The Caretakers

The power never wavered. 

Internet? Gone. Cell service? Gone.

But the lights? Steady as a rock. And that never made sense. 

In retrospect.

At the time, it was all good. After all, Zak had woken to an absurdly abrupt, violent storm, despite a sunny forecast. So when, in a neighborhood notorious for its shaky grid, the poor guy successfully flipped on a light switch, he checked it off as a win.

Still rocking the power! Yes! Baby! Thank freaking God!

Fair enough, at very first blush. But later? Even after he discovered that the networks, and the networks alone, were all out? Still incurious? Never once suspecting anything exotic? The least bit out of the ordinary?

Eventually, sure. But man, it took a while. That first day, Zack’s gripes remained inexplicably — unforgivably ⸻ prosaic. Go figure.

Power’s intact, so I’m cool. Other shit’s a nuisance, but it’ll all come back eventually as long as the power lines’re up. Stupid cable company sucks, of course. Usual bullshit. Cell towers malfunctioning when the power’s good is a bit odd, I admit. But waddaya gonna do?

Perhaps the peculiar circumstances would have troubled him more if there had been anyone who needed to hear from him that morning, or the next. But Zachariah Fleming was a freelance sportswriter with an estranged family and no close friends. Such a pristinely self-contained entity as Zak greeted a lock-down storm as eagerly as a bear does winter.

Coffee in hand, he parked himself in front of a dark computer screen and tried to recall the weather forecast from the day before.

They didn’t have the slightest clue this storm was coming, so how big can it be? Not very. Ergo, it won’t last more than a few hours. Nice.

He stared at the empty display for a spell, wondering how to pass the time without electronic media. Finally, he sighed, eased out of his desk chair, and dug through some junk subscription magazines he kept on the coffee table. He grabbed a few, settled into his favorite lounger, and thumbed the mags for a couple of hours before lunch. He peered out the window before snatching something to eat.

Still blowing like a mother out there. Wish I could check a forecast update.

Zak opened a can of tuna as he entertained the first tiny inklings of concern about how long the storm would last. The winds repeatedly rattled the windowpane throughout his repast, unsettling him enough at one point enough to cause him to drop his fork. By the time he finished his meal, he decided there was no hope of a break in the weather anytime soon, and the day, therefore, was shot. So he headed to the sofa for a little lie-down, hoping to kill a couple of hours in blissful unconsciousness.

A good, long nap is what I need. I’m watching too closely, is all. I wake up a couple hours from now, and it’ll be easing up. Might even have internet back by then. 

But right then, as his head hit the armrest, the tempest escalated! Roaring winds shook the house to its foundation, jolting him off the couch. He jumped to a window and stared in disbelief.

A thick, swirling blood-red cloud now swept past the glass. Thanks to stray beams of refracted sunlight, the tainted air sparkled, but the churning fog was otherwise impenetrable, leaving the outside world completely hidden. Surely, this should have been Zak’s epiphanic moment.

Yet even at this stage, his speculations didn’t venture that far afield. Zak didn’t yet truly fathom the peculiarity of the stable power supply, still taking it as a given. 

There’s got to be a rational explanation! If I’ve still got power, the winds themselves can’t be too bad, no matter what I think I hear or feel. Maybe a dust storm?

The nervous urge to demystify had replaced insouciance. But Zak’s hypothesis wouldn’t have made sense even if he did live in or near any kind of desert or prairie, which wasn’t the case. No dust storm could ever produce the insane spectacle before him. Deep down, Zak kinda knew it. But no other sensible explanation immediately suggested itself, so he uneasily bore his air-borne dirt hypothesis to bed, soon after the veiled sun set.

At nightfall, the storm transformed into a ghostly howl.

“The weather’s been really dry. Couldn’t that do it? Everyone knows that can cause a dust storm,” he said aloud, lying wide-eyed in bed, flinging his words at the ceiling like talismans, as if they would stamp themselves upon his world and render it comprehensible.

But the puzzlement endured, and sleep, when it came, was fitful.

When Zak woke the second day, the storm had worsened, and his determination to wrap his predicament in a rational bow buckled. First, whatever was out there didn’t even look like air anymore — it was some kind of gaseous substance that was palpably thickening. Zak gaped in wonder as it streamed past the windows, spiraling in an infinite variety of luminescent reds and yellows and everything in between.

