Alien Nation #6 - Passing Fancy (31 page)

At first Cathy thought it was one of those colloquial American English idioms. Something Fran had picked up along the way, something Cathy needed to have interpreted.

But then Fran asked, “How did they get in there?” and added “Get them out,” with such chilling, calm conviction that Cathy realized the actress was serious.

Not three seconds after that, Cathy received an altogether new sympathetic sensation. It was akin to the tingle she had felt on her scalp when Fran was losing hair, but now it was on her brow . . . there first . . . then
very
strongly on both cheekbones and spreading behind the ears. As before, the sensation began as an itch, but it rapidly developed into something more naggingly intense, something
in
there
deep,
too deep for scratching or rubbing to offer any desirable relief.

It felt like the pinpricky sensation on a leg that has “fallen asleep” to which circulation suddenly returns. And, sure, you could liken the pinpricks to insects’ feet because they were

pointed.

Moving.

In patches.

Dancing.

Scuttling.

But Fran wasn’t
likening
the sensation to bugs, she was
believing
in the bugs. Cathy knew why, and she knew what it meant.

This is the bad part,
she thought.

As if the rest had been pleasant.

But, relative to the rest, she was right.

Fran’s hands were rising to her face. Cathy gently reached forward and grabbed her wrists.

“I have to get them out,” said Fran. “The bugs.”

“I know,” replied Cathy. “That’s not the way.”

“Well, what
is
the way?”

“It’s my job to do, not yours. Trust me?”

“Yes.”

“Stick your arms out.”

Fran did, wincing spasmodically every other second.

Her face was starting to revert, to reassert its Tenctonese structure. All the altered bones in Fran’s head were beginning to soften, to become malleable, almost fluid, to facilitate the change. The musculature was simultaneously adapting and pulling the softened bones back into shape. Things just as extreme would be happening to the affected areas of her skin. Fran’s hands could not be permitted to rub, scratch, or put pressure on her face and skull. Any such contact ran the risk of subverting the regeneration process, causing deformity, nerve damage, brain damage—or worse.

Cathy lifted the straitjacket. Held it in front of Fran expectantly.

Fran regarded the garment, fighting the impulse to touch her face.

“How will that help?”

“No time to explain. Come on.”

Like a child, Fran allowed Cathy to guide her arms through the sleeves. And Cathy worked quickly, not even pausing to rub her own face, which, though perfectly immune from the process, still registered the insidious sensation. In order to protect Fran from herself, Cathy had to forgo her own comfort, work at breakneck pace.

When the jacket was firmly on, Cathy got behind Fran, pulled the sleeves tight, and belted them in. Then she reached around and embraced the actress, holding her close. Hoping this would work. There were no guarantees. Withdrawal was still dangerous and Fran could still die.

“Ah!” Fran breathed, in pain. “Ah! Ah
-ah!
You said you’d get them
out! Ow!”

“I know.”

“You lied!”

“I know.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you!”

The shouted reply exploded out of Cathy without conscious thought, and amazed her, for somewhere along the line it had become true. She had connected to the fire in Fran’s soul, to the dark-bright
passion
that no cosmetic alteration could mitigate, and the thought of such spirit being snuffed out was now more than she could bear.

Cathy didn’t know if Fran heard her reply, because on the heels of it,
right
on the heels of it, Fran screamed. It was a sound of exquisite hideousness, of a sentient being in senseless torment, the like of which Cathy had not heard since the days of Overseer atrocities on the slave ship. Only worse, because the sound was not behind closed doors or echoing forebodingly down metal passageways. Cathy was right on top of it.

And now she could
see
the torment as well. Fran’s cheekbones were pulsing, little mounds of biological matter seemed to be
moving
under the skin (just like clumps of insects),
scuttling
about, searching for a place to settle.

“Make them stop! They’re eating me inside! I can hear them!”

