Frankentown (10 page)

The army man’s baton flew in the direction of his face. Each hit brought thousand bright lights in fractal patterns. The blood rushing down his mouth was starting to fill up and everything the man said sounded like he was hearing it through a tube. It almost turned into a stinging whistle and gurgling of the rushing blood.

“Sign this and you’ll live.”

“HEY! Ever heard of first amendment?! Stop hitting me, Goddammit!” he said, spitting a clotted gob aside, unable to see what the blurry guard looked like, though he couldn’t care less. He could already feel a tooth coming loose, but he knew better than to sign such a contract.

Baton rapped him square across the face.

The guard then emptied what seemed like an entire can of mace on his face with Frank screaming, breathing in some of its pepper flavored pain. He immediately dropped to the ground, coughing, panting, heaving.
Then a familiar female voice he couldn’t quite place screamed “What the fuck are you doing?”

Too late, Frank was close to death.

“You promised you’ll go easy on him!”

The handwriting on the contract barely constituted his signature.

But it
was
legally binding
.
Have I just signed my death certificate?

The female voice was so familiar, but he couldn’t think of any woman who had such a raspy voice.
“Clean him up!”

Someone brought in a cart with a bowl of warm water and a couple of towels. They wiped his face with washcloths, which although wet, were very rough to his broken, bleeding skin. Several minutes later, two guards dragged him out of the stockroom, through a wide corridor to a narrower corridor and to a dark, tightly-shut room. Thick dark leather belts secured Frank in a small chair about a size too small.
Then came a jab of a needle went under the skin of his lower right back, just out of reach.
Half-conscious Frank was then escorted to a room several minutes away. There were many windows during the walk over, but none of them were more than a backlit sheet of a double-sided poster, creating a semi-convincing outback atmosphere.
Finally, after a lengthy elevator ride that turned Frank’s stomach upside down on one of the guard’s feet, they reached the seventh underground level. His vision slowly returned with the expelling of stomach acids, he couldn’t not notice his surroundings.
If this building was government built, then something was amiss with the architecture.

It was not built by men.
A series of dark halls with some manner of colored fungus growing around.
Finally they arrived in a blindingly bright-lit room,
not unlike some laboratories on the school campus.
Frank was a little tired; he had not gotten a pummeling like that since he went to a Roman-Catholic elementary school.
At the far end of the laboratory, Hector Weiss sat hunched over at a counter in the middle of the room, pondering over a small
-
to
-
little laptop computer. Disturbed by noises from around the door he looked up to see Frank.

Hector had never liked Frank much.

He knew his dad quite a bit from his archeology class and never cared much for him either. This was perhaps because there was no end to Hector’s sense of douchebaggy entitlement.
He had always judged Frank’s every word.
An unwelcome, detailed evaluation of his life.
So it was then then not too hard to guess why Frank preferred people like Steve and Allen.

“What are you doing here?”
Frank was eager to find out. Weiss was neither bruised nor bloody. He didn’t even look distressed or displeased to be there, or to see him.
“Have you not signed up a long time ago?
 
They were recruiting at the UC.” Hector said, mockingly puzzled at how he could have missed such an opportunity.

“I guess you must have missed it.”
“That sounded a little condescending, Weiss.”
Frank had a knack for assessing every situation.

“Anyway, what are you doing here?”
“I came to study biological lifeforms of some kind
…
” Hector explained to a puzzled Frank.
“Didn’t they brief you?”
“Oh, they briefed me alright.” Frank said with a bloody lip, nonchalantly pushing a loose tooth out at him with his tongue. Hector caught the sarcasm and managed to take it personally somehow.

“I’m not surprised.”

“I found a thing
…
” Frank explained, temporarily ignoring Hector’s snide retort.“
…
a creature.”

“So you’ve been brought up to speed then?”
He gave away his contempt with an ever-so-slight nod.
”Oh! So that’s what you had in the basket?
Explains why you’ve been away for so long.
Did you kill it?”

He was a little too excited for Frank’s liking.
“I don’t know. I was on a beach. It died on a beach.”
                   
