I, Alien

THE LOAVES AND THE FISHES by John DeChancie

I STOPPED AT the Long John Silver’s right next to the Long Island Expressway ramp and bought myself lunch—a three-piece “Fish ‘n’ More” with fries and slaw and extra hush puppies on the side. I liked the hush puppies. But I really liked the fish. I liked fish, any kind of fish. Hence, my moniker, which had stuck with me since high school in Bensonhurst.

I came out of the restaurant and headed toward the parked Lincoln. It was one of those perfect fall days on Long Island when you can smell the sea and the wind comes in from the Atlantic and stirs the tall grass. The sun was bright and the sky was mostly clear except for a few clouds that seemed to hurry across the blue, as if called to some pressing business beyond the horizon.

I was so intent on the prospect of eating my lunch— the tantalizing smell of deep-fried cod filled my nostrils, inducing a kind of trance—that I didn’t notice someone sitting in the back of the Town Car until I’d slid into the front seat.

I jumped a little; but when I saw a familiar face in the rearview mirror, I grinned.

“Hello, Jerry.”

“Hello, Fish.”

My grin faded. “Something’s up.”

Jerry Juliano, in black turtleneck and brown leather jacket, shrugged his narrow shoulders. He was blond and thin and had a fierce look. He always looked mad at someone. Anyone. Everyone. Legs crossed, he held a revolver almost languidly across his chest. “You screwed up big time, Charlie Fish.”

“Yeah?” I said innocently. “I was just going to the meet with DiNardo.”

“Yeah, with a wire, I’ll bet,” Jerry added.

“Huh?” I said.

“You know what I’m talking about,” Juliano told me. He heaved a big sigh. “Christ, I hate it when I know the guy.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“But you don’t leave us any choice. I don’t know what got into you. What the hell did get into you, anyway?”

I played dumb, always a good policy. I shrugged and said, “Jeez, I dunno.”

“Okay, I can understand the midlife crisis thing. Your ma dies. Your brother goes to jail. Your wife starts fooling around. Then she bails on you. I can understand all that.”

“Yeah,” I said. I couldn’t believe this. This was too much. I started to laugh. The irony.

Jerry was appalled. “What, you think this is funny? You think I’m kidding? This is just a warning, or what?”

I shook my head. “Nah. I know it ain’t no warning.”

“We gave you warning. Christ, how many times? You don’t steal from us. That’s one thing you don’t do. We don’t care that you run a perfectly good dry-wall business into the ground. We gave you the best contracts, we cut a deal with the union. City contracts, county contracts. All the business you want. And then you don’t pay the withholding, you skim that off, you shortchange on all the paperwork—and we do a surprise audit and what? What do we find? Company’s practically bankrupt. And then what? Do we take you out? Do we whack you? No. We give you a second chance. And then a third chance. And Christ, if everyone don’t start talking about giving you a fourth. Finally, we gotta throw in the towel. Right?”

“Yeah,” I said, shrugging almost apologetically. “Yeah.”

“I even put in a good word for you,” Jerry said. “But I mean how many times do you go to bat for a guy and he goes on screwing you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And then we get the word. You’re talking to the feds.”

“Hey,” I said. “When the feds talk to you, you gotta talk back.”

“Yeah? They talked to me, too. I told ‘em to take a cab.”

“That’s you. I strung ‘em along, is all.”

“Christ.” Juliano let out another sigh. “Don’t you think we have people with the feds? People who feed us info? Did you think you could get away with it?”

“With what?”

“Forget it. Okay, get driving. Take the Expressway east.”

“Okay.”

I started laughing again. It was just too much.

Jerry was annoyed. “What the hell is with you?”

I turned the key and the big car’s motor hummed to life.

“I think you’re nuts,” Jerry said. “I always thought you were a flake.”

I shot a grin into the rearview mirror.

“Cut me a break,” was all Jerry Juliano had to say.

I pulled out of Long John Silver’s, drove slowly to the Expressway ramp, and pulled onto it. As I did, I sent a furtive right hand to rummage in the cardboard box bearing the fried fish lunch.

