From Planet Texas, With Love and Aliens

by Pat Hauldren

  ***

  C. L. Nichols is a writer living in Ft. Worth, Texas. His writing style is often likened to that of Stephen King.

  TWO-LANE BLACKTOP

  by C. L. Nichols

  Rain had let up. Patrick twisted the turn lever, setting the wipers to intermittent. A few drops gathered on the windshield before the blades stuttered across, flicked them away. In the pickup’s low beams, slashes of white glinted sharply on the blacktopped rural road but the edges faded to shadowy murk. He focused on the headlights’ reach, squinted as he passed an abandoned car on the shoulder.

  Patrick glanced into the rearview and, as expected, found only night. This was no high-traffic throughway, and the thunderstorm kept away backroad boozers.

  When he looked ahead, a white arm jutted from the darkness into the opposite lane on his left. A woman’s face flashed by, mouth open wide. Patrick thought he heard her muted cry.

  He jammed the brake. In the over-sized side mirror, her shape turned red. The truck slued sideways, tires shrieking. The rear end swung around and slid to a stop, front angled toward her bent figure.

  Stooped and sagging in the truck lights, she remained red. The woman was matted in blood.

  Something large came out of the dark, loomed over her, then took hold and pulled her out of the light.

  This time he was sure when she screamed.

  Patrick reached to unlock his door, paused. What just happened? Who, or what, had grabbed her? Could it be a trap? Maybe, but he could only assume she was in danger.

  He unlocked the door, pulled the handle. As one foot dropped to the macadam, he groped behind his seat for the tire iron. Gripping the heavy tool, he stood, faced where they’d gone.

  Patrick took a step forward. Then another. His cautious bootheels echoed through the dark.

  Then stopped.

  A five-foot circle of pavement, slathered in blood mixed with a thick mucus fluid, shimmered like oil on water. The heavy rain had let up less than ten minutes ago. This was more recent.

  Patrick stared down at the gore then snapped his head up at an odd sound. Not footsteps. Something dragging itself forward? Something at the side of the road, just out of the truck lights. Something large.

  He raised the tire iron, waited for it. Whatever it was.

  A raindrop struck the top of his head. Others followed. The staccato sound on the pavement quickened, became a downpour. Patrick could no longer hear the dragging noise, and now he could hardly see the weapon he clutched head-high.

  Something bumped him. Something solid.

  He swung the tire tool, connected. It was like smacking a slab of beef. There was no reaction. No scream of pain, no bellow of rage.

  It shoved again. Patrick was pushed away, nearly falling. He caught himself and spun around, bringing the iron down as he turned. The wet metal slipped through his grasp, arced into space. The storm masked its fall.

  Emptyhanded, Patrick turned toward his pickup. Its light, distant and watery, was a beacon of escape. Where was the creature, and what about the woman?

  Water on the roadway splashed waist high as he began to run. He twisted his head to look back, but the black rain was a closed curtain. Patrick looked ahead, tried to make sense of the situation. Survival was his goal. Just get out, come back with help.

  Something stumbled into the roadway in front of him. Backlit by the headlights, it was smaller than he’d thought. It dropped onto the road, lifted one arm toward him. He stopped, stared. The woman.

  Patrick searched the dark at the edge of the road, swiveling his head side to side, then hurried forward to kneel beside her. She groaned, struggling to speak, but no intelligible words came forth.

  Covered in the same blood and mucus as the mess on the pavement, her mouth formed the gash of an open wound. Even the pounding rain did nothing to wash it away.

  Like afterbirth, the gummy slime coated her entire body. The thick fluid had begun to harden. The glaze cracked as she moved, lifting herself and forcing out breath.

  “Help me.” Her speech was strained, and she gasped with the effort.

  Light splayed across her face, gave it a glossy sheen that distorted her features. The substance was quickly setting, and she’d soon be in serious danger.

  The light...

  An idling engine cut through the downpour. Patrick turned, saw a man standing behind the open door of an older pickup, watching.

