17.
 At that moment, Sparto felt a bullet pierce his chest. He lay back, unable to move. He turned his head and watched the car’s dark shadow receding into the night as it rolled down toward the building.
Bullets flew overhead, and the night was rent with popping noises and muzzle flashes. Alien weapons also cut in, arc-welding patterns of brilliant white and blue light in crazy zigzags.
Then the car blew.
Rodney had managed to turn the key.
A millisecond later, numbed and deafened, the mortally wounded Sparto watched as pieces of the car flew up into the night sky, and presumably pieces of Rodney with it. For a second the motel was lit up and then it vanished in a blizzard of splinters. The night became dark again, a carpet of stars overhead, a concerto of falling objects bouncing and splattering and rattling and plopping all around. Nothing heavy fell on Sparto. But he touched both hands to his chest, looking at the blood dripping copiously from his palms.
For a few minutes all was silent. The parking lot was a vista of smoking silent death.
Then two small busses without windows popped in out of thin air, one on each end of the parking lot. Men with odd looking handguns jumped out. They wore dark jumpsuits and ribbed helmets, and they formed into two knots of bodies shouting at each other.
“Your side betrayed us!”
“No, you did it!”
“You’ll pay for this!”
“Wait until El Supremo hears about this!”
While they shouted and threatened each other, Sparto lay sadly looking at them from a body no longer under his control. It seemed all was lost.
Next moment, there were one, two, three stunning explosions. The two busses exploded in showers of sparks and twirling quarter panels. Most of the men on the ground died in those blasts, but a few remained lying on their sides, pulling their weapons toward them as they struggled to get up.
Marching through the parking lot wearing his sheriff’s uniform, complete with knee-high motorcycle boots and cowboy hat, was highway patrol officer John Lance, who had stopped Korinta for a flickering taillight. He held a machine gun in each arm and marched across the parking lot with visibly gritted teeth. Every so often he turned his head slightly to emit a thin stream of brown liquid between the brown tooth and its forward neighbor. As the guns blazed, his arms shook, and the remaining syndicate gangsters twitched and grew still. When the last one had stopped moving, Lance’s overheated guns would not fire any longer. He threw them down and ran toward Sparto. “What happened?”
“I got shot,” Sparto gasped. “I know you. You stopped us on the highway.”
“I figured as much,” Lance said. “You are one beautiful babe, mister.”
Sparto felt numb as his life oozed away. “What...what are you? Who?”
“I’m with NBI Internal Affairs,” Lance said. “Your agency, different planet of origin. We began to think someone was a rat, and we were just beginning to suspect Dorio. We never expected he’d betray us like this, but I drove over here just in case.”
“I’m dying, Lance. Do you understand that Korinta dies too?”
“I’m not one of your race,” Lance said, as his skin grew green and scaly. He was letting down his deceptions, the polite and civilized thing to do in the presence of someone in so grave a condition. “How do you do this switching?”
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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