Row, Row, Row Your Boat

By Jason Hauser

It had only been an hour since camp had been set up and he’d hit the sack, but Tex was nearing the end of his patience. "C'mon man,” he said to Brutus, “don't you come with some kind of spray? You'd think by now they could have at least spliced in some flower-smelling DNA during one of your thousands of re-clonings."

Brutus slowly and reluctantly rolled over and stared Tex in the face. He glared furiously into the human's eyes, while his mouth peeled back to reveal multitudes of sharply aligned teeth.

Snarling between each word, Brutus growled back violently, "All I gotta do is pull this trigger, and we get a shiny new DNA copy of you. It would be sometime tomorrow before they send you back, and I'd be very happy in the meantime."

Tex cut his eyes slowly up to see the glare of a silver barrel pointed at his head, and thought better of pressing the issue. "Well, all I'm saying is that I could be in the tent with Flint or Hawk, but nooooo …"

The sudden rustle of leaves beside the tent shut the both of them up instantly. Reacting without thought, both Brutus and Tex grabbed their steel and aimed at the front of the tent without making even a whisper of sound.

As Tex began to slowly creep out between the tent flaps, a mutant, standing directly beside the tent, slowly raised his gun in anticipation of the cheap kill. Tex had a foot out of the tent when he heard the all too familiar sound of a gun rattling in the hands of a waiting enemy. He immediately tucked and rolled himself out of the tent, unsheathing his other gun with his left hand and aiming both at the mutant beast in a blur of speed.

The mutant stumbled backwards in shock, and a single shot was fired. The mutant fell dead, landing directly on top of Tex with a thud.
He looked at the weapon in his right hand, and then to the one in his left.

"Hey! I didn't even get to give him a famous Tex quote. What the …"

"Nice of you guys to join us," Flint interrupted, smiling.

A slow cloud of smoke rose from the barrel of her sniper rifle into the night.

"Hawk and I heard the mutant about 10 minutes ago. We just wanted to see how close he could get before you morons actually heard the noises."

"Oh, we heard him a while back," said Tex as he stood to brush himself off.

"We just wanted to give you guys a chance to prove yourselv—"

Before he could finish, a blade materialized below his chin. Breath tickled the hairs on the back of his neck, and he realized it must be Hawk.

"Okay, okay, you got us," Tex admitted. Hawk lowered the blade and returned it to its holder with a flourish.

"Can someone please tell me why we have to spend the freaking night out here again? I mean, I get cloned and think that surely I'm gonna see some action, and I end up sleeping in the middle of a mutant haven with the rose-smelling beauty over there," Tex complained, pointing at Brutus.

Brutus jumped down from a cliff above Tex's head. "I sense no more enemy signatures present. The camp is clear."

"That's coast is clear, you dumb oaf. The coast is clear … ah, forget it. You'll never get humans, Brutus," said Tex.

"You don't know why we're out here, Tex? Didn’t the medic tell you when she cloned you?" Flint tucked her sniper rifle into its holster on her back as she walked to the middle of camp. "The Confed can't deliver us in daylight due to the atmospheric interference, and our objective is more obtainable in the daylight. So, they thought we could use the sleep, and perhaps bond with some marshmallows over the campfire while singing ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’"

"I don't sing," said Brutus.

"Uhh … I think it's a joke, Brutus. What she means is that the Confed is hoping that this might give us the chance to get to know each other on a more … personal level. That way we might actually be able to work with each other more efficiently," Hawk said.

Tex smiled and put his arm around Hawk. "Well that's why I thought the tent arrangements should be different." Hawk threw Tex's arm off and walked away. He shrugged his shoulders. "Thought I'd try."

A transmission interrupted the banter in the camp. "Team, it's go time. Hope you guys got your shut-eye because the objective is fully obtainable in 2 hours. Take out the mutant village. The atmosphere will probably render communication inoperative because of daylight, but you'll be close enough to know what you're looking for by then. From there on Good luck."

"Well there goes the “Row Row” session. And I was so looking forward to hearing Brutus' singing voice," Tex said while slapping Brutus in the chest jokingly. "All right, let's lock and load."