Halloween and Other Seasons (11 page)

“You!” Baby Boss gasped. “How
—
?”

Doozy held up her wing for silence, and then covered her form in the tight fitting latex costume which had gained her entrance to Space Station One. With the body mask in place, she looked exactly like Spiffy!

“But
—
?” Baby exclaimed.

Doozy clucked a hoarse grunt of pleasure, and pointed upward. All hamster eyes looked to the dome to see the dead, splayed figure of the real Spiffy, squashed between two cartoony hamster figures of his own manufacture
—
it looked as though he was holding hands with them!

“You fiend!” Baby growled.

“I could have killed you at the porthole,” Doozy shot back. Her eyes gleamed red fire. “But the rules of Space Battle forbade it! But now
—
!”

 She produced her Magic Umbrella, in green-glowing battle mode, from it’s hidden holster secreted in the feathers of her back.

 Someone behind Baby Boss tossed him his massive golden Hydrogen Rifle, the most powerful weapon in the Universe, and he cradled its smooth lines against his fur covered ribs as he raised its foot-wide maw of destruction and aimed it in Doozy’s direction.

“Yes, now!” Baby said, preparing to pull the trigger.

Space Station One trembled and convulsed, and the domed ceiling collapsed in a groaning, vacuum-of-space inducing pile of wreckage around them.

“Oh, shit,” Baby said
—

~ * ~

REEL NINETY-THREE

~ * ~

“I can’t believe we’re back on the planet Pluto,” Spiffy said. He waved his atomic paintbrush in the air for emphasis. The night sky, black as ink, the faraway dot of the Sun, a lonely cold beacon, all of it was so alien!

“Yes, and I’m particularly glad that we’ve been able to reconstitute you in Cyber form, Spiffy!” Baby Boss put a fatherly paw on the younger hamster’s shoulder. “You always were one of my favorites
—
and a heck of an artist!”

They shared a chirp of hamster laughter before Cyber Spiffy climbed back up into the massive rigging of catwalks crisscrossing the Pluto Dome, half finished, which, when completed, would ape both Hamster Central on Earth and the lately destroyed Hamster Space Central. Since the soil of Pluto was rock hard, making it impossible to make an underground abode, it had been decided to build a series of above ground tunnels, all leading to Hamster Pluto Central. It would be, in effect, Hamster Space Central lay gently on the ground of the ninth planet.

Baby Boss sighed in satisfaction, and prepared to push the Hamster Pluto Alarm.

“Stop!” It was the voice of Doozy Chicken, broadcast from her Chicken Rocket, which now swooped sleekly in through the open ceiling of the dome and settled in a susurrus of smoke and dying fire next to the waiting Baby.

“Bring me my Hydrogen Rife!” Baby exclaimed, and Cyber Spiffy scrambled down the scaffolding to obey.

“That won’t be necessary!” Doozy cried, jumping from the lowering rocket gangplank to stand beside Baby. There was a strange look in her eyes. “The war is over!”

“What!” answered Baby, dumbfounded. He saw that Doozy’s holster had been taken from its secret hiding spot in her feathers and was empty.

Doozy suddenly took Baby in her arms, and kissed him!

With shock and relief, Baby found himself kissing her back!

“I love you, Baby Boss! I’ve loved you ever since our Cyber Selves fell in love!”

“And…I love you too!” Baby replied in wonder.

He jabbed at the Hamster Alarm with authority. “It’s time all the hamsters knew this! Time they all shared in our joy!”

“This will mean the end of hostilities, and the friendship of hamsters and chickens forever!”

“Hurrah!” said Cyber Spiffy.

The alarm was sounded, and the Underground Hamsters arrived to see Baby Boss and Doozy pledging their love.

“Hurrah!” all the hamsters cried.

At that moment the scaffolding gave way, along with the badly designed, half-finished dome, and tons of building material, as well as Cyber Spiffy’s partly finished mural, came crashing down.

No one said, “Oh, shit,” because, this time, they were all dead.

TRAIL OF THE CHROMIUM BANDITS

By Al Sarrantonio

Ride the Wild West.

Ride the Wild West with the hiss of falling spaceships splitting the sky like comet trails.

Ride the Wild West with justice in your heart and the remembered kiss of a woman on your lips.

Ride the Wild West in a Toyota.

