Bea Cannon - A Small Gray Dot

“Six. Listen, can you trust this Dr. Bennett? Morgs told me about him. What is your next move? Are you bringing Morgs back now?”

“No. Getting out of here will not be easy – or fast. But yes, I trust Dr. Bennett.” Trusted him, yes, but wasn’t quite sure about his sanity yet. “Morgan will be okay here for a while. Look, six guards are not enough.” I thought for a moment. There were people on whom I could depend in a pinch. “I’m going to call someone and get some backup for you and your guards.”

“Who? And how will I know who they are?”

“Friends of mine.” She needed a way to identify friendlies from somebody showing up from Semptor. Judging by Talbert – and the guards – this Henderson guy had a bunch of goons working for him. I thought a moment, then I had it. “Ask anyone that shows up what I did for a living before I became a gravedigger.”

She was silent for a moment, then said, “You were a gravedigger?”

“It’s a long story, but yes. Before that I was a middle-school English teacher.” Everyone in my circle of friends knew that. If anyone Semptor sent happened to know my real name, it was possible some of them might know I used to dig graves, but I didn’t think any of them would know what kind of work I’d done before that.

“You were a teacher?” she sounded bemused.

“Yes, ma’am.” There wasn’t time to discuss that, either. “There’s something else you should do. I don’t know how far-reaching these people are but you should put your folk in Wilmington on alert, just in case.”

“Good thinking. I’ll do that right away. And Tennessee, thanks for finding my sister.”

Well, she’d paid me a huge sum of money to do it but I didn’t bring that up, instead, I said, “You’re welcome.”

The minute she was off the phone, I called Lowell and gave him a rundown on the situation.

He didn’t hesitate. “No worries, Tenn. Always glad to help a lady in distress. I’ll get right on it.”

He knew who all to contact and would get everyone together. I knew the first person he called would be Simon. “And Lowell,” I added, “give our friends in blue a heads up. They might be able to spring loose a few uniforms to help out, and even if they can’t they need to know what’s going on because you know it’ll get a little noisy if somebody does show up.” He agreed.

Once I hung up from that call, I turned to Morgan. On the surveillance monitor, I spotted our jackets and gloves on a chair in the livingroom where we’d left them. I’d kept my knit cap on but her hat was out there, too. I felt it was best if they were out of sight so I sent her to get them. Then I turned to the doctor who was sitting in one of the wheeled chairs at a desk next to one of the computers. I lowered myself into a chair at the desk beside him.

I studied him. “I’m not saying I don’t believe you Doctor, but what you’ve said sounds… incredible.”

He smiled. “Of course it does. I understand your skepticism. I’ve only learned they are aliens within the last three weeks but I do have proof, Mr. Murray. I would never have said it if I didn’t.”

“Okay. I’m ready for that proof, and sir, if you don’t mind, I prefer being called Tennessee – or Tenn.”

He nodded, pushed back a stray lock of hair that had fallen over his left eye, and pulled open a drawer on the desk. He removed something from it.

“I could show you pictures but those wouldn’t actually prove anything except perhaps that I’ve lifted images from some science fiction site still in operation on the internet. But, I have something I believe you will find to be credible.”

He held up the item he’d taken from the drawer, a rectangular object about the size of a deck of cards. “I appropriated this from Julius Henderson, whose real name, by the way, is Simretun, or that is how it sounded to me when I heard it. Normally, I work from home, I am only occasionally required to go in, and then only for brief visits.

“Over the past year, I’ve observed some… odd… behaviors on the parts of some of the employees that I have come to consider his inner circle, most notably, Martin Bedlow, his head of security. And by the way, there are varying numbers of them housed on the Semptor grounds in one of the buildings – around five hundred at this time, I think.

“They work at organizing the merchandise while folk from the neighborhood do packaging and loading, and then moving the goods to their various endpoints. Occasionally, Henderson’s people go out with the drivers but, other than organizing merchandise, their main task is to guard the company warehouses. He never uses human guards for that and uses none of his people as guards in the neighborhood. All neighborhood guards are humans.”

I wondered if Bedlow was the guy with the odd accent that I thought of as black suit, but I didn’t stop the doctor to ask what the man wore, though, there was one question I thought was pertinent.

“How do you know these people aren’t human?” An odd accent didn’t make a person non-human.

“They’ve made mistakes that I’ve had occasion to observe; small inconsistences such as their movements aren’t always the ones you’d expect, or they will laugh inappropriately.”

I remembered the odd giggle black suit let loose the first day I’d come to Blue Heaven. I still wasn’t convinced but it was something to consider.

He went on, “But the incident that sealed it for me was the day I dropped by Henderson’s office to ask about something. His door was ajar but he didn’t see me. He removed a panel on a machine and reached inside. I don’t know his reason for doing that, but when he withdrew his hand, he cut it on something sharp and it bled. The blood was more blue than red and it had a peculiar odor. At that point, he was turning toward the door so I knocked as though I’d just arrived. He quickly rubbed at the hand and the cut disappeared.

“He invited me in. Since the odor still lingered, I thought it would be suspicious if I didn’t ask about it so I did. He explained it away by saying it was the smell of oil as he was trying to get the machine to work. I had never seen the machine in operation so I asked him what was its function, and he said it was a new type of printer but was malfunctioning so he wasn’t using it. I could see it wasn’t a printer but I didn’t dispute him. He replaced the panel and I didn’t mention it again.

“No human has blood like that or can heal a cut that fast, Tennessee. That was big but I have more. I hired on with them because I’d been seeing strange frequencies on my lab instruments for some time and after determining they were coming from Semptor, I was hoping to get inside to get a look around. It didn’t take me long to spot some peculiar machinery that I reasoned might well be the origin of the odd frequencies, but I was never able to get close enough to examine one.

“After the incident in which he cut himself, Henderson was overseeing something, and had me meet him in a different area than usual. It was in a large room of a small building adjacent to his main office building. He wanted to go over new distribution scheduling, he said. While there, his walkie-talkie went off and someone said something to him in a strange language. He excused himself and said he’d return shortly. I had noticed several of the odd machines at the back of the room so the moment he left, I hurried over hoping to get a quick look at one of them.

“I must say I was nervous he’d return before I’d gotten my look. While I was doing a hasty job of studying one, it made a noise, a buzzing sound, and this” – he indicated the thing he held – “appeared on a ledge on the front of the machine beside it. Afraid Henderson would be back at any moment, I put it into a pocket and got back to my seat just in time.” He smiled again. “He therefore doesn’t know I have this. It’s what has led me to discover what they are and their agenda.”