The uncertainty of perception confused Malcolm, the sensation of being hopelessly surrounded by darkness and of being in a room which pervaded with the sudden and jarring silence that comes only to someone who has woken from a nightmare just before death, but is not yet ready to open his eyes and find out if he really was just dreaming. In his dream, whatever it was he had been fighting was pouncing on him, but he usually slept through the scene of his own death. Transitions from dream to waking were a gray area of experience, leaving a confusion of what was true and what wasn’t for later interpretation.

The blue digits of his alarm clock strobed brightly, pulsated, as his eyes tried to adjust. 3:00. Too early. It wasn’t time to get up for work yet. Not even close. At least a couple of hours yet to wake up, or more, or less. Damn morning math, unreliable as the universe on a windy day.

His first coherent thought of the day was tinged with paranoia. What caused him to wake? He’d heard a sound, it had just come back to him, or maybe the telepathic perception of movement in the room, but now that he was more awake, he was sure it was definitely something external to the dream itself. His joints resisted him, his motor responses fought his desire to turn, to find a position that wouldn’t knot his muscles by the time the alarm went off, every thought fell to sleep. His eyes were still heavy, groggy, desiring to remain closed, forcing him back under to delta wave, rapid eye movement and more nightmares.

The next time he woke up, the covers had tangled around him, wrapped around his leg, and wound its way up his chest, wrung into his clenched hand, another fitful surrender to the subconscious. He forced his eyes open. The sun must have been just rising above the horizon, a small amount of blue light slipped casually in around the shade. Even this dim light was shockingly painful, unexpected, lambent, and so far away a desperate man would see it as salvation, but would never be able to reach it. He wondered if he was waking in a dream within a dream, and scanned the room for clues. Had he left his shirt draped like that over his dresser, or a shrouded figure? Could be a trick of the mind. He couldn’t move no matter how hard he tried. He pushed hard, his heart started beating faster under the strain of his exertions, the dull thud of that beat grew louder in his head, isolating him further from any normal reference point, he became an island of fear surrounded by an unfamiliar ocean. Time, too was off, he realized. He thought it was just moments since he’d last found wakefulness, but couldn’t be sure, and he still lay immobile. He tried to see the clock, but it was out of view and blurry. Clouded perception. Something was somewhere, of that he was certain now, and the light beyond the blinds got further and further away.

Then the sound came again, its direction indistinct, coming from everywhere and nowhere, but closer. He was being hunted. Since he couldn’t move his head, his hearing was pure monophonic, and non directional, the attack could come from any direction. His confusion told him to be wary, but something kept him from knowing quite why, something getting weaker by the second. It sounded like his distempered cat, its claws looking for a blood fix. It couldn’t have been the cat. The cat never left the front room, and had died years ago. Malcolm blinked and grunted, trying to break whatever force was holding him from the slightest movements.

The sound came again, just at the edge of perception. It was real, he was certain now, as he was certain now he was awake. The blinking was working, pulling him out of hypnogogic delusion.

Early morning noises made him suspect the worst. Human intruders didn’t come into apartments like his. It had to be something far worse; even the best of charms and wards couldn’t guard against every kind of demon or spell. The urge to sleep pulled at him much stronger than if he’d woken up early and was still drowsy, the pull felt unnatural, impossible to resist. It eased any fear he had, comforted him like a sweet lie, lulled him and gained strength in the incantation into forgetting why he was wavering in and out of sleep.

Then he heard more sounds, and a half-felt tug came at the blankets near his feet, then a movement on his chest, the sensation of something with no weight pouncing. He awoke again, this time suddenly fully aware, and eye to eye with a Mara. Malcolm could only catch a slight edge of its form in the low light, the glow of its eyes faintly illuminating Malcolm’s face. The illumination was like a candle, traveling only those few inches before being lost in the darkness.
Malcolm shuddered in surprise, his body convulsed, every muscle fired once in unison trying to break free of the Mara’s hold, and the Mara uttered a singular unimpressive squeak of surprise. Prey never moved that much when under its control, the prey never moved at all. The little creature closed in anyway, feeling confidence in its powers. Another warning sign it ignored: Malcolm continued to stare directly into its eyes. The Mara went on with its feeding, sensing that the prey had already moved into the first stage of fear: awareness. It wrapped its tiny hand around Malcolm’s throat, just a little squeeze and the resulting dip in oxygen would induce panic.

It didn’t know the predator-prey relationship it had until now been enjoying was changing by the moment, Malcolm was alert now, and saw through the deception, saw it for what it was. Malcolm’s perception was this: a small, translucent green creature, knee high to someone shorter than Malcolm, large bright yellow insect-like eyes, a large round head supported on a tiny body, strangling him softly with delicate hands more befitting something out of a cartoon than a predator. What the Mara thought Malcolm saw was this: desiccated flesh stretched taught over a huge frame, claws long enough to go all the way through, tattered black skin stretched over bone wings, spiky gray hair covering its body. Or maybe just eyes, large and glowing red, a body unreliably outlined by dark perched above the prey. Or maybe two figures in the room, lights outside the window, the abduction psychodrama.

The Mara realized then something wasn’t happening it was expecting, the energy rush of feeding wasn’t coming. The thought that something was wrong broke through its primitive thought process a very brief moment before it was too late.

Malcolm knitted his brow, and reached up. Now it was the Mara panicking, now it was the Mara being strangled. Now it was the Mara that was screaming and tumbling through the air, striking the wall, falling to the ground, and now it was Malcolm feeling only drowsy and angered, and knowing he wouldn’t get back to sleep.

The Mara ran through its instinctual devices, wondering what it had done wrong, but then it saw its prey rise and look directly at it. It wasn’t the time for learning processes. It was the time for survival. It looked for a way out of the situation, but no ideas were forthcoming. The thought occurred to it to flee, but as this thought flashed through consciousness like an uncertain leap into fog, it found Malcolm standing overhead, impassible. The cornered Mara geared up the fiercest responses it could muster.

Malcolm recoiled his leg and kicked the Mara, his foot striking with a satisfying thud that felt as if this creature had a measurable mass. This always troubled Malcolm, how they had no weight but still could be felt and handled, were just as deadly as anything anyone else could see. The physics of the phenomena was something Malcolm had only just begun to study.

The Mara doubled over, coughed and moaned. Malcolm could have just picked it up at this moment, but the first kick hadn’t satisfied Malcolm’s frustration enough, and so he kicked again, and again for good measure. He hesitated a moment as the creature, still only half-seen by morning light, tried to recover. As he recoiled his leg for another strike, he decided the maximum of frustration he could take out on this creature had been reached, and he just wouldn’t be salved in this way, and so he picked it up again by the throat and carried it, kicking and protesting like a petulant child, its little hands prying at Malcolm’s grip. Malcolm walked it down the hall with a calm as if this were just a matter of course.

Turning left into the kitchen, his eyes landing on the coffee maker on his counter. The little glass pot waited to fulfill its purpose in life, and it gave Malcolm a new thought on this early morning, a thought of his curse, a thought of his ability, his own personal stigmata, and how it just cost him another morning’s sleep. And a thought of coffee. How much of a relief it would be to wake up to a simple cup of coffee without something like this happening. It didn’t seem like it would be too much to ask. Malcolm paused here, holding the Mara, and flipped the switch on the coffee maker. The light cheerfully obeyed the command, it gave a promising gurgle, and then continued to his back door.

As Malcolm opened the door, the Mara screamed loudly, a sharp and piercing cry that cut especially deeply in the auditory nerve this early in the morning like a demonic dog whistle, and Malcolm was the only one who could hear it., a parting shot at Malcolm. He dropped the mara to the stoop, as nonchalantly as if he were putting out a cat. The Mara began to writhe, rolling on its back, kicking and turning, but it was too late. Its figure began to dissipate and disintegrate in the sunlight as it got to its feet. It ran for the open door, but it had already mostly disappeared, only its legs were running, then only its calves and feet, then only its left foot stepped on the threshold of his apartment before also disappearing into a vapor. Malcolm stepped away, back inside, to his cereal, coffee and newspaper.

The cereal he chose from a systematic filing order in his pantry was the same cereal he’d been eating every Tuesday since he was seven: Cap’n Crunch. He removed the milk from the refrigerator and a bowl from the cupboard. He opened the jug of milk and poured, but only a small trickle came out. Funny, it was fresh two days ago. Two bowls of milk, two glasses at night before bed, about four cups, far less than the gallon. Something else was consuming the milk. It wasn’t possible to be out of milk, not at all, but there it was. The anomalies of the morning had to be recorded before anything else happened.

June 24th, 2003: Woke up early this morning. I had no choice. A Mara was trying to strangle me. Mara feed on fear and helplessness, then leave you bewildered and seemingly untouched, leaving you to wonder if it all really happened.
Awareness. You must be aware of something to fear it. Prey is never afraid of the hunter hidden perfectly behind the dark undergrowth. Fear is part of the hunt, and the prey must see the hunter, hear the hunter, smell the hunter to fear it.

When you feed on fear, apprehension is the appetizer.

This is how a Mara feeds: First the Mara lets you know its there by making a slight sound, drawing attention, letting you imagine the worst; a hostage mind running through its worst case scenarios is its playground. It is nocturnal and has learned you are more susceptible to horrific imaginings if it strikes at night. You create your own image, confront the menagerie of your nightmares, making the prey complicit in its own predation.

Most prey visualizes a much larger creature, its own natural predator, or visualize simulacra over other things in the room, giving common objects a form that is anything but small and impish or familiar. Usually it appears huge, frightful, or numerous.

You’re paralyzed before it touches you. Your heart starts pumping faster, supplying blood to muscles that cannot move. Some victims might fall prey to a heart attack right here, ruining the meal for the Mara. The Mara needs a captive and alert prey. Only then will the Mara reveal itself.

In the end they’re only a nuisance, a weak species, almost never fatal. I don’t even need to cast a spell to kill them, which was good, because I had no pen and paper handy. Since they are so prone to nocturnal hunting, they have an intolerance to sunlight. If they were more common, or deadly, I’d keep a sun lamp on my night stand. As it was, my weapon was just below the horizon.

I killed it, of course.

I don’t really mind Mara attacks, not like the bigger demons, but it’s a damn ugly thing to wake up to. I also ran out of milk.

I’ll be getting closer to a regular schedule soon, our mending is going well, as are most of the other projects. I’d like you to check out a relatively new one, The End of the World Times, the Journal of a (hopefully) Alternate Future. You should enjoy it. We have 4 writers currently uploading material and two more coming on-line soon.

Also want to let you know about The Compulsive Writer’s Support Group. This is my podcast about writing, and I’m going to start covering writing The Hidden on it with the next episode. What this will amount to is a kind of director’s commentary that you would listen to if you had the DVD of the movie of this storyline, but I don’t play them both at once here because that would be confusing. I’ll discuss the decisions behind the storyline, some of the secrets, backstory, and some of the things that went on around writing this book. I have an odd habit of things that I write coming true in very odd ways, and that will be a running theme with the podcast analysis.

But for now, Chapter 4a

The sun dripped down the distant skyline, its reflection oozed down the buildings, and passed through the pollution to color everything the shade of rotten blood. The air hung still, infectiously humid, stagnant. This was the joy of Chicago summers, hot, humid, and sticky. The day was feeling longer and longer for Tobias, the result of too much time spent wandering in the open.

Times like these that the streets made the streets their most hostile; Tobias didn’t know who was watching, or what situation might arise to ensnare him. The police knew his face from numerous run-ins and the street had eyes and teeth of its own. It could spot a person in distress from blocks away, and swallow him whole in a second. A rival gang member on an incursion could take you out without the courtesy of letting you see who’d done the killing, a hit and run driver could be thirsty for a victim, a beggar might pull a knife. Any of these events were not just possible, but likely if you showed a hint of weakness at the wrong moment.

The worst thing running around in his head, though, was a single image: the shop keeper, growing pale, groaning, falling over, turning blue, his skin sinking in, turning transparent, skin cracking open, and then it flashed out, his mind couldn’t take it anymore, and he found he’d walked another block without noticing anything. Over and over for blocks it happened, and it didn’t get any less jarring through repetition.

But of all the things that could kill, stop or otherwise harm him, his biggest fear was facing up to his brother Wesley. The streets may have been dangerous, but his brother was his best protection. His fear was that word spread like an outbreak on the street. He needed to call Wesley, come in, face up to it, save as much face as possible.

He flipped open his cell phone. Nothing happened. He tried opening and closing it again, detaching the battery, blowing on the contacts, as if that ever did anything, and then reattached it. Nothing. He shook it. Still nothing. The battery was dead. This struck him as odd. His battery had never died so quickly, and it had been fully charged when he left the house. It didn’t matter, facts was facts, he needed to find a payphone.

When survival is key, it’s best to look at your assets and threats, evaluate each for its own merits, take inventory, make decisions, always keep moving. He had allies, shaky and tentative alliances, everyone that spent time as a plaything of the streets had to have some, and the more you had the less chance the streets would eat you. But those alliances all had prices, and he owed more favors than he’d given. He didn’t have much more room on his street credit card. He couldn’t count on everyone in his gang. They’d without a doubt protect him, but most were out for their own advancement, and they would use this to their advantage if they could find an angle.

Some of the allies had told him the cops came around asking with urgency, just a routine matter, the usual line. But they were detectives, not the beat cops. Detectives never came around on routine matters, you never saw them in the bad neighborhoods like the beat cops. The beat cops knew where Blooddog territory ended and Lunatic Species territory began, who was in power and who wasn’t. Beat cops were Tobias’s main problem. They knew Tobias was out there, and they all knew their beats.

