Damage Control - ARC (2 page)

It turned out nobody in the village had put
it there, and stranger still, the rock was made of granite, with
little glinting bits of quartz and mica in it, which meant it had
to have been shipped in from far away. Granite was simply not a
stone that occurred naturally in the Gogue.

Eventually, more than twelve days later, the
scientists at the Laboratory found out about the rock and came out
and examined it. They asked lots of questions about when it was
found and who had touched it and whether anyone had moved it, even
just a little. They took measurements and images. Then they hauled
the rock to the Laboratory and took samples and conducted
experiments. But in the end they still couldn't say where it had
come from or how it had gotten there.

Eleven years later, it was a tree.

The tree was found by a young villager on
his way home from hunting, in the same area where the rock had
been, maybe even the same exact spot, but nobody could say that for
sure. It was just lying on the ground, roots and all, so he took it
home and planted it. The tree bore a delicious fruit, and he called
it 'sandfruit' and built himself a thriving business cultivating
and selling it.

Ten years after that, it was a mammal...

P
iper Craven went to
sleep in her dorm room and woke up in a cage. For a split second
she thought she was dreaming. Then she jumped up and tugged at the
bars on all sides, looking for a door.

Nothing opened. The metal bars wouldn't even
rattle or bend. After a while her throat hurt and she realized she
was screaming. She stopped and just stood there until her breathing
evened out.

She guessed the cage was a kennel made to
contain a number of big dogs at once. There was a sort of square
bucket in it, mostly full of water. She cupped her hands and drank.
The water was lukewarm, but at least it was clean.

Beside the water was a strange-looking purple
object on a six-sided plate. She sniffed it, and it had a sharp,
pungent, awful smell. Maybe it was insect repellent. The only other
thing in the cage was a large empty box with a hinged cover,
possibly made of some sort of plastic.

The cage was near the end of a long,
unfamiliar room. The walls were plain and painted white, not broken
anywhere she could see by either pictures or windows. Maybe there
were windows around the corner, though, because a soft light came
from somewhere, and she didn't see any lamps or light fixtures. The
ceiling was white, too, but exposed beams gave it a more
interesting look than the walls.

The furniture—if it could be called
furniture—was large and lumpy and Piper didn't know what to call
it. It was not chairs or tables or couches or desks or bookcases or
anything else that had a name. It was just four big shapeless
soft-looking brown heaps and two highly-polished, heavy-looking
wooden blocks with designs carved into the tops.

The floor was a mottled lavender color, and
when she reached her finger between the bars and poked it, it
turned out to be made of something rubbery. The bottom of the cage
was lined in something similar, but in a dull brown color, and
under that were the metal cage bars.

She reached her arm between the bars in one
end of the cage where there seemed to be a door, and felt for the
latch. She thought she found it, but couldn't be quite sure. She
wished she'd had a mirror so she could look at it. At any rate, if
that was the latch, it was locked. She examined every inch of the
bars and found no other opening, nothing else that seemed to be a
latch, no way of popping the hinges, just a woven mesh of round
metal bars about four inches apart.

She knelt and had another drink from the
water-box, then sat back down on the cushion she'd woken up on to
retrace her steps. But it was hard to think when everything was so
deafeningly quiet. For a moment, she just listened to the silence.
There was no refrigerator humming, no radiator hissing, no water
sloshing through heat pipes. Yet it was uncomfortably warm in the
cage.

She had just started to go over what had
happened in the last few minutes in the dorm before she'd gone to
sleep when she thought she heard a faint sound of water sloshing,
as though someone were taking a bath with the bathroom door
open.

"Hello, is anyone there?" she called, jumping
up, then held her breath to listen.

The only response was her own heartbeat
pounding in her ears.

Then she realized that someone taking a bath
may not be inclined to answer. She could practically hear her
grandmother saying, "Polite people ignore the outside world when
they are indisposed."

But Piper needed help, even if she had to
disturb a very proper lady during her bath. "Is anyone taking a
bath?" she called. "I need help. I've been kidnapped." That should
get her attention.

Nothing.

She sat back down on the spicy-smelling
cushion she'd woken up on. It just didn't make sense. How could she
have gotten from her bed in Holt Hall in Naperville College to—to
wherever this was?

She had walked back to her dorm from the
campus Post Office shortly before curfew, put her hair in curlers
and gone to bed. At the Post Office she'd mailed a very
strongly-worded letter to her brother Philip, because Philip had
used that very same Post Office to send her a box of live mice. And
now she, Piper, was in danger of being expelled for it.

Then she'd fallen asleep and had the
strangest dream about hot sand and huge lizards. But that couldn't
be quite right because she distinctly remembered burning pain in
her arms, her legs, her face and several other places. She'd never
been in actual pain in a dream before—not like that. No, this was a
real memory. She'd been lying on her back, very sick for some
reason, with people fussing over her, and her skin had felt like it
was on fire.

