by David Coy
She’d worked as a mechanic in a steel mill in Detroit one summer and it had a place called the soaking pits. They put huge ingots of steel down in the soaking pits and put a huge thick cover over them and blasted them with hot gas until they were soaked through with heat and red hot so they could roll the ingots out into thin sheet steel. This place reminded her of that, only it was a chamber filled with goo with a two-foot space of air above her head. It was completely sealed with a black seam across the top and the only light came from the dim little photosphere dangling like a pear up in one corner. She used to stretch her toes down and try to touch bottom, but gave that up long ago. The warm, translucent goo was up to her neck and the only thing that kept her afloat was the rubbery tube that ran down her throat. Where the tube met her mouth, fine tendrils ran out from it and encircled her head like roots. The vine ran up and out through the seam. It was attached like a dozen others to a huge bag-like organ in the ceiling of the chamber above.
She stared at the color, the dark, brownish black color of the walls that was her world and wished for light. She wanted
bright sun and white light on her skin.
She could feel a crawler on her right foot, then she felt another and another. They were rising up out of the bottom of the soaker. Soon her legs were covered with them. She had never seen one since they never left the goo. Mary figured they were probably blind. Sometimes they bit.
Her first time in a soaker, after she had settled down from thrashing with panic as they crawled over her, she gently closed down on one with her thumb when it crawled out to the tip of a forefinger. She had felt its resilient little body and judged that its size was about like a bean and she could feel its strength as it squirmed. She had held it and rolled it in her fingers and tried to picture what it looked like in her mind when it bit her. She would have screamed if she could have. She brought up her trembling hand and looked at the little scoop-like wound on her thumb that dripped blood back into the goo and realized that the crawlers could eat her alive by the thousands. That was the last time she ever tried to touch one. She remained motionless, not even blinking, as the crawlers covered her. She could feel them working, concentrating on the new incisions. She tried to ignore them as best she could.
She’d endured this dozens of times and knew she would be out of the soaker soon. The crawlers would drift away one at a time, the dark seam would part with a sound like tearing meat and the vine would pull her up. She would have to hold tight to the slippery vine to keep it from breaking her neck, but it would drag her out and deposit her on the mushy, sticky floor.
Then the fine tendrils around her head would untangle and the tube would slip up out of her gullet. She would retch as it did but that would be the worst for a while. The soaker and the crawlers and the vine would leave her body miraculously healed and restored, cleaned and polished. Only dozens of new thin scars would remain as a testament of her ordeal. She would lay and weep and perhaps sleep, then finally get up and walk through the warm dripping water in the tube leading out of the chamber. On the way through the tube she would wipe the thick fluid from her body and hair. She would pick up clothes in the chamber at the other side. Sometimes she found the clothes she had on yesterday, sometimes not. Any old shirt, some pants and some shoes that fit would do here.
When the vine released her she forced herself up on her feet and into the shower tube. She stood there in the tube’s rain and let the water wash over her. She wiped goop from her arms and legs and watched it drift in amorphous clumps along channels toward rat-hole-sized drains at irregular intervals in the tube’s floor. She couldn’t begin to understand how they had done that. Oh, the concept was familiar enough and she knew how she would have accomplished the same thing with regular materials because she had done a lot of building and plumbing. She stared blankly at the configuration and let the water rain down on her from the nipples above. Like so much here, these drains were unfathomable.
She let her mind drift and as always when she was in the rain of the tube, she remembered her last night on Earth.
She had been watching “Marathon Man” on cable when Jack Delacroix called her and asked her to come out to his place to fix a leaky joint on his tractor’s hydraulic pump. “It’s an emergency!” he’d said. The place where the break was “spurting fluid like a damned cut artery.” He couldn’t lift the tiller and had to till a path through his beets getting back to the barn.
“Why didn’t you just leave it where it was?” Mary had asked.
