M55

by Robert Brockway

  “Yeah I – wait, what’s that?”

  “They said he caught her all alone while she was closing up, then hit her with a ketchup bottle and stomped on her for a while. Then, what? He just took off? I can’t for the life of me figure out why he stopped.”

  “Because…because he didn’t want to-”

  “You can’t be in here,” the cook was standing at the head of our table, his arms crossed, one hand clutching a greasy, foot-long kitchen knife.

  “Why not?” Jen tilted her head up at him.

  “You god damn well know why not,” our waitress piped up from behind the cook, “your friend nearly killed Kelly!”

  “But that’s got nothing to do with us,” I said, trying to keep the pleading out of my voice, for Jen’s benefit.

  “The hell it doesn’t,” the cook said, “you university folks always come in here, looking down on us, thinking you can use us and our town however you’d like. Well we don’t need you. We don’t need you, and we don’t need this. You get up and get moving the hell away from my restaurant right now. I’ll give you three steps towards the door, and then you’re gonna be the fucking breakfast special.”

  “Come on, Jen,” I was trying to figure out how to save face from this. Maybe I could say something clever at the last minute, right as we were making the door, when it was too late for them to come after us.

  ‘Can’t we hash this out?’

  ‘I guess we better scram…ble.’

  Damn. No good.

  ‘Looks like YOUR special is…’

  Jen reached up and impaled her hand on the tip of the knife. A bright red spurt of blood shot out across the cook’s filthy white apron. Another sprayed the waitress in the face as Jen wrapped her hand, still impaled, around the blade of the knife and yanked it out of the stunned cook’s hand. In one smooth motion she slid the knife out of her own flesh and opened a foot long gash on the cook’s arm. He yelped and leapt backward. The waitress’ eyes roved about in her head. She was trying to find the voice to scream. Jen was already standing up from her seat at the booth, her eyes on the waitress. The knife moving towards her.

  “No!” I shot out of my seat and grabbed her wrist. She dropped the knife. I hustled her out the door before anybody could gather their wits and react. I was trying to get to her run with me towards the observatory, but the most she’d manage was a hurried mosey.

  “Come on,” I urged her, “pick up the pace.”

  “Why?” She said, a bit of a giggle in her voice.

  “Because they’ll kill us!”

  “Not if we kill them first, which I was about to do if you hadn’t stopped me. Why did you do that? It was stupid.”

  “Why?” I spun around and pulled her wrist to my stomach, drawing her close. I grabbed her jacket with my other hand, shaking her there. “Because you can’t kill people!”

  “Sure you can,” she laughed, “it’s actually really easy.”

  “You shouldn’t!” I screamed into her face.

  Her expression fell. Her thick eyebrows swept together. Her thin lips quivered. She looked so lost. I didn’t even know what was happening, but it was happening. I pulled her in the remaining few inches and kissed her, hard. I poured all of my fear, and worry, and confusion, and pent up lust into that kiss; I poured out the accidental touches as we both reached for the same printout; I poured out my furtive glances — visions of her chewing her hair in the sickly green light of her terminal; I poured out the way I felt about her tiny earlobes and emptied every sleepless, masturbation plagued night into her. I poured it all out. I left myself nothing.

  When I finally opened my eyes, hers were staring back into mine, wrought with concern.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “I’m spurting blood all over your crotch,” she said, gesturing to where I’d pinned her injured hand against my belly.

  Sure enough, my slacks were soaked through. I looked like a vampire who had pissed himself.

  “Let’s get back to the focus room,” I said, my one true moment utterly defeated. “I think something’s going on with that signal.”

  …

  We made it to the observatory without further incident. Hardly anybody was out in the downpour, though it was barely mid-day. We’d left the lights and the terminals on, and the door unlocked. In my haste, I’d even abandoned my tea right there on my desk. It was cold and bitter — appropriately like puddle water — but I belted it back anyway.

  I would need it.

