Moles

Moles

  David Wesley Hill

  Copyright 1997 David Wesley Hill

  This story was originally published in Little Green Men magazine.

  The Mermaids of the Darian Coast (short story)

  The Execution of Thomas Doughty by Francis Drake (essay)

  Searching for the Golden Hinde (essay)

  The Thinner Man (horror short story)

  On a Lazy Summer Afternoon (horror short story)

  Calling the Children (science fiction short story)

  The Curtain Falls and Other Stories

  (award winning science fiction and fantasy stories)

  Castaway on Temurlone (science fiction novel)

  At Drake's Command (sea adventure novel)

  My wife dug a finger into the skin of her neck and with a brisk upward motion stripped off her face and exposed her real self to me. The invasion was on. She didn’t have to hide any longer.

  Beneath the human mask her flesh was chalky and hard. Her eyes were bulbous, faceted, insectile. Small mandibles worked around her mouth.

  Tossing her face into the kitchen garbage, she said, “You don’t know how good it feels to finally be out of that get-up. Twenty-three years. God. I itch.”

  We’d been married nineteen.

  I was at the dining room table, tied to a chair. Vicki had met me at the station in the Honda at 6:10 as usual. We’d made small talk during the five minute drive home. I told her about the petty aggravations of the city and she told me about the real estate market and what the kids were up to. It was a perfectly ordinary end to a perfectly ordinary day right up until we pulled into our garage. Then the sky lit up, the evening becoming brighter than morning. Slow thunder began rolling past. Vicki cocked her head as if listening to words only she could hear. I didn’t realize immediately that this was exactly what was happening.

  Suddenly the sky was full of ships.

  From the direction of the city a barrage of antiaircraft fire began rising skyward. Beams of hard red light stabbed down from the armada. Vicki slipped behind me while I goggled at the engagement and tapped me expertly behind the ear with precisely enough force to cause me to drop my attaché case and fold to my knees. Then she grabbed my arm and shirt collar and dragged me into the house, handling my six-foot frame as easily as a child’s. She wasn’t even breathing hard as she drew the clothesline tight around my wrists and ankles. I couldn’t help thinking that my wife was full of surprises today.

  “What did I do?” I asked her stupidly.

  “Shut up.”

  “Vicki—”

  “Just shut up. I’m tired of listening to you. Day in and day out. It’s always something. Can’t we have some peace and quiet for once?”

  That was when she stripped off her face. Then she opened the china closet—the one the kids and I weren’t allowed in, ever—and took out our set of Spode. She stacked the china with incongruous care on the table before keying a secret switch and revealing a hidden compartment crammed with futuristic armament.

  Vicki rummaged around for a minute. She backed out carrying what appeared to be a portable missile launcher, which she hoisted up onto a shoulder.

  Our house is located on a knoll at the bottom of a dead-end lane. One hundred yards away, obscured by a thick screen of trees, is a major artery into the city. Vicki triggered another switch, detonating mines that she had evidently sown earlier, blowing clear a wide lane from our backyard to the highway. She opened the sliding glass patio door and stood there with the missile launcher aimed at the stretch of road that was now visible. It wasn’t hard to guess what she was waiting for. The army base was only three miles north of our little suburban town.

  That was when Scott came home.

  He’s almost thirteen, tall and gangly and too full of energy to ever keep still. He slammed open the front door and barreled into the house, a whirlwind of baggy jeans and gigantic sneakers and loose plaid and denim shirts overlaid one upon the other, all very cool. “Mom! Dad! You see what’s happening! We’re being invaded! From space—”

  Then he noticed me. “Dad. What’s going on? Why’re you tied to the chair?”

  And then he saw Vicki. “What the hell is that thing?”

  She whirled around with impossible speed and slapped Scott across the face, rocking him right off his feet. “That’s no way to talk to your mother, young man,” she said, mandibles working furiously around the black orifice that was her true mouth. She hoisted him effortlessly by the scruff of his neck and bound him to the chair next to mine. Then she retrieved the missile launcher and returned to her post by the patio door. “I’ll deal with you later,” Vicki said over her shoulder. “With both of you.”

