by B. V. Larson
“Nope,” I said. “I don’t want to get them involved. What if these crazy people go after them, too?”
She stared at me in concern. “You came to me, though. You didn’t have any problem dragging me into this mess.”
“Admiral Shaw doesn’t know about you. They don’t know you might be infected with—whatever this is.”
Kim licked her lips. I could see her worrying brain chewing the situation over. She didn’t like the taste.
“What if they come after me? What am I supposed to do? Should I cut my trip short and run back to the mainland?”
Something in her tone made me look up from my second bag of fries. I could see her eyes were wide, fearful. She was freaking out a little.
“Just stay away from hospitals. They seem to find people that way.”
“But what if I get sick?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I pulled Jason out of the water and gave him mouth-to-mouth, and I still feel good. You’re not infected. You’re fine.”
“Maybe you’ve got some kind of natural resistance,” she said, winding up that long dark hair of hers with a finger. “Maybe I’m the one that they’re really looking for.”
“Why would you think that?” I asked her.
She stared at me again for a time, then suddenly smiled.
“No reason,” she said. “You must be tired, right? Let’s go back to the hotel.”
She paid the bill, and we left. I wanted to leave the tip, but I was just too damned poor. I felt kind of bad about that. I told myself that when this mess was all cleared up I would get a job and pay off my debts.
“This is the last week of your vacation, right?” I asked her.
“Yeah. But Gwen took off. She’s flying back home tomorrow. Seeing Jason die—it was too much for her. I’m alone on the island.”
“Thinking of going home too?”
“Maybe. Let’s go have a drink. You look like you could use one.”
We had several. They were strong, and by midnight, I was happy for the first time in twenty four hours. Arm-in-arm, we headed back to her place.
Kim wasn’t as drunk as I was. She’d been nursing her drinks. She smiled vaguely as we collapsed on her bed.
I reached for her, and at first, she recoiled. But then, she slowly relented. We made love again. It felt great to be alive.
It had been a long day, and after we’d satisfied each other, I passed out. I didn’t even take off my sandals. I was totally drained.
Just as I was beginning to dream, I heard a strange sound. Sort of a clank.
I opened one eye. There, standing over me with a wild look of fury on her face, was Kim. She had a long metal floor lamp in her hands, and she was holding it like a batter swinging for the fences. With a grunt, she swung the lamp’s heavy base down at me.
Clearly, she wanted to bash my skull in.
=6=
In my short lifetime I’ve pissed off any number of women. I’d be the first to admit that. But until this very moment, none of them had actually attempted to murder me.
When Kim came at me with that lamp, I couldn’t believe it. Rolling off the bed and onto the floor with a thump, I managed to avoid her first swing. Fortunately, she was no athlete—but her enthusiasm made up for that lack of physical power.
She turned, snarling, and lifted the lamp with both hands again. She held it over her head like some kind of medieval war hammer.
Scrambling to my feet, I jumped back, but there’s only so much space to retreat in a hotel room.
She swung again, sweeping the air with a powerful blow. I dodged, and the base of the lamp took out the TV. It crashed into junk on the floor.
“Hold on, girl!” I shouted. “What’s wrong? Was I that bad? I thought you enjoyed it!”
She didn’t even seem to hear me. She lifted the lamp for a third try.
That was my chance, and I took it. I rushed in and pushed her onto the bed. She struggled with me, but I didn’t expect it to be a contest. I thought she’d burst into tears and curl up and declare exactly what her problem was.
She did none of those things. Her eyes were determined. Mean.
I had to climb onto her and hold her wrists by force to keep from being injured. She was all claws and teeth, and she kept slamming her knees into my back. Damn! Those skinny limbs were stronger than they looked.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Kim?” I demanded, shouting into her face.
Panting through her bared teeth, she looked around with a crazed expression.
“He won’t kill me,” she said. “I’ll kill him first. He won’t kill me.” She was almost chanting the words. It was as if she was talking to herself.
“Listen,” I said. “I can see you’re in a bad mood. I’m willing to leave, no hard feelings. Would that be okay?”
Her eyes focused on mine for a moment.
“No,” she said. “Don’t leave yet. I need to kill you.”
At last, I was beginning to catch on.
“Kim, listen to me,” I said. “I was wrong before. I think you do have the disease. Whatever it was that came down from space. Whatever Jason found on that bubbling rock at the bottom of the sea, must have infected you. You have to try to control yourself.”
“No I don’t. I have to kill you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll kill me if I don’t.”
“How do you know that? Who told you that?”
She looked around the room. “I don’t know. Something did.”
“It was the sym,” I said, putting it all together in my head. “They call it a sym. Maybe it’s some kind of symbiotic life form…?” I asked aloud. “Yes, it must be some kind of parasite in your mind.”
“Why are you talking so much?” she demanded, her voice rising to a wail. “Why haven’t you killed me yet?”
“I don’t feel it—not like you. Not yet, anyway. I think maybe some people are better able to control it than others. There was this guy named Jones—”
She began struggling again.
“Stop that,” I insisted, “you’re bruising up your arms. Let’s call a truce, okay?”
