Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 92 Read online

The fire gun flew up in the air. Snakes twisted, writhed, disappeared.

  It was very quiet for a few seconds.

  Then there was the renewed whining of machinery and noises like a pile driver, the sounds of filing and banging. Steam came up over the crater lip.

  “Sounds like a steel foundry in there,” said Sweets.

  “I don’t like it one bit,” said Lindley. “Be danged if I’m gonna let ’em get the drop on us. Can you keep them down?”

  “How many are there?” asked Skip.

  “Luke and Sweets saw four or five before all hell broke loose this morning. Probably more of ’em than that was inside.”

  “I’ve got three more shots. If they poke up, I’ll get ’em.”

  “I’m goin’ to town, then out to Elmer’s. Sweets’ll stay with you awhile. If you run outta bullets, light up out the draw. I don’t want nobody killed. Sweets, keep an eye out for the posse. I’m telegraphing the Rangers again, then goin’ to get Elmer and his dynamite. We’re gonna fix their little red wagon for certain.”

  “Sure thing, Sheriff.”

  The sun had just passed noon.

  Leo looked haggard. He had been up all night, then at the telegraph office sending off messages to the university. Inquiries had begun to come in from as far east as Baton Rouge. Leo had another, from Percival Lowell out in Flagstaff, Arizona Territory.

  “Everybody at the university thinks it’s wonderful,” said Leo.

  “People in Austin would,” said Lindley.

  “They’re sure these things are connected with Mars and those bright flashes of gas last month. Seems something’s happened in England, starting about a week ago. No one’s been able to get through to London for two or three days.”

  “You telling me Mars is attacking London, England, and Pachuco City, Texas?” asked the sheriff.

  “It seems so,” said Leo. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “’Scuse me, Leo,” said Lindley. “I got to get another telegram off to the Texas Rangers.”

  “That’s funny,” said Argyle, the telegraph operator. “The line was working just a second ago.” He began tapping his key and fiddling with his coil box.

  Leo peered out the window. “Hey!” he said. “Where’s the 3:14?” He looked at the railroad clock. It was 3:25. In sixteen years of rail service, the train had been four minutes late, and that was after a mud slide in the storm twelve years ago.

  “Uh-oh,” said the sheriff.

  They were turning out of Elmer’s yard with a wagonload of dynamite. The wife and eleven of the kids were watching.

  “Easy, Sheriff,” said Elmer, who, with two of his boys and most of their guns, was riding in back with the explosives. “Jake sold me everything he had. I just didn’t notice till we got back here with that stuff that some of it was already sweating.”

  “Holy shit!” said Lindley. “You mean we gotta go a mile an hour out there? Let’s get out and throw the bad stuff off.”

  “Well, it’s all mixed in,” said Elmer. “I was sorta gonna set it all up on the hill and put one blasting cap in the whole load.”

  “Jesus. You woulda blowed up your house and Pachuco City too.”

  “I was in a hurry,” said Elmer, hanging his head.

  “Well, can’t be helped. We’ll take it slow.”

  Lindley looked at his watch. It was six o’clock. He heard a high-up, fluttering sound. They looked at the sky. Coming down was a large, round, glowing object throwing off sparks in all directions. It was curved with points, like the thing in the crater at the Atkinson place. A long, thin trail of smoke from the back end hung in the air behind it.

  They watched in awe as it sailed down. It went into the horizon to the north of Pachuco City.

  “One,” said one of the kids in the wagon, “two, three—”

  Silently they took up the count. At twenty-seven there was a roaring boom, just like the night before.

  “Five and a half miles,” said the sheriff. “That puts it eight miles from the other one. Leo said the ones in London came down twenty-four hours apart, regular as clockwork.”

  They started off as fast as they could under the circumstances.

  There were flashes of light beyond the Atkinson place in the near dusk. The lights moved off toward the north where the other thing had plowed in.

  It was the time of evening when your eyes can fool you. Sheriff Lindley thought he saw something that shouldn’t have been there sticking above the horizon. It glinted like metal in the dim light. He thought it moved, but it might have been the motion of the wagon as they lurched down a gully. When they came up, it was gone.

