“All communications systems are down,” he said abruptly. “Can’t get a word in or out. You folks know anything about that?”
“Sorry,” said Honey in her best brisk and professional voice. “Information only on a need-to-know basis. You know how it is.”
“Oh, sure, sure.” The deputy actually relaxed a little in the presence of such obvious authority and competence. “Good to have someone here who knows what they’re doing. We’re mostly part-timers. Sheriff’s off sick with his allergies, and Doc Stern’s busy with a car cash on the other side of town. This is all . . . a hell of sight more than I signed on for.” He looked at Honey sharply. “Did your people know this was going to happen? Is that why you’re here?”
“It’s our job to know about things like this,” said Honey. “Has there been any panic in the town? Any rush to get out of Roswell?”
“Well, no,” said the deputy, frowning heavily. “Everyone here was expecting the tourists to get in their cars and head for the hills once the news got out, with the townsfolk right behind them, but . . . everyone’s being real calm about it. Doesn’t make a blind bit of sense . . . I’d leave, if I had anyone halfway competent to leave in charge, but . . . it just doesn’t seem right to go off and leave old Jim Thomerson lying there in the morgue. Not . . . respectful. Here; this is it.”
He showed us a large reinforced steel door with a keypad lock. More security than I’d been expecting. We all waited impatiently while the deputy keyed in the six-digit number with great concentration.
“I don’t normally get back here much,” he said. “Only the sheriff and the doc ever come in here. Doc’ll be back as soon as he can. You want me to stick around . . . ?”
“No,” said Honey. “Go back to your post, Deputy. We’ll handle it from here. And, Deputy: no one comes back here till we’re done, and no one says anything to anyone. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the deputy. He hurried away, not looking back.
“Potentially bright young fellow, I thought,” said Walker.
We went into the morgue, shutting the door behind us. It was a lot bigger than I expected, with bright lights and immaculate gleaming walls.
“This . . . is not normal, for a small town,” said Honey. “Maybe . . . ten times larger than it should be. This is more the kind of thing you’d expect to find in a major city. Makes me wonder if they might have had to contend with . . . unusual situations before.”
“This was custom-made,” said Walker. “By someone expecting trouble.”
“Maybe something did happen here back in the day, “ said Honey.
“And no one told you,” said Walker. “Shame on them.”
“Never mind that,” I said. “Look at that! They brought one of the bloody cows in here!”
Two mortuary slabs had been pushed together on the far side of the room, and a cow was lying across them on its side. The four legs stuck stiffly out over the edge of the slab. We all gathered around the carcass. The cow had been sliced open the whole length of its underside, from throat to udder. The sides of the belly had been pulled out and pinned back to reveal that the whole interior had been . . . rummaged through. Some organs were missing, others had been cut open and had pieces removed, still others had been moved around, rearranged. Large holes had been drilled through the hide and the head to no obvious purpose. Both eyes were gone, and all the top teeth had been neatly extracted. The tongue had been sliced in half lengthwise, and then left in place. One stiff leg had been dissected to show the nerves, another to show the muscles.
“Interesting,” said Walker, leaning in close for a better look.
“Extremely,” said Honey, leaning right in there with him.
“Gross,” I said, staying well back. “I want to know how they got that thing in here through that little door.”
We all looked back at the distinctly human-scaled door, shrugged pretty much in unison, and turned our attention back to the cow.
“The work looks professional enough,” said Walker. “Definitely used scalpels rather than knives. And since there’s no damage from local predators, it was done not long ago. Some burn marks on the internal tissues. Laser drill, perhaps? But none of this work makes any sense . . . It’s not just a dissection. I feel sure there was a definite end in mind, but I’m damned if can make out what . . .”
“They practically strip-mined the poor creature,” I said. “But why take some organs and just cut up others? Why open the beast up just to move things around?”
“Presumably they were curious,” said Walker. “Perhaps . . . they’d never seen a cow before.”
“What?” said Honey. “They came all the way here with their snazzy new stardrive but couldn’t tap into our computers to get the information they needed?”
“Maybe they just like to get their hands dirty,” said Walker. “Assuming they have hands, of course.”
“Seems more to me as if they were looking for something,” I said. “And if they didn’t find it in the cow, maybe that’s why they moved on to the poor bastard lying on that slab over there.”
We all moved over to look at the middle-aged man lying naked and cut open on the next mortuary slab: Jim Thomerson, farmer and well-known local businessman, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and paid for his mistake with blood and horror. We leaned in for a closer look at the terrible things that had been done to him. His injuries were similar to the cow’s but so much more disturbing for having been done to a man. Organs missing, limbs dissected, his insides rearranged . . . His empty eye sockets stared accusingly up at us.
“Judging by the defensive wounds on his hands and arms, he was alive when they started,” said Honey. “Though hopefully not for long.”
“Why now?” said Walker. “Why start doing cattle mutilations to people now? What’s changed?”
“Obvious answer,” I said. “These are new aliens. A species newly come to Earth, who don’t know the rules. I’m going to have to teach them a hard lesson: that you don’t come waltzing in here unless you’ve cleared it with the Droods first and learned the bloody rules. Someone’s going to pay for this.”
“But even so,” said Walker, “why take some organs but just—”
“I don’t know!” I said. Walker and Honey looked at me, and I lowered my voice. “I don’t know. They’re aliens. They don’t think like us. My family has been dealing with aliens for centuries, and we still don’t have a translation device that works worth a damn. Sometimes we don’t even have basic concepts in common.”
“What do you do, if you can’t communicate with a species?” said Walker. “If you can’t get it to follow your rules?”
“We kill them,” I said. “And we keep on killing them till they stop coming. What do you do in the Nightside?”
“Pretty much the same,” said Walker.
“I’ve had some experience with aliens,” said Honey just a bit defensively. “Not really my department, but all hands to the pump when the river’s rising.”
“What?” said Walker.
“It was an emergency!” said Honey. “And I was the only experienced agent on the spot. I was in the Arctic, searching through Area 52 for something important that had been shipped there by error (and you’d be surprised how often that happens), when something got loose from the holding cells. I swear, I’ve never heard alarms like it. I had to dress up in a total environment suit and go out on the ice to hunt it. Fortunately, it didn’t get far. Stupid thing made the mistake of trying to go one on one with a polar bear. Took us ages to find all the bits. And we had to stomach-pump the bear.”