He hadn’t returned home since this morning, and he hoped his mother was too drunk to care about anything when he got back. If he malingered long enough, she would have reached the bottom of her bottle, and dropped it by her side on the way to an alcoholic slumber, a cancerous liver, and a terribly painful end. She wouldn’t come out looking for him.

He decided in the end that it was best to keep it in the family, regardless of how much grief Wesley would give him. It was time that he stopped avoiding the issue, and faced it with some amount of dignity. He convinced himself that this was the way he would grow into an adult, a leader, to face up to his mistakes.

He thought these were his biggest problems. He coughed twice, he felt a constriction in his lungs like he had asthma. He kept telling his mother he should get checked for it. His chest felt constricted, his throat felt like it was closing in. His asthma was picking a bad time to come back, but he figured the stress wasn’t helping it any.

The demon perched on his shoulder. When riding something like this, it limited its effect as best it could. It was unnecessary energy expense. All around it, the demon sensed food, but it all moved too quickly to be easy prey.

Tobias found a payphone outside of a gas station, picked it up and deposited his quarters. One of his first lessons was to always use a payphone for business so there was no evidence in the telephone records of who called who. Payphones were getting scarcer these days, finding one that hadn’t been vandalized beyond usefulness was even harder. He picked up, deposited change, and dialed.

The phone picked up on the first ring to the sound of a hard and cautious voice.

“Yeah,” Wesley said.

“Wesley. I’m in trouble,” Tobias was suddenly pleading. He didn’t expect to be suddenly broken practically to tears. He thought he’d be able to maintain his composure. Some adult he turned out to be.

“Tobias? I heard the cops are out for you. What’ve you done this time?”

“I didn’t do a thing. I got caught up in somethin’. Don’ even know what. But, the cops is looking for me.” He turned around quickly, keeping an eye out for cars or cops.

“What’s the problem? Did you get into a fight?”

“No, It jus’ happened. I didn’t do nothing.”

“Uh-uh. Ain’t buying it. Where’s my gun?”

“I ditched it. Had to.”

“You ditched it? I just got you that gun. Shit, that was a good gun, too.”

“I need a lawyer, bro.” Tobias was ashamed to admit it, but he knew he needed it.

Wesley sighed. It was one more time through this routine. “Shit. I’ll call Ellis. Come home. He’ll bring you in,” he said in disappointment, adding the obvious, “And keep out of sight.”

The laws that govern coincidence insist that as soon as things like this are said, a Newtonian equal and opposite force must come into play. This force happened to be a police car, which drove by mostly minding its own business. Tobias was well past the point of playing it cool, the stress of being out and pursued all day had burned out his patience for playacting. He panicked, cowered, turned, hid his face. It was instinct, but the wrong one, he immediately realized that his rash decision just nailed him. The police decided it was worth a second pass to investigate. They slowed down suddenly, put on their lights, and blew the siren once.

“Oh, no. No. Shit,” he said, but there was nowhere to go.

“Tobias, what is wrong?” Wesley yelled through the receiver, hoping to get a straight answer out
of a messed up little kid.

Tobias decided not to try to get away, but to make his continued failure quick and painless.

“I gotta go, bro. I’ll call you in a couple hours.”

Tobias hung up the phone and raised his hands as the police got out of the squad car. They were angry at him for making them get out of their air conditioning in the heat, and it showed, their faces immediately scowled, angry that they were forced out of comfort.

“This better be worth it,” one said to the other, wiping the beaded sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. The other nodded his head in agreement. He pulled his shirt and vest away from his body to get some air.

The officers were quickly on him, asking him for identification. This however, was mere formality. They knew who they had, they’d seen him around many times, and had picked him up at least once before each. They read him his Miranda rights, put on the handcuffs and helped him into the back seat of their car.

The demon sniffed at the police officers. They smelled healthy and fit. They did not have the scent of the struggle for survival. The energy he’d expend in weakening and corrupting them would be greater than the benefit of feeding from them. He waited for easier prey.

The ride to the central processing station in Chicago was slow and shameful. Tobias thought everybody in his neighborhood saw him being driven in the back seat of the patrol car. It was nothing they hadn’t seen before, but it still hit him like this every time, probably his mother’s influence. His cough grew stronger, phlegmy, more violent on the way, got worse every block. He thought it might only be due to the stress, the rotten city air, the heavy Chicago humidity. He couldn’t do anything about the snot, it dripped onto his jeans and the plastic seat of the squad car. He shivered, and considered asking the cops to turn down the air conditioning. He knew they wouldn’t listen, but the shivering made him look nervous, and the nervousness made him look guilty, even though this was the first time he wasn’t.

He played the game. They led him in the front door of the station, and he dutifully followed, dragging his feet on the broken sidewalks only as much as was proper. There were formalities to every situation. When his feet hit the tiles of the polices station, he scuffed along again, to show a proper amount of indignation. It was all a matter of meeting expectations.

The police station was cooled mostly with ceiling fans. The air conditioners that teetered in the windows couldn’t hope to keep up with the number of bodies and the amount of activity in the front rooms, so Tobias was always uncomfortably in a draft. The wooden chairs they forced him to sit in while they did the initial processing were seemingly designed to automatically cause a knot in his back, as if he were leaning on a stone that jabbed only where it would irritate him the most. This made him more bitter and aggravated while the desk sergeant, a plumpish Hispanic woman in the dark side of her forties, searched out the proper forms for admission and processing. Tobias had plenty of time to brood while a pile of triplicate forms accumulated on the desk before her.

Next came the check-in gauntlet. Nami was contacted, and they booked Tobias Stinson on one count of attempted robbery at Nami’s direction. Despite the futility of the charges, it would be near midnight when the booking was complete, and they would be sufficient to hold Tobias until he could be questioned in the morning.

Tobias was pushed along to the fingerprinting station, a tall table with cards and ink pads. The officer here filled in another blank on the paperwork, and drew a card to take Tobias’ prints. Tobias had been through it before, and so when his hand was firmly clutched, his fingers dipped in ink and rolled on the pads, he kept his expression straight and clean, emotionless despite the offensively suspicious gaze in the officer’s eye.

The demon sniffed at the officer, but again held off feeding. He could bide his time. Somewhere near there was proper prey, ripe prey. The scent of corruption was in the air, the scent was close.

The fingerprints done, Tobias was escorted to the next station.

The backboard measured Tobias at five nine. He knew the poses. The flash went off, and he turned without being prompted. When they checked the image, they saw a minor smudge over Tobias’ shoulder. They assumed it was due to a fingerprint on the lens, but his image was unaffected, so it was acceptable.

The demon had never been so exhausted as it had been since it came through. It had never needed to feed so much, its desperation for food had become so tangible he could almost eat it, but it’s species didn’t metabolize desperation. Usually it found its prey after desperation had taken hold, done its work, brought the creature to the beginnings of decay.

Tobias was then escorted through the lockup, his personal items confiscated, cataloged, and bagged: One pair shoes, Nike Jordans size 10; one pair jeans, black; one belt, leather, black; one athletic jersey, Chicago White Sox; one gold bracelet; two gold necklaces, one wallet containing fifty-six dollars; eighty-three cents loose change. This was placed in a large bag, at which point he was issued an orange jumper, and canvas shoes that couldn’t be made into a weapon.

The file officer uncapped a sharpie and said, “Name?”

Tobias replied sullenly, “Tobias Stinson.”

“Name?” The demon replicated the syllables. It was still learning the ways and languages of this new world.

“Age?”

“17.”

“Age?” the demon asked, not knowing what it was asking. “Age?” it asked again, louder. Still no response. There was no recognition at all.

“Age!” it shouted. Still nothing.

Fadil didn’t die a natural death, and the kid didn’t kill him. The message at the fire showed me whatever the inspector determines, the fire started with a demon. Unfortunately the messages were as obtuse as usual, and I have nothing else to go on.

Demons are something separate from our religions, though many of our historic religious demons have been transplants mistaken for religious experiences. Rather they are invasive species, come from a higher plane of the universe.

Lenore told me, their world is dying, and they’re trying to escape into ours. The demonic underworld has a tight grip on the scene in town. Any newcomers are discovered and either assimilated or dealt with quickly. Lenore may have information about any new crossings. She would be able to check her contacts and find out.

She can be hard to find at times though. You can’t summon a succubus, they have their own ways of finding you when they need you, and rarely does it work the other way.

I’ve learned much from Lenore, despite her understandable reluctance to give up too much information on this subject.

She says they have to feed quickly when they’ve crossed over, to establish some stores of power, or return. Or die.

The old breed were content to lay low, feed slow, establish themselves over eons.

It doesn’t work like that anymore. People move faster, there are more to feed on. People don’t perceive demons like they used to. We’re too busy, we don’t notice them until they’re in your face, sucking the manna from you, and sometimes not even then.

(cont’d) Maybe there are more demons now because there are more ways to get here, more places that are worn thin. It was rare in the past, but now with our science experiments, our super colliders and reactors, the doors are opening wider and more frequently.

So here’s their world, our world, a supercollider in the middle. Is this how it works, or just another dead end? And in all of this, where do I fit in?

I’ve tried to figure out the physics of this theory, and I have some difficulty getting from the equations to what I observe. It’s not exactly my field, but not entirely unrelated either. I have studied independently, I can at least speak with some intelligence on the subject.

This episode covers all of chapter 3. Thanks for sticking with me through the delay. It’s been some trying times here, but there’s no stopping this show. As always, you can check out the mini-site for The Hidden at http://mindofbryan.com/thehidden. I’ll be adding some supplementary materials there as i get time and to the right points in the story. You can subscribe to the podcast here:

To give you some idea about some other projects that are happening, you may want to check out The End of the World Times, the journal of a (hopefully) alternate future. Set in the year 2012, the world has had a chain reaction of apocalypses, and the Times send out reporters to cover survival niches. There are several reporters nearing joining, including a zombiepocalypse, but our first character has already met cannibal mushroom farmers and a psychotic survivor who thinks he’s Pickman from the H.P. Lovecraft story. It’s fun for the whole family.

I am also feeling daring enough to upload the first parts of “Inside”, my next novel on the main Mindofbryansite. Inside is an adults only story about a fetish artist who decides to take on the forces of religious fundamentalism in America through his art, and finds out that its a difficult world to love in.

There will be a journal entry to follow this chapter as well.

So, without further ado, Chapter 3.

Chapter 3

The beginning of the paperwork was as close to a ritual as Nami ever came. He started with a meditative review of the initial evidence, laying out the ingredients that would eventually lead to a reading and a suspect. It began at the end, the scene of the crime, where the visualization of the evidence begins. Each piece was a node in a matrix, waiting to be connected together, coalescing to form a whole picture of the crime, a visual network in Nami’s cortex.

The paths of the individual pieces of the tale of why Fadil Marak was found dead on the floor of his convenience store formed brightly lit paths, like a complex molecular diagram. As he introduced new evidence the diagram would shift, new links were made, a new result was formed eventually leading to an ending point, a solution. The paperwork was the first added chemical, the first process of review, where some suspects were ruled out, some were flagged for their potential as the protagonist in this drama. Nami’s gut told him who to focus in on, and in some of his cases, he was right even this early in the process.

At this point his list of suspects was thin. The only people known to have been in the store in the morning were the victim, a delivery driver, and this gang kid out for an early morning robbery, who instead called in the ambulance. There had been no credit card transactions, and the security cameras had picked up only a couple other customers who had paid and left prior to all of this happening. This was not looking like a homicide.

On the other hand, there had been a gun in the store, and nothing could be ruled out quite yet. He would have preferred to hand this off to street crime, since it appeared to be a robbery with utterly bad timing. Suspicious circumstances were the only things keeping this in his current case load.

He started in on the typewriter, filling in the first of many forms, but had hardly forefingered his way through a word when he heard a knock at the door. Detective Garcia, a relative newbie from street crime walked in.

“You ever going to use more than two fingers to do that?” he mockingly asked Nami.

“Call me when you’ve ended the gang problem,” Nami replied without looking up. You had to hold your own in the ego games of the station.

Garcia smiled, he didn’t have a comeback to that one.

“I saw your tape. The kid on the surveillance camera.”

“You know him?”

“Grew up with him. When I was working juvie, he was a regular. Now that I’m on gangs, its like he never left.”

Nami stopped to assimilate this into his story, his motion picture of the event.

“What’s his name?”

“His name is not quite as important as exactly who he is. Tobias Stinson, the youngest brother of Wesley Stinson.”

These names meant nothing to Nami. He shrugged and shook his head.

“Wesley is in the upper echelon of The Blooddogs, a younger brother, Lavon, is in middle-management, but is never going to make it. Your boy Tobias is Wesley’s protégé, but when you look at it, he’s got even less potential than Lavon.”

Nami immediately wrote the name down on a note pad for inclusion to his files. “We know how to get our hands on any of them?”

“Tobias has to keep a permanent residence at his mothers, terms of his probation. But you probably won’t find him there. Not after something like this. You’ll have to find him on the street.”

“Great.”

“Don’t worry. He’s not too smart. He’s still a kid. You’ll find him,” Garcia reassured Nami.

“You know, I’m not too sure this is a homicide. It might fall back into your lap. You want me to pass it your way if it is?”

Garcia considered this for a moment, then dismissed the thought.

“Attempted armed robbery, probation violation, maybe assault. Not much on the camera, no witnesses. The gang retains a local Johnny Cochran for their defense, so the whole affair is a time consuming wash.”

He started to step out, but realized it might be a bit of a high-profile case if it came to all that.

