Free Pteranodon Mall by Ian Woodhead Page B

reason only led to destruction.
    It obviously hadn’t thought this one through. If the idiot hadn’t set off that bomb in the first place, then none of this wouldn’t have happened anyway. The feathered fuckwit reminded Desmond a lot of his granddad. Now that was one complete religious nutcase. He spent his life using the God excuse to explain everything from the crappy weather to losing his wallet at the bookies.
    Desmond was the youngest boy from a large family. He had another five brothers and two sisters. His mum’s sister hadn’t exactly been known for her ability to keep her legs shut either back in her wilder and prettier days. She had given poor Desmond five older cousins, who just loved knocking the crap out of their ugly cousin. Thankfully, the beatings were few and far between as the two families only met up once a month, when they all converged on their grandparent’s place for Sunday lunch.
    While Gran entertained the adults, Granddad took the kids upstairs, out of the way. If it hadn’t been for the others, Desmond might have enjoyed playing with the old toys and listening to his granddad bang on about the evils of the world and how God came down harshly on any bastard who stepped out of line.
    He sighed heavily. Perhaps if Granddad had looked a little closer to home, he might have noticed a few bastards stepping out of line as soon as the old man left the room to visit the toilet. As soon as they were alone, his cousins took turns punching Desmond in the guts or nipping him, or slapping his face, while Desmond’s brothers looked on, giggling away.
    Granddad visited the toilet a lot in those days.
    After Granddad died, Desmond used to wonder why the old man’s God never bothered to tell granddad to get himself checked out. They might have detected the bowel cancer early enough to do something about it.
    The old man’s God obviously thought that telling him that it would be pissing down when he went to collect his horse race winnings was more important.
    Even so, despite his grandad’s dodgy interpretation of God, the old man had been the only person who’d ever treated poor Desmond with any respect when he was growing up. Perhaps his religious ideas weren’t as daft as he once thought?
    After all, Desmond was still here, walking around this mall, still alive and relatively safe, unlike all the other poor buggers who’d been caught up in all the excitement. Oh, Desmond didn’t put his narrow escape from the jaws of death down to his granddad’s God, fuck no. He put it down to meeting someone who acted just like that mental old bastard.
    Zinik-Tow told Desmond that the Great Deity had allowed their species to conquer their planet before reaching for the stars. In the millions of years since discovering warp drive, they’d colonised the nearby star systems, encountering over two hundred other sentient species as they spread throughout the outer spiral arm. Naturally, their species believed that the Great Deity had placed these alien races on those planets just to taunt the species, implying they should have reached these planets long before such lesser creatures could develop to become an embarrassment to the Great Deity. Consequently, they had wiped them out.
    His new pal explained that he believed his species shouldn’t have used kinetic warheads on their planets followed by the release of millions of assault drop-troops landing on the surface, ready to vaporise anyone still standing once they had demolished their cities. Zinik-Tow said that using such advanced weaponry against creatures who couldn’t defend themselves was blasphemy. The Great Deity created them to hunt and to kill their prey in face-to-face combat. Where was the honour to their God into turning a city of millions into molten slag from the safety of an orbiting weapons platform?
    If it was truly necessary to conquer the galaxy, then instead of taking a few days to annihilate the new alien races they encountered, the species