Death Puppet

by Jim Nisbet

  Oui, oui, we, oui, we, oui, we, oui, we, we…

  Again the Doppler Effect. No? Again. No? Yes?

  Who the fuck you asking, the devil muttered, going through a rack of magazines in front of the toilet. The horse?

  We haven’t been introduced.

  His name’s Hoc Bhui.

  Aw, come off it, man, come off—

  Just the facts, ma’am, said the devil, throwing aside a copy of Vogue. Why would I lie?

  Tucker swayed awkwardly above the rocking saddle, his face pinched. Were there scorpions in Nam?

  A matter of course, the devil said distractedly, of course there were.

  I…

  The little devil scowled among the magazines. Rolling Stock, Playboy, Elle, Catholic Digest, Exquisite Corpse, Cineaste, Casa Vogue, The Police Gazette, Penthouse… You don’t remember?

  No. No, I…

  Tsk. Ah. Here it is.

  Soldier of Fortune.

  The little devil licked his sensual, thick, goatlike lips.

  Tucker Harris was distracted. Where did that bullshit about the scorpion come from? We never saw a scorpion in Vietnam. Did we?

  The devil forced a tuneless whistle through the gap between his pointed front teeth. He peeled off his cheetah jockstrap and settled into the ergonomic chair to leaf through the magazine.

  Tucker didn’t like this chain of thought. Even while driving up here, three days straight, he hadn’t found this much time, for profound reflection on just how saturated his mind had become by the Devil’s Business.

  But then, all the way up here he’d had the radio and the tape machine in the truck. Weapons to clean, a perimeter to maintain… It had only been on account of his tight logistics that he’d found time for Mattie Brooke. Even on that score, however, his little devil had obliged him by cleverly restoring what Tucker had assumed lost, the Mattie Brooke file, so that he could find her—so that, for that matter, he could remember her name. But this shit about scorpions… It bothered him.… And now, the name of this horse… He thought back. He couldn’t recall hearing Jed mention the horse’s name.

  Then the blood came to his face, and the already reddened landscape that stretched around him darkened a shade. This helmet’s really sensitive to heat, he thought, adjusting a knurled knob at his temple. But he shouldn’t have said that. I might have just tied him up and…

  No, no… I wasn’t going to tie him up, was I? No, I’ll tell you how I know, because Jed said what he said because I asked him if he had any last requests.

  Jed had already found his two men, at the summer range shack where they were supposed to be keeping an eye on Tucker. Too late, he realized they’d never had a chance against Harris. Nor had Jed himself. But he took it like a man. Jed’s jaw had sloughed halfway out from under his face, taking the muzzle of his own Winchester barrel a little way with it, and his upper lip curled, showing some teeth.

  “Harris,” he said, looking Tucker right in the eye, “you’re a oneway street knee-deep in pig shit.”

  Tucker shot him before he put the period to it. Straight up through his big mouth and out the top of his head. Blew his goddamn larynx right out from behind his goddamned ultra-waxed mustache. Good-night, Irene.

  How could Jed name a horse for a massacre of civilians?

  He laughed uncertainly and prodded the horse with his heels. Sensing the vector home, the horse geared up to a canter, a very bumpy ride for someone deficient in the equestrian basics. Devil’s Business, that’s it, he thought, leaning forward and grasping the pommel. He closed his eyes against the rest of the nightmare occasioned by the words, Hoc Bhui. To help him out, he pressed the waterproof stud on the waterproof Walkman in a zippered pocket, its headphones built into the helmet. Ah, thought he, “The Speeches of Jesse Helms,” my favorite. No, wait. How about “Chicago”? Yech, said the devil. “Night on Bald Mountain”? Screamin’ Jay Hawkins? No, wait, I got it. The Andrews Sisters: “Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar.” No matter, this tape had them all. But his favorite was Fast Forward. All that squeaking sounded like he was evesdropping on his own mind.

