“Huh? Oh, yes. Well, you’ll see.” Decimus picked up his cup and took it to the sink. “Ready to get out of here and find the head?”
Steven translated that in his head and realized the agent must have been Navy prior to his recruitment to the very secret alien agency, whatever acronym it bore. “Please.”
Relieved of that pressure, Steven followed Decimus through the halls of a bland and beige office building. They reached an elevator, and for the first time Steven saw signs that something wasn’t average and normal here. Decimus stuck his face close to the scanner and blinked rapidly. “They say it’s psychosomatic, but I swear the lasers make my eye water.”
The elevator door slid open, and the two men stepped in. Decimus tapped a small touch screen on the wall and typed in something Steven couldn’t follow. The elevator sank smoothly, Steven could tell as his ears popped. Otherwise, it was silent and impossible to tell how far they were going down. Steven wasn’t sure what floor they had been on, to begin with. There had been no stairs, but the halls had been sloped.
Decimus stood staring at the screen, so Steven didn’t talk to him. He was still wondering what kind of place this was, and whether they were going to let him go afterward. He shivered a little in the cold draft from the roof vent. Who would notice he was gone, and how quickly? His roommates might just think that he’d decided to go home for a visit, or to a friend’s place. His parents would assume he was working and too busy to call or visit. Steven thought glumly that he really ought to have set up a more regular routine of calling his mom. Texting, at the very least. If they let him go, he decided, he’d start sending her a message every day. She’d like that. He blinked, his eyes suddenly wet for some reason. As he got them under control, the elevator lurched slightly and the doors slid open.
Xenofauna and Other Aliens
“Welcome!” Decimus gestured grandly. “To our home away from home.”
Steven looked around. It looked like a warehouse to him. No cages, no alien creatures. Down one aisle lined with metal racks, a man in a shapeless blue lab coat was pushing a broom slowly. Decimus led the way toward him.
“Ho, Bob!” he called as they came up, and the man turned. Steven recoiled slightly before he could stop himself. The man wasn’t a man. Not even vaguely human. The shape under the coat had thrown him off, but now he could see that what supported the ‘head’ was a bunch of tentacles and the big eyes of an octopoid creature blinked at him from what would have been a man’s thorax region. The ‘head’ was simply the top of a cephalopoid dome, constricted to a ‘neck’ with a dull metal ring. Like a man-bun only much bigger and not hairy at all. Steven took all this in while Decimus was talking to the being.
“Bob, what have I said about safety glasses? Dude...”
The thing emitted a high-pitched titter. Decimus shook his head. “Yeah, yeah, you’re terrestrial. But that mop you’re pushing has ammonia in the cleaning solution and we don’t want your ocelli getting any more damaged. Go see Doc and have her check you.”
Bob made a shrugging motion that only involved his head, although Steven was fascinated at how much it mimicked shoulders moving under the coat he was wearing over his head and tentacles. Bob waved one ‘arm’ which Steven could now see was simply a stubby tentacle shoved through the coat’s arm.
Seemingly satisfied, Decimus kept walking down the long aisle. “Bob is great at his job. Really dedicated to clean, y’know? But he’s not that great about taking care of himself, and so we all take turns nagging him to be better about self-care.”
Steven blinked and then nodded. “I’ve got friends like that,” he offered. His friends were all human, but…. His brain hurt. They made a turn and came out into an open space set up like a library. Steven looked around. Exactly like a library. Tall shelves stood in roundels with tables scattered around these. At the tables, in places surrounded by stacks of paper and the occasional glowing laptop screen, were... people. Working at whatever they were doing, they mostly didn’t even look up as he and Decimus wound their way through the area. Decimus was headed for someone specific, Steven guessed.
They reached an empty table, and Decimus gestured. “Have a seat. We’ll have to wait, she might be in the Vault, and I can’t take you there.”
This statement gelled something Steven had been slowly trying to put together in his mind. “Why have you shown me this much? Aren’t you afraid I’m going to talk when I get home?”
