Read Online Pecked to death by ducks by Tim Cahill - Free Book Online
Authors: Tim Cahill
Tags: American, Adventure stories
Ads: Link
It booms, then busts . . ." The bust, the Day of Judgment, will come when we can no longer reproduce.
Smith's enemy angels apparently consider earth a dull duty. They are getting restless and impatient down here, waiting for the moment when we all become sterile. These antsy angels are handcuffed by an immutable law of the cosmos that states that human beings, created in the likeness of God, may not be dissected for scientific purposes. Cattle, however, live in close proximity to man, and the angels know well that mutagenic agents, such as plutonium, migrate to the gonads in both cattle and man. If your prize bull's balls are full of plutonium, so are yours. The extraterrestrials, these warriors from heaven beyond the solar system, spend a lot of time mutilating cows and studying bovine genitals in order to figure out just how much longer they are going to have to wait until Judgment Day. And that is the Unspeakable Truth.
People like Smith, "mutologists," save their harshest comments for conventional scientists and men like Kenneth Rommel, a former FBI agent who headed up a fifty-thousand-dollar government study of the phenomenon. "If surgeons are doing it, they're doing it with their teeth," Rommel said at a news conference, and he backed up his contention with a series of color slides showing predators such as coyotes and wild dogs gnawing away at the soft parts of down cows. The precision-surgery effect, Rommel explained, is caused by shrinkage and desiccation of the tissues. Crows or magpies take the eye, flies mass in the resultant pulpy mess, sun and wind dry the tissue, which then shrinks away from the wound in a perfectly rounded circle. A coyote may start his meal with soft and accessible delicacies like the genitals. Every one of the twenty-four New Mexico mutilations Rommel investigated was caused by natural predators: coyotes, wild and domestic dogs, eagles, crows, vultures, and flies.
The predator theory—disappointing and anticlimactic as it is— seems the most convincing to me. Still—gory close-up photos notwithstanding—blowflies lack the pizzazz of enemy angels in UFOs, and this, I think, partially explains the persistence of con-
voluted theories about the mutilations. I mean, really, isn't it more fun like this:
The ship sits on an alfalfa field near the pond on Poison Creek. It is no saucer, but a quivering, jelly like cell, and it glows from within with a color out of space, a color out of time: a blue and strangely hypnotic incandescence in the long shadows at the end of a long Montana summer day.
The cattle scatter in panic. One yearling, slower than the rest, is seized from behind, and it bellows in lusty protest. The Mutilators gibber and click, then set up a gurgling dirge as laser scalpels flash into readiness. The genitals first, then the anus — oh so carefully now — and eyeballs and lips and tongue. The yearling's bellows rise in pitch, then subside into hopeless sheeplike bleats and end in a single, strangled, tongue less croak.
The tentacles of the Mutilators drip with certain fluids of delight, and the cell of the ship pulses with a deeper incandescence. The cattle are bunched in dumb horror in a corner of the fence line, and the Mutilators from Outer Space lurch toward them in cold reptilian glee.
Ah, but here come the boys, the cowboys, protectors of the cattle, human beings. They are bouncing over the field in an old Jeep, and they are clutching shotguns and gleaming hunting knives, fury spinning like fire in their eyes. The ship keens out a warning and pulses red, a burning red, like molten steel. The Mutilators cower in terror. Their tentacles are dry as parchment, and they recoil before the rough and thunderous rage of the boys. Now there is brutal carnage in the alfalfa field. The boys have fired all their shells, and they are hacking about with the razored hunting knives. Green reptilian blood erupts out of jagged wounds: cold green blood, thick as vomit. The boys are
Smith's enemy angels apparently consider earth a dull duty. They are getting restless and impatient down here, waiting for the moment when we all become sterile. These antsy angels are handcuffed by an immutable law of the cosmos that states that human beings, created in the likeness of God, may not be dissected for scientific purposes. Cattle, however, live in close proximity to man, and the angels know well that mutagenic agents, such as plutonium, migrate to the gonads in both cattle and man. If your prize bull's balls are full of plutonium, so are yours. The extraterrestrials, these warriors from heaven beyond the solar system, spend a lot of time mutilating cows and studying bovine genitals in order to figure out just how much longer they are going to have to wait until Judgment Day. And that is the Unspeakable Truth.
People like Smith, "mutologists," save their harshest comments for conventional scientists and men like Kenneth Rommel, a former FBI agent who headed up a fifty-thousand-dollar government study of the phenomenon. "If surgeons are doing it, they're doing it with their teeth," Rommel said at a news conference, and he backed up his contention with a series of color slides showing predators such as coyotes and wild dogs gnawing away at the soft parts of down cows. The precision-surgery effect, Rommel explained, is caused by shrinkage and desiccation of the tissues. Crows or magpies take the eye, flies mass in the resultant pulpy mess, sun and wind dry the tissue, which then shrinks away from the wound in a perfectly rounded circle. A coyote may start his meal with soft and accessible delicacies like the genitals. Every one of the twenty-four New Mexico mutilations Rommel investigated was caused by natural predators: coyotes, wild and domestic dogs, eagles, crows, vultures, and flies.
The predator theory—disappointing and anticlimactic as it is— seems the most convincing to me. Still—gory close-up photos notwithstanding—blowflies lack the pizzazz of enemy angels in UFOs, and this, I think, partially explains the persistence of con-
voluted theories about the mutilations. I mean, really, isn't it more fun like this:
The ship sits on an alfalfa field near the pond on Poison Creek. It is no saucer, but a quivering, jelly like cell, and it glows from within with a color out of space, a color out of time: a blue and strangely hypnotic incandescence in the long shadows at the end of a long Montana summer day.
The cattle scatter in panic. One yearling, slower than the rest, is seized from behind, and it bellows in lusty protest. The Mutilators gibber and click, then set up a gurgling dirge as laser scalpels flash into readiness. The genitals first, then the anus — oh so carefully now — and eyeballs and lips and tongue. The yearling's bellows rise in pitch, then subside into hopeless sheeplike bleats and end in a single, strangled, tongue less croak.
The tentacles of the Mutilators drip with certain fluids of delight, and the cell of the ship pulses with a deeper incandescence. The cattle are bunched in dumb horror in a corner of the fence line, and the Mutilators from Outer Space lurch toward them in cold reptilian glee.
Ah, but here come the boys, the cowboys, protectors of the cattle, human beings. They are bouncing over the field in an old Jeep, and they are clutching shotguns and gleaming hunting knives, fury spinning like fire in their eyes. The ship keens out a warning and pulses red, a burning red, like molten steel. The Mutilators cower in terror. Their tentacles are dry as parchment, and they recoil before the rough and thunderous rage of the boys. Now there is brutal carnage in the alfalfa field. The boys have fired all their shells, and they are hacking about with the razored hunting knives. Green reptilian blood erupts out of jagged wounds: cold green blood, thick as vomit. The boys are
Similar Books
