by David Coy
* * *
Phil jumped out of bed and pulled on his pants. This was no jet engine he was hearing and it was right over the cabin whatever it was. He pulled on his boots, grabbed his shirt and put it on fast. He snatched up his large five-cell Maglight off the dresser and headed out of the bedroom. Just as he was getting to the bedroom door, he dashed back, opened the top dresser drawer, stuffed the stainless steel, forty-caliber Smith and Wesson auto into his back pocket and raced out.
Better safe than sorry, he thought.
He crashed out the front door and vaulted over the porch rail. He had the light on and pointed skyward before he hit the ground. The sound coming from above was deafening.
Set for a narrow beam, his light drew a bright pencil-thin line on it, illuminating just a small spot. Phil quickly twisted the head of the light to get a broad flood light on the thing’s underside.
Phil blinked and shook his head. When what your senses tell you in the now runs contrary to what they have so carefully gathered in the past, history usually wins. “That thing’s impossible,” he said under his breath.
He was looking at the shining underside of the creature’s carapace and could make out the huge flat, overlapping plates that armored it. Phil was no biologist, but he knew enough about natural science to know that he was looking at something very close to an arthropod. It was more insect-like than crab-like. It had no visible appendages, as if it were an immature or larval form rather than a fully developed adult. Its color was dark brown, like a beetle. Phil gauged its size at about forty feet in length and fifteen wide. The entire rear section was encased in a framework of dull metal-like machinery. Near the anterior where the machinery was the heaviest, the creature had grown into and around it like a tree will grow around offending barbed wire. The craft was stationary, and Phil panned the light toward the head. The head lacked detail except for the eyes that looked precisely like the compound eyes of any bug he had ever seen. The light found an open orifice some three feet wide in the thorax. As he watched, a brown plate slid over the hole and the deafening sound stopped. The auditory void seemed to leave his head wrapped in cotton.
Phil’s hair suddenly stood up as if influenced by static. The craft banked and moved off without a sound down the westerly side of the hill just above treetop level as if it were sliding down on ice. The motion had an element of smooth grace to it. He tracked after it with the light until it was lost in the darkness of the canyon.
Phil Lynch was not subject to hallucinations. He had never had one, auditory or visual, either drug-induced or otherwise. He questioned at that moment whether or not he had just had one. He replayed the entire incident and carefully viewed the details. No holes existed. Nothing had been lost in some mental fog since the craft drifted away. There was the creature in his mental play-back, shiny, insectoid—the machinery woven into it—the sound organ booming its unearthly throat-singer’s harmonic at a jillion decibels.
There it was, he thought. I saw it. I heard it. It was not from Earth. It was alive. It flew because somehow all that grown-over hardware allowed it to do so, and it made noise. It was all of these things—and it was real.
He pursed his lips in thought but felt the smile starting somewhere deep in his facial apparatus. He held it down at first, but let the smile out, finally, and felt its stiffness, its ambivalence, like smiling at a cop who was writing him a ticket. It was far too important to smile about, this event, but smiling was the only possible response. He had just seen a thing that had changed his perception forever about Heaven and Earth.
It was one thing to imagine a biological impossibility, to draw it, say, or model it. Nothing in Phil’s history supported even the remotest possibility of the honest-to-god, there-it-is reality of the bizarre animal he had just seen. So he smiled.
“I’ll be godamned,” he said.
There was something else, too. The creature had left a sense of alien danger in the air like a residue. He held the light under his arm, took the pistol out of his pocket, racked the slide and chambered a round. Just to be fully prepared, he took off the safety and wrapped his forefinger around the trigger guard.
He stood there for a minute, gun in one hand, light in the other shaking his head in disbelief. He shined the light over the immediate area and the cabin, looking for any artifact the craft might have left that could add real matter to the memory of it.
