Eclipsing Vengeance

by Jeremy Michelson

  I stood up. Corbin looked at me like he was surprised I was still there. All right, Ken, I said, Time for you and me to talk some. Buck needs to time to himself.

  But–

  I held up my hand and motioned to the door. Corbin looked to Buck, who just took a sip from his bottle. Corbin stood and followed me out the door. Then he and I walked over to his fancy SUV and we talked about how much Buck’s services were worth to him.

  Considering he was a billionaire, I gave him a number that was big enough to make him wince. He started to open his mouth to protest.

  Non-negotiable, I said.

  His jaw clamped shut and that red came over his face again. I hoped the man saw a doctor on a regular basis. Might have a blood pressure problem or something.

  I made him give me a direct number for him and told him where he could deposit the first half of Buck’s payment. Then he climbed in his fancy SUV and peeled off in a cloud of dust.

  I sighed and turned back to the trailer. Buck stood in the open doorway, watching Corbin drive off into the sunset.

  Time to go hunting again, Buck said.

  Nine

  Blue-green light blazed out around the sides of the steel lid. It gave off enough light to see Buck. He was looking up, his teeth bared. His fingers gripped round that shotgun so tight I thought the barrel would squeeze between his fingers like putty. He gave me a glance and put a finger to his lips.

  He didn’t need to tell me to shut up. Though I couldn’t make my heart pound any quieter or stop the chatter of my teeth.

  The metal box welded to the back of the oil car stank of crude and welding flux. Not even Buck’s cinnamon gum could overpower the smell this time. I shifted, trying to find a comfortable way to crouch, while I tried to avoid thinking how much like a coffin this box was.

  Times like this made me wish Buck had taken up accounting instead of alien chasing. ‘Cept he wasn’t much for numbers, so that wasn’t gonna go to work. Somehow I couldn’t picture Buck doing any kind of normal job. Though I did fantasize about it on occasion.

  The rumble of the diesel engines cut out. In their absence, I head the big generators winding down. The bumping, rattling of the train slowed. After a minute or two the car jerked to a stop.

  We kept waiting. Me sitting in terrified silence. Buck staring up at the steel cover like he was ready to burst through it and start blasting things.

  Above the creaking and ticking of the rail car next to us, I heard something else. A kind of deep pulsing, thrumming sound. Was that the space ship hovering over us? The same one the hobo had described to us when Buck and I caught up with him in Oklahoma?

  What else could it be? Santa Claus?

  A new sound came to me. A whistling, whooshing like something cutting through the air. Then all of a sudden something clanged onto the oil car. Several somethings. I counted eight clangs. Which could only be the little hubcap ships the hobo had told us about.

  Next up had to be the space trucks to haul us up to the mother ship. I wanted to ask Buck how he knew the space grappling thingy wouldn’t kill us instantly. Or if he knew at all. I opened my mouth and his hand shot out and covered it. He shook his head. He gave me a look that clamped my jaws shut. His eyes glittered in the greenish-blue light coming around the edge of the lid. Almost like his eyeballs were glowing. It really creeped me out when they did that.

  I heard another sound over the deep thrumming. It was a rapid pulsing, like a jackhammer wrapped in blankets. It got louder and louder until it felt like it as all around me. I clapped my hands to my ears. Buck didn’t bother with it. He just kept looking up.

  The pulsing got louder and deeper. Then the metal all around us started shaking, vibrating. I heard metal groan, then the railcar jerked and I felt us start to lift. It was right about then that I started wishing for some rubber pants.

  Didn’t seem to faze Buck any. He stayed crouched, looking up, hands gripping the shotgun. I felt for the oval thing Buck had given me. He saw the movement and grabbed my hand shaking his head. Not yet.

  I gave him a look back, which said I know, I was just making sure the dang thing was still there.

  Except I was thinking of ripping it out of my coat and tapping out of the little sequence Buck taught me. Any thing that would stop this horrible pounding, rattling trip into the belly of an alien mother ship.

