Terminus: A Novella of the Apocalypse (8 page)

Upon impact, it half-buried its prow into the loamy soil, gouging out a huge scar in the landscape, which is already overgrowing with weeds and saplings taking advantage of the disturbed soil.  As with any wreck, debris is scattered around and before it, having been jarred lose and thrown forward of the crash by the momentum of its descent.

Moving around to the far side and walking along a narrow strip of grass separating the hulk from the sandy shore, I see something curious.  I point and ask, “Has anyone examined this in daylight?”

Chief approaches to stand on my left while The Girl guards my right, her eyes constant on the ruined spacecraft, her face ashen though flat, as ever.  The Engineer lingers near the prow of the vessel with the rest of the governance board, and Darling appears to be dry humping Teacher at the waist, her skirt pushed high and her long legs curled around his.  Her hands rove his chest, back and scalp as she ignores his insistent attempts to dislodge her.

Chief says, “Yeah, we saw it.”

The Engineer adds, “We think it is what it seems to be.  The remains of a rocket body.  A dud, obviously.  Marked with Russian insignia.”

“They shot it down, do you think?”

Chief shrugs his massive, muscle-bound shoulders, and replies, “Something happened to it, that’s for sure.  The missile clearly didn’t help.”

“Agreed,” I murmur, distracted.

As I continue my stroll around the wreck’s perimeter, Chief follows, declaring, “We found the spaceman hanging out of what must be the craft’s cockpit up front.  After it quit burning and we could get inside, we searched for other remains, too, but couldn’t find another body.  A few of us took souvenirs.  Some of those are still sitting inside the shuttle bus.  Otherwise, what you see is what you get.  Exactly the way we found it about six months ago.”

When I complete a full circle and return to the entourage, Darling peels herself away from Teacher to demand, “Well?  What do you think?  It’s real, right?  A real spaceman?  A real spaceship?  Alien?”

I shrug.  “I don’t know for sure.”  They groan, and I placate their complaints by showing them my palms.  “You’re asking for my scientific opinion now.  Sure, I’m with you.  It all looks like what it seems to be.  Without biological tests and metallurgic analyses, however, I can’t make a definitive statement.”

Engineer softly replies, “We already thought of all that.  We even drove over to the local university to figure something out.  We couldn’t get the equipment to work.”

“Yeah,” adds Doc, “that’s why we need you.”

“Do you know how to do any of that stuff?” asks Darling.

I nod.  According to my intent, I lift debris from the ground and I pry a few bits from the wreck, itself.  When Doc informs me they already have samples, I tell them I need to get my own.  “Not that I don’t trust you,” I grunt, wrenching away something that looks like a tiny control panel, “but I don’t.  You understand.”

When I try to stuff these artifacts into The Girl’s purse, she snatches it away pointedly, shaking her head.  Instead, I carry them back to the van in my hands.

Then we return to the hotel, where I cut away a chunk of the alien’s flesh.  From there, the governance board disbands for the evening, all promising to meet again in the morning to take a trip to the local university, where will see what we can see.  Chief indicates he will bring a portable generator for power, and The Doc assures everyone he will have plenty of drugs on hand.

Resuming her role as our host, Darling leads us across the street to one of the townhome communities within The Village.  Somewhere deep inside these structures, we hear a party underway.

Pointing to a particular doorway, she says, “This one is empty.  Somebody already removed the bodies and cleaned the place.  The former occupant won’t need it any more, though, since she hung herself on the golf course last year.”

Darling purrs and pushes close to me, “You can come back here to sleep later, though.  After.”

“After what?”  I eye the closed door, number twenty-one, and wonder what sort of bed is in there.  The Girl presses up against my back possessively, apparently knowing, woman-to-woman, what comes next.

“After the orgy,” returns Darling coyly.  “By the sounds of it, they’re just getting started.  I’ll let you do me in the ass.”  When The Girl hisses behind me, the mayor makes a dismissive motion with her right hand, “Don’t worry, honey, you can come, too.  While your boyfriend works on me from behind, I’ll lick you until you scream!  Come on!  It’ll be loads of fun!”  She giggles.  “Literally!”

