What Happened to Lori

by J. A. Konrath

  More screeching.

 

  “That is quite enough, Mr. Fabler.”

  The creature fell over, and Fabler scrambled on top, fumbling for the helmet latch. After he yanked it off, he shoved the barrel of the Glock into the monster’s nasal opening.

  “I want my wife.”

  “Let him go, or I shall cut the arms and legs off of Lori while you watch.”

  “This isn’t a negotiation.” Fabler fired twice, then got up, prying his axe out of the dead grey’s foot.

  Eight greys now surrounded him. Three hauled away Grim, Doruk, and Kadir, the latter two men now fitted with black collars and being lifted onto gurneys. The other five greys circled Fabler. But they lacked the precision of a trained military unit.

 

  “I killed two. I can kill a whole lot more. Give me Lori.”

  “Killed? Who have you killed, Mr. Fabler? See for yourself.”

  Fabler figured it might be a trick, but he chanced a look at the first monster he’d stabbed in the head. Another grey leaned over it, holding some sort of—

 

  The gun sported a thin bayonet on the underside, which the grey jammed into its dead buddy’s face.

 

  Then the weapon fired. But it wasn’t a weapon. Fabler saw smoke, heard a zapping/sizzling sound, and stared, awed, as the dead alien sat up and blinked, wiping away the residual blood and gore, his burst eye now whole again.

 
 

  “Put down your backpack and weapons, Mr. Fabler, and accept the supplication collar. I promise, you will not be harmed. I will take you to your wife. You will understand everything.”

 
 
 

  A black pinprick appeared in the distance, and started to grow. The aliens pushed Grim and the others toward the newly opened hole, their gurneys floating on cushions of air.

  The other grey, the one Fabler had shot in the head, stood up alongside the companion who revived him.

 
 
 

  Fabler thought of a mission, deep in the sandbox, his squad boxed in with mortar fire. He had despaired then as well, a pucker factor of ten. T-Man dialed in the range, slow and methodical, like they were playing a game of Battleship. Only a matter of time before a mortar dropped on their heads, and no clear path to retreat.

  The savior that day turned out to be Grim.

  “I’m not sitting here, waiting to get blowed up.”

  “You wanna pop smoke?”

  Grim grinned. “Hell, no. I’m pressing.”

  “Attack the superior force with the height and cover advantage?”

  “Last thing they’d expect. You with me, brother? Up for a little POO hunt?”

  Grim’s suicidal confidence infected Fabler, temporarily overriding his fear. They charged the enemy, and within thirty seconds found the Point Of Origin, and capped the team of four Taliban who’d been raining death upon them.

  They’d gotten bronze stars for that bit of stupidity.

 

  “I’m coming for you, asshole. I’m coming for you, and I’m going to cut you into hamburger, and I’m going to make damn sure none of your asshole buddies bring you back to life.”

  Silence ensued. Fabler swapped out magazines for the KRISS and the Glock, pointed himself toward the blackness, and marched ahead.

  “ALL TEAMS FALL BACK. I AM SENDING IN THE EXPERIMENT.”

 
 

  Fabler watched as the last of the greys vanished through the widening hole, taking Grim, Kadir, and Doruk with them.

  For a moment, nothing happened.

  Fabler halted, his arm hair raising up in the vibrating hum.

  And then—

  Something came out of the darkness.

  PRESLEY ○ 9:15am

 
 

  Curled up into a fetal position on the cabin wall, parallel with the ground, put a lot of things into perspective.

  Presley had known pain.

  Her mother dying young; terrible.

  Losing Brooklyn’s father in a car wreck; devastating.

  Brooklyn’s congenital illness; debilitating.

 
 
 

  Presley had done a lot she wasn’t proud of, a whole lot, while getting Brooklyn a new heart.

 
 
 

  The loan from the Turks, and the honey traps; mistakes.

  Taking this job; a giant mistake.

  Sleeping with Grim…

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

  Presley told herself that, often. And, on the surface, it rang true.

 
 
 
 

  Waiting for the ship to leave was maddening.

 
 
 
 

  As the seconds and minutes passed, and the self-loathing increased exponentially, Presley came to an ugly realization.

 
 
 
 
 
 

  Presley hadn’t found self-worth in the military. She found PTSD, and a daughter with disabilities, born because some higher power deemed it was time Presley stopped acting like a navel-gazing sociopath and instead cared about something more than herself.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  ers.

 
 

  That last bit of self-awareness smacked Presley like a fist to the mouth.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

  Presley sobbed. “I can’t watch her die.”

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

  “I need to stop running.”

 
 
 
 
 

  Parallel to the ground, Presley stared down at her feet, clinging to the side of the cabin like she wore antigravity boots.

  Then she pushed her shoulders back, leading with her chin, and walked, sure-footed, along the wall, and came to the corner of the house, staring into the cylinder of light.

 
 
 

  Presley answered herself.

  “No. That’s not what I think.”

 

  She stepped off the edge of the cabin and let the light take her.

  FABLER ○ 9:16am

  Most stress comes from the waiting.

  In the military, and in prison, Fabler lived the life of a wound spring, waiting for violence to erupt. For the past few weeks, waiting for the greys to return, he’d become so tightly coiled that he often wondered if the tension would snap his own spine.

  Being in a constant state of ready had bowed him over, crippling him.

