“I was hoping you could tell me,” I said.
“Stop the car. I need some air.”
I did as I was told. We were on a cliff road. She got out and I followed and we stood by the railing, looking over the dark mass of the Atlantic. It was damned cold. I took off my coat and put it around Angie. She glanced at me and I think that was a thanks.
There was something good though, out here, between us. A bond, only a few hours old, yet it felt deep. We were silent as we stood there. Smoking, staring out at the sea but aware of each other. When I said we should get back into the car she looked at me for longer than was decent.
About fifteen minutes later she told me to stop again.
The dawn was turgid grey. The rain was back.
Down to our right, down on the beach, there was a bungalow.
5: Ghosts
Sand, soft under my feet. Hard to run on sand, hard to fight, but when you fall you can claw at it and burrow and hide…
They came out of the shadow of the leeward side of the bungalow. The ghosts. I saw Angie’s parents again, I saw my buddies, half crouched, clutching their rifles to themselves.
I burst out of the landing craft and the others are behind me because they trust me; Bannerman, Morrow, Peabody... I run and the world is ripped to shreds around me. I see shattered flesh and guts and blood… My legs give way. Down, I have to get down. I have to get out of this. I claw and scrabble and swallow sand and sob like a child.
And now they were inside me and they were so damned cold and I was on my knees again and I wanted to lie down and feel the sand and bury myself like a worm, bury myself real deep, and keep going and going.
Ahead, the sea pounded on the beach and threw up spray and blood, and tipped corpse after bullet-torn corpse onto the sand.
I saw Angie’s hand, grabbed at it and held it tight and let her haul me on. I sobbed and shouted and my legs were so weak I could barely stand. Angie had the love of the man in that bungalow to keep her on her feet. Me. I had nothing but memories, the bottle and failure. So I had to keep going because this was the only way through.
Then I slammed into the rough wall of the bungalow and they were gone.
Angie leaned against the sun-bleached timbers beside me. No heat this morning, just the grey clouds and a savage wind blowing off the land towards the boiling, angry waves.
“You okay?” Angie said, so softly I wanted to take her in my arms and crush her till her bones snapped.
“Yeah,” I croaked at her instead. “How about you?”
She nodded. “We got through, Tom. We made it through our ghosts.”
Now we had to go in. Face the guy. Find out what the hell was going on.
“Stay behind me,” I ordered.
I moved around the side of the bungalow to the steps. Then, before I could make my move, Angie shoved past me and ran up to the front door.
I followed as fast as I could.
***
He was sitting in a rocking chair, at the far end of a small room cluttered with ocean-related chachkas; ships in bottles, shells, and nets strung across the ceiling. It was him; Bannerman. A big, tall man in a suit that looked as if it had seen some hard labour, shirt open at the throat, feet bare.
I stared at him, unable to make sense of the sight of him, sitting there, living and breathing, the man I had seen torn open by machine gun bullets.
He spoke at last “I wish I could say I’m pleased to see you Hanson.”
“I wish I could say that too.” I sighed, suddenly weary. “I’m sorry. I ... I let you down.”
“No,” he answered. “You didn’t let me down. You let Private Bannerman down. He’s dead. Too late to be sorry about that.”
“Dead can mean a lot of things,” I said, suddenly waxing philosophical.
“This kind of dead,” Rick said and unbuttoned his shirt. The bullet scars were livid. No one could have walked away from that, yet here he was hale, though not so hearty.
Angie must have seen those scars many times before. I guess they didn’t mean much to her. A lot of men had come home with the marks of war tattooed on their bodies.
And on their minds.
“What do mean, dead?” Angie said. “I don’t understand.”
Rick finally offered her his hand and she went to him and he held her tight. When she drew back he said. “You have to go, get out of here as fast as you can.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
He sighed, infinitely weary. “I knew you’d say that and I knew you’d come looking. And I knew the mind-ghosts wouldn’t stop you.”
So, he had sent them to keep us away. What the hell was he?
“I guess Angie hired you to find me,” he said.
“The cops hired me. They want to know how you can be dead on a battlefield, then married and then missing.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Angie had rounded on me. “You’re crazy. Rick, I’m so sorry…”
“It’s not your fault hon.” Rick stood up and took a step towards me. “You were a coward back then and now you’re a dumbass. They weren’t cops.”
“They looked and smelled like cops, and I should know.”
“Just like I look and smell like Rick Bannerman.” He made an odd movement and suddenly he was clawing at his chest, like he was having a heart attack. Angie cried out and grabbed at his arm but he shrugged her off. The skin came away like a torn shirt. Underneath were…
...tendrils that waved like plants in the sea, black, hair-like, thousands of them. As I watched, they grew longer, as if exploring the new world they had been released into.
“I’m dying, that’s why I’m here. These things are eating me from the inside. No, it’s okay, it’s meant to be like that. If we don’t open the gate in time we destroy ourselves. And time is running low.”
“Ourselves?”
