Wily Coyote lay flat on his stomach, shoulders squared, unwavering yellowblack eyes aligned down the sight of a highpowered bolt action sniper rifle. Surrounded on all sides by giant windcut rock formations. Shielded from the noontime sun. He wrinkled his small black nose and wet his lips and gently cleared his throat. Then he thumbed the focus wheel on his riflescope and glassed the colorless terrain below.
He lay watching the sharp blue horizon for a long time as a dry sandpapery breeze pulled through his scruffy mudbrown fur and clipped the icy sweat running down his upturned brow. A ringnecked buzzard stood perched atop a tall gray cactus in the distance. He lined its small head up in the needlethin crosshairs and allowed his index finger to hover temptingly over the trigger, but he didn't take the shot.
Hours slunk by, the beating orange sun clawing at his back, his forearms, his scalp, his snout. Flies snarled about his head, fluttering weightlessly in the wind. Shadows rolled on past him.
Movement on the horizon. A hazy red dustcloud. One mile out. Maybe less. Streaking toward him. Gaining speed. He cocked his shoulders and slowly readjusted his aim. His heart raced but he kept his cool. He lowered the sight, measuring the distance. Approximating. A thousand calculations blustering simultaneously through his head.
He fired and the rifle recoiled with a long hollow whooshing sound.
The scope dropped back into position. His eyes refocused. There was a bright orange flash and the speeding red thing ground to a halt in the middle of the clearing as if slamming into an invisible brick wall.
He shouldered his rifle and got to his knees and gazed excitedly down into the canyon, admiring his handiwork. When the dust cleared he sat up straight and wet his lips again and stood glassing the rocky terrain below. The bird lay dead in a heap between two gnarled cactuses. Shot through the neck. Dark red blood speckling the cracked colorless dirt. A hardedged wind dragging through its short gray feathers.
He put away his rifle and climbed down from the steep terracotta outcropping and made his way out across the canyon floor, bitter rocksalt sifting through the humid air, whistling past his ears.
The roadrunner lay right where he'd shot it. He shooed away two circling vultures and bagged the kill in an empty burlap potato sack and scoured the dirt for the bolt but he came up empty.
Crossing the desert floor was like walking on hot coals. When he arrived back at camp he sat down inside his tent and wrapped his bare feet in bandages. Then he went back out into the punishing sun and built a small bonfire in the ashblack pit. He skinned the bird and stripped away its insides and hacked off its head and its legs and roasted it over the crackling yellow flames.
It was delicious, if a little overdone.
When he was finished he stamped out the fire and walked down to the edge of the plateau and just stood there allowing his dark wandering eyes to trace the vast sweeping horizon below. Sundown. The long clear sky gleaming orange and pink. Glittering white stars just beginning to bleed through high misty cirrus clouds. Rolling gray desert as far as the eye could see. Not a soul within a hundred square miles. Silent. Empty. Only the dust and the wind and the furious heat to keep him company.
Today was the day.
When night fell he rode the maintenance lift up to the highest peak and slipped on his white labcoat and set to work.
The launchpad was empty. A giant flat octagon and towering thirty foot steel gantry. Black metal. Handmade. Balanced precariously in the middle of the narrow plateau. Creaking in the blustery wind like the hull of a huge seaswept vessel.
He crossed the launchpad and climbed the steep winding stairwell to the top of the gantry, heavy metallic footfalls reverberating for miles in the vacuous night air. He punched some flashing red buttons on the command console and watched as the launchpad churned and sputtered to life with an emphatic roar. Out of the ground rose an enormous knifeshaped rocketship like a flightless phoenix embracing the vastness of the night sky. Steel grinding against steel. A low rumble. The entire cliff shaking violently. Then nothing. Chipped streaking orange paint layering slick colorless wrought iron. Fifty feet high. Needlenose penetrating the cloudless black canopy above.
He went back down and paced a wide slow circle around the gilded rocket base, clipboard and ballpoint pen in hand. Damage inspection. Onboard systems check. Fuel and propulsion survey. All clear. Diagnostics. Geometry. Vertical flightpath. Good to go.
Last but not least he entered five simple words into the square monitor on the internal CPU. Then he signed and addressed them and closed the hatch. All the hard work, all the triumphs and all the failures, all the blood sweat and tears came down to this.
One shot.
At liftoff the rocket appeared stable. Wily hid behind a giant heat shield just below the gantry, peering up into the blinding white light through a tiny rectangular fiberglass window in the reinforced steel wall. Tears streaming down his cheeks. The din was incredible. Like a thousand primed howitzers firing at once. Like the loudest sound he'd ever heard multiplied out into infinity. Lingering in his ears. Like static. A shockwave. An incessant ringing with no end.
Blue flames licking red stone. A great sphere of hot silver smoke expanding out across the clear night sky like ashen oceanwaves. The plateau trembled and split. Rocks shattered beneath his feet. The gantry buckled and collapsed, disintegrating into dust, blowing away into the night. The launchpad sizzled and liquefied in the charring heat and pooled into a thick bubbling black soup. A smell like rotten eggs.
Sweat pouring down his brow. Fire everywhere. What the inside of an oven must've felt like. Wily dove for the emergency ladder and slid down to a securer level, ears ringing wildly, eyes clouded by huge glowing brightspots. He watched the platform crumble above him and dodged a giant smoldering boulder as it spiraled down toward the endless desert floor below. The wind nearly took him. He grabbed hold of the nearest cliff face and dug his fingertips into the hard rock wall and clung on for dear life.
He waited there for a long time. Teeth chattering. Heart thundering. Eyes held shut. Too scared to move. Too scared to think. Mind blank as a slate. He refused to look, even when the desperate rumbling finally ceased and the smoke cleared and the low resonant drone of desert crickets returned to fill the air.
And that's when the rocket, now but a small red streak high in the cavernous black sky, broke apart midflight and came plummeting back to Earth.
The crater glowed a dark translucent orange. Debris everywhere. A hollow rustladen cylinder. One of the smaller pieces. Buckling the hard gray caliche like wet clay. Thick sheets of steam peeling off the charred metal surface. Crackling in the cool evening breeze.
Taz spotted it from the road. He'd watched it tumble from the sky like a meteorite and crashland at the bottom of a long shallow embankment near the empty roadside. He pulled his dirtstreaked denim jacket tighter around his shoulders and stood studying it from a distance. Then he pushed his rickety shopping cart full of cannedgoods down into the valley and covered it with a wrinkled blue tarp and set off toward the rubble without a thought in his head.
The ground was warm even for the desert and he could smell hot ash on the air. When he reached the steaming wreckage he stopped and stared up at it for a moment, his large jaw gaping absentmindedly, baring his pointed yellow teeth, beads of saliva gobbing at the corners of his mouth. He took a slight step forward, his torn canvas sneakers setting in the dry orange dirt. Sizzling. He poked the giant tin can with his index finger and withdrew sharply, pain splaying rapidly up his arm.
The thing lurched forward and he staggered back, losing his balance, stumbling to the ground, clutching his hand. A rusted hatchdoor swung open above him with a piercing metallic shriek. Behind it a large square monitor. Cracked from corner to corner. Dripping with static. A message. Still barely legible. The words he couldn't read.
Dear Mars,
Take me away from here.
Wily Coyote