WET sign. “The aswang either wasted no time metabolizing and sweating out the fluid, or it’s spending enough time around solar winds to mess up the signal. We might have to wait until that progeny of Satan shows its crugly face again. So mellow out.” Snoring again. “Seriously, Vintross, hit the sack.”

Another snort tugged like a lawnmower revving up, and Pacemaker just split apart the record for Most Times Waking Up in a Three-Minute Period. “Where am I?”

H2O shook his head. “Why are you so old?” The subject had to be broached. “Don’t blame him. I coated his chair with an intoxicant. I also coated it with a laxative. Thank your lucky stars his body processes the two at different rates. Get your bathroom breaks in now, though, because the toilet is going to be a pyre of odors soon.” That subject didn’t have to be broached.

“Okay, Clip.” Bullet stepped around Puttyman and advanced on H2O. She shoved herself into H2O’s personal bubble so adamantly that her face plunged into his chest, which was like breaking through the curtain of a waterfall. “Can you hear me better in here? Enough with the pranks. This isn’t my front lawn after all.” Her voice came out gurgling considering she was technically underwater. That was weird, right? You think that was weird? Was that skin cream waterproof? “We’re no closer with this aswang than we were a year and a half ago. And you want me to mellow out? Every time we kill it, it comes back in a different form like it’s trying on costumes.”

“That’s what aswangs do,” H2O said.

Bullet surfaced. “Intergalactic Protection plans to renege on the Hyperability Injunction using this thing. So I’ll ask you again: how much time does this tracker fluid need?” She backed away, took out her cylinder again, and rubbed more cream into her arms. Yeah, that whole thing was weird.

“Like I said, mellow out.” H2O nodded and smiled. “Because there’s nothing else we can do right now. Here.” His liquid hand scooped up a cup from the dashboard, in it a purple concoction. “Grape smoothie?”

Bullet pressed the cup aside with two fingers and continued rubbing in her skin cream. “It’s laced with horse tranquilizer, isn’t it?”

“It may or may not be but definitely is.” H2O sipped from the straw. His face stretched in icy shock. “I can’t feel my arms or my legs!” He jolted out of his chair and hurled the cup onto the stained flooring. In his contrived terror, the bubbling-rivulet sound of his voice was accented. “Jeff, I can’t feel my arms or my legs! Get me to a hospital!”

“You’re made of water, Clip.” Bullet crossed her arms and tapped a foot on the smoothie puddle.

“Oh, thank Alaphus.” H2O dropped back into his chair, feigned panic attack vanished.

“I don’t want your smoothie. I don’t want your horse tranquilizers. I just want that creature found and killed. Again. I want its head mounted on my wall and its heart stuffed into the garbage disposal. For now, let’s comb the aswang’s latest sighting for clues.”

Puttyman slapped his forehead. “Again? That’ll be the third time!”

“Yes, again. And again and again until that thing is killed. That’s an order.” Bullet reeled around and stomped back into the living quarters in Chug’s hefty rear. Puttyman’s baby got back.

H2O offered Puttyman a hangdog smirk and shrugged. “One of these days someone’s gotta slip her an upper. Or lace her a smoothie.”

“Or lace her a smoothie!” Pacemaker shouted, scuttling fingers along piloting sockets. If you knew Pacemaker, you’d know his life was on a five-second delay.

“Good idea, Vintross. Enjoy this strawberry smoothie.” H2O handed Pacemaker a second cup, but the old-timer was already asleep. H2O tweezed the straw and began sucking. Red saturated into his clear cheeks.

“No worries.” Puttyman squeezed a hand over H2O’s shoulder. Nope, his fingers slipped into the wash. H2O’s pulsing cardio circulation made Puttyman feel as if he gripped an intermittent water jet. “A few months from now, I’ll open a spot for you on my own vigilante group, dude. You’re in, right?”

H2O gave Puttyman a thumbs-up. “In in a second.” He stirred the smoothie with his straw and returned to the navigator’s chair. “Pacemaker, that’s a theme park you’re about to crash into. Ooh, good swerve there, curling up against the flight sticks for a nap.”

Chapter Eight: The Insatiable Belly of the Beast

The creature gobbled its latest meal in voracious handfuls, grasping at savory blood and stringy entrails that felt fatty but nonetheless nourishing considering the state of this Terran, whose weight tipped the scales around...maybe a battlecruiser’s. Crock, this blimp was several layers of blubber with a thin semblance of meat underneath. Leaner prey treated the creature’s cholesterol better, but for some reason the creature hadn’t graduated past eating heavyweights who wouldn’t know a celery stalk if one fell into their peanut-butter parfaits.

The creature would love a clean table—street pavement, always street pavement—but evidently the residents here didn’t think “so clean, you can eat off the floor” should be a concept. In this polluted alley littered with the throwaway accrual of consumerism, the creature hesitated to devour anything off the asphalt. A coffee cup, rattled by dirty wind that howled as incessantly as the baying coyote several dingy streets over, settled against the corpse. The creature clawed the cup away, but a food wrapper replaced it. Then a transport wreckage. The creature usually didn’t mind eating off dirty surfaces, but some pavements invalidated even the sacred ten-second rule.

Coyotes were house pets in this city?

The creature felt the vigor of this meal course through its heart, beating it harder, faster. Its blood felt hotter. It breathed more vigorously. Thoughts were clearer. New power surged through it. Its claws creaked longer, stiffer. Its teeth sharpened. The corpse’s blood fueled it, gave it more life, increased strength, new potency, and a burp that burned. Ooh, zesty mustard.

Thanks to news that preyed on the rapt anxiety of its audience to keep ratings elevated, the creature had gained popularity. Now three distinct groups dogged it, all from different balances of the law. The Good Guys represented the bright side of the law. The Bad Guys covered its evil shadow. And, in the middle ground, tipping the scale in neither direction, was Blowtorch, its members operating toward their own goals. The creature’s creaturic powers told him that. No, wait. Its creaturely powers. Creaturely. Creaturely powers didn’t extend to owning a thesaurus.

Blowtorch was the only group with which the creature had experiences. It had almost killed those vigilantes quite a few times. They’d tried liberating it from captivity only to turn around and destroy it. Did they not know? The creature could be destroyed by only boredom via weight-loss hypnosis seminars.

The creature snapped out the meal’s heart, detaching veins and aorta. Ahhhh, yes. It lifted the heart above its mouth and squeezed the organ like it would an orange. Anticipation tickled through its veins like ants trotting over its skin. As tasty as chicken grease, which wasn’t far from the truth for this pillowy man the creature had devoured. It choked. A bone had slipped down the wrong pipe. The creature burped generously.

The creature shoved the heart into its cavernous maw and slurped. Ptew. Tasted like a used gauze pad. Did anybody around here bathe?

The creature was done feeding. Done but not sated. It slavered for more prey, some who hadn’t eaten enough jalapeno-drenched burgers to blister your mouth. A few hours of unpleasant gas awaited the creature tonight.

What was with this hunchbacked cottontail form into which the creature had begun life hours ago, into which it couldn’t shove this meat gelatin without feeling grave consequences? It had assumed many forms before—a dinosaur, an angel of death, a koala, an oven mitt—but now the cosmic game of roulette had spun this rabbit form into the wheel of identities. The creature was unsure how to cope in this hulking rabbit. It held a policy against assuming the form of kid-friendly holiday archetypes. Whatever. It had taken the form of a dung beetle the day momma visited. Hadn’t heard the end of that one: “Why couldn’t you take the form of a doctor or a lawyer?” It had once come close on that last one: a pig.

Meal ended. Sustenance semi-enjoyed. Mouth wiped. Fart dispatched. The creature peered at the moon—and leapt into its golden-coin glow. Escaped the confines of this alley, its flanking apartment complexes and filth. Soared into the sky—clocked its head on a streetlamp. Crock.

That last feeding had profited it much power. It could previously eat only so much, could metabolize only so quickly. But now, with that feeding, now...it could eat as fast as it found food. That meant its power grew as quickly as it feasted.

And it could feast swiftly.

These mortals and their streetlamps. The creature would feel this in the morning. Crock, it was morning.

Chapter Nine: Tastes like Street Chicken

Master Asinine had seen people search for clues not by sight and sound alone but also by taste. So he took to licking the street. It was, after all, splattered with speckles of carnage from a recent fight. Carnage was the sauce of a fight. If his taste buds turned up nothing, at least he could sample the fight sauce. In this case, the fight sauce was barbecue baste blown out of that Squabster garbage receptacle on the street’s curb. Compliments to the fight chef.

He stood, backbone a firecracker of creaks, and indicated the sauce with his foot. “Lieutenant, you gotta taste this fight sauce. It’s honey garlic. And pebble.”

“I’ll pass, sir. I’m still stuffed from the fight sauce at our last stop.” Lieutenant IQ 23 rubbed his belly. “Mmmm. Delicious lane-division paint.”

“Lieutenant, I said taste this fight sauce. The sweet dew of honey conjoined with the tang of garlic. Have you heard tales of such a culinary weapon?”

“At most places that serve wings, sir.”

“Well, taste this delight anyway. You’ll not regret it.”

Lieutenant IQ 23’s face soured, but he obeyed, ducking down on all fours, tongue to pavement.

Asinine had heard, through a news report, that the woodland creature’s latest appearance/incident/book signing had destroyed the morning peace here like a fork in a microwave. He might have confused this news report with one about an independent author’s breakthrough debut, but if not, he was eager to crack open a copy of the creature’s Quilting for Absolute Crocktards. That same news report had led Asinine and his accompaniment—IQ 23, the gigantic living hand Punch, and the obese ninja Multipurpose—here. They now pursued clues up and down this street’s sparse length. The occasional citizen who happened upon here on this closed-for-business morning hightailed it at the sight of a gigantic walking ninja marshmallow and a gigantic walking hand.

Asinine held the breeze in his nostrils. A mixture of an autumn brush of fallen leaves—because in this hemisphere, autumn settled in February—joined wisps of burned wreckage from that dumpster, whatever the robobakery was robobakering up, and Multipurpose’s latest dietary misadventure piping out his rear flue.

The Bad Guys had amassed in this alleyway. Well, Asinine and some of the junior thugs, the name he’d given to his top-level cohorts. The other junior thugs saw fit to either call this a waste, tell Asinine how much he himself was a waste, or be Schizophrenic and not listen to a thing he said in the first place. Amaranthia avoided this mission because she’d rather skip school. Guess she hadn’t realized she’d griped about coming on a mission that happened during class time. Asinine felt suspicious Multipurpose had come only to eat the woodland creature.

Asinine kept speechless Braindead at Station Zilcho to convince Schizophrenic how much the Bad Guy leader wasn’t a waste of time through arbitrative conversation. In other words, staring contest it was.

“Nothing like a good fight sauce, sir.” Lieutenant IQ 23 stood, knees and elbows damp with the morning’s moisture.

“Really? Because I don’t think you experienced the full throttle of the fight sauce. Did you taste the tangy garlic and/or dewy honey?”

“I tasted the tangy garlic and/or dewy honey, sir. Throttle was on full.”

“I don’t think you tasted the tangy garlic and/or dewy honey full throttle.” Asinine faced IQ 23 with a different angle of his body as if challenging the assertion that the lieutenant’s throttle was set to anything higher than half.

“I tasted it so much, sir. So much that, if I taste any more, my throttle intake will exceed full, and it’ll ruin me for the throttle of other fight sauces. We still have many mulched orange peels to sample together, sir.”

Master Asinine flipped this around in his head, balancing the timing of IQ 23’s sampling against how rich the tang and dew tasted. “Nnnnnooo, I think you need to taste a little more throttle. Try it out. We might try to duplicate this throttle later.”

“I’m one hundred and ten percent on it, sir.” Lieutenant IQ 23 nodded sheepishly and plopped down on all fours again. He lapped like a kitten at a saucer of milk.

“You guys hear that?” Punch’s eyes, in the center of his palm body, found the sky, watching nothing but picking out some subtle scent or trace resonance. “Something’s coming.”

Asinine sensed nothing except morning ozone and IQ 23’s slurping. But wait. Ah, there it was. The low rumble of a starship filled the rippled clouds. Master Asinine couldn’t see it, but he noted the clouds parting like a show curtain. The rumble grew—what a sweet purr from what must be a sweet—Nope. The purr choked up a hairball. A hairball in the form of a gas haze that preceded a starship’s entrance to this soundstage of a street. Whoa, whoa. A transport dipped asymmetrically, clipped an apartment rooftop, and swept aside a chimney like a single-toothed, petulant infant walloping aside a tower of building blocks. This misdirected the starship, a Letchtech Tinfoil, which bobbed left-right-down-left like a dance student tripping along a pattern of footsteps on an instruction mat. And what idiot taught an infant to blemish the art of dance like that?

The Tinfoil settled on the rooftop, landing trestles grinding out and kicking away the remains of the chimney. The Bad Guys stared up at it, watched it silhouetted by whatever you called that yellow fire orb that burned in the morning sky like a sun.

Multipurpose rushed to Asinine’s side. He squeezed his tater-tot thumbs down the steaming folds of his hips, which yielded an odor like burning tires. The thumbs searched, hooked themselves on something, and finally produced a pair of sais from the ninja belt hidden under those generous fat flaps. “I should crocking parkour up the sides of these pissing buildings and take care of that crocking jalopy before it attracts too much pissing atten—” He clasped his chest. “Hoo. The hustle over here gave my heart a workout like only a true ninja could have. Gotta conserve my crocking strength, or I’m liable to go ape-swaggle on this watch store here.”

“The only thing you’re liable to go ape-swaggle on is the door to the robobakery,” Asinine said. “But leave that starship alone for now. The pilot might offer us free landscaping services.”

A Terran wearing sunglasses, a brown sweater, and a belted pair of tan pants emerged from the Tinfoil. Asinine’s jaw dropped. Wwwwow, what a chic gent! His wardrobe might look normal, not as flashy as the stuff Asinine usually cobbled together, but he excelled at what he worked with.

The chic gent in question perched one foot on the roof’s safety railing, the other braced on the rooftop proper. Arms crossed on his elevated knee, he leaned forward, toward the street, observing the Bad Guys like a gargoyle, but a well-groomed gargoyle. With nicely trimmed eyebrows.

“Hey, dudes, how’s it going?” he said. A hand perked up for a wave, which was how Master Asinine noticed the coffee cup he held. A coffee wave. “Ssssooo, why exactly are you here besides being wanted criminals in public?” He tugged his sunglasses halfway down his nose. “Also you parked in a loading zone.”

A loudspeaker bludgeoned a hello with a dictatorial squeal. The dapper man in sunglasses—who must be a male model to dress that stylishly—ducked from the noise and squashed his hands against his ears, the hand holding the coffee cup doing its best without dropping the drink.

A nasal voice replaced the squeal. “BAD GUYS, YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO INVESTIGATE THIS SLAUGHTER. WE HAVE DIBS BASED ON SENIORITY RIGHTS. THAT’S SENIOR-RIGHTS DIBS, AS DICTATED BY SEVERAL RULES AND PROCEDURES I DRAFTED JUST NOW.”

The fashionable Terran glanced a wordless “enough already” over his shoulder at that mil-tran that belched purple smoke from under one wing. Wow, was that man’s sweater modish. Where did he shop? Magnifique! Probably got a lot of rubber-necking peeps from the ladies. Back to the Bad Guys, he said, “That’s Bullet, our esteemed leader. Her nose is epic. Seriously the most swollen horn you’ve ever laid eyes on, dude. She looks like a cantaloupe roosted on her face. But she’s still kind of not wrong about you. We were investigating the street earlier this morning. Had to repel a demonized rabbit without my morning coffee.” He displayed his coffee cup in a semicircular gesture. “In fact, haven’t had my coffee until now.” He sipped. “Tastes like a mountaineer’s dream.”

“Demonized rabbit. I knew it was a woodland creature.” Asinine literally patted himself on the shoulder. “Good going, self.”

“This crocking moron is stomping on my last crocking nerve.” Multipurpose skimmed his finger along his sai. “I’ll crocking take care of him. Taste the steel of my bladed fury!” He reared back and spiraled his sai at the man on the roof. The sai thudded oafishly into a flower bed. Multipurpose gasped and winced, clutching his arm and rubbing it up and down. “Ooh, ooh, ooh. I used too much top-ranking ninja force for that action. I gotta learn to crocking hold back. Someone make sure I didn’t cause a ripple effect that’ll bring the buildings down on top of us.” He panted, hands on shins. “Are we safe?”

“Sir, should I murder that man to death?” Lieutenant IQ 23 wielded his pistol. He clapped one palm over the other to double-grip the pistol’s butt.

“No, Lieutenant, let’s hear what the man has to say. He’s too trendy for death-level murdering.” Asinine couldn’t take his eyes off the man’s urbane aura. “But keep tasting the throttle of the sauce.”

Lieutenant IQ 23 couldn’t hide a longsuffering gulp. “But my knees hurt, sir.”

“We brought kneepads in the starship. While you’re there, check the windshield for parking tickets.” He cleared his throat and prepared his diaphragm for a shout. So...two different factions fighting over fight sauce and rabbits. How should he approach this? “Hey, good sir. How are things?” Better than expected. “Love the outfit.” Much better.

The king of wardrobes decided to grace the Bad Guys with his presence: he set his coffee cup on the eave, grabbed a ventilation pipe, and swung forward over the railing into open air. Those arms, like elastics, stretched as the dashing stranger controlled a leap that lowered him eight stories to the ground. And with his arms stretched out, the—dare Asinine think it—amazingly tailored shirtsleeves stretched out, too. L-gear. The man landed on the ground, brown shoes scuffing on the curb, and reeled those arms in. With a fluid gesture, he reached behind that upmarket belt and brandished a pistol more voguish than IQ 23’s.

“WE HAVE TO COME UP WITH A BETTER WAY OF GETTING TO THE BATHROOM BEFORE EVERYTHING CUTS LOOSE,” an unsolicited voice broke over the public address system of the Tinfoil above.

“VINTROSS, YOU NEED TO WATCH WHAT YOU SAY OVER THE SYSTEM,” came that female nasal voice. “OR DID CLIP REVERSE THE ON AND OFF COMMANDS ON CHUG’S SYSTEM...AGAIN?”

“CLIP DID NOT...NOT,” a third voice popped in, one that sounded like water flowing. “DON’T GIVE ME THAT LOOK, BULLET. YOU’RE WELL AWARE YOU’RE INFATUATED WITH ME.”

