I was pretty sure an offer of twelve dollars wasn't a compliment...
 

Fantastic Mars
by Erin Halfelven
 

 
-2- Bandits of Mars

We were near what I thought of as the west wall of the big room with the windows above us. Well, above me. Trike had tried to look out but said there was nothing to see except endless red desert. The rooms, doors and hallways were all to Trike’s scale. This place had probably been built by the green Martians in some long ago time.

The windows, by the way, were just openings in the thick walls. You could sometimes hear the wind blowing through them or even across them in which case it made a very low-pitched “foom” sort of noise.

It happened to do that just after Hote and Seejay had gone down the hallway to the south, past the room where we had all woken up in a pile of bodies.

It did it again as the bandits came from the north end, out of dimness. My goosebumps chased each other all the way out to the end of my tail.

The bad guys came in a rush, a handful or two in light armor swinging machete-like swords and honking big hammers. Some of them had pistols, too. They must have been waiting in the corridor until they could all charge at once.

“Kill ze greenie first, cap-a-ture the girl,” yelled one of them in broken English. They were all Earth-type humans.

Bullets spanged into the wall near Trike as he surged to his feet, picking up a couple of rocks in his lower hands. I’d seen him making a stack of them earlier, but it hadn’t registered.

He grunted as a bullet grazed his cheek and another hit him in the thigh. “Get a-hint me, girl!” He ordered.

My tail between my legs, literally, I did as I was told, squealing and shrieking for all I was worth. This was something I had no experience within my real life, and I was terrified. I hadn’t been in any kind of fight since middle school and nothing that involved bullets.

“Ess-top shooting, cabrones,” yelled one of the leaders. “You chookos doan hit the girl, she is val-ay mucho!” A rock thrown by Trike took him in the mouth on a bounce, and he stopped shouting, falling over backward and spitting out teeth.

I wanted to cheer—my pom poms were certainly big enough for that role. Instead, I yelled back, in Spanish, since he had been mixing bad Spanish with bad English. “Chingase, pendejos!” Rude but satisfying, it gave me a little thrill to tell them to go screw themselves.

I hid behind one of Trike’s massive legs and wished I had a gun. I wouldn’t be effective throwing things, I’d never been very good at that even back on Earth with a different, stronger body, but our little group had gone to the shooting range twice, and I had turned out to be a pretty good shot. The princess in a story like this should have a gun, I told myself. Burroughs’s heroine had a gun and a sword.

“Geeve her op, greenie an’ we doan have to kill you, ese?” said the man with the bloody mouth. His men waved their weapons, all while leering at me enthusiastically.

Trike answered by charging the group of them, a rock in each hand. Four rocks, four guys down with bloody heads. But Trike had been cut by the swords and mauled by the hammers. He retreated against the enemy advance and to tell the truth, I was glad to have him back directly in front of me.

I hadn’t moved from where I cowered against the wall. I’m such a chicken shit. I tried to look at Trike’s wounds but they oozed a green slime that must be what he was using for blood, and I thought again that I might throw up. I felt terrible about not being able to help.

“I’m not hurt that bad,” said Trike, pushing me behind him again. “You can’t do anything about it, and you don’t want to get my blood all over you.” He grinned, “Red and green? You’d look like Christmas.”

I sniffed. He was right. Was I going to be completely useless in this encounter? I didn’t even have a tiara, some princess I was. Which reminded me that both of us were naked. As if I weren’t well aware of that, my tail came around in front of me and tweaked my left nipple.

“Stop that!” I yelped. I grabbed at it, and it easily avoided me. “I’m not going to play that game again!” I said aloud.

“What game?” Trike wasn’t looking at me but peering into the dimness to see what the bad guys were doing. “They’re up to something.”

The bandits pulled their wounded back and regrouped. The guys Trike had hit all got up so no one was dead but they were hurt. There was a lot of yelling and cursing in several languages, though. One of the men went to each of the injured and did or said something and they all looked better after he had.

“Magic? They’ve got a cleric or something,” said Trike, disgusted. He chunked a rock at the cleric but missed.

“Looks like,” I agreed. “Magic works here?” I had an arm, and now my tail, wrapped around Trike’s less wounded leg, carefully not looking at the spiny sausage above my head.

“Well, it worked in Artie’s campaign, there just wasn’t much of it. We were running his own system, and Artie’s rules made magic hard to find and harder to do. It was a lot like GURPS, but you rolled 2-by-2 percentile instead of 3d6.”

“Oh yeah,” I remembered Artie’s odd system now. You rolled two pair of dice of different colors, reading them as percentile somehow. I craned my neck to look up at him. “Can you do any magic?” I asked.

“Me? I’m the meat shield, girl!” He looked a little amused in a sour sort of way. “You should be asking if you can do any magic.” He tossed another rock, this time at the leader who dodged then amused us by hopping on one foot four or five times. Trike had evidently hit him on the end of a toe.

I stared toward the hallway where Seejay and Hote had disappeared, my tail whipping around me like an agitated cat. “What is with you?” I asked it.

“Who? Me?” asked Trike. “I’m keeping them thinking about me but I ain’t actually trying to kill any of them. Maybe that’s a mistake?” He half turned toward me but stopped when one of the bandits yelled.

