Death Puppet

by Jim Nisbet

  The little devil took hold of himself. Better turn down the sound, he suggested.

  Tucker had completely forgotten the Rolling Stones. He turned them way down, then off. Now he could hear the barn crackling, and it was very loud, louder than he realized.

  But it wasn’t louder than the whining in his right ear.

  Say, that damn barn’s burning like a house on fire, the devil noted.

  Do you think anybody can see it?

  The devil worked his keyboard. Pretty remote. But it’s a big fire, and people fear fire like the devil himself.

  We should finish and go, if we’re going.

  The devil smiled. One more. Then…

  Tucker was against the jamb of the back door. Then?

  Ears. Jesus. Maybe just one. Whose? Hers. But—just one.

  He peered around the jamb, toward the barn. Sweat poured over his face, inside the helmet, and down his neck. The light was intense, and he had to adjust the infrared sensors accordingly. The corral, perfectly illuminated by the flames, was empty, the horses had fled. The flames towered twice as high as the barn itself, perhaps eighty or a hundred feet, and embers streamed above them, forced skyward by the intense heat. The entire structure would soon be consumed. It seemed highly unlikely that someone wouldn’t remark the conflagration, and come to investigate.

  Harris hesitated. You and your ears. This is peacetime.

  The little devil chuckled.

  We know her.

  The little devil cackled shrilly. Tucker had always been fascinated by this unnerving cackle. It sounded to him as if it came from some sadomasochist allowing some intimate part of his anatomy to be pierced by hot needles, crucified by a radical dichotomy of pleasure and pain.

  The devil redoubled his shrieking. It sounded like two thousand subway cars putting on their brakes as they entered Brooklyn. Her ears are pierced, the devil shrieked, maybe even still have those little pearl studs in them.

  Something scraped the ground to his right. He crouched and wheeled the barrel of the AK-47. His concentration was slipping. This rock and roll indulgence is going to have to go. Not ten feet away, crawling through the dust and sobbing, making as much noise as she could, Mattie was painfully scraping her way toward the corner of the house and, he could see it plainly, the Colt .44 that waited there. She was twisted onto her good side, pulling herself forward with the good arm while in that hand she held suspended the broken wrist of the other, pushing herself with the toes and heels of her boots. A wounded bird, unable to fly.

  The only reason she might be certain the gun was there would be that she’d made it out by the light of the barn fire. In any case she was only a couple of feet away from it, would crawl over it in a moment.

  Driven by a depravity an exorcist would have paid to watch from a private booth, Harris propped his combat rifle against the door jamb and pulled the knife from its sheath on the side of his boot. It was a short, double-edged weapon of the finest steel, honed to a razor sharpness on one edge and serrated, like a steak knife, on the other. Good for slicing, good for sawing. A fine tool. The blade glinted like a tongue of fire strayed from the burning barn, jetting from his hand.

  He stepped over the blackened, smoking hulk of Chevrolet just beyond the stoop, and Mattie heard him. She looked over her shoulder and saw him. Or saw it, for, once again, silhouetted against the looming, thrashing flames of the burning barn beyond, garbed in the accouterments of ultimate guerilla technology, Harris could not possibly have looked human. He was an android, a killing machine, an ebony gleaming thanatophage with no other speciated function imaginable than to extinguish dwelling places, modes of transportation, communications, perhaps history itself—and the life forms that propagate and use them, in as efficient if sometimes messy a manner as possible. In a world propelled by spontaneous mutation, somehow, by some vast, conspiratorial travesty of evolution, an environment had arisen in which this new creature had been not only engendered, but encouraged to flourish. Now such a monster stood triumphant, and blindly so, over a gentler, milder, more delicate species, poised as if cynically, cruelly hesitating over the diction in the final proclamation of victory.

  Penultimate vulgarities flitted between the little devil, his computer, and the derelict mind that harbored them.

  That barn’s hot, back there…

  She’s stopped crawling…

  No time…

  But, hey, that was some good stuff.… Lookit them hips.…

  Finish.

