3zekiel (First Contact)

by Peter Cawdron

  “The Orion?” Pretzel asks, having overshot. He clambers, grabbing at the next pod, trying to reverse his direction, skidding as though he’s on ice. The challenge is not to overcorrect, and he takes his time, gently pushing off and sailing back next to us. I rub at the plastic, clearing away the outer layer of ice crystals, peering beneath the surface.

  “Yep,” Garcia says somewhat proud of his discovery.

  Pretzel looks worried.

  “Why so glum?” Garcia asks, picking up on his negative sentiment. “This is our ticket home.”

  Pretzel peers at the spacecraft, which to me looks amazing. My heart is racing with excitement. This is brilliant. We’ve got a way to get back to Earth. I don’t understand Pretzel’s worried look. He’s quiet, examining the craft but not speaking his mind.

  To me, the Orion looks like one of the Apollo capsules that went to the Moon, with machined aluminum panels wrapping around it. The craft is a teardrop shape, kinda like a round pyramid. There are windows, a bunch of small circular openings that look like exhaust points, and a hatch. My heart leaps at a familiar sight. UNITED STATES has never looked as good as it does in bold, black lettering set below the red, white and blue of the Star-Spangled Banner and the NASA logo printed on the side of the Orion.

  “This is it. This is how we get home,” I say.

  “You’re not going to get a gorilla in that thing,” Garcia says.

  “The Orion’s not going anywhere,” Pretzel finally says.

  “What? But we need to get home.”

  “Kid. I know. I understand. But we have no idea if we can even power this thing up. We don’t know how much oxygen it’s got, let alone things like electricity, food, water… it’s impossible.”

  I hate being called a kid.

  “It’s not impossible,” I say. “We have to try.”

  “We’ll die,” Pretzel says.

  “But you could do it,” I say with unfounded enthusiasm.

  “I wish I could,” he replies. “But even if Houston could take control remotely, there’s simply not going to be enough fuel.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The Orion got here by coasting, by drifting on a wild, eccentric orbit—skating across the ice, so to speak, sliding through space. But once it got here, the alien vessel captured it, removing that momentum. To get it started again. The delta-v required. I just don’t know that it carries enough fuel.”

  “But it’s got rockets,” I say.

  “Tiny ones,” Pretzel replies. “Small ones designed for maneuvering, not blasting from one place to another… I’m sorry Josh.”

  “But. But.”

  “We’ll find another way,” Garcia says. That Pretzel doesn’t comment on Garcia’s enthusiasm leaves me feeling there is no other way. We’re trapped. We’re going to die up here. I try to shake that thought from my mind. Jana and Lady. I’ve got to focus on finding them, but then what? How do we get home?

  I hate turning my back on the Orion. It seems like a mistake, but Pretzel and Garcia move off, examining more of the custom pods.

  “I just want to go home,” I say quietly to no one in particular, feeling my heart sink. The others are too far away to hear me mumble. I’m on the verge of crying. Our cause seems hopeless. Even if we find Jana, what chance do we have of escape?

  “Found a bike,” Garcia says. “Not one of those fancy ones with gears. A kid’s bike. Real simple.”

  Pretzel replies with, “I’ve got a jeep. It’s white with UN markings.”

  We continue examining the artifacts in the hold, but our enthusiasm is gone. We might be calling out our findings, but the passion is dead. I don’t know what I feel. Anger? Disappointment? Defeat? Hurt? Resignation? I’ve got to bury those emotions. I’ve got to push on.

  “I’ve got mammals,” Pretzel says with a sudden burst of excitement, and Garcia and I flick our way across dozens of semi-transparent coffins, for lack of a better term, working our way over to join him in the soft red light.

