Lost Cargo Read online

  “Hot dog. You like hot dog?” The local pointed to the sky. “You from up there, spaceman? Going back?”

  Tech 29 sensed more about the local in front of him. The local was an immigrant. He’d come across the planet to this street corner to find a better way of life, but he’d traded a few rooms back home that he shared with eight brothers and sisters for a few rooms that he shared with five impoverished roommates. A dusty street for a dusty street. He owed money on the cart. Business was not as good as he’d thought it would be. Winter was coming, and customers were falling off, and he didn’t know how he would make his payments. He would lose everything if he lost the cart. The alien sensed his desperation.

  Then the local stepped out of the cart and knelt on the sidewalk. “You going back, spaceman? Take me with you.”

  Tech 29 swallowed the last of the food and skittered away.

  “Take me with you,” the local repeated and reached out.

  Going to try to grab his arm like the first local. The alien scrambled for his camouflage and vanished from sight.

  “Take me with you,” the local called, feeling the air, but the alien was running toward the woods.

  Can’t take you with me, friend. I have a bad task and an uncertain future.

  Tech 29 put the local out of his mind and followed the Elemental’s faint trail through the woods until sunset. He finally turned back when the streetlights came on. The Elemental had passed under a bridge, up the bank to the street and down again into the woods, but the early evening scents of dust, traffic, and footprints crisscrossed the faint trail with too many messages.

  Discouraged, the alien went back to the avenue.

  A balding male with his shirt flapping out of his pants and a sleek black briefcase in his arms pounded across the sidewalk to a female in a heavy black coat. “Judge Madison,” the male gasped. “You left this in my cab.” The female broke into a smile. They shook hands. She gave money to the male, who turned and gave it to a ragged beggar on a bench.

  The locals on this planet looked out after each other. They shared their food and their money. Maybe some of them were a little greedy, or a little desperate, but they had good hearts.

  Tech 29 stood up. It was probably a peaceful planet, too. Maybe it was even the kind of planet where a traveler with a dangerous job could do what he had to do for the last time and then find a small corner to grow a garden and feel the ground under his feet once and for all instead of the black abyss of space.

  Time to eat again and sleep.

  The ship was several hours away. Exhausted, the alien reached the building where he’d started out and stared up at the shadowy balconies. He placed his footpads on the cold stones and began to scale the wall, searching for an unlocked door.

  The third floor balcony opened to an empty, well-lit room with plush red furniture, a big screen, and stacks of books. The alien stood in the doorway, sensing. The owners had gone to watch games and would be back in the morning.

  A hot cup of gribble would be perfect.

  They probably didn’t have gribble on this planet. When he moved into another room, he discovered a huge black box almost as high as the ceiling and pulled the handle with both hands. Frosty air streamed out. Food. He poked his head into the cold. Nothing even remotely looked like gribble, but the shelves held plenty of mysterious packages, frozen on the left and fresh on the right.

  Bottles of amber liquid and small jars of purple goop that wouldn’t open. Dark brown liquid so sweet the scent made him reel. PURE VERMONT MAPLE SYRUP, FANCY announced the letters on the label, but he couldn’t read them. He put the bottle back. Thick white liquid, too sweet again. RANCH DRESSING. A light yellow rectangle in a clear wrapper. MONTEREY JACK. He ate the rectangle, found it stuck to the roof of his mouth, tried a bowl of green leaves, and finished off a clear bag of large brown seeds with strange folds. WALNUTS, WHOLE AND PIECES.

  Then he emptied a spray can of white cream into his hand and carefully tasted it. REAL WHIPPED CREAM, 20 PERCENT MORE FREE! Wonderful, a far cry from the bland nourishment wafers and essential liquid on the ship.

  Where did they keep their drinking liquid? They had to have something like gribble, something tasty and hot.

  Down the hall he found a small room with smooth blue tiles like the room the locals had trapped him in earlier, where he came across a bottle of liquid with a tantalizing smell. He took a tiny taste and spat it out. Horrible. A cleaning agent.

