Becoming Alien [antikvár]

1 Floyd County, Virginia Cap down to his black brows. Warren leaned on his truck, hearing out two men slouched in a junker car—the kind of car those men leave in a ditch after they've done their business. As I came up. Warren said to them, "Well, if you put it that way, I'd come up with them pills." The driver smiled, then asked me, "Tom, you help your brother Warren in the business?" "Hush, Tom," Warren said. He stared at the truck hood ornament, finally said, "My brother's not in this." "But he'd be so good as a courier, not quite blond, not quite dark-haired. Can't be much money in four or five hundred hens." "He's not part of the deal," Warren said, getting the overnight bag out from behind the truck seat. Drug investors—I tried not to look at them. Did they know he'd been crazy once, me in foster care, the farm almost lost? Yeah, they knew, gave them good leverage. "And your brother's underage." "No, I'm sixteen," I said, my face turned down, away from them. I didn't like Warren's drug thing. Warren asked the men, "And where you from? What's your address?" "Atlanta's enough. Be in touch with you." So more and more into drugs for Warren. While Warren's new Methedrine distributors made pickups, I drove off miles through the surruner heat, trying to 1 2 / Rebecca Ore forget that I might come home to find Warren arrested or dead, the truck and Ford Fairlane confiscated. Three weeks after the Atlanta guys visited, I drove up a dirt road, then walked by White's Branch into the woods, trying not to think of jails, school. Warren—so wild and crazy. The ground screeched like rocks being dragged across rocks. I saw smoke and ran up to a wreck, burning, not a car, but no wings—an odd-looking machine. A hatch opened. I saw flames behind a man-shape, face twisted bad—wrinkled face writhing and crying. I flashed that he looked weird, but I rushed to get him out and laid him down. When we heard screams, he sat up and shoved me toward the wreck. Help them! The ship sizzled, the screams stopped. He pushed me again with long bony hands, but now I was really looking at him: dark eyes rolling under bone swellings like bone goggles all around them. He was naked except for pants, them burnt. ^ Slowly, he raised a hand to his head hair and felt the ash in it. Face hair charred, too, so you could see the skin through it, like on a dog's belly. And face all wrinkled from eyes to pointed chin. I touched him—not cool like a frog, but bird-hot. Sparse burnt hair covered his body. Then I noticed the eyelashes. Regular eyelashes. Who'd have thought a creature that weird would have regular eyelashes? When I tried to take a pulse, the creature winced and reached for my hand. He muttered with a tongue that sure looked un-Earthly—dark red, flat-pointed like a bird's, but broader behind the point, real flexible. No nipples, no navel. Gooky blood oozed out of wire nicks. He was alien, trying to get up. I held him down. "Easy, whoa, easy," I said, feehng his legs and arms for breaks. The joints and tendons were a bit different, but nothing felt really out of place. "You're a problem," I said to him, considering Warren's business. "Whole troops of investigators gonna hit this place." Maybe someone at Tech should help him with his burns, I thought. He had burnt places all over his back like he'd been struck with red-hot coins and wire. Alpha extraterrestrialis. Or was that supposed to be extrater-