  There are monkeys, bonobos, chimps, even a howler. It’s easy to forget just how much diversity there is in the jungle. Often, the pod shape offers no clues. Even small creatures like bats can be in large pods because there will be three or four of them laid head-to-toe. They have their wings wrapped tightly around their bodies as though they’re asleep, which makes the overall length of the pod similar to that of a human, which is misleading. I come across an Okapi with its young. Okapi look like half-finished Zebras, with horizontal stripes on their thighs and legs, while their upper body resembles a deer. Dad called them ‘God’s mashup,’ but I’m sure Pretzel would disagree, providing some longwinded explanation about natural selection.

  “I’ve got a villager,” Garcia says.

  “Here,” I say, rubbing the ice off the surface of a nearby container. “I’ve found her.”

  Jana looks dead. She’s lying on her back with her arms neatly by her side. Her skin is pale, while her lips are blue. I’ve never seen her naked before. Her body looks almost fake, as though her head has been seamlessly attached to a department store mannequin. Her dark skin is flawless and smooth. Her breasts follow a graceful curve, while her stomach is flat. She has a small tuft of hair set perfectly between her hips, while her thighs taper down to her knees, with her legs curving to petite feet. To my mind, she looks more like the idealized carvings that sit on top of a stone casket in some ancient crypt. It’s hard to believe she’s alive, or indeed that she ever was.

  Her eyes, though, are open, which is unnerving. They’re haunting, staring up, looking at nothing. There’s a light frost on her cheeks, just a touch of ice crystals giving her dark skin an almost pearlescent shine.

  Pretzel swims through the frigid air toward me, so I say, “Open the graves, right? That’s what it said.”

  “That’s what it said,” he repeats, although he doesn’t sound convinced.

  I look down at Jana lying there so peacefully, wondering if we’re about to kill her, hoping we can save her.

  3zekiel

  “What can you see?” Pretzel asks Garcia.

  “Hundreds of machines.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask, not seeing anything beyond her cold body lying on a bed of white foam.

  “Beneath her,” he says, spinning slowly around and working his way down beside her waist, looking sideways into the pod. As he speaks, his legs drift slowly back to the surface of the craft. “They’re attached to her back, just above her hips.” He reaches around, touching his own back, showing us where. “About here. Not near the spine, though. Just above the small of her back.”

  I look to Pretzel. He isn’t happy.

  “Kidneys, spleen, liver, adrenal gland,” he says. “They’re all easily accessible from there.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say.

  “They’re keeping her alive,” he says, resting his hand on the cold transparent surface, looking beyond his fingers at her inert body, neither breathing nor moving. “They’ll be tapping into the abdominal artery.”

  “So we get her out of there.”

  “We’d kill her.”

  “But—there must be something we can do.”

  Garcia’s quiet.

  I fight to hold back tears. “Where are they?” I ask, looking around. “Where are the monsters that did this to her?”

  “There’s no one—just the machines.”

  “No. No,” I say, shaking my head. “What about Ezekiel? He saw these machines. He survived.”

  Pretzel doesn’t reply. His head hangs. He hasn’t moved his hand in spite of the cold. His fingers are splayed wide, stretching out across the frozen surface of Jana’s coffin. He’s trying. He wants to help, but desire is not enough. I can see the pain this causes him. He too wants to believe there’s a way, but the reality of what we’re seeing is telling him, no. Garcia moves around the pod, examining it from different angles, trying to see something with his super vision, desperate to break the impasse.

  I can’t acc
ept defeat. My heart races. A hot flush rushes over me. Emotions well up, choking my throat. I feel helpless. There must be something that can be done. We’ve come so far. Instinctively, I want to lash out, to flex my muscles, to hit something, to break into the casket. It’s as though violence can somehow succeed where reason has failed, but that impulse is futile and I know it. I turn, looking around the multi-layered hold, desperate for a solution.

  Garcia and Pretzel talk in hushed whispers, but in the desolate chamber even a murmur carries in the frigid air.

  “What?” I ask.

  Garcia’s quiet, although I know it was him that spoke first.

  With a sense of calmness I don’t understand, Pretzel says, “He can open it.”

  “But,” Garcia adds. “She’ll die.”

  “You don’t know that,” I reply, pushing off and sailing over next to them. “You don’t.”

