The Stickmen (19 page)

“The post-mortal subject is approximately
twenty-six inches long. It appears to be the forearm pronation of
a—”

Jessica stopped; she looks blanched,
overwhelmed. It was if the reality of what she was doing had
assailed her after the fact. She turned to Lynn, afret. “Look, I’m
sorry, but this is too much! I don’t think this thing is fake
and—Jesus!—if it’s not fake then-then-then it must be
real!
”

“Calm down, Jessica,” Lynn said. “Get a
grip. You’re a doctor; it’s a doctor’s job to be objective. Relax,
will you?”

Jessica glared back. “I’m doing a post on
the skeletal structure of an
alien arm,
and you’re telling
me to relax? Look, I’m just the assistant around here. My idea of a
big day is indexing toe tags and looking at cell-smears in a
microscope. I’m not qualified for this!”

“You’re a trained pathologist,” Lynn
reminded her. “You’re perfectly qualified. All we need is a prelim
exam recitation.”

But Jessica’s professional self-esteem
seemed to run right down into the drain in the floor. She kept
shooting appalled glances at the bones on the table. “This is
crazy! That
thing
on the table is
not
from a human
being! Shouldn’t somebody in the government be doing this?”

Oh, boy. This woman’s going ape-shit on
me, and she’s asking all the
wrong
questions.
“That
would defeat the purpose,” she admitted. “We’re trying to
conceal
this from the government.”

“Why?” Jessica nearly wailed.

“Because at this point we don’t know which
government branches can be trusted, all right? We need your help on
this.
Harlan
needs your help.”

“Harlan!” the woman exclaimed. “That
crackpot hippie loser is the
last
person I’m going to stick
my neck out for!”

Smart move, Lynn,
Lynn thought. Then
she just yelled: “Stop acting like a stupid red-headed insecure
bimbo and do your job!”

The rant gave Jessica the jolt she needed.
“You’re right, you’re right. I’m a professional.”

“Yes, you are. Now get a grip on yourself
and continue. This is a historic occasion, and remember—you’re part
of it.”

Jessica rubbed her gloved hands together,
nodding. She took several deep breaths, then returned her
attentions to the morgue slab. “The post object appears to be the
forearm pronation of a…non-terrestrial being, severed at what we
would think of as the styloid process, or the elbow. An extremity
is attached, via something akin to a pair of carpel-like pisiformic
and lunate bones. The extremitic process appears to be possessed of
one three-jointed opposable thumb and one long four-jointed
finger.”

That’s better.
But now Lynn, after
all of her lecturing, got a bit of a jolt herself, when she took
her as yet closest look at the skeletal arm.

The charred-black forearm and twin,
pincer-like fingers.

Not from this world.

The reality of the image brought a sudden
sensation of ice-water filling her gut, and snakes were swimming in
the ice-water.

Good God. Harlan really did it this
time…

Jessica was gingerly fixing down the charred
forearm bone in a double-vise mounted on the side of the morgue
platform. Then, with a long course file, she ground several bone
particles off the bone, letting the grindings fall into a tin she
held below the vise.

“What are you doing?” Lynn asked.

“You want a geochronologic analysis, don’t
you?”

“A…what?”

“A carbon-date. Don’t you want to know how
old this thing is?”

Lynn hadn’t even thought of that. “Good
idea. Go for it. But doesn’t that take a long time?”

“Sure, it involves a series of sophisticated
cosmogenic and chemical analyses whose results are then processed
together: a Libby Test, a radioisotope scan, a Marcellin Treatment.
It takes about a month for all the labs to get the tests back. What
I’m doing now is the first stage—a sample collection and carbon-14
scale. I put the filings in the mass-photo-spectrometer for an
isotopic scale read-out. A high-temp element burns the filings into
a gas phase, then the spectrometer will give us a percentile carbon
makeup.”

Wow, I guess she really
does
know
what she’s doing.
“How long does
that
take?”

“About five minutes.”

Jessica put the scrapings into a
thimble-sized crucible. Then she walked over to one of the machines
on the shelves and lowered the thimble into a cylindrical opening,
over which she closed a hatch. She flicked a switch and suddenly a
hissing drone could be heard. Lynn watched, fascinated.

