InsaneJournal

Chapter Nine – In which Zim hits like a girl

“So how did you find me, anyway?” Dib asked curiously as he crawled out from under the shelves, Irken savior close beside him.

Zim blew a little raspberry at the question, serpentine tongue lolling out of his mouth for a second afterwards before he merely replied, “Long story. Zim shall explain later. Yes.” He glanced up, antennae perking. “Oh, hello.”

“Huh?” The teen chose this moment to glance up as well, and was quite prompt to shriek a choice phrase of ‘OH MY GOD’. Or, to be more accurate, he shrieked about half of it before Zim shoved him aside, pulled out his stolen plasma pistol, and actually managed to shoot a hole through the side of the droid’s covershield.

The Krakemeth inside wasn’t entirely pleased, if his whacking Zim into a nearby shelf was any indication. “Ha! Is that all you’ve got, pitiful wormy-thing?!” the Irken exclaimed. “A smeet could hit harder than you!” He pointedly ignored the fact that his squeedilyspooch had been bruised in seven places and three ribs were cracked. His PAK could fix that stuff, anyway. Mmmmyep. All he had to do was not die first. And not dying was easy – he’d been not dying for a little over a century and a half now!

Zim extracted himself from the crater he’d made in the shelf, just in time to duck into a rather painful-looking roll to avoid a sharp droid-appendage, which buried itself where his head had been just moments before. “You know, it’d probably be a lot easier to kill it if you’d actually shoot at it!” Dib called from his ‘safe’ spot behind a slightly scorched bargain poster.

“I’m working on it!” Zim screeched back, fumbling with the gun for a moment before aiming and firing – the shot glanced off one of the droid’s legs. “I meant to do that!”

“Use your PAK legs!” the human exclaimed, giving a little wince when the droid swatted Zim off his feet, the would-be invader only narrowly avoiding being impaled. “Before you end up getting yourself killed!”

The Irken threw up his hands in frustration, accidentally firing a shot that ricocheted off the covershield. “Yeah, that’d be real smart if I could actually use them right now! It’s not like I had to mentally exhaust my amazing self using them to get here in the first place!”

“Oh, and I’m guessing I was supposed to know that, because…yeah, I’m psychic and everything!” Dib yelled back irritably, scowling when Zim bluntly responded with a ‘yep’ and continued to suck at aiming. After smacking a hand to his forehead, the teen rushed from his hiding spot and snatched for the pistol. “Give me that! You couldn’t hit a brick wall if it was five feet in front of your face!”

Zim glared at him and pulled back on the weapon. “Yeah, great idea, let’s get in an argument over who can aim better when we’re being attacked in a grocery store about to go up in smoke! I’m the trained soldier here, so leave this to ZIM! I can handle this simple opponent with ease!” he snapped, waving his free hand in the direction of the droid, which seemed to have slowed to a stop, the Krakemeth within staring at the two incredulously.

Dib tugged back on the pistol, returning the glare full-force. “This would be a lot easier if you’d just hand it over, because at least I know I can aim, Mr. Superior Irken Soldier,” he stated, the last bit dripping with metaphorical sarcasm.

“Oh, so you can just turn on Zim and save your own sorry hide? Did you think ZIM would not see through your scheme?! TREACHERY! TREACHERY!” Zim shrieked, giving a couple of little yanks on the pistol that made it seem more as though he were a small child having a tantrum and trying to take a toy back from his mother, rather than the trained soldier he actually was.

“You have got to be kidding me!” Dib exclaimed, clearly frustrated. “For your information, I-” He trailed off, a bemused expression settling on his face. “Uh…what’s that gurgling noise?” The two glanced from their miniature and quite juvenile game of tug-of-war and up to the droid, which they hadn’t even realized had stopped moving – the creature inside was shaking with suppressed gurgles. “Er…what is it doing?”

Zim stared at the Krakemeth for a split second before stating dully, “It’s laughing.”

“At us, right?” the teen responded, equally dull.

“Most likely,” Zim replied, unimpressed. “What else would it be laughing at?”

There was a bit of quiet, in which Dib thought to himself, still tugging at the pistol. Then, he stated hesitantly, “It might’ve just thought of a terribly funny joke.”

“A terribly funny joke about shooting the both of us, maybe,” the Irken responded dryly, pulling back on the weapon between them. “You want to know what the punchline is? Us – dead. I don’t know about you, but Zim doesn’t find that funny.”

“Yes, well…I think we both know what a better punchline would be, huh?”

Zim glanced to the human curiously, then to the Krakemeth (which had diminished into a quivering mass of gurgly giggles – no threat there for the moment), before questioning uncertainly, “Uh…sure – us…not dying?” Well, it seemed obvious enough.

