Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails

by John G. Hartness

  “Maybe they’re retractable, like vampire fangs,” I said.

  “You said there was a lot of blood at the scene,” Skeeter said.

  “Yeah, there was so much it made a mud blood puddle. Heh, that sounds like something out of a Harry Potter book,” I said with a chuckle.

  “Not a very good bloodsucker if it leaves a bunch of blood behind,” Tyson remarked.

  “Et tu, Tyson?” I asked.

  “Hey, man, don’t get all Latin on me,” he protested. “Just because it ain’t a chupacabra don’t mean we don’t need to shoot it.”

  “We don’t need to shoot nothing, Hopalong,” I said, motioning to his leg. “I couldn’t catch up to that thing with two good wheels, how you gonna do it with one?”

  “I ain’t,” he agreed. “I’m gonna catch it with four.”

  An hour later we pulled out of Tyson’s driveway with a trailer hitched behind his pickup. A pair of four-wheeled ATVs with high-powered spotlights mounted on the front were strapped down on the trailer, and we were loaded for bear. Or enchilada. Or really any damn thing we might run into. I had Bertha, my Mossberg, and a pair of H&K MP-5 submachine guns mounted to the handlebars of one ATV. Ty had his Colt 1911 loaded with hollow point .45 rounds, a Benelli M4 shotgun, and a Remington 700 with a night scope across his ATV’s gear rack. I didn’t so much think we were in danger of anything that might be out there as I thought we might be in danger of being mistaken for an invading army if we got anywhere near the Mexican border. We also had a couple of battery-operated flood lights and a flare gun with white phosphorous flares to light up the whole area if we needed it.

  We pulled up to the house where I stopped the night before and unloaded the ATVs. I turned to Tyson. “You sure you’re up to this?”

  “Son, that’s at least the fourteenth time you’ve asked me that since we left my house. For the last damn time, yes, I’m fine. I ain’t gonna go running after the damn thing. I’m gonna hang back and shoot the shit out of it.” He threw his leg over the four-wheeler and cranked the machine to life. We pulled our night vision glasses on and rolled out toward where the chalupa killed the coyote the night before.

  Once we got to the creature’s known hunting ground, we started our search there. We made concentric circles on the ATVs, spiraling out from the kill zone at center in an ever-larger radius. After two hours of literally driving around in circles, I slowed down to let Tyson pull up alongside me and we turned off our rides.

  “This ain’t working,” I said.

  “It’s early yet,” Tyson replied.

  “We ain’t seen so much as a coyote in the last hour,” I argued. “We’re making too much damn noise. Ain’t nothing going to come near us on these things.”

  “Shit.” Ty nodded his agreement. “I was a little bit afraid that might be the case.”

  “But you couldn’t stand the thought of being left out,” I finished the thought for him.

  I reckon he was glad it was dark so I couldn’t see him blush. I didn’t blame Ty, though. We weren’t the kind of men who sat at home and made plans or watched the computer screen. We were meant to be out here, in the middle of the shit, and anybody who didn’t believe that had no place being a Hunter. “Alright, so now what?” I asked.

  “Well, my ideas ain’t worked out so good so far, so I don’t reckon I know.”

  “Well, I ain’t an expert in desert hunting, so even though this was a shitshow, I reckon I’ll still take any ideas you got,” I said.

  He didn’t have time to tell me any ideas he might have because just then I heard another coyote scream. This one sounded closer than the one last night, and it only took me a second to get the general direction locked in. I thumped Tyson on the shoulder and said, “Let’s go!”

  He looked at me, rubbed his shoulder a little bit, and cranked his four-wheeler. We headed in the direction the howl had come from, and this time we had wheels. We crested a rocky dune and looked down into another small depression, where this chimichanga obviously liked to do its hunting. There was an orange spray of blood painting the ground in my night vision, but two bright red shapes still circled each other in the bottom of the ditch.