“Still, call if it turns my way. I’ll see what I can make of it.”

Somewhere in the wilds of Chicago, another side of the death of Fadil was running scared, unsure of exactly what kind of trouble he was in, but certain that it didn’t bode well for him. Tobias tried to avoid eye contact with everybody he encountered on the street. Nearly every face seemed hostile now, threatening, and the hot chills of a fever sweat had begun to run through his body. He wasn’t sure if his nerves were driving him, or he really was sick. His judgment seemed so clouded right now, he couldn’t trust his instinct.

Over seven hours had passed since he’d left the convenience store, so he figured the police may have come up with his ID if they were on their game. Response time was at least one of the characteristics of the police with which he had intimate knowledge. When they finally got it into gear, he’d catch wind of it long before seeing a cop. He kept to the side streets and alleys, he was in his territory, so he felt a degree of comfort and ease to get around inconspicuously. Still, he didn’t want to be seen, just in case the cop that landed on the case was a young go-getter.

Tobias carried a rider on his shoulder that he wasn’t aware of, it was invisible, and had no weight at all. This world was very new to it. On its home world, there was nothing like what he was experiencing now. It knew of cities, but had never been to one, it had only sat on craggy desert mountains and looked at them from afar. If its kind ever went near cities, they would be chased away or killed. The cities there didn’t look anything like this. This was huge. It’d never seen anything as tall as the formations around him that were built with intelligent hands. They looked like cliff walls, but straight and regular. It didn’t know why it wasn’t being thrust away, expelled, destroyed. It didn’t even know how it had found its way here, and so it went about its ways cautiously.

It just knew it was hungry. In the outskirts where it lived on its homeworld, food was scarce and it was nearly always hungry, but not like this. The food it had taken so far should have been able to last months, but it had been hours only, and it was already weak with hunger. Its belly was gaunt, it could see its sinews and organs outlined. It would need to feed again soon, or it wouldn’t survive.

The things in the places its host had taken it had shown little weakness, its last meal had taken nearly as much energy to consume as it had given, but it was necessary. The prospects were looking better, though. It could smell frailty in the air. Where it smelled frailty, there was easy prey. It was only a matter of time.

Tobias crossed 113th and headed west on a one-way, ever deeper into his neighborhood. The bricks of every building bore the familiar tags of his gang, which were repeated on the aluminum surrounding every payphone, on every street sign and every streetlight. His plan to avoid capture started with a change of clothes. In order to last much longer, his appearance couldn’t match what was on the security camera tapes.

Every step he took, though, made him more angry. Why the hell did I follow Levon’s advice, he thought. What the fuck does he know? Show Wesley that I’m ready for advancement by robbing somewhere? Fuck. How stupid can I be following that advice. Dumb piece of shit.

When he rounded the corner to his block he stopped and waited. He didn’t see any cars that might be police, marked or unmarked, there didn’t seem to be anyone just sitting in a car somewhere, which would have been a suspicious enough sight to make him deviate from his plans. He waited for ten minutes, but the cars that passed by were all locals, no patrols were out looking for him, at least not yet.

Even so, he took the back stairs up to his mother’s apartment, hesitating still to be sure no one waited for him in the alley. He took the stairs with apprehension, stepping as light as he could, one decrepit paint-peeled step at a time. He didn’t need anybody hearing his footfalls, the creaks and bumps that brought the residents of this neighborhood to glance out the window from around a corner to see if they were going to be broken in on or not. Behind all of his hesitation hid the reality of why he didn’t want to go back home: he was ashamed of what he did.

The back door to his mother’s apartment led directly to the kitchen. Through the narrow holes in the old lace curtain in the window he could see the silhouette of his mother, lumbering about the kitchen.

Tobias’s mother was a large woman, who bore the rough complexion, gray hair and the strained voice of a hard life. Her presence meant she hadn’t gone in to work at the church, which was just fitting for the way today was going for Tobias. He’d been hoping not to run into her.

He slipped his key into the lock with dread, as if he was a kid who had played hooky from school to have his own adventure and was now expecting his punishment. The lock was a new deadbolt that Wesley had installed for protection, but more for his merchandise than for them. It was about the only shiny new thing in the house.

The lock popped open, and the door jumped a bit; Wesley hadn’t done a great job aligning the lock with the jamb and it was impossible to sneak in. He opened the door with as little noise as he could, as if to do so with any more noise would disturb a delicate natural balance.

But the balance had been disturbed, and the disruption provoked a startled and spastic movement from his mother, and he heard, half concealed, a hard object sliding across the counter. She was trying to hide her bottle of booze. Tobias pretended not to hear, not to notice her sudden start, her alcoholism was beneficial to his own purposes at the moment. If she was drunk, she was easier to deal with when there was trouble.

Smiling wide, she turned around to face him, slipping a fifth bottle into her purse with the discretion of a kid caught with his hands in a candy jar. He could smell the alcohol from across the room, gin, by the smell of it.

The demon smelled her. She would do. She was ready. It could smell liver damage, and a hint of arthritis.

“Tobias. What are you doing sneaking up on me like that?”

He didn’t answer, just gave her a gruff look.

“I— I’m just heading off to work.” She clutched her keys. “You’ll be alright honey?”

He looked at her expressionless, feeling nothing but anger. He forced out an excuse.

“Just stopping by, Ma. No worries.”

She held on for a second, waiting for something else to be said, but nothing was. She grabbed her purse, stepped past him, and headed out the door, closing it with a hard push that shook the house.

The demon didn’t worry that she’d be back. Traces of her disease were all around.

Tobias didn’t dwell on his thoughts, though. He had an objective. They’d be looking for him sometime, and this was the first place they’d come knocking. He rushed into his bedroom, and pulled off his basketball jersey, donning instead a PMZ Gangsta Designs shirt. His shorts were traded for jeans, they’d be hot now in the sun, but if he had to stay outdoors tonight, they’d keep him warm enough.

He dug into the hip pocket of his shorts, and pulled out his cell phone, which was a Swiss army knife for street survival. He found the lead for his power adaptor on his floor and connected it, five minutes would top off the charge. He also pulled out a knife and a dime bag of weed. The weed he tossed on his dresser. The knife he slipped into his jeans pocket, he knew how useful even the glint of a knife could be on the street in the right circumstances. There were plenty of pitfalls on the street, even the street people were dangerous. Some of them would kill you for the few extra cents they needed for a dollar bottle of gin, but a weapon would dissuade them easily.

He flipped open the phone and hit speed dial for his brother’s number. It picked up immediately to the grating static of wind noise. His brother was in convertible, or a car with the windows down, Tobias never knew what he found for himself to drive on any given day.

“Yo,” Wesley said.

“Wesley, I–,” Tobias started, but he was cut off.

“Hey, little bro! What’s shaking? You take care of what I asked you to?” Tobias heard the car accelerate and horns.

“Wesley, see, I—“

“I don’t want excuses little bro. I need it done. It’s important for you if you want out of that house. Other people are watching your performance on this one.”

Tobias pulled hard on his dresser drawer out of frustration. It fell to the floor, dumping out socks, underwear and large satchels of weed. He’d never felt so put in his place, suffering the results of his own actions, unable for the sake of pride to tell Wesley what he’d done, and staring down at the dresser that he’d had since he was a kid, beaten and worn out long ago, nailed together several times and barely still standing. He stopped everything, too helpless to do anything. Then he swallowed his pride and tried to tell Wesley everything.

“Yeah, sure look, I’m in—“

“Hold up, hold up.” He heard Wesley talking to someone else, quietly. “Lavon. You see this shit? What the hell is Latrell doing here? This is our territory.”

The wind noise disappeared from the phone. He had no choice but to wait. Tobias picked up two t-shirts from the floor, and a pair of socks, not even looking at them, and then grabbed a pair of Calvin Kleins, and stuffed them into his backpack as well.

Through the muffled phone, he heard Lavon’s deep voice mumbling, but couldn’t make out what he said. Lavon wasn’t one for precise elocution. Then he heard Wesley’s voice again, “No, no. We’re going to call the cops on him. Gotta go, little bro. Remember, to take care of that for me.”

“Hey Wesley I—,” Tobias tried to get him back, but Wesley’d already hung up.

That settled that, Tobias decided. He’d have to go it alone for the day, try to hide on the streets since he didn’t have a real safe house to run to. It was almost better that Wesley hadn’t heard yet. Maybe he could find his own way out of this trouble.

He looked at the weed. The big packages weren’t his, and he’d have to offload them to someone with less heat. He decided that the dime bag had to be flushed. It was part of the private stash and Wesley had sacrificed good money for it, but leaving it would only compound the problem. The police would search the house for the gun that was on the scene if they hadn’t found it already, and if they found any drugs, it would be almost as bad as if he had it on him. He didn’t need to add possession to the list of charges, he was already going to need enough defense to make Wesley very angry.

He ran to the bathroom down the hall and emptied the contents of the little plastic bag in the toilet and then tossed the bag in after and flushed.

As the water swirled down the drain, so did his world, his head felt like it was flowing around a bowl, he wavered forward and back, he felt like he was seeing from far behind his eyes. He fell back to the door, then his knees weakened, faltered, gave way, his whole body dropped to the floor, and his head dropped to the porcelain, catching his forehead. After a moment, it cleared, and he stood, using the doorknob for support. That had never happened to him before.

He returned to his room to grab his phone, verified the charge, and pocketed it. Next, he had to find a way to get rid of the kilo in his bag. That was intent to distribute, and any bit of anything that he had going for him in the Blooddogs. He ran through his list of contacts, and the closest and easiest was Droob, who lived upstairs and three apartments over. He tossed the kilo in his bag and ran out the back door.

He pounded on Droob’s door for a minute or two before it opened. Droob looked strung out on something, but it was better than being caught out in the open with the stuff.

“Droob, I got trouble. Can you do something for me?” Tobias asked. He heard a television with some talk show on in the apartment.

“Man, I just got my shit on. What you need?”

“I got somebody on me. I can’t get this over to The Doctor’s. Can you do it?” He held open the bag so that Droob could see what was in it.

“Man…What’s in it for me?”

“They said they’d give me a hundred bucks. Its yours if you get it done today.”

“I could turn this into a couple G’s myself.”

“You know if Wesley knew you did that, you wouldn’t make it two days.”

“Shit, coupla days’d be all I’d need.”

“But if you helped Wesley’s little brother out in a jam like this, you know he’d look favorably upon you.”

“Really?” he said, still hesitant. “Alright. Alright, I’ll do it, soon as I come down, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Tobias handed over the package and turned away before the door was closed.

Now there was nothing for him to do but brave the streets.

Malcolm arrived home, still hungry, but with milk, eggs and other victuals, but it wasn’t time for food. It was the time for processing the information he had collected. There was something more involved here than just a simple death, something that Nami wouldn’t be able to fight, wouldn’t be able to stop. That was what he’d learned at the Convenient Store.

So he put the eggs and milk in the refrigerator and left the non-perishable goods in the bags on the counter, to be put away later. He thought for a second that after being in the store this morning, he’d have to reconsider his notion of non-perishable goods, and maybe buy another refrigerator. But there was a time and a place for that as well. He opened a drawer and pulled out a dishtowel, ran it under the faucet for just a second, and then opened his freezer for ice. Using this, he wrapped his hand. Maybe the swelling would come under control, the throbbing would end, and he’d be able to move his fingers without pain again.

It was just like his mother had done. He knew about ice packs like they had at hospitals, but preferred his utilitarian approach to life. Modern conveniences were not so great when you needed them and they weren’t there.

He headed to his study. The first clues in a case like this were always elusive, but he had his means to suss them out. They came to him from the papers he collected, miscellaneous bits of information that seem to gather relevance by direct experience of the environment and then a viewing through Malcolm’s perception. He arranged them on his desk, finding a grocery list with six of eight items crossed off, and a phone number written on the side in another person’s writing; an address scrawled under the words “massage therapist,” though, by the name next to it, “Thumper”, she’ll probably give a bit more than a massage. These and the rest he arranged on his desk. He didn’t need to look at them to know another demon was on the loose, he was looking for his starting point.

He spent a minute in complete silence, breathing slowly, letting go of the weight of the day and taking in the calm and quiet of his home, and when his heart had reached a slow, normal pace, and his breathing had relaxed into deep breaths and longer exhales, only then did he look at the papers.

Nothing happened. No revelations. Nothing.

He moved the pieces around a couple times at random, thinking maybe the recombination might spur a further clue, but they still gave him nothing. He could never make the messages materialize on command. This fact that told him that whatever his ability may be, he didn’t produce the messages, he received them.

The papers were silent, and that was just the fact of the matter. He put them aside until they found it a fitting time to say something to him. He turned to his journal.

Somewhere about the eighth ring, when the answering machine picked it up with the clicks and whirs of its tape decks, Malcolm realized the phone was ringing. He decided to ignore it.

The machine clicked to life, the cheap plastic box vibrated harmonically and distorted while playing the message. It was from his boss.

“Malcolm, remember that job you didn’t come in to today? I hope you do, because you don’t have it anymore. I’ll mail your final paycheck.”

This didn’t hit Malcolm, it was of very little consequence today. He stood to look at the north wall of his study. There was no window, and so it afforded him the greatest possible surface area with which to post pressing issues. Years ago, Malcolm had covered it with corkboard, floor to ceiling and long enough to pace in front of when he had to take in the bigger picture, and occasionally the bigger message.

The wall did to text what Jackson Pollock did to paint, and Malcolm was the artist that oversaw the confused placement of the materials. Covered with papers, clippings, and notes pierced through the heart like an insect collection mounted for study, the papers were tacked in a specific and irregular arrangement that defied all logic save Malcolm’s. Some had been up long enough to be yellowing with age, but most were quite recent, cases that were most pressing.

