The first alien shoved its pad in his face. “TAKE”
Ness squinted at it, then reached for its pad. The alien pulled it away and moved a claw in a broad sweep, shaking the pad again: “TAKE”
“Yes, to take the planet,” Ness scribbled, “but why?”
“WASTE”
“I don’t understand.”
“YOU WASTE PLANET”
“Pollution?” Ness wrote. “We were going to destroy the Earth, so you took it away?”
It shook its fat head in exaggerated sweeps, claws clicking rapidly. “INEFFICIENT WASTE PARTS DESERVE EFFICIENT”
He held out his palms, wrote, “I don’t understand.”
“INEFFICIENT WASTE DIRT AIR WATER”
“We were ruining it?”
The alien jounced up and down. “NO NO NO WASTE WRONG USE”
Ness pushed the knuckle of his thumb against the bridge of his nose. “We were using the dirt wrong.”
“YES”
“How should we have been using it?”
“RIGHT”
“How right?”
“WHAT”
“How were we supposed to be using it?”
“RIGHT”
Ness laughed in frustration too deep for words. Or gestures. Or any other known form of communication. Here he was not five feet from the answers to everything that had happened in the last year—probably the only human to have ever been faced with this opportunity—and they were locked in a Who’s On First routine. It was enough to make him want to cry. Or shoot something. Or shoot something while crying.
“What is the right way to use our dirt?” he wrote.
The alien paused, gazing at its pad, a few of its claws twirling in what Ness was beginning to suspect meant frustration. “AS THE DIRT WANTS”
“How does the dirt want to be used?”
Its claws snapped back and forth. It calmed itself, squiggled its tentacle above the pad. “HARD TALK” It erased that and made a new series of gestures. “AND WATER”
“We were using our water wrong, too?”
“YES AND WE WANT”
“You wanted our water?” Ness wrote. “The universe is full of water!”
“HARD WATER BAD WATER”
“Hard water? You blew us up because melting Titan’s ice was too much work?”
It began to gesture, but the tentacles of the ones in the wall cut it off. A minute later, it turned back to Ness. “GO”
“Now?”
“GO” It tucked the pad into a pouch in its strappy clothes, grabbed him up, and scuttled down the hall.
“Hang on a damn minute!” Ness said. It hurried down the tunnel to the room with the grated floor. The door hissed closed. Cold river water flooded the chamber. Ness breathed hard as it climbed to his shins, his thighs, his belly. His clothes hadn’t even begun to dry. The water rose to his chin. Outer doors whirred; water clapped into the room, filling it. Once the surging tide calmed, the alien swam forward, using its tentacles as rotors, and struck straight for the surface. Ness’ head broke the surface. He gasped.
It delivered him to the shore and got out the pad, which showed no sign of being harmed by its trip through the water. “GO”
Ness yanked up a cattail and drew in the mud. “My brother and I are prisoners at the power plant.”
“YOU ARE HERE”
“But I have to go back,” he wrote. “Can you help us get out?”
“NO”
“Why not?”
“NOT GUTBROTHER”
“But I told you what happened to your gutbrothers.”
The alien paused, pincers tracing slow circles. “TOMORROW”
“Hot date with a prawn?” Ness said out loud. He wrote in the mud, “Why tomorrow?”
“FOR THINK”
The creature whirled and delved into the river. Bubbles popped in the swirling current. Water dripped from Ness’ clothes. He peeled off his coat and shirt and wrung them out. The rest would have to wait till he was home. His shoes squelched on the walk to the truck. He shivered hard. On the drive back, the vapor from his clothes humidified the cab; he swept his sleeve across the fogging windshield, smearing it halfway clear. He parked in the car lot and went to turn in the key.
“Why are you wet?”
He startled. Roan faced him, the fuzzy flaps of a bomber jacket raised around her neck and chin. Ness glanced down at his damp jeans, as if just noticing.
“I was climbing a tree to get a better look at things,” he said. “I fell in the river.”
