by Neil Clarke
And now, wriggling up from the dark depths of her psyche, came this self-destructive impulse to prove herself to Ben. To the town. To prove she was useful in this new caveman world of fear and guns, and not just in the sad, lost world of civilization, where she had known she was Ben’s superior.
Had Ben known she would feel such an impulse? Had he known she would be more afraid of the strange cavemen, the Army soldiers, than the cavemen she knew?
Fear, manipulation, and mind control. Good old Ben. Once she had admired that will toward dominance.
Then, James said, “Maybe you’re afraid you won’t measure up.” Reading her mind, too—he was her twin, after all.
Strange how knowing what was in someone else’s mind ought to give you empathy for that person. Instead it seemed as if only the weak could sustain empathy. The strong couldn’t resist the temptation to use their knowledge to get what they wanted.
Defeated by James and Ben, by her own attitude, Alexandra said, “All right. Tell me what you want me to do.”
And so that afternoon, clad in a clingy flowered sundress and straw hat, her long blond hair spilling over her shoulders, Alexandra walked up to a pair of beefy soldiers and smiled. “Excuse me? Officers? I wonder if I could get into the warehouse.”
One of the soldiers swiveled his head toward her, so she could see her reflection in his sunglasses. She still looked pretty damn good. The soldiers’ guns turned her stomach queasy and her hands cold, but, she told herself firmly, what was in their minds mattered more.
“We’re not officers, ma’am—” the soldier began, politely.
“Oh!” she said. “Of course! How silly of me! You’re not the police!”
“—but no,” he went on, “we can’t let you into the warehouses.”
“But you see,” she said, “I rent space in one. For some of my overflow.” He was staring politely but blankly at her. “I own a bookstore, you see? The only one in town. And your colonel, Mr. Fikes, came in today and we started talking about Lewis and Clark, and whether they should be admired as brave explorers, or whether they were just the vanguard of genocide and colonial oppression, and he asked for a book about them.”
She smiled again at them. Their body language was changing subtly but unmistakably: shoulders relaxing, faces turning towards her. Excitement mixed with terror rose in her. They were falling for it . . .
“I recommended Undaunted Courage to start with, but, as you can imagine, it’s a popular book around here, at least since there hasn’t been any TV. I didn’t have any copies left in the store, but I know there are some out here in the warehouse. So I came out here to pick up a copy for the colonel. You can check with him if you like.”
Part of her still hoped the soldiers would send her away, and she would be able to tell James she had done her best. But she was also fiercely willing them to submit.
He nodded. “All right, Ms.—?”
“Alexandra Hanover,” she said, using her maiden name.
“I’ll have to accompany you.”
“Oh, that’s fine!” she said, and smiled her most glorious smile at him. And she followed him across the parking lot between the tanker trucks, and through the big roll-up door.
The space inside was cavernous, dark and cool. The soldiers had shoved aside quite a few of the pallets and shelving units to make room for their equipment, and the smells of diesel oil and sweat mingled with the older dusty scent of dried peas. The guard accompanying her paused to explain their mission to a man leaning over a trestle table—probably a genuine officer.
The man at the table looked her up and down with a hard, suspicious stare, but Alexandra smiled at him, too, with just the right mixture of hopeful inquiry, submission to his authority, and winning, wholesome cheerfulness. (Oh, it was going to work. All those years with Ben had been good for something after all.) Then he, too, nodded.
She and her guard threaded their way around pallets laden with sacks of dried peas, heading toward the back of the warehouse. The shelving units that she rented stood against the wall at the back, next to a locked metal door that led outside.
Next came a part that depended on her own physical quickness, something she had never had to rely upon before. But excitement propelled her now. She no longer wanted to turn back.
“Could you help me?” she asked the guard. “I have a bad back.” The guard glanced at her. She pointed. He still wore his sunglasses, so he wouldn’t be able to see the nervous tremor in her hands. “It’s in that box there, on the second shelf.”
He bent over, reaching for the box. Alexandra opened her purse and took out the vet’s tranquilizer dart that James had given her. The guard started to pull the box off the shelf. She reached over and stabbed his neck with the dart.
“Hey!” he yelled, turning swiftly toward her. She backed up, but before he could take a single step, his knees buckled and he pitched face forward onto the concrete floor.
That looked as if it hurt. But she could not help smiling. She had done it!
She reached in her purse again and took out the key that James had given her, doubtless Reggie Forrester’s. She slid back the deadbolts and opened the door.
The gravel lane behind the warehouse was deserted except for a skittering stray cat. For a moment she thought the soldiers must already have arrested Ben’s deputies. Then behind her, inside the warehouse, a commotion erupted: people yelling, booted feet clomping at a run across concrete.
And then brother James rose out of the brush on the far side of the lane and ran toward the back door. A line of Lewisville deputies followed him. Two tremendous explosions detonated at the front of the warehouse, one right after the other. A blast of heat and smoke and a rain of debris rattled across the interior of the warehouse. Alexandra jumped outside through the doorway.
Alexandra thought: People were being shot, even killed. She had helped it happen. It was a betrayal of everything she thought she stood for. Why was she so excited?
