[Original Novella] Facade, Part 3

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Seeing no chance to escape without the incident being reported, I obliged. Their company, at least, rendered me less suspicious to others. We soon arrived at a decadent Western residence, with three floors and all manner of decorative flourishes. Inside I was seated opposite the two pleasant, aged ladies at a small table with a frilly laced tablecloth in a space they soon informed me was their “breakfast nook.”

Despite myself, I scowled. A room just for breakfast? While one of their neighbors could not even afford wallpaper. As expected! But the tea truly was refreshing and I enjoyed listening to the old hens’ banter. Until one lifted a bundle of meat wrapped in paper and twine, as if fresh from the butcher.

Delicately, she unwrapped it. Gore spilled out. Intestines, chunks of lung and liver, half of a heart and various other entrails, now spread out across the table. The ladies looked at one another excitedly, then at me. That’s when they took off their masks.

It was so sudden. One hand under each of their chins, then off it came like a rubbery hood. Underneath, something resembling an immense maggot. Rippling folds of translucent white flesh, beady little black eyes and rapidly twitching, almost mechanical looking mouth parts. They dug into the bloody mess before them, meticulously searching for only the choicest morsels.

I stood up and backed away, hand over my mouth. Still struggling to comprehend any of it. The two creatures ceased gorging and stared at me. “Aren’t you going to have some?” one gurgled. The other then asked “What’s in the case, dear?”

I clutched it to my chest, and fled. Even during training, I never ran for so long. Barging out through the back door, I hoisted myself over the fence in a flash, desperate to put distance between myself and the feast.

I exhausted myself halfway up the mountain. If the capsule got me here, I reasoned, there must be some mechanism for return. But the capsule was gone. I searched the area I knew I’d landed in, confirmed by scorched Earth and a couple of perchlorate candles that’d fallen out when I opened the hatch. Yet, the descent module itself was nowhere to be found.

I broke down. In spite of my training. In spite of everything. The mind has certain limits. Crying, screaming, collapsing to the ground and thrashing until I could regain control. The picture grew somewhat more clear when I finally thought to open the case.

Inside, cushioned by foam, sat a MIRV. One small conical warhead, usually launched six to a missile, each of them able to independently target a different city on descent. Just one would do, it seemed, for the mission at hand. Which was explained as completely as they deemed necessary by the single sheet I found in a manilla envelope, secured to the inside of the lid.

“Following the first nuclear tests, it was anticipated by all knowledgeable men that every country would develop their own as soon as feasible. So it goes with dimensional travel. The tremendous advantage of it ensured that we were not the first to develop this technology and won’t be the last.

But it is not only humans who traverse the many Earths. Nor are we the most advanced. There are...others...who have been at this far, far longer. Races which make a living out of attracting unsuspecting pioneers, new to dimensional travel. Lured by a decoy of familiar sights and sounds, believing they have returned home by some error, or found an Earth very similar to their own. Until the moment that the facade falls away.”

So, do not believe in the authenticity of anything you see. Instead, deliver the nuclear device you’ve been supplied with to the included coordinates. The energy requirements for a transect only permit passage from one Earth to the most similar neighbor, one at a time. So each new world must be painstakingly industrialized, so that the machinery necessary to reach the next can be built.

Our Earth is next in line. I trust you appreciate the importance of preventing them from completing a bridge to it. They use rockets very similar to our own, but simply send cases filled with dormant eggs.

If you hope to survive this, see to it that you’re on that rocket instead of the egg case when it launches, with the device set to explode some minutes after you’re in orbit. Descend below the surface to get close to the launch facility without being noticed. Below you will find instructions for setting or disabling the timer.”

So there were. I studied the material with newfound determination. Long had thinkers predicted that there might be intelligent life beyond Earth, jealous eyes fixed on the natural wealth of our planet.

The exact nature of that adversary, they could never have predicted. Nor how close it was. I pocketed one of the perchlorate candles on the off chance I’d need it on the way home, then headed back down the mountain.

I interpreted “descend below the surface” to mean traveling by sewer. Only upon removing the manhole, I did not find a sewer of any kind. I found a ladder, which I descended for about thirty feet before reaching the true ground level. From below, I now realized that the suburbs above me were constructed on a layer above the real city, held up by load bearing pillars every hundred feet or so.

The city, if I could describe it that way, made no pretense of being designed for humans. That was the purpose of the layer above it. Down here, the architecture was bizarre and unfamiliar. Endless rows of grey, featureless stone columns. Vast factories, which by the smell of it were for processing meat. A sticky creek of blood ran along the gutter, then down something like a storm drain.

Just then, one of those creatures rounded the corner. Entirely unclad, such that I could see its real anatomy. How could it fit in the shape of a human body? Easily twice my size, it lazily scuttled along on hundreds of twitchy little feet, shuffling its soft, bulbous white body towards me.

I froze. Then, thinking quickly, greeted it. Somehow despite the inhuman mouth parts, in crystal clear English, it greeted me back. Then continued crawling along. I would later see more of them, some in full human disguise. Others wearing the body, but with their masks off. Presumably for fresh air, or because wearing them wasn’t required down here.

It was a challenge to behave as though none of it phased me. The easiest thing was not to look. I could still see their impossible writhing forms out of the corner of my eye, but remembering the task at hand, I trudged onward towards the objective.

My sole advantage was the element of surprise, and I pressed it as far as it would get me. Because everything was designed in close imitation of Earth and it’s inhabitants, despite feeling intensely out of place, I fit in perfectly. It was just a matter of maintaining the charade long enough.

The launch facility was entirely below ground. Or below the false surface, to be specific. The launch door loomed above, the strange vehicle below it towering over me. A rocket, certainly. But unlike any I’d ever seen.

Angular, menacing looking fins jutting out from it at various tiers, the whole thing shiny black, more closely resembling a doomsday weapon than a spaceship. Although given what would result should it reach my own Earth, it was both.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 4!}