Even worse, the energy of the storm had intensified manyfold. The walls trembled again and again under the onslaught of what had evolved into unremitting typhoon-force winds.

I’m gonna die. Simple as that. I’m a dead man.

The elements had turned fantastical, his situation existential. Nonchalance finally yielded to terror, and Zak retreated to the basement and waited for the house to collapse. But it didn’t. After a couple of hours in which there was no sign of structural dissolution, Zak figured that somehow his home was, and would continue to be, safe, and so he tentatively climbed back to the first floor. He wasn’t about to die, at least not immediately. So, even as the winds roared, Zak reconstituted his faith in reason. Though a benign, relatively quotidian origin to his peril no longer fit the bill, rules of logic still reigned. Perhaps an apocalyptic explanation, then?

So, not a dust storm. But what else? The Yellowstone caldera? How far are we? Less than a thousand miles, right? Whatever, serious shit, no question. But we’re all in it, right? Everybody on Penrose Court, for starters. One of ‘em might have an idea or two.

Ah, his neighbors. Those strangers behind their tinted windshields, with whom he exchanged an occasional wave as they drove in and out of the cul-de-sac.

But contact would mean venturing outside — undoubtedly inadvisable.

The way it’s blowing, how could I possibly? I can’t even…. I mean, I wouldn’t even be able to see whatever crap’s flying around. And that’s putting aside that I’d probably need a gas mask. No way. Forget it.

So Zak, despite the calamitous outlook, shut-in that he was, still rationalized inaction.

Eh, whatever. Help’ll come, eventually! There’re always people outside any disaster area, aren’t there? Even the most humongous tsunami or earthquake or who-knows-what! How else do survivors get rescued?

 He settled his nerves with whiskey. Then he lit the house up like Christmas, blasted the rock from old downloaded playlists, and brought his emergency stores up from the basement ⸻ enough food for three months, by his estimate. If the house didn’t blow away in the meantime.

He drank away the panic festering in his gut. 

Zak woke the next morning in the living room recliner, liquor spilled on the rug and head pounding. The view from the windows was as opaque as before, and communication networks were still dead.

But for the first time, the winds had quieted. 

This could be my chance. Still scary, though. Maybe the car? ‘Cept the Subaru ain’t airtight, and where would I drive anyway if I can’t see a lick? Can’t reach the car any easier than anywhere else, either — no way this crap hasn’t been seeping right under the garage door from the get-go. Forget it. If I’m goin’ out there, I should just do it! But only a test first, of course — I’ll hold my breath. What could go wrong in a few seconds? 

Zak showered and changed and steeled himself for the task at hand over a bowl of breakfast cereal. Then, still a little hung over but satisfied by the sustained calm, Zak took a deep breath and stepped out on the porch.

It was like stepping into a just-used, inside-out wetsuit two sizes too small — greasy, wet, and freezing cold. The shock forced a miniscule, reflexive inhalation that burned like thousands of needles rushing down his windpipe. Tears cascading from his poisoned eyes, Zak staggered, spun around, groped for the door handle, and threw himself back into the house. After slamming the door shut, he collapsed to the floor, his hands and face frosted, his stomach discharging its contents. Half blind, he sat by the toilet puking and splashing water in his swollen eyes for the next hour.

It took a while. But Zak’s gut eventually settled. His eyes healed.

Man, oh man. Never doing that again!

Near-death ordeals have a way of altering perspectives, and Zak was not immune to this dynamic. He was shaken. So much so that he now questioned his very view of the world. 

If rescue squads with infrared vision, hazmat suits, and all the rest have been standing at the ready, and they can see what we’re dealing with, then where the hell are they?  

Contrariwise, if the entire country, or continent, or planet, simultaneously suffered the same calamity, then he was on his own, wasn’t he? And any survivors, on Penrose Court or anywhere else, were as relevant to each other as denizens of distant stars.

Stars!

That’s it, isn’t it? Of course! How else, the preserved utilities? The friendly environment inside this leaky house? Staring me in the face!

The incongruity of it all punched Zak square in the nose. They were out there, running the show. They! And if they were running the show, then they were watching! 

We need to talk.

Zak grabbed a caulk gun from under the kitchen sink and sprayed a message on the kitchen window, the dirty white sealant sticking well to the room-temperature interior surface of the glass. The message? ‘GREETINGS,’ backward, in oversized capital letters, above the crude outline of an open palm.   

I’ve been an idiot! I’m being kept alive — so obvious! The structure, the design of it all! 

