by Barry Reese
Sebastian dived, rolled. The Obayifu kept on going, landing on the back of one of the two remaining hired guns. The other man continued tearing at the planks nailed to the door, ignoring the screams for help from his pard.
Elora ran over to Williams, tugging him to his feet.
The Nightmaster boomed again and again. Two more silver bullets tore into Phoratho’s torso, the impact knocking it off the body of the man he had just killed. The last man had gotten the door open, all the fingernails torn from his hands in his hysteria. He scrambled over the huge snow drift piled against the door and was gone.
The strong wind blew snow inside the cantina. Cold, cold air dried the sweat on the faces of the three humans still left alive.
Phoratho grinned with his mouth of many teeth, his face thickly covered with blood. He simply pointed a finger at Williams, who grinned back.
Phoratho sprang. Sebastian fired two more times, the silver bullets taking Phoratho full in the chest. The Obayifu ignored the bullets and swung his long arm, knocking Sebastian Red clear across the room. He hit the wall, fell heavily to the floor, gun and sword clattering as they fell out of his reach. All breath had been driven from his body and his lungs desperately struggled to draw air back into them.
“No! Get away from us!” Elora screamed as Phoratho stalked toward her and Williams. He pushed her away.
“Get clear, woman! It’s me he wants. Save yourself. Get outside. Better to die a clean death in the snow—” Williams was cut off by the Obayifu leaping at him. Even weakened as he was, Williams gripped the creature by the neck, holding those horrible teeth away from his throat. The Obayifu panted as if in the grip of passion, its hands tearing at Williams’ sides.
Elora snatched up Sebastian’s sword. It was heavy but she managed to lift it and stagger over to where man fought with monster.
“Ana’l nathrakh, u’rth va’s bethud, dokhje’l djenve!” she screamed and drove the sword into the Obayifu’s back. The creature threw back its head and howled as if it had been dropped into a bath of hot coals, throwing Elora to the floor. It released Williams and staggered around in circles, trying to reach around and tear the sword free.
Sebastian Red got to his feet, stumbled over to Phoratho, yanked his sword out of its back. “Go to hell,” he snarled. The blade hissed.
Phoratho’s head tumbled through the air as black blood geysered from the stump of the long neck. The body continued to stagger around, arms outstretched as if searching for the severed head.
Sebastian picked up his Nightmaster, aimed for the Obayifu’s heart and sent a silver bullet directly into it. The body thumped to the blood-soaked floor.
The three surviving humans could only look at each other with relieved exhaustion. Sebastian Red went over to Elora and helped her up. His eyes were troubled. He had heard what she said just before driving the sword into the creature’s back. She had said words that were never to be said. Words of power from a time so ancient, so alien that it wasn’t even legend anymore. There weren’t many places Elora could have learned those words and none of them were good. Sebastian Red knew because he had learned those words himself. But he would never have dared to say them. Not even if it meant his life.
But she had. To save all of theirs. Yes. Yes.
With the death of the Obayifu, the snow had stopped falling and in fact, three days later it was all gone. Of course, natural snow would soon replace that, but by then Sebastian Red planned to be long gone.
Elora and Williams stood on the porch of the cantina, watching as Sebastian Red secured his saddle to Ra’s back. The great stallion was eager to be away, as was his master.
Sebastian Red took off his sombrero as he walked over to Elora and Williams. He looked tenderly at her. “You still comin’ with me?” It was a fool question. He already knew the answer.
Elora shook her head. “I’m going to go with Amerue back to his land and his people. With his brothers all dead he’s going to need help in his work.” She reached up a slim hand to stroke his lean face kindly. “And you and I both know what’s going to happen at the end of our road together.”
Sebastian Red nodded. “I know.” He looked up at Williams. “You gon’ do right by her?”
Williams wrapped an arm around her slim shoulders. “You have my word, my friend.”
The two men gripped forearms in the time honored warrior’s shake. “You take care a’her and yourself, Williams. You’re a good man.”
“As are you, Red. May your road be free of incident.”
Sebastian Red set his sombrero on his head and swung up on Ra. With a final wave, he rode out of the now dead town of Zeso.
He passed by the hut up on its poles. The Asian man sat outside the hut, whittling. He peered at Sebastian. “Had enough, hay?”
“More than enough, uncle. You take care a’yourself now, y’hear?”
“You too, boy. You too.”
Sebastian Red nudged Ra into a gallop that would eat up the miles and take him back to warmer lands. He now yearned for the hot southern country where everything was green and golden. He wanted no more snow for a long time and in fact, wanted to see nothing of the color white for a long time.
Except maybe when he got the urge he would find a nice hill with tall emerald green grass and lie upon it. He would look up into the azure sky with its majestically huge white clouds floating so impossibly high. And he would remember and dream of what might have been.
Yes. Yes.
TERROR IN TOYLAND
by Mike McGee
I shot the three-headed dog that had been rooting around in my trash for the past few days. After, I felt kind of bad about it. Hell, that dog never did anything to anybody, unless you count being ugly and having three heads as a crime, and I guessed I really couldn’t...wasn’t the damn dog’s fault. But I just got tired of him being out there, day in, day out, appearing at all hours of the night to wake me from as sound a sleep as I ever got with his tearing around in my trash in search of a chicken bone or some coffee grounds or... Jesus, I don’t know, whatever it is in a man’s trash that interests a stray mutant dog with three heads, and not a whole brain between them.
