BLAZING SADDLES, SMOKING TENTACLES CH1. - RAYGUNS AND RAWHIDE

BLAZING SADDLES, SMOKING TENTACLES CH.1 - RAYGUNS AND RAWHIDE
By Scott Perkins


The fellow on the table isn’t going anywhere, so you decide to accompany the sheriff out to the abandoned mine to see what your fellow beings are up to and why they’re in your territory.

You nod the sheriff toward the door and when he turns his back to leave, you slip your Bolt Piecemaker ray gun out of the drawer and into your holster. As you strap up, you feel better with the polished brass and ceramic hanging on your hip; as their marketing transmissions like to say, “Quar’phon made cephalopods, Bolt made them evil.” You’re a terrible shot, but you don’t need to be a very good shot with a Bolt Piecemaker; aim in the general direction of your opponent and make him, his close kin, distant relations, and part of the landscape behind him go away.

If there are more like the guy on the table out in that mine, you aren’t taking any chances. (Bolt can make all the claims he wants, your people were already evil before he invented his ray gun.)
The sheriff shouts through the door for you to quit dawdling and get the lead out. You’re not sure what that means, but he seems impatient, so you hurriedly jab the unconscious creature with a hypodermic full of blowfish toxin, just enough to keep him from wandering off before you get back.

The sheriff has brought the horses around and is waiting outside the door alongside his deputy with the teeth like a Missouri mule. You feel your skin ripple in the heat as you come out into the high plains oven that these humans jokingly call a town.

“You reckon you’re gonna need that hogleg, son?” the sheriff nods at your Piecemaker.
“I reckon I don’t want to need it and not have it with me,” you reply.  The deputy titters nervously and hands you the reins of your mount.

You can feel the eyes of the townsfolk following you as you head out of town and you do your best to return the stares with a friendly nod and a touch of your brim.

Thankfully, the glare of the sun is so intense that you’re not the only one in town keeping your hat pulled low. The problem is that it means anyone around you could be hiding their ears, or their tentacles, or four, maybe five extra eyes…

It’s easy to feel outnumbered in these situations and you catch yourself thinking that maybe you should’ve grabbed the rifle too.

A few miles outside of town, you finally begin to relax. The sheriff seems lost in his own thoughts and you’re damned if the deputy has any, so you’re left with yours and that’s fine with you.  As the trail takes you across the barren stretches of brown scrub land, you find yourself in the lead.

That’s fine with you. You know the area well from when you scouted it from the air when you first arrived. The rocky terrain rises steadily and then fractures into gullies and eventually canyons where prospectors have frittered away their lives in the search for gold, burrowing into the landscape like a colony of heat-addled prairie dogs.

You can hear your companions talking in low voices behind you as you enter the base of the washout that leads up to the hole in the ground which once generously gave up gold, apparently in return for a steady influx of rusted pick axes and rotting minecarts.

You draw up to wait for the sheriff and his deputy, your horse dancing nervously as sounds whisper across the rusting junk, sounds that are not of the earth.

What the hell have these idiots been up to? How hard can it be to blend in with a bunch of fleshy bipeds so primitive that they think the telegraph qualifies as high technology? You didn’t choose this planet for its amenities.

The sheriff arrives as you dismount. He’s alone and looking back, you can see the deputy off his horse with a Winchester in his hands. The bucktoothed buckaroo hightails it back down the gully and you scramble up one face of the wash, seeking higher ground.

“Figure we can use high cover, and there ain’t no need for the kid to see what shouldn’t be seen.” The sheriff marks the dust at your feet with his tobacco juice to drive the point home. “Hear what I’m sayin, Doc?”

 “You don’t want your town sullied by my… kind.”

“We have an understanding, then.” The sheriff drops to the ground and ties his horse loosely to a nearby bit of scrubby tree. “You, I don’t mind. You help folks out and hold up your end. But these troublemakers are gonna make trouble for all of us and I won’t have it, Doc, I just won’t.”

This seems a bit unfair. What does all this have to do with you anyway? Just because a fella has a certain kind of skin or a certain number of tentacles doesn’t mean he’s responsible for everyone else who does too.

“Get in there and find out what they want, but anyone who comes out of there sporting more than two legs and two arms is getting drilled.”

“That’s some negotiation strategy you have there, Sheriff.”

