The street cop shook his head. “Can’t drink on duty.”
Augie nodded. “Just thought I’d offer.”
The cop frowned. “Just sit there and keep your mouth shut.”
“I can do that,” Augie said.
The door to the woman’s john opened and Lori walked out, followed by the two detectives. Osbourne and Gayle. Augie had dealt with both of them before.
“Everything okay out here?” Gayle asked.
“Sure,” the street cop said.
He handed an evidence baggie to Osbourne and pointed down the bar to where Augie’s sawed-off shotgun rested; breach cracked and shells gone. “I figure the shotgun for the murder weapon. It’s unloaded now.”
“Any word on follow-up?” Osbourne slid the baggie, with the two spent green shells inside, into his pocket.
The street cop nodded. “Squad’s outside. Crime scene crew’s stuck on the West Seattle Bridge.”
“Thanks. Take the girl outside, will you?”
“Can she leave?”
“Uh huh.”
At the door, Lori turned and looked at Augie, then she was out and gone.
“When you gonna tell me I can have a lawyer?” Augie asked.
Osbourne shrugged. “We don’t have to read you rights, not unless we arrest you. You want us to do that?”
“No. I’ll tell you everything that happened.”
“What did happen?” Gayle asked.
Augie didn’t much care for the sound of her voice. Loud and too aggressive, even for a cop. Too back east for her own good. He glanced at Osbourne. The detective dipped his chin in approval.
“I know I didn’t murder anybody,” Augie said. “I saved the planet, that’s what I did. That little creep ain’t human.”
He tipped his head toward the body sprawled on the floor in the center of the room, feet stretched toward the bar, toes up. Most of the stiff’s head had been blown away by the point-blank blast of the twelve-gauge. Blood everywhere.
“Gonna take one of those professional services to get the place clean again,” Augie muttered. “I swear, it’s enough to drive a fella crazy.”
“What was that?” Osbourne asked.
“Nothing.” Augie shook his head. “Just talking to myself.”
Gayle took a step closer. “What do you mean when you say not human?”
“What do you think I mean? He’s some sort of alien, like you see in those supermarket papers. Ready to invade us.”
“Why would aliens invade White Center?”
“Not here; not Seattle. I mean the world. Earth.”
Gayle leaned even closer. Augie eased away.
“You expect us to believe that crap?” she asked.
Augie folded his arms across his chest. “It ain’t crap.”
She was in his face now, one corner of her lip curled up. Augie wished the bitch would go away, let him talk to Osbourne.
“Some Martian comes to Earth and walks into your bar, for no other reason than to swap jokes?” she sneered. “Come on, Augie. Why wasn’t he three thousand miles east of here, parked on the White House lawn?”
“I never said he was Martian.”
“You even sure he was an alien?” Gayle said.
“Check the stiff, you’ll see.”
Gayle glanced at Osbourne. He watched as she went to the body and knelt beside it. With one blue-gloved finger, she pushed at the expensive-looking mask the stiff clutched in one hand.
“Never seen one this realistic,” she said.
“Maybe from that effects shop in L.A.,” Osbourne said. “The place that made the mask used in the Ohio bank job.”
“Maybe.”
Gayle continued to inspect the corpse. Osbourne turned back to the bar. “What happened after he came in?”
Augie shivered. He’d never felt so cold. Coming down with something, had to be. The little creep must have infected him with some alien disease, not to mention how bad he messed up the bar.
“Augie?” Osbourne said.
Augie twisted his shoulders. The muscles popped in protest. He continued. “I try not to pay attention to what customers look like. I get all kinds in here. This one was funny, though, I’ll give him that. He knew jokes I ain’t never heard and that takes some doing, let me tell you.”
“Stick to the story, Augie.”
“Sorry.” Augie mopped at his forehead with a fresh bar rag. Too hot now. No doubt about it. He’d been infected, probably those nano-things. He’d seen too many movies not to recognize it. If he didn’t die in some nasty way, he’d probably turn into a zombie. He drew a deep, shuddering breath. He wouldn’t let that happen, no matter what he had to do.
“Talk to me, Augie.” Osbourne sounded impatient now.
Augie spit a wad of green-black phlegm into the bar rag.
“The little creep leaned at me and said, ‘You hear the one about the alien that walks into the bar?’ I leaned on the bar, our noses almost touching. He grinned, then –”
Augie couldn’t swallow, couldn’t catch his breath.
“You okay?” Osbourne asked.
“I’m burning up.”
