Chapter 14 #3
And somehow she loses him. He doesn’t see how.
Maybe Maria, coming back for more because you don’t ever assume a possum’s dead just because it’s down.
Somehow, rather than the factory floor stretching out forever ahead of him like a bad dream, his feet spill him into a pipe-cluttered wallspace.
Not exactly a happy thought, knowing what’s carried through those pipes, but at least it’s shorter on guns than the place he was in before.
Just one gun, in fact. A yipping voice barking out his name.
He bunches, crouched, turning. Knowing he should run but knowing he’ll take the hit if he does.
Instead he does literally the worst thing against a popgun, which is make himself look big, the perfect target.
It’s instinct, though, the raccoon standing tall on its hind legs, arms out and fur bristling as though he was facing some dog dumb enough to be intimidated by the display.
Ripper has her popgun loaded now, levelled at him. Just as his mad rage has washed away, so has hers. She’s cold and level on the far side of the gun.
“Company raccoon,” she says. “Where’s your collar?”
“This again?” Skotch complains. “You’re an army squirrel? Your friends are back there getting murdered, Ripley. You want to pretend you’re here with a gun on me cos of orders? Or you care about the damn mouse? You don’t even know what’s going on here.”
“And you do?” she throws back and he almost gags on his frustration.
“I mean, I don’t!” he shouts at her. “But this whole circus is because all those dumbasses think I do! Go help your friends, Ripley. Go fight the Reds. Isn’t that your job?”
Right then she obviously thinks her job is loose raccoon disposal, because she doesn’t go anywhere.
And he reckons that her general dumbassery didn’t extend to getting payment up front from the Country Clubs, and now she’s got absolutely nothing to justify to her superiors why she went and got a load of their soldiers killed.
And not like a dead raccoon is going to level those scales, but it will obviously give her a huge amount of personal satisfaction.
“Just a shame you came out here, Skotch,” she tells him, because even with her finger on the trigger she wants him to hear the sound of her carping voice just a little longer. “Means I got to drag your dead weight all the way back in to the separators.”
He goes for her, or he tries to, but the hurts, the encroaching dumb, the threat of the gun, they conspire to fix him in place, compliant as you choose for the shooter who doesn’t want a challenge.
Something comes down between them, though.
Like a curtain. Feathers. A high voice telling “Ripper” Ripley that she can’t.
“No, no! I need him! He owes me a story!”
Skotch hears the sharp clack of the popgun even as Lulu intrudes.
Her voice is abruptly a shriek of pain, swatted out of the air by the force of the bolt.
She collides with him, a meaty weight of pigeon enough to knock him down from his threat display.
She’s flailing, keening, feet scrabbling at the air.
Skotch shoves her off him, no time to be delicate. Comes up facing Ripper.
Her eyes are wide. She’s shot Lulu. The pigeon; the pet. Rule One. Rule One, which says, fight, squabble, politick, build, and thrive, but under no circumstances ever bring humans into the Gehirner world. Because all we are is theirs, and they can take it back.
The next shot snatches Ripper away, sends the Graycoat spinning off back towards the factory floor, knotted about the bolt.
There are more Reds moving in. The first few just step past Skotch and the spasming Lulu, barely sparing them a glance as they hunt their territorial rivals.
The second wave stop and stare, waiting for someone with authority.
It’s an army and the Reds are big on chain of command.
Skotch claws over to Lulu: still alive, shivering, one wing flat out at an awkward angle.
“Hurts,” she gets out, all those words condensed to just one. And Sly’s dead, and Fitch and Springer, and now this. This ludicrous, irritating bird whom Skotch never wanted involved in any part of his life, except she was and now she’s shot.
He calls out to the Reds, demands a medic. They ignore him, soldiers who don’t take orders from some civilian. Some US civilian, surely closer to their enemies than to them. If they only knew …
Then there’s a squirrel standing over the pair of them.
Or at least standing beside, because, on his hind feet, he’s not really much higher than either Skotch or Lulu are lying down.
He wears a cuirass of buttons that rattle together when he moves, and his helm is a bottlecap, emblazoned with a little image of a cheery cartoon panda.
His whiskers are curved like elaborate mustachios and, of all things, there’s a tiny gold-rimmed monocle somehow propped over one eye.
He has a popgun in his hands. For a moment it looks like he’s going to just finish the pair of them and move on.
“Big stretchers,” he calls out, and the way the other Reds hop shows that this is the near-side terminus of the chain of command. “Get these two back to forward command. Maybe one of them can tell us what the devil is going on.”
And Skotch probably could have done, once, but he’s falling down the well of Plangent deprivation and right then feels he could barely get out his own name.