Just Plain Weird (31 page)

    
    
“The artifact-- it planted it all in my mind. It’s not like before-- like direct telepathic connection. It’s like when you take a capsule, for the flu or something; the capsule slowly dissolves in your stomach and releases the medicine. It’s like a memory capsule-- information is beginning to seep out. I don’t know everything, yet, but just bits and pieces,” I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. I didn’t want her to suspect I now knew other, disturbing things that I was certain would freak her out. The beings that attacked the planet belonged to an organization-- sort of like a corporation-- they came with their enormous ships, and they targeted the richest deposits of the materials the wanted. Their method was to come in and leave with as much as they could in as little time. They were unwilling to commit a long period of time to grab every little bit of the materials. So when they finally departed, the planet still had valuable resources that were widely scattered. That was when the true scavengers arrived, beings that were related to but not of the same species; they came with smaller ships and had all the time in the world. They did not have extractor beams, but landed on the planet, scouring its face, picking and pecking at the leftovers, like vultures going after the remains of some carcass that had already been mostly eaten by a large ground predator.
 
I could see them in my mind now. They looked like a cross between a praying mantis and a cockroach. They looked nearly five feet long. They appeared to be covered in a shell that was shiny and inky black. Their extremities ended in claws, sharp as razors and yet capable to performing the most intricate of tasks. They did not always travel in groups-- as many earth insect swarms-- but functioned, for the most part, independently. Though they possessed an extreme level of intelligence, they were very, nearly fatally, single-minded. Their focus was only on the chore at hand, its completion, and the eradication of anything that prevented them from completing that chore. They never stopped to study the life forms of other worlds-- those life forms being irrelevant, excepting for the value of the chemicals comprising their physical bodies. They were mindless conquerors, and the chances were that, even after three years, some of them were still around-- slowly gathering the crumbs left beyond, and the way they looked at it, we were a couple of the crumbs, a couple sacks of chemicals worth about a hundred and fifty dollars on earth and who knew how much to them.

    
    
“Is anything wrong?” Eliza asked, after my lengthy pause.

    
    
“No,” I said.

    
    
“You sure?”

    
    
“Yeah, just take us back to the crater-- the same spot we were before,” I said. “I want to check something.”

    
    
Soon she was stopping the four by four near the crater. I told her to stay inside-- that way she wouldn’t get filthy from the falling snow-- and I grabbed at couple road flares. I walked out to the edge of the crater. The wind was gusting strongly, and I had to squint as my face was pelting by the snow. I could already see my snowsuit patterned with black dots, like cancerous freckles. I pulled the cap off the flare, and struck the flare with the sandpapery end of the cap.
 
The flare ignited, its end glowing orange-blue. I threw it down into the crater. It wheeled and on the way down lighted some of the snowflakes that must have contained high concentrations of oil. The snowflakes burned in its wake, like a swarm of fireflies. When the flare hit the bottom, about three hundred feet down, it set off the layer of snow that had accumulated there. About a hundred square feet of earth blazed a moment, illuminated part of the crater, throwing off otherworldly shadows-- for a moment it was like gazing into the bowels of hell-- before finally dying out and returning everything to darkness except the one spot of light that was the flare. I turned away and headed back toward Eliza. My snowsuit was already heavily speckled with black. By the time we got home, it would probably be entirely black. I climbed back into the warmth of the four by four, and Eliza was already looking at me, her head tilted somewhat.

    
    
“And what was that about?”

    
    
“I just wanted to satisfy my curiosity,” I explained.

    
    
“Oh, that again,” she sighed. “Well, is it at least satisfied?”

    
    
“Yeah, they dug deep enough to be certain they got everything. Most people don’t realize how much there is underground a city-- tunnels and sewer systems. There could be miles off old wiring, say-- a lot of other things, too,” I said, and then added quickly, “Do you noticed anything?”

    
    
She chuckled. “You mean aside from the obvious.”

    
    
“There’s something different,” I said, staring out the windshield, not being able to pinpoint what was troubling me. I hit the button to lower the side window, which was already coated in black. A cold gust of wind blew snow into the four by four.

    
    
“Hey, what’re you doing?” Eliza growled. “You’re letting the snow in, and I don’t think that stuff will come off the upholstery?”

    
    
I was scarcely paying attention to her, though, instead listening carefully. I heard the wind whistling outside, followed by a roll of distant thunder. There was something different here, I was sure, but couldn’t pin down what. Just after I shut the window, to Eliza’s relief, I realized what was wrong.

    
    
“Back up slowly, and turn to your left,” I told her.

    
    
As she did this, the high beams, which had been stabbing out straight forward into the darkness above the crater, now swept to the right, dimly illuminating the sides of a couple surviving buildings and the sidewalk areas before them. And there it was: the light poles were missing. When we’d last been here, I was sure the light poles had been there; a loose sign on one of the poles had clanged loudly in the wind. Now the pole and sign, and all the other poles lining the sidewalk, were gone. All that was left were the bases sunk in concrete, to which the poles had been bolted. This wasn’t good-- not good at all. How long had we been gone?-- just a few hours. They were here, and they couldn’t be far away. Even the harsh weather couldn’t deter them as they pecked at the remains of the city.

