The Getaway Vehicle

The airlock hissed and the planet’s weak atmospheric pressure crept in, threatening to evaporate her. But she’d been waiting. Preparing. She was ready. She held her form as tightly as possible as the three-foot-thick door swung open. All she needed was one. One warm body.

Voices crowded in. Those awful, squawking voices she’d grown to hate. The smell followed. Wet and cloying and acrid like that smoke they were always sucking into their bodies.

Focus. Focus. One warm body.

In the few times the chamber had been opened before, gloved claws reached in to collect her before the fog even had time to clear. She expected that this time, too. But no: the door opened and those creatures in their long, bright robes stepped aside, their odd round heads leaning over each other to look at her.

FLASH

Something exploded. A waves of photons slammed against her. She pulsed a little harder, straining with all her strength to keep her plasmatic form just a moment longer. Just one.

The fog cleared. She pulsed again, and the creatures made a cooing sound in unison, jostling to get a better look at her.

FLASH

Another explosion of photons. She wavered. She pulsed even harder, drew every molecule of herself together. She couldn’t wait. It had to happen.

Now.

She aimed for the one holding the explosive photon machine and leapt.

FLASH

Halfway there and she collided with an onslaught of white hot photons. They scraped against her outside edge, incinerating half of her already diminishing mass, but before she could register the pain, she slammed into a body.

The wet, solid, warm thing had no trouble holding its shape. She could feel the poor creature’s distress, its confusion as it tried to reject her presence there, an alien entity taking swift and ruthless control of its nervous system. She swarmed its memories looking for a way out, dulling its ability to hear the utter chaos breaking out around it.

Car, it said, and an image of a machine flashed across its hijacked memory.

She pierced the memory center again and locked into the creature’s muscular memory. He moved at once, helpless, even as his brain fought to shake her off.

Let me in, she pulsed back at him, prying deeper into his consciousness. She pitied him. Usually when she found a host, she would do it in isolation, let them slowly lose themselves to her. But that process took time, and she needed to get out of here now.

She let the creature walk itself away from the group, taking note of its gait and the way its muscles and skeleton worked together. They pushed against door after door, passing people—people the brain kept noticing—in those long bright robes, all looking at them rushing into the room where she’d been a prisoner for an immeasurable amount of time. Their eyes (even in her great urgency she marveled at the complicated little organs) flicked from her host to the thing clutched in its claw-like appendage.

Notes. Notes. Notes. The word repeated on a loop in the brain she’d commandeered, strong enough to fight through her vice-grip on its conscious thoughts.

She spared a precious iota of focus from their escape to register these notes in the creature’s grip. A small, black box. Flat and not very deep. Light, easy to carry. It didn’t appear to be slowing them down so she let it be.

The upper limb of the creature spasmed, fighting to hide the notes in a fold inside its robe. Fine, fine, she thought. A small concession if it meant they didn’t have to break their stride. One of them was going to notice very soon that she was no longer in that airlock chamber. No longer in the building. She’d observed them for a long time. They weren’t stupid.

She and the body shouldered through the final door, out into the sunlight. Only one sun, but remarkably bright. Nothing like the multiple dimming specks on her own planet. She stabbed the memory center again and the body turned immediately in the direction of the car.

Faster, she pushed, and they broke into a run. It was indescribably blissful to be in a body again. To have limbs and a shape. To no longer have to struggle to maintain a form.

She released her grip on the creature’s nerves to let the claws and limbs and legs and feet do what they needed to do to make the car—

“Please—“ it said. And even though she didn’t understand the sound, she could feel the ache it invoked in her host. The fear and confusion. The obsequiousness.

Drive, she throbbed through his brain.

VA-ROOOOM

Go, she pulsed through the body.

The car screeched as it tore toward her freedom. Finally.

—//—

They drove without stopping. She tried once to begin the linking process, but the creature screamed and the car jerked. Its survival impulses were strong. So she waited.

Eventually, the car slowed. It made a sputtering sound.

The host’s memory flashed: gas.

The car stopped. The creature twisted a small, jagged knife stuck near the steering column, and all went silent.