  But now, in the white light, with the Experiment shambling toward him, Fabler stood up tall and felt freer than he had in years.

 
 

  In the light, the Experiment didn’t look like Fabler had imagined it while fighting in the dark so long ago.

 

  Imagine a spider with fifty legs, larger than a hippo. And instead of spindly spider legs it had dozens of human legs and arms, male and female, all lumped together like a box of melted candles.

  But it had more than limbs. It had patches of orange hair—armpit, chest, pubic, and head, dotting various curves and crevices. Several heads; Fabler counted six. Human heads, not grey heads. Caucasian, male and female, each wearing the grotesque, contorted expression of chronic agony.

  Between limbs, torso parts. Breasts, buttocks, genitals, and other appendages that looked vaguely human, but misshapen and malformed.

 

  For a Frankenstein patchwork of sewn-together human beings, the Experiment moved swiftly and with purpose, beelining straight for Fabler at the speed of a sprint, doing a sort of shuffling/rolling motion unlike anything he’d ever seen in nature.

  Fabler dropped his edged weapons next to his feet and unslung his backpack. Bringing around the KRISS, aiming carefully, Fabler unloaded a magazine into the thing. Blood exploded out of its horrendous, naked body like liquid fireworks, and when Fabler changed mags he heard an unholy chorus of moans coming from its many heads.

  He switched out mags.

  At fifty meters away, Fabler had already shot it over a hundred times.

  It didn’t even slow down.

  At twenty meters away, with not enough time to reload, Fabler dropped the rifle and emptied a full Glock mag, managing to shoot the scalps off of three heads before diving out of the way as it churned past.

  The Experiment stopped on a dime, adjusted, and then steamrolled over Fabler, pinning him down with clutching, scratching, kicking limbs, raining a waterfall of blood.

  It ripped off his helmet, pawing and poking.

  The smell choked him. Septic and antiseptic, bodily fluids and chemical preservatives, mingled with FAN; the stink of barracks and unwashed soldiers, feet, ass, and nuts.

  Fabler managed to turn onto his side and pike his body, snatching the DoubleTap from his ankle holster, putting both rounds into a leering face.

  A face with red hair and blue eyes, swatches of grey at the temples.

  A face belonging to a man in his sixties.

  The man’s scalp came off, and his brain plopped out onto Fabler’s chest, warm and wet.

  As Fabler fumbled and struggled in the whirlwind of arms and legs, reaching for his SEAL folding knife, a realization rendered him limp.

 
 
 
 
 
 

  Fabler turned his head to the side, retching, then shook the blood out of his hair and sliced and cut and hacked and stabbed, all the while cursing with rage, determined to kill this thing, to end its misery, not to save himself but to save his wife from any more suffering if she had somehow become part of this abomination of nature.

  For over a minute, Fabler wielded the blade with the speed and endurance of a middleweight boxing champion at the height of their career, jabbing and dodging, sticking and moving—

  —and then the spring in him, the spring so tightly coiled it had controlled his every move for too long to remember, finally wound down.

  As the energy and fight went out of Fabler, he felt hands encircle his neck and squeeze, and the edges of his vision closed in with the blackness of certain death.

 
 
 
 
 

  Something squealed at him. Something female.

  Fabler squinted and saw a snarling head staring malevolently at him with blue-green eyes.

  Her face bathed in blood.

  Missing an ear.

 

  Fabler couldn’t tell.

 

  Then, his air running out, his brain starving for oxygen, pure panic took hold.

 
 
 
 
 
 

  “Fabler!”


  A female voice. Strong. Determined.

  Recognizable.

  And then the hands were off of Fabler’s throat, and he gulped in air and pawed blood from his eyes to see who called him.

  There she was. Silhouetted by the light. And Fabler got swept up by emotion so deep and powerful it was like being jolted with the stun gun.

 
 

  Fabler called out to her, a strangled cry of hope.

  “PRESLEY!”

  She had his Espada knife in one hand, the Winkler axe in the other, and she bellowed like a Valkyrie and rained hell upon the Experiment with both blades.

  PRESLEY ○ 9:22am

  Chopping coniferous trees down.

  Except it wasn’t chopping trees. And it wasn’t running backward using a mirror. And it wasn’t circling the house in a welding helmet, lighting the way with a road flare.

  It was fighting a monster, in an alien spaceship filled with light, in some sort of backwards physics dimension where left meant right and forward meant backward.

 

  When first coming onto the ship, the disorientation had been extreme. Presley could barely walk, and every movement she made contradicted her own mind.

  But after a minute, she adjusted.

  Running away from the gunfire, which meant going toward it, Presley tried to comprehend the scene going on before her. Fabler, fighting against some creature made up of human arms and legs.

 

  “There will come a time when something happens that is so bizarre, so alien, that your brain won’t be able to handle it. But you don’t need to understand it. You need to act.”

 
 

  So Presley acted.

  She picked up the blades that Fabler dropped, yelled out his name, and descended upon the monster with extreme prejudice, hacking and slashing and cutting it down.

  Fabler managed to slice off a dozen limbs, and shoot it so full of bullet holes that every time the thing moved it looked like a blood sponge being squeezed.

  Presley focused on one appendage at a time. An arm. A leg. A head. Chopping and chopping until the thing’s mobility became so limited it could no longer fight back.

  After that, it was no longer about survival.

  It was about mercy killing. Putting this pathetic creature out of its misery.