by Faith Hunter
“No. We really are just here for the kitten.”
“The kitten.” Von Moose sighed and petted his machine as though it were a living thing. “Don’t you even want to know what it does?”
Frank nodded. “Well, yea, sort of.”
“Excellent.” The professor rubbed his hands together with excitement and paced around the machine. “Gentlemen, may I introduce you to the Static Transfer and Halting Progression machine. Or as I call her, the STaHP machine. You see, I place one of the subject animals there in the center.” He paused and pointed to the fabric-covered flaps that lined the hollow center. “The furrier the better. This hairy beast rubs against the machine, to which the velvet flaps transfer static electricity from the animal’s fur into the heart of the STaHP via these wires here.” The man waved at a series of complicated gadgets on the machine. “The electricity is compounded by the flywheels and gears, which in turn powers the main generator there.” He pointed to the far end of the thing. “When directed to the core of our Lady Terra Firma, this heightened static electricity will slow her gesticulations. Ideally, it will halt her gyrations entirely.” He stopped speaking and stared at Frank and Earnest, as if gauging their reaction.
Frank waited for more. There didn’t seem to be anything else coming, so he asked, “What does it do then?”
“That’s it.”
“What’s it?”
Von Moose’s smile faltered. “Don’t you understand? It’s a doomsday device.”
“A what?” Earnest said.
“A doomsday device,” the professor said.
Frank had no idea who this Lady Terror Firmer was, or what a doomsday device was, nor did he want to know. From the way this professor man was leering and grinning and going on about using the machine on some poor woman’s gesticulars, the whole thing probably meant something very private and embarrassing. And while Frank sometimes enjoyed a peep show now and again, he sure didn’t want to witness this one.
“Ah, yeah,” Frank said. “Well. As interesting as that is, we really are here for the cat. Do you mind if we, just, you know…”
“Frank,” Earnest said.
“Take her and leave?” the professor said.
“Frank,” Earnest said.
“If you don’t mind,” Frank said.
“Certainly not,” the professor said.
“Frank,” Earnest said again.
“Shut up, Earnest,” Frank said. He nodded to Von Moose. “Thank you, sir. Sorry we troubled you.”
“No trouble at all,” the professor said.
“Frank,” Earnest said.
“What?” Frank snapped.
“What about the other animals?” Earnest said.
“What about them?” Frank looked to the pens. “They all seem clean and warm enough. They all got plenty of food and water. He looks like he’s taking fairly good care of them.”
“Oh I am,” the professor said. “I provide proper care and nutrition for each and every one. I need them in top shape for my needs.”
“There you go,” Franks said. He tipped his fingers to his hat and nodded once more to the professor man. “Good luck on your, um, machine.”
“Thank you,” Von Moose said. Just as Frank and Earnest neared the exit, with Victoria in tow, the professor added, “I just wished they didn’t explode every single time I employed the machine.”
Earnest gave a soft gasp. The kitten in his arms mewed. Frank stopped in place and closed his eyes, praying that he didn’t hear what he thought he just heard.
“Explode?” Earnest asked.
“Yes,” Von Moose said. “I can’t manage to get it to reach full capacity without the excess static directing a jolt of feedback into the animals themselves. They explode under the pressure, you see. It causes quite a mess. As you can imagine.”
Frank opened his eyes, turned on his heel and glanced about at the dark red soil and rocks. The blood-soaked soil and rocks. How many little Victorias had the man already exploded?
“Frank,” Earnest said.
“I know,” Frank said. “I heard him.”
Victoria meowed.
Frank took a few steps toward the professor. “Sir, isn’t there a way you can maybe not blow up animals? See, my cousin Earnest here has quite a soft spot for furry little creatures, and he won’t leave here if he thinks they’re gonna get hurt.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” the professor said.
This was followed by a soft click.
“I don’t think you’ll be leaving,” the professor added. “Not today. Not ever.”
