20

I Become a Flinduvian

THE FLINDUVIANS carried in a box that looked something like a coffin. It was bigger than most coffins—though given how big the Flinduvians were, that made sense. It was also very plain, with no decorations or fancy woodwork or anything. The only marks on it at all were some squiggles across the top, which might have been Flinduvian writing. Suddenly I realized that the squiggles looked like the marks on the box where the Martin-clone had imprisoned Gaspar and the others.

The Flinduvians stood the coffin upright. Dysrok touched a button on its side.

The front swung open.

Inside stood the hulking figure of a dead Flinduvian.

My new home.

Like the other Flinduvians, this guy had muscles on his muscles, tentacles instead of fingers, and feet that looked like long, flexible horse hooves. Even though its eyes were closed, I could tell they were big and bulgy. So was its snout, with its upthrust fangs.

They carried the collecting bottle over and connected it to a pipe on the side of the box.

Then they pumped me inside the Flinduvian.

At first I felt only a horrid clamminess, as if I had been wrapped in a piece of raw liver. Then, slowly, the body began to come back to life. I could feel the alien blood pumping through its alien veins. I would have screamed again, but I couldn’t; the body was not mine to control, merely to inhabit.

My eyes blinked open and I could see again.

Seeing the world as a Flinduvian was very different from seeing it as an Earthling. First, colors did not look the same. It wasn’t as simple as them looking lighter or darker than usual. They looked like nothing I had ever seen before. It’s hard to explain clearly, but I have to tell you, it was pretty freaky.

Second, Flinduvian eyes are much sharper than ours. I could see things I had never seen before: the texture of clothing, the flecks of color in the eyes of someone twenty feet away. I could count the individual hairs on Gaspar’s hand.

But along with that sharpness came something that I can only describe as “interpretation.” Every object I saw seemed like either a potential danger or a potential weapon—sometimes both at once. And every non-Flinduvian being, even my sweet old grandmother, looked like a menace and an enemy. If it hadn’t been for the lucky fact that I had no control over the body I was in, I might have rushed forward to crush her.

I did not like being a Flinduvian. But at least I could see why they were so nasty—though I wondered if they saw things this way because they were so nasty, or they were so nasty because of the way they saw things.

Dysrok took a black box from his pack. He turned a dial, and I felt a jolt of power tingle through me. It was scary, but not totally unpleasant.

“There,” he said. “He’s been activated. Zarax, step forward.”

Must be Zarax was my name, because I had no choice but to step forward.

Dysrok smiled. “See how simple it is? It takes only moments to reactivate the body with one of your ghosts. Once done, that body is completely under our command.”

“What about the ghost itself?” asked Gaspar. “What happens to it?”

Dysroks tongue flicked out. “The ghost is merely a battery—a life force to energize the body. And since the device that prevents more than ten members of a species from passing through a Starry Door on any given day does not apply to corpses, we can bring through a million of these warriors-in-waiting if need be. With a small advance group in place to activate them, we can transport an army large enough to conquer this puny planet in a matter of hours.”

He stretched his chest triumphantly. “Once the planet is ours, the real work begins. We will harvest your ghosts. Then, using them as fuel for our warriors’ bodies, we will take our rightful place as rulers of the galaxy.”

I thought about the sorrowful spirits we had met in the Land of the Dead, and imagined them being imprisoned in Flinduvian bodies as I now was. I thought about Grampa being stuck here. I thought about old Mr. Zematoski from across the street, who had died last month, and Edon Farrell’s big sister, Gwen, who had been killed in a car accident two years ago. The idea of their spirits being stuffed into these cold Flinduvian corpses was so appalling it made me want to twitch.

To my surprise, one of my new arms did twitch.

What made this surprising was that I was not supposed to have any control of the Flinduvian body at all.

I tried to do it again.

Nothing.

I focused my thoughts, putting all my energy into moving the right hand.

Nothing . . . nothing . . . nothing . . . Twitch!

I stopped immediately. I didn’t want the Flinduvians to know what I was up to. I tried to glance around to see if any of them had noticed, but twitch or not, I didn’t have control of my eyes. All I could do was look straight ahead at the parlor of Morley Manor, which was fairly crowded, despite the fact that all the furniture was gone.

Gramma and Sarah and all the members of the Family Morleskievich were looking at me. Sarah was crying. I wanted to wave, to signal somehow that I was alive and well, but couldn’t manage it. The weirdest thing of all was seeing my own body, from which Grampa was staring at me with horror and fascination.

I had no idea what to do next.

It didn’t make any difference; Dysrok decided for me. Twisting the dial on his control panel, he sent me to stand against the wall.

“Close your eyes and wait for future orders,” he said.

I did as I was told.

The darkness was complete. I couldn’t move. The Flinduvian body, though animated by my spirit, remained the coldest thing I had ever experienced.

I wanted to shiver, but couldn’t. It was, I suppose, a lot like being dead.

No, that’s not really true. If I had been dead, I could have moved on to the Land of the Dead, which, strange as it is, would have been better than this living coffin of cold Flinduvian flesh.

Then I realized that this was what they wanted to do to all of Earths dead, or at least as many as they could harvest.

It made me want to scream.