by Neil Clarke
Harvey cast around for the Nikons, only to discover that Susan had usurped his most powerful binoculars and was gazing through them toward the mountains. Anger stirring in him, he picked up the little Minoltas. Through them, the world looked quiet enough. The only movement was a hawk floating across the immaculate blue sky. But Harvey never trusted the quiet. The eetees might avoid the desiccating heat of daytime, but they were always stirring around up there. Plotting the next raid. And the coyotes—
If only he could spy into those mountains as easily as the eetees’ fear-storms roared into his own head.
The nape of Harvey’s neck began to twitch. “Do you see something?” he demanded. “Are the coyotes—”
“I’m looking for Fred,” Susan said coldly, without lowering the binoculars.
“Fred is gone.” Now the anger boiled in Harvey’s gut. “You should be watching for eetees, not pining after your lost dog.”
“Fuck your eetees! Fred is out there somewhere. He wouldn’t leave us and never come back!”
Her voice had turned flat and uncompromising, and Harvey knew one of her rages was coming on. But he could not rein in his own fury.
“If you care so much,” he said, “why did you let him loose?”
Susan finally turned to stare at Harvey. She was breathing hard. “I didn’t let Fred out.”
“Oh, so the coyotes unbuckled his collar?”
Deep red suffused Susan’s face. “Fuck you,” she screamed, “and fuck your coyotes!” She slammed the binoculars onto the deck, she reached toward the rifle—
Harvey grabbed his shotgun and aimed. How stupid to leave his rifle propped against the railing, out of reach—
Susan threw the rifle onto the deck, and then the tray holding the remains of his midnight snack; she kicked over his lawn chair and the tripod for his rifle, and upended the box of shotgun cartridges he’d been packing with rock salt. “Shoot me, Harvey!” she screamed. “Shoot me! I know you want to!”
Harvey snatched up his rifle but did not shoot. At last Susan stopped her rampage. She stared with fierce hatred through her tangled, greasy hair, panting. “I didn’t let Fred out, you moron. You did.” Then she flung herself in her own lawn chair and picked up a tattered and yellowing issue of last summer’s Lewisville Tribune.
The shakes took Harvey. While he waited for the waves of fever cold to recede, he gritted his teeth and said to her, “I’m going to do my rounds now. Just keep an eye out, okay, Susan? That’s all I ask? Watch for eetees, who want to kill us and steal our water, and not for your dead dog?”
When she did not answer, he heaved open the glass door again and stalked into the house. Susan might as well be using a weather-maker, the way she kept terrifying him. Harvey was jumpy enough today. He just had been lucky that last night’s raider had probably stolen its weather-maker from a higher-ranking eetee and wasn’t skilled in its use. And by now Harvey had learned to keep his distance and rely on his rifle and sniper’s night-scope. So the lightning strike of blind terror had fallen short. Harvey had caught only the peripheral shockwave—although that that had been horrible enough.
Weather-maker was what Harvey called the weapon. Other people called it a fear gun. Dr. King and Joe Hansen, putting their heads together, had suggested that the gun produced (as quoted in a bulletin distributed by the sheriff’s office) “wireless stimulation of the amygdala, mimicking the neurochemical signature of paralytic terror.” But no one had yet been able to figure out the insides of those whorled red pendants, and no one could do with them what the eetees did, not even Harvey, who was so hypersensitive from repeated exposure that the weapon affected him even when he wasn’t its target. Even when they weren’t being used. (When Dr. King told him that human researchers had for years been able to produce a similar if weaker effect with a simple electrode, Harvey had, next time he was alone, checked his scalp for unfamiliar scar tissue. But if Susan or Ben had had such an electrode implanted, they had also concealed the traces well.)
Harvey unbolted the connecting door that led from the kitchen into the garage. As angry as Susan’s abdication of responsibility made him, this was the opportunity he needed. She would read and re-read her Tribune for hours, trying to pretend that the entire last year hadn’t happened.
In the garage he quickly donned his rubber gloves and plastic raincoat. He raised the lid of the big chest freezer, long emptied of anything edible, and heaved out the large tarpaulin-wrapped bundle, humping it into the pickup bed. The raider’s corpse hadn’t frozen yet; Harvey just hoped it had chilled sufficiently to last until he reached Dr. King.
