Writing, Reading, Genre

An excerpt from...

Winos Save the World

(a secret history of the 1990s)

by Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

Rod Lance: Man or Myth (a prologue)

Some people say there never was a Rod Lance. This is indisputably false. The government has records: birth certificate, military service record, tax forms, all sorts of records. Rod Lance was a real human being.

But, others will say, surely he can't have been everything that's said about him. One man, surely, didn't drive back the shapeshifting alien menace, not only from Earth, but from the entire galaxy ... with a bottle of Thunderbird in each hand?

Well, he didn't do it singlehandedly. But he did do it. And while it's harder to prove, I can bear witness. I was there.

Chapter 1: A condition of absolute danger ... gazing out windows at passing trucks ... but not without rodents ...

"Where were you when Nixon was shot?" The audience gapes.

"Oh yeah. He was shot and replaced by a alien crab thing. What did you think he meant by a 'new Nixon,' anyway? He wasn't the same person at all. This alien ran for President – and won. Gerald Ford was the last human being to occupy the White House. That's why Reagan had all those "operations". It wasn't cancer, it was the strain of the masquerade."

The speaker, Roderick "Cap" Lance, has the complete attention of everyone in the small, poorly-lit room. It's 1985.
In the months to come, Cap will learn to play an audience like a Stradivarius (not that he has the slightest idea what a Stradivarius is). But now he paces the stage like a captive rhinoceros, massive and not very agile, but exuding a condition of absolute danger. It is this that holds his audience tonight.

"The collapse of the Soviet Union was a big setback to them. Enemies are required to distract us and help keep the 'sheep' moving in one direction together.

"So now they're planning a small nuclear war in Africa. Chad will be the tinderbox, but when it's all over everything from Libya to Morocco and south to the Ivory Coast will be dead flat. Laugh while you can; it's not their planet.

"Nixon was the start, but Carter was the keystone. This isn't party politics, it's a whole damn alien invasion.

"Don't ask me why they're doing it. I don't think they know themselves. We captured one, when we questioned it it said 'It's just what we do. We're a ravening alien horde, we conquer planets. Don't you know anything?' Then it died.

"Their advanced technology is curiously flawed. They got blasters that can punch a hole in foot-thick concrete and don't need no sighting at all – cept they fail at crucial moments. That's why I'm alive."

Cap is the leader of the human resistance. Though he is in fact nothing but an aging wino who hasn't held a job in over twenty years, within months the entire resistance movement will look up to him for his calm demeanor, strategic genius, and firm, confident leadership. He is in fact at this point the only human being to have seen an alien in its natural form and lived to tell the tale – in itself an example of their truly heroic ineptitude. He will tell this story many times throughout the late seventies and early eighties, to rapt audiences of resistance members, but this group of John Birchers and ex-Eagle Scouts in Monessen, Pennsylvania, is his first large speaking engagement, and he's got a bit of stage fright.

A bit? He's positively nauseous, running solely on the nervous energy he built up by convincing these people to listen to him in the first place.

"It was the spring of '73, I was on a three-week bender in D.C. M'uncle Marshall had died recently and left me enough money so I could travel around and stay permanently wasted on the interest, so I was doing a tour of the nation's great skid rows. The best is in Portland, Maine, by the way. The winos are sociable and relatively clean and the handouts are surprisingly forthcoming.

"Anyways, so there I am passed out in this alley and I wake up on account of I hear some horrible kind of sucking sound nearby. If I ain't so drunk I guess I'd be dead. My head hurts too much to move it so I just open my eyes and see this pair of dark pinstripe pants standing in front of me, and real shiny shoes. Can't see no higher than that cause of the brim of my hat. There's another pair of pants farther off I can see up to about the chest, looks identical so I can pretty much guess what I'm looking at is two guys in dark suits. What I since learned to call MiBs, Men in Black, the way the yoofoe guys do. And out of the corner of my eye I can see something dark red.

"They say that God watches over fools and small children and I guess that must mean winos too cause he was sure looking out for me that day. I'm about to glance over at the red thing when the suit farther from me says What about the wino? and this rattling clattering voice says He's useless but harmless and we don't need any bodies lying around. Then the red thing skutters forward and I can see it's kind of a huge bug like a flea or maybe a crab and it's talking in that dry voice. It says You boys don't know how good it is to get out of that shape and stretch my skizzix or something like that. And then there's this incredible heat and the bug thing sort of melts only it drips up instead of down, and when it's done there's another pair of legs standing there, bareass naked. I can see up as far as the belly and that's about as close as I come to giving myself away because the crotch is smooth, like a Barbie doll. It takes everything I can do not to scream or even move. Then it starts putting on these clothes the MiBs give it and when it bends over to put on its socks and shoes there's no mistaking that ski jump nose and those shifty eyes. It's all there, even the five o'clock shadow.