His toes and fingers tingled. His head throbbed. He focused on Osbourne’s hound-dog face and choked out the words. “The creep grabbed both his ears and pulled his face off. Tried to hand it to me, kid you not.”
“Hey, Oz,” Gayle said. “come look at this.”
“A second,” Osbourne said. “What did he look like, Augie?”
“Without his face? Some kinda green-skinned robot. No nose, no ears. Two beady eyes.”
“And then?”
Augie’s stomach was in knots. “He leaned close again and said, ‘I’m going to take over your damned dirty planet and I think I’ll start with you.’”
“And then?”
Augie shuddered. “Dear God, he breathed into my mouth.”
“Oz, you got to see this.”
“I heard you, Gayle. What did you do, Augie?”
Augie glanced down the bar.
“Answer me, Augie,” Oz said.
“What do you think?” Augie tipped his head toward the gun. “I keep that sawed-off twelve-gauge under the register ‘cause I been robbed twice. I grabbed it and blew the little creep away.”
“Oz, I need you now,” Gayle said. “This body’s so hot it’s almost glowing. We could grill a steak here.”
Osbourne poked his finger into Augie’s bicep. “Stay where you are. You hear me? Not a step, not a single step. If I got to come after you, you’ll be sorry.”
Osbourne hurried across the room. Before the detective reached the body, it sat up, turned at the waist and looked at Augie. It stuck its thumbs where its ears should be and wiggled all its fingers.
“What the hell!” Gayle jerked away and scuttled backwards on her butt, putting distance between her and the moving stiff.
Across the room, the jukebox kicked to life. Johnny Cash belted out Ghost Riders in the Sky. With a nasty-sounding puff, the corpse burst into flames. Osbourne dived through the fire, grabbed Gayle and rolled with her all the way to the far wall.
Augie felt his bladder go, felt warm piss trickle down his legs. The least of his concerns.
“Ain‘t gonna be infected by no aliens,” he muttered. “Ain’t gonna let that happen.”
He quick-stepped around the bar, scooped up the shotgun and pulled two fresh shells from his secret stash clipped to the belly of the beer dispenser. He braced himself and snapped the breach shut.
“Don’t do it, Augie,” Osbourne shouted.
“Hell with that.” Augie pressed the shotgun barrel into the juncture of his neck and jaw, and pulled both triggers.
Pilch extruded a dorsal tendril and keyed a communications link to the control shell of the little silver ship. “Did you get it all?”
“Every nuance,” Runk replied. “So intense it almost made me vacate my ventral sleeve.”
The ship rode a geostationary orbit, twenty-two thousand miles above the surface of t
he Earth, tucked in among a string of communications satellites.
Alone in the contact shell, Pilch shed the delicate remote- sensor harness and wiggled away from the control array. Grit and abrasion! It would be difficult to shed the input data from that damned avatar; might take a full cycle in stasis to filter out the images and sounds. There could even be psychic scarring.
“The rhythmic noise at the end was a nice riff,” Runk said.
“The locals call it music,” Pilch said.
“Whatever. I think this is your best work this trip.”
Pilch’s own ventral sleeve sphincter tightened. “Kind of you to say. The peace enforcers were a little hard to figure.”
“You played them perfectly. The reanimated, exploding corpse is a classic comedy routine.”
“Thank you. I think so, too.”
“I should thank you. A pleasure to record it all. I almost split a membrane when you pulled the avatar’s face away and the barkeep shot you.”
“That always gets a good response.”
“It never does get old. What do you say? You ready to go home or do you want to record another gig?”
Pilch’s eye stalks quivered and contracted. An involuntary gland secretion wasn’t far away. “Head for home. I’m exhausted.”
“You should be, after a performance like that. When these immersives play to the crowds at home, the emotive fluctuations from experiential transfer will flush the mucus out of them.”
“You really think so?”
“They’ll beg to sit through it again and again. We’ll make a fortune.”
“Good,” Pilch said. “I need a break.”
“Loyon, Grimik and I took a float through the outer islands last trip home. The feeding ― ”
Runk’s reminiscence became a withdrawing tide of sound. The nodal lights in Pilch’s contact shell shifted to ultraviolet and body-temperature liquids began to ooze into the space.
Pressure in the shell increased. Runk must have initiated the acceleration field. They’d be home in a quarter-cycle, and not an instant too soon.
Pilch had gotten too close to the audience this time, had even snickered at some of Augie’s jokes. And when the barkeep committed suicide – an unanticipated first in Pilch’s one-hundred-seventeen cycles of improvisational performances – Pilch had lost ventral sleeve control.
