Alien Home

by Mark Zubro

  “You can have my communicator.”

  “I think the implant is the key, although the communicator is important. I’m not sure I could make a duplicate of yours, certainly not in the time we’ve probably got. As for them not finding us now, maybe they haven’t because there isn’t a direct enough bus route at this hour to this neighborhood. Maybe they could get Earthlings to help them, but even that takes time as it did with you. They can’t just appear in a mile-wide ship in the sky and announce in great booming tones that we have to show ourselves. Even these guys have rules. You don’t frighten an entire planet, at least not an undeveloped one.”

  Mike took Touhy Avenue out toward the Edens Expressway. As he swung onto I94 going north, he asked, “How are they tracking you?”

  “I suspect the implants. My guess is every time your energy field is off, they can find me. A further guess is that since I mixed Earth and Hrrrm technology to make your communicator, they’ll be able to home in on it once they adjust their instruments, if they haven’t already. It also depends on whether they have both the ability and the proper equipment to make such adjustments. Then actually making the changes takes time.”

  “Minutes, hours, days, weeks, years?”

  Joe shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “We need to have it on to keep you alive and shielded from their instruments, but it is possible that with it on they will be able to find us sooner?”

  “Yep.” Joe imbued the syllable with depths of despair and annoyance that would make an angst-ridden character on an evening teen soap opera envious.

  Mike glanced at him. “You sound worse than I’ve ever heard you.”

  “I feel worse. If I thought we could get to my ship, I’d feel better. I don’t see how to do that. I’m in a hideous situation that I cannot see my way out of. I’ve taken you away from your nephew, who I also care about very much. In a short time, you could be taken away from all that you have known and loved for your entire life. I have no training to deal with this. I have no solutions. I can’t imagine ever being able to stay here peacefully with you. Maybe we were just deluding ourselves, me most of all.”

  “Nobody can predict the future.”

  “I just didn’t realize how powerless I am, how little I was really told or taught. Despair is not my style, but I’m not seeing options or choices. I’m not sure even why we’re going so far now. To gain time? For what? It would be more comfortable to be trapped at home holding and comforting each other.”

  “Being held by the man I love is how I would want to wait for my doom.”

  Joe glanced at him.

  “I’m serious,” Mike said. “If this is the end, I want to be with the one I love for as long as I can. I also don’t want to give up without a fight. Maybe I’m a hopeless romantic. I know I love cheap sentiment. Perhaps I’ve seen too many movies where the hero comes up with a solution at the very end. I still love it when the cavalry charges or the good guys show up to save the day in the last reel of the movie. I realize we are in a position where we are most likely to hear ‘We are the Hrrrm, resistance is futile.’ I realize this next thing is probably pretty naïve, but would it do any good to try negotiating with them?”

  Joe raised an eyebrow. “Frab’s opening gambit was to control my implants so I would be powerless to resist. Negotiating is not an option. On my planet with the ability to read minds, motives and wants and needs are tough to keep secret, and from these guys, impossible, at least for me. I couldn’t keep them out of my mind. I could deflect a few of their probes because of the experimenting and alterations I’ve done here, but I am not able to do anything really significant.”

  They passed the closed-for-the-winter Great America theme park on their right. They were nearing the Wisconsin border.

  Mike said, “They aren’t all powerful. They couldn’t get to me. Can’t we give you what I’ve got?”

  “It’s you being human as much as the technology that’s making the difference, and like I said, there isn’t time.” He paused and thought for a minute. “Your physiology, the neural paths in your brain are different than ours. Maybe it’s as simple as like in those Harry Potter books. He was saved when he was a baby from Voldemort by his mother’s love.” Joe shrugged. “Your physiology, the changes that love makes in the synapses of your brain, Vov’s experiments, the fumbling I did with what we found from his lab. Maybe it’s a combination of all of the above. For whatever reason, you have some power, maybe a lot of power that I don’t have, and they don’t have. I just don’t know if it will be enough.”

  After a few minutes silence, Mike said, “What the hell am I going to tell my parents, if I even get the chance? I certainly don’t want to leave Jack and Meganvilia trying to explain what happened to a passel of concerned relatives and probably the police. I can hear my Aunt Rose. ‘What do you mean “aliens”? There are no aliens. Balderdash.’ She’s the only human who still says ‘balderdash.’ We’ve both got a lot to lose here. I’m not willing to give up, even if it is a hopeless fight without a chance of winning against odds that are infinity to one against.”

  “Losing you would be the worst thing that could ever happen to me,” Joe said. “Giving up isn’t my style either. I just realize how impossible it is.”

  “We’ve got some of their communicators. I’ve seen you do spectacular things with just two of them before. Couldn’t you try something with them again?”

