Ruthless (3 page)

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," said Johnny.

"It's only a Gronk," the gunman replied.

"Yeah," said Johnny. "But they
do
bite."

The gunman looked down for just a moment and Johnny took his chance. He kicked up his feet and smacked hard into the ground, raising another cloud of dust, groaning as his back took the impact. The Vaara bandits were still staring at him in bemusement when their ears registered the sound of the gunshot.

The Gronk hit the ground screaming something about the noise, too hysterical to realise that it had been dropped for a reason. Its former kidnapper swayed unsteadily on his feet, his eyes turning blindly up towards the hole in his forehead. Behind him, there was a fine red mist where the back of his head used to be, still hanging in the air as the other gunmen made their move. Everything... happened... verrrry... slowwwwly...

Gronks are loyal, and furry, and occasionally incredibly stupid, but what separates them is their reaction to danger.
Gronkus Narcolepsis
immediately feel very, very sleepy at the first sign of danger. This unusual survival trait has proved most unsuccessful and subsequenstly, there aren't too many of them left these days. Curling up into a ball and hoping that the danger will be gone when one wakes up has never worked well, though it did cause some highly prolonged skirmishes during the Gronk Civil Wars of legend, particularly the infamous Battle of Sleepover Trench.

A less pleasant but longer-lived species is the
Gronkus Laxativus
, which reacts to perceived threats by explosively evacuating its substantial alien bowels. No predator without quick access to soap and water ever paid them much attention. They have survived in large numbers, but form an untouchable class, even among the Gronks. They tend not to travel offworld and comprise a large part of the Gronk civil service.

But this Gronk, this was the philosophical genus of Gronk, the high caste known to xenologists as
Gronkus Pavidus
- "The Panicking Gronk". Blind, shrieking, blue-murder conniptions are the most obvious trait. Running in circles yelling for their parents, or indeed, anyone else's available parents at the first sign of danger, these supremely nervous critters have managed to survive because they have a deep secret. You would need to be inside a Gronk's mind to see it, and nobody has been inside a Gronk's mind except Johnny Alpha and the occasional brain weevil.

While the lower mouth shrieks away in a stream-of-consciousness rant about the injustice of the world, and the potential damage that may be incurred by its poor heartses, the Gronk forebrain remains absolutely calm and collected. The body may quiver and shake, and run around in small circles waving at least one pair of arms in the air, but the Gronk forebrain knows exactly what it is doing. Its eyes swivel in all directions, its nose snorts the surrounding atmosphere in search of comforting smells, and it makes a plan for action.

Its poor heartses
.

A Gronk heart usually has an easy time of it. The centre of gravity is low. The legs are short. A Gronk heart isn't the most active muscle in the galaxy. Until, that is, panic sets in, and it gets a wholly unwelcome glandular injection of heavy-duty chemicals, in particular, one called juddermine.

Juddermine does exactly what it says on the tin, or what it says on the small vials of contraband juddermine that are occasionally injected by unwise humans in search of a thrill. The digestive system goes into overdrive and the heartses pump like there's no tomorrow. The brain synapses fire ten times as fast as usual. Absolutely everything that makes a Gronk gronky is magnified tenfold and the Gronk turns into a shaking, quaking bundle of hypertensive, hysterical nerves. But for the Gronk itself, time seems to slow down.

The Gronk was still falling when the juddermine kicked in. Johnny Alpha was still poised in mid-air himself, somehow suspended at an improbable angle, smoke still trailing from the upper muzzle of his Westinghouse. As the Gronk's head furiously swivelled, its forebrain was able to take in the situation in slow motion, as the four remaining gunmen brought their weapons to bear.

Far removed from the trembling bag of nerves of popular myth, the Gronk weighed its options in the next extremely prolonged second. It could stay where it was and hope that the newly dead bandit who had dropped it would not fall on top of it. It could run to the side, hoping to get out of the way of trouble, or even run back between the legs of its former captor, towards the relative safety of the big black rock behind it.

There was a bright blink of light above Johnny Alpha's head. Somewhere from the rocky cover behind Johnny, someone had fired a weapon at the remaining bandits. The initial muzzle flash reached the Gronk at the speed of light but the missile itself plodded far behind with the relative slowness of a recalcitrant donkey.

