The surviving players dropped their tiles back into the viper’s cage for the next hand and anted up. H raised his empty glass, and the waiter refilled it with the moving purple ooze. “Now, let’s talk business,” he said to Anatoli, gesturing with his full glass of motile liquor. “I can move this stuff.” He was a little buzzed and that was bad. It was dangerous, and prohibited on any mission, but especially reckless on an undercover operation with no backup. MiB had special chemicals that agents could take prior to going out into the field that neutralized most forms of intoxicants, at least temporarily. H had eschewed them. Again, he was pushing out past the edge, and he found himself feeling practically nothing at all. “Who do I need to talk to to get a whole lot more of it? ’Cause… I’m in.” The hooded woman batted her eyes at H and then gave him a wink. Again, there was the hint of a smile under the obscuring hood. H didn’t hide his flirtations with Anatoli’s companion. Another dare, another risk. “I could get used to this place.”
“I wouldn’t,” Anatoli said dryly as he took his turn, thrusting his arm into the cage. The Fmekian viper’s heads all swayed and hissed, but the snake didn’t strike. The alien crime boss took the tile he wanted and began to move his arm out of the cage as if he had all the time in the world. He placed the tile on the table and turned his reptilian gaze on H. “You see, I have a very strict no Men in Black policy.”
Silence fell over the room. Everyone’s gaze fell on H, who, seemingly oblivious to the attention, was counting his winnings.
“I don’t blame you,” H said. “Who’d want those assholes coming in here, spoiling the vibe? All it takes is one bad apple.”
Anatoli was impressed by this undercover cop. Not a single tell that he had been compromised. Was he that good, or just that drunk? If he didn’t know better, he’d swear his intel was bad, but it wasn’t. The information that his new potential business partner was MiB had come at the most fortuitous time to avoid getting busted. Just imagining having all he had worked and fought for taken away from him by a bunch of cosmic do-gooders who knew nothing of how life really worked made his poisonous blood boil. H’s identity was worth the small fortune he had paid for it on the black market. Though they would never meet, the Cerulian mobster was in debt to whoever had been leaking MiB classified data. Anatoli nodded to his men.
One of the bodyguards slipped a garrote around H’s neck from behind, attempting to choke him. H jammed his feet against the edge of the table and used it for leverage to flip himself up and over the goon. He drove a powerful kick into the man’s back, sending him flying forward. The bodyguard crashed onto the table. Plumes of money flew up around the room. The guard’s face smashed against the cage, knocking it open. The Fmekian viper’s three heads all struck, biting the guard. The dying guard’s eyes inflated and swelled as he rolled off the table with a groan, and collapsed on the floor.
The angry viper slithered from its cage onto the table. Players and onlookers shouted, screamed, and fled from the room as the second bodyguard charged at H. H kicked a chair into the guard, sending him tumbling to the floor. Another goon came at H. Swiftly, the agent grabbed the Fmekian viper off the table and hurled it at him. H knelt and recovered the dead guard’s blaster from his holster, rising to take aim at Anatoli, who was still seated, the hooded lady still at his side.
“I am MiB, you Cerulian scum,” H said, “and FYI, I think your club sucks. It’s pretentious. Now you’re gonna give me everything—suppliers, sellers—your whole network.” H winced in pain, suddenly.
“Your luck ran out,” Anatoli said, glancing down. One of the viper’s mouths was attached to H’s leg. “You’re already dead.”
H’s eyes had already begun to swell up as the venom took effect. It felt like freezing acid was being pumped into his veins, his heart. Despite the pain, he sneered at the Cerulian crime boss as he tore the viper loose and tossed it skyward. It landed in the crook of the ceiling’s rafter beams and hissed down at him.
“Am I?” he slurred. He fumbled with numb fingers for his jacket’s interior pocket. “Antidote, asshole.” But where the vial of antidote should have been in H’s coat pocket was only a wet spot; he pulled the shattered vial out as Anatoli began to chuckle. H tossed the bottle away and desperately licked his fingers—nothing! He wrestled with his jacket, trying to suck any of the precious fluid out of the cloth of his pocket.
“Bad luck, mate,” Anatoli said. “Only one person here has the antidote, don’t they, sweetheart?”