  Desperate, he turned the faucets in the sink and discovered liquid. Drinkable liquid. He gulped huge mouthfuls of the cool, clear fluid, and then turned the faucets in the bathtub, folded his clothing, and cautiously stepped in the tub. The delightful warmth soothed his aching limbs and seemed to seep into his bones. He poured some of the cleaning agent into the water and discovered it foamed into fragrant clouds of soap bubbles. A luxury like the food, and another far cry from life on the ship where he used microbial lotion.

  Somebody somewhere on this planet would help him if he decided to stay. He’d seen it in their faces. The technician has the authority to destroy the cargo if capture is impossible. Everything depended on the timing of the ship’s regeneration.

  He dried off, returned to the living room, found a device that would operate the screen, and turned it on to learn more about the planet.

  Games with locals in bright uniforms. He watched them bounce a ball for a while, realized the officials were cheating, and moved on to a drama with locals in glittery clothes who seemed to be in love with themselves. More games and entertainment. The planet from space. He recognized the luminous white clouds and the vast blue ocean and sat up.

  A pretty female stood on the shore while the wind blew her hair into her face.

  “We’re here on the coast of Oregon,” she was saying, sweeping her arm toward the sea. “Out there, about 500 miles away in the North Pacific between the United States and Japan, is the Great Garbage Patch. Scientists say it’s twice the size of Texas and five times the size of the United Kingdom.”

  The wind whipped her hair. “What’s in the Great Garbage Patch? Plastic trash, about four million tons of it. Countless plastic bottles and bottle caps, toothbrushes, pacifiers, shoes, plastic toys, cups and dishes, plastic bags, you name it, you’ll find it in this huge, accidental garbage dump. Ocean currents bring the trash to the Pacific and break it down into tiny pieces, where it floats in a toxic soup that will never biodegrade. The Great Garbage Patch contains more plastic than plankton, the ocean’s basic food source.”

  The alien sensed the room. The screen itself was made of plastic. And so was the control device in his hand, and the silver picture frame, the elegant clock, and the thin white pens on the table. Half the things in the room were plastic.

  The local on the seacoast pushed her hair out of her eyes again. “Scientists estimate that a million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and untold numbers of fish die every year from eating plastic trash, which poisons and strangles them and fills up their stomachs, causing them to starve to death. Why don’t people clean it up? The Great Garbage Patch is just too big. It’s a floating soup of plastic among thousands and thousands of gallons of water.”

  She swept her arm toward the water again, went on to local politics, and finally said, “Mary Michaels, on the coast of Oregon.”

  Unrelated scenes flashed by. Soap. Food. Beautiful things made of plastic for sale. Then somber music came on and an image of a nightmarish explosion filled the screen.

  “Join us next for the history of the bomb,” a voice said.

  A grave, white-haired man in an armchair turned around. “In the next hour, we’ll take you through the history of nuclear weapons, from the Manhattan Project and the birth of the atomic age, to the race for the hydrogen bomb, to neutron bombs, dirty bombs, and thermonuclear weapons with nine mile wide fireballs. Coming up next, the history of the bomb.”

  The alien sat on the couch long after the show ended. The screen chattered on, but he didn’t hear it. Finally
he went out on the balcony and sensed the locals as they strolled below through the cool evening darkness. They were preoccupied with dinner and games and going home to their loved ones, but nobody was thinking about the Great Garbage Patch or nuclear bombs.

  So the planet was full of horror.

  Over the years he’d visited one other planet where the civilization had spiraled into decay under a deceptive commercial surface. The Chamions, a green-eyed race with mottled skin, created a technology based on a poisonous mineral and never made plans to dispose of their mineral-based trash. The mineral was in everything, even their toothpaste and their toys. It destroyed their water and their air and they kept selling it to each other and pretending they still had time and it wasn’t that bad. And then they became extinct. They ruined their planet and didn’t have the technology to leave. Chamion, the Crazy Planet.

