Aliens Among Us by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois

Author:Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois [Dann, Jack & Dozois, Gardner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2013-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

When the doctor came to himself, it was in fact to a part of himself only. Before he had opened his eyes he found that his wakened mind had repossessed proprioceptively only a bizarre truncation of his body. His head, neck, left shoulder, arm and hand declared themselves—the rest was silence.

When he opened his eyes, he found that he lay supine on the gurney, and naked. Something propped his head. A strap bound his left elbow to the gurney’s edge, a strap he could feel. His chest was also anchored by a strap, and this he could not feel. Indeed, save for its active remnant, his entire body might have been bound in a block of ice, so numb was it, and so powerless was he to compel the slightest movement from the least part of it.

The room was empty, but from the open door of the vault there came slight sounds: the creak and soft frictions of heavy tarpaulin shifted to accommodate some business involving small clicking and kissing noises.

Tears of fury filled the doctor’s eyes. Clenching his one fist at the starry engine of creation that he could not see, he ground his teeth and whispered in the hot breath of strangled weeping:

“Take it back, this dirty little shred of life! I throw it off gladly like the filth it is.” The slow knock of bootsoles loudened from within the vault, and he turned his head. From the vault door Joe Allen’s corpse approached him.

It moved with new energy, though its gait was grotesque, a ducking, hitching progress, jerky with circumventions of decayed muscle, while above this galvanized, struggling frame, the bruise-colored face hung inanimate, an image of detachment. With terrible clarity it revealed the thing for what it was—a damaged hand-puppet vigorously worked from within. And when that frozen face was brought to hang above the doctor, the reeking hands, with the light, solicitous touch of friends at sickbeds, rested on his naked thigh.

The absence of sensation made the touch more dreadful than if felt. It showed him that the nightmare he still desperately denied at heart had annexed his body while he—holding head and arm free—had already more than half-drowned in its mortal paralysis. There lay his nightmare part, a nothingness freely possessed by an unspeakability. The corpse said:

“Rotten blood. Thin nourishment. Only one hour alone before you came. Fed from neighbor to my left—barely had strength to extend siphon. Fed from the right while you worked. Tricky going—you are alert. Expected Dr. Parsons. Energy needs of animating this”—one hand left the doctor’s thigh and smote the dusty overalls—“and of host-transfer, very high. Once I have you synapsed, will be near starvation again.”

A sequence of unbearable images unfolded in the doctor’s mind, even as the robot carrion turned from the gurney and walked to the instrument table: the sheriff’s arrival just after dawn, alone of course, since Craven always took thought for his deputies’ rest and because on this errand he would want privacy to consider

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