Not One of Us

by Neil Clarke

  Other wriggling strands came snaking across the bowed deck. He wrenched around and hit his head on LeBouc’s tackle box. He thought one of the things had grabbed his ear but it was the latch on the box, caught in his hair. A hollering came and he realized it was his own ragged voice.

  His hands beat at the cord but prickly spines jutting out of it stung him. That jolted him badly and he tried to pull himself up to get a tool. The tackle box. He grabbed a gutting knife. With both hands he forced it under the edge of the cord across his chest. The ropy thing was strong and fought against the blade. He got some leverage and pulled up and the blade bit. The pink cord suddenly gave way. It flailed around and the main body lashed back at him. He caught it on the point of the knife and drove it into the side of the boat. That gave him a cutting surface and he worked the knife down the length of the thing. He sawed with all his strength. It split into two splices that went still. Stroking along it he sliced it in two, clear up to the housing at the stern.

  The shooting pain in his calf he had made himself ignore and now he turned to it. The cord had sunk into his jeans. He pried it up as before and turned the blade. This one popped open and drooled milky fluid. He hacked away at it, free of the lancing pain. It took a moment to cut away chunks. They writhed on the boat bottom. With stinging hands he reached into the tackle box and found the workman’s gloves. That made it easier to pick up and toss the long strands into the sea. They struggled weakly.

  Numbness crept up his leg and across his chest. He felt elated and sleepy and wanted to rest. His eyes flickered and he realized that his face was numb too. Everything was moving too fast. He needed a rest. Then he could think about this. Figure it out.

  Then another pink rope came sliding over the gunnel. It felt around and snaked toward him as if it could sense his heat or smell. He felt the tip of it touch his deck shoe. Sharp fear cleared his mind.

  The knife came down on it and he pounded the point along its length. Without cutting it into pieces he lurched toward the gunwale. With a swipe the tie line popped away from its cleat. He leaped over a section of pink rope and cut the second line. He could barely see. With his hands he felt along the stern and found the starter button and helm. The outboard caught right away. With a strum the engines turned over and he slid the throttles forward to rev the engines into a quick-start warmup.

  He veered among the pylons. With a click the flashlight glare made the scene jump out at him. There were pink strands in the water.

  No sign at all of LeBouc.

  He hit the throttle and shot out into open water and reached for the radiophone.

  The worst of it was the wait.

  He stung in running sheets of fire all over the right leg and chest.

  The thing had wrapped around his calf like a bracelet. He wondered why the ME never said anything about the corpses being pumped full of venom and only then realized that he had felt electrical shocks, not stings. His leg and arm had been jerking on their own. He fingered the trembling muscles, remembering through a fog.

  He got away from there into the darkness, not caring any more about the Busted Flush. Eventually he thought that they might be following the sound of the outboard. He shut it off and drifted. Then he called the shore and said he was headed in on the electric. By then he was flopping on the deck as debilitating cramps swept through him. Breath came hard and he passed out several times.

  Then a chopper came out of the murk. It hovered over him like an angel with spotlights and an unfurling ladder. Men in wet suits dropped onto the deck. They harnessed him up and he spun away into the black sky. On the hard floor of the chopper a woman stood over him with a big needle of epinephrine, her face lined with concern. He could not get his thick tongue to tell her that this case was something else. She shot him full of it and his heart pounded. That did clear his sluggish mind but it did not stop the shooting jolts that would come up suddenly in his leg and chest and in other places he had no memory of the pink rope being at all.

  She gave him other injections though and those made the whole clattering chopper back away. It was like a scene on late night television, mildly interesting and a plot you could vaguely remember seeing somewhere. She barked into her helmet mike and asked him questions but it was all theory now, not really his concern.

  The next few hours went by like a movie you can’t recall the next day. A cascading warm shower lined in gray hospital tile, McKenna lying on the tiles. A doctor in white explaining how they had to denature something, going on and on, just about as interesting as high school chemistry. They said they needed his consent for some procedure and he was happy to give it so long as they agreed to leave him alone.

  He slowly realized the ER whitecoats were not giving him painkillers because of the War on Drugs and its procedural requirements. A distant part of him considered how it would be for a lawman to die of an excess of law. Doctors X and then Y and finally Z had to sign off. Time equaled pain and dragged on tick by tick.

  Then there was Demerol, which settled the arguments nicely. he next day he found a striping of tiny holes along his leg. More across his chest. He guessed the corpses had sealed up most of these when they swelled, so they showed only a few tiny holes.

  The ME came by and talked to McKenna as though he were an unusually fascinating museum exhibit. At least he brought some cortisone cream to see if it would help and it did. He recalled distantly that the ME was actually a doctor of some sort. Somehow he had always thought of the ME as a cop.