She looked down and realized that her arms
and legs were very red, as though they were sunburned. She hadn't
gone to bed with a sunburn. And even if he had, it wouldn't have
been this shape. She'd gotten this burn in her pajamas, after she'd
gone to bed.

Then, almost all at once, she remembered.

Piper woke up and coughed. Dizzying pain shot
through her head. She shaded her eyes with her hand and began to
open them, but the stabbing light nauseated her, and she shut them
fast.

She spat out sand and tried to stand up but
only fell on the burning, shifting surface. She tried again and
again but always ended up in a crumpled heap on the sand. She
stopped when she thought she heard voices.

They were voices, alright, but she couldn't
make out what they were saying. She tried to yell to them for help,
but all she could manage was a hoarse squeak. Her throat burned.
She tried to look for them, but the sun on the sand was too much
for even a quick glimpse.

The voices came closer and she realized they
weren't speaking English. There seemed to be two of them, and they
picked her up and put her in a truck or something and drove
away.

She didn't open her eyes until the truck had
stopped and the voices had moved her to a cool, relatively dark
place. But even then, she may as well not have bothered. No matter
how much she struggled to focus her eyes, the images she saw made
no sense.

She'd been laid on her back on some sort of
table or bench: that much she could tell without looking. And when
she opened her eyes, she could make out walls and a ceiling,
painted white or off-white. She thought the room might be an
unusual shape, not square, but she was so dizzy she couldn't be
sure.

It was the people that she wasn't seeing
correctly. The people who spoke a foreign language, who were now
beginning to wash her face gently with cool water, looked like
people, yet not like people. They stood upright and wore clothes.
They had hands with four fingers and a thumb. But they were
scaly-skinned and a color somewhere between gray, green and brown.
Their fingers ended in claws, and there were spines on their bald
heads.
I'm hallucinating from the heat
, she thought,
or
just dreaming. I should try to go to sleep, so I'll wake up.

One of the lizard-people rinsed the sand out
of her mouth, gave her a cube-shaped thing with a tube sticking out
of it and helped her put it to her mouth. It was like an
oddly-shaped juice box with the straw in the bottom instead of the
top. She sucked on the straw and cold water rushed into her mouth,
soothing her throat.

Someone washed the sand off her arms and
legs and put a cooling balm on her sunburns. She felt sleepy and
her headache was beginning to subside. She finished the water box,
put her head down and went to sleep.

Piper was hungry and needed a bathroom. Her
headache had started to come back, too, and she was bored. She took
her curlers out and hid them under the cushion. Then she decided to
pass the time by practicing her French. At least she'd be well
prepared for next week's final.

She exhausted her tiny French vocabulary
pretty quickly and recited all the conjugations and declensions she
could remember. She had just begun to attempt a review of her
American History class when she began to hear noises.

She sat on the cushion and listened and
waited. The noises came steadily closer, and soon she was sure
there were people in the house. The question was, were they her
kidnappers or someone who could help her? Either way, she was
desperate to get to the bathroom. "Hello!" she called. "Who's
there?"

She wasn't surprised to see two people enter
the room and approach the cage. What did surprise her was how they
were dressed. She hadn't been hallucinating earlier: the people
really had looked a lot like lizards, and here they were again. Now
that she was alert, it was obvious that it was a costume, a
disguise. 'I guess that's good news,' she thought. 'If they're
hiding their identities, then it means they don't intend to kill
me.' They were both men, and one was smaller than the other.

Piper thought of about ten things she wanted
to say, and they all crowded together in her head. To her surprise,
the only thing that came out of her mouth was, "Where's your
bathroom?" It was a good thing Grandma wasn't there to hear it.
'Ladies don't mention such things,' she would have said.

The men didn't answer. The smaller one looked
at Piper with a quick, curious, amused glance and continued through
the room and around the corner, in the direction of the sloshing
sounds. The larger one unlocked the cage and opened the door.

Piper's desperately-f bladder gave her
courage, and she hurried right past the big man and began to search
hurriedly for the bathroom.

She found it, but it was the oddest bathroom
she'd ever seen and she almost didn't recognize it. The toilet, for
example, was only about a foot high, had no tank on it, and was
round instead of oval. She dashed inside and tried to shut the
door, but the big man was holding it open. "Please," she begged,
"close the door."

The man only laughed and kept his grip on the
door. She tried to push him off, but his arm was huge and muscular,
and she couldn't budge it.

She gave up. Fortunately, the pajama top she
was wearing was long, almost like a tunic, and she pulled it down
over herself and was able to get her business done without too much
immodesty. There didn't seem to be any toilet paper, but there were
some squares of something that looked like blotting paper, and she
used one of them. It was rough on her delicate skin.

She looked for a sink, but there didn't seem
to be one. Maybe she'd need to wash her hands in the kitchen. The
big man still held the door half-open, blocking her exit. For the
first time, she got a good look at him. He must have been close to
seven feet tall.