Five minutes later, a printer spat out a
single sheet of paper, and when Jessica looked at it, she said,
“Holy shit…”

“What?”

Jessica walked back to the exam table,
turned the recorder back on. “A preliminary carbon-14 index of the
post subject proved negative, which indicates that either the
testing equipment is defective…or that the post subject lacks
elemental carbon.”

“Holy shit,” Lynn repeated the doctor’s
remark. It had always been her understanding that all living things
were molecularly based on carbon…

From under the exam table, Jessica pulled up
a hand-held orbital saw. “I am now going to cut the post subject at
the center of the radial/ulnar process,” she told Lynn and the tape
recorder, “in order to inspect the marrow fissure and take a
culture and histological sample.”

Lynn grit her teeth and winced when Jessica
pulled the saw’s trigger-like power button. The saw whined like a
dentist’s drill. But then the whine turned to a shriek when Jessica
bore the blade down against the alien bone. Black dust flew up as
the saw began to cut a groove into the bone. A trace of the
faintest smoke rose, and so did a vaguely unpleasant smell, like
wire-insulation burning. Then—

“JESUS!” Jessica yelled over the saw’s
irritating shriek. Lynn flinched at the start. The saw’s motor
wound down when Jessica released the trigger.

“I don’t believe this!” Jessica loudly
complained. She held up the saw. The blade was
smoking.

Lynn could clearly see that all of the
blade’s teeth had worn off.

“These saws can cut through cinderblocks and
concrete like butter!” Jessica exclaimed. “But I only got—” With a
magnifying glass, she looked at the groove she’d cut on the bone.
“Jesus! Looks like about a millimeter before the blade wore
out!”

“Barely a scratch,” Lynn observed.

“Yeah. Barely.” Disgruntled, Jessica
reclaimed some semblance of composure and spoke again toward the
tape recorder. “The, uh…the bone structure of the post subject
resisted my attempt to cut it after less than one millimeter. The
saw’s diamond-bit blade…has been worn smooth…”

Next, almost vengefully, Jessica reached
upward and hauled down the odd apparatus mounted on the ceiling.
Its spring-hinged arms extended, and there seemed to be cables
running through them. At the end was a white cone with a
handle.

“I am now going to attempt to sever the
radial/ulnar structure with the suite’s surgical laser,” Jessica
announced to the recorder. She grabbed the handle and wended the
cone to the charred bone, and when she pushed a button on the side,
there was a sound like a hiss from a leaking inner tube. Lynn
noticed the tiniest thread of black smoke rise when the laser’s
emission-tip touched the bone. Jessica held it down for at least a
minute, then grimaced, depowered the laser, and swung it aside.

“Shit!”

“Anything?” Lynn asked.

Jessica sniped her answer into the tape
recorder. “My attempt to cut the post subject with the laser has
failed. The emission beam seems to only have scratched the surface
of the bone process, maybe only a few more microns than the
saw.”

That’s some bone,
Lynn said.

Jessica turned away, simmering. She snapped
off her gloves and threw them across the room.

“This is impossible!”

“Calm down—”

“That’s a carbon-dioxide laser! It’ll cut
through tempered titanium for Christ’s sake! It’ll cut
anything!
I give up!”

But during Jessica’s tirade, Lynn was
staring wide-eyed past her shoulder. Her mouth fell open but no
words came out.

“What’s wrong?” Jessica asked.

Lynn slowly pointed to the morgue slab. When
Jessica turned around and saw what she was pointing at, her mouth
fell open too. They were both looking at the bone on the table.

It wasn’t a bone anymore.

It was now covered with skin—wet, shiny,
pale-pinkish skin—under which muscle fibers and veins could clearly
be seen.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“What do you mean, they’re not skeletons?”
Garrett hotly asked. He was getting agitated. “I saw the forearm,
Swenson
gave
it to me. It was charred
bone.
It was
part of a goddamn
skeleton.
”

“Not quite,” Ubel countered. “These beings
do have a skeletal structure that essentially serves the same
purpose as any skeletal structure, and that’s part of what you
saw—that forearm and hand.”