  “Josh. I’m sorry.”

  “There’s got to be another way.”

  “I’m sorry,” Pretzel says. “This is the end. We can’t open her pod. We’ve reached the end of the line.”

  “No,” I say defiant. “This can’t be the end.”

  Pretzel is resigned, speaking quietly. “We’re out of options.”

  “B—But the tractor,” I say. Both men look at me as though I’ve gone mad, and perhaps I have, but as I continue speaking a smile slowly reaches Pretzel’s face. “The water tank. The bike. We can open them, right?”

  “Oh.” Pretzel grins, on the verge of laughing. “You little devil. You’re a genius.”

  Coming from Pretzel, that’s high praise. He gets it. That thin strand of a thought I’m grasping at has already blossomed into a fully-fledged concept in his mind.

  “What?” Garcia asks.

  Pretzel’s already on the move. I’m beside him, pushing off the floor and dancing over the hold, skipping between pods, using my hands to pull myself back to the surface so I can go faster without waiting for gravity to pull me down. Garcia follows as Pretzel explains.

  “We can’t open Jana’s pod. We can’t open any of these pods without killing whoever’s inside, but—”

  “But?”

  I complete the thought, pointing at the tractor. “But we can open these ones.”

  “Why would you do that? How is that going to help?”

  Pretzel says, “Because it breaks the program. It’s going to cause an alarm somewhere. It’s going to provoke a response.”

  We come down beside the sealed tractor, bouncing slightly, slipping on the thin coating of ice covering the slick floor.

  Garcia says, “And you’re sure this is a good idea?”

  “No,” Pretzel replies. “But it’s all we’ve got.” He holds his hand out, signaling for Garcia to do his thing. With his mechanical head, Garcia looks at me—looks through me, for all I know, and then turns to the pod with the tractor.

  Quietly, he says, “These things are sealed. But they’re just like the pod we rode up on. I saw how they opened our pod. There’s a mechanical release. It seems to trigger some kind of electronic lock, but the seal starts down here, under the rear section.”

  He points. I don’t see anything. I doubt Pretzel does either, but Garcia reaches down and his hand disappears inside the cloudy plastic.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready,” Pretzel replies.

  A mist spills over the floor, seeping out of the pod. Garcia fiddles with his hand. Cracks appear in the alien plastic. There are dozens of them slowly running up over the middle of the casing before dividing like the petals of a flower opening to greet the sun. The pod slowly falls apart, exposing the tractor.

  Pretzel and I look at each other. Nothing. He squeezes between the petals, stepping into the pod and examining the tractor. Diesel has dripped onto the casing. Mud still clings to the wheels. It’s slightly moist so he takes a handful of it and tosses it out into the alien vessel, yelling out, “Hello? Is anyone out there?”

  There’s a key in the ignition. I climb up on the worn leather seat and sit on the spongy padding, feeling the old springs sag. If there’s one advantage to living in Africa over growing up in Boston, it’s learning how to use heavy machinery. I may not be able to drive a car, but a front-load tractor is easy. I reach down and pull out the glow plug toggle, warming the engine block, unsure if the tractor will start in the cold. For a few seconds, I rest my fingers on the key, waiting, wondering how long it’ll take to heat the cylinder, hoping there’s plenty of juice in the battery.

  Pretzel nods. I put the clutch in, pushing hard against the heavy spring set behind the metal pedal, half-pushing myself out of the seat in low gravity. After making sure the gearbox is in neutral, I release the clutch and turn the small silver key. The tractor splutters, sounding less like an engine and more like an old man with a persistent cough.

  Black smoke billows from the exhaust, which is little more than a sawn-off pipe leading up behind the seat, with the opening just above head height. A metal flap clatters at the top of the pipe, designed to keep rain from running down inside the exhaust. It chatters in time with the engine, slowly opening up as the engine idles.

