V_The 2nd Generation

by Kenneth Johnson

  On the smoking debris field that surrounded the exploded shuttle, the few Resistance fighters who had survived were helping each other to their feet. Margarita and Nathan, soaked with sweat and spattered with blood, were struggling to rise. Margarita surveyed the devastation, the destroyed and burning shuttle, the body parts and entrails that lay everywhere. She looked at the wounded with an aching heart, then she saw another squad of heavily armed Patrollers coming and she shouted to her remaining people, "North! Go north! Go underground!"

  Nathan saw one of the airborne Air-Pats dodging fire from Ruby and returning pulse bursts toward the burned-out car. He shouted, "Ruby! Dammit," and dashed off toward her.

  Hearing the girl's name, Margarita looked back and fleetingly saw Nathan running through the blowing smoke. Then one of the bloodied freedom fighters caught her sleeve shouting, "Come on, Margarita! You're right, the only way out is north."

  Margarita looked back again but Nathan had disappeared into the dense smoke.

  THE TAXI HAD CARRIED EMMA AND THE ELGINS HALFWAY ACROSS THE Bay Bridge. It was only after Emma agreed to pay the driver extra that he turned off onto Yerba Buena Island, which gave access to the man-made Treasure Island Naval Reservation.

  With no water left in the bay, the four-hundred-acre island was now a mesa that rose in isolation above the dry bay valley. Over the last twenty years it had gone to seed and become a haven for squatters and indigents who were routinely rounded up by the Visitors and "relocated" to the storage capsules.

  Amid the falling-down wood-frame structures one old steel edifice loomed over all the rest. It was a truly gigantic hangar designed to house blimps. Long out of use, it had several low maintenance buildings attached to it that were in frightful disrepair.

  Inside one of those structures Emma, Mary, and Charles hurried along pushing a secondhand gurney with a rattling wheel that bore the weakening Charlotte. Emma cringed in disgust at the smell of urine that permeated the ratty hallway. Dimly lit by dusty, broken, or flickering fixtures, the walls, with their paint blistered or peeling, looked leprous. As they hurried down the dismal corridor they passed shuffling patients in street clothes or mismatched hospital gowns. Some were merely slouched against the wall. The patients outnumbered the beleaguered medical staff to a far greater extent than at a normal hospital.

  The hospice doctor attending Charlotte was a thin woman in her fifties with gray streaks in her light brown hair and a careworn look in her tired eyes. "We do what we can," she was telling the Elgins and Emma. "We don't have much equipment or meds, but we're really the only place that scientists can go."

  She guided them across the uneven floor into a makeshift E.R. with battered cabinets and sparse supplies stacked haphazardly. A half-breed male nurse who looked exhausted rose to help.

  Emma stayed near the door, but Mary was at her daughter's side, holding Charlotte's slender hand. "Charlotte honey, hang on. It's going to be okay now."

  The tired doctor saw that the nurse was already about his business. "Good, Charlie, you get her hooked up. Start a drip. I'll try to find some diatome."

  As the nurse searched for a vein on Charlotte's frail arm Charles also leaned close to his daughter as Mary repeated, "It's going to be okay."

  Charlotte was exceedingly weak, but still managed a faint smile, though her breath was short and her voice halting. "I know it will be, Momma . . ." The teenager was genuinely more concerned about her parents than herself as the light in her eyes grew dimmer. "Just don't lose hope or . . ." Her shaved head lolled limply to one side.

  Charles reached in and cupped her head with both hands. "Charlotte . . . Charlotte!"

  Mary was frantic. "Oh, please God! Charlotte!"

  The doctor stepped quickly in and injected the girl as the nurse dropped the IV gear and started urgent CPR heart massage.

  Charles saw an old defibrillator unit in the corner and grabbed the paddles from it. "Here! Use these! Quickly!"

  The doctor had clapped an oxygen mask over the girl's nose and mouth as she said to Charles, "It's broken." She was seeking a pulse on Charlotte's willowy neck.

  "Please, please," Mary was crying.

  But after a moment the physician sighed and touched the nurse for him to cease his CPR efforts.

  Mary grew frantic. "No, no—NO! Charlotte!" Mary was not about to give up. She pumped her hands desperately on her daughter's shallow chest. "Charlotte! Please! Come on!"

