Becoming Alien

by Rebecca Ore

  Before Warren could inject the painkiller, Alpha sighed and went utterly limp. His heart didn’t beat again, even after five minutes, ten.

  The eyes clouded up, the fingers stiffened. “He’s dead,” I told Warren.

  “They’re hunting us,” Warren said. “Aliens’ll find us and kill us. I didn’t want him dead. Honest. Tom, I’ll hide him good, but if the other aliens come, I’ll preserve him for autopsy. Maybe they can regrow him. Why did he die like that when I was trying to help him?”

  Warren was too spaced out to deliver the pills, but they had to be delivered, or it wouldn’t be just aliens all over us. I drove down to Wytheville and found the black guy and an Oriental waiting by a Ryder truck.

  “You late,” the Oriental said as we rolled the drums from one truck to the other.

  “Had problems at home,” I said.

  “You brother’s using,” the black said. “Not good.”

  I shrugged and got back in the cab. “Where’s the money?” I asked.

  They threw an attaché case at me. I looked in it. They had probably shorted me, but what the fuck could I do about it. The Oriental guy smiled as they started the truck up.

  When I came back, the alien’s body was gone, and Warren was huddled by the fire muttering, “Can’t trust nobody no more.” Speed-talking, I thought at first. But he stayed incredibly jumpy after the alien died, as though someone—drug people, aliens—would get revenge on him. “But the body will prove me innocent,” he said, “’cause I didn’t shoot to kill,” looking up from the fire with eyes that seemed trapped between smiling and screaming. “He’d have lived if he’d been human, hurt like that.”

  The work we did for the Atlanta investors piled up, what with Alpha gone, hard for me to make the egg route and help Warren under the hill.

  Then one day I came home to all the county cops, some Feds, the IRS boys, and eight photographers snapping cameras at everything.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” I said, beating my fists on the steering wheel. One of the local deputies, a former high school baseball pitcher, cuffed me and led me aside.

  “Who did us?” I asked. A gun went off, muffled sound, inside the house. A guy in regular clothes came running out, screaming for tear gas.

  “Aw, Tom, the Feds found them an informer in Atlanta. Your brother’d signed a receipt for a pill-making machine.”

  Crazy Warren. I never knew whether speed warped his brain or whether he’d brooded himself crazy over possible vengeful aliens. Whatever, be was under the house waging his last war.

  “Tom,” the deputy who’d cuffed me said, “I can take you into town now.”

  “Want to see what happens to Warren.”

  They finally got him out, both him and deputies all bloody, two deputies shot some in legs and arms, but the law’d worn body armor when they went after him.

  “He probably won’t die, Tom,” a medic deputy said.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  So I went to jail, in handcuffs and leg irons like a real badass, while Warren rode a helicopter to the hospital in Roanoke, screaming about aliens from his stretcher.

  Cold steel bars with painted cement floors—light bulbs protected by wire grids. The deputy said, “If you’d give us all the egg money and the milk, my wife might be able to take care of your hens and cow.”

  “Is Warren alive?” I asked as he turned the key in the cuffs and shook them off.

  “Yes, but he’s out of it. Crazy.”

  The cell toilet was open, with a sink by it. “Yeah, let your wife take care of the hens and the cow. Cats, too.” Hoss, the town drunk, grinned up from a bunk as he fiddled with his cock under his greasy overalls.

  Every morning, they made us mop with Lysol, then fed us plates from the diner, cold by the time someone walked them across the road.

  Jail breeds bad daydreams—when I wasn’t ducking drunks or hearing various deputies and prisoners brag about where their cocks had been, I sat in space fantasies, hours and hours of Alpha’s drawing imagined almost real.

  While Amos, a big black, wrestled a deputy over the Valium vial, I dream-walked around those alien buildings with Alpha. If only we’d waited a bit longer that night.

  The judge asked, “Tom, why’d you get involved in this? We could have arranged foster care, even if you hadn’t said what Warren did.”

  I shrugged in my cuffs and said, “Warren needed me.”

  They took into consideration my age and the influence my brother had over me. So I spent time in Camp 28, in a sheet-metal dorm full of men at night, walking the roads picking up trash during the day.

