by David Coy
“We have to find some way to stop the aliens before they dump the wasp larvae on the Earth. If we don’t—and we manage to escape, we’ll die anyway.”
He hated to parrot George Greenbaum, but he couldn’t find a better way to put it. It pissed him off.
“How the hell are we supposed to do that?” Ned asked with a scowl.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said and let it sink in.
“What’s that mean?” Mary asked.
Phil felt his ability to communicate slip and stumble down a gravel covered slope. His keen analytic skills flew out of his hands as he fought for balance.
“For us it’s different. If we escape, we’ll live to see . . . let me put it this way . . . if we run, we won’t escape death for long.”
“But it would give us,” Mary implored, “two of us at least—the chance to be with our friends and families.”
“Mary, listen to me. You’d be with your family all right, but you’d be carrying a secret of such horror, you’d wish you were dead.”
“I’m doing that now.”
“Then you’re getting the point,” he continued. “While your family was smiling at you, you’d be dying inside. You won’t be able to tell them what’s wrong because it would be useless. First, they’d never believe you. Second, if they did, or pretended to, what would you do? Hide in a hole? Would you have them hide in a hole while you all waited for alien wasps to eat you alive? It’s preposterous, isn’t it? It’s preposterous that it’s happening, but it is.”
Mary groaned a deep moan and buried her head in her arms.
“What are we supposed to do?” she asked without comingup.
“That doesn’t matter, either,” he said and chuckled strangely. He felt himself land flat on his back and start to slide.
No one said anything for several seconds. When Mary finally spoke, her muffled voice was barely audible.
“I don’t get it,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter what we do,” Phil repeated. “We just have to do something, anything to try to stop it. That’s the right thing, the correct thing to do.”
“The moral thing?” Ned asked. “The noble thing?”
Phil just nodded his head.
Mary looked up and her eyes were teary. She tried to smile a little through the tears.
“There’s nothing to do anyway . . . ” she said. “Nothing to do but die . . . ”
“You’re getting the point,” Phil said. “We’ve got nothing to lose, do we? We’ll give up our lives if we have to.”
“Why not?” Mary said into her arms. “Why the hell not?”
The odds of success were so slim it made no sense to even discuss it. There was always a chance—there always was—but if they dwelt on the odds, they’d freeze up.
Mary was showing symptoms of another hysterical laughing jag; and this time, Ned joined right in early. There was a demonic note to the sticky laughter.
“Maybe I could screw up the timing of the air lock,” she laughed. “Maybe we could evacuate all the air.”
“Maybe we could make it sick?” Ned suggested.
“Yeah, cough on it, Ned.”
“Sneeze on it.”
“Piss on it.”
“Shit on it.”
“Fuck it.”
“Make it die.”
Phil took the little envelope with the wire straws out of his pocket and started to crumple it up. Then he smoothed it slowly and put it back.
* * *
Ned moved stuff with his foot, kicking it around idly. There were plenty of blankets, books, pots, cups and other mostly useless crap. Some of it, however, was quite remarkable: a small Buddha covered with flaking gold leaf, shards of broken clay pottery of Asian origin, and primitive wooden bowls and vessels from the third world’s remote areas.
“What are we looking for?” Ned said finally, using his foot to lift a folded aluminum lawn chair.
“I’m not sure,” Phil said. “A weapon of some kind—I don’t know.”
“They’re not stupid,” Mary said. “You won’t find as much as a butter knife in here.”
She picked up the chair Ned was so disinterested in.“But maybe we could make something,” she said.
She turned the chair around, checking it for potential lethality, then gave up and tossed it back down on the heap. Then something caught her eye—the corner of a small woven object. She squatted down and freed it from the tangle. It was a small basket, about eight inches wide and woven fairly tightly like a giant piece of shredded wheat cereal. It was sewn shut across the top with just a few loops of the same smooth, reed-like material as the basket. A longer strand of softer, fibrous material was attached to two corners and acted as a shoulder strap. It was well-worn and used. The material was frayed at the squarish corners.
“Nice purse,” Ned commented with a wry grin.
She shook it gently. When she stopped, she felt a slight movement, a quiet bump from inside it.
“There’s something alive in this,” she said jiggling it again.
“What? Check it out,” Phil said, still rummaging.
Mary unthreaded the fiber holding it shut and slowly parted the seam. Holding the basket open, she looked as if she’d opened up a bagful of diamonds. “Oooo . . . they’re darling . . . ” she said.
“What is it?” Phil said, coming over.
“The cutest little frogs . . . ” she said holding it open for the two men to see.
There in the bottom of the basket, lying partially on one another, were two small, bright red and black frogs, each no longer than a couple of inches.
“See . . . aww . . . looook . . . ” she said.
Phil wondered for not the first time in his life how time and tide and the winds of fortune blew to no known rhythm. Life’s oscillations had no metered movements or regular heartbeat, only random ups and downs and an irregular pulse.
“Hallo-fucking-loo-ya . . . ” he said, putting his hand on the basket possessively.
She started to reach her hand in to touch one with her finger.
“Don’t touch them!” Phil barked, grabbing her hand.