  “Lights,” I said, stripping off my goggles and flipping on the spotlights mounted to my handlebars. The xenon lamps cut through the dark like lasers, illuminating a battered coyote dancing and jumping around something that I couldn’t quite identify. It was black and orange striped, about five feet tall at the shoulder, and about ten feet long, with a thick tail and a stubby head. It moved fast as lightning on its four stubby legs, and the coyote kept getting nipped when it went in to try and snap at the thing.

  “Son of a bitch,” I heard Ty murmur behind me. He had the high-powered LED floodlight out of the case and up on its stand, shining down into the depression like a miniature blue sun.

  “What the hell is that, Ty?” I asked.

  “That’s another one of them damn were-lizards that bit me, only this one’s about twice the size,” he said.

  “That ain’t no were-lizard,” Skeeter said into our earpieces. “That’s a giant Gila Monster, and if it gets hold of you, it’ll chew your damn leg clean off.”

  “A giant Gila Monster? Is that even a thing? Or are you just messing with me and really it’s a churro?” I asked.

  “That ain’t no kind of chupacabra, Bubba. That thing looks like a Gila Monster, just five times the normal size. That means five times as venomous.”

  “Wait, you mean it ain’t just a giant lizard with a shitload of teeth—it’s a poisonous giant lizard with a shitload of teeth?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Skeeter said. “Try not to get dead.”

  “Always the goal,” I said. I pulled Bertha from her shoulder holster and ran down the sand to about twenty yards from the lizard. I still wasn’t convinced that it wasn’t a chalupa, but either way, it looked a lot like something that was in serious need of killing. I drew a bead on the thing and squeezed the trigger. Bertha jumped a little in my hands, and a sound like a thunderclap came from her.

  The fifty-caliber slug smacked into the lizard right in the side, a little high, but I was elevated and shooting down, so I gave myself a pass on a little bit of accuracy. Truth be told, I was a wee bit excited to be shooting something I’d never put a bullet in before, so that might have made me a little jumpy, too. The bullet hit home with a solid thwack, and the lizard turned and looked at me, its baleful yellow eyes boring holes into me as if to say, “Okay, asshole, you got next.”

  “Shit,” I said. “That shoulda put a hole the size of a damn pie plate in that thing.” Instead, there was a tiny trickle of blood where it looked like I broke the skin, but just barely. “Ty, did you say you killed one of these things with that Colt?”

  “Yeah, but I reckon I got the runt of the litter,” Tyson hollered back. “Get clear so I can put a few into its head!” I ran around to the right to get clear of Ty’s line of fire, and he put five .308 rounds in the lizard’s head and neck within half a dozen seconds. The lizard let out a screech and decided we were way more a threat than the coyote.

  It spun around, looking for the critter that hurt it, and since Ty was way back at the ATVs shooting with a rifle like a sane person, I was the first thing the super-Gila found. It scurried up the hill way faster than anything with them stubby little legs ought to run, and I emptied Bertha’s magazine at it as it came. One round caught it square in the snout, and that pissed it off enough to stop for a second and let out a bellow that sounded a lot like a dragon screwing a really upset billy goat, then it got right back after me.

  I holstered Bertha and squared up like I was back at UGA getting after a quarterback. I didn’t know which way I was gonna have to juke, I just hoped I’d be fast enough and the stupid idea that popped into my head was gonna work. Ty reloaded and put another couple rifle slugs into the critter’s side before it got to me, then it was go time. The lizard came at me like a dead run, and I was facing down more ugly death than I’
d seen since the last time I had all-you-can-eat fajitas at La Casa del Fuego on dollar Budweiser night. It ran straight at me, and I jumped just far enough to the right to miss getting a gut full of pissed off lizard teeth.

  I landed, spun around, and jumped again, landing on the Gila-Gigante’s back just forward of its front legs. It bucked, and I wrapped my legs around its neck like a stripper on a wobbly pole, holding on for dear life. I managed to squeeze tight enough to lock my feet under the monster’s throat, and it wasn’t shaking me loose come hell nor high water. It thrashed, jumped, and wiggled, but I was stuck tighter than a tick in a poodle’s butt hair, and frankly, I was too scared to let go. It even rolled over one time, squashing all the air outta my lungs and mashing one ball flatter than a penny on a railroad track, but I still hung on.

