by David Drake
Ten yards from where Lorne hung and twenty feet below the roof beam, the baize curtain of the pipe loft twitched. Lorne froze in fearful immobility.
The creature had been able to leap the width of a street carrying the weight of an adult; its strength must be as awesome as was the rigidity of its armor. Whether or not it could drive its sting through Lorne's brace, it could assuredly rip him to collops if it realized he was awake.
The curtain moved again, the narrow ivory tip of a pincer lifting it slightly. The creature was watching Lorne.
Ben carried three armor-piercing rounds in his. 357 Magnum for punching through car doors. Lorne tried to remember whether the revolver had remained in Ben's hand as he fell. There was no image of that in Lorne's mind, only the torchlike muzzle blasts of his own shotgun. Slim as it was, his only hope was that the jacketed bullets would penetrate the creature's exoskeleton though the soft buckshot had not.
Lorne twisted his upper torso out of the hole for a closer look at Ben, making his own cocoon rock angrily. The baize lifted further. The streetlight lay across it in a pale band. Why didn't the creature scuttle out to finish the business?
Brief motion waked a flash of scintillant color from the pipe loft. The curtain flapped closed as if a volley of shots had ripped through it. Lorne recognized the reflex: the panic of a spider when a stick thrusts through its web. Not an object, though; the light itself, weak as it was, had slapped the creature back.
Ben's bright flashlight had not stopped it when necessity drove, but the monster must have felt pain at human levels of illumination. Its eyes were adapted to starlight or the glow of a sun immeasurably fainter than that of Earth. "Where did you come from, you bastard?" Lorne whispered.
Light. It gave him an idea and he fumbled out his butane lighter, adjusting it to a maximum flame. The sheathes were relatively thin over the victims' faces to aid transpiration. At the waist, though, where a bulge showed Ben's arm locked to his torso, the membrane was thick enough to be opaque in the dim light. Lorne bent dangerously over, cursing the stiffness of his neck brace. Holding the inch-high jet close, he tried to peer through Ben's cocoon. Unexpectedly the fabric gave a little and Lorne bobbed forward, bringing the flame in contact with the material sheathing Ben.
The membrane sputtered, kissing Lorne's hand painfully. He jerked back and the lighter flicked away. It dropped, cold and silent until it cracked on the floor forty feet below. Despite the pattern of light over it, the curtain to the loft was shifting again. Lorne cursed in terror.
A line of green fire sizzled up the side of Ben's cocoon from the point at which the flame had touched it. The material across his face flared. The policeman gave no sign of feeling his skin curl away. The revolver in his hand winked green.
Lorne screamed. His own flexible prison lurched and sagged like heated polyethylene. Ben was wrapped in a cancerous hell that roared and heaved against the roofbeams as a live thing. Green tongues licked yellow-orange flames from the dry wood as well. Lorne's cocoon and that to the other side of Ben were deforming in the furnace heat. Another lurch and Lorne had slipped twenty feet, still gripped around the waist in a sack of blue membrane. He was gyrating like a top.
The loft curtain had twitched higher each time it spun past his vision.
The bottom of Ben's cocoon burned away and he plunged past Lorne, face upward and still afire. Bone crunched as he hit. The body rebounded a few inches to fall again on its face. The roar of the flames muffled Lorne's wail of rage. His own elongated capsule began to flow. Flames grasped at Lorne's support. Before they could touch the sheathing, the membrane pulled a last few inches and snapped like an overstretched rubber band. The impact of the floor smashed Lorne's jaw against his neck brace, grinding each tortured vertebra against the next. He did not lose consciousness, but the shock paralyzed him momentarily as thoroughly as the creature's sting could have done.
Bathed in green light and the orange of the blazing roof panels, the scorpion-thing thrust its thorax into the nave. It walking legs gripped the flat surface, dimpling the plaster. The creature turned upward toward the fire, three more cocoons alight and their hungry flames lapping across the beams. Then, parti-colored by the illumination, its legs shifted and the opal eyes trained on Lorne. The light must be torture to it, muffling in indecision its responses, but it was about to act.