  On they rode, horse and rider, through the infrared landscape. For that was the spectrum afforded Tucker Harris by his peculiar helmet, consisting as it did of night-vision lenses affixed in front of his eyes, and binocular ones at that, powered by a battery pack whose wire snaked off one side of the helmet and into one of the pouches suspended from the back of his combat harness. It was a flickering, Martian landscape—the Mars of deep space, the Mars of war—reds on darker reds, and reds on those, and blacks on the reds, the Mars of reds bleeding over blacks, and blacks bleeding over reds, the Mars of evaporating blacks and condensing reds, of heat and death.

  Odd, Harris thought, as they bounced along, this is some kind of contrapositive of sensory deprivation, sentient as I am in a desertscape of heat ghosts, with so much rock and roll blasting my ears that I can’t even hear these horse’s hooves, beneath me, here.

  You didn’t think that, the devil muttered darkly from behind his magazine. I did.

  Tucker contemplated the image of the little devil, who, it just now occurred to him, wasn’t so little anymore. He had his hind hooves propped up on the computer desk, the covers of Soldier of Fortune magazine illuminated by the green glow of the computer screen, his face hidden, he was massaging the scabrous, suppurating Joystick with one lubricated prosthetic hand, as he slowly turned pages. The Joystick. As ever, Tucker was repelled by the sight, but could not refrain from fascinating introversion. The devil’s testicles looked like mohair octahedral dice somebody had spilled beer on and left to dry. The engorging desquamatory member changed shapes, pieces of rotting flesh flaking off it, even as he watched, until Tucker turned up the rock, so loud it distorted, and looked away. Extroversion. Soon, he realized with resignation, the little devil would be usurping even more of Tucker’s entertainment. But as he swept the infrared vista in front of him, he determined not to let the little devil have all the fun.

  At least now he wouldn’t be a sitting duck. Well, he grimaced, he’d never really been a sitting duck, not completely. A toxic duck, maybe. But not a sitting one. Uriah and Marvin, Tucker’s two hands, would never forget that. He laughed a short snort of a laugh. They’d never forget anything, now.

  But it had been Jed who precluded forever the sitting duck verdict. Searching Jed’s body, Tucker had found the keys to his own truck, which was still, then as now, parked in an arroyo halfway between the ranch and the range shack. On the ring was the key to the big steel tool locker bolted to the bed behind the cab. In the locker was a choice, choice selection of field ordnance. His only regret was the usual one; that he couldn’t take all of his weapons on any one mission—not, at least, without bringing along the truck to carry them. More than once he had stifled a similar impulse, to take at a swallow his entire supply of Benzedrine; but he’d done neither—yet. Chew them, get off faster.…

  This helmet, for example. Tucker thumbed a knurled knob on his forehead. The outbuildings of the ranch, still over a half mile distant, focused, then unfocused, then focused again.

  Take the horse, the little devil had suggested at the time, and the keys. Take a load off your feet. Besides, this is the Wild West. The pain in his feet reasserted itself, like the noise of a passing helicopter, pain crescendo, pain diminuendo. Load up on supplies and go in on the horse, thereby gaining the element of surprise, the devil had advised. They’ll think you’re Dowd. Or somebody had said. Its tough to assign credit for these decisions, even on a committee of two.

  It’s a cinch a jury wouldn’t, the devil grunted, turning a page in Soldier of Fortune. Mmmmm… “Choice Congo Assignments.…”

  Tucker scanned the ranch. Many cars had departed since he’d last been there, but that was O.K. The little devil had put a note into the file on this case with about ten of their license numbers, which he could check out later. Montana, Colorado, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Arizona—they’d been from all over
the west, even Utah, one of them. It would be quite a can of worms, once he had time to open it up.

  Now only Jed’s vehicles remained. But he was looking to confirm one among them, hoping against hope. If Michaels and Mertz were still there, and they just about had to be, because they didn’t have the nerve to slip out of Jed’s clutches like Tucker had, nor likely the skills… Well. That would be some fun. Along with their guard, whoever that might be, and anyone else who’d been so foolish as to dawdle, a nice little roundup. And, aha. Love this technology. There’s a Chevy that wasn’t there when they so rudely took me away. And, what’s this?

  There’s a man, sitting on the hood.

  He’s got a gun.

