Illegal alien, p.21
Illegal Alien, page 21
“Don’t. I happen to like my job.” Although at this point, I could have stood for it to be a little warmer.
“Fair enough. So listen, I should get back to it, but I wanted to see if you’re available for dinner? I know it’s last minute and all, but I’m not the best at planning social engagements more than two hours in advance. It’s a curse.”
“Well…” I trailed off in uncertainty.
“No pressure,” he hastened to add. “I meant what I said at the cemetery.”
“I know you did. It’s just that…well, I’m working. And I’m not sure if I’ll be done in time to make it to dinner. I wouldn’t want you to think I’m standing you up, and I’ll be unavailable by phone.”
“Oh.” He sounded nonplussed. “I hadn’t even thought of that. Well, what if I text you my address, and you make it if you can. I could probably wait as late as 8 until I start thinking cannibalism might not be such a bad option.”
“Now I’m tempted not to come just to see if you go full Donner Party.”
“That’s what I like about you, Audrey. You’re so caring,” he shot back.
“Thanks. I should go, but maybe I’ll see you later.”
“Good enough for me,” he said. “Now, essays.”
“You think that’s bad, you should see what I’m up to,” I replied, and then I hung up before he could reply and settled in to wait for the might-be-an-alien to return to its ship.
CHAPTER 43
I huddled behind my cardboard camouflage for about ten minutes before I started to have second thoughts about my life choices. Again. The cold had sunk deep into my bones by then. And what for? Why hadn’t I taken one look at the wreckage of the ship and gotten on the horn for backup? Hardwicke might be angry at me, but even he wouldn’t be able to deny the existence of some UFO parts under the Cherry Street Bridge. Taking the ship would also cut off any hope of escape for Mr. No Mouth. His chances of hiding amongst the populace were slim to none, leaving him with no way out unless he managed to phone home like E.T. As far as plans went, it made perfect sense, so why exactly wasn’t I doing it?
Maybe Hardwicke had been right. Maybe I was a bit hypocritical. I’d always been such a sticker for following the rules when it came to my trainees, and the moment I’d been confronted with an unsolvable case, I’d hauled off and broken every single rule I could think of and maybe even some new ones nobody had come up with yet. All because I couldn’t bear the thought of not getting to the bottom of it. Because Audrey Vorkink closed cases, and her ego wouldn’t handle leaving this one unsolved. Sure, I had some cold files in my desk—everybody did—but those cases had gone unresolved due to lack of evidence, or because the suspect had fled town before we figured out he was our guy. Not because I couldn’t make sense out of the pieces I’d gotten. I’d had plausible deniability on those—the failures hadn’t been my fault—but not on this one, and I hadn’t been able to handle it. Couldn’t give up until I solved it all on my own. I had to ask myself honestly—if Ronda was still alive, would I have called her before I came out here to look for the wreckage?
I probably wouldn’t have. She’d deserved a better partner than I’d been. I’d fed her all this fluff about trusting your partner and equal credit and a whole load of bonus bullshit, but at the end of the day, I couldn’t share my toys. And even knowing that didn’t make me pick up the phone. I’d find Mr. No Mouth and bring him to justice, and then I’d get to work on learning how to share better than your average five-year-old.
If I didn’t freeze to death first, anyway.
I tucked my hands further into my armpits, but my fingers had already gone pins and needles. As stubborn as I was, I knew this was a deal breaker. At the very least, I needed to go back to the car and warm up a bit, because I wouldn’t be able to defend myself against Mr. No Mouth if I couldn’t make my hands work.
No sooner had I resolved upon this course of action than I became aware of a splashing sound coming from the water. The boxes blocked my view, and I didn’t have an eye hole pointed in the right direction, so I couldn’t see whatever it was. A rowboat, maybe? But that didn’t make sense given the scrim of ice that sat atop the waters of the Maumee. The river certainly wasn’t safe for boating, and the noise sounded too loud to be waterfowl. Curious, I inched painstakingly off to the side, trying to find the right angle and catch a glimpse of whatever was making the noise. It was probably nothing, but I’d rather know for sure before I went off to my car and its glorious heater.
