Hard Luck Hank: Prince of Suck (27 page)

The only reason the Therezians had not
dominated the galaxy was because they had no technology. None. Species create
technology in response to their environment and to overcome their shortcomings.

Therezians needed nothing. They had no
shortcomings.

On the train everyone was talking about
it and the loudspeaker report was growing more and more shrill.

“Is it a practical joke?” Valia asked.

“If it is, I’m going to arrest that
person,” I said.

I found myself checking my guns for some
unknown reason. Guns wouldn’t do anything to a Therezian.

“Hank, are you going to fight the
giant?” someone asked on the train.

I saw everyone looking at me
expectantly.

“I doubt there is one,” I mumbled.

Outside the docks, the streets were
jammed with people.

At one point there had only been a
thousand Therezians roaming the entire galaxy. I had since heard their home
planet had been destroyed to prevent any more of them from leaving, but I wasn’t
sure.

“Move!” I shouted. I pushed through the
herd with ease, parting the mob with my arms. Valia was close behind me.

A hundred voices were calling out asking
questions. These weren’t just curious spectators. They were worried. This was just
what I needed. The Boards were going to crash again.

Whoever was making this news report was
going to—

And then I saw him.

He must have been about fifty feet tall,
dwarfing all the buildings on either side of the street, and he was walking
this way.

How did anything that big even
get
to Belvaille? Could he fit in a freighter?

There were screams and yelling and pure
terror. I didn’t look back, but I didn’t have to. From the sounds of their
voices fading, the throng of people was beating a hasty retreat.

The Therezian wore black. A vest, aged
and torn. Shorts that might have once been longer pants. Bare feet. Bare arms.
Therezians only had three fingers and no joints on them. The species were
sexless from what I had seen in the past, but they had overall masculine
physiques—just blown up to gargantuan size.

I heard an electric whirring beside me
and Zadeck, in his golden wheelchair, drove out in the street in front of me.
What was he doing?

“Wallow?” Zadeck creaked.

No! It couldn’t be. Wallow was never
that big. Wallow was sucked out into space seventy-eight years ago. It couldn’t
possibly be him.

“Zadeck,” the Therezian boomed.

That voice had given me ten thousand nightmares.
It
was
him!

“Wallow!” Zadeck repeated, full of
emotion. “You’ve returned! I-I missed you. Everything has changed. But you’re
back!”

He was still more than two blocks away.

Wallow had grown somehow. I remember him
being maybe thirty-five feet tall. Was it just perspective? No, he was
definitely larger. His arms were bigger. His legs. That ugly, rotten face with
its ridges and bones. Had he only been a child when he was here before?

Zadeck had been Wallow’s old boss—more
than that. Wallow was almost a pet of Zadeck’s. And now Wallow was back. Zadeck
was the King of Belvaille.

Garm might reign in City Hall,
surrounded by her fortress, but Wallow could knock it all down like it was
tinfoil. Governor, City Council, Supreme Kommilaire, all that stuff was
meaningless now that Zadeck had Wallow again.

Guess I’d be retiring sooner than I
thought.

I turned back and saw the street was indeed
clear except for a few reporters, Rendrae, and—

“Why are you still here?” I asked Valia.

“Because you are,” she said calmly.

“Get out of here. That thing is a
psychopath.”

“I’m not scared,” Valia said defiantly.

“Then you’re stupid.
I’m
scared.
Now go.”

“Boss,” Wallow said. Yet there was
something about his tone.

He took what looked like a half-dozen
steps, and jumped into the sky!

I had never seen Wallow jump before. I
had to crane my head back as far as it would go to follow him.

BAM!

Wallow came down with a crash and the
shockwave flung me back onto the bare metal road.

All the roads in Belvaille were sprayed
with a tacky substance to provide grip and compression. When it got damaged, we
simply sprayed more. Wallow’s splashdown ripped up the entire road and flung it
against the buildings where it collected in heaps.

I managed to look back and see Valia
land about twenty feet behind me. She scrambled to her feet and ran like she
was custom built for running. I’d never seen anyone sprint so fast.

Zadeck.

Wallow slowly straightened and I
realized he had landed on his former boss. There wasn’t the smallest sign of
him left. Whether he was stuck to the bottom of Wallow’s feet or crushed into a
black hole, I didn’t know.

The monster was ten feet away from me
and I was prone on my back. I couldn’t get up, let alone run away. And even if
I could, Wallow was faster than anything on this station.

Wallow stared at me, slowly cocking his
head.

“Hank,” he said.

Wallow had loved Zadeck and now Zadeck
was reduced to atoms.

Wallow had always hated me.

I think I was hyperventilating. And my age,
my illness, my prostate, my fear, all joined forces and decided to be super
helpful: I peed my pants. At least I’d get Wallow’s feet smelly when he
squashed me.

Wallow pushed his face closer to my
helpless form. He had to put two fists on the ground beside me to lean so low.

His face. It must have been around seven
feet tall. Every two inches or so was some scar. A pockmark. A cut. A crater. A
gash. Burns.

Wallow didn’t have so much as a blemish
when he was on Belvaille before.

This was a creature who had been
fighting for seven decades. Warring for seven decades. Who must have confronted
everything a galactic civil war could throw at him.

And he was still here.

“You look fat,” Wallow said. “And old.”

I wanted to say something. To not die
just sitting here in a puddle of piss. But I couldn’t talk. I don’t think it
was a heart attack. I was just really really frightened.

