The VMR Theory (v1.1) by Robert Frezza

shield and bounced it off its nose.
    It tilted its head the other way and looked at me with the other eye.
    “Didn’t your mother teach you not to play with your food?” I muttered. Determined to go down fighting, I followed up the shield with a handful of rock-solid shadur poop.
    Its head cocked sideways, the shadur took this one in the eye. For the moment, it was even less happy than I was. Tilting its head toward the ceiling, it voiced a wild and terrible cry.
    I took advantage of the situation to crawl between its legs and retrieve my penknife. Then I was struck by the sudden inspiration that the only place in the room where it couldn’t reach me was on top of its back. After twenty-odd hours of starvation, the dumbest ideas seem plausible. Using the knobs on its hide for handholds, I climbed up.
    I found out two things very quickly. The first was that the nodules on the shadur’s hide were fine for climbing while the animal was standing still, but weren’t easy to hang on to when it started moving. The second was the critter had a cartilaginous frame. Being boneless, it was effectively double-jointed.
    As I found myself sliding down the shadur’s back I tried jamming my knife in its hide to halt my slide. About a half second later I noticed that the animal had twisted its head around 180 degrees and was about to take a bite out of my midriff. I quickly lost interest in trying to hang on.
    Several things happened very quickly. When my knife penetrated the skin, it creased the nerve cord, causing the shadur to twitch convulsively as it chomped down on the spot where I was before I went flying gracefully through the air like a rag doll. Distracted by pain and with its vision screwed up, the animal missed and bit into its own back.
    I, of course, landed on my head. It hurt.
    A few moments later Wipo opened the door and joined me to watch the beast in its death throes.
    I used my free hand to find my spine, hoping for an out-of-body experience because the body I had wasn’t working very well. As a vamp, I am, of course, allergic to aspirin, ibuprofen, and acetaminophen, so when I get a headache, it comes to stay and brings suitcases. “Excuse me for not getting up. You, ah, wouldn’t happen to know a good chiropractor, would you?”
    Wipo bobbed his head at me in obvious disbelief, then pulled out his notepad and began writing. My banged-up little dictionary translated, “Possible application of Cotdenis Theory of Economics to hunting of shadurs. Apparently if paid enough, shadurs will hunt themselves.”
    I sat up and tried twisting my neck back into place. “So, what’s next? Do you feed me to giant sandworms or send me over Niagara Falls in a barrel?”
    Wipo paused to consider this. “Hmmm, no. Not tonight. We would have to lay on a plane, and it would lake too long. I must consult with our ephors.”
    He ordered the guards to dump me back in my cell, which is where I ended up after I washed up and signed a few autographs.
    The cell was depressing. Lunch was some sort of fricassee, and I thought I recognized bits of Big Boy floating around in it. For some reason, my guards also sent down a bottle of mediocre whiskey and a carton of Bulgarian cigarettes on the end of a boat hook. As the day wore on my blood sugar began doing flip-flops.
    I amused myself by reciting all I remembered of Richard III. That used up all of ten minutes, including long pauses. I switched to mumbling prayers of the “Dear God, if You get me out of this, I’ll never, ever do whatever it was again” variety.
    The praying, interestingly enough, really spooked the guards. I could hear them talking to each other and running around overhead. Figuring God would understand, I started praying louder.
    As the hours passed and I started feeling loopy, I tried working my way through the Bible, improvising freely whenever memory failed, which was fairly frequently. I got up to Ecclesiastes and was trying to remember whether the chapter starts