Night of the Cooters

Night of the Cooters

By Howard Waldrop

“We was watching, and these damn things started coming out – they looked like big old leather balls, big as horses, with snakes all out the front – “

“What?”

“Snakes. Yeah, tentacles Leo called them, like an octy-puss. Leo’d come back from town and was there when them boogers came out. Martians he said they was, things from Mars. They had big old eyes, big as your head. Everybody was pushing and shoving; then one of them pulled out one of them gun things, real slow like, and just started burning up everything in sight.

“We all ran back for whatever cover we could find – it took ‘em a while to get up the dirt pile. They killed horses, dogs, anything they could see. Fire was everywhere. They use that thing just like the volunteer firemen use them water hoses in Waco!”

“Where’s Leo?”

Sweets pointed to the draw that ran diagonally on the west. “We watched awhile, finally figured they couldn’t line up on the ditch all the way to the rise. Leo and the others got away up the draw – he was gonna telegraph the university about it. The bunch that got away was supposed to send people out to the town road to warn people. You probably would have run into them if you hadn’t been coming from Theobald’s place. Anyway, soon as them things saw people were getting’ away, they got mad as horners. That’s when they lit up the Atkinson’s barn.”

Night of the Cooters. Photo by Elena

A flash of fire leapt in the roots of the tree, jumped back thirty feet into the burnt grass behind them, then moved back and forth in a curtain of sparks.

“Man, that’s what I call a real smoke pole,” said Luke.

“Well,” Lindley said, “This won’t do. These things done attacked citizens in my jurisdiction, and they killed my horse.”

He turned to Luke.

“Be real careful, and get back to town, and get the posse up. Telegraph the rangers and tell’em burn leather getting here. Then get aholt of Skip Whitworeth and have him bring out The Gun.”

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Fifth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. St. Martin’s Press, 1988.)