---

Grifting the Zaxonite

by Cooper C. Wilms

Of all the cons in his little black book, Trevor McKay liked his current grift the best. Small-fish stunts like his Spanish Doubloon gambit were always foolproof and reliable for a week of food and booze, but there was no challenge to it. His Slot Machine Repairman scam raked in the dough and let him flex his inner thespian, but the security at the casinos would inevitably recognize his face. But The Stranded Zaxonite, as he had come to know it, made him proud to call himself, not just a con man, but a con artist.

He twisted his cigarette into the bar’s ashtray and raised his bourbon to his lips. His mark had to be a particular breed of man. Isolated. Desperate. Willing to believe. He scanned the room and took short, silent sips. He passed over the trio of soldiers in flirtatious conversation with a waitress, and ignored the man by the turquoise-inlaid jukebox that clearly owned the black Sportster out front; but there, in the back, with the thick Buddy Holly glasses and the beat-up porkpie, was the perfect target.

Trevor slimed his way across the floor. He moved around the tables like a snake through the reeds. He made sure not to shake his upper body too much in case the rubber antenna he had glued to his head fell out from under his Panama hat.

He loved the antenna. He bought it for fifty cents in a Tucumcari costume shop and it paid for his entire trip up from Santa Fe. Twice, the damned thing fell off mid-conversation and he had to hightail it out of the bar, but he loved it all the same. It wasn’t often a scam went sideways, especially if he remembered to follow his rules, but slip-ups happened, and when they did, it was always back to square one. First things first, he had to corner the mark.

“I can’t believe it!” Trevor enthused as he fell into the seat across from the man. He lowered his voice: “I saw you from across the room.” He tipped up his hat to reveal his antenna. “A Zaxonite always knows another Zaxonite.”

Creativity was a burden to Trevor. There was a time when he would have been satisfied pulling the same Vase Drops and Three Card Montes out of his bag of tricks—the same grifts every Joe Blow pulled—but there was no showmanship to any of that. Trevor deeply believed that the modern rube deserved to be parted from their hard-earned dollar in more and more unique ways. He would spend hours wringing his brain just for a drop of originality.

Inspiration, in this case, came in the form of a naked homeless man who accosted Trevor in Portales. “They’re coming!” he’d shouted as his flaccid member slapped against his thighs. “The Zaxonites! They’re coming!”

Trevor had broken away and ducked into a nearby diner for a cup of coffee. He’d watched through the wide window as the man upset more passersby. “They look like us! But they have antennas on their heads! They’re coming!” The police eventually came and subdued the man.

As he slurped his coffee, the word Zaxonite filled his head like a gathering storm, then, in a sky-splitting crack of lightning, the con was born.

Behind his glasses, the mark’s eyes widened and his mouth hung off the hinge. His pupils followed the antenna as Trevor tucked it back under his hat. “It’s impossible,” he started. “I didn’t know there were other Zaxonites in the region.” The mark lifted the front of his porkpie and let his antenna—one that looked exactly like Trevor’s, only fleshier—fall past the brim.

Trevor’s mouth became a dry, lifeless stretch of desert. Suddenly, the naked man didn’t sound crazy anymore. What was the second rule of a con? Be confident. Confidence felt like an impossible act when his mind whirred like an engine without a belt and the veiny appendage on the mark’s head seemed to pulse.

“I lost contact when I landed,” the mark said. “I’ve sent out signals every day, but I don’t know if I was getting through to anyone.”

“You got through,” Trevor reassured as coolly as he could. “They sent me here to help.”

The mark flashed a smile, teeth too perfect to be human. “What’s your name?”

Never sign the crime, Trevor thought to himself. Besides, “Trevor” didn’t sound like a common name in the far reaches of the galaxy. In the movies, aliens had names like Klaatu or Exeter, names that sounded like five other names that were chopped up, blended, and hastily glued back together. He let the syllables roll off his tongue: “Xelquar.”

The mark’s eyes grew wider. “Xelquar? Like Matrax Xelquar?”

Play along, Trevor said to himself. You play along all the time to get into a con, now do it to get out of it. “Yes, like Matrax Xelquar.”

“Any relation?”

“He’s my father,” Trevor said, with hope there was a level of prestige associated with the name.

“You’re kidding! Your father is General Matrax Xelquar? The General Xelquar sent his son to rescue me?” He laughed a warm chuckle that still sent a chill through Trevor’s body. “I have to ask: do you have any news? I’m completely cut off down here. Is the invasion still in full swing?”

Invasion? The word hit Trevor’s stomach like Marciano’s right hook. Images of ants swarming pieces of overripe fruit crawled into his mind. He thought of his brother screaming and bleeding out on the beaches of Normandy.

Look at this thing, Trevor thought to himself, this thing disguised as a human. That, in itself, is a con. The whole invasion is a con. A blunt con. A con of force. There’s no subtlety. It’s an entire species of schemers, louses, and cheats from beyond the stars. Don’t they know this is my turf? There’s only room for one con artist in this little corner of the universe, and it belongs to Trevor McKay.

“The General has been briefed on the communication issue,” Trevor responded slowly. “He thinks it’s from the nuclear testing. Something in the atmosphere. He’s deemed this mission too risky and it’s being called off. He personally sent me to track down any and all Zaxonites still on this planet and tell them to abort.”

The mark shook his head. “This planet’s an outpost. Rich in resources. We need it—”

“I know we need it. You don’t think I know we need it? I’m just telling you what I’ve been told. Chain of command, right? The plan’s off and we’ll try it with a different star system. And if you run into anyone else on recon, tell them it’s off, too. Spread the word, make my job a little easier.”