The sun was blinding bright and the landscape was…nothing. A wasteland. A dry, sticky scratch bloomed in her mouth, and she was suddenly aware of the panic in its body.

Notes.

A spike of urgency.

Notes. Notes.

She allowed the host to reach for the notes.

The notebook opened like gills. Thin, warped pages covered in what must have been some kind of language but looked like nothing more than stray marks to her. Patterns and indecipherable loops.

And in the middle of the notes—

She locked down on the nerves and muscles, freezing the body in place.

Her own language.

Clumsily scrawled like a beginner, but unmistakably her native tongue.

Go forage and return abundant. There is much left to know.

The blessing for travelers.

Not until her host’s shaking hand touched the writing did she notice she’d lost her grip on its brain. It’d gone quiet. Observing her. Observing itself.

“Oh my god…” he said. His hand snapped up to his mouth as he let out a jagged, barking sound. In his body she could feel the relief, the joy, the disbelief racing through him. A long story of his countless years trying in vain to decipher the writing he could now plainly read flickered through his memory.

He reached back inside his short robe. He took out a stick and pressed it against the notes to make more squiggling, stocky marks.

“Can you write?” he asked aloud. “Do you have a name?” To her astonishment he tried to give control of his brain back to her. She seized it immediately, and began to make her own marks on the notes.

I am Hea from the planet Ludo in the Alo stars. I am lost.

He made the barking sound again. She liked it. It lit up their shared brain and washed it in a warm, pleasant glow.

“I’m Roger. Roger Dixon. Uh…we’re on planet Earth. M-Milky Way galaxy. Can you talk? Out loud, I mean?”

She pulsed quickly through his entire body looking for a way to make herself heard.

No.

She sent a quick pulse down his arm.

“Of course, yes. Go ahead.”

What happened to Ludo? she wrote.

“I don’t know. I didn’t even know about Ludo until right now.” When she didn’t write anything else, he went on, “But here on Earth it’s uh…it’s May 15th, 1951. Not that that…probably means anything to you.”

It does not, she wrote.

Roger barked again.

“Sorry. I’m not laughing at you. It’s just…I mean am I losing my mind?”

You will. To me.

A tingle that had nothing to do with her ran down Roger Dixon’s spine. Poor thing. He couldn’t know that this wouldn’t last. That she was merely biding her time until they were somewhere she could—

Something vibrated through the air. Faint. Distant. But she felt it clearly on the fringes of her awareness.

Someone’s here.

Roger swiveled around in his seat. His eyes saw nothing. His ears heard nothing. But he knew she was right.

“How do you…”

A billow of dust blossomed on the flatline horizon. The vibration grew stronger and stronger as the other car approached, a clear image of its driver coming together as it grew closer.

Another man. This one called himself Fred Vernon. As soon as the name and the face came together, Roger Dixon’s body broke out in the same hot, itchy feeling she’d noticed when they ran out of the building.

“Who is it?”

She flicked through Roger’s memories for them both to see. There was something about Fred Vernon that wasn’t right. Flashes of a man who seemed too…much. Too awake. Too alive. Who never seemed tired, who was always scribbling and doodling and never looking anyone in the eye but always listening. Who lingered just a second too long over Roger’s shoulder every time he passed his way.

“A mole,” said Roger. Whatever “mole” meant, she got his meaning. Duplicitous. Untrustworthy.

“He wants my notes. I’ve been deciphering the…your…language for uh…a long time. I was getting close.”

Before she could stop him, Roger tore the pages of their conversation from the notes and stuffed them in a hatch in the front of the car. He closed the notebook and slid it into his pocket just as Special Agent Fred Vernon cut his engine behind them and popped his car door open.

His boots made a crunching sound as he walked from his car to Roger Dixon’s. He bent at his waist to see inside and made a shape with his mouth that she recognized as friendly, but another sense told her was a warning.

Roger rolled down the window and despite being a very solid man, the vibration rolling off of Fred Vernon practically dissolved Hea into particles. It was strong. Persistent. Familiar.