He was checking out the rocks a hundred feet to the east when he heard the running sound some distance behind him down the hill. He spun and saw just a glimpse of the animal as it scrabbled up behind a juniper thicket down the hillside about fifty yards distant. He wasn’t sure what it was, but the Marine in Phil didn’t like the motion it made one bit. The movement sent a series of very telling messages to the part of Phil’s psyche that was trained to react in the gravest extreme to open threats to his person. In the Corps they taught you not to die for a cause, but to make the enemy die for his. Like the skull tattooed on his shoulder, that idea had faded somewhat with age, but it was still there, etched on his soul, still legible. It was his righteous duty to preserve his life and expend that of his enemy, if necessary, in the process. Period. In light of recent events, rational thinking was giving ground to a much older, highly reactive set of responses.
He began to form a clearer idea about the sounds he’d heard coming from the campsite below. That wasn’t raucous play he’d heard; they’d been attacked.
As he watched, the animal left cover and scrabbled up to another thicket some fifty feet closer. He got a clear enough look at it this time to see that it was definitely not local fauna. It was big, about two hundred pounds, fast, and moving with what looked very much like hostile intent.
He wasn’t quite convinced it was an assault, but the thing wasn’t extending an invitation to tea, either. Phil knew by that unmistakable maneuvering cover to cover that he was the object, if not the target of its approach. He did a quick tally of his assets: light, hill, truck, porch, pistol with ten rounds in the magazine, one in the chamber. He had the advantage. He narrowed the light’s beam and put it directly on the thicket. As he watched, another one just like the first scrambled up to the former’s first location. The intention of these things was now leaning very strongly toward the unfriendly side. He hadn’t seen anything that resembled a weapon on their naked bodies, but it was foolish to think there weren’t any.
He needed cover.
He walked quickly backwards until he could move in tight behind the truck’s open back door, all the time keeping the light and his sights on the thicket. There was very little between him and them in the way of cover now; and despite the fact that there were two of them, he felt sure he could plant all of his bullets in them if they charged. He wished suddenly that he had an extra magazine with him, but eleven rounds of .40 caliber, high pressure, jacketed hollow points was enough to stop an elephant. He raised the light up on his shoulder and aimed at the thicket, placing the light’s beam right over his sights—and waited for their next move.
His breathing was shallow and quick. Bad. He deepened it and slowed it down.
This is crazy, especially if it’s real, he thought.
There was no trace, no facts to see, only his memory to rely on for the truth. He needed to see the damn things, to capture them in the light.
Come out!
His breathing was getting short again. He breathed deep.
There was no movement from the thicket. This was nuts.
He was holding a thicket at gunpoint, that was all. Phil thought back on everything he had eaten that day, looking for the source of the botulism he had ingested.
Still nothing. A bat flicked down out of the darkness and through the light for an instant then out again.
Come out!
The first gray hunter leaped from behind the thicket and with great strides of its powerful legs, sprinted up the hill toward Phil’s position. There is no doubt about the meaning of some behaviors—charging, snarling behavior being one o
f those that is especially clear. It came out and ran directly up his sights, and Phil had no trouble at all seeing that the wicked teeth in that vicious head had him as their goal. It kept its head oddly level as
it ran, providing a fairly steady target.
This thing is stupid, he thought. I’ve got it cold. Hallucination or not, Phil held the sight on the thing’s head, squeezed the trigger and felt the comforting recoil of the pistol. When the barrel dropped back down on the target a millisecond later, the creature was still moving. He shot again and again, timing each shot just right, dead on each time. The animal crumpled and dropped forward like a sack after the fifth shot, raising a cloud of dust, not more that twenty feet from him.
Goddamned things can take a bullet and still move like lightning.
He breathed deep and put his sights on the thicket, waiting for the second one to attack.
No weapons. They should have come at the same time, charged in unison, he thought.
The strategy was clear and Phil swallowed hard. He turned the light on the fallen creature in front of him and chanced a good look at it.
Alien. Nothing like that on Earth, ever.
The thick, long neck was twisted and the musculature was clearly visible under the thin skin. Its skin looked wet; and, even though it was dead, Phil got a sense of overpowering malice and strength from it. He could see the black dots where he’d hit it. He’d hit its head three times, once directly between the eyes. Looking at the creature, it occurred to Phil that what he was seeing just wasn’t capable of building or using the thing he’d seen floating above the cabin. The feet/hands were the clincher. The fingers were blunt, only three to an arm/leg, and it had no opposable thumbs.
