Aliens, Tequila & Us: The complete series

by Michael Herman

  Standing near the picture window, the young engineer regarded him with cool disdain before answering. The old man was always questioning, always trying to micromanage every little detail as if he were the only one capable of intelligent thought. If the old man didn’t have such a long history of serving the Beloved, he doubted he would bother with him. Seeing him crumpled in his ancient chair, almost disappearing into its overstuffed fabric, he wondered about the day when he’d discover him lifeless and staring out his dusty picture window to the sun-dappled ocean beyond, to the Beloved of the Ocean and the Earth deep below the grey water.

  He shook his head and said with mild acid, “Look at you. These days you’re like one of the Chinchorro mummies my brother watches over.” His brother, employed as a watchman at the Museoâ Arqueologico, oversaw 120 Chinchorro mummies.

  Used to being disparaged by this young tonto del culo, the old man refused to take the bait. Ignoring the insult, he repeated the question simply.

  “The body. Where?”

  It was an important question because discovery of the body would bring unwanted attention. Better that the body simply disappear.

  “The cave,” the engineer said curtly, thinking, of course, it was the cave, where else did the old man think we would get rid of the body? It was where they had disposed of the other Breakthrough Starshot technician only months before, and the software engineer before that and the IT technician before that; all senseless killings in his mind. The Beloved would take care of the Breakthrough Starshot endeavor without their assistance. Their actions, their murders, were simply annoyances to the Breakthrough Starshot organization; tragedies that only mildly disrupted their progress. What did it really achieve? This most recent murder was no different than the rest. The removal of key people would be met with replacement. It merely slowed things.

  “Where in the cave?” the old man asked, pushing for more detail.

  God was in the details, the old man had proclaimed to the arrogant young man on more than one occasion, corrupting a famous American architect’s words.

  “In the well of the Beloved.”

  The old man grunted his approval. The cave was difficult to access, making it unlikely an unwanted person would stumble upon it. Dropping the limp body into the well meant that it would disappear within a day.

  “You did not disturb the ancients?”

  The engineer rolled his eyes upwards and let out a snort. “No.” Always the same question and always the same answer. Disturbing the secret three Chinchorro black mummies in the cave was tantamount to a mortal sin. Nearly 8,000 years old, they were terribly fragile. No one touched them, no one went near them, and no one spoke to them. Except for the old man; that was his realm.

  But the engineer’s answer was a lie, and in his mind he silently recounted what had transpired.

  When he and his watchman brother came upon the black mummies, they halted and dropped the body to the ground. Their moving LED lanterns that bathed the cave in bright white light made the sacred mummies seem animated and spookily lifelike. The light from their lanterns made the shadows on the wall behind the mummies leap and dance. As they stood there gazing at the mummies, something about them called to the young engineer. This time he risked what he had never done before. He approached the tallest mummy, knelt before it, reached out and touched its crusty hard skin. To his surprise, when his bare fingers made contact, his young head flooded with images as the Beloved silently spoke to him.

  In his mind’s eye, he saw the ancient mummy as a young woman, kneeling over a human cadaver, carving the soft skin from its bones, pulling the brains from its head, separating its organs from its body. He watched as she skinned, eviscerated, and then reconstructed the dead person, preserving it and mounting it along the ocean shore to face seaward in ephemeral dialogue with the Beloved. And he knew the Beloved was satisfied by this.

  As if he were seeing through the woman’s eyes, he looked out over the grey ocean and saw that at the edge, where the Pacific oceanic plate meets the South American continental plate, the Beloved thrived and grew. Starting deep in the ocean and spreading its great body inland to the mountains, he felt it biding its time.

  As he knelt before the black mummy in the dark cave, an ancient past inhabited his mind. It was divine revelation bearing sacred knowledge of the Beloved. A new understanding was being achieved.

