With everyone else back on task, I turn to the girl and offer my hand. “August.”
She smiles and shakes my hand. “Megan.”
“You know what’s weird,” Mark says, and I think he’s noticed something about the light bending shape smoothing out the ground by our feet. “No one uses last names anymore.”
“Huh,” I say, finding the observation mildly interesting. Jeb is right. The things that separated us, that marked us as not united, including family names, might no longer have a place in the world. Of course, with only twenty-nine people around, the odds of people having the same name are slim. I crouch down without replying further and reach out. “Let’s get this done.”
“Wait,” Megan says, her hand outstretched. “Shouldn’t we be wearing gloves?”
“You have any?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“Didn’t think so. If you’re uncomfortable, I can—”
“I can do it,” she says, and reaches out, making contact. Light bends beneath her fingers as they slide over a surface. “Feels like thin plastic with a body beneath. Its frame is rigid. Stiff.” She slides her fingers to the end and slips a digit beneath the fabric. It disappears. “Got a knife?”
I remove my knife from its sheath on my belt and hand it to her. She places the blade against the invisible fabric.
“Okay, August,” she says, “hold this side. Mark, just keep that light steady.”
Mark stands closer, aiming the flashlight over the top of my head, while I take hold of the fabric, watching my fingers disappear. She gives me a sidelong glance, and I nod. She draws the knife upward, slicing through the surprisingly tender material until the slight resistance slips away. She cuts clean through.
I take a deep breath, holding onto my side of the cut fabric, looking into Megan’s eyes. We both know what comes next, but neither of us are ready for it. How could we be?
“My boss told me to pretend that the bodies I examined were just dummies. Organic parts assembled to resemble a body. Non-living material. It helped. Sometimes.”
“This isn’t a person,” I point out.
“Just do it,” Mark says, “before I puke.”
I nod at Megan and say, “Now.”
We both pull, and for a moment, I consider taking the cloak for myself, but then the invisible shroud parts to reveal what’s very visible underneath, and I forget all about pillaging. The first thing I notice is the stench, like chlorine, chemical and sterile. Like a lab, I think, but I keep that to myself, not because I think the others can’t handle the tidbit, but because that’s when I see it.
The light from Mark’s flashlight shakes as he steps back, hand to mouth. Megan has backed away, too, an arm over her mouth.
I stay rooted in place, my scientific mind running wild.
“Oh my god,” Megan says. “Oh my god.”
“The hell is it?” Mark asks.
“The enemy,” I say, and I turn to Megan. “Still up for this?”
She hands the knife back to me. “How about I supervise and you cut?”
Without a word, I take the knife, turn to the exposed body and lower the blade toward its head.
42
AUGUST
The knife blade hovers over the body. The realization that I’m not sure if it’s actually dead has stopped me. The three bullet holes I can see suggest a violent demise, but there’s also no blood. And who’s to say these things have hearts to stop. It’s alien. The odds of its physiology being anything similar to human are slim to none. It didn’t evolve on Earth. It might not have even evolved on an Earth-like planet.
No, I think, it must have evolved in a similar environment. The fact that it has arms, legs (four of them), eyes, a mouth (is it a mouth?) and is roughly six feet from head to toe—there are three toes on each of the four feet—suggests a similar evolutionary path. But the similarities end there. The body appears rigid and tubular. Pipe-like veins run up and down its limbs and torso, covered by taut brown flesh coated in gelatinous sludge.
Instead of cutting into the monster, I scrape some of the slime from its pipe-organ-like ribs.
“Dude,” Mark says. “That’s nasty.”
I think back to my previous encounters with the Blur. The wooden faces. The long pointed fingers. “They didn’t have this coating before.”
Megan crouches next to me, sniffs the goo on the knife blade and winces. “Could be waste material. We don’t know how they, for lack of a better word, shit. When people die, all their muscles go slack and—”
“I get it,” I say, wiping the blade clean in the grass by my feet. “Sure you don’t have any gloves around?”
