More Tomorrow: And Other Stories

by Michael Marshall Smith

  ‘Well George,’ Eddie said, his voice eerily calm, ‘Looks like we’ve got a situation. They sent some guys already, you weren’t there, they got your wife.’

  George pulled his hand away from his lip, visibly tried to pull himself together. ‘Has this ever happened before?’

  ‘No. The vaccine was negotiated. Even if it was just our bad luck that the fetchers were already on the way, they should have been recalled. Hopefully it’s an error. If it’s deliberate, then it’s moving outside the usual rules of engagement.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘First thing, you go in the bar and call your room. Check she’s not back there.’

  ‘But why…’

  ‘They could have realized the fuck-up, dumped her back and she’s sitting there not knowing what the hell is going on. Go call.’

  After George had shouldered his way into the mass of people in the bar and was out of sight, Connie looked at Eddie.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a screw-up. I think it’s deliberate.’

  ‘Could be the greys?’

  ‘I guess, but I don’t think so. They usually do their own thing and don’t mess with stuff the big boys have set up. Plus they know better than to fuck with me. After that last time.’

  ‘What you going to do? Head back out there?’

  Eddie shook his head. ‘Not tonight. If it’s a screw-up, I want to give them time to put it right. If not, then I’m surely going to have to have a word with them.’

  ‘Want a hand?’

  ‘Could be. You ever whacked an extra-terrestrial before?’

  ‘Not so far as I know. They really bleed green?’

  ‘You got me. I never whacked one either.’

  They mused on the subject for a minute, then Eddie started getting a sinking feeling. They went inside and checked the public phone where it stood a noisy yard from the gents toilets. Five minutes later the whole building had been searched, and it was for sure.

  George had disappeared.

  Sunrise found Connie standing out on the deck at Havana docks, on the off-chance. Eddie meanwhile was sitting on the little balcony outside the Beckers’ suite at the Marquesa. He knew nobody was inside, because he’d checked. He’d also tossed the room and the luggage. Sometimes things got left behind. He didn’t know whether it was because the aliens were careless, or out of a desire to leave behind some kind of annoyingly meaningless clue, but on occasion you found little globules of alloy, or scraps of stuff which looked like tinfoil but wasn’t, or coins from some other century. Eddie had a collection of such things that would make a UFOlogist hyperventilate. He kept meaning to throw it out, but hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

  There was nothing in the suite, except what you’d expect two older people to take with them on a week’s vacation.

  At a quarter after seven on the dot he saw a guy in a white coat approaching, bearing a tray of breakfast and the morning paper. Eddie quickly dropped around the edge of the balcony, and waited until he’d heard a soft rap on the door and the footsteps walking away. Then he flipped back up and helped himself to coffee. Way things were shaping up, the Beckers weren’t going to miss it and Eddie strongly believed it a shame to let good coffee go to waste. The toast, on the other hand, he let lie.

  He’d had plenty of time in the small hours, and all his thinking was done. The odds were that George would be a very long way away by now, beyond reach of anything Eddie could do to help him. What had to be done had little to do with his client, though obviously he’d keep an eye out for the guy and his wife. Today’s dealings mainly had to do with showing some skinny-shank weirdoes that you didn’t fuck with the way things were done. A vaccine was a vaccine: if the Colombians could understand that, then assholes from the planet Zog could too.

  When there was still no sign at a little after eight, Eddie left the hotel and went to meet Connie down at the docks and get some breakfast with meat in it.

  Meanwhile, less than a mile away, George was sitting at the end of a long concrete promontory right at the opposite end of Duval Street. Either side of the first half was beach with a little restaurant down the way, but the last half poked right into the ocean and was in fact the southernmost point in the whole of the USA. That wasn’t why George was sitting there, however. He’d already done the experience with Jen the day before, as a tourist thing, and actually neither of them had felt themselves come alive with excitement. It was a five-minute’s-worth kind of attraction, though as pleasant a place to sit as any. Truth be told, he had no idea why he was there, or how it had come to happen. He was merely sitting, his legs dangling over the end, watching the waves.

  After a while a woman came up and stood behind him. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘It’s time.’

  A few hours later Connie was sitting in back of the boat, running the engine and slowly working his way through the beers in the cooler. Eddie perched up front, smoking. The sun was bright out on the water, and the ocean ran flat out as far as the eye could see. It was hot, in the dry clear way you only get when you’re moving fast over water. When they were still a way from the right area, Eddie swore. He grabbed the binoculars and glared through them at a dot on the horizon.

  ‘What?’ Connie asked, speaking loud against the noise of the engine.

  ‘Spirit of Key fucking West.’

  Connie looked at his watch. It was just before eleven. ‘Kind of early for them, isn’t it?’

  A glass-bottom boat, capable of carrying fifty-odd tourists out to go stare at under-water things and be told stuff by earnest people in white shorts, the Spirit of Key West usually took its first cruise out of the Havana docks at around mid-day.

  ‘It’s coming season,’ Eddie said. ‘Guess Jack reckoned he could squeeze in a load of early birds.’

  ‘That’s going to fuck things up, isn’t it?’