He looked at me a long time. His
eyeballs were gigantic. You could bowl someone down with one. Why was I
thinking that?

He suddenly stood up. He walked past me
a few steps and stopped.

“Is that grain storage still in the
northeast?” he asked me.

I spun myself around so I could see him.

“Uh, n-no, it’s not. Been gone a while,”
I answered, anxious to be helpful.

I noticed that Wallow no longer spoke in
halting, guttural Colmarian.

Wallow turned away and began walking.
Some suicidal instinct gripped me.

“Wallow! Hey! Do you want a job?”

Why did I call out to him? He was
leaving!

Wallow turned back around and I saw his
face, which looked perpetually angry, look even angrier.

“I don’t work for anyone anymore!” Then
his voice dropped to merely a semi-deafening roar, “I’m…tired.”

Wallow continued onward and it slowly
dawned on me that I wasn’t about to die.

Though it would be just like Wallow to come
running back around the corner and step on me right when I had my hopes up.

http://www.belvaille.com/hlh3/wallow.gif

I had my Stair Boys discreetly check on
Wallow, who was in the northeast, standing in the middle of a street. I didn’t know
if that was how he slept or if Therezians slept at all.

But I knew no one was going to bother
him.

Zadeck had told me they eat very little in
relation to their size. They really got every single good attribute a species
could get. Except finger joints.

I finally decided I had to go and see
him because I didn’t want him to get hungry and start raiding the city for
food. Not when we would be more than happy to give it to him.

I made it clear that I wasn’t looking to
give him a job. I just wanted to know if he wanted food or water.

He said yes. Each meal was maybe the
equivalent of three of mine and a lot of water. We set up a schedule and I
tasked various businesses with providing the supplies. Normally I expected them
to push back on this demand of their resources, but no one blinked.

It wasn’t that much food, they preferred
it to a hungry Therezian, and I said they could advertise themselves as an
“Official Feeder of Wallow.” In the end they probably came out net-positive.

Though it was still pretty frightening
pushing a wheelbarrow full of food up to a fifty-foot giant.

I sent some couriers to Garm, hoping
they knew some secret way inside her fortress. They all came back and said they
couldn’t deliver.

“Who
is
Garm, anyway?” Valia
asked.

We were sitting in my apartment, having
dinner. I had often eaten with MTB, but with him self-transferred, I was
talking to Valia more often. She was considerably better to look at.

“Garm is our boss. In a way. She owns
the city.”

“How can anyone own Belvaille? It’s so
disorganized.”

“She bought it long ago, which allowed
us to expand, and she has control of all the major systems.”

“So then what would the Governor and
City Council be to her?”

“I don’t know.”

“And why is she maybe trying to kill you?
But then fires the judge who was barely even bothering you?”

“I don’t know,” I sulked.

“But you know her, right?”

“Oh, yeah. We used to date! I mean, for
like a month or so. Few months. I can’t remember. But we worked together a lot.
I thought we were good friends. Then she just kind of disappeared from public
life and locked herself away.”

“And you took over public life?”

“Me? I’m hardly public. It’s just a
job.”

“Are you kidding? I heard about you
where I grew up. And that was before I even knew about this part of the galaxy.”

“Well, as you can see, not all the fairy
tales are true.”

“Honestly, you’re almost exactly like
what the stories say about you. Just a lot slower.”

“Where did you grow up, anyway?” I
asked.

Valia had been drinking some wine and
was getting looser. I liked her this way, she seemed more vulnerable. Less like
she had a chip on her shoulder. Like she wasn’t trying so hard.

I didn’t get drunk often. Delovoa’s
crazy brews could get me there but I always ended up regretting it. I had
thought about taking drugs to unwind, but I had enough health problems.

“I grew up in the North Reach Cluster of
the old empire. It had been colonized by Colmarians instead of being an
existing species that had been taken over by Colmarians. So it was only a few
thousand years old. It was clean,” she said, smiling.

“I pretty much grew up on Belvaille. I
keep thinking where I’m going to go after here, but if I leave, I know I’ll be
uncomfortable. It’s hard to change as you get older.”

“Don’t leave. Belvaille is exciting.
Trust me, I’ve been all around, and in this one city I’ve seen more than on
whole planets.”

“Yeah, but how many nude junkies do you
really need to see?”

“If you want quiet and boring, go pick a
mountain somewhere, sit down, and wait to die.”

“That doesn’t sound half bad. I’ve never
seen a mountain. I haven’t seen just about anything except this space station.”

“Here.”

Valia dumped my container of oats on the
table. She then pushed it all together between her hands, making a pile.

“Picture that a million times bigger.
That’s a mountain,” she said.

She stared at it closely.

“See how it doesn’t do anything? How no
one is there? No Hobardi. Or Garm. Or Feral Kids. Just…nothing. It’s like outer
space except you die slower.”

“Alright. Alright. Put it back in the
container, I’m going to eat that,” I complained. “So what about you? Do you
think you’ll want to stay on as a Stair Boy? Maybe work with MTB when I’m
dead.”

“Probably not,” she said.

“Wow, that was honest.”

“I think you have to care to do this
job. And right now I care. But I think it wears you out. When you care so long
and get burnt so much, it’s easier to not care. And then you’re no good as a
Kommilaire.”

“Hmm. You think I still care?” I asked
her, worried about her response.