Alien Nation #6 - Passing Fancy

by David Spencer

  “Ah!” Fran breathed, in pain. “Ah! Ah-ah! You said you’d get them out! Ow!”

  “I know.”

  “You lied!”

  “I know.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I love you!”

  The shouted reply exploded out of Cathy without conscious thought, and amazed her, for somewhere along the line it had become true. She had connected to the fire in Fran’s soul, to the dark-bright passion that no cosmetic alteration could mitigate, and the thought of such spirit being snuffed out was now more than she could bear.

  Cathy didn’t know if Fran heard her reply, because on the heels of it, right on the heels of it, Fran screamed. It was a sound of exquisite hideousness, of a sentient being in senseless torment, the like of which Cathy had not heard since the days of Overseer atrocities on the slave ship. Only worse, because the sound was not behind closed doors or echoing forebodingly down metal passageways. Cathy was right on top of it.

  And now she could see the torment as well. Fran’s cheekbones were pulsing, little mounds of biological matter seemed to be moving under the skin (just like clumps of insects), scuttling about, searching for a place to settle.

  “Make them stop! They’re eating me inside! I can hear them!”

  And of course it would feel like that, the dissolution of solidity; it might even sound like that, like chittering—

  —and Fran’s right ear was dangling. The skull had reclaimed that amount of cartilage it needed for the barely discernible swell of a Newcomer ear and simply discarded the rest . . . closing off the blood vessels to the appendage . . . tightening the skin around its perimeter until the skin around the skull had pulled free of the skin around the ear (oh, gods, maybe that’s what Fran had heard, the sound of skin ripping . . .).

  Under where the “human” ear had been—something glistened. Cathy had to look away.

  Fran screamed again, and Cathy was hit with a fresh wave of shadow pain. She tensed, gritting her teeth, again forgoing her own relief, holding onto Fran as the actress’s head thrashed back and forth, seeking to subdue the painful sensations by beating them away upon the nearest solid surface. But only Cathy’s breasts were available, and they proved the perfect cushion.

  The dead ear was hanging by a long thread of dead skin, and it kept hitting Fran’s chin as her head shook back and forth. Fran, dimly aware of the sensation, opened her eyes—

  —and there it was.

  Her own ear.

  Hanging below her jaw.

  “Put it baaaack!” she shrieked. “Put it baaaaack!!”

  And now Cathy experienced a different kind of phantom sensation, one she hadn’t expected. It fell on her like a wall of desolation.

  She saw the bugs. Under her own skin. Eating their way out of her own face. Saw them. Believed in them. Crawling around the strands of her musculature. Their furtive antennae, their masticating mandibles, sickly brown chitinous bodies, eye stalks and—

  —and then the hallucination was over. Fran was still in the throes of it, but the vision had passed for Cathy. For how long, though? I didn’t know about this part, Cathy thought. I knew about sharing the pain; not the delusions . . .

  If her mind was not to be her own any longer . . . if there was to be more of this . . . she didn’t know if she could maintain her sanity.

  She noticed then that while in the grip of the vision, she had loosened her grip on Fran. That scared her. Scared her more than the bugs.

  Because with less luck, Fran might have worked herself out of Cathy’s grip, done herself irreparable damage. It might still happen.

  What to do? Please, please, what to do?

  Cathy concentrated, forcing herself to push away panic. Think simply, she thought. Take stock and think simply. And a simple idea came.

  She altered her grip on Fran, worked her arms underneath the tightly belted sleeves, the straitjacket holding both pairs of arms in place now.

  How firmly in the long run she didn’t know.

  She only hoped that—

  Another wave of pain.

  The bugs crawled into her mind.

  Fran was screaming.

  Cathy screamed right along.

  And on that note, the Leethaag became a living nightmare . . .

  C H A P T E R 1 9

  A VERY PRETTY place to have your office, the Silliman Building. Located in West Hollywood right on Santa Monica Boulevard, it didn’t look like an office building at all. Four storeys high, it had a tan adobe facade. A full flight of stone steps approached its main entrance on each side, and the front doors were made of clear, thick glass encased in golden, art deco style frames.

