Rhubarb

by M. H. Van Keuren

  ~ * * * ~

  Martin awoke on a brick-red tile floor. As he staggered to his feet, a door swung open and Jeffrey squelched in. “Sorry about that, Screw Man. Couldn’t have your girlfriend martyring you back there,” he said.

  “Where am I?”

  “The Herbert’s Corner kitchen, circa 1986. In fact, these are the same appliances. We bought them at the auction when they remodeled. Pretty cool, huh? These are the exact ovens where Margie and Linda Laughlin baked thousands of pies. Everything runs off gas. We’ve even got well water from Brixton. I can tell you’re impressed.”

  “Where’s Cheryl?” asked Martin.

  “Oh, she’ll be along. I’ve sent her out to collect supplies. You two are going to bake me one last pie,” said Jeffrey.

  “Go screw yourself,” said Martin.

  “Clever. No, I’m serious,” said Jeffrey. “And before you say anything, it’s too late for deals. I’m tired of mucking around, and Chumpdark’s getting very impatient.”

  What would have been the back door of the kitchen banged open, and the two goons forced Cheryl and Lee inside. Cheryl had an armload of fresh rhubarb. Lee had a twenty-five-pound sack of flour. They dumped their loads onto the wide stainless-steel table in the center of the room.

  “Are you all right?” Martin asked.

  “Oh, just peachy,” said Cheryl.

  “Hi, Lee. You meet Cheryl?”

  “We’ve gotten briefly acquainted.”

  “She’s not a fan of the show,” said Martin.

  “Nobody’s perfect,” said Lee.

  “Did you ask her not to stab me?” asked Martin.

  “Did I need to?” asked Lee.

  “Tell her that you met Stewart, too,” said Martin.

  “Enough. Time to bake a pie,” Jeffrey said, clapping several tentacles together.

  “How many times do I have to tell you…?” said Cheryl.

  “Yes, yes. You don’t know the secret. That’s why you’re going to bake it with Martin,” said Jeffrey.

  Cheryl laughed. “Martin? What, do you have a store-bought frozen pie for him to thaw?”

  “You’ve been away a long time,” said Jeffrey. “Your paramour’s been rather busy.”

  “Is it true what Martin told me?” asked Cheryl. “Are you going to kill everyone on Earth?” Martin noticed that she didn’t protest the use of the term “paramour.” He didn’t know what it meant exactly, and maybe she didn’t either. But he liked the idea that maybe he was hers.

  “Details,” said Jeffrey. “Start baking. Now.”

  “Tell me,” said Cheryl. “Or I don’t bake another pie. Ever. I don’t care what you do to us.” Lee gasped. Jeffrey slammed several tentacles on the table and grabbed for Cheryl.

  “No,” Martin shouted. “I do have the recipe.”

  Martin heard every sucker of Jeffrey’s tentacles pop off the stainless steel as he slid back slowly. A single product pan fell from a shelf under the jostled table and rattled on the floor.

  “You win, Jeffrey. Get Dork-Chump in here. I want him to see everything.” Cheryl tried to protest, but Martin put up a hand. “We’ll bake you the best damned pie in the universe. But someone’s got to take me to my truck. The secret ingredient is there.” Jeffrey glared at him. “What are you waiting for?” asked Martin. “Go get your boss and have one of these goons take me to the Screwmobile.”

  ~ * * * ~

  The ragged shaft through which the FastNCo. fleet Ford E-250 Super Duty Cutaway Screwmobile had raged was deep, but not as deep as Martin expected. The hangar opened perhaps two hundred yards away through the sparking tunnel of wreckage.

  Stewart had warned him, but Martin marveled at the insubstantialness revealed by the crash. Here, in the microgravity, the facility had been outfitted with paper-thin walls, and hollow, brittle structure. Bird bones.

  “You tricks no,” the squid goon grunted from the other end of his staple gun and stretched out a tentacle. “Fast get.”

  “I’d get it if you’d let me,” said Martin, pulling against the goon’s appendage. “It’s right here.” The goon let slip a bit of slack, and Martin yanked the driver’s door open, tilted the seat forward, and found his bag. He secreted the lighter in his pocket and turned around with the Pall Malls.

  “What it?” the goon asked.