A small form wrapped in a flaming shroud dropped to thump the floor beside Lorne. His arms would move again. He used them to strip the remaining sheathing from his legs. It clung as the heat of the burning corpse began to melt the material. Something writhed from a crackling tumor on the child's neck. The thing was finger-long and seemed to paw the air with a score of tiny legs; its opalescent eyes proved its parentage. The creature brought more than paralysis to its victims: it was a gravid female.
Green flame touched the larva. It burst in a pustulant smear.
The adult went mad. Its legs shot it almost the length of the nave to rebound from a sidewall in a cloud of plaster. The creature's horizontally flattened tail ruddered it instinctively short of the fire as it leapt upward to the roof peak. It clung there in pale horror against the wood, eyes on the advancing flames. Three more bodies fell, splashing like ginkgo fruits.
Lorne staggered upright. The fire hammered down at him without bringing pain. His body had no feeling whatever. Ben's hair had burned. His neck and scalp were black where skin remained, red where it had cracked open to the muscle beneath. The marbled background showed clearly the tiny, pallid hatchling trying to twist across it.
Lorne's toe brushed the larva onto the floor. His boot heel struck it, struck again and twisted. Purulent ichor spurted between the leather and the boards. Lorne knelt. In one motion he swung Ben across his shoulders and stood, just as he had after their helicopter had nosed into the trees and exploded. Logic had been burned out of Lorne's mind, leaving only a memory of friendship. He did not look up. As his mechanical steps took him and his burden through the door they had entered, a shadow wavered across them. The creature had sprung back into the loft.
Lorne stumbled to his knees in the parking lot. The church had been rotten and dry. Orange flames fluffed through the roof in several places, thrusting corkscrews of sparks into the night sky. Twelve feet of roof slates thundered into the nave. Flame spewed up like a secondary explosion. There were sirens in the night.
Without warning, the east facade of the tower collapsed into the parking lot. Head-sized chunks of Tennessee-stone smashed at the patrol car, one of them missing Lorne by inches. He looked up, blank-eyed, his hands lightly touching the corpse of his friend. Of its own volition, the right hand traced down Ben's shoulder to the raw flesh of his elbow. The tower stairs spiraled out of the dust and rubble, laid bare to the steel framework when the wall fell. On the sagging floor of the pipe loft rested a machine like no other thing on Earth, and the creature was inside it. Tubes of silvery metal rose cradle-form from a base of similar metal. The interstices were not filled with anything material, but the atmosphere seemed to shiver, blurring the creature's outline.
And Lorne's hand was unwrapping Ben's stiff fingers from the grips of his revolver.
Lorne stood again, his left hand locking his right on the butt of the big magnum. He was familiar with the weapon: it was the one Ben had carried in Nam, the same tool he had used for five of his thirteen kills. It would kill again tonight.
Even in the soaring holocaust the sharp crack of Lorne's shot was audible. Lorne's forearms rocked up as a unit with the recoiling handgun. The creature lurched sideways to touch the shimmering construct around it. A red surface discharge rippled across the exoskeleton from the point of contact. Lorne fired again. He could see the armor dull at his point of aim in the center of the thorax.
Again the creature jumped. Neither bullet had penetrated, but the splashing lead of the second cut an upright from the machine. The creature spun, extending previously unglimpsed tendrils from the region of its mouth parts. They flickered over a control plat
e in the base. Machinery chimed in response.
The shivering quickened. The machine itself and the thing it enclosed seemed to fade. Lorne thumb-cocked the magnum, lowered the red vertical of the front sight until it was even with the rear notch; the creature was a white blur beyond them. The gun bucked back hard when he squeezed; the muzzle blast was sharper, flatter, than before. The first of the armor-piercing bullets hit the creature between the paired tendrils. The exoskeleton surrounding them shattered like safety glass struck by a brick.
The creature straightened in silent agony, rising onto its hind legs with its tail lying rigidly against its back. Its ovipositor was fully extended, thumb-thick and six inches long.
