July 2, 2029. Washington, D.C.
His shoes echoing in the big, dank corridor, Oliver picked up his pace. He was late, and he couldn’t easily explain why that was, because the truth was he’d been on the toilet, dealing with anxiety-induced diarrhea.
It was one thing to be drafted into the CIA, given the circumstances, but this—this was too much. Maybe his background made him the perfect candidate to attempt communication with this Luyten, but his disposition did not. He was not an action guy; he was a behind-the-scenes guy. He should be in Research, advising someone on how to approach the situation; he should not be approaching the situation himself. But so many of the action guys and gals were dead, and Oliver had to admit, on paper he seemed ideal for this assignment. He knew more about how to bend someone to one’s will with words and gestures, more about the use of language to gain power, than anyone alive. He just wasn’t sure how well that knowledge translated into action.
He watched the room numbers pass on the big steel doors, but it turned out that wasn’t necessary. Ariel Aardsma, his supervisor, was waiting in the doorway of the room he was looking for, her arm across the shoulders of Kai, the boy who’d talked to a Luyten. Assuming he was telling the truth.
Kai was big for a thirteen-year-old, but with a baby face, and long-lashed eyes. He was staring into the room where the Luyten was being held.
“Dr. Bowen,” Ariel said. “This is Kai.”
The boy went on staring into the room. As Oliver reached them, he peered inside the room as well.
The Luyten was unconscious in its cell. It was mustard yellow, its body housed in a thick, ornately ridged exoskeleton. Doctors had sealed the massive wound, injected binders to facilitate healing. Oliver eyed the stump, trying to imagine what it had looked like when the soldiers went under the church to get it. They’d said that after losing the limb in the crash, the thing had sutured the gaping wound closed with electrical wiring it pilfered from an air-conditioning unit under there.
Being so close to it was unnerving.
“Kai has been very helpful,” Ariel said. “We’ve had a good talk with him.”
Oliver had watched the interview remotely the day before. Incredible as it was, the boy’s story checked out in every detail. The woman’s corpse in the bus repair depot, the key under the flagstone, the hidden cache of food, his intimate knowledge of the local woman’s relationship with her daughter; all of it had checked out.
Beyond the facts, Kai looked scared to death. He kept swallowing, and he was blinking rapidly, his hands dangling limply at his sides. This was not a kid who craved the attention that came with making wild claims about telepathic conversations with Luyten. Under ordinary circumstances Oliver would have been repulsed by the idea of subjecting this child to any more close contact with the Luyten, but these circumstances were as far from ordinary as they got.
Ariel led them into the room, closer to the Luyten. Kai was staring at it like it might leap from the cell and tear him apart at any moment.
“It can’t reach us. Don’t worry.” It had to have been a kid. Oliver was clueless when it came to kids. He didn’t know how to talk to them, was uncomfortable in their presence. When his sister visited with her children, Oliver always found urgent work he needed to do.
“Well,” Ariel said, “I’ll leave you to it.”
Evidently Kai shared Oliver’s wish that Ariel stay, because he watched her leave with an expression bordering on panic. Ariel and others would be monitoring remotely, but Oliver was on his own when it came to getting Kai to relax.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Oliver gestured toward a chair.
Kai sat on the edge of the chair like a kid in the principal’s office. The room didn’t help things; it was bland and oppressive, windowless, nothing on the walls but an American flag in a wooden frame, and the ubiquitous population tracker, doggedly ticking back the dwindling world population.
“So it looks like we’re going to be working together.”
Kai swallowed, nodded.
“Maybe we should discuss procedure and strategies?” When Kai didn’t respond, Oliver forged ahead. “Here’s what I think might work best: Once the prisoner regains consciousness, repeat anything it says to you out loud. This way we won’t have to rely on your memory later. It’s important that you repeat word for word…” The boy was looking past Oliver, his lips forming a tight O.
Oliver looked over his shoulder. The Luyten’s eyes were open. It was watching them.
“Is it speaking to you?”
Kai shook his head.
Oliver stood, inched closer to the Luyten. “Say something to it. Out loud, like you did when it was under the church.”
It was clear Kai had no interest in speaking to the Luyten. He licked his lips and said, “I just wanted to get you help. You were hurt.”
Oliver studied the Luyten, then turned and watched Kai. “Anything?”
“No.”
Feeling simultaneously foolish and very uneasy, Oliver moved within a few feet of the flimsy-looking mesh that separated them from the creature. “My name is Oliver Bowen. I understand that you can communicate with us. Are you in pain? If you are, I may be able to arrange relief.”
