CENSUS_What Lurks Beneath Page 25

  “Sure, at least alien to us.”

  The flashlight with its four D batteries was now impossibly heavy. “I’m going to shoot you now and take my chances.”

  He smiled and picked up another heaping handful of ants. “I would look behind you first.”

  “I’m not falling for that.” “Then just listen.”

  He fell silent and smiled. Her eyes squinted slightly as she concentrated on the ambient noise, which quickly grew in volume to a cascade of tiny creaks and bumps—as if millions of tiny pieces of hard plastic luggage

  were crawling over one another. Parlor trick or not, she had to look, and she aimed the gun at him once again as she snuck a glance out the still open front door.

  The porch and the grass in the immediate area shifted oddly in the small amount of light provided by the moon. She pivoted her head to confirm that Dave had not moved—he hadn’t—and then stared again at the odd vision outside.

  She still couldn’t make out what she was looking at. Turning back to Dave, she shifted her gun into her left hand and kept it trained on him. She used her right hand to grasp the flashlight, which she spun to the side to illuminate the porch just outside the door. She jumped in spite of herself, and took a step away.

  The porch and the surrounding area were covered in a layer of ants several inches deep. She took another quick look in Dave’s direction and then used the flashlight to see farther out into the grass—though the grass was also now covered in several inches of ants.

  She looked at the threshold of the door and saw that something was keeping them from crossing it. For now.

  “If you shoot me they come in.” “You control ants?”

  “I asked you if you believed in intelligent, alien life.”

  She nodded, which to him was simply a shift in the top of the darkened shadow in front of the door.

  “I told you that your being here tonight was not your choice.” She nodded again.

  He stood up and the ants already positioned around his body shimmered in the beam of the flashlight.

  “I mentioned that the queen ant is the most powerful one in the colony.” “Yes goddammit! Just tell me what is going on?”

  “Please lower your gun. You can keep it of course but I don’t want you accidentally shooting me.”

  She took a quick look at her surroundings once more, and then slowly lowered the gun until it was pointed at a spot between them.

  “Thank you. And if you could please lower the light a little as well? It’s beginning to hurt my eyes.”

  The light stayed trained on his head. “Ok, have it your way.”

  The distant sound of an engine starting up distracted Deputy Evans. She had always had problems with the starter grinding, and that starter sounded exactly like hers. She frowned, stuck on all fronts, very sure that her keys were still in her pocket.

  “Don’t worry, we’re just moving it for you.” “We?”

  “Bill and Willis—and a few others you haven’t met yet. We can’t have your car just sitting there at the gate. You’ll get it back soon enough, provided you make the right choice.”

  She reached down with her hand holding the flashlight and rubbed the side of her palm against the front pocket of her jeans. Yes, her keys were still there. She knew both of the neighbors from the interviews she had conducted as part of her investigation. She knew them well enough that she had no desire to speak to either of them again.

  How did they start the car?

  Dave, seemingly in response to her unvoiced question, smiled again. The smile pushed her over the edge.

  She raised her gun and fired a round, which hit the wall just to the side of Dave. Ants immediately began to spill out of the small, round hole in the drywall. The throng of ants outside responded by pushing farther across the threshold and piling up even deeper. Had this been in the big city the neighbors would be scrambling for their phones to report the shot. Out here in the sticks, gunfire, even at night, wasn’t quite as big a deal, and the distance between the properties could make a gunshot sound like a lot of things.

  “Stop speaking in riddles. I’ll put the next one in your eye.”

  The smile never left Dave’s face. “I have one more question for you— and I’ll even help you figure out your answer. The question is, ‘How do you value life?’”

  She wavered, thinking about following through on her threat, but her curiosity won out. “Value how?”

  “You eat salad, yes?” She nodded.

  “The lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes were once alive. You didn’t do it directly, but you ended the life of a living thing, and then consumed it.”

  “Plants don’t count.” “Why?”

  She smiled in spite of herself, oddly enjoying the exchange. “Plants aren’t sentient.”

  “No? There’s plenty of evidence supporting that fact that some trees alter the chemical composition of their leaves to make them taste foul when they sense the presence of grazing animals.”

  “Whatever. Trees don’t talk, and as far as I know lettuce doesn’t do any- thing.”

  He nodded, “So you’d have no problem at all cutting down a 200-year- old oak tree since it doesn’t talk?”

  She chewed her lip, trying to figure out where he was taking this. “No, I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Because it’s old? Older than you?”

  “Yes, out of respect for its time here if nothing else.”

  “So, your value system prioritizes things you see as both sentient and long-lived, with the least valuable life forms being those that don’t com- municate—at least not with humans—and are short lived?”

  She now knew exactly where he would take this, and she wasn’t inter- ested. “Cute. I don’t need a map to see where you’re going. Why don’t you just tell me what you want to tell me—or perhaps I should just go ahead and shoot you.”

  The smile never left Dave’s face as he gazed at the legion of ants milling about the threshold. “That would be a poor outcome for you, but since you’re apparently in a hurry to get back to your mobile home and your cat, I’ll give you the abbreviated version. You’re aware of the pipeline explosion out here, back in the ’80s?”

