Damage Control - ARC (3 page)

"Where can I wash my hands?" she asked.

He gestured toward a triangular object
installed in a corner.

"What's that?" Piper said. Whatever it was,
it wasn't a sink.

He switched hands on the door and reached his
right arm out to put his fingers in the object. Suddenly, water
began to flow from a hidden pipe, making little splashes on his
clawed fingertips.

Piper jumped and the man laughed. She put her
own hands in the same spot and water poured onto them.

"Where's the soap?" she asked.

All he did was stare at her, so in the end
she had to settle for just the water.

When she was through, the man stepped aside,
letting her out of the bathroom. At the same time, there was a loud
splash from a nearby room, followed immediately by a female voice
letting out a stream of angry sounds that were definitely not
English. The man laughed and gave a sharp reply in the same
language.

"No wonder you won't talk to me," Piper said.
"You're foreigners; you don't speak English." But at the same time
she wondered whether maybe they did speak English and for some
reason just didn't want her to know that.

The big man gestured to Piper to follow him
back to the cage.

"Are you crazy?" she said and turned the
other way, to their right, toward where the men had come in.

He responded by putting his huge hand on her
back and nudging her toward the cage. When she resisted, he pushed,
and when she tried to squirm away from his hand, he knocked her
off-balance and caught her again. So she walked to the cage while
he kept his hand on her back.

He followed her into the cage, ducking for
the doorway, and guided her to the empty box. He lifted the cover
and squatted over the box, like a mime using an imaginary latrine.
Piper made a face and looked away. So the box was meant to be a
chamber-pot. The idea was disgusting, but if she was going to be
shut in here again, even a box would be better than nothing.

He got off the box and closed the lid, and it
was her turn to play the mime. She started by pretending to wash
her hands. The man imitated the motion, and she wasn't sure what to
make of that. But she hoped at least it meant that he understood
the request, and she moved on to her next one.

But how did one use gestures to request
toilet paper? Instead, she led him out of the cage and back to the
bathroom, and grabbed a handful of the blotting-paper squares
herself.

Back in the cage, she set the blotting paper
next to the box and put her hand to her mouth, pretending to eat.
He picked up the six-sided plate with the purple thing on it and
tried to hand it to her. She held her nose and pushed it away.

He laughed and walked out of the cage,
shutting her inside but taking the plate with him.

Soon he returned with the same plate, or one
just like it, this time bearing an object roughly the color of
ivory. At first she thought it was an orange with the outside skin
peeled off and the inside skin left on, but when he'd brought it
close she realized it was a vegetable she'd never seen before.
Unfortunately, it didn't smell any better than the purple thing. In
his other hand, he had a big five-sided bowl of water, which he set
beside the box, but not too close to the blotting paper.

After that, they left her alone again, locked
in the cage hungry like before. She saw the smaller man briefly as
he walked back through the room, his strange clothes dripping as
though he'd just taken a bath without remembering to undress. He
wasn't small, she realized: he only looked it next to his huge
companion.

She tried to sleep to pass the time, but she
was too hungry. And besides, her headache was getting worse. At
least she didn't need the bathroom anymore. By putting her mind to
it, she reviewed all her courses, even going back over the French
again. After that she tried to come up with something else to think
about, but her head hurt too much. So she just sat on the cushion
with her head in her hands, staring at the brown floor.
Occasionally, she heard the sloshing again.

She had no way of knowing how long she sat
like that, but eventually the pain in her head began to subside,
and she stood up and began to pace the length of the cage to
stretch her legs. 'I'm like a tiger in the circus,' she thought,
'except I'm not the one with the claws.'

By the time the men returned, her stomach
hurt from hunger as well as her head. She'd had to use the box,
which was difficult because it was too high for her, but at least
this time she had privacy. And the cover fit well and seemed to
seal in any odors.

This time it was the big man who gave Piper
an amused glance and disappeared in the direction of the sloshing
sounds, and the regular-sized man who stopped at her cage and
unlocked it.

