Unidentified - a story of the dark side of the Parodyverse

Unidentified - a story of the dark side of the Parodyverse

    The long ribbon of Oklahoma road went on into the distance, straight and endless in the long hours after midnight. The battered Ford Taurus sped along on cruise control, its driver kept awake by a rolled-down window and the crackled company of the local radio station. On either side of the road the fields swayed with green wheat. The sky overhead was clear and moonless, and this far from the cities the stars sparkled.
    “And now for another oldie here on WRMD, here’s Bob Dylan and the Band with Wheels on Fire … skraaaawk!”
    Then the signal broke up into meaningless static as the cheap old radio’s automatic tuner decided to search for other frequencies.
    “Hey!” objected the driver prodding buttons by the light of the dashboard, “Give me Bob back!”
    Then the cruise control kicked off and the car began to decelerate.
    “What now?” The young woman behind the wheel glanced down in time to see the instrument panel flicker then black out. The manual speedometer and rev counter peaked at impossible highs before dropping to zero too. But the car sped on into the night.
    “Uncle Alex!” the girl called to the passenger sleeping under the rug on the back seat. “Uncle Alex, something screwy’s happening with the car!”
    There was a muffled mumble from the rear of the vehicle and the sleeping man shifted to pull the quilt over his head.
    Then the headlights failed. The driver swore and stepped hard on the brake. Under the moonless sky she couldn’t even see the tarmac of the road. There was a bump as she came to the kerb and then the whipping of corn being mowed down as the vehicle went into the field.
    “What the hell?” gasped Uncle Alex, roused at last from his deep slumbers as the car bumped over the uneven terrain and decimated the wheat crop. “Zoe?”
    The Taurus ploughed to a halt in the midst of the field and the engine died.
    “Sorry uncle! Sorry. Sorry! The lights went out. There’s an electrical fault I think. I couldn’t see where I was going.”
    “Calm down, Zoe. It’s okay. We’re not hurt.”
    The girl grabbed the short blonde hair at her temples as if to hold herself steady. “Yeah. I know. Sorry. It’s okay.” She turned the ignition, and although the starter turned over the engine didn’t catch.
    “Give it a minute, You probably flooded it.”
    “Right. Okay.” The girl gave a self-depreciating shrug. “Sorry I lost it there for a moment.”
    The radio buzzed on, its static almost rhythmic in its pulsing, hisses in the language of the background noise of the universe.
    “Try it now, Zoe.”
    The girl turned the ignition key, but just then the car was surrounded by a blaze of brilliant light. The travellers in the Taurus could see as well as day; clearer, because there were no shadows anywhere, as if the light came from all around them.
    “Wha…?” the frightened blonde gasped.
    Her passenger blasphemed as he looked up through the moon roof. “Look! What is that?”
    Directly above the crippled vehicle was a circle of silver. It’s entire underside was rippling with light, and it seemed now that the beam that lit the car shone down from the vessel above.
    “Run, Zoey!” called Alex. “Out of the car. Run for your life!”
    The girl was out of the vehicle and pelting into the corn before she realised that the central locking had failed and the man in the back seat couldn’t get out. She turned to race back but as she watched the entire vehicle bucked then lifted from the ground. It rotated slowly and floated into the air, up towards the glowing saucer above.
    “Nooo!” she screamed, then turned again and fled into the wheat field away from that horrible light.
    She raced blindly and her eyes were still dazzled from the brilliance of the beams she’d left behind, so she didn’t see the object in her path until she tripped over it. She tumbled with a scream and rose with blood on her hands.
    It was a heifer, sprawled on its side where it had burst as it had fallen. It looked like it had been dropped from a great height, given the extent of the splatter. The girl screamed again, and then the noise choked in her throat as she noticed another detail.
    The poor cow hadn’t only been dropped. First it had been butchered. Eyes and snout were surgically cut away, along with udders, tail, and genitals.
    And then the girl heard the rustling in the corn. It was the sound of someone moving through the field. Or something. And more than one something, from more than one direction.
    She rose to run again, but then the light was all around her and she felt strangely detached, no longer frightened, merely curious about what was happening to her. She felt herself rise from the ground just like the Taurus. She wondered if they were going to drop her like the cow and whether it would hurt to be splattered like that, but it was an academic curiosity, not a real concern.
    She looked up and saw the great shining circle of the ship coming ever closer; or perhaps she was moving up into it.
    The light became overwhelming, and then it dimmed from painfulness.
    “Please don’t worry, Zoe,” a calm, beautiful voice told her.
