“No, I don’t want a shuttle,” she protests to the banana. “I need a direct evac to the Moon.”
My fingers finally touch the banana. The skin feels like regular peel, while the banana itself is motley, with flecks of black in the skin and a bruise at one end. I wouldn’t eat it. My mother would make banana bread with it, or muffins, or something. She certainly wouldn’t talk to it.
“I don’t have time for this,” Sharon snaps. “He’s dead, don’t you get that? If I don’t get him out of here, he’s gone. A shuttle isn’t good enough.”
Sharon drops the banana to her side. I’d call her crazy, but my father told me, never call someone crazy if they’re holding a gun. I think that’s good advice.
“We’ve got to get to the lab,” she says. “If I can get a cerebral imprint, I can reconstruct his conscious awareness before it fades, but we don’t have long.”
The banana drops to the floor. I’d be happier if she dropped the gun.
“What’s going on?” I ask, trying to walk a tightrope with someone undergoing a severe mental breakdown.
“Oh, the banana?” she says.
It’s not just the banana I’m interested in, but that’s a start.
Sharon says, “They’re a great source of potassium isotopes—half-life of over a billion years!”
I raise my eyebrows. That’s not quite the explanation I was after.
“Potatoes will work too. Brazil nuts are the best.” She appeals with her hands. “It’s tech you wouldn’t understand. I can use the nuclear resonance of the isotopes as a natural amplifier. It allows me to communicate with the others.”
“Oh, I think I understand,” I say, backing into the corner of the bathroom by the sink. Carrying Mark inside, okay, I was trying to help a grieving neighbor. Shooting at cops, talking to bananas… yeah, this isn’t my circus, these aren’t my monkeys.
“Do you trust me?” she asks, and I must admit, looking into those pretty brown eyes and hearing her soft feminine voice is somewhat hypnotic, but I’m officially freaked out.
“No,” I reply, deliberately looking down at the gun in her hand to emphasize my point.
“See,” she says. “Honesty. I like that in a man. I get hit on by creeps all the time. They’re never honest, you know? I appreciate your honesty.”
Sharon grabs the tinfoil from the floor and tears off a couple of strips roughly two feet long. She hands one to me.
“Ah,” I mumble, looking at the thin, shiny foil drooping under its own weight.
“Quick,” she says, wrapping the tinfoil around her head. She crumples the foil so her head looks like a Hershey’s Kiss.
“Hurry,” she adds, waving the gun around.
“Uh, okay,” I say, somewhat reluctantly mashing the tinfoil over my head. I’ve gone for a World War II combat helmet look, but I look utterly pathetic in the mirror.
“Is tinfoil really necessary?” I ask as I mash the foil in place.
“A-lu-min-um foil,” Sharon says, correcting me. “Oh, aluminum foil is an invention ahead of its time. Horribly underappreciated. People just shove it in ovens, not realizing its potential. Did you know the docking collar on the Apollo missions was protected by aluminum foil? This is the stuff of rocket launches and moon landings. It’ll shield us from surveillance.”
I’m not convinced.
“Can I go now?”
“Yes, yes,” she says. “We need to go. Grab Mark.”
Ordinarily, I would say, “Fuck no,” but she gestures with the gun and it seems only polite to comply and stay alive for a few more minutes. I don’t want to end up like Mark—dead and buried in ice—so I hoist him and his ice-head up and over my shoulder. Slush runs down my arms.
Without looking, Sharon squeezes off a few more deafening rounds, firing out the window.
“Come on,” she says, but I can’t hear her words. My ears are ringing, but I can read her lips.
I follow her out into the foyer of the building. Nervous eyes peer from the corner of the stairs on the second floor. A cell phone camera snaps a shot of me with the iceman slumped over my shoulder and Sharon with her gun. That’ll make it onto the evening news. Sorry, mom.
We head out the back of the building into the alley.
Sharon’s able to move much faster than me. She keeps beckoning me on with her gun. I’m trying to recall how many shots she’s fired. I’m racking my brain. I don’t recognize the make of the handgun. How many rounds does the magazine hold? She’s fired four or five shots. She’s probably got at least the same number left.