  After several moments Charles reached slowly from behind Mary and gently tried to enfold his distraught wife in his arms, but she pulled away, disconsolate. Mary collapsed across her daughter's chest, sobbing inconsolably. Charles stood by feeling helpless, numb, empty.

  The doctor and nurse quietly left the room to see to their living patients. They passed by Emma, who hadn't moved from beside the scuffed and dented doorway. When Charlotte died Emma had felt a sudden, subtle, but very physical change in the shabby room. It was an abrupt vacancy, as though the very air had somehow become thinner. The only sounds now were the choked sobs of the grieving mother.

  Emma slowly eased out the doorway to give them privacy. Turning into the rancid corridor she found herself looking toward a matching doorway on the opposite wall. She could see that the room inside it wasn't small. And she heard a strange low sound coming from it, a soft dissonant chorus of human moans. Curiosity compelled her forward. She pulled her sable coat closer around her throat and as she stepped through the doorway the room opened out breathtakingly around and above her.

  It was the inside of the blimp hangar. Shadowy and vast, it was at least three hundred feet tall, equally wide, and twice that length. It was the largest interior space Emma had ever stood within. There were pools of light from an eclectic collection of floor lamps scattered into the dim distance.

  Between the mismatched lamps in dozens upon dozens of uneven rows were beds, metal bunks, cots, and wooden pallets of sick or dying people who very much needed a real hospital. It called to Emma's mind pictures she had seen of disaster victims who had become refugees and been crowded onto the floor of some domed sports stadium. But this forbidding place was much darker and more crowded. Emma walked slowly among the patients. She saw that hospital gowns were scarce, most of the patients wore their own clothes and far more than half of the beds had no sheets, but only a single meager blanket if anything at all. Some beds were mere frames with no mattresses. The sour, pungent smells of bodily fluids, vomit, and excrement combined with medicinal scents and the stale, humid breath of the unwell.

  Emma looked at those individuals nearest her. She looked at the withered, drawn, perspiring face of one young man who seemed to be fighting severe abdominal pain; at a beautiful thirty-year-old Latina with dark, sunken eyes and a festering pustule on her cheek who vomited a small amount of dark blood into a used paper cup.

  Emma looked up from the woman. The suffering people multiplied and expanded to the extent of her vision on all sides. She realized there was only a very small handful of nurses and doctors attending to the multitude. The labored breathing and groans of the ill and injured intermingled to create the low inharmonious hum that lay like an invisible, undulating carpet over them all. The effect was smothering.

  It added to the increasing emotional weight that Emma had felt pressing down upon her since entering the cavernous space. She realized what she was feeling was shame. She felt like a latter-day Scarlett O'Hara, who had always been egocentric and utterly self-absorbed in her own privileged world, until she suddenly discovered the thousands of wounded Civil War soldiers spread across the enormous train yard in Atlanta. The war, with all of its unspeakable horrors, suddenly became grievously tangible and undeniable because she was looking into the very face of it.

  Emma, the blithe young singer, the popular star, the Player, the engaging spokeswoman for her alien friends, was now confronting a very different side of The Visitor Way.

  She felt a wispy touch on her leg. She looked down at a very small blond boy who lay on a bare, st
ained mattress. His fingertips were brushing the soft luxurious black fur of her sable coat. His angelic face was fevered, damp with perspiration. The child's exhausted eyes stared up into Emma's.

  SHE FOUND HERSELF WALKING BLINDLY ALONG THE DARK AND DIRTY street outside the blimp hangar. She passed a few scruffy people who were gathered around a fire in a rusted oil drum, but she barely noticed them or the trash blowing in the street or the empty morphalyne packages and used syringes in the gutter. She'd been stunned into a trancelike numbness by the multitude of sick and dying people she had seen in the huge hangar. When the taxi had not been waiting she had just begun to walk. As she came upon an intersection, red and blue flashing lights began to play rhythmically across her face.

  Emma slowed, becoming aware of the emergency lights and the raspy squawk from police radios. She was passing an ugly auto accident. There was twisted metal and bodies covered with rubber sheets. Businesslike SFPD officers and paramedics were exchanging information. Then she noticed a Visitor Patroller near one crashed car as he bent to pick up something flesh-colored. He glanced around cautiously, didn't notice Emma, and seemed content that he was unobserved. He slipped into an alley.