Decimus sat across the table from him and looked Steven in the eyes. The twinkle of humor had gone, and the man looked old and tired without it. “Who says you get to go home?”
Steven bared his teeth in something like a smile. “You aren’t funny. You said you couldn’t flashy-thing me.”
“No. But the cocktail of drugs is pretty damn good. What would you say if I offered you a job?”
Steven rocked back in his seat. “Drugs?” He took a breath, coughed wetly, and tried to collect himself. “I have a job. It might be bottom of the barrel when it comes to pay, but Dr. Thompson is teaching me a lot, and it’s a rung for my career.”
Decimus nodded, his face still grim. “Was. That ended today. You fell down the other leg of the pants of time, and now... We’re offering you a chance.”
“What if I said no? What if I walked out of here and talked about what I saw?”
“What if you did? Plenty of crazies in the world.” Decimus shot back. “You’d never work in science again, that I can promise.”
“What if I accepted the job, and then talked? Or even just let something slip?”
Decimus cocked his head slightly. “Steven. I didn’t read you as stupid, not even terminally geek social dumb. You remember that CDC guy, few years back? Got denied a promotion and walked into a river?”
“Yeah, we were joking about the start of the zombie apocalypse when he first went missing. I thought he got the promotion, though, not was denied, which made it really weird.” Steven remembered sitting in class with Jay discussing zombie apoc and how the best fiction about it was all-too-real: some SF writer named Ringo, but not the Beatle. “But I thought he committed suicide? That was connected to your organization?”
Decimus shook his head. “Did you make the connection to the other guy, the one who was denied a promotion, snapped, and killed his mother, wife, and kids? Set them on fire and disappeared into the woods.”
“Um.” Steven wasn’t sure he’d ever heard of that incident. “No. Was that you?”
Again, Decimus shook his head. “Neither of them were. Both were in the agency, had been for some time. Both were affected by their work. By something they saw, or had to do, in the same line of work I’m offering you.”
Steven crossed his arms against his chest and leaned as far back in his chair as he could go without legs leaving the polished concrete floor. “You suck as a recruiter.”
A high-pitched, feminine voice behind him made him jump, and twist around to see the speaker. “Yes, he does. But I don’t think you have a lot of choices...”
He sort of recognized her. The green skin, the big eyes and ears, the overly-slender limbs relative to her torso... “You’re a gremlin!” Steven blurted, then blushed deeply.
She cocked her head a little, looking up at him even though he was still seated. “Why, yes. Interesting you know that, and you’re here, and Decimus is doing his best hardball at you.”
Steven, his cheeks cooling again, was happy she hadn’t taken offense at his solecism. “I’m, um, a bit confused about why I’m here, actually.”
“And you’ve met a gremlin before?” She took a seat next to Decimus, coming around the end of the table near Steven. He caught a hint of the familiar vinegar smell. For some reason she was as tall seated as the agent. A booster of some sort? She smiled. Sharp teeth, with elongated canines, glinted at him. “Hi, I’m Snirblefritz.”
He blinked. “Um, hi.” He put out his hand.
She lifted one of hers, palm outward to him, keeping it away from his hand. Her fing
ers were short and blunt, indented in the center with very short needle-shaped nails. “I can’t shake. No offense, but human and gremlin chemistry is, ah, very incompatible. Contact would be uncomfortable for both of us.”
The vinegar smell, the spill in the lab, the compound fracture of the lab gremlin’s leg... the penny finally dropped for Steven, and he felt his eyes widen as it hit him. “Oh! Your blood, well, body fluid, it’s like paracetic acid, isn’t it? That’s what the lab was full of.”
“What?” She looked at Decimus. “A lab full of blood?”
“No, no. The smell.” Steven answered for the agent. “There was a gremlin with a broken leg... is he ok?”
That part he addressed to Decimus, who was leaning back a little with a small smirk playing around his expression. “I haven’t heard. Fritzy?”