  Jail and prison were both hideous, dumb, and stinking. Steel bars, steel mesh got into my soul. So this is what I am, a felon, with about 90 percent chance of returning. Just before I was supposed to enroll in a prison carpentry class, I got put out on probation.

  I was lucky; Floyd County didn’t hang charges over me to keep me away from my own farm. But when I wanted to go back to school, the high school told me to study at night with guys out of jail like me and real dumbass dropouts.

  The teacher laid it out slow and easy, as though he dealt with bobcats.

  I turned eighteen under court supervision and wondered if I’d ever get used to being a criminal. At night, I’d dream about the alien, mostly as a friend, sometimes haunting me, his skinny body surrounded by cats.

  I heard a knock on the porch door one afternoon and saw a stranger there, man with big eyes, in a tee-shirt and baggy jeans. Not a black man, I thought uneasily. Maybe Indian, with that coarse shaggy hair.

  “Can I look around your woods for mushrooms?” he asked in an accented voice I couldn’t place. “My name is John Amber.”

  Undercover law. A spate of them had checked on me over the past two years. What’s the use of keeping him off? “Sure, you won’t find anything.”

  Then I noticed the old cats, who’d stayed on after Alpha died, checking this stranger out, so I followed him into the woods, quietly.

  He stood staring up the hill, a lump under his chin vibrating. I couldn’t hear anything; the cats ran up to him. When he saw me, his knees flexed slightly and shoulders got rigid. Alien, just like Warren feared. Maybe made over into human form—the face seemed stiff. I dropped my hand to my boot knife and said, “I guess you came about your friends.”

  The man-thing turned, and asked, “Where are they?”

  I’d thought when I first saw him that he must have eye trouble—big eyes like Bette Davis has. Like the human-looking thing the guy who had the egg had shot… “Two died in the crash. My brother…I tried to get the little one away.” I had a memory flash of Alpha handing Warren the knife.

  The alien with the man’s face said, “Are they all dead?” Not completely like a man’s body. The flat chest…that’s why I thought it was a man.

  I nodded.

  Its shoulders rocked back and forth, breaths heaving in and out. “Even Mica? He was alive after the crash.”

  “Mica? His name was Mica?” Slowly, I eased my hand back toward the boot knife, while the cats did cat-figuring and slunk off. The alien cried, murmuring in that strange tongue that Mica (Mica, strange to know his name now) couldn’t teach me. I felt guilty. And terrified. “Are you the one who was shot in California?”

  “My true son is dead, then?” The alien looked at me, and I froze my arm where it was, halfway down my leg. “What happened,” it asked, “to the others? They also were my kin. And you shoot, keep us from the location device, play cruel movies. If you touch what you’re reaching for…”

  I said, “The ones killed in the crash we’ve got bones of. How come you look human? How can you speak English when he never could?”

  “Surgery made us look like you,” the alien said. “I asked to be made the dominant sex. I couldn’t stand being considered one of your females.”

  Us. The alien crouched, muscles tense, eyes level with mine. Something cracked a twig behind me. The alien looked over my shoulder, then back to me with a twitch of th
e lips.

  Two others, like a black girl and a blond man, both moving wrong for humans, stiff-faced, came up brandishing chrome things I suspected were guns. The black woman-looking one, about five-foot-two inches tall, with impossibly high tits, like a demon sex cartoon, slid the knife out of my boot. “Vicious xenophobes, Cadmium,” she said to the blond guy, who was a bit shorter than me. “They stay still if you put the point here,” she added, putting the knife point under my chin.

  I thought, I’m dead.

  “Don’t do that, Rhyodolite,” the blond said. The black girl one oo’ed slightly, obscenely, and lowered the knife.

  They took me back prisoner to my own house. “What about Mica’s body?” the John Amber one asked me, eyes quivering, oily tears rolling down the human-styled face. They all had big, big brown eyes with lopsided whites.

  “Warren preserved him. He hid the body, so you can do an autopsy and know that we were trying to help. He pulled a shotgun on Warren. My brother shot in self-defense. He tried to treat the wound. Mica could have lived.”

