What Happened to Lori

by J. A. Konrath

  Fabler pulled over to the side of the road and got out. He faced the heavens and spread out his arms, letting the water drench him. The sweat, the blood, the stench; it all swirled into the desert sand.

 
 
 

  Fabler stripped down to his underwear and got back into the Jeep, changing into the dry clothes he’d brought along; jeans, a tee, socks. He’d forgotten shoes, so he had to put the wet boots back on. Then he wasted five minutes applying antibacterial gel and administering a shot of lidocaine to his scalp laceration.

  Looking reasonably normal, Fabler realized he was driving on fumes. He found a gas station in town, bought a case of bottled water, jerky, nuts, some fruit, and a beige, hooded alpaca poncho.

  Back in the Jeep, he noticed a green fly on the dashboard.

  Fabler lashed out and slapped the insect with his hand.

  He intended to wipe the insect guts off on his pants, but felt a tiny stinging sensation on his palm. Fabler raised it to check, expecting he’d gotten bitten.

 

  Fabler squinted, trying to make sense of what he saw. Rather than insect parts, the fly had exploded into what looked like silver glitter.

  Fabler felt another sting, a millisecond after seeing a small electric spark come from the fly parts.

  He closed his hand into a fist, dug into his backpack, and pulled out the first aid kit again, selecting the magnifying glass. Then, sitting in the driver’s seat with the overhead light on, he examined the fly.

 
 

  Fabler’s confusion coalesced into recognition.

 
 
 

  Then Fabler remembered the cameras Grim had installed around the house.

  For surveillance.

  “This is a bug.”

 
 

  Fabler wasn’t sure what to do with the bug, but on the off chance it could still transmit, he brushed it off outside the vehicle.

  Then he wasted ten valuable minutes searching the vehicle for more.

  GRIM ○ 7:59+am

 
 

  Some sat there, looking drugged out of their minds.

  Some sat there, weeping.

  Many were missing limbs. One guy had a face like a Picasso, his eyes where his mouth should be, ears on his neck.

 

  Grim accepted that he wouldn’t find her. Lori had to be gone. Probably a blessing. Three years in this extraterrestrial POW camp was a fate too horrible to comprehend.

  After passing the first group of cells, Grim got lost. The corridors all looked the same, and they branched off at regular intervals, like a corn maze.

  The bloody dead gland tissue that Grim had spent fifteen minutes gouging off the dead alien for no good reason because it wouldn’t open doors, turned out to have a purpose after all. Grim smeared a splotch of blood on the lower portion of a wall after every turn, sort of like a trail of breadcrumbs.

  Turned out he’d been going in circles. He adjusted accordingly, stopping every few steps to listen.

 
 

  Ships don’t contain hundreds of meters of empty corridors. Every square inch is utilitarian and has purpose. Grim expected a spaceship would be similar.

 
 
 

  Grim couldn’t even find the control room again, where the Watcher had vivisected Kadir and Doruk. Or the breeding room, where he’d been intimate with those plastic drills.

 
 

  Grim pushed on a wall.

  Solid.

  He gave it a kick.

 

 
 

  Following his trail of blood markings, Grim retraced his steps back to the brig area, intent on telling Presley that he had no clue what to do next.

  But he couldn’t find Presley.

 
 
 
 

  “Presley!” Grim yelled in a stage whisper.

  No reply.

  He tried again, louder, bracing himself in case the greys bum-rushed him. “Can anyone hear me?”

  No one answered.

  He tried one final time, filling his lungs and letting loose with as much sound as he could make.

  “PRESLEY!”

  Several seconds of silence passed. Then a woman yelled back.

  “You’re not Grim.”

 
 

  “LORI!”

  Grim jogged down the corridor.

  “You sound like him, but you’re not him.”

  “Keep talking. I’m near you.”

  “Leave me alone.”

 
 

  “Lori, it’s Grim.”

  “No it isn’t!”

 

  “Nine years old. On the playground. You hung upside-down from the monkey bars by your knees, to do a penny drop. You landed wrong and broke your ankle. I went with you to the ER.”

  No reply came.

  “After you got your cast, Dad bought us ice cream. You dropped yours and I gave you mine.”

 
 

  “Grim?”

  “Keep talking, Lori. I’m coming toward you.”

  Grim kept moving forward, eyeing the walls for blood marks.