“No!”
I heard something then. Something from outside—something bad. It was a single squawk from a cop’s radio. Then I heard footsteps coming from the walkway. We were on the third floor, overlooking the parking lot. The window was cracked open, and the curtains were fluttering slightly in the breeze.
“You called the cops?” I asked her. “Before you tried to kill me with a lamp?”
“In case you got the upper hand,” she said. “Insurance.”
“That’s just great. You’re going to jail. You know that, don’t you?”
Kim laughed, and kneed me in the back again.
“Help!” she screamed. “Help me!”
“Oh, dammit,” I said.
A hammering began at the hotel door.
I knew what I had to do, but I sure as hell didn’t want to do it. I got up off Kim and walked toward the door. I took pains to turn my back on her as I reached for the doorknob.
Before I unlocked and opened it, I counted to three. It was hard to do.
One… two… three...
The hammering on the other side became intense. I was trying to time things right. I had to open that door just in time to have the officer see Kim, looking deranged, coming for my back.
It was a calculation. Lots of things could go wrong. She might not do anything, or she might manage to clock me before I could open the door. The cop might even believe her story. The situation didn’t look good for me, and I knew I was going to have a hard time getting the cops on my side on this one.
Unfortunately, this was the only move I could think of pulling, so I took the chance.
On three, I yanked open the door and threw it wide. It was raining hard outside, and the man standing in the doorway was dripping wet. Behind him, the railing above the parking lot ran with beads of water.
Shock ran thro
ugh me as I realized the man standing on the walkway outside wasn’t a policeman. He was none other than the same marine I’d tossed out of a speeding car earlier today.
His suit was torn up, and he didn’t look happy to see me at all. There was a pistol in his hand. He had it raised up even with my head. I shied away, but he fired without compunction.
For a split-second, I thought I was dead. In fact, I was sure of it. But the bullet sailed over my shoulder. It took out Kim instead. She’d been charging up behind me with that damned lamp again.
Shot right between the eyes, she fell back, flopping and bleeding on the thin brown carpet.
The killer looked at me and shook his head.
“You can’t be a chicken if you want to survive,” he said to me matter-of-factly. “When they get like that, you have to take them out. Even if it’s a pretty girl.”
My mouth hung open, and I stared at Kim. She was really dead on the floor. I couldn’t believe it.
The marine wasn’t done yet. He drew a long knife and walked to Kim’s body. He chopped at her neck. I grappled with him, but he was strong. With two final quick strokes, the head was off.
“You crazy bastard! You killed her!” I said, unable to comprehend what I was looking at. It was too much.
“Damned straight I did. You can thank me later. Did you know it took me all frigging day to find you? I wanted to shoot you too—don’t think I didn’t. But Shaw’s got some kind of hard-on for you. Now, are you coming with me, or are you going to stay here and take the blame for this mess?”
Stunned, I staggered out of the room after him. He waved at me with his pistol.
The enormity of what I’d just seen ate at my mind. I’d witnessed the murder of a nice girl who I’d liked. A woman I’d made love to twice—just hours ago. She might have been out of her mind, but she hadn’t deserved death and mutilation.
I felt a blind rage begin to build inside my skull. It must have been shock over the murder that triggered it. But instead of rushing to attack the murderer, I came up with an instant plan.
“Cop!” I said, pointing down over the railing toward the street.
He fell for it. It was a believable enough development.
As he looked for the phantom police car, I stepped close and pinched a nerve in his blocky hand. Self-defense training had its benefits.
I snatched the falling pistol out of the air and brought it into line with his body, backing away.
He spun around to face me. It was then, I think, that he saw the murderous intent in my eyes. Oddly, he smiled when he recognized the expression.
“Ah…” he said. “So you do have a sym. They told me you were harmless, but I can see it, looking right at me out of your eyes.”
“Tell me your name,” I said with an animal voice that wasn’t entirely my own.
“My friends call me Samson,” he said. “But you’re not my friend. You can call me—”
Before he got out another word, I shot him seven times in the chest. I would have fired more rounds, but the pistol was empty.
Then I threw his body over the railing onto some parked cars. A windshield shattered, and two car alarms began singing.
Too bad murder wasn’t enough to stop a thing like Samson.
* * *
The stars exploded again after I killed Samson. I was on the run, out in the open, or I might have missed it.
It was the middle of the night, and the rain had finally stopped, but I had no way of knowing the exact time. I’d ditched my wallet, my cellphone, and everything else that might have identified me or connected me in some way with the heinous crimes of the day.
As I walked through a forested area, I came to a clearing and looked up. The sky had cleared and brightened. But it wasn’t the light of the Moon I was seeing—it was much too bright for that.
The stars had come out from the behind the clouds, and they were moving. That stopped me in my tracks. The Moon was rising on the western horizon, but the light was coming from a glowing nebula that had appeared directly overhead. There was no missing this display. It was the granddaddy of all stellar flux events.
Scruffy clouds crawled across the face of it, but the luminous effect shined right through. I’d watched my share of vids on the internet and live broadcasts about the mysterious stellar flux. The revealed nebulae were usually a greenish yellow. They normally grew in an oval shape then receded some fifteen minutes later.