But then, at that same moment, moving so unbelievably fast that she barely had time to register what happened, a dark shape roared across the sky, shrank into a distant speck. Another deafening explosion—
The deputies all ducked belatedly. “Raid! Raid! Eetees!” James shouted. Now gunfire and screams echoed from inside the warehouse.
Then a band of eetees, all thin heads and long froggy legs, came around the corner of the warehouse and started shooting.
She had never seen them in the flesh. They weren’t supposed to come out in daylight! Terrified, she flung herself back inside, crawled away among the pallets into the darkest corner she could find, and wedged herself behind a row of fiberboard barrels, arms over her head. Smoke filled her nose and mouth. Explosions echoed through the warehouse, more yelling and screaming, the crash of metal shelves overturning.
Then she heard a sound right nearby.
She looked up. One of the aliens squatted atop a stack of barrels. It apparently hadn’t seen her yet. It gazed out from its high vantage point into the chaos of the warehouse. The alien wasn’t any larger, really, than a Great Dane or a teenage boy. It had long legs and arms and wore some kind of glistening translucent all-over covering like a wetsuit, and its taloned glove held a long-barreled red pistol. It smelled like slightly rancid raw chicken. Alexandra looked at its narrow chest for one of those red whorled pendants James had once shown her, carried by the high-ranking eetees, that could paralyze this entire warehouse full of men. She did not see one.
She must have made a sound—whimpered, perhaps—because the eetee turned and glanced down at her. Its narrow face was unreadable behind the slimy protective sac. Its pistol was aimed at her negligently, as if she were no threat at all, but she really did not like guns.
As angry as if it were Ben, Alexandra threw her weight into the stack of barrels. The eetee toppled to the floor along with all the rolling, tumbling sections
of its unstable perch. The pistol flew from its hand, fell and struck Alexandra’s hip. Her first instinctive reaction was to bat the horrible object away from her; then, fumbling, she grabbed for it and caught the wrong end.
The eetee scrabbled to its feet, heaving barrels aside. Alexandra reoriented the pistol with two clumsy, shaking hands, and took aim. She clearly did not inspire fear: Instead of ducking behind a barrel or throwing itself to one side, the eetee fixed Alexandra with its egg-yolk gaze.
Icy blackness swept her mind, it stopped her breath and froze her limbs—
But the eetee didn’t, it surely . . .
The overwhelming weight of her terror crushed the half-finished thought toward nothingness, and all that Alexandra could grab hold of was her desperate rage. She was so tired of being on the sidelines, the one not in control. She realized she had squeezed her eyes shut. She forced herself to open them. There was no blackness except on the backs of her eyelids.
Mind control she understood.
She pressed the button on the red pistol and the eetee exploded, showering the wall above her with great gobs and ropy drips of what looked like snot.
“Take that, Ben,” she whispered.
Civilization is a wonderful thing, but survival trumps it every time.
Then a human soldier, a black woman, pushed through the barrels toward her to offer a hand. “The warehouse is burning! Come on!”
The soldier took the red pistol from Alexandra’s now nerveless hands and tugged her through an obstacle course of tumbled communications equipment, pooled blood, dead human and alien bodies, and furiously burning sacks of dried peas. At last they burst onto the smoke-filled parking lot. The remains of the Army’s fuel trucks still blazed brightly. Soldiers pushed her down behind a tank.
“This the one who let the militia in?” one of them said.
“She splattered the froggy with the fearmonger,” her rescuer told them. “Lucky for you.”
But there had been no fearmonger.
As the flood of paralytic terror receded, dragging cold shakiness in its wake, Alexandra’s last thought but one rose back into sight. The eetee hadn’t carried a fear gun. It hadn’t needed one to shoot her full of abject terror.
Noise and commotion went on for a long time after that: the burning diesel, eetee aircraft sweeping overhead, explosions, missiles screaming into the sky, shouts, rattling gunfire. Alexandra knew Ben’s plan had gone entirely wrong, and she was, plainly and simply, screwed. Ben and his deputies were even more screwed, if they weren’t already dead. Now Lewisville really would suffer a military occupation. They would all be herded into camps.
Still, right at the moment she felt like God looking down on creation. She had killed an eetee.
Her brain could not leave alone the image of that clouded alien face at the moment she had pressed the trigger.
All this time she’d been hearing about Ben and his deputies—so brave to venture out, over and over, against such a terrible weapon—and it turned out there was no such thing as a fear gun.
The red pendants must be just some kind of officer’s insignia. It said you were authorized, you had the ability or the training to wield terror. But as for the fear itself—
It all begins and ends in the mind.
7.
Fred crossed the dry, thistly lawn and stopped in front of the old brick building with the flagpoles that Harvey would never let him piss on. In hot weather the children stayed away and the building usually sat empty, but now the strangers had brought grownup people there. Fred hoped Harvey might be one of them.
Fred dropped his burden to sample the air for Harvey’s scent. The air was still heavy with the acrid taste of yesterday’s conflagration. He reared on hind legs to put his nose to the windows. No one had opened the mesh coverings, but the sashes had been raised so he could smell all the guests packed inside. There were even more than at the big barbecues Harvey and Susan used to hold. The people were not enjoying this party, though. Many stood in line in front of a table. The rest sat around on cots or folded blankets, glum, angry, or fearful.