  “A kind of herb,” said Martin. “You know what an herb is?”

  “No,” said the goon.

  “Then stop asking stupid questions and take me back,” said Martin.

  ~ * * * ~

  The kitchen had been altered. One wall had been slid away, revealing a glassed viewing room full of impatient squid. A battery of dinner plate-sized images—dozens of live video feeds and data streams—dotted the periphery of the glass. A different image cycled onto a prominent central circle every few seconds. Every surface of the faux Herbert’s Corner kitchen must have been embedded with sensors and covered with cameras.

  “I suppose the doors are all locked,” said Martin after the goon had dumped him into the kitchen and left to join the others.

  “What are you playing at?” asked Cheryl.

  “I’m a little curious about that myself,” said Lee.

  “We’re going to bake them the magic pie,” said Martin.

  “I won’t,” said Cheryl.

  “Then I will,” said Martin.

  “You?” Cheryl laughed. “You can barely make a waff…”

  “I make a great waffle,” said Martin.

  “Whatever. If you really have the recipe, you can’t give it to them,” said Cheryl.

  “Yeah, you probably shouldn’t,” said Lee.

  “Actually, I think it’ll be okay,” said Martin.

  Jeffrey’s voice boomed over a PA. “If you monkeys are done squabbling, we’d like to see you bake a pie now. Some sort of herb, Martin?”

  “It’s not what you think, Jeff…Asshat. That name suits you much better,” said Martin.

  “Sticks and stones,” said Jeffrey. Behind him, Chumpdark bellowed and slapped the blade of a tentacle against the glass, with a firm eye on Jeffrey. “Get started. Now,” said Jeffrey.

  “Fine,” said Martin. He turned to Cheryl. “Help me. Please. Last one.”

  Cheryl closed her eyes. Lee put his hands to his forehead and drug them back through his thin hair.

  Martin found a couple of large stainless-steel bowls on a shelf under the central table and banged them down next to the armload of leafy, unwashed rhubarb. A magnetic strip covered with knives hung over a three-basin sink. A rolling pin and several other utensils bristled from a drying rack next to a stack of foil pie plates. Various shelves and cupboards contained the sugar, the Crisco, the cinnamon. As if on cue, an icemaker dumped a load of ice into its bin and began to sluice in another batch. Martin surveyed it all again and still felt like he lacked everything.

  He shouldered between Cheryl and Lee to get to the wide commercial ovens. He picked the top of the two, touched the knob, and hung his head, trying to remember.

  “Four twenty-five,” said Cheryl.

  “Thank you,” said Martin. He set the temperature, and after a little orange indicator clicked alight, the oven rumbled as the gas ignited deep in its bowels. Martin turned back to the table, and found Cheryl gathering up the rhubarb.

  “Wait,” said Martin. He put a hand on the rhubarb, and she paused. “Trust me,” he said. He dug the Pall Malls from his back pocket but kept them out of view under the table. They probably had a camera there, too, but it felt safer to do it this way. Cheryl glowered when she saw what he had brought, but he hushed her before she could speak. Martin zipped out a single cigarette, returned the pack to his pocket, and then, doing his best black-and-white movie star, popped the cigarette between his lips.

  “No smoking,” Jeffrey called over the PA, slapping on the glass. “Besides, you don’t smoke, Screw Man.”

  “Do you want your pie or not?” Martin asked out of the corner of his otherwise occupied mouth. Then,
shielding his lighter like James Dean in the wind, he lit up.

  He took a long first drag and fought back the urge to cough out his esophagus. He let the smoke burn deep into his lungs, and then, eyes watering, exhaled it slowly, first toward the glass and the suddenly apoplexic cephalopods, and then all over the rhubarb.

  “What are you doing?” asked Cheryl.

  Jeffrey burst through the door with frightening speed. A tentacle lifted Martin off the floor. Another pushed Cheryl back, and another, Lee. A fourth snaked around Martin’s neck as Jeffrey drew him close to one of his eyes.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Jeffrey asked.

  “Put him down,” Cheryl shouted.

  “Put it out. Now. And stop fooling around,” said Jeffrey.

  Martin choked a smoky breath directly into Jeffrey’s eye. It squeezed shut, and the skin around it browned and shriveled. Jeffrey bellowed and wiped at his eye with a juicy tentacle. Another arm batted the cigarette from Martin’s fingers, and another squashed it on the tile floor.