Master Asinine’s eyes had climbed to that Tinfoil, but they now descended back on the hotly tailored man in front of him. “So your friend is a hilarious prankster.”

The man’s sunglasses had landed askew, but he flicked them back in place. “He does have access to fourteen types of sedatives. Now, why don’t we discuss thiiisss...let’s call it an animal-control dispute. The rabbit you’re chasing is actually an aswang, a beast that won’t die. Our claim to the aswang is we have the inside scoop on exactly what it is, and we’ve been destroying it since Maul discovered it two years ago September. Your claim to it is...?”

“It’s the greatest nonshiny object that’s distracted me from the latest season of Dragon Zoo.”

“As valid a reason as any. So”—the man shifted his hands back and forth between them—“how can we come to a middle ground?”

Master Asinine spat a laugh, one equally humorless and spritzing. He grabbed his own pistol. Pistol party. “We don’t, and I blow your brains out, which would be a shame because I can’t get over your outfit. Where did you get that sweater?”

“From my aunt. I don’t have much choice in the way of clothing. So here’s the new deal then.” The man tapped his pistol, one without the blinking lights and “gun goes blam blam from this end” sticky note that Asinine’s boasted. He sniffled and scratched his nose. “There’s almost nothing my team can do to stop you from dogging this thing. You have the firepower, you have the lack of ethics—”

“Always a plus when volunteering at a food bank.”

“—and you have the underlings who lick streets. So I propose this.” The man combed a hand through the hair at his temple.

Asinine mimicked the gesture and planted his pistol against his temple. That hit the spot. He finished the comb by waving his weapon skyward and firing a couple shots. And killing a bird.

“JEFF, DID YOU EAT THE REST OF THE ZITI?” That voice like a babbling brook again. “IT’S...I CAN’T FIND IT IN THE DOOJIGGER—OH, WAIT. IT’S HERE. NEVER MIND.”

Asinine guessed that the man to whom he conversed was the Jeff accused of grand theft lunch. Jeff waited a beat and then continued the conversation. “So here’s what I think will happen. I’ll suggest you abandon this idea of capturing this rabbit...or whatever it is after we kill it another dozen times. But you won’t. You’ll try to capture it for whatever dumb reason you think you have. You’ll corner it. You’ll believe you have the upper hand. And, when you’re caught off guard...it will rip you in half. And I’m not talking figuratively. It will open your ribcage like it’s prying open a coconut.” Jeff leaned closer and spat out a stage whisper. “Leave this to the amateurish professionals.”

“Lieutenant, you can stop tasting the fight sauce.” Asinine shifted aside to allow IQ 23 room to woodenly clamber up. He waved his pistol at Jeff. “Can we team up then?”

Jeff peered over the rim of his sunglasses at Asinine. “That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard, and I once ate a jar of pickled eggs because someone wagered me a jar of pickled eggs that I couldn’t eat a jar of pickled eggs.” Jeff reached up and, in the time it took him to flick his wrist, his arm stretched up with a slurping sound and grabbed that same pipe he’d used to descend to the street. He ascended the eight stories back to the roof. “I warn you. This aswang is a destroyer.” He ducked back into his flying death trap, which promptly reeled in its ramp. It snatched up wind and lifted a couple feet.

Over the public address system, Jeff clicked his tongue. “OH, GREAT. I FORGOT MY COFFEE CUP OUTSIDE. THERE GOES A GOOD OUNCE OF BAILEY’S. IS IT TOO LATE TO RELAND? CLIP, YOU DID SWITCH CHUG’S ON/OFF SETTING AGAIN.”

“Well, sir,” IQ 23 said behind Asinine, “looks like we should heed this man’s warning. Given what we’ve heard about the rabbit, I’m inclined to agree with him.”

Asinine watched the Tinfoil bob unevenly into the air. As its landing trestles folded into their recesses, it wavered but keep its balance. “No, Lieutenant. The man lies. Through his face.”

“Through-the-face lying, sir. You hate that for its deceptive qualities.”

“These folks want all the rabbit to themselves. We’re still on. Plan A is that thing will be our weapon by sundown. Plan B is it will be our weapon by nightfall. And, Lieutenant? Get back to tasting the fight sauce. You need a little more throttle.”

Lieutenant IQ 23 issued another exhausted sigh. “Yes, sir. Right away.” He kneeled back down.

Chapter Ten: Ready, Set, Go!

“Wwww-ww-wwhoa.” Pincushion braced himself as F-Kestrel twisted between two high-rise apartment buildings on their approach toward the garbage-mucked streets of Ratfink Pest Control. He tried to keep the weight off his metal knee. The goat Franchise avoided the concrete sides of those high-rise buildings with more skill than the regular Franchise.

Pincushion felt as though he stood on ice, not far from the truth on this recently polished floor. His pulled hamstring responded with hot yelping. He slipped into the navigator’s chair, and his spikes popped several holes in the red leather. The starship jerked upward to slow its descent, giving Pincushion a good view of a sky choked in smog as thick as yarn. It wasn’t smog, though: the underground sugar kingpin had weaved cotton candy into the atmosphere.

Music piped through F-Kestrel’s internal speakers. Power Plant had set up the Red Hot Chili Peppers to coerce Goat Franchise into funking instead of chewing every article of clothing in sight. Now The Uplift Mofo Party Plan grooved the starship, but Goat Franchise still hungered for shoelaces. At least the music had stopped Power Plant from trying to eat a hand towel. “Ya know, this half-cottons-half-rayon crocks ain’t half bads,” he grunted through an overstuffed mouth. Okay, almost stopped. “Ooh. S’ gots microfiber and no trans-fat.”

“Goat Franchise, approach ground level at a parallel angle, no faster than one hundred knots.” Pincushion jabbed the inertia button on his seat to trap himself in place. His pulled muscle throbbed, and his spikes jabbed the chair’s upholstery again when F-Kestrel charged right. “Must I rip holes in everything I sit on?”

With hooves unwieldy and yet adequate, Goat Franchise tapped Pincushion’s command into the starship’s computer. Then the goat issued a vibrating “baaaaa,” cracked its hooves as though they were knuckles, and returned to sharing Power Plant’s towel.

“Grixtrigla markveg”—what the—“veg sugoma xseddzarchnika.” the starship said in whatever language it chose to speak. Hauntingly, it used Janice’s happy-go-lucky spirit. “Craf craf norkgixturla. Tee hee!”

Pincushion kneaded the heel of his hand into his forehead. “What the communication error was that? Also why?”

From the passenger deck, Organism said, “That sounded like a Trioxidillian language. Probably Tsargtrioss.” If a larynx ever slept, Organism’s sounded as if it perpetually dozed off.

“Great. Now our ride talks in foreignese. Anyway, good goat,” Pincushion said, and Goat Franchise tilted its head into his fingers. Pincushion rolled his eyes—“Fine”—and scratched behind the goat’s ear—“but I’m not loosening your leash. That thing stays on in public, or we get a citation.”

An antagonistic draft juddered F-Kestrel, ferociously shoving the right side up and banking it against a building. F-Kestrel’s aft wing cracked a window, sliced a set of drapes, and pancaked a windowsill flowerbed. F-Kestrel barely kept them aloft. A mangy starship sliced so dangerously close Pincushion discerned the aloof expression on the pilot’s face. The starship’s wake left exhaust as cloudy as ashen plush.

“Whoa!” Pincushion gripped the navigation console to support himself. His jaw cracked against a flight stick, inactive since Goat Franchise had diverted all control to his console. “What was that?” Along with his hamstring, his chin now ached.

In his robotic, full-body armor, Incendiary spoke up, “My suit’s system says that starship is registered as Chug, under ownership of vigilante group Blowtorch. They’re registered them in our watch database.”

“That thing? Aswang-hunting vigilantes drive that thing? Goat Franchise, you trail that starship, and I’ll get you however many saltlicks your goat blood pressure can handle. And F-Kestrel, acknowledge. Next time, warn us before a starship nearly hacks us in half.” Pincushion rubbed the rasped skin at his side. “And warn us in English.”

Goat Franchise’s sluggish efforts suddenly pumped with life. His hooves slammed over buttons with gusto. F-Kestrel veered left—whoa, Pincushion gripped the edge of the navigating console—up—he lost his breath when his ribs jabbed his chair’s arm—and into the contaminated sky with a roar of thrusters. In seconds, they caught up to Chug’s polluted rear where belched such a foul haze of emission it gave the toxicity in the air stiff competition. Pincushion smelled the burned oil.

“F-Kestrel, acknowledge. Send starship entity Chug a landing order.”

Chug wormed among a slalom of antennae above buildings. F-Kestrel followed, biting at Chug’s tail. Pincushion felt as if he rode a mechanical bull, though his body remained in place thanks to the inertia field. From choking gray, the sky bruised to a sickening red. Had they already hit the residential areas?

“F-Kestrel, acknowledge. Transmit another landing order to starship entity Chug. And put some panache in it this time. Use a threatening word, like, like...”

“Unconstitutional!” bellowed the international-studies student Incendiary.

Pincushion shrugged a hand at the windshield. “Unconstitutional it is.”

But those vigilantes weren’t getting the hint. “Incendiary, brother, on deck,” Pincushion commanded over the thunder of furious thrusters. He kept one eye on Chug’s crisscross trajectory, one on the now-purpling sky, and one over his shoulder to address the suited Good Guy in the passenger deck. That made three eyes. Whatever.

Goat Franchise’s hot pursuit had forced Organism to wrap tendrils of himself around his chair for balance. Power Plant had likewise hugged his arms around a chair. Incendiary, however, stood in place. The magnetic boots of his repurposed Mechaknight suit kept him steady during the raucous steering.

Pincushion fingered his inertia button to release himself. He bolted to his feet and checked the dimples his spiky protrusions left in his seat’s upholstery. The seat was already healing. “We need to head off that starship from the front. Incendiary, you up for a reconstitutional flyby?”

Incendiary clanked to attention in his robotic suit. “President Abends, am I up for a reconstitutional flyby?” Always regarding Power Plant as the president of a fake nation, Jefftaria.

“Stop asking Power Plant for approval whenever I issue you an order. He’s not your combat consultant. Half the time, he leaves Station One without pants.”

Power Plant shrugged at Incendiary. “He ain’t wrong, you knows.” He wore a partially eaten media outfit, one and a half shoes, and hair teased in every direction by Goat Franchise’s blunted teeth. A tan leash, which trailed from Goat Franchise at the helm, hung from Power Plant’s slack fingers.

Incendiary jangled off a quick salute to Pincushion and launched himself at the exit. “F-Kestrel, acknowledge. Open embarking door.”

“Hekropma stekk. Yeehaw! Stekk hoy hekropmo-ti.” F-Kestrel responded, and before Incendiary inquired about Jefftaria’s population distribution, he had vanished from the starship. The embarking door clattered shut behind him as Goat Franchise pitched the starship left to keep up with Chug.

Outside, Incendiary’s boot thrusters roared aflame. He pitched ahead, barrel-rolled, and diverted himself in front of that claptrap ahead. Blowtorch’s space jalopy—if it was spacefaring, since Pincushion questioned how it even taxied off the ground—screeched to a midair stop to avoid splattering Incendiary over their windshield. Pincushion guessed they valued their windshield more than they valued Incendiary.

Pincushion braced his stumble by grabbing a flight stick when F-Kestrel swerved around a building to prevent the front hood from chewing apart Chug’s thrusters. He couldn’t rely on his pulled hamstring to keep him up. “That’s it. F-Kestrel, acknowledge. In whatever impractical crap you respond with, open hailing connection with starship entity Chug. And send them that eerie ad for blue whales. In stereo. That’ll teach them for almost smacking into us.” He wanted to have a tête-à-tête with these so-called aswang stalkers.

“Stekk grax frommath-ti.” Whatever.

Chug was on the move again. It maneuvered sideways to slice between two cuddling buildings. Goat Franchise didn’t risk it: instead he soared above the buildings and resumed chase once the roofs had passed underneath them. By this time, Incendiary had overtaken Chug and tried grounding them by buzzing a crosshatched path across their nose cone. No such luck.

“Members of the vigilante team Blowtorch,” Pincushion said. He didn’t even know if that hailing connection had linked, but he’d assume it had. His stomach couldn’t take much more swirling. “This is Good Guy field leader Pincushion.” He wobbled against a starship wall when Goat Franchise swung the mil-tran around a hotel. His spikes gored tiny holes in the metal siding. “If you haven’t noticed, we’re trying to force you to land before you make one of our agents a fly on your windshield. We need to chat.”

“Heh. Dude, that ain’t happening.” Some cocky passenger aboard Chug clicked his tongue. “We’re not exactly fans of Intergalactic Protection. Besides, you’ll regret meeting us. We don’t have a working shower.” A grunt. “Wait. Is Organism aboard? I need to have a chat of my own.”

Ain’t happening? “You’re willfully disobeying a military order. You want to land your crocks in jail, brother? If you refuse to land, we’ll blast you out of the sky.” Pincushion jabbed some buttons on the navigation console to transmit a force command to the other starship. Instead Chug’s thrusters growled louder, like a lion provoked awake. Had they reprogrammed Chug’s computer? That was illegal!

Metal on metal collided in a gust of sound loud enough to cure Pincushion’s insomnia forever. The spiraling form of Incendiary fell away from Chug, knocked aside in the starship’s haste.

“Hey, they hits the guy who keep tracks of my laundry. Lemme at ’em!” Power Plant launched himself at the command console.

Pincushion shoved him aside. “Jeff, everything you say sounds like a furious dwarf stomping on piano keys.”

“But I can smack ’em outta the sky and hopefully won’t kills us at the same time probably. That the Jeffy guarantee.”

“Be a unique and neurologically challenged snowflake in the corner.”

“Nuh-uh. This stuffs up here’s more interestin’. I goes back there and—bam!”—he punched his open palm—“suckitude city.”

“But you have a whole new Franchise to instill phobias in.”

“Oh, yeahs.” Away Power Plant bounded. “Hey, Goats Franchise, come check out these pictures o’ clowns!”

“Not while he’s operating heavy machinery!” Back to that smug passenger who sounded as though he enjoyed this chase with a hot mug of cocoa. “Members of Blowtorch, land—this instant—or I’ll be forced to shoot you down.” How, over a populated area? Pincushion wouldn’t bring that up. “Do you understand?”

A viewscreen appeared in the corner of their windshield. On it appeared a man wearing a pair of sunglasses, which he hooked with a finger and drew down his nose, revealing hazel eyes. His brown hair looked as if a comb hadn’t graced it in months. Behind him wandered a man who—as loopy as this sounded—was composed of water. His steps rolled like liquid. “You sure you can shoot us down? You’re barely keeping up, dude. Try flying without knocking into an apartment building.”

“Jeff, we’re going to comply with their order.” A Gharalgian shoved her way into the viewscreen’s angle. Her skin burst with bright orange, dry flecks speckling her face. “Chug, acknowledge. Slow flight speed to zero.” Their starship snapped to a halt meters in front of F-Kestrel.

Goat Franchise zippered around the console to beat ferocious hooves across F-Kestrel’s piloting controls. Mechanisms ground to a standstill. Inches from a rear-end collision that would have obliterated the two teams, F-Kestrel skidded to a stop. The force pitched the front of the starship up, and everyone clenched to keep from toppling into the windshield. The two starship bumpers poked each other. Maybe Pincushion’s breakfast would stay in.

“Thank you, big-nosed orange woman. And, Jeff is it? I take it you’re the pilot. Kiss my rear thruster.”

“Hey, what wuzzat?” Power Plant reared into the cockpit deck and gripped the viewscreen, knuckles paling an angry white. He looked ready to wrench the viewscreen off the windshield. “What wuzzat name? Ain’t no one else call Jeffy. You tell your parents ta take that back! Where’s they? They owes me an explanations!”

Pincushion pried Power Plant away and into the navigation chair. “Let the adults and the guy wearing the sunglasses handle this. Did you really think you were the only Jeff?”

“Yeah!” Power Plant leered at Pincushion with truly stumped eyes. “I dids! Now lemme bicker!”

“Bicker with them when you speak like autocorrect didn’t take hold of you. You handle English about as well as our starship is handling it right now.”

“Gronkratimus fatreik,” the starship announced. Or asked. Or accused. Who knew?

“Go be Trioxidillian to someone else, Kestrel. You’ve already caused enough foreign-language damage. Anyway, back to the vigilantes. I’m giving you five minutes to land your jalopy on that garden rooftop. I have questions about your involvement with the Bad Guys. Also, bring your starship’s emissions-test documents. Your ride smells like a pig roast.”

A Raestagean flew past the viewscreen, hooting and babbling something about how awesome bouncing in enclosed spaces was.

Someone else appeared in the viewscreen, a Logistican with caricature muscles. A tattoo, climbing his arm and crawling across half his face, dressed his skin, and he wore more high-yield firearms than clothes. He squeezed between the pilot and the Gharalgian suffering from a raging skin condition. He was knitting a scarf, small missiles as needles. Clamped between his canine teeth, a cigar billowed a volute of smoke, which he whipped out of his mouth. “That order ain’t happening,” he said, holding up the scarf and examining his progress at arm’s length.

“Which order...the landing or the emissions thing?”

“The pig roast thing.” He resumed knitting.

“That was an observation, not a—”

“Bullet”—the Logistican dropped his knitting project and slapped the stippled barrel of a silver fusion cannon by his shoulder—“this looks like a job for Money Shot. Get out of here, but pick me up in an hour at that charming keepsake store down the street. I’ll take care of these soup makers myself.” He disappeared off the side of the viewscreen.

“Hey. Hey!” Pincushion jabbed a finger at the viewscreen. “Get back here. I need answers from you guys, among them what a soup maker is.” He said to Power Plant, “Great. Now that’s going to bug me all day. Is that some new word with you kids nowadays?”

“I dunno.” Power Plant still stood next to him. “But take offenses at ithat. Like...ten or eight pounds of offense.”

“Brother, go play with the box cutters in the back.” Pincushion leaned closer to the viewscreen. “Blowtorch, you are all und—”

A boom took over all reality, a metallic galonk that manhandled the starship. Pincushion hopped backward, away from the windshield. The Logistican had launched himself out of his own starship, across the forty-foot gap, and onto F-Kestrel’s nose cone. His cigar still braced between his teeth, he peered through Money Shot’s sights at the windshield.

