by David Coy
“Are you intelligent?” Bailey asked. It would have been a fairly dumb question if it hadn’t been so innocent. She’d asked it just like she was asking his name.
“Very,” Phil said with a smile.
Mary thought how nice it was to see a smile and was filled with respect for the person who could produce it so easily in these circumstances.
They sat on Mary’s bed and ate at random from the cans and boxes and noisy plastic packages. The feel of it wasn’t too far removed from the thousands of conversations she’d had with friends who’d talk, knosh and talk some more.
“How many cycles does it normally take before you wind up like the African down the tube?” Phil wanted to know.
“It varies quite a bit. I’ve seen them fold and give up after the first one. When that happens the goons drag you off and that’s it.”
Mary could feel Bailey’s rapt attention on her face like the glow of a wood stove. She wasn’t crazy about having Bailey hear all this right now, but she seemed to be taking it well. She watched her take another big bite of Sara Lee cheesecake.
“Where do they take you? What happens?” Bailey asked through her food.
Mary studied her face. Okay, we all have to grow up sometime, she thought. She took a deep breath before she spoke.
“These beings, the witches, use flesh like we use building materials. They craft it like we work iron or steel. This ship is an example. It’s alive—for the most part. But that’s just the beginning.”
Bailey swallowed fast so she could ask it. “This room is alive?”
“Yes,” Mary said. “The whole ship or station or whatever you want to call it, the whole superstructure is alive. And it has to eat.”
“What does it eat?” Bailey asked, her eyes wide. Mary fixed her with a strong, but measured look.
“Well, it doesn’t eat cookies. There are orifices spread throughout the ship that must be feed holes. They’re four or five feet wide. I’ve seen the body parts piled up around them and seen the goons pushing the parts down—human and animal. I’ve seen them dump whole bodies down them, too. All the waste goes down the holes. If you can’t get up, if you’re too weak, you’re waste—and down the hole you go—usually.
“So they use us until we can’t get up?” Phil asked.
“That’s it exactly. For some reason, being weakened and debilitated doesn’t get it if you’re an incubator, so off you go.” She paused for a second. “But you don’t always end up in a feed hole.”
“Where then?” asked Phil.
She looked at Bailey who had stopped chewing and was waiting anxiously for the answer.
Okay. You asked . . .
“This incubation stuff is just part of the picture,” she began. “I said they use flesh as a building material—it’s their wood, iron, steel, brick, whatever. Imagine that you’re a builder of chairs or beds or pliers or hammers, whatever. You’d need a lab for building the prototype of what you wanted to build and a lab for testing it. But even before you got the first one of the thing you were building built, you’d have to have a lab to do the materials testing and analysis. What are you going to make it out of and how? Well, that’s where some of us wind up—in those testing labs, or as building material.” She looked over at Bailey with as much sympathy as she could muster.
Phil let the thought sink in. He remembered the thing he shot the night he was taken and how alien it was. Not alien so much as bizarre and unnatural.
“They use parts,” she went on. “Systems, structures, units -living components—and can modify the shit out of them and then recombine them any way they want.
“Just think, what’s a better tool than a human hand? It can do more and manipulate more things than any other device on Earth. Well, what if you could take its basic structure and enhance it for a special purpose, say just to crush soda cans end to end—the hard way.” She picked up an empty Coke can and demonstrated. “It would have to be bigger, first of all, and have a much wider grip, so you’d have to force it to grow bigger—I don’t know how you do that little trick, but you do it. It would have a reinforced palm to withstand the force of repeated closures against metal and stronger fingers too. In fact, it wouldn’t even need fingers, so why not fuse them together into another palm-like structure and reinforce that.” She used her hand as a model. “The muscle in the forearm might not be big enough so you make it massive like Popeye’s ‘cuz there’s a lot of cans to crush in the world. Fuck the rest of the arm . . . ” She held her own arm out and made like she cut it off at the elbow. .”..be- cause you want to attach it to a better handle anyway. Make the handle out of some other material, say a goat leg that moves the hand part out and back real nice and gives you something to hold onto ‘cuz it’s thin and strong. Now insert a controller to move the hand out and back and another one to open and close the hand. The wires, or nerves you can get from either the man or the goat—if you have the tools and the knowhow. The controller could be a real switch or one of those opener switches. Power it all up with a little glucose and oxygen and you’ve taken a human hand and enhanced just one function of it to do a specific job. You’ve taken advantage of what evolution has done already and saved your precious wood, iron, copper, flint, whatever—if you had any to begin with—for other things that flesh can’t do.
