Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

The way his shirt/jacket/uniform moved over the bunching muscles of his broad back was hypnotic. The fabric, although black, had a luminescent quality. She didn’t think she’d ever seen anything like it, but the thought was beginning to lose its power to surprise her. She was starting to think she knew what was going on. She didn’t like it, and in fact, she really ought to be running screaming from the room if it were true, but she thought she was right all the same. She said, “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“Ha.” Just that. As dry and flat as if it were written and not laughed out of him. “No, I am not.” Tagen turned back to her at last, looking long-suffering and pained with patience. “Now will you please return to the bedroom, Lin…Daria Cleavon?”

She felt a blush of heat between her legs and looked down to watch herself wet her pants. She hadn’t done that since she was eight. God, how very vaguely embarrassing.

Tagen sighed and soon his strong hands were pulling her to her feet and placing her inside the bathtub. He began to undress her.

As her shirt and jacket came away, fear finally flared up, dim and shaky perhaps, but there. She tried to push his hands away. “Cut it out.”

“I will not harm you,” he said, implacably stripping her to the waist. And then he was tugging at her jeans.

“No!” she screamed, and exploded in a slapping windmill of motion. “Let me go! Let go of me! Where am I? Don’t touch me! Dan! Dan!” She lost everything then, falling back into the wall and shrieking helplessness and horror.

Tagen caught her before she could fall. He held her firm, but did not fight her. His strength was god-like, impervious to her haphazard blows. He had only to wait for her to exhaust herself, and finally, she slumped against him, moaning and sick.

He patted her back with a perfunctory kind of comfort and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, “Mild, my ass.”

“Please go away,” Daria whispered.

“No.” He resumed undressing her, kneeling to work her feet free of her shoes, socks, and jeans. “We are going to speak more very soon, Daria Cleavon. But this is not the time.”

Daria closed her eyes, miserably accepting this, and listened as Tagen started up the shower. Apparently, he didn’t know about the hot water knob, but Daria didn’t want to show him. The cold was fine. It was too hot, she was too sick and drunk, and the cold was just fine. She took the towel he gave her when he was done, wrapped it around her shoulders, and went back to bed.

*

The second time Daria woke, it was dark.

She lay on her side in the bed, hugging the blankets to her neck and feeling the comforting weight of Grendel against her hip. ‘It was a dream,’ she thought, testing the idea for the ring of truth. ‘I dreamed it.’

Slowly, she reached out one arm and felt at the side of the bed. Her fingers touched damp terrycloth, and she withdrew to the safety of the bed as though burned.

‘Okay, so I got drunk and dreamed it. I got drunk, and I took a shower, but I did dream it.’

Daria sat up, dislodging Grendel, who mewled at her belligerently. She slid her feet onto the floor, biting her lip with the effort at keeping silent, and stood up.

She had no idea what to do next. Should she go downstairs and make good and sure she had hallucinated the creepy cop-guy, knowing she would feel silly the whole time? She was naked. If she put clothes on first, wasn’t that a subconscious admission that she knew there would be someone downstairs?

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she told herself, trying for sternness and falling short, even in her own mind. ‘No one is downstairs. You dreamed it.’

Daria inched across the floor and silently eased her panty drawer open. She took a pair at random and pulled them on, her ears straining futilely to try and hear something beyond the closed bedroom door.

Grendel was watching her with feline fascination. When she crawled into a t-shirt (Merry Christmas! Seventh Annual Sister’s Eggnog Celebration, it said), he decided she must be going down to fix him breakfast. He hopped off the bed with a deafening thump and went running to the door, miowing madly.

“Shut up!” Daria hissed, her heart cramping with completely unreasonable terror. She grabbed the cat around his ample middle and shoved him into her closet, then leaned against the door, trying to listen past his indignant pawing.

Nothing. What did she expect?