As he applied the finishing touch to his makeshift howdy-do, Zak was quite that a superior intelligence would have no trouble construing its meaning. All the rest of the day, he paraded past the window, hands clasped behind his back, peering through the gummy letters against the multihued background, waiting for a collocutor to present himself. Night fell. His salutation hardened upon the pane, unanswered. Doubts swelled. 

What if the language gap is insurmountable? Like you’ve got to start with symbols and numbers, like in that movie. Or what if they can’t even see it? What if they don’t see at all? Can a space-faring race be blind?

In the end, though, Zak’s faith in the transcendent powers of the presumed interstellar visitors won the day.

Umm, maybe they’re just too busy right now. It’s a big freaking world, after all. And it hasn’t been that long, really. Be patient, dude.

Having belatedly grasped that his survival inside the house was otherwise unfathomable, and in the wake of a three-day journey from indifference to terror, Zak was in no mood to dissect his paradoxical confidence in all-powerful custodians who were actually safeguarding his survival. For now, this was his safe space. So he relaxed. He showered, shaved, dressed each morning, and donned pajamas every evening before bed. He ate three proper meals each day and focused on books and music and food except for an hour every afternoon when he sat sipping a cup of tea, staring out the windows, wondering when his mystery guests would declare themselves.

On those days when he fortified his afternoon tea with a finger of booze, he’d invariably nod off, only to wake after sunset and resume staring through the window as if he had never stopped ⸻ the alien gases, painted now in nighttime shades of black and gray, never relenting. 

A few weeks in, as Zak sat in the kitchen eating SpaghettiOs out of a can, his thoughts meandered to his diminishing food supply. The optimistic foundations of his extraterrestrial-as-saviors theory wavered anew.

Inconceivable they’d let me starve to death, isn’t it? Because if they wanted me dead, they would’ve just killed me at the outset. Unless… Wait a minute. Could they just be studying me? Like, how long does it take me to die? Shit. 

A low rumble, like heavy machinery, interrupted his morbid reverie. The tremor shook him so severely he bit his lip. Glassware vibrated across the counter, fell to the floor, and shattered. The half-eaten can of SpaghettiOs spilled to the floor. A table-lamp tipped and smashed. 

An earthquake?! Whatever it was, it lasted little more than a minute. Then — nothing. As if someone had turned a knob.

What the bloody hell was that?!

Limbs in working order? Check. Jaw unbroken? Pants unsoiled? Check and check. But what remained of Zak’s adorable faith in his Star-Lords lay in tatters.

Some Guardians these jokers turn out to be! Coulda been one of ‘em just sneezing, for all I know! What am I to them, anyway? A lab specimen? A pet? Man, I am straight outta time! I gotta get hold of one of these suckers before one of ‘em stumbles and steps on me!

Zak flew into action, want of relevant expressive means be damned. First: a stab at whole-house semaphore. He turned off all the lights in the house, grabbed a flashlight, and then ran all over the place, up and down the stairs and in and out of every room, shining the torch randomly at various windows ⸻ on-off-on-off, interspersing the occasional SOS, for what it was worth. Then he sat panting on his bed, watching the minutes tick away on the wall clock.

So much for that.

Zak upped the ante. Despite fleeting trepidation about messing with his miraculous utilities, he turned every light in the house back on — and then threw them all on and off from the master switch on the fuse panel in the basement. This accomplished nothing other than the answering of a single prayer — no fuses got fried. Zak was unappreciative, though.

I’d have been better off wrecking the damn breaker box. Ruining their life-support setup might be the only thing that’d get their attention.

But Zak had no intention of taking an ax to his power panel. Instead, he rubbed his face in frustration and analyzed his failure so far. First, his interplanetary guests had ignored his written missive. Maybe that was a language thing, but now they’d disregarded visible shout outs of the most primitive sort, ones that required no deciphering. Would audio work better? Zak sat up straight and grinned devilishly. He ran to the kitchen, retrieved a box of matches, mounted a stepstool under the smoke alarm, and struck his miniature torch.

The alarm blared, and Zak nodded to himself as he planted himself as far as possible from the teeth-jangling racket. His retreat was mostly futile, though — the siren filled the house.

Bastards can’t miss that!

He gave it half an hour. 

Head spinning from the insane noise, Zak clambered back up to disconnect the klaxon.

This is bullshit. 

