by Laird Barron
Larocca gives me a leer. “That should make sense to you. You’re the one who thinks it’s a god.”
“You’re out of your minds,” I say. “The military already tried to kill the king aliens. They tried with everything they had.”
Pryce shakes his head. “Not this gas. Not from up close when the alien’s not ready for it. Or so my contact tells me.”
“Then your contact’s full of shit. And just to be clear, I don’t care if you come back here with every luxury item left in the world. I am not going to do anything that might draw the king’s attention.” I imagine the huge eye from my dreams rolling toward me, the double pupils dilating. I shudder.
“Whatever else the gas does,” Pryce tells me, his tone gentle, “it will kill me instantly. So there won’t be any way for the creature to know you were involved.”
“Really?” I say. “What if it already knows who disguises people as monsters, but up until now, it hasn’t cared? What if you being dead doesn’t stop it from pulling information out of your brain? What if it can see through time like you and I see across space and it backtracks you to my shop?”
Larocca makes a spitting noise. “You’re letting your imagination go crazy.”
“It’s dangerous to assume that these things have human limitations,” I reply. “If the last year hasn’t taught you that, then you’re the one who’s crazy.”
With one sure, sudden motion, he points his M4 at me. I freeze.
“Let’s cut through the crap,” he says. “Bill’s right. I don’t like any part of this. But if he says this is the plan, then I guess it is. Meaning, if you don’t operate on him, I’ll shoot you. Simple as that.”
I look to Pryce. “Is it?” I ask. “As simple as that?”
He looks regretful but not enough to matter. “I didn’t want it to go down this way. I hoped you would want to help. But yes, if we have to do it like this, we will.”
“If you kill me, that’s the end of your stupid plan. Nobody else can perform the surgery.”
“But if you refuse, what’s the difference?”
“None to you, maybe. But other people will come here. Not with some insane plot but because they need my help to survive for a little while longer. Are you going to take that away from them?”
Larocca laughs. “A minute ago, it was all about what’s good for him. Now all of a sudden he’s a saint.”
Pryce ignores that to stay focused on me. “I am willing to let those few people suffer,” he says, “just like I’m willing for you to die if you won’t cooperate. It’s not right or fair, but Paulie and I are fighting for the future of the whole human race. Once we win here—”
“But you won’t!” I explode. “Hell, forget the god itself. Have you seen the Macmillan Center? It’s covered in barnacles, and it’s got monsters wandering in and out of it all the time. If just one of them gets suspicious, you’re toast.”
Pryce smiles. “That sounds like a reason for you to do your best work. Because the way you live through this is if you get me to the target and then the gas turns out to be everything it’s cracked up to be.”
“Shit,” I say.
Pryce claps me on the shoulder. “You’ll see, you’re doing the right thing. And afterward, nobody has to know we twisted your arm. You’ll go down in history as a hero.”
“Let’s just get it over with,” I answer.
The preparations are pretty straightforward. I take the parts I’m going to use out of the freezer to thaw. When they’re nearly ready, I have Pryce strip, and then we both wash at the bathroom sink. It probably doesn’t get us perfectly clean, but the aliens’ sterilizing spray kills whatever germs the soap and water miss. I park Larocca in the corner, and he hunkers down to glower and point his rifle in my general direction.
He keeps it pointed, too, through the administration of the anesthesia and the hours of cutting, grafting, and laser-splicing—I call the beam a laser but it may be something else—that follow. The gun makes it that much harder to keep my hands steady.
I manage, though, and when the job is done, I give Pryce the shot that will wake him up, pull down my surgical mask, and peel off my latex gloves. My hands tingle and ache. I go back into the bathroom, bend down to the faucet, and gulp my thirst away.
Behind me, Larocca yells, “Hey! Hey! Talk to me, Davis! Tell me how it went!”
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “Look for yourself. And ask him. He’ll wake up in a second.”
Larocca moves to the surgical table. Then his mouth pulls into a grimace. He already had some idea of what I was doing. But watching from across the room isn’t the same as seeing the results up close.
