Finally, Lucy was close enough to identify the man as her boss, Dr. Theodore Robertson. When he blinked at her, tears rolled down his cheeks.
The last time she saw him, late that afternoon—and God, did that feel like a lifetime ago—he’d been climbing into his car to go home. And now he sat in a classroom’s doorway in this old elementary school with a scooped-out cavity where his stomach used to be. His small intestine looped out of the abdominal hole to form a prim, lawn-hose coil on the floor beside him.
Lucy crouched, but she stopped short of touching him. “Professor?”
She saw now that his intestines lay atop one of the slime fingers, which extended back to a stalagmite. As she watched, a bead of light erupted from the stalagmite and traveled the length of the slime to disappear into Robertson’s viscera.
“It’s keeping him alive,” Stark murmured. He shone his flashlight into the empty room behind Robertson and then down the hallway. “Shit, I don’t like this.”
Horner nodded. “Bait.”
“Uh huh.”
Dr. Robertson ran a gray tongue over his lips. “Lucy. Get out of here.”
“But we’re going to get you out.”
“They’re after you, love.”
“What?”
Stark, Horner, Kelton, and Mal hunkered down. Kelton and Mal aimed back the way they came while Stark and Horner swept their flashlights through the shadows.
Kelton said something about a trap and needing to move, but Lucy ignored him. She leaned closer to Robertson.
The man hardly spoke above a whisper. “The project you were working on. The solaranite.”
She blinked at his use of the codename she and Alice had given their secret collaboration. “How did you know about my research?”
But even as she asked the question, she guessed the answer. Of course her boss knew about her photon fission research. Hadn’t she obliquely told him about it at the very beginning? At the time, he’d waved her off with a speech that he didn’t want to know what she was up to after hours at the lab. Wink, wink. He must have kept an eye on her, nonetheless. Maybe he’d even hacked into her encrypted computer files. Of course he did. She would have done the same thing in his place.
Stark leaned in. “We don’t have time for this.”
Robertson’s eyes rolled back, and his mouth worked like a fish’s. Another bead of light traveled down the finger of slime to disappear into his pile of intestines. Lucy was afraid he’d passed out.
But then Robertson opened his eyes. He continued in an even softer voice. “Splitting a photon isn’t like splitting an atom. Its…its power is enormous. And they fear it. It’s too strong of a weapon for us to have. We can’t control it.”
“Weapon?” Lucy shook her head. “But we’re not building a weapon. It’s just a potential power source.”
Robertson closed his eyes again.
She looked to Stark and Kelton for support, but they were no help. They knelt beside her amid the broken ceiling tiles and the trails of slime—dirty and bloody and sweaty—and glared at her like she’d betrayed them.
Kelton shook his head and turned away. That was somehow more horrible than the mutilated man in front of her.
Lucy closed her eyes. Yes, her and Alice’s research could be weaponized. That’s partly what had them so excited earlier today as they reviewed the new data, although neither would admit it. The data showed the potential for an enormous chain reaction under the right conditions. Could something as cheap and easily collected as sunlight become an entirely new energy source, better than conventional solar panels? It would revolutionize particle physics and push solar panels into the realm of laughable crudity. Solaranite could be as far beyond solar panels as a tsunami was beyond a water mill. But a photonic chain reaction posed other, disturbing possibilities Lucy had already sensed but had denied as being improbable for practical application. Applications such as bombs. Perhaps Ernest Walton and John Cockcroft had the same thoughts when they first split an atom in 1932.
Although she had been in denial, it was apparent now the aliens were not. As she and Alice labored, they had no idea they were being monitored.
One of her favorite books was H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. She even memorized the opening lines as a school girl. Strains of it now seemed apropos:
… that as men busied themselves about their various concerns, they were scrutinized and studied…intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded this earth…and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
Lucy swallowed a rising sob. “Oh, my god. I didn’t know.”
“You have to get out of here,” Robertson said.
She turned to Kelton. “This is all my fault.”
