Despite that I was peeling out of the street out front of my house, a knife still stuck in my hip and blood soaking my pants, I was feeling alright. That may have had something to do with the shots I’d taken inside my house, or the fact that I’d replenished my car cooler with cold brews and grabbed a pair of choice bottles, but who could say? Trees sped by on either side of the road as my hydrocar ate up ground at a little more than double the speed limit.

  “Alright, time to head back to the rocket ship, and for you to give me some answers,” I said in no uncertain terms as we raced up the country road leading out of my home.

  “Aren’t you going to deal with that knife wound?” Blart asked, incredulous.

  “It’s not going anywhere,” I replied, glancing down at the knife. It wasn’t that bad, the knife couldn’t have been more than four inches long, and it was pretty clearly stuck in the bone. Compared to many of any number of wounds I’d received in the corps, the pain wasn’t so bad. The bleeding had even mostly stopped, though these pants were going to be ruined unless the ship had a built in washer/dryer.

  As I was driving, we zipped by a pair of cop cars speeding down the road in the opposite direction, cherries and berries flaring. In my rearview, I watched as one of them slammed on its brakes and pulled a U turn, going into the dirt on the side of the road and carving great furrows in the soft mud there with its tires. “Uh oh,” I muttered. “Grab the wheel, hold it steady!”

  “What?” the pig asked, but I was already fishing in the back. “You crazy damned primate!” Despite his protests, though, he clearly wanted to live, because he lunged across the cab and grabbed the wheel in his mouth, holding it steady. I found what I was looking for, the dismembered hand of the lieutenant, and pulled it into my lap.

  Once I had the hand, I began yanking the glove off. Surprisingly enough, this is not as easy a process as one might expect. Ballistic gloves are meant to hug the hand pretty tightly, and they’re hard to get off when the extremity isn’t attached and firmly anchored to a limb. I managed to pull it off after a few seconds, which was about when my back window exploded and a little hole appeared in my front windshield. Blart squeaked a terrified, piggy squeal and yanked the wheel a little bit. I snatched the other side and kept us from plowing into an oak tree going one hundred and five, but only barely.

  “Hey, dipshit, I said hold it steady!”

  “They’re shooting at us!” he shouted.

  “If you don’t stop being as useless as a tick on my taint I’m gonna shoot you myself!” As I yelled at the portly porcine I jammed the cop’s glove on my big mitt. It fit, barely, and was uncomfortably wet on the inside. Better than nothing, though. The sounds of gunfire from behind continued, and I gave the pig an angry look. “Hold it steady now, you fuck!” Blart tried to comply, and I chucked the lieutenant’s hand out of the back window at the car following us.

  It sailed true, slapping wetly into their windscreen and bouncing off, starring the glass nicely. I realized that I recognized the pair of cops who were following us, and I felt perhaps the tiniest bit bad about what I was about to do. The ones who’d been at my house were non-local special tactics guys, probably the heaviest nearby police force we had within forty minutes in the state. These guys, though, were the local town cops. There were only six regular cops in the whole municipality, and I knew each and every one of them by name.

  Either way, they were trying to kill me, so that left me with few options. With the officer’s glove on, his pistol would work for me, so I scooped it up and aimed out the shattered back window. The pistol was one of their heavy 12 millimeter guns, and it roared in the cab when I fired it off. I only had eight rounds, so I didn’t waste them trying to hit the driver or any such nonsense. Instead, I fired off all eight rounds straight into their engine block. The first few didn’t hit anything too immediately important, but eventually one of them must have hit a hydrogen cell powering the car, because it spewed forth a gout of flames at about the same time my magazine went dry. The cops slammed on the brakes, but the flames were spreading through the vehicle already. When the conflagration reached the other cells, the whole engine block roared out a massive explosion. I didn’t get a chance to see whether either of the cops within managed to bail out.

  “Why is all your filthy ape technology so explosive!?” Blart asked when I turned back around and grabbed a hold of the steering wheel.

  “Because it’s efficient and… really neat,” I said, feeling oddly self-conscious about our tech. “At least we aren’t jerkass sodomite squids.” The pig puffed an insulted harrumph, and we kept driving.

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  - - -

  After we blew up the cop car, we weren’t heavily pursued, probably because there was nothing nearby that could do so. The local guys didn’t have the compliance drones that the cities did, and they only had two patrol cars. It was yet another benefit of living in a small town. We got outside of the town’s limits with relatively little further difficulty, though Blart seemed to have an endless litany of complaints.

  “Blart, why the hell are you even here?” I finally asked him.

  “Isn’t it obvious? Even one of your limited intelligence and stunted evolutionary development should be able to figure it out.”