  I steered Jen into the kitchenette and bandaged her hand with our cracked plastic first aid kit. The paper slips surrounding the band-aids had gone slightly brittle with age, but gauze is gauze, and alcohol is alcohol. With that done, I hauled her chair to my terminal and sat her beside me. She had seemed to go almost catatonic after the kiss. I chalked that up mostly to shock, and only a little to my own personal charisma. She was clearly overwhelmed by it all. I studied the printout of the signal, but it meant nothing. Just a line executing a pattern of spikes and dips on a sheet of paper.

  “Does this mean anything to you?” I showed her the printout, waggled it in her face as gently as possible. “Does it…say something to you? First Peter starts acting strange, then you – something’s going on and it started here.”

  No response. She wouldn’t even make eye contact.

  I got up, plugged my headset in, slotted in the tape with the signal on it, and listened. Nothing exceptional, just an ululating bass tone interspersed with some clicks and squeals. I played it backwards, and heard backwards squeaks and clicks.

  Well, what did I expect? The devil’s voice commanding me to kill? Jesus, what was I doing? I was supposed to be a scientist, and yet at the first sign of distress I started chasing extraterrestrials. How childish. The girl must be doing this to me. I needed to get my head on straight and think this through rationally. That was my strength. So, what common denominators did Peter and Jen – and only Peter and Jen, out of all the inhabitants of this entire miserable town – share that could be responsible for such dramatic changes in behavior? Nothing, save for the signal, this room, and me. Could it have been something in the room itself? A chemical leak of some kind? We used no chemicals here. There’s no other lab even close to the observatory. The harshest thing around is printer ink, and I doubt that causes murderous urges. Another question: Why am I apparently exempt? So the question actually becomes: What commonalities do Peter and Jen share that I-

  The squeal of an office chair, swiveling. I glanced to my left – Jen was still seated there, motionless, staring off into space. I turned very slowly toward the dark corner containing Peter’s workstation. A figure slumped in the shadows. Lumpy and bald.

  “Peter?” I said.

  “Haaaaa…” It was part a laugh and part a frustrated groan. “That is me. Peter. And you? And you?”

  “I-it’s me, Peter. Do you know where you are?”

  “No,” the figure shook its head slowly at first, then more and more violently, like it was trying to dislodge water from its ear. “Yes. Sort of. I know, but I forget what it is to me. This place, what is it to me?”

  “What are you, drunk again?”

  “What?!” The figure fired out of the shadows, grabbed a fistful of my sweater, and threw me from my chair. I hit the cupboards in the kitchenette and lost my breath. I slid to the cool tile, and tried to calm the ebbing tides of color that threatened to overwhelm my vision.

  “You think you know meeeuuugh-“ Peter vomited suddenly. A torrent of chunky crimson.

  “Ah Jesus, Jesus god,” Peter moaned, and he collapsed in my chair, beside Jen. She still hadn’t reacted. Might not have even blinked.

  My vision cleared, and I found myself fixated on the puddle of vomit. It looked like Peter had been eating raw hamburger. There was something whole in there. He hadn’t even chewed it. Just horked it down his neck in one large gulp, like a duck. It was waxy and had delicate little swirls like a…

  I looked at Peter, sitting in th
e light now. His shirt was torn and covered in blood. He was barefoot. His fingers were twisted into arthritic-looking, inflexible claws.

  “Peter?” I said. His head swiveled vaguely toward me, but his eyes were unfocused. Bloodshot red, so wet he was practically crying. “Did you just puke up a human ear?”

  “Should I not have done that?” He laughed deep in his belly, “too much. Couldn’t keep it down. Too much.”

  “Jen, get away from him,” I said, trying to keep the urgency out of my voice. I don’t know why, but instinct told me that it wasn’t my words, but any hint of panic in my tone that would set Peter off again.

  “Why?” She said, not pulling her gaze from the nothingness she was focused on. “It’s just Peter.”

  “Did you not just hear what he said? He…he ate somebody. He’s not-”

  “I’m here,” Peter said, and his eyes focused on me for the first time. They were awful. They were so… human. It looked like he’d been sobbing hysterically all night. I could sense a plea in those eyes, something that couldn’t make it past his lips.

  “I know you are, Peter,” I said.

  “I’m here,” he said again. “I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.”

