More Tomorrow: And Other Stories

by Michael Marshall Smith

  If in doubt, bring a weapon. It seemed so obvious now.

  ‘And,’ Connie added, spotting another flaw, ‘you’re one of the people who’s been kidnapped, surely.’

  ‘He’s referring to me,’ said another voice, female this time. A young woman stepped out of the shadows on the other side of the clearing. She had big hair, dainty tattoos, and a gun in her hand that looked like a bunch of big spiders fighting on a frog. ‘You got a gun, Connie?’ she said. ‘Sure you do. Take it out, slowly, and throw it on the ground.’

  ‘Fran?’ Connie asked, his voice finally cracking, ‘What in Christ’s name are you doing here?’

  ‘Could ask the same of you. But I’m not going to, because to be frank I don’t really care. Just lose the piece.’

  Connie reached into his pocket like a man in a daze, pulled out the gun, and dropped it on the ground.

  ‘Great,’ muttered Fud. ‘Thanks for your help, banana-boy.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Connie said, still staring at Fran. ‘Well, you’re so tough, you do something.’

  ‘We’re not good at that kind of thing,’ Fud muttered.

  Fran motioned George forward with her gun. George picked Connie’s weapon up and held it in his hand, as if unsure how to proceed. In the light that was always present in the clearing he appeared strange, shaky, as if holding himself together by will power alone. His face looked bulbous and pale, his skin damp.

  Connie shook his head. ‘Is Janine running the bar by herself?’ he asked, in need of clinging to something he could understand. ‘It’s Friday night. She’s going to go ape.’

  ‘No pun intended, presumably,’ Fran smiled. ‘I have no idea. I don’t give a shit. I hate that bar. And those olive things you do? What are they about? Are they supposed to be food, or what? They’re crap. Now, to business.’ She pointed her gun at his head. ‘You know too much. You have to die.’ She laughed delightedly. ‘Cool. I always wanted to say that.’

  ‘I know shit,’ Connie said hurriedly. ‘Really.’

  Fran did something to the gun which was clearly preparatory to using it to hurt people. ‘Sorry, but that’s the way it’s got to be.’

  ‘Seriously, it’s overkill. There’s fish in the bay got more idea of what’s going on than me. Far as I know, you’re just a waitress. A damned fine one, don’t get me wrong. But a waitress, mainly.’

  ‘Oh, I’m a lot more than that,’ Fran laughed. ‘In fact, I’m…’

  There was a sudden, short cry. Everyone turned, to see that George was now lying on his back on the ground with the air of someone who would be there for a while. Standing beside him, his gun pointed unswervingly at Fran’s head, was Eddie.

  Connie didn’t think he’d ever been so pleased to see anyone in his life, and in that moment, in a tiny, very male way, he loved the guy to bits. Eddie looked so casual. He looked so armed. He looked so much like if Fran even twitched then she’d be missing her head before she knew it—which, though a very specific way to appear, was easy to recognize and good to see.

  No-name goggled. ‘Are you seeing this too?’ he hissed to Fud, in a low voice. ‘People just keep appearing.’

  ‘Yo, Fran,’ Eddie said, carefully taking a couple of steps forward. His gun, while he did this, remained so steady that you could have rested a beer glass on it and not lost a drop. ‘If that’s your real name. Which frankly I doubt. Why don’t you lower the gun.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Fran said.

  There was a quick, dry cracking sound, and Fran’s right hand disappeared, taking the gun with it. She blinked, and a moment later a thick black gloop began to drip from the severed wrist. ‘You fucker,’ she said, with quiet amazement.

  ‘Why don’t you tell Connie what you are?’ Eddie suggested.

  ‘He doesn’t want to know,’ Fran snarled, shaking her wrist. ‘Jeez, Eddie, have you any idea how long it’s going to take to grow a fucking hand back? Fingers are really hard to do.’

  ‘Fran’s from another planet,’ Eddie said to Connie, slowly letting the gun drop. His tone suggested this was no more remarkable than her being a Pisces, or lifelong Blue Jays fan.