In an angry gesture, he blasted an AC/DC CD at full volume. 

Which he kinda recalled doing some weeks before for the hell of it, to no effect. But he let it go this time until a speaker blew out, then he ripped out the disc and hurled it to the floor.

Why sound or light? Why assume they are even bound by those media? They’re space travelers, for God’s sake! Who knows what kind of sensory organs they’ve evolved?! They probably read minds directly! 

 Zak sat on the rug, closed his eyes, and meditated. After a while, he dozed off. When he startled back to consciousness, nothing had changed.

Useless.

Zak didn’t move for ages after his failed stab at telepathy. He just stared at the wall, ruing the hopelessness of his quandary. The ambition that had animated his flurry of distress calls now fled. The confidence with which he pinned his hopes on super-intelligent wardens evaporated. His hypotheses and moods resumed their ping-ponging.

Half-assed theory — that’s all it was. What do I really know? Forget about extraterrestrials — I don’t even know anything about how utilities work! Who knows why some should stay on and others conk out? Aliens! My Lord, what was I thinking?

Invaders from space or not, he didn’t even care anymore. A terrible disaster had swallowed the world, and doom beckoned in either case. He trudged upstairs to his bedroom and drew the shades. Dropping his clothes to the floor, he crawled into bed naked. 

I should kill myself, get it over fast. Hmm. Wouldn’t be hard. Just walk out the door, take a deep breath….

Confounded and despairing, Zak drew the covers over his head, turned to his left and…

Holy mother of God!

Coughing, choking, he tumbled out of bed with a thud. He scrambled to his feet and stared.

Where did she come from?!

A stunningly beautiful young woman lay beneath the sheets, asleep.

The bedspread undulated suggestively as she shifted position. Luxuriant, sable hair overflowed her pillow, and the ever-so-slight parting of her perfect lips elicited a response from Zak that demanded a hasty recovery of his pants. Modesty thus restored, he drew back the curtains for more light. The customary blood-orange glow filled the bedroom.

Hot damn! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Suddenly, Zak was again an alien devotee. After only a few seconds, however, misgivings arose yet again.

Real or fake?

His excitement subsided as he tried to figure out whether the lovely creature in his bed was or was not a hologram or even an illusion placed directly in his brain.

Might be dangerous to touch her. 

Should he dig up a broomstick or a spoon or a…?

Ah, screw it.

Zak reached out and tapped her upper arm — soft, warm, smooth, and very real. She withdrew and rolled over, stirring him anew. 

Striving to tether his excitement to a sliver of rationality, he moderated his conclusions.

Could still be a hallucination.

But even so, what point was there in testing his visitor further? Having enveloped the world in a poisonous fog, and dropped this fully fleshed vision into his bed, Earth’s occupiers hardly required fancier subterfuge to kill him or torture him or anything else.

Besides, there were worse ways to go.

Zak checked himself in the mirror and smoothed his thinning hair ⸻ a mite old for her, he thought, but nothing out of bounds. He returned to the bed, cleared his throat, and gently shook the lady’s shoulders.

“Excuse me, ma’am. Ma’am? Hello? Ma’am?”

The woman buried her face in a pillow. But he persisted, and, at last, she startled and groped and flung up a hand. He evaded the sluggish karate chop and crossed his arms. She opened one eye under a cascade of ebony locks.

Her smile was irresistible.

She traced her upper lip with her tongue and regarded him with a look of bemusement. Then, dragging her knees to her chest, she pulled the covers to her throat, and crossed her exquisite arms atop the blanket. She studied him from behind a fountain of tousled hair.

“And who might you be?” she asked in a husky voice that sent a shiver down his spine. 

“I, uh, I get to ask the first question,” Zak answered, with admirable fortitude. Surprised by his own resolve, he forged ahead, “This is my house. Um, who are you and w… w… what are you doing here?” 

The woman’s smile broadened, and she cocked her head. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears.

“My name is Vivian. The Caretakers have assigned me to you.”

He thought he’d drown in those big, brown eyes. Still, he held her gaze.

“Wait a minute!” Zak retorted. “Who are the Caretakers! What the hell! Are you even…” 

“Tah-tah,” interrupted Vivian, wagging a finger. “Your turn, sport. Name?”

“Fine, fine. Call me Zak.”

“Short for Zachery?”

“Zachariah.”

“Lovely. And your last name?”

“Never mind about that. Call, and I shall answer. That should be good enough.”

