The Stickmen

by Edward Lee

  Zero lift and fall at half a mile.

  Made in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the long ugly weapon housed a fat eleven-round snap-clip and chambered a specialized .50-caliber semi-jacketed round loaded with more RDX explosive propellent than filled a typical Mark IV hand grenade. The Bausch & Lomb scope only made death more of a certainty. The sodium paste sealed in the projectile’s flattened tip would explode upon impact. With a weapon like this, Sanders could definitely reach out and touch someone.

  He assembled the weapon in a matter of moments, then inserted the magazine, and jacked back the charging handle with a loud, metallic CLACK!

  Sanders shouldered the weapon; when he did so, the twenty-six-pound rifle became an integral part of his anatomy, an extra arm. He brought his cheek to the right side of the stock, lined up his sight, then began to rove the target area.

  He flicked off the manual safety on the other side of the receiver, then began to lay the reticle’s crosshairs on the primary target’s head.

  This was one kill Sanders definitely needed to add to his tally, this writer named Harlan Garrett.

  ««—»»

  Ubel bummed one of Garrett’s cigarettes. “I quit a couple of years ago…but I guess now is a decent time to start up again.”

  Garret lit the guy’s smoke for him. “You were saying?”

  “It was some osmotic or telepathic mode that they used to communicate to Swenson. They didn’t have voices, not like we have; it was more like a sound they projected into his head. It was almost as if they’d selectively jimmied his memory; he knew he’d been abducted, but he could never remember how. And for a short time after the abduction, they maintained some kind of mental contact with him. It brought on incredible headaches, but he was certain they were communicating with him, gicing him vital information. That’s why they abducted him in the first place. To tell him.”

  “To tell him what?” Garrett asked.

  “The first thing they told him was that the first ship crashed because of a wavelength flux. It’s some kind of gauss-matter propulsion system that’s not compatible with the earth’s EM field. That first vehicle stayed past the flux margin, so their fuel elements lost power—”

  Garrett had read about the theories in numerous physics books. “—causing an overload of some sort of buffer system. I’ve know all about the gauss-matter hypotheses. It would be like yanking nuclear fuel rods out of a graphite absorption block. The eventual result would be an explosion.”

  “That’s the way Swenson figured it, and we all agreed. It was the only thing that made sense. But when they abducted the General, they also told him that they’d be returning sometime in the future, and that if we interfered with that return, some very cataclysmic things could happen. So that’s why we formed our own group. Swenson jinked all the paperwork, and lied to eight Presidents. He didn’t trust the government to take him seriously, and neither did we.”

  Garrett didn’t quite get it. “What do you mean? He jinked what paperwork?”

  “General Swenson never reported his own abduction,” Ubel revealed. “Not to the members of his own Aerial Intelligence Command, not to anyone else in the government or Defense Department, and after that he produced counterfeit records that claimed the Nellis bodies were transferred to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Hanger 1166, part of the Air Force Foreign Technology Division. Unfortunately, not too long ago, our good friend Sanders went over, with everything he knew. He didn’t know everything, mind you, but he knew enough. He blew the whistle on us to someone at NSC or maybe even the executive branch, so now he’s working for them. Why? Because no one but Swenson, Urslig, and I ever knew where the Nellis skeletons are actually being stored.”

  The answer bloomed in Garret’s mind like an ugly hot-house flower. “It’s here, right? Swenson said as much. You’ve got those skeletons hidden somewhere on this post, haven’t you?”

  “Um-hmm. And right now, no one in the world knows that except for you, me, and Sanders.” Ubel looked right at Garrett. “But only I know exactly where.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s how Swenson wanted it. Only one guy in the group could ever know the exact location of the bodies. Me. Because I’m assigned here, I have the greatest control. The Edgewood Reservation occupies more land that most major cities. They could dig out here for years and never find it. They could tear up every building, warehouse, and vault on this post and never find the spot.”

