“Well, you got to understand we’re not in the habit of marching potentially armed strangers straight to Dear Leader.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it.”
He scowled, creasing his beard. “Quit making my job tough, would you? You want me to do this, or want me to bring up one of the girls?”
She cocked her head. “You’re fine.”
He proceeded, businesslike, only pausing when he saw the scarring nub of her right-hand finger. After, he led her down to the lake, where the rebels caught fish and scrubbed clothes. Tristan accepted a bit of trout and a mealy bowl of boiled and mashed roots.
“She’ll see you now,” the older man told her a few minutes after sunset. He brought her to a cabin. Inside, a woman in her early thirties gazed down at a desk full of papers.
“Kerry tells me you want to join up,” the woman said without looking up.
“Kerry’s wrong.”
The older man coughed. “Hey now, you said—”
“I said I wanted to kill aliens,” Tristan said. “And I will. If they get in my way. What I want to do is find my brother.”
The woman frowned, wrinkling her young face. “We’re not a search and rescue team.”
“And I’m not dumb enough to expect you to be. The alien prison camps. Do you know where they are?”
“We’d be pretty bad at this if we didn’t.”
“Any with children? Teens?”
“Could be,” the woman said. “It’s not a priority.”
Tristan placed her four-fingered hand on the table. “They’re taking kids and that’s not a priority?”
“Tonight, I won’t give it a second thought, and I’ll sleep fine. Our one and only priority is the survival of the human race.”
“Not to me.”
“Sure enough.” The woman tapped her fingers on the desk. “Not here to enlist? This meeting is through.”
“I need to know where the camps are,” Tristan said. “I need to find my brother.”
“Then I’d advise you to get walking.”
Tristan gazed across the desk. “It’s just information.”
“And it’s also need-to-know.” She stood, chair scraping. “Kerry will show you out.”
Tristan stood perfectly still. Kerry wore a rifle on his shoulder; she’d need to take that away. Twist it to entangle his arm in the strap, the drive her elbow into his head. Take him down and turn the gun on the woman until she talked. Use her as a hostage to as Tristan retreated to her scooter. Would be an awful lot of guns trained on her when she walked out the door of the hut, but she didn’t have a choice.
The woman smiled slowly. “You’re thinking about killing me.”
Tristan shook her head. “I’d need you alive. Talking. Convincing your soldiers not to shoot.”
She laughed, shooting a bemused look at Kerry. She tapped her finger on the table. “You ever seen one of them in person? Do you have any idea what you’re getting into?”
“They kept me captive for weeks. Last month, I escaped one of their camps. I was the only one to make it out.”
“That were you got those scars?”
“The one on my neck.” Absently, Tristan stuck her tongue into the gap where her left canine and nearest incisor had been knocked out. “The rest came afterwards.”
The woman rolled her lips together, suddenly pensive. She rubbed her nose. “Farms east of Fresno. Somewhere off 168. That’s where I hear they’re keeping the kids.”
“Thank you.”
“Been a while since I heard that. Might not be any good.”
“Then I’ll keep looking.”
The woman snorted. “No doubt. If you could kill a few of the squids while you’re there, it would really give us a hand.”
Kerry led Tristan outside. “She must have liked you. Sure I can’t talk you into staying?”
“Where are my guns?” Tristan said.
He chortled. “Take it that’s a no.”
She’d grabbed a state map from a rest stop as soon as she’d crossed into California. She knew Fresno wasn’t far, all things considered, but when she saw it was less than 150 miles north, she smiled for the first time in weeks.
She coasted down the mountain slope, buzzing past the yellow deadlands of Bakersfield. Smoke rose from the city. The grumble of machines. She needed gas, but she didn’t stop to siphon any until she was on the very edge of town. Even then, she listened to the wind for engines or gunshots before she paused to take fuel.
She throttled the Vespa to its top speed, 40 MPH on flat ground. Twisted orchards flashed by, leafless and brown. Dusty signs denounced a senator for causing the drought. One denounced her for causing the Panhandler, too.
