Becoming Alien by Rebecca Ore Read Free Book Online Page B

kitchen table, strip him.” Warren left me while I did that, the alien softly crying, hands fluttering, touching my eyebrows. Warren came back with a first-aid kit and a syringe.
    As Warren heated morphine and water in a little copper pot Mom’d used for melting butter, the alien drew in the air with his hands, then grabbed me and looked around until he saw the pad. I got it for him, and he drew me with the aliens and looked at me.
    Exhausted and crying, I nodded. He wrote more on the drawing, then drew me giving the drawing to other aliens who looked like him. Then he quivered, the blood oozing from his chest.
    Warren drew up a needleful of morphine and palpated the veins in Alpha’s inner elbow. Alpha tried to touch Warren’s face. “He’s got veins, almost like us,” Warren said, slipping the needle in, drawing blood into the syringe.
    Before Warren could inject the painkiller, Alpha sighed and went utterly limp. His heart didn’t beat again, even after five minutes, ten.
    The eyes clouded up, the fingers stiffened. “He’s dead,” I told Warren.
    “They’re hunting us,” Warren said. “Aliens’ll find us and kill us. I didn’t want him dead. Honest. Tom, I’ll hide him good, but if the other aliens come, I’ll preserve him for autopsy. Maybe they can regrow him. Why did he die like that when I was trying to help him?”
    Warren was too spaced out to deliver the pills, but they had to be delivered, or it wouldn’t be just aliens all over us. I drove down to Wytheville and found the black guy and an Oriental waiting by a Ryder truck.
    “You late,” the Oriental said as we rolled the drums from one truck to the other.
    “Had problems at home,” I said.
    “You brother’s using,” the black said. “Not good.”
    I shrugged and got back in the cab. “Where’s the money?” I asked.
    They threw an attaché case at me. I looked in it. They had probably shorted me, but what the fuck could I do about it. The Oriental guy smiled as they started the truck up.
     
    When I came back, the alien’s body was gone, and Warren was huddled by the fire muttering, “Can’t trust nobody no more.” Speed-talking, I thought at first. But he stayed incredibly jumpy after the alien died, as though someone—drug people, aliens—would get revenge on him. “But the body will prove me innocent,” he said, “’cause I didn’t shoot to kill,” looking up from the fire with eyes that seemed trapped between smiling and screaming. “He’d have lived if he’d been human, hurt like that.”
     
    The work we did for the Atlanta investors piled up, what with Alpha gone, hard for me to make the egg route and help Warren under the hill.
    Then one day I came home to all the county cops, some Feds, the IRS boys, and eight photographers snapping cameras at everything.
    “Shit, shit, shit,” I said, beating my fists on the steering wheel. One of the local deputies, a former high school baseball pitcher, cuffed me and led me aside.
    “Who did us?” I asked. A gun went off, muffled sound, inside the house. A guy in regular clothes came running out, screaming for tear gas.
    “Aw, Tom, the Feds found them an informer in Atlanta. Your brother’d signed a receipt for a pill-making machine.”
    Crazy Warren. I never knew whether speed warped his brain or whether he’d brooded himself crazy over possible vengeful aliens. Whatever, be was under the house waging his last war.
    “Tom,” the deputy who’d cuffed me said, “I can take you into town now.”
    “Want to see what happens to Warren.”
    They finally got him out, both him and deputies all bloody, two deputies shot some in legs and arms, but the law’d worn body armor when they went after him.
    “He probably won’t die, Tom,” a medic deputy said.
    ∞ ∞ ∞
    So I went to jail, in handcuffs and leg irons like a real badass, while Warren rode a helicopter to the hospital in Roanoke, screaming about aliens from his stretcher.
    Cold steel bars with painted