“Quick, the shuttle’s coming.”
I jog down the dark alley behind her. My lungs are burning. My heart is pounding in my chest. Alien or crazy woman? I’m thinking crazy, but I’m half wondering if I’m going to see some kind of UFO alien space shuttle thingy arriving in response to her banana call. Nah... She’s a nutbag.
Headlights blind me as I round the corner of the alley.
An old-fashioned bus pulls up, the kind with the 1950’s flares and grooves, and an absurd amount of polished chrome. Instead of a digital display, there’s an old hand-cranked sign above the driver: Downtown Shuttle. I can’t help but let out a soft laugh.
Pneumatics sound as the door opens and Sharon scrambles up into the bus. I climb in behind her, seriously thinking about dumping the body and running, wondering how good a shot she is, but not wanting to end up like Mark.
“Thanks, Joe,” Sharon says, which confuses me for a moment because my name’s Joe but she’s not talking to me. She stands behind the driver, adding, “For a moment there, I thought we were screwed. Good old Joe. You’re always there when I need you.”
“No problem,” Good Old Joe replies. “I was in the neighborhood anyway.”
Good Old Joe’s an African-American in his late sixties. Tight grey curly hair and a receding hairline are the only clues to his age, as his skin is young and vibrant. He’s wearing a uniform, but he doesn’t look like a regular bus driver.
I plop Mark and his impromptu ice helmet onto an empty seat. His body slumps sideways and I have to stop him from falling onto the floor. I look up at the passengers apologetically. No one seems to notice. I’ve just climbed into a bus with a dead body draped over one shoulder and no one cares?
“How’s Mark?” the driver asks as the bus pulls away from the curb.
“He’s fine.”
“He’s dead,” I say, snapping those words into the conversation. I can’t help myself. This is absurd.
“He’ll be fine,” Sharon insists, gesturing to the seat opposite Mark.
I slide in against the window and Sharon sits down next to me.
Turning sideways, I look at the other people on the bus. There are a couple of teenagers making out in the back, a middle-aged man wearing a business suit, a nurse still in uniform, and an old lady sitting two seats behind Mark’s body. His feet stick out into the aisle.
“What is wrong with you people?” I ask, desperately hoping someone’s dialing 911 with their phone hidden out of sight. “Dead body? Gun? Tinfoil hats? Anyone?”
“Shhh,” Sharon says, trying to soothe me. Softly, she corrects me yet again with, “A-lu-min-um foil.”
I want to scream, but I compose myself.
“You need help—professional help, Sharon. Turn yourself in to the police and I’m sure we can work this out. No one has to get hurt.”
Sharon sighs.
“Do you know what I hate about all this?” she asks.
She gestures with the gun, waving it around as though she’s stirring soup with the barrel, only the barrel is pointing at my crotch. When Sharon asks if I know what she hates, I think she means our general predicament, but the direction that gun is pointing in seems awfully personal.
“Not being honest with you people,” she says. “We should trust you humans. Perhaps not everyone, but some of you. We should find people we can trust and we should trust them.”
“Yes,” I say, feeling like I’m finally get
ting somewhere with her. I’m hoping my nonverbal body language is saying something along the lines of—dialogue is good, crazy lady, now point that fucking gun somewhere else.
“Do you trust me?” she asks.
It’s the second time she’s posed this question. I’m tempted to say yes to curry her favor, but a loose hold on a loaded gun and a dead body in the next seat gets the better of me.
“No.”
“See, that’s what the world needs—honesty. You don’t trust me, but I trust you, and do you know why?”
I shrug my shoulders.
“Because you’re honest. You can trust someone that’s honest. You can never trust someone that lies to you because you never know when they’re lying.”
She leans in and kisses me on the cheek, saying, “Thank you for not lying to me.”