While its body twitched and jittered, the Gronk's shakey-cam eyes focused on the new arrival: a rocket-propelled grenade, lazily arcing over Johnny's head, its supersonic wake causing the desert air to shimmer. It spun as it flew, slow enough for the Gronk to read the serial number on its side, and the maker's designation - Day series, High-Explosive. Handle with Care. Made in Taiwan.

Of course, thought the Gronk in satisfaction. Mister Johnny wouldn't have come alone. From somewhere among the rocks, Wulf Sternhammer had just unleashed a thunderbolt from the north. The grenade was an unimaginative dark green, tipped by a long, fearsome spike, a gyve designed to crumple on impact and set off a large explosion.

"Eek," said the Gronk's upper mouth, involuntarily. The simple exclamation, once begun, could not be stopped, causing the Gronk's next subjective minute or so to gain an annoying background shriek. Its own prolonged scream causing its skull to vibrate, the Gronk told its stumpy little legs to scamper in the safest direction possible. Considering the approaching grenade and the gun-toting bandits, the Gronk figured the safest direction to run was
towards
Johnny Alpha.

Swaying and lurching against its own juddermine-pumped muscles, the Gronk began to advance while the rocket-propelled grenade continued its slow and lazy passage overhead. The Gronk and the grenade passed each other halfway between Johnny and the bandits, the heat pressing uncomfortably against the Gronk's fur. But despite the burning sensation, the Gronk was pleased with itself. Standing this close to a grenade in flight might be nasty, but it was nothing compared to being caught in the explosion. Burning alive while doped up on juddermine was not an experience any Gronk should endure. Dying could take subjective months.

The Gronk swivelled its head to look forward at Johnny Alpha. He was still several feet away, the dust of his fall still hanging above him like a low red cloud, a smoke ring from his gunshot floating in the air before him. He was firing his Westinghouse a second time.

Humans don't have the benefit of juddermine. Their actions are agonisingly slow to a panicking Gronk. Johnny didn't have time to admire the scenery. For him, only a second had passed since he let off his first bullet and he had no option but to remain on autopilot. With inexorably dumb human reflexes, Johnny's finger pulled the trigger, unleashing a bullet at ground level. Spinning considerably faster than the lazy grenade, a number two jack round shot out of the muzzle and straight for the Gronk.

Belatedly, the Gronk came to understand that running towards a man in the middle of a gunfight could have its drawbacks.

"Eek," said the Gronk's lower mouth, adding to the ear-splitting whine of the earlier scream.

Throwing itself to the ground was out. Gravity would take at least half a second to take hold. Its momentum would not allow it to go far enough to the left or right to dodge in time. There was only one option, and that was to use the full power of its juddermine-augmented muscles.

The Gronk jumped. It sprang into the air with all the might of its tiny, chemically altered limbs, leapfrogging the bullet even as it tore past on its way towards its target. With the subjective speed of an eager rat, the bullet sped safely between the Gronk's legs, but now the Gronk had another reason to panic.

It was designed for scuttling, not taking athletic bounds. Its stumpy legs had given it a bit too much forward momentum, and now it was slowly executing an unstoppable mid-air somersault.

The Gronk flapped all four of its arms ineffectually. For a moment it was parallel with the ground, flying like a furry superhero, and then its legs were above its head and it was facing backwards.

Astonished and over-alert at the best of times, the Gronk's eyes bugged outward in distress as a dozen of the bandit's return-fire bullets whooshed around it, safely over Alpha's head, but dangerously close to its hapless self.

A guttural, throbbing, bass rumble shook every fibre of the Gronk's being, growing to a deafening roar, and then climbing still higher, drilling into the Gronk's eardrums, hammering the inside of its head in relentless pain. For the Gronk, the passing of the grenade was ancient history, but back in real time it had only just happened, the sonic boom it dragged behind it drowning the Gronk beneath its killer waves.

The Gronk gritted its teeth and waited impatiently. In spectacular upside-down-o-vision, it saw the rocket-propelled grenade reach its target - the unprotected chest of one of the gunmen.