  “Having trouble?” the man yelled, cupping his hands around his mouth, keeping behind the door. He obviously didn’t trust the situation. “Hey, what’s wrong with her?”

  The man reached back inside for something, killed his engine. He left the lights on, a bridge between the two trucks.

  “Stay back,” Patrick shouted. “Something’s here.”

  Patrick waved at the man, who either didn’t understand or else ignored the gesture. He stepped from behind the door and came forward, one hand held by his side.

  Something moved into the road between them. A dark mass, larger than the pickups but impossible for Patrick to distinguish form or figure, settled over the man. The flat report of a gunshot echoed, then a scream sliced through the storm, abruptly cut off.

  The dim headlights beyond the deluge became visible again. The road was empty

  Patrick looked down at the woman, who seemed oblivious to anything going on.

  “Let’s go,” he said then helped her stand as far as she was able. “My truck.” They needed to get away, or at least find a better weapon.

  With no warning, the dark mass blotted out the headlights of his own pickup.

  Had the creature circled around that quickly, or were there more than one? He looked toward the fading lights of the other man’s truck, far away.

  “Come on.” Patrick turned them around, made for the other vehicle.

  With each splash of their feet, he expected to be caught. Water streamed off their combined shape. They slogged through the shallow stream that the highway had become.

  The light behind them brightened. The thing had moved again.

  Rain had let up but remained steady. Soaked and trembling, Patrick supported the woman to the driver side door of the old pickup. As he propped her beside the rusty door, he saw the stranger on the ground near the rear of the truck. Checking that the woman wouldn’t fall, he hurried back and knelt next to the man.

  Nausea gripped him and he gagged. The man’s head lay on the ground, neatly scissored from its body beside it.

  A pistol lay in running water beside one hand that jittered in the current. Patrick lifted the gun from the thin stream, stood, then was slammed against the rear fender.

  He put the gun into the slab of meat and pulled the trigger. The shot was muffled as the bullet entered the creature.

  It slammed him again into the truck. He dropped the gun, shoved with both arms. The thing moved away into the dark.

  Patrick looked down for the handgun but couldn’t find it. He turned back to the pickup.

  The woman was gone. The creature must have taken her.

  A dragging sound moving away from the pickup made Patrick step to the edge of the shoulder. Was it fleeing with the woman? He doubted the bullet had made much difference.

  He followed.

  Water rushed halfway up his boots. Even in the dark, Patrick made out the wide furrow left by the creature. The path headed away through tall weeds into the countryside. Rainwater raced downhill and quickly filled the deep ruts.

  Fifty feet out, beside a usually-dry creek bed now flowing swiftly, he came to a huge mound made by chunks of mud. Tracks led to the top of the spiraling heap. Patrick slipped several times as he climbed it, then looked inside, surprised by the light below.

  A bright beam fell upon the woman, slumped to one side of the cavity. A huge mass sat in the center, away from the light, so Patrick couldn’t make out its shape. Against his better judgment, he climbed down into the creature’s lair toward the woman. He needed to get her out of there.

  Near
the bottom of the pit, Patrick glanced at the thick shaft of light that came out of the opposite side. He felt disoriented and couldn’t understand what he was seeing.

  Something large...lowered?...on a thick cable from the source of the light. Patrick squinted. It looked like a man-sized glob of raw meat.

  From out of the dark mass of the creature, something shot up toward the glob. Patrick gasped. It was a claw, attached to a jointed arm. The pincer grabbed the meat, and suddenly the cable tightened and reversed direction. The entire mass of the creature rose with it, the pincer clamped tightly on the bait.

  As large as a city bus, the creature took shape in the bright light. Patrick finally identified its form. A huge crawfish.

  As the line lifted, Patrick reached the cave floor and looked up into the light.

  One huge blue eye pulled back to reveal the grinning face of a freckled, red-haired boy. As the crawfish neared him, the giant stood up in overalls and straw hat. Patrick heard his booming laughter as the crawdad passed through the hole above and disappeared.