“You’ve spent enough time out there.”
Heat prickled Ness’ neck. “But I haven’t even been to half the orchards.”
“We won’t have the manpower to get to them for years,” Roan said. “By then they’ll be completely changed. You’re wasting time.”
He stared at her, lungs stinging, wanting to shout it wasn’t fair. But fair meant nothing to her. His mind shifted gears, clicking from itchy panic into cold analysis. Roan cared about order, efficiency. Ness scrambled for the right lie.
“Some of the orchards are on lower ground than others. They can be irrigated easily. If this can be done in time for summer, it would only take a handful of workers at a satellite farm to produce enough apples to generate hundreds or even thousands of gallons of fuel. Far more than if those same workers were helping to grow corn.”
Her gaze was as steady as the southwest wind that had him shivering in his clothes. “I need reports.”
“Of course.”
“And a proposal. You have two weeks to find your location. If it takes longer than that, it can wait till next year.”
“Thank you, sir,” Ness said. She strode away. He turned in his car keys and went to his room. Only then did he grin. After years of lying to Shawn and his mom to stay out of trouble, it had become as natural and effortless as setting down his foot. He’d bought himself two weeks. Fine. For all he knew, the aliens would move on Daniel and Roan tomorrow.
He drove back out in the early morning, taking a change of clothes with him. Once again, the thing was already waiting for him in the cold shadows of the orchard.
“WHY HERE,” it wrote on the pad.
“Because this is where we met before,” he wrote on his.
“NO WHY YOU HERE”
He cocked his head. “To learn from you.”
“BUT YOU HATE US”
“No,” Ness wrote. “Well, yes. It’s complicated.”
Its semitranslucent lids slid across its fist-sized eyes. “NOT GUTBROTHERS”
“Us?”
“YES NOT”
He scratched the pen over his notepad. “What is a gutbrother?”
It spun its claws in circles. “IT’S COMPLICATED”
Ness laughed. Sparrows flitted from the branches, undisturbed by the alien presence. “Then why are you here?”
“YOU’RE NOT AFRAID”
Ness laughed at that one for some time. “Yes I am. I’m one tentacle-punch from shitting myself.” He crossed that sentence out. He had to be simple. It wouldn’t understand figures of speech any more than he understood its talk about dirt. “I’m very afraid. But my curiosity is even stronger. And so is my want to help my gutbrother.”
“DON’T USE”
“Don’t use what?”
“OUR WORD”
“Gutbrother?”
“YES NOT”
“Why not?”
“HUMANS CAN’T BE” It swung its claws up and down, eyes rolling. Thinking? Frustration? It waggled its tentacle over the pad. “GUTBROTHERS TALK WITHOUT MOVING GUTBROTHERS DON’T LEAVE GUTBROTHERS HUMANS ALWAYS LEAVING”
“Wrong,” Ness wrote. “I could leave right now. I don’t because it would mean leaving my brother to die.”
“WORDS BAD DON’T GRASP TRUTH”
“I know.”
“COME FOR GUTBROTHERS ALWAYS ALWAYS”
“And you wouldn’t come for me?”
It clacked its claws rapidly—laughter? Or extreme so
briety? It had reacted the same way when he’d asked the absurdly large question of why they’d sent the plague.
“THE HELL NO”
“Have you been watching our TV?” Ness said out loud, laughing. He wrote, “I still don’t know why you’re here.”
“OWE”
“You owe me? For telling you who killed your gutbrothers?” he wrote. It wagged its fat head up and down. Ness gazed into the trees. “Then what will you do to repay me?”
“HOW RELEASE GUTBROTHER”
“You’ll help me get my brother out?”
It retracted its claws. “DEPEND HOW RELEASE GUTBROTHER”
“They keep us locked in two rooms,” Ness wrote. “There are a few guards nearby. That’s it.”
“DANGEROUS”
“I know.”
“TALK OTHERS”
“Tomorrow?”