  A shadow fell over the girl and she lay within it, unmoving, the whites of her eyes gleaming, helpless. Twin blades rose in their shocked, dilated pupils. In more ways than one, she hovered on the edge of consciousness. And then the strange mask that covered the ogre’s face exploded outward, sprinkling her with electronic parts, splinters of green breadboard bright with copper, shards of shattered lenses, short lengths of colored wire, small canisters with filament legs, bits of foam padding, pieces of fiberglass, slivers of bone, orts of brain.

  Afterward, the next to last thing she could recall was a tremendous roar, a sonic boom.

  Harris heard it too, but it was the last thing he heard, and he knew, right away, what it came from, and, experienced, was surprised that he’d heard anything at all. After that, he was flooded with a rising and absolute sense of relief, in precise proportion to the rate at which his life had begun to ebb away. He knew he’d been shot, and he knew the wound was as good as instantly fatal, which was why he was surprised that he heard the report that succeeded the hit. But the prospect of permanent rest, a perpetual release from the avaricious clutches of a life gone awry, a brain turned against itself and half inside out, contained by a skull that itched as if filled with statically charged steel wool, instantly overwhelmed any regret he might have had about his failure to complete his mission, and he dismissed all further thought of earthly endeavor, even as the means to accomplish any of it drained from his falling corpse.

  The little devil took it less well, and Tucker’s last microseconds of sentience were suffused with detached amusement at the little devil’s frantic antics to salvage something, anything, of one of his most magnificent creations. But in the end his frenetic despair was complete. A finely tuned instrument of destruction had been reduced to a heap of composting wreckage in a mere flick of an eyelash. So empathetic had he been in homing in on the last kill, the keyboard clicking like teeth in a berserk skull, frantically yet with not so much as an instant of uncertainty, the Joystick expertly homing the host organism in on the target, and, not incidentally, guiding himself to new thanato-erotic heights, quite some amount of precious time had elapsed before he noticed the huge hole that had appeared in the wall behind him. When he noticed it, the vacuum was already beginning to pull down, and, even then, he was distracted by the considerable damage to the file cabinet that stood there, behind his desk and against the wall. Its uppermost drawer had been blown clean away, which meant that all the memory backups and masters for most of the late sixties were permanently lost: not to mention the twin busts of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and Virgil (70–19 b.c.) which had stood prominently on top of the cabinet, looking over his shoulder for, oh, years—blasted to plaster dust.

  With fiendish energy and a frothing string of curses in tone and degree of contumely excrementitious, defiant salutations not unlike the ones so recently heard from the terrified mouth of Eddie Mertz, the little devil briefly attempted damage control. His fingers flew over the keyboard, his eyes bugged futilely in his simian forehead. Their pupils glowed umber red, orange, scarlet, white hot, ice blue, and reflected the green of the computer screen as it haltingly relayed report after report of irreversible mortal injury, until, finally, for the first time ever, corrosive fluids washed over their bulging orbs, and his eyes flooding orange resembled nothing so much as two adjacent portholes on the Titanic, going down. The exterior vacuum sucked at the files heaped in the cabinet, and they gushed outward, a lifetime of documented malfeasance spewed into the void
at an astonishing rate. The magazines went, then the furniture began to go. The cabinet itself. The ergonomic chair. The desk was ripped right out from under the computer, and the computer would have gone immediately after, or before, had not the little devil been clinging to it with one claw, and the stained rim of the toilet bowl with the other. Even the septic wastes therein, which in his excitement he’d forgotten to recently flush, geysered up and divided themselves more or less evenly about his face as they rushed to join the insubstantial oblivion beckoning beyond the enlarging hole. But soon the computer flew into the negative tornado of the consuming vacuum, tearing loose from his grasp, and separating the devil’s tail from the devil himself, about a foot from his spine, with a tremendous snap that sounded and felt like a catheter separating in situ. Though he would easily have grown another, given certain nutrients, for the first and last time in his career the little devil screamed in despair and anguish, and in doing so loosed his grip on the toilet and was thoroughly shredded by the howling suction, as it wracked him outward through a hole not quite big enough for the little devil to pass through whole, and it therefore took him piecemeal, and out into a cold and hostile desert night, which, without a proper host, he would never survive long enough to subvert, had he survived—or ever existed—at all.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE LAST THING MATTIE REMEMBERED WAS CHIEF JOSEPH sniffing her from foot to earlobe, pausing over her face long enough to pass his tongue the length of the bleeding laceration the torn screen had opened in her left cheek, then sniffing her back down to her boots. Then the dog barked, and Mattie lost consciousness. Good old Chief Joseph. Darkness.