Daria moved toward the bedroom door, her heart thumping louder with every step she took. She was giving herself the heebie-jeebies, she knew, and she was doing it all for nothing, but that was fine. She’d laugh herself sick later. Right now…right now, she just had to be sure.

It took her a whole year to turn the doorknob quietly enough to open it. She cracked the door ajar and peeked into the hallway.

Nothing. Just the hallway and the stairs.

The TV was on. Law & Order was playing.

Daria’s stomach tried to swallow itself, and she had to hang on to the door with both hands to stay on her feet. She couldn’t feel any part of her body. She was a ghost.

‘You’re completely freaking out over nothing,’ she insisted silently. ‘You went out this morning. You got drunk. No, you don’t remember getting drunk, but you did. You came home and got all sappy over Dan and you watched Law & Order the way some other flaky chick would wear his old sweater. It’s only still on now because it’s always on, that show is the fucking vampire of basic cable and it is constantly walking the earth, you know that. You got drunk, that’s the important thing. You got drunk and you watched Law & Order and you took a shower and you went to bed and had a scary dream. You don’t even need to go downstairs to prove it.’

Except she did.

Leaving the monster-proof safety of her room felt like stepping out of a suit of armor. She felt horribly pink and exposed. Just why she should feel pink was a bizarre sort of mystery to her, but she did. It was an awful, clammy color pink, too.

‘See? Drunk! Sober people do not have thoughts like this!’

Step by silent, trembling step, Daria made it to the head of the stairs.

Her bills were still on the floor in the foyer. The TV was still on. Everything was horribly, horribly wrong.

She found herself keenly wishing she had a weapon in her hands. She could go back into her room and get the table lamp, but that was about it, and that only thing it was likely to break if she hit someone with it was itself. If this were the movies, she’d have a halberd collection or something mounted helpfully in the hallway, or she’d be a ninja who knew how to kill a man with a hard-boiled egg. God damn the movies!

She began to descend, agonizing over each step, trying to remember if she had ever noticed a squeak on the stairs, trying to think of what she should do when she got down to the foyer. Should she grab a knife from the kitchen and search the rest of the house? Should she call 911 and risk exposing her case of the megrims to the public eye? Should she split and run half-naked along the eighteen mile strip of road into the nearest town and call 911 from there? She kind of had the feeling that if she did that, she’d better by-God be sure there was someone in the house first or she was going to end up back in mandatory therapy and probably a rubber room besides.

The sound on the TV suddenly muted, and Daria stopped, shock-white and shivering, her hands pressed to her mouth. That was it. That removed all doubt. There really was someone in her house.

Whoever it was got up from the couch. She heard the heavy tread of his footsteps on the carpet and then the awful click as he stepped off onto the hardwood floors. Her mind spat up an image of the feet she’d dreamed—three thick toes and black, hooked talons.

Her nerve snapped. Daria heard a long, silvery scream rip out of her and even in her frozen state of terror, she thought it was a very Hollywood scream. Her brain seemed to be watching, bemused, as the rest of her flew down the remaining stairs and crashed into the door. She yanked at the knob half a dozen times before slapping the deadbolt free. She yanked another half a dozen times before registering the door still wasn’t opening. She looked up in dumb disbelief at the slat of wood nailed over the top of the jamb.

“Lindaria Cleavon.”

She whirled, flattening herself against the door in a pointless attempt to push her molecules right through it and out the other side. He was there, he was coming for her, his horrible clawed hand stretched out before him. She shrieked again, grabbed the coat rack from the corner and threw it, coats and all, right at him.

He caught it, stumbling back with an expression of surprise that would have been funny if only it weren’t happening right in front of her, and banged the back of his knees into the coffee table. He pinwheeled, waving the coat rack for equilibrium, and Daria seized the little end table that occupied the little space between the front door and the couch and threw that at him, too. He snatched it out of the air before it hit him, but lost his balance, drop-sitting onto the coffee table with explosive results. Daria ran screaming past him.