  ‘I see,’ Connie said, nodding sagely.

  ‘So’s George, though he didn’t know it.’

  Connie stopped nodding and stared at Eddie, like an owl that believed someone was trying to pull a fast one on it. ‘Kind of hard thing to forget, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I’d have thought so, but that’s what happened. For the whole of his life George believed he was just a regular guy who sold people houses and land. Jen believed that too, which must have made this afternoon rather difficult for her. But recently he’s started to remember—because someone began dumping clues in his head. He thought it was a memory of abduction, and I assumed it was these assholes gearing up to make a play.’ He indicated the spindly aliens, who were wide-eyed and silent. ‘And you guys didn’t go out of your way to correct my mistake, which pisses me off somewhat. Given that I’ve now saved your gill-headed asses, I think there’s going to be a change in pay and working conditions.’

  ‘Saved our asses?’ Yag said. ‘How so?’

  ‘This is some kind of significant staging post or trans-dimensional transportation thing you’ve got going on this island, right? And it’s your job to guard it.’

  ‘There’s an element of that,’ Yag admitted cagily. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Worked it out. I figure that if there’s a whole universe out there, chances are there’s going to be more than one type of alien and their pets around.’ He winked at the greys. ‘No offence, fellas.’

  ‘None taken,’ the lead grey said. ‘Hell, we like being pets. People give you food.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ one of the others added, pointedly.

  Eddie turned back to Yag. ‘Fran, she’s not one of yours, so obviously she’s one of a different type. Her attitude seems somewhat hostile. I didn’t know from the beginning she was in on what’s going on, but I figured someone other than George had to be—especially after George disappeared. My guess is that somehow, at some point in the past, she must have slipped through immigration and has been laying low. And last night I realized George wasn’t what he seemed, or even what he thought he was. When I asked him how long ago it was since his wife had been abducted, he told me forty-five minutes.’

  ‘And?’ Connie asked. He took a couple of steps away from Fran, who was glaring unhappily at Eddie. ‘So what?’

  ‘Take about ten to get from the Marquesa to Slappy’s,’ Eddie said, ‘Even if you were slow and got lost. Maybe he spent ten other minutes tearing his hair out in the hotel suite, or running around the grounds. Still leaves a block of time unaccounted for. I think he spent that time sitting staring into space in the room. I think that Fran abducted Jennifer as part of a process of getting George to remember what he really was.’

  ‘What, like, gay or something?’

  ‘No,’ Eddie said patiently. ‘George is a sleeper. An alien in disguise even to himself. She needed him to wake up, because she wanted him to help her take this base and open the floodgates.’

  ‘So why’d George admit it was forty-five minutes?’ Yag said. ‘Why didn’t he lie?’

  ‘He’d stopped being wholly human,’ Eddie shrugged. ‘But hadn’t yet reverted to his real type. He was confused. He no longer really understood what to say, or how to say it. When we saw him at the bar, the human part was temporarily back in control again. He didn’t understand what the hell was going on, and he was afraid, and he told the truth because he thought it would help. He’d lost his wife. He wanted her back.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Connie said. ‘Fran was in the bar at the time. How’d she do the Mrs Becker thing, when she was carrying drinks in front of my eyes?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Eddie admitted irritably. ‘I also never understood the appeal of Seinfeld, and the whole grassy knoll thing is a mystery to me. I haven’t got the complete thing worked out. But that’s basically how it happened, right Fran?’

 
; Fran had stopped shaking her hand.

  She looked calmly back at Eddie.

  ‘Four hundred and fifty years,’ she said, eventually. She didn’t look defeated, or worried, or frightened. ‘I volunteered. I came ahead. I knew Florida when it was just a big swamp, just a few Indians wandering around. It seemed like a good place to wait for backup. It was quiet. It was hot. Then the white guys showed up. Decided this was Heaven on Earth. Whacked the first lot of Indians, and then let some more in and called them Seminoles. Let them stay. For a while, and then whacked them for the most part too. Meanwhile drained and farmed and did stuff, turning the mainland into a zoo. Then there was that stupid-ass fight about whether you were allowed to own other humans or not, so I came down the Keys to get out of the way. Watched the hotel guy, what was his name, Flagler?—lousy lay, whatever he was called—build the bridge right down through the Keys. Then the hurricane took it a couple years later. Then another got built.’