He had no idea if the medical people had administered a painkiller. Probably not—they knew next to nothing about the creature’s physiology. He’d made the offer more as a generic gesture of concern.
Oliver turned and looked at Kai. “Anything?”
Kai shrugged. “No.”
There were a few possibilities. The Luyten might be staying silent because Kai could no longer help it, or because it knew they wanted to communicate with it to seek some advantage in the war. It was also possible the Luyten was communicating with Kai, and Kai was lying because he was on its side. Oliver thought that was unlikely.
“What’s that?” Kai asked, eyeing the population counter on the wall. At the moment it read three billion, seven hundred thousand and change. The numbers went on rolling backward, counting down.
“It’s an estimate of the world population.” The number shrunk by several hundred in the time it took Oliver to answer.
Kai studied it. “How does it know when someone dies?”
“It’s just an estimate, based on updates people here receive.”
Kai pressed his tongue to his upper lip, stared at the readout, mesmerized.
“Why don’t you try talking to the Luyten again?”
“He told me to call him Five.”
The idea of it having a name unsettled Oliver in a way he couldn’t articulate.
“It’s a he?” Oliver asked.
Kai shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems like a he.”
“Why Five?”
Looking sheepish, Kai shrugged yet again. “I don’t know.”
Luyten tended to congregate in groups of three, when they congregated at all, so Five probably didn’t correspond to his place in a group or family, although it might. It was a prime number, but Oliver couldn’t see how that mattered. Maybe it wasn’t his real name, only one he’d chosen for Kai to use.
“Does the number five hold any special meaning for you?” he asked Kai. “Your lucky number? Your birthday?”
Kai couldn’t take his eyes off the Luyten. “Not really.”
Oliver stared at the Luyten. Looking at it was unpleasant, not only because it was large and terrifying, but because of the wound, the ragged stump.
Oliver folded his arms across his chest, leaned closer, counted its limbs.
Five. There had been six, now there were five.
It was a tiny insight, but it provided a glimpse into how the creature thought.
“Why don’t you try talking to Five again?” he said.
“What should I say?”
“I don’t know. Anything.” Oliver waved his hands, trying to come up with something. Topics of conversation were not his strong suit. “What did you talk about before?”
Kai shrugged. “Where to find food, how sca
red we were.”
That wouldn’t work now. What else could you talk about with an alien? Maybe they should try to win it over, with pleasant topics. Small talk. Fall back on standard CIA interrogation procedures.
“Tell it about your hobbies.”
“My hobbies?” Kai said it as if he’d never heard the word before.
“Things you liked to do. Before, you know, you couldn’t do them anymore.”
Haltingly, Kai began to talk about a water park near his house, where you surfed up a stationary fifteen-foot wave.
The Luyten remained silent.
7
Lila Easterlin
July 2, 2029. Savannah, Georgia.
It had once been an indoor flea market. The battered sign by the road, hanging from a rusted pole, read KELLER’S FLEA MARKET. It sported an image of a cartoon flea. Now it was an enormous morgue, a body factory. Lila hated the place, dreaded going in there, but her father was too busy to bring the containers out, and there were too many for Alfe to carry on his own. Plus, Alfe didn’t look any more eager to go inside than Lila.
“You ready?” He was already holding the balled-up T-shirt close to his mouth and nose.
“Shit. I’m never ready to go in there.” She stepped out of the two-seat open buggy she’d salvaged and converted to solar.
Inside, she tried to keep her eyes on the concrete floor, three feet in front of her, but her peripheral vision picked up a bit of the horror show that was all around, and her imagination filled in the rest. The bodies were on tables, on the ground, some literally stacked in piles along the walls. Many were badly burned; most had gaping wounds. The ones who’d been killed by the Luyten’s lightning gun had the soles of their feet blown out.
Even if she were wearing blinders, the rancid stench would have made the place intolerable. Even with the T-shirt covering her mouth and nose, she held her breath as long as possible before taking a quick, gasping breath and holding it again.
Lila wondered if you ever got used to the smell and sight of bodies. Maybe she had, to a degree, only so gradually she hadn’t noticed. Wouldn’t the sight of hundreds of bodies have sent her screaming and gibbering three years ago? Probably.