  He now realized that the Beloved–here since the advent of the ancient Chinchorro–maintained interest in their development as they fished the narrow shores of the arid mainland and made tokens of human cadavers to commune with. He felt the Beloved watch them and become satisfied by their simple lives; lives that changed very little over millenniums.

  He understood that their belief in the afterlife, in the powers of the dead who watched the Beloved watching them, was a devotion the Beloved nurtured and rewarded.

  He saw that in response to their acknowledgment of its presence, it protected and fed them; stimulating the ocean currents and temperature to provide them with ample sea life to sustain themselves.

  He observed that–as precarious as the Chinchorro’s existence was–the Beloved remained obligated to them. When the tectonic granite plate that it resided on occasionally shifted, sending deadly tsunamis into the coastline to wipe out their minimal communities, it stayed with them; watching over them as they regrouped and regrew each time.

  He felt that their primitive life was what the Beloved nurtured.

  Though their technology was rudimentary, he saw that it was efficient. With no ceramics or woven cloth or metal tools, they simply adapted plants and bones to their needs. Fishhooks were made of shells or cactus thorns, fishing line was made of plant fibers and animal or human hair. Stones were used as sinkers and spear points. Reeds were woven into baskets, mats and hut coverings.

  He watched them extract food from the ocean and swampy coastal environment where plants, birds and animal life were in abundance with the help of the Beloved.

  He understood that this was how the Beloved wanted life to continue among the people populating its domain.

  And yet he felt that the Beloved knew that this idyllic life would not last forever.

  Kneeling before the ebony mummy, he saw that as millenniums passed, humans from the north migrated down into its domicile and conquered its people, bringing with them their civilization and tools. The changes signaled that the Beloved would need to put its dormant powers to the test, and so it flexed them every now and then just to reassure itself. When the Earth’s crust moved as it wanted, it rested; satisfied. It would observe and wait for that future moment when it was needed.

  In the cave, once the engineer had broken physical contact with the mummy, he had turned back to his brother, who said impatiently, “Satisfied? They’re just dead artifacts.”

  To his brother, who watched over the many mummies in the Museoâ Arqueologico, they were just more of the same, nothing different.

  “How long was I kneeling there?” the engineer had asked.

  “What do you mean? You just knelt down, touched the thing and then looked at me,” the brother answered.

  That was all the engineer had needed. His experience that stretched out for thousands of years was in reality just a moment in time where the Beloved had graced him with knowledge previously bestowed only on the old man. In his heart, he now knew the old man’s time was coming to a close, and he would be the old man’s replacement.

  When he and his brother completed their task of disposing of the body, he said nothing of his blessed fortune. The moment for revelation would be later.

  Now, being in the same room with the old man, he could indeed sense that it was just a matter of days before the old man would pass into the afterlife, and what the engineer had known in the cave was confirmed.

  Gazing out of the old man’s living room window to the vast ocean beyond, he contemplated the Beloved’s situation. Science advanced and people within the Beloved’s limited domain turned their powerful te
chnology to the skies above. Chile, the small slice of land they inhabited, eventually had become home to the greatest observatories of the world; Paranal Observatory, Las Campanas Observatory, La Silla Observatory, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Nanten 2 Observatory, Llano de Chajnantor Observatory, Very Large Telescope facility, to name a few, he thought to himself. With those achievements, it became apparent that, in this 21st century, they might find the link to the Beloved’s passage here; a link that he knew the Beloved must prevent them from realizing. This he understood and now knew that the old man’s efforts paled in comparison to the Beloved’s future actions.

  Watching and listening through humans psychically linked to the Beloved, through their eyes and ears, the Beloved had tracked the beginnings of the means to discover its secret. He knew that because of this, it had gathered itself; extending within the Earth to manipulate the Earth’s mantle to unleash powerful forces from below.

  He understood that as it stretched and readied itself, smaller shifts in the Earth’s crust had been felt by the crust’s inhabitants; movements that were commonplace and expected due to thermal pressures within the Earth. The effects of its preparations were lost among the natural movements of the always shifting plates.