As I twisted, the splashing noise grew. It reminded me of days spent playing on the shallows of the beach with Greg when he was a toddler. We hadn’t taken many vacations, but we’d gone to the lake a few times a year and spent long hours there, swimming all day and cooking hot dogs over charcoal, eating while our bathing suits still dripped. But the Maumee was no place to take a pleasure dip. There were No Swimming signs posted at regular intervals along the water, as if they were needed. One look at the greenish tinge of the river or a whiff of the rotten chemical stink of the water on a hot day should have been enough to convince anyone with half an ounce of common sense to go fill a kiddie pool and splash around in that instead. Anything would have been preferable to taking a dip in that muck.
Unless you were an alien, anyway.
Through a gap in the cardboard, I caught my first up close glimpse of it. The long, gangly limbs moved in ways they shouldn’t, like the creature had too many joints and felt obligated to use them all as much as possible. My gym clothes clung to its cavernous torso, dripping with sludge and river water. Ice clung to the fabric in spots. The head was obviously misshapen, with a bulbous forehead, nonexistent ears, and a vestigial chin with no mouth to speak of. The greyish, corpselike skin looked like it belonged on Bug’s autopsy table. Large dark eyes fixed on the wreckage of the craft to the exclusion of everything else, and it crept in that direction, clutching a plastic bag from the local drug store in one long fingered hand.
I had a momentary, horrible mental image of this thing in my apartment, going through all my belongings. Looking at the pictures of Greg and Aunt Rose. Putting on my clothes, and then wearing them as it leapt off the building with Ronda. It must have known that it would survive the fall somehow, using whatever alien technology it had at its disposal. Just as it had in the car crash with Sankaran.
Suddenly, it all made sense. If this creature could heal itself using that black goop, then it didn’t have to worry about the dangers posed by a fall from great height or the impact of a collision. So when it had felt threatened, it had killed Sankaran and then Ronda. I’d struggled to make sense of the murders not because I was a poor detective, but because I’d made one fatal yet logical assumption—that the killer had been human.
But as I looked out of the gaps in my hiding spot, I had to admit that it wasn’t. I felt chilled to my bones at the realization. It was a phenomenon that had nothing to do with the temperature.
I must have let out some small noise of shock or horror at this—not all that remarkable since I’d just discovered evidence of an alien murderer living under a bridge in Toledo, Ohio—and the creature froze. Its head began to twist, luminous eyes wide as it searched for the source of the noise. Apparently, it wasn’t deaf despite its lack of ears. I froze, hoping that my makeshift shelter might hide me from its gaze and buy me time to decide what to do next, but I had no such luck.
Its eyes met mine.
CHAPTER 44
For a moment, I locked eyes with the alien. After that, it seemed silly to stay huddled behind the cardboard, so I stood up, knocking the makeshift shelter aside. My heart pounded as I contemplated what to do next. Since I wasn’t an idiot, I kept my hand near my sidearm, pushing my coat out of the way in case I had to draw it rapidly. But what else should I do? In the hokey movies they played late at night on the SyFy channel, the hapless human would approach a UFO with one hand held up in a gesture of peace, only to be shot dead by a laser, so that option was out.
I settled for attempting to establish some kind of contact. Perhaps this creature was confused. Maybe it didn’t realize it had killed Dr. Sankaran or Ronda. After all, if it came from a world full of self-healing creatures, death wouldn’t be so much of an issue. Hell, maybe grabbing onto your friends and throwing each other off buildings was a fun game to play there, like hide-and-seek or spin the bottle. Maybe this creature simply didn’t understand. Communicating that would be difficult, but I had to try.
“Can you understand me?” I asked, using the same calm, low tones that I employed to talk down a drug addict on the verge. “I just want to talk.”
