Dead Sea

by Tim Curran

  “We should try communicating with it,” Cushing said. “So it can understand we mean it no harm.”

  And George almost burst out in hysterical laughter. Cushing suddenly reminded him of that dumb scientist in The Thing from Another World, the old 1950s sci-fi/horror flick. The one that tries to reason with the hulking, blood-sucking vegetable man from Mars and gets swatted aside by the bastard for his trouble. This scenario was too much like that. Mean it no harm? That was a good one, because George did want to harm it and he knew that, if there weren’t so many of his kind around, that hideous Martian or whatever in the fuck it was, would have killed him without a second thought.

  Because George was getting a strong vibe from this thing.

  Looking at that pissed-off face and those glaring, hating eyes, he was understanding this creature. Yes, it was intelligent and methodical… but so was a cruel little boy who pulled the wings off of flies and lit the tails of cats on fire. The intelligence of this thing was like that – tyrannical, sadistic, and maybe more than a little fanatical. That’s why it had started when Fabrini took a step too close to its machine. Because it had built it and inferior things like men had no right to touch it. Men were nothing but mice to it, shit-eating apes that belonged in cages with dirty straw. Something to be gawked at or laughed over, but certainly not equals. So don’t be touching my machine, you stupid rutting ape.

  “So, go ahead, Cushing,” Saks said, badly wanting to hack the thing to bits, “try talking to that fucking puke. Go ahead. Take us to your leader, you ugly shit.”

  Cushing opened his mouth, but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  It always looked real easy in those old movies, but the reality of such a situation was a little different. This thing was such an angry, grotesque creature that talking to it, trying to reason with it would have been like trying to reason with a spider when you were caught in its web. Don’t sink your fangs in me, okay? Don’t suck my blood out and cocoon me up… can we agree on that?

  Yeah, it was ridiculous, George knew.

  Maybe this thing had harnessed the power of the stars and the secrets of life and death, but there was no hope of communicating with it. Yes, its intellect was vastly superior, but cold and unreasoning. It had a mindless, stupid hatred for any but its own kind. You couldn’t barter with such a creature. It got its hands… or tentacles… on you, most you could hope for was to be dropped into a jar of preservative and labeled or maybe dissected alive. And if it was in a particularly dark mood – it was – then maybe it would yank out your nerve ganglia and prod it with a knife, study your agony with an icy, alien detachment.

  Fabrini said, “Fuck this. Let’s get out of here. I can’t handle that prick looking at me like that… looks like it wants to suck my eyeballs out of my head.”

  And George was thinking, why don’t we just get it over with? We’re going to kill it and we know it, so let’s just do it already.

  “Let’s just go,” Elizabeth said, the last sane voice to be heard.

  For now the men were moving. Slowly, but moving all the same. And the thing was aware of it, but maybe uncertain as to what to do about it. The men were forming sort of a loose ring around it and its machine. A nauseating, sour stench came off of it and George wondered if it was afraid. If it sensed what was about to happen. It must have felt like a modern man being ringed in by Pliocene apes. So vastly far above them, yet no match for their numbers and brute strength.

  It started to move with a writhing, fluid motion. Wiry muscle flexing with a smooth, serpentine grace under that rubbery flesh that was seamed and sinewy like old pine bark or driftwood. Those tubes on its belly began to undulate, pissing more of that black juice to the deck where it steamed and sizzled. The tentacles at its mouth drew back and apart like the pincers of an ant. And its face… dear God, that wrinkled, bony face positively leered. The membranes of the eyes pulled completely back, exposing the glistening red jewels of those eyes themselves.

  And nobody seeing those eyes in their multi-lensed, scarlet glory had ever seen such raw, blistering hatred before.

  Nothing in the universe… or out of it… could hate like this monstrosity.

  The mouth distorted into a shriveled ovoid like it wanted to scream and those eyes, they narrowed in their sockets, filled with a deranged wrath. If such a thing could go insane with rage, it was pretty damn close.

  Pollard was the one who started it.