Weiss looked at him bemused and annoyed, which made Frank realize that now was a good time to think long and hard about what he should and shouldn’t share with Weiss. Mentioning details could be a misstep.
 

Can’t mention Steve and Allen
∴

Neither of them even saw the body.

“I was squid fishing one evening when a huge craft came out of the ocean. Then another and then another. I followed it to the beach.”
Hector’s eyes lit up with excitement like $2 road flares .

“Just wait till you see them here!”

Frank might’ve smiled,
but with the swelling you couldn’t tell anymore.

Chapter Eleven

A Warm Welcome

Frank sat in a cold concrete room.
An attending guard graced him with coffee from which steam rose like from a volcano. The walls were so thick that each room was practically perfectly soundproofed.
It was a fortress of secret.

Weiss hadn’t clued Frank in to what was going to happen. Since their rendezvous, he was given access to a surprisingly elegant shower to wash the blood out of his hair and soothe his busted lips.

The binding contract was now signed, so he was a part of it all. And that was that. Once they gave him a fresh change of clothes; a government issued lab coat, shirt, slacks and shoes, he was placed in this cold concrete room with nothing to do but read the contract he signed.

By the time he finished reading, his coffee was cold and of thicker consistency.
The first few pages outlined a general non-disclosure contract, which already bore his signature, and blood.
It was not unlike dozens of which he’s already signed while working on projects at the UC.
One of the last clauses in the contract, several lines above “sign here” stated:

Confidentiality of the matter disclosed to undersigned is of highest importance to national security. The US Government and representatives reserve the right to protect secrets of national security importance by the means of injunction, imprisonment or deadly force.

There was nothing more to do. He had already signed, although even if he hadn’t, it was clearly too late to back out of the contract now.
Circumstances pushed him to the wrong place and time.

Stapled to this contract was a 20+ page brochure.
Its pages were taped together from the outside, to ensure it was tamper-evident. Frank carefully tore through to reveal the title page with small bold letters:

GRAY TREATY

He had heard of project Blue Book before in an old film. It was a codename of the US government for keeping tabs on UFO activity. The second page started with a friendly introduction to the idea of extraterrestrial life.
Then the topic dove right in:

The United States of America have been in indirect contact with extraterrestrial entities since 1941. After two representatives were taken into custody by the United States military in 1947, communication extended to clear messages with selected government employees.
The Grays allowed us to learn about their origins and their culture, but no direct line of contact has ever been established.
In the year 1969, an extra-terrestrial peace party made contact with us in private at Groom Lake, Nevada.

Door of the concrete room creaked and Frank jumped.
After hours of deafening silence, he didn’t know what to anticipate.
 
A tall muscular lab-coat walked in.
The first impression was that this wasn’t somebody you’d miss in an L.A. crowd. He was about 6 inches too tall to blend in, but hardly had the face for a basketball player.
His warm welcoming face was only obstructed by his bristle-like mustache and goatee, supporting his vanishing chin. Also his head was literally a few sizes too large.

“Hallo.” He bellowed at Frank.
Frank was too struck to speak.

The tall man smiled.

“My name is Nor.” Frank wasn’t sure he heard correctly. The guy spoke loud and mumbled.
He could hardly understand him.
The lanky man rolled up his sleeves, all the while observing Frank with a reassuring look on his misshapen face. He was friendly.

 
Frank intersected.

“So
……
what’s going on?”
The tall man got out a small kit. Out of the case he took out what appeared to be an injection tube, but with a rounded knife-point for a needle.
Frank began to get sick. His head started feeling heavy and he took big panic breaths.
The man grabbed his arm down tight.

Frank would’ve started going crazy and screaming, but momentarily he was alarmed at how paw-like his hands were; short stubby fingers and enormous palms.

“Now, Mr Cabella, there’s nothing to worry about here. We’re just going to tag you. It lets us know where you are. Don’t worry, it dissolves in two weeks.”

Frank was momentarily fascinated with the man’s unusual face and didn’t even feel Nor injecting the tracking chip. All it was; was a small metal button.”
                 
