by David Coy
Part of Mary would rather have seen Fred kick and punch and be killed by the big bastards than to have witnessed the total, sycophantic surrender she was seeing. She started to turn away in disgust, then her anger turned her back like an irresistible force.
“Why don’t you just kill him!” she yelled down the tube.
Gilbert turned slowly and looked at her like she was an annoying child. Then he held his hand up like a priest to silence her. Speechless heads appeared in the openings to the holes along the tube, drawn to the ruckus.
“Fuck it!” she said. “Just kill us all!”
After venting, she cooled off a bit and thought it best to hold her tongue. She’d made her point, at some risk to herself, and there was no sense in pushing it further. She might have pushed too far already. She pulled back into the hole.
Bailey had drawn up into a fetal position under the blanket. Mary sat down at her feet, drew her own legs up and stewed.
“Fucking place. Fucking things. God, let me out of here.”
“Is this Hell?” Bailey asked her.
Mary thought about it then smiled wryly. “At least in hell you’d know why you were there,” she said. “In this place nobody knows shit.”
“What do they want?”
“Ha,” she blurted. “Nobody knows what they want. They just want to use our bodies. That’s all anybody knows.”
The first big bastard looked into the hole and glared at them. All of the goons’ looks were dirty looks, so Mary couldn’t tell if she was getting one now as a direct result of what just happened or not. She could sense the tension in Bailey from the sight of the thing’s big ugly head. It didn’t whistle, confirming what she knew already that it wasn’t them they’d be taking. When it moved away from the hole, Mary gave it the finger, careful not to let the good see it.
Gilbert’s head appeared in the opening next, and he crooked a finger at Mary to come over. He’d never stoop to actually entering her domain, Mary was sure of it. She had some words for this sonofabitch.
“You shouldn’t do that,” he said.
“Don’t wag your finger at me.”
Gilbert seemed to think about it, but gave away nothing of what he was thinking. He had the very annoying habit of tagging key words or phrases with an interrogative so that everything he said sounded like he was apologizing for it.
“You shouldn’t . . . yell? . . . at them.”
“Why not? Am I gonna get my brains sucked out if I do? What a laugh! Besides, it’s just a matter of time before I’m dead and you’re dead, so to hell with it. If I go off once in a while, I’m sure you’ll understand.”
“You might . . . survive? . . . if you don’t do anything to cause trouble? . . . for me or the others?”
“What do you mean ‘cause trouble’. Are you nuts? You are aren’t you? Don’t you realize where you are? What in the fuck could I do to endanger you more than you are already. You’re stupid.”
“You shouldn’t be so rude.” He pushed his big, aviator- style glasses up on his nose and wiped the corners of his mouth with his thumb and middle finger. “That’s not right. And I wish you wouldn’t use the ‘F’ word.”
You sanctimonious prick! she thought. “How dare you— that’s it. Listen to me, you shit. I’ve been using the ‘fuck’ word since I could speak. I don’t think I’ll stop now just to spare your pious ears.”
Mary was livid. She felt her cheeks growing hot. That’s the way it was with the religious. The priorities were all too often distorted and artificial.
Gilbert just looked away and thought.
Mary suddenly wondered if he had any real empathy for anyone. Something about his voice was too damn sincere. Apologizing for everything he said was his way of oh-so-gently getting you to swallow every lame little phrase that came out of his mouth. He was wiser, more holy than thou, it had to be so.
“Got any more . . . ideas? You know, any single thing that might be . . . useful? . . . to us?” she asked, mocking him with her own interrogatives. She paused, waited. “Well? Do you? If not, get the fuck away from my door.”
Gilbert didn’t leave, he just looked away and Mary knew that the thin relationship they’d had, had just taken a turn for the worse. He was thinking how much he hated her, and Mary could feel it like infra-red. She could feel his mind racing, rationalizing his point of view in broad sweeps when a thoughtful person would have simply walked away. His hatred for her had nothing whatsoever to do with this incident, either. He wouldn’t look her in the eyes, and Mary was sure of it. So ultra cautious. A perfect liar. He hated her. He couldn’t have said it with words and said it better, but he didn’t have the guts to say it out loud. She did.
“You know, I bet I could beat your bony ass to a pulp,” she said evenly.
She was positioned in the opening like a cat and could leap out at him at chest level and easily knock him down. Then she’d clamp her hands around his neck and crush it, just like the big bastard almost did to Fred. She draped one strong arm over her knee and tensed it and stared and let that soak in, too.
The statement was intended to shock him and mess with his mind. Running with the rowdy boys of Trader had honed the ability to insult, to bluff or to fight well at an early age and she was pleased with the result of this little interaction.
How do you like that, you prick. A woman just challenged your twisted ass to a fight.
He couldn’t leave just yet, because if he did so too quick it would show that he was intimidated by her. His mouth was open just a little and he swallowed out of fear but managed to keep his mouth open to try to hide it. Mary could see his big, damn Adam’s apple work in a single big pump. He harrumphed just barely loud enough that she could hear it, then turned and walked away.