Kelton began to say something. Maybe it was no, don’t blame yourself or a flippant gee, thanks a lot, bitch—but the man who appeared in the doorway behind Robertson interrupted.
He drove a sword into her boss’s chest.
It wasn’t just any sword. More like a long talon, perhaps. It emerged from his forearm as a secondary bone, curved and black and sharp. It telescoped, lengthening the arm, to puncture Robertson’s sternum.
Blood sprayed from Dr. Robertson’s mouth into her face.
Gasping, Lucy scooted away on her butt. She crab-walked backward until she hit the wall on the other side of the hallway. But Stark had checked that room. Where did he come from?
Stark fired his shotgun, and the alien who killed Robertson fell back into the darkness. More emerged from the formerly empty room: another man in a dark suit, identical to the one who went down, and a woman with long, brown hair.
More identical twins emerged from the rest of the classroom doorways. They must have been been invisible when Stark and Horner checked those rooms, or they could walk through walls. Two, three, four pairs of the same man and woman charged the group from all sides.
The hallway flashed blue as Kelton fired his laser rifle—“Everything’s bad! Everything’s bad!”—and Stark fired his shotgun—“Stay together!”
Shouting and gun blasts and charging shadows.
Lucy stood up and ran for the stairs. Have to get out of here.
But powerful arms grabbed her from behind. A hand encircled her throat, and she lost all voluntary muscle control. An electrical thrumming traveled down her neck into her arms and legs.
All she could do was scream as her body betrayed her. Keeping a firm grasp on her throat, her captor puppeted her legs. They fled together into one of the classrooms.
The darkness swallowed her whole.
***
Lucy must have passed out, because she next became aware of the strong odor of rotten eggs and the craving to remain asleep.
She opened her eyes to find herself leaning against a wall crisscrossed with slime tentacles and peeling paint. She wasn’t restrained, but she felt a profound lethargy that bid her to remain still.
She stared into the eyes of a dead man.
He must have been a detective. He wore a police badge on the lapel of a brown rain coat, over a brown suit. Terrible necktie. Its pattern hurt her eyes. Blood covered the lower half of his face and throat, all the way back to his ears.
He blinked.
Lucy reeled back in surprise and looked away, her neck creaking with the effort. When she turned her head to the right, she saw one of the male-female pairs of aliens staring down at her.
She tried to sit up straighter, to get away—anything—but the effort was too great.
Rusty pipe hookups and a smashed sink were the only clues as to the former function of this room. But there were no windows or working ceiling lights. So where was the blue light coming from? She rolled her eyes in her sockets, searching for the source, until she saw a mass of slime tentacles near a ceiling corner. It clung to the wall like a starfish and emitted a soft glow.
The male alien smirked down at her as his companion handed him a small metal box. It was about the size of a matchbook. He crouched in front of Lucy and swallowed it.
She saw now that the right sleeve of his suit jacket hung open in tatters to reveal a wound. Bullets had flayed open his human skin to expose an insect’s dark carapace. It leaked orange blood. Could this be the same one they shot in the sewer?
From this close, she saw the flaws in his human mask: the way his skin was too soft around the eyes and too tight in the cheeks, the unnatural orange veins at his temples. But his eyes were the least human part about him. Pupil and iris combined into a solid red mass.
Whatever he swallowed caused him to jolt in pain. He opened his mouth, and orange blood gushed out to splat onto her ankle. She didn’t have the energy to pull away. The alien grinned as the last bit of fluid clung to his chin, too viscous to fall. It wagged below him like a little beard as he began to speak.
“My name is Eros. I need this communicator to make my vocal sounds into something you can understand.”
She realized he referred to the thing he swallowed, not the blood hanging from his chin.
His voice was low and soft. He dragged out his sentence endings like a Baptist preacher: understan-dah.
The police detective coughed, and Lucy turned to look at him. She was surprised to have the energy. She was further surprised she could turn her head a second time to look back at the alien. Which meant she was getting stronger. But she felt so lightheaded, she doubted she could walk without help.