And of course it
would
feel like that, the dissolution of solidity; it might even
sound
like that, like
chittering
—

—and Fran’s right ear was dangling. The skull had reclaimed that amount of cartilage it needed for the barely discernible swell of a Newcomer ear and simply discarded the rest . . . closing off the blood vessels to the appendage . . . tightening the skin around its perimeter until the skin around the skull had pulled
free
of the skin around the ear (oh, gods, maybe
that’s
what Fran had heard, the sound of skin
ripping . . .
).

Under where the “human” ear had been—something glistened. Cathy had to look away.

Fran screamed again, and Cathy was hit with a fresh wave of shadow pain. She tensed, gritting her teeth, again forgoing her own relief, holding onto Fran as the actress’s head thrashed back and forth, seeking to subdue the painful sensations by beating them away upon the nearest solid surface. But only Cathy’s breasts were available, and they proved the perfect cushion.

The dead ear was hanging by a long thread of dead skin, and it kept hitting Fran’s chin as her head shook back and forth. Fran, dimly aware of the sensation, opened her eyes—

—and
there it was.

Her own ear.

Hanging below her jaw.

“Put it baaaack!”
she shrieked.
“Put it baaaaack!!”

And now Cathy experienced a
different
kind of phantom sensation, one she hadn’t expected. It fell on her like a wall of desolation.

She saw the bugs. Under her own skin. Eating their way out of her own face. Saw them. Believed in them. Crawling around the strands of her musculature. Their furtive antennae, their masticating mandibles, sickly brown chitinous bodies, eye stalks and—

—and then the hallucination was over. Fran was still in the throes of it, but the vision had passed for Cathy. For how long, though?
I didn’t know about this part,
Cathy thought.
I knew about sharing the pain; not the delusions . .
.

If her mind was not to be her own any longer . . . if there was to be more of
this . .
. she didn’t know if she could maintain her sanity.

She noticed then that while in the grip of the vision, she had loosened her grip on Fran. That scared her. Scared her more than the bugs.

Because with less luck, Fran might have worked herself out of Cathy’s grip, done herself irreparable damage. It might still happen.

What to do? Please, please, what to do?

Cathy concentrated, forcing herself to push away panic.
Think simply,
she thought.
Take stock and think simply.
And a simple idea came.

She altered her grip on Fran, worked her arms
underneath
the tightly belted sleeves, the straitjacket holding
both
pairs of arms in place now.

How firmly in the long run she didn’t know.

She only hoped that—

Another wave of pain.

The bugs crawled into her mind.

Fran was screaming.

Cathy screamed right along.

And on that note, the
Leethaag
became a living nightmare . . .

A
VERY PRETTY
place to have your office, the Silliman Building. Located in West Hollywood right on Santa Monica Boulevard, it didn’t look like an office building at all. Four storeys high, it had a tan adobe facade. A full flight of stone steps approached its main entrance on each side, and the front doors were made of clear, thick glass encased in golden, art deco style frames.

A semicircular driveway curved past its small, stone-bordered lawn, in the center of which was a fountain that had been reconverted to a palm frond-based floral display.

Yeah, real pretty, reflected Detective Beatrice Zepeda. Even in this awful, pouring rain. You wouldn’t think of it as home base for the scum of the earth, but that was probably why scum rented space there in the first place.

The fronds were collecting water and spilling it onto the lushly green lawn in fountainlike arcs as one unmarked police car—Zep’s—and two black-and-whites pulled up in front of the stairway. Ducking against the weather, Zep and her partner pelted up the stairs on one side while a pair of uniforms came up the other. The pair from the third car emerged from their vehicle in ponchos and split up to keep an eye on the building’s exits.

Upon entering the building, Zepeda reflexively tossed her head back and forth, shaking water from her impressive mane of long raven hair. Of all the female cops in the precinct, she was arguably the hottest-looking: slender and sleek, olive-skinned, with dark, deep, shiny eyes. On the other hand, no one could say she didn’t look like she belonged in her profession. There was a hard beauty to her Hispanic features: too many lines crinkled around the eyes for one so young; elastically expressive lips formed a mouth that was unusually large, covering teeth that were unusually big, in a jaw set unusually forward; so that at odd moments, her cheeks could appear unexpectedly hollow, her face unexpectedly bony—and undeniably cop-tough.

