by David Boop
The saloon’s swinging doors let through dust and sand from the desert outside. The usual scents of El Paso—cow town, dry heat, mixed with human and animal waste from the sewers just below the streets. Selman was almost used to it by now. But tonight, the winds seemed to bring it out.
“Is that the sewers or you?” Selman asked, sniffing the air, and the bartender and a few locals chuckled around him. But the strangers showed no reaction.
“They say you killed the greatest lawman in the West,” one of them said, its overly large beady eyes scanning back and forth as it took in the room.
Who was this—a male or a female? It ain’t no human. Its limbs looked stretched out, overly long, hands resting just below the bumpy knees. Its companion looked just as strange, only slightly chubbier, and both of ’em stank worse than Mexicans from across the border in Juarez. Just more foreign scum wandered into another Western town. Well, Constable John Selman was intent on cleaning up El Paso, and he’d damn sure clean this mess up.
Selman’s adrenaline spiked, his heartbeat racing, as his hand hovered over his Colt .45, flexing and ready. “Yeah, I shot him. Three times. Son of a bitch threatened my son.” Selman’s eyes narrowed.
“That makes you the champion,” the other stranger said, flashing sharp teeth in what might be a smile.
“Champion of what?” Selman scoffed. The way the two strangers looked at him made him feel cold all of a sudden and he hesitated, fear rising for the first time.
“We are the best in the universe,” the first stranger said.
Selman laughed. “Not the humble sort, are ya?”
In an instant, Selman had drawn and the two strangers did, too, pointing oddly long, wide-barreled pistols of a sort at him while the bartender shouted for them to “Take it outside!”
They all fired simultaneously, Selman’s hand so used to the Colt, it barely bucked at the recoil. His stare locked on the strangers, cold, hard, and sure.
Selman felt the wind sucked out of his lungs as a searing hole opened in his chest. There was a burning pain as an invisible force caused his body to buck.
“Son of a bitch!” he cursed as he fell. They’d shot him. Suddenly, he couldn’t move. His hands were clammy, and sweat dripped down off his forehead to sting his eyes.
“That was too easy,” the first stranger said, shaking its oddly shaped head. “Maybe it’s true he shot John Wesley Hardin in the back like a coward.”
“I ain’t no coward,” Selman whispered, choking on blood. He spat and tried again, but the strangers paid him no mind.
“Shot him in the back? Too afraid to face him. This is no great gunman,” agreed the other.
Selman’s anger rose at the insults, but they were the last words he heard before he slipped into darkness, the bartender calling for someone to get his son and the town doctor.
* * *
Everyone in the Acme stared at Jailak and Mairej as the two Andromedans holstered their blasters. They stood over Selman’s body lying on the floor in a widening pool of blood.
“He was supposed to be good,” Jailak said. “We traveled back in time for this?”
“He was not,” agreed Mairej. The man who shot the greatest gunman in the Old West had been a pure disappointment. John Wesley Hardin was legendary. John Selman had become famous for shooting him. Mairej saw no other reason why such an unexceptional human being should be remembered. The man was skinny, almost like he’d barely eaten, a bushy mustache over his lip, gray streaks in his blondish hair.
They turned to the bartender. “Is this not the man who killed the great John Wesley Hardin?” Mairej asked.
The bartender nodded. “Shot him in the back right over there.” He motioned down the bar a few feet. Mairej could still see the stain on the floor where the great gunman must have fallen.
The two aliens exchanged a look and headed for the front door.
“Wait! The sheriff’ll be coming!” the bartender called.
“We are done here,” Jailak said, ignoring the man, and followed Mairej through the swinging doors, dodging blowing tumbleweeds—some of them bigger than the aliens themselves—as they stepped onto the smelly, dusty Old West street. Sand clouded their eyes and made them water a bit as the sounds of saloon music and laughter resumed, filling the night air.