  Scott licked flecks of blood from his lips. “Is it true, dad?” he whispered to me.

  “I’m afraid it is, son,” I whispered back.

  “Who’d have guessed?” he mused reflectively. “Mom—everyday suburban housewife? Or alien scumsucker from Pluto? Had me fooled. Right, Dad?” He gave me a broad wink.

  My reply was drowned by the roar of the missile launcher, by the keening whine of laser-guided rounds coursing toward the column of armor that had appeared on the highway below, by explosion after explosion. Vicki accounted for eight tanks, two humvees, and three supply trucks before her fire was returned. Perhaps a platoon of troops survived the barrage. They took cover in the woods below the house and began shooting wildly toward us. Again Vicki rummaged in the closet, emerging with a device halfway between a mortar and a machine gun. It seemed to erupt. Within three minutes not one soldier was alive.

  Then she turned our way. I said, “Darling—”

  “Don’t darling me.”

  “Fine, then. Vicki—”

  “Don’t call me Vicki.”

  “All right. Whatever you say,” I agreed reasonably. “What should I call you?”

  The thing that was my wife didn’t answer directly. Somehow her mannerisms remained her own despite the metamorphosis—despite the corpse pallor of her chitin, despite the bulbous glare of her faceted eyes—and I could almost see her nibbling her bottom lip while she thought the situation over, never mind that her mouth was now a dark gulf in which glistened a thicket of canines as sharp as needles.

  Finally she reached a decision. “You couldn’t pronounce my real name, George. I guess Vicki will have to do. For now.”

  I ignored that last bit. “Good. That’s settled, then. Vicki it is. So, Vicki—”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, actually, I was wondering what you’re going to do with us. As long as you’ve turned into some sort of alien—”

  “—bastard spawn from Neptune—” piped in Scott, who played entirely too many computer games.

  “—alien person,” I finished, kneeing the boy obliquely.

  Vicki put down the mortar and brought her face close to mine, loose ropes of slaver unraveling from her mouth. “You’re so predictable, George,” she said. “It’s pathetic. It really is. You can’t imagine the self control I’ve demonstrated, simply letting you live, for God’s sake. You can’t imagine how tempted I’ve been, how I had to restrain myself, having to listen to your voice, having to touch you. Nineteen years, George. Well, it’s over now. I don’t have to put up with it any longer. I don’t have to put up with you.”

  “I think we certainly have a lot to talk about,” I said.

  “No, we don’t. Aren’t you listening, George? Can’t you get it? It’s over. It never was. You disgust me. You’re a man.”

  Just then the front door opened and our daughter arrived. Betty is sixteen, very tall, quite beautiful. She is also supremely intelligent although she does her best to hide this quality behind too much makeup, a vacuous expression, hair streaked orange and blue, and a vocabulary consisting to great extent of
the word like. She sauntered into the dining room and glanced incuriously at Scott and me, seemingly oblivious to our peculiar circumstances. She also ignored the fact that her mother no longer possessed features even vaguely approximating those of a human being. My first thought was that Betty was simply demonstrating her typical teenage self-absorption; but then I learned exactly how wrong I was.

  Vicki focused her glittering red eyes on the girl. “The sheriff’s office?” she hissed. “You took care of it?”

  “Sure, Mom, everything’s, like, cool. And the town hall, too. No problem.”

  “What about the Con Ed sub-station?”

  “Been there. Done that. And you know what? The dam’s, like, history.”

  “Good. I’ve saved your brother for you.”

  “Too cool!”

  Betty knelt down in front of Scott, so that they were eye to eye. “Hey, little creep, remember when you, like, scratched my Incesticide CD?”

  “I told you that was an accident!”

  “Or when you, like, sold Neil Edwards a pair of my panties for ten bucks?”

  It