  Emma inched forward and carefully peered into the alley. The Patroller was unaware that she was watching him as he examined what Emma realized was a severed human finger. The Patroller smiled. Emma watched him open his mouth and swallow it whole.

  IN THE RESISTANCE WAREHOUSE ALL THE LOOSE EQUIPMENT HAD been gathered and secured within the trucks ready for speedy departure at a moment's notice. It was a precaution they always took when there was the slightest possibility that their current location might have been compromised. Gary, Street-C, Blue, and others had been called in to help. Everyone's nerves were tightly wound as they awaited word. Ysabel looked over her half-glasses at Julie, whom she saw was particularly restive. With Blue's help, Julie was at one of the medical trucks taking out some of their first aid supplies, to be handy in case there were injuries incoming from Hunter's Point. Ysabel knew that the lack of contact from Margarita down there was eating into Julie. Ysabel poured them both a cup of tea and took one to Julie, who started slightly. "Oh. Thanks, Ysie."

  The older woman was looking around for a way to distract her beloved leader when her eyes fell upon Mike Donovan who was frowning with an introspective expression as he lay on his cot across the room.

  Ysabel sipped her own tea. "Was it just me or did he seem to react funny when he heard that the Great Purge was in '99?"

  Julie blew across the vapory surface of the hot tea as she nodded slowly. "Yeah. I saw it, too."

  "We always wondered who could've given Diana so much detailed information about the Resistance."

  Blue had paused in his work to listen and said to them, "He must've been captured in the London Uprising back in '91."

  "Yeah"—Julie gazed at Mike trying to imagine—"if he was the one that gave them information . . ." She couldn't finish the thought, but Ysabel did.

  "Then he must've gone through eight years of Diana's torture before he caved."

  At the mention of torture, Blue instantly felt a surge of electrical discomfort originate deep in his groin. It spread upward through his bowels with a searing, high-voltage intensity. It was his invariable reaction to seeing someone injured or particularly to thoughts of torture. That was the one part of being a Christian that unnerved him; the thought of the torments Jesus had undergone on Golgotha. He knew that day had actually happened; that so many other days of hideous agonies had been visited upon so many innocents, like the young girls forced to undergo the pain of female circumcision. Such horrors always made him queasy and tightened his stomach. He would break out in a cold sweat as though all of the air conditioners in the world had suddenly been turned on. Though Blue was a big sturdy man and physically quite strong, the prospect of torture and the horrifying pain he imagined from it turned his innards watery.

  Julie's eyes grew distant as she tried to fathom the unspeakable experience Mike must have undergone. "What he must have suffered through."

  "And if they got him on morphalyne"—Ysabel shook her head; she had been studying Mike—"once they got him hooked he might not even know he told them."

  "But if he suspects he did," Julie was trying to envision Mike's feelings, "can you imagine the burden of guilt he's carrying?"

  The three of them looked at the fallen hero, lying immobilized in the shadowy warehouse. Then Julie's cell rang and she grabbed it quickly. "Yes! Lexington Base."

  Emma was leaning against one of the dingy brick buildings on Treasure Island. The police emergency lights still flashed on her from the accident scene down the street. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, her breathing was shallow. Her nerves were raw, her voice shaky, but resolute. "Juliet . . . It's Emma."

  In the headquarters, Gary gravitated to where Ysabel was watching Julie listen carefully to her phone. Then Julie drew a large breath in reaction to something she heard. She nodded, saying into the phone, "Yes. I understand. We'll be in touch. And, Emma . . . please be careful." She clicked off the phone as she looked at Ysabel and Gary. "Emma is with us."

  "Good," Ysabel said. But she could see Julie's extremely serious expression, her reaction to something else Emma had just told her.

  Gary also recognized there was more. He inclined his head toward Julie. "And what's the bad news . . . ?"

  Julie drew a breath. "She says the Visitor Leader is coming."

  "Holy Mother of God." Ysabel's voice was low, dumbfounded. "What does that mean?"