Then he stripped off his protective gear and gave it a swift rinse with Clorox in the utility sink. On the cement floor beside the sink, still at the end of its chain, lay Fred’s unbuckled collar of blue nylon webbing—a testament to Susan’s lies.
Harvey fetched last night’s newly scavenged eetee gun from the wheel well of his pickup, where he hoped this time to keep it hidden from Susan and Ben. Next, after checking the yard through the front door peephole, he bore the ladder outside to begin his daily inspection of the video cameras, the locks and chains, the plywood boarding up their windows, the eetee cell that powered the house (one of the few perks Ben allowed them).
It hurt Harvey to think about Fred, happy Fred, the only one of them unchanged since the days before the eetees had come to Earth. When he and Susan had been happy, too, in their dream house with the panoramic view atop De Soto Hill. Fred was just one dumb, happy golden retriever with no notion of the dangers out there in the mountains. More likely the coyotes had gotten Fred than the eetees—not that it made any difference.
Sweating, his scalp twitching, Harvey made his way downhill through dry grass and buzzing grasshoppers. He righted the black power cell (how he’d had to argue with Ben to keep two), slipped on a spare adapter to re-connect the cell to his well pump, and refilled the salt-loaded booby traps the raider had sprung. All the while he searched the trampled ground for the raider’s missing weather-maker, but still without success. Had the coyotes taken it? There couldn’t have been bad weather without a weather-maker . . .
Finally he was climbing the hill again, eager to return to his deck. On his deck he was king—at least, on the deck he had a chance of seeing death before it peered at him with its yellow, slime-covered eyeball.
He had nearly reached the house when a new sound stopped him in his tracks. A shape thrashed through the tall thistles along the driveway. Adrenaline and ephedrine together surged in Harvey’s veins, making his hands tremble like grass in the breeze.
But even as he pulled the eetee gun from his waistband and clutched at his rifle with his other hand, he saw that what rustled onto the driveway was not an eetee. It was not even a demented coyote come to grin mockingly at him and then zigzag wildly away into the fields, tongue flapping, while Harvey tried in vain to ventilate its diseased hide.
“Fred!” Harvey whispered in horror. Fred dropped what he was carrying and wagged his tail.
Dust, burrs, and thistledown clung to Fred’s copper-colored rump, and he smelled like rotten raw chicken. As he approached Harvey, his tail-wagging increased in frequency and amplitude until his entire hind end swung rapidly from side to side. Fred tried to nose Harvey’s hand, but Harvey shoved him away with the point of the rifle.
The swellings and bare patches in the fur were unmistakable. The biggest swelling rose at the base of Fred’s skull.
Just like the coyotes.
Eetee cancer, Harvey called it. Ben said that was just more of Harvey’s paranoia. No other spotters had seen it.
But their posts—the ones still manned, anyway—lay miles further from the shipwreck.
Harvey had only one choice. It was pure self-defense.
Fred lay down and smacked his tail on the ground. His eyes pleaded as if he knew what Harvey intended. But Harvey remembered the coyotes and their g
leeful eetee hunts, and he hardened his thoughts as if pummeled by stormy weather. He slipped off the safety. His finger tightened on the trigger—
Footsteps rasped behind him. He spun and found himself staring into the short, ugly red bore of another eetee gun.
“Don’t you dare shoot Fred, you fuck,” Susan hissed.
Oh, Harvey, stupid, stupid—the video monitors on the deck—Ben must have given her a gun, knowing she would someday use it—
They stood there aiming at each other. Harvey could see in her face that this time she really would do it. She was going to splatter him over Fred, and Ben would get his way at last.
The blazing July sun heated his skull like a roast in an oven. Susan’s gun did not waver. Harvey willed himself to breathe.
Fred thwacked his tail another couple of times, then pawed playfully at Harvey’s foot. A lump pushed up suddenly in Harvey’s throat and he had to blink several times to clear his vision. In a thick voice he said, “Look at Fred, Susan! He’s sick! You don’t want us to catch it, do you? You don’t want us to get all freaky like the coyotes, do you?”