  Garrett rubbed a hand across his five o’clock shadow. “It’s in your best interest to tell me, you know that. The rest of the group is dead—you’re the only one left. You don’t have to know how to clone sheep to figure out that you’re on Sanders’ list too. Only he won’t kill you—not until you give him the information. And I have a pretty good feeling that a guy like Sanders has some foolproof ways of making people talk. You’re next, Mr. Ubel. I can guarantee it.”

  “I know that,” Ubel said. “But I’m not sure what to do. How do I know I can trust you?”

  “For God’s sake, man. You trusted Swenson, didn’t you? Swenson sent me to find you.”

  “Or so you say.”

  Garrett grit his teeth in frustration. “What? I’m making it up to trick you? I stole the files and that arm from Swenson? Then why would I come here?”

  “To get the location from me,” Ubel said.

  “All right.” Garrett pulled back his jacket, showing the 9mm Sig pistol stuck in his pants. “If I was working for the other side, I’d have this gun to your head right now, right? I’d be shooting your kneecaps off to give up the exact location.”

  Ubel eyed Garrett behind a hint of fear.

  Garrett removed the pistol and cocked it. “Isn’t that what I’d be doing? First your kneecaps, then your elbows, then your hips and your shins?”

  “Uh, yeah. I guess you would.”

  Garrett handed the pistol to Ubel. “So if you can’t trust me, buddy, you can’t trust anyone.”

  Ubel hefted Garrett’s gun, looked at it. “I guess you’ve made your point.” Then he relaxed in the driver’s seat. “Area November, Depot 12,” he revealed. “It’s not on the base grid map, it never has been. I’ve got the directions and the lock combinations stashed back at my barracks. There’re also some documents stashed behind the refrigerator. So if I don’t make it—you’ve got to go to my place and get the stuff.”

  “Area November, Depot 12,” Garrett recited, relieved. “But what about the kid, Danny Vander? That’s another part that I can’t figure. Is he the one who stole the ADM?”

  “We have to assume so. There’s no other explanation.”

  “But how is that possible? The ADM weighs three or four times more than he does. He’s just a little kid.”

  “He’s a little kid being aided and abetted by extraterrestrial lifeforms,” Ubel reminded.” He returned Garrett’s pistol. “In case I get waxed, you have to do everything you can to ensure that the kid is allowed to do what he sets out to do. Even if it means killing Army personnel. If Danny Vander is not allowed to set off that ADM at exactly the right time, then… Christ, I don’t know what will happen. Who knows what those things might do in retaliation?”

  Now Garret’s confusion crested. “You’re asking me to help somebody set off a nuclear weapon?”

  “That’s right,” Ubel affirmed. “This isn’t Dr. Strangelove. That ADM only has a yield of half a kiloton. The safe-distance demarcation is only 2000 meters, and the depot is underground. There isn’t even any fallout, it’s so low-yield. We have to get that kid to Depot 12 on time. And the time is tonight.”

  Garrett nearly spat out his cigarette. “Tonight!”

  “Yep. Tonight.”

  “But why?” Garrett insisted. “Why to we have to ensure the detonation of an ADM? What the hell is so damned important about blowing up a bunch of skeletons?”

  Ubel’s face was beginning to shadow in the early dusk. “Well, see, that’s the catch,” he said. “They’re not skeletons.”

  «
«—»»

  The actual morgue suite wasn’t quite what Lynn expected. High fluorescent fixtures veiled her in flat white light. Plain white-tile walls, a drain in the floor, and only one autopsy table. A rush of sudden fumes in the air chafed her sinuses and watered her eyes.

  “The fixation fluids are tough if you’re not used to them,” Jessica said, getting into her autopsy greens. “But don’t worry, in a few minutes the fumes will kill enough brain receptors that you won’t notice it anymore.”

  “What!”

  Jessica rolled her eyes. “It’s a joke. I was joking.”

  “Oh.”

  Behind her stood a flank of stainless-steel cabinets, and some shelves full of equipment. A pan scale depended from the ceiling directly over the table, like an odd hanging flowerpot. Some other sort of apparatus was mounted on the ceiling too, folded up on hinged, pivoting arms. Lynn couldn’t imagine what it was.