  “I don’t know what you’re playing at,” said Jeffrey, holding Martin farther away, glaring with his un-smoked eye.

  “Not…playing…” said Martin.

  “You’re choking him,” shrieked Cheryl. Jeffrey’s good eye swiveled toward her in time to see the rolling pin. It blunted against his eye and clattered to the floor. He bellowed again, and Martin found himself free, collapsing, not ready to hold his weight. But at least he had air to breathe.

  When Martin had recovered enough to look up, he saw Lee standing between Cheryl and a blinking and sputtering Jeffrey.

  “Listen to me,” said Lee, his commanding, chocolate voice belied by the quivering knife in his good hand. “Martin and Cheryl were only defending themselves. There’s no more need for violence. Now, you may not like what you’re seeing in here, but you asked Martin to bake a pie. And he’s providing you a demonstration in good faith. If you want to know whether he’s serious or if he’s simply wasting your time, there’s only one way to find out. And that’s for you to get out and let him work.”

  After a few moments, Jeffrey relented. He brought a rheumy eye back to Martin. “So help me, if you’re screwing with me…” The door slipped shut behind him.

  “Thank you,” said Martin. “And nice throw.”

  “I’ve had a lot of practice the last few weeks,” said Cheryl. “What do we do now?”

  “We make the pie,” said Martin. He slapped the pack of Pall Malls down next to the rhubarb and rubbed his throat.

  “Smoking will kill you,” said Cheryl.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” said Martin.

  Chapter 28

  Martin had expected every nuance of the making of the pie to be scrutinized, but he and Cheryl worked virtually ignored but for the kitchen sensors. Even through the language barrier and the muffling glass, the squishy ruckus in the viewing room seemed perfectly clear. Jeffrey argued, waffled, and equivocated. Every breath of secondhand smoke seemed to enrage the accountant more. Her voice was more pointed and precise, as if she had the facts and the moral high ground. Martin hoped she was on his side. Chumpdark thoomed angrily when he could get a word in edgewise.

  “I don’t think they care for smoking much,” said Lee.

  “That’s what I hoped,” said Martin.

  “How’d you figure it out?” asked Cheryl. “I mean, unless it’s…” Not real? she mouthed behind a hand.

  “Pie-making 101 with Doris Solberg,” said Martin. “She showed me pictures of your mom and your grandmother, always smoking, even while they baked. I put two and two together.”

  “Is that why your friend is so sick?” asked Lee. “Being around smoke and pollution so much?”

  “Are you talking about Stewart?” asked Cheryl.

  Martin nodded. “Laura and Milton and I have been looking in on him since you disappeared, but…”

  “But?”

  “He’s not going to be the same when you get back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He had to take off the human skin—they call it a dermis—but I don’t think he can put it back on,” said Martin. Cheryl sighed, and Martin blew another cloud of smoke into the rhubarb and sugar.

  Cheryl worked quickly, and Martin had to smoke only five cigarettes before she put it in the oven. After Cheryl set the timer, she slumped onto the floor against a cupboard out of direct view of the arguing aliens.

  Cheryl tucked her knees up against her chest and asked, “Where is he?”

  “Who? Oh, Stewart?” asked Martin, joining her.

  “He’s in my motel room,” said Lee. He sat where he could keep an eye on the glass and the door.

  “The Brixton Inn,” said Martin.

  “My producer’s looking after him,” said Lee. “I hope.”

  “Cheryl, he loves you, and he’s been trying to stop all this,” said Martin. “Are you okay?”

  Cheryl had buried her face in her knees. “I keep hoping that I’ll wake up,” she said. “That I’ll be back in my bed, alarm going off, and late for work. But it keeps getting worse. I don’t know what to believe anymore.” A squishy tentacle thwacked the glass as if in response. “And maybe I’d be able to think clearly, if those things would quit fighting over there.” She grabbed a metal pan from a shelf and hurled it at the glass.

  The nobbering ceased when the pan struck and clattered onto the floor, then resumed. Jeffrey took over the discussion, and then several phlegmed objections arose at once. It sounded like the goons had joined the debate.