  A semicircular driveway curved past its small, stone-bordered lawn, in the center of which was a fountain that had been reconverted to a palm frond-based floral display.

  Yeah, real pretty, reflected Detective Beatrice Zepeda. Even in this awful, pouring rain. You wouldn’t think of it as home base for the scum of the earth, but that was probably why scum rented space there in the first place.

  The fronds were collecting water and spilling it onto the lushly green lawn in fountainlike arcs as one unmarked police car—Zep’s—and two black-and-whites pulled up in front of the stairway. Ducking against the weather, Zep and her partner pelted up the stairs on one side while a pair of uniforms came up the other. The pair from the third car emerged from their vehicle in ponchos and split up to keep an eye on the building’s exits.

  Upon entering the building, Zepeda reflexively tossed her head back and forth, shaking water from her impressive mane of long raven hair. Of all the female cops in the precinct, she was arguably the hottest-looking: slender and sleek, olive-skinned, with dark, deep, shiny eyes. On the other hand, no one could say she didn’t look like she belonged in her profession. There was a hard beauty to her Hispanic features: too many lines crinkled around the eyes for one so young; elastically expressive lips formed a mouth that was unusually large, covering teeth that were unusually big, in a jaw set unusually forward; so that at odd moments, her cheeks could appear unexpectedly hollow, her face unexpectedly bony—and undeniably cop-tough.

  She scanned the directory on a nearby wall for the Serovese Corporation. She saw the names of several literary agencies, a graphics design place, specialty newspaper offices, an accounting firm . . . but not what she was looking for.

  “Now what?” said her partner, Laura Stanczyk. She was a small girl, but the size was deceptive. She would bench press a three-hundred pound thug if she had to.

  “Got to be here,” Zep said. “The reverse directory says so.”

  The reverse directory was a phone reference whose use was theoretically limited to law enforcement agencies. Rather than look up a name to get an address and a phone number, you looked up a phone number to get a name and an address. Less than an hour earlier, Matt Sikes and George Francisco had requested a reverse directory search—the number Max Corigliano had given them for the Serovese Corporation’s answering machine—and the result of the search had revealed three things. One: that the number was indeed held by a Serovese Corporation. Two: that the number was unpublished and unlisted in any public directory (leading all and sundry to wonder just what kind of corporation chose to have an unlisted number). Three: that the Serovese Corporation was located in the Silliman Building.

  “May I help you?” said an officious, self-important voice behind Zep and Stanczyk. They turned to find a uniformed doorman. Young fellow, real pretty, an effete Hollywood hopeful with “mean queen” written all over him. “Visitors are supposed to be announced. As I’m sure you’ve read.” With his eyes, he indicated a nearby posted advisory to that effect.

  No time for this, thought Zep. She flipped her badge and, for the hell of it, pulled her gun.

  “Yeah, you can help,” she said tersely. “You can give me the room number of the Serovese Corporation and you can bag the attitude. I’m really not in the mood.”

  The response was immediate and satisfying: The young
fellow fuhmfured quite impressively. “I . . . uhhh . . . that is, the, uhh, Serovese Corporation has a strict no visitors policy. That’s, you know, why they’re not on the direc—”

  Zep leaned in closer.

  “Am I to understand that you wish to be considered an accessory to these guys? Speak up so my partner can corroborate me in court. I am just dying to run somebody in today.”

  Laura smiled prettily at him.

  “Four-oh-seven,” said the doorman, and that was that.

  They left one of the uniformed cops with the doorman to see to it no warnings were called up to room 407. The second uniformed officer took the stairs up as Laura and Zep took the elevator.

  The three converged on room 407 together. The uniformed officer and Laura took positions on one side of the door. Zep took the side nearest the knob.

  Guns drawn, pointed up. Ready.