  Skip was gone. His rifle was still there. It wasn’t melted but had been crushed, as had the three-foot-thick tree trunk in front of it. All the caps and cartridges were gone.

  There was a monstrous series of footprints leading from the crater down to the tree, then off into the distance to the north where Lindley thought he had seen something. There were three footprints in each series.

  Sweets’ hat had been mashed along with Skip’s gun. Clanging and banging still came from the crater.

  The four of them made their plans. Lindley had his shotgun and pistol, which Luke had brought out with him that morning, though he was still wearing his burned suit and his untouched Stetson.

  He tied together the fifteen sweatiest sticks of dynamite he could find.

  They crept up, then rushed the crater.

  “Hurry up!” yelled the sheriff to the men at the courthouse. “Get that cannon up those stairs!”

  “He’s still coming this way!” yelled Luke from up above.

  They had been watching the giant machine from the courthouse since it had come up out of the Atkinson place, before the sheriff and Elmer and his boys made it into town after their sortie.

  It had come across to the north, gone to the site of the second crash, and stood motionless there for quite a while. When it got dark, the deputies brought out the night binoculars. Everybody in town saw the flash of dynamite from the Atkinson place.

  A few moments after that, the machine had moved back toward there. It looked like a giant water tower with three legs. It had a thing like a teacher’s desk bell on top of it, and something that looked like a Kodak roll-film camera in front of that. As the moon rose, they saw the thing had tentacles like thick wires hanging from between the three giant legs.

  The sheriff, Elmer, and his boys made it to town just as the machine found the destruction they had caused at the first landing site. It had turned toward town and was coming at a pace of twenty miles an hour.

  “Hurry the hell up!” yelled Luke. “Oh, shit—!” He ducked. There was a flash of light overhead. The building shook. “That heat gun comes out of the box on the front!” he said. “Look out!” The building glared and shook again. Something down the street caught fire.

  “Load that son of a bitch,” said Lindley. “Bob! Some of you men make sure everybody’s in the cyclone cellars or where they won’t burn. Cut out all the damn lights!”

  “Hell, Sheriff. They know we’re here!” yelled a deputy.

  Lindley hit him with his hat, then followed the cannon up to the top of the clock-tower steps.

  Luke was cramming powder into the cannon muzzle. Sweets ran back down the stairs. Other people carried cannonballs up the steps to the tower one at a time.

  Leo came up. “What did you find, Sheriff, when you went back?”

  There was a cool breeze for a few seconds in the courthouse tower. Lindley breathed a few deep breaths, remembering. “Pretty rough. There was some of them still working after that thing had gone. They were building another one just like it.” He pointed toward the machine, which was firing up houses to the northeast side of town, swinging the ray back and forth. They could hear its hum. Homes and chicken coops burst into flames. A mooing cow was stilled.

  “We threw in the dynamite and blew most of them up. One was in a machine like a steam tractor. We shot up what was lef
t while they was hootin’ and a-hollerin’. There was some other things in there, live things maybe, but they was too blowed up to put back together to be sure what they was, all bleached out and pale. We fed everything there a diet of buckshot till there wasn’t nothin’ left. Then we hightailed it back here on horses, left the wagon sitting.”

  The machine came on toward the main street of town. Luke finished with the powder. There were so many men with guns on the building across the street it looked like a brick porcupine. It must have looked this way for the James gang when they were shot up in Northfield, Minnesota.

  The courthouse was made of stone. Most of the wooden buildings in town were scorched or already afire. When the heat gun came this way, it blew bricks to dust, played flame over everything. The air above the whole town heated up.

  They had put out the lamps behind the clock faces. There was nothing but moonlight glinting off the three-legged machine, flames of burning buildings, the faraway glows of prairie fires. It looked like Pachuco City was on the outskirts of hell.