  Now the waiting for the moment of great movement had come down to weeks and days. The point of extreme was almost upon the Beloved where it would flex, and the Earth would shift in a way not seen for millenniums. Soon it would accomplish what it had been planted on the Earth for. Soon it would reveal itself. Soon it would be open warfare.

  Soon...so soon.

  Preview Girl with all the Pain Chapter 1

  Day 1

  Santiago, Chile

  A slap.

  It starts with that.

  Surrounded by his “tribus urbanas” goading him on, thirteen-year-old Roberto strikes her once more. When ten-year-old Isabel registers only surprise, another slap is delivered, harder, more deliberate. That’s how the game goes. Hurt her. Then hurt her again so she knows it isn’t an accident. Make her think she’s in for a beating. Hit her again, harder still. Make her cry. Make her fear. And when she becomes a terrified little animal, grab her and hold on for as long as you can.

  Roberto grabs her bare elbow and yanks her around to face him for the next blow. His palm tingles with the electric bite of her fear; a sign he’s on track to bring her to full charge. Maybe the next blow will set her off completely. He delivers a roundhouse slap to her tender cheek, making her cry out in pain.

  Her face snaps to the left and she kicks out, missing his groin and hitting his thigh. Swinging her arm into his, she loosens his hold on her and then twists out of his grip. Suddenly free, she charges into the cordon of young boys enclosing them. As she breaks through, her small body glances off a shirtless boy, Jorge, not much bigger than her, who yelps when her bare elbow slams against his bare chest. Bitten by her voltaic fear, he yowls in distress and his hand reflexively goes to his chest, which stings from her touch. The other boys laugh at his injury.

  One yells in Spanish to Roberto, “Get her. Don’t let that little puta Mapuche get away.”

  Embarrassed by her escape, he reddens with anger and clenches his hands into fists. No more open palms when he catches up to her. He sprints out of the ring of young boys, knocking Jorge aside, splashing through a trash-strewn puddle in the alleyway, crunching broken glass beneath his shoes, gaining on her, bearing down hard on the asphalt paving, hopping over a pothole and sidestepping a dead rat. With arms pumping, he starts to close the gap between them. The footfalls and whoops of the boys behind him echo against the adjacent building walls.

  They’ll witness his act of bravery. All he has to do is hold on for thirty seconds and he’ll pass the gang initiation, an initiation every one of the boys behind him went through. If they can do it, so can he.

  Suddenly, she darts into an open doorway of the abandoned building next to them. He slides to a stop on greasy gravel at the doorway and nearly falls. Regaining his balance, he bolts into the unlit building and stops after a few steps, blinking in the darkness, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the lack of light. Beyond, at the far end of the dark room, he catches the sound of footsteps climbing a stairway. He charges after her, around smashed and broken boxes, past a pile of rotten fabric smelling of decay and mold, to come to the bottom of rickety stairs where he catches a glimpse of bare legs and the hem of her ratty dress before she disappears around the corner above him.

  She can’t run far. Buildings in the neighborhood are only three stories. He’s been inside this one before. There’s no second set of stairs to escape down. She’ll be trapped inside for the boys to encircle once again. His initiation is assured. All Roberto has to do is hold on for the requisite duration.

  Almost caught up with him, the boys behind him yell excitedly. They know this building just as he does. He takes to the stairs like a canine hot on a feline quarry. When he gets to the second story landing he hears footfalls above him climbing to the third floor. All the better, he thinks. She’ll be winded and easy prey by then. He is a good three years older than her. She is the lamb going to slaughter. Without hesitation, he darts up the stairs to the third floor, where he arrives puffing and exhilarated. Across the empty room, he sees her climbing through an open window to then disappear up exterior metal stairs leading to the flat roof.

  Now he has her. There is no escape from the roof. This will be much better under the noontime sun where everyone can watch, enjoy, and record with cell phones. His passage into the street gang will be immortalized. Beneath his feet, the stairs vibrate from the pack of boys who follow yelping and squalling like hounds after a fox.

