by Anthy Kris
Levine had been trying to get the classical station on the car radio when he hit the thing head-on.
He was doing eighty-three miles an hour, coming down the Interstate at 2AM from a late-night session at the agency. He had been thinking about the problems with his client, and about the problems with his marriage, and about the weight he was gaining, and about the hair he was losing, and about the bills that wouldn't stop mounting up, and about how some Vivaldi would maybe keep his blood pressure down.
He had been thinking about everything but the road. And that was why his heart nearly stopped when the thing stepped out of nowhere and into his headlights.
Shit! He felt the thud in his belly more than he heard it. The clean line of his BMW hood crumpled back like aluminum wrap and warped toward the windshield. Denim and a flash of a sleeve, something red and checkered, flickered across his line of vision like a frame in a subliminal film. A neuronal spray of white cracks split instantly across his windshield with the force of a sledgehammer. Whatever it had been was flying behind him already, rolling and flapping across the concrete and into the dark.
Levine hit the brake. The rear end of the car swerved hard.
Jesus! I killed somebody!
He twisted the wheel to keep from spinning out and losing control of the car. The brakes and wheels made high ripping sounds, like amplified chalk on a blackboard.
Out of the corner of his eye he stared for a glimpse in the rear view mirror as the scarecrow shape flopped to its halt somewhere on the concrete.
The BMW's brakes ground as he fought for control of the car, and with a gut-deep snap the car straightened and the rocking and wobbling passed. Levine smelled the tart warmth of spilling antifreeze. Something under the hood muttered and huffed erratically, as the car's smashed muzzle cast cones of white light in novel directions, the headlight eyes now pointing separate ways, like the startled eyes of a lizard.
He was far away now, far away, and getting farther.
Run for it. He felt the thought in his gut. It's late, nobody saw me. I could -- .
His jaw tightened. No. These days every inch of expressway was covered by digital cameras on monitoring poles. Hell, there were satellites in space now watching cities and putting it on the net twenty-four hours a day. Everything was recorded now. Somewhere a lens had seen it. Recorded it. His plate numbers were probably already being used to call up his personal data.
Levine felt trapped. Then angry. Then ashamed. Dear God -- he'd hit someone. Idiot, stupid. He hadn't been looking. It was all his fault. His responsibility. He placed a shaking hand on his forehead.
His head turned and he looked for the exit. He spotted it a half mile ahead. He looped around and drove back onto the Interstate heading in the other direction, passing the spot where it had occurred, and looping around again.
He tried his flashers. They still worked. The clock on the dash glowed 2:12AM. There were no other cars in sight.
He slowed down as he neared the spot. His headlights, out of sync now, lit the long smears of blood on the concrete, the colors shifting with a weird magic in the asyncrohonous beams, the low metal-grey grin of the moon, the flickering sterile gleam of the fluorescent lights swelling like antennae above the overpass. The streak of blood stretched till it ended in a body lying by the wayside. He pulled over to it, each headlight slanting shadows outward from a different angle from the figure, and stepped out.
The body lay on its side, half off the road. The back was to him. It lay casting double shadows in patches of dried brown grass and gravel, among some discarded M&M wrappers and a McDonalds take-out bag.
There was an empty Coke bottle by the victim's shoes. The legs were thin and small and in old blue jeans. The sneakers were cheap. The red check shirt, was dirty and half off, and the white T-shirt beneath was dirty.
Levine saw long hair, platinum blond, streaming from under a baseball cap. A girl -- .
My God. I hit a kid.
Astonished, dream-like with grief, Levine walked toward the body as though he were a fish floating upward toward light. He stood over the body in the dark. The small back twitched. There was a shudder in one of the legs.
In the distance Levine could hear a siren that he didn't hear. He put his hand over his mouth and then he took it away and he bent down and put out his hand and touched the body gently. It shifted, and turned to him.
A sound like piccolos hitting two or three atonal notes all at once drifted into the night. Levine's throat bleated a different, shocked noise.
He jerked backwards and stumbled and fell back onto his side. He pushed still further away, inching raggedly farther like a startled crab, and then just sat there and stared wide-eyed at the figure bleeding in the gravel. He was still staring when the police car pulled up and came to a stop behind his own.