Malcolm removed some clippings from a spot on the wall that hadn’t had any action for weeks. Either the demon had died of natural causes, or the trail was irrevocably lost. He collected those papers, bound them together with a large paperclip, and labeled the stack for filing according to specifics, symptoms, locations. He’d developed an easy reference system to track demonic attack. The bundle was moved to Malcolm’s files, a card catalog spared demolition from a library that got the computer budget early in the previous decade. The drawer was labeled “Cold Case”, a drawer Malcolm hated to open, because it represented so many failures.

The new scraps of paper were put up in this case’s place. The Polish menu. A piece of notebook paper with hastily scribbled directions to a sordid hotel rendezvous, a cast off advertisement for a pest control outfit. This one read, in full:

Direct Pest Control

Certified * Licensed * Insured

20 years in the neighborhood.

Reasonable rates.

Safe and effective.

Call Brad 773-145-8900

It had pictures of various home pests in the margins. A second glance, and Malcolm saw none of that. He saw, in irregular, uncertain script only one word. “Decadere.”

“Latin root. Decay,” Malcolm said, translating and interpreting automatically.

Malcolm’s eyes fell on an article cut from an obscure journal of scientific study that a layman would never have heard of. The article, by a Dr. Algauer, described a new theory which was gaining momentum. In it he outlined how our universe is only one of many universes in what he called a megaverse. It also described a possible mechanism for the crossing over of matter between these universes. Malcolm removed it from the wall, and sat back down to his journal.

Malcolm picked up his phone and dialed information. When the operator came on, he asked for Fermi Lab, Head of Theoretical Physics. The operator turned the call over to the computer, which automatically spouted the number, and began the offer to connect at no extra charge, a pre-programmed routine it repeated millions of times daily. Malcolm had already disconnected by the time it offered, the number was a permanent fixture in Malcolm’s memory. He wouldn’t ever forget it. The phone rang three times before picking up.

“Hello. This is Dr. Algauer,” said a small, dry voice.

Malcolm looked at the photo of Algauer that accompanied the article, a little, bespectacled man in a lab coat beside a large mural of a nebula, a galaxy and miles of space, bisected by red lines and notation. His voice fit the picture.

Malcolm suddenly seized, he was unable to speak. He was breaking out of his tightly organized world again, and that never sat well with him. His throat became pasty, uncomfortable. It was hard for him to form words correctly when this happened.

“Dr. Algauer, I was interested in um, well,” a false start. Malcolm hadn’t thought this all the way through, he knew better than to act on an impulse, but didn’t think about it until it was too late. Start again, he told himself.

“I’m sorry. My name is Malcolm Pierce and…I’m interested in your experiments.”

“Oh. Okay, uh, Malcolm. What can I do for you?” Algauer sounded somewhat puzzled. This wasn’t the way he was usually approached. He was getting apprehensive to this curious disruption.

“I’ve been conducting my own research and it’s led me to your work. I’m in the area. I was wondering if I could stop by to ask you some questions?”

Now Algauer knew that this was not an established scientist, but he cautioned himself that Einstein did his best work as a patent clerk, you never knew when another one of those would come along. “What field is your research in?”

“I’m working on something along the lines of your multiverse theory, concerning naturally occurring points of weakness between the universes, and specific types of matter crossing between,” Malcolm offered.

“A little early for that type of work, isn’t it? We haven’t even proven the existence of other universes yet.” Algauer countered.

“This is more speculative.” Malcolm was very tentative. He was in over his head.

“You’re a writer, aren’t you? Sci-fi? Is it a novel, or maybe some ill-conceived film script?”

Malcolm thought he’d lost it. This would never work. He backpedaled, turned himself, adjusted. It was always this difficult, gathering research without letting on what he knew.

“No. I’m not. I’m investigating a case for the police, and I think your work might help my investigation.”

“You’ve been reading too much Douglas Adams.” Algauer was having his fun now. He thought he had Malcolm figured out like a Bose-Einstein Condensate. He was wondering who put this guy up to it.

“You propose that the disappearance of gravitons into another dimension should be detectable, but you haven’t found your evidence. I think that the collision creates a void, and something from that dimension must rush in to fill it. Something that wouldn’t be detected as a graviton, it wouldn’t even be detected because we aren’t even looking for it. I think it’s some form of mirror matter.” Malcolm said it quickly, as if it were much more difficult to think than to actually say.

This statement changed everything for Algauer. He stopped his work for a moment, stopped typing. He thought for a moment that whoever this Malcolm was, he’s an amateur, but he’s read up on the subject. And there was the director’s community outreach program to consider.

Malcolm, on the other hand, didn’t know what was happening, he thought Algauer’s hand might be slowly placing the handset back on the receiver, to get rid of whoever this crank was.

The fear was allayed as the scientist became aware of his ellipsis, and muttered something just for the sake of muttering something. “I…I’ll be free tomorrow morning. If you’re here at 9:00, I can see you.”

Malcolm released a relieved breath. “Thanks. Nine o’clock. I’ll be there.”

Cont’d: I’d been going to that convenience store for years. I knew Fadil – well, as much as I can safely know anyone. I hope its not what I think. It can’t be simply coincidence. Coincidences are just a pattern we’re too afraid to see. I’m attracting these things now to the people around me. I’m a danger to everyone, but I can’t do anything about it.

Even I can’t get used to waking up to a demon attack. Mara are old demons. Every culture has some experience with them, from the old hag of the Scandinavians, some interpretations of the Succubus and the Incubus (the succubus does exist in a very real form, the incubus is an iteration of it), the Celts had faeries that would swipe children at night, the Philipinos have a fat naked man that stuffs his genitals down your throat. Its name, Mara, comes from the Norse “Mare,” and is, in part, the derivation of our modern term, nightmare. Every culture has them, In Poland, it’s Nocnitsa, In Finland, Painajainen, In Persia the Bakhtak. There are equivalents in Iceland, Germany, just about everywhere.

The fact that the little thing was named so long ago, gives me an indication that there have been others like me in the past, and many other demons feeding on humans.

I call them demons, but they aren’t really. That’s just the best word I have for them. They’re just a number of invasive species, existing on a plane I seem to be the only one with the ability to see. I’m still trying to figure out what brings them over. I have partial answers, but that seems to be the only thing I ever get, partial answers.

The Mara is a weak demon where it comes from, it’s part of a symbiotic pair. The mara is the hunter, selects the prey, paralyzes it with fear. Its partner is called a garl, large, clumsy and dumb, but also vicious and strong. It could never surprise prey, it is too cumbersome for that. It needs the mara to incapacitate prey, so it can mosey up and rip off its head. The closest comparison I have for the garl is a carnivorous giant ground sloth. I have not found an analogue on earth.

I’m late for work and I don’t care. Its almost lunchtime, and I should eat. But after the smell in the store, I’m not sure I can. It’s the kind of thing that really ruins the appetite for the rest of your life. I suppose I have to. Just something to reset some order to the day.

There’s a diner near here, a lounge where the management bought into the Denny’s model a little too much for the regulars, but they still go there. They start making my order when I sit down, and don’t bother me much. I’m going there for cereal.

It was a stiflingly hot and humid day, befitting a jungle urban or otherwise, and a faint odor of rotting hung in the air. Malcolm suspected that somewhere in the next alley over, some rats were getting their fill of something that was edible a day or two ago. There were plenty of restaurants in the area, and it could be that none of them have had their garbage picked up for a day or two. With every step he took, the smell got worse.

The sun shone almost intolerably brightly, piercing as it reflected from the mirrored windows of skyscrapers and the windshields of cars. Malcolm had to shield his eyes even from the light reflected from the pale yellow brick Chicago builders seemed to favor in a particularly prolific and aesthetically disappointing period of urban development. Malcolm wondered if some brickyard must have had a special on it. The streets were filled with bleary-eyed young urbanites who sipped five dollar coffees in paper cups with plastic lids on the way to drop the kids at daycare and get to the office. Chicago seemed to run on high-end caffeine. Shops that sold those five dollar coffees seemed to be on every block, and flourished wherever they were opened.

All of this told Malcolm it was another place he didn’t fit in. He couldn’t claim to be a part of the schedules and interactions of the city. He almost believed himself to be a guest symbiote in the great organism that is the brick and mortar, the steel and asphalt and the people that were the organism of the city. Sometimes he felt that no matter where he went, he was the object of strange looks, wayward glances, and incomprehension from first sight. Most people came to the city for jobs, or the night life, his path to this city had been far different, but this is where he’d landed, and where he seemed to be needed.

Malcolm needed milk, and so he headed to The Convenient Store, an aptly named grocery that was staffed by the owner and his family. It was five blocks from his apartment with two turns, and his route featured two blocks on Foster. He hated major streets like Foster for the information overload, but he had no way of avoiding it. When he made the turn, he took a deep breath, shielded his eyes and walked on.

A constant assault of textual over-stimulation and visual information which barraged Malcolm’s hyperlexic mind with messages. Even simple things jumped into his mind, had to be processed before being filed away forever in his memory. “Closed,” “Sale,” and “New summer Fashions” screamed at him, while most people completely overlooked them. Some of these messages came from human agencies, but some of them came from a far more occulted source that had never been clear to him. Inwardly, he trudged, as if he was walking against a blizzard.

Along with the requisite coffee shop, this block featured a clothing resale shop, and an almost as obligatory Polish restaurant. A Polish man with a limited English vocabulary stood in its doorway, passing out papers advertising the restaurant, which were mostly discarded a block ahead, most not even hitting the garbage can, an exercise in futility. Malcolm pocketed the one he was handed quickly, never looking at it. There must have been two dozen in his files at home, collected while working various cases. It was the first time he’d seen this particular man, and the momentary contact with his hand brought Malcolm the image of him, tyrant, beating his five year old son for wetting the bed, an act his son did for attention. The image was not of his concern, but would never be forgotten, but filed to an area of his brain reserved for memories that were none of his business. Malcolm had long ago learned to keep his mind pure of problems that aren’t his.

Malcolm had to walk this street with a carefully trained tunnel vision to make any forward progress whatsoever, had to limit his intake in order to make it all comprehensible. He needed milk for his cereal. That was all he needed, then he could start his day and go to work. He didn’t need the billboards, the advertisements for thousand dollar watches or overpriced jeans for which were placed in bus kiosks. Their target market was apparently people that are not able to afford cars in the city. He didn’t need the neon signs in the windows of every market and liquor store, the sandwich boards with the special of the day in front of every restaurant and bar, or a weathered Sun-Times newspaper box proclaiming “Hospital Evacuated Due to Mystery Illness,” (and affixed to this, the stickers for a band, Geostationary, defunct several months ago due to band politics and the bass player sleeping with the guitar player’s girlfriend).

Everywhere was that smell of rotting. Urban decay. Flesh being stripped from an animal, a person, a neighborhood.

Finally he arrived at the store, walked past the front windows and their ads for cigarettes and alcohol. The smell was now unbearable, flies swarmed in the air near the door, which opened diagonally out to the heart of the intersection. He made a familiar half-turn to the door, but was stopped before entering. A pair of police officers blocked the way seeming rather serious about keeping people out.

“Sorry buddy, store’s closed,” one of the officers said, keeping his eyes on Malcolm.

Malcolm was confused. He wasn’t sure if this was some kind of joke, or if this was a Chicago cop feeling big today. Either way, Malcolm just needed his milk, and didn’t need this problem. His muscles tensed a little bit more, he was about to press past the police officers and into the store when the door opened and a stocky man in plain clothes stepped out backwards, dragging a whirring fan and talking to somebody inside.

The two officers at the door tried to at once cover their noses and continue to be a physical barrier to Malcolm. They stepped aside, stretched their arms out and carefully prevented Malcolm from seeing whatever might be going on inside, or who was coming out. This was the first that Malcolm knew that something was not right, the way they were preventing him from even getting a glimpse in. That wasn’t a good sign. The smell of rotting, however, was suddenly stronger and Malcolm suspected the source was somewhere inside.

“Okay, enough complaining,” the man in plainclothes said impatiently. “We’ll prop the doors open, but it better not contaminate the scene.”

Malcolm didn’t want to recognize the voice, but he did. It belonged to Detective Nami, Chicago Police Homicide division. His presence meant something unfortunate had happened.

With the fan in position holding the door open just enough, the man turned and pulled two rolls of yellow police-line tape from under his arm. He handed the rolls to the officers stationed outside. Apparently in this scene, they were the lucky ones. They looked blandly at the rolls as if he was sticking them with garbage duty.

“Start taping off the doorway,” he said. When they didn’t jump to it, he added, “Or I’ll make you wait inside with us.” The officers regained their composure and started unrolling the tape.

Nami turned around, gulping air to clear his senses. He looked lightheaded and pale. Even though the smell of rotting and death was routine in his line of work, even he was overwhelmed by the air inside the store.

Detective Nami was a tall, stocky Asian man. Wispy hair was slowly vacating the top of his head, but he’d long since given up trying to find a hairstyle that would in some way hide the fact of it. Corpses and cops didn’t care about receding hairlines, so he figured he shouldn’t either. He was dressed in his usual basic suit, nothing special or flashy. He chose his work clothes to be functional, and only cops in TV shows dressed like they were on a runway. On this sweltering summer day, he was certainly overdressed, but the police force dictates a certain professional decorum. He caught his breath and looked up, noticing the one person the crime scene has already attracted. He wondered how they found these things so quickly, it wasn’t like they advertised. It took a second for Malcolm’s face to register on Nami, he was out of context as a bystander.