“I’m not the only one, Hanson, Didn’t the cops tell you? We use the dead as vehicles, like godamned hermit crabs. We’re here to open the gate, so the real visitors can come through to rape your planet.”
“You bastard,” I said. “You defiled his body…”
“I’m not a bastard. I’m a virus, I don’t have feelings.” Rick’s shoulders slumped and he shook his head. “Except I do. Maybe Bannerman was still alive when I infected him. You humans are damned hard to kill. Maybe a little part of him is still in here. And loving you, Angie… It was only meant to be camouflage, but…” He straightened. “I don’t want your planet laid waste the way the others have been. It takes all six of us together to open the gate. That’s why I ran, playing for time. But you’ve brought the others here, Hanson. You’ve slaughtered your own world.”
What I could say?
“Just let me die.” Rick sat down again.
“No,” Angie knelt beside him, grabbed his hand and wept softly. “You can’t die.”
Rick stroked her hair. “It has to be this way, hon. There’s no pain. It’s okay.”
Moments later the window behind me exploded inwards and all was shattered glass and whirling white fire.
6: Six
I was down, groping for Angie. The fire boiled above me. I pissed my pants the way I’d pissed my pants on Omaha Beach while my platoon was slaughtered around me.
A hand clasped mine and suddenly me and Angie were scrambling for the door. It was only as we tumbled out onto the sand that I realised she was yelling: Rick was still inside.
I tried to drag her away. Tried to make her see that we had to get out of there, and that Rick wanted to die. That he had to die.
The car was where we had left it, up on the cliff road. There were two other cars now, unmarked, but cop cars, no doubt of it.
I twisted around and saw them, spread out, walking through the morning murk towards the bungalow. I recognised the three ‘cops’, plus the happy couple from the diner.
“Keep out of this Hanson!” Morrison shouted. “Your job’s
done, get the woman away.”
Angie slapped at my face, clawed, swore and called out to Rick. I clung on, trying to drag her away.
The enemy moved closer, dark figures under the restless grey sky. They seemed larger than they should be, taller. Wrong.
Angie wrenched herself free of me and darted back towards the bungalow.
A fireball slammed into the sand and blew us off our feet. I heard Angie’s cry of shock, then a locomotive was thundering through my head. I writhed in the sand, face down, sobbing out my terror as the world was ripped apart around me.
Then Angie screamed again and I looked up to see her in the arms of Desoto. No, not arms. They looked like ... tentacles. Gleaming, slippery and tight about her waist and neck. I saw her face, and even from this distance I could see her raw terror. Desoto’s suit was in tatters, too small to contain what was inside.
“We’ll hurt her Bannerman,” Morrison shouted. “A great deal and for a long time. Can you hear me?”
The locomotive still roared, making it hard for me to remember why I was here. My attention switched to the diner guy. He was carrying something that looked like a poker. The end glowed red. The fireball launcher.
“Bannerman!”
“Let her go, I’m here!” A figure appeared in the shattered doorway of the bungalow; naked, bleeding tendrils from wounds all over his body.
“No, Rick!” Angie shouted back.
A hand, a pad of glistening membrane, muffled her shouts.
Rick shuffled forward, the diner woman and Sergeant White went to help him. The poker guy had his back to me. I wanted that damned train to stop so I could think.
Rick stumbled to a halt. White and the woman stood on either side of him. Angie was still Desoto’s prisoner. Morrison nodded to him and Desoto flung her aside like a discarded soda bottle.
The dull, early morning light grew strange. I looked up.
There was a rent in the cloud - red, like a wound.
I had to do something.
The poker. The godamned poker…
I ran.
More red light, bars of it, connecting Morrison and Rick and the rest of them. They let out a cry and each one was wrenched backwards, bodies arched at an impossible angle.
I ran.
The red light blasted upwards and something unfurled itself from the hole in the sky. Something titanic, city-sized and many-limbed. I glimpsed more of them behind it.
I ran–
-and slammed into the poker guy and we tumbled violently onto the sand. The weapon flew from his hand. I drove my fist at his face, feeling skin tear and bone crack.
There were shouts. Tentacles wrapped themselves around my arms and legs, tightened around my neck. The light was back, the colour of blood. The circle had repaired itself, the gate was opening. I could no longer breathe. I’d slaughtered the world-
A single detonation.
Rick fell, head a bloody ruin.
Angie, on her feet, pistol in both hands.
Then there were five.
Not enough.
A sound like the booming of a giant bell thundered through the air. I looked up, vast tentacles slithered back, clouds rushed to cover the wound. Red faded to grey.
I scrambled over to Angie who slumped into my arms. The ’cops’ made no move to stop us. Morrison dropped to his knees, flesh splitting, fibrous tendrils breaking free. Desoto was next.
We left them there. The rising tide would clear away the mess. It always did.
We Three Remain
by Stewart Hotston
He was once nine. Not the most numerous of his kind, but among the oldest and respected because of it. He lost one of his lives in a car crash, the two-door convertible side swiped by an eighteen wheeler on a major junction in Seattle. The truck never stopped. His own recall of the event was fractured, partial, like a jigsaw thrown into the air. There was nothing he could follow up on, no way to trace the man who'd killed one of his parts. Solly, the part of him who'd been crushed into jelly against the unforgiving soft furnishings of her car, barely had time to understand what was happening before the life left her body, evaporating like so much dew on a hot morning.
