"Brian Plante - Something Meaningful" - читать интересную книгу автора (Plante Brian)

“George Hemlick, do you want to be cured?” the alien said.

I wanted to scream, yes, yes, save me from this murderous woman, but my
eyelids were so heavy. One of the aliens leaned over me and I felt something cold
and wet covering my mouth before I blacked out completely.

****

The blue spaceman sucked the life from me. Like water rushing through a
pipe, I felt myself draining ... out.

And then it all went topsy-turvy.

Everything was different. In mid-thought, the dull old bedroom where I lay
rotting was transformed into a vibrant, surreal vision of the familiar space. The scene
swam before me in a riot of colors that I don’t remember seeing even when my
eyesight was still good, and I couldn’t focus properly on anything. Sounds jumped
out at me from all corners of the normally quiet room: a faint electrical buzzing from
the table radio (which was turned off and should have been silent); the tick-tock of
the alarm clock like the beat of a drum; some scratching sounds from a cockroach,
perhaps, within the walls; and the breathing noises of the people in the room
sounding like a windstorm. The odors of sweat, vomit, vodka, and ...
old-people-smell was overpowering.

Everything was the same as before, only magnified tenfold. No, that’s wrong.
More like a thousandfold.

Was this finally death, then? An out-of-body experience? I knew Irene was
trying to kill me, but I didn’t feel dead yet. I just felt ... different.
Despite the circumstances, I was thinking clearly, like a curtain had been lifted
from my mind. And I definitely was outside my body, because I saw myself lying
there on the bed, an old, withered carcass all flushed and convulsing. Three of the
blue people, Canopians, were gathered around me and Irene was making a great
show of it, wailing and throwing off great drippy crocodile tears.

After a minute or two, the room stopped swimming and I began to realize I
wasn’t some discorporate soul floating on the ceiling. My brain was telling me this
was real, not some near-death hallucination. I was flesh and blood, but I wasn’t
human flesh.

I was one of them. I was the fourth Canopian.

Opening my mouth, I tried to yell to the strange blue men that Irene was trying
to kill me, and to have them call the police, but I couldn’t open my mouth. I tried
frantically to point, but I barely succeeded in raising the strange tentacle hand at the
end of my arm. My brain, my Canopian brain, sent the signals to move human
fingers, but there were just the blue octopus fingers that only fluttered aimlessly at
my command. After a few seconds of frenzied fumbling, I realized I did not know
how to make this body breathe, and I became consumed with the thought that my
salvation from Irene might be very short lived, indeed. I would soon suffocate.