“No point in beatin’ the devil round the stump, Doc,” the lawman replies. “I have the citizens of my town to protect and they’re simple folk, salt of the earth… you know, morons. They don’t accept strangeness very well.”

There’s certainly no point arguing with that fact.

You came all the way out here, you might as well go through with it and anyway you’re not entirely sure at this point that the sheriff is entirely ready to count you among “his town’s” human citizens.

You ease your Piecemaker in its holster and continue alone the last few yards toward the mouth of the mine. The creature at the door isn’t in any form that the sheriff would offer a room at the Grand Hotel. The mass of waving tentacles greets you silently, one tentacle extends to caress the tip of your nose and then loses interest in you once you’re identified as of the correct flavor for entry.

As you slip past the guard and venture into the welcome cool of the mine, your eyes adjust to different wavelengths of light and you begin to notice carvings on the walls of the mineshaft. Pictograms you haven’t seen since you left home trace spirals across the walls and ceiling of the shaft, telling a story that’s not going to be considered good news by the sheriff and his town.

As you descend into the darkness and damp, you are reminded of home, and it makes you edgy. You pull your ray gun fully out of the holster. The weight of it feels good in your hand and far too small and ineffectual to make a good negotiating tool. If the door guard isn’t bothering with human form, then whatever the rest are up to won’t be good for anyone else who has taken to walking on two legs. Things might get interesting.

“Cthoth-hurragh ctchuck t’ut-t’ut ftaghn!” A harsh voice cuts through the silence. “Cthoth-hurragh ctchuck tut-tut ftaghn!”

You step into a large chamber and stumble to a halt. Whether this space was dug out for the men working the old gold mine to gather and watch sporting events or the mine had broken through to a natural cavern and made improvements, you can’t rightly say. The uneven floor is heaped all about with piled backfill dug out of the tunnels that open in all directions from this central chamber.  Several of the nearby heaps of slag have an open space in the center, being watched with rapt attention by an undulating crowd of miscellaneous nightmares of scale, slime, and tentacle.

The spectators, though, aren’t what make your skin go rubbery and cold. A massive creature stands at the center of the watchers with a smaller human-sized creature held above what should by all rights be its head. As you watch, the creature shouts “Cthoth-hurragh ctchuck tut-tut ftaghn!” once again and brings the human form smashing down on the rocks.

The spectators take up the chant and soon they are chanting just one, ominous word. “Mon-go” they shout. “Mon-Go! Mon-Go! Mon-Go!” the name of an ancient terror out of the depths of your race’s darkest nightmares.

As you backpedal back down the tunnel, the darkness echoes with that ancient name. The ray gun feels useless in your nerveless fingers. You have to get out of there, you have to…

Your back slams into something solid and you realize you’ve run into a dead end. The chants are getting louder and the faint sussuration of suckers and feelers dragging obese bodies across stone floors follows. The tunnel in front of you gets darker as the Mongo approaches.

Your Bolt Piecemaker rocks in your hand as you empty it at the approaching terror. The flare of the death ray scours the pictograms from the stone walls and burns the hydrogen and methane out of the air, sending waves of fire and smoke down every tunnel and crevice. The rumble of the collapsing mine are accompanied by the realization that even if you bring the entire mountain down on its head, it’ll just make it mad.

You pray to your dark gods that the sheriff has the good sense to run as the dark hand of the Mon-Go reaches out to you.

Whether it’s the falling mountain that kills you or the creature is irrelevant, you’re jelly at the bottom of a deep, dark hole.

And that’s just not a good look on anybody.

BLAZING SADDLES, SMOKING TENTACLES CH. 1 - LONG ARMS OF THE LAW

BLAZING SADDLES, SMOKING TENTACLES CH.1 - LONG ARMS OF THE LAW

By Annie Evett

A tumble weed blows dramatically across the dusty main street of Mulder’s Lot. You grin at the cliched scene, taken directly out of the penny westerns stacked high in the tiny dusty room above the General Store you call both home and your control centre. You squint as grit blasts into your eyes, and untie the scarf which, until now, has sat fashionably round your neck. You’ve studied hard to fit into this town and although you’ve stayed longer than your posting normally allows, you find the inhabitants quaint and on occasions, interesting. 

