Bill 4 - on the Planet of Tasteless Pleasure (20 page)

Wild Will stepped up and slapped Bill on his back. “Good shootin' fella! Well, the brothers are dead but Billy the Kidney and the Jism Gang are still out there somewhere, laying low!”

A voice shouted from beyond the door. “Frank! Jesse! You guys okay?”

“They're dead, Billy the Kidney!” snarled the bartender. “We got ourselves the Stoned Ranger in here, and you'll be just as dead if you waggle your tail in here!”

“Arrrgh!” he snarled. “Did you say the Stoned Ranger? Well, we've gotta make our deposit in the Ovum Bank tomorrow, and no Stoned Ranger is gonna stop us! Tell ya what, Stoney. I'm challengin' you to a shoot-out! Yeah, just you an' me, Billy the Kidney! At the No-Go Corral. Tomorrow, at the crack of dawn!”

“Right!” cried the bartender. “He'll be there, Billy. Just get ready for a trip to Boot Hill!”

“You mean 'Shoe Hill,' don't you,” said Bill blearily.

“Naw. Billy bought himself a grave in Dodge City.” cried the bartender. “Now you and your gang get your butts outta here, Billy!”

There was the sound of cursing, and then the pounding of horses' hooves clattering away out of town.

The bartender grinned back at Bill and the others. “They're gone! The Jism Gang and Billy the Kidney got run outta town! Hip hip hooray for the Stoned Ranger and his faithful companion Procto!”

“Hip hip hooray!”

Bill smiled blurrily. “Gosh, sounds good to me. Only what about his showdown at the No-Go Corral tomorrow?”

“Don't worry, Stoned Ranger!” said Wild Will, “Just so happens that the Sheriff is coming back in tonight on the ten-ten from Kansas City. He'll help you out!”

“Right!” said the Chinger. “And remember, you've got Irma waiting for you back in the hotel room! Gee — this is just great! The Ultimate Confrontation, tomorrow at dawn! This could be the very thing to nullify the Over-Gland! How symbolic!”

Bill did not hear the last part of Bgr's enthusiastic speech. He only heard the name “Irma,” and that was enough.

“Irma!” he said, remembering. “And it's about time for me to head back to her waiting arms!”

“Here you go, sport!” said the bartender. “Another splash for the road, huh?” He filled Bill's glass with whiskey. “She's a-waitin' for you, hero!”

“You betcha!” cried Bill, draining the glass, turning unsteadily and started for the door and the hotel across the street.

“Enjoy yourself, Bill,” the Chinger called after him. “I'll just stay here and enjoy a straw or two and jaw some with Wild Will!”

“Shwush,” said Bill, hardly noticing, staggering out toward the door.

“Irma!” he said. “IRMA!”

How he yearned for her, yearned for her eyes, yearned to whisper sweet nothings in her ears. Bill had never felt like this before, not in his entire life.

So this was it, he thought, blinking through the reddish fog of alcohol.

He was in love!

Sigh!

He didn't know if it was his love for Irma or the whiskey, but he felt as happy as an Altairean sandhog in rut. Life had meaning after all, and all the meaning in life had fawnlike eyes, and a sweet smile and a cute nose and was spelled I-R-M-A!

And wonder of wonders, she loved him too!

Galactic Troopers didn't fall in love. There were specific regulations forbidding it. But Bill didn't care, mad, headstrong fool that he was. Could he finally, after all this time, feel something stirring in this boot-camp hardened heart? Sweet, gentle emotion!

Ah, sweet dear Irma!

With a lilt in his step, a song in his heart, alcohol in his brain and cirrhosis at the doorstep, Bill stumbled up the steps to the hotel. The clerk in the lobby was only too happy to tell Bill that Miss Irma had checked into Room 122, and that she was expecting him, apparently, having just ordered up two bottles of champagne and a rare sirloin steak from Room Service.

Bill grinned sappily.

His heart beating out the rhythm of his passion, Bill stumbled down the hallway, looking for the room.

Eventually, the numbers “1-2-2” reared up before his fevered eyes. He tried the door. It was locked.

He knocked.

There was no answer.

But what was that? Bill thought he heard sighs of passion from within.

“Irma, my shweet!” he called out throatily. “It is I, Bill, your beloved. Let me in, darling.”

There was the sound of sudden screams and breaking furniture. Bill's head pounded with alarm.

Was something violent going on in there?

Irma was in trouble.

“Don't worry, Irma!” Bill called. “I'll save you.”