“Okay…”

“Fine. Now tell me about these ‘Caretakers.’”

“Caretakers?”

“Yes. You said…”

Vivian stood ⸻ she was just a bit taller than Zak. She drew within inches of his throbbing heart, holding the sheets to her chest. Then she dropped them. His situation was hopeless.

“What say we put the Caretakers on the back burner?”

Works for me.

_____________________

Eventually, Zak flagged and dozed off. He woke alone.

“Where did ya go?” he said to the wall in a conversational tone of voice.

 He sat and listened in vain for a few minutes before dressing and searching the house from top to bottom. Vivian was nowhere to be found. 

An elaborate hallucination or reality briefly dangled — who knows which? Sucks either way! 

Zak balanced his disappointment, however, against newfound certitude about his extraterrestrial overseers. Surely, answers ⸻ and food! ⸻ would be right around the corner. Or even — one could hope! — Vivian redux.

Kind of a weird way to say hello, but I’ll take it! 

 But Zak’s dreams failed to materialize. Days passed with no more ladies or fresh food or anything else. Quite to the contrary, his living situation deteriorated markedly. Shampoo ran out. Then laundry detergent. Then the very last bar of soap. The place stunk.

Not even a hallucination would come within a quarter mile of me now.

Extreme rationing won an extra month of survival, but the end neared. The last of the coffee. His final granola bar. The last dozen cans of survival foods. Vivian faded in memory. Suicidal despondency again reared its head.

“Bastards!” he shouted at the walls. “What do you want?”

Offing myself would really mess with them, wouldn’t it? Screw up their little experiment, but good.

But Vivan’s shadow lingered still — fleeting snapshots setting Zak’s hindbrain aflame. Ruby lips. Musky perfume. That sexy, irresistible voice. And what happened once could happen again. The fear of missing out stayed his hand. 

Exactly six weeks post-Vivian he ate the last of the Spam, flung the can against the wall, and cried out, “There! Now you can watch a man starve to death. That’s what you’ve wanted all along, isn’t it? Thanks for nothing!”

He went to bed that night angry as a hornet, yet…. didn’t entirely buy his own gloom. They had to have kept him alive for a better reason than killing him. There just had to have been more to Vivian than a stop on a trolley line to death!

We connected, man! We were simpatico. You wanna find out about stuff like that, the human stuff, don’t you? That’s gotta be part of the plan!

Sleep came easily to the half-starved Zak, and, undisturbed, slumber would have lasted long into the morning. But a noise jolted him awake near midnight. He sat bolt upright, instantly hyperaware.

They’re back!

No hot number in the bed this time, but unmistakably them. A commotion directly beneath him, on the first floor. He sat at the side of his bed and parsed the hubbub.

A party!

Zak could barely contain his excitement. A multitude of Vivians flashed before his mind’s eye, and the first smile in days tugged at the corners of his mouth. He skipped downstairs on bare feet. Then he flicked on the lights, whipped around the corner at the bottom of the stairs, and headed toward the living room.

He blinked in disbelief.

What the bloody hell?

The west wall of the living room had vanished. In its place roiled the deadly, external atmosphere. Somehow the terrible gases did not diffuse into the room, but hung like drapery, billowing in all their glory. 

That nothing substantial stood between Zak and those toxic fumes, a few bare feet away, was terrifying enough. But there was more.

The party-like noises? They originated from within the vapors. And now, at close proximity, that noise crystallized into a multitude of voices ⸻ alien voices.

It’s them! They’re inside the wall! Or not-wall. Or whatever. Holy shit.

And then.

They became visible. Limbs emerged and disappeared from the rippling nimbus. Black and hairless appendages, bending in impossible directions, waved about a few seconds at a time, only to be withdrawn. Occasionally, an “arm” would shoot straight out half-way across the room and open a ‘hand’⸻ a club-like nubbin with a dozen or more wormy ‘fingers’ attached.

Zak had a few seconds to watch and wonder. But then the temperature dropped, and an acrid smell filled the house. 

Formaldehyde? Smells like! I’m not dead yet, you bastards!

Zak retreated from the ET rave as far as his legs could carry him, upstairs to a bedroom in the farthest reaches of the house. But there he found no relief from the deepening chill and steady, noxious effluvia. So, uselessly keeping his breaths shallow and slow, he wrapped a coat around his naked shoulders, and returned to the otherworldly living room ⸻ where he could, at least, witness the scene unfold. Little puffs of condensation rose from his blue lips. His teeth chattered.