  He sprints across the garbage littered room kicking up dust and dirt in his wake. At the window, he ducks down and through the opening to emerge out onto the rusted metal landing. Looking up, he sees no evidence of his victim but smiles because time is running out for her. Grabbing the handrail and taking the risers two at a time, he quickly emerges at the top. As his head peeks over the parapet wall, he catches her running to the opposite parapet that will be a dead end for her.

  “Roberto, you see her?” one of the boys, arrived at the landing below, yells.

  When he turns from her to answer, two more boys tumble out onto the metal landing, shaking the stairs. He points and yells back, “She’s up here!” By the time he turns back to her, she’s at the waist-height parapet opposite him, frantically racing back and forth along its edge, searching for an avenue of escape.

  Finally, she stops, leans against the stucco parapet and faces him, waiting. Nothing but hot roof separates them. He knows she knows she has nowhere to go. Good. She’ll be even more frightened. Slowly and methodically he advances, punching his right fist into his left palm, cracking the air with the sound of skin against skin, stretching out the moment, dramatizing the threat, building up her fear; crack, pause, crack, pause, crack. With his crew behind and flanking him, she’ll be all his with no chance of escape.

  Coming to a body-length halt from her, he narrows his eyes and flexes his fist open and closed in anticipation of the blow he’ll deliver. He considers; blacken an eye? Or maybe bruise a cheek? Or just bloody her lips that are stretched thin and tight. If he draws blood this time, she’ll react just like he wants.

  Her lips tremble and her scrawny arms shake. Her dark dirty long matted hair barely moves in the breeze. Her eyes travel from his fist to his predator eyes that hold only the promise of injury to her. Her breathing is short; near hyperventilating. Awful helplessness twists her intestines. Her bowels are close to releasing.

  The boys fan out behind him, creating a barrier she’ll not break this time. Laughing and goading Roberto, they cheer him on, “Make it a good one this time. Make the puta Mapuche cry.”

  Bam. Bam. Bam. One boy beats out a rhythm of threat with a stick on a garbage can lid.

  Nervously, her eyes flit from boy to boy, each face gleaming with anticipation.

  When she looks back t
o Roberto, his eyes go mean as he starts to close the distance between them. She crouches down and defensively crosses her bare arms in front of her. Her tattered dress slides over her dirty legs to reveal filthy panties with a dark stain at the base.

  He stops a foot from her, grins maliciously and stands triumphant as his buddies move closer, tightening the half ring barrier around them. One records her with a cell phone as she cowers against the parapet wall.

  Then it happens. Roberto bends swiftly and lets loose with a wild right-hand punch at her face that glances off of her arm.

  “Whoohoo,” a boy yells. “You never connect to her face,” he taunts. “She too fast for you, Roberto.”

  Undeterred, Roberto swings his left fist into her, smacking her upheld arm and then lets loose with a direct right-hand punch that shoots past her defense and thuds against her cheek, knocking her face sideways and eliciting a pained shriek.

  This is the moment. She’s in tears and her eyes are wild with terror. He grabs her right wrist with his left hand, endures the charge of her skin’s electrifying bite and yanks her to her feet, where he wraps his right arm around her; squeezing her to him. Taking the full brunt of her charged defense, he releases her wrist, drops his left hand down her back to the bottom of her buttocks, slides it in and hoists her nearly off her feet to a full body press.

  Hopelessly bound by his sweaty body and strong arms, she squirms, attempting to wrestle out of his grip, but the harder she tries, the tighter he squeezes. Around them, the count has started.

  “One, two, three” two boys start with a metered chanting count.

  Glancing up into his face, she sees his bared teeth gritting against her defensive charge as he trembles while the current passes into his body.

  “Seven, eight,” two more boys join in on the count.

  His eyes seem like demonic black holes staring back at her, determined and awful.