"It walks away and the MiBs follow it. I figured out by now they're Secret Service men. I risk a glance up and there's the President straightening his tie in the end of this horrible old alley and stepping into his limo. He glances my way and for a moment I'm sure he looks me in the eye but I guess that can't be true or I'd be dead today, right?

"They drive off and I get up slow. I done everything slow in those days. I walk up the alley to where I first seen the bug thing and shit'n'onions if there ain't a burnt patch on the concrete where it melted up into the President. And scattered around farther up is a bunch of little gray ropy things about six inch long. I pick one up and look real close – and then I finally let out the scream that's been building up all this time and throw it away from me and run.

"It's a rat's tail, bit off, and I grabbed it by the bloody end."

At this point in the presentation one of the superannuated Eagle Scouts stands up. "You got any proof?" he asks.

Cap glares at him. "Whassyaname, boy?"

The heckler tugs at his collar, then decides he can put up with being called boy. "Roland Zopriewskij." He gulps and adds, "Sir."

"You callin me a liar, Roland Zaprooskie?"

"Nossir. But you said you were on a bender. How do you know what you saw wasn't just DTs?"

Cap isn't shaken at all. He's ready for this question, he's been hoping for it. He says, "Two things, Zaprooskie. One is all the research I done since then. I can tell you what major politicians are aliens and even when most of them was replaced. Why d'ya think Nixon kilt off the space program? What do you think is really in that hangar in New Mexico, anyway? Who shot JFK, for Chrissake? It was a setup. They was starting their replacement program and Oswald fucked up and did it in public. Teddy isn't an alien, though, he's just a dipshit.

"Think, man. Think! Do you think humans would run the country this way? Poison all the water and air on purpose? Who but an alien would make your ten-forty impossible to understand and call it tax simplification? Or call two-digit unemployment an economic boom?

"I'll show you all about that stuff later, Zaprooskie. I got documentation of all kinds a stuff would make your hair curl.

"But right now I guess you want to see something concrete. So here it comes.

"I'm standing in that alley, remember. I know I seen something big – I mean, the President of the You Ess Ay is really an alien crab thing that eats rats, and the Secret Service knows about it. So I figure I got to tell someone. But who's goin to believe some damn wino about something like that? So I got the only evidence I could."

Cap Lance reaches into his pocket, pulls out a plastic box, and places it on the opaque-viewing magnifier. The audience gasps

The box contains half a dozen ancient, shrivelled, mummified rat tails, severed neatly at the base, as if clipped by huge pincer claws.

The resistance movement is slow getting started, but it grows with time. The largest enclaves, initially, are in the Western Pennsylvania steel towns and Southern California, especially Orange County. Those early converts rise to high positions in the Org (as it's called by its members); Roland Zopriewskij winds up being the visible right hand and vicar of the increasingly paranoid and reclusive Rod Lance.

Growth is greatly hampered by the necessity of maintaining secrecy. Nonetheless, the first (and last) great anti-alien-chameleon-crab-thing-resistance rally is finally held in Houston in late January of 199-.

The resistance workers meet in the Astrodome late at night. Friendly security personnel are bribed heavily to keep it secret. The large numbers of tourists with odd paraphernalia are explained to hotel staff as attendees as a convention of science fiction writers.

The rally starts well enough. The gathered throng, nearly twenty thousand, rises to sing the National Anthem and their own hymn, "Pureblood Humans Rise in Anger." Cap takes the stage to deafening cheers and speaks for forty-five minutes, recapitulating the fruits of his research and exhibiting his rat tails (which have certainly seen better days).

The rally continues for three nights, with speeches, panel discussions, social events, seminars on how to recognize aliens, etc., etc. Cap is continually busy, and constantly surrounded by admiring resistance fighters.

By the third day he seems utterly exhausted. He is seen gazing out the window of his hotel room at the alley below. One of his entourage asks him if he's all right

"Yeah," he rumbles, "I'm just looking at those trucks, deliverin food to the kitchen down there." One of them offers to fetch him something, but he refuses, saying he won't be able to eat until this shebang is over.

That night is the last of the rally. Cap comes on stage at six A.M. to deliver the closing address. But as he approaches the mike, he is shoved aside by a figure in black.