She tore through the kitchen in a frenzy, ripping up drawers in disbelief and staring at the total lack of knives, forks, corkscrews, spoons or anything that could be used as a weapon. Her dishes were gone from the cupboards. There were no cans of cat food or jars of spaghetti sauce. There was nothing! There was nothing!

He was coming down the hall.

Daria seized a box of crackers and a handful of Tupperware and threw them, still screaming, peppering his face and chest with the only ammunition she could find. He stumbled back a pace, slapping at pudding cups and sandwich baggies full of cereal, and Daria raced around the cooking island, through the dining room, and back out into the hall behind him.

He bellowed her name at a volume that could rattle walls, and then he was running after her, the thunder of his stride pounding in her ears.

She reached the laundry room door, slipped and fell through it, then slammed it shut and crawled to the back door. She was still trying to scream, but her voice was gone; her breath shuddered in and out of her in whistling gusts.

The back door was boarded shut. Not just nailed, either, but screwed into place. She tugged at the boards, sobbing, and managed only to get splinters in both hands. The windows were barred. Why hadn’t she climbed out her bedroom window? There were no bars on the second story windows. The worst that could have happened was her falling and breaking her neck, and that was lots better than this.

Daria put her back against the door, looking in tearful desperation at anything she could use for a weapon. The room, like the kitchen, had been picked clean of everything sharp, heavy, or remotely dangerous. She grabbed an empty paint can off the work shelf and held it out before her like a cross, shaking violently.

The door to the hallway was still closed.

Daria stood there, the empty paint can heavy at the end of her arm, and finally managed one wobbly step forward. And another. And a third. She reached out across miles of distance and touched the doorknob.

Silence.

She tried to turn it.

It wouldn’t budge. He was gripping the other side.

Daria sprang back and banged into the washing machine. She threw her paint can at the closed door and then slid down to the floor and huddled there.

Nothing moved. The door remained shut.

Daria picked up a sock that had somehow missed the hamper and hugged it to her chest.

The doorknob began to turn.

Daria tried to push even tighter against the washing machine, but the laws of physics prevented her. She twisted the sock in her hands and shivered.

The door swept open and the man peered in at her. Fury made his golden eyes smolder, but he did not fly at her. He glanced down at the empty paint can, nudged it aside with his foot, and then took a step towards her.

She threw the sock at him with a despairing howl and then clapped both hands to her mouth and waited for death.

He looked at the sock. He looked at her. He looked skyward. And then he looked at her again. “Do you know who I am?” he asked. His voice had the prick of irritation but he was keeping calm.

She didn’t want to know, but her brain provided the information anyway. She nodded, tears streaming over her fingers and splashing onto her chest. When he only waited, she pried her hands a little apart and whispered, “Tagen Pahnee.”

Something in the hard set of his shoulders relaxed slightly, but he still looked pretty pissed at her. He took one step forward and stopped again. “What else do you remember?”

She remembered him holding her hair while she was sick in the sink. The thought seemed to curdle somewhere inside her; her shivering body began to go slack, not with relief, but in defeat. “You’re not going to hurt me,” she sobbed, not believing a word of it.

“No. I am not going to hurt you.” He regarded her with a bitter intensity and took another step toward her. “And you are not going to throw things at me.”

“Okay, I won’t.” She looked up at him through a shimmer of tears. “Now please go away, okay?”

“No.” He took the last step, and then reached down and took her arm. He brought her inexorably to her feet and glared down at her, his claws still strong on her bicep. “I need your help,” he said, stressing the word ‘need’. “And I am staying until I have it.”

“No!” she moaned, and tried to pull away from him. In a moment of pure absurdity, she heard herself add, “I’ll call the cops!”

“I have the phone,” he countered, his eyes narrowing. He let go of her and watched as she inched away from him and hugged the dryer. “Do I need to tie you before you stand still?” he demanded.

She looked at him, her lip quivering. She shook her head.

