by David Beers
He stood and turned back around, walking to the ring of ash again.
The two scouts still knelt, at different spots now, picking up data points from as many places as they could.
“The ash here in the center, it’s showing someone here within the last five hours,” Lane said, not looking up.
“Not five hours,” Will said. “Probably ten minutes.”
“Possible,” Lane answered, moving to another place.
Will didn’t respond; it wasn’t just possible, it was the truth. Whoever was here had heard them coming in and ran through the woods, ran away, scared.
Will walked back down to the center and waited. Waited and thought. The hammer, that’s what Rigley had said. He didn’t know for certain—how could he?—but he felt fairly confident it would be necessary. That everything in this place, including him, would need to be eradicated to keep the human race alive. This wasn’t South America, wasn’t Bolivia, though that was the closest thing he could compare it to. Bolivia, they had a chance because they’d been lucky, because Rigley had been tough. Here, so far, there wasn’t any luck to speak of. He wondered if bad luck was just an absence of luck, like cold was the absence of heat? Rigley, hopefully, was still tough—though he wasn’t sure even that would be enough.
He smiled at the thought. Contemplating his own death and waxing philosophical.
Bolivia. It hadn’t been fun, but it was the closest to a hammer anyone had seen since the forties. It put his name on the mental maps of everyone in every intelligence agency across the world. It introduced him to Rigley and more or less made his career. Now, this place would end it.
“Extraterrestrial,” Andrew said.
Will heard him, but wasn’t listening. He was back in the past, back to a younger version of himself. Remembering what it had been like to be at the top of his game, to understand the technology and know how to use it for his advantage.
“You’ll want to look at this,” Lane said, finally standing up. Will snapped back to reality, seeing the black ash and the green forest surrounding it. He shouldn’t be going down that path, going into the past, not right now. Maybe at the end of all this he would have a chance to think about Bolivia, but now he needed to be here. The job wasn’t lost yet; he didn’t know anything about what arrived here—he was only speculating.
He walked over to Lane, about thirty feet closer to the ring’s edge.
“What is it?” Will asked.
“The readings. You seeing the same thing, Andrew?”
“Yeah, same thing on mine.”
Lane sighed and brought the little gadget he held up to where Will could see it. The thing had a green background, and single lines running across it horizontally with different lengths.
“What the fuck am I looking at?” He asked.
“This shows all the readings that anyone has ever picked up. Any material that’s ever been analyzed by one of these, in any part of the world, is warehoused. Add that to all the data that’s been collected since we’ve had the capability to dissect it, and you’re looking at about twenty to thirty years of analyzation.”
Will didn’t care about any of that, about the explanation, though the fact that he needed telling showed just how much these guys understood about him. They knew the stage of life he was in, and we’re politely trying to help him along.
“Just tell me what I’m looking at.”
“We’ve never seen this before. Whatever landed here, nothing like it has ever come to Earth. I mean, the genetic makeup of the object…not a single piece, a single strand, is coded in anything else we’ve ever experienced.”
14
Present Day
Rigley looked in the mirror, not seeing herself at all.
She stood in the fifth floor bathroom at work. She had been washing her hands when her phone vibrated on the counter; she didn’t even bother drying them before picking it up.
They say this is brand new.
I think one of them said the word ‘incredible’.
That was what made her lose sight of herself in the mirror, the word ‘incredible’. She sent seasoned people down there to Will. People who had seen a lot, been around the world to see it, and were on the way up in their careers. People like that didn’t describe things as incredible. People like that weren’t awed. People like that should be stone.
“There’s more, of course,” Will said. “People have been here. A few at least, and I’m fairly certain they heard us arriving and took off right before we got to the site.”
“Did you catch them?” She asked, already knowing the answer.
“No.”
“Jesus Christ, Will. Have you done any kind of recon with the locals?”
“The scouts are on it now,” Will said, and then went silent.
“This isn’t good.” Rigley didn’t know if she was talking to him or to herself. She turned around and leaned against the counter. She quickly checked the bathroom, confirming her assumption of being alone held true.
“I have another twenty-four hours. I’ll have more information for you over the next two.”
Rigley nodded, though no one was around to see it. “What do you think?”
There was a pregnant pause. Rigley waited, hoping that the prognosis would be decent, manageable.
“I think we’re fucked,” Will said.
“How fucked? Bolivia fucked?”
“Worse. Bolivia was bad, but in the end, it lacked intelligence. I think this thing has that intelligence. I think that whatever landed here is smarter than us.”
“Bolivia was smart, too,” Rigley said, knowing that it was only part true. There had been elements of it that were smart, that were adaptable, but no one who lived through that could say it was smarter than humanity. More persistent, maybe.
Will didn’t say anything back and she knew why. She was bullshitting, trying to coat a broken house with paint to make it look better. The house would still collapse no matter what color the inside walls were.