* * *
The Andromedans returned to the chrono tag and ported back to their ship, leaving 1895 behind them like the dust of that El Paso street. The familiar warmth and clean smell of home greeted them, and once they were orbiting Earth again, they took lunch in the observation deck cafeteria and watched the demolition of the Eastern Seaboard. The various time crews wrapping up their exploitation of the planet’s past would witness the treat of its demolition prior to the development fleet’s impending arrival.
“That,” Jailak said, “was a waste of time and budget.”
Mairej nodded. “It was…unsatisfying. And not nearly enough footage.”
Raiding the timelines of inferior species for entertainment purposes was considered the bottom of the duggha trough in the new Andromedan economy. Anyone with CNS mapping could capture the experiences. And then the recordings of them could be resold in small rapidly consumable experiences—even several at a time. The sample (in a neat handful) that Jailak fed him after the first interview had Mairej under the moons of Garglex killing Charlobundix III, their greatest warrior, with a blowgun. Only he’d done it while sampling the finest Dambril wines and having sex with three of the four poet sisters of Telpaz Prime. It was four minutes and thirty-seven seconds (Andromedan Standard) that boggled his mind and convinced him to join Jailak’s small company on the brief break between Garglex and Earth’s assimilations.
Jailak’s eyebrows went up, and he nodded at the glass wall and the burning planet below. A bright light flared and then collapsed upon itself. “That was Boston I think.”
“New York,” Mairej said. “So what is our plan?”
Jailak took a bite of his Glomboli sky bat salad. “Well, we have to go back. I think maybe we need to kill John Wesley Hardin ourselves.”
Mairej nodded. “Kill him before Selman does?”
Jailak thought about it some, then clapped and pointed. The cafeteria waitstaff saw and started moving their direction. “That is New Jersey; I’m sure of it.”
“Miami,” the waiter said as he rearranged a bat wing. Andromedan cafeterias were known intergalactically for their fine dining and apt help.
“No,” Jailak said.
“I’m pretty sure it is,” Mairej said.
Jailak waved at the screen. “Not that. No, we don’t do it before Selman. Can’t. It violates all kinds of rules.” Jailak took another stab at the bat on his plate. “For starters, Hardin wasn’t killed by aliens in the original timeline. He was killed by Selman.”
Mairej blinked, his partner was talking in circles. “But Selman wasn’t killed by aliens in the original timeline either. So haven’t we already violated all kinds of rules?”
Jailak shook his head. “No, not really. Just one rule. But if we do it to Hardin, too, then it’s all kinds of rules.”
“Or two,” Mairej said. But he was fairly certain that it didn’t matter what he told his new boss. “Then what are you thinking we do?”
Jailak leaned forward and smiled. “I think we go back, bring John Wesley Hardin back from the dead, and kill him all over again ourselves.” He waved his hands around like they were six shooters in a flurry of bad pantomiming.
Mairej pointed. “That was D.C. there.”
Jailak laughed. “No. Seattle.”
“Seattle is on the West Coast.” And that was when Mairej experienced the first inkling that things might not work out.
* * *
The dust and stink of the nineteenth century was a shock after the cool green mist of the restaurant when they slipped back to work. Mairej noted that El Paso had changed during lunch and it baffled him.
“Where are the horses?”
Jailak shrug
ged. “I’m not sure.”
“The buildings are different, too.”
“We’re in a different part of town,” he said. He pointed. “There’s the cemetery there.”
The night air was hot and quiet other than the sound of automobiles slipping past beneath the gray light of buzzing streetlamps. Mairej took it all in. “We are not in 1895 El Paso. This isn’t the Wild West.”
“No,” Jailak said, already moving toward the gates of the Concordia Cemetery. “Just a bit later.”
Another internally combusted engine rumbled past. This metal beast had a 1968: NIXON’S THE ONE sticker on its bumper.
“But our license is for 1895,” Mairej said.
“A brief stop. Then 1895.” Jailak was over the gate now and moving off into the dark. As he counted paces, Mairej followed at a distance and kept an eye out.