Organism suppressed a gasp with his hand. Goat Franchise dismounted the pilot console and trotted nervously backward. He whinnied an uneasy bray and dropped the wheatgrass from his mouth.

“Crock, crock, crock.” Pincushion eased a hand onto Power Plant’s shoulder. No matter what came out of that cannon, this would hurt. He decided now was a good time to hold his breath. And suffer from a heart attack, but that wasn’t up to him. “This will seriously mess up our insurance policy.”

Chug fired its barbecue-scented thrusters and ripped away again. It vanished in the time Pincushion took to ward off a sneeze and make sure the acrid odor wouldn’t melt his eyeballs. The only indications of Chug’s presence were the twin trails of black haze marking its escape.

The Logistican straddled their hood. With a sinister chuckle that sounded like a distant avalanche, he curled his finger around the trigger—

Wham! Incendiary swept across the span of the windshield and slammed into the mountain-muscled Logistican. The Logistican locked in his machinery arm, Incendiary careened into a rooftop smokestack, pulverizing the thing and pinning the one-man Logistican armory under him.

Pincushion collapsed into a chair. “Holy crock, I’m giving Incendiary a massive raise. I’m not authorized to do that, but at least he’s welcome to my coffee stash.”

Chapter Eleven: The Stupidest-Laid Plans

Wearing his flashy new sunglasses—form a line, ladies—Master Asinine moseyed forward into their starship’s cockpit area. Lieutenant IQ 23 sat at the piloting console, surveying the street outside. Next to him sat Punch, the copilot on this jaunt, pressing buttons with the fingers that acted as hair atop his body.

The starship flew low—about a foot and a half off ground level—to keep its presence on the hush-hush. Asinine checked the radiograph and trajectory readings on the viewscreen array dashed across the left wall of the cockpit, rubbing his chin with a greasy hand. His gut gave birth to an itch of excitement, like water coming to boil.

Master Asinine tugged his sunglasses down his nose with just enough dapper. Just like that dapper aristocrat. His eyes trekked up the viewscreen data. “Interesting. Iiiiiiinteresting. Especially this part with the letters.” Was it? He had no idea. He took another voracious chomp out of the slice of pizza in his other, greasier hand. Hawaiian. Blech. Who thought pineapple belonged on the same food as cheese? What came next for pineapple? Fruit cocktail? Audacious little produce. That was the last time he let Multipurpose order. And why had Asinine paid for it? He headed the biggest criminal outfit this galaxy had ever seen. Oh, well. What else could you expect from the guy who had tried ordering the pizzas first from Home Depot? Then again, paying for the pizzas offered him the chance to showcase his cupcake necktie in public, and they got a free two-liter jug of Beast energy drink with the order.

He regarded the viewscreen again. “This is monumental.”

“How would you crocking know?” screamed Multipurpose from the back, hoarse from all that hot sauce he’d drenched over the pizza and his face.

“Hey, I know monumental when I see it, and this is it.”

“I doubt you even know notable when you see it. And you’re wearing footy pajamas.”

“Don’t insult my space jammies!” Asinine flapped a hand at Multipurpose, whom he wished would stop talking. That eating machine was hard enough to ignore when he burped.

“Then how about I insult the fact that you’re wearing sunglasses indoors.”

“Hey, I’m climbing the stylish ladder like nobody’s business. I’ll be debonair by the time you fall into your midafternoon food coma.”

Asinine had commissioned Brainiac and her science mind to whip up a contraption for capturing this bunny, a little something-something according to some well-thought-out masterminding. (Really, Asinine had tossed some harebrained ideas at IQ 23 and then ordered the good lieutenant to send them to Brainiac and to shut up that nonsense about safety coming first.) End result? Something called The Contraption, so significant even the word the had a capital. The Contraption was a titanium cage...propped up by a stick...attached to a sedative-laced carrot...via a taut string...that hung said carrot from the inside of said The Contraption. The sedative was one Brainiac was absolutely pretty sure might possibly somewhat half slightly knock out an aswang rabbit. So when the rabbit happened along this carrot, it couldn’t resist the sweet song of its favorite food according to cartoons everywhere, which were as good as factual data. It would snatch up the carrot, thereby pulling the string away and dropping The Contraption around itself. Bam! The rabbit would be The-Contraptioned and, combined with the heavy sedative, also be theirs forever. Game, set, and checkmate. This idea was foolproof despite Schizophrenic doubling over with laughter every time Asinine explained it. Funny thing was Schizophrenic, who refused to come on this mission, was the only one truly excited to see Asinine follow through with the plan. Go figure.

Anyway, the plan was guaranteed to work. Television told the truth 100 percent of the time. And cartoons told the truth twice as much.

The readings strewn across the starship’s viewscreens showed how close they’d come to finding their quarry, as estimated by the radiation readings. Not an easy task, but, judging from the foxtrot of those readings, the Bad Guys were in the right neighborhood. About time. Out of the two hundred pizzas they’d ordered, Multipurpose had already worked through seventy-two of them. The Bulbosoid fatso had fashioned a food slide that led to his gullet. Now he fed on pizza, boxes, plastic tripods, and all. Still technically a diet for him.

“Punch, how close are we to this thing?” Asinine gestured at the nearest viewscreen with the jug of Beast. He chomped down on his slice of pizza. Olives, pineapple, ham, cheese. A mélange of conflicting tastes confused his palate as much as the letters on children’s building blocks confused his spelling abilities.

Situated on his side of the cockpit, the hand-shaped Punch hunched over a monitor. A punch hunch. “The rabbit’s not far. We’ve reduced its lead to shorter than a minute.” He smoked a pipe, which he tapped of ash.

And, as Punch delivered his estimation, lo and behold but what should appear before them? The rabbit, its back toward the starship. Its tail looked as if something had torn it out hair by hair until only a trace remained, the rest having left a barely healed cavity. It stooped over a bloody meal on which it feasted, nose against a wall as if to conceal table manners as wild as Multipurpose’s.

“Holy wow.” Lieutenant IQ 23’s breath hiccupped. “Sir? Sir? Sir. Sir?

“I see it, Lieutenant. Stop the starship.” Asinine padded closer on flannelled feet.

Lieutenant IQ 23’s fingers lieutenant-danced over controls, and the starship slowed to an inactive hover. The rabbit, now washed in headlights, leered at them over its shoulder. Asinine noticed its meal: a cat, belly ripped open to reveal a scatter of ribs, blood and intestines dyeing its fur. Asinine found a new appreciation for Hawaiian pizza.

Asinine didn’t dare take his eyes off the rabbit, but his hand found Punch’s shoulder, which was really a knuckle on this hand man. “Punch, engage The Contraption. Or tell that thing we’ve got pizzas. I don’t know what would lure it on board faster, but this Hawaiian junk has to be more appetizing than cat guts.”

“No way am I sharing!” Multipurpose screamed from the back. He had stood but his sudden bellow left him wheezing and stooped over, palm on a countertop.

“You said that about our turkey dinner last week, but you still let me eat your utensils.”

The colossal aswang shambled around to confront them dead on. This was the first time Asinine had witnessed it in person. Its eyes, yellow but accented with the raw decoration of rubicund veins, lit with a lethal fire. Its nostrils were slit into one. To complete the snarl of its face, its octopus-tentacle tongue slathered out and rolled along its lips, smearing the blood. Its white fur, hopelessly matted, was patched in blemishes of gray with the unpredictability of a Rorschach pattern. Its paws, as gigantic as novelty catcher’s mitts, held aloft the cat corpse and wrung droplets of carnage onto its remorseless tongue. Its hind paws looked just as fleshy. Terror didn’t even begin to outline what Asinine felt right now. Indigestion did, though.

Punch choked. “Forget offering this thing a pizza. It would rather dig them out of Multipurpose.”

“Punch, what did I say about The Contraption? Engage that thing so much I want it engaged, turned off, and then engaged some more.”

Punch’s fingers, fleshy hair on his scalp, rattled along the starship’s console. “Engaging it now. Turning it back off. Reengaging it.”

Indeed, The Contraption was engaged. A mechanical arm laid the ten-by-ten-foot cage on the pavement a few paces from the rabbit, near the back door of a psychic’s parlor, Madame Mental’s Mentorium. Another mechanical arm tilted The Contraption and placed the propping stick under the elevated side. A third arm placed the trigger carrot and tied the string to attach it to the stick. And yet a fourth arm gently but securely affixed a sign on The Contraption: FREE CARROT. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. MUST BE EIGHTEEN OR OLDER. And where did this starship get off having four arms when Asinine had only two? Who was in charge of evolution around here?

Asinine clutched his hand to the soft warmth of his flannelled chest. “Man, I wish Amaranthia had come to samurai this thing up.”

“Let me at it!” roared Multipurpose from his position in the back. “I’ll crocking samurai that thing up six ways from crocking Sunday.”

“You said that about the pizzas, and you have yet to samurai them up one way.”

“Just you wait until lunchtime. Lunchtime is samurai time.”

“I’ll believe that next time you eat something healthier than a dead raccoon.”

“I’m as healthy as an otter. Oh, heartburn.”

“Really? Because I remember your ordeal from the time the airfoil in Station Zilcho’s grain silo broke.”

“No one’s digging deeper into the otter comment?” Punch gave everyone a moment, but no one responded. “Fine. The Contraption”—he clicked a button, which lit with energetic red—“is now”—he clacked another button, which lit with enthusiastic blue—“ssssset.” No third button. Asinine was looking forward to excited green. Or at least reluctant brown. Console designers these days really phoned it in.

The mechanical arms retreated into their recesses with nary a whisper. They retreated with mechanical squeals like the yowl of a lit cat, but no whisper.

“Now,” Asinine said, fingers twiddling against each other, “we observe the rabbit as it takes the bait.”

Punch tapped his pipe against a bowl to empty it of spent ash. “Or as it ignores the bait in favor of the more substantial meal it’s already eating.”

“Perhaps both.” Asinine blinked, but that was all he dared. He was otherwise entranced, observing every inch of the rabbit’s movement.

The rabbit’s hairs bristled as it took notice of The Contraption and the sedative-laced carrot. Its nose—what remained of that frayed organ—twitched with curiosity. It seemed to consider the carrot for a moment, the fat, orange baton swaying in a breeze as gentle as a baby’s sleeping breath. Asinine read the rabbit’s aloofness, the unimpressed curl of one side of its ratty nose. Was that a dismissive “harrumph” it issued? It returned to the cat, gripped its guts between its jaws, and snapped out another length of intestine...

...before it discarded the feline corpse and shuffled around toward the carrot. It was taking the bait!

Every step like a grapple with life, the awkward form of the rabbit negotiated the constricted alleyway. It plodded up the curbside to reach The Contraption and study it, surmising the bars up and down with its nose. Finally, it hunched underneath the raised gap, careful not to disturb anything, and lumbered toward the center where hung the trigger vegetable. Its fissured tongue licked its equally cracked, bloodied lip. One paw wrapped around the string that dangled the carrot. The other paw, somehow larger and uglier—

Asinine’s heart tightened.

—gripped the carrot—

Asinine’s blood froze.

—and drew the carrot to its drooling fangs.

Asinine bit a similar carrot he’d kept for himself and then eyed it suspiciously. Was this the laced one? He shrugged and continued eating. He liked the taste of sedative.

The rabbit mangled its carrot into orange mulch, drool spewing out sunglow orts. Even the bushy stem fell in. In fact, this thing nearly devoured its own paw. Would the sedative work? Asinine stopped chewing, jaw open, fibers of carrot all over his pajamas and—Oh, great. What a mess. These PJs had just come out of the wash.

Well, the sedative wasn’t taking effect on Asinine. He’d have known by now, because somehow he got smarter when he consumed tranquilizers. At the Bad Guy trivia nights he hosted, he guzzled them by the handful. Only way he could beat his stuffed animals in the arts-and-entertainment round.

He leaned closer to the windshield, whisking his hand around Punch’s pipe smoke. These pajamas better not stink like smoldered cherry after this.

The rabbit slurped the last of the carrot into its cavernous maw and then tongued the debris off its swordlike teeth. It issued a menacing glare as if not through feeding and then—

—it careened sideways and crashed to the ground. The simple tumble seemed like the toppling of a tall statue. Dust clouds billowed out from underneath the rabbit, belching grime from its pavement bed. Dust clotted in the rabbit’s fur and blew the string aside. An ambitious wind snatched up the string and...and...AND—the cage crashed down. It clattered squarely against the ground, and from its four corners emerged anchors that gripped the pavement, clawed in, took bites as hungrily as the rabbit had chewed the vegetable except without the lack of societal charm.

“Yes, yes, yes!” Asinine pumped a fist, swinging his elbow like a baseball bat. It looked awkward and upended him into Multipurpose’s punchbowl—sorry, punch pool—but he felt like celebrating. “Yes a fourth time!”

“Yes a fifth time!” Lieutenant IQ 23 joined in on the act of swinging his fist. He pirouetted into the punchbowl on purpose.

“Lieutenant, I alone count my yesses. Start yours at one.” Asinine picked himself up, dusted himself off—didn’t work when you were drenched in strawberry juice and ginger ale—and proceeded to the change station. “Now, let’s go pick up our new toy and harness its immeasurable power. Which reminds me, I’d like to stop by the store for a new toy, something whose immeasurable power I can harness. A wind-up toy maybe.”

“I’ll see who has the best deals we can rob, sir.” Lieutenant IQ 23 wriggled out of the punchbowl.

“Don’t sit on any furniture until you have a dry bottom.”

Chapter Twelve: Like Grocery Shopping

“You let them arrest Maul!” Bullet whacked a flight stick with an eight-fingered hand. Good thing Chug was at a standstill, or that whack would have propelled them into the pet store below. Puttyman wasn’t a fan of birds.

“I’m mad, too. He had my favorite breakfast fork,” Puttyman said. The tension in the cockpit felt thicker than the tar with which H2O had coated Pacemaker’s piloting chair. The tension also included Pacemaker’s snoring, also thicker than tar. You might remember that tar from a moment ago.

“You lost Maul and a fork. And he was supposed to prune the ammo growing out of Kudzuka. It’s flowering!” Bullet kicked the huge launcher with vines crowding out of its barrel. It slid off Chug’s piloting console.

Pacemaker slept in the pilot’s helm, H2O next to him at the navigator’s console. Puttyman stood behind H2O, hands on the chair back. Also Sediment vigorously paced the back of the cockpit deck, hands worrying around the air. She muttered to herself about the damage their Mechanism lookalike had inflicted on Chug’s meteor guard, how the Good Guys could release Maul, and how her darks had come out with so much starch they now doubled as roofing material. Every so often snippets percolated above her murmurs. The latest snippets Puttyman caught were “Speed Line,” “playing with parging supplies,” and “spanking.” Yikes.

Bullet loomed over Puttyman, her orange skin an angry shade of persimmon. In this shadowy deck, the years that had chased away her youth were more apparent than usual. She slid a hand over her forehead, sweeping brittle flakes from her golden skin. “This thing is your fault.”

“You’ve had this blame-shifting habit lately.” Puttyman spoke that comment at half volume to keep from disturbing Also Sediment: she had stopped pacing to examine a blouse with the rigidity of sheet metal.

H2O offered a tube to Bullet. “Here. Ointment will clear up that habit.”

“I don’t want your ointment.” Bullet slapped the tube aside. It spun away and deflected against Also Sediment’s blouse, which snapped in two. She skipped back, wondering why she abruptly held a half in each hand.

“That ointment was Oswald’s, guaranteed to last up to twenty-four hours.”

“I just want Maul back.” Bullet speared a finger at Puttyman and almost jabbed his nose.

Puttyman rested against H2O’s chair in a leisurely tilt. “How is this my fault? I had no idea they’d unleash their toaster oven on him.” He fused his malleable hands behind his head in a gummy meld and leaned in.

H2O barged in on the conversation. “You don’t see Also Sediment blaming me for what I did to her laundry.”

“Hey!” Also Sediment launched herself across the cockpit deck. “It’s Sediment. Just Sediment. Not Also Sediment, Alternative Sediment, Derivative Sediment, Supplementary Sediment, et cetera. Just because I didn’t register the name in time...just because that thief who registered before me sued me for name infringement...and just because I’m legally forbidden from using that name in public...does not mean I’m not the real Sediment.”

“Funny you’re not concerned over who screwed up your laundry. Still thinking about spanking Speed Line for it? That might not be good for whatever enclosed space you find him in.”

“We were late seven weeks with that registration.” Also Sediment threw her arms out. “Seven measly weeks!”

“You sent Maul out, Jeff.” Bullet swept Also Sediment aside. Her hands found her hips. She fumed at Puttyman, shifted her eyes slantwise at H2O, and then returned that stern stare to Puttyman. “You told him to—let me quote—‘jump out and sauce those IP dudes up. And do it boss style.’”

A chuckle dug its way out of Puttyman. He would suggest Bullet loosen up, but that seemed impossible. “Yeah, I have my own unique way with words.” He knuckle-bumped with H2O. “And he did sauce those dudes up boss style.”

“And now he’s their prisoner. Who knows what information they’re torturing out of him?”

Puttyman clicked his tongue. “Torture? You’re acting a wee tad over-over-over-overdramatic a lot.”

“This is Intergalactic Protection. Torture isn’t beneath them. They’ll stoop to anything in their power to suit their needs, no matter who they hurt. And we need Maul to prevent them from violating the Hyperability Injunction with that aswang. If they violate it, I’m holding you personally responsible. We’ll find ourselves in the middle of the very Armageddon my daughter gave her life to stop. She didn’t sacrifice herself for nothing.” Bullet had worked herself up into such a tizzy her breathing had run amok. She had to inhale to speak through her exhalation.

Puttyman wanted to jab another joke at Bullet but relented. Her anger was warranted. Her daughter was killed protecting people in the Perseus War Hyperability Incident, and IP intended to use the aswang to undo her sacrifice, to end the injunction.

Bullet stomped away, stormed toward the rear of the deck.

Puttyman called to her. “Well, dude, you’ll be pleased to know Clip finished Baby Blue, and he assures me our new bundle of joy suffers from night terrors. We ccccoooouuulllldddd use Baby Blue on those Good Guy clowns.” He gave Bullet an eager smile.

Bullet stopped, seemed to consider this without turning back. She slouched in lament. “No.” A trace of a tear moistened her voice. “Save it for the aswang.”