H’s vision was blurring, but he saw Anatoli’s companion produce a slender vial from her purse. She held it up as she regarded the struggling H with those beautiful eyes.
Before Anatoli could continue gloating, the Fmekian viper dropped on him from above, striking with all three heads to his face and neck. Anatoli fell from his chair and gasped on the ground, his eyes now growing, expanding. He looked at H with sheer hatred and then snapped his fingers at his companion, gesturing for the vial. H fell to his knees, his lips turning blue. It was getting hard to think, to see, to breathe. The hooded woman looked to H and then to Anatoli and back again.
“Please,” H said, fighting to focus on those beautiful eyes. “Whatever you want…”
Anatoli tried to scoff, but he was losing control of his muscles.
“Ha!” he gasped. “You think someone as gorgeous as her would be interested in someone like you?”
Both men looked to the alien woman for salvation. She wrapped her fingers tighter around the small vial and pulled it close to her chest. She looked at H. Her voice from within the hood was thick with an eastern European accent, like Anatoli’s. It was also honeyed with desire.
“Did you say, ‘whatever I want’?”
Those were the last words Anatoli ever heard.
* * *
The late Anatoli’s suite was on the top floor of a very exclusive London hotel. H awoke, the sunlight peeling his eyeballs a layer at a time. His stomach ached, and his head swam. He couldn’t be sure if it was the self-propelled purple port or the viper’s venom that was making him feel like Tarantian poo. He rolled over slightly and saw that his bedmate, Anatoli’s former girlfriend, was still sleeping. Her long, tentacled arm was draped over his chest. He tried gingerly to dislodge it, but it was stuck to his skin. Carefully, he lifted it off, with the suction cups making a pop-pop-pop sound as the vacuum seal was broken. The cups left tiny red rings in a diagonal trail across his chest. The alien woman—H hadn’t caught her name—stirred but didn’t wake up. He climbed silently out of bed, his striped socks hitting the floor, and dressed quickly. Standing before the vanity’s mirror in the bedroom, H searched the drawers until he found some lipstick. He quickly scrawled a note on the surface of the mirror and then removed his neuralyzer from his jacket pocket.
Again, he was breaking a rule. Neuralyzation of one’s own self was strictly prohibited by the MiB Field Agent’s Guide. It was dangerous and irresponsible. Technically, his memories were the property of MiB and he was deleting company files by doing this. He adjusted the small dials and then flashed himself squarely in the face with the memory-erasing beam. H blinked a few times and realized he had no recollection of anything after Anatoli’s demise. There was a note scrawled on the mirror:
DO NOT LOOK BEHIND YOU.
JUST LEAVE. TRUST ME! H.
H took out his hankie and wiped away the message. He paused for a moment, staring at the bright red lipstick on his handkerchief, smiled, and almost turned around to see what he’d cautioned himself against—but then he remembered his own advice and quickly and quietly departed.
7
Em waited on the subway platform. It could have been any platform in New York City, but this one was part of the MiB Battery Tunnel complex. A few other MiBs and various alien support staff stood on the platform, looking at their phones or reading the paper, like anyone else waiting for a train. Other MiBs… She was one of them now, off on her first assignment, her first great adventure. It all felt so unreal.
&
nbsp; Reality came wheezing and clattering to a stop at the platform. An old, dilapidated subway car, festooned with graffiti, shuddered to a stop with a groan and a hiss. Not the Hogwarts Express, Em thought, but I’ll take it.
The car doors opened, and a group of four short aliens swaggered out. Their slender bodies reminded Em a bit of a worm’s. They each had a pair of long, drooping antennae on top of their vaguely-frog-like heads; two long, slender, stick-like arms; and another pair of smaller arms folded close to their torso. The worms were pulling rolling luggage with them, and several of them were wearing Hawaiian shirts that were louder than an Iron Maiden concert. They were all chattering in Brooklyn accents. They immediately pulled vape pens from their shirt pockets as they cleared the doors of the car and started puffing. Others pulled out flasks and gulped from them nosily.
“Move it or lose it!” one of the worms shouted to one lagging behind as they sauntered by. They all laughed as they headed toward the command center in a cloud of what Em’s nose suspected was Kushberry vape juice.