“Tough man loses his nerves at the first sign of alien sweat-shit,” Megan says with a hint of a smile. “I see how it is.”
I turn the knife blade around and offer it to her.
She holds up her hands. “I know my way around human cadavers, not...this.”
I spin the blade hilt back into my hand. “Then tell me where to start.”
“We should confirm that the subject is actually dead.”
I nod. “But how? It might not have a pulse. It might breathe through its skin. This slime could be some kind of regenerative coating. A full body scab, protecting the wounds from alien bacteria. We have zero idea what to expect here.”
“Stab it in the eye, man.”
Megan and I both turn to Mark. The idea is revolting, and I think Megan agrees with me until she nods and says, “That should work.”
“You’re serious?” I ask.
“Dude, if that doesn’t wake it up, it’s dead or so close to death that it can’t react. Worst case scenario, it’s alive and we blind it in one eye. If you’re worried about that, just stab it in both eyes, so that it can’t see us when it wakes up.”
I turn back to the body and say, “I miss computers.”
“I miss surfing,” Mark chimes in.
“The Walking Dead,” Megan says. “Now get it done or we’re going to run out of time.”
With my own tight schedule working against me, I clutch the knife in my fist and lean over the rectangular, line-etched face. I aim the blade at one of the oily eyes, imagining what it will feel like to stab it, then I draw the blade back and repeat. No good, I decide, and then I move past my fears, anxiety and revulsion.
The blade slams down, meets momentary resistance and then punches through. With a groan, I lift the blade up and stab down again. This time, the impact is different. Softer. I missed the eye and plunged the knife into the Blur’s forehead. I lift the blade and stab again, hitting the second eye this time. I pull back, knife in hand, breathing hard.
“I think you could have stopped after you stabbed the thing in the forehead,” Megan says.
“You’re...assuming...that’s where...its brain is,” I manage to say between deep breaths.
“Geez,” Mark says. “Check out its eyes.”
Despite my hammering heart, I lean forward again and inspect the damage I’ve done. What I see takes a moment to make sense. “They...shattered.”
The oily fluid seeps out of the broken eyes, leaking down over the expressionless face. My eyes track downward over the body. The flesh is taut. Uniform. Organic, but...flawless.
Almost flawless.
There’s a horizontal line cutting across the Blur’s forearm, which appears to be composed of four straight tubes arranged in a diamond shape and wrapped in tight skin. I lower the blade to the line. Without cutting, the blade slips between the folds of skin.
It’s a seam.
The reality of what we’re seeing comes out of my mouth even as I fully realize it. “It’s a suit.”
“A suit?” Mark asks.
Megan elaborates on my discovery. “A two stage bio suit. The outer layer protects against the elements, the outside world and discovery. The inner layer is more mobile. Tighter. Providing a second barrier of defense. That might be what the slime is for. Maybe the suit sensed a breach and secreted the gel
to seal the suit and protect...”
Megan steps back.
“What?” Mark asks.
I know what Megan is thinking. The fear stamped on her face matches my own. I didn’t stab it in the eyes. I simply broke the eye pieces of an alien hazmat suit. That’s why they always seem so expressionless. The alien creature...the Blur...is inside the second suit. We haven’t really seen it yet, and I don’t know if it’s dead—bullet holes or not.
I remain rooted in place, the knife blade still hugged by the seam, my need for knowledge outweighing the instinctual desire to flee. With a long slow breath, I steady my shaking hand and focus. Ignore the others, I tell myself. Ignore the night. The urgency. The chemical stench. I lay out a mental track. Information leads to discovery. Discovery to solutions. The Blur are a problem that needs solving.
“August,” Mark says, sounding unsure.
“I have to,” I tell him.
“Fire with fire,” Megan says, understanding what’s driving me.
“Science with science.” Information, discovery, solutions. Ways to fight back. Ways to win, or at least, to survive.
“I have to,” I say again, this time to myself. Then I apply pressure to the blade and draw its flat surface down the forearm, toward the hand. Clean, white sinewy flesh is revealed, still and motionless.
