Join the Club, Chapter Three

If the oilseed was dead, then next second Sheila all but jumped out of its final resting-place at the sound of screeching tyres. Vramm like a crimson squiggle was weaving his front fender in and out of the various lanes, avoiding every hazard not to mention other golfers who were rapidly fleeing for the gate. Twice as swift was the rearrangement of components which shifted Vramm from four wheels to twin soles skidding to a halt beside his charges, but none of that was to say the big boy was slow in adopting a slightly realigned stance relative to the sun.

Which was all it took for his breed.

For then there stood where the boy had been a thing far larger and nowhere near as well-made, its bulbous bare head boasting finny ears and vast opalescent eyes. What was more, had either Sheila or Tessie believed themselves to be toting clubs, the article this creature hefted in its hand would have taught them otherwise. It resembled half a gnarled tree, its broad end dotted with glinting spikes.

“I am Azaki!” the brutish bearer of this object gurgled at Vramm. “And yesterday I broke the heads of three of your mass-produced kind!”

Vramm set his chin and grimly let fly with the electro-pistol he carried, though he was only too aware it didn’t back the punch of his outer shell’s photon rifle. The girls screamed and scrambled, Tessie following Sheila’s lead in casting aside her useless instrument, while Azaki raised his far more practical one to weather the worst of the barrage. A fearful boom then reverberated over the crazy golf course, as that same club loosed half its studs amid a cloud of what looked like gunpowder.

Tessie had a feeling friendly fire would prove about as worthy of the adjective as anything else to which it had been applied today.

Inside the watermill seemed to her safest.

Unfortunately it did to Shelia too, so that when the girls made a simultaneous dive at the one square window in the outer wall, they wedged with their lower halves still sticking out. Azaki’s assault miraculously missed what would have been the most tempting target for many, but cracked free of its moorings the plastic edifice from which protruded that double display. As Vramm lowered his shield again and returned fire, the watermill bumped to land on its wheel and described a long slow teetering circle while the shootout continued, Tessie and Sheila’s shrieks muffled but some distance short of inaudible, their legs kicking from the exterior in a manner reminiscent of ducks.

At last the tottery tower tilted irretrievably to fall and crash apart on the course, and both girls roly-polied knickerwise out more breathless than hurt. They made an immediate shift to hunker behind the largest chunk of wreckage, for electrical crackles were still flying one way and bulletlike pointed projectiles the other.

Vramm by now was winning though. He had Azaki on the ropes.

Which wasn’t good news for one of the onlookers.

Because Tessie knew that as soon as Sheila had two minutes of peace and quiet to look back, the treacherous hand she’d taken in this wouldn’t be hard to see.

Shouldn’t have gloated. Shouldn’t have mocked her.

Shouldn’t have all but given away she’d been expecting Azaki to show up.

And Sheila had been suspicious. Tessie had seen it written on her face. So unless she could come up with some way to shunt all such doubts from that ginger skull, and convince its idiotic occupant they were fellow victims rooting for their favourite overgrown boys’ toy, then –

Why was she still tugging her knickers about and gibbering?

Tessie had had it. Funny how it was sometimes the little things. “Ever think of buying an album like other people do?” she hurled at Sheila above the battle-noise.

“It’s not that!” came back the wailing reply. “This oilseed is supposed to have a power to defeat that creature, but it just won’t work!”

Ask, and you shall receive. Talk about your basic lifelines.

“Then you can’t be doing it right, you nit!” flung Tessie, wrenching down the protesting Sheila’s waist-elastic to disclose pale quivery demiglobes from atop which she swept the crinkly faded dreg. It didn’t look to her as if it could have very much of any sort of power left in it, which Tessie guessed owed something to where it had been, but by this stage unlikely remedies were the only ones going. For if Azaki botched his job, she wouldn’t be to blame, whereas blowing her cover would land her in it with Gachna forevermore.

Tessie rammed the oilseed down her own knickers and went for broke, not that she had much of an idea what she was supposed to do. As it turned out, however, she knew enough.

A world of waxen yellow resonance flooded from gusset to golf-course, and this time it was Azaki who fell prey to friendly fire.

Which Tessie regretted, as it happened, though she dared say he’d live.

He seemed to her nicer than Gachna, for what little that was worth.

“I misjudged you, Tessie,” was the first thing Sheila said, after Vramm had made certain their attacker had checked in his club and quit the fairway. “Today I’ve thought several things about you of which I’m now ashamed, having seen how you came through for us all when it mattered. We’re past the time I’d have wanted Mini-Flash Juniper to spank you with her hairbrush,” she appended feelingly.

“Was she going to?” Tessie asked, trying to keep up.

“As for our match today,” Sheila moved on, “I’m willing to call it a draw. Including…”

The next part clearly took effort.

“Including the wager about you-know-who,” continued Sheila, albeit with a grimace. “One of us will still have to lose that particular contest, Tessie. We can’t share Calvin in the way we both want, but I see now I don’t have the right to treat him as my property either. You can’t own a person. Those creatures are the only ones who think that way.”

Which was truer that Tessie herself knew. Falsely mirroring Sheila’s smile, she felt only relief at being able to breathe easy again, together with a renewed determination to see somebody owned by Gachna for good. It quite escaped her notice that somebody else already was.

“Now we’d better return Mini-Flash Juniper’s oilseed,” Sheila sparkled. “I was worried for a moment I’d squashed it when I sat down or something. If I had, and brought it back while she was brushing her hair, I guess she’d have made sure I wouldn’t do that again!”

It took a minute for Tessie and Vramm to figure out what she meant, after which both deduced they were required to laugh, so did.

END OF CHAPTER THREE