Eros kept smiling. His beard of orange blood wagged. A rooster’s gizzard. Lucy felt the urge to laugh. Stop it. Whatever he’d done to her had thrown her emotions out of whack.
“Do not mind him.” The alien nodded at the detective. “He knew nothing about you, so we silenced him.”
At last she understood. They’d cut out his tongue.
The tickle of laughter fled immediately, and tears welled in her eyes.
She looked back to the detective. She saw now he wasn’t dead. Just maimed. The man looked as exhausted as she did, unable to do much more than nod his head in greeting.
Her gaze snagged on the long wooden handle of something lying near the wall beyond him. It rested atop a dirty sleeping bag and pile of blankets. A charred pile of wood and a cooking grate swiped from someone’s grill lay beside that. A homeless person must have been squatting here until the aliens displaced him.
Her eye went back to the wooden handle, which disappeared into the blankets. Was it the axe used to chop the fire wood?
She tried to keep her face impassive. As lousy as she felt, that wasn’t too hard.
Eros the alien smiled. “We learned of you from the old one.”
He means Dr. Robertson. Is he going to ‘silence’ me, too?
“You have started a war between my people and yours.” Your-suh. “I will let none survive. True, we now have you. But others will follow your ignorance. So why not skip to the end of your story where you all fall under our feet?”
Eros bared his teeth as he talked, exposing a row of fangs. Lucy wondered how many teeth he had and what kind of food he ate.
She wondered at herself, too. This wasn’t the time for science. Figure out how to get out of here. But she couldn’t control her thoughts any more than her emotions.
Orange blood. Anemia, probably. Or an iron deficiency. She would look it up in her medical texts when she got back to the lab. Dr. Robertson might have a clue.
Dr. Robertson…
Lucy blinked hard and managed to sit up straighter. A shard of broken tile dug into her ass. Need to focus if I’m going to survive.
Eros was talking again. The blue light swam around his narrow face. Lucy shook her head to make it stop.
“Your people do not have the mental capacity to keep up with the technology you develop.” Develop-puh. The gizzard of orange blood finally dripped off to land on her leg. “You wield weapons that are above your knowledge and play with them like toys. You are a stupid race.”
He reached out and dug a fingernail into the hollow below her right ear. Lucy screamed as he punctured the skin.
He pulled the finger back, now covered with blood. He licked it with a forked tongue and smiled again. “I am to take you back to our world for interrogation.”
Even now, her thoughts and emotions swirled. Her thoughts were questions she would’ve liked to ask: what is your home world like, how did you get here, and—remembering Dr. Robertson’s work—how did you reanimate the dead?
But her emotions were a pit of loathing. It repulsed her that Eros epitomized everything she had lately worked for in her career: the reanimation of dead tissue (by day, for Dr. Robertson) and the creation of solaranite (by night, with Alice). Only now, when it was far too late, did she realize some stones were best left unturned. The price was too high. She’d just killed an entire town.
She summoned her voice, failed, and tried again. “Everyone is dead. Because of me.”
“Yes. That they are.”
The alien reached for her again and dug his nail into her ear. It sunk in like a blade. She screamed but didn’t have the strength to bat him away.
Eros nodded at the female who stood behind him, and she crouched on Lucy’s other side. Hesitantly, she reached for Lucy’s ear. Lucy caught a glimpse of a sharp black fingernail extending from the woman’s forefinger like a cat’s claw.
Interrogated? She wouldn’t survive long enough for that.
Death would be a welcome release.
Chapter 25
KELTON
“Everything’s bad!”
It was the only thing Kelton could shout as the aliens jumped out of classrooms he thought were empty. Watch out, they’re coming required too much thought when one was about to die.
His ears rung from Stark’s shotgun and Mal and Horner’s handguns. Kelton fired his laser rifle and missed, punching a hole through a wall. Plaster and wood showered across the slime tentacles on the floor.
Lucy screamed. He glanced back to see her being pushed into another doorway.