~ * ~

Mitch Hilligan hooded his eyes to squint into the lowering sunset of West Texas. Something itched at his fingers, then burned; he looked down to see the raw red end of a cigarette gouging into the flesh of his thumb and forefinger. He dropped the cigarette into the dust and ground it out with the toe of his boot.

“What do you think, Sparky—game’s gonna start soon?” he said. He tried to bite his words before they came out, knowing how useless they were now, but still not quite used to the way things were. “Come on, Sparky, speak to me.” The dog at his feet wagged its tail, its tongue lolling out expectantly. Hilligan cursed shortly and drew a dog biscuit out of the deep pocket of his poncho. He tossed it to the ground and the dog was upon it instantly, making crunching sounds that annoyed Hilligan. He tried to ignore the sound, then suddenly drew his foot back to kick the dog. He hesitated, his anger draining.

“You’re a useless weapon, old pal,” he said, reaching to pet the dog on the ruined head that had once held Sparky’s intact brain. “Not your fault.”

Hilligan straightened, and brought his binoculars up to his eyes. He scanned the horizon below, searching for the telltale signs of a campfire, but found nothing. He cursed and lowered the binoculars. Waiting for night to fall before trying again.

They were stupid, in most ways, but incredibly crafty. Here they were, a band of four, leaving their droppings—candy wrappers, empty food cans, milk cartons, beer cans, liquor bottles, pissmarks, piles of shit—and still, Hilligan had barely had a glimpse of them for three days. One silhouette glinting in the sunset two nights ago, a hint of horizon movement the day before. He knew he was close but still they were all but invisible, leaving a trail of crap but it was the Invisible Man’s refuse.

“Yep, game’s gonna start soon,” Hilligan repeated, to himself.

Hilligan made camp twenty minutes later. The sunlight had dropped; the Moon was a weak sickle just cutting up the East. Stars burned into the purple of twilight; burned brighter into the blackness of night.

Sparky tried to piss, seemed to forget how, mewled as the wetness ran ineffectively down his leg followed by a runlet of tepid shit.

Hilligan cleaned the dog, settled him under the rusting rear of the Toyota Corolla and lit another cigarette. The dog, under his blanket, gave a large sigh and then slept.

Hilligan watched the stars, passing his cold gaze from Betelgeuse through Orion’s belt and down to Risius. The Milky Way stretched gauzily through the ecliptic, a pointillistic band of millions of tiny, distinct flaming suns.

“Games…” he said to himself, and then rolled into his blanket and lightly slept.

~ * ~

He slept heavily. The heat of day, not the light, awakened him. Sparky was still under the Toyota, awake, tongue lolling, dehydrated but not realizing it. He opened his mouth when Hilligan’s eyes met his, and for a moment Hilligan had hope; an aching sense of loss, combined with an overwhelming wish—and need—for the dog the way he had been, washed over him. But only a weak rumbling sound came out. Sparky put his head down on a front paw, still panting.

Hilligan poured water into a bowl and gave it to the dog. By the sun, it was already nine o’clock. It had been stupid to sleep so long; by now the band would be miles ahead.

Hilligan ate a can of beans, washing it down with a warm can of Coors, and then packed the car. The engine resisted, coughing toward death and then suddenly roaring into its bad muffler like a lion. On the seat next to him, Sparky slept. The radio was on, hissing nothingness, the occasional snatch of Country-Western music from a faraway station.

The day, the miles, rolled on.

He found their trail at four. A telltale pile of refuse and body wastes broadcast their direction loudly: West toward Lawrence. He thought fleetingly of Anne; he had left her in Lawrence not four days before, and the salt-taste of her first kiss still lingered on his lips. He saw her amusement at his blush—“Why,
Marshall
, one would think you’d never been kissed before,” and her deepening amusement and interest when he asked, “This love thing’s sort of a game, isn’t it?” and he remembered the look on her face that said, “Come back, come back soon…”

Hilligan turned his attention back to the bandit’s camp. If anything, they were even less concerned with his pursuit. They had been reading; he found a pile of
Mad
and
Playboy
magazines in with the chili and tuna cans; on closer inspection, the magazines were smeared with shit, had been used as toilet paper.

Once again, he stood on a ridge and studied the darkening sky with binoculars.

A movement among a group of live oaks.

Them.

