Aliens Among Us

by Gardner Dozois

  "Close the door, Alex." I turned around and closed the door. It was dark in the bedroom. "Come here." I sat down on the bed and leaned close. "Alex, I want you to get rid of them. I want you to get rid of them now."

  "He's taking a shower. You know they haven't got anything over there in that shack."

  "We haven't got anything over here in this shack. Get rid of them, Alex."

  "I'm taking the TV." I unplugged it and carried it out of the room. When I closed the door again, I heard something thud against it from the other side. Probably her pillow. We had lately begun to break things and to throw things at each other when we were angry, which was often.

  Pops was standing naked in the tub. His clothes, except for the coat, were piled up on the floor next to the tub. He would not let go of the coat; something precious was rolled up in it. The bucket was flowing over into the steel sink. I put down the TV and shut off the water, then carried the bucket over to Pops.

  Pops was a big man, barrel-chested and muscular, though he sagged around the middle. Popeye, on the other hand, was skeletal.

  "Here," I said, offering Pops the bucket.

  "No," said Pops. "You give the bucket to Popeye to pour on me. You go plug in the TV. We wanna see the Evening World Report."

  I set up the TV so Pops could see it as he showered. From inside the bedroom, Corinne shouted, "Is that man naked in the living room?" No one paid her any attention. Synthesized strains of Beethoven's Fifth, the theme music for the Evening World Report, were just beginning. The anchor man, a substitute, someone I didn't recognize, was shuffling papers at his desk.

  "Hold the water ready," Pops told Popeye. To me, he said, "we come from far away, you hear me, boy? Far, far away! That's the truth."

  "That's the truth," Popeye echoed. "All Pops says is gospel true."

  Something heavy slammed against the door. "Are they gone yet?" Corinne shouted.

  "All Pops says is gospel truth," said Popeye. "It's true in this place. It was true in the other. If we stuck here another million years, it be true. If we be back home this night, it still be true."

  "Tune that in better," Pops told me. I fiddled with the rabbit ears till the ghosts went away. Behind the anchor, numbers flashed with percent signs and dollar signs. There was a pie graph, followed by a bar graph and then pictures of long lines of grey people bundled up against the cold.

  Pops started to unwrap the thing in his coat. "Pour a little," he told Popeye. "Ouch! That's hot, hot, hot!"

  "Is it too hot?" I said.

  "Quiet now," Pops warned me.

  I looked at Pops head, and I couldn't stop looking. The flesh had melted away where the hot water had hit him. Pops's scalp was gone. The skin was folded down over his forehead and ears, hanging over the nape of his neck like damp rubber from a burst balloon. Nor was there a cranium to speak of. The bone had scattered like ash, powdering what was left of Pops's face with a fine white dust.

  Something else hit the door. Corinne shouted, "I hate you, Alex!"

  Popeye asked, "Can we lock that door?"

  "Not from this side," I said.

  "Never mind that," Pops commanded. "Turn up the juice on the Evening World Report, you. And you, Popeye, pour me some more hot."

  I made it louder. "But it's just a commercial," I said.

  "It's just a commercial!" Pops laughed as hot water erased his eyeballs, nose, ears, and the upper part of his jaw, burning streaks down to his ankles as if it were nitric acid. His brain slipped down like liver into a grinder, settling into his mouth and then his throat. Pops continued to stand erect. Pops continued to speak, although there seemed no place left for a voice to come from. "Just a commercial!" he howled.

  Popeye said, "We don't know no commercial from no nothin' else. You see sun and you see sex, but it all just hot to Pops. If you please, now pinch the poojum before it fall away." He pointed to the thing cradled in Pops's melting hands. I pinched the end of it between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. There was that smell again, acrid and cutting, reminding me of things no human being has a right to remember.

  "Damn you, are you burning something in there?" Corinne shouted. We could hear her start to get up out of the bed.

  "More hot!" cried Pops. And to me: "You, pull, man! Pull it to the tube, man! Give it to the big bow tie."

  "To the what?" I said.

  "Quick now!" Popeye said, pouring. "Are you deaf? To the big bow tie! Give it to the big bow tie!"