  The boy shouted to someone Patrick couldn’t see, then ran away to show his prize catch to whomever else was there.

  Patrick shook his head in disbelief, looked again at the light, then over at the woman. After one last glance into the light, he ran to her, helped her to her feet, then started up the slope toward their own side of the lair.

  Together they climbed out into the rainy night.

  ***

  Recently retired from a business in Brazil, Kendall Furlong’s dream is to write fiction in his native language, English. The issue of teaching old dogs new tricks remains unresolved, but Kendall attempts both by writing a bang-up novel. If he succeeds, then Dave Farland’s workshop deserves a lot of the credit, even if six intensive days of story analysis and practicing techniques reduced his brain to Play-Doh. It also imparted the self-confidence to go on.

  HALLOWEEN MOUSSE

  by Kendall Furlong

  It’s what a balloon feels on a helium bottle at a Halloween party; your head grows lighter, emptier, and possessed of an irrational urge to fly off into the sky. I recognized the sensation; insulin scavenging my blood for the glucose that wasn’t there.

  Damn! I thought, struggling to open my eyes in a world slipping away.

  The girl lying next to me groaned with the pleasure of my kneading her breasts. I stopped. The effort to keep the act going with its deep sensuality shrouded my concentration. I needed to recover from the overdose.

  This is crazy, I thought. I could barely remember her name now even though I’d shot up the extra insulin for her.

  Susan! It came to me. After weeks of putting moves on Susan, she had finally accepted a Halloween date—dinner at my apartment, just the two of us. I prepared a special Halloween menu: For cocktails, “Bloody Twilight” Campari and tonic. Sprinkling trail mix over romaine lettuce produced a salad I wasn’t sure what to do with until I remembered some plastic heather an ex-girlfriend and Emily Brontë fan had given me. With a heather-garlanded bowl, I had “Withering Heights” salad, then a “Werewolf steak” of ground beef accompanied by sautéed vegetables in garlic sauce as the main course. But the piece de resistance was desert—extra butter and Cointreau-laced chocolate “Mousse de Ghoul”. I rather liked that. It’s why I did the extra insulin; I wanted to have enough in my body to deal with the sugar bomb that meal would dump into it so I wouldn’t have to reveal my medical history before she got to know me. First, I wanted to prove diabetics had a life, too.

  Sensing my distress, she held my hand and cooed, “What’s the matter, baby?” guiding it back to her nipple, clearly not wanting to let go of the spell.

  Yesterday, I’d waited for her in the atrium of the office building where we worked to renew my long-standing dinner invitation. She’d never accepted before; always willing to go out, but not to my apartment.

  “I’ll go out with you, but it has to be in public,” she would say, stiff like that. I guess she’d said it so many times it seemed natural so that I got used to it after a while, taking it as a badge of her virtue. Clearly, she didn’t sleep around. And when I accepted her terms, she became vivacious, full of interesting takes on life and fun to be with, which is why I kept asking her out.

  But now fuzz balls were filling my head, clouding my mind. “I’ve got to get some sugar in me,” I said, ignoring the suddenly willing Susan in my bed and trying to fight off onrushing panic.

  “Me too,” she said. Her tone was teasing as she turned to face me. Dark, bottomless eyes peered into mine as she reached out and rendered me helpless with the erotic thrill of her taking me in her hand.

  Without large quantities of sugar, insulin shock follows in less than ten minutes from the first sensation of something going awry inside you. Locating a large, compact supply has to quickly become your sole goal if you’re to survive.

  When I admit to people I’m diabetic; I don’t go into details. It’s the details that scare them: diabetic comas, clogged arteries that restrict circulation in extremities and cause limbs to fall off. Some people get squeamish, and I avoid that part of the story—especially with girls I’m trying to make.

  I’m sure she felt my limpness in her hand and saw my eyes filled with the desperate fear of trying to force myself onto a survival track because she whispered, “It’s all right, sweetie, we have all night.”