  Jessica snapped on a pair of latex gloves, then lay the subject of her exam in the middle of the guttered, rulered, height-adjustable table. She turned on a small tape recorder.

  “The post-mortal subject is approximately twenty-six inches long. It appears to be the forearm pronation of a—”

  Jessica stopped; she looks blanched, overwhelmed. It was if the reality of what she was doing had assailed her after the fact. She turned to Lynn, afret. “Look, I’m sorry, but this is too much! I don’t think this thing is fake and—Jesus!—if it’s not fake then-then-then it must be real!”

  “Calm down, Jessica,” Lynn said. “Get a grip. You’re a doctor; it’s a doctor’s job to be objective. Relax, will you?”

  Jessica glared back. “I’m doing a post on the skeletal structure of an alien arm, and you’re telling me to relax? Look, I’m just the assistant around here. My idea of a big day is indexing toe tags and looking at cell-smears in a microscope. I’m not qualified for this!”

  “You’re a trained pathologist,” Lynn reminded her. “You’re perfectly qualified. All we need is a prelim exam recitation.”

  But Jessica’s professional self-esteem seemed to run right down into the drain in the floor. She kept shooting appalled glances at the bones on the table. “This is crazy! That thing on the table is not from a human being! Shouldn’t somebody in the government be doing this?”

  Oh, boy. This woman’s going ape-shit on me, and she’s asking all the wrong questions. “That would defeat the purpose,” she admitted. “We’re trying to conceal this from the government.”

  “Why?” Jessica nearly wailed.

  “Because at this point we don’t know which government branches can be trusted, all right? We need your help on this. Harlan needs your help.”

  “Harlan!” the woman exclaimed. “That crackpot hippie loser is the last person I’m going to stick my neck out for!”

  Smart move, Lynn, Lynn thought. Then she just yelled: “Stop acting like a stupid red-headed insecure bimbo and do your job!”

  The rant gave Jessica the jolt she needed. “You’re right, you’re right. I’m a professional.”

  “Yes, you are. Now get a grip on yourself and continue. This is a historic occasion, and remember—you’re part of it.”

  Jessica rubbed her gloved hands together, nodding. She took several deep breaths, then returned her attentions to the morgue slab. “The post object appears to be the forearm pronation of a…non-terrestrial being, severed at what we would think of as the styloid process, or the elbow. An extremity is attached, via something akin to a pair of carpel-like pisiformic and lunate bones. The extremitic process appears to be possessed of one three-jointed opposable thumb and one long four-jointed finger.”

  That’s better. But now Lynn, after all of her lecturing, got a bit of a jolt herself, when she took her as yet closest look at the skeletal arm.

  The charred-black forearm and twin, pincer-like fingers.

  Not from this world.

  The reality of the image brought a sudden sensation of ice-water filling her gut, and snakes were swimming in the ice-water.

  Good God. Harlan really did it this time…

  Jessica was gingerly fixing down the charred forearm bone in a double-vise mounted on the side of the morgue platform. Then, with a long course file, she ground several bone particles off the bone, letting the grindings fall into a tin she held below the vise.

  “What are you doing?” Lynn asked.

  “You want a geochronologic analysis, don’t you?”

  “A…what?”

  “A carbon-date. Don’t you want to know how old this thing is?”

  Lynn hadn’t even thought of that. “Good idea. Go for it. But doesn’t that take a long time?”

  “Sure, it involves a series of sophisticated cosmogenic and chemical analyses whose results are then processed together: a Libby Test, a radioisotope scan, a Marcellin Treatment. It takes about a month for all the labs to get the tests back. What I’m doing now is the first stage—a sample collection and carbon-14 scale. I put the filings in the mass-photo-spectrometer for an isotopic scale read-out. A high-temp element burns the filings into a gas phase, then the spectrometer will give us a percentile carbon makeup.”

  Wow, I guess she really does know what she’s doing. “How long does that take?”

  “About five minutes.”

  Jessica put the scrapings into a thimble-sized crucible. Then she walked over to one of the machines on the shelves and lowered the thimble into a cylindrical opening, over which she closed a hatch. She flicked a switch and suddenly a hissing drone could be heard. Lynn watched, fascinated.