“You,” Susan said, “already have.”
Bleak inspiration came to Harvey. He forced himself to drop his rifle and eetee gun, slip the shotgun from his shoulder to the ground, raise his hands. “I could take Fred to Dr. King. Maybe she would look at him.”
“She’s not a vet and he’s not sick.”
“Yes, he is! Susan, look at those tumors!”
Her gaze did flick toward Fred, growing the slightest bit uncertain. “Abscesses.”
“Then he needs to have them cleaned. At least.”
Something broke in Susan then. Her lip trembled. She blinked. She looked at Fred. Fred crawled toward her and wagged his tail some more. Tears began to roll down Susan’s cheeks. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a wave of sympathy rushed through Harvey. He had loved Fred, too.
“What do we have,” Susan said in despair, “what do we have that she would take in trade?”
And there it was: the first acknowledgement in months that their world had changed forever. Harvey’s hands were shaking again, but he managed to gesture at the garage. Susan looked at him askance, then, gun still trained on Harvey, backed toward it. Harvey followed, though he hated leaving his guns behind. Fred lay beside them, thumping his tail.
When Susan pulled back the tarpaulin in his pickup bed, she gasped and jerked her hand back as if bitten. “Harvey, Ben will kill you! And me, too, you asshole!” Which was probably not just a figure of speech.
Susan said, wiping at her tears with a filthy hand, “Promise me, promise me, Harvey, that you aren’t going to hurt Fred. That you won’t let her hurt him.”
“I won’t,” Harvey lied, trying again to swallow the lump in his throat. “Promise me that while I’m gone, you’ll keep watch?”
Susan said nothing, but this time Harvey felt as if she might actually do it. Donning his raincoat and gloves and now rubber waders as well, Harvey took Fred’s collar out into the yard to buckle it around the dog’s neck. As he urged Fred into the back of the pickup and chained him there, Fred tried to lick him in the face. Up close, the stench of carrion was enough to make Harvey gag.
Two presents for Dr. King, just sitting in the back of his pickup for anyone to discover. What risks he was taking today! Harvey had survived this long by trusting his fears and keeping a close eye on the weather. By being infinitely careful. Today he was throwing all caution to the winds.
But he couldn’t afford to nod off the way he had this morning. He needed Dr. King’s little pills. And he couldn’t let Susan keep Fred here.
Harvey wondered whether on his return he should just shoot Susan before she learned he’d had Fred put down. She would try to kill him again when she found out.
He didn’t want to shoot her.
Maybe, he thought, looking at the happily panting Fred, just maybe he would turn out to be wrong about Fred’s tumors. Maybe Dr. King would tell him they weren’t contagious. The coyotes’ fur had grown back, after all, and most of the swellings had vanished.
Or maybe that notion was just Fred trying, the way the coyotes did, to control Harvey’s thoughts.
One last task before departing: Harvey picked up the thing Fred had brought home. He dropped it in his Weber. Up close, the lump of rotting eetee flesh looked like raw hamburger, had the consistency of custard, and smelled like the bottom of a Dumpster. Golden retrievers had such delicate mouths; Fred hadn’t left so much as a tooth mark in it.
Sweltering in his raincoat and waders, Harvey poured on the gasoline provided by the sheriff’s office. As he dropped in the match, and flames sheeted up from the charcoal bed, Fred began to bark in agitation. So he did not hear Susan’s shouts until she rushed up to him waving the Nikons. “Look, Harvey! Look!”
He dropped the lid on the grill to char Fred’s little present to a cinder. Then he pulled off his befouled rubber gloves, took the binocs, and peered in the direction she pointed.
The highway had been dust-blown and empty for a year. Now, vehicles climbed over a rise three miles away, popping into view one after the other like an endless chain of ants: trucks, fuel tankers, humvees, and Bradleys carrying helmeted men and women. The convoy ground steadily along, heading toward Lewisville.
Susan said, almost sobbing, “It’s the Army. Oh, God, Harvey, they’ve come to save us at last.”
