“You are McGill’s woman. I shall leave you stained and dead, as he did to my greatest love.”
That was all he got out of that dribbly snout of his before I caught up and launched on him. I hadn’t shouted any warnings or threats thus far. Instead, I’d just pounded pavement until I was behind him.
My combat knife was out, and I pressed it against his thick hide, near the spine. I made sure it cut in a ways, so he could feel it.
Hissing, he dropped the girl and turned around. “McGill! You are so easy to manipulate. You make a poor agent for Earth.”
So saying, the scaly bastard shoved a shock-rod into my face. I tried to cut him, but I lost the use of my limbs. Soon afterward, I lost consciousness.
* * *
I woke up on the pavement, gasping for air. My lungs barely cooperated. Old Raash had stunned me good.
A few patrons from the bar were walking past, glancing down at me and tsking. They shook their heads, rolled their eyes and a few looked like they wanted to spit.
They all thought I was drunk, of course. There wasn’t much pity to be had on the street, and I couldn’t talk yet, so I strained to look around me.
Natasha was gone. Raash was gone. There was no one and nothing I recognized nearby.
A few minutes went by while I struggled to regain the use of my tingling limbs. Before I had recovered, a cop wandered by. Maybe someone had alerted him.
At this point, my limbs were operating at half-power, but my lips were still rubbery, as I’d taken the full shock right in the kisser.
The cop bent over me and looked amused. “I thought you legionnaires could hold your liquor. I guess you had a little too much of the hard stuff tonight, huh starman?”
I slurred something out, but it was unintelligible. That was just as well, because he wouldn’t have liked it if he had caught my words.
“All right,” he said. “I can see you’re waking up, and you haven’t pissed yourself or anything yet. How about I give you a break tonight and you keep walking? You want me to call you a ride or something?”
I managed to shake my head “no”.
The cop shrugged and shook his head. He turned away to walk off, but I reached out a long arm and hooked his ankle.
Now, under normal circumstances, a man might expect to tug away from a drunk’s fingers. After all, to his mind I was too far gone to speak.
The truth of the matter was the fingers of my right hand were still rubbery. The stun-gun had left some parts of me numb—but my left hand was doing pretty good. I caught him with a solid grip and didn’t let go. As a result, he took a header and landed on his face.
The cop got back to his feet, snarling. His good-natured joshing was forgotten, and he had a nightstick in his hands quicker than I would have credited.
“All right,” he said, “I’m a fool. I was trying to be the nice guy, but I should have known you’d be trouble.”
He didn’t just start whacking on my thick skull. That’s what I kind of expected, but I was still lying down, looking messed up. He walked around me warily and reached for my wrist, whipping out a pair of gravity cuffs. He got one of them snapped on, too, before I could stop him. He knew his business, I have to give him that.
Unfortunately for him, a gravity cuff on just one of my wrists was worse than useless. I immediately turned it into a weapon and whipped it around to crack him a good one on the temple. He sprawled, and I sat up.
He tried to get up again, but I gave him a hard time, pushing him back down.
“Sorry,” I managed to croak out. “Girlfriend… kidnapped.”
The cop wasn’t in the mood for talk, and I couldn’t blame him for that. He struggled and fussed, but with each passing second more tingling sensations came back into my thick arms. As I was a trained fighter, he didn’t have much of chance.
“Sorry,” I repeated, my voice clearing up a little. “Really, I need your help.”
The cop was on his face, which was bloody, and he was panting. He was a few pounds over the limit, and I calculated that he’d been skipping his morning jogs more often than he should have. As a result of his poor physical condition, he was running out of gas.
“Is this your way of reporting a crime?” he asked me from the pavement.
“Yeah. I’m not actually drunk, I was hit with a stun-rod and my girlfriend… she’s gone.”
“You’ll let me up and submit to arrest if you know what’s good for you, McGill. Yeah, I know your damned name. The gravity cuff reads tappers, you know.”
“Huh? Really? That’s a neat trick. But look, I can’t take the time to get arrested and all that. I need to find Natasha.”
“Natasha? Specialist Natasha Elkin?”
“Yes, that’s exactly right.”
The cop heaved under my knees. I was kneeling on his back by this time to hold him in place, so he collapsed again, gasping.
“You freak!” he wheezed. “She’s dead! This is all some kind of legion thing, isn’t it? A hazing ritual gone wrong?”
“Dead? Where?”
“Just up the street three blocks, hero. You probably did it yourself, didn’t you?”
I heaved a sigh and put him out. With a murder nearby and me knowing the victim and all, there was no way any wannabe hog cop was going to help me find Raash. He’d probably put me in a cell and bury me with interrogations and such-like. I just