  He didn’t mean to. He stepped to the side, maybe trying to get away from that monster and almost tripped over the alien machine. He stumbled, knocked it aside… surprised at how very light it was. .. and found his feet again. And you could see the thing’s anger consume it like lye. Hot and bubbling and lunatic. The tentacles it had for fingers began to coil and writhe, those tubes on its underside shuddered and the thing began to make noise. It had been silent thus far… but now it began to make a sibilant, hissing sss-sss-sss-sss-sss-sss sort of sound like that of a rattlesnake preparing to strike. The crazy thing was that the sounds came not from its mouth, but from those tubes that spit acid and sucked air.

  Saks said: “Watch it-”

  But that’s all he got out, because the thing moved. Jumped, slithered, something. It moved in too many directions at the same time and its blue flesh seemed almost plastic and oozing. Nobody noticed in the midst of this that the alien had something like a small cylinder of golden metal in one of its tentacle-hands. By the time it brought it up, it was too late to do anything.

  It aimed it right at Pollard.

  It was a weapon. What came out of it was not a laser beam like on TV, but a sparking cloud of pale green gas that hit Pollard in a wet mist. He froze-up solid and… and in the space of a second or two, his flesh went liquid like hot wax and melted from the bones below. And this almost before he had time to fall over and die. He collapsed in a fleshy, steaming blur and George caught one insane glimpse of his face running from the skull beneath like tallow down a candle stem, his left eye sliding down his chin. Pollard hit the deck like a Halloween skeleton with clipped strings. He folded up in a bony, smoking, bubbling mass.

  And George started shooting.

  He put three rounds into the thing and it screamed with a high, keening sound, those tubes standing erect for just a moment. It slumped over, pulled itself up, and Elizabeth tossed her machete at it. It struck the arm that held the golden cylinder and with such force it nearly severed it. The cylinder hit the floor. The thing crab-crawled around, like some half-crushed spider, watery green blood spurting from the holes in its hide, its shattered arm, gouts of it pissing across the floor like lime Kool-Aid… and the crazy thing was, it had about the same consistency.

  And it stank… Jesus, stank like spilled bleach.

  The men closed in from all sides with their weapons, moving now purely on automatic for it was time to slay the beast, this alien defiler, this absolute violation of all that they knew. Bleeding and damaged, the creature knew it, too. It looked upon them with absolute hostility, those bright red eyes narrowed and hating. Maybe there was horror there, too, or disgust at the sight of those animals that hemmed it in… those four-limbed, two-eyed, pink-skinned monstrosities. To it, they were a crawling pestilence that needed to be stepped on, purged. Vile, idiot things with their crude weapons and simple nervous systems. Yes, maybe there was disgust there, but more than that there was simply hatred and rage that these pale apes would dare kill it.

  And that’s what George was seeing as he leveled the. 45 at it again: a cheated fury. For it was a master of time and space and all other life forms were its slaves. Yes, the alien looked on him, scarlet eyes smoldering like electrodes, and George felt his mind boiling to mist. It was so easy for this thing to dominate and crush a single human mind. Maybe even two or three. And it wanted George to know this, wanted him maybe to understand what waited for men at the dark rim of the universe.

  Cushing saw what that monster was doing to George. Maybe they all saw it. Saw how that awful thing was sucking
his mind dry. Cushing, however, did not wait for completion. He swung his axe at the thing, bringing it right down on the crown of its skull, slicing through those blue-black writhing tentacles and splitting open the top of its head. The axe did the job neatly… but upon impact, there was a flash and Cushing was knocked senseless on his ass, the axe still buried in its head. The thing let go with a shrill, grating, oddly metallic scream that was pure rage and agony. It sounded like the starter of a car whirring or iron placed against a grinding wheel.. . sharp, piercing, deafening.

  Everyone fell away from it as it thrashed and whipped and leaped, more of that green juice spilling from its cloven skull along with a brownish sort of slime. The axe was still in there, the handle hot and smoking now. Saks didn’t get out of its way quick enough and one of its tentacles… because they were not arms as such, but coiling tentacles… lashed out at him, catching him across the knee and he cried out, fell right over. That tentacle had burned right through his pants to the kneecap below.

