“Certain it has been known of old,
since man has been placed on earth,
that the mirth of the wicked is brief
the joy of the godless mere moments.”
-Job 20:4 & 5
The boy was slender, about ten years old by his shape, with ginger hair. He wore work boots that were clown large on him and was dressed in white thermals and tan overalls, again, very large and waifish as hung from his gaunt frame. The moon was high and near to full, its brightness bathing the earthly night. The men, oblivious to the boy, continued in their hurried file, Drexler still hauling Browne’s body.
The dog next to the boy was as tall as the child who looked longingly up into the sky. Sean wanted to look up, but the dog was huge and had company. It was a great brindle mastiff, a head like Drex and a lean 200 pound body.
Chuck noted, “The boy does seems to gaze at a point of light north and east of the moon, a star, or…”
“Or the worst boss on Mars!” growled Glass.
“By his reckoning, the Solar System,” corrected Heston.
“Captain, the kid has a metal plate on the side of his head. Our new late friend called this transcrittery for the eagle he knocked down, transhumanry in this case. Permission to feather the cute little fella?”
“Knock, but don’t loose. If it’s just a boy. You could not live with it.”
“Narrative pause, Cap?”
“Christian conscience, Glass.”
The boy smiled wide at the moonglare sky. He then placed one dirty set of fingers in his mouth and whistled. The ears on the big dog went up, betraying a golden glint on one. The boy’s continued whistle was greeted by the baying of hounds.
“Narrative pause, after all. Glass—fire at will, for God’s sake!”
Sean loosed the arrow at the boy, his heart sinking in a sea that lapped at the memory of a smiling son. The arrow transfixed the right shoulder of the boy, who screamed as a dozen canine forms emerged from the thin wood-lined ridge.
The voice of Drex wolfed, “Right face and take that ridge!”
“Marines!” snarled Sean as he loosed an arrow and took the first of the all-star dog team in the neck, an Irish wolfhound. Heston knocked the head from a pitbull. A half dozen dogs bounded southeast to meet Drexler’s men, a mix of German police shepherds and heelers. Four, the mastiff and three dogs, Rhodesian ridge-backs, bounded for Sean and Chuck. The yelling of men and the barked snarls of their oldest friends mixed in horrid enthusiasm.
The first ridge-back went down with his last arrow threading it from throat to guts.
Chuck blew the front shoulder off of the next fastest.
Chuck cocked his flint lock pistol and leveled it over the left hand holding his scalping knife, waiting patiently.
Sean crouched and awaited the furious ridge-back hair missile, the mastiff lumbering at Chuck.
Pistols were firing to his left. Chuck’s pistol misfired to his right, the click lost in the snarling of the Rhodesian that cleared fifteen vertical feed with one leap. Sean relaxed with his knife in a forward ice-pick and the hawk on his shoulder. He cleaved that slathering face in half with a stroke that brought his shoulder inline with the hurdling body. Knocked back onto his left side, his right shoulder gory and numb, Sean’s heart sank as he heart Chuck get bowled over by the huge mastiff.
“I’m comi—” was cut off in his throat as a wicked snake like head—a greyhound out of nowhere, darted for his throat. He parried left with the knife, spinning on his back and rising to his left knee and right foot in time for the thing to bight his hand, pressing it into the knife hilt. Down came the spike of the hawk, through the base of its skull. It amber eyes softened from that of a ravenous wolf to a sad dog. Letting go the hawk to pry his hand loose of the canine grip, Sean heard a tearing, growling, gurgling convulsion to his left, the sounds of canine human battle to his right. Shaking the sad-faced ruin from his hand, he lost the knife as a singular snarl cut the night.
Before him, between him and the convulsing form of the best man he had ever known, was that great mastiff, stalking forward with blood-dripping jaws. It charged as Sean roared with a fury, that despite his rage, sounded to him a bit too girly. This made him crank that crocodile kick all the harder. His right shin hit the beast in the left shoulder, causing it to spin and miss him, skidding prone with its back on his left foot. He brought down a chopping ax kick just above his hips and broke it’s back.