It hit the one with the big long beard, the one that the Gronk almost liked because he had fur on his face, like Mister Wulf. The Gronk knew that its tormentors had been prepared to kill it, but even so, it liked to see good in everybody. The Beardy one had brought it food. He had told the Gronk to shut up marginally less often than the others. He had called it some names that the Gronk didn't really understand, but it figured they couldn't have been all that bad. The Beardy one, reasoned the Gronk, was the most likely to reform at some later date. If he made it through alive, perhaps after a little penal servitude, he might pay his debt to society and become a nice human being like Johnny Alpha.

But there wasn't much chance of that now. Shrieking in horror, the Gronk plastered all four of its hands over its eyes, willing the sight to be gone.

Then, in spite of itself, it peered out from behind a lattice of eight stubby fingers and watched the slow, savage moment of the pointed gyve of the grenade sinking into skin and bone. The gunman's sternum buckled before the metal spike as the grenade drilled furiously into his chest, whirling a swift corkscrew of blood out in its wake. The grenade wasn't designed for use against human targets. The gunman was too soft to crumple the spike and set off the explosives - it was going right through him and out the other side.

Hellish as it was for the Gronk to watch, it managed to work itself into even more fretting merely by considering how it must have felt. There was a flash of sunlight on something the Gronk couldn't see in the distance, and then something exploded the skull of the man next to Beardy. Johnny Alpha's second bullet had hit home.

The Gronk was impressed for a moment. Only a few seconds ago, it had been a prisoner of five gunmen. Three of them were now dead on their feet, their bodies creatively mangled, though the Gronk could no longer see them. Its somersault carried it back around again, right side up and facing away from the gunman. Out in the rocks, it could clearly see the white pelt of a deceased fellow Gronk - Wulf Sternhammer's treasured cape. The Gronk was pleased. It knew that Mister Wulf would never let it down. Unpleasant, achey, and downright painful as these moments were, they would end soon and the Gronk would be safe.

The Gronk continued to tumble. As the form of Johnny Alpha, still shooting, hoved into view once more, the Gronk pondered. The Gronk didn't know all that much about guns and stuff, but a rocket-propelled grenade was not an everyday household item. Even the Gronk knew they were launched from bazooka-tubes. If Wulf Sternhammer had launched one at the gunmen, then right now the tube was still sitting on his shoulder. It was going to take him dozens of seconds to drop the spent tube, snatch up a more appropriate weapon, take aim and fire again. Considering the grenade's low altitude, Wulf must have been lying on the ground to launch. Merely getting to his feet and fumbling for another gun could take precious time. In the meantime, Johnny Alpha was without cover or back-up, and menaced by two surviving bandits.

The Gronk panicked again. Its hearts, starved of juddermine for at least half a second, got yet another dose, squeezing blood around its tiny body like there was no tomorrow. Things seemed to slow even more and the Gronk bewailed its fate. Of all the creatures in the universe, what terrible deeds in a past life had caused it to be born a
Gronkus Pavidus
?

There were still bullets in the air, but the Gronk was too far away to see them clearly. It twitched erratically at the noise of each passing missile, unable to distinguish between subsonic and supersonic, not knowing whether each new
whoosh
and
crackle
was the sound of a new round passing, or the forgotten echo of an old one that was long gone. Ricochets added new frets as bullets flew at it from unexpected directions, chased by sharp shoals of rock fragments.

The juddermine maxed out. There was simply no way the Gronk could imagine things getting worse. Its somersault continued and it was upside-down once more, forced to endure the miserable spectacle of the two remaining gunmen, their eyes now locked on Johnny Alpha as they took slow but sure aim.

Johnny Alpha evaded as best he could, rolling sideways on the ground towards cover, but he was never going to make it. The Gronk watched sadly as Johnny's gun fired another round, thrown off course by his rolling motion. His opponents' eyes were clearly locked on him now, their gun-arms swinging glacially into position. Next time their slow human muscles pulled triggers, the barrels of their weapons would be aimed right at Johnny Alpha.

The Gronk prayed to its complex pantheon for divine assistance - particularly to the newly sainted Gloppus, said to watch over the Search/Destroy Agents. Surely it could not end this way with so few wrongs righted? Johnny Alpha must not, and could not, die. The Gronk could not bear to see it. The Gronk made a succession of wild promises to the departed Gloppus. It sought further intercession from other divinities, most notably Flookus, the Gronk god of unlikely coincidence. Perhaps, thought the Gronk, Johnny Alpha's armour might save him. Something,
anything
, thought the Gronk.