The two fellows looked to be about his same age, though Cuddy was bad at guessing ages. But looking at them now, they seemed happy enough. Liking to laugh himself, Cuddy smiled and waved. “Hello… I’m Cuddy and this is Rufus. She’s a yellow laboratory retriever. She has a sister in town named Trudy.”
Their smiles were gone. The driver of the truck looked angry and Cuddy wondered if he’d said something wrong. He did that from time to time. The truck driver secured a greasy strand of black hair behind his ear; his face was riddled with pimples. Cuddy wondered if he washed his face often enough.
“What… are… you?” the driver asked.
“Huh?”
Rufus growled.
“I said… what the fuck are you?”
“Um… I don’t know,” Cuddy said, avoiding eye contact and looking down at his feet. He remembered Momma’s warning.
“He’s the town retard,” the one in the passenger seat said, sporting a crew cut and a scar over his left eye.
“Is that right? You the village idiot? I think I heard about you. Got dropped on your head, or something, as a kid. Your brother pushed you off a hayloft.” They both laughed at that.
Cuddy shrugged, not knowing how at first to respond, but then said, “He didn’t mean it.”
“He didn’t mean it… he didn’t mean it,” the long-haired teen behind the steering wheel repeated.
Cuddy heard the engine turn off. Both doors opened wide on rusty hinges, and he took a step back.
Climbing out of the truck, the driver glanced over to his friend as both moved closer. The dark-haired teen puffed out his chest and raised his chin, trying to make himself look taller. But Cuddy was nearly a foot taller than either of them.
“You need to stay the hell off this road. Matter of fact, I don’t ever want to see that big melon head of yours around here again. Understand that… retard?”
Rufus growled louder.
“I’m not retarded. I have a learning disa… disability.”
The slap came fast and hard to Cuddy’s left cheek. He’d never been struck like that before. Not ever. He didn’t understand what was happening and looked down at the guy through tear-filled eyes.
“You didn’t just back-talk me… did you, retard?”
Cuddy rubbed at his cheek. It still felt hot where he’d been slapped. “I want to go home.”
Rufus growled and bared his teeth.
The one wearing a crew cut looked down at the dog, and said, “I think that dog of yours has the mange.”
Cuddy tried to find his voice. “The mange? What’s that?”
“It’s like rabies. Your dog’s got rabies. You know what they do with those dogs?”
Cuddy shook his head.
“They put them down.”
“Put them where?”
“They kill them, retard!”
Scared, Cuddy looked down at Rufus, finding it hard to breathe. He suddenly became fearful he might pee his pants.
The crewcut-haired teen took a quick step backward, then moved forward even faster—kicking out with a boot that connected hard with Rufus’s ribs. The old dog yelped and tried to run, but couldn’t—something had broken inside. Cowering now, Rufus lowered to the road, trying to wrap himself around Cuddy’s feet. Trembling, the dog looked up at him.
Cuddy reached for his dog, wanting to hug him. Let him know he was there. That he would protect him and give him love—at the very least.
The teen with the crew cut punched Cuddy in the face—hard enough to knock the cap from his head. Shocked, Cuddy staggered, seeing stars dance before his eyes. The pain was intense. Next, a kick came to the back of his legs and Cuddy’s arm whipped upward. Unintentionally, his knuckles connected hard with the long dark haired teen’s face. Cuddy heard a cracking sound—like the sound of a pencil snapping in two. Blood spurted from his nose. The teen screamed something then, bending over, clutched his face.
The crew cut teen then came at Cuddy with a vengeance. Lips pulled back in a snarl, he struck out, first with his left fist then with his right. Cuddy took the new blows to his cheek and chin, and cried out as he toppled to the ground. Quickly curling into a ball, he did his best to cover his head with his arms. Momentarily, Cuddy thought of the glowing angel he’d seen in the woods. Was he a guardian angel? Could he help me now?
Next came a series of merciless kicks—each one harder than the one before it—to his stomach, his back, and to his face. He’d never felt such pain before. He heard Rufus whimper nearby—for the first time in his life he wanted to hurt another person—he no longer regretted breaking the dark haired teen’s nose. As the unrelenting kicking continued, he began to lose consciousness. He felt the daypack being pulled from his shoulder. Slipping into darkness, he heard one of them say, “Shit… I think we killed him. Let’s git!”
Chapter 5
Tow had been working for four straight hours, trying to feed power back into the wellness chamber. Damage caused in that last attack by the Howsh, when the Howsh plasma strike hit the aft section of the Evermore. The ship had lurched, violently propelling him off his feet, and into an adjacent bulkhead. He knew right then his leg was broken. The plasma strike took out several key mechanisms—including the wellness chamber.
Tow concentrated on the electrical panel before him, where much of the ship’s power conduits were junctioned together. The problem—much of this ship section was heavily damaged; primarily, the starboard berth compartment, not more than five feet away. The compartment had suddenly decompressed, crushed in on itself, flattening the sleeping berths. Seven lives were lost within a split second and the bodies were still in there, with no easy way to recover them. There had been no easy way to retrieve their essences for the heritage pod.
Tow, presently, hung upside-down between two bulkheads near the ship’s stern. He’d give it another few minutes’ effort before giving up, turning his attention instead to the propulsion system. What he really wanted most was to return to space… quickly.
Holding a test probe down onto the tenth series of contacts, he asked the hovering nearby AI orb, “Reading anything here?”
The orb said, “No… that terminal is dead.”
“That one should be energized,” Tow said, moving the tip of the probe down to the next series of contacts. “How about these here?”
“Yes, activated.”
“They are supposed to be nominal!”
The AI orb said, “You could reverse them. I calculate you have a forty-percent chance of success.”
“You do know that’s less than even odds…”
“Yes.”
At that point, Tow had little choice, since he wasn’t an engineer. He swapped the plug-in junction cables between terminals ten and eleven.
The AI orb said, “That did it. The wellness chamber is now re-initializing. I believe you have alleviated the problem, Captain Tow.”
Though I fixed one problem, I’ve most likely instigated another, coming down the road, he thought.
Aside from the emersion-matter drives, the wellness chamber had the most complex technology on board the Evermore. Another contribution by the Kartinals—the chamber was the advanced administrator of a completely independent, artificial intelligence medical treatment system; one that fundamentally changed the living conditions back on Mahli. The Pashier, as a race, saw life spans extend from an average of eighty to ninety years to twice that. Diseases, once terminal and inoperable, were all but wiped out. As far as Tow knew, there was only one exception: wellness chambers were ineffective in the treatment of the Dirth. The scientists—the Kartinals, required to make necessary modification updates to the wellness technology, which would diagnose the recent vile disease and treat it effectively—were all gone. They had either succumbed to the disease itself—before they could make modification—or were among the billions who died in the spatial attacks.