Skull Full of Kisses

by Michael West

  “About time,” she said as he sat down. “I thought you’d abandoned me.” She looked him over and her eyes filled with concern. “You’re still sweating. What did Edwards say?”

  “I’m fine,” he lied, wiping his brow with his left sleeve. It felt as if an angry swarm had landed on his right shoulder, each bee taking its turn at stinging him.

  She lowered her book and her coffee, her voice uneasy. “Well, if you won’t tell me the truth about that, at least tell me what the hell is going on with Lee.”

  “Have you looked at him?”

  “Only for about the last twenty minutes.”

  Sean bobbed his head slightly in the creature’s direction. “Look closer, the others too.”

  She started to turn around.

  “Wait!” He whispered. “Don’t be obvious about it.”

  Carla flashed a mixture of annoyance and bewilderment, then slowly turned her head, brushing a hand through her bright red locks, as if she were actually trying to see something in her hair.

  Slick. Very slick.

  When her eyes met his again they were still filled with confusion. “What?”

  He bent over the table. No matter how quiet he tried to be, his voice still sounded as if it were echoing off the cafeteria’s gray metallic walls. “You don’t see it?”

  She leaned in as well, speaking just as softly as he had been. “What is it that I’m supposed to see?”

  “They’re aliens.”

  Carla gaped at him. “They’re what?”

  “You heard me.”

  She laughed, but not for long. “You’re serious.”

  He nodded, hoping his face conveyed just how grave the situation was.

  “Jesus, Sean...” Her fingers found the medallion that hung from her neck, stroking Saint Albert’s silver nose. “Have you told anyone else about this?”

  “I told Doc Edwards, but he turned out to be one of them. He tried to inject me with this...this squid-like creature that—” He saw the look of shocked skepticism in her eyes. “I know how wild and paranoid it all sounds, okay, I do. I didn’t want to believe it was true either. And if it was just my vision, I wouldn’t have believed it, but I’ve felt smooth, slimy skin; smelled the black fluid they use for blood. This is real, God damn it!”

  “Sean, I know you believe this, but just think for a moment...” She smothered Saint Albert with the palm of her hand. “If there are other intelligent beings out there somewhere, and someday we make that first contact, they’ll be explorers, just like us. They might try to signal us, meet with us face to face, but they won’t be hatching elaborate plans to take over a starship...invaders from space is ancient science fiction nonsense, and you’re smart enough to realize that.”

  “We’re Columbus.”

  A tear welled in the corner of her eye and her lip quivered slightly. “You’re not making any sense.”

  “We’re sailing through the stars, explorers, just like Columbus. But to any species that actually lives out here, we are invaders from space. Maybe they’re afraid, and this is their way of protecting—”

  “We’re a run-down geological survey ship from a distant mining company. What possible threat could we be to anyone?”

  He glanced across the room. The group at the other table quietly plotted their next move, unconcerned. He told Carla, “Columbus was just looking for spices when he wiped out thousands of indigenous people on Earth. His crew carried foreign diseases that the natives had no immunity to.”

  Carla let go of her medallion, wiped her eye, and held up her hands. “Okay, fine, if this is real, why can’t I see what you see?”

  He rubbed his aching shoulder. “I don’t know why. We’ve breathed the same canned air, eaten the same crap...”

  Pressure-induced psychosis?

  No! That was bullshit! There had to be another reason, something that was different about him, something that—

  “My arm.” Sean grabbed his burnt-out prosthesis and lifted it onto the table with a loud clang.

  The worry in Carla’s watery eyes seeped into her voice. “What’s wrong with your arm?”

  “The motors and circuits are all fried, but the neural interface must still be functioning. Maybe it makes me immune to their camouflage, lets me see what you can’t.”

  She still looked doubtful. “Sean...”

  He reached across the table for her hand, happy she did not jump or pull away. “Carla, if there’s even a chance it could be true, you have to come with me now. I can get you real proof, proof you can see without any kind of enhancement.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  He thought of the Sanderson-thing lying down in the hold, of the dark serum that flowed from its wound. “I’ll get you a blood sample. You can examine it, see that I’m telling the truth, maybe discover a way to beat them.”