Pryce’s human eyes flutter open. Larocca tries to hide his revulsion but isn’t fast enough.
“I guess our friend did a good job,” Pryce croaks.
I bring him some water and hold the glass while he sips through a straw. “How do you feel?” I ask.
“Not too bad.”
“The anesthesia’s still wearing off. There’ll be more pain later. But I can give you pills.”
“Thanks.” He tries to sit up, and I help him. “Let me see what’s got Paulie’s so shaken up that he can’t look at me straight on.”
“You should brace yourself.” I bring him a hand mirror.
Give him credit. Unlike Larocca, he doesn’t flinch even though it’s his own face he’s looking at and even though I’ve given him what he asked for: my best work ever.
Mottled black and yellow like a bruise, oily hide covers his head and neck completely, and, together with the lack of external ears, the three extra eyes bulging from the forehead, and the serrated mandibles framing his mouth, nearly erases any trace of humanity. Thanks to the implants, even the shape of the skull is different.
The same slimy new skin covers his shoulders, from which flop the flabby tubes a Barnacle Man uses to connect itself to the inside of its shell. From there, the hide runs downward to make sleeves for his arms and mittens for the hands that now resemble flippers with thumbs.
“It’s perfect,” says Pryce. His voice is almost steady. “How could the monsters not believe I’ve turned into one of them, physically and mentally both.”
“Glad you like it,” I say. Waiting, hoping the resistance fighters can’t tell that I am, I move to the instrument stand and start cleaning up.
Meanwhile, Pryce looks to Larocca. “Can you grab my clothes? Davis, leave that. Just pack a bag. We’re moving out as soon as I feel up to it.”
“What?” I say.
“You’re coming with us,” he tells me.
“That wasn’t the deal!”
“I know, and I’m sorry. But you said it yourself. Nobody else in the world knows how to do what you do, and the human race needs you to do it over and over again until all the aliens are dead.”
“Then the human race is out of luck.”
Larocca hands Pryce a ball of tangled clothing, then aims his M4 at me. “I don’t believe you,” he says. “Bill’s about to give his life for the cause. You just need to work for it while the rest of us do everything we can to keep your safe. So get with the program, you cowardly son of a bitch!”
For another moment, I wonder if I really will have to. Then Pryce jerks, sways, and makes a retching sound.
Larocca turns back toward his friend. “What’s wrong?” he asks.
Pryce’s mouth moves, but nothing comes out except drool.
Larocca looks back at me. “What’s happening?”
I could tell him. It gets back to what I said before, about how you shouldn’t make assumptions about an alien, even one of the lesser monsters, based on what’s true for human beings.
A Barnacle Creature doesn’t have a brain. But it has strings of nervous tissue running through its skin that serve the same purpose.
Normally, I lobotomize the brain web when grafting Barnacle-Man hide, and lobotomized or not, I don’t connect it to a customer’s own nervous system. But Pryce isn’t really a cu
stomer.
Of course, I don’t want to tell Larocca any of this, and Pryce—or the thing that used to be Pryce—saves me the trouble of lying. By throwing its arms around Larocca and pulling him in close.
Larocca shrieks and tries to get his rifle pointed at the Pryce-thing. But before he can, the hybrid’s scissoring mandibles find his neck and puncture the left carotid artery. Blood spurts in an arc.
By then, I’m scrambling for the other M4, the one Pryce carried into the operating room. The creature either recognizes the danger or just wants to make sure I don’t escape. Anyway, it shoves Larocca away, jumps up, and lunges after me.
I snatch up the rifle and lurch around. The Pryce-thing is nearly on top of me, but not quite. I fire and fire until it falls down, then shoot it three times more.
Afterward, my ears ringing, gasping like I’ve run a mile, I realize my half-assed plan worked better than I had any right to expect. Yet what I mainly feel is ashamed.