  Joe pulled the old and the newly acquired tech marvels from his pocket and held them in his cupped hands. “We’ve got time to give the new ones a try although using them could also act like a homing beacon.” He shrugged. “Maybe I could get hold of their ship in some way or use this to find it. They’d have the same problem I did of finding a place to hide the thing.”

  “And we reported them to the FBI. As a species we may not be able to stop you, but the police could at least make nuisances of themselves like they did with us.”

  “Let’s see what I can do with these. How long until we get to Meganvilia’s cabin?”

  “Maybe an hour and a half west of Racine. Probably two hours from here.”

  “Let me start doing an analysis of this thing now.” He sighed. He opened the glove compartment and put his and the set of new communicators on top of the door. He added Mike’s. He rubbed his face with the palms of his hands.

  “You okay?” Mike asked.

  “The effects of the last attack are passing. If I could tune these into whatever it is about your personal energy field that stops them, maybe I could take whatever that is and expand it. Then again, in discovering the source, I could give them an opening into how to get around it.”

  “Is there really much choice?” Mike asked.

  “Not really,” Joe said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Through the frigid night they drove. The weather forecast Mike heard said the temperature might hit an all-time record low for any winter in Chicago history. Frost gathered around the edges of the crack in the window. The world outside was bright with moonlight glinting off surreal white drifts. A harsh north wind continued to buffet the car as they neared the border.

  Outside Mike saw the passing world gone now almost completely to gray, black, and white. Dashes of neon occasionally broke the bleakness. When they turned off at Highway 11 and headed west, Joe sat back and shook his head. “I’m not sure I’m getting anywhere with these. I need a break.” He stared out at the cold countryside for several minutes then sighed and said, “I keep trying to think of what I could have done differently.”

  “Which thing in particular?”

  “About disguising what happened in the final battle,” Joe said. “There must have been something more I could have done.”

  “There wasn’t anything more. Who knew they’d be this interested?”

  “I’m not sure why they are,” Joe said. “They told me they didn’t consider my mission that vital. If he was a dangerous criminal who could pose a real threat to the people on this planet, my
superiors didn’t seem to care. What makes it more important to get me than him? I’m no threat.”

  “Maybe you pose a bigger threat to your own planet?”

  “How would I be?”

  “I hope we don’t have the chance to find out.”

  The mounds of snow heaped along the side of the road were smaller than in Illinois. Along the Tollway near O’Hare Airport, a few of the drift-induced snow banks had reached over ten feet high. When they turned off the interstate and drove west, few were higher than a foot.

  As they passed through Union Grove, Mike said, “I’d sure like to know if the FBI showed up at the hospital. I hope Hynes and Henry were able to inconvenience them.”

  “They could simply mess with people’s minds, alter what they see or what they think they see. It is against all the rules to alter the minds of a native species, but that’s what they could do.”

  “But you didn’t. You said there were rules.”

  “I’m not sure these guys, whoever they are, follow the rules. And if what I suspect is true, that there are agents of the central government and from different factions, I’m not sure which of them is quite willing to do what.”

  “But if it would give us time to balance one set of agents against the others?”

  “And if I love you, and if the laws of my planet don’t seem to be quite what I was told they were, why don’t I alter what’s in people’s heads? The answer is, they can break as many rules as they want. I know what I was taught. I know the rules I live by. I know I broke them for you. I am not going to break them.”

  Mike saw an occasional distant light on an isolated house or barn as they traveled west through southern Wisconsin. Past Union Grove the road signs said Highway V for a few miles then changed to Highway C.

  About an hour later they found the road leading to Meganvilia’s. The snow didn’t look to be more than an inch or two deep, but the wind and cold were as relentless as ever. Even with the heater and defroster on full blast, the side and rear windows had snippets of ice gathered along the edges.

  They eased into Wilmot around five o’clock that morning. They stopped for provisions at a convenience store where Highway W intersected C. Joe thought he could keep the energy field intact for the few minutes it would take Mike to pick up some food. In the short trot from car to store door, Mike felt the incredible cold. Taking a breath of the Arctic air seemed to be fraught with risk.

  The clerk behind the counter put out her cigarette, washed her hands, and sliced the turkey, ham, and American cheese Mike ordered. As she weighed each item, she talked about the snow and the cold comparing them to winters past. A grunt of seeming interest dropped at intervals in her monologue kept her talking. Mike wished she’d work faster, but he was probably her only customer in the past few hours. Maybe she felt the need for a little human conversation and connection.

  They pushed on through Wilmot. Meganvilia’s cabin was on Lake Elizabeth. The very tip of the south end of the lake was actually in Illinois. Mike exited Twin Lakes Road at the south end. He followed little more than a dirt path west through dense woods on both sides and then north for a few miles. For the last five hundred yards before the road ended, he didn’t see another driveway. Finally, he made out the form of a cabin off to his right so he took the next turn-off and headed toward it.