“Malcolm? What the hell are you doing here?” he said, only partially surprised. Malcolm always seemed to be around when he was needed, but he had no idea why. He then added under his breath, “How’d you hear about this?”

“Hear about what? I just need some milk and eggs.”

Nami took this as one of Malcolm’s peculiar little jokes, even if it wasn’t particularly funny. Malcolm’s delivery always confused Nami. Malcolm could give stone face pointers to Buster Keaton.

Nami opened the door and led Malcolm into the store. Malcolm’s eyes first fell on the body, its eyes staring back at him, open. They had sunk into their sockets slightly. He just barely recognized its face as that of the shopkeeper, Fadil. His body was twisted and gaunt, far more skeletal than he’d looked like in life. You couldn’t see the hard outline of bones on him when he was alive yesterday. Malcolm turned back away. The possibility that it might have been Fadil that was the victim hadn’t occurred to him outside. He’d been holding out hope that Fadil was being interviewed around back by one of Nami’s assistants, that he was just a witness to someone else’s death.

Nami caught Malcolm’s reaction.

“What is it?”

“Can we at least close his eyes?”

One of the forensics officers who seemed to be directing the detail, looked up to them.

“No, we can’t. The tissue has dried, and won’t flex.”

Malcolm swallowed hard and looked back at the corpse. The smell was far worse in here. The air was clogged by a stench that had driven most of the men to wear breathing masks. The air conditioning, which had been cranked to the fullest, couldn’t filter the rot from the air fast enough. From the smell of it, Malcolm could imagine a horde of insects, vermin and other assorted better-not-thought-of elements of the food chain waiting for the human intrusion to leave the buffet. He saw that they had even opened all of the doors from the coolers to help bring in fresh air, and cool the place to slow the decay. Malcolm didn’t think it could have helped much, all things considered, but at least it was worth trying.

The gathered forensics officers paused in their collection of evidence at the intrusion of this stranger, but resumed their duties when they saw Nami had brought him in. Malcolm and Nami each took latex gloves from a box, snapped them onto their hands and proceeded further into the store.

The soot of the dirty floor grated audibly on the soles of Malcolm’s shoes, but it was always that way here, a friendly layer of unmoppable dirt had always coated the floors, clinging hard to crevices in the pitted and worn tiles. This little independent convenience store might have lacked the modern, hospital-like cleanliness and sterility of the 7-11 down the street, but it had character. White paint peeled from the aluminum ceiling tiles, a holdover from the building’s early days, and a sight that was becoming rarer and rarer in the city. Dusty abandoned cobwebs hung along the edges of the walls. Ziggy cartoons cut from  newspapers in the eighties slowly yellowed away underneath a well-worn plastic cover on the counter. The merchandise had settled into slouching piles with a thin coating of dust on dilapidated shelves that were bought second-hand from a closed grocery a decade ago. Even despite this, Malcolm felt that the store had aged greatly since his last visit.

Malcolm took a few more steps into the store, and this was when he first got a good look at the horribly decomposed body, and he had to admit to the fact that he’d lost another friend under less than pretty circumstances, and his only thought was that everything really was going wrong for him today.

The body had putrefied for what looked like weeks, though Malcolm had seen him re-pricing his stock only yesterday. The lips were curled back revealing a horrific caricature of the toothy grin that had greeted customers almost every day since the store opened. The eyes were dried and shriveled, but they still looked back up at Malcolm, a memory that he couldn’t file away into the unimportant parts of his mind.

“Polachek, what have you got for me?” Nami called, breaking Malcolm’s concentration on the body.

A thin dark-haired man standing on the other side of the body looked up through gold spectacles at Nami, then at Malcolm.

“Is he okay here?”

Nami nodded.

“Malcolm, Polachek, Polacheck, Malcolm. He’s helped me out on a few odd cases.” Nami looked at the body and decided to add, “He might be helpful on this one, too.”

Malcolm and Polachek shook hands over the body before Polachek crouched back down to his task.

“Fadil Marak. Egyptian. 47,”he summarized his notes. “By the looks of things, he was stocking the morning’s deliveries when he was attacked. There were no external injuries, no entry wounds. According to the security camera tapes, the time of death couldn’t have been later than 7:30 a.m.”

Nami regarded the putrescent body again, puzzled. It didn’t make any sense.

“7:30 a.m. when? Two months ago?” Nami asks, repulsed. He’d seen many a stinker in his day. How could the body have become like this in only an hour?

Polachek scratched his head and glanced up in confirmation.

“That’s the last time we see him on the security tape. The rate of decay is tremendous. I can’t explain it just yet. But that’s not the only thing I can’t explain—his ribcage—its collapsed.”

Malcolm turned away, not wanting, or needing to see any more. Fadil was dead, that was all he needed, or at least wanted to know on this case. His eyes caught on a small sign in front of the register. It showed a cartoonish teenager, holding up his I.D., and read, “FIND IT.” Malcolm stared at it until Nami’s voice drew his attention back to the situation at hand.

“Who called it in?”

“Some kid called from the payphone by the door, then hung up and took off. Got a couple prints. We’ll run ‘em, see what comes up.”

As Polachek replied, Malcolm turned away again, and saw a lottery sign, featuring a rainbow and a pot of gold, and the words, “STOP IT.”

Nami looked around. A number of fresh boxes lined the aisle, waiting to be stocked, though a closer look revealed them to be moldering as well. A fresh delivery receipt for all of it sat on the counter.

“Maybe the delivery driver saw something,” Nami posited, again breaking Malcolm’s tangential attention, drawing him back to the inner circle. “Let’s see if we can find him.”

Stepping around the body, Nami moved behind the counter, which disturbed Malcolm even more. Fadil should have been behind there, Nami’s presence was an alteration to his expectations that reinforced that something in the world had been irrevocably lost. He imagined Fadil in Nami’s place, moving just as Nami did. It seemed unnatural, Fadil moved in different ways, the simulacra didn’t hold up no matter how hard he imagined.

The Nami-Fadil amalgamation opened the cash register, and then closed it.

“Cash is still here,” Nami’s voice said, and then the façade washed away, it was just Nami, irrevocably Nami.

“So it wasn’t a robbery,” Polachek theorized.

“Not a successful one at any rate.”

Nami rewound the security tape and started it from moments before the event. Malcolm caught a glimpse of a black teenager, his eyes wide with panic, his clothing matching the pattern of a local street gang.

“If it wasn’t a robbery, this kid has a hell of a piece,”  Nami said.

Polachek looked the body over, before responding, “Sometimes its hard to see if there’s a gunshot wound on bodies in this state of decay, particularly if there’s no exit wound.”

Then he stopped in a sudden realization, looked the body up and down again, “Strange that there’s no bugs.”

“Bugs?” Malcolm asked. He  wasn’t particularly well versed on forensic science.

“Maggots, beetle larvae, flesh flies, blowflies, mosquitoes, the usual things you’d expect. Flies would be able to get into a place like this pretty easy, and the body is the most accessible host. Even just a few hours later, untouched, there’d be bugs.”

Nami ejected the tape and sealed it in an evidence bag. He handed it to a forensics officer.

“Get copies of this tape to robbery and street crime. See if they recognize him,” he said.

But Malcolm didn’t hear this exchange. Their voices faded to the background, then faded out entirely. He heard whispers, half-formed words, many voices talking to him at once, hushed voices that weren’t in the room, but watched it nonetheless, a voice like a shrieking whisper saying, “FIND IT. STOP IT.”

He felt light-headed, suddenly drained of even the strength to stand. He stumbled back, his hand touched the counter, and he got a flash of a few hours ago, of Fadil heaving, weakening, and collapsing. His lungs overflowed with blood and mucus; it poured from his mouth. His heart stopped before he hit the floor, and this was where Malcolm came back around, as if someone had just administered smelling salts and he was instantly alive again.

“So what is that smell?” he asked, interrupting the further discussion.

All the eyes in the room turned to him, wondering how he missed the obvious.

“Everything. Everything in the store has gone bad. Even today’s fresh deliveries. Hell, even the Twinkies went bad, and I didn’t think that was possible,” Polacheck answered.

Malcolm looked at the Twinkie display rack. The Twinkie Ranger said, “KILL IT.”

“Anything else you can tell me yet? Cause of death?” Nami asked.

Malcolm couldn’t bear to hear the answer. His throat felt as if a strong hand was closing around it. He felt feverish and short of breath. He turned on his heels, needing to escape the onslaught of sensations and ran out the front door.

Nami didn’t mind following Malcolm out of the store to calm his friend’s nerves, any excuse for a breath of clean air was good enough for him, but by the time he made it out the door Malcolm was out of sight. The two cops guarding the door pointed in the direction of a small city playlot down the street.

Malcolm knew that Nami was going to follow him, Nami’s human compassion was predictable and reliable, one of his better qualities, even if Malcolm didn’t feel it necessary in his case to be the object of the compassion. Throughout their history of working together, Nami had always looked out for Malcolm, while being completely unaware of how many times Malcolm had returned the favor.

When Nami caught up to him, Malcolm sat on a bench in front of the park, holding his head as if he had a hangover, made worse by the high pitched laughter of the children monkeying about on the slides and swings. The kids seemed blissfully unaware of the catastrophe back in the store. Even the prevailing winds shielded them from the smell of the convenience store, for the most part. I’m strong enough for this, Malcolm thought, I don’t need to be coddled.

Usually the victim of demonic attack was someone with a questionable background, drug addicts because their altered chemistry allows easier feeding; or black magic users who were in over their heads when they did a summoning; deaths that were excusable, maybe even beneficial to the rest of us. This time, Malcolm thought, the victim was a friend, an honest man who had no idea what was just beyond perception. He didn’t seek this out, nor did he deserve it.

But Malcolm pulled himself together as Nami sat down next to him. It wasn’t like he could tell Nami what had really overwhelmed him in the store. He held his breath a moment before saying anything.

“I’m okay,” Malcolm said, drawing out the last syllable like a child emphasizing the point.

This hardly convinced Nami. He resettled himself, unbuttoned his collar to feel a bit more relaxed. He’d never seen Malcolm behave like he did in the store, never seen him lose even a hint of composure, and any number of reasons why floated through his head. He was unsure of how to begin. Malcolm, he knew, was sometimes as obtuse as they come, and sometimes more astute than anyone in the world. Nami knew he always had to use just the right words with Malcolm.

“I know I usually don’t bring you to the scene, but this time you brought yourself. You sure you’re okay?”

Malcolm didn’t have to reflect on this one long. Even though their frequent collaboration on homicides had led Nami to receive ever more unusual cases, Malcolm had seen far more disturbing images than this. He didn’t want to mention this, though. That would have led to a longer conversation of reminiscing that he wasn’t in the mood for. Malcolm deliberated on just what course of conversation will get Nami to leave him alone the quickest.

In the end he tersely said, “I’ll be alright.”

Nami didn’t believe him. He interpreted this as Malcolm’s attempt to convince himself of some strength he didn’t have. He admired the attempt.

“I forget what its like, not seeing this every day. You get used to it,” Nami offered.

In a way, Malcolm wanted to tell Nami everything, wanted to tell him about the demons, the truth about the cases they’d worked in the past, how he conducted his part of the investigations, the clues he found in text of whatever holistic derivation, of evidence and testimony that would be impossible to register in court. No, he couldn’t reveal any of that. That always led to trouble., trouble like what happened in The Convenient Store.

“I’m not so…” he started off, but then thought better of it. He didn’t want Nami to come to harm. He negated himself, and internalized the desire come clean. “Never mind.”

Nami reached into an inside pocket of his overcoat and searched for a moment before producing a bottle of water. It made Malcolm wonder if it was only he and detectives who had to be prepared for anything regardless of the weather.

“Here, have a drink.” Nami said, offering the bottle to Malcolm. Malcolm eyed it warily, as if its contents were suspect.

“It’s not from the store. Scout’s honor,” Nami held up three fingers, making an oath.

Malcolm accepted the bottle, but still examined it before cracking the cap.

“It’s strange how hard it is to keep your eyes off the…victim-especially the first time,” Nami said and, trying to breach the subject with tact and decorum, “Is this your first time? I usually only bring you after the scene has been cleaned up.”

Malcolm looked up at him incredulously, hoping to impart a great deal of information about his history of dealing with sordid endings with the look of his eyes. The gaze left too much to guesswork, or the message he read overloaded Nami too much and so he passed over it, filtered it out, getting only the feeling of being strangely and horrifically unsettled. He decided to stop beating around the bush, he had to ask directly or Malcolm was never going to figure out what he was really trying to ask.

“Of all places you could have gone to, what brought you there?”

“Like I said. Milk. Eggs. I ran out.”

“Sheesh…” Nami groaned. “How is it whenever some poor bastard finds a really messed up way to die, you happen to run out of milk and eggs?”

Malcolm laughed slightly, his eyes lit up, having just hit on a thought that Nami would bet was amusing only to Malcolm.

“It’s a convenient store,” Malcolm said. “I always go there. I’ve known Fadil for years.”

Nami could tell from the tone of Malcolm’s voice that Malcolm was amused, but finished with him. He had a way of saying when the conversation was over without actually saying it that Nami had learned to accept, no matter how abrupt it was. At that point, the conversation was simply over.

“Hey, had to ask, you know?” Nami said, relenting. He put his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder reassuringly, smiled, and got to his feet, resigning himself to going back to the smell. The apprehension was obvious even to Malcolm. He lingered a moment longer, taking in deep breaths of air in preparation of going back.