He'd lost parts of himself before; of course he had. None of his kind were unfamiliar with loss. As children, freshly budded from their parents, they would be encouraged to grow into two or three hosts of their own before their parents would put one to sleep. They were sheltered, cared for, while they dealt with pain and grief of the loss of themselves. It was the second of their three rites of passage into adulthood. The rite of loss, as it was called, demanded that they use no drugs to suppress the memories, that they not communicate their loss to the friends of their hosts, but most importantly, that they quickly bud within another host. It was, by most, considered their duty to only grow, never to diminish.
Children were, he reflected in the aftermath of the second death, rare enough. So infrequently did any of them have the urge to split themselves, to allow one of their parts to take on an independent life of its own, that new children were greeted with a mix of awe and confusion. When he first arrived on Earth, he had watched the apes get tangled up in their genders. The most technologically advanced societies were still confused enough about their instantiation that they insisted on defining themselves by their physical attributes, their sexual preferences. The less advanced ones…Well some of them made him shudder with relief that his own kind weren't so preoccupied with the need to reproduce that they’d commit genocide as a by-product. He had been to gendered planets before Earth, but not for millennia. It took him a year to relearn how to distinguish between them within language. He'd arrived knowing he needed to remember it was important, but being able to instinctively remember which was he, which was she and that it was better not to ask if hes liked hes, shes or other took time. Their biological imperative was keyed off a shorter lifespan than his, so he concluded it was reasonable for them to have a short term outlook, but he did not allow his hosts to indulge those instincts.
He did allow his hosts a broad range of their own motivations, only acting to keep them from self-harm, excess or standing out of the crowd. The cranial capacities of humans might be limited to three dimensions, but they were excellent pattern spotters and he had no interest in being noticed.
The third death made him worry, coming as it did just a week after the second, only ten days from the first. He felt that losing one part of himself was bad luck and two was devastating but still within the uncaring realms of possibility. Three was a cause for serious concern.
Exacerbating his fear and pain was the fact that, yet again, he had not observed the person responsible. This time his host, the third of his four female hosts, died suddenly with only a glimmer of what was happening. She turned her head at a crack of splintering wood in time to see someone standing next to a toppling tree trunk. It was absurd in its improbability. A fraction of a second later, the tree smashed through her skull, her brain matter splattering all around as his connection to her ended.
Nine was now six. His six were stuttering, like computers whose hard drives had been partially wiped. Four of them were in public and he rushed them to private places where he could collect himself safe from prying eyes.
It was then that he knew someone had come for him. His fourth part, one he had acquired substantial affection for over the thirty years he'd been using the human as a host, delaying his ageing and suppressing hereditary diseases, opened the door to the flat where he slept, only to die in a gas explosion triggered by a lone spark from his switching on the lights.
He’d seen movies that were less elaborate in killing their characters.
He had no main body; all his kind lived distributed existences across all their hosts, relishing the experiences of each equally. If he'd fallen into the habit of referring to himself as gendered, he allowed it only because five of his nine were male, so were in the majority. So he called himself Veel, a word in one of hu
manity’s languages which meant ‘many’; a moniker that was nothing more than a bit of fun.
Veel distilled himself into one body, the last of his four female parts, to think. The four who had died, who had been murdered, lived in four different countries on two continents.
The attacks were coordinated; that much is obvious. He had been targeted. Veel tried contacting any of the other three of his kind he knew lived on the planet, but none were answering. Their silence wouldn't normally be a cause for concern; they were a private people given to socialisation only rarely, yet in light of the assault on his persons an additional layer of fear caused each of his parts to shiver.
Who could do this? To think clearly he took almost complete possession of the conscious activity of each of his parts. His four remaining parts were each at home, one in Washington D.C., another in Manchester in the United Kingdom. The third was in Rajkot, Gujurat and his last, the one remaining female, was in Ito, in the Izu peninsula of Japan. He felt that if he could answer the question,he would know whether to bring himself together in one place, prepare to defend his parts in isolation or to spread himself to the four corners of the planet. The first thing he did was run a series of analyses of his electronic footprints, looking for signs of observation, trying to figure out if humanity had discovered his presence. The initial pass found nothing untoward so he turned his attention to mankind's orbital presence, checking for signals or anomalies that might show another species was present within the solar system.
His was a low-tech existence, relatively speaking. He had no access to faster-than-light travel, meta materials or matter transportation. What he did have was a self that was distributed across time and space. For sure, even if low tech for a space faring civilisation such as his, what tech he did have was far in advance of the inhabitants of the planet he was living on. Yet it was peculiarly suited to his way of life, of drifting through the cosmos almost randomly looking for places to live and grow in peace.
Aliens - The Truth is Coming (Book of Aliens 1) Page 14