This time was different. The skies were blazing. The colors were magnificent—magenta, green, and with a stripe of glimmering blue down the center like the hot core of a living flame.
I moved out of the trees and walked around in an open field, gaping upward. Out on the highway, cars honked and slowed. People were hanging their heads out of their car windows. I heard a distant squeal of brakes and the crunch of metal smashing into metal.
I didn’t bother to look. No one did. We were all fixated by the display overhead.
On TV, I’d heard guys in glasses and suits try to explain these strange events. There were theories about prismatic effects such as refracted glints of light coming to us from deep in the galaxy. Some thought the flux effect was caused by a wormhole. Others claimed a different form of space-time like a rip that temporarily allowed us to see the center of our galaxy. They postulated that perhaps the black hole suns that we suspected lurked at the core of the Milky Way were colliding.
It really didn’t matter who was right. The stars hadn’t been acting normally for some time now, that was for sure, and everyone on Earth knew it.
But tonight was different, not only because it was a bigger rip in the heavens than we’d ever seen before, but because something came through that rip to visit us.
The central slash of blue-white light flared brighter as I watched, and then something slid away from it. More shapes soon followed.
I could see long, sharp triangles of reflective silver. They had to be made of metal. Shaped like arrowheads, I watched them flash in, moving fast at first, then slowing down and joining a growing formation that hung together in the sky.
Seven, eight—thirteen. Each object appeared, moved into position, and hung there.
I squatted down in the wet, rippling grasses. I didn’t bother seeking shelter. Where could I have gone? Earth appeared to be at the feet of an invading fleet of spacecraft—I had no doubt in my mind that’s what I was seeing gather overhead. There was nowhere to hide.
It occurred to me, as the fleet continued to gather, that my Earth was like an island. A lonely scrap of land in a vast ocean. We were nothing more than monkeys in trees, beasts who’d long assumed the rest of our ocean was populated by nothing other than an infinite number of lifeless waves.
But we’d been wrong. There were other islands, after all. We could see them at night. We’d even had the hubris to give them silly names. Now, the creatures who’d apparently existed out there all along had come to visit our chunk of floating rock.
I sincerely hoped they would turn out to be friendly.
=7=
After what seemed like a long time, but was probably no more than fifteen minutes, the bright rip in the sky faded and closed.
The ships remained behind, however. There were thirty-one of them in all. I’d counted several times, until I’d gotten the same result three times in a row.
My mind wasn’t happy. I was shivering, despite the fact the night was humid and warm. I felt a desperate urge to relieve myself, and I went ahead and did so.
All the while, I never stopped craning my neck around to look at the sky, eyes wide and rolling.
After the stellar flux had faded, I noticed one of the silver ships was growing in size. I realized it was descending. Silently, the wedge-like shape came rapidly closer to Earth.
There was no sign of a propulsion system. No running lights. Only the moonlight made it visible at all. The descending ship was a dark shadow with one edge of it reflecting the Moon, like the gleaming blade of a knife.
Seeing it
come down got me to my feet. I started to run. Surprisingly, I ran like the wind. My lungs sucked in air. My feet pounded and splashed in puddles. My sandals were soon lost in the rocks, mud and plants, but I didn’t care.
Twice, I took a tumble over something hard in the dark and sprang up again like a cat, bleeding and dirty, but I ran on anyway.
Instinctively, I headed for the water. I don’t know why, but I’d come to think of the beaches and the warm ocean beyond them as a refuge over the last few months.
Cars honked as I blurred over the highway, but I didn’t even look. They could have hit me, but I must have gotten lucky, like a deer that bolts over a road and makes it by chance to the other side.
When I reached the sands, which were still slightly warm from the heat of the day, I began formulating a rudimentary plan.
I’d swim out into the ocean. Way out there. Then I’d tread water and wait, going under as much as possible. Whatever this alien ship wanted to do to the island, it could do. With luck, I’d be skipped over. Hell, I was a good swimmer. I was familiar with the currents, and I could tread water until frigging Friday if I had to.
My feet splashed into the waves, and I began to feel a surge of well-being. Somehow, I felt sure that escape was just ahead.
The waves swelled and crashed over my knees, then my hips. They drowned out the sounds from the island behind me. People were driving around frantically, trying to get home, trying to find refuge, just like I was. There were wrecks strung all along the highway and the streets of Lahaina.
But the descending ship was closer than ever. It hung over the center of the island. I stopped wading into the sea to look back, feeling awe overtake my other emotions.
Drifting west and close to the surface now, the ship glided over the land. It was huge. At least a half-mile long. It was as if an aircraft carrier or a super-tanker had taken flight and now sought vengeance upon the land-dwellers who had dared to crawl like fleas over its decks.
I watched as it slowed and hovered, motionless. It was close to the ground, maybe a hundred yards above the West Maui Mountains and the forest preserve. The alien vessel sat low, almost touching that primitive region at the top of the island—one of the wettest places on Earth and averaging more than an inch of rain each day. What could it want with that dense jungle?