  ‘There’s no way the weirdoes will uncloak in front of a bunch of assholes with cameras.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘Any idea how long they stay out over the reef?’

  ‘Never been. Got no real interest in denizens of the sea, unless there’s cocktail sauce on the side. Plus, like, I live here. But shit, how long can you look at some fish? Fifteen, twenty minutes? And that’s assuming you’re stoned.’

  Eddie swore again. ‘I guess we just wait.’

  Connie cut the engines and they drifted for a while. It was calm and very quiet, just the hollow slocking sound of water lapping up against the sides of the boat, and a few birds running the avian commuter routes up above. The seabed was maybe ten, twelve feet below, mainly bone-coloured sand but some white rocks and patches of weed. Eddie knew that, in a few places in the area, if you were to dig a few feet below the surface you’d find un-rusting metal caskets, places where the visitors stored things that included the buried remains of both their own kind and humans. But he had no interest in finding them.

  They gave the boat twenty-five minutes, and then Connie got on the radio to suggest to Jack that maybe his clients had seen enough fucking fish and would he like to get the hell back into harbour.

  After about a couple minutes of trying Connie gave Eddie a look. Eddie nodded. ‘Let’s go see what’s going on here.’

  It took them ten minutes to get within shouting distance. Neither of them especially felt like shouting, so they went in a little closer. The boat, a sixty-foot Seabreezer IV, was stationery near the reef, though a hundred yards more to the West than you would have expected. The engine was off. The boat was drifting. Eddie tried again on the radio, and got no response. Then he tried shouting anyway, in case Jack had slipped out of the control room for a cigarette while his passengers were down on the lower deck inside. Nobody shouted back.

  Meanwhile Connie brought the boat in closer. ‘So now what?’

  ‘Bring us up right to the back.’ Eddie already had his gun in his hand, and one of the big knives slipped down into his boot.

  Connie
picked up the other gun. ‘And if they suddenly kick in the engines?’

  ‘There was anybody on the bridge, we’d have spoken to them by now.’

  They got the boat up flat against the stern of the Spirit of Key West, and tied her on. Then they climbed aboard, Eddie first, Connie second: neither of them especially scared and both reconciled to the idea of shooting someone if the need arose.

  The boat was a standard of its type. Open at the back so you could catch some rays on the way to and from the reef, a covered place at the front for sitting and the eating of potato chips. At the prow, an area where you could stand and pretend you were that baby-face asshole in Titanic. A bridge area, and, below decks, the lower section where you leaned on rails and look down through the bottom.

  There were no people in any of these areas. There were also no bags, paperback books, jackets or other signs of things having been left behind.

  After checking each of the levels, Eddie climbed back up to the top and stood and looked for a while at the desk where you bought soft drinks and cookies and stuff if you really couldn’t go an hour without taking on some kind of sustenance.

  Connie joined him after poking around in the bridge. ‘This would be unusual, I feel?’

  Eddie nodded thoughtfully. ‘That about covers it.’

  ‘So what’s happened to all these people?’ Connie capped a beer that he’d luckily thought to bring on board with him, took a long pull, and peered out through the windows at the tinted ocean.

  ‘Obvious answer is there’s been a mass abduction.’

  ‘Right. That was kind of what I was assuming.’

  ‘But,’ Eddie said, ‘I’m not sure that’s working for me as an explanation.’ He accepted the beer from Connie, took a drink, and thought some more. Then he lifted the hatch on the food desk and went behind. Opened the cupboards and fridge.

  Connie watched. ‘I sense the Kruger intellect working overtime here.’

  ‘Where’s the stuff? Where the cans and the chips and those boring fucking cookies?’

  ‘They are, I take it, absent.’

  ‘This boat’s not going to come out on a jaunt without them. You take a load of tourists out here in the sun and then tell them they can’t buy a soda, you’re going to have a mutiny. People are going to lose their minds with worry and just go berserk.’

  Connie shrugged. ‘Maybe Karen didn’t make it in this morning, and Jack took a chance on doing a trip without provisions.’

  ‘Right. Or maybe the weirdoes had the munchies, and took all the stuff with them. I don’t like either version.’ Eddie got out his mobile phone, flipped it open. No signal. ‘Go try the radio.’

  Connie went forward into the bridge again. Eddie walked out back and stood on the sun deck, leaning back against the rail and watching the waves. He’d been holding a question mark in his head overnight. He was wondering if all this might provide an answer to it. Difficult to tell at this stage, but he was beginning to think it might. Trouble was, wasn’t clear what the answer might be.

  Connie came out, smiling. ‘Just spent a few minutes talking to a guy who was ready to shit a brick.’

  ‘Jack’s back at the harbour?’

  ‘You got it. With Karen, and those perky dudes in white shorts from the Marine Biology place. Not to mention a muttering hoard of sunburners who bought tickets yesterday afternoon and are really keen to come stare at fish and been looking forward to it all last night, and are currently two short steps away from litigation. He’s had to stand a round of free ice teas already.’

  Eddie rolled his shoulders, flicked the safety back on and holstered his gun. ‘There is something unusually weird going on here,’ he said, ‘And it’s pissing me off.’