“Why not? Believe me, I’ve touched frogs before . . . ”
“Not like these. They’d probably kill you. They’re poison dart frogs—South American variety.”
* * *
Linda’s hand was over her mouth and nose like she was trying to keep out noxious fumes. She wasn’t even aware she was doing it.
“Where does something like that come from?” she asked through her fingers.
“Hell must exist in some corner of the universe,” Greenbaum said. “I’d say it came from there.”
The photos didn’t have great quality. They had the grainy look of enlargements, but enough detail survived. The edges of the object were flared and fuzzy from the enormous backlight of the sun, so much so that all detail there was lost. There was virtually no background whatsoever—just washed out nothing- ness—and the halo around the edges added to the impression of a ghastly specter floating in a white null. On the 8 x 10 print, the image of the ship was about the size of a clenched fist.
“What are those things?” she asked, pointing to the appendages sticking out of it.
“Vestigial remnants of legs I’d say.”
“Whats?”
“It’s former . . . legs.”
“Christ. Is it a reptile, mammal, fish, what?”
“I don’t think any of those apply to it.”
Linda clamped her hand tighter and stared wide-eyed at the photos. She spread them out with her other hand by pecking at the edges with a finger. Some were lighter or darker but were all basically the same.
“How big is it?”
Greenbaum frowned in thought. “I’ve done the calculations and within a hundred feet or so, it’s seven-hundred yards across.”
“Jesus . . . ”
The ship wasn’t quite round, but nearly so. They were looking almost straight up at the creature’s underside. It
reminded Linda of the dead and gas-swollen bodies of bovines she’d seen in pictures of drought and war. The eight little legs stuck straight out from the enormous distended gut, the tips lost in the sun’s brightness. The surface was striated laterally in thick rolls. The most disturbing part was the head, clearly visible and hanging down out of the swollen body like a freakish parasitic appendage. It was small, minuscule compared to the rest of the body.
“It that the head?” she asked without pointing at it.
“I’d say so.
The detail was good enough to reveal a twisted, anguished expression like the stiff faces of the battle field dead. There was a difference, though, that turned Linda’s stomach: this thing wasn’t dead.
“How do you do that?” she asked into her palm. “How do you make something like that?”
Greenbaum shook his head. “Unknown. I suppose if you screw with a thing’s DNA enough, and feed it enough, you could get that.”
“What’s all that crap at the rear end?”
The anterior portion was covered with what looked like barnacles, or bumps and scales as if it had a strange disease.
“It looks like hardware. If you look closely, it has a mechanized appearance. I’d say it’s part of the propulsion system. It may not be metal.”
Looking at the raised, rash-like anterior made Linda want to scratch her bottom.
“I’m sick,” she said.
She turned to the sink, filled a glass with tap water and took a long pull on it.
“It’s not what I would have expected,” Greenbaum said. “But it makes sense in a way. We have technology that uses stuff, material, to make and shape things. But if you remove those materials, take them out of the evolutionary equation so to speak, and . . . and advance the technology in the right direction, it doesn’t take much imagination to visualize the result.”
“What do you mean?” Linda asked.
“We use, consume, shape and change materials to accommodate real or imagined requirements. This alien species does the same, only it takes advantage of the ability of DNA to grow and shape an organism into usable forms. We do the same thing with dogs, live-stock, crops—but we’re infants compared to these things.”
“I don’t see the advantage.”
“There are some.”
“I don’t think so,” she said, burying her face in her glass.
“DNA is self-replicating—self-fabricating so to speak. Once you have the basic pattern down, all you have to do is feed the organism and it’ll shape and manufacture itself into whatever pattern is locked in its DNA. It’ll even reproduce itself—breed and make more of itself. You no longer need a manufacturing infrastructure. All you do is grow things into whatever you need—tables, chairs, clothes, lamps, houses—hulls of space ships.”
“You’re crazy,” she said, sticking her head back in the glass.
Greenbaum knew she was denying the possibilities because of the implicit horror. They’d both heard Phil’s reports from inside the vessel. These invaders didn’t grow better corn or smarter dogs. They forced, bent and cut the living material into required forms. They didn’t just work on the benign level of cellular modification, they molded the fully developed, living, feeling material as well.
“I suppose I am,” he said.
“Look, screw all that,” she said. “How does it help Phil?” She moved back up to the table, and her hand found her mouth again as if she’d stepped into a cloud of noxious gas.
“I’m not sure. It’s larger than we thought. It’s more hideous than we thought. I’m don’t know how either of those helps.”
Linda looked at the photos and something started to click in that part of her mind that did the pattern recognition. She pushed the cups and the condiments aside and laid the photos out in two rows of five.
“Are these the frame numbers?” she asked pointing to the time and date stamp in the corner of one.
“Yes.”
She shifted them around, organizing them left to right by the frame numbers until she had the complete sequence.
It took her a couple of tries to do it, it was hard to move her eyes from one frame to the next and keep her focus on the hideous head of the creature. By the third try, she was playing back a jerky but viewable little movie in her head. As she played it back, she could see the subtle difference in the head of the creature from beginning to end. It seemed to twist and turn just slightly as if trying to extricate itself from it’s own body. What she saw was an alien beast in a torment so profound it wrenched her guts.