She shook her head, frowning fiercely. With her hairless head, this did interesting things to her forehead and ears. Steven was left wondering about the origin of Klingon makeup design. “I was not told there was a breach, much less an injury.” She stared at Steven. “So... what happened?”
Steven took a deep breath. If he kept having to tell the story over and over this was going to be a very long day. He started with his arrival at the lab, rather than when he was hired, thinking she wouldn’t be interested. She stopped him as he was describing bumping into Julian with his eyes feeling like they were melting out of his skull. “Wait. You work with Dr. Thompson?”
“Yes?” He wondered how she knew his boss.
“OH!” She flounced, a very interesting feat while seated, and whirled around to look at Decimus. “That man! What has he done now?”
“He set a trap for the gremlin that was stealing stuff in our lab.” Steven butted in again. Maybe he should have started earlier than that morning. “But I don’t know how the gremlin got injured, he wasn’t in the trap when we rescued him.”
She put her hands on her face. “Ok. Start again, but this time, from the beginning.”
Steven started with the conversation he’d had with his boss that started with a missing autoclave basket. This time, she didn’t interrupt him. He got to the part about Bob, and she giggled. “Decimus. Really?”
“I didn’t set it up.” The agent put on a mock-aggrieved expression. “But it was too good to pass up.”
Steven, his throat sore and dry, shrugged. “I was a little taken aback.”
Snirblefritz looked at him, then Decimus. “Hire him. Put it in my budget. He starts... no. He started when y’all pulled into the facility.”
Steven blinked. “Hey. I have a job.”
“Had. Your boss is going to lose his funding, and there goes your job.” She hopped down from the chair. “But right now, I’m guessing you need food, and a drink. ‘Cause I know these idiots won’t have thought of that.”
“Um. I had some coffee?” Steven stood up, awkwardly, as Decimus had already gotten up. The smirk on the agent’s face wasn’t hiding, now, it was threatening to turn into a full-blown grin.
Snirblefritz boggled at him. “In the breakroom? And you’re not bleeding out from an ulcer? Damn...” She shook her head and started moving briskly. Steven, unsure what else to do, and his stomach wanting that feed she’d mentioned, followed her. For a very short woman, she moved fast.
“Um. Where are we going?” He finally asked, trying to catch his breath, as they wove through the stacks and back into the giant racks full of... things. He didn’t get a good look at the various pallets of shrink-wrapped oddities, they were moving too quickly for him to stop and sightsee.
“To fire your boss for playing practical jokes on innocent lab techs.” She shot over her shoulder, not slowing down. “Right after we check in on Vulframcoonidge.”
“How do you know his name? Why are you firing Julian? How…?” Steven felt dizzy and short-winded even though they weren’t walking all that fast. His head was spinning, which made their route through racks of weird stuff even less sensible.
“He was Julian’s watcher and research partner.” She answered, not looking back. They had reached a vast blank wall, punctuated by doors every hundred feet or so. Steven had an impression of many, but no time to count before she had leaned in to a short biometric panel. One located above her head must be for humans. Or beings taller than gremlins, at least, he corrected himself as they walked through it and into another bland hallway. Not, he thought, the one he’d been in before.
“But Julian was trying to trap... oh.” Steven reeled. He put out a hand and caught himself on the wall before he fell down. Panting, he stopped and Decimus almost ran into him.
“Hey! You ok?” The agent said.
Steven couldn’t see him, only hear his worried tone and see gray fog filled with sparkles of light as he fell down an endless tunnel.
He came back to his senses lying on the floor, looking up at Decimus’ frown. “What happened?”
“Hell if I know,” Steven croaked. He tried to clear his throat. His heart was still racing. “Urgh.” That last came out as half word, half wheeze.
“You need to be seen by a doctor.” Snirblefritz was shaking her finger at Decimus now, and he was comically backing up. “How long was he exposed to gremlin’s blood?”
“He, ah, we put in him in a suit, but...” The agent suddenly lost all amusement and rubbed his face with his hands. “He found the spill in the first place. I don’t know how much exposure.”
