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Three bad men from Nevada—Haby, Smith and
McCall—are amazed at the change in their old crony, Skinner
Alexander. Skinner has become like the rest of the people in weirdly
peaceful Contention City, Arizona where they serve cool water and
vegetable juice instead of whiskey in all the saloons.
If the men can’t stomach whisky, they
can’t fight. With that, the three bandits plan a job Skinner doesn’t
want any part of.
Episode 28
Smith and McCall backed out of the bank the
next day at 1:15 p.m. carrying slightly more than $10,000, revolvers
drawn, more grift than they dared hope for.
"Get down!" McCall ordered,
erratically motioning all the employees to lie on the ground. "You
count to a hundred—slowly—and then you get up. Any sooner and I'll
put some holes in you," McCall screeched like a male banshee
through his striped bandanna pulled up just below his eyes. He must have
practiced the psychotic, threatening voice until he had it down pat.
Smith, Haby and McCall hopped on their saddles
and started to ride out.
Contrary to Haby's belief, it didn't really
matter how few drank whiskey in this town. People in Contention made
their decisions based on what was the greatest good for the greatest
number of people. Evil people couldn't be allowed to get away with
brazen acts of malfeasance.
Phinneas X. Majors, owner of the bank, was one
of Contention's biggest brrkup supporters. By giving the brainclipped
employees small raises, he'd persuaded nearly all of them to get them.
The teller, Gene Hill, grabbed the
fifteen-shot repeating rifle that Majors had placed on a rack beneath
the counter and moved into a prone shooting position just outside the
front door. The mustachioed bank employee fired at the fleeing gang. He hit
Smith in the small of his back and tagged McCall in the shoulder.
Dismounting stiffly, they took cover behind their horses, shooting
wildly.
Haby turned around and fired at Hill. The
teller rolled inside the doorway, unscathed by any of the bullets.
"Blasted! They're gutsy!" Smith
said, frozen there in the middle of the street.
Among the people McCall told to lie face down
on the floor were Jesse Garon and Steve Birch. Though neither man had a
brainclip, they weren't the type to take a physical threat without
responding. Garon knocked out a foot-wide pane of glass and stuck his
head and right arm out. With his six-shooter, the former mountaineer hit
Smith in the leg as he tried to scuttle to the opposite side of the
street. Smith moaned in increasing agony from his second wound.
Birch dived out the door, past Hill and,
taking cover behind a trough, squinted and started firing on the hapless
gang. Birch couldn't see well enough to hit the side of a barn standing
on the inside, but the gang didn't know that. They kept their heads
downs and stayed scared.
The three outlaws retreated into a newly
opened dress shop, a store without a back exit. Haby grabbed the
proprietor, Mrs. James Starr, and pushed her out the front door sending
her sprawling on the walkway in her fine blue dress from Philadelphia.
McCall fired at a plank next to her head, a warning for her to get up
and run away. She did.
Graax was questioning me about the wonders of
bees and ants when we heard the shooting. I didn't get up. I was busy
sketching an ant I'd seen back east that had fur.
A few moments later Tony Grace, a
nine-year-old boy, busted in. "Sheriff! They're holding up the
bank!"
I groaned and put my head in my hands. "I
was afraid of something like that. I heard the guns." I'd been
hesitating to check into the shooting because I wanted to eat lunch and
have a conversation with Graax about bugs rather than arrest anyone.
Past one, I usually get very hungry. I was craving a thick, juicy steak
like the one I had the day before at the Contention Café.
Usually I'm all business, but I can't think
well when I'm hungry. Graax had kept me from eating sooner by insisting
I tell him everything I knew about those two insects.
Anyway, I went with Tony, who bounced, telling
me what he'd seen.
"Fine! This blasted standoff is going to
go on forever," I said disgustedly.
"Should I come too?" Graax said,
getting up.
"Might as well. According to the Council,
you're as much of a sheriff as I am. It'll give you something to think
about besides bugs."
Graax crouched down next to me from our
vantage point across the street at the wainwright's.
"We can take care of these three easily,
my friend," Graax said, palming a metallic pebble.
"What's that? How?"
The extraterrestrial smiled his thin-lipped
smile I suspected he learned from watching us humans talk to each other.
Or, perhaps, since recovering from his accident, he had more to smile
about. "It's another one of those things I can't describe. I don't
know enough of the words in English to be sure I'm telling you about it
correctly."
"Okay," I said, able to envision
that steak. "I trust you to do whatever it takes to get those
dastardly lawbreakers out of that store, hear? Whether they live or die
means nothing to me. I'm hungrier than a blind wildcat. Just don't
destroy June Starr's inventory of clothes. Please? Edith has her eye on
a pretty white thing!"
"How does she keep her eye on
something?" Graax asked seriously.
"Don't ask," I said, unwilling to
explain the idiom. "Just finish them off."
"This is an air. I don't think it would
do anything to the dress that you want for your wife," the alien
said.
"Air?" I said, not understanding.
"What in tarnation is some air going to do to those guys?"
"They will not feel good from the air when
they breathe it into themselves," Graax said.
"So it's like some kind of a fart?" I
laughed. "You're going to get them out of there with a giant fart.
This is going to be good."
"I don't know how to explain well . .
."
"Never mind. I'm hungry. Whatever it takes,
just get them knocked out so that you and I can clip them and get on to
eating," I said.
"I only wish I had that thing Caleb used to
hunt with. A sling?"
"You need a sling? Surely there's another
kid in town who has a sling," I said, looking around for the Grace
boy who was nowhere to be found.
"I'll try to throw this through the front
window. There's enough glass missing. It shouldn't bounce," Graax
said.
When Graax stood up, the robbers took shots at
him.
"Careful! You're going to get yourself
killed!" I said.
"Sorry," Graax said, sitting again.
They'd come close, but they missed.
The Squaattoosian aimed perfectly. An orange
smoke billowed out of the pebble. The bandits clambered out through the
windows and door holding their throats, coughing.
"Wait until the smoke clears. Don't inhale
or you'll feel like them," Graax said.
"Dead?"
"Sick."
They sure looked like they were dying, twitching
like dogs who'd been shot in the head. "They're going to sleep,"
Graax said. "They shake the same, like Squaattoos."
"Oh," I said hollowly, amazed at the
alien's resources. Was there anything he couldn't do? "Tell me what
you can all do so I don't see things like this and get surprised. The
shock might strike me dead one of these days," I joked.
Graax took me seriously. "I didn't think of
these barrkepp. I have six of them and no more. They don't make
themselves, like the brrkup. They have a piece in them we cannot get on
your planet as far as I know."
"How long these boys going to sleep?"
I wondered.
"It depends. Not all creatures the same. I
have never used them on humans. We should put a brrkup in before they wake
up so it will not make a difference if they are awake or asleep."
"No problem. I agree," I said.
I kept six brrkups wrapped in a square of muslin
in an old chewing tobacco tin in my back pocket. I unwrapped one of them
and placed it under Smith's nose and followed that with the others.
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