“Hey! Giant!”

We looked back at the men who wanted me. Ragged clothes with crusty stains, dirty beards that needed to be attacked with a weedwhacker, a smell that made burning garbage seem a pleasant memory. As wretched a gathering of slime and villainy as you were likely to find outside of the Mos Eisley spaceport.

I shuddered a bit to think about what they wanted me for, it didn’t take much imagination since I was already naked, but they were actually just about to tell us what their purpose was.

The leader stepped out in front of his men and spoke. “El Capo say find-a the muy hermosa girl with long black hair, ese?”

Compliments? His chieftain described me as very beautiful. Flattering, but I didn’t need compliments right then. What Trike and I needed was for Hote and Seejay to get back, preferably with a unit of the cavalry. I kept an eye on the corridor they had left by.

Almost casually, Trike flipped another rock at the bandido leader who dodged then paused to spit blood out of his mouth. He shook off the fright and alarm and went back to talking. “He say, twenty solidos for each of us. Cien pesos, egualmente, por cada, ese?” I didn’t know what a solido was, but a hundred pesos where I came from would barely buy you a burger and fries at a fast food place.

Thinking back though, I remembered that the pesos in Artie’s game had been large silver coins about equal to how much you would usually pay someone like a carpenter or a cowboy for a day’s work.

Trike heaved a particularly large boulder into the middle of the bad guys, wounding a few more of them and making work for their healer who began to look a bit frazzled. A quiet argument started as they got organized again. “We can get the girl, but the greenie is going to kill some of us doing it, Zandro,” one of the other men said to the leader in what sounded like an American accent.

Trike heard that too. He called out, “I don’t want to tear anyone’s head off, but you know I could do that.” He looked a little sick as he realized, that yes, he certainly could do that.

I doubted that he would. Like me, Trike had never been in the military and had never contemplated actually hurting or killing someone in real life. I suspected he had been holding back when he charged the bandits, hitting them with rocks in his hands. We could both play badasses in the games, but we were really just pussies. Literally now in my case.

The leader, Zandro if that was his name, scowled around his ruined mouth as he and his men backed away from Trike a bit. The big guy had stopped throwing stones, preferring to keep the four he had left in his hands as weapons. “You okay?” he asked me in an aside.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Scared shitless, but I’m not hit at all. You, on the other hand, are still bleeding in half a dozen places.”

He grinned, showing his enormous tusks. “Which one is the other hand? I’m okay. Most of it is just scratches, except the bullet in my leg hurts. I can stand on it, but I’m not going to make another rush at them, I don’t think.”

“Ese!” called the leader. “What it is, we stan’ aqui and keep shooting you, we take aim and shoot you bastante you bleed to death! We doan hit the girl. Just geeve us to her, and we go away. We leave you que mas dinero tenemos? Hey? How much money we got now.”

“I don’t know,” said Trike. “How much money do you have?” He whispered to me, “I’m stalling.”

I nodded. I had never felt so unnecessary. Trike was standing off these banditos and me, I was just hiding behind him. Without me, the bandits would probably avoid a guy his size completely. Someone had offered them money for me? How did anyone know I was here?

“We don’t even have anything to make a bandage out of,” I whimpered. We were both still naked. My tail was between my legs but coming up in front of me, and I grabbed it like a security blanket.

“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” said Trike. “Seejay and Hote will be back any moment and, and….” He trailed off. We were losing hope. With all the yelling and shooting, our friends should have showed up if they were coming. If they were still alive.

Zandro yelled at us again. “We got monedas, dinero. Nine pesos is like twelve bucks, ese? You can buy a different girl in Carterville with that much money. One beeg enough you can have sex with her.” He laughed, and his men laughed, too.

Twelve dollars? Was this asshole offering to buy me for twelve dollars? I decided I was offended as much by the price as by the idea of being for sale in the first place.

“Carterville?” Trike muttered. It had been a long time since Artie’s game, but the name of the town sounded familiar.

“We not goin’ wait all day, giant,” yelled Zandro. “Maybe I count to ten, and we start shooting?” I noticed he wasn’t calling Trike greenie anymore. Perhaps my big friend had won a bit of respect.

Trike bounced a rock in his upper right hand. “I’m gonna have to kill him,” he said, sounding disappointed. I looked back toward the south corridor again. My tail did a bird dog impression, and I suppressed an urge to gasp.

The bandits lined up like a firing squad, pistols at the ready. One had a long gun that looked like an old-time musket. The leader took a half-step closer and raised his own weapon. “Enu, dwa…” he started, apparently counting in some language that was neither English nor Spanish.

I swear I didn’t know I was going to do any such thing when I ran out in front of Trike screaming, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

My tits were bouncing, which was a weird feeling, my tail was flying like a flag, which might have been weirder but maybe not. I’d never been much of a runner, back in high school I often got accused of running like a girl. Well, now I had a good reason for such a label.

Fists up, elbows at my side pushing my boobs forward, hips swiveling madly, I ran naked into a beam of light coming from a window in the west wall of the chamber. Just as the light hit me, I crossed my eyes, touched the jewels on my tongue to the roof of my mouth and wished urgently for something to happen.