  Now, let me say that I’ve had my share of adventures with Buck. I’ve seen things that would make most men drop a steaming load in their drawers. And if Buck hadn’t been with me, I woulda done the same. But I ain’t never been inside one of them alien ships. Especially not one so big that it could swallow a thirty car oil train. My poor old head was filled with pictures of the kind of monstrosities that lived up there. Big, ugly, bug eyed things slobbering acid from their jumbled up faces. The kind of things that would throw us in a cooking pot like soft shell lobsters and serve us up for supper. Yeah, To Serve Mankind, my ass.

  Times like that made me wish Buck wasn’t so tightlipped about what he knew. Like always, I’d tried to get him to tell me what he thought these aliens was. He just shook his head and said, We’ll find out when we get there.

  Except he knew.

  I had a suspicion that them blue skinned aliens that stole him when he was a kid did something more than run a few experiments on him. I think they put some stuff into his head. Maybe they were experimenting to see what people brains could hold. Like the way we train monkeys to read sign language, just to see if we can.

  I don’t think them blue aliens woulda done any of that to him if they had any clue Buck would escape. Maybe they’d done it before with other humans and ended up with quivering puddles of fear on their lab tables. But then, they’d never caught no one like Buck before.

  I have no doubt they regretted every second of picking up that scrawny kid from a Montana ranch. He never did tell me if he was coming or going from the outhouse when they snatched him.

  Being on our way up to the belly of an alien mother ship seemed like a bad time to ask him.

  The blue green light faded and things went quieter. The pounding, vibrating noise lessened and took on a odd, echoing quality. My breath went quick as I realized we was in the belly of the beast now. It was a good thing I was wearing them thick winter gloves. Otherwise I might a been carving holes in my palms with my fingernails.

  The rail car suddenly wrenched to one side, throwing me and Buck around the little box like pinballs. We got ourselves braced just as the shaking stopped. The oil car got quiet, just little ticking and groans as the metal settled. This part of our ride seemed to be over.

  I was about to say something to Buck when there was a huge clang to the back of us. It sounded like someone had dropped a dump truck full of frying pans on a concrete road.

  The car we was hanging off of vibrated with the sound. So did my dang head. I was surprised I didn’t get a nosebleed from all that banging and rattling.

  Just as the ringing from the last thing died off, there was another giant clatter. Except this was seemed farther away. It was still enough to add on to the headache I was getting.

  A few seconds later there was another huge clatter.

  It finally soaked into my addled brain that it was more rail cars getting lifted up into the ship. I started counting the gonging clatters. After twenty six, the noises stopped. I did a quick rewind, thinking about where we were at in regards to the train. We was in the third rail car, after the two engines. That would have left twenty-five more cars and the pusher engine.

  The aliens had us all loaded up.

  Now what?

  I heard a blatting sound like some kind of warning call. Orange light flashed through the gap under the lid. Then a voice boomed out, saying something. A least what I heard sounded like words. They was in a language that didn’t sound nothing like anything I’d ever heard. I looked to Buck, but I couldn’t see nothing but the orange light flashing on the brim of his hat. It was so dim in the box, all I had was a sense of him leaning
against the far corner. Which wasn’t that far.

  All of a sudden I got grabbed. A hand clenched a fistful of my coat and pulled me over. I got a sniff of cinnamon gum and whiskers tickled my ear.

  “Get ready to run,” Buck whispered, “You follow where I go. Exact, you hear?”

  “I hear,” I said.

  My heart pounded like a marching band getting chased by a herd of grizzlies. I wished Buck woulda let me have a gun. I woulda felt a whole lot better. But Buck still remembered that one time I accidentally filled his backside with buckshot. It was an honest mistake, but Buck had a long memory for such things. It’s not that he held grudges…well, yeah, he did hold grudges. He held them forever the way a miser holds onto gold.

  That’s why he was still chasing aliens.

  I felt Buck move. Metal creaked and the flashing orange light filled the box. Buck pushed the lid all the way up. He reached down and yanked me to my feet. And I got my first view of the alien ship.

