Alexis Latner - Threat of Stars at 912 Main

In fractured glimpses over my shoulder, I saw how the alien things moved by rolling gelatinously, like predatory Jell-O cubes. That way they covered ground fast. And gained on us.

“Where can we go?” Tam took in a sharp breath. “Nothing’s open!”

She was right. They were chasing us away from the cafe. Now we were near Main Street, nothing there but office buildings. I breathed hard, my side and my heels starting to hurt.

We veered around a corner, the locked front door of a fast food restaurant. The things rounded the restaurant behind us, rolling out into the street in wide turns as if their locomotion wasn’t much good for tight maneuvers.

And that gave me a sudden hope. Maybe they couldn’t jump any better than they could make a tight turn.

“This way!” I towed Tam down Main Street. The glass tower of 912 Main reared up against the sky. Next to it stood the stone bulk of the old Lamar Building. I’d studied that one only a month ago for my “Lamar Building in 1926” and I knew ten times more details than had gone into the painting. Including, the fire escape.

The Lamar Building had a fire escape retrofitted onto the outside wall. It was the kind of contraption that hangs overhead until somebody runs down it and their weight takes it to the ground. Sprinting the last ten yards, I bounded off the wall to get high enough to grab the lowest rung of the escape, which came down with a rusty and reluctant creak. Tam got the idea and boarded with a flying leap. I followed right behind her. We galloped up to the second floor landing.

Without our weight on the bottom end, the counterweights raised the fire escape back into its normal position. A metallic groan announced that the drawbridge was up. I stopped. “I don’t think they can jump. We’ll be safe here,” I explained, gasping for breath and wiping sweat out of my eyes.

She turned toward me. “Did you see? It ate my painting! I hope it gets indigestion!” Furious and breathing hard, with her whole body alerted tense, her beauty suddenly struck me, an effect as powerful as it was untimely.

“I don’t think it ate it. It has a pocket like a kangaroo,” I murmured. “Keep an eye on them.” I tore my attention away from her and looked up to figure out what to do next.

The fire escape terminated at a window on the corner of the top floor of the Lamar Building. I hoped that window wasn’t locked on the inside. It gave me the creeps to think about having to perch on the fire escape all night with the aliens prowling on the sidewalk below.

Besides the possibly-locked window at the top of the fire escape, there was another window not too far away. Like all of the top-floor windows on the Lamar Building, it had a decorative, eccentric, 1920s ledge: wider than the window itself, with a fretted rim, nice and deep. And inviting.

Even though the intervening drop was seriously dangerous—five stories straight down to the street—fire escape to adjacent window-ledge constituted an easy jump for me or for a girl with long legs. And that window should be unlocked—why lock or seal a window that nobody can easily get to from the outside?

I leaned against the stone wall that our fire escape was attached to. The Lamar Building’s bumpy limestone blocks still felt warm from the heat of the day. The giant glass spar across the street at 912 Main gleamed, darkly unsympathetic, but the Lamar Building would help us, give us refuge.

“They have a language,” Tam whispered.

The sound effects ranged from Mixed Media’s aluminum-can clinks to noises like shooter marbles in a coffee can coming from its companions.

rattlerattlerattle

RATTLE!RATTLE!

Ratatattle, tatrattle!

Each seemed to wait for a pause in the other’s rattle-racket before it started up. Definitely conversing.

From our vantage point, the group of aliens reminded me of the mobilized contents of a dumpster. Broken fluorescent tube, bent hubcap, empty cans, scraps of cardboard. “They’re like carrier snails or something,” I whispered. “They’ve picked up trash for camouflage. It sticks in the goop they’re covered with.”

“Maybe the goop is their space suits or flight suits?”

The comparison of orange gasket goop to space suits gave me cognitive dissonance. But not for long. Tam gasped, “Look!”

The garbage balls were making a stack out of themselves. One-two-three high. The stack reared up, with short thin pseudopods at the top end waving for contact with the fire escape. “Up!” I ordered.

The fire escape squealed ominously. Dismayed, I glanced back to see the aliens in stack formation mounting it, vividly and unpleasantly reminiscent of an enormous centipede.

Clatter rang out. It sounded like empty cans and bent hubcaps clanking on metal. A bottle broke. The aliens were rushing up the fire escape, whacking the steel stairs and guard rails with their crusts of trash.

Cursing under my breath, I crowded Tam’s heels climbing the steps. I wanted the things to get me if they got anybody. But I didn’t want them to get me either.

At the fifth-floor landing, the top, the window was locked. I’d half expected that. With nowhere to go but that deep-silled window five feet away. I pointed. “Jump to there!”

Peering over the guardrail, Tam reacted to the long drop to the street below. “Ee-yow!”

I gestured toward the commotion of the things just one floor below us. Convinced, Tam climbed over the guardrail like a cat over a fence. She poised herself, then made it to the big window ledge in one clean jump—landing in a bunch of roosting pigeons. The birds fluttered away in all directions.

I clambered over the rail after her. Just as I tensed to launch myself, something looped around my left ankle. I lost my balance and fell.

Tam screamed, “Michael!”

I belly-flopped against the stones of the Lamar Building. Bruised and jarred, I dangled upside down with nothing between me and the street five stories down but flapping pigeons and empty air.

One of the aliens had seized my ankle.

The hold around my ankle felt slippery. The tentacle was losing its grip. Sagging a few inches, I frantically pushed up against the rough old stones. Loose change fell out of my pockets and tinged on the stones on the way down.

All four aliens rattled at once.

They say your life passes in front of your eyes when you’re about to die. All I got was a flashback to a Boy Scout trip on Galveston Bay. One kid had hooked a shark, and the small sailboat rocked wildly. The kid yelled, Where’s the net? Other boys shrieked back, Let it go before it pulls you in! and, Cut the line, stupid!

I gripped those bumpy old stones with my fingers and scrabbled with my knees and the toe of my free foot. That way I inched my torso up toward the window ledge where Tam was kneeling, reaching for me.

I got my fingers onto the ledge and its fretted rim. Tam flung herself down onto the ledge, reached over the edge, and grabbed me by the belt.

The tentacle unwrapped from my ankle and let it go. The liberated leg skidded down the wall. I almost lost my grip on the ledge. Tam let out a short scream, but she held on to my belt.

With Tam helping to haul me up, I crawled onto the ledge. My arms and legs shook like bags full of rubber bands. I flopped into a puddle of pigeon-polluted water—rain left over from the last thunderstorm, contained by the rim of the ledge.

Over on the fire escape landing, the aliens concatenated.

Aw, it got away!

Better to let it go than fall in!

I wish I’d had a net!

Tam tried to open the window.

It didn’t budge.

I tried. I used all my strength. “Damn! I don’t believe this!” It was locked.