  I was still pinching the thing. I had stretched it away like bubble gum. The scent made my head spin. "What are you talking about?" I said. "I see the bow tie, but how am I supposed to . . ."

  "Give, man! Give it!" Pops sang out. There was little left of him besides a vertebral column balanced on the coccyx, dripping slime, which smoked and ran in rivulets into the old wash tub. I could not see which part of it held his end of the poojum, but he held it still. "This my moment, man! Give it quick, before the sports news!"

  "If it go to the sports news, we gots to wait another thousand million years," old Popeye said.

  The door pushed open. Corinne came out in her bathrobe, brandishing an iron lampstand.

  "Do it now!" Pops commanded.

  I pressed the gummy end of poojum onto the TV screen where the image of the anchor man's bow tie floated.

  "Pour!" screamed Pops. Popeye poured. The house filled with steam, carrying that strange, ancient smell into every room, into every crevice. The string of poojum connecting the TV screen with the sliver of Pops sizzled and vibrated in widening arcs. The TV man droned on. Corinne was gasping, falling toward the vibrating string. Popeye leapt toward her, deflecting her from it, so that she fell backward into the bedroom. The lampstand clattered to the floor.

  "She out!" shrieked Pops. There was no more of him now than a peak of whipped cream, with the poojum on top, gradually sinking in, just as Pops's brain had sunk down through his old body before.

  "She out cold!" said Popeye. There was fear in his voice. "She out, Pops! How'm I gonna leave this place? How'm I gonna go with my Majesty now?"

  "The sports news isn't on yet," I said. It was as if it were an evening in someone else's life, a dream on the operating table, vivid but remote.

  "He right," Pops declared. "Slap that Corinne. Wake that Corinne. She your ticket to ride, Popeye."

  "Corinne!" I shouted, trying to be helpful. "Get up, honey! Get up! Wake up!"

  "She out cold," Popeye whimpered. "Goodbye, Pops! Goodbye, my lord!"

  "That's it, Popeye, my dear! You a loyal servant. Take the poojum. I gonna scoop you back to me, Popeye. Hold the poojum and wait."

  On the TV, a woman in a blue blazer was reading football scores. The string of poojum hummed, then snapped. The steam, the smell, and the dark, viscous remains of Pops all whirled, roaring, into the insignia on the sportscaster's blazer.

  "Goodbye, lord!" moaned Popeye, staring at the TV.

  Then there was only the wind rattling the window panes and the dit-dit-dit-dah of the closing music for the Evening World Report. Popeye was scuttling around, picking up Pops's clothes and putting things away. He had already secreted the poojum somewhere on his person.

  The top of the woodstove was glowing red. I grabbed Corinne's coffeepot off the hotplate. All the water in it had boiled away, and the metal was burning and stinking. I opened the door and laid the pot down in the snow. It sizzled. I left it there and went back into the house.

  I felt drugged. Popeye stood before me as if he were waiting for permission to leave. "She gonna be all right," he said. "Just a bump on the head." His face was streaked with tears.

  The TV was babbling behind us. "How did you get stuck here in the first place?" I said. "Who was it that planted flowers around Pops?"

  "You don't wanna hear about them, son. They big. They old. They got more names than your earth and moon. We don't wanna talk about pyramids now, and big lizards and volcanos and holes in the sky."

  "Is Pops back home now?"

&nb
sp; "He got through."

  "What happens to you?"

  "I'll get by."

  "What did you need from Corinne?"

  "Her anger, son, just her powerful anger. I don't think you would understand."

  "You probably don't want me to talk about any of this."

  "It don't matter. Everybody knows I gots my poojum."

  We caught each other's eye. Popeye laughed, and I tried to.

  "I best be going now," he said.

  I let him out the door and watched him disappear into the snowy field.

  Corinne was moaning and pulling herself to her feet. "What happened?" she said.

  "You fell," I said. "Are you okay?"

  "I think so. My head hurts. Where did everybody go?"

  "Pops went home after the Evening World Report. Popeye just left."

  "Did Pops take his shower?"

  "Yes."

  "Alex, please don't let those men in here again."