The last of the cushioning amniotic fluid filled the shell. Pilch drifted into stasis, whispering the mantra a crèche parent had offered as absolution so very long ago.
“Sluice the untagged slime-worms, kid, if they can’t take a joke.”
© 2013 KC Ball
K.C. Ball lives in Seattle, with her wife, Rachael, and two fussy cats. Her fiction has appeared in various online and print publications, as well as a short-story collection, Snapshots From A Black Hole & Other Oddities, from Hydra House Books, and a novel, Lifting Up Veronica, from Every Day Publishers. She is a 2010 graduate of Clarion West writers workshop and received the Writers of the Future award in 2009 and the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Older Writer award in 2012.
How did you come up with “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One”? What stages did you go through in the process of getting the idea down?
This story was one of six I wrote during Clarion West. The final draft that appears here in Waylines is much changed since that first version, written almost three years ago. I’ve never understood some writers who say they never rewrite. I jigger with my stories until everything fits into place, like one of those steel-balls-in-the-depressions games I used to play as a kid. And it was an experiment. I wanted to try a short story told in three discernible points-of-view and - because I believe a sense of humor is one of the marks of a thinking being - I wanted to address the notion of what an alien might find funny. I’m pleased with the result.
How did you maintain the balance of humor and the more serious themes of the story? Do you find that humor is as difficult to write as is often suggested?
I’ve always been drawn to jokes. They’re one of humanity’s most enduring forms of story-telling. And I’m fascinated by the way in which jokes travel and change according to the culture in which they’re told. As far as maintaining balance, The problem I’ve always had is repressing my humorous natures so that it doesn’t take over a story. Still, writing funny can be a challenge. The trick, I think, is pushing a straight situation until it becomes absurd.
Your collaboration with Mike Alexander, “The Moon Belongs to Everyone” (Analog Dec 2012) received a recommended from Locus, and also appeared on a few years best. How did it feel to see the story being praised so highly?
I’m so pleased with that story, and with the praise it has received. I know that Mike was, too. I’m also happy that it appeared when it did, so that Mike could see it and the two of us could celebrate. It appeared just a month before he died (early in December 2012 after a long and heroic battle with cancer). I miss Mike more than I can tell you. We met for the first time at Clarion West in 2010 and became fast friends. We used to kid about Mike being my younger brother from another mother. Mike was getting noticed as a writer - six or eight of his short stories were published in major SF magazines in the two years before his death - and I believe his success would have continued, if he had had more time. We both wrote, late in life, to fulfill a long-delayed dream and wrote the same kinds of stories. Old-school speculative fiction. The collaboration for “The Moon Belongs to Everyone” was so much fun for both of us. We were four thousand words into a sequel, “Pie in the Sky”, at the time of his death, and had a rough outline for a third story using the same characters, “Mars is More Than a Candy Bar”. I hope to finish both stories, if I can.
Why write? Surely there are so many other, far easier, things you could be doing?
As I said, I write because it always was a dream of mine and now that I’m retired I have the time. Easier things that I could do? I suppose I could sit and watch television all day. No, I’ve always been a story-teller and writing is a joy.
What are you working on at the moment? Where can our readers find more K.C. Ball?
I have four other stories that will be out soon or may have just appeared when this issue of Waylines is published. “Drawn to the Glow” appeared February 28, 2012, as the two-thousandth story at Every Day Fiction. “This Little Piggy”, a SF riff on one of my favorite jokes, will appear in the Spring 2013 issue of Big Pulp, the online magazine; “A Quiet Little Town in Northern Minnesota” is set for the July/August 2013 issue of Analog, and “Kindred Souls”, a horror story with an older protagonist (one of the things I’d like to see more of in SF) is included in A Quiet Shelter There, an anthology that will be out later this year from Hadley Rille Books. And my story collection, Snapshots From A Black Hole & Other Oddities, is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, as well as my publisher, Hydra House Books.
What I’m working on? I’m excited about “Sweetwater Notion and the Hallelujah Kid”, a steampunkish novella I just sent out for the first time. I also have three stories almost finished, “Thumbing It”, a horror story set in the sixties, “Froggie Went A’Courtin’”, environmental SF in the Pacific Northwest, and “Amid a Crowd of Stars”, a hard SF piece based on the notion of human inter-connectedness. And I have about 35,000 words written toward an alternate history novel, Shadow Man
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