  When they arrived at the cabin, Mike shut off the car. He stared at the frozen world. Dawn was still over an hour away. Starlight and moonlight glinted off the thin covering of snow. Mike realized they had all the seclusion they could want, which also gave him brief pause. If they got in trouble, rescue would be miles away. He also realized there was no rescue on Earth that could help them, none that Joe had revealed from his planet, and as Joe explained earlier, no way to get to his ship. Mike asked, “Isn’t there somebody on your planet who would be on your side? Who would help us?”

  Joe shook his head. “Not that I know of. I was a cop. We’d be the ones to help, but they’re the ones after us. There’s no help coming from my planet. I don’t even know of someone to send to for assistance.”

  “A friend, a relative?”

  “The few people I know could never get here in time. If I had time and intergalactic cruisers were a dime a dozen, I could maybe have tried to contact someone to help keep us hidden, but I wouldn’t want them to take the risk.” Joe still sounded more depressed than Mike had ever heard him. Joe looked pale and exhausted.

  With the heater off the temperature in the car dropped. The blue aura protected them somewhat.

  Joe said, “I don’t have the energy to make the field strong enough to keep out the effects of the storm completely.”

  Mike said, “Your not-good-enough is better than most people’s best.”

  They opened their doors and got out. The bare trees rustled and rubbed their limbs against each other in the howling wind. The strongest gusts caused wisps of snow to swirl along the ground.

  Five feet from the front door, Mike heard a resounding crack. The blue glow flashed to brightness. He dropped the groceries. He dove for Joe and brought him down under him. Mike looked around then heard a creaking sound and a moan. He glanced up. He saw a foot thick tree limb swaying above them. Mike didn’t know if the energy field would protect them from a solid Terran object. Mike shoved Joe to the left and lunged to his right. The tree limb gave a final crack and shuddered to the ground between them. A second or two later and significant portions of their bodies might have been crushed and mangled.

  They got up and dusted snow off their clothes. Mike asked, “Would the energy field have protected us?”

  “It’s supposed to,” Joe said.

  “We could try bashing each other with baseball bats and see if it works.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  At the door Mike fumbled with the keys. Joe stood with his head down. Mike dropped the keys. He picked them out of the snow and unlocked the door. Once inside with the door shut, they realized that the interior of the cabin had the virtue of being out of the wind but had the vice of being unheated. Mike found a light switch next to the door and flipped it on. A feeble light went on over the kitchen sink and another outside over the front door.

  Mike said, “I saw a woodpile on the side of the house.”

  They both hurried back outside and grabbed an armful of wood. When they had a sufficient amount stacked inside, Mike zipped a plastic lining around the door that he’d seen the last time they were there. It kept out the worst of the draft. To the left was a small kitchen with a wood burning stove, a half refrigerator, and three small cupboards above a sink with a hand pump for water. Mike had purchased bottled water at the store. He’d doubted if they could get the pump working. They found the Franklin stove with bits of kindling stacked and ready to be set alight. Matches rested on top of a shelf over the kitchen sink. In their heavy clothes they huddled together next to the stove waiting for the heat to rise.

  Joe said, “How are you feeling about what you did to Jack’s dad?”

  Mike shook his head. “I’ve never been so conflicted. I know I did the right thing. I know I did the only thing I could do, but killing someone? That never entered my mind as something I’d want to do or could do.”

  “You’ve been angry enough to think it about some people, wishing them dead.”

  “Well, sure, people think that or fantasize that, but actually killing someone.” He shook his head again. “It’s going to take me time to think about, process, get used to.”

  Joe said, “This is my fault.”

  Mike almost smiled. “That his dad was an asshole? I don’t think so. That we’re in the middle of an intergalactic shit storm? Well, we could just as easily blame the random twirling of the cosmos as anything else for that.”

  Mike didn’t think an intergalactic blame game made sense. He said, “I wish I knew something profound to say when all the universe seems stacked against us. Light humor doesn’t seem appropriate. The accidents of the universe have brought us to this poin
t. We made decisions. We handle consequences. I’m not sure blame works. We’re doing the best we can.” Joe pulled him close and held him tight.

  They glanced at their surroundings. Farther in on the right was a Formica-topped kitchen table with three plastic-covered chairs around it. On the wall overlooking the dining area was a calendar featuring an out-of-date Mr. November wearing a gray thong. Just beyond that was a small sitting area with a high-backed rocker, a love seat and two chairs, on one side of which was a television and a brick fireplace that Meganvilia had told him was sealed for the winter. To the left beyond the kitchen was an open space at the end of which was a large bed, with a screen folded closed but that could be pulled around, like a shower curtain, if the inhabitants of the bed desired a modicum of privacy. Straight ahead was another door, which Mike knew led to a chemical toilet.

  Sheer pink fabric served as curtains for the windows. Bright, shiny porcelain geegaws covered any surface larger than a square inch.