  "Okay, Corinne," I said.

  Corinne shook her head and lumbered back into our small, dark bedroom. "Come on," she said.

  "Corinne . . ."

  "Yes, Alex?"

  I looked at Corinne, sleepyhead, in her long, cotton nighty, wisps of brown hair half-covering her face, sweetly drowsy. There were no big lizards or volcanos in those eyes. She only wanted me, and a good night's sleep.

  "It's a big world, Corinne," I sighed.

  "I know it," she said. She came back out of the bedroom and kissed me. "You look lost, Alex."

  "Your coffeepot's a goner, Corinne. I burned it."

  "Don't worry,"—leaning her forehead against my cheek.

  "Do you think our bulbs will make it through the winter?"

  "Always have," she yawned.

  Tired as I was, I lifted Corinne into my arms—she smiled—and I carried her to bed.

  The Autopsy

  Michael Shea

  Here's one of the scariest science fiction stories ever written, showing that aliens may be hiding anywhere among us—including some places no one would ever think to look . . .

  Michael Shea has established a substantial reputation working on the borderline between horror, fantasy, and science fiction. His collection of linked stories, Nifft the Lean, won him a World Fantasy Award. His other books include the novels A Quest for Simbilis (set, with the permission of the author, in the universe of Jack Vance's Cugel the Clever stories), In Yana, the Touch of Undying, and The Color out of Time (a sequel to H. P. Lovecraft's story "The Colour out of Space"), the chapbook Fat Face, and the acclaimed collection Polyphemus.

  Dr. Winters stewed out of the tiny Greyhound station and into the midnight street that smelt of pines and the river, though the street was in the heart of the town. But then it was a town of only five main streets in breadth, and these extended scarcely a mile and a half along the rim of the gorge. Deep in that gorge though the river ran, its blurred roar flowed, perfectly distinct, between the banks of dark shop windows. The station's window showed the only light, save for a luminous clock face several doors down and a little neon beer logo two blocks farther on. When he had walked a short distance, Dr. Winters set his suitcase down, pocketed his hands, and looked at the stars—thick as cobblestones in the black gulf.

  "A mountain hamlet—a mining town," he said. "Stars. No moon. We are in Bailey."

  He was talking to his cancer. It was in his stomach. Since learning of it, he had developed this habit of wry communion with it. He meant to show courtesy to this uninvited guest. Death. It would not find him churlish, for that would make its victory absolute. Except, of course, that its victory would be absolute, with or without his ironies.

  He picked up his suitcase and walked on. The starlight made faint mirrors of the windows' blackness and showed him the man who passed: lizard-lean, white-haired (at fifty-seven), a man traveling on death's business, carrying his own death in him, and even bearing death's wardrobe in his suitcase. For this was filled—aside from his medical kit and some scant necessities—with mortuary bags. The sheriff had told him on the phone of the improvisations that presently enveloped the corpses, and so the doctor had packed these, laying them in his case with bitter amusement, checking the last one's breadth against his chest before the mirror, as a woman will gauge a dress before donning it, and telling his cancer:

  "Oh, yes, that's plenty roomy enough for both of us!"

  The case was heavy and he stopped frequently to rest and scan the sky. What a night's work to do, probing soulless filth, eyes earthward, beneath such a ceiling of stars! It had taken five days to dig them out. The autumnal equinox had passed, but the weather here had been uniformly hot. And warmer still, no doubt, so deep in the earth.

  He entered the courthouse by a side door. His heels knocked on the linoleum corridor. A door at the end of it, on which was lettered nate craven, county sheriff, opened well before he reached it, and his friend stepped out to meet him.

  "Damnit, Carl, you're still so thin they could use you for a whip. Gimme that. You're in too good a shape already. You don't need the exercise."

  The case hung weightless from his hand, imparting no tilt at all to his bull shoulders. Despite his implied self-derogation, he was only moderately paunched for a man his age and size. He had a rough-hewn face and the bulk of brow, nose, and jaw made his greenish eyes look small until one engaged them and felt the snap and penetration of their intelligence. He half-filled two cups from a coffee urn and topped both off with bourbon from a bottle in his desk. When they had finished these, they had finished trading news of mutual friends. The sheriff mixed another round, and sipped from his, in a silence clearly prefatory to the work at hand.