So I shot him.
Don’t know why I hadn’t done it before, if I was gonna do it at all. I was actually starting to get used to him. For a while there I thought about even naming the dog, but I thought it might get to be confusing. Suppose I named him Bob. If I shouted, “Here, boy! Here, Bob!” would the whole dog run over, or would just one of the heads take notice? They seemed to function independently, the heads, and so I suspected that might very well be the case. I could just see that poor sonofabitch getting all happy in the one head while the other two kept eating my garbage, and that happy head trying to force the whole mutant dog to come when I called him. Would it work? I suspected it would not. I figured the dog would just get in a fight with himself, or at least stumble over his own legs. It was funny to think of, but kind of cruel, too. So I chose not to do that. I could have named all three heads, but the idea of shouting three names every time I wanted to call the dog – even three short names – well, it just made me tired. So I decided to go ahead and skip that option, too.
So I shot him.
Why I did it, I still can’t tell you. There was no practical reason. The dog never bothered nobody. Not really. And I wasn’t going hungry; I had a lot of meat and even vegetables stored away in cans, though I mostly got by on the smokes I rolled and my store of beer. Used to have some bourbon, but I drank all that up a long time ago. Wish I hadn’t – way back when, I used to tell people there was no good reason to draw breath in a world without any Jack Daniel’s, and now I knew it to be the truth.
Anyway, point being, I wasn’t gonna eat that dog. Now mutant animal don’t taste any different than any other kind of animal, and that’s okay when you’re talking about a chicken or a squirrel. Not so much dog. I never did eat a dog, and maybe if I knew a dog with three heads might taste like, let’s say, a pig, I might make
an exception. But I’m inclined to think otherwise. Here in civilization, we don’t eat dogs. It’s just not done.
I spent a while looking at that dog after I killed him. He was brown-furred all over except for some white spots on his muzzles, and a gray sort of patch over one eye on the head furthest to the right. All three of his tongues hung out – the right one to the left, the left one to the right, the middle one straight down.
I still don’t know why I done it. The dog didn’t look especially sad when he’d been alive, like his condition was any problem for him. Actually, he looked pretty pleased with himself, most of the time. I don’t think that dog ever was very smart. Had he been, he would have been miserable as all hell.
I looked at my watch. It was four-thirty. Time for Terror in Toyland.
I stepped in out of the sun and set my shotgun off to the side of the door, standing up right where I could grab it if I heard any kind of trouble from outside. There never was any trouble outside, but I imagined there could be, one day.
I went to the icebox, the damp, rotting floor of the trailer squishing and sagging under my work boots as I walked. There wasn’t nothing to be done for it. Air was humid. The whole damn world was gonna be a swamp before long. I had a place to live for as long as that lasted, and once it fell apart, I guessed I’d have to make me a hut out of coconuts and monkey poop somewhere.
I set down on the sofa and reached forward to pull the ON knob of the TV. I cracked open my warm beer and waited for the picture tube to warm up. There wasn’t no good reason to put my beer in the icebox other than that’s where beer goes and some things got to stay the same, never mind the rest of creation’s gone to hell in a handbasket. Hadn’t been any electricity in who could say how long. I had a nice color set with a great big screen, wired for cable even, which was no longer worth a good goddamn. Well, I did put things on top of it. But to actually watch television, I had to depend on the little black-and-white TV that June had used to watch her stories on when she was cooking.
It ran on batteries, see. Even though June couldn’t have known when she bought it what was coming, I like to think she somehow did know it, unconscious knowledge, and was looking out for me when she did. She always did know how better to look out for me than I did myself.
Still, I did wish the damn thing would warm up faster. The fella who did the broadcasting ran the movie half past every other hour right on the dot, and I didn’t like to miss none of it. I already had, standing out there with the dog, and that was bad enough.
But it did come on, and it was still in the credits. I had a picture just in time to see that title come up: Terror in Toyland. I smiled at the screen and tipped back my beer can. The letters was written in this funny sort of drippy lettering that I guess was supposed to look like running blood, and I’m sure it would have if they’d been red on my TV and not this sort of dark gray with some black around the edges. I don’t believe it would have looked real scary no matter what color it was, but at least it would have had a fighting chance on the other TV.
Wasn’t long before those same stupid kids it always was wandered into that ghost town you knew couldn’t have been any good, and they should have known it too and not gone there, but if they’d had any sense there wouldn’t have been no movie so they weren’t allowed to be but so smart. Anyway, they was out of gas. Almost out, you know. Now it was plain to see hadn’t no one managed that gas station in who knew how long, but they went there anyway, and I guess I couldn’t have blamed ‘em. Why they didn’t leave right away when they saw the dead fella behind the counter, that I don’t know. Doesn’t do you any good to scream at some dead fella, unless maybe you’re looking to catch the attention of the man who killed him.