  “Get ready, Luke,” said the sheriff. The machine stepped between two burning stores, its tentacles pulling out smoldering horse tack, chains, kegs of nails, then heaving them this way and that. Someone at the end of the street fired off a round. There was a high, thin ricochet off the machine.

  Sweets ran upstairs, something in his arms. It was a curtain from one of the judge’s windows. He’d ripped it down and tied it to the end of one of the janitor’s long window brushes.

  On it he had lettered in tempera paint COME AND TAKE IT.

  There was a ragged, nervous cheer from the men on the building as they read it by the light of the flames.

  “Cute, Sweets,” said Lindley, “too cute.”

  The machine turned down Main Street. A line of fire sprang up at the back side of town from the empty corrals.

  “Oh, shit!” said Luke. “I forgot the wadding!”

  Lindley took off his hat to hit him with. He looked at its beautiful felt in the mixed moonlight and firelight.

  The thing turned toward them. The sheriff thought he saw eyes way up in the belittling atop the machine, eyes like a big cat’s eyes seen through a dirty windowpane on a dark night.

  “Gol Dang, Luke, it’s my best hat, but I’ll be damned if I let them cooters burn down my town!”

  He stuffed the Stetson, crown first, into the cannon barrel. Luke shoved it in with the ramrod, threw in two 35-pound cannonballs behind it, pushed them home, and swung the barrel out over Main Street.

  The machine bent to tear up something.

  “Okay, boys,” yelled Lindley. “Attract its attention.”

  Rifle and shotgun fire winked on the rooftop. It glowed like a hot coal from the muzzle flashes. A great slather of ricochets flew off the giant machine.

  It turned, pointing its heat gun at the building. It was fifty feet from the courthouse steps.

  “Now,” said the sheriff.

  Luke touched off the powder with his cigarillo.

  The whole north side of the courthouse bell tower flew off, and the roof collapsed. Two holes you could see the moon through appeared in the machine: one in the middle, one smashing through the dome atop it. Sheriff Lindley saw the lower cannonball come out and drop lazily toward the end of burning Main Street.

  All six of the tentacles of the machine shot straight up into the air, and it took off like a man running with his arms above his head. It staggered, as fast as a freight train could go, through one side of a house and out the other, and ran partway up Park Street. One of its three legs went higher than its top. It hopped around like a crazy man on crutches before its feet got tangled in a horse-pasture fence, and it went over backward with a shudder. A great cloud of steam came out of it and hung in the air.

  No one in the courthouse tower heard the sound of the steam. They were all deaf as posts from the explosion. The barrel of the cannon was burst all along the end. The men on the other roof were jumping up and down and clapping each other on the back. The COME AND TAKE IT sign on the courthouse had two holes in it, neater than you could have made with a biscuit cutter.

  First a high whine, then a dull roar, then something like normal hearing came back to the sheriff’s left ear. The right one still felt like a kid had his fist in there.

  “Dang it, Sweets!” he yelled. “How much powder did Luke use?”

  “Huh?”

  Luke was banging on his head with both his hands.

  “How much powder did he use?”

  “Two, two and a half cans,” said Sweets.

  “It only takes half a can a ball!” yelled the sheriff. He reached for his hat to hit Luke with, touched his bare head. “I feel naked. Come on, we’re not through yet. We got fires to put out and some hash to settle.”

  Luke was still standing, shaking his head. The whole town was cheering.

  It looked like a pot lid slowly boiling open, moving just a little. Every time the end unscrewed a little more, ashes and cinders fell off into the second pit. There was a piled ridge of them. The back turned again, moved a few inches, quit. Then it wobbled, there was a sound like a stove being jerked up a chimney, and the whole back end rolled open like a mad bank vault and fell off.

  There were one hundred eighty-four men and eleven women all standing behind the open end of the thing, their guns pointing toward the interior. At the exact center were Sweets and Luke with the other courthouse cannon. This time there was one can of powder, but the barrel was filled to the end with everything from the blacksmith-shop floor—busted window glass, nails, horseshoes, bolts, stirrup buckles, and broken files and saws.