At the interchange, she peeled off I-5, Fresno-bound. An anxious readiness tingled in her veins. Field after field faded behind her, browned-out by the sun. Isolated patches of green exposed the people clinging to the land. She hit Fresno and followed the road through Clovis, heading for the hills. She thought she might face days of searching, but the blue cones stood from the heights like signal fires.
She parked by the road and crouched in the brush, sighting the alien camp through the rifle. Her heart sank with the sun. Besides the swaying grass, the grounds were motionless. She waited for nightfall before she climbed up the hills and entered the settlement.
She found no aliens. No vehicles. No people. If Alden had once been here, he’d been gone for a very long time.
23
Soldiers tromped across the dusty grounds. Ness stood still, fixated. The workers went quiet. A few trickled from the lodges to stand with the others. Curtains stirred in the windows.
Daniel walked behind the soldiers. Roan was with him, steps as smooth as a leopard’s. A machine gun hung from her shoulder. Ness counted fifteen other troops, all armed.
Daniel clapped his hands and smiled. “I heard there’s been a strike. That true, Howard?”
The old man—Howard; it was the first time Ness had heard his proper name—tugged on the bill of his faded baseball cap. “Looks like.”
“Would someone like to tell me why?”
Faces turned to Ness. His went hot. He searched for words.
Erasmo stood. “Because you’re working us to death and you’re not even fighting back.”
“Is that what you want to do?” Daniel said. “Fight back?”
“Hell yeah.”
“All of you? You want to put your lives on the line assaulting superior beings who’ve already reduced humanity to far-flung tribes?”
“Better that than waiting for them to wipe us out,” Ness said.
Several others murmured their assent. Roan found each speaker, her eyes lingering, as if fixing them in her mind.
Daniel ran his thumb through his beard. “I’d like to fight, too. Very much so. If it made sense, I’d devote every spare erg to the cause. But that’s the thing. It doesn’t make sense.”
“You said you had tons of nuclear waste,” Ness said. “How many dirty bombs would that be good for?”
“Hundreds,” he shrugged. “Thousands. But after we set them off—assuming they have stationary bases worth bombing, and that we can reach those bases without being bombed ourselves—we will discover they just don’t work.”
“Radiation—the thing that kills everything—won’t kill these things.”
Daniel shook his head, morning light bouncing from his glasses. “Do you know how much cosmic radiation these beings must have absorbed over the course of their flight? Even if we assume they’re capable of traveling at light-speed and that they came from the nearest extrasolar star, they spent five years in flight. It’s more likely they spent ten. Twenty.” He tipped back his chin and pursed his mouth tight. “A two-year flight would expose a human to enough cosmic radiation to cause a breakdown of the DNA. This, in turn, would case fatal cancer.”
Ness glanced around for help. “So maybe they’ve got shields.”
“Cosmic radiation differs from earthbound ra
diation in one key aspect: it’s traveling very, very fast. As fast as matter goes. No amount of shielding could protect them from it.”
“Well, they didn’t take the fucking highway! Obviously they got through it somehow.”
Daniel nodded soberly. “Indeed. Because they’re immune.”
“Immune to radiation?” Erasmo said.
“That’s one option. The other—and, from a logical standpoint, perhaps more likely—is that they don’t exist at all.”
Ness gaped. Several people spoke at once. Howard’s rangy voice cut through them all. “Better explain yourself, boss.”
Daniel gestured at the sky. “Do you see any aliens? Have you ever seen any aliens?”
“I have!” Ness said.
“So you say.”
“Because I’m in the general habit of saying true things. And am just concerned enough about my fellow man to want to warn him about the interstellar monsters that landed in my back yard.”
Daniel tugged his nose and sniffed. “Where was that, again?”
“Moscow. Idaho.”
“So the first and apparently only place the aliens stop when they finally reach Earth is a town so obscure you have to clarify which state it’s in.”