Garrett shook his head, brushing his hair
back in frustration. “But you just got done saying it’s
not
 a skeleton!”

“It’s not.”

Garrett slumped in the car and lit another
cigarette.

“I guess this is a little confusing, huh?”
Ubel went on.

“Oh?”

“It’ll be easier for you to understand if I
put it this way. The bones aren’t just bones.”

Garrett grinned sarcastically. “Oh, that
clears it all up. Stupid me.”

“What I mean is—”

Those were the last words that Ubel would
ever speak.

At that instant, Garrett had leaned over to
flick his cigarette out the window, and after that—chaos. Myriad
things seemed to take place in the same fraction of a second. A
loud
thwack-BOOM!
cracked from a distance. The driver’s-side
window exploded, and suddenly tiny bits of glass were blowing
around the inside of the car, stinging Garrett’s face. The car
rocked on its springs. Instinct grabbed Garrett’s nerves; he ducked
down into the footwell, his face is peppered with blood. When he
looked up—

Holy shit…

—he saw Ubel slumped and obviously dead in
the driver’s seat. The hole in the warrant officer’s chest—centered
just to the left, perfectly over the heart—looked big enough to
admit a fist. Blood freely eddied out of the ragged hole as Ubel’s
body teitched a few times via autonomic nerves, then fell still.
Smoke wafted up from the hole, and within, Garrett could see
strands of veins emptying, lungs hanging, bone shards sticking out
sharp as needles.

Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck!

Garrett’s heart seemed to palpitate; fear
was running through his veins right along with his blood. Then,
when he considered the angle at which Ubel had been shot, it
occurred to him:
The bullet hit him at the exact same second I
leaned over to flick my cigarette…

The bullet was meant for me.

Garrett, still hunkered down in the
footwell, glanced around uselessly. If he shoved Ubel’s body out
the door and tried to drive the car away, his back and head would
be exposed to the rifle fire.

Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck!

Garrett knew he didn’t have much time to
think—or live, for that matter. But the car was parked on an
incline, atop a low hill. Garrett reached up and put the car into
neutral.

Go go go!
Garrett screamed in his
mind as the Army sedan began to roll down the grassy incline.

Thwack-BOOM!

Another round socked into the car, then
another. The car rocked back and forth at the impact…but kept
rolling downward.

Garret jostled along with the vehicle’s
suspension. Gravity pulled the car along until it began to pick up
considerable speed. Still jammed down into the footwell, Garrett
braced himself for the inevitability and then—

Garrett clacked his teeth closed and shut
his eyes when the car’s front end collided solidly into a stout
tree at the bottom of the hill.

More glass shook out of the windshield,
raining down on him. More ear-pounding
thwacks
resounded as
more bullets hit the car.
Well what are you going to do,
moron!
Garrett frantically shouted at himself.
You just
gonna sit here? DO something!

Then—

Thwack-BOOM!

The next hit lifted the vehicle several
inches off the ground. Garrett drew his pistol and quickly crawled
over Ubel’s bloodied body. Keeping his head down, he popped open
the driver’s door and shimmied himself out of the car onto the
ground.

On his belly now, he crawled several feet
through some thorny brambles. At one point his hand landed in a
rotten possum carcass…but he was too scared to notice. Eventually
he managed to duck behind the same fat elm tree that the car had
smashed into.
Where is he? Why did he stop shooting?
he
thought in panic.

Thwack-BOOM!

A moment after the giveaway sound, the was a
CRACK!
as a large chunk of the tree he stood behind blew
away. Garrett’s face, only inches away, could feel the odd and
scary concussion of the impact. The hundred-foot tree actually
shook, and a cloud of fresh splinters exploded where Garrett’s head
had been only a split-second previously. He could smell sap
burning. The gouge in the tree looked as big as a duckpin ball.

What the fuck has he got up there?
Garret thought, frenzied.
A goddamn howitzer?

He shot his arm out, aiming Lynn’s black
pistol at the puff of smoke he glimpsed a good three hundred yards
up the hillock.
Try some of this, dickhead
he thought, and
squeezed the trigger. He squeezed
real
hard.