"Was it fun to kill them, bug?" Lorne screamed. "Was it as much fun as this is?" His fourth shot slammed, dimpling a belly plate which then burst outward in an ugly gush of fluids. The creature's members clamped tightly about its spasming thorax. The tail lashed the uprights in red spurts. The machine was fading and the torn paneling of the loft was beginning to show through the dying creature's body.
There was one shot left in the cylinder and Lorne steadied his sights on the control plate. He had already begun taking up the last pressure when he stopped and lowered the muzzle. No, let it go home, whatever place or time that might be. Let its fellows see that Earth was not their hunting ground alone. And if they came back anyway-if they only would!
There was a flash as penetrating as the first microsecond of a nuclear blast. The implosion dragged Lorne off his feet and sucked in the flames so suddenly that all sound seemed frozen. Then both sidewalls collapsed into the nave and the ruins of the tower twisted down on top of them. In the last instant, the pipe loft was empty of all but memory.
A fire truck picked its way through the rubble in the parking lot. Its headlights flooded across the figure of a sandy-haired man wearing scorched clothing and a neck brace. He was kneeling beside a body, and the tears were bright on his face.
The Automatic Rifleman
Fritz Leiber is credited with developing the horror story with an urban setting. His Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series is more a parallel development to Robert E. Howard's work than it's a copy (compare Le Fanu's Carmilla with Stoker's Dracula for another case of "similar" not meaning "the same"). And for horror in an SF milieu, it'd be hard to better, say, "A Bad Day for Sales" or "A Pail of Air."
I stole this idea from Leiber's urban fantasy "The Automatic Pistol."
Well, it's not quite that simple. Vergil was regularly accused of stealing from Homer, to which he would reply, "Why don't you try it yourself? If you did, you'd understand that it's easier to filch Hercules' club than it is to steal a verse from Homer." But "The Automatic Rifleman" wouldn't exist in the form it does were it not for Leiber's literally seminal story.
If you like my work, go out and read everything Fritz Leiber wrote before, say, 1960. I don't know of a writer with a more varied and brilliant take on every subject he touched.
The story itself is a wish-fulfillment fantasy like a great deal of other horror fiction, some of it very good. The story posits the notion that things are in their present state because some external force is working to make them bad; in other words, the world's problems are not the result of mankind's own actions.
I wish I could really believe that was true.
Coster was waiting for them in the darkened room, hidden by the greater shadow of the couch. His face was as lean and hard-edged as the automatic rifle he held pointed at the door. "Where's the goddam light?" Penske muttered. He found the switch, threw it, and froze with his hand halfway down to the knife in his boot.
Davidson bumped into Penske from behind and cursed, her lips twisting into the sneer she kept ready when she was around the short man. "Move your-" she began before she saw why Penske had stopped. Then, without hesitation, she cried, "George, look out!"
"Too late," said Coster with a bailiff's smirk and the least motion of the rifle muzzle to bring it to the attention of George Kerr. The black man in suit and tie loomed behind his two companions. His eyes were open and apparently guileless, shuttering a mind that had already realized that the flimsy apartment walls would be no obstacle to rifle bullets. "But we're all friends here," Coster went on, his grin broadening.
"Then I suggest we all come in and discuss matters," said Kerr in a cultured voice, showing his bad front tooth as he spoke. His fingers touched Davidson's right elbow and halted the stealthy motion of her hand toward her open purse.
"Sure," said Coster, nodding, "but stay bunched in that corner, if you will." His head and not the rifle twitched a direction. "Until you're convinced of my good intentions, you'll be tempted to-put yourselves in danger. We don't want that."
"Who the hell are you?" Penske demanded, shuffling sideways as directed. An angry flush turned his face almost as dark as that of Kerr beside him.
"My name's Coster," the rifleman said. "Agfield told me where I'd find you."
Davidson whirled angrily toward Kerr. "I told you not to trust that bastard!" she said. "Somebody ought to take one of his basketballs and stuff it-"
"Dee, that's enough," the big man said, his eyes still on the rifleman. He had closed the hall door softly behind him. Nothing in his manner called attention to the pistol holstered in the small of his back.
"He said you could use a rifleman for what you had in mind," Coster amplified. "We're what you need."