  All further communication would occur in silence now. Nods. Mouthed monosyllabic words. Hand signals.

  Zep reached for the knob with her free hand. Turned it, testing it. In agonizing slo-mo. Not wanting to make a noise.

  Surprise.

  It wasn’t locked. She could feel the metal tongue sliding into its socket.

  Easy entry.

  Too easy?

  She made eye contact with Laura, with the uniformed officer. Imperceptible nods. Yeah, the look said. We’re gonna do this.

  One . . . two . . .

  On three! she threw the door open and burst in, gun drawn two-handed, Laura right beside her, the uniformed officer at the rear.

  “FREEZE!” shouted Zep.

  “POLICE!” Laura augmented.

  The room was nearly bare. It was just that, a single room, possibly the smallest office in the building. It contained six things.

  A desk.

  A swivel chair.

  A phone.

  An answering machine.

  A Barbara Cartland romance novel.

  And a blinking, gum-chewing secretary.

  “You ladies looking for somebody?” she said. She spoke in a nasal voice, making her sound for all the world like Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls. Her hands were on the desk, steadying the book she’d been reading when Zep and Laura had burst in. The notion that she had any concealed weapons at the ready—or that she was in any position to grab one if she had—became increasingly farfetched with every passing second.

  Starting to feel profoundly silly, Zep lowered her gun.

  “We’re looking for the Serovese Corporation.”

  The secretary kept working her gum and smiled hugely.

  “Honey,” she announced, “I am the Serovese Corporation!”

  She wasn’t, of course. She was simply its sole visible employee. She was Maureen Goldfaden, a woman who had answered an ad. Her job interview had been conducted by phone, and when she showed up at the office nearly a year ago—the key having been left with the doorman—she’d found her first week’s salary and an innocuous list of instructions.

  Her duties mostly included maintaining the neatness of the office and seeing to it that the answering machine never ran out of tape on its incoming reel. When a cassette looked to be running out, she was to replace it with a fresh one. She would put the old cassette in an envelope and leave it at a “drop” in the local public library—behind the books on the second shelf of western novels. This she did every Tuesday at 4:30.

  The answering machine had been jury-rigged so that she could not hear incoming messages, although she always knew, by the sounds the machine made, when her bosses were accessing messages by remote (which they had not yet done today). She was given strict instructions never to listen to the tapes herself. She was told that they were somehow encoded by the answering machine, and if any but authorized ears listened, the Serovese Corporation would know, and her job would be terminated.

  She suspected this was a bluff; the answering machine looked like a bargain-basement Panasonic to her; but she had chosen to behave as if she believed the warning because the paycheck was extraordinary, and why mess with good fortune?

  She’d fully expected that the good fortune would run out someday. The arrangement was too fishy, the bosses too anonymous, the security measures too paranoid. But she’d also known that she was legally untouchable. Her safety net was the letter of her routine, which contained not even the implication of illegality. As long as she adhered to it, she imagined she’d stay out of trouble—and she was right.

  In regard to her job at the so-called Serovese Corporation—hey, it had been a nice ride while it lasted. If it was over, it was over. She thought she might take a week off, maybe go to Hawaii with her boyfriend before hitting the job market again. What the hell, she could afford it on what she’d socked away.

  Zep and Laura took her number and address, advised her that plans for Hawaii might be slightly premature, and let her go.

  When they reported in, they wound up having a twelve-minute police radio confab with Grazer, Sikes, Francisco, and Billy Youmans, a lanky lieutenant who headed up the SWAT team. Together they formed a plan of action.

  Shortly thereafter, a trace was put on the Serovese Corporation’s phone line to locate the sources of any incoming calls. Maureen had been correct about the answering machine: It was a bargain-basement Panasonic, and its speaker had been rendered useless. But it had a jack for an external sound system. No need to wait for elaborate electronic hardware: A patch cord and a cheap speaker from the local Radio Shack solved the problem of monitoring any incoming calls.

  If new messages came in . . . they would know.