At the sound of my voice, the alien dropped into a crouch like a wild animal backed into a corner. The tips of its fingers grazed the frozen earth, but it didn’t seem to notice the cold. It considered me a long moment, and I held my ground. Showing weakness to this seemingly feral creature struck me as a bad idea. Rather than locking eyes with it in an aggressive manner, I fixed my gaze on the center of its face, trying to appear unthreatening without looking like prey.
It began to slink forward on all fours. The motion reminded me of a jungle cat on the prowl, with the same languid, liquid strides. Only instead of a muscled body covered in rippling fur, this creature was all grey skin stretched tight over bone. I froze before it, watching in horrified fascination as it crept effortlessly over the ground. It drew closer and closer as I noticed how its arms bent and shifted, the wrists moving in ways that a human’s wouldn’t. The elbows bending backwards, limbs twisting in their sockets.
I could hear something. A voice whispered in the back of my mind, the words incomprehensible and alien. I could feel it searching for a handhold in my mind. Pictures flashed in front of my eyes, the same photos that had decorated my walls. Now they felt like a threat, and a wave of anger rose in me. The alien presence seized on it, and I felt a sudden tug and lurch within my mind.
All my resistance evaporated. I would do whatever necessary to protect my family. I needed to bring the piece of Sankanium I had at home; the alien had been searching for it all this time. It had tried to find it in my apartment, but I’d had it with me the whole time. The craft must be fixed, and anyone who stood in the way removed…
Something hard struck me on the forehead, breaking my daze. I put my numb hand up to it as I was pelted again. Hail began to fall from the sky, and the alien stopped only a couple of feet away to cower from the onslaught. It had gotten almost close enough to touch me while I’d stood there and waited for it to close the distance. What was wrong with me? I felt foggy and dazed, but the tiny slivers of pain drove away the unnatural malaise. I ripped my gloves off with my teeth, then drew my gun with hands shaking from fear and numbness and pointed it at the creature.
“What did you do to me?” I demanded.
The alien looked at me again, and I felt my mind begin to cloud once more. I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood and felt my head clear once again. I let out a snarl and put my finger on the trigger.
“Stop!” I demanded. “Stop that, or I’ll shoot.”
Either it didn’t understand, or it didn’t care. It leapt toward me, and I pulled the trigger. The shot struck center mass, tearing open the creature’s chest and ruining my gym clothes. Black, viscous goop sprayed everywhere. Still, it kept coming, reaching for my head with its long fingers. Time slowed, giving me what felt like an eternity to wonder at the extra joints on those fingers and to worry about what they would do when they caught hold of me. I shot again, and the hands jerked, but still it kept coming.
The creature grabbed onto my skull and began to squeeze. Now there was no question in my mind that it wanted me dead if it couldn’t control me. I shot it again and again as my head exploded in pain, emptying my entire clip into the thing in the space of only a few seconds. Then, the gun was empty, but still I kept pulling the trigger, over and over again as the creature’s grasp weakened. Then it fell to the ground in a heap at my feet.
It was dead.
CHAPTER 45
After I shot the alien, I spent a long time staring down at it in shock. I no longer felt the cold. Frankly, I’d lost all ability for rational thought. I just kept thinking that this couldn’t be real, that I hadn’t just been attacked an alien that was trying to squeeze my melon into a smoothie. For a while, the hail pinged off the body and pooled in its crevasses, but the downpour soon tapered off.
I was so discombobulated by what had happened that I didn’t notice the body had begun to decompose until the process was well underway. The right foot detached itself from the leg and flopped over on its side like it was simply exhausted and couldn’t stand being a foot any longer. I let out a gasp of shock and finally began to focus again. The creature now looked much smaller than it had while it was stalking me. The face had taken on a positively mummy-esque cast, and one of the hands crumbled away shortly after that foot had given up the fight.
