David Drake - Balefires

The creature straightened in silent agony, rising onto its hind legs with its tail lying rigidly against its back. Its ovipositor was fully extended, thumb-thick and six inches long.

"Was it fun to kill them, bug?" Lorne screamed. "Was it as much fun as this is?" His fourth shot slammed, dimpling a belly plate which then burst outward in an ugly gush of fluids. The creature's members clamped tightly about its spasming thorax. The tail lashed the uprights in red spurts. The machine was fading and the torn paneling of the loft was beginning to show through the dying creature's body.

There was one shot left in the cylinder and Lorne steadied his sights on the control plate. He had already begun taking up the last pressure when he stopped and lowered the muzzle. No, let it go home, whatever place or time that might be. Let its fellows see that Earth was not their hunting ground alone. And if they came back anyway-if they only would!

There was a flash as penetrating as the first microsecond of a nuclear blast. The implosion dragged Lorne off his feet and sucked in the flames so suddenly that all sound seemed frozen. Then both sidewalls collapsed into the nave and the ruins of the tower twisted down on top of them. In the last instant, the pipe loft was empty of all but memory.

A fire truck picked its way through the rubble in the parking lot. Its headlights flooded across the figure of a sandy-haired man wearing scorched clothing and a neck brace. He was kneeling beside a body, and the tears were bright on his face.

The Automatic Rifleman

Fritz Leiber is credited with developing the horror story with an urban setting. His Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series is more a parallel development to Robert E. Howard's work than it's a copy (compare Le Fanu's Carmilla with Stoker's Dracula for another case of "similar" not meaning "the same"). And for horror in an SF milieu, it'd be hard to better, say, "A Bad Day for Sales" or "A Pail of Air."

I stole this idea from Leiber's urban fantasy "The Automatic Pistol."

Well, it's not quite that simple. Vergil was regularly accused of stealing from Homer, to which he would reply, "Why don't you try it yourself? If you did, you'd understand that it's easier to filch Hercules' club than it is to steal a verse from Homer." But "The Automatic Rifleman" wouldn't exist in the form it does were it not for Leiber's literally seminal story.

If you like my work, go out and read everything Fritz Leiber wrote before, say, 1960. I don't know of a writer with a more varied and brilliant take on every subject he touched.

The story itself is a wish-fulfillment fantasy like a great deal of other horror fiction, some of it very good. The story posits the notion that things are in their present state because some external force is working to make them bad; in other words, the world's problems are not the result of mankind's own actions.

I wish I could really believe that was true.

Coster was waiting for them in the darkened room, hidden by the greater shadow of the couch. His face was as lean and hard-edged as the automatic rifle he held pointed at the door. "Where's the goddam light?" Penske muttered. He found the switch, threw it, and froze with his hand halfway down to the knife in his boot.

Davidson bumped into Penske from behind and cursed, her lips twisting into the sneer she kept ready when she was around the short man. "Move your-" she began before she saw why Penske had stopped. Then, without hesitation, she cried, "George, look out!"

"Too late," said Coster with a bailiff's smirk and the least motion of the rifle muzzle to bring it to the attention of George Kerr. The black man in suit and tie loomed behind his two companions. His eyes were open and apparently guileless, shuttering a mind that had already realized that the flimsy apartment walls would be no obstacle to rifle bullets. "But we're all friends here," Coster went on, his grin broadening.

"Then I suggest we all come in and discuss matters," said Kerr in a cultured voice, showing his bad front tooth as he spoke. His fingers touched Davidson's right elbow and halted the stealthy motion of her hand toward her open purse.

"Sure," said Coster, nodding, "but stay bunched in that corner, if you will." His head and not the rifle twitched a direction. "Until you're convinced of my good intentions, you'll be tempted to-put yourselves in danger. We don't want that."

"Who the hell are you?" Penske demanded, shuffling sideways as directed. An angry flush turned his face almost as dark as that of Kerr beside him.

"My name's Coster," the rifleman said. "Agfield told me where I'd find you."

Davidson whirled angrily toward Kerr. "I told you not to trust that bastard!" she said. "Somebody ought to take one of his basketballs and stuff it-"

"Dee, that's enough," the big man said, his eyes still on the rifleman. He had closed the hall door softly behind him. Nothing in his manner called attention to the pistol holstered in the small of his back.

"He said you could use a rifleman for what you had in mind," Coster amplified. "We're what you need."

"We?"asked Penske tautly. The muscles beneath his leather jacket were as rigid as the bones to which they were anchored, for he recognized even better than the others the menace of the weapon which covered them.

"Me," said Coster, "and him." His left forefinger tapped the gunbarrel where it projected from its wooden shroud. His right hand stayed firm on the rifle's angled handgrip, finger ready on the trigger.

Calmly, Kerr said, "Agfield doesn't know what we have in mind."His right hand was now loose at his side, no longer restraining Davidson.

"Sure he does," said the rifleman, flashing his tight-lipped grin again. "Kawanishi, the Japanese Prime Minister. And I'm here to make sure you get him."

For a moment, no one even breathed. Coster leaned forward, his right elbow still gripping the gunstock to his ribs. He said earnestly, "Look, if I were the police, would I be talking to you? The whole World Proletarian Caucus is right here, right in front of… us. And if it was trials, convictions, they were after-the evidence ison you, or at least outside in your car. You blew away a teller in La Prensa, and you've still got the gun, don't you? And the one that killed that little girl in Mason City?"

Davidson mumbled a curse and looked hot-eyed at Penske.

"But we're friends," Coster repeated. Very deliberately, he rotated the automatic rifle so that its muzzle brake pointed at the ceiling. The rubber butt rested on his thigh.

"Friends," said Kerr. "Then we should get comfortable." He took off his suit coat and turned, as deliberate as Coster, to drape it over the back of a chair. The grip of the big Colt was a square black silhouette against his light shirt.

Everyone eased a little. Coster laid the rifle across his knees, one hand still caressing the receiver of the weapon. Davidson and Penske both lit cigarettes, the latter by flicking the head of a kitchen match with his thumbnail. He tossed the wooden sliver toward a wastebasket. It missed, but he ignored it as it continued to smoulder on the cheap carpet.

Kerr took one of the straight chairs from the kitchen-dinette and sat backwards on it, facing in toward the living room and Coster. The pistol did not gouge at him that way. "Penske, why don't you bring things in from the van," he said.

The short man glowered, but his expression suddenly cleared and he walked to the door. "I'll knock when I want you to open," he said as he left the room.

Davidson moved over beside Kerr, her fingertips brushing the point of his shoulder."You sound very confident about your ability to use that gun," the big man said with a gesture toward the oddly shaped rifle. "But I don't know that I'd care to make plans based on something… suppositious."