    The girl turned round. She hardly noticed the silver walls with their shifting patterns of light and shadow, or the streaming rows of lights than flickered over incomprehensible control surfaces. She only saw the man.
    He was beautiful. He stood well over six feet tall, muscular and handsome as a Greek god. He was dressed in a toga of brilliant white. His skin and hair were golden, and he was smiling at her.
    “I know this must be a little alarming for you,” he want on in reassuring, kindly tones, “but when I’ve explained what’s happening, I hope you’ll forgive us our intrusion into your life.”
    “Where’s Uncle Alex?” she asked. Then, because the mind works in unpredictable paths in times of stress, she added, “And our luggage?”
    “Your uncle is sleeping,” the golden man assured her. “And your hardware sales samples are quite safe. It’s you we’re interested in, Zoe.”
    “Who are you?”
    Another reassuring smile. “As you have probably guessed by now, we are visitors to your planet from another world. You may call me Glorious.”
    “Aliens? This is a flying saucer?”
    “If you wish. We have selected you, Zoe, because we wish to make contact with your people, the humans.”
    “Then why not go to Washington, land on the White House lawn? Do a press conference?”
    “We have rules about interfering, Zoe. We can’t disrupt your culture so severely. We have to prepare the way gradually, so that when we come to offer your people a place in the fellowship of civilised races of the galaxy they can accept it without social and personal upheaval.”
    In the strange atmosphere of the dream-like ship that seemed to make some sense. “Nobody’s going to believe me,” the girl warned Glorious. “Not without proof. I’ll just do the kook-spot on chat shows, give statements to the FBI to go into the X-Files, and that’s it.”
    “You misunderstand, Zoe,” Glorious told her gently. “We’re playing a long-term strategy to prepare your planet. It’s not you who will convince your people. It’s your son.”
    “My son? I don’t have a son.”
    Glorious smiled again, a perfect smile with perfect teeth. “Not yet. But we will give you one.”
    “Huh? What?”
    “You will lay with me, and our son will bring your world into universal harmony.”
    The girl considered this then frowned. “No way. Find an escort agency. I’m not that sort of girl.”
    Glorious stopped smiling. “The tides of cosmic destiny demand this of you, Zoe.”
    “The tides of cosmic destiny can go jerk off then. I said no, buster.”
    Glorious shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry then,” he told his captive. “Then we’ll have to do this the hard way.”
    Then the light flared up again. The blonde girl shrieked and tried to struggle, but somehow she found herself laid on a cold luminous metal slab. Wherever her body touched the table she was unable to pull away.
    She glanced up. There were lots of tubes and wires above her, terminating in equipment that looked disturbingly medical. This room was much darker, with gunmetal walls and a background throbbing like a straining turbine.
    Grey faces peered down at her as she lay helpless. They had enlarged eyes and childlike features in great domed heads. Their torsos and arms seemed puny in comparison, and they carried instruments with their elongated fingers.
    “No!” the girl tried to scream, “Get off me!” but her throat was paralysed.
    One of the aliens reached down and started to cut off her clothes.
    “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” demanded Alex from the doorway.
    The Greys turned round in surprise as the middle-aged man looked round as if suddenly realising where he was. “Hey, is this a U.F.O.?”
    “Go back to sleep,” one of the greys thought to him. “This does not concern you.”
    “If’n you’re about to do probes to my niece it concerns me plenty,” Alex assured them. He lurched over to one of the shining control surfaces. “Now back off or I’ll push this stuff.”
    “You are a fool,” another of the Greys told him. “You are a primitive who knows not what he does. Nor will our vessel listen to your commands.”
    “You martians aren’t going to take our womenfolk!” Alex warned them. “Now while I’m around.”
    The Greys seemed to find this amusing. One of them gestured and a green light enveloped the intruder. “Stay there and watch us,” the Grey thought at him.
    “How you gonna do that, then?” Alex asked them, nodding at the examination table. It was empty.
    The Greys twittered in confusion. They couldn’t understand where the subject had gone.
    Then the vessel lurched and the lights dimmed for a moment before recovering. The Greys rushed from the examination room towards engineering.
    The girl was there. She was squat cross-legged beside the particle reactor core, and she’d ripped loosed a complicated bunch of pulsing cables that she cradled in her lap.
    “I wouldn’t come any closer,” she told the Greys. “I’ve set up a few active tachyon streams across the deck, and they’ll do very bad things to you if you stumble into them.”