Ness’ skin prickled. “You told me you knew about them. Do you actually believe what you’re saying here? Or is this another lie to keep us happy and hoeing?”
Daniel blinked, affront spreading across his face. “I don’t know whether there are aliens. All I know is what you say and what I’ve seen. I haven’t seen any. Neither have the people we’re in contact with in Spokane. Or Umatilla. Could there be aliens? Hypothetically. But the physical evidence suggests they’d have an awful hard time getting here. And if they were capable of such a thing, of absorbing or deflecting lethal doses of radiation, I don’t see why they’d be incapable of continuing to do just that.”
Ness could only shake his head. All that radiation stuff, was that even true? It sounded plausible enough, scientific enough, but—well, he supposed there was no but. It didn’t matter whether it was true. It mattered how it sounded. Most of the audience around him had even less education than he did. Fieldhands like Nick. Old farmers like Howard. All they knew about space was it was really big and you couldn’t reach it no matter how high you jumped. He could already see their doubt, their furtive glances.
Daniel made a pleading gesture with his palms. “We’ve been doing very well here. Power. Water. Plenty of food. Thanks to Ness, it’s looking like we’ll soon have cars again. Working farm equipment. I’m sure you’d all appreciate that.”
The old scientist rubbed his temples, face a portrait of concern. “We’re staring down a critical juncture. We’re in the middle of harvest. If we finish reaping what we’ve sown, we’ll find ourselves with abundance. Next year, we’ll be able to divert that much more resources to the luxuries we’re all missing. To making life better. We’ve all seen how fast things can change for the worse. Well, things can change for the better, too. But it’s going to take a lot of hard work. If you’ve got questions, those I can answer. But if things stay where they are, all that food we’ve worked for will rot in the field. We’ll lose a whole year. I may know how to maintain a nuclear reactor, but I can’t turn back time.”
The people did have a few questions—whether they would all have access to cars once the fuel came in, whether the settlement could divert the resources into getting the farm another pair of washing machines and dryers—but the answers didn’t matter. He had already won them back. Roan found Ness’ eyes and smiled.
They went back to the fields that afternoon. For lack of anything better to do, Ness went back to the stills.
“Did you really see the aliens?” Nick asked.
“They came right up to our cabin.”
“Then why did Daniel say they didn’t?”
“He’s either ignorant or a liar.” Ness pulled the lid from a fermenting tub. “I don’t much like it either way.”
The wagons returned with corn and wheat. The nights grew colder. The harvest finished days behind schedule. Kristin sent him a note asking him to cross the river, but when he went to see her, they would up fighting over the dumbest of things—whether Bush had been right to invade Iraq; Kristin thought the evidence had been fabricated, but Ness argued it didn’t matter, not when Saddam Hussein was a ruthless dictator—and he went straight home, shivering in the north wind. The first frosts fell. The days alternated between cold and clear and cold and damp. He and Kristin made up, but fought again the next week. With Ness feeling the lowest he’d been since their mother had died, Shawn came to see him.
“What do you want?” Ness said. He was in bed reading one of the communal library’s paperback mysteries. The cover had fallen off. He suspected his bed had fleas, too. He hadn’t yet caught one, but he had small red bumps on his arms and legs.
“Just wanted to catch up with my baby brother.”
Ness rolled his eyes. Shawn knew he hated that term. “Nothing to catch up on.”
“Really? ‘Cause I heard you were a little Che Guevara out here.”
“Nope.”
“Well, okay.” Shawn plopped down on the end of the bed, jolting Ness’ book from his hands. “Then I guess you don’t care they just hired me to build a fence around you guys.”
“What?”
“Now, a thinking man might ask, ‘Why do they want an electrician to build them a fence?’ But this here man just needs to think a little harder. What if the fence were electric?”
Ness set down his book. “Why would they do that?”
Shawn shrugged. He looked good. Tan. Well-fed. “Normally you rig one of those when you don’t want your cattle getting loose.”