She scanned the directory on a nearby wall for the Serovese Corporation. She saw the names of several literary agencies, a graphics design place, specialty newspaper offices, an accounting firm . . . but not what she was looking for.

“Now what?” said her partner, Laura Stanczyk. She was a small girl, but the size was deceptive. She would bench press a three-hundred pound thug if she had to.

“Got to be here,” Zep said. “The reverse directory says so.”

The reverse directory was a phone reference whose use was theoretically limited to law enforcement agencies. Rather than look up a name to get an address and a phone number, you looked up a phone number to get a name and an address. Less than an hour earlier, Matt Sikes and George Francisco had requested a reverse directory search—the number Max Corigliano had given them for the Serovese Corporation’s answering machine—and the result of the search had revealed three things. One: that the number was indeed held by a Serovese Corporation. Two: that the number was unpublished and unlisted in any public directory (leading all and sundry to wonder just what kind of corporation chose to have an unlisted number). Three: that the Serovese Corporation was located in the Silliman Building.

“May I help you?” said an officious, self-important voice behind Zep and Stanczyk. They turned to find a uniformed doorman. Young fellow, real pretty, an effete Hollywood hopeful with “mean queen” written all over him. “Visitors
are
supposed to be announced. As I’m
sure
you’ve read.” With his eyes, he indicated a nearby posted advisory to that effect.

No time for this,
thought Zep. She flipped her badge and, for the hell of it, pulled her gun.

“Yeah, you can help,” she said tersely. “You can give me the room number of the Serovese Corporation and you can bag the attitude. I’m really not in the mood.”

The response was immediate and satisfying: The young fellow fuhmfured quite impressively. “I . . . uhhh . . . that is, the, uhh, Serovese Corporation has a strict no visitors policy. That’s, you know, why they’re not on the direc—”

Zep leaned in closer.

“Am I to understand that you wish to be considered an
accessory
to these guys? Speak up so my partner can corroborate me in court. I am just
dying to
run somebody in today.”

Laura smiled prettily at him.

“Four-oh-seven,” said the doorman, and that was that.

They left one of the uniformed cops with the doorman to see to it no warnings were called up to room 407. The second uniformed officer took the stairs up as Laura and Zep took the elevator.

The three converged on room 407 together. The uniformed officer and Laura took positions on one side of the door. Zep took the side nearest the knob.

Guns drawn, pointed up. Ready.

All further communication would occur in silence now. Nods. Mouthed monosyllabic words. Hand signals.

Zep reached for the knob with her free hand. Turned it, testing it. In agonizing slo-mo. Not wanting to make a noise.

Surprise.

It wasn’t locked. She could feel the metal tongue sliding into its socket.

Easy entry.

Too easy?

She made eye contact with Laura, with the uniformed officer. Imperceptible nods.
Yeah,
the look said.
We’re gonna do this.

One . . . two . . .

On
three!
she threw the door open and burst in, gun drawn two-handed, Laura right beside her, the uniformed officer at the rear.

“FREEZE!” shouted Zep.

“POLICE!” Laura augmented.

The room was nearly bare. It was just that, a single room, possibly the smallest office in the building. It contained six things.

A desk.

A swivel chair.

A phone.

An answering machine.

A Barbara Cartland romance novel.

And a blinking, gum-chewing secretary.

“You ladies looking for somebody?” she said. She spoke in a nasal voice, making her sound for all the world like Miss Adelaide in
Guys and Dolls.
Her hands were on the desk, steadying the book she’d been reading when Zep and Laura had burst in. The notion that she had any concealed weapons at the ready—or that she was in any position to grab one if she had—became increasingly farfetched with every passing second.

Starting to feel profoundly silly, Zep lowered her gun.

“We’re looking for the Serovese Corporation.”

The secretary kept working her gum and smiled hugely.