She handed him the plate with the stinky
vegetable, and he took it away and returned with it full of
something else. It was a pile of tube-like green stalks that
resembled overgrown chives or small scallions and had a smell
somewhere between tomato paste and rubbing alcohol.

She was so hungry she put one of the stalks
in her mouth and bit it. It didn't taste quite as bad as it
smelled, and if she held her breath she could manage to swallow it.
It felt so good to eat something again, and she finished the
plateful.

The man grinned through his scaly mask and
began to stroke her head, roughing up her hair a little as though
she were a dog.

She barely had time to turn away from him
before vomiting it all on the rubbery brown floor.

To Piper's relief, the man didn't seem angry,
only surprised and disappointed. Without bothering to lock the
cage, he walked quickly to one of the odd-shaped room's corners and
retrieved an object that had been hidden from Piper's view. It was
a pale grey cylinder, about the size of the big man's thigh. He
must have flipped a switch on it, because it began to hum, and he
waved it over the spot where she'd vomited and all the vomit
disappeared.

"Nice vacuum cleaner," she remarked.

"Clackloob cleadle," he replied—if it really
was a he. It seemed to Piper that the voice was a woman's. But
then, she could have been imagining it. After all, she hadn't eaten
anything for who knows how long—not that had stayed down,
anyway—and she was dizzy and having trouble focusing her eyes. She
sat down on the cushion, and the person, whichever sex it was, left
with the vacuum cleaner, locking the cage this time.

She let her body slump onto the cushion and
closed her eyes: she couldn't really see through them, anyway. She
thought she heard sloshing again, but couldn't be sure if she was
hearing or imagining or dreaming it, or if she was awake or asleep
or somewhere in between. She thought she heard voices: a man's and
a woman's. She thought she should try to make out what they were
saying, but then she couldn't bring herself to care.

No longer feeling hungry, she lay there,
alternating between a desperate craving for some kind of change and
an irrational wish to lie there undisturbed forever. Never quite
alert and never quite asleep, she had no idea how long she remained
that way. She only knew that at one point the two voices came
nearer, and someone began to spoon something into her mouth. By
reflex, she swallowed.

She didn't notice when the spooning stopped
and she fell asleep.

When she awoke, her headache was gone and she
was alone except for the sloshing sound. She used the box, relieved
to find it empty and clean, then had a drink of the lukewarm water
and looked at the six-sided plate.

To her surprise, it contained what appeared
to be pieces of fresh fruit and cooked meat, although she couldn't
have said what kind of fruit or what kind of meat. It smelled
delicious and she suddenly felt very hungry. She began cautiously
by biting off the tiniest corner of one of the meat pieces, but it
tasted so good that she soon had the whole plateful finished. Then
she went back to the cushion and slept again.

This time she woke with the voices quite
close: her captors must have come back while she'd slept. She sat
up and saw them reclining facing each other on the two closest
brown heaps, the big man on the heap to her left and the smaller
one of ambiguous gender on the heap to her right.

At first she thought they were having an
argument: their strange words exploded from their mouths with a
vehement force. But they looked relaxed, maybe even happy, their
facial expressions and body language suggesting an intimate chat
between close friends. Between them was one of the heavy-looking
wooden blocks, and now the deep carved recesses in its top were
filled with what seemed to be strange fruits, nuts and flowers.
Occasionally, one or the other of the lizard-people would reach for
a handful of these and eat it.

She couldn't be sure—she'd been so hungry
when she'd last seen them—but it seemed to her that they had
changed their clothes. At least, she didn't remember having seen
the shapes of their chests before. And yes, they definitely both
had chests—male chests. On the big one, that was to be expected.
But the smaller one, despite its male chest and masculine bearing,
had unmistakably female hips and a decidedly feminine voice. It
wasn't even one of those voices that could have belonged to a man
and been softened by training and practice.

