Scum of the Universe Read online

  Mister and Missus Tuesday went off into the sunrise, one carrying the other across the glowing sand dunes, towards a new life.

  *

  Jim woke up in the considerable arms of his Russian bride on a stained patch of linoleum. Stifling a scream of surprise so that it came out as little more than a rat-like squeak, Jim carefully peeled Ruska’s sausage fingers away from his ribs and attempted to sneak out in a ninja-like way perfected by parasitic bastards the world over. Looking down at his cheap white robes and the plastic blaster pistol on his hip, Jim sighed.

  Dressed as Princess Leia again. Honestly, he was so sick of waking up like this...

  Jim emerged from the shadows and stepped into what felt like the surface of Mercury. Blinking away the assault of Apocalypse-level sunlight on his sizzling retinas, Jim squinted to discover that he’d been sleeping in the ruins of an abandoned service station in a wasteland. The creaking wreck had been tarnished to the same colour as the local dunes after decades of neglect, and it looked like it was one stiff breeze away from collapsing into little more than tetanus.

  Shielding his eyes and steeling himself, Jim made it a total of ten steps across the steaming sand before he realised that the deep desert seemed to stretch forever. As Jim Tuesday was an unfit wreck who did horrendously dangerous drugs every day, wandering over glassed sand for a week without a drop of water wasn't an option. Perhaps if he found something to...

  “Morning,” Ruska purred in Jim’s ear.

  Jumping in surprise and almost messing his white robe at the sound of the thickest, deepest Russian accent he'd ever heard, Jim did a half-revolution before his feet touched the sand again. Jim slowly looked up...and up...and up...

  My, she was big.

  “What's doing?” Jim tried to say casually, while his brain screamed AAAAARGH at full volume. Jim hoped that this giant tree sloth, or whatever it was, didn’t intend on following him around. Dumpsters were crowded enough for his lanky frame as it was, and he was a lone wolf to the core.

  “I love you,” Ruska said with devotion.

  Jim screamed hysterically. After about eight seconds he realised that this was upsetting the creature for some reason. Jim clamped his mouth shut, blinked, and attempted to change the topic.

  “How about that…concert?” Jim managed, trying to access his non-existent memories.

  “Yeah. How about that concert?” Ruska said suggestively.

  Jim tried to calm down and think through this. His most popular methods of getting rid of unwanted lovers included begging, bargaining, threatening, farting and even just simply running and hiding. As a big fan of the classics, Jim chose to use the latter technique. Diving between Ruska's legs, Jim did a commando roll across the rotten lino and bolted through the service station. Scurrying under a decayed counter and squeezing into a corner, Jim silently prayed.

  Please not the hairy woman, please not the hairy woman, please...

  Of course, Ruska sniffed out Jim within seconds and leaned down to give him a watery, hurt expression before picking him up by the ears. Jim screeched just as much as you’d expect.

  “Don't you love me?” Ruska rumbled with a quiver.

  Jim thought about this.

  “What would be the exact consequences of choosing ‘no’ as the answer to your question?”

  The expression on Ruska's face had the word DEAD growling behind it. Long, sharp teeth started to appear between her hamburger lips.

  “Are you aware that even smaller primates, such as chimpanzees, have more than enough upper body strength to rip human arms right out of their sockets?” Ruska asked in a conversational way.

  “Of course I love you!” Jim said far too loudly.

  Ruska beamed, and painfully embraced Jim. His ribcage creaked.

  “Do you?” Ruska snuffled wetly.

  Noticing a nasty itch, Jim looked at his left hand, then at Ruska's furry paw, to see that they had purchased identical plastic wedding rings at some point. However, the one Jim was “wearing” had been anchored to the metacarpal bone of his ring finger with hair-thin electrodes, and was studded with tiny pinheads of explosive gel. Turning his hand over, praying to whatever deity cared, Jim saw that most dreaded of logos: TRUST.

