ATEUCHUS

“I am a worm and not a man...”

Psalm 22:6 (attributed to Jesus)

1

ALFIE DROVE THE Jeep hard over the rough, rock-strewn road that led to the find. He was up high now, altitude of at least 10,000 feet, the wind brittle cold. He kept the windows down, relishing the clean air, even if it turned his knuckles to blue bolts as they held the steering wheel.

The Jeep lifted high on the passenger side, came down with a thud, then dipped left into a gulley, rocking Alfie so hard his feet momentarily left the pedals. He jerked back into the seat, laughed, and gave it more gas.

James had said “not of this earth,” and James – an Oxford man through and through – wasn’t one for hyperbole or metaphor. Quite literal, his geologist friend. He’d also said the sample showed dramatic aging that held no relation to its geological position or depth. Put the two together and you had a nice fat meteorite, a juicy bit of space right here on planet Utah, only a few hours’ drive for Alfie from his home-based lab near the university. He praised the heavens that the thing wasn’t found a bit further north, across the border, or James might have been calling Jim Robinson at Wyoming instead. Even so, Alfie figured the find was technically on federal land, part of Ashley National Park, but he wasn’t about to bring that up with James. Hell no, this space rock was his and by God he meant to have it.

The Jeep bounced over a ridge and Alfie saw the tents in the distance, navy green pimples dotted along a butte a half-mile ahead, the thin dirt road twisting like a brown snake right for it.

“ABOUT FIVE-THOUSAND YEARS, I’d say. More or less. Just a baby, really.”

Alfie nodded, stared at the blackened chunk of rock lying in the middle of the miniature crater the geologists had dug around it. Its surface was jagged, almost crystallized, and gave off a black, chalky residue when touched. It looked, to Alfie anyway, rather unstable. More like shale than stone. James’ crew, all students, stood absently around the dig, some of them likely hoping to be included in whatever this discovery ended up being, the rest simply cold and homesick. Alfie smirked, remembering his own years as a student, having to take whatever shit the professor or project head doled out.

Hate to break it to you fellas, but your claim on this meteorite went out the window when your boss brought my sorry ass up this mountain, he thought, itching to be gone but not wanting to seem overly anxious, lest James rethink the importance of the discovery.

“Pre-Egyptian,” Alfie mused, as if bored, each word punctuated by clouds of breath in the frigid air. “Any similarities?”

James jammed his thin white hands into the front pockets of his vest to warm them, stuck out his lower lip. A posture he took often, and one that Alfie always thought would go well with a pipe and a stuffed hawk in the background, decorating the mahogany of whatever Oxford study room the professor most often postured within.

“Nothing on record, not anything like this, at least. She’s a rare bird. The composition is strange for a meteorite. As you can see it’s flaking, oxidization must have been slowly cooking this thing for the last few millennia, killing it from the inside out. But like I said, the material is completely alien. I may not know much about this little guy, but I know it wasn’t born on planet earth. I’ve already taken my samples, pictures, measured, weighed, catalogued. It’s not a chrondite, I can tell you… some rare achondrite I’ve never come across, and since you’re the only meteoritic within a thousand miles, I figured I’d hand you the baton. I have my hands full with the shit I actually came out here to do.”

Alfie nodded, only half-listening, not entirely caring about James’s considerations on the matter, since the man knew as much about meteorology as Alfie knew, or cared, about the archeologic bone-digging mission the Brits were on about. Besides, he was entranced by the object before him; it consumed every ounce of his attention. “Iron prominent, I assume?” he asked, knowing the answer but wanting to build some goodwill by asking the idiot his opinion.

James looked at him strangely, his voice lowering, as if nervous of being overheard. “That’s the thing, Alfie. You’d think it’d be packed with ferrous, yeah? But it’s not. So far, our tests have shown no iron at all.”

Alfie gave him a hard look. “You’ve got to be mistaken.”

James scoffed, pulled the front of his khaki archeologist vest down neatly. “I don’t think so. If there’s one thing I know, it’s how to test the chemical makeup of rock. Or, in this case, meteorite. Ergo, I’m curious what the university will come up with.”

Alfie nodded. “Well, I better load up and get it over there. People are waiting to see this baby,” he said, knowing damn well he had no plans to take the find anywhere but his own home lab. He didn’t want – or need – the university’s premature meddling in a case like this one. If he was ever going to raise his personal profile within the scientific community, he knew it had to be outside the purview of his employer. He stepped down into the belly of the crater the team had dug out, his eyes dancing over the rock in anticipation.