    
    
“What’s wrong, Travis?” Eliza asked.

    
    
“Nothing,” I said; I couldn’t tell her-- I just didn’t have the heart to tell her. I could already imagine her panic, her horror at the mere thought that these creatures were still around. I wanted to save her from the trauma of the experience, thinking, hopefully, we would be able to go about our business and collect everything we needed without running across a single one of the slimy black bugs, its pincher jaws open and ready, dripping bluish ooze. She just didn’t need such a terrifying episode-- not on top of everything she’d already endured during her short life. The urge to protect her now seemed more important than anything else, even gathering everything the artifact was requesting.

    
    
“You sure?” she was asking.

    
    
“Yeah,” I lied, and felt a pang of guilt, which quickly passed. “It’s just the weather-- I think it’s getting worse. I don’t think we have much time. We have to move fast, or else we’ll get stuck here.”

    
    
I gave her directions to the warehouse, which was only a few blocks away. Along the way, I kept a sharp eye, looking for movement in the dark that lined the street. I saw nothing, but knew that that was not relevant; the creatures were jet black, and could be infesting the darkness without anyone being the wiser. They were shadows moving invisibly through the night, and not being able to tell whether they were present was the scariest thing of all.

    
    
When we reached the warehouse, I instructed Eliza to pull around the back of the building, by the loading dock. She turned down the narrow alley that was squeezed between the towering outer walls of two buildings. She looped round to right at the end of the alley. And we found the rear entrance to the warehouse. It was a surprisingly small loading dock, a single downward-angling slot for a semi to back into and abut the building. Next to the dock, there was a single rear exit door, and next to that a set of large steel doors-- probably so that the warehouse could easily receive shipments from other trucks, smaller than semis.

    
    
I told Eliza to pull up to the steel doors.

    
    
“So what’s the plan?” she asked.

    
    
“I’ll find a way inside, and open the doors. We should be able to drive right inside. The aisles are wide enough to drive down.”

    
    
“So you want me to wait out here?”

    
    
“Yeah.”

    
    
“Alone?”

    
    
“It won’t be long,” I assured her. “It looks like the dock door is part open. All I have to do is walk round.”

    
    
“All right, then,” she said uneasily.

    
    
I climbed back out into the cold again, and walked over to the dock. The large steel overhead door was indeed opened partly, lifted up about two feet. I tried to lift it up further, but it was jammed or locked in place somehow. So I lay on the ground and rolled under it and into the building. It was pitch-black inside, black enough to believe I was blind. I still had a road flare in the pocket of my snowsuit. I pulled it out, and groped in the dark for a while to take off the cap and light it. It hissed to life, casting everything around me in a red hued light. There were stacks of cartons just inside the dock door-- probably the last shipment the business had received, still sitting there unopened. I walked over to the left, toward the storage area where row after row of steel shelves were lined and rose nearly to the top of the high ceiling made of corrugated steel. The shelves were all partially filled with overstock. I found the inside of the double doors. It was easy enough to open them; all that was securing the doors was two bars, one that slipped down into a slot in the foundation, and another that slipped up into the header. The lock between the two doors was open. After I pulled the bottom rod up and the upper rod down, the doors were free and I shoved them outward. I was immediately hit with the high beams from the four by four along with a gust of snowy wind. I tossed the road flare away, and walked out to the four by four. As I climbed back into the passenger seat, I was gratified that the entire procedure had been so simple. Eliza, however, didn’t see things the same way.

    
    
“What took you so long!” she screamed at me, as soon as I shut myself inside with her.

    
    
At first, I thought she was joking. I hadn’t been inside but sixty seconds or so. Then I saw that her hands were trembling badly-- not for fear at being left alone, but from anger at being left alone for so long.

    
    
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “I wasn’t gone but a minute.”

    
    
“Oh, it was a lot longer than that,” she said, and then mumbled, “Sitting out here alone…in the cold… in this gunky black snow.”

    
    
“It wasn’t that long,” I said.

    
    
“Yeah, whatever,” she snarled, and slipped the four by four into gear, and eased it into the building. We crept pretty far up one of the aisles in the storage room, before Eliza finally asked, this time in her normal tone, “Hey, where am I going, Trav?”

    
    
“Just keep going straight,” I told her. “When you reach that wall up ahead, there ought to be another set of doors that leads to the retail area.”

    
    
When we found the doors, they were already swung open on the retail section. The place was enormous. It stocked just about every imaginable electronic luxury, gadget, or part. Banners, hanging from the high ceiling, marked off the departments: computers, stereo, communication, games, televisions….