  I turn on the lights and push on the large black button in the middle of the steering wheel, sounding the air horn. The blare echoes through the spaceship. I doubt this craft has ever heard anything as alien as the fog horns farmers use to scare off wild buffalo. Most newcomers to Africa think lions and crocs are dangerous, but those critters are amateurs. Hippos and buffalo kill far more people each year than the big cats. Buffalo, in particular, can be grumpy as hell—to quote my Dad. They look nothing like our American buffalo. They’re more of a pimped-up black panel van with horns. I heard of one ramming a tractor just outside of Ubandi. The animal’s horn punctured the radiator. Buffalo: 1 — Farmer: 0.

  I rev the engine as the tractor splutters, spitting pungent smoke into the air. The frame of the old tractor rattles. Tractors like this are common throughout Africa, being relics of the past, handed down from father to son. This one’s probably forty to fifty years old. As the engine comes up to speed, the roar goes from deep, throaty blasts to a steady hum.

  Spider-like aliens come clambering over the walls, hanging from the ceiling and climbing over the surrounding pods, all converging on the tractor. Pretzel signals with a finger running across his throat and I cut the engine. The lights go out and the cargo hold within the alien vessel is plunged back into darkness.

  “Quick,” he says, and we hurry out of the pod as alien machines begin pouring over the edge of the plastic, rushing into the broken casing, trying to figure out what just happened.

  “Ah, I think that worked,” Garcia says. For someone that can see in all directions at once, he still orients his body as though he’s staring ahead. Instead of facing us as we climb out of the casing, he’s turned sideways, looking at the closest wall.

  “Yeah, I noticed,” Pretzel says, stepping back and drifting through the frigid air as the tractor is consumed by thousands of spindly metallic legs.

  “No. Not them.” Garcia has his hands outstretched as though he’s trying to keep someone at bay. “Him.”

  “Who?” Pretzel asks. “Where?”

  “There... No, there... Wait, it’s all around us.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say. It’s taken a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim light again, but I don’t see anything beyond the small spider-like machines. The aliens are preoccupied with the tractor, closing the casing and sealing the plastic.

  “You can’t see that?” Garcia asks. “It’s everywhere. The whole thing is coming alive. The walls. The floor. The ceiling. They’re all…”

  A mist drifts over the ground, swirling as if in response to a door opening, forming eddies that dance around us. There’s a sound as of a heavy breathing. With the tractor pod sealed, the small alien machines disappear, shrinking back into the shadows.

  “But there’s no one here,” Pretzel says.

  “It’s the entire craft,”
Garcia replies. “It’s come to life. There’s energy. Everywhere.”

  “Who are you?” Pretzel calls out, yelling within the vast hold.

  In the silence that follows, his voice carries with an echo.

  We wait. No one speaks. The response that comes is haunting, like the wind whispering through the trees on a dark, lonely night. Rather than being a sentence, it’s as though a single word has been spoken in reply, slowly passing through various vowels and syllables without any clear distinction between them. It’s mimicry, repeating Pretzel’s question back at us but without any clarity.

  “Ooooooo-wwwhoooooo-arrrrreeee-yoooou?”

  A rush of blood causes me to blurt out the one word that’s been burning in the back of my mind ever since I sat at dinner with Brother Mordecai and my father.

  “Ezekiel?”

  No one moves. None of us dare. A cool wind swirls around us, enveloping us, chilling us to the bone. I don’t know where to look. The alien speaks from everywhere and nowhere at once, but it makes no sense to me.

  “Threeeeeeee,” drifts through the cargo bay.

  Pretzel, Garcia and I have our backs up against each other, facing all the approaches, unsure what’s happening. I go to speak, but Pretzel turns slightly, holding a finger to his lips as the alien intelligence completes its response.

  “Zzzzzzekiel.”

  Suddenly, light surrounds us, bathing us in a brilliant, all-pervasive white. There’s no source in particular, no spotlight as such, but rather, the light comes from all around us, even the floor. I blink, struggling to see, looking down at my feet—there’s no shadow. My boots, my jeans, even my shirt turn white, slowly melting, losing all sense of form, blinding me. It’s as though my body is being dissolved by the light.