His vision swam. Spinning… falling…

Zak grabbed a chair in the nick of time and fell into the seat instead of onto the floor. But the exertion forced him to suck liters of the airborne toxin into his lungs. He threw up.

Vision faded. Consciousness ebbed.

And then the alien limbs all withdrew. Behind the ochre curtain, the voices suddenly went silent.

Mere seconds later, something sucked all the air from the room. Zak’s eyes bulged. Nothing at all remained to fill his lungs, poisonous or otherwise. He wheezed in futility against the vacuum and expected — and by now, yearned for — the end.

But Zak’s time hadn’t come. Before his heart stopped, the Caretakers restored a breathable atmosphere ⸻ smelling more antiseptic than paint thinner-y this time, temperature ratcheted back up above freezing.

Far from perfect. Barely life-sustaining, in fact. But the pounding in Zak’s head eased. His heart rate slowed a tad. General awareness returned. 

Thanks?

Conditions remained borderline. Zak was alive. But he was still severely short of breath, fatigued and woozy. As he wondered what new abuse lay in store for him, the wall-fog ballooned, and out plopped a creature of impossible proportions. Zak fought to describe the thing in his mind. 

It was huge. Alternately spherical and oblong, and jet black, it changed shape as it moved, and its surface wept a clear, thin fluid. It glided across the carpet as if the room were full of water, deforming and rolling like a half-filled bladder. But it wasn’t floating — it was walking. Four legs supported its mass ⸻ each jointed at three ‘knees’ and impossibly meager for such a ponderous torso. Six arms waved above its ‘head’ as well, terminating in tiny multi-tentacled disks. After wandering about the room to no apparent purpose, the thing turned in a split-second, raced up to Zak — who still could barely sit upright — and lowered itself within inches of his nose.

Zak lifted his head to peer at a section of the shiny, black surface ⸻ a face of sorts. This region rested in a depression in the lower portion of the towering, pear-shaped body. A single, dewy compound eye lidded with a translucent membrane blinked at him. A pore at the bottom of the depression sucked and bubbled. 

“Sonofabitch. Why can’t you… [breath] Just give me back… [breath] My air the way it was? [breath] Idiot.”

“He’ll never understand you that way, sport. Let me help.”

Zak stared in astonishment as Vivian, entirely nude and comfortable, appeared beside him. She sashayed next to the alien and laid her head on its moist flank. She stroked it with an open palm, closed her eyes, and hummed.

The creature turned rigid as a wax pumpkin, pulled up its legs, and bounced out of the room, straight through the cloud-barrier. The toxic fog transmuted back into the original living room wall. Conditions normalized. The temperature rose, the residual odor vanished, and Zak’s breathing eased within seconds.

All was as it had been. Zak slumped in exhaustion. Vivian pulled up a chair with its back facing him and mounted it. She set her chin on interlaced hands atop the backrest and regarded him with curiosity.

“Sorry about that, sport. Our friends can get impatient with their transitions, and then they lose track of how far along everybody is. It won’t happen again.”

“Our friends? Who the blazing hell are you, I might ask? And I’d like you to put on some clothes. Can you do that for me?”

“Really?”

“Yes! Can we pretend things are normal for a few minutes? If you’re a human being…”

“I am.”

“Then put something on! Grab something from my closet upstairs.”

Vivian smiled in assent and walked away. She returned in one of Zak’s dress shirts and jeans.

“They’re big and they don’t smell so good, honestly,” she said, referring to the borrowed clothing. She crinkled her nose in disgust.

“They’re fine. Now start talking.” 

“What would you like to know?” she asked, tilting her head seductively.

Zak glared, unamused. Vivian squirmed.

“Okay, okay,” she relented. “First of all, you’re perfectly safe. What happened just now, that was a mistake. That guy, he’s in big trouble. They are taking good care of us. I mean, generally. They have to. We’re precious to them. Irreplaceable. Like…. like rare specimens, right? So they’ve got to treat us real delicate. They’re doing their best.”

“Specimens, huh? Sounds bad to me. Like we’re guinea pigs. Sorry, Viv, not gettin’ the warm and cozies.”

“No! Not like that at all! ‘Guinea pigs’ is wrong. More like orangutans and, umm,  antelopes, and such. But nice, you know? Comfortable. Pleasant. What happened just now is very unusual. Unheard of, really. Can’t happen again.”

