by Chris Winder
Both men inspected the thing as Cletus turned it over in his hands. Then both men inspected the hole it created in the roof of the carport, and then the crater, and the tools it had scattered.
“D’ya think it fell from space”, Cooter asked, his voice full of awe.
Cletus nodded. “It surein’ didn’ fall outta my ass”, he said with a grin and both men laughed. “You think it’s alien? Maybe the guvermint dropped it outta’ some jet or sumthin’?”
Cooter looked thoughtful, spit a great splash of tobacco juice onto the ground and said, “It coulda’ but I ain’t seen no jets today.” He thought about it for a second longer. “Nope, not even one.”
“You ain’t heard-o ‘stealth jets’?”, Cletus said with a roll of his eyes. “You can’t see them. They’re stealth. Tha’s what it means. I seen it on the tee-vee.” Cletus stretched out ‘tee-vee’ into two long syllables to demonstrate the infallibility of the source.
Cooter looked thoughtful again, and after a few seconds of deep contemplation, shrugged and smiled, revealing dark, tobacco-stained teeth and dozens of small, black, shredded leaves sticking out from the corners of his mouth.
“What we got here”, Cletus continued, “is a bo-na-fide space gun.”
After a moment of consideration, both men whooped their best rebel yell and danced in a circle. Somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line a Confederate soldier rolled over in his grave.
Cooter stopped dancing first and stared at the device he now recognized to be a space-gun, though he thought it might still be a functional toilet plunger as well and asked, “Whaddya’ think we should do wid it?”
Cletus stopped dancing and looked from his friend, to the space-gun, and back to his friend. Then he grinned, revealing that most of his teeth, just like the little piggy in the nursery rhyme, had gone to market. “We’s gonna shoot stuff”, was his reply. Then both men cheered again.
After running to Cooter’s truck to grab the twelve-pack of beer, absolutely necessary equipment for fixin’ things and shootin’ things, Cletus took off at a gallop into the woods. It suddenly occurred to him, moments later, that he wasn’t wearing any shoes. It wasn’t so much that he remembered he was shoeless, as was reminded that he wasn’t wearing shoes. The sensation of a pile of Vietnamese potbellied pig poop, still warm, squishing between his toes brought the fact to his attention. Cletus looked down at the mess and wiggled his toes. The poop didn’t fall off like he was hoping, but instead seemed to form little balls and roll-up under his toes becoming even more tightly packed than before. “Clyde!”, he hollered. “You stupid pig! I’m fixin’ ta’ kill, cook an’ eat ya! You better run, ya’ dang-blasted pig!”
Cletus looked to Cooter to go fetch him a stick or something, but the man looked like he was about to laugh, both hands over his mouth and eyes dancing. Laughin’ at me, of all things, as if’n he ain't never stepped in poop before, Cletus thought to himself. Then Cletus remembered something. He had a bo-na-fide space-gun in his hands. He began to wonder if the first thing he should shoot should be Cooter. Lord knows he’d asked for it enough times, but Cletus just couldn’t do it. Not only did he not really know if the space-gun worked, their mamas went to church together and he’d never hear the end of it.
Cooter seemed to sense he was in danger, and did the only thing a proper Southern gentleman could do at a time like this. He frantically searched the ground nearby for a stick with the proper length and girth to assist his friend in the removal of the fecal matter from between his toes and from the bottom, and what appeared to also be the top, of his foot. He began to sweat because all the sticks in the immediate area were too green, too short, or too brittle to get the job done.
Cooter shrugged and when Cletus scowled at him and adjusted his grip on the space-gun, the message was delivered. Cooter scurried away, nose pointed at the dirt in a desparate search for a poop-scraping-stick. Then cooter bent down and held up a stick which, Cletus had to admit, was probably the most perfect poop-scraping-stick he’d ever seen.
Without saying a word, Cletus held his hand out and took the proffered poop-scraping-stick and used it for it’s purpose, the only reason such a perfect stick could have been created. The job went quickly, as expected from such a perfect stick and when he was done, Cletus inspected it closely. Not so closely that he could discern the smell of the last thing the pig ate, but close enough to try to figure out how he could preserve such a perfect poop-scraping-stick for later use. Finding no way to do so he regrettably had to toss it aside.