He took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then let it out in a sigh. His unnatural eyes glanced her way once more and then he turned his back on her and walked out. “When you are ready to listen,” he called as he left, “I will talk.”

Panic was a nice thing to have in bad situations. It numbed the senses nicely and kept one from having to come to real grips with horrible things. Unfortunately, it was not self-perpetuating. Without the continued presence of the stranger (The alien! The monster! The clawed, fanged, evil thing!) to feed it, panic slowly bled out of her and lucidity stole in.

Daria shuffled forward, keeping contact with the dryer as long as she could, as though it were her own private tether to normalcy. She stooped and picked up the sock she’d thrown and returned it to the hamper. She put the empty paint can back on the shelf. It was dulcet powder, and she’d need the sample if she ever had to repaint her bedroom.

The door was still open, inviting her back into her house. The stranger was nowhere in sight. Daria tugged her t-shirt down over her thighs, steeling herself, and finally stepped out into the hall.

He was in the living room, cleaning up the wooden shards that used to be her coffee table. He glanced at her when she crept in, but that was all.

Daria waited nervously for him to do something and when he only continued to ignore her, she moved past him and picked up the bills she’d dropped in front of the door. She had nowhere to put them, so she righted the end table and put them there. The coat rack went back in the corner. The coats were hung up on the rack. After that, she had nothing else to do but look at Tagen Pahnee, the invader.

He leaned the pieces of her coffee table against the wall and turned around to face her. He glanced once at the muted TV—Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy was prosecuting the blue hell out of some little old lady—and then he looked at her again. It was hard to meet his frustrated, golden gaze without flinching.

She opened her mouth several times before she managed to ask the question that had been gnawing at her. “Are you an alien?”

“Am I—?” Surprise smoothed the anger out of him, and made his hard features seem somehow younger. A thin smile twitched at the corners of his mouth, exposing the tips of some very sharp teeth. “No,” Tagen said. “You are.”

The incongruity of that statement left Daria speechless and a little dizzy. She swept her eyes around the room, trying to draw strength from all the nice, normal things that bolstered up her life, and then looked back at him helplessly. “Why did you lock me in?”

“To keep you from running out,” he replied, raising one brow archly. “I need you, Lindaria Cleavon.”

“Daria,” she said. “Just Daria.”

Tagen nodded, closing his falcon’s eyes briefly. “Yes,” he muttered. “You told me this.”

“What…What are you?” she asked. “What are you doing here? What are you going to do to me?”

He was watching her mouth closely, as though trying to read the words as they left her, and he gave his head a hard shake as her voice started to climb. “Slowly,” he said. “Please.”

She backed up a step, but there wasn’t anywhere to go. She stood and looked unhappily into his alien face, feeling lost.

Tagen seemed to be waiting for her to repeat her questions, and when she lapsed into her miserable silence, a thin line appeared between his eyes. He regarded her with that half-frown for a long space of seconds, and then said, “I do not know many of your words, but I will explain as much as I can. More than that, I can only say it is not my…my plan to hurt you. I would not be here at all if my need were not…not…bad.” He scowled at the inadequacy of the word and then shot her a glance.

She did not volunteer another. Eventually, he went on.

“I am—” He gestured at the TV, where a new Law & Order had started. “—a police. I have come…There is someone…”

He stopped, frustration climbing through his whole body, and glared at the television. “I cannot tell you. I have no words.”

Daria shook her head, her hair snapping out wildly. “No, no-no-no! You can’t just lock me in here with you and say it’s okay because you’re a cop! That’s not a reason, that’s a résumé! Now you tell me what you’re doing here or I’ll—”

Tagen shot her a glare and then advanced on her like a panther. His mouth opened and out came a furious rush of sound that she tried hear as an alien language for several minutes before she realized her was speaking perfect Spanish.