That’s right, you run, she thought. “‘And ‘F’ you,” she said to his back.
She moved back over to Bailey and tightened the blanket around her shoulders.
“Who is that?” Bailey asked.
“The enemy. Another one,” Mary replied.
* * *
He could feel nothing.
There was no way he could tell how long he lay there, unmoving, under that brown light.
Bones and tissue conduct vibration as effortlessly as a tight string between two tin cans. After an eternity of lying there in the soundlessness of the cell, he began to hear the barely audible sound of the wasp’s grubs eating him alive. It started as a rhythmic scratching noise down deep, and as the hours passed and the worms grew, the sound got slightly louder. He could visualize the hundred or so sets of mandibles working as they snipped through fat and strands of muscle tissue like tiny scissors. The sound was now his personal and grisly white noise. It had bleached his thoughts of all rationality for hour upon hour.
They moved as they fed, and he knew they were leaving a trail of by-products in their foul channels to be dispersed and absorbed by his tissues. The growing infection from invading bacteria would be enormous. He knew also that he was bleeding from a thousand severed capillaries and small veins. Since he was still alive, he questioned whether the grubs’ instincts warned them off the larger, critical arteries, nerves and organs. Protein was what they sought, and they could find an abundance of it by staying in muscle tissue alone.
Clever little sonsofbitches, he thought. Keep the food alive and fresh longer by not killing it too fast.
He didn’t feel sick, but he knew he had to be slowly dying. It was just a matter of time until the toxins from the inevitable infection would overcome him. He was captive now to their gruesome purpose, but he would escape them eventually. The surgical grazing of the grubs, despite its terrible purpose, could not prevent his certain escape from it by dying.
For the millionth time, he closed his eyes and shut out the sickly brown light of the cell.
Of all the bizarre ways to die one could imagine, he thought darkly, I’ve topped them all.
A moment later, he felt an itch on the end of his nose. That itch sent him into a ne
w panic as surely as if he’d been set aflame by it.
I can feel.
There was a sharp pain down deep in the back of his arm like the pinch of tweezers. Another followed in his chest a quick breath later, and then another and another in his legs, and then abdomen. He lifted his right arm just an inch or two out of reflex to the pain and realized clearly that his motor ability, and with it the perception of pain, was quickly returning.
Before he could retreat into deep shock, before he got anywhere near those hallowed gates, he felt the collective mincing bites of a hundred cutting mandibles as they tore his tissues and he watched his body, as if from afar, writhing in the pain of it. He saw a pale gas-like smoke filling the chamber from a small vent next to the light. He felt himself being jerked down almost violently into painless unconsciousness. Deep blackness was his world, and he was sure must now be dead and was thankful for it.
* * *
He floated in black oblivion. Somewhere in the nothing, an impossibly small sphere of substance grew to an impossibly large sphere of substance and back again, time and time and time again with an ethereal rhythm.
He rose out of death slowly like a bubble through tar and was greeted by the low, groaning sound of human pain and despair. He was surprised he could turn his head and lift it, and he did both. The first thing he saw was the inch-wide viney tube stuck square in his chest just under his sternum. It was held in place with root-like appendages radiating out where it pierced him, as if it were growing out of him. It ran upwards into the light, and he lost it in a jungle of other tubes and instruments above. Beyond the cluster of equipment above was a dark ceiling that seemed to want to swallow him with its blackness. The brown light was somewhat brighter here and he could see naked human bodies lying all around him on the tops of smooth, black, table-like structures. Each one attended by an alien being.
The human bodies were cut and splayed open like biology
class frogs.
The groans were the groans of the humans as the alien beings cut with their hissing instruments and probed into the bodies of the humans with their strange tools.
He watched as the alien working next to him probed into the man’s body and pulled out a squirming two-inch long grub. The alien held up the squirming larva and examined it. The alien then carried the larva to a gallon-sized container and dropped it with a slick little plop. The walls of the container were translucent, and Phil could see that it was at least half full with wiggling grubs.
They’re harvesting the goddamn things, he thought dimly. Are they food?
While his shocked and dulled brain replayed the question, an alien appeared at his side and began to feel his body with its hard, thin fingers, testing him like he was a ripe melon. It reached below and pulled up an empty alien container like the one on the opposite table. Phil was a smart man, even when in shock and drugged. It came as no surprise to him when the alien tugged a small cutting device down on its umbilical from above and started to cut him open. He didn’t feel the pain until the cutter hissed deep into his abdomen.
The hours passed and Phil watched as the being cut and probed and pulled out of his body grub after grub. He vacillated between outrage and horror and when he wanted to scream from the pain and wail at the being to stop, the most his voice could produce was a flat monotone groan. This infuriated him as much as the cutting and he tried desperately to modulate the sound, mold it into some shape, if just an approximation of words, that would impart a clearer imperative. The more he tried, the more he realized that the sound, though devoid of the shapes of words, conveyed his anguished meaning quite clearly and required no further sculpting whatsoever.