“Just fucking fix it,” she said into the phone and hung up.
She was breathing heavy and her hands shaking.
Just fucking fix it.
Had she ever felt like this before? Not in Bolivia, but things had been very different back then. She had been different.
Why the change, then?
Had she even noticed it? Fifteen years or so, moving up in this organization, and had she thought herself the same as when she started? She was still young, not like Will, not venturing into the world of retirement—but was he changing? She didn’t think so; if he had, then she couldn’t tell. He sounded the same. He acted the same. Her though? That was the question.
Tears came to her eyes.
“You can do this,” she said into the empty bathroom. “You can do this.”
Her voice shook just as her hands did. They were words, just empty words in an empty bathroom, and neither her body nor mind believed them. A week ago, she had been fine. A week ago, life was going on as it should, and then this thing came crashing down, and now her world was in danger of collapsing.
You know why you’re shaking; you know what it’s from—
But she wouldn’t hear that. Wouldn’t listen to it for a single goddamn second. Not here in this bathroom, not alone with tears about to stream down her face. She wouldn’t ever hear that again. That time was long gone. That was back in Bolivia and there wasn’t any need to ever bring it up again. What she did in Bolivia didn’t have any bearing on what she did now.
“You can do this,” she repeated.
It took Rigley a while, but the shakes finally stopped and she put on the face that the outside world knew.
* * *
Rigley didn’t know when her mind began forming rooms inside her head. It was sometime after her child, after Bolivia. Before, her mind had been one large open room where she was free to wander as she pleased. Room might not be the correct imagery, because a mind can never be a single room, but a wide open mansion. No upstairs,
no downstairs, just a huge home and she could see everything inside it.
The stairs came first. One morning they were simply there and they hadn’t been when she went to bed. She didn’t think too much about them because they led nowhere, simply a massive staircase that spiraled up into the air and ending abruptly. If she were to climb to the top and step off the staircase, she would fall back to the houses’ floor.
She should have known. Of course she should have. One couldn’t keep walking through a home when evils lived in it. The mind couldn’t always handle everything that the body put it through, and for Rigley, when it couldn’t handle it anymore, it started building.
The staircase first, and sometime after—not a long time, because this kind of construction needed to be finished quickly—the upstairs. No bannisters, no rooms, no ceilings that blocked Rigley’s view completely. Just hallways that connected to those staircases, long winding hallways that led to nowhere, but looped back on themselves. Still she didn’t venture up the stairs, there wasn’t any need to. She only watched her mind as it built, without her consent, without her input.
The rooms came next. Doors that were too big, that stretched in unnatural positions, not quite level and not quite proportioned. Doors that looked like someone on acid might have created them. No lights were built into the hallways, and the ceiling of the first floor began spreading out too, blocking her vision of the dark and large second story.
At last, she couldn’t see the construction anymore, because her mind had blocked it off from her. The only thing she could do was to walk up those long stairs and peer hard into the hallways—that is if she wanted to see what was up there. She hadn’t, for years and years, she had lived in the bottom floor of her mind, content with what it let her see, not needing to venture into places that might not be…healthy for her.
Now, though, she thought it might be time to go up those stairs, to see what she hid from herself, what she let herself forget.
Rigley stood at the bottom, looking up, seeing the airy light of her first floor disappearing into the stuffy dark of the second. And how many floors were there? How far did the darkness extend? She took her first step onto a stair that she had avoided much of her life. The second step was no easier than the first.
15
Bolivia
The country was dirt. That’s the first thing Will thought when he arrived. He knew the history of the place, had read up extensively on it over the past few days. Simon Bolivar running around down here, killing the past regimes and then new ones sprang up. New ones spouting words like communism and republics of the people. It all meant the same thing, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
If anyone doubted that, all they had to do was look at the dirt. The whole country, the one named after the man who supposedly saved South America, was a pile of dirt with people living in it.
His mom would have told him he didn’t know the first thing about what these people had been through, and she would have been right. Will’s mom was dead, though. She said a lot of things when she was alive and a lot of them were true, but the important ones weren’t, were they? The important ones, those had been lies, so it was hard to take what she would have said now and listen too much to it.
The city was dead, so that could be one reason it looked so God-awful to him. It wasn’t as dead as it could be; something lived here, but the people? Nothing resembling a person lived in this place besides the people in the line of cars he was a part of, all rolling down the street.
The whole goddamn thing had started from a meteor shower. That’s what really amazed Will. A few rocks falling from the sky, and now a pink mess covered the city.
Don’t touch it. None of it.
That’s what all of them had been told, every one of the mechanics brought down here. They had all sat at tables and listened as a general prepped them for what they were going to see. They looked at pictures and watched videos, watched the pink sponge grow across people faster than ants could squirm out of a hill. Will saw the pictures, but it didn’t prepare him for this. He didn’t think anything could have prepared him.
