“Leave?”
I said. “Run away and abandon the people of Roswell to their fate? To be cut open while they’re still alive, like that poor bastard on the slab? By the time we got back here, everyone in this town could be dead!”
“And what if you’re wrong?” said Honey, sticking her face right into mine. “Imagine the mass panic once word got out! How many would get trampled underfoot or killed in car crashes? You could end up with hundreds dead and injured, all over a . . . a conjecture!”
“I’m not wrong!” I said. “And I won’t abandon these people! That’s not what Droods do!”
“Have you noticed it’s getting darker in here?” said Walker.
Honey and I broke off from glaring at each other and looked around. The overhead strip lighting was blazing as fiercely as ever, but a dark and heavy gloom was seeping in from all sides, soaking up the light. A blue tinge invested all the other colours in the morgue, giving everything a strange and unhealthy look. I felt heavy, drained, with even my thoughts moving more slowly than normal. My torc burned coldly around my neck, trying to warn me of something.
And then both the cow’s carcass and the farmer’s body burst into flames: fierce blue-tinged flames that burned with such intensity that all three of us were driven back, holding up our arms to shield our faces from the intolerable heat. The flames snapped off as abruptly as they’d begun, and conditions in the morgue returned to normal. The slabs were completely empty with just a few ashes floating on the air above them.
“Damn,” said Honey. “Someone really didn’t want anything left behind.”
“Which would seem to imply that someone was, and probably still is, looking in on us,” said Walker. “Three unexpected new factors endangering their planned experiment.”
“So this was a warning to us not to get involved,” said Honey.
I had to grin. “They don’t know us very well, do they?”
And then all our heads snapped around as we heard steady quiet footsteps in the corridor outside the morgue. They drew steadily closer, sounding louder and heavier all the while, until finally they stopped right outside the closed morgue door. We all stood very still, listening. The silence stretched on and on. Until finally Honey lunged for the door, with Walker and me right behind her. She hauled the door open and we spilled out into the corridor . . . but there was nobody there. The corridor stretched away before us, still and silent and completely empty.
“You heard it, didn’t you?” said Honey. “He was right outside the door!”
“I heard it,” I said.
“Told you we were being followed,” said Walker.
“Those were human footsteps,” said Honey. “Nothing alien about them. So where did he go?”
“I don’t see any other exits,” said Walker.
“Could someone in Roswell know what’s going to happen?” said Honey. “Some human Judas goat, perhaps, betraying his fellow humans for thirty pieces of technology?”
“There are other organisations who might have an interest in what’s happening here,” said Walker. “Black Air, Vril Power, the Zarathustra Protocols . . . Any one of them could have chanced across evidence of what’s due to happen here and struck a deal . . .”
“No,” I said flatly. “There’s no organisation on this planet better informed than the Droods when it comes to aliens. If anyone had known, it would have been my family, and I would have been told.”
“Really?” said Honey. “The Matriarch tells you everything, does she?”
“Everything that matters,” I said.
“Yes, well,” said Honey. “You would think that, wouldn’t you?”
“Children, children,” murmured Walker. “We still have to decide what we’re going to do, while there’s still time.”
“Less time than you think,” I said, my torc burning cold as ice. “Brace yourself, people. Something’s coming . . .”
The corridor before us changed, altered, stretched, its far end receding into the distance. The kind of corridor you could travel all your days and never reach the end. The kind of corridor you run through endlessly in the kind of dreams you wake from in a cold sweat. A strange glow replaced the normal corridor light, intense and overpowering, a light not designed for the tolerances of the human eye. Even the air was different, tasting foul and furry in my mouth, and so thin I was half suffocating. A different kind of air, for a different kind of being. Static tingled painfully on my bare flesh, and I could hear . . . something. Something scrabbling at the outsides of the corridor walls, trying to get in.
“I recognise this,” said Honey. Her voice was harsh and strained and strangely far away. “I know this, from abduction scenarios. An intrusion of alien elements into our world. The aliens aren’t waiting for us to track them down . . . They’re coming to us.”