He watched the blood flow freely from the wounds and thought at first that he would surely bleed to death. His dwindling blood supply, however, was replaced with the deep purple fluid flowing into his aorta from the vine-like tube stuck in his chest. He soon saw none of his own blood flow from the clean incisions, but only the bright alien substitute.
They want to keep me alive, he thought bitterly.
A thin veil of shock still clung to his senses and helped insulate him from the horror. After a few hours, Phil became, if not emotionally accustomed to the horror, at least acquainted with the process of it. The pain fluctuated wildly from low to high, from sharp to dull, and during periods when it was tolerable enough not to scramble his perceptions, he tried to learn what he could about the grisly procedure being performed on him. If he was going to endure, he had to learn something, anything, even if the facts were as palatable as carrion.
The more exotic tools were attached to structures above, which either supplied power or delivered some other material through the umbilicals connected to them. The being used nearly all of them at one time or another and the speed with which it reached and grabbed the probes, cutters and separators, sometimes without looking, suggested even to Phil’s torpid mind that this species had reached some unfathomable pinnacle in the use of this family of instruments. The tools, especially the knives and cutters, fit the being’s hand in such a way as to almost become an extension of it. So enabled, the tools in these alien hands were capable of the most precise cutting and separation of tissues. Phil wondered how many eons would have to pass before the form of any hand device on earth would become so bonded to the user.
The surgeon’s hands in themselves were tools, incredibly deft and nimble and the being closed the larger incisions with such quickness and perfection that Phil would have been impressed except the open incisions it closed were in his body. One of the devices delivered what was unmistakably a surgical glue which accomplished the adhesion normally reserved for stitches. There were several types of this thick substance in various shades which were applied, Phil thought, to different kinds of tissues. The surgeon would work the alien applicator along a raw seam with one hand and close it up as it went, without aid of clamps, with the other. It did this almost gently it seemed, but Phil knew there was no hint of sympathy whatsoever in the bedside manner of this practitioner and that the light touch was designed not to reduce the patient’s suffering but only to ensure a quick, neat closure.
It worked quickly and often had as many as four or five large incisions open at one time as if the pursuit of the wiggling grubs buried in his tissues had an excited heat about it that made secondary the closure of the now fruitless and abandoned incisions.
There seemed little concern for the possibility of infection, since the surgeon worked without benefit of gloves or body covering of any kind. Phil questioned whether the blood substitute might contain some very powerful antibiotic to destroy any invading bacteria. The hypothesis seemed to make sense and the air was suffused with a slightly bitter scent, he believed from the blood substitute, that imparted a metallic taste on the back of his tongue not unlike that of penicillin.
Once it had found a grub and extracted it, it flushed the entire vile channel with copious amounts of what looked like clear water. It would then follow with another device which had a rough, spinning ball on it not unlike a large version of a dentist’s drill that Phil guessed scoured and knurled the tissues lining the grub’s channels, thus freshening them for the closure to follow. It was this scouring device that caused the most pain.
The being never once looked at Phil’s face with those beadlike eyes. Phil was nothing more than a thing to it, just a place that housed the grubs it sought. It never rested. It was as devoid of emotion as a shark, and it worked with a tireless persistence of hand and eye that was nothing short of miraculous. It never stretched so much as a finger or yawned or scratched and was so focused on the task at hand that it seemed at times to Phil to be more machine than living organism.
After an eternity of open wounds, the being closed the last of them and flushed Phil and the entire area surrounding him with water. Then it pulled down each of the tools from above and carefully flushed them off as well.
Phil lay there unattended for what seemed like days. He looked over at the man on the table next
to him at one point and they exchanged the emotionless looks of the recently damned. Phil tried his last time to utter the word “why” to the man. What came out of his tortured throat wasn’t a sound with any specific human meaning, but the same hoarse, animal noise he’d made for the last ten or twelve hours. Then, exhausted by the ordeal and this last effort to speak, he blinked out of awareness as if by a switch.
When he came to again he was adrift vertically in a bath of thick, warm fluid. Another of the viney tubes ran into his mouth and down his throat this time and he felt an odd fullness in his gut as if he’d just eaten. He could feel the soothing warmth of the fluid against his skin and could move his arms and legs. He waved his arms slowly through the fluid as if he as was treading water and tried to stretch down and outward to touch bottom or the side walls but found no hold.
He reached slowly up and felt the thick vine rammed down his throat and the thin, wire-like roots radiating out from it and around his head. The roots were quite snug but not dangerously so. He took hold of one of the them with his fingers and lifted it up away from his cheek. When he released it, he felt it slowly go back into place and adhere there. He bit down on the thick vine to test its composition and felt its rubbery resilience under his teeth. His neck was tilted back, and he realized then that the vine was keeping him afloat in the fluid and if for some reason it let go, he would probably drown in it. He let the vine alone after that.
He’d lost completely the sense of time and wondered how many hours or days had passed since the wasp first stung him. He hurt all over. He suspected he’d been given some kind of analgesic at some point because his violated body hadn’t signaled the brain to shut down. The overwhelming pain, which would persist long after the actual trauma, must have been masked by something.