  Five minutes later, a printer spat out a single sheet of paper, and when Jessica looked at it, she said, “Holy shit…”

  “What?”

  Jessica walked back to the exam table, turned the recorder back on. “A preliminary carbon-14 index of the post subject proved negative, which indicates that either the testing equipment is defective…or that the post subject lacks elemental carbon.”

  “Holy shit,” Lynn repeated the doctor’s remark. It had always been her understanding that all living things were molecularly based on carbon…

  From under the exam table, Jessica pulled up a hand-held orbital saw. “I am now going to cut the post subject at the center of the radial/ulnar process,” she told Lynn and the tape recorder, “in order to inspect the marrow fissure and take a culture and histological sample.”

  Lynn grit her teeth and winced when Jessica pulled the saw’s trigger-like power button. The saw whined like a dentist’s drill. But then the whine turned to a shriek when Jessica bore the blade down against the alien bone. Black dust flew up as the saw began to cut a groove into the bone. A trace of the faintest smoke rose, and so did a vaguely unpleasant smell, like wire-insulation burning. Then—

  “JESUS!” Jessica yelled over the saw’s irritating shriek. Lynn flinched at the start. The saw’s motor wound down when Jessica released the trigger.

  “I don’t believe this!” Jessica loudly complained. She held up the saw. The blade was smoking.

  Lynn could clearly see that all of the blade’s teeth had worn off.

  “These saws can cut through cinderblocks and concrete like butter!” Jessica exclaimed. “But I only got—” With a magnifying glass, she looked at the groove she’d cut on the bone. “Jesus! Looks like about a millimeter before the blade wore out!”

  “Barely a scratch,” Lynn observed.

  “Yeah. Barely.” Disgruntled, Jessica reclaimed some semblance of composure and spoke again toward the tape recorder. “The, uh…the bone structure of the post subject resisted my attempt to cut it after less than one millimeter. The saw’s diamond-bit blade…has been worn smooth…”

  Next, almost vengefully, Jessica reached upward and hauled down the odd apparatus mounted on the ceiling. Its spring-hinged arms extended, and there seemed to be cables running through them. At the end was a white cone with a handle.

  “I am now going to attempt to sever the radial/ulnar structure with the suite’s surg
ical laser,” Jessica announced to the recorder. She grabbed the handle and wended the cone to the charred bone, and when she pushed a button on the side, there was a sound like a hiss from a leaking inner tube. Lynn noticed the tiniest thread of black smoke rise when the laser’s emission-tip touched the bone. Jessica held it down for at least a minute, then grimaced, depowered the laser, and swung it aside.

  “Shit!”

  “Anything?” Lynn asked.

  Jessica sniped her answer into the tape recorder. “My attempt to cut the post subject with the laser has failed. The emission beam seems to only have scratched the surface of the bone process, maybe only a few more microns than the saw.”

  That’s some bone, Lynn said.

  Jessica turned away, simmering. She snapped off her gloves and threw them across the room.

  “This is impossible!”

  “Calm down—”

  “That’s a carbon-dioxide laser! It’ll cut through tempered titanium for Christ’s sake! It’ll cut anything! I give up!”

  But during Jessica’s tirade, Lynn was staring wide-eyed past her shoulder. Her mouth fell open but no words came out.

  “What’s wrong?” Jessica asked.

  Lynn slowly pointed to the morgue slab. When Jessica turned around and saw what she was pointing at, her mouth fell open too. They were both looking at the bone on the table.

  It wasn’t a bone anymore.

  It was now covered with skin—wet, shiny, pale-pinkish skin—under which muscle fibers and veins could clearly be seen.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “What do you mean, they’re not skeletons?” Garrett hotly asked. He was getting agitated. “I saw the forearm, Swenson gave it to me. It was charred bone. It was part of a goddamn skeleton.”

  “Not quite,” Ubel countered. “These beings do have a skeletal structure that essentially serves the same purpose as any skeletal structure, and that’s part of what you saw—that forearm and hand.”