“Forget the fact that it’s impossible to do to any of that— they can do it anyway. I don’t know how they do it exactly, but I know they do it. They can do it so well that you’d look at this new can-crusher thing and think it was a can-crushoid crushoid- ius or whatever—a real animal. They don’t just attach and sew the parts together, they get them to grow together somehow, without the rejection, the infection—any of that. They can manipulate flesh and bone and tendons and nerves better than we can control wire and aluminum and wood and steel.”
Phil didn’t doubt it. He’d seen many examples of it already, but hadn’t known exactly what he was seeing. He wondered how long it had taken them to unravel the human race and other species on Earth in order to break out and categorize the components and materials. How many had died in those labs before the inventory was known? How many more would die? Worse than that, how many were still alive, or partially alive?
“Christ,” Phil said.
“Yeah,” Mary replied. “Strange, huh?”
“What are the wasps for?” Phil asked. “I think they’re food, maybe they’re some kind of delicacy, or the grubs must contain a drug they’re addicted to—something like that. They’re making a hell of an investment in them whatever they’re for.”
“I think they must be used for some part of the combining, the building process,” Mary said. “Maybe the grubs contain a chemical that allows them to fuse the components together or modify them—I don’t know. But you’re right about the investment. Most of what goes on in the ship is related to those grubs. There’s no telling how many they’ve harvested so far.” Bailey had listened intensely to the whole exchange; and, even in this brown light, Mary could see she had turned the color of early spring grass.
“They make animals?” Bailey asked. “They made those big gray bear things?”
Mary nodded her head. “Several different species went into those things—even human—I’m sure of it.”
“What do they want with us?” Bailey asked. She’d finished eating and had drawn her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms tight around them. It was a curious reaction, Phil thought, how we make ourselves tighter and smaller when we feel threatened.
“I’ve given that a lot of thought,” Mary said. “I have no idea.”
“Not enough information yet,” Phil said to Bailey.
“I like to at least know why I’m being killed,” Bailey said into her knees. “What’s the point? I think it’s important to know.”
Bailey, in her guileless way, had posed a key question. They were doomed to die, horribly in all likelihood. It probably made more sense to figure out a painless way to commit suicide about now or how to
euthanize the others.
Phil and Mary exchanged looks. No, it wasn’t important— it was the only thing that mattered.
Why am I being killed?
The void that question left was like a lens that magnified the horror.
“Then we have to find out,” Phil said. “Besides, there’s no telling what we’ll find along the way.”
* **
“The goons come through every twelve hours or so,” Mary was saying, “and take from one to, say, four of us at a time. They use the seam at the front end of the tube, always.”
Gilbert sat and listened placidly, not letting his thoughts show. He let his gentle gaze drift to Phil.
Another pagan, Gilbert thought. That’s what he is and no amount of talking can change that. He’s just looking for a way to save his own skin, like all pagans do. Desperate men do desperate things. They only think of themselves.
Gilbert had seen many such men. They always had the easy answers but the big answers eluded them. It was the same for all godless men.
They can’t fool me, or God, he thought.