No thumbs, no grip. No grip, no tools. No tools, no technology. That was the law. This was an animal in front of him, and it was not capable of fabricating the flying thing he’d seen.
He turned the light back on the thicket, and no sooner had he done so that the creature behind it galloped and weaved away down the slope. It was soon out of range of the light and the pistol, and Phil thought better of shooting at a retreating threat and wasting sparse ammunition.
The sound was a phoop sound like a child’s pneumatic toy. It came from the rocks to the west. The projectile was slow, because he remembered having time to turn his head fully toward the sound before it hit him. It had come within a hair of striking the truck’s door and whacked him right in the midsection, just under his sternum. He remembered thinking what a nice shot it was as he turned the light down on his abdomen to see what kind of hole, exactly, an alien weapon would make.
Stuck in his chest was a dark burr about the size of a golf ball. It was covered with sharp, inch-long spines and the body of it, which pulsed slowly, was iridescent like the sheen on a buffet roast. Its forward inertia must have created a sizable dent when it hit, because fully half of the spines were stuck at various depths in his flesh. A warmth radiated immediately outward with the burr as its center. It spread rapidly through his chest and out his arms and down his legs. He turned the light on the rocks and saw nothing that might have launched it. He started to raise the pistol up and heard the phoop sound again. The second burr struck his gun arm square in his forearm, and he knew from the angle that the shot must have come from somewhere in the vicinity of the cabin. There were at least two weapons on him at right angles to his position.
Excellent flanking, he thought slowly. I’m dead.
The warmth of the second burr melted the pistol out of his hand like wax, and he remembered seeing it fall end over end. He cringed slowly when his clean, perfect pistol landed muzzle down in the dry dirt. His legs went next, and he slumped to his knees. He tried to make his hand go out and pick up the pistol. He managed to get the hand over to it, but couldn’t make his fingers close on it. By the time his face hit the ground, he couldn’t even close his eyes.
3
H e had been rendered nearsighted, and he tried to force his eyes to focus past his arm, but failed. He could see the burr stuck in his forearm clearly enough, but beyond that only darkness and some bright areas devoid of form or meaning. The burr seemed important somehow, then he remembered the sound of the weapon that delivered it—and it all came back with a gush. The burr had lost its iridescence. It looked dead.
Fucking thing will infect me, he thought. I need an antibiotic . . .
The effort to raise his arm tired him, and he let it drop. He felt the rubbery surface of the material under him and tried to gauge what it was. He could feel hardness under the resilient surface and got the impression that it was rubber padding over something very dense and heavy that held him. He could see large patches of light in regular rows above but could make out no detail. He blinked and squinted and opened his eyes wide until he began to gain some distance vision. Finally, he could make out the distinct parts in the structures above. The lights were circular, organic, and striated radially like the spokes on a wheel. They were arranged row-wise and were imbedded in a dark brown ceiling with an irregular surface. The light was an odd color, not as cold as florescent, but not quite as warm as tungsten, either. It wasn’t quite, but somehow the light felt brown.
He tried to move his legs, but the signals to do so didn’t quite make it down and the most he could do was twitch them a little. He raised his arm again and with concentration and the help of his left hand, he took hold of one of the spines on the burr. When he pulled, the spine came right off effortlessly. He plucked the remaining spines from it like pedals from an evil flower, leaving a dull brown ball still stuck by the spines that had penetrated his flesh. He took hold of the burr and pulled. The burr had the stiff, leathery tough consistency of a dried apple. As he pulled, he brought up a large tee-pee of skin with it. This stung, but he was determined to remove it. He pulled harder and steadily until the spines began to slowly come out.
As he pulled the burr loose, he could see that the spines had transformed into short roots. Blood red, they squirmed in coils like worms and he could feel the wiry strength and urgency in them as they flailed against his fingers. Disgusted, he dropped the burr on the floor. Thin trickles of blood left red trails from the pincushion pattern on his arm.