Chapter Thirteen: What Doesn’t Die

Pincushion took a seat across from the beefy Logistican who looked as if he’d had enough of swatting away Goat Franchise’s attempts at eating his shirtsleeve and Power Plant’s attempts at eating his other shirtsleeve. This Maul was unlike any Logistican that Pincushion ever met. Logisticans were businesslike, grave. Solemn. This one had a tattoo and a mean streak that spiced him up more than his typical compatriots. “So, Maul—”

“If thats is ya real name!” Power Plant launched himself at Maul with a fist poised.

“It is.” Pincushion grappled Power Plant away. Back to Maul. “So, Maul, you’re in the business of hunting rabbits.”

“Yeah, but that’s all I’m gonna say.” Maul leered at Pincushion. “That and the fact that I’m hungry and like tuna. Hint, hint.”

“Organism can whip you up a sandwich”—Pincushion evaluated Maul with a quick up-and-down—“or ten.”

“Tuna coming up.” Organism began searching the small counter in the back. He thumped through some cupboards in search of tuna. They had none. Pincushion had seen to that himself since Power Plant had thrown around spreadable meat the last time someone had brought Spam on board. Mabel’s cats had swarmed this starship for days after that incident.

Pincushion reclined on his chair, supporting the ankle under his pulled hamstring on the opposite leg’s knee. The hamstring still bulged with snappish tension.

Goat Franchise had grown tired of Maul’s shirt and gone to work hoofing commands into F-Kestrel’s computer. F-Kestrel complied by locating a rooftop onto which to settle. Its tripod of landing trestles unfolded with a drone felt throughout the craft.

“Let’s start with your association with the Bad Guys, brother. We have news footage showing you in the same area the Bad Guys showed up in. And we have more news footage showing you and them talking. This news footage aired on Channel Seventeen. They’re the ones who claim fire is responsible for formaldehyde, but still. Their accuracy is up thirteen percent this quarter. To nine percent. According to them.” He shrugged. “I don’t know how they math.”

Organism reached into a cupboard. He rooted around so intently he was shoulder deep. When his arm emerged, it held a silver cellophane package. “Is this a Peanut Cluster Ball? Weren’t these discontinued about a century ago?”

Pincushion rubbed the back of his head. “Organism, I think Kamikaze dropped a pita behind the thruster feed a few months ago. Grab that.”

“I...I can’t.” Organism examined himself, flexed an arm to pop up a muscle. “The thruster feed is too heavy.”

“What? The feed can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. You’re a six-and-a-half-foot tower of bulk. Just grab it on both ends and crush.”

“I can’t. It’s...just...” Organism gripped the feed—a thick, plastisteel pipe that dangled through the length of the starship—and playacted a halfhearted lift. Nope. He backed way. “I can’t.”

“You mind?” Maul grunted and flicked his head away from Power Plant, who was tasting his collar. In Power Plant’s defense, the collar was bleached and faded, his favorite.

Yellow teeth hid behind the Logistican’s all-military lips, which he revealed like a cornered wolf baring its canines. “We got nothing to do with the Bad Guys. We told them to take their business elsewhere.” Power Plant flicked the Logistican’s collar with his teeth.

“And take it elsewhere I’m sure they did. But the fact remains that you and they were seen together. That needs addressing.”

“An’ whiles ya at it, you can explains why your pilot look like a haunted tree,” Power Plant said.

Maul struggled to launch forward but couldn’t. Pincushion had dialed his chair’s inertia field to an immobilization setting. His neck tensed with exertion, that claw tattoo bulging with the effort. “I told you. We got nothing to do with the Bad Guys. They’re after the same thing we are. That’s why we ended up in the same place at the same time.” He eyed Power Plant, lined up their foreheads, and—Clonk. Power Plant collapsed to the floor. There he thrashed between the two aisles of chairs. Goat Franchise clopped up and sniffed him.

“Then let’s talk about this rabbit. What is it, and why are you interested in it?” Pincushion leaned forward and peered down at Power Plant, who gripped his radish-red forehead and exuded a whimper. “Serves you right, Jeff. And your impact shirt’s on backwards.”

“It’s on fashionably awesome,” Power Plant managed through his pain.

Maul tightened a glare at Pincushion. “You’re an IP thug. The aswang’s your chief experiment. You know more about it than we do. Listen, if we’re through here, I gotta return a breakfast fork to Puttyman.”

Pincushion leaned so close Maul could probably taste the sour onions on his breath from the cookbots’ ill-advised attempt at vanilla custard. He still shuddered at the thought of what it considered a nut and what it considered a ball bearing. “Taking into account the number of microbiological diseases that break out at Station One in a twelve-hour timespan, we have plenty of criminal projects to track without IP’s. So pretend the Good Guys aren’t privy to whatever you’re accusing us of. Because we’re not. Now...” He hoped Maul caught the teriyaki hint from his latest slice of cake. “...tell me about this rabbit, or you’ll find yourself underfoot of a military investigation so fast I can’t come up with a cliché threatening enough to explain what’ll happen to you.” He shooed away Goat Franchise, whose interest in Maul’s shirt had renewed.

Maul formed what Pincushion would describe only as a contemptuous smile. “Not everything trickles down to the rank and file?”

Power Plant recovered. He stood, still holding his head.

Maul examined Power Plant as if wanting to deliver another blow. “Your ‘rabbit’...it ain’t a rabbit. We ain’t know what it is. Closest word we thought up for it is aswang. It was cooked up from who knows where for who knows what purpose. Best estimate I heard is it’s seven thousand five hundred years young. It feeds on blood ’cause blood sustains it. It hunts, plays with its prey. No plan, no endgame, no master, no restraint. And every time it eats, it gets tougher, stronger, worse.”

Goat Franchise spat out a scratchy bleat. Incendiary, a few paces behind Maul, crossed his arms. “He’s asking how you know all this.”

Maul tried to twist his head around. No such luck. “You understand what that thing says?”

Pincushion crossed his ankles. “Incendiary has Rosetta Stone downloaded. Jefftaria has budget for that but not free health care. Power Plant runs a tight ship.”

“I’m fierce cool at my job.” Power Plant pointed at his beaming smile. “Ya can tells I’m a good diplomat from all the crock comin’ outta my mouth.”

Pincushion said, “Feel free to head-butt him again. He gave this floor the best dusting it’s seen in weeks.”

Maul looked around at the group: Goat Franchise, Power Plant, Organism who still rifled through cupboards for sandwich ingredients—he’d tucked a jar of mayonnaise under one arm and a cinnamon shaker under the other—and then Pincushion. “How can I know all this, eh? Hold on. That’s coming.

“In 9095, an IP squad stumbles across our little aswang when they stop their mil-tran for repair work on a Logistican moon.”

“Ooh. Present-tenses story time.” Power Plant sat cross-legged on the floor and settled forward in rapt attention.

“Back then the thing’s a timber wolf. It attacks the squad, kills a couple o’ them soldiers. Then they manage to blow it to bits. But”—Maul interrupted himself to allow a chuckle—“by the time they finish fixing their ride, the thing comes back to life. In a new form. So they kill it again. And again. And again, and you see where this is headed. You kill it and kill it and kill it, but it keeps coming at you. New body every time. Nothing you do stops it. Crocking nothing.”

“Okay, language around Power Plant. His new thing is swearing.”

“Crock, crock, crock, crock, crock”—Power Plant inhaled—“crock, crock”—he leaped off the floor and began strutting around—“crock, crock, crock, crock.” Power Plant swaggered to the rear of the starship.

“The squad finally wises up, reports back home about what they found, and gets orders to bring it back. So they kill it again, strap it down, and cart it into their mil-tran.”

Organism shuffled past, his lethargy contradicting the bounding musculature he carried, like a lazy man stuffed into a brick wall of brawn. He hugged a bag of potatoes to his chest.

“The mil-tran shows up at IP on Minerva, but everyone on board’s missing. And the aswang’s wandering around. The welcoming party who got ordered to meet the squad kills the aswang again and then reviews the mil-tran’s video logs to see what happened. Turns out this thing ate the squad on the trip home. Everyone. Well, nukes cha-ching in the IP chiefs’ eyes. They got a chess piece they can’t pass up. So the experiments start, and every time they blow this thing to pieces, it keeps coming back in some new body. This whole scenario lasts three years. You ask me how I know all this? I used to be an IP soldier. A general. I was stationed at IP’s chief headquarters on Minerva, same place as you guys before Station One was finished. See, I was one of them goons on the welcoming party, and I was one of them goons enlisted to kill this thing every time it came back to life. I was the lead goon.

“That thing gets transferred to IP’s personnel campus on Gaia because all the best science brains are there. I get transferred with it, me and my squad. But I find out what IP’s got planned for it”—Maul clamped his teeth shut and spoke through them, the light muting their dull yellow into the color of rotten cheese—“so I kill it. Course, it comes back to life. Every time. I kill it again and again, and it takes on a new body: an ox, a thundermammal, a gnu. Didn’t last long as a gnu. So I enlist others—put a callout over the Intergalacticnet—because I ain’t liking what IP’s got planned. They’re cultivating this thing as their chief weapon. They were, anyway, until Mechanism hit IP during his galactic genocide.”

“—crock, crock, crock, crock—” Power Plant was making another round behind Maul’s chair.

“When Mechanism attacked the personnel campus a few weeks ago, he trashed the place. The aswang escaped. It wanted to use the diversion to devour everyone, but I chased it off. Mechanism and his band of merry men was doing a good job of slaughtering everyone anyway.”

Maul returned to his story. “So then my friends and me, we register ourselves as vigilantes. Call ourselves Blowtorch, named after my favorite form of crowd control. And we’ve been hunting this thing ever since.”

Organism was stooped at the navigation console, an underside cupboard open. “Why is flax seed in here?” He engaged in a swat fight with one of Mabel’s cats over a jar—“Shoo!”—and won. He pulled out the jar and turned it over. “Hrm. Sixteen grams of protein for every cup. Is that good? F-Kestrel, acknowledge. Is that good?”

Pincushion shook his head at Maul’s story. He issued a sentence that started as a stammer, as if his brain were playing ad hoc with his thoughts, but he eventually revved his words into language. “W-w-w-what...why does IP want to play with this thing? They’re tasked with killing stuff like this.”

“You ain’t following, are ya?” Maul chortled through his nose, a show of cynicism that didn’t reach past his neck. “Idiot yes-man soldier.”

“—crock, crock, crock—”

Pincushion slammed a fist on his armrest. “Okay, Power Plant, I’m instituting a swear jar.” He turned back to Maul. “What is IP scheming, brother?”

Goat Franchise trotted up, a potato-cornmeal-and-cinnamon sandwich in its mouth, which it dropped onto Maul’s lap. The goat trotted off, only to return seconds later with a bib napkin that it deftly tied around Maul’s collar using its teeth.

“Logisticans like me are slaughtering your Stratus Cloud troops out in other galaxies. And IP don’t like that. But Logisticans have been talking about heading to war right here. Threatening your galaxy on your home turf makes IP rrreeeeaaallll uncomfortable. Logisticans are too powerful, and IP can’t compete with just regular soldiers. So they want to send hyperpeople into battle. And this aswang is legally a hyperperson. It’s gonna be the point man. They wanna use this thing. They plan to violate the Hyperability Injunction.”

Among the galaxies in Renovodomus, the Logisticans were Stratus Cloud’s loudest and most active enemy, motivated by a conflict over natural resources. They’d threatened war for decades. Apparently IP predicted their hostility to come to a head now.

But IP didn’t realize what they were messing with. The Perseus War Hyperability Incident was an incident in which Reef had caused an explosion—was the explosion—that ended a city block and everyone in it. The incident had given way to a few clashes that resulted in near genocide. But peace talks prevailed: due to the unpredictability and vast variety of hyperabilities, several galaxies in Renovodomus signed a treaty called the Hyperability Injunction, an agreement to bar the use of hyperabilities in combat. And now IP sought to break that?

“So IP wants to win a war against Logistica, but it will risk inciting every other galaxy to war? And they want to use a giant aswang for that?” The spikes on Pincushion’s shoulders ran through several shades of brown as his flesh ran cold.

Maul ignored Pincushion’s question. “You don’t find it weird you’re out here in the first place? You guys was created to thwart the Bad Guys, not investigate planet-level murders or play animal control. So lemme ask you: who put in the order to capture this thing? Legion? Or did it come from higher up?”

Pincushion’s stomach prickled now with a sensation he hadn’t experienced since the cookbots had come up with their version of kielbasa. He switched his ankles, the shift rusty with nervousness. “Came from...” He swallowed down trepidation in his voice that reminded him of the time he was fifteen and someone had caught him stealing. “Came from IP.”

Maul chuckled like a lawnmower skirting over rock. “You’re just IP’s tool. They’re using you to bring their weapon home. And their weapon is rrreeeaaalll important to them”—Maul struggled to lean closer, as if to show the import of what he said—“’cause every time it eats, it gets badder, more indestructible. It takes on newer abilities. If it eats one meal right after the other—or like all at once—it gets stronger exponentially. The more it eats at once, the more exponential the growth. And the more exponential the hunger. Every time it’s killed, those abilities reset. It starts back up at square one. But it ain’t in captivity now. So if it keeps eating, we ain’t gonna be able to stop it no more.”

“This makes so much sense. A few weeks ago, Reef told Burnout and me about a violation of the Hyperability Injunction. But before we got to the bottom of it, Mechanism attacked. Burnout and Reef died, and I never followed through.” The prickling Pincushion felt in his stomach melted into his bowels. When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple felt like a rubber ball in his throat. “F-Kestrel, acknowledge. According to local surveillance, where was the last place entity Rabbit was seen?”

“Hrat sankfarchowl, und greeben por mask hrat-fern.”

“Incendiary, translation.”

Incendiary clanked a step closer. “Entity Rabbit was caged by the Bad Guys, who then hauled it onto their starship. Their starship was last seen shuttling in the direction of Station Zilcho.”

“The more it eats at once?” Pincushion couldn’t rein in his gasp. “That station will be its smorgasbord.”

Power Plant stood behind Maul. “Ya smells like crock salt.” He caught Pincushion’s sidelong leer. “I means rock salt.” At the mention of rock salt, Goat Franchise clip-clopped over to investigate.

Chapter Fourteen: I, Rabbit

The creature curled up inside this cage, this inconsequential, meager snare those mortals had used to...imprison it? No, that wasn’t the word to use, because the creature was in no way imprisoned. Oh, no. It merely bided its time. It had new toys to play with. To eat. To floss out because flossing helped keep teeth and gums healthy and disease free.

It would bide its time until this food transported it to their home. Until this food brought it to more food. They were the appetizer. But it would allow the appetizer this notion that they had captured it, allow them their delusion of control. And then it would feed. It would drink. It would devour. Every last one of them. And it would grow unstoppable.

And it would fall asleep from all the tryptophan.

* * *

A couple hours later, it decided it would get its claws done at the spa. Every once in a while, it deserved a treat.

Chapter Fifteen: Commence Bowel Contraction

Detritus coughed again. He scrutinized the timer, the docile box that one day—or, frankly, any second now—would trigger these sixty-million-foot robots from their profound slumber. The robots’ canopy heads bore head-sized bolts that seemed like eyes watching him wherever he stepped in this undercover room.

Detritus and his long-distant cousin/cohort, Wasted, were generics, those lowest-level workhorses of the Bad Guy empire. Detritus grew sick of seeing everyone else graduate to being named agents, especially that walking eclipse, Multipurpose. Why not Detritus and Wasted? They had hyperabilities, too: Detritus blew himself up, and Wasted got drunk on oxygen and sober on alcohol. So to prove themselves to Master Asinine, the two busted out on their own to cause shenanigans here at Station One posing as Good Guy recruits. The shenanigans didn’t last long: after a short while, they found this room. This undercover room with gigantic robots.

During a short moment of sobriety drinking his hooch, Wasted, college graduate, had discovered this timer counted randomly, across more than one timeline. Crock, just when Detritus thought he had counting figured out, the Virillian species throws this curveball.

Despite the undisturbed quality, the room held a foosball table, a headless corpse sitting in a chair off to one side, and the starting lineup of the aforementioned sixty-million-foot robot sentries at the back wall. With the aforementioned timer. Oh, and the licorice whip Detritus now chewed on. Grape, in case anybody kept track.

The air here felt almost undisturbed, virginal. Station One’s haunt control had no domain in here. Detritus had issued it every command he could think of, but nothing got through.

Beep, beep, beep. That was the insufferable melody of the timer at the robots’ feet, the four-by-six-foot showpiece that characterized this room. Its beeping scuttled through Detritus’s veins like cockroaches skittered through a seedy apartment. Beep, beep, beep. Still a smarter conversation than one with Wasted.

Speaking of insufferable, Wasted sloshed around the top of that foosball table in a bout of hungover sleep that thrashed like medieval combat. The barf bag around his neck was tangled around a goalie. Keeping him boozed and coherent had grown expensive. Leaving him alone was far cheaper and had netted the red team six points.

But that timer. It kept beeping. Nonstop beep-beep-beep as if it had nothing better to talk about. Whatever timers talked about, anyway, like about being all timery and how good they were at counting stuff.

The timer’s numbers twirled in speedy cycles, synched up with its ceaseless noise that frayed Detritus’s brittle sanity, keeping him from a good night’s rest. He grabbed fistfuls of hair to somehow think up a single reason for the timer’s existence, the robots’ purpose. What happened when it hit its random launch time?

Detritus hadn’t breathed evenly for six days now, ever since he and Wasted had stumbled across this robot militia. He finished his licorice whip in an effort to forget the beeping. But he couldn’t. Never. He heard it even when he wasn’t in this room. When he walked, when he ate, when he tried unsuccessfully to keep Wasted from rolling into garbage compactors. Those beeps kept him restless at night much like he imagined PTSD victims lay awake, illusory firearms discharging in the victims’ ghostly hallucinations.

Beep, beep, beep, beep.

He snapped his yellow suspenders against his orange impact shirt. “Buck, I got no idea what to do.” He twirled around at Wasted, who had somehow stuffed his face into the blue team’s goal slot. “I’m outta answers, but we gotta try something.” He knew Wasted wasn’t listening—how over his vicious snoring?—but talking aloud helped him slog through this problem. “Maybe we oughta tell the Good Guys what’s cooking in here. Maybe they don’t know. Maybe it’d put us in a better position with them, buy us a few trust points. Maybe we should take care of this thing ourselves. Maybe we should call us a specialist.” Crock, crock, pissing crock! “Or call you a mixologist.”