“TOMORROW”
Ness nodded. It was as much as he could have hoped. “What did you mean when you said we used the dirt wrong?”
It considered him with unblinking eyes. “DIRT WANTS LIFE”
“But we bury our dead in it? Is that sacrilege?”
“NO TO BE LIFE” It reached out a tentacle and tapped his notepad. “DEAD DIRT NOT-LIFE”
Ness pointed at its black pad, writing, “That looks pretty dead to me, too.”
It shook its head. “INSIDE LIVE”
“What about that?” Ness pointed at the straps of its clothing.
“EXCEPTION”
“That’s convenient.”
“YOUR WHOLE WORLD EXCEPTION”
Ness laughed; had he just annoyed it? Well, the alien could deal with it. Ness himself was still a little angry over their whole apocalypse thing. With that thought, he was struck by situational vertigo: he stood in a quiet orchard trying to ally with one of the monsters that had nearly wiped out his entire species. That had killed his mom. That would have killed him, if not for whatever quirk of genetics had left him immune. Why wasn’t he angrier? Shawn would have already tried to kill it.
Himself, he just didn’t seem to care. He couldn’t take the invasion personally. Ironically, that same lack of personal involvement that had made it so hard to connect with other people was the same quality that left him equipped to speak with the creature in front of him.
To try to, anyway. He attempted, with minimal success, to explore its concept of live dirt and dead dirt, live air and dead air, but he got the impression it would not have been simple even if the alien had been a native English speaker. It seemed to believe this was a basic organizational principle—that all matter wanted to become life, and thus to shape matter into dead, inert things was to violate some sort of fundamental will, to sin against the very universe—but so much of that was reading between the lines, his human interpretation of its blocky, chopped-up words.
“PURPOSE,” it tried at last, claws spinning in what Ness had come to take as its gesture of frustration/anxiety. “BREAK PURPOSE EVIL”
“So you came here to correct us,” he wrote back. “By killing us all.”
It shook its head, claws spinning. It began to twitch its tentacle over its pad, but the pad lit up. It went still, listening to a message Ness couldn’t hear. It looked up, drawing its tentacle back in the sinuous gesture Ness could now understand without the pad’s interpretation:
“TOMORROW”
Ness had expected as much. On the off chance Roan meant to drill him daily, he spent a few hours doing what he was supposed to be here for—surveying the groves for ease of irrigation—then drove back to the plant, where he asked for and received permission to see Shawn. A guard escorted Shawn to the lab, then sat against the wall, folding a dog-eared copy of Maxim over his lap, presumably to ogle the models who were no less attainable now that they were all dead than they’d been when the magazine was printed. Ness swore. The man’s presence was going to make things a whole lot harder.
“What’s up?” Shawn said.
“How goes your effort to earn your citizenship?”
“Slow and steady,” Shawn shrugged. “Didn’t expect it to happen overnight.”
Ness glanced at the guard, who turned the page. “What if it could?”
His brother squinted one eye, then smiled slowly. “I’d jump.”
“Really? You almost seem happy.”
“Because it’s a load more practical than stealing the guns to shoot our way out, you dork.” Shawn looked lazily at the guard, who remained engrossed in the glossy pages. “It’s called working within the system.”
“But if there were another way?”
“Then fuck the system.”
Ness grinned. “Be ready.”
Shawn gave him another squint. “What have you got up your sleeve, little bro?”
“You’d never believe me.”
“Guess I’ll sleep with my shoes on.”
They caught up for a while, exchanging the trivial details of their progress with the ethanol and the fence, respectively. The guard broke it up to escort Shawn back to his own room.
Ness spent the evening fantasizing about their escape. The alien would crawl in from the ceiling vents, just like in Aliens, strangling a guard in one tentacle, tearing another to ribbons with its claws, and halving a third with its lightsaber-like laser. It would get shot, but Ness would catch its laser in midair and blast down the guard before the enemy could finish the job. As Ness supported the alien on his shoulder, laser in hand, Shawn would range ahead to the gates, sneak up on Roan, and snap her neck. They’d ride out in the jeep, deliver the alien to its friends at the river, shake limbs, and go their separate ways.