  Ten

  First thing that hit me was the smell. Like something from the ocean that washed up on the beach and died under the hot sun. The smell was so thick it felt more like I was chewing it than sniffing it.

  Buck was already climbing out of the steel box while I stood like an idiot with my mouth hanging open. Orange lights flashed from the low, girdered ceiling of a huge space. Dozens of oil tanker cars spread out in neat rows around us. On the nearest wall I could see strange symbols painted. They looked mysterious and exotic, but probably said something boring like, Cargo Bay 12, or such.

  Buck grabbed my arm. “Come on,” he said with a hiss, “They ain’t gonna suck the air outa here, but they ain’t gonna leave the heaters on, either.”

  It only took half a second for that to sink in. If we was off to outer space, then this cargo hold was gonna get cold enough to turn us into redneckcicles. I levered my ass out of that box and took on out after Buck.

  He jumped down to the floor and waited for me to follow. Though I did it with a helluva lot less grace than he did. He pointed to the floor. It looked to be gray metal, decorated with white lines of different widths, plus dots and squares.

  “Follow the middle thick line,” he said, “Don’t step on the circles or squares.”

  “What if I do?” I asked.

  He gave me a sour look. Which was a lot like his normal look, but with more disgust.

  “Then I won’t be concerned with a little brother no more,” he said.

  He set off along one of the lines, heading toward the nearest wall. I got a move on, and I made sure my tender footies didn’t come near them dots and squares.

  Buck made it to the wall without no slobbering aliens coming out and blasting us. He waited for my pokey self to come along. Probably glaring at me the whole time, but I didn’t care. I was looking down the whole way. I didn’t want to put my feet places they wasn’t supposed to be.

  “You need to drop a few pounds,” he said.

  “You need to stop hitching us rides on alien battleships,” I said.

  “This ain’t no battleship,” he said.

  “What is it then?”

  “It’s a dumpy little cargo ship that some stupid aliens are using to piss me off,” Buck said.

  He said it like it was a personal thing. He tended to do that a lot. Take things personally, that is. I’d tried talking to him about it, but he just gave me one of them looks. The kind that said if we wasn’t kin, he’d be taking it personal against me, too. Sometimes I wondered just exactly what done crawled up Buck’s butt and died all them years ago.

  Buck went along the wall until he came to a door. What I assumed to be a door. It was a big chunk of metal standing a little inset from the rest of the metal on the wall. Seemed like a door to me.

  There was a panel with some blocky shapes on it. They looked like buttons, but bigger than what I would think of for people buttons. I sized up the door. It looked to be a good ten, maybe twelve feet tall. The door was plenty wide, too. How big was these aliens? Twelve feet tall and ten feet with with fifty razor spiked tentacles and giant mouths filled with piranha teeth?

  “Uh, Buck, about these aliens…” I said.

  “Shut up,” he said. He pulled something out of his zebra stripe duster. It looked like a stubby little magic wand. He set the end just above the button panel and gave me a look.

  “You move through that door quick when it opens, hear?” he said.

  “But–”

  But the door hissed and slid open. Just a few inches. Enough for me to squeeze my belly through. I said a silent prayer for no piranha toothed aliens to be on the other side, and dove through the opening. Half a second later, Buck was there, pushing me out of his way. The door hissed closed, cutting off the blatting sound and flashing orange light.

  Something that sounded like a turkey gobbling while been dragged backwards through a sewer pipe hit my tender ears.

  I spun around and saw this dumpy gray blob of a thing with three yellow eyes waddling toward me. It wore what looked like green coveralls and had two stubby legs and long arms like an orangoutang that it was waving at us.

  Buck flashed by and punched the thing in the face. It staggered back, wailing and warbling. Buck gave it a kick to the belly, then a roundhouse kick to the head.

  The thing went down like a sack of potatoes. Its three eyes closed and a long, purple tongue lolled out of its mouth. Buck was already down on one knee, fishing through its green coveralls. He took out a couple flat objects and stuck them in his coat.