There were two sounds in the world Frank was intimately familiar with. One was the sound of money, or rather the noise of a coin dropped on a wooden table. The other was the sound of trouble, or rather the metallic click of a hammer being set on a pistol. He glanced down to greet the weapon now aimed at him and his cousin.
Frank raised his hands.
Earnest raised one hand, the other still clinging to the small kitten in his arms. “He’s got a gun, Frank.”
“I can see that, Earnest,” Frank said.
“Why don’t we have a gun?”
“Because they’re expensive. And besides, you’d just shoot your fool head off.”
“I think I could handle a gun.”
“You can’t handle your personals when you gotta pee. What makes you think you can aim a gun the right way when you soak your trousers half the—”
“Gentlemen,” the professor said over their untimely argument. “I would like to thank you for stumbling on my little den of iniquity. I was hoping for a face-off against a worthy opponent, but I can see you’re just a mild distraction. Never mind, I have plans for you. Both of you.”
The professor flipped a switch on the machine, sending it into crackling, huffing, and whirling life. Blue lighting raced back and forth across the middle gap.
Frank wasn’t certain, but he thought he heard Victoria growl.
A chorus of growls rose from the back of the cave.
“You should know,” Von Moose said, “I hadn’t really given human beings much thought when it came to the STaHP machine.” One hand still holding the gun, Von Moose used his free hand to push a little cloth-covered trolley across the cave. “I always assumed animal fur was the perfect conductor for my needs. But now, ah, now I am forced to rethink my original plans. I must thank you gentlemen for this opportunity. Perhaps animal fur isn’t what I needed all along. Perhaps human hair is the answer to my conundrum.”
“Frank,” Earnest said. “Frank. Frank. He’s gonna put us in the machine, Frank. He’s gonna put us in the machine.”
“He’s not gonna put us in the machine,” Frank said.
“Au contraire,” the professor said. “Your cousin is quite correct. I am going to put you into the machine.”
“How?” Frank said. He waved a raised palm at the STaHP machine, or more specifically the gap. “That hole is far too small for either of us to fit.”
The professor yanked the cloth away from the trolley. A fair number of blades and saws and other nasty as well as blood-soaked instruments were strewn across the cart. Von Moose held up a saw blade the length of his arm and coated in crimson. “You will fit. I can make certain of that.”
It didn’t take a professor to understand what that meant.
Frank and Earnest screamed together, and at the sound of their collected shrieks Victoria pounced on the professor. One moment the kitten was growling in Earnest’s arms, and the next she was clawing and biting at the professor’s face. Von Moose dropped the gun and the saw blade and hollered in agony as the kitten laid into the man, giving the crazy bastard all she had. The pair of them careened backward as the professor stumbled toward his creation in his efforts to free himself of the kitten. They slowly lurched toward the crackling, huffing, and whirling machine.
Frank scrambled forward and snatched up the gun.
“Victoria!” Earnest cried. “Look out!”
The kitten leapt aw
ay from the professor, her parting momentum providing a last push which delivered the man into the heart of the STaHP machine. Professor Von Moose’s head landed square in the center of the gap, his neck coming to rest on the edge of the velvet pads. Tendrils of blue lightning reached out and stroked his face. For a brief moment the man smiled peacefully, his hair rising on end and his eyes lighting with wonder and joy.
“It’s so beautiful,” he said almost too softly for Frank to hear.
That beautiful moment passed quickly, replaced by a loud pop as the man’s head exploded in a puff of crimson. The stump of his neck poured with blood, a shower of red that painted the adjacent walls and floor while his body kicked and writhed alongside the machine. Frank and Earnest and Victoria took a few quick steps backward to avoid the rushing stream of crimson until at last the body fell still.
The machine then began to chug instead of chuff, and give off an unpleasant odor of smoke that told Frank something wasn’t right. Well, something more than the fact that a man’s head had just exploded inside of the thing. Frank rushed forward, taking care not to slip in the pooling blood, and flipped the switch to what he hoped was the off position. The machine fell silent, until all that remained was the steady drip of life still draining from the professor.
