"Prisssssssss. For G.o.d's sake, help me."

His face reflected so much terror that she couldn't bear it, and she knew there was only one way to end his torment.

Pris ran over to Bobby Lee and gave his chest a violent push. His feet slid backward into the gaping hole and he fell forward, latching onto the hem of her dress and pulling her to the ground.

"No! Please, don't do this."

She kicked and screamed and managed to break free, but before she could scramble out of his reach, Bobby Lee grabbed a fistful of her long hair and dragged her over to the edge of the chasm. A bone-chilling numbness spread quickly throughout her body, and Priscilla stopped struggling. Her lover's dead eyes stared into hers, and his swollen lips curved into a grotesque smile.

"I forgive you, princess."

The earth began to tremble and Priscilla closed her eyes. Bobby Lee held her in a desperate embrace as the power of moonlight claimed their bodies, entombing them forever in the darkness of his grave.

"Hiding Mountain: Our Future in Apples"

Earl P. Dean.

Earl Patrick Dean is a computer programmer working in Lexington, Kentucky. He holds a BA degree in that field from Transylvania University and holds graduation certificates from The Inst.i.tute of Children's Literature. He is a past member of the Online Writing Workshops on Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. Earl is active in several writing groups in the greater Lexington area. He reads, writes and collects science fiction and fantasy and has attended conventions in Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, and Virginia. He is a University of Kentucky basketball and football fan. Visit his author site at epat02.typepad.com/clamped_planet.

When the aliens came to Salvation, they came as a dark wave rising out of the peaty soil somewhere on Hiding Mountain. They adjusted their form in order to work with us, but never lived here as far as I know. From that work we discovered apples. We people of Salvation work in the squimix midges every day, digging out the apples and showering them under our garden hoses. It's come to be our way. Apples sell. We need the money from outside because our town is small.

My daddy's name is Ken and my brother took Patch for his after his eye was out. One morning they left the house to work in squimix after a breakfast of sausage and eggs; this part tells what happened to Patch. An awful lot more followed this, all tied up in knots. I know it all to the point where my daddy lets off. I tell it so maybe I can gain some closure.

It started at midday.

Their legs were half-buried in the squimix, with the tops of their waders on up sticking out of the midge. Small flies swarmed over their heads, as was usual. Patch pulled his apple-grapple out of the midge, removed the skewered apple and dropped it on the conveyer. He re-sank the apple-grapple and leaned on it, watching the apple he'd dropped as the conveyer pulled it under the shower down-line from his a.s.sembly crew. That's how we'd come to work it by then. The apple fell in a packing chute.

"How have we gone on like this for three hours?" Patch said.

Dad's smile soured. "You know I don't think about break. This here is man's work; the only time when I'm glad I don't need sleep. The day will come when I get some medicine. But it'd better not affect my work."

Dad says Patch laughed hard and slipped. I imagine he did slip, that's all I can manage. Sliding off the apple-grapple, he fell under the midge. The one thing the aliens warn you about: squimix on your skin is a killing sin. Daddy talks softly about it, but I know how he screamed. He did not think, just took off his rubber gloves and wiped his hands over Patch's face. He had to do it; the gloves slipped. He screamed. The squimix on Patch's face etched a river through my daddy's heart.

It did no good.

My brother died from the pain.

Brant Allen, their foreman and our neighbor, ran out of his office trailer to see what was screaming. Before he got to the midge, he'd come to approach at a sidelong trot like a horse changing gait. Looking off, yet near to retching, he gave Daddy the talk under his breath, led him to the office trailer.

The office trailer was not too cramped inside. I'd been there on several occasions. Mr. Allen led my gla.s.sy-eyed daddy to a chair across from his own and the metal desk that straddled a crescent moon's s.p.a.ce between them. Brant stepped around the desk and sat, clawing through his oily hair.

"You ready for this?" Brant said.

If you worked in squimix, you knew what this was.

"I'll let the Didagens examine me," Dad said, "to learn why the squimix didn't kill me when I wiped Patch's face, and to prove that I'm able to work this job-I've got to if I can; I won't have my daughter, Ann, working such risk."

Why Daddy didn't want me working in squimix is plain. But I have always wondered if his big hand pounded the desk, or his belly popped out the shirttail of that faded-out rag he wore for days on end, swearing it pa.s.sed for flannel. Brant would've nodded. What happened next is policy.

Brant slid the medical release form to Daddy.

Daddy reached over his beer belly with an ink pen. He signed.

A dome on Brant's desk covered a frilly mesh sc.r.a.p. It trembled if you opened the dome. Brant gently lifted out the sc.r.a.p and caressed it, walking to the outside door.

The sc.r.a.p fluttered aloft into blue sky.

It wasn't long before a Didacrawler came to the door.

Didacrawlers are a sort of Didagen, the aliens that work us in squimix to dig out apples, the one I'm speaking of having come, as I said, to the office trailer door.