“You gon’ put sum shooz on now?”, Cooter asked.
“Nah”, Cletus said. “Sun’s ‘bout to go down in a little bit here. We’s got sum shootin’ to do! Let’s go!” With that, the two men whooped again and began jumping through the tall weeds like they were a couple of deer trying to outrun a wolf. Somewhere in the Deep South, a confederate soldier rolled over in his grave again.
Once the two reached the edge of the woods, they began to slowly stalk, just as they had when they were sneaking up on the unknown source of the explosion. This time, however, they really were trying to sneak up on something. They weren’t sure what that something was, but as long as it ran away if they missed and they had something to chase, that was good enough. Deer season was over, squirrel season was all year long, but because Cletus owned eighty acres, give or take, of these woods and the property lines weren’t all that clear, and he was fairly certain that what he was holding wasn’t a “firearm” per sé, both men were pretty sure they weren’t exactly ‘huntin’.
* * *
Admiral Eekbo stood in front of the command chair of the assault ship looking as majestic as a king, riding a chariot drawn by six dozen white stallions. Of course, he would say that he felt like an emperor, gliding on a Dithnar War Skiff being drawn by a thousand slaves, but the idea was roughly the same.
He imagined himself receiving medals upon medals from Admiral-General Froop of the Kalaxian College of Warfare himself. The adulation of his peers, the talkshows, the movie scripts, the book rights and the females. Perhaps , he thought, I could get a position at the college . Possibly the Senate . The Admiral allowed himself a few moments to daydream about all of the possibilities.
Eekbo was proud. He was surrounded by his most loyal, brave and trusted bridge crew. He knew this because some of the bridge crew hadn’t made it over from the command ship to this one before the self-destruct sequence completed, so these had the be the most loyal and brave ones. Furthermore, who else was he going to trust?
He and his crew were all clad in Kalaxian battle armor, resplendent and hard as the emperor’s will. It was constructed of seven hundred and three interlocking plates of metal, each one swiveling and gliding against one another to provide complete protection against nearly any known weapon an enemy could unleash against them.
Each plate of the battle armor was hooked and barbed to dissuade an enemy from attempting to grapple with its user. Though Kalaxians had been known to grapple with their opponents, their very flexible bodies putting the hooks and barbs to good use. A Kalaxian could envelop an opponent, squeeze them tightly and either shake the life out of them or slowly draw armored, barbed and hooked tentacles across sensitive-looking parts.
Kalaxians weren’t strong, physically, but their battle armor more than made up for it. Each plate was powered and enhanced whatever the wearer wanted to do. Battle-armored Kalaxians could, and did, hoist their enemies into the air and rip them in half with their armored tentacles. They could knock-over battle tanks, bend great metal beams and slither at speeds no enemy that survived ever forgot.
Battle armor also came with enough power in its batteries to fight for an entire week without recharging. It administered painkillers when its sophisticated artificial intelligence detected such drugs were necessary. It also contained a very small entertainment unit to keep its wearer entertained during lulls in the battle. The wearer could watch holo-vids featuring the latest torture technology, always a favorite, soap opera
s featuring captured slaves, who would always be tortured at the end and cooking shows, where the food was tortured by being cooked alive.
Then came the moment Admiral Eekbo had been waiting for. The invasion was ready, as reported by a little green light that popped to life on his control panel. Battle lust boiled within his armor, but the air-tight seals prevented the pheromone from escaping. This was a fact that he was already aware of, but the Senate knew what they were doing. If they didn’t believe that a crew could be motivated by the buttery scent of bloodlust from their Admiral, they had good reason, he knew.
“Pilot”, the Admiral ordered, “begin the assault! Battle stations!”
* * *
Both men had already worked their way through half of the beer, leaving a trail of aluminum breadcrumbs behind them.
Then a target of opportunity presented itself and both men had to stifle a squeal of joy. Cletus turned to his friend and uttered words that meant tragedy or victory, infamy or reverence, was about to take place, “Hold my beer”.