  If the Serovese Corporation beeped in for its messages . . . they would know.

  If anybody tried to warn the Serovese Corporation—at this number anyway—about the bust about to go down in Inglewood . . . they would know.

  The phone line was secure.

  Phase One of the operation was complete.

  Outside, the rain was less fierce, slowly ebbing back to a drizzle.

  Phase Two went into effect at 4:46 under a clearing sky, when Matthew Sikes walked up two worn iron steps onto an iron landing, stood before the metal door of a former warehouse in Inglewood, and activated the door buzzer.

  From the speaker over the button, he heard an edgy, “What is it?”

  “I’m here to do the memory upgrade on your computers.” For a long time only an electronic hum issued from the speaker.

  Save for that, the building appeared dead. It was three storeys tall; it sat on land that was overgrown with weeds; and its many tall windows were either boarded up or painted black from the inside.

  At length, there was a response. “That’s Corigliano’s code. What’re you doing with it?”

  “Wrong answer,” said Matt, and started to walk away.

  “Wait a minute.”

  Matt turned back to face the door.

  More electronic hum. Then:

  “We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow. Thanks for being so prompt.”

  The surly tone of voice belied the words, but it was the correct countersign.

  “You got a question now?” Matt challenged.

  “Same one. This isn’t even Corigliano’s time. Who the fuck are you?”

  “Name’s Matt Sikes. I work with him at Richler; you can call him, run a check on me, or I can just show you ID. I’ve been hip to his operation for a while. I gave him a choice—cut me in for a little taste or face the music.”

  “So now you want a route of your own, is that it?”

  “Not even close. There’s possible trouble. The cops may be onto him. He doesn’t know for sure but he thinks they’re tailing him. He sent me in his place to warn you.”

  “And you actually came?”

  “Is it so inconceivable that I’d want to protect my investment—or are you actually as dumb as you sound?”

  “All right, you’ve warned us. Begone.”

  “Don’t you want your money?”

  Again, electronic hum.

  Lots of it.


  Then: “Wait there.”

  The rain had ceased, but it was the rain that saved his life.

  Matt heard the door unlocking and reflexively took a step back. His foot landed toe first on a part of the iron landing that had been worn smooth by six or seven decades of shoe traffic and had subsequently become a shallow recess, where today, as on all inclement days, a puddle of rainwater had collected. Slippery when wet.

  His foot shot out behind him, he overbalanced, and nearly fell backward onto the hard steps. He grabbed for the metal banister, whose peeling, lead-based paint cut into his skin, and found himself swinging against it like a gate.

  In this manner, he missed the path of the shotgun shells.

  For when the door flew open, a Newcomer with a sawed-off rifle stood there and fired at where Matt should have been. Seeing his error, the Newcomer pivoted to adjust, but by now George had popped up from behind the unmarked police cruiser parked at the curb, his own gun at the ready, and fired into the shotgunner, who staggered back floppily and dropped like a suddenly stringless marionette.

  Leaving the front door wide open.

  Which was the first thing they needed.

  George barked a signal into a walkie-talkie. Meanwhile, Matt, steady and gun-ready, peered around the door into the illicit drug factory. He ducked down as bullets whined over his head, but he’d seen what he needed to see.

  He pressed himself flat against the wall next to the door, shouting as he did, “Ten human males, three of ’em armed, four long tables full of equipment, center of the room!” All of which George repeated into the walkie-talkie as five cop cars and a SWAT truck came tearing around both sides of the block to surround the building.

  Matt fired a few shots through the doorway. Upward warning shots. To keep anybody from trying to close the front door. Which might be hard to do in any event. The Newcomer’s body was blocking it.

  The uniforms took defensive positions behind their vehicles as the SWAT guys mounted the offensive, firing assault rifles upward into the large first-floor windows, whose blackened glass shattered and fell away to expose the first-floor operation, just as Matt had described it. One man attempted to fire back; a SWAT marksman pinged him before he could steady his aim.