The Spy Who Haunted Me

  “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.”

  I charged forward, my golden fists studded with heavy spikes, reaching for the alien. It disappeared, gone in a moment, and the corridor returned to normal. No more strange lights, no energies, no distortions of space. I stumbled to a halt and cried out in wordless rage. I spun around and punched the nearest wall with my golden fist, hitting it because I had to hit something or go insane. I hit the wall again and again, the plaster cracking and the brick crumbling. And then I made myself stop, reining in the anger and forcing it down, storing it for later. I armoured down and stood before the wrecked and ruined wall, breathing harshly. Walker and Honey approached me cautiously. Honey touched my face with her hand, wiping away my tears. I hadn’t even realised I was crying.

  “We have to warn the local authorities,” said Walker.

  “They wouldn’t listen,” I said. My throat hurt, my voice a harsh rasp. I’d been yelling at the alien all the way through its presentation, but I hadn’t realised. “Would you believe something like this, without proof? And even if we could make them believe, what good would it do? I don’t think the aliens would let them leave, and no one here has anything that could defend them against unseen forces and invisible scalpels. No; it’s down to us. We stand between the townspeople and the aliens. We’re all there is.”

  “But what about the game?” said Honey. “What about Alexander King’s prize?”

  I looked at her, and she met my gaze steadily.

  “How can you think about that at a time like this?” said Walker. “After everything we’ve just seen!”

  “It’s my job to stay calm and focused and to concentrate on the bigger picture, on what really matters,” said Honey, her voice perfectly reasonable. “What we saw, what the aliens are going to do . . . It’s not what we’re here for. I have a dut
y not just to the people of one small town, but to all the people. You heard that thing: after Roswell the cities, and then the world. I don’t know of anything that could stop them, and neither do you. But maybe Alexander King does. Maybe there’s something in his hoarded secrets that will do the job.”

  “That’s not why you want his secrets,” said Walker. “You want to win the game.”

  “We were sent here to solve the old mystery of Roswell, not this new one,” said Honey. “There’s no way King could have known about this. So this . . . is irrelevant.”

  “You’re scared,” I said. “Scared of what you saw. You can’t cope with something this big, this important, so you hide behind the rules of a stupid little game that doesn’t matter anymore. We have to stand our ground here, stop the aliens from doing this. There’ll be time for games later.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Honey. “I have my orders and my responsibilities. The Independent Agent’s secrets must end up with the right people.”

  “And my duty is to ensure that people like you never get their hands on the prize,” said Walker. “You can’t be trusted with it.”

  “And you can?” said Honey. “Little dictator of a little world?”

  “More than you,” said Walker. He looked at me, as calm and composed as ever. “I’m sorry, Eddie. The game must come first. We can’t be distracted by . . . lesser events, no matter how disturbing.”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions here,” I said carefully, holding my anger in check. “Don’t be so quick to assume these aliens aren’t what we’re here for. Why couldn’t these aliens be the answer to the Roswell mystery? The teleport bracelets must have dropped us here and now for a reason . . . So let’s stop the aliens, save the town, and take evidence of that back to Alexander King, so we can claim the prize. Screw There can only be one. We can share the information.”

  “No,” said Honey, and to her credit she did sound honestly regretful. “The mystery of Roswell is what crash-landed here in 1947. And that had nothing to do with cattle mutilations. They didn’t start until much later. And none of the descriptions of the original aliens were anything like the thing we just saw.”

  “Then why are these new aliens here?” I said. “Why choose Roswell out of all the small towns in the world?”

  “Perhaps because Roswell has such strong alien connections,” said Walker. “To make what happens here more . . . visible to the rest of the world. An alien atrocity in this town would be reported all over the world.”

  “We’re not here to be heroes,” said Honey. “We’re here to be agents. To discover the answer to a specific question. That has to come first. It’s the job. And Eddie, I really don’t think my superiors at Langley would approve of me sharing King’s secrets with anyone else. They might even call it treason. So, I will do what I have to do. I know my duty.”

  “So do I,” said Walker. “You cannot be trusted with King’s secrets, Honey. Or your masters. I’m not sure anyone can. So I will win the game, take the secrets, and bury them deep in the Nightside, where no one will ever find them.”

  “And the people of Roswell?” I said.

  “There will be time for revenge later,” said Walker.

  “My duty is to protect people from outside threats,” I said. “All people, everywhere. To hell with all games, and secrets, and politics. People come first, always. Get out of my sight, both of you. Go play your precious game. And when this is over, and I’ve stopped the aliens and saved the town . . . I will come and find you and take your precious prize away from you.”

  “You do what you have to,” said Honey. “And I’ll do what I have to. I hope you do defeat the aliens, Eddie; I really do.”

  “Yes,” said Walker. “I’m sorry it has to end this way, Eddie. But we must all follow duty in our own way. Good luck.”

  And just like that, we all went our separate ways.

  I walked slowly through the crowded Roswell streets, one man in the middle of unsuspecting crowds, all of them so much dead meat unless I could come up with a plan to save them. It was hard to keep from staring into their happy, innocent faces. How could they not know how much danger they were in? Couldn’t they feel the tension on the air, the first echoes of the horror that was coming, so close they could almost reach out and touch it? Of course they didn’t know, didn’t even suspect; they lived in their world and I lived in mine, and it was my job to keep them from ever finding out my world even existed.