It took its true form: Didacrawlers have frilly-spaghetti legs that glow and move like willows. We must do as Daddy did when we see one: stand at address as the alien comes in under its oozing lurch-and-slap. As Daddy did so, one of the legs billowed toward him. It whipped slowly.

Daddy believes it gave him a shot.

Last thing Daddy recognized.

Daddy's sight tunneled as he looked past the Didacrawler's hub, which its legs radiate from like spokes on a Ford F-150; different, how I said. Daddy saw the crescent desk reflecting coldly on the window of the trailer door. Suddenly it was the door that wasn't, seeming not the slat-wood gate through which Dad'd entered, but a changed maw of yawning sponge. Daddy thought to himself, lands, what a memory. But mine? Beyond the spongy maw a swath of dirt stretched across a field into a patch of rhododendrons and weeds, giving seclusion till it all reined in at deep woods; nothing of our midge. Above, the sky was cloudy, rainy with no grey; come from the Blue Navy.

The swath held a monument like a wad of mashed potatoes cut rough in steps around its stone sides. Daddy needed to see the back for himself; it seemed what the alien would have him do, so Daddy thought, so he walked out. Climbing the steps, he but kicked a soft spot in the rise. A hole bored through. Framed in mash, far-side steps let out onto rolling savannah littered with iron beds that curved winding to a far-off speck. The beds were made with patch quilts. A person lay face down on each bed.

The blue navied sky rippled like bedding.

Daddy was drowsy.

He closed his eyes.

He wouldn't sick himself at fifty.

Daddy's stomach was bubbling strange.

He opened his eyes. A blur cleared.

Daddy was lying under a patch quilt on a bed in a white room, where a recessed pool in the floor rolled like a cloudy sky with no grey.

Daddy craned a view at his spongy window.

"Clear the film. Show me Hiding Mountain," Dad said.

A Didacrawler bucked subtly across the room at the command, switched out its running bio-segment to get a share of the ad-hoc system that would replace its clinical schedule. Daddy thinks the Didacrawler belched arrogant that it could build the silly window process, appendages off.

"Don't smart me," Dad said. "I know you can, and I know from those pool colors changing, they come from the Blue Navy. This is Hiding Mountain.

"Show it."

The Didacrawler squelched toward the window. When it arrived, one of its legs billowed and whipped slowly.

The spongy window seemed to emulsify its own film until it became clear. Daddy gasped, reacting how he'd have avoided in cases when he could, as he looked out on a vast, starry blackness rising above a promontory that jutted from atop canyon cliffs, lit through alien control. Cliffs fuzzy with blue ferns, yellow gra.s.s, edged with low-grown solids. Perched above, blue-glowing Earth took Daddy's breath.

Hiding Mountain was an asteroid.

Daddy sat up, alert in his bed in the white room. The patch quilting fell off and revealed the mound of his hairy belly. He scratched. He soaked in the frigid window scene till the alien Didacrawler bucked and its eyes reddened. To settle its nerves, Daddy lay down. The Didacrawler sloshed to the cloudy pool and whipped out its arm, sinking it in the pool. It hauled out a container, round, of wire mesh. A blue, rumpled sheet packed in, until the Didacrawler dumped it on the floor.

The Didacrawler lurched out the spongy door.

Didaboss came next into the room.

Didaboss was nearly a plain old Didacrawler except for a man's necktie looped around its hub, a fashion it got from us (so Daddy thinks). Didaboss moved on its legs at a quick trot to the sheet that was dumped.

Didaboss shot a leg out, uncurling the sheet in a plane as smooth as a store-bought bolt of fabric. But Daddy knew cotton and flannel, and this was no such bedding. It was plate of mirrored steel. Daddy was awed after seeing it stuffed in a wad. Didaboss scurried around to Daddy, and its eyes lay green on him.

"KEN.

"KEN STAND.

"KEN STAND HERE," Didaboss said.

Didaboss let an appendage rustle in front of the plate.

Daddy middled, facing window.

Didaboss flattened its legs till they slithered beneath the plate some odd way and jacked it up as they reinflated-that's the only word I can conjure for what Daddy thought was done. Didaboss puffed it legs under plate, hefting it until it teetered against Daddy's back. Didaboss gurgled as the plate propped up for the seconds it took him to chatter, waddle and hum over it as he danced a reel. Daddy jumped, too; it would've had him laughing, but the plate fell and slapped the floor.

Daddy didn't laugh, then.

Twice more my Daddy went through that, trying to figure out what was going on. From both of his flanks, it happened. Didaboss finally gurgled out the pliable door.

"THANKS. KEN," the alien said.

The Didacrawler lurch-slapped into the room.

It gave another shot.