“Frank?” Earnest said.
“Yeah?” Frank asked as he stared at the disaster.
“You reckon he’s dead?”
“I don’t think a man can survive a thing like that.” Frank turned away and swallowed the bile rising to his throat.
“I don’t guess so either. What are we gonna do about that doomsdeedoddle thing?”
“Leave it here I guess.”
Earnest stooped to scoop up the gray kitten. “You suppose we should let the other animals go now?”
Frank nodded. “Yeah, I reckon we should since they got no one to care for them now. But be careful, they look pretty spooked.” And Frank couldn’t blame ’em. He was pretty spooked too. Hell, he was downright disturbed. It wasn’t every day you got to watch a man’s head blow up like that. Well, not often at least.
It only took a few minutes to release the two dozen or so animals penned up in the cave. Most of them took off in a run for the exit once their cage was opened, but more than a few remained behind. Frank knew it was their inexplicable love for his cousin. It seemed that small animals were drawn to the man. It was like he knew what they were thinking. Like he could whisper to them or something. Shame they couldn’t profit from it.
Earnest began gathering the animals up, talking all the while.
“And I’m gonna call you Buzz. And you Mee-ko. And you Jewel, on account you got that pretty spot on your face. And you Fiona. And you Bustyr. And you Little Bustyr, cause you look like Bustyr, only smaller. And you Kasey. And you Kizzy.” He paused as he stuffed an adorably fluffy orange cat into his jacket pocket. “And I’m gonna call you Mr. Wiggums.”
“Come on,” Frank said. “Grab your furry friends and let’s get the hell out of here before anyone finds us. I don’t think we can explain this one without looking bad.”
“We could just tell the truth.”
“Would you believe us?”
Earnest grunted for a few seconds, then said, “No. I guess not.”
As Frank led his cousin and the passel of animals back outside, he wondered what they would do next. He reckoned, aside from watching a grown man’s head explode, they had just done a fairly wonderful thing. Sure they may have only rescued a bunch of animals, but that was the most good they had ever done in their whole, rotten lives.
“Frank,” Earnest said.
“Yeah,” Frank said.
“I kinda liked making money doing something good.”
“Yeah, I sorta did too.”
“You think when we give Victoria back we can find another nice job to do?”
“I would like that. Yeah.”
And so it went. Frank decided that maybe this wide frontier had enough outlaws. Maybe what it needed were a couple of good guys.
Good guys for hire, of course.
From Parts Unknown
James R. Tuck
Truett McCall looked at the people gathered on the side street between the Velvet Tiger whorehouse and the Church Of The Tribulation chapel. The two buildings sat side by side but their entrances faced opposite ends so that any crossover patronage had the furthest walk possible. On one end of the alley formed by the two buildings high walls twittering churchgoers stood in dresses and hats and suits cobbled together to be presentable. They whispered amongst themselves behind the ratty rope strung up by the town constable to mark off the crime scene.
At the other end stood ten or so working girls, soiled doves, held back by another piece of ratty security rope. They gossiped every bit as much as the church folks, they simply did it around cigarettes that dangled from rouged lips and without any edge of hysterics. This far out into the Flats even the swift, sure hand of Magda didn’t protect them. The town of Modest was a little shithole far from Lost Vegas, a scrap of survival carved out of the wasteland and built off the back of a decent strip of slag to mine. These girls had seen plenty. The dead body covered by a worn wool blanket wouldn’t be the first for most of them.
Damn sure wasn’t the first for him.
The constable shuffled his feet. “Sure you want to see this? I wish to hell I hadn’t.”
Truett spit a long stream of tobacco juice and looked at the short man with the bent tin star through a squinted eye, hand resting on the worn wood handle of the six-gun on his hip. The notch of the hammer rubbed the crease between two thick stripes of scar tissue. “You trying to be funny?”