“He could be drowning in his own fluids!” She pulled a cell phone from a pouch at her waist.
Steven sat up slowly, waiting to see if the tunnel vision came back. Going down like a sack of potatoes was no way to impress a new boss. “Not drowning.” He pointed out. “See?”
He started to stand, and Snirblefritz pointed one stubby finger at him and barked, “Stay put.”
Steven stayed. For under five feet, she was scary. “Yes, ma’am.”
She looked down at him and smiled “You can call me Fritzy. You,” she looked back at Decimus. “Can call for a medic.”
Steven scooted until he could lean against the nice, non-moving wall. He wasn’t sure what it meant that the motion of the world was a lot like a ship at sea, but it probably meant she was right and he ought to sit for a while and let them take a look at him. After that, he could work on getting the world to make sense again. If it ever made sense again. He tuned out the conversation Decimus was having on his cell phone, trying not to let his mind wander down the path of how he was getting service in the bowels of an office building, and focused on the gremlin who was, evidently, his new boss. Or boss’s boss. That wasn’t clear. She definitely was the Officer in Charge.
“Fritzy?” He asked in the silence of Decimus having hung up and shut up.
“Yes?”
“Are you really going to fire Julian?”
She came over next to him and sat carefully close, but not too close. “You don’t call him Dr. Thompson?”
“He told me not to.” Steven leaned his head back against the wall. “He said that it was too formal for just the two of us.”
Fritzy nodded. “Huh. So, do you think you can keep working with him?”
“Why not?” Steven thought about it for a minute. “Especially now that I can actually learn what he’s working on.”
“Even though he injured you through a prank... no, that’s probably not what it was, although his sense of humor will be the death of him. What it was, was a recruiting stunt.”
“What?” Steven didn’t follow that. “Julian and, um, the lab gremlin set this up?”
“I don’t know for sure. I do know Dr. Thompson and Vulfram. They are... like-minded. And he never, ever, asks his lab techs to call him by his personal name.”
“Oh.” Steven wondered if he was supposed to feel flattered. He thought he mostly felt tired and terrified in a vague sort of way.
“Would you be willing to work with him,” she repeated, “And keep him in line?”
“Oh, hell no.” Steven blurted. “I couldn’t...
”
“Yes, you could. He’s going to be wracked with guilt over you being injured.” She nodded her head, staring at the opposite wall, no doubt picturing Julian’s remorse.
Steven wasn’t so sure of that. “I don’t have a choice, do I?”
“Not really.” She sounded positively cheerful and turned her head to flash him a sharp-toothed grin.
“Does it at least pay well?” He could see the medics coming down the hall, now, with a gurney rolling between them.
“Better than a lab tech pays. And it’s a very permanent position!” She stood up. “Welcome to the Organization, Mr Taylor.”
Beige, I think I’ll paint it Beige
“Thanks,” Steven said absently, accepting the mug. He sniffed it suspiciously. “This didn’t come from the breakroom, did it?”
Septimus grunted. “Do I look like I want to poison you?”
Steven looked up for the first time. “I’ve worked with you for two months. I don’t think there’s been a single day where you didn’t look like you wanted to poison me. I think you randomly bring me coffee because someday it’s not going to just be caffeine in there.”
Septimus smirked, “Point. I don’t want to poison you today, though, because I need you to ride along.”
“They’re letting me get out of the office?” Steven had thought working in federally regulated labs was bad, until he tangled with the training paperwork of the Organization. He hadn’t even gotten to go back to his old lab yet, even though he was supposed to have been hired to keep working there - and incidentally to keep an eye on his old boss and try to keep him out of trouble. But he couldn’t do that, he’d been informed in no uncertain terms by his terrifying new boss, until he had completed training and orientation.
“Haven’t asked them. But Decimus is out sick, and you seem to have recovered...” Septimus eyed Steven skeptically.
“I’m all better.” Steven assured him hastily. “And I’d love a field trip, thanks.”
Lab Gremlins Page 4