  I opened the door and went inside between the John Amber one and Rhyodolite, the fake black girl. The blond one and Rhyodolite sat me down on the living room couch while John Amber called a number on my phone and asked for Room 18, then said in English, “You can join us now.”

  Aliens looking like people terrified me, since they had to be trickier than the first one seemed to be. “You found the egg, then?” I asked. “I didn’t tell Warren to send it away from here.”

  “We found it,” the little black female-shaped Rhyodolite said, “after one of your kind shot Black Amber. It told us everything.”

  “Black Amber? Not John, then. I heard one of you was shot when you tried to find the egg. I’m so sorry.”

  Black Amber sighed. Her hand moved over her stomach. “So vicious,” she said through her human fake mouth. She’d shaved her face, but the stubble growing back was inhuman, thin face hairs like Alpha/Mica’s.

  “Can I use the bathroom?” I asked.

  “I’ll take you,” Rhyodolite said, following me to the john, holding that gun-like instrument dead steady. When I finished, the alien pulled out a cock.

  “God,” I said, “do your women have those?”

  “I’m small. Female human fit better,” he said as he pissed thick stuff like Mica’d done. “Being among hostile aliens pisses me off, too.”

  We all sat around the living room—them waiting for the others to arrive, me numb. Rhyodolite, his face rigid, held his chrome space gun out, a flat bell facing me. His arm lay flat on the coffee table and his head drooped, as though he was exhausted. The arm and fingers had been considerably shortened.

  “The egg lead you back here?” I asked.

  “The people who tried to keep us from it caused unnecessary delays,” Amber said. She leaned up against the blond one and closed her oil-smeared eyes.

  Finally, we heard a car drive up. “Cadmium,” the Amber one said to the blond, “make sure it’s the Barcons.” The blond one went out and came back with two others, a different kind, who looked like stout Negroes with straight hair, if you didn’t look too closely. Both were taller than me, one about six-foot-four and the other just a shade shorter. When I looked closely, I realized how different their jaws were, how thin their lower faces were for such a spread of nose. And no dent between the nose and lip.

  “Is that what you really look like?” I asked.

  “Yes,” one said after they looked at each other, “except for seasonal hair. And this. It spread out a hand—six fingers.

  The five aliens talked to each other in what seemed to be two different languages.

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  “We Gwyngs don’t kill sapients, but the Barcons can,” Black Amber said.

  “Mica drew a shotgun on Warren.”

  She didn’t answer for a while, then said, “Gwyngs don’t kill,” as if I’d lied to be cruel.

  That night, Black Amber and the other two Gwyngs heaped together on the bed where Alpha/Mica had slept. Squirming around, crying, they left oily patches on the sheets and pillowcases. I tried to bump elbows, but Black Amber stiffened, and bobbed her head with that attack nod-like I’d seen Mica/Alpha bob his head at Warren. I backed to the door and asked, “Why can you talk English? He and I couldn’t figure out at all how to talk to each other.” Somehow, that she could talk English seemed a mockery—if only I could have talked, really talked to Mica.

  “It’s a fake tongue manipulated by two skull computers.” She poked it out—like a human’s tongue, not flat and broad—then pulled it in and kept looking at me out of that almost human face, but her eyes were so alien.

  In the living room, the rawboned black Barcons watched television while I sat in a chair, unable to sleep. A space horror film came on about midnight. Alpha…Mica hated to see those, I thought as I got up to turn it off, but a Barcon took my hand off the dial. My skin crawled to have six fingers touch it.

  “I wasn’t afraid of just one alien,” I said defensively.

  The smaller one said, “Our Federation used to get very upset with xenophobes, but we’re gentler now.”

  The other Barcon stretched and said, “Well, he’s not irrationally xenophobic. The Gwyngs do want to bruise him.”

  “What kinds of aliens are you?” I asked.

  “Barcons,” the biggest black said, “and Mica and these are Gwyngs. The closest thing you have to us is bears. The Gwyngs evolved from marsupial bats, let another animal carry their young in its pouch.”

  As we watched the show, I told them about The Day the Earth Stood Still, so they’d understand we didn’t always make aliens out to be the bad guys. “The alien was a saint from space.”