  “Is it really you, Grim?”

  Grim got to a fork in the hallway, one he hadn’t even noticed before because the walls and compartments were all identical.

  “It’s me, Lori. It’s Grim. Where are you? Where—”

  Grim stopped, realizing he’d come to a cell.

  Lori stood behind the translucent plastic, wearing a loose, stained gown. Her hair, her face, everything exactly as Grim remembered.

  Grim choked on a sob and fell to his knees.

 

  “Lori. Oh my god, Lori.”

  Lori’s face trembled, but she jutted out her chin. “This isn’t some trick? Prove to me you’re real.” Tears streaked down her face. “Prove I’m not imagining you.”

  “It’s really me.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t. I can’t take this anymore. It’s hard enough to believe anything. But you? Here?”

  “Of course I’m here. Nothing could keep me away.”

  Then she collapsed, full body sobs shaking her. She hugged her own chest, and Grim realized her right hand had been amputated.

  “I almost gave up, Grim. So many times, I almost gave up.”

  “You can give up, tomorrow.” He smiled through his tears. “Today, keep fighting.”

  Lori sniffled. “I said that.”

  “I know. It’s helped keep me going.” Then Grim noticed her ears.

 
/>   “Fabler told me he pulled your ear off.”

  She raised a hand and touched the side of her head. “It’s a graft. Not mine. I think the woman they took it from… I think she’s dead. They can do things, sculpt flesh. Add it.” She raised her stump. “And take it away. When did you get here?”

  “A little while ago.”

  “Is Fabler with you?”

  “No.” “Are you okay? How have you been?”

  Lori squinted at him. “You look. Different.”

  “This is new.” Grim held up Presley’s hand. “I can finally count to fifteen.”

  “Yeah, that. But your face. You look… older.”

  “It’s been a few years, Sis.”

  “Years?”

  “Three years.”

  Lori shook her head. “It can’t be. It’s only been a few months.”

  “It’s 2017, Lori.”

  “It’s not. I don’t have a watch, but I have this.” She smoothed out her dress and rubbed her belly bump.

  “They put you in the breeding program, too?”

  “It’s Fabler’s. Right before I was taken.”

  “I thought you had that POTCS thing.”

  “Polycystic ovary syndrome. I do. I did. When I got here, the Watcher did something to me. You’ve met him, obviously.”

  “Yeah. You really think it’s only been a few months?”

  “My mind is all kinds of screwed up, but my body isn’t lying, Grim. Fabler and I spent two years researching pregnancy. I’m in my twenty-second week.”

  Grim figured it had to be some Einstein relativity space travel thing, like that movie he saw where people didn’t age because they were travelling close to the speed of light, even though everyone else back on earth aged.

 
 

  “Grim, why aren’t you in a cell? How are you running around?”

  “Long story. I killed my guard.”

  Lori’s eyes got wide. “Grim, do you know what they’ll do to you? The things they do here…”

  “Let’s not think about that.”

  “I spent two weeks without my legs, Grim. Do you know how horrible that is?”

  “I’m getting you out of here, Lori. Us out of here. Everybody.”

  “How?” Lori’s beautiful face cracked. “There’s no way out. This place is pain, and despair, and death. It’s hell, Grim. There’s no way to get home.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  Lori didn’t respond for several seconds.

  “Oh, Grim…” She put her hand next to Grim’s. “Did they come for you? Because of your DNA?”

  He nodded. “But Fabler was ready for them. All this time, he’s been preparing for them to come back.”

  “Where’s my husband, Grim? Where’s Fabler? Is he… dead?”

  “No. The Watcher kicked him off the ship.”

  “What ship?”

  “This ship. This alien ship.” “Lori, I hate to break this to you, but we’ve been abducted by aliens and we’re on a flying saucer hurtling through the galaxy.”

  She shook her head. “They’re not aliens, Grim. And we’re not in space.”

  “Lori…”

  Lori moved away from the front of the cell and went to the back wall.

  “Look.”

  She pressed it, and it seemed to dissolve, going from opaque to transparent.

  Grim stared in disbelief. Stared into a tropical rainforest, stretching back into the horizon, illuminated with gigantic light posts. A rainforest complete with animals. Birds. Monkeys. Some wild pigs. Even an elephant.

 

  “Lori… is that… a woolly mammoth?”