That’s stupid, though. Because while there may be a tomorrow, there won’t be a day after tomorrow. And if you let the fools who think there can be call the shots, they’ll rob you of the last little piece of life that you have left.
On a Kansas Plain
Michael J. Martinez
I’ve never been to Kansas.
In fact, this is the last place I thought I’d end up visiting. Yet here I am, heading north on a two-lane highway out of what passed for “town,” surrounded by fallow fields and cold blue skies and a whole lot of nothing.
But this is where the trail led. If I’m right, I finally found Jim.
Once upon a time, James Williamson was probably one of the best equity traders out there. He had an almost preternatural sense of the market. His ability to spot trends and put two and two together made him a legend, and a rich one at that. And he leveraged it well. He married our mutual college friend, Jane Esperance, an old-money New Englander. They lived large on the Upper East Side. They gave to the right charities, went to the right parties.
I don’t run in the same circles, of course; reporters rarely do, even if they work for the big papers like me. We get all the political pull with, like, 1% of the income.
Anyway, Jim wanted to have kids, but a decade into the marriage, it just didn’t seem to be happening. When we got together for drinks—something that happened less frequently as time went on—I didn’t pry, but I could see there was stuff weighing on him. The last time I saw him, right before the incident, he confided that his marriage was on the rocks.
Then the incident happened. Jim was caught on the wrong end of a huge trade, and all his hedges blew up too. It was a one-in-a-million thing, apparently, but the odds weren’t with him. By the time it was done, he’d lost $3 billion of the company’s money, and a decent chunk of his own, too.
He disappeared that night. Nobody’s seen him in three years.
Four months ago, Jane asked me to take leave from the paper and try to find him, something I’d already been doing in my limited down-time; the stipend she offered made it easy to say yes. Jane handed over all his papers and his computer, all left behind the night he took off. It took some digging, but it turned out he set up a tiny little shell company in Bermuda—you can do that without actually going there—and bought a scrap of land out in Kansas about four months before the incident. It was the only thing he had left besides about $50,000 in cash, withdrawn the day after the incident.
With nothing else to go on, I booked a flight, rented a car…and here I am, turning off the highway onto a little dirt road, past no more than four “NO TRESPASSING” signs, going up to a rickety old trailer that looks as though a stiff breeze could send it tumbling. The pickup next to it—imagine Jim in a pickup!—looks just as decrepit.
I park the rental about ten yards from the place, where the road ends and wild grasses take over. I can see where the grass flattened out into scrub, but it feels like I’d be driving on someone’s lawn, if you can call that straw patch of crap a lawn.
“Don’t move.”
I nearly jump out of my skin at the voice behind me, which is followed by a metallic click. You know the click, the one you hear in the movies when someone cocks a gun. And what do you know, it sounds exactly like the movies.
“It’s me, Jim. It’s Steve,” I say, reflexively raising my hands. I don’t turn around yet. I don’t know if I should.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Jim says. “You look like Steve. How do I know it’s you?”
This is the point where I start getting nervous. Is this what the deep end looks like? “Jim, we went to school together. You majored in econ, I majored in English. We pledged Alpha Xi together. Roomed for a year in Jenkins Hall. You had the top bunk.”
“Asshole,” he says. It’s not an epithet, more like a leading statement.
“Twenty-eight consecutive turns,” I say, remembering that one epic drinking game we had. “That night our freshman year. I was sick for four days.”
I can practically hear him relax behind me. “All right. Get inside. It’s cold out here.”
With that he trudges right past me toward the trailer. I can’t see his face, but I can see the rest of him has totally gone to seed. No more Brooks Brothers here. His hair’s a long, matted mess, and he looks like he’s got a good bushy beard now. His clothes are pure hick, faded Wal-Mart jeans and flannel. The boots look sturdy, though.
The rifle—the one now on his shoulder—looks pristine.
“Where’d you come from?” I venture as we approach the door. It’s got six locks on it. His keys jangle as he methodically unlocks each one, top to bottom. I can see his windows are barred from the inside, too.
