Tour of Duty: Stories and Provocation (33 page)

“Well, then we’d best be to it,” I decided. Better to meet it on terrain we could exploit than wait for it to come to camp. The beast always came for the client. I just had to make the most of the circumstances.

I led, and Papa followed closely behind. He moved surely and well for an older, heavyset man with a healed knee injury. Hell, he moved better than some younger men.

Other than being a fellow professional liar, I wondered, what had consigned him to hell? It could have been many things. Some doubted the stories of his knee. I’m told that walking after a knee shot is all but impossible. Exaggeration of facts might have brought Steinbeck to hell, and me; so it might hold for Hemingway, too. Or perhaps his politics?

He saw me studying him, seemed to gauge my thoughts by eye and said, “We are all here for reasons known or unknown; only the purport of our damnation remains muddy.”

I nodded.

Finding the brute really wasn’t difficult. This was
the
top-end predator, perhaps of all time, until man happened along. So it had no incentive to worry about noise.

I was worried about how fast D. Rex might move. Something scuffled in the wild ahead. The scuffles turned to cracking whips of bent branches and reeds, to thumps, and then . . . there it was.

D. Rex stood so tall I wondered if he regularly got nosebleeds. The ground trembled with each hop. Yes,
hop.

When I was alive, portrayals of T. Rex resembled Godzilla, or vice versa. The reality (or hellish incarnation, or both) was bizarre.

He was feathered.

I knew some dino-related critters had been, but to see it in the fledge—eighteen feet tall with a wattle, comb and crest—was ridiculous in a terrifying way.

Nor did he trudge upright. He actually hopped like a chicken. Of course, this hopping, six-ton chicken made the ground shake.

Then he clucked. The sound was a gurgle like that of a manhole sized drain. I’d have nightmares about this for weeks.

Was that this creature’s sad eternity, if that applied? To be snickered and gawked at?

I was so entranced, I started when Hemingway whispered behind me:

“What do you suggest, Peter?”

I was going to suggest a quick, quiet trot back to camp and a game of cards. There was no escaping this confrontation, though. Not now.

“My guess is the brain is between the eyes and that knob at the rear. I recall it being a tubelike thing. A shot there should ruin his day,” I said.

Ernie nodded and rose carefully into a good stance. I eased sideways and down, tensing my ears for the assault. One can’t go deaf in hell. Or at least I haven’t. I’m sure it’s possible if Satan decrees. I still get the full brutal impact of each concussion wave.

This all seemed too easy. Suspiciously so. We’d found the beast, the shot was lined up, and if Hemingway missed, I had sufficient light artillery to do major structural damage to the thing, as well as disable its legs.

Was it the D. Rex who was supposed to suffer?

Ernie was stable enough, feet balanced, that beautiful rifle nestled against his shoulder and over his hands. I split my attention and watched his finger flex, felt the muzzle blast roar and boom in basso, and looked to see the effect.

He missed. Oh, it creased the feathers and blew some fine tendrils free, but it grazed at most.

The Rex whirled, clucked in a voice like a sinking drum, lowered its jaw and hopped, then started into a run. It was fast off the blocks.

Ernie coolly fired his other barrel, and hit it in the throat. The Rex shuddered but kept coming. Hemingway calmly broke the action; the two panatela-sized empties ejected over his shoulder as he slid two more in and clicked his weapon closed.

I was a good ten feet away and crabbing sideways when I saw he wasn’t going to have time for a follow-up shot. I raised that insane rifle to my shoulder, watched the muzzle waver as I pointed, then spiraled in on the tiny brain inside the huge case—and snapped the trigger.

The recoil was no worse than a 12 gauge magnum, but the blast from the muzzle brake hit the grass like jet exhaust. I suppose it was.

I hadn’t missed. The bullet was the size of my thumb and punched into the target just below and behind its eye, a quartering shot. The eyeball actually popped loose from its orbit; sticky, feathery gunk blew out the far side.

I didn’t know if the Rex would drop, though. There was every chance that momentum would carry its bulk right over Ernie. Or it might be stupid enough to continue to run for several seconds.

I was right and wrong on both counts.

I hadn’t put it all together. Feathers. Clucking. Hopping like a monstrous bird. What is notable about birds? Their hindbrain runs far down their spine.

I’d headshot it.