  "They talk about rough justice," he said. "I've sure seen it now. One of those. . . patients of yours that you'll be working on? He was a killer. 'Killer' don't even half say it, really. You could say that he got justly executed in that blast. That much was justice for damn sure. But rough as hell on those other nine. And the rough don't just stop with their being dead either. That kiss-ass boss of yours! He's breaking his god-damned back touching his toes for Fordham Mutual. How much of the picture did he give you?"

  "You refer, I take it, to the estimable Coroner Waddleton of Fordham County." Dr. Winters paused to sip his drink. With a delicate flaring of his nostrils he communicated all the disgust, contempt and amusement he had felt in his four years as Pathologist in Waddleton's office. The sheriff laughed.

  "Clear pictures seldom emerge from anything the coroner says," the doctor continued. "He took your name in vain. Vigorously and repeatedly. These expressions formed his opening remarks. He then developed the theme of our office's strict responsibility to the letter of the law, and of the workmen's compensation law in particular. Death benefits accrue only to the dependents of decedents whose deaths arise out of the course of their employment, not merely in the course of it. Victims of a maniacal assault, though they die on the job, are by no means necessarily compensable under the law. We then contemplated the tragic injustice of an insurance company—any insurance company—having to pay benefits to unentitled persons, solely through the laxity and incompetence of investigating officers. Your name came up again."

  Craven uttered a bark of mirth and fury. "The impartial public servant! Ha! The impartial brown-nose, flim-flam and bullshit man is what he is. Ten to one, Fordham Mutual will slip out of it without his help, and those men's families won't see a goddamn nickel." Words were an insufficient vent; the sheriff turned and spat into his waste-basket. He drained his cup, and sighed. "I beg your pardon, Carl. We've been five days digging those men out and the last two days sifting half that mountain for explosive traces, with those insurance investigators hanging on our elbows, and the most they could say was that there was 'strong presumptive evidence' of a bomb. Well, I don't budge for that because I don't have to. Waddleton can shove his 'extraordinary circumstances.' If you don't find anything in those bodies, then that's all the autopsy there is to it, and they get buried right here where th
eir families want 'em."

  The doctor was smiling at his friend. He finished his cup and spoke with his previous wry detachment, as if the sheriff had not interrupted.

  "The honorable coroner then spoke with remarkable volubility on the subject of Autopsy Consent forms and the malicious subversion of private citizens by vested officers of the law. He had, as it happened, a sheaf of such forms on his desk, all signed, all with a rider clause typed in above the signatures. A cogent paragraph. It had, among its other qualities, the property of turning the coroner's face purple when he read it aloud. He read it aloud to me three times. It appeared that the survivors' consent was contingent on two conditions: that the autopsy be performed in locem mortis, that is to say in Bailey, and that only if the coroner's pathologist found concrete evidence of homicide should the decedents be subject either to removal from Bailey or to further necropsy. It was well written. I remember wondering who wrote it."

  The sheriff nodded musingly. He took Dr. Winters' empty cup, set it by his own, filled both two-thirds with bourbon, and added a splash of coffee to the doctor's. The two friends exchanged a level stare, rather like poker players in the clinch. The sheriff regarded his cup, sipped from it,

  "In locem mortis. What-all does that mean exactly?"

  " 'In the place of death.' "

  "Oh. Freshen that up for you?"

  "I've just started it, thank you."

  Both men laughed, paused, and laughed again, some might have said immoderately.

  "He all but told me that I had to find something to compel a second autopsy," the doctor said at length. "He would have sold his soul—or taken out a second mortgage on it—for a mobile x-ray unit. He's right of course. If those bodies have trapped any bomb fragments, that would be the surest and quickest way of finding them. It still amazes me your Dr. Parsons could let his x-ray go unfixed for so long."

  "He sets bones, stitches wounds, writes prescriptions, and sends anything tricky down the mountain. Just barely manages that. Drunks don't get much done."