Alien Nation #2 - Dark Horizon

by K. W. Jeter

  THERE WERE REAL advantages to offing someone on the water. It was easy to maintain visual contact with the targeted subject. And satisfying to watch what happened.

  Guerin lowered his binoculars. Noisy and obtrusive—that had been the late Richard Parris. He had made an even bigger noise at the end of his life, but now he was quiet. Peaceful, even—Guerin liked that. There had been so many loud explosions and gunfire in his career—as with a lot of ex-military, he had a certain amount of ordnance-related tinnitus in one ear. He had learned to live with that, but he had also developed a genuine appreciation for silence. It so often meant that a job had been well done.

  The rooftop of one of the office buildings farther along the marina’s curve had given him a perfect vantage point. To watch, and wait—the explosive charge aboard Parris’s sailboat had been wired with a timer delay to the ignition of the small gas motor aboard. The other boats bobbing in the slips were so shiny white and pretty, it would’ve been a shame to damage any of them. A job well done was a clean job.

  Time to go, but he wanted to hang around a few minutes longer. He didn’t have to worry about being disturbed up here. He’d jammed the lock on the roof’s access door, so anyone who might have wanted to come up for a smoke—there were cigarette butts strewn all over—would’ve been out of luck. Even if somebody had managed to get through the door, how much suspicion would be attached to somebody admiring the ocean view on a sunny day? Doing a little bird-watching with the binoculars; there was a tiny strip of protected wetlands on the other side of the marina. Not suspicious at all . . .

  He swung the binoculars around to the dock. The two police detectives were still there, watching as well, though not from such an excellent vantage. Their arrival on the scene had been an interesting development. A pity that they had been broken into squabbling between themselves, and fighting and rolling around like a couple of school-kids. If they had gotten straight into the motorboat and caught up with Parris, they might have been aboard in time . . . in time to get a really close view of the explosion. How nice that would have been, to have eliminated that many pests so quickly and easily.

  It was nothing to grieve about. Guerin dropped the binoculars into their carrying case. The time was coming soon enough—sooner than any of them knew—when all the parasites would be exterminated. And the humans who had betrayed their own species, cozied up to the parasites and done their bidding? Guerin smiled as he fastened the straps on the case and slung it over his shoulder. It would take longer, but eventually justice would be meted out to the collaborators as well. And often a slow process, of hunting and punishment, was many times more enjoyable.

  Sirens wailed inland. He should definitely leave now, before the investigation of the sailboat’s explosion took in a widening spiral.

  He turned and walked toward the stairwell door. Behind him, in the distance, dirty brown smoke rose higher from the water.

  The dock had been cordoned off with bright yellow DO NOT CROSS tapes. Behind them, gawkers who had been attracted by the noise and fire, and BMW types who were annoyed about not being able to waltz right down to their pleasure craft whenever they wanted, stood in a pack, talking and pointing out bits of debris floating by.

  Along the walkway between the slips, George took a statement from the beach kid, the one whose speedboat he and Sikes had almost managed to commandeer. The kid didn’t have much to say—he’d seen the bang, and that was about it. Getting it down was pro forma, and a way of filling in time until Sikes and the other investigators got back. George had admitted to himself that his nerves had been rattled, and had made no attempt to go out on the water with the humans.

  “You never talked to Mr. Parris?” He kept his pen on the notepad.

  “Naw.” The kid shook his head. “He wasn’t a real friendly guy.”

  He flipped the pad shut. “We’ve got your phone number. We’ll call if there’s anything else we need from you.”

  “Hey, you know what I think it was, man? I bet it was one of those drug things. Like he was this big dealer or something—”

  George nodded to one of the uniformed officers, who led the kid off.

  Out on the water, an oil slick marked where Parris’s sailboat had gone up. The harbor police continued to skim the surface for pieces of evidence as the county skiff drew its curving wake back to the dock.

  Sikes and Medical Examiner Allen climbed off the skiff. Behind them, two of the Coroner’s Office staff unloaded a zipped-up body bag.