  I started moving toward Jen slowly. Peter’s eyes locked on mine all the while, though his body remained otherwise rigid. I took a step toward them.

  “I’m here.”

  Another step. Not far now.

  “I’m here.”

  I reached out and grabbed Jen’s arm. I guided her up from her seat and past Peter. She followed me listlessly, like she was sleepwalking.

  “I’mhereI’mhereI’mhere.”

  I took a step toward the door, Jen in tow, never taking my eyes off Peter.

  “Imhereimheimhimhimimim,” Peter’s syllables flowed together. His eyes were still locked on mine. Dull blue shot with flecks of green. Tears. Pleading. Human. And then…not. “IMHE. IMHE. IMHE HERAM HOA HANUK.”

  I had only a split second between the moment that I realized this was not Peter anymore — not in any form I would recognize him — and the moment he lunged at us.

  God, so fast.

  I was on the floor. A sound like feedback in my ear, one eye not working. Something was scrabbling at my leg like an animal, but my sensory information was coming in starts and stops. My brain was muddy. If I could just get this damn sound to stop for one second so I could concentrate…

  When I finally did shake the cotton from my brain, Jen was straddling Peter, who lay prone on the floor. His legs were shaking. Jen was doing something to him, but I couldn’t see what. Her back was turned to me. I got to my knees and shuffled toward the pair of them.

  “Jen?” She didn’t respond. Still grabbing at something. Maybe wrestling with Peter? Trying to subdue him? I should help. I need to save her, so she can see what kind of man I really am. Or at least, what kind I want to be.

  “Jen, I got him,” I said, just as I came around her shoulder, and saw what she’d been doing.

  Peter was dead. Beyond dead. His neck had been torn open, laid bare by Jen’s fingernails, which were still inside his throat, poking, probing and ripping. She was yanking at something hard in there, over and over again, but it wouldn’t come free. His spine. She was trying to take his spine.

  “Jen?” I said. “I think you can stop now. I think he’s dead.”

  Jen’s head snapped toward me, eyes like a two day hangover, tears streaming down her cheeks, gaze thick with a plea she couldn’t seem to speak.

  …

  The secret is bleach.

  That’s all. Just bleach, a bit of time, and a lot of fresh towels. That’s how you clean up a very large amount of blood. The big pools are no problem. It’s the little spots that will trip you up. There were little spots of crimson in the keyboards of our terminals; drips of red in between the stapler’s lever and handle; blood mixed in with the coffee at the bottom of Peter’s mug. I got all of it. Every bit. I had plenty of time. Only the Big Ear volunteers come down to the focus room anyway, and I was the only one of those left. The hardest part was dragging the bodies. It seems so much easier in movies. But it’s not like dragging a heavy couch or something. Bodies are limp flesh — they catch on things. They slip through your hands. They bend strangely. It took hours to get Peter and Jen into the woods behind the array. It took hours more to dig the holes.

  Really, cleaning was the easy part. It’s silly how big a deal everybody makes of it.

  “Blood never comes out.”

  Nonsense. Unless they’re speaking metaphorically…

  As a scientist, I cannot definitively state that the signal is what caused Peter and Jen’s violent outbursts. My sample size is too small. There were only three of us. I can only say that it is my hypothesis that something in that signal causes human beings to slowly lose all semblance of humanity and become something violent and animalistic. It remains only a hypothesis, until such time as I can test it and prove the results. I burned all of the printouts, but the tape recording of the original signal is sitting beside me on this greyhound bus, in the bottom of my backpack, wrapped in a clean towel. I left a note on the focus room door. Some bullshit about worker’s rights and the true agenda of science. We were all walking out en masse, I wrote. Going to join a new lab that would pay us a fair wage for meaningful work. The university would pull three more lucky volunteers from the astronomy department, and work would continue without missing a beat. Their work. My own work is only just beginning, and there’s so much of it ahead. I will document the true effects of this signal. I will prove my hypothesis. For Jen and, to a much lesser extent, for Peter. I will employ only the most rigorous testing methods, going forward. And I will need a much, much larger sample size.