Eric Stever - Non Metallic

Reynolds saw her and the lights began to flash on his disc. The disc lifted a dozen more feet into the air, but she paid that no mind. Emma stared at him, controlling the Droolie with her eyes. Yes, that glint told her what she wanted to know. He recognized her.

With a sigh, Reynolds flittered down to the ground, his disc touching the cracked, weed-covered pavement of the supermarket parking lot. Emma just stood there, looking at him, trying to hide what she was going to do.

But his good eye was unseeing, blinded by the sight of her, the curled hair, the white dress. No, she was not the pretty one in her family, but she was an angel to him now. Something from before, Emma thought.

She stood only a foot from the disc, and rarely had she dreamed she would be so close to one of them. The green film between them blinked off, and though he was fully clothed, he seemed naked to her, unprotected. The stench that wafted out was strong enough to make her eyes water, but she did not let this show, save for a slight grimace, which she quickly forced back into a smile.

“Rey-nolds,” the Droolie cooed, “Rey-nolds.”

Emma stepped onto the disc and was surprised at the way her shoes sunk into the soft rubber mat that gripped its surface. She looked at Reynolds and tried to think of the man he had been, and not the jabbering creature that stood at the disc pedestal, fluttering its limbs in excitement.

Emma shuddered with revulsion as he licked his lips, his good eye traveling up and down her body. He held out his arms and she went to him: Reynolds, a soldier, and possibly a good man.

But that was before, everything was before, and when she brought the taped hunting knife out from behind her back, she did not break eye contact. She jabbed it into his chest over and over again. The blood spattered onto her white dress, onto the shoes that did not quite match it.

Emma did not look away, did not flinch from his gaze until he was gone, crumpled on the sidewalk. She threw the knife away, and then rolled his body off of the disc platform as if he were a buck, now skinned and quartered, and ready for transport.

She scarcely noticed the calm core which had allowed her to do all of this. She had killed a man… just a Droolie, her sister’s voice said in her head, just a stinking Droolie.

“He was a man,” Emma said out loud. The cold fall air blew through the curls in her hair, across the nape of her neck. Emma reached down, touching the controls along the left side of the pedestal where Reynolds had pressed. The green force shield enveloped her.

“Most of us are already dead,” said a voice, transmitted through her disc.

Emma jumped and the disc rose up off of the ground. It had been too easy, she thought. Was it a trap?

“You will learn to control it, I am sure,” the voice said. Emma could tell it was the Captain speaking. She’d heard the Captain of the Droolies order her friends to death and she couldn’t forget that papery voice, so soft for such a large man. “But I will drive the disc for now.”

“How did you know—” Emma began. The disc took her up over the town, over the low brown hills where she had learned to drive a standard transmission. Her sister had been better than her at first, and hadn’t stopped mentioning it in all these years.

“Besides myself, there are no others that are not damaged,” the Captain said. He paused as if regaining his composure then continued. “Some are close to death already, and even I am… At least I am aware enough to know it. My left arm didn’t just ‘go numb’, no matter how much I want to believe it to be true. A stroke is like that, I’ve been told.”

“Then you… But why do you do it to us? You could help us. Throw the other Droolies out and—”

Emma cut herself off. She was in the disc yes, but she wasn’t flying it yet. She wasn’t in control.

“I am helping you,” the Captain said. “There are a limited number of these machines. My crew and I were testing them when the attack came, thus we were shielded from it.” He chuckled, but it sounded more like a cough. “Partially anyway. But we will soon die.”

A heads-up-display appeared in front of her. Emma did not understand the blue flashing symbols that appeared before her. Something was running low, a dial in the red, but she didn’t know what it meant. She reached out to touch the display and then it blinked off.

“So you torture us. That’s your last act here on Earth. You’re soldiers. Why not attack the Chinese, a final battle, glory and—”

Emma’s disc lifted up over the sagebrush sea. Somewhere in the valleys beneath her, fires were burning, unchecked by man.

“And then what?” the Captain asked. “We’d surely be destroyed, or worse, these ships would become property of the Sino-Caucus alliance.”

“Then they… they attacked?”

“Everyone attacked. All at once. It was not coordinated,” the Captain said. “More of a piling on you could say. Kicking us when we went down. And no, I don’t know who started it. Maybe some bored kid sitting in his bedroom. Maybe our government or theirs.”

“But why us?”

“You were the closest protected enclave,” the Captain said. He let his words sink in before continuing. “Didn’t you wonder why so many of you were allowed to gather here, in this town. So many people who refused to connect to the networks?”

Emma shook her head. Her disc whipped across the valley, her town was no more than a dull glow somewhere in the distance. She pressed another button, or thought about it, and the ship started to slow. Emma noticed that opaque tendrils, fine as thread, had wrapped themselves around her ankles and wrists while she was speaking to the Captain. They disappeared into the body of the disc.

Was this the way monsters were born? Not with a flash of lightning, but the touch of a feather.

“You were the best we could find,” the Captain said. “Not the best, but the best of what’s around. There’s nineteen more discs available. You’ll have to choose who gets them.”

“And the rest?”

“They’ll be all right. For a while anyway. But you Emma, you’ve got work to do. You can take who you like. We’ll have to make it look like treachery at first. You’ll outsmart us, or trick us, and then the rest of us will die off. And you will inherit the discs. You can drive the disc now, if you want.”

Emma felt a wave of nausea as her disc banked sharply and then began to speed back towards her town. Did she tell it to do that?

“And what about you Captain?”

“I will lead you back to the base. There you will live, in hiding, building more discs and repopulating.”

Emma looked down at the thickening tentacles that held her ankles in place. She kicked off first one shoe then the other, allowing her feet to sink into the rubber mat on the disc’s surface.

“And you will build more discs, and repopulate,” the Captain said again. His voice sounded fainter. “I will… It will be hidden from whoever takes over, until—”

“Until we attack,” Emma said. She was rushing back to the church, where all of the townspeople were waiting. “Until we take it back from them, after they’ve gotten comfortable.”

“Yesss,” the Captain said. “It appears I have chosen well.” His voice was no more than a whisper.

Emma touched down outside of the church, landing the disc on the brittle brown grass next to the sidewalk. When the townspeople saw that it was her, they broke out in cheers. Through the green film she could see the faces of the elders, so smug and certain. Mr. Ferguson slapped Major Fleishmann on the back so hard that he almost fell over his cane. Reverend Holloway had his arms around Emma’s mother, and was now kissing her, his plump fingers tracing the line of her hips. Emma felt her gorge rise at this sight.