by David Coy
Linda noticed George’s glance at her legs. It was a fairly discreet glance. She’d been checked out with less tact plenty of times. It flattered her just a tad. No more. “I suppose, but it’s not like I had a choice,” she replied.
* * *
Bob Lynch wasn’t there when they arrived. The samples had been transferred to lab dishes with the lids taped down. A little white label stuck to the top of each noted the time, location and the investigating office in charge. There was just a blank line where the case number would go.
“There’s no case,” the tech had said. “There’s been no crime yet.”
Linda wasn’t so sure about that but held her tongue. None that’ll ever be prosecuted, she thought.
George took the samples from the technician, an intense and sallow toxic smoker named John Ross, and had a good look at them. He asked Ross if he could put the skin flap under a scope, and the tech guided him to a stereo microscope on a lab bench. George peeled the tape off one side of the dish, lifted the lid off, then put the sample down on the stage. He adjusted focus like he’d used the scope all his life. He turned the sample around.
“What do you make of it?” he asked Ross, not looking up from the oculars.
The tech crossed his dry arms and leaned on the bench. He started to speak, then stopped himself. George raised his head and looked at him hard, waiting for the aborted answer. Ross cleared his throat and tried again.
“If it wasn’t as thick as boot leather,” he said evenly in a southern accent, “I’d say it was toad skin, or something very much like toad skin.”
“Did you compare the interstitial or venous fluid to the stuff that pooled on the ground.
“Just by smell.”
“And?”
“It’s the same shit. It came from the same animal.”
“How much fluid was there—guess.”
“A gallon. Maybe more.”
“Pretty big toad, huh?”
“You didn’t hear it from me,” Ross said and held his hands up like he’d just had a gun pointed at him. “I freelance. I get paid by the job. They just lend me this lab. You do the analysis; and if it turns out to be toad skin, I’ll testify that I collected the samples where I said, when I said—and that I turned them over to you on this date—that’s all.”
“You got it,” George said flatly.
“That’s as far as I’ll go at this time,” Ross said almost angrily, “now I’m tellin’ ya.”
He knows! Linda thought. She lowered her head and shook it. It was amazing, she thought, how prudent, sane people—the best witnesses—fled from the appearance of unorthodoxy— how they ran like demons from the unseemly, the questionable, the bizarre. The motives were understandable. If it ever got around that John Ross claimed to have found the goop from a five hundred pound toad on a hilltop in Haight Canyon, he’d be lucky ever to get another job as anything, let alone as a criminologist. But the fact that John Ross suspected what she already knew made her feel less alone and she smiled briefly at him.
“I understand,” George said to him. “I’m on your side.”
* * *
She was curled against the door and was sucking at her lower lip; she did that when she needed to think but couldn’t. All she wanted was Phil back safe and sound. It was all she could think about now.
They’d planned to go up to High Ridge, too. George wanted to take his own pictures and take a first-hand look. When they got on King Solomon’s road the feeling of well being she usually soaked up from just being in the canyon gave way like a wisp to a growing wind of fear and dread that threatened to overwhelm her before they got to the gate.
“Do you have a gun?” she asked.
“Sorry. I gave them up.”
Linda was way on edge, and the remark angered her.
“Really?” she asked a little snootily.
George got out of the car to open the gate and when the door to the car shut, she had an overwhelming impulse to lock the door and leave him to the space monsters. It was an irrational response, she knew, but she was feeling a little irrational.
She pulled the zippered nylon case holding her Colt Python out of her purse, unzipped it, took the slick pistol out and rested it on her lap. Its cool weight on her thigh comforted her. That’s better, she thought.
George got back in and looked over at the revolver. “Do you think that’s necessary?”
Linda saw the glimmer of unease in him. “You bet. ‘Zit make you nervous?” she asked.
“Do you know how to use it?”
Phil had taught her how to shoot early on in their relationship. Some couples have golf. Some have bowling. Linda and Phil had shooting. They shot skeet and trap. They shot pistol. They’d even tried their hand at black powder. Linda was about to let the remark slide, when her pride got the best of her. “Why would I have a gun if I didn’t know how to use it?”
She didn’t want to get into it with him; he was obviously a gun-o-phobe. “There’s nothing wrong with guns,” she added. It was a trite and shallow remark, and she regretted saying it.
“I suppose,” George said.
“They prevent more crime than they cause. In fact they don’t cause crime at all. People do that.” She just couldn’t stop herself.
“It’s okay. I really don’t have a very big problem with guns,” he said as if reading her thoughts.
“I’m an expert pistol shooter and I have the medals to prove it, I’ll have you know.”
“That’s great.”
“Okay,” she said testily.
“Okay,” he said calmly.
Linda stuck the loaded revolver in the back pocket of her jeans as she walked up to the cabin porch, just like Phil used to. She hoped George saw just how cavalier she was with it. Only a pro would do such a reckless thing.
George got all the pictures he wanted both in and around the cabin, and they hiked down to the wash. He got some pictures of the depression the UFO made, too. It was a long, hot hike back up and Linda was glad she had some instant lemonade to make when they got back to the cabin. There was no power yet; Phil had planned to install a solar-powered system but never got to it, but the refrigerator was gas-operated so there was always cold and ice.
