“How many of those things did we kill?” Foster posited this rhetorical question to the group as Hoover activated a series of pathway lights in the ceiling above them. Then, as if the universe had decided to answer his pointless question, they were finally able to see the once pristine floor now entirely concealed by the remains of the entities.

  In fact, the only thing still visible to their bloodshot eyes was the sobering and unmistakable truth that all three of them were fortunate to be alive.

  “I have no idea.” Joseph hobbled alongside Foster, who was trying his best not to falter under Justine’s weight as she limped along with them. “But there must have been hundreds.”

  “Sounds about right.” Her wounds still seeping, all she could talk about until this moment was the machine powder and what it must be doing to her insides. “I mean, if this stuff were white, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine a snowstorm had just blown through here.”

  “I don’t know if I would call it a snowstorm.” Joseph corrected. “A snow shower maybe.”

  “Just like the slopes back at Wilson… huh?” Justine ignored his reclassification of her description and instead fondly remembered back to when she had first met Foster. Her stomach tore with every step, but she still managed to smile. “I bet they were a lot of fun.”

  “They weren’t there for the inmates,” the wounded scientist sighed happily. “Besides, you would have to be crazy to try and make it down any of those death traps.”

  Justine took another couple of steps, regretting each one more than the last. “If that were the case, Foster, we both know those trails would have been running all year long, twenty-four hours a day.”

  They both laughed at the idea of ski therapy for the criminally insane.

  Joseph, who had no idea about their history together or a lonely mental institution named Wilson, found nothing of what they had just said very funny. So, he found himself asking, “Is there a joke I’m missing?”

  “It’s kind of a long story, Joseph.” She reached out and patted the deputy on his uninjured shoulder. “Our good Foster here spent some quality time in an institution before coming to your little town of Elmira.”

  Joseph accepted her warm embrace with a grunt but still had no idea what she was talking about. “Institution,” Joseph asked through a grimace of pain. “Like a college?”

  “No,” Foster chuckled but sought to clear up any confusion their stupid in-jokes were forcing down the alien’s throat. “I was in a mental institution, Joseph. A nut house.”

  “Really?” The deputy’s tone was more sarcastic than inquisitive.

  “Yeah,” he said bitterly. “You know that signal I intercepted eight years ago? Your signal. Well, I told the government I thought aliens had something to do with it. And you can guess how they reacted to that pronouncement.”

  “But aliens did have something to do with it.”

  “Right?” Foster’s mood lightened at the alien’s unexpected confirmation of his original views. “Still, if you have ultra top-secret clearance and scream aliens are coming without any real proof, the outcome is usually a padded cell.”

  “Wow.” Joseph found himself smiling at first, but he soon frowned at Foster’s impromptu sharing session. Because after everything that had happened to them over the last ten hours, only one question popped into his head. “Was she in there with you?”

  Everyone, even Hoover, found his question extremely amusing.

  Near the end of the corridor, the light grew strong enough for Hoover to extinguish the 8-ball’s fiber optics. No longer necessary, the small orb drifted lazily down onto a rare clean spot on the floor for Foster to retrieve it. Once he did, the trio continued forward through an ever-decreasing layer of fine powder.

  In fact, by the time they emerged from the passageway, nothing remained of their would-be killers but the strong odor of burnt metal.

  “My god,” Justine gasped as her eyes adjusted to the dark foreboding design of the death corridor giving way to a large, stark white circular room. A space whose sterile, lab like motif stood in sharp contrast to everything they’d seen before. “Are you sure we didn’t die?”

  “I don’t think so.” Joseph said as he too surveyed their new surroundings. “I’m in too much pain.”

  “Yeah,” Foster agreed. “I don’t think heaven hurts this much.”

  A few feet away from the entrance sat three black benches like the ones in the Alien prayer room. Tracking soot with every step, he led his injured companions over to these out-of-place seats. When they were close enough, he helped each one of them sit down.

  “Hoover…” Foster placed two bloody hands against the small of his back and stretched the aching muscles. “Where are we?”

  “We’re in the prisoner containment facility.”

  “Great.” Foster began limping around the room. “So, this is where my proof resides?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” The non-committal nature of his friend’s response left him even more revved up for answers.

  So, starting on the left side of the room, he slowly walked over to where a series of tubular pods that stood lined up within a carved out track just inside the room’s outer wall. Half white metal and half clear plastic sheeting, these device’s materials were skillfully bound together to form the shape of a gigantic pill.

  “What is it?” he asked cautiously.

  “For lack of a better translation,” Hoover began. “It’s a stasis tube.”