“The concept of a zoo doesn’t do much to reassure…”

“What? No. You got me going on the wrong track again! What I’m trying to tell you is they treat their guests ⸻ ah, that’s it! Guests, Zak, that’s what I meant to say. So they treat their guests much more humanely than we ever did or could in a million years. Get it now?”

“Sure I do. House arrest.”

“Oh, my God! Ridiculous! Open your eyes. Just look at me! Don’t you realize I can go wherever I want?”

“Yeah, how about that? Wherever? If you’re human like you say you are, then how do you get around outside — meaning, for one thing, without oxygen?”

“I’m modified, obviously.” Vivian shrugged. “You will be, too, if you just give them a little more time.”

“What if I don’t want to be modified?”

Vivian laughed.

“Why wouldn’t you? How else are you going to get outta here? How else are you going to commune with the Caretakers?”

“Oh, it’s ‘commune’ now, is it? I don’t want to commune with them. I want to talk to them.”

“Well, that’s just it, sport. They don’t talk.”

“Sounded like talk to me, a while back. Before they suffocated me half to death.”

“Amongst themselves, sure. That’s different.”

“Well, before you and I lose our power of speech for good….”

“That won’t ever…”

“Sure, sure. Still, before I take this entirely voluntary leap.…”

“No one’s forcing you.”

“Right. So as I was saying, before I decide.…”

“How can I help?”

“I have questions.”

“Shoot.”

Zak closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead with both hands.

“How many people are left?”

“In the world? Many. A lot. Everyone who was, you know, in his or her own domicile when the Caretakers arrived. Get it? I mean substantial houses, not thatch roofs or teepees, of course. That’s how it works. The Caretakers envelope worlds with their own kind of air to make it easy for ‘em to come down. Structures that already exist, they seal ‘em up with their occupants inside. Easy-peasy! No new cages ⸻ I mean, homes. Too expensive, tough to get right. And there are only so many examples of houses and people they need…”

Zak blinked hard.

“How many people?” he asked again.

“Like I said, they’re very humane, the Caretakers. It’s always very quick, everywhere they go, and it was that way here. I think you know their atmosphere won’t support Earth life for more than a few minutes, seconds, even.”

“My God.”

“They barely knew what hit ‘em.”

“How many survived, Vivian?”

“Almost half! Okay, ‘almost’ is an exaggeration. But still. Can you believe it? There are billions — billions! — alive, preserved, and appreciated. I mean really appreciated — all around the globe!”

“These bulbous assholes murdered over half the population of the entire freaking world?”

“Not saving everyone isn’t the same thing as murder! They saved billions! And that doesn’t include fauna and flora. Don’t you see! They are the galaxy’s Caretakers!”

Vivian’s eyes widened with excitement.

“You’re insane.”

Vivian’s exhilaration cooled, and her grin unclenched into a soft, come-hither smile. Her finger traced the curvature of her neck.

“Look, sport. There’s no going back. Why not make the best of it?”

Sexy and nuts were not mutually exclusive. Zak could see where this was going.

“I gather you’re part of the plan.”

“The Caretakers would like us to get acquainted, yes.”

“We have been.”

“Not so bad, was it?”

His choice was stark: life as a fog-breathing stud for a race of genocidal psycho-balloons or death.

“No. I suppose not.”

_____________________

It could, indeed, have been worse.

Zak puffed his pipe as he lay back on the chaise on the deck. The boy played in the yard with the schnauzer. It was a beautiful day, the sun bright above the dense orange clouds.

Zak could tell.

“You men have ten minutes until supper,” yelled Vivian from the kitchen.

“Yes, ma’am,” answered Zak.

Vivian’s cooking was a bonus. Of course, their diet veered from pre-Caretaker days to support their altered biology. But Vivian’s poached lemon slug in liverwort sauce, on tap for that evening, was a knockout.

“How’s the boy doing?” asked Vivian, appearing at Zak’s shoulder.

Zak smiled up at his bride, the glow of pregnancy in her cheeks.

“Outstanding, of course. It’s all second nature to him.”

The couple watched in pride as their son bounced and glided over the lawn, and the schnauzer, still in transition, tried to keep up.

“He’s the future, you know,” said Vivian.

Zak placed a hand on her round lower abdomen, at four months near parturition.

“As is she,” he said.

They kissed, and the audience applauded.

END