  Ty couldn’t shoot no more, on account of him kindly not wanting to kill me, and the lizard couldn’t shake me, so I was the one in the catbird seat. Or maybe the lizardbird seat. Super-Gila kept running around and thrashing, but I just unslung that big Mossberg 12-gauge from my back, pressed the barrel to the back of the lizard’s head, and cut loose with eight shotgun shells right into its brainpan. The first three didn’t penetrate, but even the toughest hide can only take so much abuse, and a twelve-gauge shotgun at point-blank range is a hell of a lot of abuse. The lizard stopped moving after six shots, but I plugged a seventh one in there just for good measure. The eighth was just cause my nuts hurt and I was pissed off.

  The creature flopped to the dirt on its belly, its skull a destroyed mess all over my shoes. I unhooked my feet, my ankles and knees screaming at the abuse I heaped on them, and I collapsed right beside the lizard. Tyson cranked his four-wheeler and drove down next to me, stopping a couple feet from my head.

  “You alright?” he asked.

  “I ain’t dead, but my knees are shot and my balls hurt, and if this don’t give me a ferocious case of hemorrhoids, I’ll eat your hat,” I said.

  “So what you’re saying is you’re fine.”

  “Yeah, I’m alright.”

  “Good, cause we seem to have another problem.” Tyson pointed past me to the other side of the little gulley the lizard was hunting in. Just on the edge of the floodlight’s throw was a cave, just about the perfect size for this Uber-Gila to crawl into. Poking out of the mouth of the cave was a pair of little lizard heads. By little, I mean they looked to be the size of normal Gilas, about a foot high and probably two feet long.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said.

  “Yup,” Tyson agreed. “I reckon the one I killed last week was Papa.”

  “And I just killed the mama. Shit.”

  I pressed the button on my earpiece, but Skeeter was already listening. “I got you, Bubba. What are you gonna do with two baby Giant Gila Monsters?”

  “Why do I even have an off switch on this thing if you can just turn it on whenever you want?”

  “So you have the illusion of being in control of one thing in your life. Don’t avoid the question. What are you going to do with them baby super-lizards?”

  I let out a sigh and dug my phone out of my pocket. To my surprise, it was still intact after being rolled over by me and a giant lizard. Them Otterbox things are the bomb. I scrolled through some contacts until I got to the M’s. I pressed a button, and a big goofy face filled my screen.

  “Bubba? Is that you?” a voice came on the other end.

  “Mason, I need a favor,” I started. I explained what I needed, then hung up the phone. A minute later, I looked at Ty. “It’s handled.”

  “What are you doing? You ain’t killing them things, are you?” he asked.

  “Nah, looks like they only got to be real feisty when they had babies. This lizard’s probably been hunting around here for decades without hurting anybody. It just had to widen its hunting ground because the babies needed fed. No need to exterminate what might be the last two just because their territory shrank the same time their family grew. I got a guy in Missouri. He’s friends with a…dude that runs kind of a wildlife preserve for the wildest kind of life. He’ll take these little guys out there where they can make friends with a couple gowrows and some other critters, and they won’t need to bother nobody.”

  Ty thought about it for a minute, then nodded. “That sounds good. I reckon if they didn’t have to hunt for food for their babies, I never would have run afoul of the papa.”

  “Yeah, but Papa turned manhunter. It was only a matter of time before some hiker or camper ended up out here and became lizard food. This way they’ve got a safe place, and we don’t have to kill ‘em,” I said.

  “What are we gonna do with that?” Ty asked, pointing to the dead lizard.

  I looked at it for a long minute, then grinned up at him from my spot on the ground. “Well, son, I’ve heard fried lizard tastes like chicken. Be a shame to let all that meat go to waste.”

  “I’ll call Vanessa, tell her to break out the big skillet.” He helped me to my feet, and we started back to the truck.

  We got about twenty feet when something hit me. I looked over at Ty and said, “You know the rule she’s gonna enforce, right?”

  “What’s that?”

  “We killed it. We gotta clean it.”