“Made it pretty far, Roger,” said Fred Vernon. Again he flashed his teeth and Roger Dixon’s spine tingled. “But it looks like you’re all outta gas. You could use some help, huh?”

Roger laughed, but the warm, glowing feeling wasn’t there. “If you happen to have some gas, I’d take it.”

“As a matter of fact, I do.” He hefted a red box that sloshed with the fluid inside it, but Hea barely registered this as she read perfect script on the side of the box:

Ludo is gone.

Fred frowned at Roger. “What? Not even a thank you?”

“Thank you,” Roger whispered. The hot prickling itchy crept up his neck. Hea pulsed—hard—through his muscles, pushing him to look Fred Vernon in the eye.

No, Roger pushed back. But Hea was stronger, and when Roger and Fred’s eyes locked, the pulse overwhelmed them—all four of them.

Suddenly Hea was awash in memories that weren’t hers and weren’t Roger’s and weren’t event Fred’s—but whoever he was hosting. Memories of the last days of Ludo, of her beloved home on fire and crumbling in on its own center. A black hole where once her family lived and thrived. A flicker of the journey from the Alo stars to this one. The loss and confusion of not knowing where the others went. If they were here, or in this galaxy, or even still holding a form.

She saw the same struggle between Fred and this creature when it first inhabited his body. How hard he fought to keep himself in tact while she locked down on his brain. How weak she’d been from her escape. How they’d reached a compromise.

“I thought so,” said Fred. He smiled at Roger, but this time there was no shiver down his spine. This time Roger smiled back, and the warm glow between Hea and her kin made the two men giddy.

“Rog,” Fred leaned in closer, “I need those notes.”

“Why? You already know how to—“

“I know we do, Dixon. But they don’t.” He jerked his head back toward the facility. “Besides. I got something here I think you may be more interested in.”

From his inside coat pocket, Fred Vernon produced an identical notebook: small and black and the size of his hand. He opened to the middle and flipped it around for Roger to see.

Two full pages of gorgeous script. The language Roger had spent the better part of two decades trying to decipher. And now, because of Hea, he could read it all as simply as if it were English. Hea pulsed down his arm, compelling him to reach for it. Fred Vernon handed it over without hesitation.

“Trade, Dixon.” Roger hardly noticed as he handed Fred his precious notes, flipping through an entire book of the elegant handwriting—now he could see how the shapes made sounds and words and ideas, how complex and simple and clear it all was.

“Why don’t you just tell them?” Roger asked.

“Roger,” Vernon cocked his head. “You know what they’d do to us if they knew. You’ve seen what they do in there. Nah. You gotta get out of here, Roger. Keep writing. Learn everything you can. But don’t come back here. You might think about changing your name.”

He chuckled like they may have been out on a smoke break together.

“I’m speaking to you, now.” Fred said. The sound of her own language coming from a human body frightened Hea. It was awful and unnatural, barely an approximation of the beautiful sound she so missed hearing. “In the old ways, we were conquerors. Now we are guests. Treat him well.”

Hea was stunned into stillness.

“And you, Rog,” Fred went on in his human drawl. “Try to be amenable. You can be something great, or you can fight it and just be a getaway vehicle. Up to you.” He winked at Roger, who couldn’t move. Could barely form a coherent thought.

“Alright!” Fred said at full voice, leaning away from the car at last. “You got your gas, I got these notes. I think we’re all set here, friend. Oh uh…there’s a little something in there for you both. A gift from the family. Drive safe now, you two.”

He patted the door and crunched back to his car. The engine roared to life, and with a spit of dirt he turned sharply and sped back toward the facility.

When at last the trail of dust behind him settled, Roger and Hea flipped through their new notes. In the back cover was a svelte pocket, and tucked inside was a folded up piece of paper. Roger took it out, unfolded it, and sucked in air so fast it made Hea dizzy.

She pulsed in his throat. Speak.

“Twenty thousand dollars,” he breathed. “Twenty….”

And while he laughed and laughed, Hea saw that Fred Vernon had written a note in the perfect, neat script of a planet otherwise lost to the universe:

Go forage and return abundant. There is much left to know.