  Two days later a team of Fed guys led him out of the hospital and into a big black van. They had preempted local law, of course, so McKenna barely got to see his supervisor or the Mobile Chief of Police, who was there mostly for a photo op anyway.

  In the van a figure in front turned and gave him a smile without an ounce of friendliness in it. Mr. Marine.

  “Where’s Dark Glasses?” McKenna asked but Mr. Marine looked puzzled and then turned away and watched the road. Nobody said anything until they got to Dauphin Island.

  They took him up a ramp and down a corridor and then through some sloping walkways and odd globular rooms and finally to a little cell with pale glow coming from the walls. It smelled dank and salty and they left him there.

  A door he hadn’t known was there slid open in the far wall. A man all in white stepped in carrying a big, awkward laptop and behind him shuffled a Centauri.

  McKenna didn’t know how he knew it, but this was the same Centauri he had seen getting onto the Busted Flush. It looked at him with the famous slitted eyes and he caught a strange scent that wrinkled his nose.

  The man in white sat down in one of two folding chairs he had brought and gestured for McKenna to sit in the other. The Centauri did not sit. It carefully put a small device on the floor, a bulb and nozzle. Then it stood beside the man and put its flipper-hands on the large keyboard of the laptop. McKenna had heard about these devices shaped to the Centauri movements.

  “It will reply to questions,” the man in white said. “Then it types a reply. This computer will translate on-screen.”

  “It can’t pronounce our words, right?” McKenna had read that.

  “It has audio pickups that transduce our speech into its own sounds. But it can’t speak our words, no. This is the best we’ve been able to get so far.” The man seemed nervous.

  The Centauri held up one flipper-hand and with the device sprayed itself, carefully covering its entire skin. Or at least it seemed more like skin now, and not the reptile armor McKenna had first thought it might be.

  “It’s getting itself wetted down,” the man said. “This is a dry room, easier for us to take.”

  “The wet rooms have—”

  “Ceiling sprays, yeah. They gotta stay moist ’cause they’re amphibians. That’s why they didn’t like California. It’s too dry, even at the beach.”

  The Centauri was finished with its spraying. McKenna thought furiously and began. “So, uh, why were you going out on the shrimp boat?” Its jointed flippe
rs were covered in a mesh hide. They moved in circular passes over pads on the keyboard. The man had to lift the awkward computer a bit to the alien, who was shorter than an average man. On the screen appeared:

  <>

  “Is that what attacked me?”

  <>

  “Your young are feeding?”

  <>

  “Why don’t we know of this?”

  <>

  He could not look away from those eyes. The scaly skin covered its entire head. The crusty deep green did not stop at the big spherical eyes, but enclosed nearly all of it, leaving only the pupil open in a clamshell slit. He gazed into the unreadable glittering black depths of it. The eyes swiveled to follow him as he fidgeted. McKenna couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “I, I can’t read your expression. Like Star Trek and that stuff, we expect aliens to be like humans, really.”

  The alien wrote:

  <>

  “You don’t have our facial expressions.”

  <>

  “Of course. So I can’t tell if you care whether your young killed two men on fishing boats.”

  <>

  “We don’t know! Our government has not told us. Why?”

  The man holding the computer opened his mouth to say something and thought better of it. The alien wrote:

  <>

  “People are okay with your visit. They might not like your seeding our oceans and moving in. Plus killing us.”

  This time it took a while to answer:

  <>

  McKenna blinked. “Is that a religious idea?”

  <>

  “Uh, sky? . . .”

  The computer guy said, “Mistranslation. I saw that one with the astro guys last week. The software combines two concepts, see. Sky—means astronomy, ’cause their world is always cloudy, so the night sky is above that—and history. Closest word is cosmology, astronomy of the past.”

  McKenna looked at the alien’s flat, unreadable gaze. “So it’s . . . science.”

  <>

  McKenna could not see where this was going. He had read some pop science about something called dark energy, sure. It supposedly was making the whole universe expand faster and faster. “So what’s it . . . this dark heaven . . . do?”

  <>

  McKenna blinked. “You mean we . . . our minds . . . send out their . . .”

  <>

  “This sounds like religion.”

  <>

  McKenna was getting in over his head. He felt light-headed, taking shallow breaths, clenching his hands. “You don’t regret that those men died?”

  <>

  “Around here murder is a crime.”

  <>

  “Look, even if spirits or whatever go someplace else, that doesn’t excuse murder.”

  <>

  “Being dead matters to us.”

  <>

  The Centauri blinked slowly at McKenna with its clamshell opening in the leathery, round eyes. Then it stooped to get its sprayer. From its wheezing spout moisture swirled around all of them.

  The giddy swirl of this was getting to him. “I, I don’t know where to go with this. Your young have committed a crime.”

  <>

  McKenna stood up. The damp scent of the alien swarmed around him. “Some more than others.”