  The little devil in Tucker Harris’ mind was sweating now, and had a huge erection. Not exactly Aubrey Beardsley, the little devil thought, appraising it familiarly in the mirror that passed for his mind’s eye, not Salomé, but… big. And diseased. He grasped it at its root and squeezed until Tucker thought someone had a pipe wrench on his brainstem. Hit me, Tucker snarled against the lights that flashed beneath his eyelids, hit me with that diseased rhythm stick. The little devil gasped with pleasure.

  Tucker forwarded the tape with shaking hands. The Rolling Stones.

  The little devil threw the prurient magazine to one side and booted up software old as computing itself, he’d been working on it for centuries. It was called WarWare. Quickly he drove through the various introductory menus, an option incorporating the helmet, an option eliminating sound. An interesting possibility, fighting with your audio so full of rock and roll that the sense of hearing is effectively canceled out. You’re left with simple vision, augmented by technology. After that, only paranoia, the sixth sense. As in the past, the latter might prove more useful than anything. Touch? Forget it. Good only for hookers and booby traps.

  In a few moments he had on his screen exactly what Tucker Harris was seeing through his eyes, aided by the infrared night-scope strapped onto his host’s head. Various menus and windows popped into and out of the corners of the field of battle. A map of the ranch. Descriptions of Scott Michaels and Eddie Mertz. A weather report. A make on the Chevrolet, which indeed proved to be one Tucker had seen before. A make on the weapon held by the man sitting on the hood of the Chevy. A Winchester, model 94. Pathetic. Same popgun Jed had. The gun that won the west, along with Manifest Caucasianism. The little devil smiled. Tucker Harris smiled with him. Such weapons would lose it, now.

  Lay an egg on him, the devil suggested. He fingered the keys that controlled menu selections and with the other hand he grasped his devilhood, the Joystick. A blip on the computer screen, superimposed on the feed from the night-vision scopes, moved as the Joystick moved.

  Tucker’s hand went to the grenades on his chest, bobbing up and down to the motion of the horse like rotten Halloween apples in a tub of mercury. He caught one.

  But where’s the rest of them? Tucker swept the yard and buildings, and saw nothing. But then, two hundred yards from the Chevrolet and closing fast, he saw another position. He was behind a hay rake, arrayed among other farm implements far to the right of the house, and he was armed.

  The computer beeped. AR-15. A schematic of the weapon rotated through three axes on the screen. Finally, a challenge. Calculations were made.

  At last, a challenge, Tucker Harris came fully alive. His face tingled beneath the helmet, its infrared scopes, the breathing mask, the wires, the pounding rock and roll, which he no longer even heard. Hairs sprang alert along the top of his spine like a bed of anemones sensing a warm current rife with krill. His scrotum screwed up into his abdomen as if he were dangling at the end of a rope in the ionosphere. A layer of perspiration sprang beyond the last dermal surface of his entire body, pushing three days of dust out of every pore ahead of it. He urged the horse forward, who, sensing the corral just ahead and relief from the strange weight radiating confusion from the saddle, needed no urging, and accelerated the canter to a trot. Fifty yards from the Chevy the man with the gun rose from the hood and, standing on the front bumper and looking back over the top of the car, called a greeting. Harris couldn’t hear Curly, but he could see him clear as day. Curly could hear the horse, but he couldn’t see a thing, let alone the hand grenade which, jerking the explosive away from the pin encircling a finger of the hand clinging for dear life to the pommel, Harris bowled along the ground ahead of him and his horse. The hand grenade skipped along, hit a rock, bounced up against the undercarriage of the Chevrolet and straight down with a thump, where it stopped, spinning, just beneath the gas tank under the trunk. Curly heard this, but confused the sound with the hoofbeats that almost immediately overtook the stationary Chevrolet and passed beyond it, toward the corral. Besides, he was almost immediately blinded by the flare. When the insidious device, the grenade, exploded, nearly immediately combusting the gas tank too, and then the police ammo, like twin sonic booms and a string of firecrackers, the double concussion caved in the delicate cavities of Curly’s metabolism, he was an older man, and the hood buckled away from the driver’s compartment and smacked him on the side of his head as he rose into the air, senseless forever. He didn’t have time to flinch.