The constable looked down at the six-gun, his eyes sliding sideways once there to stare at the dark-bladed hook-knife that hung beside it. “No, not at all. I was just...” he leaned toward Truett, his voice dropping to a whisper, “ah, hell, I’m spooked. This is a terrible, terrible thing and I’ve seen my share of terrible things.”
“I’m sure you got me beat.” Truett spit again. “Now pull that goddam blanket back and get this shit over with.”
The constable lifted the blanket slowly, looking away as he did.
The churchgoers gasped.
The whores quit talking.
The blanket stuck to the thing laying underneath it, some liquid that was never meant to be outside a body drying into the fibers. The constable had to shake and jerk to get it free.
Most of a woman lay there.
Her arms and legs were there, bent at wrong angles and splayed unnaturally, but there and attached to a torso that had been hollowed out, scooped clean of any type of organ or viscera. The ribs had been popped free of their nodules on the sternum and pushed open, spread like a bowl. The skin had been peeled back, ripped along the sides and tossed out of the way of whatever had disemboweled the woman. It lay across her left shoulder. Across the ground like a discarded shawl made of thin leather. The edges of it curled in the heat of the day.
An awful sight.
Her face made the entire thing worse.
It was untouched, serene save for a smear of dried blood across her pert little chin. Her wide mouth was slightly parted, not enough to see tongue or teeth, but the slackness of it very much as he would imagine her sleeping. It softened features that held a cruel beauty, features that could become harsh in anger, but in death lay like a masterful painting on a pillow of coarse reddish-brown curls.
“Who was she?”
“Only ever knew her as Lucille. Kept to one of the rooms under the Church here and worked what she could at the purification plant at the slag mine.”
“Kin?”
“None that I know of. Nobody lived with her.”
Truett squatted, looking closer. Something was wrong with her eyes. They were closed but they didn’t look right. He poked one with a blunt-tipped finger and the lid sunk in. It was spongy underneath. He flipped one back with his thumb and found what he’d suspected. The eyeball was gone, leaving nothin
g but a socket full of congealed blood and aqueous fluid.
The constable jerked back. “Oh my fucking God!”
Truett ignored him, shifting on the balls of his feet and looking closely at the giant wound that took Lucille from crotch to throat. She was empty. Only bone and meat and cartilage left in the hollow. Everything soft had been completely removed. He studied the flap of skin tossed aside, his mind running over what he knew of the insides of corpses. The skin had no fat on it. No subcutaneous membrane. Even the woman’s breasts had been scooped free of fat and mammary glands and left like tiny puckered purses in the center of the skin shawl.
The skin on her legs and hands had tiny circle wounds that dotted along their length, all of them the same circumference and depth. From the look of them he could stick his finger in to the second knuckle.
Almost to the third.
He wasn’t going to stick his finger in a dead woman’s wounds. She’d suffered enough indignity.
He flexed his left arm, feeling the double row of circle scars that ran around his bicep and onto his chest pull tight. They were souvenirs from a run in with one of Crowley’s leftovers, a tentacled beast stuck in a partially collapsed gateway between its hellish dimension and a community of gypsies. The damn wildbloods had been feeding it settlers that encroached on their land. He’d been sent by Ann to put a stop to it. He’d done it, but it got him good with the suckers that ran underneath one of its flailing appendages, clipping the skin away in two trails of circles. The circle wounds on the body...Lucille...were similar, but random, no symmetry to them like his had.
It told him a lot. He didn’t know what without some sorting, but all the information his eyes had taken in began to shuffle in his mind, finding its place next to what he already knew.
“Cover her up.”
The constable pulled the blanket back in place. “You need her for later?”
“Save a chunk of hair, skin, and nail but bury the rest of her in hallowed ground.” He turned to go. “I’d get to it a’fore sundown just in case.”