He backed up, ran forward and aimed a great Camp Leon Trotsky-trained shoulder at the wood. One slam, that was all it took, and Bill crashed through the flimsy door. He staggered into the darkened room, bellowing, “Irma! Irma! Where are you! Irma!”

He immediately slipped on the empty champagne bottle and crashed face first to the floor.

He blinked blearily up from his sprawl on the ground, only to find two faces staring back at him, poking out of the covers of the big brass bed.

One belonged to Irma.

The other face in the bed belonged to the evil Dr. Latex Delazny!

SHOOTOUT AT THE NO-GO CORRAL

“Irma!” cried Bill. He blinked his eyes, bulged and popped them in astonishment at the sight before him: his darling, the love of his life, under the sheets with his worst enemy, a villain intent upon rule of the universe.

“Irma! I'm here to save you!”

He hurled himself forward — then squealed to a stop and Irma called out.

“Stow it, buster,” she snarled, training a derringer on him. “You harm a single hair on my darling's balding skull and I'll put a slug of lead right through your pinhead where, theory has it, you're supposed to have a brain.”

“But — but —” stammered Bill. Reluctantly putting one and one together to get a horrifying two. Slowly but inescapably, reluctantly, the horrible truth trickled through into his consciousness and down between the alcohol loaded synapses.

“This can't be true! You're my girl!” Bill croaked helplessly.

“Men! A gal says a few silly words, and you think you own her! Real life just ain't like that, buster. You've been reading too many romance comics. Now split.” She sneered at him with contempt.

“But I love you, Irma,” he whined in sickening self-pity. “And you said you loved me!”

“So I'm fickle. It's a woman's prerogative to change her mind.” She snuggled up to Delazny, nibbled on his shell-like ear. Clam shell, that is. “I have found myself a real man!”

“But your father — he said that while Delazny lusted after you, you always spurned him! That was one of the reasons that good man went ga-ga!” He turned to Delazny. "Irma was one of the reasons you wanted to plumb the secrets of the Over-Gland! That must be it! You're here, you discovered the secret power of attraction that drives women out of their mind, beyond reason.

“Actually, no, not quite yet,” said Delazny. “Sorry, old sport ... that happens tomorrow when Billy the Kidney, the Jism Gang and I finish you and the opposition at the No-Go Corral and then plunder the outlaw savings at the Ovum Bank. You see, the secrets of universal power reside there.” He looked at Irma and smiled. “Irma and I just ran into each other in the lobby and we hit it off at once.”

“I realized how much I'd missed him. I was so naive, so priggish back in the old days. So, if you don't mind old friend, and I do mean old, why don't you split.”

“And,” Delazny sneered, “May I add my recommendation to that, pardner. Get lost. I'll see you tomorrow at sun-up! Just make sure you order yourself up a nice coffin!”

“Irma!” said Bill, feeling his vulnerable heart melting in his chest and slowly dripping down to his heels. “What's wrong with me!”

Irma curled a disdainful lip. “Well, those fangs for one thing.”

“You said you liked my fangs!”

“You just don't know how to treat a girl, Bill,” sighed Irma with disdain.

“I can learn! Irma ... please ... give me another chance! Don't stay with this villain. Come away with me now!” Bill fell to his knees, begging, acting the complete idiot.

“Go, Bill. For my new love is absolutely mythic!”

Bill's head was whirling, and there was only an ache in his chest now where his heart should have been. He turned and staggered shaken from the room, having severe difficulty breathing.

Dr. Delazny!

Dr. Delazny and Irma!

Life, which never was exactly a bed of roses, was getting a little too awful of late. Bill had never expected justice. But it would have been nice to have some. He sighed deeply as he stumbled down the stairs.

No justice. Just bribery, chicanery and the old boys network. And booze. He hurried back towards the saloon before the others got too far ahead of him.

The horizon was like a cracked egg, and dawn resembled its yellow yolk as sticky albumen was spreading now over the distant mountain and desert. The smell of death was already in the air. The morning tasted of boots and graves and the cold, arid desert. Bill's spurs jingled as he walked toward the place they called the No-Go Corral, his holster unfastened, fresh bullets in his revolver, the Chinger who once was Eager Beager strolling at his side.

“Gee — I hope that you are ready, Bill?”

“I reckon,” said Bill.

“This is shore a red-letter day in the history of the Universe!”

“Yep.”

“How you feeling?”

“Murderous and rotten.”

“Now that is what I call real great, Bill. Just great. Nothing like lots of violence to bring peace to the galaxy, huh?”