The bones went out of Daria’s body. She staggered back and he came forward, circling her and driving her out the corner until she hit the edge of the couch. She sat strengthlessly and stared up at him. There was something so fundamentally surreal about an alien speaking Spanish, although she supposed there was no reason that should be any stranger than one speaking English.

“Stop,” she said finally. “Just stop. I don’t understand you.”

“No,” he snapped. “No no no. You cannot command me to speak and then refuse to hear me merely because you do not know Panyol.”

“Okay, I get the point.” Daria dropped her gaze and tugged her t-shirt over her knees. “I’m sorry.”

“We,” Tagen said fiercely, “must find some way of living together, because my patience is growing very thin and I am not going to leave until my questions are answered.”

“You may not believe this,” she said, tears stinging at her eyes and unsteadying her words, “but I am dealing with you the best I can.”

For a moment, the anger continued to smolder in his gaze. Then he let out a breath and stepped back, the tension fading from his body. “Yes,” he said, and he sounded tired. “I suppose you are.”

She made herself see him then, not just look at him, but truly see him. She saw a stranger who knew full well that he was alone and far from home. She saw a man at the end of his endurance, exhausted down to the very bones of him, and desperate enough to grab at straws. She saw a cop at the end of a long day, one who had put himself in a lot of danger and who was still determined to do his job. She saw Tagen Pahnee, and it broke her a little.

“Okay,” she said. “What are your questions?”

He met her gaze, mistrustful now that she had shown compliance, but then come forward again, intensity a hammer behind every word. “What are your planet’s defenses?” he demanded. “Who has control over the weapons that orbit Earth? Can they be used to repel off-world invasion? What are your methods of locating alien life-forms once they have come to your world? What is your access to the media of—”

“What are you talking about?” Baffled, Daria interrupted him with upraised hands and a hard shake of her head. “We don’t have anything like that on Earth! Most people probably don’t even believe in aliens, and no one could stop a—” The breath fell out of her, heavy as a hot stone, and she stared at him. “Alien invasion?” she gasped. “You’re invading Earth?”

“What?” Now it was his turn to draw back, confused. “No!”

“Don’t lie to me!” She sprang up, her fists balled uselessly at her side and shouted at him. “Why else would you need to know what Earth’s defenses are? I’m not a complete idiot, you know, I can connect the dots! You’re going to invade and kill us all, and you think I’m going to help you do it! Well, I’m not! You can kill me, but I’m not telling you shit!”

Tagen derailed her suicidal bravado with one universally-recognizable gesture. He raised his hand and smacked himself in the forehead.

Daria’s growing outrage blew out of her like steam from an open kettle. She blinked at him, watching him stand before with his eyes tightly shut and his breath coming hard and slow between tightly-clenched jaws, and slowly sat back down. “You…aren’t invading?”

“No.” Tagen moved nothing but his mouth and that not much. “Not as you mean it. There is one only. I am here to take him back.”

“Then…then why would you need to know all that stuff about…weapons and…and repelling aliens and…”

He snatched his hand away and glared at her. “I thought perhaps Earth’s defenses may have located him, sparing me the trouble. It was a fool’s thought, not a conqueror’s. Did you really think I would come to land on Earth and then ask what defenses you possessed if I came to invade?” he demanded, sweeping his arm out to one side as though physically displaying the stupidity of that notion. “And that you would think all of Jota would come to Earth! Do you know what that would cost? What would put such a thought into your head?!”

Daria picked at the hem of her t-shirt, her eyes darting to the shelves beside the TV where she kept her DVDs. Damn the movies.

“No,” Tagen continued. “Only one has come to Earth and only I am come to find him. Even if I were to die, still no one else would come. Your Earth is quite safe from invasion. Are you glad with that?”

“Am I…? Yeah, I guess I’m satisfied.” She risked an upwards glance and dropped her eyes back to her knees when she saw he was still glaring at her. “Sorry.”

He did not seem much mollified. “Will you answer now or must I ask again?”