  Eddie was keen on the idea of a cigarette by this point, but knew it would ruin Fran’s sense of occasion and he figured that after a few centuries she had a right to that. Plus he was running very low. He just listened. The others did too. You sort of had to.

  ‘All the time,’ Fran said, shaking her head. ‘You guys have no idea that you’re all just barely-tolerated guests, and that these guys’—she indicated Yag and Fud with distaste—‘have already laid claim. I wait, and I wait. They said they were going to send more after me. That there’d be enough for us to take this ridiculous island, which small though it is, is very fucking important in the general scheme of things. That was my job. But no-one appeared. No-one. For year after year after year. Until finally I learned what had happened. I got a message.’

  ‘How?’ Eddie asked, intrigued.

  ‘They’re beamed down, coded into The Jerry Springer Show,’ Fran said. ‘What else do you think is the point of that shit? Anyhow, the message told me that the controls had been tightened. They had managed to get someone over, but up in the North—and he’d only been able to stay for less than five hours. So he’d popped through, made a baby with a human, and then slipped back again. That baby was George, and he had no idea who he was. Until I finally found him, and started floating things into his head, waking him up to the way he should be. He got drawn down here, as all the sad abductee fucks do because they know something’s going on around here and they think it’s going to help them to be near. He still wasn’t really getting with the program until last night, when I got a wino to go around to the Marquesa and grab the little woman out of her suite. And that about brings us up to date.’

  Everyone looked at her for a moment. Then Eddie spoke. ‘All that waiting, for one more guy to arrive?’

  ‘One is all I need,’ Fran said. ‘Hell, one good man is all anyone needs.’

  ‘And now it’s all screwed,’ Connie said, with satisfaction.

  Fran laughed, with a kind of quiet contentment. ‘Screwed? I don’t think so.’ She nodded at where George was lying prone. ‘I really don’t think that at all.’

  Eddie was quick. He turned, stepped back and put three shells into George before anyone else had even moved. But it made no difference. By the time the erstwhile realtor was on his feet, his body was already halfway to changing. His knees had swollen to twice their usual size, and the skin was splitting like a dropped fig. The rest of his body was swelling too, unevenly but very quickly—some parts looking like they were about to explode, others dwindling to twig thickness.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Yag said, in a quiet, aghast voice. ‘It’s one of them.’

  Eddie popped a measured three shells directly into what had been George’s head, but was now a huge twisted thing that look like an old tree trunk covered in moss. It made no difference. Then he heard the greys gasp, and turned to see the same thing was happening to Fran. She was getting bigger. She was expanding and contracting in the same way George was, but as part of the process both of them were simply acquiring more mass. Somehow, drawn from somewhere, more stuff was going into them—and they were getting larger and larger. Both were making a low keening sound, though it wasn’t clear whether this was coming from what was left of their mouths or if it was part of the process of change, flesh and bone screaming as it was pulled agonizingly into a configuration never meant to spend time on this planet or in our reality. It looked like something that Hellraiser dude might have come up with, the morning after far too much Mexican food.

  As the creatures got bigger and bigger, and started to vibrate like gross, blood-spitting tuning forks, everyone suddenly drew breath and realized they wanted to be somewhere else. Yag and Fud ran to a point on the left-hand side of the clearing and started hammering their fists on something Eddie couldn’t see, but assumed was the means of going back whence they’d come. Evidently it wasn’t opening. The greys meanwhile ran in five random directions, got scared after a couple of yards, and then all hurtled back again to crash together in the middle. The two weirdoes gave up on the invisible door and tried to go sprinting off into the trees, only to find that something had happened to the air there and it had become an invisible wall. No-name, meanwhile, was evidently trying to crawl underneath one of the reclining chairs. Connie just stood, hands down by his side, watching events unfold with the air of a man who’d decided that if the world was going to drive him stark raving mad he might as well go along for the ride, and get full value out of the experience.