  She shrugged. Everyone in the greater area knew about the explosion. People 100 miles away felt the impact.

  “That explosion did quite a bit of damage on the surface. It also woke something up that had been resting here for years. Thousands of years.”

  “The alien queen ant?” Were it not for the bristling legion of ants sur- rounding the house she would have shot him now and been done with it.

  “The analogy here is crude. I don’t fully understand the actual details myself.” He tapped his head. “I don’t know that humans are capable of truly grasping it but, yes, what we’ll call the Colony was awakened from its slumber. It had been dormant, cut-off from nutrients for so long that in its weakened state it took quite a while to get back on its feet.”

  He toyed again with the ants around him—almost caressing them. “On top of the explosion there was all the drilling. Turns out the Colony was working on a way to convert the oil into something useful for them as well. All of the humans on the surface, scrambling around like— ants— and punching holes into the ground in a competition of sorts that they were not even aware of.”

  “So the Colony acted to protect itself ?”

  “Yes, though the Queen at the time was old, weak. She influenced events as best she could to protect the Colony.”

  “The McAlester kid?”

  “Yes, and the sour gas. The Colony was buying time for itself, disrupting whatever it could to keep itself intact. It lost access to plenty of oil via the other wells in the area, but at least the well coming directly for the Colony was spared.

  “And you?”

  “I fought a bit harder than was expected. The Colony can fairly easily control lower life forms, particularly those like ants that already subscribe to its approach. The old Queen thought to use me as the next step i
n expanding its presence. Simply killing off those that dwelled here wasn’t going to work long-term. All civilizations either expand or wither.”

  “The Colony helped you fake your own death?”

  He chuckled again. “Yes and no. My fight against the Colony had me at the end of my mental rope. The Colony thought that pushing me past

  my breaking point would allow it to gain control over me. My…episodes were a combination of that struggle along with some help from others in the area that had already joined the Colony.”

  “And?”

  “After the fish-kill, for which I can thank Bill Jennings, I decided that I would rather kill myself than go on. I was done. I thought I could protect my family, my son, by simply ending it.”

  She lowered the light ever so slightly, partly to help her cramping arm. “So how does this end up with you crushing someone else under a trac- tor?”

  He rose to his feet in one fluid motion and walked over to her. She raised the gun again and aimed at his head.

  “In the midst of what were going to be my final hours, the Colony became dissatisfied with the potential outcome and dethroned the old Queen. A new, younger more powerful Queen took her place, and that Queen explained to me that my death wouldn’t be the end. They would come for Adam. The Colony really liked the idea of starting off with a child. Something much more malleable. A significantly longer life span. Etc. I knew it was true, as Adam already had an unnatural attraction to the place.”

  She raised the flashlight back up and concentrated on his eyes, which did not shirk from the light. “What do you mean when you say she “ex- plained” to you? How does an alien queen living far beneath the surface explain anything to you?”

  He eventually blinked and shielded his eyes with his right hand, which was missing the pinky. “I don’t have a great answer for you there. Re- member, I was done. I was ready to end it all with the shotgun. This was not a…coherent time for me. The Colony was trying to wrest my mind from me. I don’t have memories of it to share.”

  She crinkled her eyes in dissatisfaction.

  “I think the easiest way to say it is that I struck a deal to protect my son.” “What kind of deal.”

  “I willingly gave myself to the Colony. In return the Colony agreed to leave my family out of its plans.”

  “And then you killed someone and faked your own death?” She trained the gun on his forehead, angry that she had ever had thoughts about him.

  He took her aim seriously and held up both hands. “No, that was Bill and Willis. I can tell you more about that in a minute, but I think I need to tell you something else first. Something else that you’re going to find challenging.”

  She chewed her bottom lip.

  Challenging?

  What an odd word to use. It was almost like talking to a different person. A person—

  “Please understand, I haven’t communicated with anyone outside the Colony for a year. I am still me. I’m just…rusty.”

  She digested that thought for a second. Where had he been for a year?

  He affected an odd, almost blank expression that she’d never seen on his face. “I don’t know exactly. I was…under.”

  “Underground? For a year?”

  He nodded. “For most of it. I can’t access any specifics.”

  His use of the words “can’t access” disturbed her almost as much as “chal- lenging.” She then realized that he was finishing her thoughts. Reading her mind?

  “Yes. You and I have always shared a bond. Now as a member of the Colony I can take that several steps farther.”

  She shook her head in disbelief and the light of the flashlight wobbled from its aim on his face. Her training as a Sheriff ’s Deputy took over, and came back to what she could process.

  “This Colony killed someone.” “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “I have no idea. He was presented to me one day down at the lower pond.” He looked off to the side, still squinting in the harsh light of the flashlight. “I wasn’t really lucid at that point, but I remember Bill pinning him beneath the tractor. He didn’t fight it, he just lay down.”

  He turned back to her. “The ants did most of the rest—though I did have to donate some teeth and douse the body with my own blood.”