The pinkness of it—that startled him almost as much as what it had done. Bright pink, almost neon, like one of those signs at a shitty strip club, lighting up and saying Girls Inside.
The whole city looked like one of those signs, a big bright international sign saying New Fucking Owners.
No one knew what this shit did, besides spread like a virus. The buildings were covered in it, looking like pink nets draped down, flowing into the streets. Indeed, the tires of Will’s vehicle ran over the pink tendrils right now, but they were coated with a substance that seemed to retard the growth of it. Had the tires not been coated, the entire vehicle would be filled with the pink, almost powdery, growth. It would probably be growing out of Will’s eyes by now, his brain not just coated in it, but the invader actually filling in his synapses.
Or was it synapsi? He thought, smiling.
They were here to destroy this stuff. That was his objective. Kill it. All of it. And do it in a way that kept the rest of the world from knowing about it.
16
Present Day
It was odd, looking out his own eyes, but not being able to control anything. His brain still worked and he was still inside his brain, so it made sense that he could see everything, but yet only as a passive observer. Bryan thought it might be like a movie, during the time when he waited for her to wake up, but now he realized this wasn’t a fucking movie. That was his arm moving, those were his legs walking; it was his brain thinking these thoughts. All of it coming from something else, another entity propelling him forward.
He thought he knew the name of the thing controlling him. Although, he wasn’t sure a name really described her. A name was a human trait, but this thing was not human. She thought of herself as Morena Var, but that was more a title than a name, Bryan thought. She was Morena, but she was also a Var—though he didn’t know what the title meant.
An alien possessed Bryan.
It was a shocking thing to understand, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized there was no other explanation. He wasn’t having some kind of mental illness mishap, this was no Earth driven parasite inside his mind—and how he wished either of those were true. He would much rather, much rather, have something made from this planet causing a delusion, than to know the truth.
The truth: an alien, from outer space, had taken over, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Morena had been walking him around for the past five or six hours, driving him from place to place. He watched, silently, scared to speak up. He caught glimpses of her thoughts, but they were…different. They weren’t linear like his, but seemed to…
He couldn’t fully describe it; her thoughts didn’t flow from A to B, but rather combined A and B, creating a new letter. She thought holistically, encompassing multiple timelines and points of view in one single vision. So when he caught glimpses of those thoughts, he barely understood them. He didn’t know what she wanted, why she was here, why they were running around this town—none of it.
An alien controlled him.
That thought never turned normal, never became something he could simply accept. Each time it came to him, it felt like the first, nearly sending him into the panic that he feared so much now.
They were currently in the public library, with Morena bent over a book. Bryan could see it was a geography book, but he didn’t understand how she took in the information. The first page was open, and she stared at it, had been for the past five minutes, not moving, not flipping to the next page. Something was happening inside his head, he could feel it, though again—he didn’t understand it. It felt more like energy than anything else, like excitement, except it also felt like a rapid game of Tetris. Like millions and millions of different shapes were falling into place all at once, without a single gap in any of them.
He looked at the page, unable to do anything else, and growing mor
e and more antsy by the second. He wanted to speak to her. Wanted to say something, and the fear that had kept him from doing it since she woke up this morning was wearing thin underneath that want.
What was the worst that could happen? Outside of death, it didn’t seem like much more could be done to him.
Morena closed the book and sat there staring at the cover.
“Hey,” Bryan said.
Morena lifted her head up slowly, Bryan watching as his eyes scanned up from the table to the space in front of it. He didn’t know what to say next, but he knew that she hadn’t been expecting his thoughts to come through so forcefully. That was why she moved her head up from the book, the only physical sign she showed at the surprise.
“What are you doing?” he asked, feeling stupid as he did it, but literally having no idea what else to say.
“Bryan,” she said, still seeming to taste taste the word.
“Yes. That’s my name,” he said, feeling eerily calm. Maybe it was that he had sat inside himself, in a corner of himself, for the past eighteen hours. Maybe it was that, really, nothing else could be done to him. “What are you doing? What the hell is happening?”
He watched the world tilt as she cocked his head to the side slightly, perhaps his mind mapping out for her the physical response to confusion.
“You’re an interesting creature,” Morena said, her voice sounding (is there sound in here, Bryan? Inside your head?) like a song, like a child playing a game. “I’d like to know more about you, while we’re here together.”
“The fuck are you talking about? Know more about me? You control me!” He almost laughed at the ridiculousness of her words.
“There’s a block of sorts, I’ve found. There are things I can access, important things, but not the most important. Your language, that comes to me easily. How to move that metal machine outside as well. But you, Bryan, I think you hold a lot of it in your…you call it a mind, the piece of you that I haven’t taken over.”