  Tucker Harris hadn’t been expecting to see Mattie, not to mention catching her red-handed, holding a flare gun behind the main house. Nobody had mentioned her to him, so it was a surprise to see her. The sudden illumination of the flare was nothing if not beautiful, seen from within the infrared helmet, and he appreciated it. Simultaneously, he realized that he’d ridden into a trap, a trap in which Mattie was a participant, and they would have a score to settle later. For the moment, seeing that she had only an empty flare gun in her hands, he concentrated on neutralizing the dude with the AR-15, who, he’d ascertained with a glance as he’d ridden by the Chevy, was Scott Michaels. It had to be. As usual, Michaels had waited for the flare to light his shot, and that had been his undoing. If he’d fired on Tucker when he was supposed to he might have gotten off the only clear shot he was going to get. He wouldn’t have scored then, either, but he would have had his chance.

  He slid off the bay, away from Mattie. The noise, light, and force of the explosion caused the big horse to bolt right through the corral gate, and immediately the corral was full of screaming, circling, rearing horses, illuminated by the burning gasoline-soaked hulk of the Chevrolet. Cartridges exploded in the trunk. Pieces of flaming wreckage fell all around, on the roofs of the buildings, into clumps of tumbleweeds clustered up against the fences, onto the stack of hay full of sleeping chickens behind the corral. Fires started. The awning on the Winnebago caught. A piece of burning metal rolled off the barn roof and plummeted into the watering trough in the corral with a tremendous hiss. Steam and smoke began to fill the air. The roof of the barn caught fire.

  Weapon in hand, Tucker rolled under the corral fence and came up in prone firing position. At the same time Mattie, stunned, looked up just in time to see a piece of Chevrolet coming down out of the sky, flames rippling behind so that it sounded like the shirt of a motorcycle rider, whipped by the slipstream. She screamed, but Tucker had to give her credit. Without hesitation she jumped right through a screen door on the back of the house. The door opened out, but it was the only way. He heard the beginning of a second muffled scream as the wire and splintered frame of the door tore at her flesh, but it was lost in the crash of the flaming metal, which caught the edge of the stoop Mattie had easily cleared in a single leap, just missing her boots sticking out of the hole in the door. It was a large piece, covered in gasoline, the trunk lid maybe, or a fender, and it flickered heartily, orange and blue.

  Chapter Sixteen

  IT IS NOT GENERALLY KNOWN, BUT RELEVANT TO NOTE, THAT the devil prefers multiple orgasms. Hardly had Tucker finished perpetrating the one spectacle of death and destruction and the little devil was at him again, urging him on toward greater excess.

  Tucker heard the chatter of the AR-15. Beyond the roaring bonfire that had been a car, a line of holes stitch
ed along the sides of the barn and the Winnebago—miraculously intact. Tucker smiled. Michaels’ nerve had failed him, and he was uselessly strafing the flames, probably hoping that somehow a clip of bullets would solve all his problems. Problem. Scott Michaels had only one problem, so far as Tucker Harris knew.

  The syncopated booms of an automatic shotgun came from the other side of the house. First one shot, then two more in quick succession. Sprays of birdshot trickled uselessly against the buckled passenger door of the Chevy and the weathered side of the barn. The little devil worked his keyboard. That would be Mertz, thinking that Scott could see something to shoot at when he couldn’t, but shooting anyway.

  He heard movement from the back of the house. He saw Mattie’s boots disappear through the hole in the door, their bottoms clearly etched by the light of the piece of burning car. Then one came back out and kicked the piece away from the stoop. Then Tucker saw the .44 lying on the far end of the step and he was up and moving.

  Before he got there a small hand came out of the hole in the screen to pick up the gun, but he kept going. The hand grasped the pistol. Harris closed the gap fast. The hand began to withdraw the pistol into the house. With ten feet to go Harris put forth an exponential burst of speed and ran directly past the porch, without stopping. As he passed he golfed the slim arm with the butt of his weapon, much as if the gun were a polo mallet. The bone snapped just above the wrist. He felt but could not hear a wet twig breaking. There was a scream, a loud one, and the pistol skidded ahead of him in the dust, stopping just before the corner of the house as Harris passed it.