  “And what is he even doing here?” Cheryl asked Martin, jabbing a thumb at Lee. “I’m not some back-of-the-milk-carton national news story on BI, am I?”

  “No,” said Lee.

  “That’s good, because I might have to do something to you, and I doubt they’d stop me this time,” Cheryl said.

  “Everyone knows about the portal, though,” said Lee. Cheryl shrugged.

  “It’s how they get on and off Earth,” said Martin. “Wormholish thing up the Deaver Creek bluff on Highway 360. A bunch of Wakers were there when we came through.”

  “I think we may have topped Orson Welles,” said Lee.

  “What? This was on the radio?” Cheryl asked.

  “A little,” said Martin, and then turned to Lee. “What do you make of the National Guard?”

  “Probably crowd control,” Lee replied.

  “Not some kind of UFO squad?”

  Lee shrugged and threw up his hands, and then said, “You look surprised.”

  “I always figured you had people scanning military radio traffic, or had contacts with insiders who tipped you off to this type of stuff,” said Martin.

  “Oh, good grief,” said Cheryl. “You don’t take anything on his show seriously, do you?”

  “We’re on an alien spaceship,” said Martin.

  “That doesn’t mean you…oh, never mind,” she said.

  “She’s right,” said Lee. “I’m an interviewer. People show up and I ask them questions. That’s all.”

  “But why all the paranormal stuff if you don’t believe in it?”

  “I found a niche and filled it,” said Lee.

  “A niche?” asked Martin.

  “I’d done local radio for about ten years. Morning talk, drive time, whatever. But then during the first Gulf War in ’91, the Pentagon offered to fly local media types to hang out with local troops for a few days. It sounded like an adventure. So I signed on, and I found myself out on this airbase in Saudi Arabia a few clicks from the Iraqi border. One night, I stumbled on a rumor about strange lights in the sky near the base. UFOs coming to keep an eye on American air operations, they said. So I packaged it all up nice and spooky, tongue in cheek, and sent it to my producer. When I got back a week later, no one wanted to talk about anything else. No one got the joke. The phone rang off the hook, and the ratings…? It didn’t take long to figure out that there’s a market for this stuff after the sun goes down.”


  “What were the lights at the airbase?” asked Martin.

  Cheryl rolled her eyes. Lee laughed. “See? My point exactly. They were rumors at the end of a long chain of telephone tag. Or a joke—bored soldiers keeping themselves amused in the desert. I was a radio guy living out a bit of military fantasy, not a journalist. I didn’t realize that I should be appalled that people cared more about UFOs than the war.”

  Cheryl returned her forehead to her knees, and Martin wished he could comfort her. But it had begun to sink in that he’d given these sadistic squids the secret they needed. He flushed. What if he’d misread the situation? No, no way I, Martin Wells, FastNCo. Area Account Representative, could have ever misconstrued the intentions and motivations of a completely alien culture. What if they’re not arguing about the cigarette smoke? Maybe they’re upset that they now have to sacrifice rhubarb-growing capacity for tobacco plantations. He scanned the room for some way to stop it. Too late to destroy the pie; they’d only bake another. Too late to kill himself, although it would be a bit of a relief. Besides, what would an afterlife hold for someone as stupid as Martin Wells? He pictured himself in a dunce cap for eternity. Any human who ever lived could punch him in the face once a day. Twice if you got neurotoxined. Even Gandhi would take a swing every few millennia.

  “It’s probably a little late to become a journalist,” said Lee.

  Cheryl knocked her head against the cupboard several times, and then asked, “What are we going to do? We can’t let them get away with this.”

  “I have an idea,” said Martin. “But it’s not a particularly good one.”

  “Why?” asked Lee.

  “Because it’ll probably kill us in the process,” said Martin.

  Lee turned to Cheryl, who shrugged, then back to Martin. “Well, tell us already,” he said.

  ~ * * * ~

  Although every pie had its own fingerprint of crimping, cinnamon and sugar, vent slits, and phrenological lumpiness, the steaming, golden-brown thing that Cheryl removed from the oven seemed too generic. Shouldn’t it glow, or levitate? Instead it was a simple dessert on the stainless-steel table among the discarded rhubarb leaves, sloppy dusting of flour, and melted puddles of crushed ice—it couldn’t be the most dangerous object in human history. Could it?