  “What does it hold? This first one’s empty.”

  “Continue down the line and you’ll see.”

  Following his program’s vague instructions, Foster gingerly began to shuffle from empty tube to empty tube, half expecting to see some monstrous alien thing staring back out at him at every stop. When this didn’t happen, he found himself slightly disappointed. But that feeling of being disappointed quickly shifted to something else when he reached the eighth tube.

  Because the thing resting inside the eighth tube quite frankly caught him off guard.

  “Well… shit,” was all the response the scientist had for the human male, dressed in board shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, resting comfortably against what appeared to be a small, cushioned pad affixed to the inside the tube. “Cowabunga, dude.”

  Unsure of how to proceed, Foster knocked on the tube’s outer shell in an attempt to wake him. Of course, all this did was alert a certain FBI agent that something interesting might be going on without her.

  “What are you doing?” Justine asked as she shifted anxiously on the bench. After all, she was a Sci-Fi nerd. If there was an alien inside one of those tubes, she wanted to be there when first contact was made. “What’s in that thing, an alien?”

  “No,” Foster pressed his nose up to the glass for a better look at the person inside. “It looks like a surfer.”

  “Is it a surfing alien?” Justine posed this hopeful question more to Joseph than to Foster. In response, the alien simply shrugged his shoulders. Confused, she didn’t know whether to take that as a sign he didn’t know or that the premise itself was completely impossible. “Is it a human or an alien?”

  “Human,” Foster rapped on the glass one more time. But the shaggy-headed blond man made no sign he heard anything outside his sterile prison. “Why?” He turned around to see her crestfallen face. “Are you disappointed that it’s not an alien?”

  Justine sighed, “Kind of.”

  Leaving the surfer behind, Foster continued down the line to find an even more eclectic group of individuals. They ranged from a standard grandmother, dressed in a flower hat and a string apron, to an aboriginal tribesman covered from head to toe in dried mud. This collection of human action figures even included a man dressed in a three-piece suit. A very old three-piece suit from the looks of it.

  To that, Foster couldn’t help but wonder why all the variety?

  Finally, he reached the last tube on his window-shopping journey, and it contained the body of a small girl. Her dirty brown hair braided into tight pigtails. She wore a blue dress made from strange material that looked almost like paper. Foster couldn’t help but compare it to an old-time bag of flour.

  “I’ll say one thing for these guys.” he stared back down the row and silently counted 22 occupied pods. “They don’t discriminate.”

  “The operators of this station extracted these subjects from a wide variety of geographical regions and different time periods. They probably used the ships in the docking bay to cull these vessels.”

  “Don’t you mean abduct them?” Justine’s mind turned over the implications of her question. Had all the stories of alien abduction throughout history began from this very space station? “And you’re talking like an evil AI again, Hoover.”

  “You dare question your robot overlords, bitch!”

  “That’s better.”

  Ignoring her parsing of his apocalyptic words, Hoover droned on for the next few minutes about how the stasis tubes worked and how they could preserve a subject for an indefinite amount of time. He even speculated that the Arbiters probably went back to Earth every so often to replenish their supply.

  Interesting stuff, but Foster seemed more drawn to the little girl’s face than anything his friend had to say about the technology. In particular, the small cut below her chin. He imagined how she had gotten the wound. Maybe playing in the woods near her house like any kid her age? And just before they took her, she was probably heading back home for a little TLC from her mother.

  Again, like any kid her age would.

  Then, he thought about the alternative to them not risking the trip here. How every dream and memory that girl had would have eventually been ripped away as her mind was erased. How soon might she have become a biological prison cell for the universe’s most wanted criminals?

  Reluctantly, he admitted to himself that Justine was probably justified in taking the risk in coming here. “Well, now we know why that rod was over 30 years old.”

  For the next couple of minutes, Foster did sort of a balletic spin move surveying the entire space. To his surprise, he discovered that most of the room had already been traversed. Then, he noticed another opening that exactly mirrored the one they had just come through.

  “Where does this go?” Foster asked as he stepped inside the doppelganger a couple of feet to find there was no light at the end of this tunnel.

  “To another transportation tube. It connects this area to an exterior structure attached to the top of this storage facility.”

  “What’s up there?”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “That area consists of a docking facility for conducting prisoner transfers and an escape shuttle, just in case the shit hits the fan.”

  “Funny you should say that.” Foster rubbed the stinging wound on his leg. “It’s become pretty shitty around here.”

  Turning back toward his companions, he quickly skimmed over the other half of the room. Consisting of nothing more than a featureless concave wall without the carved-out space for the tubes, this bleached barrier wrapped itself back around to the benches and his injured team.