  He barely made it to LeBouc’s funeral. It was a real one, with a burial plot. At the church he murmured soft words to the widow, who clung to him, sobbing. He knew that she would later ask how her husband had died. It was in her pleading eyes. He would not know what to say. Or what he would be allowed to say. So he sat in the back of the whitewashed Baptist church and tried to pay attention to the service. As LeBouc’s partner he had to say something in the eulogies. A moment after he sat down again he had no idea what he had said. People looked oddly at him. In the graveyard, as protocol demanded, he stood beside the phalanx of uniforms, who fired a popping salute.

  At least LeBouc got buried. He had washed up on a beach while McKenna was in the hospital. McKenna had never liked the other ways, especially after his wife went away into cremation. One dealt with death, he felt, by dealing with the dead. Now bodies did not go into the earth but rather the air through cremation or then the ashes into the sea. People were less grounded, more scattered. With the body seldom present, the wheel working the churn between the living and dead could not truly spin.

  God had gone out of it, too. LeBouc’s fishing friends got up and talked about that. For years McKenna had noticed how his friends in their last profile became not dead Muslims or Methodists but dead bikers, golfers, surfers. That said, a minister inserted talk about the afterlife at the grave site and then the party, a respectable several hundred, went to the reception. There the tone shifted pretty abruptly. McKenna heard some guy in a seersucker suit declare “closure” just before the Chardonnay ran out.

  On his sunset drive back down by the Bay he rolled down the windows to catch the sea breeze tang. He tried to think about the alien.

  It had said they wanted privacy in their reproductive cycle. But was that it? Privacy was a human concept. The Centauris knew that because they had been translating human radio and TV dramas for a century. Privacy might not be a Centauri category at all, though. Maybe they were using humans’ own preconceptions to get some maneuvering room?

  He needed to rest and think. There would for sure come a ton of questions about what happened out there in the dark Gulf. He did not know what he would or could say to LeBouc’s widow. Or what negotiations would come between Mobile PD and the Feds. Nothing was simple, except maybe his slow-witted self.

  What he needed was some Zinfandel and an hour on his wharf.

  A black Ford sedan was parked on the highway a hundred yards from his driveway. It looked somehow official, deliberately anonymous. Nobody around here drove such a dull car, one without blemish or rust. Such details probably meant nothing, but he had learned what one of the desk sergeants called “street sense” and he never ignored it.

  He swung onto the oyster drive, headed toward home, and then braked. He cut his lights and engine, shifting into neutral, and eased the car down the sloping driveway, gliding along behind a grove of pines.

  In the damp night air rushing by he heard the crunching of the tires and wondered if anybody up ahead he
ard them too. Around the bend before the house he stopped and let the motor tick, cooling, while he just listened. Breeze whispered through the pines and he was upwind from the house. He eased open the car door and pulled his 9mm from the glove compartment, not closing it, letting the silence settle.

  No bird calls, none of the rustle and scurry of early night.

  He slid out of the car, keeping low under the window of the door. No moon yet. Clouds scudded off the Gulf, masking the stars.

  He circled around behind the house. On the Gulf side a man stood in shadows just around the corner from the porch. He wore jeans and a dark shirt and cradled a rifle. McKenna eased up on him, trying to ID the profile from the dim porch light. At the edge of the pines he surveyed the rest of his yard and saw no one.

  Nobody carries a rifle to make an arrest. The smart way to kill an approaching target was to bracket him, so if there was a second guy he would be on the other side of the house, under the oak tree.

  McKenna faded back into the pines and circled left to see the other side of his house. He was halfway around when he saw the head of another man stick around the corner. There was something odd about the head as it turned to survey the backyard but in the dim light he could not make it out.

  McKenna decided to walk out to the road and call for backup. He stepped away. This caught the man’s attention and brought up another rifle and aimed straight at him. McKenna brought his pistol up.

  The recoil rocked his hand back and high as the 9mm snapped away, two shots. Brass casings curled back past his vision, time in slow-mo. The man went down and McKenna saw he was wearing IR goggles.

  McKenna turned to his right in time to see the other man moving. McKenna threw himself to the side and down and a loud report barked from the darkness. McKenna rolled into a low bush and lay there looking out through the pines. The man was gone. McKenna used both hands to steady his pistol, elbows on the sandy ground, knowing that with a rifle the other man had the advantage at this distance, maybe twenty yards.

  He caught a flicker of movement at his right. The second man was well away from the wall now, range maybe thirty yards, bracing his rifle against the old cypress trunk. McKenna fired fast, knowing the first shot was off but following it with four more. He could tell he was close but the hammering rounds threw off his judgment. He stopped, the breech locking open on the last one. He popped the clip and slid in another, a stinging smell in his widened nostrils.