  A spark in her eyes. She looked back at the other table. “Sean, how will you get—?”

  “Would you believe me then?” he interjected, trying not to sound desperate.

  “Yes, of course I would.” She squeezed his hand, telling him she loved and trusted him without uttering a single word.

  Sean smiled, relieved. “Then let’s go.”

  A shape dropped from the ceiling, landing with a wet splat. Sean leapt back, startled, and looked up to find an open vent. When he lowered his gaze, he saw the squid. It sat among the crumbs in Carla’s tray, its seven tentacles whipping around, its single black eye focused intently upon her face.

  Sean pushed the tray off the table, sent it crashing to the floor. The tiny invader tried to make another escape, but this time, his boot was faster. Its soft body ruptured with an audible pop, spraying rosy jelly.

  Carla was standing now. She backed away, her hands across her mouth, a river of tears on her cheek. She stared at the tray, then looked up at Sean.

  She saw it. She believed.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Sean saw the others standing, monsters playing human. He lifted his shirt and brought out the 9mm handgun, clicking off the safety as he did so. The report was as loud as a barrage from heavy artillery. Bullets sped through the air, tore into the Lee-thing’s chest and exploded from its back, giving the tables behind it an oily shower. The animal fell backward, landed on the floor with a thud.

  The Copeland alien bent down; attended to its fallen comrade. The Fritz and Montgomery-things froze in their tracks.

  “I see you,” Sean told them, shifting his eyes and the barrel of the gun between targets.

  “Okay, you see us.” It was the Fritz-thing, its mask expressionless, unreadable. It raised its hands. “We don’t have anything.”

  “Where did you come from?” Sean wanted to know. “What the hell do you want from us?”

  Silence. Blank, glassy stares.

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT!”

  The Montgomery-thing grabbed hold of Carla and pulled her back.

  There was fear in Carla’s eyes. She squirmed in the thing’s grasp, her silver medallion swinging like a pendulum from her neck as she tried to wrestle free, tried to run to Sean’s side, but the alien was clearly too strong for her.

  Sean was shaking. He held the gun in his left hand and tried to steady his aim, his eyes watering. The prosthesis felt like an anchor chained to his aching right shoulder, threatening to pull him off balance and send him to the floor. “I’ve got survey charges planted all over this ship. Let her go, let us walk out of here, or I’ll blow it up.”

  More silence, except from Carla. She was still crying.

  “I swear to God I’ll do it,” he told them. “Now let her go!”

  “Please,” the Fritz-thing pleaded, “put down the gun.”

  “You’d like that wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, I would.” It motioned to the others. “We all would.”

  He took his eyes off the thing for just a moment, looking at Carla, his lip quivering. “Don’t you hurt her.”

  “You’re the only one hurting anyone, Sean,” the
Fritz-thing told him.

  He snickered mirthlessly. “You try to put one of those squids in me, do God only knows what with the rest of the crew, and you say I’m the one hurting people?”

  Carla spoke up through her tears, “Sean...please, do what she says. Put down the gun.”

  “It’s going to be okay, honey,” he assured her, and in his mind, Sean saw how it would all unfold. He would kill these three, then hunt down the remaining aliens with Carla at his side. There would be at least another four, one for every crewmember. When they got back to the station, just the two of them, they’d tell the marshals what had happened, let them deal with the threat. For Sean and Carla, it would all be over. They could move on, could live in the future they had planned.

  A metal tray struck Sean’s left hand, sent a bolt of agony through his wrist and thumb, and caused him to drop the gun. He turned in time to see an alien form lunging at him. It was the Copeland-thing. Before he could act, it had him in a headlock.

  Its strength was amazing.

  Sean tried to break free, but the thing pushed him flat against the wall and put an elbow in his back, pinning him. Pain rang loudly throughout his body, and as the room grew dark, he heard Carla calling out his name.

  ***

  “Sean, did you see that?” she asked, pointing toward some far-off rock formations.