He’d lost all appetite. Hope had vanished like a dry sandcastle eroded in heavy wind. He felt its cavernous absence in his heart, in his chest. Hopelessness was a cold compress wrapping his forehead, something that stole his orientation of up and down.

“Okay, no more talking to myself. That ain’t helped me nothing since I tried to fake the insanity plea.”

Beep, bee—Shut up. Something bubbled inside him. His face danced from slack terror to tense rage. He rushed the timer console, reared back his foot—“What’s your point, machine? Shut up your beeping! Shut up, shut up, shut the piss up!”—and kicked—“Yyeeeeoowww!”

Clutching his toes, he pogoed to the foosball table—Wasted’s breath was foul—and right back from it toward the chair with the dead dude who, curiously enough, didn’t stink as rankly as Wasted today. Then again, unlike most drunkards and Wasteds, he was incapable of burping.

Beep, beep, beeeeeep. Click.

...

What...Was that...Was that a click? Moreover...was that a beep click?

Detritus felt an ominous aura sink into the room. As if a movie camera were zooming in for a close-up, he twisted his upper body toward the timer. That timer, with its incessant, maddening beeping he’d now trade the world to have back.

“Timer?” Detritus didn’t dare look for fear that the shift of his eyes would drown out the beeping he tried to detect. “Timer? Beeping t—Wasted, stop puking into the ball slot. I’m trying to hear stuff. Hey, timer, get back to your job.”

Like someone creeping across a crowded room, Detritus slinked toward the timer, limping off his injured foot, pulse pounding in his throat like a drum at a volcano sacrifice. The countdown had stopped. Those numbers no longer performed backflips. The racing digits now froze on zero, which looked like three-legged birds in Virillian.

Detritus swallowed, sure that the crinkling of saliva in his throat was heard all the way down the hall. No, this wasn’t happening. The timer still counted...right? He allowed himself two deep breaths and slapped his cheek. Checked the timer. Still zeroes. Freaky three-legged-looking zeroes.

Favoring his bruised foot, he skidded into a dead sprint, slewed onto the floor, scrambled around the robots, scuttled to the command console at their heels. The viewscreen welded to the lead robot’s heel no longer scrolled directives at a rate of eight pissing commands per microsecond. The commands had hushed, a final line at the bottom—the one in red instead of the usual green—starkly still. He grabbed the viewscreen in both hands, yanked himself forward at it, and read the red text at the bottom. English. Written in plain English: “Preparation sequence initiated.”

And, for crock’s sake, Wasted’s hair was tangled in the goalie.

Something powered up. In an instant, an ominous rattle-bang-choke, like a huge shuttle engine, dominated the room. Detritus scrabbled back, his injured right knee cold with pain, kicking away from the robot toward the back wall because, holy crock, something was powering up. The robots vibrated. Since when were they supposed to vibrate? Since what random time?

Oh, mama—He clambered around—crock—to the front of the robots—mama crock—unable to climb off all fours—sweet mama crock—due to his blazing toes—sweet, sweet mama crock—and peered up at them robots.

The vibrating stopped. And, though the robots remained motionless, without so much as a twitch, their...eyes...were...lit.

Chapter Sixteen: Also without the Fancy-Schmancy Novocain

Again and again, Pincushion had watched—scrutinized—the security-cam footage of Asinine abducting that rabbit, as if repeated viewings would showcase some clue to where he’d taken it. Station Zilcho seemed like the safest bet as their path indicated, but for all his roller-coaster logic dictated, Asinine could be hauling the aswang to his favorite rock-and-bowl, the place that bowled with actual rocks.

Maybe Asinine intended to take this aswang to the ball. “F-Kestrel, acknowledge. Plot and estimate entity Master Asinine’s trajectory.” Pincushion ignored the rapid Trioxidillian mammajamma. Okay, change in tactic. “F-Kestrel, acknowledge. Place tracking signal on collective entity Bad Guy’s closest mil-tran. Holler in four different languages when we’re close.” With that out of the way, what next?

He massaged his temples. “You know, with Mabel’s cats, multiplying goats, and killer rabbit aswangs, I’ve had it with the mammal species.”

“It a clade.” Power Plant stepped up behind him. “Mammals is a clade.”

Pincushion removed his hands from his temples. “It’s a wh—Your brain is held together with coat hangers and duct tape. How can you even know that? Go pass a math test for once.” He whirled his chair around at Maul, metal knee squeaking. “What’s your team’s calltag?”

Maul was still confined to his seat, but Pincushion had allowed him some upper-body mobility to swat away Puss in Boots, Mabel’s fortieth cat to stow aboard F-Kestrel. Now he leaned forward, chewing on the latest meal Organism had mustered up: the flax seed. He tipped the jar over to pour its contents into his upturned craw—and over his chin and onto his cheeks and into his nose—but he paused to say, “Captain Vile and friends. All one word.”

Pincushion’s mouth gave that “what” slant. “Which one of you is Captain Vile?”

Maul’s tattoo glistened where Puss in Boots licked his cheek. “We have arguments about that.”

Pincushion couldn’t anticipate what words would spill out of him. Or even if they were words. “Over who’s Captain Vile or who isn’t—Not important. F-Kestrel, acknowledge. Contact calltag Captainvileandfriends”—it astounded him to say that—“videophone mode.”

Power Plant raised a hand.

“No, you may not change your media name to Captain Vile.”

Power Plant dropped his hand.

The haunt control attacked them with another bout of Trioxidillian babble. Somewhere in the froth of language, Pincushion detected a racial slur. Nevertheless, the connection went through, and in the corner of the windshield emerged a viewscreen that starred the water-based member of Blowtorch, shimmering clear liquid in a Terran form. The water man squinted and leaned into the connection as if examining specimen through a microscope. “What are you guys calling us for? Hey, Maul.” He chopped off a slight wave. “How’s incarceration treating you?”

Maul shrugged. “Remember when I got captured by that dental association? Ballpark that but without them outdated fashion magazines.” He received a smack in the face from a thrown issue of Air Guitar World on datasheet. Thanks, Power Plant.

“I need your leader, brother,” Pincushion said to the water man. He rubbed his jolting hamstring. “The orange Gharalgian who hurts my eyes.”

“Bullet? Hold on. She’s lecturing Puttyman. She’ll be a few more minutes. Her lecture has only seven points this time. She really likes her lectures. Puts her shoulders into it and everything. You know, you’d think they wouldn’t include the proper technique for enjoying cotton candy but...” The water man shrugged. “...they do. I can understand, though, since cotton candy usually ends up all over our windshield wipers.”

Maul tipped the last of the flax seed into his maw and then, for good measure, dropped the jar in. This he chewed with as much nonchalance as he would bubblegum, a conclusion Pincushion came to when the Logistican blew a bubble from the plastic label. He swatted Puss in Boots away. “These things are like Tribbles on this flying shack, ain’t they?”

“Interrupt that lecture. I need to talk to her. Now.” Pincushion thumped the wall with a spiky fist. It stuck in. Dislodging it took a few yanks. He really had to watch what he thumped.

“Last I checked, she was four slides deep on her third point. That’s often the part where she lectures us about wearing shoes around the starship.”

Maul’s label bubble popped. He slurped it back in. “Clip, it’s actually a serious situation. Might wanna grab her.” He continued chewing. “While you’re at it, I need you to make sure Trial by Fire Ant is locked and loaded.”

“Already did. One ant farm chambered and four in the breech.”

“So fierce!” Power Plant hopped onto the chair beside the Logistican. “Wheres can I gets one of them crocking ant-trail blast-its?”

“Power Plant!” Pincushion snapped without turning.

Power Plant grumbled under his breath. He stabbed his thumb over the print reader on the console labeled SWEAR JAR. The console chimed and then said, “Quarter moolah deposited.”

The haunt control was still spouting Trioxidillian guesses about Asinine’s flight plan. Pincushion strained at the foreign-language information. He diverted his attention back to the watery figure on the viewscreen. “As soon as your leader finishes her rebukes, tell her the Bad Guys captured the aswang, and we think they’re bringing it back to Station Zilcho. Considering the size of Asinine’s army and according to what Maul says, this thing will feed nonstop. It’ll become indestructible in minutes.” He craned his neck forward. “And that means the end of life as we know it.”

“No mores soapstone carvings?” Power Plant stomped off the chair and kicked the nearest thing: Puss in Boots. “Crock.”

“Jeff!”

Power Plant rolled his eyes and huffed again. He stabbed his thumb over the swear jar. “Crockin’ worths it.”

Pincushion returned to his conversation with this Clip. “As soon as I hang up, I’ll send your calltag a tracking request. You need to accept the request and follow us to Station Zilcho. Prepare for the fight of your lives.”

“Before you go, I have a question.” Organism raised a finger. “If you’re made of water, how do you hold weapons? Also how do you hold stuff?”

“An’ whens you boils water, izzat cannibalism?” Coming from Power Plant, that was a legitimate question.

“Give me a sec to open the starship’s firewall so we can receive the request.” Clip tapped a pattern of buttons on Chug’s dashboard. Pincushion heard the tones and clicks but couldn’t see what he pressed since the dashboard crouched underneath the sight of the viewscreen.

“And make sure Trial by Fire Ant has a full farm bandolier. I want those ants fuming and hungry.” Pincushion slammed a palm over the viewscreen’s hang-up button, and the viewscreen blipped away from existence.

“Organism, hand me the lubricant. I have to unstick my palm. Don’t ask questions. Just do it.” Legion would pitch a fit over the number of holes Pincushion was puncturing into this thing.

Chapter Seventeen: Pardon the Intrusion

On the way home, Master Asinine had changed clothes. He’d squirted pizza sauce all over his pajamas, right on one of the rocket ships. He now wore his orange-and-white laminated suit with flashing Boxing Day tie, incomplete without his novelty vampire fangs. And you couldn’t wear the fangs without the half-length cape.

Still, he felt gnawing disappointment in the step down in wardrobe. He’d moved away from dapper and toward trim. And what use was working from home if you couldn’t do it in your PJs?

His new sunglasses bouncing at his nose and his even newer belt jangling at his waist—like the one that well-groomed guy wore—he spilled into his navigation chair, mood deflated, a mug of cooled cocoa in his hand. Beside him, IQ 23 piloted the spacecraft home.

Hrmph. Bored. He wanted to play with his new assassin toy now, the one lolling in a dreamy sleep in the cargo hold. “Lieutenant, howm lomg muntil we’re hmhome?”

“Didn’t catch that, sir.” Lieutenant IQ 23 tapped a command or two into the holographic keyboard before him, not missing a beat to blare the horn at the mass-tran who cut them off.

“I athed hmhow lomg muntil we’re hmhome.”

“Sir, I’m still...” The lieutenant regarded Asinine and shook his head in puzzlement.

Asinine leaned forward and removed the fangs from his mouth. Drool showered the console, which he wiped off with a sleeve. That accidentally commanded the starship to eject Multipurpose. “How long until we’re home?”

“Oh. Uh...piloting screen guesses three hours and twelve minutes unless we hit rush-hour traffic on the highway.”

Outside the windshield on IQ 23’s side, Multipurpose floated past, waking up and searching his surroundings in bewilderment. Asinine would order Punch to swing by and pick him up in the next few days. That’d give Braindead a chance to catch up on restocking the candy dispensers.

Asinine put his fangs back, shifted them around with a couple of chomps, and propped his cheek up with a hand. He drummed the fingers of his other hand on the missile discharge button. “Should hmhave broughnt Clue.” The missiles disintegrated a water tower.

“What was that, sir?”

Asinine tore the fangs out again—“Should have brought Clue”—and then put them back in.

“Sir, not a wise idea. You remember the Great Clash over Colonel Mustard of 9109.” Lieutenant IQ 23’s sentence blended with a double-toned beep that resonated across the cabin. Another starship hailing them.

“Attention, party people,” the starship’s haunt control said though no one currently partied. However, they were people. “Incoming connection.”

Asinine leaned forward. This could be that studio audience he ordered. “Comtrol, macknowlendge. Maccepnt commectiom.”

“Command not recognized.”

Asinine tore out the fangs again. “What’s up with—Come on, everybody! Control, acknowledge. Accept connection. Was that so difficult?”

A viewscreen claimed the width of the windshield. Asinine wasn’t about to have any of that. He wanted to see whatever they rear-ended. With two fingers, he touched the viewscreen and swept it to the right. Pincushion showed up on it, sweaty and red with nervous exhaustion. “Asinine, we need to talk about that rabbit you’re carrying home. We know you captured it. Don’t take it to Station Zilcho. It’s an aswang. It feeds, and every time it...” Confusion danced over his face. “Are you a traffic cone?”

“Hey, focus.” Asinine snapped his fingers twice in quick succession. “I don’t have an unlimited calling plan on this starship, and you’re wasting my minutes. Wait, first things first. Did Legion receive the invitation to my Finnish textiles party?” Maybe that was where the haunt control’s party comment had come from.

“He let Goat Franchise eat it.” Behind Pincushion, a costumed goat clopped up, a datasheet poking out of its crazy jaw. “Goat Franchise is still working on it.

“Anyway, Asinine. We’re headed your way. You need to abandon all plans you have with this aswang. It’s a feeder, and every time it feeds, it grows stronger and stronger. And you’re chauffeuring it to the dinner of a lifetime!”

“Pfft. You would say that.” Asinine slumped back in his chair, planting his shoulder blades in its curvature. His arms lazed off the armrests, and he dropped his vampire fangs. “You just want to keep me from having my fun. How did you get my calltag?”

“How d—You left it in the party invitation!”

“But still, how did you get it?” One of Asinine’s hands found life and shooed away the question. “Never mind. Answer my first question: you’re just saying crap to keep me from having my fun. Okay, that’s not a question.”

“Asinine, this aswang grows stronger when it eats.”

“If it’s hungry, we have a metric ton of pizzas here. We’ll give it a few dozen of whatever Multipurpose hasn’t eaten. He doesn’t like crust, so there’s a bunch of those lying around if he didn’t inhale them in his eating fury.”

Pincushion slapped his cocoa forehead. “How many learning disabilities must you suffer from to not connect these dots?”

“Fourteen. Maybe more. Maybe ten. That’s not the point here. The point is I captured this thing, and you want it, and you’re not getting it. We picked up a spiked leash for it and everything. Go to the pet store and find your own aswang. Control, acknowledge—”

“Asinine, brother, I’m begging you, your station will become this thing’s cafeteria!”

“—cut connection.” And, with Asinine’s order, the viewscreen disappeared, forever leaving Pincushion behind. Asinine chugged out a humorless snort at IQ 23. “Can you believe that guy? We earned our aswang fair and square.”

“Sir, maybe we should have done more Wikipedia research on this aswang. I’m getting the impression Pincushion was telling the truth.”

“Yeah, right. Pssh. And I’m leader of the largest criminal organization in the galaxy. Okay, I am, but still.” Asinine yanked himself forward and leaned over to pluck his vampire fangs off the floor. He inserted them and shifted them until they fit properly. “Amywaym, less get tis chariont hmhome.”

“What was that, sir?”

Asinine snatched the fangs out again. “Seriously, it’s not that hard!”

* * *

Despite his sadistic hamstring, Pincushion hobbled to the navigation console and checked their proximity to Asinine’s craft. No. No! He slammed a palm on the dashboard. “Asinine has too much of a lead. There’s no way we’ll catch up.”

“Crock!” Power Plant kicked the coffeemaker on the counter at the back.

“Looks like we’re headed to Station Zilcho. Nobody tell Amaranthia her boyfriend is a goat, and we might live.” Pincushion extended a finger back, still fixated on the diagnostics of the navigation monitor. “Goat Franchise, get that invitation out of your mouth, and get us there yesterday. Ed, Red Hot Chili Peppers comes off. Put on my haul-tail theme.”

“Speed Racer theme coming up,” Incendiary announced.

“And, Jeff, the swear jar!”

Chapter Eighteen: How to Feed and Care for Your New Pet

The Bad Guys’ starship eased toward the surface of Station Zilcho. More specifically to the surface of their renaissance fair grounds. Asinine hopped onto the starship’s dashboard, eager to bathe in the adoration of all his fans shrieking and screaming below: the generics, his named Bad Guys, and all seventeen sanitationbots. He bippity-bopped his head to the latest breakup tune from the Bittersweet Nuthin’s. He wanted to sing along, but he didn’t feel worthy enough, having suffered through only one heartbreak, and that was when Frito-Lay had discontinued Jalapeno Muchacho Doritos.

The starship landed, so Asinine took that as his cue. “HELLO, LADIES, GENTLEMEN, AND CHADWICK, IT IS I—” He peered through his sunglasses and out the windshield at the ground. Huh. Vacant lot. Where was everybody? He spotted only the sanitationbots and that one generic, Denis, who thought he was the King of France.

Asinine stepped back. “Lieutenant, didn’t you ask all my fans to come greet us?”

“Yes, I did, sir. Evidently, word of your ‘awesome recent snagaroo’ didn’t get around. Or nobody knows what an awesome recent snagaroo is. I’ll have everyone paged immediately.”

“Good. In the meantime, Punch...let’s unload the cargo. Think you can...handle that?” He elbowed IQ 23. “Get it? Handle that? He’s a hand.”

Punch was plucking the pineapple off the remaining Hawaiian pizzas and stuffing those pizzas into the fridge doojigger in the back before they went bad. He stood and set his pipe down with a flick of his pinkie. Silently nodding, he followed Asinine off the starship and down the access ramp that had unfolded upon their landing.

They moved around to the back. The cargo hold was, in essence, the rabbit netted and tied to the back of the starship. These mil-trans didn’t offer much trunk space, and that trunk space had been occupied by Multipurpose and Multipurpose’s belly. Not that Asinine thought the rabbit wouldn’t fit back there, just that he didn’t think their new guest would appreciate the odor of fish sweat.

Asinine held out his hand—“Scalpel”—and Punch responded by slapping a dagger into it. Asinine stepped up the footholds on the back of the mil-tran and, in three swipes, hacked down the net. The rabbit rolled out of the ruined net and slumped to the ground on top of the hammer platform for the carnival’s strongman game. The ringer shot seventeen feet up and chimed the bell.

“Okay, let’s summon the crane we use to offload Multipurpose and plop this thing into a proper holding cell.” Asinine spotted the first of the gathering generics wandering out into the lot. Finally. The masses had arrived.