  “I thought this was a prisoner storage facility.” He stopped next to a slumping Justine, who in turn took the opportunity to lean up against him. “Where are all the prisoners?”

  “Look up.”

  Without asking why, all three of them heeded his direction and craned their necks skyward. What greeted them was the most fantastic sight any of them had ever seen before. And that included the know-it-all alien named Joseph.

  “What the fuck?” That was all the Deputy could get out of his mouth before his mind began to stutter at the circular opening fashioned into the ceiling above them.

  About ten meters in diameter, this “porthole” afforded the trio an unencumbered view of a much more expansive section of the prisoner containment facility. Shaped like the inside of a wine cask, this overwhelmingly mammoth area contained thousands upon thousands of stasis pods in stacked rows.

  At this distance, they couldn’t discern what lay inside those pods. But distance couldn’t hide the fact that most of them were full.

  “It looks like the inside of a barrel,” Justine stated with a knowing wink. “Like that thing from…” Both men waited for her to make another movie reference. But at the last second, she bit her tongue. “Never mind. It looks like a barrel. Just an ordinary, no relation to that shaving can in Jurassic Park at all, barrel.”

  As always, Foster’s first inclination was to investigate another seemingly impossible mystery. But a tug on his arm from Joseph snapped him back to reality. “My body,” the deputy began to say, but the extra weight of an impatient alien caused a fresh wave of pain to course through his injured leg.

  “Hoover,” the aching pain refocused the scientist’s attention back on the sorry physical state all three of them were currently in. “You said something about a machine.”

  “Yes, I did.” To their left, a portion of wall detached outward, almost like the RV’s hidden garage. It slid upward on an unseen track to reveal a jumbled mess of consoles, a large convex screen and a stasis tube of a slightly different design from the thousands of others.

  “This…” Hoover initiated the unit’s startup program, and the large screen erupted from flat gray to a brilliant red hue. Black symbols, like the ones they had seen on the laboratory level, blazed across it. “This is a healing machine.”

  Foster collapsed down on the bench next to Joseph and pointed to the strange symbols on the screen. “Can you read them?”

  Like most things on this station, they were familiar but foreign. “No… I can’t.”

  “Hoover,” Foster rubbed at his bloody wound absentmindedly. “Can you translate any of it?”

  Without another word, the symbols began to phase in and out quickly. Transcribing themselves into a dozen different variations of weird symbols until finally settling into what could be best described as broken English.

  “It’s kind of rough. A lot of this language doesn’t really translate to anything other than computer code. What I’ve got up now are the basic functions of the machine.” Hoover giggled to himself. “Or if you prefer… Alien Apparatus for Dummies.”

  “Design and reconstitution?” Already back on his feet and halfway to the machine, Foster began reading the newly formed words near the top of the screen. “What does this thing work on?”

  The stasis tube’s door swung outward until it achieved a ninety-degree angle. Honestly, the thing looked like a transparent coffin and the mental image it conjured forced Foster’s already harried body to produce a slight shiver.

  “It seems whoever designed this machine created it for the sole purpose of healing and manipulating the human body.”

  “Manipulating?” Foster’s mind metaphorically began to spin up a whole new series of questions. But the sharp, searing pain stabbing into Joseph’s shoulder prompted him to interrupt the Madman of Wilson from starting a new wall of weird.

  “Forget about manipulation.” The deputy said, stifling his instinct to scream out in pain. “Hoover, you said something about healing?”

  “Indeed. This machine can heal any ailment which could prey upon a human body.”

  “Any?” Joseph looked at Justine’s pierced stomach and Foster’s blood-soaked jeans. “How long does the procedure take?”

  “There’s no data on specific time limits. This thing isn’t a microwave, Deputy Howlam. I can’t set the thing for BROKEN LEG.”

  Foster saw Justine’s pale face wince faintly as she clutched her aching side. “Forget about the time, is it safe?”

  “There is no data on success rates if that’s what you mean.”

  His eyes met with Justine’s, and he was surprised to see hesitation. Which was strange because for all her fascination with science fiction, she seemed to have some reservations about jumping into an unknown alien device. Even Foster wasn’t entirely sure the risk was worth the reward.

  On the other hand, Joseph could give a shit less about who built it or why. “You guys are a bunch of wimps,” he grumbled.

  Without thinking twice about the ramifications, the deputy climbed inside the open tube and leaned back against a small, padded area. Instantly, an unseen force wrapped itself around his upper torso and held it firm. Unseen, but not painful, the sensation reminded him of the gravity imbalance they experienced upon first arriving.