  Eyes appeared in the dark interior.

  “Remember the Alamo,” said the sheriff.

  Everybody, and the cannon, fired.

  When the third meteor came in that evening, south of town at thirteen minutes past six, they knew something was wrong. It wobbled in flight, lost speed, and dropped like a long, heavy leaf.

  They didn’t have to wait for this one to cool and open. When the posse arrived, the thing was split in two and torn. Heat and steam came up from the inside.

  One of the pale things was creeping forlornly across the ground with great difficulty. It looked like a thin gingerbread man made of glass with only a knob for a head.

  “It’s probably hurting from the gravity,” said Leo.

  “Fix it, Sweets,” said Lindley.

  “Sure thing, Sheriff.”

  There was a gunshot.

  No fourth meteor fell, though they had scouts out for twenty miles in all directions, and the railroad tracks and telegraph wires were fixed again.

  “I been doing some figuring,” said Leo. “If there were ten explosions on Mars last month, and these things started landing in England last Thursday week, then we should have got the last three. There won’t be any more.”

  “You been figurin’, huh?”

  “Sure have.”

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  Sheriff Lindley stood on his porch. It was sundown on Sunday, three hours after another meteor should have fallen, had there been one.

  Leo rode up. “I saw Sweets and Luke heading toward the Atkinson place with more dynamite. What are they doing?”

  “They’re blowing up every last remnant of them things—lock, stock, and ass hole.”

  “But,” said Leo, “the professors from the university will be here tomorrow, to look at their ships and machines! You can’t destroy them!”

  “Shit on the University of Texas and the horse it rode in on,” said Lindley. “My jurisdiction runs from Deer Piss Creek to Buenos Frijoles, back to Olatunji, up the Little Clear Fork of the North Branch of Mud River, back to the creek, and everything in between.

  “If I say something gets blowed up, it’s on its way to kingdom come.” He put his arms on Leo’s shoulders. “Besides, what little grass grows in this county’s supposed to be green, and what’s growing around them things is red. I really don’t like that.”

&nb
sp; “But Sheriff! I’ve got to meet Professor Lowell in Waxahachie tomorrow . . . ”

  “Listen, Leo. I appreciate what you done. But I’m an old man. I been kept up by Martians for three nights, I lost my horse and my new hat, and they busted my favorite gargoyle off the courthouse. I’m going in and get some sleep, and I only want to be woke up for the Second Coming, by Jesus Christ himself.”

  Leo jumped on his horse and rode for the Atkinson place.

  Sheriff Lindley crawled into bed and went to sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

  He had a dream. He was a king in Babylon, and he lay on a couch at the top of a ziggurat, just like the Tower of Babel in the Bible.

  He surveyed the city and the river. There were women all around him, and men with curly beards and big headdresses. Occasionally someone would feed him a large fig from a golden bowl.

  His dreams were not interrupted by the sounds of dynamiting, first from one side of town, then another, and then another.

  This story is in memory of Slim Pickens (1919-1983)

  First published in Omni Magazine, April 1987.

  About the Author

  Howard Waldrop is widely considered to be one of the best short-story writers in the business, having been called “the resident Weird Mind of our generation” and an author “who writes like honkytonk angel.” His famous story “The Ugly Chickens” won both the Nebula and the World Fantasy Awards in 1981. His work has been gathered in the collections: Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters Of The Recent Past: Neat Stories By Howard Waldrop, Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories By Howard Waldrop, Going Home Again, the print version of his collection Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (formerly available only as in downloadable form online), a collection of his stories written in collaboration with various other authors, Custer’s Last Jump and Other Collaborations, and a big retrospective collection, Things Will Never Be the Same: Selected Short Fiction 1980-2005. Waldrop is also the author of the novel The Texas-Israeli War: 1999, in collaboration with Jake Saunders, and of two solo novels, Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs, as well as the chapbook A Better World’s in Birth!. He is at work on a new novel, tentatively entitled The Moone World. His most recent book is another new collection, Horse of a Different Color. He lives in Austin, Texas.