A light chuckle escaped Dib. “Er…that was a rhetorical question, but…sure. Not dying would be good. And taking that thing out would probably be a big help. Maybe we could even commandeer its droid.”

“Eh…that last part won’t work out so well. Trust Zim. But, yes, we shall destroy this…thing. ‘Mortal enemies working together for the common good’, was it?” the Irken responded, a strange grin spreading on his face.

“Something like that,” Dib agreed, mirroring the alien’s expression as he glanced down to the pistol between them, then back up to his companion. “I aim, you shoot?”

The Irken gave an amused sound, one antenna perking with interest. “Sounds acceptable. Zim would still be shooting the creature, so Zim would still get the credit!” He easily ignored the teen’s slight frown. “Heh – it thinks it would be funny to shoot us, thinks it would be funny if we were dead, yet we shoot it and kill it instead. You were right…that is a much better punchline.”

Dib rolled his eyes, though the irritated frown had vanished – he felt strangely calm, and almost…good. “I’m pretty sure it was just laughing at us arguing,” he replied mildly.

“In which case we should shoot it, anyway. No one mocks the Irken elite and their allies,” Zim stated, antennae poised proudly and stance battle-ready – he really could pull off the soldier look when he wanted to. “Especially not such despicable creatures such as this. Don’t you agree, Dib-human?”

He didn’t even need to say anything. Dib shifted his grip to the Irken’s wrist, directing to where it should be to bring the pistol level with its target – he was a mix of thankful and guilty (but mostly thankful) for all the many times he’d chased after his nemesis with a SuperSoaker – and gave the alien a light squeeze; not even half a second had passed before Zim pulled the trigger.

The Krakemeth sat up sharply at the sound, gurgles ceasing a split second before a plasma bolt sliced its way neatly through the droid’s covershield and burned a hole through the flesh of one meaty shoulder. It shrieked in a mix of pain and fury, scrambling at the controls and dribbling ink-black blood as it pushed levers forward, the droid shifting back into motion.

Dib adjusted the aim once again, sweat – from nervousness, exertion, fire – trailing down his forehead and leaving streaks in the thin layer of dust and grime covering him. “Again,” he demanded. Zim didn’t need to be told twice.

A sick splat, dulled somewhat by the covershield, was heard, and the alien within slumped and fell from the control seat, the droid freezing. There was a heavy silence, and after a slight sigh, Zim glanced back to the human. “I…think we should run,” he suggested, pulling his wrist from the teen’s grip – they may be allied at the moment, but that didn’t mean he was willing to allow the other the honor of touching him without good reason.

Wiping at the sweat on his face and smearing around the grime (there was a noticeable grimace from Zim), Dib asked tiredly, “And why’s that?”

“Oh, no reason, it’s just that the droids tend to explode when you’ve killed their pilots,” Zim responded blandly with a little shrug.

It was a fact that had the teen’s eyes bugging. “Think you could’ve mentioned that earlier?!” Dib exclaimed, giving the Irken an irritated shove – not so hard as to send him off balance, but hard enough to show he wasn’t pleased. Zim simply huffed at him, and the two set off at a brisk pace. “We don’t even know if the store is stable enough to hold up against something like that! It is still…kinda on fire.” He glanced about curiously as they ran. “Huh – I must not have been out that long, if it’s still standing and I haven’t been burnt to ashes yet…” He then turned his gaze to Zim (and nearly ended up tripping over some poor mutilated body just minding its own business lying dead in the aisle). “How long has it been, anyway?”

The Irken seemed to think about this, looking back over his shoulder at the spreading fire, then down to his PAK. “Well, Zim had been searching for your pitiful self for at least half an hour…”

“And…I definitely would’ve fried to death by then,” Dib responded, looking skeptical. He figured that Zim must have been out looking for him even before the store had been attacked, although he didn’t have much to go off of. Scratching his head and wondering as they went, he then asked, “Where’d the attack originate?”

Zim continued running, easily keeping up next to his rival, and for a while it seemed as though he hadn’t heard – he was more intent on something moving about through the blaze behind them – then, he turned his head, brow furrowed. “Ehn? How should Zim know? I was busy devising ingenious plans to destroy the human race when they beamed me from my base and did my job; terribly, too, seeing as they missed a human. Stupid copying worm-creatures!” Dib’s resulting flat look had him pausing, then answering the initial question offhandedly, “Probably started in the middle of the city – more damage to do there.”