Instantly, the barrel of the revolver was up against the side of my head.

“Don’t go rocket scientist on me all of a sudden,” Juliano said tightly.

“I just wanted a hush puppy.”

Cocking the handgun, Jerry took a look over the seat. “Go ahead, get it.”

I picked up one of the warm balls of deep-fried corn meal batter and popped it into my mouth. I had come to love them.

“I don’t believe you,” Jerry said.

“I’m hungry,” I said. “Haven’t had my lunch.”

“You and fish.” Jerry shot a quick look back to see if anyone was following, then sat back. After a moment, he took note of the opulence around him.

“Nice interior,” Jerry said.

“Thanks. It’s real leather.”

“Yeah. I’m squeakin’ back here in this jacket. But it’s nice. I never thought of a Lincoln.”

“They’re nice cars.”

“They gonna keep makin’ them or what?”

“I dunno. I ain’t heard anything. It’s got computers all over the place. Look at this dash.”

Jerry leaned forward. “Nice. Go ahead and eat if you want to.”

“Thanks.”

I pulled out a huge piece of fish and bit off a big piece of it with a startling crunch.

“Smells good,” Jerry said.

“Have some. I got the three-piece.”

“Not now.”

“Where we goin’?”

“Out east,” Jerry said simply, reaching over the seat back and rifling the box. He came away with a fry and munched it.

“How far out?”

“Far enough.”

“What’s far enough? Montauk?”

“Don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”

“Sorry. You better put on your seat belt.”

“Don’t worry about the seat belt,” Jerry said. “Drive.”

Polishing off two of the fish and most of the fries, I drove east, and east some more.

“What the hell ever did happen to you, Charlie?” Juliano said. “You went wonky on me. I heard all kinds of crap. Like the alien thing.”

“Alien?” I said, still playing dumb.

“Yeah. You were seeing UFOs, or something. Something about aliens taking over your body. Stress, I guess. That right?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” I said. I saw no reason to keep anything from him now. “My body was taken over by an alien intelligence from across the galaxy, thousands of light-years away.”

“Yeah?” Juliano said, chuckling. “How’d they do that?”

“Matter transmission. Transferring bits of alien nucleic acid, supplanting the subject’s. Fairly soon, the host subject is transformed into an alien being, retaining the guise of the subject’s morphology.”

“Huh,” Juliano said, impressed. “Where’d you get that, from Star Trek?”

“It’s true. I was taken over by an advanced alien being. But I’m okay now.”

“You were taken over by the FBI, asshole.”

Juliano lurched forward, his arm looping around my neck. His hand ripped the front of my shirt open and grabbed inside. The wires hurt as he yanked them savagely, ripping them out.

He dangled the tiny mike in front of my eyes. The compact transmitter was still nestled at the small of my back.

“Aliens, huh?” he said. He threw the mike and the wires at the dashboard with great disgust and vi-ciousness. “Aliens, my ass.”

The suburbs thinned, and Jerry said nothing for a long time. Then he said, simply, “Turn off the next exit.”

“Pretty far out in the boonies,” I said, chewing a last fry.

“I was thinking of doing it in Bloomingdale’s, but I thought, nah, too many witnesses.”

I laughed. “There’s another piece of fish left. You want it?”

“Lost your appetite?”

“No, go ahead, you take it.”

“I don’t want it.”

I shrugged. “Going to waste.”

“Never mind about the goddamn fish. You eat it, fer crissake.”

“I’m not hungry anymore. You eat it.”

“Jesus. Awright.”

Jerry leaned over the seat, opened up the lid of the cardboard box and looked in.

At that moment the Lincoln hit the concrete Jersey barrier that I had suddenly and deliberately swerved toward. It was sitting by the side of the road, angled oddly out, left by a road crew that had not taken great pains to straighten up after themselves except for putting up a flimsy wooden horse with a flashing amber light, barely visible in the bright sun. For all that, the thing was no great hazard, unless you deliberately drove straight at it.