A chill crawled up Hilligan’s back. He knew they had stopped for him.
The game was about to begin.
The images he had been able to push aside the last three days flashed into his mind, stark and terrible. The town that had been Davidson, Texas, roasted to the ground, the huge trough of their ship nosed into what had been the library; the smell of broiled human flesh left in its wake; black human bodies with open mouths and empty charcoal eyes, smoking ruins that had been buildings, a McDonalds, a 5 and dime; what they’d done to Sparky, half his head roasted off…

He remembered the way the people of Davidson had looked up to him when they made him Marshall not three weeks before, after he came walking out of the desert with his dog like a movie hero, tall, sure of himself, unnaturally handsome, what a Marshall should be. They sensed trouble; he said he’d take care of it. “Thanks, Marshall,” they’d said, giving him his Toyota to use. He’d believed he could protect them. And now their eyes were burned sockets, their mouths silenced even from screams…

Thanks, Marshall.
He’d been on the way back from Lawrence when they’d needed him, seeing the black smoke from the desert through the windshield of the Toyota, roaring back into town just as the bandits were leaving, loading Jud Stern’s Plymouth Voyager with tennis rackets and golf clubs and guns from STERN’S SPORTING GOODS, laughing as they did so, turning to regard him with their perfect mirror chrome faces as he’d screamed, perfect human beings covered in chrome, running after them, one of them raising a lazy hand, turning the palm flat toward him but another standing next to the Voyager, smiling lazily, saying, “No, let’s make a game of it.”

The other shrugged, and lowered the hand to Sparky. The hand glowed metallically, and the dog buckled, then rose unsteadily again and pissed on himself, the look of the dead, the lost, in his eyes.

“Not that you have any choices, but we’ll make it a real game,” the first one said, lifting a rifle from a pile of guns in the back of the Voyager and tossing it to Hilligan. His metallic head, a perfect replica of a human’s head in chrome, smiled. “We’ll only use these.” He turned his palm toward Hilligan, the threat of death held in check. “Agreed?”

Biting back useless rage and frustration, Hilligan nodded curtly.

The others had laughed, and they loaded into the vehicle and were gone, leaving their laughter behind, the laughter of tourists on holiday, having sport, packing picnic lunches from the ruins of Davidson, taking clothes and guns and food, leaving behind Hilligan screaming and the silent screams of a dead town.

~ * ~

And now it was time for the game to really begin.

They were getting tired and bored. He knew because their toys had begun to be abandoned: the tennis rackets, the golf clubs broken in two. Soon their minds would turn to bigger larks. The town of Lawrence was only five miles to the East. They would head there next. Where Anne was…and continue their fun from town to town, from city to city, until there was nothing left.

Something spat past Hilligan’s ear, pinged into the door of the Toyota.

“Shit,” Hilligan said.

Crouched behind the fender of the Corolla, he waited for another shot. Raising his head tentatively, he searched the desert with his binoculars. No shot came, and then he saw them: a retreating band of silver glints in the distance, just disappearing behind an outcropping of rock. A careful look at their wake showed the half-buried wreckage of the Plymouth Voyager, half-merged with the side of the rock wall.

For the first time in days, Hilligan smiled.

“Shit, we’re gonna win,” he said.

~ * ~

He spent the next hour packing and camouflaging the Toyota in a stand of live oaks. The only burden was Sparky’s food, an oversize box of dog biscuits, the only thing the dog recognized now and would eat, but he gladly strapped it to the top of his knapsack, cursing not the weight but the bulk. One somber, lost look from the dog made him bite the curses.

“Come on, pal.”

He set off at a brisk walk, the dog hesitating, then following mechanically behind, the sight of the dog biscuit box firing some barely connecting relay in his ruined brain.

After two hours, he badly missed the stuttering air conditioning of the Corolla. Salt sweat had nearly blinded him, but he kept on. The sun was like a sieve, arrowing heat down at him. Paradoxically, Sparky didn’t seem to mind; as long as the bright blue box with the hungry looking German Shepherd on it was in his eyesight, he marched resolutely in tow.

They passed the ruined Voyager at noon. It had been plowed deliberately into the side of the bluff and trashed; whatever hadn’t been taken was broken. The van was haloed in broken flashlights, dart games, ripped clothing, crushed miniature televisions, portable cassette decks. Nearby, carefully placed to seemingly view the wreckage, was a severed human head, which on closer inspection turned out to be that of Stern, the sporting goods store owner. He had been placed to view the destruction of his own robbed goods.