Halloween and Other Seasons

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.

Hilligan kept walking.

At one o’clock he had to stop. He ate a sparse lunch, sipping at the water canteen instead of gulping, until his thirst was slacked. Sparky ate a dog biscuit, fighting the blurred mechanism of his mouth to work on it.

As Hilligan watched the dog slap his tongue tentatively at the shallow bowl of water, he heard the unmistakable crack of a rifle shot.

The dog tensed momentarily, then resumed drinking as if nothing had happened, completely ignoring the round hole in its left eye.

The dog drank, liquid dripping down its ruined face into its water bowl, and drank its own fluids until its body suddenly collapsed.

The dog shivered and lay still.

Hilligan was already half way up the side of the outcropping. He hoisted himself between two peaked rocks as another shot rang out below him. “Just had to make sure, Marshall,” a voice shouted, laughing. This time he saw where it came from.

He took aim at the spot and there, in his sights, was a blinding chromium head.

He pulled the trigger and the head flared in a shower of metal and flesh fragments as the soft pink fleshy head exploded.

The rifle shot echoed, then the tranquility of the desert returned.

Cautiously, Hilligan returned to his pack and removed his binoculars. He climbed the hillock and scouted.

A mere mile ahead was the remainder of the band. They had stopped in the bare shade of a stunted stand of cottonwoods, waiting for their compatriot.

He hoped they had seen what had happened to their scout; and then knew they did because the three of them abruptly walked out into the sunlight, blinding him with the metallic brilliance of their heads.

When his eyes had adjusted, he saw that between them they had two weapons, one of which looked like an automatic rifle. The third carried an inappropriately small red pack, the kind children carry schoolbooks in, stuffed to overflowing; as Hilligan watched the other two tried to load it further until the one bearing the pack suddenly lashed out, knocking the other to the ground.

Hilligan put the high power binoculars down and tried to sight through the rifle, but they were too far away.

He returned to the desert floor, mounted his own pack, and moved on.

~ * ~

When he got to the cottonwoods, the bandits were long gone. A scatter of Ritz Crackers and empty juice cartons attested to their stupidity. He hoped the juice had gone down burning hot.

He went on.

He spotted them forty-five minutes later, as they moved into the low hills. On the other side of those hills was the town of Lawrence. They were moving fast, spread out, twenty or thirty yards between them.

Hilligan sprinted to the nearest rock outcropping, balancing his rifle carefully on the lip of the overhang, and caught the nearest in his finder. It was the weaponless one with the pack, standing at the limits of range. Carefully, using the rock to steady him, he pulled off a single shot, watching the bright metallic head shatter, scattering the sandy ground with cookies, plastic jars of peanut butter, and soft flesh.

The other two glanced around, then broke into a run.

Night was coming, and they had made it to the hills.

~ * ~

The stars were up. The Milky Way rose like a glowing band. The night was Moonless, but Hilligan could see his way by the blue glow of the Milky Way alone.

He saw with his ears as much as with his eyes. He thought of a novel he had been given by Anne after taking the job of Marshall in Davidson. It was one of the Leatherstocking Tales by Cooper. With the book, Anne had also given him a book by Mark Twain with an essay marked out in it about how lousy a storyteller Cooper was. According to Twain, most of the suspense in a Cooper novel developed when someone made noise by stepping on something while sneaking around. Someone was always stepping on something and giving themselves away.

Up ahead of Hilligan, someone stepped on something.

“Sorry, Twain, Cooper was right,” Hilligan muttered.

There was a line of jutting rocks ahead, threaded by a stony path. Hilligan crept to the first outcropping, avoiding any stepped-on somethings of his own.

He waited, and then there was another sound, very close.

Suddenly one of them appeared, the silvery luminescence of his head turning a mere yard from Hilligan.

It was the one with the automatic weapon.

Hilligan was quicker, and as a spatter of lead lined the rock wall to his right he pulled a shot out of his rifle and hit the other square in the chest.

The night flared and Hilligan briefly covered his eyes at the hissing explosion as the thing dropped its rifle, uttering a tiny cry as it was blown apart.

Beyond it, in the night, Hilligan heard the other one running.

Fast.

Hilligan followed. They had entered a desert forest of cactus, up the side of a small hill. The cactus looked like they had been planted, lined up in neat rows up the side of the hillock, each giving the next just enough room to catch any available water.

Hilligan caught a brief glimpse of his prey, heard a scraped tumble of rocks that splashed down past him to the foot of the hill below.

“I’m coming for you, you bastard!” Hilligan shouted up into the darkness.

Only silence greeted him.

In the dark, with the night over him, Hilligan moved upward, from cactus to cactus. Cursing his boots, he knew that he was the one making noise this time as he kicked a scuff of shale that slid down the mountainside.

He stopped, leaned into the curve of a prickly pear without touching it, and waited.

Still nothing.

The night breathed silence.

He felt presence; heard the faintest of sounds—

A silver-white hand appeared from behind the cactus and was on him before he could react.

He was knocked to the ground. A chrome head loomed over him. He heard his rifle slide away down the hill in the darkness. His attacker raised a Colt .45, then tossed it contemptuously away and held his palm downward over Hilligan.

“This game’s over,” the bandit hissed at him. “Tomorrow I’ll play games in Lawrence. And then everywhere else on this miserable planet…”

The palm began to glow with silver light.

Something flashed in the darkness, hovered overhead, dropped on the alien’s back.

The alien cried out and fell off into the night.

Hilligan pushed himself up to see the bandit clutching at his ripped-out throat, see it thrash helplessly before lying still.

“That would have been you in another second,” Hilligan heard in his head, weakly. There was familiar laughter behind the words.

“Sparky,” he said.

The dog lay panting a few feet from the imploded corpse of the desperado. His head looked like a scooped-out bowl, the top completely collapsed, wires and bio-tubes hanging uselessly. But there was the old look of unmistakably intelligent though weakening fire in one of his eyes.

“Should always check to make sure your sidekick has really stopped playing,” the dog’s thoughts said to him. “That bullet they hit me with fused a couple of the right circuits back together. It was like waking up from a bad dream. And you were gone.” There was more humor than blame in the voice.

“Sparky—”

“Don’t apologize, Mitch. I had just enough left in me to save your ass and this planet…” The voice trailed off tepidly.

As Hilligan watched, the weak light began to fade in the dog’s eye.

“So long, pal…” the dog said in a dying whisper.

Hilligan stood in the darkness for a long time. The Milky Way, a blue glowing ribbon cutting the night, passed overhead toward the West and morning.

~ * ~

Finally, as the Milky Way faded, Hilligan picked Sparky up in his arms and headed back to the Toyota. He pulled off the camouflage, lay the dog gently in the back, and headed out.

The morning colored the east purple and yellow. Hilligan smoked a cigarette and thought about his own spaceship hidden out in the desert. He thought about the four bandits he had been sent to catch who had terrorized and destroyed so many other worlds, and about how his race’s addiction to games had probably saved himself and this planet. And he thought about Sparky, his only weapon, and how he’d been constructed to look like any Earth dog. Hilligan thought about the thin plastic flesh that covered his own chromium skin.

Hilligan thought about what he would do now. He could go home, but somehow, the remembered kiss of a woman named Anne made him want to stay for awhile.

He had a feeling that love was a good game to play.

There was a tool kit out in that spaceship buried in the desert; perhaps he could spend his spare time trying to fix Sparky up. A good sidekick was hard to find.

Perhaps the town of Lawrence needed a Marshall.

Hiligan rode the Wild West in a Toyota.