A number of the Good Old Boys in the audience get their guns out, and one actually gets off a shot, fortunately hitting nobody, before Roland Zopriewskij (for it is he) shouts into the mike, "Brothers — we are betrayed!"

Gasps, cries of dismay and disbelief rise from the throng. Lance stands up to the mike and asks him, politely, what he means.

"You know damn well what I mean, you thing from another world, you!" Zopriewskij says, sputtering with obvious rage. "How long ago did you replace Cap?"

Cap shakes his head sadly. "Poor Roland," he says. "You always was jealous of me. I guess you never got over the way you was embarrassed way back at that very first meeting. It drives you crazy after a while, hey, Roland?"

"Look at this thing!" says Zopriewskij desperately. "Cap never called anybody by their first names and it does. Cap was a great man, but he was still a god damned alcoholic. Anyone seen this thing take one drink all week?"

Mutters of no and a few that's rights

"Or eat?"

More of the same.

Lance rolls his eyes upward, angelically, and with a more-in-sorrow voice says, "Roland, I been at the center of this cyclone for six or eight days now, since before this shindig officially started. I ain't had time to drink, or eat, or sleep for that matter. I expect to do a whole lot of all three in the next few days."

Roland flares his eyes. "You must be gettin pretty tired then."

" Oh, yes."

"... and hungry!" And Zopriewskij reaches into his pocket and pulls out a live rat. "You wasn't really watching the trucks this afternoon, were you? You was watching the rats in the dumpsters!" He waves the rat tantalizingly in front of Lance's nose.

Lance steps backward. "Get that thing away from me!" he says, but his face betrays him — it is melting, extruding some sort of probing organ. "Please!" And with a flash his clothing burns, he melts completely ... and there is an insect-like thing cluttering on the stage. "Damn your eyes, Roland Zopriewskij!" it chitters and lunges forward – only to be riddled by the bullets of the Good Old Boys, who've been waiting years, some of them, for a chance to shoot at a genuine enemy. The bullets bounce off its carapace, apparently without doing any harm whatsoever.

The crab thing produces a vicious-looking tube, though nobody sees from where, and points it in Roland Zopriewskij's general direction. The tube emits a beam which misses its target entirely, but strikes a stage ninja, causing him to disintegrate instantly and immortalizing his name (Harry Finkelstein) as a martyr to the Resistance Org, enshrined beside the real Rod Lance.

Roland Zopriewskij leaps off the stage and into the crowd. The alien thing pursues, and that is its fatal error. Hundreds of Resistance Org workers – now Resistance Org fighters outraged by the murder of their founder and leader, by the terrible deception which has been practiced upon them, and not least of all by the horrible smell of burnt clothing the thing emits, pile up onto it and tear it to bits with their bare hands.

The rally is regarded by one and all as a huge success.

Author's Note:

The above is, as it says over on the left, an excerpt from a novel I suspect I'll never finish. I have to be in a particular frame of mind to write like this, and frankly, I haven't been in that frame of mind for ten minutes at once since the first Gulf War.

Nothing would please me more than to finish it and, God willing, publish it. It's a kind of monkey on my back that won't go away and won't let me feed it. I know, more or less, how it comes out, though I'm not at all clear on how it gets there. Rod Lance captures an alien ship, I know, and with a small band of his faithful winos sets out to find the crab-things' home world and make 'em stop invading us. But just how he gets the ship, how he finds their homeworld (no way he figures out how to read their maps!), how he figures out what will motivate them – well, if I ever figure those things out, I'll be a happier man.

In the meanwhile, I hope you've enjoyed this. If you want to read some of my more, uh, normal fiction, you might check out "Shaara and the Sarlacc," in Tales from Jabba's Palace, edited by Kevin J. Anderson. Then there's also "The Wallet and Maudie," which I co-wrote with Alan Wexelblat, and appears in L. Ron Hubbard Presents: Writers of the Future Volume V, edited by the remarkable Algis J. Budrys. Unfortunately, nothing else of mine is in print at the moment.

Finally, – not that I'm expecting anyone to rip me off, mind, but – please do respect the copyright notice at the head of this excerpt. I wanted to include a sample of my fiction on this page, and this seemed suitable. You're free to print one copy for personal use, and you're positively encouraged to point friends to these pages, but if I find out you're distributing it, for profit or for free, without my prior written permission, then I will have your butt in a sling and your money in my wallet. Actually, it'll probably mostly wind up in attorney's wallets, and neither of us wants that, now, do we? So just behave, play nice, and maybe I'll put some more normal fiction up here sometime... Maybe even a whole story, with an ending and everything...