Daddy slept. I took the chance to sap his dreams and get all the stuff I've told you so far. I sat up in bed, rubbed my sandy eyes, and focused on the night's moon at my window, a presence soft enough for my trance induction. Dreams are strange, but it's old hat. I know the difference.

What he faced.

Daddy woke to a squashy sound on the floor.

He scrubbed his arms and belly. They felt raw. Didaboss was busy in the room, stretching an elastic brown film between its few legs and chattering as it waddled and hummed. Daddy could only reckon at why it stretched the film across the pool on the floor and restarted its strange, c.u.mulative reel: some soft-shoe on two of its front legs, a quick tapping from the back ones added in, and some razz-a-mattaz tuning from its mouth. This had its own reason and inscrutable purpose.

Something else about Didaboss had Daddy chewing his lip. Seating himself on a spartanly hard chair by the windowsill, he propped on his elbow and thought about this Didagen. The alien bothered him right off: this fellow was a lot smaller than the other aliens he'd seen- the size of an ocean crab. Didaboss cared less that Dad was amazed. It danced and danced, tuned and tuned, till Daddy clenched his hair.

"QUIT!" Daddy said.

Didaboss hiccupped and restarted.

The alien continued until, at last, it belched.

"EXCUSE. KEN," Didaboss said.

Didaboss sloshed out the spongy door.

That was the last clear dream gleaning I got from Daddy before the end. The final images came to me disconnected from everything I've told you till now. Here's what came last. It starts with Daddy running down a long white hallway lined with doors, chased by a herd of tiny, spidery Didacrawlers.

Daddy could hear them skittering behind him, the combined rattle of the tiny hard carapaces plenty loud. Daddy ran for a door at the end of the hall, arms splayed as he yelled. Daddy reached the door and pressed a long red bar on the wall. The door folded itself along breaks, hissing into the ceiling.

Daddy gasped at what he saw.

The door opened onto broad desert that was edged on the right by a winding river of squimix that stretched away till lost. A stone wall bounded the other three sides to keep in prisoners, probably. Daddy guessed this from a line of dead men and women on iron beds along the curving river bank. Dad recalled the vision of people on iron beds he'd had at his medical exam. Had his vision prefigured this? Death by squimix was no bedtime. The people who lived were to become giants, to judge from Daddy's condition and what he saw: stretched across a gantry, a man-giant roared as a Didacrawler pack swarmed over him, filleting his skin with a battery of spinning blades clutched in accurate appendages.

Daddy was to join these.

The skin was harvested. Its giant pall was placed dead in a giant coffin made from plates like the one Daddy was fitted for during his bogus physical. If squimix did not kill you, it meant you were medically accepting of gigantism, Daddy realized. His rawness, the film he'd seen: it was a skin test, stretched to scale over the pool in order to gauge his progress toward gigantism. From the looks of it, the lucky people died by squimix, unfit for that fate. Daddy's vision was prophetic. Once eviscerated, a giant's sinew and muscle made a sick facade in bas-relief.

The coffin was set afloat.

It moved downriver.

A pack of Didacrawlers stretched the harvested skin across the squimix river. One by one, horrid forms leapt from the river, clothed themselves in the shorn man-skin. Having a.s.sumed a land-friendly form, they became new Didacrawlers. Daddy was there; the cipher was his. New Didacrawlers formed ranks around the walls, hundreds of belching ranks.

How many had already formed?

Daddy didn't say uncle.

The Didagens' plan was flawed. Daddy knew.

Gauging the moment, Dad bolted toward the squimix river as the next coffin was cast off. Several Didacrawlers saw what he'd done and lurch-slapped after him. One must've hit Daddy with a shot. The last image I got included sharp pain as my daddy dove hard for the coffin, missed, and went under in the squimix. That was what Daddy felt the Didagens had forgot: Squimix doesn't kill giants.

Dad gurgled to the surface. He grabbed the coffin.

The coffin floated away. Daddy looked back and saw the clinic getting small in the distance: a three-tiered tower of stone with spongy windows, stair-stepped as in his monument vision. Did it accommodate fast growth to a giant? Maybe Didagens move you to a larger room after a shot. Atop the tallest tier, an octet of willowy legs sought toward the coffin, undulant in the heavy breeze. Were the legs saying goodbye? Beckoning? Daddy fell fast asleep, the image he gave fading quickly. Daddy is sleeping soundly now, with no REM sleep to feed me his dreams. Daddy got his medicine. Was it good for him? I may never know.

I glean dreams best.

But each night in the approach of sleep, the warm breeze touches my hair at the window and the moon is patient and cool, sending its light. I hear the midges buzzing lightly outside in the darkness, and I hear Brant's guard dog baying vacuously down the hollow, outside the office trailer. I try this sending: I am sorry, Daddy. I'm working squimix, now.

Apples sell.

We need the money from outside because our town in small.

Awaiting you, Your dream-reader, Annie.