"Please keep your hands where I can see them at all times," recited the police officer in a bored tone.
Levine looked up. The officer was black and wore round gold wire-rim glasses and sounded like he needed sleep. A beer belly like a blue sack hung over the police belt. The officer had one hand on the butt of his holstered pistol and the other held a flashlight.
"That's not.. not... what the hell," said Levine.
The officer looked at the bloody figure in the red check shirt. He approached it and clicked his flashlight on and bent forward to look at it.
His upper lip curled.
"Ahh shit," mumbled the officer. "Every fuckin' time I get night duty..."
"What -- ?"
"You got your driver's license and registration? Sir," added the officer with reluctance, noting Levine's tailored suit and Italian silk tie. "Need your driver's license and registration. Sir."
The atonal notes slithered into the air again, more wails now than a music.
"I - yeah, sure. Sure."
Levine stood up and patted his suit and reached in and took out his wallet. He handed the whole wallet to the officer.
"Just need the driver's license and registration. Sir."
"Right. Right."
Levine fumbled with the wallet, and then handed the officer his license and registration.
The officer went back to his car and took out a slim metal rectangle connected to the dashboard by a wire and started reading Levine's stats into it.
Levine watched for a moment and then his head turned again. Toward the thing he had hit.
He'd never seen one of them before. He'd seen them on TV, of course. On the net. But not up close, never so close. It looked almost like a homeless person, lying there, with the broken shoes, the old jeans, the cheap shirt, the cap. The thin high chest rose up and down like a quiet wave on the surface of a lake, and the blood - yes, it was purple, just like the news reports said. In the light of the evening moon, it looked almost red. Almost human.
A blue-skinned three-fingered hand with strange joints reached out and, trembling, clawed the air. The wailing modulated into something almost like wind, almost like sobs. Levine ran his hand through his thinning hair. He stood there a moment. He shrugged off his coat and went to put it over the thing.
"Stay away from it!" yelled the officer, putting down his receiver.
Levine looked down into huge shining black eyes, a delicate blue face surrounded by a wild splash of long, eerily lovely, white hair, framing the unsynchronized sighing of its two tiny mouths. A spasm shook it. The snapped arms and twisted legs in their half-swastika pattern shifted. Levine saw blood, if it was blood, rapidly staining the shabby pants and shirt with sickening chrysanthemum blooms.
It saw him. It did see him. Levine was sure it saw him. Levine stood over it, holding his coat. How could it not see him?
"It's cold," he said, half to himself. "It's cold at night."
"Stay. Fucking. Away from it."
Levine stepped back. He looked at the creature, holding his coat in his hands with a half-hug, like a child holding a teddy bear.
Two more minutes went by. The police officer replaced the receiver. He reached into his car and pulled out a set of beige latex medical gloves. He pulled them on as he walked over to the creature and touched it where its bones looked broken.
The officer tried moving its limbs. The piccolo shriekings rose like some distorted avant-garde electronica, then seemed to lose all strength. Shrills of pain and sobs of breathing melded into each other and grew indistinguishable. The slim legs twitched again.
The officer directed his flashlight into its gleaming ebony eyes for a few moments, on-off, on-off. Then flicked the light definitively off. He stood up. A big melancholy grunt cut free from the depths of his thick blue belly. He flicked open the strap of his holster and closed his hand over the gun butt and pulled out the gun.
"What are you doing?" said Levine.
"Puttin' Ugly out of her misery."
"What? You're going to shoot it? You're not going to call a hospital? You can't, you, look, this is a, a living thing! You can't - ."
"Look, mister," said the policeman. "You know how many millions of these fucking things we got around the State nowadays? We got 'em coming out our goddam ass. We got to feed 'em. We got to put clothes on 'em. We got an economy that's going down the toilet, and we're spending money that we ain't even got to take care of these stupid... whatever the hell they are. Least the dumbass things can do is obey the law and stay where they supposed to. But, no -- every damn week a couple of them got to go over the wires and play in traffic. This bitch here ain't got the sense to stay where she been put? That is too fucking bad."