  16

  Chelsea (for Gina)

  I don’t see him dragging a stolen Food Lion grocery cart uphill

  loaded down with a hot water heater and cans picked up

  off the side of the road

  heading for the recycling center hoping for just enough

  to get another bottle of get me through the night.

  I don’t see her pay for a corn dog and courtesy cup of ice

  with pennies and haul the seven mismatched garbage bags

  that make up her whole world out into the heat of the August afternoon.

  I don’t see him sitting in the rain mumbling at nothing

  and carving names into his wiry limbs with a rusty jacknife

  while his own blood drips pink

  and runs off down the sidewalk,

  puddling for a second around my Ecco loafers.

  But I see you

  kneeling in front of a wild-eyed Walt Whitman madman

  to say “hey man, you alright?”

  I look at you in your duct-taped Doc Martens

  thrift-store Dickie’s work shirt

  maybe a dollar and a half in your own pocket

  while you kneel on the wet concrete

  to touch the face of a stranger

  and for a minute

  before the world washes my vision away again

  I see.

  17

  Knight of the Green

  A New Knights of the Round Table Short Story

  The yellow school bus groaned its way up the steep incline and pulled into the gravel parking lot. Gwen Dimont looked out the window at all the green surrounding the vehicle and suppressed a shudder. This was so far out of her element as to not even be on the same periodic table. She was a city girl, through and through. Charlotte wasn’t huge, but it at least gave her the comfort of concrete under her feet and a healthy coating of smog in her lungs. She was sure that this field trip was going to end with her eaten by a bear, or at least with a horrendous case of poison ivy. Could you die from poison ivy? If anyone could manage, she could. That would be the perfect capper on her craptastic morning.

  First Lance called up and bailed on this Bataan Death March of field trips, claiming some garbage about an exam in his trig class. Gwen took trig last year, so she couldn’t even tell if he was lying. Then Rex shows up at the bus with no permission slip, and his dad on some BS trip to Chicago for work or something, so she was stuck without her boys on this stupid ride.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad if everybody else in her history class didn’t hate her because she was smarter than them. Or for the other thing. Anyway, people are stupid, her boys had abandoned her, so now she was going to die in Deliverance country with a bunch of stupid high school kids. This was not the
glamorous death she had envisioned for herself. Unless the bus blew up in the next ten seconds and took them all out at once. That would be sensational enough. She really hoped her mom wouldn’t use the picture from the yearbook for her memorial service.

  “Come on, Murden, why are we all the way out here in the middle of nowhere,” Liam Crawford called from the back of the bus. As much of a goon as Crawford was, Gwen actually agreed with him for once.

  “We are out here to experience history on the ground, my boys, where it happened,” Mr. Murden said with a broad grin. His long white hair was pulled back in an uncharacteristic ponytail, and he wore a polo shirt and a pair of khaki cargo shorts, the least formal attire the students had ever seen him wear. The bus driver opened the door, and Murden bounded down the stairs, his huge floppy hat bouncing atop his head and his skinny stork legs reflecting enough light to blind them all. The ridiculous-looking teacher clapped his hands and called up to the bus.

  “Get your lunches and eat quickly, students. We have thirty minutes for lunch, then we are hiking to the battlefield. Our guide will be here promptly at one!”

  Gwen got up and stomped to the front of the bus, joining the throng of students. Of course, Liam’s buddy and partner in crime, Scott Golbert, was right behind her.

  “Hey, Gwen,” Scott breathed on her neck. “How’s it hanging?” He chuckled at her, his voice low and dirty.

  Gwen reached behind her without looking and grabbed Scott’s crotch. She felt the boy suck in a huge breath at the sudden agony in his testicles.

  “I dunno, Scotty,” she said, not turning her head. “Feels like it’s hanging about three inches. Now fuck off.”

  She let go of his nuts, and he sagged against the seat in front of him. Gwen hazarded a glance back as she turned to descend the steps at the front of the bus and was happy to see Scott sitting in a seat, a sickly green cast across his features. Good, she thought. Those gorillas have been making my life hell for two years. It’s time I started dishing out a little payback.