Pulling your felt hat firmly over your ears, you adjust the tilt of it in the General Supply Store window and made your way to the Grand Hotel for your customary late afternoon drink in the saloon, away from the noisier public bar. On your way, you nod to the preacher who is busy painting the church steps and exchange pleasantries with his wife. She stutters a greeting, but never meets your eyes. You’ve managed to fool most of the townsfolk, but you suspect she can see past your elaborate disguises and harbours a suspicion that you are not all that you seem to be. It may of course be your initial choice of body type which makes her uncomfortable, but you decide to keep a closer eye on her, as it wouldn’t do to be discovered. 

The Grand Hotel glows with a friendly light in the fading afternoon sun. The sophisticated tinkling of the pianist’s tunes cuts through the suddenly still hot air. Crickets begin to sing alongside the musician.

Getting closer, you discover a crowd around the front entrance, all eyes entranced by the show taking place inside. As you push your way through the doors, you understand the silence, now mesmerised by the glamorous songstress slowly making her way down the staircase. Her song, simple and sweet, dripped of promise as she slithers around the room; lightly touching men’s hands or faces as she goes. She waves dramatically as she finishes her song and slips out through the swinging doors of the Saloon. You wonder if it is a good idea to drink there now. 

The pianist strikes a lively tune, the hypnotic effect the songstress has had on the town folk immediately dispells.  You nod to the barman, who fills a tumbler with a pale liquor and sends it down the wooden boards. He gestures toward the Saloon. “Doc, you’d best take your drink in there. You know some folk don’t like it when you drink here.” He slides a small folded note towards you and winks. You pocket it to read it later.

You hear galloping horses up the dusty main street with a sudden halt further down the street. You already know it’s outside our office ,and from the banging on the door, the visitor is keen to employer your services. You gulp down the fiery liquid and prepare yourself for what’s to come.  

Running feet down the street are followed by the doors of the hotel swinging open and the music stops dramatically. A bored group playing cards shift their eyes, hoping for new players, but upon seeing who it is, bury their faces behind their make-or-break, chance-driven selections from the grimy deck and try not to look up again.

The bucktoothed deputy’s eyes dart around the space and fix on you. “Doc, ya gotta come quick. We got ourselves and E - mergency"   

You push yourself away from the bar and follow him down the street towards your surgery which also doubles as the town’s pharmacy. Sheriff Rogers, red faced from the exertion of riding hard stares at you for a moment. 

“I know we don't always see eye to eye, Doc, you bein’, well, the way you are, but this here is one if your, 'erm, folk. You'd be the best to help them.”

You blush with both anger and embarrassment. You’d thought you'd managed to conceal yourself from the sheriff especially, and wonder again if it’s the body choice, or something else he means. 

Your eyes wander towards his horse and the shape covered in a blanket and tied to his pack horse. A green tentacle peeps from under the blanket. This leaves no doubt what he means with his comment on “your folk” and suddenly you have a greater level of respect for the peacemaker of the town. You nod, and between the sheriff, the bumbling efforts of the deputy, and yourself, you manage to drag the body into your office and up onto the table.

You look at the deputy and raise an eyebrow at the sheriff. He shrugs and taps his head. “Aint nothin' much up there, and we are gunna need the help.”

You stare at the sheriff. “What do you mean?”

The sheriff pulls the blanket away from the body, revealing a human form attached with a distinctly scaled tentacle, charred and battle torn.  “I don’t mind you folk mosying round the plains, but when you start to fight, it just gets dang messy.” He points to the prone figure. “And when you don’t change back properly, it just leaves questions, which I normally gotta clean up.”

You lean on the table, unable to fully comprehend how you’ve misread the sheriff.

“Now there are a few more up near the old gold mine hiding out, most likely beat up but not injured like this one. You gotta tell them to move on. It’ll come better from one of their own folk.”

The figure stirs and groans. Apart from some laser burns which you know will heal within a few hours, the alien is in good shape and will just need time to regenerate and reform into human shape. 

You have some choices to make?

Do You:

A: Remember the folded paper from the hotel and find that it’s a handwritten note from the songstress, desperate for your help, and leave the alien with the sheriff and find out what she may need?

B: Decide to wait with the groaning figure on your table and find out what they are doing on your part of the planet?

C: Go with the Sheriff to reason with the aliens in the gold mine?