AllFreeNovel
Share Us
At least until you have to turn on your allies in order to be the last man standing.
Woman.
Alien.
Whatever.
I scrambled to my feet and stood up on my tiptoes to peer around the building over Kaio’s head.
The alien jerked me back down by one arm and I landed on my ass beside him.
“Ouch. Why’d you do that?”
“You can’t negotiate with these people,” he muttered.
“You don’t know that. One of them is human, right? And you haven’t even tried talking.”
I hadn’t seen them, so I didn’t know who I was dealing with.
I saw them.Kaio sent me an image of a giant, blob of gray with six legs, a tiny head with beady little eyes, and skin that looked like it could be made of stone.
“What is that?”
A Frothian Rock Beast.
“Who’s his human partner?”
This time, the image he sent me was of a thin brunette I’d seen in the prep chambers earlier. I’d overhead her name…what was it?
Sandy. Her name was Sandy, I suddenly remembered.
Okay. That I could work with.
I stood up and flattened my back against the wall behind me. “Sandy,” I called out. “Let’s make a deal.”
“This is a terrible idea,” Kaio muttered.
I would have liked to tell him he didn’t know what he was talking about, but he could read my mind, after all, so he probably did.
I heard hissing and murmuring from across the clear space between us.
“We’ll just have to kill you at some point, anyway,” Sandy finally replied.
“But before then, we could help each other get to the finish line.” I waited for her response, my heart pounding. I didn’t know if I could do that—betray someone I had worked with. I mean, it was easy enough to do in a work situation. It wasn’t like those people were going to die if I didn’t follow through with everything.
Kaio shot me a bemused look. “You’re planning to betray them even before you make a deal?”
“I’ll do what I have to do to stay alive.” My tone was grim, but from the way he looked at me, I could tell Kaio was as skeptical of my ability to follow through as I was.
“If we stick together and watch each other’s backs, we can get to the last round,” I called out.
The voice that replied was deep and rumbly, exactly what I would expect from a giant alien rock-man-beast. “Or we could kill you now and move along.”
Well, that had really worked out.
But I hadn’t become the top salesperson in my company by giving up after one ‘no.’
“Unless we kill you.” I paused for effect. “Then you wouldn’t make it to the last round at all. Not now, not ever.”
The two whispered, and then Sandy called out again. “Okay. Let’s talk.”
We met in the center of the street, exactly where I would expect an old-fashioned shoot-out to happen. And from what little I knew of Magnum T. Bloodworm, that was probably what he’d been hoping for.
Instead, we began negotiating a temporary truce.