The D. Rex took two steps before it fell over, almost at Ernie’s feet. Once it fell over, it did the Curly Shuffle and booted him sprawling; hopped up again, fell down; kicked like a frog and went on a rampage of flopping, just as if some seven-ton chicken had been given the axe.

In lieu of skirts, I raised my gun and ran screaming for the largest bole I could find. I wanted mass between me and that Rex, and I wanted it now. Ernie was a big boy; he’d know what to do. Besides, I owed him for being more famous a writer than I. He deserved a great story from this.

There was a mopane tree ahead of me and I got it behind me in a hurry, then got the bole in a romantic embrace so its mass could shield me in most of an arc.

The aptly named demon dino still convulsed. Ernie was nowhere to be seen. I wished him well.

Rexian convulsions turned to twitches, but those twitches threw its tail five yards in each direction. I hoped that was a safe enough level of dead and peeked out, then eased a foot out. The Rex didn’t hop up again, so I stepped forward.

“Ernie?” I called softly.

I saw what looked like a foot, sticking up at a nauseating angle. The thrashing super-chicken had crushed him like a roach.

The fun wasn’t over, though. A hellyena appeared through the crud, sniffing and yipping. It was followed by a brother. I moved to keep the carcass between them and me, and sidled over to see how poor Hemingway had fared.

But the two hellyenas turned into four, a dozen, a deluge of carnivorous scavengers panting and drooling and swarming over the yet-twitching meat. Others lapped at a small puddle that must be brain-covered feathers. Some eyed me.

I made it back to my lover the tree in seconds, and fairly levitated up to the ten foot level, unslung the .50 and used it as a ward, although I was more than prepared to splash one of the cursed things if need be. Jackhells and hellyenas are almost the same here as in life. There’s apparently little one can do to improve on the revulsion they generate in onlookers.

I waited a long time in the baking heat and the stink of emptied dino guts (reminiscent of three hundred pounds of sulphurous bird guano), before the pack thinned out.

Then I took a long, careful survey of the area, slid down the bole and made my way cautiously over to the kill zone. The D. Rex was a pile of bones, hide and offal covered in bloody feathers and hellflies.

There was little left of Ernie but chawed bones, and I wondered how he’d be revived—remorted?—by the Undertaker. That lovely rifle had an intact action, but the wood was scratched and chewed to splintered kindling. This seemed most unkind of all. It was a fine weapon; it had done nothing wrong, but had been punished all the same.

Sighing, I checked my directions and started back toward camp. I wondered which of my heroes I’d watch die again the next day.

Misfits

With Gail Sanders

There’s a half-true joke about characters talking to the author. One never admits to voices in one’s head, but there are times a story explodes fully realized in my mind. For some tales, I know the characters, the history, the background and even the future just like that, and it comes out in a rush.

Other times, deadlines come looming up faster than expected. With real world matters, family, multiple pursuits and multiple stories, as well as occasional health issues from military service, I can wake up and realize there’s too little time to get things done.

I often find it useful to bounce ideas off my wife, who’s a big fantasy fan and occasional SF reader, and has helped me out on some previous short stories, of course. She can be very down to earth one moment, and completely round the bend another. Most of this story is mine, but she offered a few key comments that helped me find direction.

As to those deadlined stories, they still get done. It’s just sometimes it feels like this:

How the hell
did I wind up on the back of a mammoth?
Phil wondered to himself.

The armor was a surprise, too, and the spear. But those were things one could get at a well-equipped store, or somewhere through the mesh. He was quite sure mammoths hadn’t been cloned yet. But here he was.

The sky was a weird green color. What book cover had he ended up in this time? Someone always wanted to add some twist on what had already been done. Mix up a mammoth with a guy in armor and maybe someone would buy the book. These days it was the only way for an actor to make money. Apart from a few RL stage productions, everything had become computerized and now hologrammed.

They used to use living people as store manikins, now they were used as models for story plotting. The actors were put on set and then left to react, while the author was plugged in and writing. “Write what you know,” it was said. Well, now they wrote what they could watch happen. Reality writing they called it. He was getting paid to make it interesting—best to be getting on with it.

All he could do was ride. So he rode. West.

He was supposed to be on a simulator, imagining it and posing for movement modeling. But this felt, looked, and smelled like a real mammoth. Or at least a real animal, which he’d smelled on occasion. He’d never been close to one of the cloned mammoths.