She wouldn’t have objected much to a night time service call, but Jack Delacroix’s place was miles from anywhere, it was nine at night and raining like crazy. It’d take a half hour to get there, then another hour or so to fix it so she’d be home by eleven, maybe twelve. She started to beg off, it was raining like shit, but Jack said he had to get started again in the morning if the rain let up. Jack was a regular customer and she was booked up through Wednesday; and since Jack never complained much about paying extra, she said she’d be there within an hour.
There was nothing in her life she regretted more than that single commitment she’d made to Jack Delacroix.
She hated Jack Delacroix for his dumb-assed dependency on her. Over the years she had fixed every piece of the asshole’s equipment, over and over. She couldn’t understand how he could run a farm and be so asshole stupid about the stuff he used to operate it.
She left for Jack’s at ten-thirty, deciding to watch the remainder of her movie before she put her work clothes back on and headed out. So what if she was late.
She honked her horn when she got close enough to his house for him to hear it. She half hoped he was asleep. When he didn’t come out right away she pulled her truck up close to his porch and honked again, real long. Well, the sonofabitch had been asleep. Dressed in socks and a yellow house robe, he poked his head out and hollered at her over the pounding rain, “You don’t need me do you!”
“I’ll find it! Go back to sleep! I’ll leave your bill in the mail box!” she yelled back.
She’d driven over to the barn and was amazed and disgusted at how hard it was raining. When she pulled the truck into the barn, there sat the tractor; its tiller stuck in the dirt. The dumb ass had tilled a path right into the barn.
She couldn’t depend on the lights Jack had in his barn to see or find a damn thing. She left the very ass-end of the truck outside so she could keep the engine running then hit her top lights and flooded the tractor and the barn with clear, white halogen light. Mary stepped out of the truck: and when her feet touched the ground, she felt her hair stand straight up. Mary had been in many Midwestern storms in her lifetime, and she had read and knew a lot about lightning. She was sure what she felt was the ionized charge of lightning about to strike the barn.
“Whoa . . . ” she’d said and had jumped back into the truck, pulling her feet in as fast as she could. Insulated by the big truck’s tires, she waited for the bolt to hit the lightning rod on the barn, but it never did. She waited for a full ten minutes, finally dialing in a station on the radio just to pass the time. She didn’t know how long she should wait, so she waited until she couldn’t wait any more. Finally, she scooted around and gingerly placed her left foot on the ground. She stepped out with her hands on her hips and walked slowly around a little, testing for the energy that had just scared the shit out of her.
She’d dismissed it as just a fluke of nature, one she’d remember her whole life she figured, and walked over to the tractor.
Mary Pope was not squeamish or skitterish, or very fearful of anything for that matter. She’d been a tomboy in her childhood, running harder than the boys, hitting harder when she had to, and never, ever showing fear. It was crazy Mary Pope who put the frog in her mouth headfirst; and while its legs kicked for freedom, chased Tommy Cortner down the street when Tommy made the tactical error of putting the frog down her shirt. Mary Pope was capable of anything and the one no one screwed with. On the other hand, she could be quite friendly and
helpful, too. It was Mary, after all, who taught the boys how to smoke.
Mary was strong and attractive. When the heat of puberty began to ignite lust in the loins of the boys who once double-dared her, they saw her shapely legs, lips and developing breasts as objects of adolescent desire. Mary, unfortunately, was incapable of returning the adoration. Puberty was a time of discovery, and Mary Pope discovered at that early, sexually innocent age that the white, wet, feminine bodies, with which she shared the girl’s shower filled her naughty fantasies and excited her budding libido far more than those of the stringy boys.
Mary Pope was the best mechanic in Potts County; a legend in fact, for her ability to fix the things that mattered—and in a rural community like Trader, Wisconsin—anything mechanical mattered. She had started her repair business when she was just eighteen, and her native ability around tools and her friendly disposition soon gained her a reputation for excellent service. She took night classes and day classes and vendor classes and worked hard; and before she was twenty-five, she was the most well-liked and admired mechanic in Trader. The community depended on her abilities, and Mary did her level best to fill that need.
