Becoming Alien (6 page)

After I realized he hadn’t actually blown the set away, I took the gun and shells away from him. He danced around me, flipping his elbows out, whacking me with them.

Warren had fixed the Fairlane so you could flip the back seat down and get to the trunk. Once we’d gotten the back seat out, the alien could ride up front most of the time, but could hide in the trunk if he had to, or when we stopped for gas and groceries. I thought we’d be better off to drive at night, sleep off the road during the day.

So, I sat in the car, an alien beside me, night coming on, the ignition key pushed in the slot, cartons of eggs and suitcases in back. Both the alien and I trembled. He opened the atlas and pointed to Berkeley. Maybe, I thought, some scientist could figure out how to understand him.

My hand, as though it’d grown an alien-sympathizing brain, turned the ignition key before I really wanted to. Then, remembering the teachers back at high school, I dropped one foot down on the accelerator, the other on the clutch, and shifted—
Bye,
Virginia, we’re history.

We’d escape to the alien buildings in Alpha’s drawings, abandoning pilling machines jammed on nasty drugs and photos of men with crushed legs in envelopes postmarked Atlanta.

The alien reached over the seat for the shotgun and shells. Softly making fired gun sounds, he stuck his long index finger through the trigger guard.

Damn!
I stopped and pulled the gun out of his hands. The alien watched very intently as I broke open the breech, saw it was empty, and closed it. He reached to take it back, but I shoved the gun as far as I could through the trunk hole.

As I re-set Warren’s road alarm, the alien drummed his fists on the dashboard, then got a shotgun shell, holding the shell delicately in his long fingers, the sparse fur on his knuckles picking up highlights from the inside lights.

The sooner we got off county roads and onto the I-81 going west, the safer I’d feel. Warren—I knew it was irrational—could have spies watching on Rte. 8.

The alien began to sing to himself.

About a half mile farther, I saw a black mass pull out of an abandoned house’s driveway onto the road.

My headlights hit it.

Warren’s truck!

I wondered if I could jam it on and get around him, but fence posts, high banks crowded me.

“No. No. No.”

My God, Warren’s in the truck,
I thought for a second before I realized it was the alien, imitating Warren. The alien shook his head vigorously. He’d learned
no
from Warren.

I said, “Sorry,” and stopped the Fairlane.

“No.” The trembling alien spoke exactly like he’d said the other
no’s,
precisely the same tone. He began climbing over the seat, to hide in the trunk as I’d drawn that he should do when we were around strangers.

Now the beating.
I turned and drove back home; parked close to the house, and started crying on the steering wheel.

Warren’s pickup almost rammed the Fairlane. He came out of the cab white-faced, jabbering. “If you’d waited another hour, I would have gone on, but you were so obvious, so damn fucking anxious.”

Slowly I got out of the Fairlane. “Where’s the alien?” Warren asked. “Where’s the monster? You shit, Tom, my only brother, sneaking out with an alien monster, blood drinker.” Warren yanked the keys out of the ignition and bent them against a stone. When he reached into the car again, Warren’s voice faded: “Sweet Jesus.”

I moved toward the car. Warren said almost calmly, “Stop, Tom, it’s got a shotgun trained on me.”

“Not loaded,” I said. Then I remembered the shell the alien fingered, how he’d watched me open the breech. “Wait! Could be…”

As Warren backed away, the alien crawled out over the seat, with the gun crooked in his elbow, muttering soft
blams.
The creature was crying. He said again, in Warren’s voice, “No,” and raised the gun up, finger not quite on the trigger, head and shoulder hairs standing up.

Seemingly forever, both stood in the truck headlights. Then Warren, reaching for his boot pistol, rolled into the darkness. The dark flashed, the little crack of the .22, not the big .357 magnum.

The alien screamed and dropped the shotgun. He braced himself against the car and began talking hoarsely in his own language.

“Warren, are you all right?” I asked.

“Yeah, I got him.”

“No,” the alien said. “No.” He reached down and spread a hand over the wound, then began trying to walk to Warren.

I caught him, and he pushed my hands against the wound, like wet hot meat, and collapsed.

“Bring him in the house,” Warren said. He held the door as I staggered in, the alien weighing almost as much as me.

“Put him on the kitchen table, strip him.” Warren left me while I did that, the alien softly crying, hands fluttering, touching my eyebrows. Warren came back with a first-aid kit and a syringe.

As Warren heated morphine and water in a little copper pot Mom’d used for melting butter, the alien drew in the air with his hands, then grabbed me and looked around until he saw the pad. I got it for him, and he drew me with the aliens and looked at me.

Exhausted and crying, I nodded. He wrote more on the drawing, then drew me giving the drawing to other aliens who looked like him. Then he quivered, the blood oozing from his chest.

Warren drew up a needleful of morphine and palpated the veins in Alpha’s inner elbow. Alpha tried to touch Warren’s face. “He’s got veins, almost like us,” Warren said, slipping the needle in, drawing blood into the syringe.

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 the 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.