The beast seemed tractable, and responded like a well-bred horse. Though due to its height he mounted a lot higher, and it swayed. The saddle was oddly shaped, and Phil knew his thigh tendons would ache after a while. He was spread pretty wide.

“I think I’ll call you ‘Lumber,’ if you have no objections, my friend.”

The mammoth seemed almost to shrug, and trudged on. Phil swayed atop it. The landscape seemed bleak and deserted but he was wary. The armor he was wearing had to be for protection against something; it would be no use against a charging mammoth. The spear worried him too; there had to be an opponent lurking somewhere in this scene.

“Stop telling yourself it’s not real. It’s real for as long as you’re in it. You’re paid to do the job.” Lumber twitched an ear at the sound of his voice and Phil realized he had actually spoken out loud. This place was too quiet. He didn’t think much of the author if this was how they wrote up a scene. There were no animal sounds, no birds and no breezes either. It was about as cardboard a setting as you could get—just Phil and Lumber. It could be a travel book, except there was nowhere to be traveling that he could see. It could have been an adventure story except nothing had happened yet. Phil even found himself hoping for a cliché to happen—where was the damsel to rescue or the beast to slay? He’d be glad of a damsel for once, even if she was as cardboard as the rest of this story. Or silicone.

“I bet it’s some damned bestseller trying for ‘mood,’” he muttered.

He noticed he could smell. It was earthy, dusty, with a hint of vegetation. The hazy sky resolved into mackerel stratus clouds, but remained green. Wind soughed softly. No, it blew in lazy breezes. It was almost as if the stupid author’s brain was in his. At least it was a real world now, though, not just a TV shot.

TV? That was an old term. Where had he come up with that?

The ground textured into hardpan with clumps of brush and grass; arid semi-desert.

He hoped the poor cover artist would have more to go on than this. It didn’t offer much. It would be a shame to waste good talent on cliché blahness.

How the hell did he know it was going to be a good artist? He knew so, but how?

The author was in his brain.

In his head, he heard, “No, you damned plodder, you’re in mine!” The voice was masculine, middle aged, well-modulated.

“Really? Where are you?”

“In my living room in my underwear, trying to beat a deadline.”

So the author was talking to him somehow. Something in the helmet? Except it sounded like internal monologue, only it was dialogue. Swaying on a mammoth while talking to himself. Lovely.

He said, “Good luck. You’re not getting there very fast like this.” Trudging, landscape, nothing else.

The voice replied, “Good luck back to you. If this doesn’t work by tomorrow, you’re going in the trash. That’ll be the end of your sad, boring little tale.”

“That’s not how it works. I’m an actor plugged into VR so you can throw images and let me help you model.”

“What, like Disney did with Bambi back in the Thirties?”

The voice had said, “Thirties,” not “Nineteen thirties.”

He asked, “What the hell year is it where you are?”

“Nineteen ninety-eight.”

“A hundred years ago.”

He could almost hear the eyes roll. “Great. So the imaginary character talking back to me is from the future.”

That sent ripples through him.

The author wasn’t supposed to interact with the actor. That’s what the director was for. Not only was it union rules, authors generally didn’t know how to direct.

He keyed his mic and said, “Director, oversight, please.”

There was no response.

He felt for the mic taped to his jaw, and couldn’t find it. It should be a little rubbery spot, right there. It wasn’t there. Fallen off? Except . . .

The same voice said “Director? You egotists still can’t talk to the real creative mind without an intermediary?”

“‘Real creative mind’?” Phil retorted. “I’ve got nothing to work with but a brindle-coated mammoth in a cross between an animated Old West and the Arabian desert, wearing medieval armor . . . wait, this is completely ridiculous. What are you smoking?”

“It’s called ‘fantasy.’”

“It still needs to make sense,” he insisted. He badly wanted it to make sense. He thought of dismounting and running for the studio door, but he wasn’t sure where it was, or if it was.

The author said, “It does. Or it will. This is the rough draft.”

“Yeah, this isn’t my first LASR gig, dude. Plotting. Planning.”

“It’s called ‘they cut a story and I have a deadline to make.’ Anyway, I work best free form.”

Yes, this guy really did sound like an author. Phil tried to shake his head, but the helmet hindered him.

He said, “I can’t tell it from here.”

“No? Watch this.”

The wind changed into buffets, then a shadow crossed overhead. He looked up and blinked.

It wasn’t quite a dragon, nor a pterodactyl. For one thing, it had a beak like a toucan.