I flinch, steeling myself to make a grab at the gun, but she puts her hand around the back of the seat, and I can feel the warm barrel of the gun resting on my shoulder. I can picture things getting ugly if I lunge for it. The idea of a lead slug tearing through my body doesn’t exactly thrill me, so I focus on my breathing, trying to relax.
I decide to play along.
“So what is it with you aliens?” I ask, trying to soften my trembling voice. “When you said we were being picked up by a shuttle, I’ve got to say, I was expecting something with a few more rockets.”
Sharon laughs. She’s got a beautiful smile. Why is it always the pretty ones that turn out to be psychos?
“Well,” she begins, sounding utterly sincere and genuine, “we’ve been here for about three hundred years.”
“Really?” I say as the bus turns down a darkened street. The lights are out. There must have been a blackout.
“Oh, yeah. We’ve got a base hidden on the far side of the Moon.”
“The dark side?” I ask, thinking Sharon’s been paying way too much attention to Ancient Aliens on The History Channel.
“Actually, there’s no dark side. The moon has days just like Earth, only a day up there is a month long. The sun rises and sets over the Moon just like it does here on Earth.”
“Oh,” I say. “I didn’t know that.”
The natural, relaxed tone in her voice is such that she could be giving me gardening tips, or talking about tides before going fishing.
“Our mission is to use non-intrusive means to initiate social change. We can’t introduce any new technology, but we can guide scientific discovery as a means to effecting social stability.
“Our focus, though, isn’t on any one science so much as promoting the concept. We’re advocates. We’re trying to coax rather than push—to inspire people to give up on superstitions and traditions. We want humanity to see reason for itself.”
“Huh,” I say. As far as delusions go, this one is pretty good. It’s got just enough plausible elements to avoid a sense of cognitive dissonance in her mind.
“It’s a slow process,” she says, talking to me as though I’m a child. “We’re fighting against hundreds of thousands of years of natural instinct compelling your species to war. You war against everything—skin color, gender, culture, country of origin, any kind of change. I swear, if given the chance, you’d war against eye color—fighting over blue or brown eyes.”
“You’re probably right there,” I concede.
She’s relaxing. I’m thinking about grabbing the gun, but I’m only going to get one chance at this. I don’t want to blow the opportunity.
“Our job is to encourage enlightenment—to help you see the folly inherent in your own nature, to see your own biases and prejudices. And that’s not easy for people to accept.”
I nod.
“So what about me?” I ask. I wonder, how do I fit into her paranoid delusion? I’m hoping she’s going to say the good guys get to return to their people with the gospel of good news, or something.
“Oh, we normally wipe and replace.”
That doesn’t sound good.
“Like Men in Black?” I ask, making a flashy sign with my thumb. “You know, erase memories and implant new ones?”
“Something like that,” she says.
This is good. For the first time, I think I just might make it out of this alive.
“We hide in plain sight,” she says, running the barrel of the gun across the back of my neck. “We discredit anyone that gets too close to the truth.”
“So you plant conspiracy theories in people’s heads?” I ask. “They think they’re on to something. Everyone else thinks they’re crazy.”
“Exactly,” she replies. “We give them false memories. Usually, we let them pick. Anal probe, alien space tentacle porn, things like that.
“You’d be surprised how many people opt for a field trip to Mars, but there’s nothing to see there other than rocks. Seriously, you humans have the most interesting planet in the system and everyone wants to go to the dry, cold deserts of Valles Marineris.”
She laughs, adding, “We give them something just crazy enough that no one will ever believe them.”
“And no one ever does,” I say, astonished at how immersed she is in her role-play. I had no idea Mark and his sister were this wacko. That her delusion can contemplate yet another layer of complexity is madness. Her nonchalant attitude scares me more than the gun.
“But I won’t do that to you.”
Oh, that sounds like good news. I hope. I relax a little.
“So,” I ask, my curiosity getting the better of me as I wonder just how thoroughly deluded she is, “Where are you from?”