“Save us?” Harvey said. “What Army?”
2.
Colonel Jason Fikes could see right away that something was fishy about the town. Since the liberation of Earth he had been traveling what was left of America—the devastated cities, the suburban wastelands dotted with grim encampments of refugees, the endless reaches of fallow farmland. The trip from Spokane, chasing the rumor of another downed ship, had been no different. They had passed mile after mile of fields grown up into weeds. At scattered houses and small towns, women stooped in gardens and men, shotguns in hand, sullenly eyed the convoy. Or sometimes they ran after the convoy, begging for gasoline, for medicine, for food, for rescue.
The locals’ plight ought to have grown more desperate the closer he got to the mountains and the starship. Fikes had seen the classified reports from Yosemite: starving refugees reduced to eating eetees, then each other.
But when the convoy came over a rise and Lewisville itself came into view, everything changed. Weeds gave way to neat furrows of golden wheat. Cattle grazed along the streamside meadows. And in the town itself, healthy children clustered in front of well-kept houses, staring at the convoy until adults rushed to herd them inside. Yes, most of the lawns had been dug into gardens, and only a handful of vehicles seemed to be working, and the grass in front of the county courthouse was dry and yellow now; but it had been mowed.
You could suppose they had carefully rationed supplies since the war, that they had their own hydro dam or windmill farm. Or you could glance eastward to that mile-long wreck atop the ridge, and you could draw another conclusion.
“They’ve been scavenging,” said young Lieutenant Briggs beside him, eager as a preacher pouncing upon evidence of fornication. “We’ll have to search house-to-house.”
Briggs had not seen the Yosemite reports and did not yet know the enormity of their orders. Fikes nodded wearily. “They’ll try to hide as much as they can.”
During the approach to Lewisville he had spotted a feral cat crouched in the roadside weeds, a pair of crows pecking at a dead owl. But no eetees had showed themselves. On this brilliant summer morning, the distant shipwreck looked no more menacing than a junked car. In Fikes’s experience, though, the eetees didn’t surrender and they didn’t admit defeat. If even a single one had survived, sooner or later it would test his soldiers. Still, they would have to wait on more urgent tasks.
Fikes gave the order to halt in front of the courthouse. There waited a knot of local men bedecked wit
h an arsenal of rifles, shotguns, and semi-automatic small arms. Neatly dressed and clean-shaven, they looked like Norman Rockwell banditos who’d just staged their own revolution.
Or rather, Norman Rockwell meets the Sci-Fi Channel: half of them bore red splatterguns. Eetee weapons. That would make Briggs happy. A weight descended onto Fikes’s shoulders.
As Fikes climbed out of his humvee, one of the locals stepped forward. This was a lean man in a sheriff’s khaki uniform and badge, with cowboy boots, a straw cowboy hat, and mirror shades to complete the ensemble. The only weapon the sheriff carried in plain view was a holstered .45.
“Howdy, folks,” he drawled. “Welcome to Lewisville. I’m Ben Gundersen, Lewis County sheriff.”
Fikes held out his hand. “Colonel Fikes,” he said. “U.S. Army.”
Sheriff Gundersen put out his own hand, and the two of them shook. “What brings you fellows to Lewisville?”
Under the circumstances, the question was an odd one. Fikes said, “Your community is in proximity to a downed enemy vessel, Mr. Gundersen. Assessing that threat and mounting an appropriate response is our immediate priority. But our long-term mission is to restore services and connect you to the outside world again.”
“No offense,” said the sheriff, “but with all the satellites gone, we haven’t heard much news since last summer. Who’s the U.S. Army taking orders from these days?”
“The President has installed a Provisional Congress until new elections can be held,” Fikes said. “Meanwhile, the Army is authorized under the Public Safety Act to take charge here.”
“You’re talking about the U.S. President. The U.S. Congress.”
“That’s right,” said Fikes.
One of the other banditos called out, smirking, “Didn’t they nuke Washington? I thought that was one good thing come out of all this.”
“Yes,” Fikes said. “Washington was destroyed. Now, may I ask if you have spotted survivors from the wreck? Has your town come under attack?”