  "Maybe a special treat?" Gary offered. "Like . . . Armageddon?"

  Street-C was coming from a back room and had overheard Gary. "Looks like it's already started." Then they saw what he referred to: Margarita and several combatants were straggling in, badly battered from their losing battle.

  Julie, Ysabel, and the others hurried to bring them first aid. From his cot in the makeshift infirmary corner, Mike watched with a grim, world-weary expression as the injured were brought in around him.

  Margarita took Julie aside. The grimy, scraped, and bloodied redhead was out of breath and quaking with nervous distress, "Oh, Julie, I handled it terribly. Lots of casualties. Nathan and Ruby are missing."

  Julie blanched. "Ruby was there!"

  "Nathan went after her, but I lost them. A whole shuttle full of our people got blown up. It was"—she was fighting tears of anger and guilt for losing the battle—"oh, God, Julie. This is all a nightmare. I think the bastards really are unbeatable."

  A man's voice called to them, "Maybe not."

  They looked toward the doorway and saw Nathan standing in it. He was as filthy and bloodied as Margarita, but suffused with a peculiarly optimistic spirit. He looked at Julie. "First off: nobody could've done better than Red. Second: I think Ruby escaped. Thirdly: I didn't. The lizards had my sorry ass big time. But I got rescued by a very interesting trio."

  He stepped in and motioned to those still outside the doorway. The three with the shiny skin and the strangely colored eyes entered. They examined the Resistance gathering and glanced around to take stock of the room. Julie and all the others sensed that an unsettling new presence had arrived among them.

  Julie immediately noticed that the newcomers were slightly wounded, but Street-C's eyes went wide as he pointed at Bryke. "Whoa, hang on. If that's her blood how come it's yellow?"

  Gary had seen that Ayden's blood seemed to be thick and white.

  Ysabel was stunned by something else unearthly and instinctively crossed herself. "Madre Mia! Look at their eyes."

  Nathan smiled. "Yeah, we'll get to all that. But first may I present for your approval, Ayden, Kayta, and Bryke." The Resistance gang all studied the three with wary uncertainty. Then Nathan looked again at Julie. "Remember that distress call you sent out twenty years ago?" He grinned broadly. "Well, guess what: they got it."

  15

  MARGARITA AND ALL THE OTHERS WERE THUNDERSTRUCK. THEY stared at the three mysterious and clea
rly powerful aliens. Julie saw that Ayden was looking at her specifically and she asked, "You've come to help us?"

  He nodded. "To try."

  "Awright!" Street-C pumped his fist. "Now that's some good news!"

  Margarita was still eyeing them warily. "Let's hope so."

  Julie beckoned them toward the infirmary. "But you're injured . . . Please . . ." She guided Ayden to a chair where he removed his bomber jacket and pushed back the sleeve of his gray turtleneck, revealing the cut on his arm.

  Kayta opened a small med kit she carried as Robert edged nearer, his dark eyes studying the thick, milky liquid on Ayden's arm. Blue also looked at it and said the obvious, "That . . . don't look like blood." He glanced questioningly toward Robert, aware of his expertise in anthropology.

  Robert explained, "They've obviously evolved differently from us."

  "Yeah"—Nathan grinned knowledgeably—"from insects."

  "Insects?" Street-C stepped back. "No fuckin' way!"

  Even Robert's eyes had widened. "Are you serious?!"

  Nathan nodded. "Their race is called the Zedti."

  Margarita came closer. "I'm Margarita and this is—"

  "Ysabel, yes, we know," Kayta said, adding with a hint of apology, "We have listened." Her soft violet eyes met Margarita's, then she sensed something else and her gaze drifted toward Mike Donovan who was watching from his cot on the periphery.

  To all of the Resistance team, Kayta seemed less aloof than either steely-eyed Ayden or silent Bryke. Ayden addressed Julie as Kayta tended his wound. "We know that you are the eye of this hurricane, Dr. Parish, the one who sent the distress call. We three are each different species. Our communicator Kayta is a physician and a sensitive. Particularly to pheromones."

  "They shot a blob of pheromone goop onto our car," Nathan explained, "Kayta sniffed it out. Tracked us here. Ayden's sort of like a Samurai knight with a built-in sword and—"