“I don’t think Earth has any defenses the way you’re thinking,” she said. “And if there’s weapons in orbit like you said, I don’t even know what they are. As for tracking aliens on Earth…Tagen, we just don’t have that kind of technology.” She peeked at him again; he was glaring at the television screen. “Who is this guy you’re looking for?” she asked. “What did he do? And why did he come here?”

Tagen turned back around, his eyes narrowed. He studied her in silence for a short time, and then said, “His name is Kanetus E’Var. I have no words to tell you his crime.”

“But you’re going to find him.”

“Yes.” He paused. “If he is here.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

His brows drew down slowly, carving that line in deeper between his eyes. “No.”

“You can’t…I don’t know…scan for his life-source from orbit?”

Tagen’s head cocked to one side. He stared at her in thunderstruck irritation and snapped, “Can you?!”

“No,” she admitted, and then frowned. “Are you saying…are you seriously saying that you came all the way Earth looking for one guy, and you don’t even know where to look? What was your big plan, just to walk around shaking his food dish?”

It was just as well he couldn’t follow that, because it really wasn’t too smart a thing to say. While Tagen was still obviously attempting to decipher that, Daria took a breath and tried again, more calmly, “Do you know how big Earth is?”

“Yes,” he said, with a black that’s-enough look lurking in his eyes. “I am aware that it will be difficult.”

“Difficult? Tagen, making cassoulet is difficult! Solving the Rubik’s cube is difficult! Stumbling over the whole planet on foot looking for one guy is impossible!”

“Without help, yes.” Tagen leaned forward, his eyes unblinking. “Which is why I need you, Daria Cleavon. And which is why I will not allow you to refuse me.”

Daria sat back, blinking. “Me?”

“Yes.”

“Why me?”

“I found you first.”

“Well, you have a really inflated idea of just how much help I’m going to be,” she said, stunned. “Wouldn’t you rather have a scientist or a soldier or…Mulder and Scully or someone like that?”

“Yes,” he said, with an sincerity that was almost insulting. He raked his claws through his hair and gave the ceiling a long-suffering glance before returning his attention to her. “But I have you. And you will suffice.”

Daria had never been snubbed in quite that way before. It was like winning the mystery lottery and then being told your prize was getting to be sacrificed to a giant ape. On the one hand, she’d overcome amazing odds to win a once-in-a-lifetime experience. On the other hand, it sucked.

“Well,” she said in a small voice. “How can I help?”

He eyed her warily before answering. “I am hungry.”

She started to get up and then sat back down again. “I can’t cook without dishes.”

Suspicion painted itself over his face once more. “If I let you have those things, will you try to use them against me?”

She thought about it and her heart fell. “No,” she admitted.

“Why should I trust you?”

“Because I really, really want you out of my house.”

She didn’t know what answer he expected, but clearly, that wasn’t it.

“You scare me,” she said, “but you haven’t hurt me. And you could.” Her eyes dropped to his waist. There were two devices holstered at his belt, devices too ugly to be anything but weapons. “Not even when I threw pudding at you.”

He acknowledged that with a rueful glance back down the hall. One of his talons tapped at the carpet.

“Besides,” she said hopelessly, “even if I could get away from you, where would I go? If I told anybody you were here, I’d be locked up for life. So I might as well help you because I could never get anyone to believe me.”

“Thank you,” he said dryly, but then he sighed and said it again, without the sarcasm. “Thank you, Daria Cleavon. You will find what you need in the room of holding.”

Daria smiled faintly, understanding him perfectly. Dan’s old room, the room of holding. Holding stuff, holding still. It was a good place to hide things; she hadn’t been in there in years except to open the windows in the summer and close them again for the winter. She’d have probably starved to death before she thought to go in there and look for the hammer with which to pry open the doors.

And now this had happened. Nothing was holding still anymore. And nothing would ever be the same.

Daria got up from the couch and went upstairs so she could get her alien something to eat.

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