It whimpered, like some kind of puppy dog revenge.
‘Arm up,’ he ordered himself, sheathing his knife with bloody hand and belting the tomahawk with the numb one. Chuck was dead. Trusting Drex and the rest, he retrieved the powder horns, shot bags, slung one Hawkins and cradled the other, before dipping to pick up His Captain.
Turning with a simmering anger for this alien planet that did not match the earth of memory, but the fallow dream of the Enemy, he walked towards the boy—‘Dam, I forgot the bow, I could reuse that arrow. The pistol too—oh this is messed up.’
The sounds of cursing, snarling, yelping, chopping, whining, came from the left. Ahead was the boy. To the right, still out of sight, droned that wicked unicycle bolt gun. The boy stood, rigid with tremors, his shoulder plugged through with an arrow, tears streaming down his face. Slinging the other rifle around his neck—the left ear, because Chuck’s hip was on his neck—he grabbed the little guy by his red hair and led him along towards the slaughter of his terrible friends.
No one was down, though they were all chewed up. Charlie and James were reloading their pistols. Drex shouldered Jim again and ordered, “To the rocks, double time!”
They all jogged, even the boy under his hand, until they were under the trees. Then the bolt gun sounded and the ponderosa behind which Bronson posted up as rear guard, shook.
“Double time, single file,” ordered Drex. “Don’t stop ‘til we hit high ground.”
Within a single three-minute round they were a quarter mile south through a mixed stand of evergreen that the machines could not possibly traverse. In fact, they were emerging into a moonlit meadow of two long acres.
The kid in his hand twitched. On impulse, seeing the platinum panel blinking red, he tore it out of the shaved side of that little head. The kid collapsed, though there was little blood from the removal.
“The arrow will be enough to keep him from seeing this killer world with a man’s eyes,” said Brenner, noting Sean’s look of concern. Sean looked at him seriously and Brenner quipped, “Without Chuck, thought I’d fill in as second best. I see your pain, Glass, and I feel for you despite the many beatings you served me in that damned cube.”
Sean nodded and let Chuck down next to the boy.
Bronson interjected, “In a cube and now on a sphere—same game, higher stakes.”
“You lost the Captain, Glass?” snarled Drex.
Sean wanted to cuss him and they all saw it, Drex putting up a conciliatory hand, “Sorry Glass, was out of line. You get one free kick before I kick your ass the next time.”
“Thanks, Sarge.”
They were at the edge of the meadow, Brown and Heston leaning in state at the base of a ponderosa, on either side of the unconscious, unattended and probably dying, transhuman kid.
Looking down, he thought, ‘Is he still transhuman without the plate? Did I brain damage him? I should render aid.’
“This is bad,” came the matter of fact voice of Terry Bradshaw.
They all turned to follow his eyes to the far side of the meadow. There stood a small heard of horses, gold blinking form their moonlit ears, the lead horse, a great appaloosa stallion, was ridden bareback by a naked blond woman, long hair flowing down the right side of her head, a metal plate in the shaven left side of her elvish head.
Drex answered, “How so—looks smashible to me?”
Bronson drawled, “You sure don’t know horses do you, Sarge. Those are mean hombres there—every one, especially that little paint—all stallions.”
Caan groaned, “Someone at Corporate found a way to make horse women even crazier—I hate horse women!”
Drex grinned and stepped out into the meadow, “What’s to hate? A woman has her needs—and with Sexxy Drexxy gone to Mars for so long, what other choice did they have than Stallions?”
Sean had to laugh even as he shucked the empty guns, powder and shot.
The woman shrieked like a banshee and all five of those dark-eyed horses charged.
Bradshaw reiterated, “This. Is. Bad.”
And that moonlit meadow, between a rocky ridge, a forest and a boulder-stack castle, echoed with the sound of hooves and the steely thunk of Drex’s hammer on his shield, “Come and get some, Baby!”
Sean groaned, “So much for daylight,” and hefted his knife and hawk.