Lieutenant IQ 23 popped up behind Asinine. “Sir, I’ve put out the dispatch. With extra menace, as you usually request.”

“Did you use the ‘Avengers, assemble’ line?”

“Our tagline is ‘Bad Guys, bunch up.’ And, no, I used ‘Come outside right now, or you’ll get pine needles in your Taco Tuesday ingredients again.’”

Asinine smiled nonetheless. “Foliage tacos. Always a deal breaker.” By now, the crowd had swelled to almost forty, which Asinine estimated with a quick body count. When last he’d counted his generics, they’d numbered close to two thousand. That was three zeroes, not this one-zero business he saw here. No announcement yet. He’d wait for the full army to show their faces. Jaundiced faces, if the cookbots had their way.

* * *

The aswang still feigned unconsciousness. It would play dead until its meal was served to him complete, and also it would stifle this raging burp percolating in its gut.

* * *

Finally most of Asinine’s underlings had emerged from the shadowy nether of wherever they hid. About time, too. Apparently their shadowy nether was twenty minutes away. It had better be, or else these lollygaggers were in serious trouble for taking their time. If this were a fire drill, they’d all earn a C. C plus at best. The fire marshal would hear about this. At least when Timmy got home from T-ball tryout.

Asinine stepped in front of the rabbit to conceal it until that centerpiece moment for maximum gasp. He flapped his half cape out to obscure the rabbit’s massive bulk. Checked behind himself. Meh. Obscured enough. And aswang? Pincushion must have overstated things. The only thing aswang about this rabbit was its snore.

He tapped Lieutenant IQ 23’s shoulder. The lieutenant responded with a thumbs up and a “The loudspeaker is set and ready to go, sir. It’s activated to only your voice.”

“AWESOME. I’M SO READY TO LET THESE LOSERS HAVE IT FOR TAKING THEIR TIME.”

“Sir, as I said, it’s already primed on your voice.”

“IN THAT CASE, ANY CHANCE WE CAN WIPE THEIR MEMORIES LATER?” He assumed the public-speaking stance where he jutted out his chest. Then he hopped into his dance of bliss: a little of the funky chicken, a little of the cancan, a little of the accidentally-smacking-a-knee-into-a-fire-hydrant. Not everyone had arrived yet, but he couldn’t wait forever. Cosmonaut Chimp started in eight minutes. And he had to get his knee checked out too.

“HELLO, CITIZENS OF STATION ZILCHO, IT IS I, MASTER ASININE, ESTEEMED STRUTTER OF STUFF AND WINNER OF THIS YEAR’S POOPER-SCOOPER TOURNAMENT. YOU MIGHT REMEMBER ME AS THE GUY WHO INSPIRES TRUE AWE IN EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOUR STONE-COLD HEARTS. ALSO THE GUY WHO CUTS YOUR PAYCHECKS.” He scanned the crowd, a red fence of generics broken only by an Amaranthia gate somewhere left of center. Amaranthia was busy ignoring him, too involved in the conversation with the person to whom she gabbered. Linda, Becky, maybe Esmeldereldashmere (a foreign-exchange student or octopus, he assumed). Nobody awed Asinine. Except avid Denis, who offered a refined French clap.

“FOR THOSE OF YOU ACTUALLY LISTENING, I HAVE RETURNED WITH OUR NEWEST WEAPON. FOR THOSE OF YOU NOT LISTENING, NOW IS A GREAT TIME TO WAKE UP. AND FOR THOSE OF YOU DOING SOME OF BOTH, SCHIZO, PLEASE STOP FILLING MY SALT SHAKER WITH OLD DEODORANT FLAKES.” With the traditional introduction over, time to get into the meat of the speech. Enthusiasm tingling in his gut, he skittered his tongue back and forth along his upper lip. “EVERYBODY, IT IS MY HONOR TO PRESENT TO YOU OUR NEWEST MEMBER. TREAT IT LIKE THE ANGEL OF ROYALTY BECAUSE IT’S MORE IMPORTANT THAN ALL OF YOU PUT TOGETHER. ALL OF YOU EXCEPT THE GUY WHO CHANGES MY BEDSHEETS.”

Ralph dipped in a curtsey.

“EVERYONE, ALLOW ME TO PRESENT TO YOU”—Asinine took a generous stride aside to expose—“RABBIT ASWANG THING. NAME PENDING UNTIL I COME UP WITH SOMETHING CATCHIER THAN RABBIT ASWANG THING.” Nobody clapped despite IQ 23 parading around with the APPLAUSE sign lit. Maybe broccoli was stuck in Asinine’s teeth.

Still more of the crowd filtered out the doors. Almost everyone had arrived. Nobody wanted pine tacos. Regular tacos were too good to pass up. They were as valuable a team-building incentive as blueberry muffins or torture.

* * *

Almost here. Almost a full house. The creature couldn’t help drooling from anticipation. But, still, it refrained. Self-control was an asset it needed to exercise right now. At least if it wanted to feast upon the entire Bad Guy empire, if it were to achieve maximum power, if it were to never die again.

If it were to ascend to godhood.

Its drool leaked into the sewer grate by the curb.

* * *

“I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING: HOW COULD ONE AS CHARMING AND SOPHISTICATED AS MASTER ASININE HAVE THE CHUTZPAH TO CAPTURE SUCH A MENACING CREATURE? WELL, I WON’T DIVULGE ALL MY SECRETS OR BORE YOU WITH THE DETAILS—”

“THEN WHY BORE US WITH THIS SPEECH?” called out a generic.

“STEVE, MUST I STRAP YOU TO THE FLOGGING BED AGAIN?” Asinine gave himself a second to regain his composure. “WHAT I WILL DIVULGE IS THE GREAT AND IMPERILING POWER AT THE HANDS AND HIND PAWS OF THIS CREATURE, THIS ASWANGISH DESTROYER OF LIFE, THIS ZOO STAR ATTRACTION.” By now, in Asinine’s estimation, everyone had shown up.

“Sir, you might want to explain exactly what this thing does.”

“WELL, WE DIDN’T EXACTLY HIRE IT TO MOP UP THE MESS IN THE REMEDIAL FLIGHT SCHOOL.” Fact check time. “WAIT. DID WE, LIEUTENANT?” To Asinine’s relief, IQ 23 nodded no. Fact: checked.

* * *

The creature shifted a paw in preparation. Time was nearly up. And Asinine would be its appetizer. It felt anticipation sizzle like a skillet, almost as if it waited for a table at a five-star restaurant, examining the lobsters in the aquarium at the foyer and tapping the glass, checking the blackboard for the specials—should it wait at the bar?—wondering about the catch of the day—

* * *

Master Asinine sprang into a jaunty stride before the line of generics at the front. Master Asinine Sucks, that name-mangling cowboy, stuck his foot out for a playful trip, but Asinine hopped over it. “RABBIT ASWANG THING, AS LEGEND HAS IT, IS A RABBIT ASWANG THING. BEST ESTIMATES PUT IT AT EIGHT MILLION YEARS OLDER THAN TIME AND FOUR THOUSAND LIGHT YEARS BIGGER THAN THIS WEEK’S LOTTERY JACKPOT. IT ALSO PLAYS A FIERCE GAME OF SQUASH.”

“Sir, there’s no way we can know that.”

“YOU SAY THAT ABOUT A LOT OF STUFF THAT COMES OUT OF MY MOUTH.”

A shadow fell over Asinine, so encompassing, so graying, he wondered who’d shifted the storm forward on the station’s schedule. He checked his watch. Only noon now. The storm wasn’t expected until five and was set to drop compost. Because life was like that.

And this was a rather...shaggy...storm cloud rolling over the street.

“IT HAS SLAUGHTERED THE TRANQUILITY AND GUTS OF THE CITIZENS OF RATFINK PEST CONTROL ON GAIA, AND NOW LET IT DO THE SAME HERE EXCEPT MAYBE NOT KEEP US UP AT NIGHT. ALSO IT CAN REACH ALL THOSE FRISBEES THAT ENDED UP ON THE ROOF OF THE STATION’S PILLOW-CHECKOUT CENTER.

“SO I NOW PRESENT TO YOU OUR NEWEST WEAPON...OUR FINEST DESTRUCTOR...OUR BEST BET AT GETTING OUR MONEY’S WORTH AT A BUFFET TABLE...OUR BLOOD BUNNY. OOH, THAT’S BETTER THAN RABBIT ASWANG THING.”

The generics erupted in cheers tha—No, wait, spoke too soon. They erupted in gasps. And a yelp blurted out from someone in the second row. Huh? The generics were scattering about in twisted circles, not even fleeing, just scampering around in the randomness of panic. Why? And since when did storm clouds have dirty white paws that thumped onto Asinine’s shoulder? And since when did storm clouds pant down your neck? And since when were storm clouds aswang rabbits?

Asinine slowly shuffled around to see what the dealio was. His eyes met a fuzzy neck, and above that fuzzy neck huffed heavy, ravenous panting. Asinine dared himself to peek at the face attached to this neck, and odds were it wasn’t his mom’s face up there.

Nope. It wasn’t. It was the rabbit’s. Ho boy, it was so much the rabbit’s.

The rabbit reared forward and unleashed such a superhuman roar that the whole street reeked of the decay in its gullet. It put everything at its disposal—hyperextended jaw, rock-solid cheeks, gargantuan teeth, flaring nose, full-bodied eyelashes—into that roar. It finished bellowing its threat and snatched out with a thick paw. Grabbed Punch by the fingers on top of his head. The other paw seized Punch’s legs—both paws hoisted the hand puppet aloft—ripped-tore-wrenched Punch—separated torso from legs as effortlessly as snapping a wishbone—intestines splattered, blood spouted out. The sickening display was so quick Punch never reacted. His face remained frozen in an expression so casual he could have died reading a shopping list. The pipe was still lodged in his mouth. Well, Asinine might as well cross off someone’s attendance at the carnival’s barnyard square dance. Kinda rude of Punch for cancelling, though.

Somehow a hand found Asinine’s ear and plucked out the gabber that allowed him access to the public-address speaker. Turned out it was his own hand. He flicked away the gabber the same way he would absentmindedly drop trash on the floor of his civ-tran. It ticked against a panicking generic, who flinched to deflect it but ended up colliding with another generic.

“Well, I guess no more king-size thumb wars. And the last thing I said to Punch was a really classy hand pun. Lieutenant, do you think he’s mad?”

“He’s dead, sir.”

“Oh, good. I’m off the hook. Unless do you think my hilarious pun cursed him to die?”@@

The two-headed chief of security, Schizophrenic, lurked up behind Asinine. “So this thing’s our newest weapon against the Good Guys, Master Disaster?” the left head, Lefty, said around his customary toothpick. He snorted. “After the unstoppable dining embarrassments of Appetite and Multipurpose, this station can’t handle one more hiring backfire.” He hefted up what Asinine assumed was either a fusion cannon or whatever they used to fill their jelly doughnuts. Either/or. “After this, we’re gonna have a talk about what we invite to dinner, Deputy Derpwad. I talk with my fists, by the way.”

The rabbit burped. If it wanted a burping contest against Lefty, it didn’t know who it was dealing with.

“Sir, get to safety!” Lieutenant IQ 23 threw a hand into his holster and grabbed his pistol. He pushed in front of Asinine and let loose with a hasty succession of light bullets and an eggy fart you tasted on the roof of your mouth: blam-blam-blam-ffffffftttt-blam.

The rabbit reacted with a tree-trunk arm to shield its face, but IQ 23’s light-bullets barely pinpricked its gristly hide. It howled and then, with blinking fluidity, swung a paw at IQ 23.

Lieutenant IQ 23 dropped his pistol. Both hands found his gurgling throat that gushed ropes of red like a pulse. The rabbit had sliced his neck as easily as cutting open wet bread.

Lieutenant IQ 23 collapsed against a garbage ionizer, knocking it away, eyes fluttering in near death, skin blanching.

Denis gasped, hand over mouth. “Sacre bleu!” The cheap imported wine spilled from his twist-stem glass.

Braindead shoved a generic out of the way, grabbed a tube from Schizophrenic’s leg satchel: healing putty. He didn’t even squeeze, just gripped it in both hands, tore it in half, and slathered the putty over IQ 23’s wound. White goo mixed with red seepage as thick as blood. Oh, wait. It was blood. Heh.

@@The flow stopped. Braindead cradled IQ 23 off the ionizer and to the ground, color already returning to the lieutenant’s complexion. Breathing stabilized, gurgling subsided. Even through Braindead’s face mask, Asinine sensed the horrid lividness in the Virillian. Braindead threw open his holster and blasted everything his pistol contained at the rabbit. The light-bullets did nothing but plink off fur.

“Braindead, get him out of here.” Asinine stepped in front of the two. “If he needs to replenish, we still have plenty of weird, tropical pizzas aboard the starship.”

“Freaking cottontail clown.” Schizophrenic spat out his toothpick. He took aim. One blast from the fusion cannon threw the rabbit spiraling down the street. It burst against the front of the lobby, and brick crumbled down around it. An eye-blink later, it reached out and smacked a paw into a generic who tried to scamper past. That generic found herself devoured in the rabbit’s ample maw. Limb by detached limb. No, not Hailie! She and Asinine had gone in on a set of measuring cups together!

“This isn’t going quite like I’d neglected to plan.” Asinine watched the rabbit rend another generic apart: split him in half right down the center of his chest and then stripped off sheets of skin as if the generic were a vegetable as layered as an onion. As disgusting as those three animal-transformation movies, The Human Centipede, The Human Centipede II, and The Emperor’s New Groove.

The rabbit reared back and, with a bunny hop mightier than that of any true bunny, launched itself at the next closest generic. Its clown-shoe paws flattened the generic into mulch, which the rabbit scraped off its fur and slurped down. A fourth and then a fifth generic met their demises when they panicked into reaching distance. The rabbit fed. It tore open chunks of flesh, blood, bone, tissue, and gore, and it...grew. Its chest expanded, its legs thickened, its arms swelled, its eyes glared harder and yellower, its fur had more lustrous bounce and flair.

Small wings budded from its shoulders. Every time it eviscerated a generic, those wings swelled more ambitiously. Armor plating sprouted along its arms. Horns cracked out of its skull. Its teeth inched down its chin like fingers wiggling desperately for that extra hair’s breadth of reach. Its talons lengthened, twisted out millimeter by millimeter. Its chin spread down and outward, resembling denser slate with every murder.

Asinine had lost track of the kill count the rabbit had amassed, but it had risen somewhere into the dozens, generics scrambling past it in a graceless, frantic pursuit for shelter. This reminded him of when those two Good Guys had crash-landed here and opened fire using Station Zilcho’s own defenses. What a party that was. But since then, Asinine had adopted Kyril’s army. He knew of no second army he could adopt to replenish. Couldn’t his generics panic with more smarts than this? After today’s terrible display, Asinine intended to enroll them in a freak-out class.

* * *

F-Kestrel approached Station Zilcho. The station was used for a terraforming project the government had mothballed years ago, so its defenses were rated “meager” by Station Defenses Magazine. But not even what the Bad Guys’ headquarters boasted seemed concerned with the Good Guys’ approach. Looked as though no one was concerned over triggering anything, what with carnage painting the street below. All Pincushion saw without averting his eyes was the generous bouquets of blood from carcasses left eviscerated in the street. The hulking aswang, stooped like a twelve-foot gargoyle and double the impressive size it was on the news footage, destroyed two generics by pulverizing a paw into and through one and into the gut of the one behind the first. With an esophagus that would make Appetite envious—if that thing felt envy—it swallowed whole the two generics.

It beat wings with a span close to fifteen feet, thick flappers that whipped the wind with every stroke. They weren’t dense enough to lift the aswang, but they were close. Ridges had sprouted along the beast’s back like spikes on a dinosaur. Armor plated its limbs, chest, everywhere.

A half block away, Schizophrenic clutched a cannon that launched dashes of ammunition into the rabbit. Harmless. The ammo pinged off the rabbit’s thick shell. He might as well be launching spitballs—oh, hold on—which the right head was doing.

Amaranthia slid out from under an eave, two katana flittering through the air. The blades glanced against the aswang’s armor, blows that scratched only nicks into the gray plating.

Braindead lifted a limp Lieutenant IQ 23 in both arms, braced the lieutenant against his shoulders and chest, and darted away from the extermination into the nearest building: a bouncy castle labeled as a first-aid station.

Master Asinine Sucks wielded high-caliber revolvers. A yeehaw and a kick of his spurred boots, and he let loose a high-yield light-bullet, as buck wild and as bright as a flare, that embedded in a seam between two of the rabbit’s abdominal plates. The light-bullet fizzled when the rabbit lunged to chomp the neck out of another generic. Bad Aim did nearly the same, but his light-bullets hit only a few mailboxes and split apart a No Parking sign.

Master Asinine contributed by throwing a rock.

“This is not good,” Pincushion barely whispered. “You call this an aswang, Maul? This thing came straight out of Hell, brother.”

Beside him, Organism stood, astonishment shaping his eyes. Pincushion couldn’t discern Incendiary’s expression behind that facemask, but judging from how the mask’s chin hung agape, he knew the college kid’s stomach roiled in nervous acid reflux. Goat Franchise had stopped tramping orders to the piloting computer via the keyboard in front of him, stopped chewing its hay, stopped cracking its hooves. The goat had neglected to change their approach speed, in such shock that all piloting duties had vanished from its goat brain.

Even Maul, whom they had allowed out of the chair, simply nodded, his tongue clicking in an “I told you so.” “Told you so,” his mouth agreed.

Power Plant stood stark still at the windshield, dwarfed beside Organism’s weightlifter physique. Surprising that the Good Guy whom everyone considered the team’s chatterbox was left speechless. He didn’t even avert his gaze when he flinched his hand out of its sleeve and thrust his thumb down on the swear jar’s thumbprint reader, pressing resolutely while the money racked up.

“Prepayin’.”

* * *

Okay, the rock didn’t work. Neither had the other thirteen. Maybe this next one. Asinine scooped up another, hurled it at the rabbit, and...Nope. It bounced off. And smacked Punch’s ravaged corpse in the eye. Oh, well. By now, he was raspberry Punch. Ha. Good one.

The rabbit fed on another generic, ripping out its throat, face, chest, heart, bowels. It tossed the ragdoll corpse aside as it would unwanted litter. Couldn’t it finish a meal before moving on to the next? Would help the cleanup in the aftermath. Street-sweeping equipment wasn’t cheap.

