Goodbye, Dead Man!

Excerpt

It was Orley Mattup's killing of the old lab technician that really made us hate him.

Mattup was a guard at the reactor installation at Bayless, Kentucky, where my friend Danny Hern and I were part of the staff when the Outsiders took everything over. In what god-forsaken mountain hole they had found Mattup, and how they got him to sell out to them, I don't know. He was an authentic human, though. You can tell an Outsider.

Mattup and Danny and I were playing high-low-jack the night Uncle Pete was killed, sitting on the widewalk where Mattup had a view of the part of the station he was responsible for. High-low-jack is a back-country card game; Danny had learned it in northern Pennsylvania, where he came from, and Mattup loved the game, and they had taught it to me because the game is better three-handed. The evening sessions had been Danny's idea—I think he figured it might give him a line on Mattup.

On the night in question, Mattup was on a week's losing streak and was in a foul humor. He was superstitious, and he had called for a new deck twice that evening and walked around his seat four different times. His bidding was getting wilder.

"You'd better cool down," Danny told him. "Thing to do is ride out the bad luck, not fight it."

Orley picked his nose and looked at his cards, "Bid four," he growled.

Four is the highest possible bid. Tim played his cards well and he had good ones. He had sewed up three of his points when we heard somebody moving around down on the reactor floor. It was old Uncle Pete Barker, one of the technicians.

"What you want down there?" bawled Mattup.

"Just left my cap by the control room," said Uncle Pete, "and thought I'd go get it."

"You keep the hell away from there," grunted Mattup.

Uncle Pete stopped and stood gazing up at us. We went on playing. It was the last card of the hand, and would either win the game for Mattup or lose it for him. Orley slapped his card down; it was a crucial card, the jack. Danny took it with a queen and Mattup had lost the game.

I felt like clearing out. Mattup's face was purple and his eyes looked like wolves' eyes. He glared at Danny, making a noise in his throat, and then I saw his gaze leave Danny and go to something down by the reactor.

It was Uncle Pete, shuffling along toward the control room.

Mattup didn't say a word. He stood up and unholstered the thing the Outsiders had given him and pointed it at Uncle Pete. There was a ringing in our ears and Uncle Pete began to twist. Something inside him twisted him, twisting inside his arms, his legs, head, trunk, even his fingers. It was only for a few seconds. Then the ringing stopped, and Uncle Pete sunk to the ground, and there was the silence and the smell.

Mattup made us leave the body there until we had played two more hands. Danny won one; he was a man with good nerves. When we were back in our room he said, "That did it—I'm going to get that guy."

"I hate his big thick guts," I said, buttoning my pajama shirt, "but how are you going to get him?"

"I'll get him," said Danny. "Meanwhile, we'll keep playing cards."

Things went on almost normally at the Bayless reactor....