Sharon points into the darkness. With the lights out, the stars are just visible through the light pollution thrown out by the rest of New York. She points at a star just above one of the buildings. Like an idiot, I follow her gaze. What the hell am I looking for? What am I expecting to see? There’s a faint hazy dot, barely visible in the sky. It could be Venus for all I know. I feel stupid.
“Artellac,” she says, as though that’s supposed to mean something, but I’m pretty sure she just made that up.
The bus takes a right, and it’s only then I realize the driver isn’t stopping to pick anyone up or let anyone off. There’s even the occasional couple at a bus stop frantically trying to wave the bus down as it drives on.
“We’re here,” Sharon says as Good Old Joe the bus driver finally pulls over, stopping in a taxi rank outside Baconhaus, a fast food joint that is quite possibly a crime against humanity in its own right.
I grab Mark, surprised by how heavy he is. Having had a few minutes to recover from running down the alleyway, my muscles revolt at the thought of carrying him again. I hoist him over my shoulder. Icy cold water runs down my back and trickles down the inside of my leg.
“You take care,” Joe calls out after us.
I step down onto the pavement and, with mock enthusiasm, ask, “Which way to the lab?”
This ought to be good. I doubt she really has a laboratory, and I peer around, looking for someone I can signal for help, but the street is deserted.
Sharon walks down the alleyway next to the Baconhaus.
I see a teenaged boy walk out of a nearby 7-11. He’s looking down at his phone. He glances up at me and stops in his tracks.
I point at Mark draped over my shoulder and mouth the words, “Call the police.” He gets it. I see him instantly dialing a number on his phone. He backs up, returning to the store. He peers out the window at me as he holds the phone to his ear.
“Hey,” Sharon calls out, waving with the gun.
I turn and walk down the alley, knowing the teen just got a good look at the ice packed around Mark’s head. If that doesn’t freak him out, nothing will. I relax my grip on one of Mark’s arms, allowing it to slide to one side and hang loose. I’m sure the boy has seen that. Hopefully he thinks I’m a mob hit man disposing of a body. I can just hear the 911 call: “A gangster wearing a tinfoil hat just dragged a dead body into the Baconhaus.” That’s believable. I wonder if he’ll follow up with, “Send Mul
der and Scully!”
“In here,” Sharon says, leading me into a storeroom behind the Baconhaus. The smell of fried bacon causes me to salivate, which is all kinds of wrong considering I’m carrying a dead man.
Sharon turns on a dim light and closes the door behind me, flipping a deadbolt lock.
“So this is the lab, huh?” I ask, looking up at the lone incandescent bulb. At a guess, it’s twenty watts, max. I couldn’t read in this light, which makes it a strange choice for a storeroom-cum-laboratory.
“It’s got everything we need,” Sharon assures me. “Lean him against the wall. Get those ice packs off him.”
I try to lower Mark with some dignity, but he falls from my shoulders like a sack of potatoes and sags against the wall beneath a small window.
Sharon hands me a pair of scissors and I cut away the Saran Wrap, puncturing one of the bags by accident. Freezing cold water runs over my hands.
Mark’s face is blue. His skin has shriveled. He looks more like a waxwork zombie than someone who was alive less than half an hour ago.
“Dry him off,” Sharon says, handing me a towel.
I don’t want to touch him. I’ve been carrying him, but this is different. He’s staring at me.
I stand to one side, not wanting his dead eyes to look at me as I pat down his head and shoulders.
Sharon steps to the far side of Mark with a roll of duct tape. She’s holding the tape out in front of her like she’s about to pull the pin on a hand grenade.
“Ready?” she asks.
“You bet!” I reply enthusiastically, with a big stupid grin lighting up my face. I have no idea what she’s about to do. Gagging a dead man with duct tape doesn’t seem entirely necessary.
Sharon moves with surprising speed. She tears a two-foot length of duct tape from the roll and slaps it on Mark’s forehead. Ice? Bananas? Duct tape? I should have stayed in and watched TV.
“Mechanoluminescent,” she says. “We’d get a better result in a vacuum, but this will have to do.”
Alien Space Tentacle Porn Page 2