Its antlers, three-pronged, curled like ram’s horns, creaking out of its skull like new teeth splitting out a baby’s gums. With each kill, it grew meatier, stronger, sturdier. And, unless its next growth managed to score it a face that didn’t stop traffic, Asinine needed to finish this thing stat or eventually it would work through the generics and start rummaging in Asinine’s fridge doojigger.

He yanked out his favorite gun, the one that shot a light-bullet into its target as it shot a Pez into his mouth. “Stay away from the doojigger, monster!” He fired off two shots, which flipped lemon tablets out. Mmm. Fruity madness.

“This better be the last time you let a stray follow you home.” Schizophrenic stepped back to fall in line with Asinine under the lobby building’s awning. He screened his eyes from the sunlight that trickled through the tears in the awning’s shade. “This thing ain’t even potty-trained, you omega male.”

”Sure, it is.” Asinine burst off another crackle of light-bullets. They plinked against the rabbit’s eye as the rabbit shook its hind leg over the rack of tabloid datasheets that somehow still got delivered here. “See? It’s technically peeing on newspaper, so its potty training is debatable.”

“It thinks everybody’s a two-bite brownie. Right now, everything is debatable.”

They watched Amaranthia make another stab at the rabbit’s calves. No avail. Those katana weren’t even denting its thick hide. She hopped away to prepare for another hit-and-run attack. Schizophrenic adjusted his aim to avoid hitting her as she fled. “Scarlet, if it didn’t work the last eighty times, it won’t work this time.”

“That thar varmint’s whackin’ us off one at a time. We gotta think o’ somethin’ right quick. I plan on stayin’ aboveground a spell longer.” Master Asinine Sucks joined them under the awning. He tossed his pistol, now empty of ammunition, at the rabbit. The rabbit caught it in midair and stuffed it into its mouth. “Oh, now that just ain’t proper. Ya don’t eat a cowpoke’s gun.”

The thunder of a starship raged closer, and smothering the street under a winged shadow, a Flagstar emerged from behind the assembly hall. The Good Guys! Who’d invited them? Oh, wait. Master Asinine had. So many times. He even deactivated Station Zilcho’s security for such occasions.

The Flagstar’s weapons activated with a hum that reminded Asinine of when he reached into a beehive to grab a scoop of honey. Didn’t work like in all those Winnie the Pooh cartoons, but, hey, no better way to discover you were allergic to bee stings. Or that your first allergic reaction was to swell up, turn purple, and barf all over your new sweater.

Two recesses in the Flagstar’s hood blinked open. Pulsating eagerly, teardrop-tipped shafts clacked out of those recesses, lit like dual suns. The shafts discharged their payloads, carving twin fissures into the road and spilling the beams up the rabbit’s plated back. This inflamed the plating, turned it from gray to reddish brown, split apart a plate and spread out orange blood, but otherwise it only macked off the aswang.

The aswang roared at the Flagstar, swatted with a burly paw that didn’t quite reach, and then directed its attention back to the street it had treated like a feeding trough.

“MASTER ASININE, THIS IS PINCUSHION.” The Flagstar’s loudspeaker rattled windows down the length of the street. “I HAVE NOTHING IMPORTANT TO SAY RIGHT NOW. I JUST WANT TO TELL YOU YOU’RE A COMPLETE KNOB.”

Asinine saluted. No better feeling than to hear your name announced in public.

“I tend to agree. You’re an intelligence misfire.” Lefty gunned a punch into Asinine’s arm. “Here. Have a charley horse.”

“Ooh, can I have one?” Righty chirped. “I’m also in the mood for fudge.”

The Flagstar’s port opened, sliding into its niche with the sound of metal against metal. Seconds passed, everyone staring up. Even the rabbit seemed distracted, a hiss sizzling out its throat, the raspy noise flexing the spikes that speckled its neck like a studded collar. Amaranthia took the opportunity to scuttle up with a dagger, plant it between two plates, and pry. The plates didn’t wrench off, but the weapon’s hilt popped off, leaving the blade embedded in the rabbit’s leg.

The rabbit lunged for another generic and threw him into its food furnace. Crap. There went the generics’ yoga instructor.

The rabbit reared its head back, cocked it as if loading a cannon. It sucked in a cavernous lungful and then, in one upper body thrust, exhaled thunder. Bludgeoned the street with an unbearably soul-piercing shriek. Everyone—Bad Guys, Good Guys—squeezed shut their eyes, mashed hands over ears, curled into balls. Asinine risked a peek with a single eye half open and, somehow above the sound of wrathful death exploding from the rabbit’s diaphragm, heard windows along the street shatter. Not every window, but enough for a dramatic surge in their heating bills. If they ever paid heating bills.

The sound disappeared. Echoes still wandered through the street, but Asinine uncovered his ears and stood. The rabbit’s cracked tongue hung out, the rabbit hunched and panting.

Someone bounded out of the Flagstar’s port, a Logistican whose gray skin looked gunmetal dark in the blocked sunlight. As big as flippers, his feet slapped the ground a mere ten feet from the rabbit’s position. The Logistican hoisted two chain guns, one under each armpit, to level at the rabbit’s face. Armpit guns. The convenience of modern war technology. “Hey, love, it’s been a couple hours, and you’re already killing other people.” He tensed his arms, activating the chain guns whose ammunition drums kicked up a spin that flashed a hundred light-bullets a second at the rabbit’s face. “Feel the wrath of Happy Accident!”

The loudspeaker again. Asinine should charge Pincushion for pirating his shtick. “MAUL, IT’S ONE THING TO NAME YOUR OWN WEAPONS, BUT STOP NAMING THE LOANERS.”

The weapon mulched the rabbit’s face into ground beef, the raw kind Asinine loved to eat straight out of the freezer. But once the light-bullets stopped blazing out, the face congealed back into the cuddly mug he—oh, scratch cuddly. That thing was as ugly as a rock quarry. Asinine was officially no longer a rabbit fan.

“Look what damage the guns did.” Asinine perked up. “I gotta get me a Happy Accident. Oh, wait. That didn’t sound right.”

“So you do hear yourself talk,” Schizophrenic said.

“On occasion. Lieutenant, put me down for a weapon upgrade. Lieutenant?” He whistled. “Lieutenant, here, boy.” Asinine twisted around in a half rotation. He slapped his forehead. “Right. Always forgetting when my subordinates get their throats slit.”

Two more figures poured out of the Flagstar, one a sunray of blond hair in a blue-and-yellow outfit—Power Plant—and another in a modified Mechaknight suit—Power Plant’s third- or fourth-tier sidekick. Power Plant wielded a volleyball-sized orb of light between his palms and steered his flight by throwing his shoulders into it.

Asinine threw aside his pistol and reached into his pocket for something with more cheekiness. “After today, I’m throwing out all my bunny slippers. Just to put your mind at ease,” he said to Schizophrenic.

“What would put my mind at ease is if you stop bringing home pets!”

“You’re never going to let me live the assault hamster down.”

“I was talking about Multipurpose, douche hammer. But, yeah, the only thing that hamster assaulted was our lemon squares.”

“Okay, I had that coming.”

The rabbit contorted its torso in a one-eighty to rip apart a generic sneaking past. Why couldn’t it murder-death Denis instead? King of France, his elbow. Asinine was sure the genuine le président didn’t whip up crepes as brittle as parchment from an archaeological dig.

“Time to make rabbit stew.” Schizophrenic hustled toward the carnival’s barbecue tent and grabbed a propane tank. He stuck two fingers in his mouth and issued a screeching ear splitter. “Hey!” The rabbit stopped snarling at generics and also chewing them. Schizophrenic reared back, the propane tank poised behind him. He threw a few rotations into his lob, every pivot accelerating until finally—“Treat!” The propane tank sailed up in an arc that would jam-pack a baseball outfielder with swollen joy. The tank’s flecked paint glistened off the sunlight not blocked behind the overhanging Flagstar. And then—whomp—the tank planted itself in the rabbit’s throat, lodged behind its teeth. The rabbit tried to muscle it down its gorge, the dessert in its feast of generics.

Righty clapped and struggled to coerce the Schizophrenic body to skip around with glee. “Ooh, I wish I could catch propane in my mouth.”

Asinine aimed, pulled the trigger, and—empty clicks? “Huh?” he said. “Huh?” his face also said. He whacked the handle a few times. Unlike when he whacked Braindead, nothing changed. “Out of ammo?” Another whack, and a Pez tablet leapt out and pecked him in the eye.

“I ain’ts outta ammo!” Power Plant bounded into flight and hurtled at the rabbit whose jaws worked the propane tank like a boa constrictor massaging an ostrich egg down. The light between his hands sputtered yellow like a disco ball, its size quadrupled since he’d landed. He smacked into the rabbit, twisted around, shielded his head—and let loose a wash of yellow fury.

The resulting explosion rocketed in both directions down the street. It spilled shards from the shattered windows and rattled the unbroken ones.

Flames tasted the rabbit’s pulverized face, melting eye to eyelid, skin to flesh, flesh to tissue, and tissue to bone. The face was no longer. The skull was caved in. The brain, though it still existed, sat exposed. The chin vanished, and the upper teeth had shattered to blunt roots. The rabbit’s head hung off the neck and flopped around its chest in rainbow strands.

The explosion had ejected Power Plant across the street, against an aggrandizing statue of that traitor Mechanism atop a rearing horse, one Asinine had never bothered to knock down. Power Plant shook off the brunt of the impact. Shards of propane tank and kibbles of fleshy pulp ornamented the back of his impact suit, but he’d shielded his exposed skin enough to protect himself from shrapnel.

Master Asinine collapsed against the full-length front windows of the lobby building. Schizophrenic held another propane tank but, finding it unnecessary, dropped it. It clanged down the slope of the street. The generics lolled out of hiding, being generic. Master Asinine Sucks, Amaranthia, Bad Aim...the others sat, some on the curb, others on bits of rabbit flesh. That Mechaknight-suited Good Guy panted as if he’d been useful. The Flagstar lowered to the ground, and its passengers emerged: Pincushion, Organism, and a goat. A freaking goat. Seemed the Good Guys’ hiring standards had expanded.

Schizophrenic had returned to Master Asinine’s side. Lefty popped open his container of toothpicks and fished the next one out. “Glad Little Bunny Foo Foo’s dealt with. Now back to arm wrestling for whiskey shots in the bumper car arena.”

Master Asinine slapped the toothpick out of Lefty’s mouth. “Hey, what have I said about arm wrestling and driving?”

Lefty seemed finally stumped for words. His face ticked through several unbegun sentences until finally he just reeled back and struck Asinine.

“It ain’t over.” The Logistican with the tattoo scrabbling up his arm was busy reloading his armpit chain guns, but he took a second to look up at everyone. “Hey, it ain’t dead yet! You gotta separate the brain and the heart. Keep blasting that thing before its face heals up! And are you guys doing up briskets or burgers at that barbecue?”

“Shish kebabs.” Master Asinine swept off the Pez tablet that had stuck to his sweaty cheek.

“Crockin’ shish kebabs,” Power Plant hooted.

“I’ll never understand the love affair you megalomaniacs have with skewers.” The Logistican had finished locking and loading, swung his cannon up—

The rabbit! It hurdled at him—face half healed—bits of skull sprinkling the floor like hailstones—brain still gooping out through the yawning head wound—

“ASWANG CROCKER DUDE,” another loudspeaker voice came. Loudspeakers. All the rage now. “SHAKE HANDS WITH BABY BLUE.”

The rabbit struck the ground, hesitated at the echoing voice. The loudspeaker screeched from a starship above, one billowing multishaded smog that voided the warranty on Station Zilcho’s atmospheric bubble. That Tinfoil the dapper man rode. Glowering like a high-school teacher catching a student cheating on a test, the Tinfoil zoomed in to within a few feet of the rabbit whose head still had the texture of lace.

Something aboard the Tinfoil clacked. Sounded like a weapon. Total coolness. Almost made Asinine pee his pants a smidge. An upset of machinery unfolded from the rear curvature of the Tinfoil’s hood, unfurling, extending, coalescing, unwrapping, pleating, creasing, pouring out like living liquid. Whatever fluid form it had assumed before, it now organized itself into a satellite dish giving birth to the universe’s largest telescope-columned cannon. A super laser. A duper laser.

Asinine leaned toward Schizophrenic for a private whisper. “This will end the garden gnomes in my cabbage patch, won’t it?” He checked Schizophrenic for any form of a reaction. “They’d just started to get along after the band breakup.”

A turbine at the rear of the duper laser picked up speed, rotated with the sound of a fan collecting energy from thin air. It crackled electric blue, like sunlight shimmering through clear water. And then—

It let loose. A fanatical beam of blue ripped from the barrel that peeled apart from the output it couldn’t handle. The beam, a meter thick, plunged into the rabbit like a battering ram splitting through a castle door. It squashed the rabbit and left behind only a squirt of tissue and body parts. The brain bounced out.

And then nothing. The cannon clicked off. Its thunderous crackle silenced. Master Asinine felt a pressure against his ears relinquish, an easement like the pleasing sensation of stretching your back after hours of sitting.

Asinine’s rabbit was toast. Only the brain and heart survived, though the rest was a smear. His new favorite whatever-it-was, spread over, on, across, and as part of the ground. “Quick. Someone save our killer death creature! Schizo, urinate on the wound.”

The Tinfoil landed. The choking haze it farted dispersed, and its landing trestles grunted, almost powerless to keep it on its feet.

The Logistican, still loading his weapon, probed a finger into its barrel, dug out some gray gunk, and wiped it on a leg. Did the same with his ear, but this time he raised an interested eyebrow. “Now it’s over. And Baby Blue was crocking glorious.”

“—crock, crock, crock—” Power Plant strutted past.

* * *

Pincushion blundered away from the starship Goat Franchise had landed a moment ago. He dragged his upset leg toward Master Asinine, who stood halfway down the block unaware, simply gawking at that Baby Blue as if he wanted to pick up a six-pack of them at a wholesaler.

With steps so impatient his bad leg barely kept up, he reached Asinine and swept that idiot’s face with a punch that made them both hop off the ground for a second.

Pincushion didn’t wait for Asinine to stand. He grabbed him by the collar and shook so forcefully they both nearly fell over. “We warned you, you pig-headed thing they haven’t even come up with a word for. We warned you! I haven’t seen stupidity backfire that badly since Power Plant thought doubling the temperature on the oven would halve the baking time.”

“It dids, technically,” Power Plant chirped.

Asinine bled from a gash in his forehead that one of Pincushion’s spikes had inflicted. “That doesn’t sound so stupid.”

“He was baking potassium hydroxide!” Pincushion slammed another fist into Asinine’s sternum. Asinine puked up what looked like undigested pine needles. Was Taco Tuesday late this week?

Another gun clicked its tongue inches from his ear. He threw Asinine away, twisted around...and there stood Puttyman, inches out of arm’s reach, a pistol drawn at Pincushion’s face.

“Well-dressed dapper man.” Master Asinine gasped. He waved his hands to catch Puttyman’s attention. And he got it. “Look. Look! I have sunglasses now, too!” He tapped the sunglasses that had remarkably remained on during the massacre. He smiled. “Well-dressed dapper man. After all these hours, still well-dressed, dapper, and a man.”

Puttyman tossed Maul a cigar, which the Logistican tweezed out of midair and flipped into his mouth. It was already lit.

Behind the sunglasses that never came off, Puttyman looked apologetic, almost ashamed to aim a weapon at anything other than the aswang. “Dude, I’m really a nice dude. I hate aiming weapons at dudes who are obviously stand-up dudes. In fact, last time I held a gun, I used it to cook haddock. Once I lead my own team of dudes, I’ll have dudes who’ll do this dirty work for me. But today, I insist, dude. The remains of that aswang dude”—he flicked his chin at the aswang’s bubbling and healing corpse—“are coming with us, dude. Clip created a holding box expressly to contain it, and we have to scoop its brainy bits inside one chamber and its hearty bits inside a separate one before it resurrects into a rhino or a gnawl or a drunk dude or whatever nasty dude comes next. Dude.”

“Crockin’ dude,” Power Plant said. He surprised a generic with a spontaneous high-five to the mouth.

Maul followed Puttyman’s lead, that weapon he’d borrowed now targeted at Power Plant. Bullet had emerged from Chug, hands leveled forward at Incendiary. Also Sediment appeared. Their excitable Raestagean pinballed around in destructive flight. He stopped only when he collided with Goat Franchise. Both bleated in shock.

“Whatever.” Oh, would this day never end. Pincushion sat on the curb, his hand rubbing his leg, his bad hamstring feeling as if it wanted to tear off his skeleton. “I’m frankly impressed you’re pointing a weapon that’s not big enough to shoot support columns.” He squinted in the sun at Puttyman. “You’re not leaving with that aswang, brother.”

“Oh? Why’s that, brother?” Maul’s voice belied a trace of confident sass. His claw tattoo tweezed his eye when he guffawed.

“For one thing, you didn’t bring a spatula to scrape it off the pavement.” Pincushion swept a hand to one side and then the other to indicate the literal army of Bad Guys brandishing weapons at the vigilante team. “But, really, you’ll be killed before you scrape off the first giblet. So leave. Live to hunt it another day. You can take that weapon with you. Name it after your grandmother if you want.”

“Who do you think Finishing Move is named after?” Maul grunted.

“No!” Bullet pointed at the air and let loose a burst of what looked like fingernails. Tears streamed down her bright, desiccated cheeks. “The aswang is ours. Ours. After all the pain I’ve been through, it’s ours. I won’t let IP make me relive my daughter’s sacrifice!”

Pincushion scanned the line of generics wielding weapons at them, especially the French speaker who kept muttering “oui, oui” and making cheeky winks at Also Sediment. He scared Pincushion the most.

Puttyman sighed. “Afraid not today, Ytril. Pincushion’s right. No way will this end well for us, dude.” He put away his gun and stepped back until he fell in line with Bullet. He grabbed her by the arm and forced her toward Chug. “We have a team theme song to work on anyway. Last I heard, we left Speed Line in charge, and the only words he came up with were ‘Shame, shame, double shame / now I know your girlfriend’s name.’ And knowing girlfriends’ names has nothing to do with our statement of purpose.”

“No. We’re so close!” Bullet struggled to escape. She yanked to wrench her arm free, to wring it off, kicked, punched, but Puttyman had wrapped an elastic appendage around her. “They made me use my hyperability. They made me use my hyperability!” She sobbed rivulets down her cheeks.