  He frowned. “Bill then had coyotes come over…” “Bill can control coyotes?”

  Dave gestured toward the open door. With her peripheral vision she was able to see another dark figure standing in the midst of the ants. Deputy Evans took a couple of steps backward, farther into the house, and cheated the flashlight over so that she could see the doorway while still covering Dave.

  The flashlight showed a tall, thin man clad in boots, jeans and a western shirt. His entire head was enveloped in a writhing swarm of ants. She

  involuntarily swung her gun over to take aim at this new threat, then back to Dave, then back again at the doorway.

  “I’m sure you remember Bill Jennings, Deputy Evans?”

  The figure that was Bill Jennings smiled broadly and the ants pooled around his widened mouth adjusted accordingly. Bill nodded slightly and held out his hand in greeting. “Deputy.”

  She stared at the open hand, then back at the face clad in ants, and took yet another step farther back into the living room. Bill smiled even more at her fear, dropped his hand and entered the house. The ants that had accommodated his boots quickly filled back into the vacant space in the threshold.

  “I felt exactly the same way about Bill. Believe I would have described him as a sadistic asshole. Turns out he was the one that killed the deer. My primary tormentor.” He gave Bill a thoughtful look.

  She took yet another step back and mumbled, “When you had feelings

  …”

  Dave held up his hand as if to apologize. “I should clarify. We still feel pain. We even appreciate a good joke. Humor seems to be something that we can’t live without, as the Colony found out the hard way through prior experiments (he briefly channeled a picture to her of a young man with a walking boot striding down the road with a rifle in his arms). What we don’t have any more, through the gift of the Colony is fear, anger or empathy.”

  She stared at Dave, struggling to understand what seemed like an elab- orate joke. “You also seem to have lost something else. You’re clinical, yet still sarcastic. You don’t seem…human.”

  Dave nodded, “The process is still evolving.” He gestures toward Bill, “The Colony benefits from the fact that, through his association, Bill

  has an enhanced gift to project control over larger, more complicated organisms—deer, for example. He also, for better or worse, seems to have maintained some of his more prominent personality quirks.” Bill chuckled and lightly bowed in acknowledgment of what he perceived as a compliment.

  “Just good little soldiers,” Bill added, the ants mercifully leaving his face to move down his collar and under his shirt. “I was doing my best to recruit our friend here but he was a tough nut to crack. Once he finally joined us, all of the past became just that.” He smiled again and she felt like a piece of cold meat trapped behind a sheet of plastic in a refrigerated supermarket display case.

  “Of course,” Bill said, “Things had to go quiet for a while until the in- vestigation died down.”

  She used the flashlight to go back and forth between their faces. The millions of ants just outside the door writhed and jostled for position.

  Bill joined in. “The new Queen has a new, long-term plan for the Colony. Dave’s ex is sitting pretty on the insurance proceeds and I’ve managed to run off all the potential buyers, who were already spooked by what’s happened here. Like any friendly neighbor I just put in a low-ball offer that I’m sure she’ll accept.”

  “She always hated it here anyway.”

  She turned back to Dave, noting that this was the first time he had sounded like his old self.

  Bill grinned again and the ants moved accordingly. “In the meantime the Colony worked on our frie
nd here—a lot of damage to undo, with the fight he put up. And, of course, we made our overtures to you. Now that you’re here with us it is time to move forward.”

  “Move forward with what?”

  Dave took a step closer and this time she didn’t raise the gun. She dropped the flashlight a bit as well so the focal point was on his chest, not his eyes. “We’re strong enough now that we need to take the next logical step.”

  Her blank stare asked the question for her, and he responded. “We need to move past controlling lower life forms, or converting aged higher forms of life that come with significant deficiencies. We can start fresh, but we need your help.”

  His gaze tracked down to her waist, and she couldn’t help but follow it. The meaning behind his words clicked in and she again put the beam of the flashlight in his face. “You need me as breeding stock?”

  Both Dave and Bill smiled. “We need you to become part of us, yes. I don’t remember what happened to me for much of the past year, but I know that parts of me have been modified. Parts of me that will interact with modified parts of you.”

  She backed up until she found the wall behind her. She pushed against it for support and continued to swivel the flashlight and the gun between them.

  “You expect me to buy in to your lunacy?” In response they both stared at her.

  “And I give up my life to go spend years underground pumping out freak- ish alien babies?”

  Bill chimed in, “What exactly would you be giving up?”

  She caught herself from answering automatically and thought through the question. She had no spouse, no children, no close relatives (that she spoke to), no close friends and a dead-end job. She’d done nothing noteworthy and would very likely die with that still being true. Her main objection came down to one thing.

  “My humanity.”

  Bill smiled again, “So your value system puts humans at the top? What is it exactly that’s so great about humanity? Humanity has had its way with the planet for thousands of years… ” He turned and spit on the floor for emphasis. She looked to see how Dave reacted to this act. In the past he likely would’ve come to blows over someone spitting on his clean floor. Now it didn’t even merit a look.