Swarm (2 page)

I held my gun, and I held my fire. My only hope was that I would get the chance to blow a hole in something. Something softer than steel.

I was deposited in a quiet chamber. It wasn’t big, maybe the size of a bedroom or an examination room. I wasn’t thinking too well at that point, so I just kept turning around, aiming my gun at the walls. I didn’t try to find a way out. Right then, I didn’t care about escape. I was no longer trying to run away. Everyone I cared about was dead, and all I wanted now was revenge. I wouldn’t say I was calm, far from it, but I was
cold
inside.

I think now, looking back, that my unusual behavior saved my life. Part of the wall opened, and a being took a half-step forward.

This being was an alien. There had never been anything like it on Earth, at least not to my knowledge. It would have made an interesting subject for a documentary if we’d discovered it in some remote spot of the globe. The thing stood about four feet tall and had four hooves. But it had hands, too. Well, not
hands
, exactly. Three opposed digits would describe them better, each hand looked like a tripod of thumbs. It had blades too, natural ones that sprouted from its head like antlers. Imagine a deer with horned knives for antlers and a set of three-thumbed leathery hands. It reminded me of something from Greek mythology. What had they called them? Centaurs. Half-man, half-beast. But this centaur leaned in the direction of pure beast with freaky hands.

The eyes swept over me with some level of intelligence. I could only pray this was one of things that ran the ship, because I wanted some revenge. It took a step forward, and maybe it had expected me to retreat, I don’t know. But I was not in a cooperative mood. There was red blood on those horn-blades. I suspected it was my kids’ blood.

It took a second purposeful step, lowering its horn-blades in my direction. That was as far as it got before I blasted it. I had no doubt now those blades were showing me my own kids’ blood. It was too fresh. The hard part was to
stop
blasting, even after the centaur went down. It managed to cut me once, being faster and tougher even than it looked. I didn’t care.

I stopped firing and heard something. I turned around quickly. There stood a second one. This one didn’t wait around. I fired as it charged, taking one of those freakish three-pronged hands off, then the shotgun clicked. The magazine was dry. The centaur-thing picked itself up and came at me again, and I met its head with the butt of my shotgun.

The fight went on for a while, and it became dirty at the end. I gouged at the eyes and hammered its skull with the barrel of my weapon. It took a long time to die, but it finally did so. My legs and arms were slashed and bleeding freely in spots, but I’d won. I roared at the centaur, snarling and gleeful. I hoped it was one of the ones that had gotten the kids. Mad with grief, I hoped that it had kids of its own.

At this point, I figured I had to expect more of these things. Would they give up after only two tries? There had to be more of them.

Some part of my brain that still insisted on thinking was stuck on the detail that these beings didn’t seem overly technological. Could such creatures have built this ship? They had hands, after a fashion. But why risk themselves to fight me without weapons? What was the purpose? Both the centaurs had been males. Was this some kind of tribal hunting expedition? A rite of manhood, perhaps?

I decided to stop worrying about anything other than making sure I kept breathing and they kept dying. Accordingly, I checked my wounds. I couldn’t find any serious injuries, just cuts and bruises. I used my teeth to tear my tee-shirt into strips and tied bandages around the worst spots.

Panting, I waited for the next centaur. The next one would take me, I was pretty sure. I was tired now, and out of shells. Even as a club, the Remington had done well, but I doubted it would win a third fight for me.

Getting an idea, I bent and tried to rip loose one of those foot-long horn-blades. Maybe, if I could snap it off, I could use it as a knife. The idea appealed to me, using the same blade they’d used on my kids to slash open the next one.

-3-

A voice spoke. This was a shock, as up until now, things had been pretty quiet inside the ship. There had always been a slight, background hum—and of course, the centaurs and I had been making plenty of noise in our struggles.

“Aggression demonstrated,” said the voice. The tone was vaguely feminine, but it had a non-descript quality to it. A translating computer? Maybe.

I supposed the comment was about me.  Nice of them, I thought, to tell me how I was doing.

Again, a doorway opened where there had been nothing but smooth metal before. I had snapped off a horn-blade by then and stood up, my teeth baring themselves without my consciously commanding them to do so. How quickly we turn into snarling animals if properly provoked, I thought.

There was no third member of the horn-blade species waiting for me, however. Instead, it was the snake-arm. It reached down and looped around the alien I’d killed first and began to drag it outside. Maybe it was going to drop it into my cornfield. I decided to try to go with it.

It was too big to squeeze by, and I was worried the door would melt away when it left. So I climbed onto the snake-arm and rode it out of the room. I found myself in another cubical room, identical to the first.

“Initiative demonstrated,” said the voice.

“Who are you?” I demanded, craning my neck. I didn’t see any cameras, or microphones or speakers. Nothing but blank, dark walls.

The snake-arm shook me off in the next cubicle and hauled away the dead centaur before I could climb up on it again. I watched it vanish into another room. Had I missed my ride? Had I just failed one of these tests? My heart pounded.

Then I thought of the door behind me. Climbing to my feet, I looked back around. The floor in the first room vanished as the wall between the two rooms grew back together out of nothing. I had just enough time to see the second centaur’s bloody corpse fall an unknown distance down. I blinked at that. If I had stayed in the room, would they have dumped me too, allowing me to fall tumbling to my death?

“What do you want from me?” I demanded of the walls.

There was no answer, but a moment later
two
more doors opened. Why two? I investigated both paths, gingerly tapping with my foot. The floor vanished on the first one and opened upon a scene of the Earth whirling by at night. We had to be a mile up. I was surprised, as I’d felt no sensation of flying upward. No gee forces had tugged at my body, yet obviously I should have felt the elevator-ride sensation of upward momentum. I could see a dark night landscape, dotted with light. What had to be Highway 99, strung with orange sodium streetlights, snaked off to the north and south.