  “What’d you find?” George spoke to Lois.

  “Most of a single body. The torso was still strapped into a life jacket, so it wasn’t too hard.” She looked over as the bag was loaded onto a gurney. “Positive ID—it’s Parris. Hell of a bang; right now I’m assuming that’s what killed him. I’m pretty sure that when I do the autopsy, I won’t find much water in his lungs.”

  “Any indications—was it murder, accidental death, suicide?”

  Allen shrugged. “That’s pretty hard to say, least until SID determines the cause of the explosion. From what you told me, it sounds a little large to have just been the fuel tank. I don’t know—the guy was some kind of chemist, wasn’t he? Maybe he had some kind of volatile materials aboard. Get sloppy with some of those things, you can really wind up getting your butt handed to you.”

  He shook his head. “Parris didn’t strike me as being a sloppy person. Much more fussy and precise, actually.” He remembered the watercolor Parris had been working, all technique and no feeling.

  “Well, if he’d wanted to kill himself, there are a lot neater ways than this. Bullets or pills don’t leave this much of a mess.” The gurney was being pushed toward the waiting van; she started after it. “As soon as I have something more definite, I’ll let you know.”

  The rest of the investigators were either still out on the water, or on the other side of the yellow tape, sorting out the bits and pieces they’d retrieved so far. That left George and Sikes standing alone on the dock.

  “Well . . .” George gazed across the ocean. “Until the lab reports come back, there’s not much else for us to do.”

  Sikes concentrated on drying off his forearms with a towel that one of the uniformed officers had thrown him. “No . . . I guess not.”

  Something invisible, wrapped in its own uneasy silence, hung in the air between them.

  “Matt . . .”

  Sikes rolled the sleeves of his jacket back down. “Yeah?”

  “I was thinking . . .” He kept his gaze on the ocean, as if the slowly dispersing oil slick still had some interest for him. “About some of the things that got said . . . I mean, to each other. When we were so angry a little while ago. I was wondering . . .”

  “What?” Sikes looked over at him. Nothing unfriendly in his voice, perhaps even a hopeful undertone.

  “Well . . .” George met the other’s gaze. “I was wondering if—perhaps—you wanted to apologize.”

  A shutter flicked down behind Sikes’s eyes. “You know, that’s funny, George.” He tossed the wadded-up towel away. “I was just wondering the same thing about you.”

  He knew, even before Sikes had replied, that he’d blown it. There must’ve been something else he could have said that would have handled it better. But he couldn’t think of what it would be. And to swallow the feelings stuck hard inside his own throat, and apologize to Sikes—that was impossible.

  When some things were broken, they couldn’t be mended and put back into place. The pieces floated on the surface of the dead water until they sank into darkness and disappeared.

  “Oh.” George studied the ocean. “Well, frankly . . . I don’t feel I’ve done or said anything that warrants an apology.”

  “Yeah, well, I kinda figured that’d be the case. ’Cause that’s how I feel.”

  “All right. Then I suppose you’ll be putting in for a new partner . . .”

  Sikes nodded. “I guess I will.”

  He watched Sikes walk past the boat slips, and step o
ver the yellow tape at the shore’s end of the dock. For a moment he came close to calling to him. To say something else, even if there was nothing more that needed to be said. But again, there were no words, neither his own, the ones his people had brought here, or the human ones.

  There was just silence, and the roll of waves in the dark space beneath his feet.

  The trees stacked their big shadows across the park. Buck watched the sun setting, red burning through the constant smoky brown haze. It was all dirt in the air, crap that the humans had been spitting up into the sky a long time before any Newcomers had gotten here. Like there was some other place, another planet they could all go to when this one was dead-end raggedy and polluted. But still . . . sometimes, if you looked at it right, with your mind kind of kicked back, it could be close to beautiful, the deep bruised colors seeping along the horizon.