  Dear God! A Trust ring. Of all the horrible things he could have woken up to, this was one of the worst. He'd have to find some way to remove it, but such a task would be unwise at this moment...

  Jim smiled with forced enthusiasm as he realised that Ruska's question remained unanswered. It took all of his powers of deception to manage such a huge falsehood.

  “Baby! Would I lie to you? Would I?”

  Outside, he was all smiles. Inside, Jim was crying hysterically. Like all vermin, though, most of Jim’s brain was wired up for self-preservation, so the cockroach instincts that governed Jim’s mind would wait for the right moment to scurry to freedom.

  “Wedding was nice, yes?” Ruska purred.

  She flipped Jim up in the air, gripped him by his left foot, and held him to the ceiling in a playful manner. Blood rushed to Jim's throbbing head. Somehow he remained conscious.

  “I thought they were a little…what is word?... reluctant. Priest-person was under impression I might be classed as exotic pet. But I am nobody’s pet!” Ruska spat at the desert, and glared at Jim with a dangerous glint in her eye. “I be with you forever, Jim. And when our baby boy born, he grow up to be just like you.”

  Jim screamed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HELL SWEET HELL

  Time passed slowly at their rusted service station. As the local highway was completely covered by a foot of sand and it seemed as though no flight-paths went overhead, that meant the average number of people who might decide to pop by for tea each day was zero. In addition to the isolation, it was immediately clear that every worthwhile thing in this tetanus pit had been looted years ago, and the desert silently reclaimed whatever was left. Thankfully, their survival prospects increased a few points when Jim unearthed an ancient tap that provided what could loosely be described as drinkable water (if you didn’t mind having to chew it a bit first).

  Starting on day two, Jim began the week-long process of coming down from his record-breaking Shatter binge. For the first three days he did nothing but shiver and rock back and forth in the corner in chemical shock. When his body got tired of doing this, he broke up the routine by retching violently for hours at a time and crying like a lonely puppy. The fact there was nothing to eat except an all-you-can-swallow sand buffet was of no concern, as Jim would have just thrown it back up again anyway. Curled up on the lino in misery, if Jim rested his ear against the laminate he was sure he could hear a very, very faint sound, like some sort of machinery. He wrote this off to withdrawal hallucinations, and didn't think about it any further.

  Ruska disappeared on the seventh day, and Jim instantly noticed that the little lights on his Trust ring were, for some reason, no longer flashing. If he remembered the television commercials right, that meant Ruska must have turned off the proximity restrictions, which meant that the rotten thing wouldn't explode if he got too far away. On the downside, attacking the ring itself would probably cause the explosive pinheads to detonate and take off his arm. Half delirious from hunger and knowing that this may be his only chance at escape, Jim found a sharp hunk of granite and steeled himself to cut off his own finger. Of course, a wimp like Jim barely scratched the skin before giving up, but it was a valiant effort.

  Jim cried for a while.

  Ruska returned three hours later holding a pair of very dead elephant moles in her toothy maw. The two-faced mutant critters had writhing, clawed tentacles instead of limbs and their pelts were riddled with phlegmy pustules, but after a week without food they might as well have been deep-fried garlic prawns on hokkien noodles.

  Gathering up any garbage that could burn, such as used scratch-lotto tickets, old receipts and some depressingly empty cigarette packets, Jim went to start a small fire with his trusty Zippo, but Ruska beat
him to it: extending her retractable claws, Ruska struck both of her index talons together in a shower of sparks, and the flammable pile glowed to life. Ten minutes later Jim was enjoying a medium-rare mole steak with his woman.

  They ate in silence for a time. For the first moment in days, Jim’s withdrawals had receded to the point where he felt as though he could string a few words together without throwing up, passing out, or both.

  “Thanks.”

  Ruska looked up at Jim as she slurped the bloody innards out of her mole like red strands of spaghetti. Her cheek and eye twitched in a silent “don’t mention it” sort of way, and she instantly went back to annihilating the little corpse.