  ‘So now what? Sorry to keep asking you questions and stuff, but this is, like, your area. Me, I’m just a spear carrier and happy that way.’

  ‘What did you tell Jack?’

  ‘Said we’d found his boat, it looks fine. Maybe we’d bring it back at some stage.’

  ‘He’s not barking for it now? We don’t want to be dealing with some other guys come out here to fetch it.’

  ‘Think he’s sort of given up on the day. Sounded like he had started to face the situation with the aid of alcohol-based beverages.’

  Eddie nodded. ‘Okay. That’s cool.’

  ‘We have a plan?’

  ‘We surely do.’

  ‘Hurrah.’ Connie neatly stowed the empty bottle in the trash and rubbed his hands together, his grey eyes sparkling with dangerous good humour. ‘And what is it?’

  ‘We leave the boat here, and get on with business. We go have a word with the weirdoes, outline our displeasure at the situation in general, and if necessary kick some alien butt.’

  ‘Eddie,’ Connie said, ‘That’s a fine plan.’

  Jennifer Becker sat as still as she could, covertly watching the two aliens. They hadn’t spoken to her in a while. That was okay. She didn’t want them to. In fact, she didn’t think she could bear it if they did. She was only too aware that her life as it had been up until now, which she had by and large enjoyed, was over. A conversation with either of the beings who were standing a few yards from her could only rub this in further. She had also grown tired of trying to work out what they were saying. Occasional English words floated to the surface in their discussion, which otherwise sounded like the gurgling of a boisterous stream in early spring, trickle-fed out of melting snow and gathering volume and speed as it found its joyous way down a mountainside. At first she’d wondered whether this was because the aliens didn’t have words in their language for what they were saying, like the French said they were going to have un picnic at le weekend while camping. Or whether it was more like Mrs Lal, the woman who worked at the Vietnamese grocery store in town and who’d been bilingual for so long that she seemed to forget which words belonged to which country—and who often turned to yell at her husband in a stream of gobbledygook which sounded remarkably similar to what the aliens were saying. But this was kind of an academic question and Jennifer hadn’t found that she cared enough to pursue it very far.

  Instead she was thinking about a friend of hers, Sally Dickens. Sally was the wife of one of the junior realtors in Becker & Marks. She was a little older than her husband Bruce, and Jen was a little younger than George, and the two had been close, up until a year ago. Then, little by little, Sally had started to act a little weird. At first Jenny had speculated her friend was having an affair, though she couldn’t really get the idea to stick because while Sally was a really nice person—and great, acerbic company at a cocktail party—she wasn’t what you’d think of as a hedonistic pleasure-seeker. Pretty serious, in fact, on the whole. Not the kind for sweated afternoons in darkness behind curtains in cheap hotels out by the Interstate, or hands held under the table in unpopular bars. Actually Jennifer thought that of the two of them she was more that kind of person, though of course she never had tested this theory, and had never wanted to.

  Then one afternoon they two of them had been having lunch at the quite good Italian that was part of the new mall, and she’d pressed Sally a little, partly out of concern but also just a tiny bit because her friend’s new twitchiness and silences had begun to get on her nerves. When your best friends start wigging out on you, it cuts at the heart of your life. Sally was already a few glasses of Chardonnay down at that point, and, after a couple more, and over the rest of the bottle, she tried to tell Jennifer a story. About something she claimed had happened one night when her husband was out of town, involving bright lights, strange noises, and a period of time out of time.

  Jennifer hadn’t believed her, and maybe hadn’t hidden the fact too well. It all sounded like something off a TV show, not very imaginatively adapted. The people she claimed had come to see her had been normal height or in fact a little taller, and not like those grey things you saw pictured everywhere. Apart from that it wasn’t even a very interesting story, and Jen had smiled politely and sat waiting for a gap long e
nough in which to ask for the check. Making it worse somehow was the fact that Sally had a bit of salad stuck between her teeth, which made her look vulnerable and sad. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could point out, however, not while you were being told that kind of tale. Just something that could nag at your attention, and maybe make you pay an iota less mind than you should.

  Over the next couple of months she saw Sally only once, at a party. She’d been drunk, and looked a little thin, but stood next to her husband listening to realtor stories and laughing at exactly the right moments. Her eyes had been flat, almost dry-looking, and when she saw Jen she smiled a small, tired smile that made Jen feel like a five-year-old, sensing for the first time that sometimes things happened to grown-ups which were too dismal and complex for children to understand. They barely spoke that evening, and when they did, Jen felt a little as if she was talking to someone who for reasons best known to themselves had decided to impersonate her friend, and had got the look more or less right but whose heart wasn’t really in the rest of the job.

  A few weeks after that Sally tried to kill herself. Tried really quite hard, and only just failed. Since then she had been resident in a private place about twenty-five miles out of town. ‘Depressed’, was the official verdict: just sort of depressed about stuff, in general. From what Jen could gather no mention ever been made of an otherworldly fantasy being a source for the situation. Bruce Dickens was bearing up reasonably well, probably partly because he and a female client who was trying to sell her gauche mansion over at the golf course had really quite a lot of meetings out of the office. There were no children, so that was that.