  “I have no Earthly idea what you’re talking about,” I told him. “Can’t you talk straight for once?”

  “Yes, I think now is as good a time to tell you as any. You will need to prepare your feeble mind for the monumental information I’m going to impart upon you-” he began, and then the world exploded.

  We were driving along just fine along the rural highway when a van ran a red light and slammed into my car around the driver’s side rear wheel. I remember the window shattering and the horrible sound of shrieking metal, but then I must’ve blacked out. When I woke up, the world was upside down, everything hurt, and the heat was unbearable. It was strange for it to be so hot, I thought, because it was an autumn day. Then my mind began to come back to me.

  I was in a car crash. My truck had rolled, and I was hanging upside down. Blood was seeping into my eyes, and when I cleared it with a hand, I saw that the van which had hit me was on its side a few meters away, entirely engulfed in flames. Alcohol burning cars, the civilian ones like my truck and the van didn’t explode the way that hydrocars did, instead burning with an incredible, angry heat. Reaching up with unsteady hands, I grabbed the knife stuck in my hip and yanked it out. It hurt, don’t get me wrong, but it was merely another needle prick compared to the mass of pain that was the entirety of my body. I sawed the restraints away and dropped down, explosively letting out a pained breath as my skull connected with the ceiling of my truck.

  Now freed, I took stock. Blart, of course, was missing, probably having ran off like the little coward he was. Knowing him, he was already finding some other poor guy to climb inside. My trusty shotgun was still connected tightly to its rack, and my cooler, though it had been tossed around and dented, was mostly fine. I grabbed the gun in one hand and my cooler in the other, then dragged my sorry ass out of the truck. Propping myself up with a groan of pain, I took a slug of rum after pulling it from the atomic icebox. It burned going down, which was a nice distraction from the pain of everything. Feeling as if I could use some more of that, I took another one.

  Finally, I felt like I might feel good enough to stand, so I pressed the shotgun against the ground as a crutch to heave myself to my feet. I didn’t get all the way up before I heard the sound of an approaching car, though, so I slumped back down. It sounded like it was coming on the other side of my truck, so I figured I’d be best off keeping low and out of sight. Conveniently, I was able to take another shot, and that was a pretty big added bonus. I heard the car stop and its doors open and close.

  “He had better not be dead in there,” a woman said. She sounded more than a little upset.

  “I steered it into his back panel, he’s probably fine. Even if the marine,” his voice dripped with scorn when he said these words, “got a brain bleed, we’ll toss him in a pod and he’ll be fine.” That voice was a man’s, and it was accompanied by the sound of a lighter clinking. I leaned down and peeked through the window, and saw a pair of legs standing on the other side of the cab, approaching my truck. He was wearing what looked like very nice dress pants with smooth black leather shoes. It was the lower legs and shoes of a businessman. “I’ll take a look inside and check.” A murderer’s grin rolled across my face and I readied my shotgun.

  Moments later, the man crouched down, and there was a wonderful expression of shock on his face when he came face-to-face with the barrel of my scatter-gat. He was incredibly handsome, with piercing, ice-blue eyes under jet black hair that came to a widow’s peak, underscored by a very strong jawline. He was the very picture of a secret agent. I went ahead and wiped that expression and his handsome features together off his face by letting loose a blast with the gun. He reeled backwards, shouting in agony and falling on his ass. Somewhere inside my concussed, inebriated mind, the thought occurred to me that someone shot in the face with a shotgun didn’t tend to scream, but my body was already moving. I popped up, shouldering my gun to shoot his companion.

  She wasn’t taking cover or standing there readying her weapon, or really anything I was expecting. Instead, she had vaulted over the overturned bed of my truck, feet-first. She was wearing a pair of blood red stilettos, which looked very much like the daggers they were named after while they coursed towards me. Her dropkick connected with my chest, and the wind exploded out of me with a flash of pain. She was deceptively heavy and moving fast, and I was tossed onto my backside.

  Much like her friend, she was wearing extremely nice-looking clothing, a very expensive and formal looking maroon dress with an overcoat. Additionally, my pain-drenched brain decided to notice, she was easily the most pretty woman I’d ever met, even if she was over six and a half feet tall. Leggy, with a sculpted, well-built body and gorgeous patrician features framed by glossy black hair which fell in slightly curly waves down to her shoulders. Some part of me genuinely felt bad about having to kill her. The wind was knocked out of me, but I’d held onto my shotgun, and while she picked herself up I ripped off another shot. To my amazement, my pellets slammed into her overcoat without penetrating, and that was the second to last thing I saw.

  The last thing I saw was her cross the meter between us in one quick step, lunge down from her great height, and blast her fist into my face.