With a slurp, the hand, which is actually a glove, slips free of the arm, revealing three inches of flesh. There appears to be no skin at all. Only white sinews, tightly bunched together. Perhaps that’s why the second suit is so important. Maybe the Blur have no natural defenses against external elements. But why would any creature, anywhere in the universe, evolve like that?
I turn my attention to the three-fingered hand. The long, pointed index finger retains its rigid form. It’s a tool, I realize, not an actual finger. Or is it a weapon? These are scientists, I remind myself. While the Blur can certainly kill with the long sharp digit—Steve Manke was proof of that—it must serve some kind of other purpose. Perhaps several. The nearly invisible, needle-sharp tip suggests that it could be used for drawing blood samples...or injecting material into a subject.
My eyes flick toward my shoulder for a moment, but movement and a gasp pull me back to the gloved appendage.
“It’s moving,” Megan says.
She’s right. The strands of exposed flesh are pulsing.
I draw the blade back, watching as the glove slips off the still rigid limb. Beneath are coils of the tight white strands arranged in what look like four round pipes.
The words, not dead, flit through my mind, but never make it out of my mouth. What happens next erases any doubt as to whether or not the creature still lives.
The glove falls free, propelled by some unseen force. The white, stringy flesh inside retains the hand’s shape for a moment, but then unfurls with surprising explosive force. Loops of white tendrils wriggle in all directions.
Everyone human within eyeshot, including those some fifty feet away from the action, take a few steps back.
There you are, I think. The true Blur is revealed, and like science predicts, not even remotely human.
The entire alien suit twitches, its insides roiling about, no longer conforming to a rigid, tubular state.
Then, it changes again. The writhing loops pull back, slipping inside the suit while a single, long tendril slips skyward like a charmed snake.
It’s all one creature, I realize. One, long worm-like creature. Its mind must be spread out across its mass. That would make it hard to kill. Maybe impossible to kill. Dividing its body might simply divide its mind into two separate entities. If the bullets severed the long creature inside the suit, how many of them are about to emerge?
And if that happens, how can we kill it? Bullet, blades, clubs and other conventional weapons will be useless.
Mark, who has apparently been debating the same issue, finds the solution. “Fight science with fire.”
“Gasoline!” I shout to the distant observers. “We need gasoline!”
Several people sprint away.
I turn my attention back to the Blur. The long white strand is joined by a second. They lean toward me. I somehow sense their loathing. Their deadly intent. And then, for a moment, I feel it. In my shoulder. Pain radiates out from me. But the sensation is not alone. For a moment, I feel...pity.
And protective.
So much so that when Jeb arrives with a red gasoline tank, I hold out my hand and say, “Wait!”
But then I just stand there, useless and confused, watching the tendrils reach out for me.
I reach out to touch it, ignoring common sense, lost to a strange compulsion.
“Dude!” Mark shouts. “Just do it!”
Jeb sloshes the gasoline atop the writhing mass. I’m set free, my mind reclaimed. When Jeb finishes emptying the tank, I waste no time removing a small box of matches from my pocket and striking a flame. I toss the match onto the Blur and it erupts in flame.
“Fight science with fire,” I say. “Good to know.”
As the flames lick higher into the night sky, I turn to Jeb. “We’re leaving. Now.”
43
POE
I have boobs now. For the first time in my life, I consider what it would be like to go bra shopping. My new breasts even have names—that’s how little company I currently keep. Ida and Ingrid. One of the many benefits of pregnancy, along with aching hips and the addition of an extra pillow between my knees for sleeping. When the ache starts, I fret over my pelvis size. Body parts are shifting around in there, but a tiny person usually equals a tiny pelvis. What if I can’t push Squirt out? Her activity level borders on ‘contained octopus’—she doesn’t stir, she roams around, big luscious limbs slipping around my insides. Once, with thumb and forefinger, I caught her poking foot, to the left of my navel, a puny, vigorous stone, insistent and strong. She will be fine, it seems. But will I?