  He peered through his faceplate, trying to find something out-of-the-ordinary. The obsidian spires on the horizon had the appearance of long, bony fingers rising up from the loam. “See what?”

  “I thought...” Carla shook her head in her helmet and snickered. “Nothing. Guess this place is starting to creep me out.”

  Sean gave his attention back to Orpheus, watched the rig climb the grated ramp into Ambrosia’s hold, then waited for the bay doors to seal. When he was certain everything was secure, he grabbed Carla by the arm and pulled her onto the lift.

  As the platform began its rise toward the airlock, Carla reached for the red button on the control box.

  He grabbed the railing to steady himself as they came to an abrupt halt. “What’s wrong?”

  She had her back to him, her gloved hand still at the controls. “I know I’ve been playing twenty questions with you all day, but I need to ask you just one more. It’s a simple one, only needs a yes or no response.”

  “Yes,” Sean told her.

  “You haven’t heard the question.”

  “You want to know if I’ll follow you wherever you decide to go, or you want me to marry you.” He moved across the platform, put his hand on the shoulder of her environment suit. “Either way, the answer is yes.”

  Carla pressed the green button to continue their ascent, then spun around to hug him. Their faceplates collided with the clink of champagne glasses, and they laughed at their own awkwardness, holding tightly to one another as klaxons blared and the airlock re-pressurized.

  ***

  Sean opened his eyes and let them adjust to the flickering light. A fluorescent bulb in the overhead fixture was going out, adding to his disorientation. He lifted his head to look around.

  Medlab.

  He was lying on a patient bed in the Medlab.

  Sean attempted to move his prosthesis, then remembered it had shorted out. When he tried to move his left arm, however, he found it paralyzed as well. He glanced down his torso and saw that he was tightly restrained.

  The beds on either side of him were also occupied, bodies covered over in bloodstained plastic. Corpses.

  He strained against his bonds, rocking and pulling at the straps until his shoulder cried for him to lay still. He opened his mouth to call for help, but there was no one to yell out to.

  The loud hiss of an opening hatch filled the chamber, followed by the click-clack of shoes on flooring, growing louder as they approached. “Sean? Sean, are you awake?”

  Carla’s voice.

  He rose up as far as his restraints would allow. “Are you okay? What did they do to you?”

  She stood over him, running her hand across his sweaty forehead and through his dampened hair. “I’m fine, Sean. They didn’t do anything to me. I’m fine.”

  He relaxed. “Oh, thank God! Thank God!”

  “Sean...”

  “I just remembered something,” he told her. “When we were out on the asteroid, you said you saw something. What did you see?”

  Carla blinked, then shook her head. “Nothing. My mind was playing tricks on me, just like your mind’s been playing tricks on you.”

  “My mind?” He tried to rise up again. “No. You saw the squid with your own eyes. And on the asteroid...you saw something there too. What did you see? Was it one of them?—was it—?”

  “Sean!” Carla swallowed. She looked close to tears. “Listen to me...you’ve killed people. Doctor Edwards, Sanderson, Lee. They’re dead.”

  He tilted his head to either side, looking at the covered bodies. The blood that streaked the translucent plastic was red. Human. He turned back to Carla, his mouth open and dry.

  “I know you didn’t mean to do it,” she told him. “You’re sick. We got into the doctor’s office. I read his notes. Pressure-induced psychosis.”

  “No,” Sean said, over and over again, “No.”

  Carla continued to wipe his forehead. “I know you’d never intentionally hurt anyone. That’s why I have to ask...where are the charges?”

  “There aren’t any aliens?” His voice was weak and childlike.

  “No, Sean,” she told him. “There are no aliens, no squids. You threw my tray to the floor and stomped on a packet of Smucker’s. You scared the hell out of me. And then when you shot Lee...”

  She put a hand to her eye and turned away.

  The realization of what Carla was telling him, of what he had done, slowly sank into his brain. He’d killed his friends...his family. Desolate tears flowed, blurring his vision. “Oh...God!”

