After checking on Elvis and seeing him still buried in a swarm of tiny creatures, Bower decided to explore the rest of the lower floor. The spiked alien sat motionless to one side of Elvis, confirming her suspicions that it was a vessel rather than a living, intelligent creature of its own, and that fascinated her.
“I’m just going to look around to see what I can find,” she said, not sure who she was talking to, and certainly not expecting an answer. It just seemed polite. The creatures crawling over Elvis ignored her so she wandered off. Bower was careful not to step on the various thin streams of creatures disappearing into the darkness as they went out across the floor like ants, presumably hunting down more raw materials for the reconstruction of his arm.
The lower floor was almost a hundred yards long by thirty yards wide, reminding her of the dimensions of a football field. There were offices at either end, but these had been boarded up with wood rather than steel plates. She tried to break through one of the doors, but that only worked in Hollywood, and she ended up with a sore shoulder after barging the door a couple of times. There was a kitchenette. The tap worked. There was soap and a couple of sponges, not that she needed them. She found a butter knife and a couple of forks in one of the drawers along with a small plastic jug so she took them. There was no food, which was a bit disheartening, and she went back through the cupboards a couple of times just to make sure she hadn’t missed anything.
A locked door at the end of the corridor between the sealed offices led to the road outside. As this was at the opposite end to where she’d seen the soldiers entering what looked like their headquarters, she took hope that this door could be a good place to escape.
Bower lay on her stomach and tried to look beneath the door. Using the knife, she lifted the weather strip on the other side of the door and peered out. There was no noise outside. After a few minutes, a car drove past and she could hear people laughing within the vehicle, but other than that the back road seemed deserted. Bower wondered if there was a guard standing watch. Surely, they had someone watching their alien enclosure. They could have been standing to one side of the door and she’d never have known it. Patiently, she waited, realizing the more she could learn the more options they’d have once Elvis was back to full strength.
After an hour, she was satisfied that there wasn’t a guard on the back door. She got up and looked carefully at the door. The hinges were on the inside. She tried lifting one with the dull blade of the knife but couldn’t get it to budge. It might be something Elvis could manage, though. And for the first time she felt as though they were going to get out of this mess alive.
Bower returned to Elvis and sat there watching as the alien insects continued their work. She would have loved to watch the progress in more detail, but had to accept that something remarkable was occurring at a cellular level beneath this swarm of small, intelligent creatures.
Hours passed like years. Bower noted that the black sheen on what appeared to be the outer shell of the alien insects would take on different hues at times, but these were coordinated. In addition to that, the motion of those creatures attending to Elvis seemed to undulate in some kind of rhythm. For her, it confirmed what she suspected, that these creatures were working in unison as though they were one organism. She went and cleaned the knife and forks in running water and collected some water in the jug.
Shortly before sunset, Bower heard someone walking on the upper floor. She crept behind a broken wooden crate, being careful to remain hidden, and watched with interest. Two soldiers appeared, but from the number of voices she could hear, she figured there were more of them standing just out of sight, or it could have been that the others were further around the hole and thus out of her field of vision.
“There’s the gun,” said one of the African rebels.
“But did you see them die? Did you see the monster kill them?”
One of the soldiers shone a light into the darkness.
“Are you serious?” he asked, moving the light across the carnage. “Do you think anyone could survive down there? Look at the insects, look at how they feed on the blood.”
Bower hadn’t noticed, but the rebel soldier was right. A stream of tiny alien creatures fed on the blood, gristle and sinew. They must have been using this in the reconstruction.
“There has been another fight,” said another soldier. “They are dead. There is no way they could have defeated the monster.”
“General Adan wants to be sure.”
“I am sure,” one of the soldiers said from somewhere out of sight above her. “What? Do you want to go in there and check?”
“I’m not going down there.”
“Hah,” replied the first soldier to speak. “There is no way I am going in there with the beast. They are dead. That is all Adan needs to know.”
“But there are no bodies.”
“There are never any bodies.”
For a moment, the spotlight rested on the crate Bower was hiding behind and she thought she’d been spotted, but nothing was said. The light moved on, flickering around the edges of the central area.
“There is so much blood. So much fresh blood.”
“Yeah,” another soldier agreed, seemingly talking himself into the same conclusion. “The blood is fresh. They are dead. They have beaten Adan to the grave.”
Bower was relieved when they left, and the realization the soldiers considered them dead meant no one would be looking for them when they made their escape. She returned and sat beside Elvis.
Night fell and the tiny creatures continued their work in the dark.
A cool breeze fought to make its way through the cracks in the steel plates sealing the windows. Bower stood there for a while, willing the faint draft to blow harder. The alien ignored her. She liked that. Given the alternative she’d faced when they were shoved into the hole, being ignored was a gift.
She wondered about the creature or creatures, wondering about their biology, how they functioned as a unit, where their intelligence emanated from, how their metabolisms worked, what they consumed, if they respired.
Were they carbon-based or silicon? She didn’t really understand how that worked, other than that it described the primary atom making up the various molecules that formed the creature. How would you tell, she wondered? Could it be a hybrid of the two? Visually, there weren’t any obvious clues.
For Bower, the idea that the same basic set of atoms, forming roughly the same molecules, could result in life on another planet was astonishing. And that the laws of the universe gave rise to another intelligent species, one capable of traversing the stars to seek out other life forms, was mind-boggling. Although, she thought, looking at the dark walls that surrounded them, this probably wasn’t what the alien had in mind when it signed on for this particular interstellar mission.
Bower sat down on the mattress and watched the creatures busying themselves. There was something hypnotic in their tireless rhythm. She found her eyelids growing heavy, although in the end she fell asleep more through boredom than anything else.
When she awoke with the dawn, the alien was gone.
Elvis lay alone on the shredded, collapsed remains of the double mattress next to hers. She crept over beside him, looking at his left arm in wonder. He’d need some physiotherapy to build up muscle mass, as the arm looked thin and withered, but apart from that his new arm looked entirely normal, although the skin was pale.
Bower ran her fingers down his arm, feeling the texture of the muscles and bones beneath his skin. As much as she hated to draw on a cliche, the skin on his hand was as smooth as a baby’s bottom, and that brought a smile to her face.