He was handsome, too. Most handsome men were godless. If you were handsome, women were more likely to be attracted to you and you would carry that burden of temptation around like a magnet pulling in slut after slut without remorse. Sluts sucked the penises of handsome men. They used red lipstick to cover the sores such filthy practices caused. He’d once seen a garish slut in the mall in Toledo wearing all black with tight black pants and loud makeup. Her black blouse was open, and he could see her white skin. She had long black fingernails, too, and he saw the suck-sore on the middle of her lower lip under the red lipstick. He followed her around the mall from a safe distance, just to see if his theory was true. Sure enough, she met up with a handsome, godless young man dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket outside the Baskin Robbins, and they went off together. He watched her slip her hand in the back pocket of his jeans to caress his bottom. They went off together, he was sure, to suck the young godless man’s cock.
* * *
“So they’ve never used the one we opened?” Phil asked.
“I’ve never seen them use it.”
“How do they know who to take?” Phil wanted to know.
The Canadian spoke up. “They just seem to know,” he said. “They rotate us. It’s fairly regular, but not exact.”
They had assembled everyone who could speak English—and who still had the strength to speak it, in Mary’s chamber. That was six out of twenty in the tube. Two wouldn’t come at all, the Italian who said he wanted to be left alone, and the cranky woman with the French accent who just stared at her when Mary told her they were going to meet as a group. “A group of what?” she’d asked. Mary just walked away from her.
That left Tom Moon, Gilbert, Mary, Bailey, Phil and the Canadian, Ned Butler. It took Mary no time at all to figure out that Phil had stolen Gilbert’s fire and assumed a real leadership role. The ironic thing was that Gilbert had no fire to begin with and you couldn’t steal what didn’t exist. They’d voted on it. Bailey had voted for Phil because Mary had voted for him and Tom voted for him just because.
Phil had suggested that they share what they had with the group. Somewhere in the bits and pieces, a pattern, a map existed. That map could lead anywhere, maybe home, if they were lucky.
When Phil asked for a volunteer, Bailey stepped up to be the scribe. They had several coil-bound notebooks Ned had taken from the dump intending to keep a diary, but never had. Bailey wasn’t very good at it, she’d said, but she would give it a try. At first they didn’t have a pen or pencil, and Tom had looked over at Gilbert who always carried one for making notes in the margins of his Bible.
He looked right at the Bic pen in Gilbert’s shirt pocket and Gilbert stared back at him and dared him to say anything. After Mary dug one up out of the bottom of her laundry basket, Tom saw Gilbert angle the pen sideways down into his shirt pocket to hide it. Tom thought it was funny and grinned like a school boy.
“We can do some reconnoitering,” Phil said. “We now know how to open the seam at the far end of the tunnel. I’ll volunteer for that. Who else wants to go?”
“Me,” Ned said. “I’ll go with you.”
“Who else?”
Gilbert cleared his throat just a little before he spoke. The sound made Mary’s hackles rise like a fight reflex. “Why does anybody else have to go? Isn’t two enough?”
“It seems to take . . . ” Phil started, but Mary cut him off.
“I’ll go. Hell with it,” she said.
“How many watches do we have?” Phil asked. “Hands up if you have one.”
“I’ve got one,” Mary said and dug it out of the bottom of the laundry basket. She started to put it on.
“I got about thirty watches,” Tom Moon said with a smile of pride.
Mary listened and shook her head in disbelief. Poor guy has a Jones for watches, she thought. Probably never had one until he got abducted by aliens.
Phil nodded his head kindly at him. “Great. Can we borrow five of your watches, Tom? The digital kind if you have them.”
“The kind with numbers on them,” Mary added.
“I know what kind. You want me to get ‘em now?”
“That would be great.”
When Tom got back, Phil took the assortment of cheap, multi-function watches and handed them to Ned.
“Can you synchronize these?”
“I think so. I’ve owned about a dozen of the cheap bastards.”
A paltry substitute for real communication, the synchronized time piece was the thread that would co-ordinate effort and provide a timeline for every event worth noting.
“Keep track of the time. Every time something happens, note the time. Don’t lose your watches.”
Ned was busy with the first watch, trying to set it.