Only it wasn’t no man at all what killed him, but rather a little dummy doll, all done up like a circus clown. Only with a big machete knife in his hand, which at least made him a little more interesting than the average ones you saw in the circus, and I guess that’s why the guys made the movie decided he ought to have one. That and a clown can’t kill people very well with a bottle of seltzer water, and he needed to kill people in order for there to be a story.
There was some other killer toys in the movie, but that clown doll, he was the main one. There was a bat on a string that bit this girl in the face. That bat was pretty stupid, though, and I guess that’s why they only decided to put him in the movie once. All the kids did was break the string and stomp on him. I mean, I would have done that, too, but it’s about as exciting to see in a movie as it sounds with me writing it down. Like I said... stupid.
When it got to the part where the brown-haired girl with the big titties took off her top and was kissing on some boy, I found myself sort of idly cradling my pecker through my jeans. Black-and-white naked titties on a young girl shouldn’t have excited me so much, both because she was so young and because the picture wasn’t so good, but it was kind of automatic, like the bells with the dogs and the food and however the hell that worked. The first time I’d watched Terror in Toyland, that girl had been a surprise, so it was kind of a genuine thrill. Now it was just part of my routine for watching it. I didn’t keep my hand there, it just went there. The fact that I didn’t have wood sort of made me sad, though I had no real use for it and was better off without, probably.
The truth is, I had seen Terror in Toyland before, long before any of this had ever happened, and at a drive-in back when it was new. I didn’t remember it so good because I’d been with June then, both of us just kids, not even twenty, and you didn’t really go to the drive-in to see a movie. Anyway, we didn’t. It looked different on a movie screen and in color besides, and it wasn’t even until the second or third time I ever watched it that I realized I saw it already.
I hadn’t paid no attention to it then. It was just some stupid movie I knew was a piece of shit, and I had June. I hadn’t paid no attention to it at all.
It was coming up on the end part, when the clown is set on fire and you think it’s over but then he jumps up and goes after the two kids that’s still alive (the bare titty girl is dead by then), when all of a sudden the movie just went away and there was this fella all by himself, looking at the camera and crying. I couldn’t understand him so good, but he had some blood all around his wrists, and a bloody razor there on the floor at his feet. He started screaming, and then he wasn’t making no sense at all. He picked up that knife and starting cutting away at his throat, and I knew I didn’t want to watch that.
I turned the TV off, picked up my beer, and walked back outside. I left my shotgun where it was. I knew there wasn’t no need for it.
It was dark now. The dead three-headed mutant dog was still over in the garbage, and he had some flies on him. I was gonna have to do something with that dog for sure before he turned into a damn maggot farm. Bury him, I guess. I supposed I did owe it to the dog anyway.
I sure wished I hadn’t killed him. Even after I shot him, the look in his eyes was so kind, so trusting. He didn’t think I was gonna pull the trigger, even after I just had. Dogs are that way. I looked into all six of those eyes, and I wanted to cry all of a sudden. It was a damn stupid thing to do. There wasn’t nothing to be done for it now, but it wouldn’t never be right, and the fact I knew the dog didn’t blame me for it only made me feel worse.
I looked up at the stars. You couldn’t see so many of them anymore as you once could, but you could still see some, and I knew that all of them was still up there, whether I could see them or not.
My trailer was caving in, and there wouldn’t be no more showings of Terror in Toyland, aside from the ones in my head. I could have had a dog, but I went and messed that up. I still had a shotgun, but I didn’t want it so much anymore. I figured I should just leave that there for the bugs to take, too, when they took everything else.
They already had taken my June, and I wished they’d gone and took me, too. I’d waited and waited. Damn near everything else was dead now, but not me. And here I was, old and useless and alone, a
nd what had the point been? A lot better men than me were gone now. June was gone now, and she’d been better than any of them...better than myself, without question. There just wasn’t any sense to it. None at all.
I looked north. There was a town that way, I knew, but a man would have to be a fool to imagine there was anyone still alive there. A ghost town for sure.
I polished off my beer, tossed the drained can over my shoulder, and lit out for it.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
David Boop is a single father, full-time employee, returning college student and author. His first novel, the pulp She Murdered Me with Science, came out in ’08. He’s had over a dozen shorts published in several genres, like weird westerns, and has written two short films. An edited form of the story contained within these pages appeared in the magazine Tales of the Talisman Vol. III, Issue 3, now out of print. David currently resides in Denver, CO, but speaks across the country at conventions, libraries, and schools on writing and publishing. You can find out more at www.davidboop.com.
Mark Bousquet is an academic studying American environmental literature. Right now his focus is on whales in books. He's written three novels: Dreamer's Syndrome: Into the New World, Adventures of the Five: The Coming of Frost, and Harpsichord & the Wormhole Witches. None of them involve cowboys fighting werewolves, time travel agents, or trains, but he's working on that. You can come talk with him about movies, TV, and writing at his website: http://atomicanxiety.wordpress.com.
Tom Deja writes. He talks about movies and comics. He has lived in New York City all his life. This last fact is not his fault. He can be found these days on the Better in the Dark and DJ Comics Cavalcade podcasts.