He pivoted to go after her, but then the situation changed again. Red gas shot at them from all sides, spewing from holes in the tentacles along the walls. In the dim lighting, the fumes glowed like a million red fireflies. He inhaled a lungful and started to cough.
As the other men started coughing, the aliens took advantage of the distraction to pull back. Kelton fired at a longhaired woman disappearing into a side hallway. He missed again.
Gagging, Horner pointed at the stairs. “Let’s get out of here!” He led the way. He was far ahead of the group when he stopped near one of the classrooms. “Cap? You shouldn’t breathe this in—”
A hulking, naked man leapt out of the doorway. He stabbed Horner in the chest with a knife. “You don’t belong here.”
It was that crazy bastard from the parking garage. Splatters of an alien’s orange blood covered his chest. Someone had cut the side of his neck. As Cap pulled his knife back out to let Horner fall, Kelton wished whoever it was had severed his carotid.
Stark chambered a round into his shotgun and took aim. “Goodbye, Captain.”
But the captain ran around the corner into another hallway before Stark could fire. Stark pursued him.
The red gas felt like cinders in Kelton’s mouth and throat. As he coughed, he tried to focus through his streaming eyes on an alien man who hadn’t fled with the others. A cluster of slime on the wall glowed red as the alien gripped it with his right hand. He’s causing the gas.
Mal coughed and doubled over. “It’s starting to burn!”
Kelton raised his laser gun and shot the alien in the forehead.
As he fell dead, he let go of the slime.
The red glow immediately faded from the slime, and the gas stopped hissing out.
Kelton wiped his eyes and tried to scan for additional attackers. But he and Mal were alone. He knelt beside Horner and confirmed he was dead. “I killed the guy making the gas.”
“I know. I saw.” Mal pointed down the side hallway. “Stark went that way after the naked guy.”
“Shouldn�
��t we go after Lucy?”
Mal hesitated and then shook Kelton’s hand. “Nice knowing you.”
“Yeah.”
They hurried off in opposite directions.
***
Now that he was alone, the only thing Kelton could hear was the ringing in his ears after the fire fight. He hoped the lack of earplugs, like he would’ve used on the firing range, wouldn’t damage his hearing. He glanced over his shoulder as he moved down the hallway, worried he wouldn’t be able to hear someone sneaking up.
Lucy had gone into the classroom nearest the stairs. A faded paper sign on the door read Mrs. Kalanta—3rd Grade.
The classroom was empty except for an overturned table missing a leg. He circled it toward another door in the back.
Although he was out of mortal danger for the moment, he was surprised that with each step, his heart rate and breathing quickened. Sweat broke out across his face and hands. He fought the urge to simply hide against a wall and make himself as small as possible.
He paused short of the other door to collect himself.
Had to be a delayed adrenaline reaction. Chief Simpson warned him about it when he was a rookie. If it ever happens to you, my boy, take a deep breath and try to relax. The chief had been in a patriarchal phase at the time, calling everybody “my boy,” “son,” and “young man.” He moved on to pirate slang after Paula cussed him out for calling her “little missy.” Use your brain and not your feelings to focus on survival, son.
Chief Simpson was dead, and remembering that fueled a growing anger. Despite what the chief had said, now he wanted to shoot everything in sight, starting with Lucy.
She was responsible for this? She and her other scientist friends? What the hell were they doing that was so bad it attracted the attention of motherfucking extraterrestrials? And to think he’d entertained a little crush for her. Stupid. Maybe Paula had been the only girl who’d ever been right for him.
Yet he knew, deep down, that wasn’t true, either. They’d been miserable together, but only Paula had been smart enough to realize it and dump him. And now that he’d seen her with Jeff, Kelton knew for certain he and Paula never had what those two did. So he’d felt strangely at peace watching the Trents leave in the delivery van. It was time he accepted Paula was out of his life. And now, with her out of his presence, he could think more clearly about survival.
Plan 9- Official Movie Novelization Page 24