Appeased by this, and started to feel just a little bit winded, the teen nodded; Zim’s neighborhood (and his own, he realized worriedly) was a bit farther in towards the city limits compared to here. “Guess I really wasn’t out that long, then,” he mumbled to himself, this time remembering to skirt around the next corpse lying in their way. (Zim, on the other hand, wasn’t quite as lucky, and ended up slamming face-first into a thoroughly filthy tile floor.)

Uttering what was clearly a curse in his native language as he lifted himself from the floor, the Irken wiped at his face with his sleeve – a useless gesture that only relocated some of the mess to the cloth and smeared the rest of it around. He then cursed again, in English this time so that Dib would notice his plight and do something to help his bruised ego.

No such luck, though – Dib was more worried about staying calm enough to stay alive. Rather difficult, really, when you’re trying to escape a burning building. “I can’t believe I didn’t even realize what was happening!” he groaned, vexed that he’d been so wrapped up in his usual schedule that he’d practically handed Earth over to these new aliens. That was something he complained about the rest of the human race doing!

Rather aggravated that his ego hadn’t been assuaged as he’d expected, Zim responded in a mockingly pleasant tone, “Zim isn’t surprised; you were never really that much smarter than the rest of the human pig-things. Even if you had realized, it wouldn’t have mattered. The Krakemeth race don’t do things in bits and pieces – all but the hive mothers and their leaders would have been down here, spread across the entire planet and annihilating everything in their paths. Face it, Dib-” Zim snickered meanly at this point, seeming to almost skip for the slightest of seconds. “-your race has absolutely no means of protecting itself against a full-scale alien invasion. I’m surprised it took the tentacley things so long, but then…they are unrefined in the methods of invading.”

Zim chuckled to himself, as though at some kind of inside joke, before continuing. “Irkens are much quicker at the full-scale invasion stuff, you know. One quick go-over with the organic sweepers-” He flared his hand out dramatically, a deranged grin pasted on his face. “-five minutes tops, I’d say.”

Dib gave a slight interested noise, but looked rather off-put at his companion’s enthusiasm; what was so great about bringing other races to their knees? He thought back to Torque and the other bullies suddenly, then considered how it felt whenever he managed to put Zim in his place. It was all about power. Of course. “You’re all a bunch of intergalactic bullies,” he muttered lowly, feeling just a small twinge of hypocrisy that he was quite keen to ignore. Something he wasn’t quite sure of nagged at him for a moment before he realized what it was, and he glanced over at Zim, surprised. “Wait, you know about this race?”

A similar expression crossed the Irken’s face as he stared back at Dib, as though he’d expected him to already know that – which he probably had. “Of course. They were covered in the educational plug. They destroy planets and races for fun or for monies,” he explained, a slight hint of disgust in his tone that suggested that Irkens at least made good (or at the very least, vaguely good) use of what they conquered. “There were actually two lessons, I think, but Red and Purple were always really distracting, so I just got it all in a data download, straight to my PAK.” He gave a dismissive wave of his hand, as though this was entirely common. Given how the Irken race worked, it seemed plausible.

The information was slightly dizzying – Zim knew all about this new invading race, and he’d learned it all in one go? Dib didn’t doubt that the Irken had put most of it at the back of his mind, though, deeming it all worthless until now. There was another tidbit that caught the boy’s interest, and he managed to speak up again, almost completely out of breath – thankfully, though, they were nearing their escape route. “Red and Purple? Who’re they?”

It was this question that had the alien looking over at Dib with wide, disbelieving eyes, answering in a way that suggested that everyone ought to know this. “They’re the Tallests,” he answered slowly, seeming almost concerned (and not at all out of breath, the human noted with a slight tinge of envy).

“You went to school with the your leaders?!” To say the teen was shocked was putting it mildly, and it had Zim’s antennae quirking curiously.

“Well, they weren’t the Tallests then,” Zim responded off-handedly, giving a somewhat sympathetic shake of his head. How sad it must be, to not know of beings as glorious as the Almighty Tallests!

Dib ignored this gesture, more interested in asking questions now that Zim was actually answering (although in a way that suggested that the Irken felt that his companion had more mental problems than he’d initially expected). “Were you friends?”

The Irken was swift to slither out of answering that particular question by glancing back, humming lowly to himself, and stating warningly, “It’s probably about ready to blow. It should have already, but…ehh. Maybe the thing just wasn’t entirely dead when we left it.” Just another unlikely incident to add to the rapidly growing list.

He wondered again what the moving something had been, but decided that it was better off forgotten. And burned in a stupid Earth store. Heh – fire. Zim gave a strange giggle, making it quite clear that he’d also forgotten, however purposefully, about the most recent question.