The Concordia Cemetery was in the center of the city near several busy roads and an interstate highway that rose above it on stone pillars—dust, exhaust, and debris raining down from passing vehicles above. Stone grave markers of various colors, shapes, and sizes were lined up in neat rows. A couple had buildings or shelters around them. The cemetery’s owners seemed to have made an effort at grass and flowers, but most were dead or dying from being beat down by the desert. The place was open with a nice breeze and so smelled no different than most of El Paso.
Mairej thought humans had odd burial rituals. The stones were rather plain, no valuable minerals had been used. What kind of respect did they have for their dead?
Jailak stopped at a flat marker and fished a tube from his coveralls. “This is it.”
“What are we doing?”
Jailak had the look on his face that said he hated working with amateurs just before he rolled his eyes. “We’re resurrecting John Wesley Hardin so you can gun him down on the streets of El Paso.”
“So much for the rules.”
Jailak sighed, then squeezed the contents of the tube onto the grave. “A minor violation at best. We’re not going to gun him down here. We’ll take him back to 1895.”
“1895,” Mairej said raising his eyebrows as he watched a puddle of black goo twist itself into a slender worm and squeeze itself into a crack near the marker. “And why aren’t we just bringing him back in 1895?”
“We’re not licensed to perform resurrections in 1895.”
Mairej decided against pointing out that they didn’t even have a license to be whenever they were now. Instead, he watched the ground. Something was happening. He heard a distant hum as the ground vibrated beneath their feet. He’d not seen a resurrection before. “So it’s bringing him back to life underground?”
Jailak shook his head. “Just watch.”
The goo was back, only it was a mottled gray instead of black. First a slim tendril, then another. And then another. Until there was a gray puddle growing large enough to make them step back.
Mairej glanced up at Jailak and saw concern on his face. “What is it?”
He shrugged. “Usually it’s pink, not gray. But see? It’s working!”
The goo was spreading out in the form of a human body there on the ground above the grave. Mairej took another step back. “It smells.”
Jailak wrinkled his nose. “That’s not normal either.” The smell was something akin to gundar carcasses left in the sun too long before cooking, only much, much stronger.
The body was taking on more definition now but it looked decayed and unhealthy, as rotten and barely hung together as the suit it wore. They both jumped when the eyes popped open, black and full of nothing. A pale worm crawled from one socket and disappeared back into another.
“Good evening, Mister Hardin,” Jailak said as he offered the man a hand. “Time is short, so if you’ll come with us.”
John Wesley Hardin took the hand and stood, growling as he did.
Mairej finally found a question that he suspected he could handle the answer to. “How many times have you resurrected humans?”
“Oh this is my first human,” Jailak said. “But it was pink on Orthon V.”
Their new traveling companion seemed bewildered but willingly led. He said nothing, groaning and growling instead. As he walked, the top of one ear flopped up and down, hanging off his head.
When they slipped into the time pod, the bio screen filter paid John Wesley Hardin no notice at all as Jailak dipped them back in 1895.
* * *
It was approaching High Noon on Main Street when they gave John Wesley Hardin a pair of loaded Colts and a gun belt. He wouldn’t take them and strap them on so Jailak had finally buckled them around the man’s moldering waist himself.
Mairej moved upwind of the gunslinger. In brighter light, the man looked even worse for wear. Whatever the goo had done, it didn’t look like any kind of healthy. And Hardin didn’t like the sunlight or the people who stopped and stared. It wasn’t clear which he was growling at but he sniffed at the growing crowd of horrified onlookers.
“Is that John Wesley Hardin?” Mairej looked and realized it was Jailak who had said it. “Get ready,” he said in a lower voice. “Are you rolling?”
The sensory capture bug clicked in his ear as Mairej checked his blasters. “We are.”
“Me too,” Jailak said, tapping his own ear. “Go.”
Mairej checked his distance from Hardin, spread his legs, and held a hand over the butt of his pistol. “John Wesley Hardin, you are the most notorious gunslinger in the Homo sapiens American Wild West, and I aim to gun you down, you murderous son of a bitch.”
He reached for his gun and when John Wesley Hardin did nothing, Mairej paused.
“Say that last part again,” Jailak said.
“I said, ‘I aim to gun you down, you murderous son of a bitch.’”
Still nothing.
“Shoot him, then.”
Mairej drew, convinced that any moment the rotting hand would slap leather and beat him to it.
Hardin sniffed at a woman near the edge of the crowd.
Mairej took aim and fired, watching the shot tear into Hardin’s side. The resurrected gunslinger howled but it wasn’t pain or fear—it was something else—and then immediately he leapt at the crowd.
Jailak pulled Hardin kicking and flailing off the woman. Her leg was bleeding and a huge lump of flesh tore off, clamped between Hardin’s teeth. The stinky bastard chomped it down as quick as he could, whimpering and whining the whole time. The crowd screamed and hollered as they scattered in panic, some fleeing as fast as they could down the street, others backing away, but still watching and chattering.
“Well, as Dylan said, ‘He ain’t no friend of the people.’ This is a mess.” Jailak looked around. “We’re going to need a different plan.”
Suddenly, every implant in Mairej’s body went off in instant alarm. “What is that?”
“It’s a chronoalert,” Jailak said. “Some idiot has damaged the timeline. We’re being recalled.” Hardin was struggling even more now and his howls sounded hungrier than Mairej wanted to allow. Jailak pulled him away from the crowd. “This isn’t working anyway. Shoot him again so we can get out of here.”
“Don’t we need to take him back to where we got him?”
Jailak rolled his eyes again. “No. He was dead there, remember? And with whatever else is going on, we don’t need to add to the problem.”
Mairej shrugged, shot John Wesley Hardin once through the head, and helped Jailak move the body off the dusty street.
* * *
Back in the cafeteria, it was more of the same but this time, Europe. They were detonating Paris, London, and Rome simultaneously as part of the early dinner show. And by tomorrow, Earth and all of its resources along with its rich history would be safely tucked into the Andromedan Expansion Plan.
They found themselves at the same table with a waiter who looked unexcited to see them again so soon. This time, Mairej tried the bat. It was dry but adequate. “So what do you think happened?”
“Hard to say
. I’m just glad we wrapped up before anything else could go wrong.”
Speaking of things going wrong, Earth below was dark now and that seemed odd. They’d left the lights on, after all, so it could be seen. And the show should’ve started but didn’t.
There was whispering.
A waiter slipped by and Jailak grabbed his sleeve. “What’s happening?”
“I’m certain it will be resolved shortly.”
Mairej leaned in. “Is it serious?”
When the waiter spoke, it was with a low voice. “There was a timeline disruption in the late nineteenth century.”
Jailak met Mairej’s eyes. “Really? Somewhere in Europe or Asia, I’m guessing?”
“American West, actually,” a new voice said. This Andromedan didn’t wear gray like the rest. This one wore black. And there were only three black uniforms in this particular Expansion fleet. “But I think you know that already, Jailak.”
“Chronogeneral Terflex,” Jailak said, his face turning red, “I didn’t realize you were with this fleet.”
“No,” he said, “but I knew you were. And I knew just whose license to pull when I saw humanity wink out of existence. The origin point of the disruption is El Paso, Texas, 1895. Sound familiar?” Andromedans weren’t particularly tall or intimidating but Terflex pulled off both. “So come along. If you’re lucky, you only have some questions to answer.”
“What if I’m unlucky?” Jailak asked.
“Then you get to help fix the mess you’ve made before it costs us our work here.”
Mairej kept his eyes on his plate and worked on finishing the bat as Jailak stood.
“You too,” Terflex said, looming over him.
Sighing, Mairej left another unfinished meal, having no idea just how grateful he would be for his empty stomach when he smelled what the late nineteenth century had become.
* * *
El Paso stank before, but now it was out of this galaxy. Mairej and Jailak wore masks to cover their faces, and the stench was still almost unbearable.
“Son of a Taglothomri gundar,” Mairej hurled a classic Andromedan epithet at the ground as he spit, “don’t worry about the rules, you said. Minor violation. Does that smell minor to you?”