  Bombs with nine mile wide fireballs and nobody was concerned about them. The alien blinked his cluster of eyes in the gloom and searched the sky for the stars he suddenly longed to see again, but the city lights masked everything except the planet’s single moon. The yellow orb rose above the trees.

  He’d allowed himself to fall in love with those trees and the childish comforts of food and hot water. The loneliness of the ship came back to him, but there were worse places to end up in the galaxy than an animal control vessel. He stared at his thin hands on the rail. He was nobody, really, just a government laborer, but he was probably the luckiest soul on this planet—because he could leave. Maybe.

  He had to kill his cargo or take it with him. He couldn’t leave it running loose.

  The Elemental crept through the dark woods, up a tangled bank, and over a low wall toward the light in a ground floor window. The creature pressed against the security bars, but they held fast.

  Memories, flesh, memories, flesh, flesh. Strange blood and specks of bone and brain matter imprinted with a lifetime of experience coursed through its body. The creature drew on the knowledge of the woman it had eaten near the creek to make sense of the room behind the bars.

  Contemporary furniture. Lipstick red ceramic lamps. Four bottles of Guinness on a dresser, jeans and sweaters tossed carelessly over a chair, a white Persian cat with gold eyes on the bed.

  Light seeped under a door on the far wall.

  Faint splashing water.

  Voices. A man and a woman in the shower. Laughter.

  Mouth open, the creature rattled the security bars again, but they still held. The Persian froze in mid-lick, hissed, and slunk off the bed.

  Famished, the Elemental began to lengthen. Its muscles spread out as it wormed up the side of the building. It followed a drainpipe, exploring crevices for unsuspecting prey, searching for windows without bars, for the rattle of mini-blinds, for sheer curtains floating in the night air, for another cat, or an old man, or a plump infant napping near a windowsill.

  Minutes later, it reached the roof. Guided by instinct, it stole across the tiles, drawn by sleeping shapes with satiny wings and plump gray breasts. It sensed a heartbeat, seized a pigeon, and devoured it, and another, and another, before the flock awoke, shrieking, and fluttered away.

  The night wore on. The moon waned as the streetlights faded. The sky grew lighter. The Elemental’s pigment changed, muscles and skin adjusting to the light of the strange new world, and then it used all its energy to go into hiding.

  Chapter 8

  Monroe’s Door

  Seven o’clock in the morning. Monroe Broussard was brushing his teeth when he saw the image of the door again, and like the first time the image appeared, it unnerved him to his core. He rubbed his eyes and stared at the cramped basement bathroom. Reality. No damnable doors. Just his toothbrush, his old striped towel, and the painted pipes overhead. The floorboards creaked while his roommate walked around upstairs. Safe, sane, familiar sights and sounds.

  A cup of coffee and he would be fine.

  But the haunting image was still there, as if it had seared itself into the back of his brain. Luminous blue light streamed through the doorframe. The door began to turn, spinning so far overhead in a black night sky that it was impossible to see what was inside it.

  He grabbed a white shirt and conservative red tie and fumbled for his shoes under a pile of laundry. “Socks,” he said in a loud voice to chase away the apparition. “Where are my socks?”

  The door had shown up twice now. He saw it last week when he was stuck in a cab on Pennsylvania Avenue. The glowing door had appeared like a tiny sun behind the cab driver’s bald head and hovered by the man’s ear for a few seconds before it blinked itself out.

  “It could be my eyes,” Monroe told himself. Maybe he needed vitamins. Or maybe he’d inherited the Third Eye his Haitian grandmother Antoinette claimed she was born with. She’d always said she knew who was going to ring her doorbell twenty minutes before they came clomping up the steps, but then she’d thrown a live chicken over his head to cure him of the chickenpox. Thanks, but no thanks. He was a modern man with no interest in crazy family folklore.

  Time to go. He found his keys and took the Metro downtown to the law firm where he clerked, intending to study government contracts on the train. Someday all this was going to end, the train, the book on his knees, running from work to night class, gulping coffee after coffee to stay awake. Someday it was going to pay off.