“Let them come,” I said, and armoured up. Immediately I felt much better, more human, more myself. “Stay close to me,” I said to Walker and Honey through my featureless face mask. “Proximity to my armour should help ground and protect you, insulate you from the effects of this alien-created environment.”
Their faces cleared quickly as they moved in close, and they both stood up straight, strength and resolve rushing back into their features.
“I’m even breathing easier now I’m close to you,” said Honey. “How does that work?”
“Do you tell me all your secrets?” I said to hide the fact I wasn’t entirely sure myself. “Just stick close and get ready to beat the crap out of anything that isn’t us.”
“Good plan,” murmured Walker.
“No one takes a Drood anywhere against his will,” I said. “Or his companions. Walker, why are you standing behind me?”
“Because I’m not stupid,” said Walker.
“I don’t hide behind people,” Honey said haughtily.
“Bet you I live longer,” said Walker.
Wild energies crackled up and down the impossibly long corridor, seething and howling. They jumped from wall to wall, fast as laser beams, snapping on and off, leaving pale green trails of ionisation hanging on the air. Malevolent forces surged forward to attack my armour. I stood my ground, Honey clinging to my golden arm, Walker right behind me. The energies raged furiously all around us, discharging on the air with blinding flares and flashes, but still stopped dead, balked, unable to touch or even approach my armour.
As though they were afraid of it.
Lightnings rose and fell, pressing in from this side and that, searching for some weak spot in my armour that would let them in . . . but I stood firm, and suddenly the energies fell away, retreating back down the corridor, fading like the memory of a bad dream. I could hear Honey’s and Walker’s harsh breathing in the sudden silence. I warned them quietly against moving away from me. This wasn’t over. I could feel it.
And then the alien appeared. No door opening in space, no teleport effects; it was just there, right in front of us, no more than ten feet away. Its appearance was so sudden that Walker and Honey actually jumped a little, and if I hadn’t been wearing my armour I think I might have too.
“That . . . is a really ugly-looking thing,” I said.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Honey. “Walker? You ever seen anything like that?”
“Thankfully, no. Eddie?”
“Nothing even remotely like that,” I said. “It is quite definitely not one of the fifty-three alien species currently covered by the Drood Pacts and Treaties.”
“Fifty-three?”
said Honey. “There are fifty-three different kinds of alien currently wandering around our world? When were you planning on telling the rest of us this?”
“Fifty-three that we know of,” I said. “The Droods don’t know everything, though never tell anyone I said that. And . . . there are always a few species coming and going we don’t have any kind of agreement with or control over. It’s a big universe, and life has taken some really strange forms Out There.”
“Fifty-three . . .” said Honey.
“From other worlds, other Earths, higher and lower dimensions,” I said. “They add up. Droods protect humanity from all outside threats.”
“All right; I’ll put you up for a raise,” said Honey. “Now
what
is
that
?”
“Haven’t a clue,” I said.
We studied the alien as it presumably studied us. It looked like a pile of snakes crushed together or lengths of rubber tubing half melted into each other. Each separate length twisted and turned, seething and knotting together, sliding up and around and over, endlessly moving, never still for a moment. The pile was taller than a man and twice as wide, and though its extremities were constantly moving and changing, the bulk and mass stayed the same. Lengths of it melted and merged into each other, while new extensions constantly erupted from the central region. It was the colour of an oil slick on polluted water, with flashes of deep red and purple underneath, and it smelled really bad. Like something dead that had been left in the hot sun for too long. The alien’s basic lack of certainty was unsettling and painful to the human eye and the human mind. We were never meant to cope with things like this. We’re not ready.
Shapes began to form on the end of long writhing tentacles. Things that might have been sensory apparatus . . . or even organic weapons. And then a dripping bulge rose up through the top of the squirming pile and sprouted half a dozen human eyeballs. A pale pink cone formed beneath the eyes, wet and quivering as it dilated.