The air in the canyon was so hot and still and empty to her. This was the time of day when nothing in the canyon moved, and even birds refused to fly. Too hot to work. She and Phil had spent many lazy hours in the shade of the porch during afternoons like this when the warm wind cooled the sweat on their necks and arms and covered them with the sweet scent of sage, earth and pine. It was the time of day when the bright, silent air gently emptied their hearts and minds of all pain and worry and breathed back to them the refreshing innocence of nature itself in the warm exhale of the wind. She let the gentle wind and the blinding air empty her now and felt it carry away her grief as surely as a healing touch, and she filled her lungs anew with the earthen richness of the canyon’s warm breeze.
Phil is gone, she thought. I must get on with my life.
George was fine-toothing the hillsides with binoculars when he saw something and called her over, disturbing her peace.
He handed the binoculars to her and pointed down the canyon. “Just this side of the rocks,” he said, “on the other side of the stream.”
Linda took the binoculars and looked. The heat made shimmery waves of the air, but she could see in the round, flattened field of view the blue tent and VW bus partially covered with brush. The camp was still, as still as the air. They could be napping in the tent. It was a good time of day for that.
“That’s a kid who sneaks in and camps a couple of weekends a month in the summer. I recognize the vehicle. We never minded much.”
“Does he stay during the week?”
Linda shook her head thoughtfully. “No, he never does.”
“Then we’d better take a look.”
Linda handed the binoculars back to George. Then she instinctively touched the grip of her pistol with her hand.
* * *
“Where’s Mary?” Phil asked, knowing the answer.
“They took her at . . . ” Bailey checked her watch. “.. .four p.m. exactly.”
Phil allowed himself to contemplate the horrific process she was going through for a brief, gut-twisting moment. The fact that the entire operation was a means to get—to grow, some strange, alien delicacy made the atrocious exercise even more hideous.
Twelve hours of hell, he thought. I hope she makes it.
“Who else?” he asked, taking a deep breath.
“Tom Moon,” she said matter-of-factly. “And one of the Chinese guys.” She plucked up another Oreo cookie out of the plastic tray and stuffed her mouth with it.
Phil saw the intense, steady look in Bailey’s eyes and recognized it right away. Combat survivors had that look. The eyes said “I’m alive, and I plan to stay that way.” It took the duress of this bizarre situation to bring that strength of spirit to the surface—if one possessed it to begin with.
“Good work,” Phil said.
He took the pupae out of his shirt pocket and popped it around in his hand. “What’d ‘ya think we oughta do with this?” he asked of Ned.
“What is it?” Bailey asked, twisting up her face at it.
“We think it’s a wasp larva,” Phil answered. “We found millions of them in a chamber at the end of the tube.”
“Cool. Maybe we could smash them and make them stop this shit,” she said.
“I doubt it,” Ned said. “They’d just kill us and start over. Or not kill us and start over. We think they’re food for the aliens.”
“No shit?” she said with childlike fascination.
Their excursion hadn’t been a resounding success, but the ancient remnants of the hunter-warrior in the two men was much pleased with the female’s interest in the spoils of the hunt, meager as they were.
Phil intoned the whole expedition. When he was done he tossed the hard pupa over to Bailey who caught it in her open hands with a look of disgust. She handled it gingerly and rubbed a finger over its smooth, shiny brown surface. “Can I have it?” she asked.
“Sure,” Phil said. “It’s dead. But keep it out of sight of the big bastards. They might wonder where you got it.”
Ned chuckled.
Bailey put the pupa under the corner of her sleeping bag.
Then, after the men had moved away from the opening, she lifted the corner back up and took a long look at the horrible little doohickey again. The longer she looked at it, though, the more interesting its appearance became. She took another glance at the vacated opening to be sure they were gone, then picked it back up and held it closer to the light. It was translucent like the coating on a candy apple and was slightly streamlined being tapered at one end. Under the translucent coating, she could make out the larval form of a wasp, and the shell followed its form exactly, smoothly, as if it had been dipped in thick syrup. The larva’s legs could be seen bunched up neatly under it. If she looked closely she could see the form of the wasp’s abdomen. The whole thing reminded her, somehow, of those seeds in glass that people wore around their necks; the little tear-shaped glass things with the seeds in them.
Mustard seeds, she thought.
That gave her an idea.
It was a quite primitive idea and grew out of the tribal brain owned by all women. Bailey didn’t see it like that. But she knew a unique piece of jewelry when she saw it.
Mary had a stash of tools—or things that looked like tools—against one wall, all neatly lined up so the big bastards wouldn’t scoop them out as garbage. She scooted over to them and found one, a little sharp thing that looked like a flattened nail with a black tape handle on it. It looked like it might do the job.
She worked the pointed end of the little awl through the very tip of the tapered end of the pupa, blowing away the shavings of the casing as they worked out along the blade. It made a fairly neat hole. Her sleeping bag was sewn together with clear nylon thread, and big lengths of it had worked loose of the seams. She found a loop of it and pulled it until she had about 2 feet of it. Using her teeth, she bit the thread off. Holding the pupa up so she could see, she threaded the length of nylon through the hole and tied off the ends.