Em hefted her backpack and entered the car with the other agents. It was a typical old, nasty subway car inside. Em and the other passengers found their way to the seats with the least amount of questionable fluids on them. “Departing New York station in thirty seconds,” an automated voice droned over the car’s speaker. Em was impressed with how well a machine could mimic a bored city employee.
The doors hissed closed, sounding like a two-packs-a-day asthmatic, but then bumped open again to allow access to the car for a pair of aliens who seemed to be composed primarily of teeth. Em wasn’t sure if one of the toothy duo smiled at her or bared its fangs. The doors closed again with a groan, and the whole car instantly began to undergo some kind of transformation, shifting, morphing. It reminded Em of how the MiBs’ car had changed outside her house that night, so long ago. The stained plastic benches flowed and changed, becoming seats with heavy restraining harnesses like something in the cockpit of a race car or a fighter jet. “Departing New York in ten seconds,” the mechanical Transit Authority employee announced. Em saw the other passengers clicking themselves into the harnesses and securing and tightening the belts. Em followed suit, and just in time.
The transformed car blasted away from the station at an unimaginable speed. It felt to Em like her brain had just sloshed to the back of her skull. She had to be pulling multiple G’s of acceleration, but the hum and roar of the car didn’t sound like any kind of conventional rocket engine. Maglev? Em wondered. Magnetic levitation?
She looked over at an agent reading the Wall Street Journal, his face pancaked, cheeks fluttering like a deflating whoopee cushion. Another agent held his coffee mug out in front of him and tipped it. The coffee sloshed through the air and landed in his open mouth—a ten from all the judges. There was movement on the ceiling. A small, furry alien, clearly a regular commuter, was clutching one of the ride straps on the bar above her. The alien was being pulled completely horizontal by the acceleration of the train, flapping like a flag. It was reading from a small tablet, indifferent to its condition. Been there, done that. Em felt a sense of civic pride swell up in her. No real New Yorker was fazed by anything on the subway.
The blasé automated voice said over the speaker, “Next stop, London Station.” Em glanced out the car’s window to see a blue whale drifting through the dark waters of the deep Atlantic, a cloud of small fish clustered around it. Then the maglev capsule shot past them and continued on toward the UK.
Beneath the waters of the venerable River Thames, which bisected the city of London, there was a glint and blur of something moving at unimaginable speed. Blink, and you would miss it.
“Arriving London Station,” the automatized voice in the subway car reported. “Next stop, Amsterdam Annex.” The voice paused for a second, then began again. “Schtock-prith London Smitmonak. Vernox mip Amsterdam…”
She disembarked the train and looked around the station platform. MiB agents streamed past her without a second glance in her direction. There were rows of polished, silver ascending and descending escalators with a sign at their base that simply declared, “London.”
Em walked past a magazine kiosk near the base of the escalators. It was staffed by a man she wasn’t sure was an alien or not. His pale skin and dark eyes were a striking contrast to his mop of curly blonde hair that had been meticulously braided into a halo-like crown that radiated away from his head in all directions. Beside the gum, phone cards, lighters, and candy, the magazines prominently displayed in the kiosk had titles like Alien Charisma, Astronaut Gourmet, and The Galaxy Chronicles.
Em was still feeling a bit like silly putty from the train ride as she ascended the escalator that took her from MiB London Station’s maglev platform to the command center. London Station’s architecture was similar to New York’s immaculate, well-lit white walls and chrome. The vast, multilevel, man-made cavern of columns, braces, corridors, and walkways had a similar motif, but was laid out differently. The elevated office that she assumed belonged to O’s London counterpart was a sphere, not an oval, and felt like an eye at the center of everything, overlooking all the chaotic activity taking place at different locations on the main floor.