“That’s pretty good,” he said. “Vivid, at least. You have my attention. What does it do?”

“Yeah, I’m working on that.”

“I’m curious.”

“Don’t be. I borrowed that,” the author admitted.

The Toucanodactyl, Toucansaurus, whatever it was, hovered into an angled stoop like a seagull awaiting a piece of popcorn, from that ferry ride when he was twelve. It remained in a hover.

The author said, “I’m glad you remember that. I’d forgotten.”

“Just doing my job,” he said. “Okay, so I’m Phil. What do I call you?” The creature’s wings blew gusts in tempo.

“I like being ‘God.’ Or so the joke goes. But I hate lording it over my characters. I’d rather be on good terms. Call me Joseph.”

“Well, the director isn’t in the loop, so let’s do be on good terms.” Yes, please. This was too creepy. Friendship with the voices in his head was better than the alternative.

Joseph said, “This ‘director’ thing. You seem to seriously believe you’re from my future, and real.”

He replied, “I sure as hell hope I am. Though things are a bit hazy on getting on set. I remember my past, I see the present, but the sequence is vague.”

“Try now.”

Yes, there it was, gearing up, getting briefed, reviewing the basics of the script, which were still vague, then into the environment room, which . . . yes, looked like a 1990s TV studio he’d seen once online.

“Oh, shit.”

“Told you,” Joseph said. “It’s my universe.”

“And yet I remember a past that includes your era.”

“Of course you do. Do you remember two thousand ten, though?”

He thought back. “Not directly. I remember some stupid protests, airborne drones being used in battle, financial crises in Europe and an America that got worse. War in the Middle East.”

Joseph snorted. “That’s a copout. There’s always war in the Middle East. There is now. Everyone with a brain knows it’s going to get worse. And do you notice you talk like me? We’ll need to fix that.”

His brain roiled and he almost vomited.

“Oh, gods, don’t do that, I beg thee.”

The Toucansaurus cawed and settled.

He felt a bit safer with that thing grounded.

He tried again. “Dammit, Joseph, don’t make me talk like a cliché high fantasy warrior.”

“Yeah, I’m working on that, too.”

The Toucan spoke, in a voice musical and deep, a baritone.

“You think you have problems,” it said, in a human voice from that monstrous beak. “I’m told my name is Buttercup.”

Phil winced. “Better change that fast.”

The lizardbird said, “It’s better than Sam. This writer is atrocious with names.”

“Yes I am,” Joseph said. “Work in progress, okay?”

Phil said, “Just keep in mind that apparently our lives depend upon your work in progress. I’d like to return to my, very real to me, present, when you get done.”

“I’m not used to letting characters live. But let me see what I can do.”

“Please.” Oh, hell, not one of those angsty, everyone-has-to-die for pathos types.

This wasn’t what he signed up for, and scale plus per diem wasn’t enough for it. A little shaking around in set was inevitable. Nausea, vomiting, psychic connections with the author and potential death called for a contract review.

Joseph said, “I always hated you union types, but in this case I do sympathize. But you need to get the hell out of my mind or I’ll want to kill you.”

At least his voice was outside Phil’s head now. But it came from the sky, loudly, much like some deity. That wasn’t an improvement.

“Are we separated?” he asked.

Joseph said, “Yes, at least enough to work. Okay, we need an interesting universe. Let me think what’s been done.”

The dust stirred, rose, and other mounted troops appeared, in garish armor on mammoths, mastodons and woolly rhinos.

“Going Paleo, are we?”

John said, “That’s from some other story I’m working on for next year. It’s warmup.”

“And the enemy? We must be fighting something.”

There was more stirring, and across from them, cowboys on Camptosauri.

A brawl between cavalry didn’t suggest a good outcome.

He said, “That’s some imagination there, Joseph. I can’t help but notice they have revolvers.”

“Yeah, but Thirty Eight Long Colt shouldn’t penetrate your armor.”

“‘Shouldn’t’?”

“As far as I know. I guess we’ll find out.”

“This still makes no sense. And I’m getting ill again.” He wasn’t sure if the nausea was related to the world change, Lumber’s movement, or feeling his impending doom.

“Good. Once you get it all out you’ll feel better.”

Phil leaned sideways, puked hard, and splashed vomit over his armor and Lumber’s coat.

“Sorry, friend,” he gasped.