The two months since that chaotic day in the woods, when I found the crashed vehicle, and all those Blur, have been uneventful. If you don’t count the continued news from August. His group—twenty-nine people—is on their way here. His revelations about the Blur, what they look like on the inside and what we might really be to them, is disturbing, but I try to focus on the impending arrival of August and his—our—people. They’re still slowed by August’s health, which varies from day-to-day, and by the logistics of feeding that many people while traveling, but they’re making progress.
But no matter how boring my life has become, or the good news from August, my mind continues to wander back to the Blur, and why they are here. There isn’t a single possibility that gives me any long term comfort. Even if I’m being protected by Rose, why? My baby, I think, but will they come for her? Will they come for me?
Is it delusional to think they’re coming for you, when, in fact, they may be coming for you? Where does paranoia end and realism begin? Counter to my vigilance, many fractures run crisscrossing around my brain, so much so that I actually decide to venture back out to the grocery store, despite already having gathered most of what’s left there. All I know now is that August and Mark were attacked, and we could be next.
My own ancient Volkswagen bug, long since freed of the snow that kept it rooted in place for several months, seems pathetic, too innocent and inadequate, not really something you’d take into battle. It’s more of a burden in need of protection. Liabilities I don’t need, especially the friendly and comfortable variety. I consider the massive propane truck, but if a quick getaway is required, that lumbering beast won’t do. I give my lonely bug a pat on the hood and climb into my parents’ red Chevy flatbed truck.
August and I discussed how to prepare the house against attack, ways to stumble intruders, early alarm systems. We devised easily rigged stuff, methods not needing an electrician or too much dangling of my pregnant self from ladders. Planning for the possibility that I might need to defend myself against aliens with unknown intent and technology, has forced those mental fissures
open a bit more. It’s just so otherworldly. Dreamlike. Like something a crazy person would do, like the way I thought my parents were turning out, ludicrous uselessness, spitting on a forest fire. But sometimes implausibility is all we have, and the dark, deep clefts opening up in my head force me to choose between complacent surrender or preposterous action. So I’m choosing.
I will be vigilant. I will hope for encounters with only the benevolent Blur, and that they will remain protective.
I say that I’m the one choosing, but really, Squirt has determined for me. And for that, for her, as I back my dead parents’ truck out of the driveway, I’m grateful.
Abandoned cars still litter the streets of my town. I’m not sure why I thought anything would be different. Lawns are bright green and overgrown, weeds already reclaiming the flower gardens surrounding houses. Despite the humid heat of July, I keep the AC off and the windows down. This is the life I need to get used to. Eventually, cars won’t work either, but I don’t need to get used to that yet—not while I’m alone and very pregnant. My due date is next month, but that doesn’t mean the baby can’t come early.
It smells like nature outside. Like flowers and grass. Like them, I think, but I push the image away. These scents were wonderful and a part of the human experience long before the Blur arrived, hijacking nature’s more pleasant odors.
I drive to the grocery store, there in minutes this time, and walk boldly in. I have brought bags from home, and expect to take more from the front counters—I’m craving chocolate. The smell sends me reeling. The contained, nearly airless environment has been a perfect petri dish for rotting meats, cheeses and old produce to host all manner of molds, fungus and bacteria. It smells like a landfill, toilet and a filled diaper, but stronger. Like I could be wearing the filled diaper on my face.
I’ve taken to wearing my father’s T-shirts, due to my burgeoning belly, and I lift the neck of it over my nose, walking around that way, as briskly as possible, my own personal scent not nearly masking the stench. Slick juiciness coats the floor, sticky and nondescript. Water drops fall from the ceiling, remnants of yesterday’s thunderstorm, dripping over rotted gunk, smearing it over the floor. I could contract something deadly in here, I’m sure of it. Salmonella. E. coli. Ugh, what am I doing back here? I remember the dog, and the very large, physical danger it presented. So obvious and bold. But now...I could bring a deadly bacteria home on my shoe soles, no doctors in sight. The silent invisible killer of mankind...before the Blur.
The Distance Page 27