“Do you know how Daniel broke our strike? He told them the aliens weren’t real.”
“Tell that to the shit I dropped when they came to the cabin.”
“Well, thanks for coming by to rub it in. After I kill myself, I’m going to haunt you. You’ll never jerk off in peace again.”
“I didn’t come here to rub your nose in it,” Shawn said. “I came here to do something about it.”
“Like what?” Ness said. “Capture an alien?”
“Well, I was just gonna go yell in the streets or something. But yeah. Let’s go bag us an alien.”
“You’re serious.”
“Why not?”
“Where are we going to get an alien?”
“Last time I saw one, it was banging down our front door. Ness, I think it’s time to go home.”
Ness laughed, surprising himself. “Do you think we can take one alive?”
“Why? You want to do some probing? Give them a taste of their own medicine?”
“I want to poison one with radiation until it dies.”
Shawn’s face puckered. “You’re sick, dude.”
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“I’ll get the jeep. You get planning.”
Ness rolled out of bed. “Can you give me a ride across the river? There’s someone I need to see.”
“Hot piece of tail?”
“Don’t talk about her like that.”
Shawn snorted. “I bet.”
The sun had set a few minutes earlier. Shawn’s headlights slashed across the black water. He dropped Ness off in front of the three-story outbuilding and Ness jogged up the stairs and knocked on Kristin’s door.
“What do you want?” Her eyes were bloodshot, tired. “Think up some brilliant new defense of strike-first fascism?”
“I’m leaving,” Ness said.
Her lips parted. “Ness. It was just a silly fight.”
“Not you. And not long. Just until I bring back an alien.”
Kristin drew back her chin, eyes darting between his. “Are you trying to impress me? Flowers are more traditional.”
“Daniel’s going to build an electric fence around the farm,” Ness said. “To pen us in. And the only way I can get the others to do anything about it is to prove the
aliens exist—and that we can kill them.”
“I think the electric fence might be enough to get them off their butts.”
“He’ll just tell them it’s for their own safety. I have to prove he’s been lying about everything.”
She rubbed her fist against her forehead. “Wow. Holy shit. What if you don’t come back?”
“Then tell my friend Nick,” he said. “And consider running away before things get any weirder.”
They kissed, long and sweet. Ness put his hand up her shirt. She laughed and closed the door behind them. Down below, Shawn honked the horn.
“I think I hate your brother,” Kristin said.
“He gets that a lot. Love you.”
He hadn’t meant to say it. Judging by her expression, she hadn’t expected to hear it. He blushed furiously and ran down the steps. As he jumped into the jeep, Kristin opened the window and waved.
“Kind of skinny,” Shawn said.
“Shut up.”
Shawn told the guards he was taking Ness home for the night, then turned onto the southbound road. Cold air gushed through the roofless cab.
“How’d you get the jeep?” Ness said.
“Obviously I stole it. Guns are in back.”
Ness twisted in his seat. The weapons gleamed from the floorboards. “How are we going to take them alive?”
“You got two and a half hours to figure that one out, smart guy.”
Ness sat back and spent the next ten minutes wishing he’d brought a thicker coat. They roared through town and circled around to the highway, blowing past the defunct wineries and desiccated blueberry fields. The stars blazed from the sky. When he leaned close to the windshield, Ness could see his breath; it could snow soon. Cliffs of black basalt flanked the road. Wastelands of cheatgrass and sage blew past the car. Pullman was completely silent. No lights, no smoke of chimneys. The bodies dangling from the poles were months old.
“Well?” Shawn said as they drove into Moscow. Moonlight glinted from the curved metal roof of the Kibbie Dome. “What’s the big idea?”
“Shoot them until they’re dead.”
“I could have thought of that. I did think of that.”
“Well, what are we going to do, stuff a chloroformed rag in their beaks and hope they have lungs?” Ness pushed his wind-mussed hair from his forehead. “Anyway, they don’t need to be alive for us to bombard them with radiation.”
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 130