She hadn’t acquired the skill to fix and repair heavy machinery without learning early to get in there and make the tool do what you wanted and never mind about the busted knuckles and grease and dirt. Mary Pope, the frog-eater, knew how to approach a dirty problem. It was her fearlessness that allowed her to learn and get better and better.
That was then, when the world as she knew it existed.
There had been a puddle of hydraulic fluid about a yard wide right under the pump, and she had followed a clear trail of the shiny liquid right up to the split in the hose. She was sure she had the part; it was a fairly common length for farm machinery. The seals might be a problem, but she probably had those, too. She eyeballed the problem for the tools she’d need, and having made that assessment, she started back to the truck. It was then that she heard the sound.
What she heard was the deepest, lowest harmonic she had ever heard. It contained such bass that she didn’t so much hear it as feel it. The sound literally rattled her teeth and vibrated her bones. At first she thought it must be thunder rolling in from the distance, but the sound was too even, too regular and too long to be thunder. She stood there and let it rumble her until it stopped. The sound, combined with the earlier ion charge, had given her a genuine case of the heebie-jeebies. She shuddered involuntarily then shook it off and willed her mind to the task at hand.
She had just tugged the hose free from its coupling and dodged the stream of escaping hydraulic fluid when the shadow came from behind her and fell on the tractor. She had been sure it was Jack, so much so that she didn’t bother to turn around at first. “Go back to bed, Jack,” she’d said to the coupling, “I’ve got it under control.”
She still didn’t turn around when she asked, “Did you hear that godamned noise. What was that?”
She’d started to run the o-ring up the flange for a test fit when she realized that she hadn’t received an answer to a direct question. No one had ever accused Mary Pope of mumbling, and she was sure she had said it loud enough and clear enough.
It was standing on its back legs when she turned and was about the same height as a person. The high, bright lights on the top of her truck were full in her face, and she couldn’t make out its shape exactly. The only thing she was sure of was that it wasn’t Jack, and fear hit her like a brick. It was something about the electrical charge and the rumbling sound, and now this thing twenty feet away that coalesced to form the bomb of fear that went off in the primitive part of her brain. The feeling of panic was so strong that she felt her bladder start to let go a little, a feeling she’d felt only as a child when her father was about to strap her.
She got the sense of an animal from it, and an alien muskiness drifted to her to confirm it. When she said the words that reflex demanded, they came out more as a choked sound than an order.
“Get outta here!” she’d screamed at it.
She’d shielded her eyes from the truck’s lights and stepped sideways to get a better look at it. As she moved, she could feel it tracking her. As her viewing angle improved and the details of it gave way to the light, she tightened the grip on the heavy spanner in her right hand and felt her mouth going dry.
The creature had been oddly familiar to her, and when she was at a right angle to it, and enough of its form was showing, the fact of it occurred to her like a bird tweet over the pounding din of her fear. The thing was a construction, it was a living thing that had been fabricated somehow, like the tractor.
Godamned motherfucking things! Godamned things! she thought, wringing water from her hair.
The need to do something was at the core of all mechanical things. You could tell what a thing did if you just looked at it. If you could touch it and move it, even better; but the interconnect of parts was always logical, and eventually these told you what force went where and what did what. The creature had not had a Frankenstein’s monster look about it, with its kludgey, sewed on parts and fat stitches. Quite the contrary. To an untrained observer, the creature would have looked perfectly organic and natural, if not horrible. To Mary’s experienced eyes, the key had been visible in the relationships of the components and a slight lack of smoothness to the transitions one to the next. The relationships had been sound, but the whole had lacked unity and polish. Unlike some inherited flaws in an otherwise perfect representative of a dog breed, these flaws couldn’t be accounted for naturally and had to be the result of a trade-off or compromise in the mind of the builder. Although she couldn’t put her finger on it exactly at the time, she had been certain the monster in front of her possessed some of those kinds of flaws.