  “That’s not a mammoth. It’s a mastodon. The mammoths are larger, with longer hair.”

  Grim shook his head. “Those are extinct.”

  “And they might go extinct again, with the rate they’re getting eaten.”

  “What are you talking about, Lori?”

  “You see all those bones out there?”

  Lori pointed to something Grim had glanced over earlier, thinking it was a pile of dead trees.

  A stack of bones. A stack of enormous bones.

  “What’s big enough to eat a prehistoric elephant?”

  “Hope you don’t see for yourself. They’re terrifying.”

  “Lori… what the hell is going on?”

  Lori walked back to him, the surreal scene playing out behind her. “We weren’t abducted by aliens, Grim. I thought the same thing at first. But the reality is a whole lot worse.”

  Lori spent a few minutes explaining everything she knew.

  Grim went from skeptical…

  To awed…

  To shocked…

  To terrified.

 
 
 
 

  KADIR ○ 8:21+pm

  Opening his eyes, Kadir can’t understand what he’s looking at.

  Arms. And legs.

  So many. Dozens of them. All fused together, a giant lump of human flesh.

  And his thoughts are jumbled. All over the place.

  Like a dozen people all screaming over each other.

  Memories invade Kadir’s head. Memories that aren’t his.

  Giving birth.

  Visiting his father in hospice, but it isn’t his father, it is some ginger he’s never seen before.

  Getting a blowjob, from some girly boy, and looking up and seeing himself in a mirror and staring into…

  Doruk’s face.

 

  Kadir tried to move his arm—

  —and felt six arms move in response.

 

  Kadir glanced down, expecting to see his body. But instead he saw more of the flesh monster.

  He tried to move a leg.

  Five legs moved.

  Kadir filled seventeen lungs with air and bellowed out of ten different mouths.

  “WHAT HAVE I BECOME!?!?!”

  PRESLEY ○ 8:21+pm

  She cranked out ab crunches like a machine.

 
 

  Of the many things Presley had learned as Fabler’s ward, preparedness stuck to her ribs the hardest.

 
 
 
 
 

  Presley finished a set of a hundred, then began another set.

  Somewhere, down the hall, someone shouted.

  Someone who sounded a lot like Kadir.

  Presley ignored it.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

  “Molon labe, motherfuckers. Molon fucking labe.”
r />   LORI ○ 8:22+pm

  She watched as Grim sat next to her cell, no longer responding to her voice.

  “I know it’s a lot, Grim. But you have to get up. The guards come randomly to check on us. They have this chemical link. When they are tuned in, what one of them sees, they all can see.”

  “Unbelievable. It’s all too unbelievable.”

  “This is real, Grim. Tell me how you got here. Tell me about Fabler.”

  Grim’s eyes focused, and he stared right into Lori’s soul. “He never gave up on you, Lori. He did more, and fought harder, than anyone I’ve ever known. He loves you so much.”

 
 
 
 

  “How has he been, Grim? Has he been okay?”

  “He’s been… busy.”

  “How have you been? Tell me something happy. Did they make you chief of police yet?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “My life… it’s… things have been really screwed up since they took you, Lori.”

  “Are the Osmonds doing okay? At least tell me your fish are okay.”

  “Uh…”

  “How’s Heather? Are you guys married?” Lori squinted. “Is that… Heather’s hand?”

  Grim touched the hand, protectively. “No. It’s a woman named Presley. She’s a soldier. Fabler trained her, to help find you.”

  “She’s here now?”

  Grim nodded. “Somewhere. In a cell, like yours. Is there more than one area for prisoners?”

  “They move us a lot. Or maybe they don’t move us, maybe the layout just changes. The walls and windows are organo-polymers. They shift their shapes.”

  “How big is this place?”

  “I don’t know. Big.”

  “Have you ever been outside?” Grim pointed. “Out there?”

  The memory brought shivers, and Lori hugged herself. “Once. It’s awful. There are things out there, Grim. Horrible things, that there aren’t even names for.”

 

  “I hear something coming.” His head craned to the right.

  “You have to run, Grim. Get away.”

  Her brother stood up, looked away, then met her eyes. “I’ll be back for you. I swear.”

  “Go, Grim. Hurry.”

  He took off down the corridor.

  Lori walked to the rear wall, closed the window, and waited for her cot to form. Then she sat down and tried to calm herself.