The car hit the thing at a little over 30 mph. The impact was enough to throw Jerry over the front seat and head-first into the windshield, cracking it. He ended up a fetal huddle on the floor in front, his neck bent at an odd angle. The windshield bore a small circular wound like a star with rays of cracked glass.

Both front air bags in the front, the one on the steering wheel, and the one in the passenger side of the dash, had deployed with astonishing explosive energy, uselessly. My seat belt had restrained me from coming into contact with my bag, and Jerry’s head had simply glanced off the other.

I was fine. My shoulder hurt a bit, but I felt okay. I unhooked my belt and leaned over Jerry, listening.

I heard no breathing. Jerry’s gun was nowhere in sight. It didn’t matter. Jerry wouldn’t be using it. I reached into my jacket and brought out my own piece, a black plastic 9mm semiautomatic. I checked it over, put it back. Then I got out.

Inspecting the front of the car, I was surprised at the minimal damage. The thick plastic and fake-chrome bumper had deformed only slightly. Not only was the car still operable, it was hardly touched. They make good vehicles, I thought. Nothing like a big old car. I hated compacts.

There were woods nearby, and I took myself for a walk. Following a deer trail, I passed through a copse of beech trees and came out into a little clearing.

It was a perfect day. The sunlight warmed and the wind cooled. The high sun backlighted a single cloud of writhing wisps and smokes, illuminated to an ethereal glow. It could have been some long-departed spirit, once earthbound but now free.

I was that spirit. I was a ghost on this planet, a shade of my former self, my former life on a planet far across this island universe that my race shared with the dominant species of this world. My essence had been transmitted across the vast black reaches, and I took up a new life here. The irony, the irony of the nature of that new life.

I smelled the sea and watched a white gull circle below the cloud. Birdsong came from a stand of timber to my right. A breeze came up and stirred the tall grass and made the sound beach grass makes with wind in it, a high, thin, brittle rustling, as if the grass were made of paper.

I smelled sea smells and earth smells, and the mixture was heady. The sky seemed bigger, out here in the boondocks, and the earth and sky was all there was. I heard no highway sounds. I looked down. The black earth was damp. I watched a beetle crawl along the ground, then disappear under a rock.

An insect flitted by; a blur of color, a flutter, then gone.

I felt odd, but good. I was aware of the world, and my place in it, interloper though I might be. I was here. Why? To see. To see, I thought. And I saw. I saw all this. I was alone on the Earth. There was only the Earth and myself, in solitude with my senses. My life—my lives—and their particular details, their shape and contour, their fits and starts, and this final faltering, were of little importance. All that mattered was that I was alive. I was here. I saw, I experienced. From this I derived an immense satisfaction, wordless and incommunicable.

But what of the life I had supplanted, usurped? That individual—Charles “Charlie Fish” Bonanno—was gone, and his demise posed an ethical problem, for all that he had possessed the morals of a slug. What rankled most was that it had all been in vain. “Juliano” could have been a transplant himself, an agent, an assassin sent by the galactic criminal organization I had betrayed eons ago, in another star system at the other end of the starry swarm of the Milky Way. Their tentacles were infinitely long. They were still reaching for me.

There was no remedy for it. I had no way of communicating to my protectors. There was no instrumentality on this planet capable of sending a distress signal. I was trapped here. The trouble with the Witness Protection Program was that it was a one-shot affair, so to speak. You got one chance to escape and hide. It was useless. If they could find me once, in time another assassin would come. Of that I could be quite assured.

I took a deep breath, then walked back to the car. I wedged my stocky frame into the front seat, and took out my primitive firearm. I slid out the clip, looked at it, then shoved it back into the handle.

Releasing the safety on the automatic, I glanced at the still form on the floor beside me. Was he or was he not an agent sent by the Organization? I didn’t know. But it didn’t matter. It was only a matter of time before such a one appeared. My only recourse was clear.

Holding the gun upside down, I placed the barrel between my lips and fired a bullet up through the roof of my mouth and into my tiny human brain.