  My knees were shaking, but I made myself step closer. The rancid ocean smell coming from it just about made me choke. I looked it over while Buck ransacked the thing’s clothes. Far as I could tell, it wasn’t twelve feet tall, or ten feet wide. No tentacles or piranha teeth, either. Though a bit of slobber was running down the side of its mouth.

  “A Blinky?”

  “Blinky,” Buck said, “Yup.”

  “What are they doing here?” I asked, “Aren’t they supposed to be our friends?”

  Buck gave me a sidelong glance and stood up. He hocked a wad of spit at the Blinky. Smacked the thing right on its fat chest.

  “Blinkys ain’t no friend of ours,” he said.

  I shoulda been surprised, but I wasn’t. Every wing nut conspiracy UFO nut was actually right. The Blinkys that appeared in the sky a few years back with promises of peace and inclusion to their galactic union weren’t here to help.

  “Does the government know this?” I asked.

  Buck rolled his eyes. “Government knows,” he said, “But same time, they don’t know crap about dealing with them.”

  “Does the government really have them alien corpses in secret labs in Area 51 like they say?” I asked.

  Buck scrunched up his face. “No, you idiot,” he said, “They don’t keep ‘em there. What kind of secret base is a secret base if everyone knows its name?”

  He grabbed the Blinky’s collar and dragged him over to a door on the opposite side of the corridor. I realized Buck hadn’t actually answered my question. Something he did a lot. I was kinda used to it, but it still pissed me off.

  Buck opened the door with his stubby magic wand–I wondered if he’d gotten it out of the pocket of some alien whose ass he kicked like the Blinky. There wasn’t no more slobbering aliens popping out of the room. The room looked more like a broom closet than a room. Buck stuffed the Blinky in the room and closed the door. He did something to the panel with his magic wand thingy, then he was off, striding down the hallway.

  I set off after him. For the first time, I took a good look at the hallway we was walking down. It was gray metal, top and bottom. The floor was a slightly darker gray and had a kind of tread pattern to it. There were light panels on the ceiling every few feet. Colored lines of different thicknesses ran along the wall opposite the cargo hold. I noticed Buck looking at them. Did he know what they were? Where they were taking us? I hurried to catch up with his long steps.

  “Where we going, and
what we gonna do when we get there?” I asked.

  “Gonna to the bridge, then I’m gonna kick some ass,” Buck said.

  For a second I had an image of a bridge over a river, then I realized he was talking about a bridge like on Star Trek. Going to the ship’s command deck. It seemed like a practical and really stupid thing to do.

  “Aren’t they gonna have guards there?” I asked.

  “Probably,” Buck said.

  “You ain’t worried about that?”

  “Nope.”

  The man didn’t lack for confidence. Had to wonder about the brains department, though. I plucked at his zebra stripe duster.

  “Uh, what if they got bigger guns than you?” I asked.

  “Won’t matter,” Buck said.

  I realized I hadn’t felt the big ship move. That meant we must have still been on Earth, hovering over the rails where the aliens stole the train. Somehow that made me feel better. Buck must have been planning to knock out the aliens, then we could just crash the big ship near the tracks. Let the Feds take care of the rest.

  I told this to Buck and he almost laughed. He pulled one of little rectangles he stole from the Blinky out of his duster and looked at it for a second. Then he turned and went to a nearby door. He did the magic wand thing and the door slid open. I half expected something nasty to jump out, but it was another empty room. Buck went in, motioning for me to follow. I did, but not happily. The room was dark except for something grayish white round thing at the other side. I followed Buck to the round thing.

  “Take a look and tell me we ain’t committed,” he said.

  I stepped closer. I realized I was looking at a window. Stars dotted it. The round thing was the moon. It got bigger and bigger until we passed it. Then it got smaller and smaller. My breath came quick and my heart jackhammered in my chest.

  We was definitely committed.

  Eleven