  George put three more bullets into its head, splattering goo and green steaming blood against the bulkheads as the thing twisted in upon itself, screeching and thrashing and whipping, corkscrewing over the deckplates like it had no bones… squirming like a salted slug and worming like a leech, then dying, dying with a bellowing, cacophonous scream of violence, frenzy, and absolute dementia. The sound echoed through that steel-plated room and dropped more than one of the thing’s attackers to the floor, sick and vomiting from that overwhelming sonic intrusion.

  Ten minutes later, there was nothing but the stink of the thing and the survivors standing there looking down at the remains of Pollard and the corpse of the alien. It was just as ugly dead as alive. It was still steaming and smoking. Its flesh was decomposing fast, seemed to be liquefying. Its eyes had filmed yellowed, fallen back in its skull and it seemed to be decompressing, collapsing, fragmenting. The green blood had pooled around it now, its body creaking and cracking, limbs falling free, tentacles curling up like dead snakes. Everything about it was hissing and bubbling.

  If it had a soul, they decided, then it must have been a black and cancerous one.

  “Pollard,” Menhaus kept saying. “Oh, Jesus, look at him… oh shit.”

  There didn’t seem much to say about it. Pollard was dead. He had died very quickly, but also quite horribly.

  “I’ll send flowers,” Saks said with his usual compassion.

  Menhaus glared at him. “How can you be… you’re an asshole, Saks. That’s all you are. Just an asshole.”

  “Have I ever denied it?”

  The palms of Cushing’s hands were badly burned. “When I hit it with the axe… Christ, it was like swinging an axe into a live two-twenty line. Knocked me right on my ass. It must’ve… I guess the thing must’ve carried an electrical charge to it like an eel.”

  Saks’s knee was burned, but it wasn’t bad. “Ugly cocksucker,” he said. “Looks like Fabrini’s mother. Smells like her, too.”

  “Fuck you-”

  “Look,” George said. “Look at that…”

  Everyone was numb and senseless in the aftermath. Elizabeth was bandaging Cushing’s hands and fawning over him. Nobody seemed particularly interested in looking at what George was seeing, but they did, all with that same oh-God-what-now look on their faces.

  The hindquarters of the alien were shaking. Quivering. The tripod of its snaking legs were trembling. There was a wet, sloshing sound and a puddle of green-gray jelly spread out behind the thing. There seemed to be bubbles, bubbles about the size of softballs trapped in that flux of jelly.

  “What… what the hell is that?” Menhaus said. “Those things, like…”

  But they could see what they were like and what they were. All those bubbles were connected by a network of tissue. Not bubbles, but sacs or membranes of transparent, pink skin and inside each one…

  “Oh, Jesus,” Menhaus said in a squeaky voice. “Pregnant, it was pregnant, pregnant…”

  It was. Birth sacs. A dozen oval birth sacs with grayish-looking fetuses veined with blue. And the worst part, the very worst part is that those fetuses were not dead. They were wriggling and slithering, all those tiny unformed limbs moving and trembling.

  Saks got to his feet, hobbled over there. “Ugly little bastards,” he said.

  He took up a gaff and began squishing them. Ripping open the sacs and smashing what was inside. Elizabeth made a disgusted sound and turned away, as did the others. Saks didn’t stop until he was done, going at it like a little boy smashing earthworms after a rain. One of the fetuses splashed out of its sac and undulated sickly at the toe of Saks’s boot.

  He stepped on it.

  George let go with an involuntary shudder at the sound… like stepping on a ripe, watery peach.

  “So much for higher fucking intelligence,” Saks said.

  21

  “It was intelligent, you know,” Cushing said five minutes later. “That creature… it was smart. It was intelligent and we killed it, killed its young.”

  “We were defending ourselves,” Menhaus said, still shaken by the sight of those squirming alien fetuses. “What else could we do?”

  “Nothing.” Cushing shook his head. “Nothing at all.”