"We?"asked Penske tautly. The muscles beneath his leather jacket were as rigid as the bones to which they were anchored, for he recognized even better than the others the menace of the weapon which covered them.
"Me," said Coster, "and him." His left forefinger tapped the gunbarrel where it projected from its wooden shroud. His right hand stayed firm on the rifle's angled handgrip, finger ready on the trigger.
Calmly, Kerr said, "Agfield doesn't know what we have in mind."His right hand was now loose at his side, no longer restraining Davidson.
"Sure he does," said the rifleman, flashing his tight-lipped grin again. "Kawanishi, the Japanese Prime Minister. And I'm here to make sure you get him."
For a moment, no one even breathed. Coster leaned forward, his right elbow still gripping the gunstock to his ribs. He said earnestly, "Look, if I were the police, would I be talking to you? The whole World Proletarian Caucus is right here, right in front of… us. And if it was trials, convictions, they were after-the evidence ison you, or at least outside in your car. You blew away a teller in La Prensa, and you've still got the gun, don't you? And the one that killed that little girl in Mason City?"
Davidson mumbled a curse and looked hot-eyed at Penske.
"But we're friends," Coster repeated. Very deliberately, he rotated the automatic rifle so that its muzzle brake pointed at the ceiling. The rubber butt rested on his thigh.
"Friends," said Kerr. "Then we should get comfortable." He took off his suit coat and turned, as deliberate as Coster, to drape it over the back of a chair. The grip of the big Colt was a square black silhouette against his light shirt.
Everyone eased a little. Coster laid the rifle across his knees, one hand still caressing the receiver of the weapon. Davidson and Penske both lit cigarettes, the latter by flicking the head of a kitchen match with his thumbnail. He tossed the wooden sliver toward a wastebasket. It missed, but he ignored it as it continued to smoulder on the cheap carpet.
Kerr took one of the straight chairs from the kitchen-dinette and sat backwards on it, facing in toward the living room and Coster. The pistol did not gouge at him that way. "Penske, why don't you bring things in from the van," he said.
The short man glowered, but his expression suddenly cleared and he walked to the door. "I'll knock when I want you to open," he said as he left the room.
Davidson moved over beside Kerr, her fingertips brushing the point of his shoulder."You sound very confident about your ability to use that gun," the big man said with a gesture toward the oddly shaped rifle. "But I don't know that I'd care to make plans based
on something… suppositious."
Coster's tongue clicked in amusement. "Do you want references? Somebody who saw us put away Kennedy? Or King?"
Davidson snorted a puff of smoke. "You don't look like a fool," Kerr said.
"I'm not-not any longer," the rifleman replied. He shook his head as if to clear something from his hair. He went on, "What we've done doesn't matter. You won't believe me, and it doesn't matter. But if you have some place for a demonstration, we'll-demonstrate."
Kerr nodded. "That would be best," he said neutrally.
Coster suddenly turned and lowered the rifle again toward the door."Speaking of fools," he said, "your Mr. Penske-"
There was no knock. The door slammed back."All right you-"Penske shouted before he realized that the fat muzzle of the automatic rifle was centered on his breastbone. The swarthy man held a carbine waist high, his left hand locked on the curving 30-round magazine.
Obviously furious but with no more sound than his chair made clattering on the floor, Kerr strode toward the disconcerted Penske. With his left hand the black gripped the carbine and tugged the smaller man back within the room. Then his right hand slapped Penske's head against the wall. He stepped away, holding the carbine muzzle-down."And if you'd used it, you damned fool?"the big man demanded."If you'd brought the police down on us here, what chance would our plans have had then? What chance?"
"You didn't have to hit me," Penske said, not quite meeting Kerr's eyes.
Contemptuously, the black unloaded the carbine, tossing the magazine onto a stuffed chair and ejecting the round in the chamber. It winked against the carpet. "Get the things out of the van," he said.
Kerr had rented the furnished apartment a month before, but that was as far as preparations had gone. The can-opener beside the sink was broken and Penske, grumbling, had to hack their dinners open with his heavy-bladed dagger.