  Sitting on a slatted bench, he kept his finger inside the book for a marker. He was supposed to be meeting someone here, just at this time, but he’d come a good two or three hours early, to sit and read. He’d lost himself in the book—that seemed to happen a lot the last couple of weeks. Only the change in the light’s spectrum had brought his head up. He looked around and saw Marilyn walking up the path toward him.

  “Hey!” He waved to her and got a smile back in return. But she looked tired, as though the slight uphill pull had become work for her.

  He stood up from the bench before she got there. “I was afraid I screwed up or something.” He’d checked his watch and saw that it showed a half hour later than the time they’d agreed to meet. “I thought maybe I got the day wrong—”

  “I’m sorry I’m late, Buck.” She slid the strap of her bag from her shoulder and laid it on the bench. “Things have been kind of . . . hectic for me lately.”

  “That’s okay.” He was having a hard time keeping his enthusiasm in, and finally gave up. He held up the book, not caring that he’d just managed to lose his place in it. “I was just sitting here, reading this the whole time. God, it’s great. Catcher in the Rye—you know it?”

  Marilyn nodded and smiled. “Yeah. I loved it when I was your age, too. Actually, maybe when I was a little younger. But it is good.”

  “What about Franny and Zooey? I got that, and something called Seymour: An Introduction, at home—”

  “They’re all pretty good. There’ll be some you’ll like better than others.”

  Buck looked at the cover, the plain flat color and the simple lettering. “What I figured I’d do is read all of Salinger. Then I thought maybe we could talk about him at our next session . . .”

  Her smile was long gone. “I’m afraid, Buck, that there’s . . . something I have to tell you.”

  The tone of her voice alarmed him. “What?”

  “There isn’t going to be another session. We won’t be discussing any more books. Or anything.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  She looked away from him, toward the sunset, the red drifting to black. “There’s been some talk,” she said quietly. “About us. Someone made a report to Mr. Fisher that you and I . . .” Her shoulders rounded as she sighed. “That the two of us are having some kind of affair.”

  He stared at her. “That . . . that’s crazy . . .”

  “I have to transfer to another school.”

  “But it’s not true—”

  “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.” The weariness drained the life out of her voice, left it flat and emotionless. “There are some things—and this is one of them—where the accusation alone is enough. And people know it. Mr. Fisher told me that he’d take the charges before the school board if I didn’t put in for a transfer.”

  “Let him!” Buck grabbed her by the arms and turned her around to face him. “We’ll fight it!”

  The force of his grasp rocked her, as though all will had left her body. She shook her head. “It’s not that easy, Buck. This is my job. If the school board decided against me, I could lose my credential. It’s happened to other teachers.” She pulled away from him. “And even if I won . . . it’d still be ugly. People saying things about me at a public hearing, and then me having to prove my own innocence . . . and then it’d never be over, anyway. Some people would never believe me, and the others would always wonder. They’d always be suspicious.”

  “So you’re just gonna give in?” His voice rose to anger. “That’s all you’re going to do?”

  She sighed. “I’m not just thinking about myself. About my career. But you don’t need this, either. There’s your family . . . and your whole future to think of.”

  “I don’t care about any of that . . .” His hand brushed against the copy of Salinger he’d stuck into his jacket pocket. He threw the book into the grass and bushes at the side of the path; it flopped open, the pages fluttering. “You’re the one who’s always saying you gotta fight for what’s right.”

  “Then you’ve really learned something now—haven’t you?” The face she turned toward him seemed older, the weariness turned bitter. “You’ve learned the same thing I have. That sometimes people just can’t do all those wonderful and noble things. That sometimes they’re just words, things that sound nice.” Her face hardened against the lash of her self-contempt. “I can’t do it, Buck. Not this time.”

  The sudden, quiet fury pushed him back from her. “I don’t understand . . .”

  She brought herself under control, putting on a different face, a mask of feeling. She extended her hand to him. “Buck, I want you to know what a pleasure it’s been having you as a student . . .”

  It was his turn for anger, layered on top of his confusion. “Why are you talking to me like this? ‘What a pleasure it’s been’—you act like we hardly know one another.”