Piper stepped to the water-box for a drink,
and froze. She looked through the bars at the reclining pair and
suddenly understood. "You're not wearing disguises," she said to
them, even though she knew they couldn't understand her words.
"Those are your real faces, your normal clothes, your regular kind
of toilet. And I'm not your prisoner; I'm your pet."

J
a
de Massilon
close
d her eyes
and shook her head to try to get control of her imagination. But
when she looked again, he was still there, standing on the orange
leaves under the oak tree that grew almost too close to the
house.

It would have been odd enough for a stranger
to walk into her backyard from the forest at all. But this stranger
looked like he should have been walking into a sci-fi convention.
His entire head was covered in a hairless, ridged and scaly mask.
He wore a futuristic-looking slate-gray jumpsuit with an intricate
design of shiny gold-colored circles embossed on the front. Heavy
gray boots came up to his knees. "My vehicle is disabled," he said.
"I require help." He had a deep voice.

"Where is your vehicle?" Jade asked, stalling
for time.

"About five hundred meters north-northeast of
here." He sounded congested.

Five hundred meters north-northeast. There
were no roads in that location—only a rough jeep track. Then either
he was confused, or he was lying to hide something. "I'd be happy
to call someone for you," she told him, and went into the house.
She would lock the door and call 911, and they'd probably take him
to the hospital.

But before she could finish closing the door,
he grabbed it and followed her inside. He was tall—at least
six-foot-six.

With an effort, she looked up at the scaly
mask. It fit him well—it must have been glued on and touched up
with makeup. "Can you wait for me outside, please?"

"No," he said, and closed the door.

“Really,” she insisted, her pulse throbbing
in her ears, “you need to wait outside.” She tried to open the door
again, but he held it closed. She kicked the little throw-rug out
of the way, got a solid stance on the pine floorboards, grabbed the
doorknob with both hands, leaned back and pulled hard. But of
course she was no match for the much bigger intruder, and he stood
there looking almost bored, holding the door shut easily with one
hand.

Telling herself not to panic, she
methodically put the mail down on the table, took off her coat and
fed the fire in the woodstove. She replaced the stove-lid, hung the
lid-lifter on its nail beside the bellows and whisk broom on the
stair-stringer and started for the telephone.

But when she had the phone almost within
reach, he grabbed her arm, stopping her. His touch felt like
leather—and no wonder. He wore gloves to match the gray-brown
'alien' skin of his mask. The fingers of the gloves ended in claws,
but either they weren't sharp or he had been careful not to scratch
her with them. "I will not allow you to contact your government,"
he explained. He must have had a bad cold: he sounded all plugged
up.

"Let me go!" Jade protested, trying not to
sound scared.

To her surprise, he did release her, and she
made a dive for the phone.

It was useless. He grabbed her arm again and
held her back.

"Okay," she breathed, hoping she hadn't
angered him. "No phone calls." She paused, swallowed, took a deep
breath, and said, "But then, I don't know how I can help you."

"I require heat," he replied. "You will stay
by the stairs." Still holding her arm, he pulled her back around
the table to the place where she’d just hung the lid-lifter. She
thought he might search her to make sure she didn’t have a
cellphone on her, but he didn’t. Maybe he knew there was no cell
signal there, or maybe he just didn’t think of it.

He stood between the stove and the table,
blocking her way to the phone, and took off his outer piece of
clothing. It was a stiff piece, worn in front like the protective
gear of a baseball catcher. He pulled his arms out of his jumpsuit
and tied the sleeves around his waist. The long-sleeved jersey or
unionsuit he wore underneath covered him completely, from 'alien'
mask to 'alien' gloves.

"What's your name?" Jade asked.

"Zuke."

"Zuke," she repeated. "Okay. Why the alien
costume?"

Zuke—or whatever his name really was—didn't
answer right away. He removed a small object from his left hip and
spoke into it: "Costube." Some sounds came from the object. Then he
replaced it and turned to Jade. "Are you asking why I wear this
clothing?"