You ready to go home? he thought, kneeling down beside the meteorite, noting it was about the size and shape of two bowling balls side-by-side, joined at the corpulent hip. He rubbed the surface with his fingertips, gave a little yelp and flinched, jerked his hand away. He could have sworn he felt a pulse, as if he had touched an electrical wire thrumming with current – not enough to shock, but enough to make him want his fingers back, thanks very much.

He stared at the black smudges on his fingertips, rubbed them together, the dust staining his skin. His hands were trembling.

“Don’t tell me it shocked you, mate. I’ll have to call the Star,” James said without humor.

“No, it’s fine,” Alfie said, the strangeness of the meteorite only building his excitement to study it more closely. “You’re the composition expert, so tell me. What’s it made of James?”

“Beats me,” James said irritably, beckoning for two nearby assistants to come over and help with load-in. “What the hell you think I called you for?”

2

ALFIE DOLLIED THE large, latched titanium case through the front double-doors of his slate-gray home, the 201 freeway roaring above and behind him as he weaved the hand truck through the entry and into the carpeted living room, rumbled over the linoleum kitchen floor and slowly lowered the hand truck’s wheels down the basement stairs to his lab, step-by-step, careful not to jostle the docile contents, despite knowing the case’s interior padding held the meteorite firmly in place.

He set the case in the middle of the lab floor, turned on all the lights and ran back up the stairs, nearly bursting with anticipation. He was sure this would be the Big One that finally raised his profile to national, if not global, heights. He imagined the grants pouring in, the book offers and, inevitably, the substantial raise in salary from the university. That’s if they could even keep him, of course! He had, after all, always enjoyed the idea of an ivy league professorship, and there was always MIT. Why not dream big?

Outside, Alfie locked up the Jeep then ran back inside, where he hurriedly closed and bolted the front door. As he flipped the deadbolt he gave a last look through the door’s small window. His front yard, a large half-acre weed-riddled thing surrounded by a low metal fence, and the giant, adjacent vacant dirt lot that served as his only neighbor, were both as empty and quiet as ever. Chastising himself for his paranoia, he turned and strode deliberately for the underground lab.

Midway to the basement stairs, he changed his mind and went through the living room to the glass double-doors leading to the rear of the property. He checked the backyard, found it clear, then locked the sliding doors and pulled the brown woolen curtains closed, robbing the room of light, leaving him in musty darkness.

He went through the rest of the house, pulled every curtain, closed every blind. On his way to the basement, he activated the door alarm, the one he usually only set when traveling.

Just in case.

ALFIE HAD CONVERTED the basement a few years back, having realized he could get more work done – without prying eyes constantly peering greedily over his shoulder – in the privacy of his own home. He’d installed a reinforced metal door with a load bar lock, put up fluorescent lights throughout, drywalled over the exposed beams and painted it all a stark, clinical white. He’d built in an industrial washing station at one end of the open room, an end-to-end stainless steel countertop along the adjacent wall, mounted cabinetry, and purchased two mortician tables that he’d wheeled together to form a workstation in the center.

It was upon the mortician tables (thoroughly steel-brushed and sanitized once purchased) that he placed the meteorite for inspection.

Alfie checked the two digital cameras mounted inside the lab – one above the counter, one on the opposite wall – and made sure they were recording to a two-terabyte cloud drive the university provided. Satisfied everything was in order, he donned goggles and surgical gloves and approached the foreign object. He shifted the rock – just a bit – so it rested easily on the table, without any wobble, and prepared for testing.

Using his lightest hammer, he chipped a fragment off the side of the dusty black rock, then another, and another. Enough to get started. He put the respective samples in their own enclosed petri dishes, labeled them One, Two and Three. He walked them to the counter where his equipment was set up, including a microscope (on loan from the university), a series of acids and solvents, brushes and fine tools and other refined equipment, some of which was his, most of which he had borrowed and not yet returned.

“One more, I think,” he said, wanting to test a particular oxygen generator mixture on a clean sample. He turned, hammer in hand, back toward the meteorite. And froze.

A thick, wriggling, maggot-like creature, white as a sunken corpse, slick with moisture and peppered with dusty black residue, protruded from a crack in the rock. From the exact spot where he had chipped away.