  His first thought was to try and wriggle free but couldn’t. “I guess I’m secure.”

  “Don’t worry. That’s just a system to keep you from moving during the procedure.”

  On the large screen, the words DESIGN AND RECONSTITUTION enlarged then shrank. The door silently began to retract. And just before it closed, Justine and Foster heard him scream out. “What do you mean procedure?”

  “He sure does whine a lot,” Hoover observed, cycling through the various programs. As he did, the clear piece of glass slowly turned dark grey. The process distorted Joseph’s features until only his outline could be seen with any kind of clarity.

  On the large screen, the symbols melted back into the red background as a detailed map of the deputy’s body appeared. At specific points on the representation, yellow dots began to form and pulsate. And directly to the side, three small boxes appeared with even more detailed scans and simple words.

  Foster reached out and touched the box which corresponded with Joseph’s injured shoulder. “How does it work?”

  “It’s pretty simple. In reconstitution mode, the machine scans the body on the subatomic level. Then, any diseases or flaws are ranked by seriousness and displayed to the right for an operator to work on.” Hoover enlarged the three boxes until even Justine could read what they said from her spot on the bench.

  “It would appear our doughy Joseph has a shoulder wound, a nasty case of early-onset diabetes, and what a layman would describe as a very fatty liver.” Hoover blew up the liver until it was the most prominent item on the screen. “I know he said he made a lot of mistakes. But do you think this came from drinking or syphilis?”

  “Did you see all those kids he had?” Justine slumped back on the bench and bashfully grinned. “I’m surprised he still has all his man parts.”

  “This thing…” Foster reached out, touched the screen again, and each window responded quickly to his touch. “It can repair all of that, even the liver?”

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  Foster turned around and looked to a weakening Justine for approval.

  “He’s the one that volunteered for your little experiment.” She pressed even harder on her stomach wound, trying to stem the flow of blood steadily escaping her body. “But if the damn thing works, I’m next.”

  “Ok, Hoover. Let’s heal somebody.”

  At his friend’s command, the A.I. activated the machine and right off the bat, a small humming sound emanated from a section of wall above Joseph’s mostly hidden body. “Nothing to worry about,” Foster said reassuringly. “That’s probably where the device’s power source is located.”

  “If you say so.” Justine closed her eyes and began to picture her happy place.

  Over the next five minutes, the machine worked tirelessly on repairing everything that was critically wrong with Joseph. On the screen, each injury’s status was indicated by a black bar, which slowly receded as the machine finished each laborious task. Finally, the bar representing Joseph’s liver disappeared, and the machine began to power down.

  When the humming sound vanished, a single word appeared in the center of the screen: COMPLETE.

  “Is that really how it translates?” Foster asked.

  “No,” Hoover activated the machine’s exit coding. “But I didn’t think displaying a bunch of ones and zeros would have had the same effect. Do you?”

  “Probably not.” But something about the way Hoover described what should have been written words as ones and zeros made him wonder just exactly who created all this stuff. “But let’s leave that for another time.”

  Once the sound completely disappeared, the door transitioned back to its original state then swung open to reveal Joseph waiting silently for the invisible force to release him. When it did, he didn’t have the most serene look on his face.

  “I don’t have syphilis,” he deadpanned, in his best Hoover impression. “I just like to drink a lot.”

  “Sure, you do,” Foster mocked. “You must have your own brewery in that barn of yours.”

  “No,” Joseph cracked a smile. “That’s not what’s in there.”

  Before he could follow up on another vague reference to the secret contents of that large barn, Justine stood up on wobbly legs. Satisfied with the machine’s safety, she was ready to have her own substantial wounds healed. “If you heard that? Why didn’t you say something?”

  “What do you mean? I was screaming at the top of my lungs. You didn’t hear me?”

  “I had his mic turned off.” Hoover giggled evilly. “You know… just in case things went badly.”

  “That’s a comforting thought.” He took a cautious step out of the pod before realizing his shoulder was pain-free. When he did, Joseph practically sprang toward Foster with an infectious grin. “That thing is amazing. And before you ask…no, I have never seen one of those either. Most of the universe is still on pills and physical therapy.”

  Hearing a soft thud, both men turned around quickly to see Justine stumble and fall to the ground. “Justine!” Foster said, reaching her first. Not far behind, Joseph helped him lift her up and carry her over to the waiting machine.

  “Does it hurt?” She asked as the invisible force pressed her firmly against the pad.

  “No,” Joseph tried to sound reassuring. “It only tickles a little bit.”