  She picked up her bag from the bench and turned away. “I have to leave now.”

  “Marilyn!” he called after her when she had taken only a few steps away. She looked over her shoulder at him. “Why?”

  He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand what she had told him, and he didn’t understand what he saw in her eyes now.

  “Because . . .” She looked away, off to the last ember of sunset. “Because maybe it is true. What they said . . . about us. Not about what happened.” She turned her gaze toward him again. “But what could happen.”

  She stepped close to him. “I want it to happen.”

  There were no more words. She leaned forward and kissed him.

  The soft, unexpected touch shocked him. He felt the clenching of his spine, the muscles tensing, ready to pull away. Away from her, away from everything that the world had dwindled into. The touch and warmth and presence against his face . . .

  He didn’t pull away. He gathered her into his arms, the kiss still unbroken.

  It was his kiss now, to her. It annihilated everything, leaving only the two of them on the shadowed hillside.

  When he first saw the big words, in the alley behind the police station, he thought that was what the humans meant. Albert had overheard Sikes and a few of the others say things about the “big words” that George used. Sometimes it was funny, a kind of joke, when they said it; other times, it wasn’t so nice, and then he didn’t understand what was going on. But then, that was the way it was in general with humans—they were just hard to understand.

  How could some words be bigger than others? Could they be so large that they couldn’t get out of someone’s mouth, but just stayed stuck in there? Could you choke on one if you tried to say it? That was kind of a worrisome thought. There weren’t any Tenctonese words like that, he was pretty sure.

  So when he saw the big words on the alley wall—he’d gone out there to empty the trash sack from his cart into the dumpsters—the spark jumped inside his head. Big words, but not the kind you said; the silent ones, like those on pieces of paper and doors. Only these were bigger than any he’d ever seen before, except maybe on billboard advertisements, and those were always way off in the distance. These words were right here i
n front of his face, so big that he couldn’t even see all of them at once; they started up by the mouth of the alley and went all the way back to the dead end.

  How could somebody write words so big? He’d stood in the alley, looking up to the top of them. You couldn’t do it with a pen, the way you put the little ones on paper. Then he’d spotted the empty spray can at his feet, the nozzle stained the same green color as the fuzzy-edged strokes that made up the words. That must’ve been what they’d used.

  His friend Beatrice Zepeda had come out into the alley looking for him, to warn him of something else Captain Grazer was on the warpath about. “Look!” Albert had pointed happily to the wall. “Those are really big words!”

  She’d read them to herself, walking the length of the alley, and had looked disgusted. “Aw, Christ . . .” She’d shaken her head. “Goddamn taggers. They must’ve thought it pretty hilarious, writing crap like this on the back of a station.”

  “What does it say?” He hadn’t had time to work it out for himself.

  “You don’t want to know. Stuff stupid people say. I’ll put in a request for city maintenance to come out and clean it off of here.”

  Later, he’d asked her, and she’d told him that ‘big words’ just meant long ones, the ones that smart people like George knew how to use. So the ones out in the alley weren’t big at all. They were all pretty short. One of them was ‘slags,’ and a couple of them were even nastier than that. Stupid-people words. He tried not to look at them whenever he dumped out the trash.

  The words stayed up on the alley wall. It took the city a long time to do anything about stuff like that, especially when it wasn’t right out in open view on the street.

  Albert had almost forgotten about the graffiti, he’d ignored it for so long. It actually surprised him when he looked up from the dumpster, the now empty canvas bag in his hands, and saw new words scrawled there, in a different color, a bright fluorescent pink. The wobbly letters even overlapped some of the words that had been there before.

  He stepped back, to try and make out what had been written. One of the words was a genuine big word, bigger than all the others, PARASITES. The little word at the beginning of the sentence, all the way over to the left side of the alley wall, was KILL. He didn’t bother piecing out what the rest of the words were. He didn’t know what they meant, but they gave him a sick feeling at the base of his gut, worse than what he got from the smell of cooking lard over in the barrio district he walked through every night going home.