The mark clicked his tongue, nodded, then took a sad sip of his drink. “Yeah, yeah, If I run into any more, I’ll tell them.”

“You’ve done your planet proud.”

The most important rule of any con, the one that kept your teeth from getting kicked in, was to know when it was time to quit; and preventing an alien take-over of Earth seemed like a good place to cut the rope. Trevor stood to leave, and the mark grabbed his arm.

“Before you head out: is your atomic recombinator working?”

“No,” Trevor said as he shook off the mark’s grip. “It was the first thing that went out when I landed. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

“I have mine set to 196, like the manual says, and it’s stuck. It just keeps spitting out pound after pound of gold and I can’t get the thing turned off.”

Trevor stopped and turned around. He knew there was a time to quit, but there was also a time to stay in the game, even if he stayed too long. The mosaic of crescent scars and plum-colored bruises beneath his gaucho shirt proved it. “Gold?”
“Primary objective was to blend in. Can’t blend in without money.”

“Ain’t that the truth, pal.” Trevor glanced around the bar to make sure nobody else was listening in on their conversation. “I’m not a repairman,” he told the mark, “but, I could come over to where you’re stationed and try to take a crack at your re-com-bib-u-lat-or.”

“That would be a lot of help, but there’s so much gold there that it’s almost impossible to move around. I’d have to bail out the boat before I can plug the hole.”

Trevor sat back down and rapped his fingers on the table. He tried to imagine how much gold this mark must have. Boxes. Crates. A bank vault stacked from floor to ceiling with those beautiful yellow bricks. “Why don’t I help you out? I can swing by tomorrow with my car and get some of it out of your way.”

“You’d really do that for me?”

“Of course!”

The mark stood. Trevor reached out to shake his hand, but the mark crossed his arms over his chest and bowed at the waist. Trevor hastily returned the salute. “Meet me here at the same time tomorrow?”

“Same time tomorrow,” Trevor echoed.

The alien turned to leave, then turned back to Trevor. “I hate to ask this…”

“Ask away.”

“I do need one more favor. I was going to offload some of my gold at the pawn shop today, but I never got around to it. Do you think you could spot me a few for the cab ride back home?”

Trevor smiled. What was a few bucks when he had millions of them coming his way? “Zaxonites have to stick together, don’t we?” He peeled open his wallet, pulled out the last of his bills, and pressed them into the mark’s palm. “And don’t let anyone tell you the Xelquars aren’t looking out for you.”

The mark gave another quick salute and left.

Trevor felt light on the inside. He felt like he could float off into space. This night took The Stranded Zaxonite to a brand-new height. Who else, other than him, could stop an alien invasion and turn a profit off of it? And what a profit! He could buy a mansion. Hell, he could buy an entire private island and build a dozen mansions on it! There were conmen and there were con artists; Trevor was past that: he was a con god.

A curly blonde waitress sauntered up to the table. “Get you anything else, hun?”

He couldn’t believe his luck and he was ready to keep the good times rolling. “You ever make it with a Zaxonite, baby?”
She gave an annoyed huff and tucked her hair back behind her ear. “Zaxonite? Nothing but a bunch of deep-space lowlifes.”
Trevor sat up. “Lowlifes?”

“Don’t give me that. Everyone knows Zaxonites have been trying to pull these stupid invasion scams for years now. Only humans fall for it.” A thin reptilian tongue flicked out from between her bubblegum lips, swabbed one of her bright blue eyes, then darted back into her mouth. “Besides, we got here first. Why don’t you guys go find your own planet to leech off of.” She ripped a sheet of paper from her pad and laid it in front of Trevor. “Pretty sure your buddy stuck you with the tab, by the way. You can never trust a Zaxonite.”

The waitress walked away, and Trevor stared down at the bill. “No, you most certainly cannot,” he said with a bitter laugh. “Can’t trust them at all.”

---

Host Commentary

Once again, that was “Grifting the Zaxonite” by Cooper C. Wilms.

John Rogers of Leverage fame once said, “…you can’t con an unknown Mark.” That’s never been more true than in this story. Our canny conman considers himself a connoisseur of confidence games, an artist practicing his art on a credulous populace who deserve a good quality scheme to separate them from their money. Some prey, however, are easier to manipulate than others. One of the joys of a story about grifters is simultaneously rooting for the grift to succeed no matter how the odds are stacked against the protagonist—the more challenging, the better—and for the grift to fail in such a way that the character gets their comeuppance for taking advantage of people.

There’s something of the trickster god in these tales, glancing slyly at us to suggest we’re in on the grift, even as we’re the ones being fooled. Often we know, or think we know, what will happen, but how precisely it plays out is where the fun lives, and where poetic justice can be served one way or another. Here, we find that the easiest person to con is a fellow con artist, and a convincing antenna will only get you so far in this universe, which is both stranger and more familiar than we might expect. Stay sharp, folks: you never know when you might run into a Zaxonite of your very own.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please do share it.

If you’d like to support Escape Pod, please rate or review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite app. We are 100% audience supported, and we count on your donations to keep the lights on and the servers humming. You can now donate via four different platforms. On Patreon and Ko-Fi, search for Escape Artists. On Twitch and YouTube, we’re at EAPodcasts. You can also use Paypal through our website, escapepod.org. Patreon subscribers have access to exclusive merchandise and can be automatically added to our Discord, where they can chat with other fans as well as our staff members.

Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Ally Carter, who said: “Every decent con man knows that the simplest truth is more powerful than even the most elaborate lie.”

Thanks for joining us, and may your escape pod be fully stocked with stories.