I cursed loudly as I slammed down the hood of the convertible. My attorney looked up from where he was lying in the back seat of our Great Red Shark. "What's up?" he asked.
I shot him the most vicious glare my bloodshot eyes could manage. "What do you think is wrong?" I hauled myself up onto the hovercar's body so I could stare down at my supine travelling companion. "We're in the middle of the Badlands. It's hot. And this thing - !" I thumped the hovercar with one of my tentacles. "This thing is broken!"
My attorney waved a leaf-covered vine at me. "So? My advice is that you fix it."
"Fix it?" My expression changed to one of incredulous hatred. "I'm a Doctor of Journalism, dammit! Not some mechanic! What do you want me to do? Write it a scathing review? You get out here and fix it!"
"The ants'll get me!"
I hopped down into the passenger seat and started fumbling through the glovebox for my flyswatter, which I used to beat my attorney about his trunk and branches. "Then! Use! This! To! Keep! Them! Off!"
My attorney tried to scramble away from me, but the slick leather upholstery of the convertible stopped him. Instead, he hurled himself at me in a fit of drug-addled rage, shedding leaves and petals in his fury. The confines of the convertible were not enough to contain this crazed battle of titans, and we ended up rolling out of the Shark and onto the dry desert where we exchanged vicious slaps that were unbecoming of our professional statuses.
Suddenly my attorney threw me off and sat up. "Shit!" he bellowed, and started to backpedal towards the hovercar, kicking up small clouds of dust as he went. "It's the hypercolony! They've found us!"
It took only a moment before I felt it as well. The ground beneath us was trembling as a myriad tiny jaws dug there way through the stony soil in search of their prey. I brandished the flyswatter at my travelling companion. "Get in the car! Pop the hood!"
I hurled the lid up and stared at the engine. What little mechanical knowledge I once had was now floundering in a sea of panicked hormone responses. In desperation I flailed at the engine casing with the only tool I had to hand. "Start, you - !"
"Start?" my attorney yelled. The engine coughed into life then roared as power surged through the transmission, lifting the Shark on its repulsors. Sand trickled from every crevice as it rose.
I felt a tickling around my ambulatory appendages. A stream of black ants were swarming out of cracks in the ground. The hypercolony's scouts had found us! Quickly, I grabbed hold of the convertible's fender and tried to haul myself onboard before I was left to the ants' ravening mandibles.