  “Shhhh.” She took the sleeve of her flight jacket and dried his eyes. “I can help you, cure you, make it so you won’t see these things anymore, but first I need you to...to tell me where you put the explosives.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he cried.

  “I know, baby.” She sniffled and swallowed, her eyes glistening in the strobing light. “The medicine...it’s going to...you’re going to sleep for a while, so we really need to know where you hid those charges now, need to make sure we can deactivate them before they go off. I know you don’t want anybody else to get hurt.”

  “I love you,” he told her, fighting back new tears.

  An odd look came over Carla’s face, as if she were searching for the right response, and Sean wondered if the things he’d done were so horrible that all she could feel toward him now was disgust.

  “Look, I love you too...” Her watery eyes skirted his as she spoke the words. She blinked a single drop out onto her cheek and it ran the length of her face to dangle from her chin.

  Sean gave an understanding nod, fresh tears scorching his own cheeks as he retraced his steps for her. He told her where he placed each and every charge, pausing several times to apologize for what he had done, knowing that no apology, no matter how sincere, would ever be enough to repair the damage.

  When she had all the locations, Carla leaned in to kiss him on the forehead “Now I can give you what you need to get well.”

  Sean felt a sting, and as the needle slid inside his vein, he noticed something strange.

  He didn’t see a Saint Albert’s medallion around her neck.

  For Her

  Brooke wanted to have a threesome.

  Not that Jeff was complaining. Sex with two women at once was the fantasy of every straight, red-blooded American man. But as this Nevada highway unfurled beneath the glare of his headlights, and the time and place for the actual event drew nearer with each passing mile, a nervous dread nestled in the pit of his stomach, feeding him the same question again and again:

  Does she want to leave me for someone else?

  Brook
e’s appetite for sex was ravenous, insatiable, and despite five years of marriage, the ghosts of imagined infidelities still haunted the darkness at the back of Jeff’s mind. He pictured her having affairs with men who were more muscular, or younger, or just plain bigger than he was, but in all of his insecure, paranoid delusions, he’d never once thought of her in bed with another woman.

  Such a scenario suddenly played out behind his eyes, and he had to fight to maintain control of the Durango’s wheel, his tires kicking up sand as they momentarily left the asphalt.

  “Careful there, Tiger.” Brooke’s hand pressed the Mapquest directions flat against her muscular thigh. “I’d like to get there in one piece. Are you falling asleep?”

  “Not on your life,” he told her, managing a smile.

  She grinned back and ran her fingers through her blonde mane, exposing the multitude of golden hoops that pierced her ear. The Japanese character for “love” was tattooed on the side of her neck, just above her left shoulder. Jeff glanced down at Brooke’s hip, finding the latest addition to her body art collection peeking out from beneath the waistband of her shorts. A bright blue serpent with mottled, feathery wings etched onto its scaly back. She had it done the day she asked him to take her to this whorehouse.

  At first, Jeff had been apprehensive. The idea of sex with a prostitute provoked nightmare visions where his cock turned black and rotted off. But Brooke wouldn’t let it go, and she’d done her homework. The ladies, she’d told him, were tested prior to reporting for duty; they worked seven days straight, and could not leave the property for any reason during that shift; and since condom use was mandated by state law, there had been no cases—zero—where the customer of a legal brothel contracted a deadly disease. Finally, his wife showed him the profile of the working girl she had in mind—a curvy Latin lovely with the exotic name of Xilomen—and there was no way he could say no.

  But Jeff couldn’t stop wondering why she wanted it so badly.

  He told himself it was just another kink she needed to get out of her system, and he was happy she hadn’t gone behind his back to do it, happy she wanted him there to experience it with her.

  Still, as Jeff chauffeured his wife toward this rendezvous with a woman they’d never met, he couldn’t help but wonder if she secretly preferred women. He’d seen enough talk shows to know such things happened to people who’d been married much longer. Out of the blue, their spouses sat them down and told them they were gay. Either they had recently discovered feelings for someone of the same sex, or worse, they’d been fighting those longings their entire life, marrying only to conform to societal norms. It was a crazy idea, but he couldn’t shake it, and it led him back to that same worrisome question: