Cowboys and Aliens

by Joan D. Vinge

  He stumbled to the table beside his, blinking his eyes clear; he ran his hand over the bed where Alice had been lying, as if somehow she might still be there, only invisible. . . . Nothing. Not even a trace of ash. . . .

  Alice was gone, as completely as if she had never existed. He could only believe that at least she’d been set free from this living Hell. . . .

  He turned away, forcing himself to move as a demon screeched and he glimpsed monstrous forms coming toward him through the fog. All he had left that he could save was his own life. He had to run—get far away from here, and from what he’d seen—run until he reached a place where nothing could ever touch him again, not even memories. . . .

  An explosion of blue lightning struck the wall ahead of him as he started for the nearest hollow in the wall that looked like a real opening, illuminating a maze of tunnels. He picked the only one that looked wrong—not shored up by timber or anything else he knew, but reinforced by struts like the ribs of a snake. They glowed in the blue light reflecting from behind him. He followed the metal-ribbed gullet on and on, because there was nothing left for him now but to keep running. . . .

  . . . Until at last he saw a different kind of light growing brighter up ahead: a light he knew, genuine daylight, not the cold deathly blue of an underworld filled with demons. . . .

  And then all at once he was outside, blinking in the harsh brilliance of the desert sun. He staggered along the rough course of the arroyo that marked the entrance to the underworld, no longer feeling the pain in his side, the cuts and bruises as the ground punished his bare feet, as he tripped and fell down and got up again . . . no longer aware of anything at all but the need to get farther away. . . .

  He made it to the end of the arroyo and out onto the flat plain beyond it, before he finally had to stop and catch his breath, so that he could run some more.

  He looked back the way he had come, too far away now to see the hidden entrance he had come out of. Instead he saw the strange rock formation that loomed above it, rising out of the surrounding mesa . . . making an indelible fingerprint on the desert sky—

  JAKE WOKE OUT of a nightmare . . . not sitting bootless on the dusty track that led to Absolution, but in the fire-lit shelter of an Apache wikiup. . . .Waking this time with the final memories of the final days of his lost life intact, at last.

  He hadn’t left Alice to die . . . she’d already died, before he had escaped. He hadn’t been such a craven bastard that he wouldn’t even try to save her. He was certain now that he would have died trying; that he had never known how much he loved her, until those final moments, before he’d realized. . . . But . . . but—

  “. . . I brought the gold . . . in the house . . .” At last he understood the whole truth, and its consequences.

  “. . . that’s why she’s dead.” It had been his fault, as surely as if he’d shot her.

  He became aware of Ella holding him, supporting him, her face wet with tears as she shared the kind of strength that only one survivor could give to another. “It’s not your fault,” she whispered, her arms closing around him more tightly.

  He looked at her, and realized she was seeing the same thing in his own eyes now that he had seen once in hers, when he’d confronted her on that hill. . . .

  He remembered that he’d left her there, with the look still in her eyes; turned his back and ridden off, abandoning her to her grief. That his only words to her then had been, “Stay away from me.”

  Yet she was still here with him, holding him, trying to bring him comfort.

  “It’s not your fault.” Alice’s ghost, speaking to him from a dream. . . .

  He looked away, as far from comforted as he could ever imagine feeling.

  And then he remembered something else. He looked back at Ella again, through her into the distance, as his eyes suddenly turned cold enough to make Hell itself freeze over.

  “I know where they are. . . .” he said.

  15

  Jake slept through the night, so deeply that he didn’t even dream. But he woke at the first light of dawn, like the stirring Apaches. No one else did, not even Ella. Emmett had been given back to them finally, at Ella’s request, and all of them were sleeping like the dead. . . . Jake grimaced, and shook the image out of his head.

  The need to follow the path he’d seen laid out in his vision was too powerful to let him rest any longer; quietly he ducked out of the wikiup’s entrance, without waking the others.

  He walked across the camp, forcing his stiff, sore body to get moving, even though every step he took felt worse than he’d been expecting. Children playing fell silent and women stared at him; dogs growled as they caught his scent. He tried not to look left or right, until he reached the spot where some of the Apache men were eating outside in the cool air of early morning.

  He stopped as they looked up into his sky-colored eyes, curious but wary, while he looked down at their bowls filled with whatever passed for breakfast here, unable to ask if he could share it. Finally one of them called out, in another direction, and one of the women brought him a food-filled dish. Jake nodded, and went away to eat alone.

  Thanks to Ella, they all knew now that he could lead them to the place where the aliens were; they’d feed him and tolerate him until he did. But their looks made it plain that when his usefulness to them was done, he wouldn’t be any more welcome here than he was anywhere else.

  As Jake sat down in front of the wikiup and started to eat, Doc emerged from inside. Jake glanced up in surprise; he’d figured the first one up after him would be Ella, or maybe Dolarhyde. But then the hangover from his vision-dream, lingering in his brain like morning mist, gave him his answer to why Doc couldn’t sleep: Maria.

  Jake held out the bowl of food; Doc shook his head, with a faint smile of thanks. Rumpled and disheveled, with his sleeves pushed up and a stubble of beard, Doc looked more like one of Jake’s old gang than like a doctor this morning. He’d even strapped on Meacham’s gun belt.

  Doc looked back at him with an equally critical eye. “Better let me give you a checkup before you ride out today, Jake,” Doc said. “You look like a pile of used hay.”

  Jake stared at him, wondering what the hell kind of diagnosis that was. Doc just looked away, watching the sun rise. Jake sat beside him and went on eating, for once glad to have the company.

  BEFORE THE SUN had gotten much higher, Jake led Dolarhyde and the remaining demon hunters, along with Black Knife, to the place he remembered from his dream. None of them had much to say as they rode.

  Dolarhyde watched Jake’s mind at work as he guided them by memory, instinct, and dead reckoning—matching the distant mountains to the ragged erosion lines of the mesa’s rim as they backtracked along the valley.

  Dolarhyde had to admit that Jake Lonergan was as sharp as a coyote, and a whole lot harder to kill . . . more like a cougar. Jake was also a far more complicated man than Dolarhyde would ever have given him credit for, before their mutual goal had forced them together. Dolarhyde had even begun to respect him, after what he’d seen yesterday when they’d found Jake carrying Ella back . . . although it galled him to admit that, even to himself.

  But then, Dolarhyde figured a man like Lonergan would’ve been dead ten times over by now, if he wasn’t all those things, and more . . . especially with a thousand-dollar bounty on his head.

  At last Jake halted them near the place he had seen in his medicine dream—not taking them to the entrance itself, but to the top of a rocky rise nearby, where they could study the aliens’ hideout without being seen.

  They had actually been closer than they’d imagined to finding the stronghold of the demons from another world, before Jake’s untimely reunion with his gang had made them lose the wounded one. The demon they’d followed all this way had still been trying to lose them before it reached its final destination, leading them off the track as the flyer had done to Jake.

  But with Nat’s skill they might’ve been standing here yesterday. Now they
had the Apaches on their side—although Dolarhyde still wasn’t convinced about how much that was worth. And it still meant almost another day lost, and another one of their group, Charlie Lyle, with it. He wondered how many more people, how many of their kin, had died in that underground torture chamber. . . .

  He stared across the valley at the bizarre thing they’d taken for an odd rock formation, from a distance, until Jake had seen it up close in his dream. Now, with the indelibly changed view of their place in the universe that Ella had given them, Dolarhyde could see that the strange protrusion wasn’t an eroded volcanic core, wasn’t made of stone at all.

  It was nothing like any natural object he’d seen: a mottled cylinder of the alien’s strange metal, more like the weapon that Jake wore. . . . More like a tombstone, sunk into the earth: a burial marker for everybody on the planet Earth. He saw Jake look out over the rocks at the ship and then down into the canyon below it, his face haunted.

  Ella crouched beside him, gazing at the tower, her expression showing the kind of unnerving focus Dolarhyde had seen on it the first time he’d met her. At least now he halfway understood what had always seemed so damned strange about her. . . .

  She’d come to Earth from someplace unbelievably far away, like a demon-hunting saint on loan from God. She was here for one reason, to stop the advance of the Devil’s army that had destroyed her home . . . her whole world; hellbent on keeping the invaders from destroying another one. This was the culmination of her mission here, and her eyes shone with the knowledge that she hadn’t come too late.

  Dolarhyde took out his spyglass and peered through it, studying the alien monolith in clear detail. Even he couldn’t scoff at the truth, anymore. “Jesus, Mary, an’ Joseph . . .” he muttered, “how’d they . . . build something like that?”

  “They came here in it,” she pointed at the fortress-ship. “That’s only the top . . . the rest is underground.”

  Dolarhyde looked back at her, incredulous.

  “It’s how they mine for gold.” She looked him in the eye. He glanced down, remembering the bitter scorn of his comments last night, even after he’d seen her walk out of the fire, reborn. . . . He wondered how he could have been so blind, so short a time ago. He looked up again. “Can they see out of that thing?”

  “It’s hard for them to see in the daylight,” Ella said. “They stay below ground, where it’s dark.”

  She had barely finished the words when an alien flyer soared overhead, so low that they all instinctively crouched down.

  Dolarhyde saw Jake look at his wrist. Jake’s expression said he thought his demon gun should’ve warned him, or was afraid it would betray them somehow . . . as if he didn’t trust his own weapon not to be as treacherous as the aliens who’d made it. Small wonder, Dolarhyde thought, after all he’d seen and been through in the aliens’ stronghold.

  But the flyer was already gone, before anyone had time to say anything. They watched in silence as it stopped dead in midair, hovering above the aliens’ fortress-ship. Then it dropped vertically onto the top of the fortress, and disappeared as if it had been swallowed whole. Dolarhyde wondered whether it was returning with more captive humans.

  “We’ll never even get close,” Doc said, shaking his head. “Those flying machines’ll just pick us off before we get anywhere near it.”

  “There’s another way underground—” Jake raised his head, peering down again into the valley below the mesa. “The same way I got out.”

  Dolarhyde’s face turned grimmer, not because of Jake’s words, but from memories of his own. “That’s an impenetrable fort. We gotta draw those things out and fight ‘em in the open, distract ‘em so you can get inside with that arm gun and get our people out.” But as he turned the words over in his mind, his frown only deepened.

  “We have one advantage,” Ella said, as she saw his uncertainty growing. Her voice hardened, “They underestimate you—you’re like insects to them. They’re not planning on defending themselves, so they’ll be vulnerable.”

  Dolarhyde thought about the people who had come this far with him—only five of them left, loyal and alive . . . and one of those an untried boy. They were all the army he had, plus a handful of Apaches—and he trusted the Apaches about as much as he’d trust a handful of scorpions. He looked back at the alien tower, finally admitting the truth, even to himself. “We don’t have the manpower or the ordinance.”

  Jake was staring intently at the tower; he looked down again at the open floor of the valley, the scarce amount of decent cover. “This is not gonna work,” he said, more to himself than in agreement.

  Black Knife spoke directly to Dolarhyde then, for the first time, and Nat translated: “He wants to use your spyglass.”

  Dolarhyde threw Black Knife a skeptical look, wondering how an ignorant savage even knew what a spyglass was, let alone how to use it. Probably the same way the damned Apaches had learned to use rifles. . . .

  His hand tightened around the scope, as some part of him fought the idea of letting an Apache even touch it, never mind share it with him. It had belonged to his father. . . .

  Black Knife stared back at him, his expression equally intense, almost a challenge, as if it was more about the principle of the thing—about what kind of man he was—than about the scope itself.

  Dolarhyde glanced at Nat. The look in Nat’s eyes was like the look Jake had shot him yesterday, when they’d confronted Jake’s gang. “Generosity is considered a virtue . . .” Nat said, and Dolarhyde realized with a shock that he was talking about the Apaches.