“No no no…” I babbled, falling to my knees beside the corpse. I was not going to lose my dead alien. No one would believe the story without it. The ship might prove that something had been here, but no sane person would believe that I’d shot an alien without an actual bullet-riddled non-human corpse to back up the story. I sure wouldn’t have believed it myself if I hadn’t been the one doing the shooting.
Unsurprisingly, talking to the corpse didn’t make it stop falling apart. Scooping the pieces back together didn’t really help either. In a burst of inspiration, I tugged off one of my waterproof gloves and held it under the decomposing alien, catching some of the pieces as they pattered to the ground. In the absence of an evidence bag, it was the best I could do.
The body kept disintegrating, breaking into chunks so tiny that the wind began to pick them up and blow them away. I took a face full of particulate alien before I realized I’d best move upwind. Then, very belatedly, I realized I ought to take a picture of the alien before it disappeared entirely, but by the time I managed to fumble my phone out, there was nothing left but my gym clothes and a few black smears of black goop.
I scooped that up into my other glove along with a nice helping of slush. Then I took a few moments to try and get a look inside the wreckage. I couldn’t move the heavy pieces, so I couldn’t accomplish much there. After that, I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I trudged back to my car.
It took a while for me to warm up once I started the heater, but eventually the full body shudders stopped. I’d put my gloves into my cup holders, but I really needed to get them into a plastic baggie at the least. Bug would want to take a look at their contents, and I knew he’d listen to me since he’d seen what the black goop could do. But his phone went straight to voice mail. I left a breathless and possibly incoherent message begging him to call me back as soon as possible, but that left me with two gloves full of dead alien and a broken spaceship, and no idea what to do about either of them.
I started to dial the precinct, but I couldn’t make myself press send. What if the wreckage ended up being just a bunch of junk? I hadn’t really gotten a good look inside, and even if I had, I wasn’t exactly an expert on distinguishing UFO parts from a bunch of other technological junk. If I called this in and neither the UFO nor the glove slop turned out to prove the existence of aliens, I’d probably lose my job on psychiatric grounds alone. Even if I didn’t, I’d be in big trouble for meddling around with the case while I was on administrative leave. That hadn’t bothered me before, but it sure did now. Maybe being almost head-squished by an alien had put things into perspective for me.
Firm evidence would fix all these problems, and it hinged on getting my samples to the correct experts. I might be waiting on Bug, but I could still work on the aircraft. I knew someone sciencey who would likely be able to help me out with that, so I called him.
“Hello?” Erich answered.
“I need a favor,” I said.
“Does it have anything to do with homemade pasta sauce, because if so, I think I can help you. I’ve never made sauce before. I suppose that means you make me extra saucy.”
I groaned despite myself. “Okay, that was horrible. But no, it doesn’t have anything to do with pasta sauce. If I rent a U-Haul, will you help me lift some pieces of what might be a UFO onto it?”
There was a long silence.
“Hello? Erich?”
“I’m trying to decide if you’re playing a trick on me,” he said cautiously. “And if that’s a good thing or not.”
“I understand your reluctance. I’m staring right at it, and I’m pretty reluctant myself. That’s why I need the help. I need someone to tell me if this is what it looks like, or if it’s a clever fake.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose there are some things we could do. I know a few adjuncts in the engineering department who might be willing to take a look in the spirit of debunking a potential fake,” he said, relaxing a bit. “It probably is a fake, you know.”
“I’m reserving judgement,” I said.
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him about the alien, but I didn’t want to prejudice him. I wanted him as skeptical as he could be, because if I could convince him when he was dead set against the possibility, it meant I had a fairly good chance to convince Sergeant Scorsone and Dr. Boudina.
We made arrangements to meet at the closest U-Haul rental. It took a while to fill out the paperwork to rent a trailer, and the sun was setting as we pulled off the road close to the bridge. I grabbed the moving dolly provided with the trailer even though I wasn’t sure it was big enough to hold the pieces. Frankly, I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to move one of them on our own, but damn it, we’d try.
