Them #12
He stumbled back toward the tree line, the leaves slicing at his wrists. How far had he hobbled since he first awoke? Tears swelled in his eyes. My hat! I lost the hat. The hat She gave me.
Just one more memory beginning to fade.
Pieces of Her slipping away. Clichés crumbling. What do I lean on?
With no answer, and an unwillingness to face the alien devils again, the man turned back to the overgrown crops and pushed on.
Each footstep into the field elicited a crunch of dead husks and a throbbing pain in his skull.
With adrenaline surging again, the concussion symptoms were gentler.
Duller. He raised his forearms over his eyes, shielding them from the sharp stalks and bright daylight.
Blood trickled from scrapes on both of his elbows, but he didn’t care. There was only one way left to go.
Forward.
The man walked on, searching for the corn maze’s end and whatever old farmhouse likely waited beyond.
The sun climbed higher and higher, filling the air with warm new life.
The man listened to the birds, their soft chestnut chirps welcoming a new day.
He felt the stinging solar radiation on his once-dark flesh, now grayed and vitamin deficient.
How long had he been nightwalking? How long since his coarse skin last felt the sun?
The man wished he could speak to the star, catch up on the past couple of years, and talk about what they’ve missed about one another.
The sun felt comforting and familiar, and for the first time in a long while, the man did not feel alone.
He felt watched over, cared for by its loving, shining brilliance.
His thoughts were beginning to clear, and his legs strode easily in their two-step motion.
At once, the man felt warm and good and victorious.
The hat was gone, yes, but he was alive, and the sun too!
Reunion with daylight was a blessing, however brief.
The man did not know that the feeling of being watched came not from Earth’s star high above, but from behind him.
He heard the birds chirping but not the low rustles of something lurking in the corn rows.
He felt the vitamin D seeping into him but not the cold metal that peeked through the wilt.
When he glanced over his shoulder, out of sloppy habit rather than genuine caution, he didn’t notice the quick dashes and ducks beneath the sight line or the muted yet heavy sounds that could not have been the wind.
So enraptured by the golden sunlight that he didn’t notice the blinking blue eyes thirty yards behind him, concealing their shine and splendor.
The man only felt the lovely sensation of being watched, and basked in the light.
I’ve always recorded things. You have to cover yourself, you know? Can’t get into a game of who said what. In my line of work, where nothing can be taken to court or deliberated by a jury of your peers, ethics don’t matter much. Not much at all.
Saved my ass a few times. Once, in the ’90s, this unbearable bastard lacking any discernable accent, Smith or Jones or something ubiquitous like that, came at me right outside my office.
A congressman, I think. Old enough to have caught on to the reality of the black budget and young enough to not know when to shut up about it.
“Move along, son,” I said, “you don’t want to get into this.” Couldn’t even tell you how he got to my section of offices. We had security clearances for a reason.
But he’d persisted, lips flailing like a fish gnawing on the back end of a curved hook, searching for a serrated point he didn’t know was there. Not until it found his soft flesh.
Smith/Jones represented Connecticut. He’d made the unfortunate discovery that his district, a small horde of New York City suburbs, was getting screwed on its taxation.
I mocked a search for my business card as I secretly hit the record button on the little journalist’s recorder in my front jacket pocket.
I learned early on in my tenure that denial only stirred their ire.
The best way to dissuade prying hands is to explain to them the futility of their situation, that they’re groping for a handhold on a stainless steel vault.
If they find a grip, if they pull hard enough, then it’ll topple over and crush them.
Smith/Jones’s district was the wealthiest in the state.
Progressive white suburbia didn’t need much police funding.
His district’s residents asked for nothing more from Uncle Sam than clean roads, public lacrosse fields, and the arrest of the local homeless population.
They always voted for the popular candidate and never minded an extra dip into their deep pockets, nor did they question the destination of those dollars.
They were shiny, smiling people who were used to watching money walk away without much fuss.
I explained to him: “Your district is simply an opportunity that the national government must capitalize on.” I didn’t bother telling him that it’s not my job to collect the black budget, that I just oversee the folks spending it.
That usually fires them up even more, and they stomp off on a crusade to find out who does that job while name-dropping yours truly along the way.
Jesus Christ, did I really sound so bureaucratic back then? So, what is it, tied down? Not quite. More like a leash, and my eyes only saw the lines to walk between.
I only see the dark now. Not many candles left.
The point is, Smith/Jones wanted to call for a monumental tax cut to aid his reelection bid, and I told him in so many words that simply could not happen.
That kind of decision-making was far beyond any of our pay grades.
If he wanted to make cuts, he had to find another way to do it, as everyone else before him had done.
Reduce teacher salaries, take construction shortcuts, sell your public land to Such & Such Industries or So&, whatever it took to keep the machine running.
I was ready to walk into my office and lock the door when he threatened me. Would leak everything he’d learned, including what I’d just told him. “Find another way to build your UFOs,” he remarked. That made me laugh.
But, funny or not, I was oath-bound to treat that threat as the last straw. I shut the door in his face, uploaded the audio, and sent an email as fast as I could. It took eight minutes. I’m sure some people could’ve done it faster. I was never very good with the tech stuff.
Smith/Jones never got reelected. In fact, he died in a car crash two or three years later. I guess that means he still meant to leak it, after all that time. That might’ve made him a good person. Someone with a stronger moral compass than I had.
No. I think he just wanted an excuse for why he couldn’t do it. For why he’d failed. An explanation as to why his reelection was so futile. I don’t think a guy like that, a high, loud voice in a thin soul, can ever handle that kind of failure unless everyone knows why he failed.
The crash took his wife too. I bet he told her.
She had to know. Of course she had to know, because Mr. Smith/Jones couldn’t let her go on thinking that he wasn’t good enough.
No, that was the women he lay with slept with crept with.
I mean for God’s sake she’d soaked up his seed and spit out some small something not that long ago and how would he tell his kid?
Tell his kid that Daddy used to be a big shot, a real gunslinger around DC ’cause he was a big man but now a hotshot no more.
I think men like that always need a reason. An excuse.
But I’m getting flowery now. Rambling like one of my books. Does it even matter? Will anyone ever read this? Probably not. Why not have a little fun with it, then?
Have to remind myself how, after all. Need the practice. Fun is an artifact.
The point is, reader, that I’ve always known how to cover my ass. And the asses of those above me. They liked me for that. Cherished me for it. I guess that’s how I maintained my position until the end. Until they had no choice but to come for me.
So when we finally brought back a specimen in one piece, I knew that we had an opportunity to get bitten in the ass. Even have a whole stinger shoved up it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisbrot, standing over the corpse of the fallen alien, the same one who’d been taken away from its home in the blink of an eye and killed two of us nearly as quickly, named it “Adam.”
Telling, isn’t it? How much we thought of ourselves?
Weisbrot. He wasn’t another kid we’d lured into the basement with false promises of wildest dreams. He wasn’t one of the hundreds of hyper-brilliant minds that got tricked into classified obscurity.
This time it wasn’t a ruse. The promise was real, and he had enough data, bleeding-corpse data, to apply the work he’d outlined in his thesis.
Project Artemis wasn’t done. Sure, the towering teleportation turret didn’t fire off much after that initial incident, but it didn’t have to. We already had what we needed.
And there was still plenty of work to be done.
The extraterrestrials’ armored skin was of great interest. Lightweight, rigid, near-impenetrable natural polymer produced inside their bodies.
Mass production of “Scorpion Steel” would’ve changed shipping and travel worldwide.
Lighter planes and ships would’ve meant less fuel and faster travel.
Lower costs and less pollution. Stronger tanks and Humvees, fewer troop deaths.