“Communication,” said the alien through the cone in a high, thin voice like metal scraping on metal. “Speak. Identify.”
And then it waited for an answer.
“I am a Drood,” I said carefully. “I have authority to speak to other species. To make binding agreements. Talk to me. Explain what you’re doing here. What you’re planning. Or steps will be taken to kick your nasty species right off this planet.”
“Drood,” said the alien. “Name. Function. Not known to us.”
“Maybe I should try,” said Honey.
“Hush,” I said.
“You are unreachable,” said the alien. “Explain.”
“Why did you injure, kill, and . . . examine the human?” I said. “For what purpose? Explain.”
“Necessary,” said the alien. “Don’t know Drood. Don’t recognise Drood authority. Don’t recognise any authority. We are. We exist. We go where we must, to do what we must. We dominate our environment. All environments. Necessary, for survival. For survival of all things.”
“Is it saying what I think it’s saying?” murmured Walker.
“Damned if I know,” I said. “At least it looks like we have basic concepts in common.” I addressed the alien again. “What brought you to this particular world? What interests you in our species? Explain.”
“Potential,” said the alien. “Experiment. Learn. Apply.”
“Experiment?” I said. “Why the animal, and then the human? Explain.”
“Learned all we could from the animal,” said the alien. “Limited. Useless for our purposes. Humans are more interesting. More potential. This will be our first experiment on your kind. On this town. This Roswell. Do not be alarmed. We are here to help you. This is all for your own good. Necessary. See.”
A screen appeared, floating on the air before us. And on that screen the alien showed us what it and its kind were going to do. What would happen to the people of Roswell.
Scenes from a small town, undergoing blood and horror.
People ran screaming through the streets, but it didn’t save them. They ran and they hid, and some of them even fought back, and none of it did any good. They were operated on, cut open, violated, and explored by invisible scalpels in invisible hands. Unseen forces, unknowable and unstoppable, tore the people apart.
Cuts just appeared in human flesh, blood spraying on the empty air. The cuts widened, and invisible hands plunged inside living bodies to play with what they found there. Organs fell out of growing holes, hands fell from wrists, fingers from hands. Some bodies just fell apart, cut into slices. Men and women exploded, ragged parts floating on the air to be examined by unseen eyes. Discarded offal filled the streets, and blood overflowed in the gutters.
The screaming was the worst part. Men, women, and children reduced to terrified, helpless animals . . . screaming for help that never came.
I saw families running down the streets, pursued by horror. One man had his legs cut out from under him, just below the knee, and he tried to keep on going on bloody stumps. Until something opened up his head from behind and pulled out his brains in long pink and gray streamers. A woman clung desperately to an open door as something unseen pulled doggedly at one outstretched leg. She howled like a maddened beast as her ribs were pulled out one by one, examined briefly, and then tossed aside into the blood-soaked street. I saw children . . .
I saw a pile of lungs assemble, one by one, next to a pile of hearts, some still feebly beating. A man sat alone, crying bloody tears from empty eye sockets. A woman screamed her mind away over what was left of her daughter. I saw whole families reduced to their component parts by unseen surgical instruments . . . Cold clinical procedures that went on and on until the screaming finally stopped because there was no one left alive to protest.
Everyone in the town of Roswell was dead. Butchered. Just because.
The floating screen disappeared, taking its views of Hell on Earth with it. I was so angry I was shaking inside my armour. My hands clenched and unclenched helplessly. Honey clung to my arm, making small shocked noises. Walker had come forward to stand beside me. His eyes were full of a cold, dangerous rage. I stared at the alien before me. I’d never hated anything so much in all my life.
“Why?” I said finally.
“You wouldn’t understand,” said the alien. “You can’t. You’re only human. It limits you. This is necessary. You claim authority in this place, Drood; you threaten the success of the experiment. Leave. All of you. Remove yourselves from Roswell before we begin in six hours. Tell everyone. First there is a town, then there is a city, then there is a world. We will do more as we learn more. We will remake you and your world, and when we are done you will thank us for it.”