"You can't just kill someone. You can't kill someone in the street. They didn't come here because they wanted to. They had no choice."
"Yeah, yeah. Their stinking world's going to pieces and the only place they got to run to is us. All right. Fine. They're here, we can't send 'em back, OK, fine, they can stay. But they supposed to stay where we tell them to stay. That's why the Federal Government got Special Areas set up. There, the Federal Government can handle 'em. There the Government got jurisdiction. Outside, these things ain't got shit. This bitch runs off and wanders into traffic, it's her hard luck."
"I can't believe this. I cannot believe this. You're going to - you're going to just commit murder and walk off? Look, it needs to go to a hospital."
The officer pressed his lips together and mumbled something under his breath.
"Look. Stupid." The officer pointed with his pistol to the creature on the ground, whose legs were beginning to tremble more and more weakly. "This bitch all busted up. How fast was you going when you smacked her? Seventy, seventy-five? She busted all to pieces. She ain't going to make it to no hospital. Even if she did, we ain't got doctors who be any good at patching up guts like those. It's Saturday night. The hospitals got drunks and drug addicts and gang members coming in. They ain't going to put humans on hold just to fiddle around with this thing. We ain't got enough money to let them take care of people from other worlds. Hell, we ain't got enough to take care of our own."
The creature's labored breathing, a whimpering nearly musical, was devolving now to yips and hoarse spittle, as bubbles of purplish blood formed at the edges of the tiny delicate mouths.
"Bitch should have stayed on the reservation. Just like you should have watched where you were going. But she did not. And you did not either. And now I got a choice. I can let her suffer and bleed a real good long time before she dies. Or I can put her to sleep here and now. Quick, easy, peaceful. What I say? Put her to sleep. Quick. Easy."
"But she's -- they're intelligent. They're aware. People from another world. You can't just - you can't just kill a person when there's medical care available. There's such a thing as basic human rights."
"You just do not get it, do you? She ain't a person. None of them are persons. None of them are human. If you ain't human you ain't got no human rights. You understand?"
Levine was silent.
The police officer looked at Levine. The police officer closed his eyes and adjusted his gold wire-rim glasses. He shrugged.
"Hey man. I ain't got to do her. I was just trying to be nice. You rather see her just lie there, bleed to death? OK by me."
He returned his gun to his holster and went back to his vehicle. He reached in and got Levine's identification and walked back.
"Here. Call your insurance people in the morning."
Levine took back his license and his papers. The officer turned to go. The faint flute-like mewings whispered into the evening air.
"Are you at least going to call the hospital?" said Levine. "Can you at least do that?"
The policeman stopped without turning around.
"I called them soon as I pulled up," he said. "Sir."
His dark black eyes looked up at the starry sky.
"Busy night. Got their hands full. They figure they'll be able to send an ambulance over for her, four, five hours or so. Not that it'll make any difference."
He turned his head and his eyes rested on the trembling three-fingered hands.
"Four, five more hours..." He shook his head.
The officer looked at Levine. Then he turned to go.
"Officer?"
"Yeah?"
"Why did you call it 'her'?"
"The hair," he said. "The females got real light grey hair. Close to white. Their menfolk got dark gray hair."
"Really."
"Yeah."
"I didn't know that."
"Well now you do."
Levine looked at the twisted limbs. A heel in a small pool of blood kicked softly, then jerked again against the empty Coke bottle beside it. Glass scratched against the gravel.
"It just seems wrong to me. To kill someone, like this. They came here looking for help," said Levine. He looked at the policeman. "They came here from so far away."
The policeman opened his car door.
"We all got to die someplace. Sir."
The officer shut the car door and drove away.
Levine watched the police car turn onto the road and drive away. He watched till it was gone, then looked down at the creature, now coughing up the purplish blood and beginning to choke on it, terrified, in the light of the twinkling stars.
Levine sat down next to it and put his arms around his knees. He looked at it. The frightened eyes. The wild white hair. He covered his face with his hands for several moments. He reached over and picked up the empty Coke bottle, and smashed it into its head, several times.
The End