I backed away into the space I had come from.

“Caution demonstrated.”

Those two doors closed, and a third door opened up. I thought about that. Had both paths, whichever one I had chosen, led to a deadly fall? I waited. Why move at all, if they were just going to kill me? After about a minute, the floor under my feet felt warm. After two minutes, I was hopping from foot-to-foot. I finally got the message and stepped through into that third room cautiously.

Clearly, these were tests. I wanted to do some testing on my alien hosts. My tests would be very easy to perform. All I wanted to do was discover what color their brains were when exposed to dry air. I did everything I could to focus on the tests, on defeating them. I tried not to think about the kids. Thinking about them would paralyze me, make me numb and useless. Grief would have to wait.

By now I was fed up with their games. But I had to play along, unless I wanted to jump out. I thought about jumping out of the ship. Perhaps this was their form of entertainment. Maybe they were sitting somewhere, laughing and betting on how far the dumb primitive would make it through their maze of tests and tricks. Part of me wanted to end the torment, but a strong desire for revenge kept me going. I wanted to crack another alien head or two before they killed me. I wasn’t quite finished with them.

In the third room the voice came back. “The subject will submit to interrogation.”

I thought about that. What did they want, my secret ATM code? What could I possibly know that would interest such creatures? It occurred to me they did not really want information. They wanted to test me. This was another step in their test sequence, just as everything else had been. Had my children been tested and found wanting? I suspected they had, and the floor had opened up for them and dumped them out of the ship. That seemed to be the universal price for failure.

This nurtured a new emotion in me:
rage
. Not just for revenge, now, but I was angry about how I was being treated. I was their lab animal, and I didn’t like it. I would pit my wits against theirs as best I could. Maybe I would get my chance to strike back. Or maybe I would at least impress these cowardly bastards. I was already envisioning guys with huge skulls in fluttering white lab coats.

What helped me think was my lack of fear. I believe most people, at this point, would have been shaking with fear. But after several life and death struggles and watching my kids die, I was empty inside. I was deflated. There was no room left for fear. I had become cold and calculating. Call it a personality flaw, but that’s how I felt.

“The subject will submit to interrogation,” repeated the voice.

I thought about grunting
no
, or staying silent. It seemed obvious they would just heat the floor again. Could I take off my clothes, wrap my feet in the cloth and stand on my gun? Maybe. But that sort of thing wasn’t what the tests, so far, had been looking for. I reviewed them in my mind: First, I was tested for fighting skills. Second, initiative, and thirdly, caution. This had to be the fourth test then. It was a puzzle. What was the answer?

The more I thought about it, I had to wonder why the voice was telling me the nature of the tests as I passed them. Why had it said
aggression demonstrated
in understandable English? They had to be giving me clues on purpose. There was no reason, if the test was to be given blindly with the subject unaware, that they would give me such hints.

The floor, by this time, had risen in temperature a good twenty degrees. My cooperation was to be forced.

“I will agree, if I am allowed to ask a question for each that you ask,” I said.

There was a hesitation. I suspected my response was being considered and weighed. Perhaps, it was being graded.

“Bargaining demonstrated,” said the voice.

Another door opened.

I raised my eyebrows at that. “That’s it, eh?” I asked aloud. I supposed I had passed another test. I had passed it just by attempting negotiation. No questions came. There was no exchange of information. It had all been part of a test.

I reached into the new room with a tender bare foot. The floor in my room had cooled now, but I figured it was time to move on. Each test had led me to a new room, and the old one had vanished. The penalty for staying in one place seemed clear: I would be dumped out of the ship to splatter on the ground a mile down. I walked into the room and looked at the opposite walls and the ceiling.

“Who are you?” asked a woman’s voice behind me.

I whirled and raised my shotgun reflexively. But I never quite aimed it at her, which was a good thing. She had a pistol leveled at me, and since mine wasn’t loaded anyway, I dropped the Remington.

She nodded, staring with unblinking, intense eyes. “Good move. I almost blew you away.”

She had been through some tests of her own. I could see it in her eyes. They were lovely, but haunted. I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. I stared at her. She was young, but not a kid. She was probably in her upper twenties. About ten years younger than me, I figured. She looked half Hispanic. It was a common look in California. She was shapely, and everything about her was attractive, even her disheveled, blood-matted hair which hung half-way down to her butt.

My eyes ran downward. I couldn’t help it. Everything below the waist was just as shapely as the rest—and naked. There was a tiny tattoo down there, a butterfly I think, done in the traditional green. She wore nothing but a torn, white cotton blouse. The nights are often hot in California’s Central Valley. It was obvious she’d been plucked out her bed in the night, just as my family had.

“Do you know anything?” I asked, forcing my eyes upward to meet hers. The fast question was an old trick I’d picked up while professoring. Lots of young women came to talk to their professor, and sometimes my eyes wandered. Asking a quick question usually got me out of an embarrassing moment when I was caught.

“About what?” she asked.

I noticed the barrel of her gun, which looked like a .38 revolver from here, had not wavered an inch. I swallowed. I hoped I wasn’t
her
test—what if she was supposed to blow me away to get to square seven?

“About the tests.”

She blinked. The barrel lowered, but only a fraction. I did a little amateur triangulating and I didn’t like where it was aiming now. I thought about telling her to put that thing away, but given the circumstances, she had every right to aim her pistol at my privates and we both knew it. Trust would have to be earned in this environment.