A disappointed look flitted across Dib’s face at the evasion, but he nodded dully anyway, slowing his pace enough to where he could breathe – seeing the state he was in, his companion did the same, although with an obvious amount of disdain. “I hope there isn’t anything overly flammable near that droid…”

“Huh,” Zim responded airily. “I thought that was the linens aisle. …And wasn’t that about two aisles down from the hair products? The very extremely combustible ones in the cans labeled ‘contents under pressure, do not incinerate or otherwise burn unless you’re an idiot’?”

They were quiet for a moment before Dib threw his hands up, giving an irritated yell. “I just had to say something, didn’t I?! Thank you so much, Lady Luck! I love how you’re just always on my side!”

The Irken tilted his head, one eye narrowing slightly in confusion. “Who’s Lady Luck?”

“No one. Never mind,” Dib huffed, a little more meanly than he intended. He then tried again, “So, were you?”

“Ehh?”

“Friends.”

Zim glanced around hesitantly, then back in the direction of the droid. He then turned his gaze back to Dib, shouting a simple warning (‘Get down!’) before shoving the human to the floor.

In actuality, he shoved him before giving the warning, but either way, it’s the thought that counts, and it ensured that both of them were safely behind something (the Playboy magazine display case, incidentally, which had Zim gagging in disgust) when the droid self-destructed, something which consequently brought about an aisle of linens and another aisle of hair care products to burst into flames and/or explode in a blazing ball of fiery doom. In any case, it only brought the fire’s spreading to new speeds, and it was about this time that Dib started to panic.

Or…well…to start panicking again.

“WE’RE GONNA DIE!” Dib shrieked, on his knees and shaking poor Zim, who hadn’t yet managed to get up, back and forth by the front of his already thoroughly abused uniform. A particularly charred washcloth (of an incredibly girly pink persuasion) chose that moment to fly over the display case they were hiding behind and land rather precariously on the teen’s scythe-lock, and as he was shaken around, it was pretty much all the Irken could look at. It was really kind of amusing, he thought.

“We’re not going to die,” Zim responded automatically, almost bored.

Not seeming to hear him at all, Dib tightened his grip on the collar of the Irken’s uniform and continued his panicked rant, something about doom and death and the kinds of things one would generally expect to hear from Miss Bitters – coming from Dib, it was just weird. “And our flesh’ll be burned off our bones! I LIKE MY FLESH!” he wailed pitifully.

There was something that Zim had always wanted to try. He’d done something similar before, back when he’d ingeniously turned the Dib-human into baloney-meat (and not-so-ingeniously infected himself, as well), but it simply hadn’t had the same effect – from what he figured, he just hadn’t really done it right.

Now seemed like a good enough time to try again.

Whack!

Dib stopped short, mouth open in shock and staring wide-eyed at the Irken.

“Get ahold of yourself! We are not going to die, especially not when my amazing self is here!” Zim snapped, pulling himself up and dragging the boy with him. “Honestly! You’re acting more like a lunatic than normal, and even normal is scary where you’re concerned.” He paused to swat bits of ash and dirt from the human’s trenchcoat, not liking the fact that such a filthy thing was so close to, as he’d put it, his amazing self. Forget his own soiled uniform – this thing was salvageable! (His PAK once again told him that he had some worrisome OCD habits, which Zim dutifully ignored.)

“Did you just smack me? Across the face?” Dib asked uncertainly, readjusting his glasses and giving the other a rather strange look as his coat was tidied up.

The Irken nodded, looking rather pleased with himself, doubly so as the trenchcoat regained a slight portion of its former mostly-non-filthy blackness. “Bet it hurt, huh?” he mocked, puffing his ego up further – a major accomplishment, really, seeing as how incredibly over-inflated and quite nearly planet-size it already was.

The teen gave a hesitant grin. “Er…not much, actually. To be honest, it was just…really girly. I was expecting you to be more of the ‘punch someone in the face’ type than anything else,” he laughed.

“I can do that, too,” Zim responded sourly, eyes narrowing up at Dib and antennae flattened back just about to the ‘angry’ position – not quite there, though, which was a relief to the human; there’d be no reasoning with his companion otherwise.

“No need,” Dib stated with mock cheer, resting a hand on the Irken’s PAK and guiding him along with him as he started walking once more (his arm was hastily knocked away and an offended look cast in his direction). “You’re right – the amazing Zim is here. How can anything go wrong?”

Normally Zim wouldn’t have noticed the sarcasm, and would have in fact agreed, but the human was being entirely too cheerful about it – suspiciously so. The Irken glanced over at him, scowling. “You’re mocking Zim, aren’t you?”

“…Just a little.”

"Hn." Silence. "Well, at least I don't have a fried pink washcloth on my head like some smelly humans."