The ship was an unwilling victim bent to the will of its exploiters.
“The ship’s not just alive, Greenbaum. It’s aware—as aware as me or you.”
* * *
Mary thought it was a dream and the image of Bailey drifting by the opening was a mere component of it. When she raised up on her elbow, blinked and saw the big bastard following Bailey’s ghost, she wasn’t so sure. She got up and looked out the opening.
“Oh . . . my . . . God . . . ” she said.
There, standing in front of Phil’s hole were Gilbert and Bailey, flanked by the biggest, meanest big bastard she’d ever seen. As if that combination itself wasn’t shocking enough, Gilbert and Bailey were dressed in the ugliest, thrift-store clothing Mary had ever laid eyes on. Gilbert had on a light brown, plaid sport coat with dark blue polyester slacks. His wide, blue tie lay over a light blue checked shirt with a big, high collar. The sport coat was at least a size too big on his thin frame. He was holding his Bible against his dick with both hands. Bailey had on a mid-length cotton print dress with ruffled sleeves and a button-down collar. Her shoes were brown lace-ups with thick medium heals. Her hair was pulled back and done up in a not- too-neat little bun. She couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like she was wearing a strange hat or tiara.
She looked at her watch and confirmed her suspicions. She’d seen thousands of similarly dressed couples throughout the small towns of rural America on this day. From time to time in her younger life, Mary had been there herself.
She didn’t know how or where, but it was Sunday and Gilbert and Bailey were going to church.
The big bastard hissed.
Phil heard it and shot upright with a pounding heart. When he looked out the opening and saw Gilbert standing there, the sense of malice folded over on itself.
He came cautiously to the opening and slowly sat in it, keeping his eye on the big bastard. This one was especially malevolent. Its arms were covered with tattoos, stretched and distended. It fixated on Phil with its pit-like eyes.
“What is this, Gilbert? What’s going on?”
“I wanted to come by and say hello,” Gilbert said. “You know, just a friendly hello.”
Phil doubted it. He looked at Bailey, and she grinned broadly, strangely, as if she was on some drug.
“Hi, Phil,” she said.
“Hello, Bailey.” He kept looking at her head because he couldn’t figure it out, but he finally did —the thing on her head was a little crown of thorns. A new bell of alarm went off in Phil’s brain.
Something had happened that was completely unforeseen. Gilbert had achieved some weird change of status and Phil had no clue how. The thought occurred to him that Gilbert had somehow converted the aliens to Christianity. He entertained the thought just until he realized that Gilbert Keefer lacked the military or economic force to achieve such a conversion on a pagan society.
“New hat?” he said to Bailey.
“Yeah . . . ” she said pressing it gently in place with a hand. “It’s different, huh? Gilbert’s idea. Isn’t it cool?”
“I’m not nuts about it,” Phil said.
Gilbert’s hold on Bailey was especially confusing and distressing. It made no sense.
“What you think doesn’t matter,” Gilbert said.
I should have killed him while I had the chance,” Phil thought.
“Why’s that?” he asked.
“You and those like you will never have
an opinion of any consequence whatsoever again. That’s why.”
“I don’t follow you, exactly.”
Gilbert handed his Bible to Bailey, and stepped close enough to Phil so that when he bent down, his mouth was close
to Phil’s ear.
Phil knew he was in for an earful of little secrets from this lunatic. They liked that, the mouth-to-the-ear stuff. Nothing better than a captive little ear to beat up with their psychopathic noises.
“Would you believe me if I told you something?” Gilbert whispered.
A wash of bad breath fell out of Gilbert’s mouth and onto Phil’s face. He resisted the impulse to clamp his hand on Gilbert’s scrawny neck and crush it closed before it coughed up any more shit. “I might,” he said.
Gilbert swallowed before he spoke. “You are evil. What you think is evil. You are an abomination.”
“Come on, Gilbert, tell me what you really think,” Phil scoffed.
“You are evil.”
Phil was surprised Gilbert could say it with such conviction. Most things he said were shallow and bereft of passion.
“Why do you think I’m evil?”
Gilbert swallowed again. “You said you wanted to . . . put your penis . . . somewhere. Isn’t that evil?”
“You mean fuck your ass? Is that what you mean? Oh, for God’s sake!”
Phil admitted to himself that fucking Gilbert Keefer in the butt wouldn’t be fun but he stopped short at the adjective evil. Obscene, certainly, but not evil. Things evil were devoid of justice.
“I take it back, then,” Phil offered casually.
“You are evil and those like you are evil.”
“You said that.”
“You make a mockery of . . . ” Gilbert swallowed “ . . . righteousness and those who follow it.”
“Righteousness?” Phil asked.
“That’s right, righteousness.”
“I see you’ve come up in the world,” Phil said. “How come?”
Gilbert was finished with the close-to-the-ear stuff and stood up. “The lord has looked favorably on me.” He threw a glance at Bailey. “And this one.”
Gilbert’s bad breath fell out of his mouth like a warm, heavy vapor. Phil winced as if he’d been struck.