Fred recognized some of the people. Mister Mayor drifted along the line of people, talking. Fred could tell that Mister Mayor felt glum and fearful, too, but he soothed the others with his warm smooth voice that had always reminded Fred of cow fat.
At the table at the head of the line sat the woman vet who had kept Fred tied up in the cold hard room. With her was the otherwise nice man who had helped with the big, long, nasty needle. Now the vet-woman had a lot more needles with her, and the nice man—as well as some of the strangers—were helping her, sticking needles in each person and writing things down.
Near the table Fred noticed Alexandra, who had stopped coming out to Harvey’s a long time ago. Alexandra hadn’t liked Fred’s nose, even when he’d sniffed her crotch in the friendliest way. Alexandra had already gone through the line and now she was smiling and being friendly to some of the strangers.
Ben was not talking to the strangers or to Alexandra. Ben had a leash between his feet and hands and he could only shuffle along. Several strangers led him forward to get stuck with a needle. Fred hoped Ben would be okay. The night before, he had smelled Ben, angry and afraid, through a basement window in the building with the big statue.
At last, in the far corner, Fred located Susan, and nearby, Harvey. Harvey sat on a cot and stared miserably at the wall.
Fred remembered the old days when he and Harvey had romped for hours in the cool of the evening, when the two of them had been joyously happy together. Then Harvey had grown afraid: so afraid of the world and of Fred, he thought he should kill Fred, even though he didn’t want to.
Fred so much wanted Harvey and Susan to be happy again. When Harvey got the present Fred was trying to give him, he would quit being so miserable and alone. He would know that he didn’t have to be afraid of Fred.
Fred picked up the present in his jaws again and loped around the corner of the brick building. A couple of the strangers’ trucks pulled out of the driveway. Their occupants paid no attention to him.
Toward the back of the brick building it was cooler and shady. A cat turd lay under a bush. For a moment, he thrust his nose against it, intrigued. Then he recalled his mission. He would not be able to go home if he failed, not while Harvey and the vet-woman wanted to kill him.
He continued to the back door of the place where the children used to eat. The sweet odor of old garbage lingered here, but there were also fresh smells where cans of oil, bags of potatoes, and crates of stale crackers and raisins had rested on the cement for a few moments. Most interesting was the delirious scent of raw meat. Someone had recently killed a cow.
From inside the building, Fred could smell boiling potatoes. He trotted up to the door itself. Two sweaty strangers guarded it. Fred put down the present and wagged his tail.
Hello, he said to them, in the new way he had learned.
They glanced down. “Hey, boy,” said one of the strangers. Fred wagged his tail some more and the stranger patted him on the head. The stranger liked him. Most people liked Fred.
I like you, too, Fred told him, wagging some more. Will you open the door, please?
The stranger pulled open the door. He didn’t look down as Fred picked up his present and trotted inside. It was just the way it had worked with Harvey and Susan, and at the big building that was kind of like the vet’s. The nice man hadn’t noticed he was letting Fred out. It was because he had wanted Fred to be happy, even though he was afraid Fred was sick.
None of them would be afraid of Fred anymore if they understood that Fred wasn’t sick, he had just learned to do some new things.
They would learn new things, too. They would all be happy once they understood each other. They would stop being afraid of each other, and hating each other, and trying to make each other do things. Like him, they would take off t
heir leashes and run joyously, rapturously free.
At least, that’s what he hoped they would do. But people were sometimes unaccountable.
Fred followed the scent of raw meat into a big kitchen where there was a lot of stainless steel. Men and women chopped potatoes and onions, and big pots of water steamed on the burners. More strangers with guns stood around, making sure the men and women didn’t go outside. The strangers were looking forward to the meat, too.
Don’t bother about me, Fred told them, and no one did, because they didn’t want to. It was a little sneaky, a coyote trick.
Off to one side, one of the men was spilling a bowl of stinky chopped onions into a big vat of ground-up raw meat, ruining its smell. Why don’t you stop and talk to your friend? Fred asked him, knowing, because of the new way, that it was what the man really wanted to do.
He couldn’t do this to the coyotes. They would have caught on right away. But, except for Harvey, the humans didn’t know yet that Fred was talking to them, or that he was trying to get them to do things, just for their own good. Until then he could be a little sneaky.
Fred trotted over to the vat of ground-up cow and dropped in the present he had carried all the way from the vet’s.
“Hey!” the man yelled, suddenly noticing him. “Get away from there! How’d you get in?” But he wasn’t really mad.
Fred backed away and lay down, wagging his tail. The man began mixing the pungent onions in with Fred’s present. By the grill, a woman shouted, “You almost done with that hamburger?”
Ian McDonald is an SFF writer living in Northern Ireland, just outside Belfast, by the sea. He’s a multiple-award winning writer, and his most recent writings are Luna: New Moon and Luna: Wolf Moon (Tor, Gollancz) and novella Time Was, from Tor.com. Forthcoming is Luna: Moon Rising.