  She woke up nearly thirty-six hours later.

  At first she had no idea where she was. She heard calves bawling. A bookcase swam into focus. Hundreds of paperback western novels. Louis L’Amour, Mari Sandoz, Max Brand, Zane Grey, Owen Rountree. In content much like Jed’s bookcase, but there the similarities ended. Several guns hung on the walls. A Winchester model 94, of course. A Savage .300, with scope. A Sharps .50, an old flintlock that must have predated Lewis and Clark. A fireplace, burning, laid up of hewn basalt, with logs on car spring andirons; branding irons and other fire tools in a rack to one side; a coal bucket full of old newspapers, magazines, hatchet, and kindling; a smoke-blackened hand-hewn Douglas fir mantel. Above the mantel, a long-barreled repeater, which Mattie recognized as Lize’s pride and joy, a Civil War .52 caliber Spencer carbine. A gun designed to kill Confederate soldiers, buffalo, and Indians a half mile away. “It’s like an extension of your mind,” as someone had once remarked to her, of tools in general. As Lize had once said.

  There was a can of solvent and a ramrod with a sooty patch caught in one end, dangling off the mantel below.

  For a moment she heard celestial music, a huge choir, singing sounds that made no sense, far away. Just as the music caught her attention, it faded.

  A knot popped in the fire.

  So she was on the No Nonsense—at Lize’s. She’d been installed on a daybed that would turn back into a couch, when necessary. An easy chair had been pulled up next to it, and there were medicaments, salves, iodine, gauze, scissors, and a can of bag balm beneath a lamp on the end table next to the bed. Though it was daylight, the lamp was still on.

  A bottle of pills among the other vessels on the table had “Codeine, 15 mg.” typed on its label. That would explain her grogginess, a sharp headache, maybe even the music, and a general throbbing that accompanied her return to consciousness, much as an old television set’s picture eventually appears, long after its hum has turned into coherent sound. She moved to brush a lock of hair out of her face and felt cool metal against her forehead. Her right wrist was tightly wrapped in tape and gauze, and the tongues of two aluminum splints showed beyond the edges of the bandages on both sides of her forearm, whence emanated a dull, persistent ache. The flesh around it showed the yellowish black tinge of a bad bruise. She studied the ache for a moment. It felt as if her wrist were caught in a hub puller or some kind of vice, two prongs bending the bone one way, against the opposition of a third between them, immovably opposed to the change. The result, she was sure, would be that the bone would snap. But some interlocutory buffer floated between her injury and her perception of it, so that she could not quite pinpoint the exact nature of the pain, nor appreciate its intensity.

  Again the hair fell across her eyes and now she brushed it out of the way with her other hand, only to discover a new patch of gauze across her left cheek. Gingerly, she explored its boundaries with her fingertips.

  She heard a screen door creak. Lize entered the room and stood over the foot of the bed, a balled fist on one hip.

  The door opened again and banged and Chief Joseph padded in after her, his nails clicking on the wooden floor until he got to the rug. He laid his head on the edge of the bed and looked at Mattie. His tail swayed tentatively, then stopped.

  “Hiya, Chiefie,” she said meekly at last, and rubbed his head with the throbbing bandage.

  Chief Joseph closed his eyes contentedly, his jowls puffed slightly over his breathing.

  When she stopped rubbing, he looked at her a moment. Then he went over to a corner of a faded rag rug, made two turns around it in a crouch, and lay down in a patch of sunlight, head up. After a moment his eyelids drooped to half-mast, and his head rocked with his relaxed respiration.