Like the New York station, there was a customs terminal here, too, bustling with aliens from a thousand different worlds and hundreds of galaxies. Em watched in wonder at the lines of aliens arriving and departing her world. She saw two cactus-like beings say farewell to one another with a hug and an exchange of water in a ritual bone bowl. One headed to departures, the other remained and waved goodbye. An alien with an inordinate number of digits was holding up the line at the fingerprint recognition station, while a few counters over, Em saw an agent check and recheck the photo on a humanoid alien’s ID. He shook his head, and Em could tell the picture wasn’t matching the alien’s mug. The alien gestured for the agent to wait a moment. A thing that looked like a cross between a snake and a crab erupted from the alien’s chest, hissing and snarling at the agent. Unperturbed, the agent checked the photo on the ID again against the alien hanging from the humanoid’s chest. He nodded in approval and waved the pair through his line.
Em skirted the line and took the route designated in numerous languages for “AGENTS” only. She paused to observe a large wall-sized monitor mounted near a junction of corridors. The monitor was labeled as CURRENT HIGH-PROFILE SURVEILLANCE, and showed dozens of famous people Em saw all the time on TV and in the news.
“It’s never who you think it is,” a man’s voice came from behind her. She turned to regard a distinguished older man dressed in a well-cut black suit, with a vest and a gold watch fob. He looked refined and authoritative, with just a hint of a dangerous edge.
“Oh no,” Em turned back to the screen. She pointed at one of the surveillance images, a shot from within the Oval Office. “That one makes total sense.”
“So, you’re the one who found us.”
“I am,” Em replied.
“I’m T,” the man said. “High T. I run this circus. Welcome, Em. O told us to expect great things.”
“Then great things you shall get.”
High T smiled. He pointed to a corridor past the terminal complex. “Take two rights and a left.” High T continued on, and Em watched him go, feeling a little cast adrift despite the directions. She looked down and saw an adorable fluffy alien at her feet. Forgetting herself, and where she was, she reached down to pat it. Even as she did so, the alien shattered… into several even tinier versions of itself. The little creatures scurried off, running amok through the MiB customs agents, who raced around trying to round up the little troublemakers. Her face a mask of innocence, Em walked away as quickly as she could.
Two rights and a left later, Em found herself in a vast office cubicle farm. What looked like hundreds of humans and aliens sat at desks in front of computers, wearing headsets. Em began to get a very strange yet familiar feeling in her stomach. Em saw there was a vacant desk with a placard that had “M” writt
en on it.
“Looks like we’re going to be neighbors,” an alien called cheerfully from the cubicle beside hers. “I’m Guy.”
Guy was blue. He had two sets of eyes, two pairs of black-rimmed, hipster-style glasses, and six small, pointed-leaf-like ears. He was portly and dressed in a bowling shirt. Em couldn’t tell if the sparse growth that covered his upper lip, chin, and one of his necks was hair or fine little tentacles.
“One sec.” Guy clicked off the mute button on his headset. “Alien Services Center, how can I make your stay on Earth better today?” Guy’s phone voice was smooth like butter. “Your human skin has torn? Hate it when that happens. There is the most wonderful tailor, just off Savile Row…”
Em sat down in her cubicle, half-listening to her new blue bestie give directions to his customer. On her desk was a plastic-wrapped headset, a thick manual entitled Alien Code of Conduct, Earth Edition, and a small, gift-wrapped box with an envelope. Em opened the envelope and read the typed note inside:
A journey of a thousand light-years begins with a single step—High T.
She opened the box. Inside was a pocket compass adorned with the MiB logo. It reminded her of the stress ball shaped like a customer’s head she got as a gift on her first day at her old customer services job in Manhattan. In fact, she thought, looking around the cubicles, a lot about this place reminded her of her old customer services job in Manhattan.
Em’s phone chirped with a call. She slumped in her seat. Her brand-new life suddenly felt very old indeed.
“What the fu—”
8
MARRAKECH, MOROCCO
The bright moon bathed the ancient city at the cusp of the desert in ghostly light. The sky was clear and gave a magnificent view of the stars from horizon to horizon. The city quarter that contained the medina, the famous, sprawling open-air marketplaces of Marrakech, was mostly deserted at this hour, the booths and stalls closed and locked. Even the cafes that dotted the fringes of the market district were closing. No one noticed, in the midnight hour, the strange particles that drifted down from space and seemed to capture the moon’s brilliance, like stardust falling. The particles began to coalesce, picking up speed as they whirled about one another, forming a pearlescent cyclone that descended toward the slumbering city’s rooftops.
Men in Black International Page 4