“Ok, Mr. Cabella, that’s it, I thank you for your cooperation.” Nor said, leaving out the door every bit as clumsily as he got in. Then the two guards that stood outside came back in, carrying rifles slung over their back. Frank immediately got up.
Another beating
∴
This time I’ll fight back
∴
!
∴
It was time to stand up for himself.
As Frank stood defensively against the guard, instead of attacking, one of the guards just nodded at Frank.
Both soldiers then stepped back out of the room and Frank quickly followed.
They walked for what seemed like at least a mile.

 
Still no real windows in sight.
Perhaps we are underground
∴
The moment they passed a great thick glass door,
the two soldiers disappeared, leaving Frank locked inside the chamber. The doors didn’t budge, though he tried.

 
With only one way to go, he made way. Once he stepped past the front wall, he discovered an enormous door lit to a laboratory down the dark hallway.
Inside were large vertical tube-tanks holding strange misshapen bodies, like the squid back on campus. Only the bodies were not unlike the one he had on his kitchen counter, only much larger, taller and mostly wrinklier.
Desks with tubes, microscopes, shelves full of tube racks and a wall of laboratory mice in separated sample cages.

A creak gave Weiss away has he leaned back in a chair from behind a microscope in the far end of the room.

“Oh, you’re here?” He said, pretending to be surprised to see him.

“Are these
…
” Frank couldn’t quite find the words to finish the sentence, and it seemed a ridiculous thing to ask a grown man anyway.

“Extraterrestrials, Cabella.
They’ve been in touch since the forties. They’re here.”

“Yeah, so it says in the pamphlet.”

“They gave you a pamphlet?

What the hell is a pamphlet?”
Weiss obviously never got one.
Perhaps there was more to know that he never found out.

“Here, check it out!” Frank said, tearing off the contract, which he stuffed it into his pocket and handed the rest of papers to Hector;
a brochure as half-assed as anything.

 
“Take a read. I’ll look around.”

While Weiss buried his face in the literature, Frank had to see this game changing new world for himself.
“So I had a chance to look at your friend.” Hector said.
 

“Which one?”
The question somehow wasn’t quite clear enough for Frank who was still fighting reality.

“The one that looked like blue mash taters with a pizza box logo printed on the side
…
.”

Frank gulped.
Hector wasn’t entirely sure what Frank could be thinking. Frank always thought of him as a brilliant scientist but a rotten judge of character.
“Ohh, yeahhh
…
..THAT one.” He finally replied, mocking Hector and all the while realizing that Hector probably doesn’t know that much more than he does,
if
he knows anything at all.
Why would he refer to the gray as friend?

“It’s a young one. Its suit looks like it tore on the back. It kills them. They can’t withstand the low pressure on land without them.”
There really was no way for Frank to react correctly, so he failed to react at all.

“Oh, you know," continued Hector,
 

"they’re used to high-pressure at the bottom of somewhere deep.”

Like
…
the bottom of the ocean?

It took Frank a good half minute before he dared to speak again. It was kind of a lot to process.

How did Hector
…
.

“They just put you in here?” Frank asked.

“Well, the project recruited me," Hector said, unsuccessfully trying not to boast.
"Came down to the campus, to my office.

I had to sign an secrecy agreement.”

La-di-frankin’-dah
∴
He thought,
sporting a sour look on his face.

“In case it wasn't clear: I took the ole’ fashioned way, through the meat grinder,
beating n’ all.” Frank said, pitying himself.

Hector Weiss didn’t look a whole lot displeased hearing of his colleagues injuries.
Frank could swear he caught a look of joyful resentment in Weiss’ gleaming eyes.

He's such a snake.

The door burst open and in walked an older graying man wearing a general’s uniform.
The dark gray of his coat was decorated with many awards- what the general would refer to as prestigious. They were merits awarded for completing specific missions. Although he never spoke about it, he was proud of every merit he had. Especially the ones for breaking up protests with bio-weaponry, and merits for successful bombing of third-world countries long time ago.