“I understand,” Malcolm conceded, it was Nami’s job to be curious. It was Malcolm’s job to protect Nami from the unseen dangers his investigations might lead him to. After many hard lessons, Malcolm has learned it usually worked out better for all involved that way, excepting perhaps himself.

“Look, I’ve got to get back. I’m sorry if he was your friend. I’ll call if I have anything for you, okay?”

Malcolm didn’t even acknowledge Nami leaving. He knew the call would be coming. He didn’t need any special ability to predict that. As he watched Nami tread his way back, Malcolm knew that starting with a phone call in the morning, tomorrow would not go according to schedule either.

Nami suspected there was a joke coming and that somehow he’d figure it out, and it wouldn’t be all that funny, and he’d regret even having stumbled upon the punchline. The conversation turned over in his head. Malcolm’s jokes almost always involved words, word puzzles, puns. Nami wasn’t good at puns. It was one of the reasons why he wasn’t an English major.

In their history together, Nami never knew how Malcolm did it, but every time he’d been stuck on a case, Malcolm looked at the files, went away and came back with the answer. They left the methodology unspoken. It just came to him, Malcolm said. He wasn’t psychic, he swore up and down, but Nami’s buddies all joked with him about how he doesn’t do any detective work, he just went to his psychic buddy and it was all taken care of. If they only knew what it was like to deal with Malcolm, he thought, the jokes are hardly worth the effort.

When Nami got to the store, he looked up at the sign above the door, which read in faded letters, “The Convenient Store.” Punchline. Stumbled over. Regretted. At least he knew Malcolm was handling things.

Malcolm pulled a notebook from his pocket, and looked up to give a slight smile to Nami as he headed back into the store.

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June 24th, 2008: Woke up early this morning. I had no choice. A Mara was trying to strangle me. Mara feed on fear and helplessness, then leave you bewildered and seemingly untouched, leaving you to wonder if it all really happened.
Awareness. You must be aware of something to fear it. Prey is never afraid of the hunter hidden perfectly behind the dark undergrowth. Fear is part of the hunt, and the prey must see the hunter, hear the hunter, smell the hunter to fear it.
When you feed on fear, apprehension is the appetizer.
This is how a Mara feeds: First the Mara lets you know its there by making a slight sound, drawing attention, letting you imagine the worst; a hostage mind running through its worst case scenarios is its playground. It is nocturnal and has learned you are more susceptible to horrific imaginings if it strikes at night. You create your own image, confront the menagerie of your nightmares, making the prey complicit in its own predation.
Most prey visualizes a much larger creature, its own natural predator, or visualize simulacra over other things in the room, giving common objects a form that is anything but small and impish or familiar. Usually it appears huge, frightful, or numerous.
You’re paralyzed before it touches you. Your heart starts pumping faster, supplying blood to muscles that cannot move. Some victims might fall prey to a heart attack right here, ruining the meal for the Mara. The Mara needs a captive and alert prey. Only then will the Mara reveal itself.
In the end they’re only a nuisance, a weak species, almost never fatal. I don’t even need to cast a spell to kill them, which was good, because I had no pen and paper handy. Since they are so prone to nocturnal hunting, they have an intolerance to sunlight. If they were more common, or deadly, I’d keep a sun lamp on my night stand. As it was, my weapon was just below the horizon.
I killed it, of course.
I don’t really mind Mara attacks, not like the bigger demons, but it’s a damn ugly thing to wake up to. I also ran out of milk.

It was dark as night in Malcolm’s bedroom when a half-heard sound startled him from sleep. The sound hung in Malcolm’s head, existing partly in the dream and partly in the real world without committing to either. He looked at the window. Not a hint of morning light peeked from around the edges of the shade. It was too early to get up, way too early, which could only mean that he was being visited. The blue digits of his alarm clock strobed brightly, pulsated as his eyes tried to adjust. Transitions from dream to waking were a gray area of experience, leaving a confusion of what was true and what wasn’t. He tried to remember what had roused him from sleep and his nightmares, but that took more energy than he had. The thought faded as fast as his memory of his dreams.
The uncertainty of perception confused Malcolm, the sensation of being hopelessly surrounded by darkness and of being in a room which pervaded with the sudden and jarring silence that comes only to someone who has woken from a nightmare just before death, but is not yet ready to open his eyes and find out if he really was just dreaming. In his dream, whatever it was he had been fighting was pouncing on him, but he usually slept through the scene of his own death.
His first coherent thought of the day was tinged with paranoia. What caused him to wake? There was a sound, it came back to him. Or maybe he’d felt the telepathic perception of movement in the room, but now that he was more awake, he was sure it was definitely something external to the dream itself. His eyes were still heavy, groggy, desiring to remain closed, forcing him back under to delta wave, rapid eye movement and more nightmares.
The next time he woke up, the covers had tangled around him. He could feel the sheet wrapped around his leg, and snaking up his chest into his clenched hand. He was acting out his dreams again, another fitful surrender to the subconscious. He thought it was just moments since he’d last found wakefulness, but couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t move.
He wondered if he was waking in a dream within a dream, and scanned the room for clues. He couldn’t tell. Had he left his shirt draped like that over his dresser, or was that a shrouded figure?
He forced his eyes open. This time the sun must have been just rising above the horizon, a small amount of blue light slipped in around the shade. Even this dim light was painful, unexpected, lambent.
He took in what information he could without moving. There was no need to alert anything that shouldn’t be in the room if he could avoid it. It was unnatural for him to wake up like this, he knew something wasn’t right. He couldn’t move no matter how hard he tried. He pushed hard, his heart started beating faster under the strain of his exertions, and hearing the rapid dull thud in his head, he got nervous, which made it beat even faster.
Then a half-heard sound came from across the room, like the sound of his cat, its claws looking for a blood fix. It couldn’t have been the cat. The cat never left the front room, and had died years ago. Malcolm blinked and grunted. Had he woken up before today? Or were those in dreams?
The sound came again, just at the edge of perception. It had woken him before, too. It was real. His confusion told him to be wary, but something kept him from knowing quite why.
Early morning noises always made him suspicious. Human intruders don’t come into apartments like Malcolm’s. It had to be something far worse. The urge to sleep was much greater than if he’d woken up early and was still drowsy, it was unnatural, and impossible to resist. It silently eased any fear he had, comforted him, lulled him into forgetting why he was suddenly awake. His joints were stiff, his motor responses resisted his desire to turn, to find a position that wouldn’t knot his muscles by the time the alarm goes off, every thought fell to sleep.
The sensation worked against him, he tried to push his arm off his chest but it exhausted every effort of his whole body, and he couldn’t even be sure if it had moved at all. The notion that this was just a hypnagogic delusion occurred to him, but he dismissed the thought even before it completed itself.
He just wanted to sleep, an artificial instinct told him all was safe. Just go to sleep. Just go to sleep. Over and over, they lulled him, gained strength of effect in the incantation. Just go back to sleep.
He knew then that something was wrong, he fought to stay awake, despite the overwhelming desire to return to the false safety of night, trying to hear what had woken him. The room remained silent, pushed him back over the edge to fall back to sleep.
He was just out of a sleep cycle enough to be relieved that he didn’t slip back into his dream.
Then he heard more sounds, and a half-felt tug came at the blankets near his feet, then a movement on his chest, the sensation of something with no weight pouncing. He awoke again, this time suddenly fully aware, and eye to eye with a Mara. Malcolm could only barely make out its form in the low light. The glow of its eyes faintly illuminated Malcolm’s face. The illumination was like a candle, traveling only those few inches before being lost in the darkness.
Malcolm shuddered in surprise, his body convulsed, every muscle fired once in unison trying to break free of the Mara’s hold, and the Mara uttered a singularly unimpressive squeak of surprise. Prey never moved that much when under its control. The prey never moved at all. The little creature closed in anyway, feeling confidence in its powers.
Another warning sign it ignored: Malcolm continued to stare directly into its eyes.
The Mara went on with its feeding, sensing that the prey had already moved into the first stage of fear: awareness. It wrapped its tiny hand around Malcolm’s throat, ready to feed.
Malcolm was alert now, and saw through the deception, saw it for what it was. Malcolm’s perception was this: a small, translucent green creature, knee high at best, large bright yellow insect-like eyes, a large round head supported on a tiny body, strangling him softly with delicate hands more befitting something out of a cartoon than a predator. What the Mara thought Malcolm saw was this: desiccated flesh stretched taught over a huge frame, claws long enough to go all the way through, tattered black skin stretched over bone wings, spiky gray hair covering its body. Or maybe just eyes, large and glowing red, a body unreliably outlined by dark perched above the prey. Or maybe two figures in the room, lights outside the window, the abduction psychodrama.
The Mara realized then that something wasn’t happening that it was expecting, the energy rush of feeding wasn’t coming. The thought that something was wrong broke through its primal thought process a very brief moment before it was too late. Malcolm knitted his brow, and reached up. Now it was the Mara panicking, now it was the Mara being strangled. Now it was the Mara that was screaming and tumbling through the air, striking the wall, falling to the ground, and now it was Malcolm feeling only drowsy and angered, and knowing he wouldn’t get back to sleep.
The Mara ran through its instinctual devices, wondering what it had done wrong, but then it saw its prey rise and look directly at it. It wasn’t the time for learning processes. It was the time for survival. It looked for a way out of the situation, but no ideas were forthcoming. The thought occurred to it to flee, but as this thought flashed through consciousness like an uncertain leap into fog, it found Malcolm standing overhead, impassible. The cornered Mara geared up the fiercest responses it could muster.
Malcolm recoiled his leg and kicked the Mara, his foot striking with a satisfying thud that felt as if this creature had a measurable mass. This always troubled Malcolm, how they had no weight but still could be felt and handled, were just as deadly as anything anyone else could see. The physics of the phenomena was something Malcolm had only just begun to study.
The Mara doubled over and moaned. The first kick hadn’t satisfied Malcolm’s frustration, and so he kicked again, and again for good measure. He hesitated a moment as the creature, still only half-seen by morning light, tried to recover.
As he recoiled his leg for another strike, Malcolm decided he could not take out enough frustration on the little Mara to salve himself, and so he picked it up again by the throat and carried it, kicking and protesting like a petulant child, its little hands prying at Malcolm’s grip. Malcolm walked it determinedly down the hall, turning left into the kitchen, his eyes landing on the coffee maker on his counter.
The little glass pot waited to fulfill its purpose in life, and it gave Malcolm a new thought on this early morning, a thought of his curse, a thought of his ability, his own personal stigmata, and how it just cost him another morning’s sleep. And a thought of coffee. How much of a relief it would be to wake up to a simple cup of coffee without something like this happening. It didn’t seem like it would be too much to ask.
Malcolm paused here, holding the Mara, flipped the switch on the coffee maker. The light came on reassuringly. He waited for a promising gurgle, and then continued to his back door.
As Malcolm opened the door, the Mara screamed loudly, a sharp and piercing cry that cut especially deeply in the auditory nerve this early in the morning. It was like a demonic dog whistle, and Malcolm was the only one who could hear it. This made him want to kill it even more. He dropped it to the stoop, as nonchalantly as if he were putting out a cat. The Mara began to writhe, rolling on its back, kicking and turning, but it was too late. Its figure began to dissipate and disintegrate in the sunlight as it got to its feet. It ran for the open door, but it had already mostly disappeared, only its legs were running, then only its calves and feet, then only its left foot stepped on the threshold of his apartment before also disappearing into a vapor. Malcolm stepped away, back inside.
Such an attack had to be recorded in his journals. He opened a battered notebook, recorded, date, time, what happened, and his thoughts for later analysis, then moved on to his cereal.
The cereal he chose from a systematic filing order in his pantry was the same cereal he’d been eating every Tuesday since he was seven: Cap’n Crunch. He removed the milk from the refrigerator and a bowl from the cupboard. He opened the jug of milk and poured, but only a small trickle came out. Funny, he thought. There was a full gallon a couple days ago, and he definitely hadn’t used it all.
So now Malcolm was awake, and had almost consumed a light breakfast. He had to head out, breakfast was the most important meal of the day, and he wasn’t going to let a little mara keep him from it.

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The measurer didn’t enjoy his job anymore. It wasn’t like what it used to be, wasn’t like what it could have been, wasn’t what he had imagined it to be, but still there was this part of him that continued on with it. The measurer didn’t work for himself, like before. At fifty-five years of age, he felt ready to retire, but he couldn’t retire yet. He wouldn’t reach average retiring age for another ten years. He had a large file on that topic, and on many other topics. Data, and surveys, and graphs, and statistics of all of this sort was easy for him to access. It was his job to supervise acquisition of such information, and then to determine its significance. Some statistics read that he was the best Measurer yet, and public opinion always held high.

The position used to entail travel, and investigation. But now, now more skills were necessary. Faster analysis, more information needed led to the necessity for more people, more desk work. More organization became necessary. Now, most of his task fell to organizing properly so that everything ran at peak efficiency, rather than the analysis that he really loved and in which he excelled. Now he was overburdened with supervising, and he left work later and later at night. His wife, two children, and dog felt neglected, but all statistics showed that followed the trend for executives of his age, especially in the higher tiers of the organizations. He had spent years in the public eye, heading up the latest collection operations. Leading a campaign against the usual token candidate. He never lost more than fifteen percent of the popular vote, and on the average, twelve point three. Always at the end of the his term, they would  speculate if he would run for another five years. He would be seen at the most glamorous events, always the centerpiece, always busy, never a moment to enjoy the places he visited.