  Five and a half hours now and counting . . .

  I strode on more purposefully, not going anywhere in particular yet, just full of the need to keep moving, to at least feel like I was doing something. I concentrated on this idea and that, coming up with and discarding one plan after another, scowling so hard as I thought that people hurried to get out of my way. I could just leave Roswell. Commandeer a car and get the hell out of town until I was out from under the aliens’ communications blackout. Yell to my family for backup and support. Throw enough Droods at a problem, and any enemy will go down in flames. The Hungry Gods found that out the hard way. Of course, there was no telling how long that might take; it could all be over by the time I got back. And nothing left to do but contain the situation and make sure the aliens couldn’t repeat their bloody experiment somewhere else. Like Walker said: there’s always time for revenge. But there was no telling what I’d run into outside of town. The aliens might just stop me at the town’s limits and hold me there, and then there’d be no one left to stand between the townspeople and the aliens.

  I couldn’t risk that.

  No; my only realistic hope was to locate the aliens’ base of operations and shut them down before they could start anything. One man against an unknown number of aliens and an unknowable amount of alien technology . . . For anyone else that would be suicide, but I was a Drood, with a Drood’s armour and training. And the aliens were going to find out just what that meant. So . . . think it through. If the aliens were jamming all communications going in and out of Roswell . . . it made sense that the jamming signal was coming from apparatus somewhere inside the town. And a jamming signal that strong would have to be pretty damned powerful and leave its own distinctive footprint on the local electromagnetic spectrum. Shielded from detection by Earth technology, of course, but not from me.

  I concentrated hard on my torc, coaxing and bludgeoning it into doing something new and different . . . until at last a long thin tendril slid up my neck from the torc to form a pair of stylish golden sunglasses over my eyes. An absolute minimum use of my armour, hopefully not enough to set off any alien detection systems. I focused my Sight through the golden strange matter over my eyes and Saw the town of Roswell very clearly indeed. Parts . . . I’d never tried parts of armour before . . . I made a mental note to discuss this with my family when I got back. Assuming I ever got back, of course . . .

  My augmented Sight showed me a whole new Roswell. Dark shapes drifted through the streets like animated wisps of shadow, lighting here and there on people disturbed by a vague sense of menace or unease. Elemental spirits are always drawn to potential arenas of spiritual destruction. They feed like vultures on the fiercer, more distressed emotions. On the other hand, Light People were standing and watching all through the town. They were scintillating light and energy bound into human form, almost abstract living things. Their appearance at a scene was both a good and a bad thing. It meant something severely dangerous was about to happen, with many lives on the line, but also that they expected some agent of good to put up a fight. I always think of the Light People as basically good-hearted supernatural sports fans. There were ghosts too, and semitransparent memories of places past, along with other-dimensional entities and travellers just passing through. None of them mattered. I looked slowly about me, sifting through the various information streams permeating the local aether, and soon enough, there it was . . . A strange alien energy broadcasting from a location right near the centre of town.

  I’d found them.

  I heade
d straight for the source of the alien signal, and people grew increasingly scarce the closer I got. In fact, the few people still on the streets seemed to be actually hurrying away. I stopped a few and asked them why, and wasn’t that surprised to find they couldn’t tell me. They didn’t know. They just knew . . . they weren’t supposed to be there.

  The source itself turned out to be something very like a giant termite mound, thirty feet tall and almost as wide, pushing up from the broken earth of a deserted back lot. There were no people here at all, the surrounding streets silent and empty. I studied the alien mound from the shadows of a side alley, my augmented Sight feeding me almost more information than I could handle. The mound itself was a strange mixture of technology and organic materials. Grown as much as made, its vast sides undulated slowly, slick and sweating, as though troubled by passing dreams . . . There were shadowy entrance holes all over it, set to no discernible pattern. The cracked and broken earth around the mound’s base suggested it had thrust up from below and that there might be a hell of a lot more of it deep below the back lot. What I was Seeing could be just the tip of the alien pyramid. I watched for a long time, but nothing came out, and nothing went in.

  Apart from the jamming signal, the mound was also broadcasting a powerful avoidance field. More than just the usual Don’t look at me, nothing to see here, move along suggestions; this was mind manipulation, a field strong enough that people couldn’t even think about the alien mound or anything connected with it. No wonder everyone in Roswell had seemed so unnaturally calm and languid; the alien signal was all but lobotomising them to be sure they’d stay in place for the great experiment. Presumably the signal would be dropped once the bloodletting began so the aliens could observe the full spectrum of human reactions to what was being done to them.

  My Sight punched right through the avoidance field, but I knew I couldn’t risk that for long for fear of being detected. There had to be all kinds of surveillance going on within the mound. So I grabbed as much useful information as I could in quick looks and glances, ready to shut down my Sight at a moment’s notice that I’d been spotted. I couldn’t See any alarms or proximity fields or booby traps . . . Just the mound, sitting there, sick and smug and serene, like an abscess on the world. So sure of its own strength and superiority over mere humanity that it didn’t even feel the need for protection. Fools.