Done.
She looped the arrangement over her head and let the pupae fall down on her chest. She drew her chin in and up and looked down at the charm with the satisfied frown only that particular maneuver can create, and smiled in spite of it. She turned it so it hung just right. She lifted the charm daintily and dropped it into her shirt so no one could see it, then dragged her hand over it a time or two to smooth her shirt. She’d have to be careful like Phil said and ditch it before she got taken, but she thought her new good-luck charm was pretty neat.
It would protect her, she was sure of it.
Who knows, she thought, maybe this one was grown in my flesh, harvested from my own body. It’s mine. Nobody in the whole world had one like it—that’s for sure.
She lay down, flapped the thin blanket around herself and tried to sleep. Her thoughts returned to Earth, and she thought about Jim and how much she missed him.
She thought also about how that thing had killed him with such meanness. She could see Jim hitting its tough head time and again with the flashlight and hear the thunk sound the blows made. Just before he died, Jim had dropped the light and tried to push the thing away from his belly with his hands. His hands had left thick smears of his own blood on the thing’s head and long neck. She wished she had it to do over again. She wouldn’t freeze up like she had. Not now. She’d have picked up the heavy flashlight and brought it down with both hands on the fucker’s head and smashed it stupid. She’d have kept smashing it until the ugly head was bashed flat.
The image of that conflict repeated itself again and again and she clenched her teeth with each blow. It focused her anger but it also produced just the slightest odd feeling of pleasure and she indulged it like a sexual fantasy.
When she tired of smashing the thing’s head to pieces and clenching and unclenching her teeth, she slept.
7
F elix Bronkowitz considered himself quite fearless, but he feared the interrogations by the alpha alien to the very bone. The simple reason was that the alpha alien wasn’t human and Felix never quite knew how to take it. The sense of the familiar, that quality of being accustomed to another with the passing of time, eluded him even after hours and hours of questions and answers. Felix was still painfully aware that he was carrying on conversations with an alien from some far corner of the heavens who could do unimaginably bizarre and horrible things to him. In short, the alpha operated under a completely different set of rules and that persistent, ominous fact was never taken for granted by Felix.
They’d yanked him out of the little hole they’d stuffed him into and brought him before the alpha alien within hours of his capture. He was still in shock, dripping blood from his nose and ears and completely disoriented, not so much so that he wasn’t shocked further when he heard the alien speak—and not because the ugly thing was making the approximations of English words, but because he had addressed Felix by what sounded very much like his first name.
In a voice that sounded like it was talking with a throat lined with straw, the alpha told Felix that it needed information. If Felix would provide it, there would be much to gain. If not, he would suffer.
Then came the questions, the answers to which the alpha just had to have known already. It was a test, that first meeting—it had all the earmarks of a test. Felix Bronkowitz did very well on tests.
It was a simple arrangement on the face of it. But the situation was soon complicated by the fact that the alpha was in fact a sponge, an information sink-hole. Felix, “the sponge” Bronkowitz knew all about that. No matter how much Felix had to say, the alien had more questions. In their first interview, Felix had asked the alpha why he didn’t just tune into the radio or TV for information, and the alpha had grilled Felix for the next three days about ho
w radio and TV worked and the nature of programming. As incredible as it seemed to Felix, the aliens had developed their technology with neither radio nor television. When Felix asked the alpha how he had learned English, the alpha told him it had been taught to him by a human.
Felix thought then, and still believed, that the alpha had no sense of humor whatsoever. If Felix had taken the opportunity to crack a joke, he might have spent the next day or two explaining the nature of humor.
The interviews started out as interesting dialogues, but they were getting old—and scary.
I’ve had enough, Felix thought today. Enough.
Photographic memories are a myth. They don’t exist. Good memories do exist, and Felix had one of the best. Combined with that able memory was a prodigious appetite for the written word in any form. As a child, Felix wasn’t content to read just the back of the cereal boxes at breakfast, but the entire paper before going to school. Given a choice between watching TV and reading a good book, young Felix consistently took the road less traveled.
The more you learn the more you can learn. It’s an upward cycle and it carried Felix easily through Harvard and then Stanford. He breezed through, swept along and upward by the spiraling wind of his own desire for words and knowledge.
Felix knew he was smart, a smartass some would say. To Felix’s way of thinking, once you knew as much as he did about as much as he did, you saw ignorance at every turn. It glared at him, nagged him, and he watched it like a cat as it sneaked around life’s corners like a rodent. He watched in frustration as people glossed over it, hid it, camouflaged it and denied it. He hated it and he called people on it when he saw it, which was often. He always had done so and always would do so.
As a maker of friends, he was doomed from the start.
Felix Bronkowitz was lucky to have had any friends at all but, if pressed, he could produce one, his fiancee Joan and a few other close calls. His family, of course, was his family.
Felix disliked most people and the feeling was reflected back, as such feelings are, as if by a mirror. This very human phenomenon was the millstone around the neck of Felix Bronkowitz, an otherwise exceptional student of philosophy.