The offer is tempting.  After all, the mayor is an attractive, well-endowed woman of refined maturity.  I picture her bent over in front of me, tits swinging, and I think it might be… entertaining.  When I turn to query The Girl, I find her standing there resolutely.  Her scarred face remains passive, flat, void of emotion, as always, but her green eyes sparkle intently.  They inform me she will go and do what I want her to do, including that.  Nevertheless, she would prefer to be alone with me inside number twenty-one.

I sigh.  I relent.

Over my shoulder, I tell the mayor, “Maybe next time.”

From the courtyard of the complex, an unidentified voice shouts, “Darling!  You came!”

Instantly dismissing us, the older woman turns to hurry away, declaring, “Not yet, I haven’t!”  She cackles.

Inside the home, which I find tastefully decorated and electrically powered, I confront The Girl unhappily.  “The party sounded like fun.  I hope you intend to compensate!”

She takes me by the hand to lead me to a shower and then then to bed.  Compensate me, she does.  Afterward, I have no complaints.  Anyway, how many girls her age are left on the whole cursed planet?

The next day, samples and generators in hand, we visit the university, where I do my best to locate and employ equipment to inform us regarding our situation.  It’s no quick study.  I eventually spend three full days there, sleeping in an abandoned office and reading manuals for various analytical devices that might help.  Ultimately, the most useful tools are beyond our means.  Either they require too much energy to activate or they require preparatory techniques that are beyond our severely limited capabilities.  Nevertheless, some of the simplest protocols are sufficiently informative, and I am able to report back to town hall and The Village governance board with some confidence on the morning of the fourth day.

“I knew it!” gasps a sober and apparently sexually satisfied Mayor Darling.  “God damned aliens did it!”

Pursing my lips, I remind them, “I can’t say that for certain.  Nothing connects the wreckage or the body to Terminus.”

“What else could it be?” demands Chief.  “You said yourself the Terminus phenomenon was at least artificial.  Engineered.  Its sudden, global effect implies otherworldly methods of distribution.  So what else could it be?”

I shrug.  I sip my coffee, an old-world comfort I have enjoyed immensely during my stay in The Village.

“So what’s next?” inquires The Engineer.

Cued by this expected question, The Girl reaches into her purse to extract what appears to be a packet of gold foil.  She places this on the table between us.  Pointing to it, I answer, “This.”

“What is it?”  Mary-Ann asks the obvious question, as she rises to get a better look at the artifact.

“Something we found in the ship yesterday evening.”  With delicate fingertips, I spread it out atop the table.  Once I press it flat, it pops open wider and wider, three successive increments, until it has spread to the approximate size of a newspaper sheet.  “As far as I can tell, it’s their equivalent of paper, except it’s active.”

“What does that mean?” asks Darling, also standing, intrigued.

“It also functions somewhat like our computer screens,” I answer, hefting the almost weightless object to better display it to my audience, “but in a semi-permanent way.  In other words, the content can change dynamically under power, but it retains the last image sent to it, once the power is cut.  At least, that’s my best guess.  Oh, also the display and the data are combined somehow; they are effectively the same thing.  Thus, they are always present, always connected, and continually available.”

One by one, the governance board rounds their table to approach mine.  They examine the frozen display with pinched faces and slatted eyes.  I have repeatedly examined the same features, so I know most of it makes no sense, at all.  In fact, only one obscure feature of it appears to represent human meaning.  I let them ponder it until they’ve had enough, hoping one of them will see what I see, if only to confirm my suppositions.  None of them do.

“It looks like gobbledy-goop to me,” opines Darling.  “Are you sure it’s not just one of their taco wrappers?”

“I considered something like that,” I concede, “until I noticed this bit here.”  I point to a patchwork of lines and symbols positioned off-center among the other indecipherable nonsense.  “Do any of you recognize it?”

They turn their heads this way and that.  They squint their eyes.  They move closer, and then further away.  Nothing seems to make any difference to them.