  Jim stopped gumming his mole for a few seconds, looked out over the sunset-washed eternity of sand, and asked a very obvious question.

  “Uh, Ruska, where are we, exactly?”

  “Depths of the Mojave,” she rumbled without any interest, loudly crushing mole bones into gelatin powder. “Very far in. Nobody bother us here.”

  Jim immediately stopped gumming the mouthful of mole crackling. If he remembered a few important facts from history class (as unlikely as that situation was), then he was sitting right on top of the location of the largest botched terrorist attack ever committed on Amerikan soil. Although the terrorists had failed to claim a single life, every schoolchild on the planet was taught all about how a gang of Buddhist extremists had protested the Dalai Lama's high-profile international trial by filling their orange robes with micronukes and hijacking a Cessna. Thankfully the would-be suicide-bomber monks got their coordinates mixed up due to the fact they had the combined IQ of a packet of yeast, and so they blew themselves to cinders more than three hundred kilometres away from their intended Los Angeles target. All they managed to do was make the hell of the Mojave slightly more hell-like for their trouble, and the event was now celebrated every August on Imbecile Day.

  Jim blinked. That explained why the dunes glowed blue-green at night-time, and why the sky occasionally rained ashes when it was especially windy…

  “Oh.”

  “What?” Ruska grunted, eyeballing him.

  “Nothing,” Jim answered. “Just might be a little background rad around here, that's all. Nothing to worry about, long as we aren’t expecting to have ki-”

  Jim stopped himself mid-word. Estimating the future sperm-producing abilities of his soon-to-be-irradiated testicles wasn’t an appropriate topic for dinnertime conversation, no matter the company, so Jim wisely went quiet and continued to strip the mole’s ribcage. Eventually, Jim formed a small pyramid of picked-clean bones and had a full stomach, so he had nothing left to do but try and extract the whiskers out of his throat. Glancing down at the demolished skeleton, Jim noticed that the white bones seemed to have formed a word on the lino: TRANCE. He didn't know why, but for some reason seeing those six letters tickled something in the back of his head, as though he was meant to be remembering something important...

  After a few confused moments, Jim just assumed the TRANCE thing was a fluke (or more likely a product of his many, many past instances of brain damage) and promptly forgot about it.

  “Mmm. That’s some fine mole.”

  Jim reclined against one of the less-jagged walls. His Shatter withdrawals had suddenly reached the “chatty” stage where all he wanted to do was talk. Of course, this invited high-speed knuckle sandwiches at the best of times, so Jim chose his words as carefully as he could.

  “So Ruska, are you, um, originally from Earth?”

  Ruska literally bristled, like a territorial cat. Her eyes narrowed a little, as though she was trying to figure out if she was being insulted. It took a couple of seconds for her to answer.

  “Da.”

  Jim waved this away, as though Ruska didn’t understand the question.

  “Okay, so you were born on Earth, but where are your people from?”

  Ruska blinked.

  “Your question, I do not…understand it.”

  “What planet are your parents from?” Jim snapped, annoyed at having to spell it out. “I know you get all sorts at concerts, especially when Scumbags are playing, and I kinda remember hearing from my dealer’s bodyguard’s sister’s de facto’s dealer that we made contact with aliens a few times over the years, and I just sorta assumed that with all the fur and other freakishness…”

  “I am human!” Ruska shrieked, instantly unfolding to her full size. Rending claws slid in and out of each of her fingertips in sync with her rapid breathing. Her pupils began to expand and contract, pulsing in a terrifying way. “I am human! HUMAN!”

  Jim held his palms towards Ruska in a placating manner, but his next words only added petrol to the cigarette.

  “Look, no offence, lady, but if you’re human, I’m a Czechoslovakian koala. What species are you?”

