Martin looked at me like I was the crazy one.
“Don’t you remember those comic strips?” he snapped. “The rock falls and then the alien zaps the human or tears his skin from his bones or—”
I waved a hand.
“I get the picture.”
“You don’t remember any of it? They used to give me nightmares. After I have a little taste, I see them again. They haunted me.”
What did he expect?
Taking drugs rewired your brain.
“It was probably a car backfiring or something,” I said. “I hate to tell you this, but you don’t exactly live in the best neighborhood. It could have been gunshots.”
“Naw, man. I know a gunshot when I hear it and that roar and thud last night was no gunshot.”
I raised my hands in surrender.
“All right. So we’ll go take a look and make sure nothing’s there.”
“We? I’m not going out there!”
“It’s your backyard.”
“It’s your responsibility as sheriff.”
Martin folded his arms.
It was no use.
He wasn’t going to budge.
“Fine,” I snapped. “I’ll check it out. But if there’s nothing there, I expect you to give me something in exchange.”
“Anything, man. You just name it, and it’s yours.”
Your wife whenever I want her.
I wouldn’t tell him my demands now in case he refused, but getting what you wanted from a user was never very hard.
“You owe me,” I said, waving a finger at him.
I shoved the kitchen door open and stepped into the large but poorly-manicured backyard.
I shoved the kids’ pedal-powered kart aside and continued down the patches of dust.
I glanced back at the kitchen window and saw Martin’s face pressed against the glass.
What an asshole…
He was going to pay for this.
Or his wife would.
I’d ride her so hard she’d be limping for a week.
I rounded the kids’ broken swing, little remaining of it save four chains hanging without saddles.
What a shithole.
Why would an alien choose to land here of all places?
They could have chosen a five-star resort.
I turned to head back and take Martin’s tasty wife with me when I noticed a wisp of smoke emitting from behind a short rise.
No cause for alarm.
Someone might have set up a barbeque.
I wandered over and crested the rise.
My jaw hit the floor at what I saw.
A twisted hunk of metal spewed luminous green liquid into the base of a crater.
Sparks hissed from hunks of machinery I’d never laid eyes on before.
I doubted if anyone had seen something like this before.
Martin was right.
Something had crashed in his backyard.
And he was right to be afraid.
I shouldn’t be handling this alone…
I reached up for my radio to request backup when a panel from the ship’s underside fell open.
I took the torch from my belt and aimed it at the hole.
“Hello?” I said. “Is anyone there?”
Silence answered me.
A low groan moaned, both deep and long and pained.
It shook me to my core.
It wasn’t the kind of sound someone made at the peak of health.
It was made by someone at death’s door.
Or something.
“I’m going to call an ambulance,” I said. “They’ll be here soon.”
“Heeeeeellp…” a voice said.
Its pronunciation was strangely twisted around the word.
I drifted a little closer, keeping a wide berth between me and the opening’s darkness.
I shone my light inside it.
“Hello—?”
I barely managed to get the word out when a hand flopped from the pitch blackness.
On the very fringes of daylight, I made out a thick thatch of hair that had to be the body of a man.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
At least it wasn’t a little green man, I told myself.
That’s something, at least.
I approached and felt at the man’s wrist.
He still had a heartbeat but it was weak.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll get you out of here. We just need to—”
Then I saw his face.
“No… That’s impossible…”
The words were out before I could process them.
I dropped the torch and fell on my ass.
I scooted back a yard before I came to a stop.
I turned my head to one side to peer closer at the figure’s face.
There could be no denying it.
It was the pilot.
Clint.
At least, he looked identical to Clint.
His twin maybe?
But what were the chances of them both falling from the sky in the same small town?
It didn’t feel right.
I reached for my radio again.
My hand shook so hard I had to restrain it with my other hand.
“Dispatch, come in, over. I repeat, dispatch, come in, over.”
Shlurp.
Shlurp, shlurp.
Something writhed from the darkness.
No, not from the darkness.
It writhed from the dying figure on the spaceship’s hull.
And that was what it was, I realized.
A spaceship.
Martin, damn him, had been right.
This thing was an alien.
Did that mean Clint was one too?
Was that how he was so strong?
Was that why he couldn’t remember anything?
It wasn’t that he had amnesia.
He just didn’t know anything about our planet.
“Dispatch, come in, over!”
The creature yanked itself from the fallen pilot.
It was as black as tar and thick like phlegm.
It moved forward with unbelievable speed and raced toward me.
I fell on my ass and skidded back away from it.
It latched onto my leg with its long sticky tendrils.
I swung my arm at it but failed to connect.
I swung with the torch again and this time my aim was good.
Then the tar absorbed that too.
It slithered up my body.
I kicked at it but it lashed my legs together.
“No!” I screamed. “Martin! Somebody! Help!”
The tar smothered my legs, my arms, and finally covered my head, until I was embraced within its cocoon.
As the creature absorbed me, I felt my consciousness give way beneath it.
Soon, everything I was, it was.
And everything it was, I was.
I knew what it wanted, just as it knew what I wanted.
I was shocked to find it was the same thing.
As the last few tendrils of my consciousness slipped beneath its control, I couldn’t help but smile.
It may not have happened the way I’d like, but Isabella would be mine.
No, she would be ours.
Isabella
After lunch, we returned to my room and I finished taking care of his injuries.
They might have been minor, as he’d said, but that didn’t explain the miraculous recovery he’d made.
I could practically see the wounds stitching themselves together like something from a Marvel movie.
“The splinters…” I said, turning his hands over