He hoped to finish his work just once. He hoped to get to the last piece of paper in the “in” box, but never did, it always accumulated. At the bottom of the box, he joked to himself, was probably an urgent memo from fifteen years ago. He was only two years off. He hoped that, just once before he retired, he could be home before the sun went down, he could spend time with his children. He planned that maybe, just before it came time to finally step down, when his successor was chosen, there would still be time to stop and take a tour of all  the places he had been. He hoped that just once he could eat a warm dinner again because he was home from work on time. He hoped that just once before he retired he could be human again.  But that possibility wasn’t available in the data before him.  He had never determined how to measure humanity.

The Weatherman

The weatherman sat at the news desk. He had no use for maps, satellite images or computer projections. He never had to show exciting footage of tornadoes. Ever since the Weather Service had regulated weather patterns, he merely doled out the schedule for when it would rain, what hours on what days. Everyday he reported facts, and his knowledge was wasted in the oration. Every night he went to sleep, wishing that it might rain on a day when it was not forecast.

Marquis

He should have been a Spanish Marquis come to chance fate because of a mission that only he fully knew, the kind of person that you’d see if you were walking through a bad part of town while clutching your umbrella tighter than usual. You would see him standing under the only working streetlight for three blocks. Swallowing the light, wearing a black hole trench coat, he would consider you passing by from behind the shadow created by his fedora. He would stand there, thumbing his pocket watch and its chain, one leg securely on the ground, or maybe floating inexplicably just above the pavement; and the other leg comfortably folded, resting impossibly on the post. The mission of this marquis, if he really is a marquis at all, could be to make you walk just a little bit faster to avoid the ambush a few blocks ahead. Or maybe he is the guardian angel that convinces you to cross the street so that you will fall into the ambush, which even now readies itself, so that you may learn that you shouldn’t walk in the bad part of town at night.  You’d learn. And then he’d head to the nearest bar for a draught of reconciliation and a shot of vodka because being an angel, being unlimited, in this world is difficult on the conscience.

“What is that?” Javier asked.

I turned around and saw it, a cloud that was much more regular in shape than the rest, it was something, I couldn’t tell what. Then it dawned on me that it was a spaceship, and not one of this world. I tried to come up with a verbal response, an expletive that was adequate, but my mind was blank. By the time I came up with one, it was much too late.

It looked like a cloud, dark blue, fairly round, but as the wind blew the clouds away, the ship remained, still. You could call it vaguely saucer-ish from the right view, but not like in the movies, not like that at all. You could tell this craft was real, you could see panel lines on its skin, irregularities and flaws, like ships which had just crossed the ocean in a storm, and they hadn’t caught up on painting over the corrosion.

“Hey come take a look at this,” he yelled into the firehouse. Some of the other members of the crew came out. They stood there for a silent minute before any of them even moved.

The silence was interrupted by sonic booms. We knew what those were, the Air Force had scrambled F-16’s from Luke. They went full throttle overhead, direct intercept path and the ship was just over the edge of Apache Junction. The thing itself was silent as a cloud, you couldn’t hear it, at least not as far away as we were. Sound carries a long way out here, we heard the F-16’s from Luke all over the place, from all directions; it bounced off the taller buildings in Phoenix back to us. There wasn’t anything in the desert to absorb sound either. We’d have heard something if it was making any amount of sound.

Some of the others had gone into the station to watch what was happening on the television.

“Rick, Javier get in here,” they called to us. “You can see it better.”

I never did finish cooking the hamburgers. They turned to solid bricks of carbon on the grill.

There were local reporters on TV, broadcasting from the tallest buildings in Phoenix, they had crews rushing out to get just below the alien ships to report from the scene, but this view was enough to put on the air for the moment. They were quickly switching to affiliates all over the country, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tampa. The ships seemed to be everywhere. They even had shots from Paris, Beunos Aires, Berlin, Tokyo. They weren’t all the same ship, it was a fleet, lots of different shapes and sizes. They were all hovering, doing nothing.

You forgot everything at times like these. Your life, your job, where you were, your name. It was just too far out of comprehension to grasp. I stood there just watching, not a thought passing through my head. You’d think you could come up with a thought of absolute wonder, but no, nothing. Years of training, of running into burning buildings, of dealing with life and death emergencies was just gone. What else could you do? A couple of the guys called their wives and kids, their girlfriends, but it was hard to get through, the switchboards were jammed. And when they did get through, there wasn’t much to say. “I know, can you believe it?” was about all they could get out. The world was never so silent as right then. The roads were empty and clear, you couldn’t hear any traffic noise. Most airliners had been turned around, ordered to the ground, so the skies were clear, except for those ships and the Air Force.

For the first half hour, things went just this way, and nobody could say anything. The news reporters did their job, which was to keep talking. They had nothing that they could say, other than the ships were there, which we could all observe for ourselves. The only new thing they could report was another confirmed ship outside another city. Boston, Madrid, Jakarta, New Delhi, Moscow.

We got bored watching it, so we turned the TV all the way up, left the windows open, and climbed up on the roof. The surface was still hot, even though the sun had long since reached its apex in the sky and crawled back down into evening. We brought up blankets, whatever we could find that would insulate us from the heat. We were so far out from the city that there was an unobstructed view for us all.

My thoughts had collected into something resembling coherence by then. I thought of being a kid, seeing Star Wars, and all the creatures. I wondered what they looked like. Were they bigger than us, smaller, did they have two arms and two legs? Of all things, I remembered an assignment when I was in fifth grade, when my teacher asked me to invent and describe an alien, but I couldn’t remember what I had written anymore, not now.

At one point, they mentioned that a special session of Congress was being called, the President was meeting with his advisers. The stations tried to tap into C-SPAN, but the feed got cut off. They said the government did it, but that was it, no other reason was given.

So far nothing indicated any hostile intent, but nobody was taking any chances. The F-16’s circled, everybody else waited. We were afraid, no doubt about it. We’d seen Independence Day, we’d seen all those movies. They just waited until things were quiet and we let our guard down and they open fired. In the movies we always won, and none of us thought that was really possible with something like this, not with what their technology must be like.
#

In the houses of Congress, the representatives who were in town were amassing in the Capitol building. Some were making their way to Washington D.C. by special flights, personal jets and helicopters, cars, anything they could, if they felt they could make it in time to make a difference.

The Speaker of the house and Senate Majority Leader called the joint session to order, and a roll call was taken, finding them sufficiently above quorum to proceed.

“My fellow representatives, we have had a startling development, and we have the honor of being the leaders who will get to make first contact with an alien civilization. We have had no conversation with the aliens yet, we have received no transmissions,. They seem to be waiting, and while they wait, we need to make decisions of what actions may be taken in answer to whatever they might say. We have no word on their wants, needs, or reasons for being here, peaceful or otherwise. The military is alerted and active in case we need defense, the president is meeting with his advisers. We are here to set a unified diplomatic response for our country and our world. I now open the floor for comments, let’s please maintain order, and God be with us all.”

She sat, along with everyone else. Several remained standing, ready to speak.

A cavernous space like the house of representatives could hardly ever be silent, and it wasn’t now. It was filled with the sounds of pages and support staff bringing messages to the congressmen. The sounds of chairs creaking and people moving in place, and the sound of breathing, and under the breath discussion.

“The gentleman from New Jersey,” she called.

“I would like to say how unifying this event is for all of us in this world, and how we should consider broadcasting a message of peace as we initiate contact–” he started, but was cut off by the gentleman from Wyoming.

“Excuse me, if I might interrupt, shouldn’t we craft our message of peace from the Congressional bunker? I’m not one to believe that–,” he said, but the speaker cut him off.

“There are no craft near Washington D.C. and so we are not under immediate threat. Are we going to allow the American public see us cowering in a bunker instead of standing in pride in our traditional chambers?”

There was some applause, and some groans of concern.

“We will be advised if there is a threat,” she said, putting the issue to rest.
#

More people were joining us on the roofs of the neighborhood. The chatter over emergency channels was limited strictly to business. It would have been very easy to clutter the airwaves with panic and idle talk, but we held back. Something like that could drown out a real emergency if it happened. Nothing had happened with our ship, it was still just hovering there. Silent and peacefully still.

Even the news was saying that they weren’t broadcasting anything. You’d think they’d be trying to communicate, but there was nothing. You could imagine this was pissing off those flyboys, circling for hours, nothing happening, having to fly between the ship and the mountains all evening. There was a lot of ego doing nothing up there, and cold war tensions die hard. There had to be a lot of dealing with a hostile enemy in their training, too, being fighter pilots. I’m sure they saved the peace and rescue training for other crews.

Another thing that the movies got wrong was how long you could sit there in awe. Usually it was two minutes, a scene before the main character came to his or her senses. That wasn’t even nearly right. Almost an hour later, we were hardly talking. We were more taking it in.

“Did you ever think?” Javier asked out of the blue.

“No. Well, of course, I’ve thought, but not like this. Not seriously.” It was true. This just wasn’t a scenario that any of us really thought possible. There were sections in the training manual about it, right next to sections on structural collapse and the event of a chemical spill, but we never went over it. We always skipped it, they told us to read over it at home. They seemed incredibly inadequate now anyway.

I talked to my mom and little sister for a minute, they lived in Tucson, but it was the same conversation as the other guys, “Yeah, can you believe it?” They didn’t have a ship near them, but they pulled out my telescope from when I was a kid to see if they could see anything.

When I was in junior high, some kids I knew went camping and came back with a crazy story about a flying saucer. We never believed them, but being so close to Sedona, you heard a lot of talk like that. I wonder how many people felt vindicated by these things appearing.

Some of the other shifts began to arrive, they didn’t have to be called, they knew that they should be ready. Most cities have laws saying that emergency personnel had to live in town, and it was just for this reason, well not this, it was in case of a large event of Earthly origin, an earthquake, something like that. Pretty soon the little roof on top of the fire station was getting crowded, we had radios with three different news stations on. One of the guys brought a CB, and flipped around through the civilian frequencies.

#

In the House of Representatives, the voices were raising, fighting for the central spotlight. The information poured in faster now, but there was nothing new about the ships than another one spotted outside another city, and that other governments were reacting similarly, with military escort and debate.

There were more quiet conversations going in the peripheral rooms of the main floor, people were trying to figure out how to use these aliens to best advantage. These arguments were kept out of the main argument, which now seemed focused on the status of the aliens.

“We have facilities and procedures for things like this,” the Senator from New York said. He had gone through the tour of Ellis Island every election cycle since the eighties. “We should let them do the work they were designed for.”

“For however many of them there are, we are already overtaxed in our immigration officers. And they have no diplomatic status,” the Representative from New Mexico, who was quite familiar with immigration law.

“I’d like to vote to recognize their government to move their integration forward,” the Representative from California said. Her district covered San Francisco, and was highly tolerant of outsiders.

“I don’t think it would be fair to put them in line in front of so many others who have come to this country legally. They’re just going to have to go back where they came from, and send in their application like everybody else,” said the Senator from Texas.

At this point, an argument started, and the speaker beat her gavel to create order. Through it the representative from Wisconsin gained the floor, and cried, “What if they are communists, maybe their government is headed by a dictator! I’d like to call a committee to explore their government–” the argument sounded again, drowning out the rest of the suggestion.

#

It was about ten when things started to happen, but what could we say had really happened? It was just a bunch of lights. At ten O’clock, the sky in the Arizona desert is hardly dark. There’s a small amount of purple glow along the horizon, and every star in the sky is visible. There’s hardly ever any cloud cover, and it gets cold fast. I actually missed it when it happened because I was going down to get a jacket. The ship lit up slowly, first a few green lights lit up around the bottom edge, then a few more underneath,  all white and very bright. You could see the desert floor pretty clearly. Then the top of the ship lit up in reds, blues, oranges. Some of the lights were points, blinking slowly, just giving definition to the shape of the ship, others were spotlights up, down and out. It had very nearly faded from sight. a black hole in the sky. But it remained still.

It stays sunny pretty late in Arizona, and this was summer. In fact, the sun had just gone down, and night had only just overtaken the day. It was dangerous to stay up in the air in the dark with no lights. We thought it was a matter of safety. If you had fighters circling you, and you meant no harm, you’d probably want them to know where you were.

The jets didn’t think of it that way. Maybe it was just a reaction, maybe they thought it was an attack, it was confusion. For whatever reason, one of the F-16’s fired off a missile, and at that close range, it hit almost immediately.

We all stood up, it was too much to comprehend, how they could just shoot at it like that. The ship was listing, falling out of the air, but it regained it’s stability for a moment. The planes split off, taking evasive action in case of a retaliation. In the panic, two of them collided in mid-air, and fell from the sky. We saw both pilots eject, their planes crashing to the mountains.

Then the ship began to fall again. It was clear that it wouldn’t be able to stay aloft much longer. Whatever the plane had hit, it was critical. I bet whatever was in that ship was scared as hell, panicking just like those pilots in the confusion. It’s path down was frenzied, first coming towards us, listing at a sharp angle, then reversed that angle, before arcing back south and west. It came down in the new developments just outside town. We didn’t wait for the call to come in. We hurried off the roof, some of us using the ladder, some of us dropping down where it was safe.

#
In Congress, they had moved onto other issues, having not solved anything yet, but with a growing laundry list of issues that would need to be sorted. This was not as useless as anyone would think. Having a list of issues was an important starting point, but as the list grew, the speaker knew it was beginning to be a distraction. It was much better to be ready with expectations when communication was established than to be completely unprepared. There would undoubtedly be protocol and negotiations, and by that time the laundry list could have some things checked off.

“The social security system cannot handle a sudden influx of new individuals to cover without input, and Medicare can’t handle it either,” the representative from Maine said.

