There was a sharp, meaty crack – the
sound of someone’s head impacting with someone else’s fist – and
another of the scientists who’d been trying to get Zektor to
step into the processing-tank went flying backward to smash into
the far wall of the lab.
"I told you to piss off, meat sack!"
The bent support beam that he’d
been using for a crutch— had been until some of his fellow Hyper
Zoanoids had dug him out of the rubble of Mt. Minakami—had since
been replaced by a pair of actual crutches. A
pair,
hence Zektor’s being able to use one of them to club a few of
the more persistent – or in his view, dumber – doctors in the
head. The flat whack of the crutch as it slammed into another
doctor’s head made Zektor smirk a bit.
"Zektor, we’re just here to help you."
"I don’t want your fucking help!" the
irate Hyper Zoanoid snarled, his baby-blue eyes spitting sparks
at his tormentors.
"We just want to fix your leg, Zektor."
"Have any of you fucking dumbshits
even considered
the fact that I don’t want to have my leg fixed?" Zektor
demanded, remembering again just how and why he’d lost his leg
in the first place, because it would be an insult to the memory
of his team if he got it fixed without finding a way to get back
at Aptom.
It would be just like forgetting
about them, so until Dr. Balkus – whom Zektor fully believed was
searching for a way to deal with that bastard Zoanoid-eater –
came up with a way to make him immune to Aptom’s infectious
cells, the leg was going to
stay off. Not that Zektor was
going to try and explain anything to these dumbshits, since all
they cared about was getting him back on his feet so they
wouldn’t look bad in front of Dr. Balkus.
"I told you pissants to stay the hell
away from me!" Zektor snarled as he bludgeoned another of the
doctors with his crutch. "Are you all deaf, or just damn
stupid?!"
"What’s with all the noise here?"
another voice asked, sounding confused.
Zektor turned with a minor amount of
difficulty, thinking that the newcomer was yet another idiot
doctor who needed some sense pummeled into his empty head. What
he saw instead was the brown-haired, impeccably groomed form of
Panadyne standing beside him.
"Oh, it’s you," Zektor said, lowering
his crutch so that he could stand on it again. "What’re you
doing here, Panadyne?"
"I came to find out what all the noise
was about," Panadyne said, grinning slightly. "I should have
expected it to be you, you old bastard. What’s your beef now?"
Zektor shrugged. "I just have a problem
with morons," he said, turning a scathing blue-eyed glare on the
scientists gathered around him and warning them off in case any
of the dumbshits were going to try and get to him while he was
talking.
"Okay. What’s your problem with morons?"
Panadyne asked, looking like he was somewhere between curious
and confused.
"Aside from the fact that they’re
so goddamned stupid—"
here Zektor turned to glare at the gathered doctors, prompting
them to take a few steps back, "—they keep trying to make me do
shit that I don’t want to do."
Panadyne glanced down at the
pitiful remains of Zektor’s left leg. "Why in the hell would you
not
want to get your leg fixed? You didn’t strike me as the type
who’d stay down any longer than you had to."
"They told you what happened to the rest
of my team, right?" Zektor asked warily, not wanting to explain
his situation again if he could help it.
"I heard they were all killed," Panadyne
said, with the usual amount of distant sympathy. "That was
always the risk though, you know."
"You don’t get it," Zektor
snapped. "My friends weren’t just killed. They were
eaten.
By Aptom."
"Aptom?" The fish-eyed look that
Panadyne gave him didn’t make Zektor feel any better about his
situation. "Aptom, as in the leader of the Lost Unit screw-ups?
Aptom, as in the guy Dr. Balkus wants to personally toss down
the incinerator chute once he gets finished ‘examining’ him?
That Aptom?"
"Yeah,
that
Aptom," Zektor spat. "He’s the reason I lost this leg. And until
Dr. Balkus finds a way to give me a fighting chance against him,
the leg’s going to stay
off."
"Your way of remembering?" Panadyne
asked, though the tone of his voice suggested that he already
knew the answer, or at least suspected.
"That’s about the long and the short of
it," Zektor said, nodding.
"Come on, then. Let’s get out of here,"
the other man offered, putting his right arm around Zektor’s
shoulders and helping the other Hyper Zoanoid walk out of the
laboratory.
Neither of them looked back.