That was the dramatic route. More likely, the alien would surreptitiously lase the locks from their doors and they would hide in the shadows of walls until the guards walked away on their routes. From there, they’d go climb the fence, or wade into the river, swim to the other side, and disappear into the city.
Or the alien would cut straight to the chase, land a jet on the roof, extract them, and fly away before the guards had the chance to lace up their boots. These things had destroyed a civilization. How hard would it be for them to bust two people out of jail?
He never got the chance to find out. The alien waited for him in the orchard, tentacles held tight to its body, morning sunshine glistening on the dewy grass. The words were already spelled out on its slim black pad:
“MELT DOWN”
30
Tristan breathed out in a hot rush. “You were going to sell me into slavery?”
Colin mashed his head against the window, trying to escape the pressure of her shiv. “That’s how it works. Bring them a worker, they lay out the red carpet.”
“Use me as a tool to escape, then sell your tool to someone else.”
“That wasn’t the plan! I wanted to help you. To find your brother.”
“Then I made the mistake of telling you to keep your dick to yourself.”
He smiled tightly. “That’s not it at all.”
She worked the blade back into the gash she’d dug in his skin. He inhaled through his teeth. She shifted her weight, holding the shiv steady. “Then why?”
“Because they’ve got something here. Power. Security. A future. No more scavenging. No more pawing over dead bodies for cans of Campbell’s. That’s not a life. That’s hell.”
“The old way wasn’t a right. Half the world was born into lives worse than we have it now.”
“Anyway, it wouldn’t be forever. You can earn your way out. Alden’s here, Tristan. Play their game for three years, five, whatever they ask, then you can take him and be on your way. Spend the rest of your lives together.”
She glanced down the road to the chain link gate. The Prius was quiet enough for her to hear a rumble permeating the dry desert air. It was a seductive thought. Put in her time, work hard, then move on once she’d earned out. Little risk. Much less than whatever she’d take on breaking Alden from captivity.
She had already grown tired of this li
fe, this endless need to be on her guard, to read the truths behind the lying eyes. It would be so much simpler to put her life in someone else’s hands for a while. To let them watch out for her while she earned her daily meals. She’d have more time to watch out for Alden, too. The people who ran this place wouldn’t want any harm to come to their investments. She didn’t have to go it alone to keep her promise to her mom. Maybe the best way to keep her brother safe would be to sacrifice herself. It wouldn’t even be forever.
“I’m at the gate!” Colin had the radio to his mouth, fingers clamped to its button. He’d snuck it from beneath the seat while she watched the fence. “Get someone out here! Hurry!”
But that was just a comforting delusion. A way to shrug off responsibility. Once they had her inside the fence, they’d never let her go.
She drove the knife through his neck. Instinctively, he clamped down his chin, catching her forearm against his chest. She reached over, popped the door, and shoved him out with both her legs. He gargled, blood spraying the windshield. The seatbelt caught him halfway out the door; he flailed one hand, keeping the other tight against his cut throat. She unclicked his belt and he thumped to the dust. She threw the car into reverse, backing over him as she swung around and tore back down the road.
She watched in the rearview as the distant gates swung open. Two men ran outside. She thought she saw rifles on their shoulders. The car dipped down the road, pulling the men from sight. The suspension jounced as she pushed the Prius up to sixty. A college campus spread to her left. She pulled in and parked among the abandoned cars. The dust on their windows was so thick you couldn’t see through, but her car was dirty enough to blend in at a distance. She grabbed a bag and ran for the entrance, where she watched from the window for an hour until she was certain there would be no pursuit.
She needed a gun. Binoculars. Black clothes. She found all three looting the houses on the north end of town. The pistol’s ammo box was half empty, but if she needed more rounds than that, she probably wasn’t going to get out alive anyway.
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 137