A hangover the size of the Grand Canyon fissured through Bill's head. His mouth felt like Death Valley filled with flies and then sauteed. His stomach resembled the fermenting vat in the Galactic Glueworks. His liver, if he could see it, which he did not want to, must look as though the Great Railway Line had been spiked into it with twenty pound sledgehammers.

Yep. Last night he'd tromped himself over to the Saloon and taken the bartender up on the offer of unlimited free drinks, letting the other cowpokes and gamblers and pimps have a few sips here and there, in return for their heartfelt commiseration over his misfortune. The Chinger had disappeared sometime during the night, but Wild Will and Doc Shoreleave were still there, and they gladly accepted the hero's hospitality, giving him sympathy for the loss of Irma, and telling him their own stories of lost loves, betrayals, sadnesses and heroic binges.

Doc Shoreleave was a particular treasure trove, since his tastes ran toward the alien and the exotic, and had afforded him plenty of opportunity for odd heartbreak. At the moment, for example, he was recovering from the stress of a particularly torrid affair he had had with the science officer of his last ship, the U.S.S. CENTERPIECE, a half-human, half-Metalloid sadist with even more perverted tastes than his. The Doc had even tried to drop his drawers and show them his scars that the passionate affair had left him with. But that was too much for even this hard-bitten crew and they had run him out of town and settled back for more drinking.

At about ten-thirty, the Sheriff, Wyatt Slurp, had joined them as promised, making up for lost time by helping them all drink the bar dry.

Bill had passed out sometime after midnight, lying on the bar with his feet propped on the Doc's face and his head pillowed on a bottle of Old Sewagemaster whiskey. He'd woken up to the sound of the Chinger ex-Eager Beager screeching in his ear about it being almost dawn. The only thing that got him up was Trooper reflexes. But once he got going, the thought of facing off with Dr. Delazny and filling the bastard full of hot lead (or rather, in his case, hot silver) gave him just the motivation he needed to bear up under his crashing hangover.

“Gee —” The Chinger had said when he told him about the events in the hotel room last night. “Too bad, Bill. But remember, there are plenty more kraxels to pringle, as we Chingers so aptly say!”

Oh well, who would expect a Chinger to understand the pain and heartache of a lost love? Particularly one who pringled kraxels. Yet the little alien glommed onto the fact that Bill wanted to waste Dr. Delazny, and milked it for all he was worth.

“Gee, Bill! I bet there's a big, satisfied smile on that Delazny's face!” he said now as Bill marched toward the No-Go Corral, with Wild Will, Doc Shoreleave and Wyatt Slurp as backup.

“Shut up, Chinger!” Bill sufflated.

“Shouldn't egg on a man going into a shootout like that, ought to let him relax,” said Wyatt Slurp, combing his long mustaches. Two bright polished Colt .45s rode in his gunbelt. And his boots were shined to a bright finish, as were all the boots of the gun party — courtesy of the Chinger ex-Eager Beager who didn't need sleep and got a whiff of nostalgia from this function that he hadn't had in years.

“I'm relaxin' fine, thanks!” said Doc Shoreleave, glugging down a swallow of whiskey. He passed the bottle to Bill, who refused.

“Nope,” said Bill, his eyes squinting down against the brightening horizon. “I want my senses raw and sharp and mean when I get Delazny in my gun sights.”

“That's the old fighting spirit, Bill!” said the Chinger, raising up four clenched reptilian paws. “That's the way we'll defeat Delazny and Billy the Kidney and his gang! Just like we finished off the Jism brothers last night!”

Bill spat into the dust. “Yeah!”

The tops of the buildings comprising the No-Go Corral hove into view ahead. The stables and the outbuildings were surrounded by a wooden fence. In front of this fence stood a solitary man, surrounded by the ugliest bunch of spermatozoa that Bill had ever seen.

“Step aside, Bill!” called Dr. Latex Delazny. The mad scientist was dressed entirely in black, except for the silvery revolvers riding on his hips, ready for action. “We're headed for the Ovum Bank to make the Withdrawal of the Century! No! The Withdrawal of all Eternity! Right, boys?”

“Right, Doctor D.!” chorused the twenty or so sperm stationed all around him, balancing on their thin flagella just as the Jism Brothers had.

“It's bang, bang, bang, and the universe is mine!” cried Doctor Delazny. “And, Bill, Irma asked me to say Hi! to you.”

“You just made that up now!” said Bill, reaching for his six-gun.