Until Chief guesses, “It looks a bit like a… ah… highway map.”

“That’s what I thought.”  I nod to The Girl, who reaches into her voluminous bag to extract and partially unfold a United States highway map.  This is already opened to the correct panel, so I arrange the foil rendition of it on the tabletop alongside her paper version.  My left forefinger traces a line on the map, while my right traces the same line in the foil.  “Nevada.  Now watch this.”

Using two hands and four fingers, I make a motion atop the foil.  The view zooms repeatedly.  From a higher and higher perspective to a successively lower views, our level of observation descends from low orbit, through high altitude, to low altitude, to mountaintop height, to hilltop, rooftop, and then suddenly the individual buildings open up as though someone has rendered their ceilings and then their floors invisible.  We pass from the top level through to the ground floor and then into basements.  We scroll around.  We trace hidden access ways and tunnels all over the mysterious installation.  Zooming up again, I reorient the foil map over a nearly circular, alabaster geological feature.

I say, “Groom Lake, an ancient evaporated body of water long ago reduced to a saltpan.  Now watch.”  I zoom again.  Once more, the perspective passes through the ground to reveal a maze of passageways, corridors, tunnels and buildings constructed underneath the broad, flat depression.

Finally, I zoom out to the original view.  The governance board exchanges glances.

Chief hisses, “Son of a gun!  Area fifty-one!”

Nodding, I inform them, “I accidentally got the thing to work once when I first found it, but I couldn’t repeat the same mistake twice.  Not for a while.  Then I came back here to re-examine the giant.  I decided to imitate the way its fingers or pincers or whatever might interact with the medium.  When I did that, I found it worked much like our touch-pads.”

“What do you think it means?”  From Darling.

Rather than answer directly, I instruct them by pointing out features stamped into the gold foil, “Look at these symbols here.  And here.  And there.  They look like active navigational aids to me.  I think this thing was once part of the spacecraft’s flight control system.  I think it crashed with its last visual burned into the foil.”

“What are you saying?” drawls The Engineer.  “Are you saying you think this was their last destination?  They were on their way to Area-51?”

“You tell me.  Yesterday, I… we… crawled through the wreckage.  Though we came across many interesting things, this is the only evidence I could understand.  Once I figured the map angle, it all fell into place.  Why not Area-51?  If you buy into the old-world conspiracies, it’s where the government reverse engineered alien spacecraft.  If you don’t, it’s also known as a black-ops site.  The Skunkworks.  We know they developed the U-2 and the SR-71 there.”

“What’s the SR-71?”

“The Air Force built it in the sixties and it was supposedly the fastest plane in the world until the nineties,” supplies Chief.  “A hell of an aircraft designed just twenty years after development of the first successful jet engine.  I always thought that was a weird story.”

I add, “Maybe the aliens were just checking in where all E.T.s land, or maybe they had an interest in the research conducted there.  Or maybe… maybe… they like the location for the same reasons the U.S. government liked it.  Remoteness combined with access to the western seaboard.  Whatever the reason, we can’t deny they had an interest in that location, and they had that interest during the last few seconds of flight.  Ultimately, the Russians shot it down, an act that had to be unexpected.  No time to cover their tracks.  No time to recover.”

Returning to my seat, I cross my legs and retrieve my now tepid coffee mug.  “One thing bothers me more than the map, though.  Why did they leave the wreckage and the body behind?  We could guess about endless scenarios, I suppose, but there are only a few basic motivations for this oversight.  One, they don’t care to clean up the mess.  Two, they can’t.  Three, they don’t yet know it happened.”

“No matter what,” concludes The Engineer, “we know they’re not infallible.  We know they’re not invincible.”

“If they were responsible for Terminus,” chimes The Chief, “maybe we can do something about it.  Maybe we can make them pay!”  The governance board offers a mixed reaction to this assertion.  Some support it.  Others don’t.  Darling rolls her eyes.  “What’s the matter with you people?” demands the muscle-bound ‘peace officer’.  “Don’t you think somebody should pay for what they did?”