Puttyman threw Bullet aboard their starship. Maul, with gun barrels and cigar scanning the weaponized crowd, clomped up behind him. Also Sediment slipped in next. Speed Line hopped up after. Then, only moments later, Chug rose into the air, lopsided and burping black toxins from its thrusters.

Before Chug broke atmosphere, its loudspeaker squealed on. “JUST SO YOU KNOW—JUST SO YOU KNOW, YOU CORRUPT MILITARY APES—WE WILL RETURN FOR THAT THING. MARK MY LOUDSPOKEN WORDS, MY DAUGHTER’S SACRIFICE WON’T BE FOR NOTHING. JEFF, WHERE ARE YOU GOING? I HAVE A SLIDESHOW REPRIMAND WITH YOUR NAME ON IT.”

Chug blasted through the atmospheric bubble, leaving behind a cough, a ring of smoke, and its thruster alternator.

Pincushion wanted to throttle Master Asinine so badly...but that swarm of surviving generics was still armed. So was Asinine, and Pincushion didn’t feel like being on the receiving end of something that tossed lemon Pez around like nobody’s business. “Good Guys, we’re out, too.”

“What?” Power Plant squawked. “But I buyed, like, eighty forty-two ten swears to crock up.” Goat Franchise mirrored his disdain by clomping a hoof into a generic’s groin and bleating irritably.

“President Abends, are we listening to this? We have these international terrorists right where we want them. Are we really leaving them with their weapon of mass half destruction half destructed?”

“Yes.” Pincushion flexed his fist. He checked Power Plant, checked Goat Franchise, checked Incendiary. “We lost this one. There’s no man, woman, or aswang that can withstand the destructive force of Master Asinine’s four-caliber Pez gun.” He discerned a twitch in Power Plant’s cheek, a tic that revealed a war raging inside the blond between the side that wanted to resume the fight and the side that wanted to return home to hide Pop Rocks under Franchise’s bedsheets and then crank the heat up to sweating intensity. “Power Plant, if the next words out of you aren’t ‘yes, sir,’ I’m revoking your membership to the station’s base-jumpers’ club.”

“Crock!” Power Plant kicked a garbage ionizer. It spilled ashen residue all over the French guy.

“Bein non.” The generic regarded his outfit with aversion. “Ce fut ma plus belle robe!” He batted residue out of his string mustache and dusted off his beret.

Incendiary had boarded F-Kestrel. Goat Franchise had trotted on after him. And, finally, after Pincushion coerced him by shoving his head forward, Power Plant followed. Pincushion slammed an open palm into the access port as it closed and dropped into the navigation chair. “Goat Franchise, get us in the air.”

Goat Franchise rasped angrily through his bucked teeth and clomped over the appropriate controls. F-Kestrel lifted off with more grace and less environmentally disastrous fumes than Chug.

Using one leg, Pincushion rotated his chair and hovered it toward the edge of the cockpit deck where no one saw his face.

And his subtle smile.

Leave the aswang with Asinine. They’d properly contain that thing before it resurrected. Pincushion had little doubt. He refused to take the aswang to IP’s doorstep for their perverse plans to violate the Hyperability Injunction. But he would tell them where to find it. If they wanted it—and they surely did—they could invade Station Zilcho themselves. Play each faction against the other. Then Blowtorch could swoop in and dispose of the aswang properly. If IP refused to supply the Good Guys with the resources to attack Station Zilcho, Pincushion would see how eager they were when Asinine had something they wanted. He expended every ounce of strength not to rub his hands together like a mastermind.

Power Plant appeared behind him with a hand on his shoulder. “Hey, I, like, stills a few crocks behinds.”

“It’ll be credited to your account.”

* * *

“Incoming connection,” Organism’s gabber erupted. Organism jerked at the buzz. Whoa! Didn’t expect that. Nobody ever gabbered him. “Incoming connection. Incoming connection.”

Okay, okay, fine. His eyes slinked across the passenger deck where sat Power Plant and Incendiary and then to the cockpit deck with Pincushion and Goat Franchise. Everyone’s backs faced him, Goat Franchise cracking hooves, an act that took two cricks considering this Franchise didn’t have as many knuckles as regular Franchise.

Organism needed to find a discreet corner in this starship. He felt uncomfortable when people overheard his conversations, as if he were on stage. Also didn’t feel like catching Power Plant wedge crock into every sentence. Seriously, Power Plant treated that word like a new secret weapon. And, considering how much it annoyed Pincushion, it kind of was.

“Incoming connection. Incoming connection.”

Organism eased himself out of his chair, made sure no one was watching, and stole into the bathroom at the rear of the starship. Silently, he eased himself onto the toilet as the l-door reappeared. With someone occupying the bathroom, the l-door locked automatically. He didn’t turn on the lights. He didn’t want to. He preferred the darkness.

“Incoming connection. Incom—If you’re taking this long to answer, maybe you’re dying. Dying to taste Reyerson’s mixed nuts. Hey, for once, a food manufacturer isn’t producing nuts to make a cute pun about testicles.”

“Okay, okay, just...keep it down. Gabber, acknowledge. Accept connection.”

“Hello, dude,” the voice on the other end said. The voice’s liveliness made Organism’s heart flutter with shy unease. “Is this Organism?”

Organism’s heart wouldn’t calm. He just wanted to be silent, to conceal himself in his own body. “Yyy-yyy-ee-ees.” That word, a single syllable, came out on a shuddering breath. “This is him. He. This is—” He swallowed. “Hi.”

“Whoo. I guessed the right calltag. This is Puttyman.”

“Puttyman?”

“Yeah. Puttyman. Jeff Greer. Best-looking dude from Blowtorch. Dude with the perpetual sunglasses. Malleable skin. Dashing personality.”

“Yes. I remember. Hhhhow are you?” Organism hushed his awkward voice. He hoped his weight didn’t crush the toilet seat when he shifted around to look at a wall.

Puttyman laughed. “I’m fine. This call isn’t about that, dude. I only wanted to...warn you.”

Power Plant’s voice penetrated even through the two-inch-steel door: “Crock you, cloud.”

“Warn me?” Organism asked.

“Warn you. Look, we have the same hyperability, you and me. I might be able to use mine like a pro or, in Bullet’s opinion, a troublemaking jackass, but I know what it’s like to take on any form you want to hide yourself in.” He paused as if to think about what to say.

Organism thought he knew where this was going, but he asked anyway, “H-h-hide yourself in?” He shyly tapped a foot against the toilet base. Had he been found out?

“I’ll let you in on a secret.” Another pause. This conversation held weight, as though Puttyman were admitting a cardinal sin. “This face I walk around in? It isn’t mine.” And now Organism knew this guy was off his rocker, but he let Puttyman speak. He didn’t possess the audacity to interrupt. “About a year and a few months ago—November 9109, around then—we snuck into IP headquarters to get at that aswang. Back then it was a snapping turtle. A real ugly one too. We came up with this stupid plan, but we thought it was awesome at the time. I’d mold myself to look like Field Marshal Hullinger and strut right in to the testing area where they kept the aswang. Hullinger was Trioxidillian, so he was hairless and had black eyes. I can’t change my eye color or shrink my hair down—hair is dead tissue, so there’s nothing I can do about it—but we used color contacts and tried to hide my hair. We did a horrible job. And, besides, IP has access points that measure your biorhythms and retinas, junk that digs deeper than visual stuff. But I was only the distraction. We wanted alarms to wail, and when they wailed, Maul would sneak past the commotion, blast the aswang, and steal its brain.

“Anyway, the plan failed, we failed, and we whimpered off with our tails between our legs. Me literally, since I was impersonating a blue-skinned Trioxidillian.” He paused. Waiting for a laugh? “Blue Trioxidillians have tails.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Just checking. Anyway, that full-body overhaul I wore was a huge mistake. I’m no artist, so I haven’t been able to mold my face back to the way it looked before. I might never be able to. That’s why I wear sunglasses all the time: to hide. From myself. Also from my old roommate since I murdered his pet parrot. But mostly to hide from myself.

“I’ll probably have to live in a face that isn’t my own for the rest of my life.” He paused again, as if waiting for Organism to fill in a blank. “The lesson here is I know you’re hiding in a body that isn’t your own and isn’t one that would callously poison a parrot that blabbered to the tenant’s association that it was you who overflowed the washing machine in the building’s laundry room.” He smacked his lips. “I might be projecting some issues.”

An invisible claw raked Organism’s heart. His hand plunged into his pocket to pick out a picture on a small datasheet, and he checked it over. His past body. “You...figured me out?”

“It’s not hard to pick out. I mean, a guy who’s packing more muscle than a supplements advertisement acting as shyly as you? Come on. Anybody rocking your abs would strut his whole attitude. I see how you withdraw whenever someone looks at you. You might not wear sunglasses to hide yourself like I do, but your timidity is your sunglasses. You’re hiding in shadow so intently you don’t realize you’re hiding in yourself. Maybe nobody else notices, but I know the damage this hyperability can inflict on you. You can be anybody, hide anywhere in plain sight. It’s as positively inebriating as getting away with parrot murder. Okay, I’m definitely projecting.

“It’s not my business what or who you hide yourself as. My point is this: the longer you disguise yourself, the harder it gets to return to you. The real you. You might lose you forever.”

The connection clicked away. No good-bye, no nothing. “Connection terminated by other user,” the gabber said. “You got told. You still in on those mixed nuts or what?”

Organism stared down at the photo. A chill washed through him, and all he could do in the scant light was flick the photo with his thumb. He didn’t dare stand, didn’t dare leave the stall. Just stared at the photo of him and Dad, back before Mom left them. His old life. His old face. His real face. With Mom.

From outside: “Crock, crock, crock—”

“Jeff, swear just one more time. Try me! You’re about this close from me rolling around on your trampoline with my spikes flexed.”

“But I bounces off that crockin’ thing! I means I bounces off that thing!”

Chapter Nineteen: What Happens in Goat Vegas...

Legion leaned closer to this new applicant, who sat across his office desk from him. He circled the bullet hole in his Alaphan necklace with his thumb. This conversation would be spoken in something he likened to a child’s raging outside voice. They had to talk over the clanking of tools and gear Ace Spandex—“I’m working on it!”—spanked over that multiverse gateway, but raging was the watchword.

“So...your media name is Lickspittle.” Legion needed clarification. Exactly what was the hyperability that came with that name? In his heart, Legion needed to hear something along the lines of usefulness.

More clanking from Ace Spandex’s corner of the room. A bundle of wires sailed onto Legion’s desk and kicked away a few datasheets. Mostly magazines from sponsors IP had acquired. Legion had no interest in children’s magazines, glamor magazines, or children’s glamor magazines. He kept them around in hopes that the scratch-and-sniff ads would knock out a certain blond imp who was especially susceptible to the pungency of artificial perfumes. Whoever said “No scents makes sense” never used them as a line of defense.

“Yes, Lickspittle the Third.” This Lickspittle nodded. There had been two previous Lickspittles? “I come from a long line of hypercustodians”—there was the explanation, which somehow begged for more of an explanation—“straight from my father, his father, his father, his mother—”

“I get it.” Legion patted the air and set aside this guy’s resume datasheet. “You come from a proud janitorial lineage. But what I’m asking is...how can your hyperability help the Good Guys?” Well, what with the recent outbreak of resurrections in the frozen meats aisle of Station One’s grocery store, how could it not?

More clanking from Ace Spandex. In a flurry of burgundy impact clothes, he threw aside a wrench in favor of a hammer that he used to shoehorn a screw into a slot. The gateway crackled to life, but a hiccup of smoke erupted from it. “I’m working on it!”

Legion wiped his cheeks with the pads of his fingertips. He’d broken a sweat thinking of how to decline Lickspittle’s application.

The gateway crackled on again. Blue spat through its LED lights. “I’m working on it!” The whirring that spun from the gateway almost drowned Ace out.

Lickspittle nodded, about to speak—but a crash and an “oof” interrupted him. Something spilled out of the gateway. Legion hopped aside to avoid tripping over a body that tumbled across the carpeted floor and into his desk. Franchise. The real Franchise.

Hyperventilating, Franchise cowered against the desk, his eyes wide and his complexion the color of petrified fright. His skin was clammy, and he stank like the inside of an animal kennel. “Stay away from me or so help me—” He glanced around in panic, but familiarity dawned on him. His cheeks loosened, his lip calmed its quivering, and his panic shrank away. His expression morphed from abject fear to anger. “I’m gonna kill Jeffy!” His voice was hoarse. “That’s the last time I trust him when he says, ‘Have fun in Narnia,’ and then shoves me through a shimmering door.”

Legion sprang over to him. “Jacob? You know where you are, right? Are you okay? Do you remember us? Do you know your name?” Ace Spandex appeared beside him, grease on his scarred brow. Lickspittle casually wandered over to the commotion.

“Am I Jacob?” Franchise’s lungs still raged, still pumped. “The only name I remember is the name of the guy who shoved me through that portal. It’s engraved on my brain.”

“That’s it. I’m out of here.” Lickspittle hurried toward the office door. “You can keep my application.”

Legion checked Franchise’s pulse. “Jacob, where have you been this whole time?”

Franchise stared at Legion, clutched Legion’s arm as if he pulled himself shivering out of a pool after a near-drowning experience. His gasps grew back to frightened intensity. “I have no idea, but I never want to go back. Never. Goats were everywhere. They tried to feed me shirts. Shirts!” He stared at Legion, stared with such ominousness he trembled like horror incarnate. “Somehow I ate four.”

Chapter Twenty: Mobilize

“Hello. Lieutenant Colonel Freuth speaking with Grand Ole Opry’s new VoiceBox Control Eight, on sale today at your local supermarket.” Freuth gummed out these words through lips that were still waking up. He had just received a morning gabber call that had torn him from sleep

He checked the clock viewscreen on the wall in his office. Couldn’t see it, couldn’t focus. He tried to blink the fuzziness away. That didn’t work, so he dug the heels of his wrists into his eye sockets and rubbed as vigorously as if he scoured dried egg off a bowl with Letchtech’s new steel wool version 2.0, available through their online store as of next week. Sponsors always offered the best steel wool and eye scouring.

He sat up in bed, his soft, Egyptian-cotton spread wrapping him in terracotta waves that almost drowned him in fabric. Straight out of the wash. No. No sitting. At this early hour, this conversation must be important. He stood, and the haunt control in his office automatically pulled the bed into his office wall. An autocommand thanks to Letchtech’s latest software update, version 171.5 and a half.

“Lt. Col. Freuth,” the man on the other end of the connection said, an old voice that yet commanded respect designated only to the speaker’s position. The gabber, still sitting on his nightstand, rattled again at the voice of his superior.

“It’s an honor to hear from you. What has you calling at this hour? Excuse me a second.” Freuth cleared his throat and checked the nighttime shadows along his ceiling. “Light panel, acknowledge. Lights to thirty percent.” The light panel flickered on at a setting that gave a placid echo of a glow off the gray walls. Just enough to define the room.

Freuth gently plucked his gabber off the nightstand, spoke some drowsy comment about taking it off speakerphone mode, and twisted it into his ear. He cleared his sleepy saliva, thick as it was. He smiled, not at the fact that the other man to which that old voice was attached owed him a slew of gratuity moist towelettes after the last wings-and-beer night had gotten a little less wing and a little too beer. And a little too vomit.

“Freuth, a few keyword alerts came up on the Good Guys’ transport starship. They’ve found Operation Injunction Junction. We’ve found Operation Injunction Junction.”

Freuth’s awareness perked. “The rhyming operation.”

“The quarry is at Station Zilcho. We trace-marked F-Kestrel with a beacon tag, and the Good Guys had one appended to the Bad Guy transport starship. That transport starship landed on Station Zilcho not long ago. And it didn’t leave. Once the final details are in place, all systems are go.”

Dead silence hung over the gabber conversation. And, finally, Freuth heard the old man say the word, as clear as windows washed with Invisible Streak now that it had 40 percent more lemon scent. That word. “Advance.”

Wait. “I think you still owe me a pitcher of beer. I’m not absolutely sure on that, but hold on a second. I’ll find the receipt.”

THE END

NEXT BOOK:

Power Plant contracts Dutch elm disease!

About That Guy Whose Book You Read Once

Liam Gibbs knew he was destined to write at age four, when he authored a breathtaking account of a cow who ate grass. The bovine saga failed to catch the public’s eye but earned the budding author parental acclaim. Since those early times, he’s gone on to write the novella Not So Superpowered and humorous articles for various magazines.

A twenty-year veteran of the brutal world of hand-to-hand comic book fandom, Gibbs cut his teenage teeth on titles such as Spider-Man, X-Men, New Warriors, and other Marvel comics.

Gibbs graduated college with a degree in professional writing, which included classes on fiction writing and story structure. He lives on the balmy shores of Ottawa, Canada, where he relaxes by watching staggeringly awful horror and science fiction movies. A health and fitness nut, he shoots lasers from his eyes, uses the word exclusive incorrectly, and once wrestled an exclusive brontosaurus. True story.

That one time I was deep in thought and—Hey, is that ketchup on the ceiling?

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Communicate via homing pigeon at chirp-twiddle-twoo or whatever pigeons say.

Table of Contents

- Available on the Author’s Super-Awesome Site

- Other Stuff the Author Spewed Out

- Your Favorite Table of Contents

- Book 18: Blood Bunny

- Appendices

- Chapter One: It All Started with a Bang...
- Chapter Two: The Power Plant Hat Trick
- Chapter Three: Everyone Joins the Party
- Chapter Four: In Plain Sight
- Chapter Five: Fine Detective Work, Lou
- Chapter Six: Calling All Irrationality
- Chapter Seven: Hot on the Trail

- Chapter Eight: The Insatiable Belly of the Beast

- Chapter Nine: Tastes like Street Chicken
- Chapter Ten: Ready, Set, Go!
- Chapter Eleven: The Stupidest-Laid Plans
- Chapter Twelve: Like Grocery Shopping
- Chapter Thirteen: What Doesn’t Die
- Chapter Fourteen: I, Rabbit
- Chapter Fifteen: Commence Bowel Contraction

- Chapter Sixteen: Also without the Fancy-Schmancy Novocain

- Chapter Seventeen: Pardon the Intrusion

- Chapter Eighteen: How to Feed and Care for Your New Pet

- Chapter Nineteen: What Happens in Goat Vegas...

- Chapter Twenty: Mobilize

- About That Guy Whose Book You Read Once