  Ruska bared her teeth. There was an entire mole paw stuck between two of her larger fangs, and Ruska’s mouth started foaming yellow slobber like a rabid dog. The drops of acidic saliva made sizzling noises as they burnt little smoking holes in the lino. She slowly drew closer to Jim by inches, growling from deep in her throat, and hissed her next words.

  “I was conceived by union of human semen and human ovary from human of two gender, just like you, but then my embryo was grown in glass womb. When I baby, they put in me many chemical, many DNA.” Ruska retracted her claws with a snick, but bared her teeth even further, as though she'd decided to bite off Jim’s head like a gingerbread man rather than shred him with her talons. “I am breed to kill, yes, and I enhanced…but I still ninety-seven percent human being...which mean I human.”

  “Sure, but chimpanzees are ninety-seven percent human too, you know.” Jim argued, pulling a random statistic out of thin air like so many wrong people across the breadth of history. “But chimps still swing from trees and eat bananas and play with themselves in full view of the zookeepers, right? A chimp is still a chimp, ninety-seven percent or not.”

  Ruska could only sit back on her haunches and tilt her head to the side in complete bafflement. It was like watching the world’s most stupid field mouse giving two fingers to a hungry house cat and then calmly taking a nap in Fluffy’s food bowl, assuming that the immediate future will be rosy. Ruska was so astonished by the stupidity of this scrawny mammal that she was stunned out of her anger for a few seconds.

  But those seconds came to an end.

  “You…” Ruska attempted, unable to find the right words for a moment. “You are imbecile! How are you not dead yet?”

  Jim belatedly realised the very immediate danger he was in. Blinking stupidly as he reviewed the previous thread of the conversation (though admittedly, Jim had to move his lips a bit to jog his memory), he mentally kicked himself for his stupidity.

  “Hey, I was just...kidding around,” Jim lied quickly, smiling feebly in an attempt to avoid ending up like that mole limb caught between Ruska’s teeth. “It’s just, um, Amerikan humour.”

  The violence in Ruska’s body language disappeared as though Jim had flicked a switch. She deflated and coiled back down to the floor, where she resumed licking the gunk out of a well-gnawed moleskin. She shot Jim a neutral look while chewing her food, and made one more casual remark to end the conversation.

  “Jim, your Amerikan humour is awful.” Ruska said calmly, her eyes dead. “Do not be doing the joke with me again or I kill you like insect, yes?”

  Jim didn’t sleep that night, and it had nothing to do with the Shatter withdrawals.

  *

  Ruska’s baby belly was showing within a month, and Jim found himself freaking out worse and worse the bigger it got. Every new millimetre was another chapter in this horror novel. Somehow Jim had survived Ruska's extraordinary temper up to the thirty-day mark, but he was bruised all over from her cuddles and other forms of affection, and the thought of staying here in this decaying slum for the rest of his natural life with that thing and its spawn was about as appealing as an aroused Winston Churchill in cling-film speedo
s.

  Once he'd survived the nightmare of Shatter withdrawals, Jim spent most of his days pacing around the layer of solidified tetanus that passed for a floor in his “home”, trying not to get flayed by the insane desert sunlight and sleeping away as much of his time as he could. Ruska had kept them both sufficiently fed so far, but Jim always secretly hoped that the mad animal wouldn’t come back whenever she went hunting for the disgusting seed of nuclear fallout they both relied on for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

  In addition to being bored by this routine, he was just as sick of having to cuddle up to Ruska (who smelled like a ripe bear carcass after a long Summer) for life-giving warmth through the frigid nights. Jim decided that he needed a real bed, as opposed to the stained patch of lino he’d been using. Gathering up the discarded skins from the dozens and dozens of moles, rats and coyotes they’d eaten so far, Jim's home improvement project was as easy as piling the pelts on top of one another and lying to himself about it being a bed. Daniel Boon would have turned his nose up at the rude pile, but at least it was soft.