  “Wh-what?” I stammered, oblivious. I jumped up, thrashing about for clothes and trying to focus on what she’d said.

  During the course on diabetes I took after my diagnosis, they programed into us a little packet of emotional-physical responses that the onset of insulin shock triggers. These synapses now fired sequentially. The first one instructed; depend on yourself--no one else is likely to know what to do. A sub-routine sent me to the closet to grab a bathrobe to cover my naked body and pushed me toward the door of my apartment.

  By this time Susan had realized something was terribly wrong. She screamed and tried to grab me, to keep me from running out into the street in a bathrobe, but my momentum plunged both of us out into the night and onto the lawn in full view of the heavy traffic of the avenue.

  The orderly row of cars whizzing past faltered as drivers, dismayed or excited by the sight of a naked beauty trying to pull a guy in a bathrobe back into an apartment, lost control and veered from their lanes to the sound of crunching metal and shattering glass.

  “Hey, baby,” a young male voice came from the street, “I’ll do you.” The beginnings of a crowd started gathering on the sidewalk.

  My second programed instruction told me to block out everything and concentrate on finding sucrose. The sub-routine this time searched my brain and came up with a large poster of an ice cream sandwich at the convenience store on the corner. I ran toward it. The impromptu crowd sent a fully exposed Susan scurrying back to into the apartment and momentarily out of action.

  Costumed revealers between me and the corner store yelled “trick or treat." When I cut across the grass, intending to leave the sidewalk to them. A clumsy replica of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock shouted, “Amok Time," wiggling his hands in the air and sticking out his foot to send me sprawling.

  “No treat gets you a trick!” they cried, then falling into hysterical laughter when my bathrobe fell open and exposed my manhood to the world.

  I scrambled, trying to get to my feet, but every movement, every step got harder, and I began to think I wouldn’t make it. My unconscious mind locked in the sugar acquisition algorithm, freeing the conscious one to speculate and I became aware insulin shock had taken possession of my body. It moved when I commanded, but not the way I commanded, writhing instead, uselessly sprawled on the apartment house lawn. I looked up at the heavens where the stars robust enough to shine though city lights twinkled down at me. So this is how it ends I thought. Victim of an unconsummated lay. I wondered if my embarrassment would be sufficient penitence; or, if this were the night God would recover His old reputation for mercy.

  The cha
nge in Susan had astonished me. She had barely tasted the meal, pronounced it “sinfully delicious,” threw her arms around me, and led me straight to bed. Wow, from prude to La Passionaria. Maybe all that passion, walled up inside her, came gushing out when released by the right person—that would be me—and now this shame ending. I closed my eyes to wait for the inevitable.

  I’m not sure the time between bowing to my fate and feeling someone shake me, but when I opened my eyes again Susan kneeled beside me. She held her hand to my face. “Baby, can you hear me?”

  Coming to, I struggled to get out a weak ‘Yes.’

  “Good," she said, “we’ve got to get you back inside.”

  Her presence was beginning to revive me--a testament either to the power of my own sexual urges or to her incredibly passionate sensuality. “I’m diabetic,” I said, fighting to get each word out. “I took an overdose of insulin . . . gotta have lots of sugar.”

  “I know, baby,” she said affectionally. “That was really, really sweet of you.”

  “Wh-what?” I blurted out, blindsided by the revelation of this knowledge.

  “Don’t try to talk now. Come on, up,” she commanded.

  “No, you don’t understand. I don’t have any sugar in the apartment to counteract the insulin.”

  “What about the mousse?” she said, arching her eyebrows with the clear intent to provoke.

  That stopped me. In the panic of finding pure sugar and my programmed reactions, I’d forgotten about the mousse. It was loaded with ingredients convertible to all the pure blood sugar I would ever need. So, with her supporting me, I managed to stand up and hobble back to my apartment.

  Inside, she pulled me away from the table and back to the bed. “No,” I said, “I need the mousse now. There’s not much time left.”