  The two Barcons made rough coughing sounds. The big one turned to me and said; “Holy from space? Xeno flipflops.” They wiggled their noses at me and each other and talked their language again. I heard something made out of almost human sounds. It sounded like Karst.

  “I’m awful tired,” I said. And I was scared, so scared.

  “We’re more tired than you,” the smaller one replied, “and not a little frightened ourselves to be among xeno flip-flops. Very tiring to be among a species with extreme ideas about us.” The one talking was just a little bit smaller than the other one, but with wider hips. Female?

  Slowly, I got up and as slowly got a blanket out of the closet. The bigger Barcon yawned and followed me to the closet, looked up at the quilts stacked on the top shelf, and pulled two down. I started for my bedroom, but he said, “Bring your sleeping things in here.” Together, we dragged in the mattress and moved the coffee table so it would be in front of the couch.

  “You will sleep tonight,” the smaller one said, grabbing my arm and pressing a needled cube against it. I half about fainted onto the mattress. When I woke up, the taller Barcon was asleep in the other’s arms, but the one awake nodded at me. Space cops, have to be space cops.

  In the morning, we all got up, stretching muscles cramped from being slept on in unfamiliar ways, and went into the kitchen. The Gwyngs, already in there, sucked on lumps of butter. Black Amber took the teakettle off a burner and nodded tensely at me. I knew Gwyng nods were hostile.

  The Barcons talked to her, and all three Gwyngs pursed their lips and koo’ed that giant demented dove noise I knew was their laugh. I supposed that the big black Barcons had just told them about The Day the Earth Stood Still, because Rhyodolite lipped off, “Bunch of xenophobic-philic twitch brains. Why should we save your nasty species from atomics?”

  “Look, I quit school to help Mica,” I said.

  “You failed,” Black Amber said.

  I looked hard at the Gwyngs for traces of the alien I’d known. Black Amber was wider-hipped than most human men, but heavier in the shoulders than most women. Surgery, or her natural body shape? Rhyodolite was delicate. With longer arms and shorter legs, Cadmium could have been Mica’s brother. Not Alpha, Mica.

  Cadmium, Rhyodolite
, and Black Amber—Gwyngs. They’d probably kill me soon.

  Black Amber slumped in a chair with a teacup in her hands. She looked at me through almost human eyes as she drank whatever was in the teacup. Tea. I noticed they had brought alien tea bags.

  “I know where the bones of two of your kind are,” I told her.

  “Have a Barcon go with you,” she said. “I can’t…” and her voice broke.

  We went out to the barn where the Barcon immediately fitted the skull bones together. Then he looked closely at the finger bones, pulled out a plastic bag and put the bones in it, then sealed the top. “Evidence,” he said. Oh, I thought.

  The other aliens stepped out on the porch. The little black girl one, Rhyodolite, pulled out a gun, a .357 magnum.

  Black Amber took the bones out of the Barcon’s hand. We all went inside where she put the plastic bag on the kitchen table, reached in, and pulled out bones, crying again.

  “Are you…you going to kill me?” I asked.

  “We don’t kill sapients,” Black Amber said, lips tight, tucked in as if their fullness embarrassed her. “I want my true child’s body, the remains of the others, pieces of the ship. Despite what you did, we found the emergency recorder. So stupidly vicious.” The fake mouth twitched. “No officials know?”

  “No,” I said. “Warren didn’t want them around.” I felt sick as the other Gwyngs took Black Amber in their arms.

  Humans were the monsters…they were the monsters… My brain twitched…my breathing was ragged, like the alien’s after Warren shot him. I stared at the aliens, half expecting their human-shaped flesh to run off their bones. But even the bones had been re-worked.

  The Barcons put one skull on the kitchen table where it glared at me with its big eye sockets and thin V’ed chin. One Barcon examined the fingertip bones with a magnifying glass, then said, dropping the bones back in the plastic bag, “Definitely burned.”

  “We didn’t mean them any harm,” I said again. “Even Warren tried to help Mica in the end, but he died anyhow. Of shock. We didn’t make the ship crash.”