  Within two long minutes Fran and George stood ten feet high, looking like twisted figures painted by Francis Bacon around an idea by Miro, rendered in blood and bloat. They took a few shambling steps towards each other. Then stopped, at what looked like a prescribed distance, and stretched out to each other with what had once been hands.

  Eddie knew what was about to happen, and emptied his gun into various parts of their anatomies, without much hope but knowing that he had to prevent the two of them becoming one. Fran had said that’s all she needed, just one other of her species. Eddie didn’t want to see, didn’t want the world to see, what happened when two of these guys conjoined. He sensed it would be a bad thing.

  He shouted at Connie and Connie slowly drew his eyes from the spectacle, realized what Eddie wanted, and pulled his gun.

  They fired and reloaded, fired and reloaded, picking divots out of the aliens’ flesh but doing nothing to stop the inexorable progress of each’s flesh towards the other’s. The two bodies were now of slightly different shape, like halves of a biological jigsaw puzzle waiting to be fitted together like sperm and egg.

  The greys and the weirdoes stopped trying to run and just watched transfixed, as the two humans stood mere yards from the twisting nightmare and fired and fired and fired. In Eddie’s mind everything in the world had disappeared. Everything within vision, everything he had seen and done and heard about, everyone he had known and killed and kissed and loved and found merely irritating. All he could see was two lumpen hands, straining towards each other, warm, glistening knobs of flesh yearning to become one thing and grow together. He hit the knobs time and again, but within seconds they were back again: while human fingers might be difficult to do, these creatures’ real shape could evidently heal and regrow almost instantaneously. Eddie was coldly aware that such a species would be impossible to fight, once they came through, and that the fate of the whole planet might depend on him doing something now, that his mother’s son held the future of the world in his hands.

  He gave it his best shot. He tried. He couldn’t do it.

  And so it was just as well that, as the bridge was made and the two hands became one with a sound that was like a hundred happy people sighing at once, there was the sudden noise of a vicious, fizzing explosion. At that very same moment the whole collective top half of both what had once been George and what had never been Fran disappeared like dirt scraped off a windshield.

  The remaining four-foot-high pieces shuddered, squirmed like sentient piles of shit, and then were blown to dust by two further explosions of the
same kind.

  The clearing was utterly silent for a moment. Everyone stood and stared at where the action had been, seeing only a large circle of scorched grass.

  Then they turned.

  Standing off to one side, each holding a complex-looking weapon and still looking sunburnt, were a pair of English honeymooners.

  ‘Sorry we’re late,’ they said.

  About half an hour later, Eddie and Connie stood at the end of the pier. The greys were gone. They’d been sent back to their compound and had complied with reasonably good grace, largely because of the promise of some extra food and being allowed to stay up late. The weirdoes were also absent. The two English people had taken them off to one side in the clearing and had a long conversation with them, during which there had been much kicking of heels, sulky nodding and general averting of gaze by the spindly ones.

  Eddie and Connie stood right where they’d been, guns still in hand, waiting for everything to start making sense. Eventually the weirdoes had come reluctantly over, obviously sent by the young couple. They’d mumbled short and insincere apologies for any inconvenience they’d caused, and then tramped in a line back over to the far side of the clearing, where this time the invisible door was evidently working again. Then the English couple had invited Eddie and Connie to accompany them back to the pier.

  ‘So,’ Connie said, after a moment of standing looking down at the boat. ‘Guess you’re not from London, England after all.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said the male one. He was wearing a white Gap T-shirt and khaki shorts, and had engaging blue eyes. ‘Well, not originally. Though we do have a small place in Islington at the moment. A pied a terre, really. Quite convenient for the centre of town.’

  ‘Where are you really from?’ Eddie asked.