    “What?” thought the greys at her. They tried to overwhelm her mind but she had erected a psychic block. “How can this be?”
    “I’m not the dream date you guys were expecting, that’s for sure,” she told them. “You were looking for a little fun, a gang-bang with a local girl who wouldn’t know what the fresnik was happening?” She smiled viciously. “Boy did you pick the wrong car.”
    “Who are you?” the Greys demanded.
    “Ziles,” answered the blonde with their central command processors in her hands. “Your worst nightmare.” She glared at the aliens. “You have sting operations on your planet, boys?”
    “You have no idea what you are interfering with here, Ziles,” the Greys assured her. “There are powers here you do not want to cross.”
    “So show me,” the Xnylonian exile challenged them. “Drop the masks. What are you really like?”
    Suddenly the greys were gone, replaced by giant silver pepperpots with prodigious electronic members gliding toward her across the engineering room floor. Their raucous metallic voices called out to her in unison, “Im-preg-nate!”
    Ziles pulled loose the wire for gravity control and suddenly everyone was in free fall. “Nice try,” she told them. “Next?”
    Then her enemy was a thousand pulsing tentacles, lashing out to grab her limbs and drag her loose from the power core. Pustulating, salivating organs Ziles didn’t want to think about grew from the tips of some of the cilia and plunged towards her.
    Ziles crossed the power floes so that the vessel core went to critical overload. As the wild electricity arced through the tentacular beast she slipped loose, dropped over the side of the catwalk, kicked the creature viciously in a node-sack, and sped for the door.
    And the brilliant light flashed again.
    “Very good,” admitted Glorious, as his captive struggled in the shining golden web she hung in. “You’re really very, very good.”
    “What, getting past a basic bio-stasis field and some crappy organotechnic security pods?” Ziles scorned. But already she was finding that none of her skills were freeing her from the glowing strands that adhered to her this time.
    “If we really were aliens from another planet you would certainly have beaten us,” Glorious admitted. “You’re very good at technology.”
    “But this isn’t technology,” a second Glorious told her, appearing beside the first and leering at the pretty captive. “That’s just a game we play these days.”
    “It’s expected of us,” the third Glorious told her. “All the tabloids demand it.”
    “So what are you really, then?” Ziles demanded defiantly as they reached for her.
    “We are beyond your ken, alien wench,” Glorious told her. “We are the butterflies to your chrysalis, the gods of earth and air. We are…”
    “Fairies,” said Uncle Alex. He sauntered in and dropped his toolkit on the floor. “They’re fairies.”
    The Gloriouses turned to frown on the newcomer.
    “You did your part, Ziles, getting them to drop their scientific glamour,” Alexander told them. “Now it’s up to me.”
    “Up to you?” scorned Glorious. “A travelling hardware salesman?”
    “Up to me,” agreed Xander the Improbable. “The sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse.”
    The Gloriouses were surprised but defiant. “Everyone knows you have no magics,” they told him.
    “Really? That’s unfortunate. Well, what I do have is a hardware salesman’s sample toolkit. With, let me see… nails. Iron nails.”
    The faeries began to look uncomfortable.
    “And… wire. Iron cored wire. And… a cold iron hammer. And look, an adjustable wrench.” And he swung it up, caught Glorious in the groin, then grabbed his nose with a set of pliers. Iron pliers.
    “Aaagh!” screamed Glorious, and suddenly he was a thin sad thing of twig and leaf, pinned and in agony. “Aaaaagh!”
    “Oh, I forget,” said the master of the mystic crafts, “You have a problem with cold iron, don’t you?”
    Now they were no longer concentrating on her, Ziles slipped from the psychic web and helped herself to a screwdriver and a monkey wrench.
    Xander looked at the stricken faeries and his face was suddenly deadly and serious. “And now we’re going to discuss your behaviour, little creatures. And then we’re going to discuss alimony for your previous victims. And then you’ll be telling me your true names so I can make sure you never bother this plane ever again. And then we’ll talk about taking the clamps off you and letting you limp home.”
    Much, much later, as the first light was appearing on the Eastern horizon, Ziles restarted the hire car and gunned it towards the nearest town.
    “No need to hurry now,” Xander assured him. “They won’t be back. Well, not for a hundred years at least.”
    “I know,” Ziles assured him. “But I heard that fairy gold turns to leaves come the morning?”
    “That’s true,” agreed Xander the Improbable.
    Ziles indicated the bag in the passenger seat. “So I’ve got less than an hour to spend this, right?” she pointed out. And the car sped on down the highway.

Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2004 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2004 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.