Things!
The thought that the thing had been physically modified for a purpose had pushed her terror even higher. If she was looking at a made thing, who or what was the maker?
Her instinct had been to get away, to flee. The strength in the thing’s limbs told her it would be impossible to bolt past it without being intercepted. As a test, she had feinted toward the door; and her fears were confirmed when the two-hundred pound creature dropped down into a crouch and moved almost in synch with her to head her off.
Then the creature had opened a mouth full of sharp teeth, raised its head and bayed. The sound wasn’t so much a bay but a long grunt. She began to inch her way toward the door. With each step she took toward freedom, the creature closed in, forcing her into an empty stall.
She could see every detail and tried to find some weakness in its anatomy she could exploit if given the chance. All she saw was virulent strength.
The creature’s gray skin was mottled and wet from the rain. The head was connected to a long, strong neck and seemed to be much smaller than it should have been. It didn’t look too bright, something like a sloth. There was an overall froglike wetness; an amphibian-ness about it that went beyond the water dripping from its limbs. In a crouch, the creature’s forelimbs or arms balanced it forward and the stubby fingers remained flat on the ground. Its rear legs remained tensed, and the small feet constantly searched for good traction in the soft dirt of the barn’s floor. It seemed to be fighting some instinct to pounce and tear her to shreds with those teeth in that terrible little head. It continued to bay, and Mary remembered thinking that she wished to hell Jack would hear this damned mutant or alien or whatever, get dressed and run to the barn with his shotgun and shoot it. Just then, the creature snapped its head toward the barn door and sprinted out it on all fours, raising divots of dirt and clouds of dust as it went. Mary had never seen anything move as fast that wasn’t made of steel and rubber. She thought at first Jack had somehow done as she’d prayed, and the creature had sensed him and fled for its demonic life. She smiled out of relief that it was gone and took a step or two toward the open door half-expecting to see Jack Delacroix with his shotgun.
“Frogs,” that what she called the gray hunters
, “frogs.” Mary knew about frogs, she’d put one in her mouth once.
Then there were the goons.
“Goon” wasn’t exactly accurate, but that’s what Mary called them anyway. They weren’t goons like a thug or hoodlum was a goon, but were huge, misshapen things, powerful and small-headed like the goons in the old Popeye cartoons. Grunt, worker, peon, big bastard, drone—she’d heard them called many things since she’d been taken, but she liked goon best. It was an ugly name; just ugly enough to dull by insult some of the horror they created.
There had been two of them that night and one of them carried Jack Delacroix’s body in a woven sack draped over its massive back like a toy. One of Jack’s arms had been torn off at the shoulder, and she could see the white bone. Blood flowed down the goon’s back and leg from the ragged wound. The goon was almost casually holding the severed arm out to the gray creature that sat on its haunches gnawing and pulling off pieces of meat from it. The other goon had its attention fixed on Mary, riveting her with a predatory stare from deep sockets where its eyes should have been.
Mary had never screamed in earnest in her life that she could remember but she had screamed then. It was more of a “whoop” than a scream, and it came out completely with a will of its own. Some governor truncated the energy-wasting whoop before it was completely done. She raised the spanner and threw it with the force and accuracy that only the short stop on the Honey Bee’s Butt Busters softball team could achieve. The closest goon dodged the wrench with a quick twist of its ugly head, and that’s all she could remember.
Goon-things. Frog-things. Things, things, things. Ugly damned gray hunter things.
Pushing the memories of that awful night from her mind, she slid the last of the gunk off her calf and foot and walked out of the tube into the adjoining chamber. She shook and wiped off what water she could as she looked over the pile of clothes in the center of the floor. She picked up a big soft cotton shirt and dried herself off with it, then chose another to put on, a plain blue work shirt. She skipped right over the dresses and soft blouses. She couldn’t understand how anyone would even think of putting on a little sleeveless blouse here, but she had seen that woman Nancy doing just that.