A buzzard, sitting high in one of the trees flapped it’s enormous wings as if to say, “I am a bird, a majestic creature, born to…”. And that’s probably where the bird’s thoughts ended, because Cletus took aim, pulled what he figured to be the trigger and turned the bird, the top third of the hundred year old tree and several seconds later, the assault ship of the invading alien force into a shower of sparks wide enough to block out the rest of the forest. The tree poured thick smoke from its tall stump.
The space-gun Cletus and Cooter had found was actually… a space-gun… of sorts. The shipbuilders of Hossenblog designed the Hoss-Master 2000 and revolutionized dung-chute cleaning. Technicians used to have to either crawl with magna-pads or be lowered on spider-strings down the chutes. Nobody wanted that. No matter how much you scrubbed afterward, the smell of dung, especially Hossenblog dung, never came out. With this new tool, since dung-chutes were just openings to the vacuum of space through which dung was jettisoned, and sometimes got clogged, the technician could just stick the Hoss-Master 2000 into the exit-hole, pull the trigger, and vaporize each and every undigested particle in the tube. Shiny and bright once again.
For those who purchased a Hoss-Master 2000, a waiver had to be signed. The waiver, among hundreds of other do-nots, warned the operator to never, ever, ever fire the Hoss-Master 2000 in atmosphere. The results would be astronomically bad. Twenty-two pages of diagrams, photographs and charts explained exactly how bad.
The two men stood in silence mouths hanging open so far that Cooter’s chew fell right out and he didn’t even notice. The spectacular sight was too much for their ocular nerves to process all at once and it seemed to take several seconds to seep into their minds. As it did, the experience seemed to have an affect on each man’s seventh cranial nerve because a wide, mostly-toothless, very bad, hygienically speaking, smile spread across both of their faces.
“Didja geddit?”, Cooter asked.
“Ah-yup”, Cletus replied. “That stinkin’ buzzard’s gone to the great stinkin’ bull carcass in the sky.” Then he looked thoughtful for a moment and Cooter’s smile began to fade. He turned to his friend and asked in a serious tone, “Do you think they’ll have to put his parts back together when he gets there? Could take a loooooooong time.” The buzzard’s still-sparkling ashes, nearly a million of them, were just falling to the ground.
Cooter stroked his wispy beard with one hand and did his best to look wise and scholarly. “Ah-yep”, he said slowly. “On accountin’ on all the bird-bits fallin’ from the sky an’ all.”
Both men laughed.
Then Cooter stopped laughing and eyeballed the space-gun. “My turn”, he demanded.
Cletus looked at the weapon in his hands, then to Cooter, who was probably more drunk than he was, then back to the space-gun. “I think you’re too drunk tah handle a pri-stine bo-na-fide space-gun. Mebbe you ought-ta just let me handle it.”
Cooter smiled, then nodded, then frowned, then shook his head, and finally crossed his arms. “That ain't fair. We’s friends and friends are s’posed tuh share!”, he complained.
Cletus clucked and stroked his space-gun. “We ain't that good’o friends”, he hissed, head full of power, anticipation and space-gunnery.
Cooter’s jaw dropped. He turned to walk away then bellowed in rage and, like a spider monkey who used to have a best friend and whose best friend was now being a selfish, flea-pickin’ ape, sprang into the air, both arms raised, to jump on Cletus’s head. Cooter intertwined his fingers into a double-fist and brought it down hard towards Cletus’s head.
Cletus did the only thing a self-respecting man of the South could do. He squealed like a pig and raised his space-gun above his head to block the blow.
Cletus never felt the blow. Instead, Cooter’s rage and professional-wrestling-style move landed on the space-gun, broke it in half and exposed the little bit of antimatter that was left in its power-pack to the atmosphere. The result wasn’t so much of an explosion as it was an end. Unbeknownst to either man, when antimatter is exposed to matter, such as the oxygen, nitrogen and other trace gasses found in Earth’s atmosphere, the two particles annihilate each other becoming pure energy. This effect transfers to other nearby particles until the energy runs out. The result was a crater even Milo Dezelbup would have been proud of.