  He knew then that the real question in the chief’s eyes was about trusting him: What kind of leader was he? That was a question he understood—backed up by the same kind of doubt. At least Black Knife had a human face, not an alien monster’s . . . even if this was a human being he’d never turn his back on.

  He wasn’t so blind that he couldn’t—by now—see the difference between an enemy who was only human and one that was inhuman. . . . His definition of “inhuman” had just undergone a sea change.

  He held out the spyglass, letting Black Knife take it from him. There was reassurance, even a flicker of respect, on Black Knife’s face as he accepted it, and Nat smiled fleetingly in relief.

  Dolarhyde’s expression turned grim again, but only because he figured the Apache leader’s expression would be reflecting his own, once the other man got a close look at what they were up against.

  Black Knife peered at the alien ship for a long moment, then scanned the rim of the slot canyon above the place where Jake had indicated the hidden entrance lay.

  He spoke again, as he handed the spyglass back to Dolarhyde. “The Apaches are mountain warriors,” Nat translated. “He says it’s better to fight from high ground.”

  Dolarhyde stiffened. “Tell him he’s a fool if he thinks he can shoot a few arrows from on high and hurt these things.”

  Nat hesitated, as if he was trying to think of a way to repeat that to Black Knife without it sounding like the insult it was.

  Suddenly Emmett said, “Where’s Jake—?”

  The others turned, their eyes searching the rocks around them. They found only one another. Looking out across the open plain of the valley again they saw Jake, on horseback, riding hell-for-leather away from them.

  Ella looked stricken, and then her face filled with uncertainty; as if she’d thought she’d finally understood Jake and his tangled emotions, only to have him abandon her again . . . not knowing this time whether it was really forever.

  “. . .That son of a bitch. . . .” Dolarhyde muttered, surprised by the depth of his own disappointment. He wondered why the hell he’d ever begun to trust—let alone respect—thieving outlaw scum like Jake Lonergan.

  Doc just looked tired as he asked, “What’d you say to him this time—?”

  JAKE PUNISHED HIS horse hard, counting on luck nearly as much as skill to keep them both from breaking their necks. Behind him the aliens’ towering fortress-ship grew small
er and less threatening with every moment that passed. He’d needed to get as far from the aliens, and the posse intent on attacking them, as he could, before anyone realized he was gone.

  Even now, he couldn’t afford to slow his pace much more than he already had for his horse’s sake; they could both rest when he reached the place he was headed—or his horse could, anyway. Time was running out—not just for the demon hunters, but for everybody: something he understood now better than any human being on Earth.

  The others had to realize he was gone by now; they’d probably seen him riding away. Running scared, he figured the others were thinking, picturing the looks on their faces.

  Running from an impossible situation. . . . And maybe they were right; but not for the reasons they figured. This time he was heading toward something too; a different kind of insane gamble, maybe, but one that might just turn a suicide attack into a fight they had half a chance of winning. . . .

  THE REMAINING MEMBERS of Jake’s gang—about two-thirds of them—who had survived the attack by the flying monsters were making plans of their own. Most of them were still nursing wounds, or sitting around listlessly—half drunk, or too dazed with disbelief to get past what had happened to them yesterday. There was only one thing they all agreed on . . . they wanted to get the hell out of this cursed place, to leave the whole damned territory, for someplace without flying monsters or Jake Lonergan.

  Bronc was on his knees counting the gold they had left, with a half-smoked cigar between his teeth, as usual. Hunt sat by, moodily gnawing his thumbnail, not able to think of anything better he could be doing, especially while Bull McCade—their self-proclaimed new leader—was watching Bronc as well.

  Bronc stopped counting and reached into his jacket pocket, looking for a match to relight the cigar, which tended to go out when he was concentrating on something else. He pulled out a match, struck it with his thumbnail. Nothing happened, and he swore, clenching the cigar tighter between his teeth.