“Who knows what their medical bills could be like. We’ll have to develop all new medicines.”

The head of the Health Ways and Means committee perked up at this thought. He was Republican, and well bought into the medical companies.

“New medicines take subsidies, they can be very expensive,” the senator from New Hampshire said.

“I think we’re overlooking a valuable new source of tax revenue here,” the Representative from Missouri said.

“They have to be in the workforce to pay taxes, and there aren’t enough jobs for our current citizen base,” the representative from Michigan said.

“I would like to state for the record that I will not vote for an interstellar free trade agreement,” said the Representative from Ohio.

#
The streets were busy with cars coming away from the crash site, but as that area of town is fairly sparsely populated, there wasn’t much traffic to deal with. The police were doing their best to direct the traffic away in an orderly fashion. I’d expect it was a bit worse further into the city. We were cautious in our driving. You couldn’t help in an emergency if you never got there. The trucks were piled high with rescuers, there was three times more people on them than would be on a usual call. We all had on our breathing gear already, a fire can create some nasty stuff that you wouldn’t want to breathe, and who knew what was on that ship.

We could see fires, see the smoke and the light of them forming a column in the sky that could be seen for miles. Getting closer, we could see the destruction. The ground was littered with pieces of bent, torn and broken metal from the ship, shattered pieces of the houses, some of it was burning. There was debris blowing around everywhere, the papers and things that people kept as keepsakes and records had exploded and been cast to the wind. Some of it was on fire, and these were the things that were important to track down, put out. A blowing and burning piece of debris could touch off more fires, and they were blowing around like tumbleweeds. They were little spots of orange light against the ground. The ground was black in most places, wet with oil, or some kind of fluid. I had to remember to keep my assumptions in check; anything I knew of machinery on Earth were likely completely wrong now. Whatever they used in the parts and systems of the ship, it was probably beyond us. Other spots of the ground were the natural dirty yellow sand and rock.

It looked like the ship had set down fairly lightly. The ship was primarily intact, and there had been no secondary explosions near the point of impact.

When we arrived at the site, there was already a fleet of rescue vehicles at the scene. We counted a cluster of at least six houses that had been destroyed by the ship. We were being directed closer to the ship itself by the crews already on hand. They had the leading edge of the ship covered, but hadn’t gotten around to the back of it with any number of rescuers. The leading edge was the more likely place to find survivors in need of aid, so they’d started operations there. The police were evacuating the rest of the area, and the military was helping, too. It wasn’t like the normal cover-up job you’d think they always do. There was no use in denying anything this time. It’d be hard to convince seven billion people that they hadn’t seen anything. Not with so many ships in so many places. Whatever it was that had come, they wanted to be seen.

There were lots of people, crying, yelling, shouting. Civilians, emergency personnel, military, the whole site was chaotic, but some order was returning, it was important in an emergency to provide some order immediately, or the situation could get out of control quickly. The civilians that were uninjured were directed away, as quickly as could be done. Just about everybody had some kind of emotional shock, but you had to get them out of way of the threat of physical damage first.

The craft was huge, six houses, plus the width of the street had been leveled by the ship, and that was only the leading edge of it. This being the edge of town, the houses were pretty spread out. Had this been in the city, a couple of blocks would have been just gone, and I didn’t even want to think about what might have happened to the civilians in that scenario.

We made our way around to the back of it, part of the journey being off-road. We’d never taken the truck on that kind of ride, but it handled it well enough to get us there. We were directed by a military officer towards a large barn that had been partially crushed by the ship. The roof had mostly collapsed, and the whole structure was on fire, but it wasn’t a blazing inferno. It was a very long barn, forty feet or more, and most of it’s length had been directly impacted by the ship. It looked like the ship had tried to cut it in half precisely from the leading upper corner to the bottom of the west end of the building. We jumped off the truck, and took a quick moment to survey the structure of it.

I went up to the door and looked in with two others from my company. It was more empty than anything. Much of it’s internal structure was made of wood, an a lot had splintered and broken apart. It was old enough wood that it would catch fire pretty easily, but it looked like the fires were starting more at the front edge of the disaster area. Under the ship, it was more isolated. The inertia of the crash had pushed everything forward, leaving the side we were on with less of a blaze.

What remained of the structure seemed to be stable, and the roof had been largely pushed off, there wasn’t much to fall on us. We had very little hope that if the ship fell, the barn would even put up any opposition to it’s weight. We shone our lights down the length of the barn and saw some crates, a truck and flatbed trailer, looked like the barn wasn’t in much use at the moment, which was good, there was less to worry about for us. I made a map of it in my head. If you didn’t do that and something caught on fire that made a lot of smoke, that mental maps was all you had to get back out safely again. At the end of the barn was light, like a door opening up into the ship, and all around it was fire. It looked like the wood of the barn, maybe some other materials. We could use water on it.

We all saw the door on the ship, but didn’t want to think about what it meant. We knew it was the door to another world, but it was best that we just put that out of our heads and focused on the emergency. You get into trouble when you start thinking about extraneous things in a situation like this. We turned back to the company, and began directing the team.

“Okay, I need hoses into this window. There’s some debris on fire in there and we need to get it out,” I directed. “Point it forward, if there’s anyone here that needs saving, we need to be able to get past.

The hose team grabbed its hose and ran its nozzle to the window next to the door. We were too far from the street to get to a fire hydrant, but the truck carried its own water supply. It wasn’t much, but it’d do enough to help us. We directed a hose team towards the front, since if there were any survivors, that was where they’d be. The back end of the barn was clear as far as we could tell.

I didn’t hesitate, I lowered my mask back down, grabbed the ax from the truck, and ran in with Javier. He used his flashlight to guide me, staying just a couple steps behind me. We got around the pickup, past the crates, and as we got closer to the ship, the area became much more dangerous. There was more fire, more debris. Tripping on debris was a danger in areas like this. If you fell, you could very quickly turn from rescuer to victim, and so we resisted the urge to rush in, we slowed down.

As we got closer, we realized that the light we saw coming from the ship wasn’t from a door, it was from a breach in the hull. We shone our lights around, searching for signs of life, and then we saw it, from the waist down under a pile of debris, and there was no way it was human.
#

The debate continued in Congress. The black-jacketed pages coming down the aisles with new information held high in their hands looked like ants returning to the nest with food. They kept to a mostly neat line, before they made the return journey to their separate offices for more of the most recent stuff off the faxes and the internet. It was late in Washington D.C., the clock had already clicked over to the next day, and the argument looked like it was just beginning. It was going to be a marathon session that would have made any filibusterer proud. There was no pretense of discussion happening, and it was falling from semblance to any normal decorum of the house into a continuous shouting match.

“Where are we going to put these aliens?” the Senator from Massachusetts said. “They  can’t hover up there forever.”

“Yes, we have a housing crisis as it is, and what about feeding them? Our food production is already stretching thinner with the population growing,” the Senator from Illinois said.

“And our resources, our water, our power, our fuels. There isn’t enough to go around!” a Representative from Colorado added.

“I propose we establish a department of alien affairs to handle these issues, with money and powers to suit,” The Representative from Oregon said.

“I’d like to provide public housing in my state for as many of these aliens as we can,” commented the Senator from Michigan. “I look forward to being able to access their technology in our manufacturing centers.”

Now the speaker saw the familiar Congress coming out, the one that looked after its own individual needs above the needs of the greater whole, the Congress that looked at special interests as if they were everyone’s interests.

“And where is that money going to come from?” The Representative from Florida added. “One of my state’s primary industries, namely space exploration, is going to be destroyed by this.”

“I’d like to ask us to consider for a moment just what kind of values these aliens are bringing to our world,” the gentleman from South Carolina drawled.

“What exactly do you mean?” the speaker asked.

“Are these Aliens Christian?”

#

It was under a pile of debris, I couldn’t see it’s head, but there was a foot, a whole leg and an arm. It was moving. It’s hand had six long, delicate fingers, covered by a tight gray love. It’s feet were shaped differently, with two large toes and a highly pronounced arch in its boot. There were gashes in it’s suit, liquid which could only have been blood was spread all over what looked like a uniform and the ground around it. I couldn’t tell what color the blood was, not in that light. It’s leg was bent wrong, even for what might have been.

With a glance of communication, we both ran straight for it.

“We’ve got a victim,” he radioed. He hesitated on the last word. “It isn’t one of us.”

There was a pause, then the radio crackled. “Roger.”

We looked the alien over, before touching anything, looking over the situation.  We heard the creaks of the remainder of the building above us, and we knew that  we’d have to work fast. There was the bleeding to address, the broken leg, and the pile of debris, and not a lot of time. Judging from the sounds of the structure we’d have to move it first, get it to safety.

We began to clear away the lighter debris, it was a lot of metal siding and lumber from the walls of the building. As we got the debris cleared, we found that it was trapped under one of the heavier structural members of the barn. We combined our strengths to lift it off the alien, and push it aside just enough to free it.

“We’re going to need an ambulance,” Javier radioed.

The alien had some sort of helmet on, a spiderweb of cracks broke up the transparent visor, and with the light conditions we couldn’t see inside.

This gave us a moment to survey the whole being. He was shorter than your average human, but built to about the same dimensions. We couldn’t be sure of what might happen if we exposed it to the air, who knew what one of these breathed, but then we reasoned that the integrity of it’s atmosphere was already compromised. If the earth’s atmosphere was going to be dangerous, it would have been dead by now, or we wouldn’t have known what to do. But we knew we were going to lose a wall on that place if we didn’t move fast.

We made the decision that we had to move it before anything else happened, no time to isolate the leg. I judged its weight was manageable, so I picked it up, and we made our way to the door. Just in time, too, as the wall gave in just as crossed the threshold.

#

Once the values question came up, it opened a door for questions that Congress clearly wasn’t prepared to handle.

“Are these Aliens Homosexuals?” the Senator from Alabama asked. It was another in a long series of such questions. They had already beat around the bush of alien pornography, obscene alien sex products, now they were looking to rip that bush out of the ground.

“I’d like to propose a constitutional amendment barring discrimination based on interstellar origin,” the Senator from California said.

“I’d like to propose a ban on human-alien hybrid genetic experiments,” the Senator from Kentucky said.

“We must destroy these invaders before they destroy us,” a Senator from Alaska said. He was a full bird colonel before running for office.

“I’d like to propose a ban on aliens being allowed to vote or run for office. Who knows what could happen if one of them was elected to congress,” a Representative from Mississippi said.

“I’d like to add to that bill a provision that they have separate facilities from humans,” the Senator from Arkansas said.

The speaker banged her gavel, but it had little effect.

#

We laid the alien on the ground, we were assured that the ambulance was on its way. From all of the sirens, you couldn’t tell if it was true, but still it wasn’t like we were going to stop tending to it. The other people from my company brought the first aid supplies. They tore into the pack and fished out what I needed, safety scissors, gauze, bandages, needle and thread for stitches, antibiotic. I pulled my fire gloves and breathing apparatus off, and snapped on latex gloves.

The first thing I did was to survey the helmet. I had to determine if the alien was conscious and breathing, if it had a heartbeat. It took a moment to figure out the latching mechanism, and in an instant the helmet was off and I was staring at the first alien any of us had ever seen. We paused for a moment to take in the sight, deep olive skin stretched tautly over high and pronounced cheekbones, wide nostrils and large eyes that were nearly all pupil. It was staggering, beautiful, frightening. I felt like that child, writing those stories, but not from imagination, this time from experience. It was a brief pause, but I snapped to the task at hand. I could tell that it was conscious, its eyes were moving, its arms were moving, slowly, it was coming to.

“It’s alive,” I yelled.

I put my head to its chest, and could hear beats. It was regular, and fast, but didn’t correspond to a human heart. A rhythm was there. It was functioning correctly as far as I could tell.

That meant that I could go to the more important issues. It was losing blood fast through a gash in its leg. I got out the antibiotic. They would likely have no natural immunity to anything here, and so it’s risk of infection was high. I spread antibiotic liberally on the large gash, then instructed Javier to put it on everything that was bleeding, no matter if it was a paper cut.

That’s when I started on the stitches. I  threaded the needle, and just before I put it to its skin, it grabbed my hand. We met eyes. It held out its hand, holding something out. I took it, a tiny clear round thing. It looked like a glass jellybean. It pointed to its ear, and I understood to put it into my ear.

“Thank you,” it said. It’s mouth didn’t speak, but came directly into the ear piece.

“I’m here to help.”

It understood.

“I’m sorry about us shooting at you.” It felt like a strange thing to say. I wasn’t even remotely connected to anyone that fired on it. “We’re not all like that.”

“We have been searching for a new planet. Our star turned red, and our planet was lost in its expansion. We wish you only peace, and to coexist.”

“I know,” and somehow I did. There was nothing that I had seen to give me a hint otherwise.

“We have been learning your languages from television and radio. Our message will be broadcast soon.”

“How am I hearing you?”

“We communicate through implants in our brains, electronic transmitters and receivers. We designed devices for species we might meet. We have so much to share.”

“I have to take care of you.”

“We expected this would happen to some of us. We understand.”

That was all it said to me. It let me get back to work. I stitched it up, and by the time the ambulance got there, I had it’s leg mostly immobilized. The paramedics loaded it onto their stretcher and into the ambulance.

“Thank you,” it said as they closed the doors.

The ambulance drove off slowly, trying to keep the ride as steady as possible until it reached the road. Then we went back to putting out the fires.

#

The Senator from Texas raised his voice above all. “I’d like to introduce a bill to ban interspecies marriage.”