John drove through the south gate at Andrews Air Force Base Hospital, at 11th Medical Group, and parked. He found his sister Katie waiting for him in the lobby, speaking with one of the medical assistants for the donor program.
The young Asian woman, dressed in white lab coat, wearing Navaho-style turquoise earrings, shared a look of sympathy with John and his sister.
“Hi, I’m Lisa Xu, I’ll be your guide for the transition. I’m so sorry for your loss. We really appreciate your brother’s participation in the Body Donor program. Now if you could please follow me, the Others will be arriving any minute.”
She led them down a long hallway, to where double doors opened onto a patio area the size of a basketball court with southwestern-style earthen tile work. Hand-woven Navaho rugs hung on the white adobe walls. Images of Kokopelli, the flute player, were artfully inscribed on the walls, and the plaintive sound of a Native flute wafted from hidden speakers. It felt like a resort John had once visited in Arizona. Technicians and officials in uniform stood around making small talk in tense anticipation of the Others. On the far side of the patio was an open space resembling a helipad.
Lisa: “NASA’s culture consultants thought it was a good idea to present an example of our Native American culture to the Others. So they’d see some of the beauty of the human condition, you know – that we’re not all about competition and warfare.”
Katie nodded in agreement. “I like that, don’t you, Johnny?”
“I guess that’s a good idea.”
Lisa gestured toward the bar: “Would you like some refreshment?”
“I don’t know – you want something, Katie?”
“Sure, I guess a little orange juice with champagne wouldn’t hurt.”
John, anxious to be over with the whole ordeal, felt compelled to say something nice about the program for Katie’s sake.
“They’ve really done a nice job out here, I’m surprised.”
His sister squeezed his arm, a forced smile on her face. “David really believed in the contribution he could make by doing this.”
John grasped her shoulder. “I’m glad he’s finally at peace.”
David had volunteered for the Body Donor program a couple years before, after being diagnosed with terminal leukemia. A computer programmer for NIH, he had always been a space travel enthusiast. NASA had covered all his medical expenses. John was ambivalent about the program, but his sister, the youngest of the three, was closer to David and supportive of his decision.
An adjoining door was pushed open and their brother’s body, covered in a red-and-blue patterned Navaho rug was wheeled out on a gurney. An Airforce chaplain accompanied him, with two other technicians who were wearing ultra-light hazmat suits and masks. They came to rest thirty yards from the building at the edge of the landing pad. Simultaneously the morning mist was illuminated by a yellowish-red glow emanating from above. John raised his eyes to see a hovering orb bearing down upon the waiting group. He didn’t detect any sound coming from the object.
Lisa whispered, “The chaplain will now present the last rites. It’s part of the protocol. Your brother approved the chaplain’s words.”
She bowed her head. John and Katy followed suit, but then they both glanced back up at the approaching sphere.
The middle-aged bespectacled chaplain began reciting:
“Oh Lord, let this body of David Witherspoon be accepted into the great beyond, where his spirit has already joined with your love and grace.”
A silver-colored saucer straight out of the campy 50’s sci-fi movies landed just a field goal distance away.
Lisa: “The Others use a powerful stealth technology which none of our optics or sensors can penetrate. They throw up this camouflage holo-replication of a spaceship so that psychologically we can relate.”
David: “So the image is like a placeholder. No photos of the real deal?”
“I’m afraid not, and it’s not as if we haven’t tried. All that you’d get is what you’re seeing now.”
The two technicians, pulling blackened goggles over their masks, wheeled David’s body toward the waiting saucer, into the glare where they disappeared momentarily from sight. They returned wheeling a black cube the size of a basketball on the gurney.
Lisa: “The Others deliver a shipment of anti-gravity with each exchange. NASA considers it a fair trade. The Others take the human body for their own scientific experimentation, and the anti-gravity is delivered to the Jet Propulsion Lab – East, here on the base, where our physicists can continue to work toward achieving something like their level of space travel.”
John: “Any clue why they’re conducting all these human experiments?”
“No real explanation. NASA only knows they’re conveying the specimens back to their world so their astrobiologists can work with them.”
John felt a rush of anger. “Specimens?”
Lisa blushed. “I’m sorry, that’s how they refer to them. After a few years with the program you kind of grow insensitive, forget that…”
“…it’s a real human being you’re talking about?” John’s anger broke the tension he’d been feeling since his sister’s call that morning, and tears flowed at last.
Katie took his arm. “John, please, lower your voice. I’m sure she didn’t mean it that way.”
A blast of white luminescence enveloped the attendants, and the saucer was gone. John’s face was caressed by the most delicate disturbance of air. He turned back to Lisa.
“So how often do you guys…make a transfer like this?”
“It’s just about once a month, and that’s been pretty steady since the program started. Thankfully it’s eliminated all the alien abductions people used to complain so much about.”
He glanced back into the sky. “I guess that’s a relief.”
When John returned to his car he tried to review the video he’d surreptitiously made from a lens on his lapel, but static obscured everything from the point of arrival of the Others to their departure. The image was lost to him with his brother.
THE END
This story previously appeared in Brilliant Flash Fiction.
Edited by E. S. Foster.
Jonathan Worlde’s novel Latex Monkey with Banana was winner of the Hollywood Discovery Award. He has over forty mostly speculative stories published in various journals, including Cirque Journal, Raven Review, Antietam Review and Gettysburg Review, most recently Mystery Tribune, Stupefying Stories, and Daily SF. He lives in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and in his free time he performs blues and Americana music as Paul the Resonator.