“Brush,” he says. “Saw your car make the turn off the main road. Good sightlines here.”
Sightlines? I’m not sure exactly when Jim turned into a survivalist nutcase, but seems like the transformation is pretty far along. I slip my hand into my jacket and feel the cold lump there—my backup, just in case. Given that my worries thus far have been spot on…well, I don’t want to think about it.
The smell of rot and mildew hits me as the door opens. I knew from past history that Jim could be a bit of a slob, but it seemed Jane cured him of that, once upon a time. Not so much, now. I follow Jim in and find my worst fears keep getting confirmed.
The living room is some kind of office now. There’s a desk—a old door held up by cinder blocks—and it’s covered in papers and books and drawings. There’s a computer there, too. The walls are covered in maps and charts—maps of New York and New England, and oceanic maps as well. Lines and notes are scribbled here and there, and I can’t even read the scrawl. The sofa’s ratty as hell, and so is the desk chair. The alleged coffee table is some two-by-fours and more cinderblocks. Everything is covered in more books, more paper, more scribbling.
“It ain’t much, but it’s home,” Jim says dully. I hear the click of the locks being applied again and try not to feel like a caged animal. “You want something to drink?”
“No, thanks,” I say. Honestly, I wouldn’t trust anything in this pit to be healthy. “So…wow. Been a while.”
I turn to him and finally catch his face. He’s lost weight—it was hard to tell under his mountain man clothes, but his face is drawn and gaunt, hollowed at the cheeks, dark rings under the eyes. The beard is just as unkempt as his hair. But his eyes…they shine. He’s in there somewhere. Or…well, is that something else I’m seeing? Fear? Predation? Both?
“Didn’t think anybody’d find me,” he says, propping the rifle up by the door. He shucks his flannel jacket and I see he’s got a pistol in one of those shoulder rigs. Christ. He goes off to the kitchen and I hear him grab something out of the fridge, followed by the familiar hiss-pop of a can. “Thought I squared everything before I left.”
He waves me to the one open spot on the couch and I gingerly sit on the edge, trying to avoid a particularly nasty stain. “Pretty close,” I allow, taking the conversation just as gingerly. “The Bermuda company regist
ry.”
Jim plops into the desk chair and smiles a particularly feral smile. “Aw, shit. I thought I took care of that. Well, hell. When you’re on the run, you’re bound to forget something.”
“On the run?” I ask. “From the Feds? For that trade that blew up?”
He barks out a short, bitter laugh. “You know in the movies where they say, ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you?’” he says, followed by a swig of beer. “It’s like that.”
Maybe he’s right; I can already see there’s a pattern to the paper detritus strewn around this crappy little trailer, and it’s making me even more nervous. “So what is it, then? You skim money off the firm or something? You kill somebody?” I kind of regret that last bit. I’d hate for him to get ideas. Then it occurs to me that I’m thinking this way about one of my oldest friends.
Naturally, I’ve managed to piss him off. “Of course not! And I didn’t do a damn thing to the firm!” he snaps, pointing the can at me for emphasis. “That whole trade was pristine. I said it then, and I’ll say it now. That was a goddamn setup.”
“Hey, I’m no finance whiz, but isn’t it a bit over the top to stick a Wall Street bank with a $3 billion loss just to screw someone over?” I ask, as gently as possible. “I mean, there’s compliance systems. Tracking. Someone would be able to trace it back.”
Jim just smiles and shakes his head sadly. “You’d think. But they made it happen.”
“Who?”
Jim stares off into space for several moments. The light in his eyes dies out as his mind retreats. Then he snaps back and looks me over. Weighing me. It’s disconcerting as hell. “You want to know what really happened?” He doesn’t even let me say yes. “Fine. Now that you found me, I’m gonna have to move on anyway, so might as well get it off my chest. Besides, I got most of it figured out anyway.”
Oh, boy. This is going to be some kind of inspired conspiracy schtick. Jim doesn’t disappoint.