Evil damned thing, he thought. He wished he’d had a raging open fire to throw it onto.
He removed the one in his chest the same way, but more painfully, then tried to sit up. The effort exhausted him, and he put his head back down and closed his eyes.
Live capture, he thought dimly. So easy . . .
Then, like a relapse of the flu, he suddenly felt his body growing weak, and without warning he blinked out of consciousness.
He came to after what seemed like only seconds and began to slowly flex his hands.
They’re working better, he thought.
He heard a sound to his right, a choking sound, and turned his head toward it. He saw a human face, an Asian male with a thin black line of a mustache. He was looking at Phil and was trying to speak. He was straining to get something out and his face was twisted up like that of a severe stammerer with a word stuck fast. His desperate eyes were fixed on Phil’s.
There was another sound, too. A high-pitched hiss filled the air.
It might have been the being’s color, perhaps, or the texture of its skin, or the fact that his vision wasn’t quite one-hundred percent that prevented him from seeing it at first.
The form was roughly humanoid, but the color was that of poor, pale wood. Its texture was like that of wet, rough paper, wrinkled and overlaid like papier mache. Protruding out of the skin at regular intervals were short dark spines about the size of pencil points. All the spines pointed downward like a sparse, hideous coat. The thing was smallish, perhaps five feet, and its limbs were thin and weak, not frail as from starvation, but small by nature. Its body was curved into a slight “S”-shape, and the head formed out into the top serif; its hindquarters the lower. The thin legs supported it from the middle. The overall impression was of a bent root with limbs. The hands,
of which he caught just glimpses in their speedy work, were long-fingered and deft.
The device in its hand reminded Phil of nothing else but a small circular saw. The nimble hands were working the device into and over the man’s body with unfathomable purpose. He could see it clearly and the man’s blood was sucked upward onto the hissing, spinning blade by its motion and ran off it in rivulets. He looked at the man’s face and realized that the man wasn’t trying to speak—he was trying to scream.
From the being’s head hung strands of sparse, dark hair that contributed to the suggestion that it might be female. Its naked body was streaked and soiled, and Phil was quite certain he had never seen such an abomination of form in nature, art or elsewhere. Somewhere far back in the thing’s evolution was the impetus to burrow or squirm in the foulest regions. The lack of hard edges and the tapered head suggested none else, Phil was sure of it. The spines were designed to keep it in those filthy places, to lodge it tight or prevent its removal.
He looked down at the feet and seeing those long-toed appendages, with dirty and twisted nails, caused an involuntary grunt of repugnance.
The thing spun around at the noise.
The movement was so rat-like, quick and malicious, that it froze him instantly.
The eyes were close set and black like beads. Nearly absent was a nose although the intent of the two small nostrils in its place was apparent enough. The forehead was low, and the skin of the being’s face had the same, paper-like texture as its body, but not quite as rough. The mouth was a horizontal slit, lipless, slightly agape, and visible behind it were upper and lower rows of small, pointed teeth.
It hunched over Phil’s body and stared him in the face with those shark-like eyes, cocking its head back and forth and grimacing like a curious chimp. Phil remained stock still. It studied the arm that had taken the burr, getting down very near it. The cutting device hissed close to the arm. When the creature touched Phil’s arm, some reflex jerked the arm back away from the alien touch. The being moved with the speed of a lizard and dropped the cutting device, leaving it dripping blood and dangling from its umbilical. It reached with one hand and leaned down hard on Phil’s neck to hold him down. Phil tried to struggle and managed to get his arms up under it to push it off. The thing felt almost soft, the bones elastic and more like cartilage than bones. It was surprisingly slippery despite the rough appearance of the skin. The spines were sharp against his hand. The sensation of contact with the pliable bones under the wet, loose skin set off a dark, grinding impulse to tear it to shreds with his hands. All he could do was struggle lamely against it and absorb with each movement more of its tactile repugnance through his hands.