  Lize stood watching this, a pair of leather gloves clutched on one hip. Her cheeks were flushed by exertion and the weather. She was dressed as usual, jeans, the exhausted down vest, western shirt, wide leather belt hitched high over her hips, knee-high laced hunting boots. She grunted and stepped over Chief Joseph to get around the end of the bed.

  “Turned cold this morning,” she observed, passing beyond the end of the living room to Mattie’s left and into the kitchen. “Be frosting by the end of the week. Fixing to be duck-hunting in Douglas County, I can taste that tender flesh already. Ouch! I just bit down on a speck of birdshot. Busted a goddamned filling.…” A lid came up off a saucepan, and a smell of broth wafted through the room. Pepper and garlic, sage and onions, celery and beef. The smell woke up Mattie’s nose, but her mouth was dry, and she’d never been so fidgety in her life. She couldn’t get comfortable, and the more she woke up the worse it got. It was as if the bedclothes themselves were making some kind of abrasive assault on her skin. There was a glass next to the bed.

  “This water?” Her voice was a weak croak that surprised her.

  “Winter?” Lize responded from the kitchen. “Fall. This ain’t winter.”

  Mattie cleared her throat. “Water,” she said, louder.

  “Water—oh, yeah,” Lize said looking over her shoulder. “That’s water.”

  Mattie drank it all. The headache was coming on strong, as was the pain in her wrist.

  “Here’s some beef broth,” Lize said, following a column of steam back into the living room. “Do you some good. Nothing like meat for healing. Meat and tomatoes and aloe vera.”

  She carefully set a tray next to Mattie on the bed. There were a bowl of soup and several slices of fresh tomato on a plate, sprinkled with salt and pepper.

  “And maybe some church,” she added. “Good for healing, too. Eh? Sit up.”

  Good idea, said a voice.

  “What?” Mattie said.

  “I said, sit up.”

  She held up a pillow and waited. “Besides, might as well eat ’em. A good frost’ll be the end of ’em, and goddamn if I feel like canning all night tonight.”

  “My head…,” said Mattie. When she leaned forward, the music came back, distantly. She sat back. The music faded.

  “Morphine,” Lize said. “Doc said a headache was likely. Headache and itching, like; restlessness. And you’ll want water.”

  “Doctor?”

  “Doctor,” Lize grumbled. “I broke down and got Lyle Tumely out here, around three o’clock this morning. No-good sonofabitch was drunk as a cooter, but forty miles of bad road a
nd a pot of coffee brought him up to veterinary grade. Good enough to patch up a broke arm.” She dipped up some broth in a spoon big enough to garden with. “Here.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Here,” Lize said gruffly.

  Mattie complied. She only opened her mouth and tilted her head a little bit, but Lize poured the whole thing in there. She swallowed convulsively. Broth ran out both corners of her mouth. It was good, but her stomach felt a little gamey. “My stom—”

  “Morphine,” Lize said, wiping her chin with a checkered cloth and dipping more broth. “Lyle said it’d likely be a little rough on your stomach, too. Eat this to-mater, here.”

  Tomato juice ran down her chin. The tomato was garden fresh, ripened just so, with fresh dill sprinkled on it, and its sweet, deep flavor was wasted on her.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Who?”

  “Lyle.”

  “An uppity horse,” Lize said. “What else ever happens to people around here? You wasn’t scalped, and there weren’t no bullet holes though for the life of me I’ll never know why not. Them bullets must all been set to trackin’ nothin’ but bucks and rams.” She chuckled. “Official ammo of the Women’s Auxiliary. Boy bullets.” She cleared her throat. “Nor a tractor tread, neither.” She spooned another dipper of broth into Mattie. “Think you can remember to tell it like that? You might want to leave out the jokes. When somebody don’t want to mind their own business, that is.”

  It all flooded back, then, a collage of horror. The sounds of the flames in the fireplace made her nervous. Tears welled to her eyes and she choked back a brothy sob. “What,” she stammered, “what was the horse’s name?”

  Lize raised an eyebrow. “I was hopin’ you could tell me his name.”