“What’s the date?” he asked. “I’ve got three dates here.” They all thought about it and looked at each other with raised eyebrows. Nobody was sure what the date was at all.
“I doesn’t matter,” Phil said. “June the fifteenth. Use that. That’ll work.”
Mary looked at hers. “It’s the seventeenth.”
“And the time?” Ned asked.
“Make it twelve noon,” Mary said looking at her watch again.
Two days lost, Phil thought. Two days stolen.
“That’ll work, too,” he said.
5
L inda sat on the porch steps and watched the large brown ants marching just past the scuffed toes of her boots. They moved over, under and around each other in both directions, following some invisible scent left by their brethren before them. Most of the ones coming from the left had seed pods in their mandibles. It took no genius, she knew, to see that if you followed the trail in that direction, you’d find a cache of seeds.
It just made sense.
She wiped a last tear from her swollen, sleepless, eyes then stuck a finger straight down into the dirt in the trail. One of the ants bumped it with its antennae, then sensing some hostile intent in the finger, latched onto it with its jaws. Linda mooshed it into the hard dirt before its jaws could close tight enough to hurt.
The ant trail reminded her of what had happened and she resented it. She took a wide, long swipe at the ant trail with her booted foot back and forth, raising dust.
She’d just been all over the house, looking for anything new for the tenth time. Edna and Ronny had come up for a while Saturday and walked in and around the site and the truck with their arms folded shaking their heads thinking how impossible it all was that Phil Lynch had been kidnapped. Ronny said that was just about the most unlikely thing in the world and
Edna had finally broke down and cried and Ronny had to take her back down to their place.
Phil’s uncle Bob and two deputies had looked the place over real good and it was the pistol and spent cartridges lying in the dirt that convinced them there had probably been foul play of some kind. There was no body or b
lood, but Bob had called in a technician from Lake Isabella to print the premises and the truck anyway. After all, it was the Sheriff’s nephew who was missing.
The only prints they found were Phil’s and Linda’s. The verdict wasn’t in on the hair and cloth fibers the technician had vacuumed up, but Linda already knew they were just hers and Phil’s.
She was bone tired. She’d taken one of Phil’s combat shotguns out of the safe yesterday afternoon, loaded it with double X buckshot and carried it with her all the rest of that day. She’d sat up all night with it on her lap and hadn’t slept a wink. She’d been so vigilant during the night that the strain of listening had stiffened her neck. Maybe she should have gone home yesterday, but she couldn’t resist the thought that Phil would come back somehow, some way.
She’d come out of the house only when the sun was up high and after a good look around out each of the cabin’s windows. She’d finally put the shotgun down when she was too tired to carry it any longer. It was leaning against the porch rail exactly one arm’s length to her right at the moment.
She got up, hefted the shotgun and walked back over to the truck and looked at the big foot prints in the dirt. There were two sets of the big prints and a bunch of smaller threetoed prints all around. About twenty feet out from the truck she could see the spot where the something had fallen. The dirt was scratched and scattered in several directions as though someone had dropped an armload of firewood there. A line of the three-toed prints led to the spot coming from down the hill and more of the big prints could be seen all around it. Bob had found a scrap of what looked like pale tissue on the spot about the size of a postage stamp which he’d bagged up and given to the technician. The technician said it looked like leather to him.
There was a patch of dark liquid in the spot about a foot wide. The technician was sure it wasn’t blood but had scooped out a couple of lab-knives full of the moist, sandy soil and bagged that up for later analysis, too.
That was all of the physical evidence at the cabin. After examining the entire area, they followed the tracks out and found more of both types of prints down the hillside in front of the cabin and some big prints behind a cluster of granite to the east. They followed the tracks back to where both types merged then followed them all to a place about a quarter mile away. There, in a dry wash, they found a large impression about forty feet long and twenty across and could see where sage and grass and small juniper bushes had been mashed flat. That’s where the tracks ended.