  Saks said, “You wanna feel sorry for it, Cushing, then take a look at Pollard there. Take a good look.”

  Menhaus clenched his teeth.

  “I’m just saying that it was intelligent. That’s all,” Cushing pointed out.

  George said, “I didn’t like the idea of killing it either. I don’t think any of us did, but it wasn’t exactly friendly. You saw that face

  … Jesus, I’ve never seen such absolute hatred before. Those eyes could burn holes through concrete.”

  “We should get back,” Elizabeth said.

  Saks ignored her. “We saw its ship. Part of it sticking up out of the weed… looked like a flying saucer. Course, Menhaus thought it was a hovercraft.”

  Fabrini chuckled under his breath. But it was not a happy sound.

  “Bullshit,” Menhaus said. “I said it looked like a hovercraft. That’s all I said.”

  But Elizabeth didn’t seem to care. “Please, let’s just go… I’m sick of looking at it.”

  “But something that intelligent… just imagine the things it knew,” Cushing said.

  Saks laughed. “There you go again. If it was so fucking smart, how did it get trapped here like us? You wanna tell me that, Einstein?”

  Cushing shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it was just an accident. Maybe something happened to its ship. That thing… a ship like you say, probably had the power to jump from star to star. Maybe it opened a wormhole into this place and something went wrong.”

  Fabrini was crouched down, elbows on knees, studying the machine the creature had built. “What about this?”

  Cushing stood up. He studied it carefully. “I think… I think it might be a teleporter. A teleportation device. A sort of machine that might be quite common where that thing came from, but is thousands of years beyond us.”

  “You lost me,” Menhaus said. “What does it do?”

  Cushing gave him his best guess. The alien was trapped here, in Dimension X, and its ship was damaged, so it decided to tunnel its way back out. It made the teleporter – if that’s what it was at all, he freely admitted – to punch a hole back through time/space to its own dimension, its own world.

  “It might have had this on the ship,” he said. “Sort of like we carry liferafts, they carry something a little more sophisticated. But, Christ, this is a really wild guess on my part. It could be just about anything. Maybe some kind of communications device. Who really knows?”

  Again, more randy speculation on his part. He told them it might have chosen this freighter because of the radioactive waste in the barrels. Maybe it was tapping that, charging its machine with atomic power.

  “Hell, this contraption might run on cold fusion… the mechanics of the stars themselves. If it is a teleporter, though,
then the mathematics and physics behind this thing are probably ten-thousand years beyond us. It boggles the imagination.”

  George said, “I read Greenberg’s letter… he seemed to think there were wormholes everywhere. Maybe this thing just opens them?”

  Menhaus was kneeling next to it. “Christ, there’s no buttons or levers or readouts. Nothing. How the hell do you turn it on?”

  “Good question,” Cushing said.

  Menhaus was checking out those mirrors at either end. They didn’t look much like mirrors really. There didn’t seem to be any glass in them or anything else for that matter. But there was something there. .. some see-through type of material like a shiny veil. He touched the front mirror with his hand, felt a tingling sensation. Shrugging, he thrust his hand in and… it disappeared. Well, not really. His hand was stuck in that mirror up to the knuckles, only his fingers didn’t come out the other side, they came out of the other mirror, from the back end.

  Menhaus gasped, pulled his hand out. It was fine.

  “Do it again,” Saks told him.

  Licking his lips, he put his hand up to the knuckles again. His fingers wiggled from the rear of the other mirror. Separated by nearly six feet of space, yet whole, connected, alive.

  “I think you’re sticking your hand into the fourth dimension,” Cushing told him, very excited now. “The usual rules of space and distance don’t apply.”

  “That’s freaking me out,” Fabrini said. “You stick your hand in the front… it comes out the back? That’s some weird shit.”

  “Does it hurt?” Elizabeth asked Menhaus.

  Menhaus shook his head. “It feels kind of cold in there, tingly, but nothing beyond that.”

  “Pull your hand out,” Cushing warned him. “If that thing cuts out

  … well, your fingers might fall off on the other end.”