  Instead of reading, though, he found himself reliving his childhood on the banks of the Cane River in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. After he finished college, he’d landed a scholarship to Georgetown University Law School in Washington, D.C. He’d expected great things, but before his second year a monster hurricane hit the Gulf Coast. The storm surge swept the family’s charter fishing boat away and washed the house off its foundation, taking every last photo, spoon, and scrap of furniture out to sea, even the fourteen-year-old cats.

  He left law school to search for his parents. Rescue workers finally recovered their bodies festering in a swamp by an interstate, but he never found out if they’d been on the boat or in the house when the storm struck. He railed at the merciless sky. Day after day the television showed ruined lives in a ruined landscape: houses reduced to nightmarish piles of rubble, downed power lines, cypress and catalpa trees torn from the earth, upside down cars pointing at the angry clouds.

  Time passed in a blur. The lawyer Monroe paid to track down his mother and father’s insurance and other records took forever to come up with nothing. The funerals cost thousands of dollars. Heartbroken and burdened with debt, Monroe returned to Washington to clerk for a law firm and pick up his studies at night, realizing it would take him years now to get his law degree.

  Annie Wong was the one bright spot.

  That night, Monroe watched Annie turn off the last lamp among Maxwell’s aisles of fine cooking equipment, linens, and organic wine. The recessed lights behind the counter caught the curve of her face, her silver rings, and plum-colored dress.

  “You look beautiful,” he told her.

  “Well, I don’t feel beautiful,” she said. “I guess I’m just tired.”

  “We’ll take the Metro. We don’t have to walk home.”

  She shook her head. “I’m fine, really. I can walk.”

  “You’re not sick?”

  “It’s nothing, really.”

  He wasn’t sure he believed her, but sometimes she got like that. Shy, hard for her to say what was on her mind. Besides, she didn’t look sick. She looked radiant, and had for a while, her skin and hair glowing with health. Before they left, she rang up ten lottery tickets for him, locked the cash in the office, found her coat, and draped her long hair over the collar. The lottery tickets were probably a waste of money, but he had to keep a few dreams burning.

  They began the long walk to her Dupont Circle apartment.

  She took his arm. “So, Monroe Henry Broussard, what are you going to do when you win the lottery?”

  “Buy fourteen bulldogs and finish law school.”

  “American bul
ldogs or the short and squatty kind?”

  “Short and squatty.”

  She laughed. “What else?”

  “Fly,” he told her. “Get a pilot’s license and fly over the Pacific. Get away from civilization. Fly over all the islands and pick the best one. Some little patch of sand with miles of sky and stars without a single apartment building in the way.”

  “What, no picket fence?”

  “Sure, I’ll have a grass hut with a picket fence. What about you?”

  She said if she didn’t have to manage a store for somebody else, she would still need something to do, so if she won the lottery she’d have a restaurant in the city, a place where she could bake bread and make soup, convert an old brownstone with a turret, a bay window, and working fireplaces. She’d put plush couches and vintage armchairs around the hearths, the tables would have linen tablecloths, and in the summer she’d serve desserts in a courtyard with climbing roses.

  “If you buy an island,” she teased, “we won’t see each other anymore.”

  He kissed her. “You can open your restaurant on my island.”

  “And you’ll be the only one who eats there, you and the fish.”

  The couple left the pubs and shops behind and crossed a dark side street to a neglected bridge. Streetlights with clouded lamps cast their dim light over a wooded gorge. Rock Creek Park. In the daytime old wine bottles and slabs of cardboard the homeless slept on showed up in the weeds, but night masked the city’s harsh realities.

  They moved on. The avenue grew brighter. Tiny shops, restaurants, and art galleries appeared. Connecticut Avenue began to run downhill. Beyond the Calvert Street crossroads the Taft Bridge spanned another chasm of black trees, Rock Creek Park again. Stone lions guarded the bridge, their heavy heads lifted as if they were sniffing the night.

  Monroe and Annie ducked inside a cafe, a sliver of a place with floor to ceiling paintings, dark wood tables, and Bentwood chairs.

  “Let’s get married,” he said over coffee.