  “Don’t worry.” Foster could see she was nervous, which he found strange because Justine was a self-proclaimed daredevil. “I’ll make sure Hoover keeps your mic on.”

  Foster stepped back, and the glass-like door closed. The machine responded in the same way at first, but something markedly different happened when her scan was completed. Because instead of Joseph’s three ailments, Justine had more than twenty.

  Smaller and more tightly packed together, the boxes barely had enough room for any legible writing to fit. Everything from scars, broken bones, cracked ribs, a perforated intestine, and three broken vertebrae were represented on squares the size of postage stamps.

  In fact, there were so many of them, he knew they couldn’t have all come from the attack in the corridor.

  “Where do we start first?” Hoover cycled through her litany of problems. “I’m surprised she was able to walk around before the fight.”

  “What is it?” Justine asked nervously, unable to see what they were looking at. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “What isn’t?” Joseph marveled at the breadth and total number of her injuries. “Were you on disability?"

  “No,” Justine felt her face flush with anger. “I just like doing stuff.”

  “You sure do.” They looked at one another and chuckled loudly. “Does any of that ‘stuff’ involve unsuccessfully dodging a freight train?” Foster pressed the box that said STOMACH. “We should start with your stomach, but there’s a lot of other damage too. I see at least twenty other things which need attention.”

  Silently, Justine ran down the list of accidents she had been in during the last ten years: broken bones, bruises, lacerations, and stitches. Not to mention the stuff that didn’t happen during her many spring break adventures. “What exactly can you fix?”

  “Everything, internal and external, from your squishy meat intestines to all the scars you’ve collected. We could even make you skinnier if you want.”

  “Why do that?” Foster interjected blindly before his diffidence could kick in. “She’s fine just the way she is.”

  “Thanks, Foster.” Her words awkwardly filtered through the thankfully cloudy partition. After all, Justine hated anyone to see her blush. Meanwhile, Joseph and Hoover did their best not to become violently ill at the subtext. Eventually, she came to a decision. “I think I’ll pass on the skinnier portion of the treatment if it’s all the same. And I would prefer to keep my previous scars.”

  “Why?” Foster asked as he made the necessary adjustments to the machine.

  “Because,” Justine secretly grinned. “Guys dig scars.”

  Hoover felt some more of his code becoming queasy, so he said, “This repair will take three times longer than it took for Joseph. So just relax.”

  As the machine began its painstaking tasks, Joseph pulled Foster aside with a serious look on his face. “I don’t mean to be an asshole. But does Hoover have any idea where my body is?”

  Foster pushed Justine’s injuries out of his mind long enough to ponder the question. He shrugged. “Hoover, can you access any records concerning Joseph’s body?”

  Suddenly, in the middle of the room, a portion of the floor slid open. From the newly formed cavity, a strange contraption thrust itself upward that consisted of an oval shaped console and a pair of massive retractable arms. Both were attached to a large, slab-like piece of flat metal that rested perpendicular to the floor. Supported by two large pylons, the whole thing reminded Foster of the ME’s table back in Elmira.

  “This is the prisoner retrieval station, gentlemen. Prisoners are extracted from the storage facility above, locked onto the table by these arms, then transferred to one of the awaiting human subjects.”

  “Does it have a record corresponding with the date I was taken?”

  “There’s a mountain of data, but it’s both corrupted and encrypted. I can get close to the time frame, but you’ll need to review the files individually to identify your particular species.”

  “Hey,” Foster’s attention homed in on the word species. “Just how many species are stored here, Hoover?”

  “Hundreds,” he said rather ominously. “There are at least hundreds.”

  “No shit?"

  “Fecal free, Foster.”

  Completely uninterested in the concept of not one but hundreds of different alien life forms, Joseph resembled a kid waiting for permission from his parents to ransack the toy aisle. And knowing how many years he’d waited for this day, Foster couldn’t help but relent with a wave of his hand.

  “Hoover, run through what they have and see if you can come up with a match for him.”

  Silently, the small, oval monitor next to the mechanical arms blinked to life. And without another word, Joseph started reviewing files like a man possessed.

  “He didn’t even say thank you.” Foster said to himself as he checked how far the machine had gotten with Justine’s injuries. From the display, it appeared the device was only a quarter of the way done, which meant there was time to plunder. Or more specifically, there was time to scratch that mystery itch.

  But just before heading back to Joseph and the retrieval station, the scientist heard Justine ask a simple yet insightful question. “Hundreds, Foster? You mean there are hundreds of different types of aliens here?”

  “Yes, Justine.” She sounded almost too excited at the prospect, but Foster couldn’t help but smile at her enthusiasm. “Hundreds.”