She spotted her dad, wearing a transparent mask that covered his whole head. He was collecting DNA samples, moving from body to body with a handheld DNA harvester. He spotted Lila and Alfe a moment later, and pointed toward the back of the immense, low-ceilinged space. Lila waved with her free hand, hurried to the back where she found half a dozen battered, filthy red gasoline canisters.
It was difficult to carry three canisters each while keeping the T-shirts in place, but they managed. As soon as they were outside, Lila let the arm holding the T-shirt and one canister drop to her side. She exhaled heavily, trying to drain every ounce of the rotten air out of her lungs before inhaling the relatively fresh outside air.
“I don’t know how he does it,” Alfe said, breathless, hands on his knees. “It’s like being in a pit of hell.”
Lila nodded as she turned and headed for the buggy. The sooner they got downtown, the sooner this hellish errand would be finished. Discovering the taps were not working that morning had shaken Lila, for surely if there was one thing you could count on, it was water.
For Lila, downtown Savannah had always been an oasis, an ancient, beautiful city of manicured squares and elegant architecture. Today it felt like a moldy, menacing place. All around people were running, shouting. There was a heavy police presence, but the police looked as exhausted and scared as everyone else.
Lila turned right onto Bull Street, anxiety rendering her unable to glean even the slightest satisfaction from the way the buggy she’d rebuilt and retrofitted to run on solar power was performing. Ahead, Chippewa Square was all but empty; there was no water distribution going on like they’d heard on the radio.
She pulled over, looked around for some indication of what might have happened.
Someone whistled. Lila spotted an old woman sitting on a porch.
“You looking for water?” the woman called. She was wearing a pink kerchief tied under her chin, and shelling pecans by hand on a rickety card table.
“Yes!” Alfe shouted.
“They moved it to River Street.” The woman pointed east.
Waving thanks, Lila headed toward River Street, wondering why they’d changed the location at the last minute without leaving word at the original site. Things were so uncertain. In the past it was always easy to know who was in charge, where to go for what.
In the seat beside her, Alfe watched the houses roll past while he chewed on his cuticle. In two weeks he’d be sixteen, and he’d go off to fight. Lila would have envied him, would have snuck off and joined him, if going to fight wasn’t synonymous with going to die. She’d be going soon enough—ten months, assuming she was alive ten months from now.
She caught movement out of the corner of her eye and flinched, adrenaline washing through her. It was only a tour bus, likely pressed into service to transport refugees. They wouldn’t suddenly be marauding through downtown, she reminded herself. There would be warning, the emergency siren at least. Sharpshooters were stationed all around the city; high-def cameras that could focus on objects a mile away were watching in every direction. That there were more of them outside the city than usual didn’t mean they were coming.
None of that was the least bit comforting. And if they came, they would kill everyone, except maybe the children.
“You okay?” Alfe asked.
“No.”
“Yeah, me neither.” He studied his finger, chewed at his cuticle a little more before adding, “I feel like we’re all in a room, and the walls move in a little more each day.”
“I’ve never had so many nightmares. I don’t want to sleep, but being awake is just as bad.”
Pedestrian traffic was growing heavier. Many of them were pushing handcarts, or carrying pails or water skins. Ahead, the crowd was tightly packed. Lila parked on the edge of the cobbled sidewalk, and they followed the crowd down the rough cobblestone to River Street. Between the brick buildings that used to house bars and gift shops for the tourists she caught glimpses of the Savannah River, where hundreds of enormous slate-blue fins jutted from the black water—markers for the portable hydroelectric power generators that filled the river. Along with parking lots filled with solar panels and a few hastily built rooftop windmill farms, it was all that staved off total blackout conditions.
There was no line, only a throng pressing toward an elevated scaffold where half a dozen people were distributing water through spigots that resembled gas pumps. A truck carrying a filtration system was drawing the water out of the river.
There was a rumor circulating that the pumps to Savannah’s houses were working fine, but Luyten had contaminated the city’s underground water supply, so the water had been turned off. It was difficult to separate the rumors from truth.
The crowd swelled, and soon Lila and Alfe were surrounded by people. It was an unpleasant feeling; those on the outside tended to push forward, eager to get closer, as if the river might run dry before they reached the front.
“There should be police here, getting everyone into lines,” Lila said.
“I guess they’re all on the perimeter.”
The honk of a tugboat made Lila’s heart nearly burst through her chest. Several others glanced toward the boat as well, hypersensitized to anything that resembled the emergency siren.
There were shouts from the front of the crowd, jostling that rippled backward until a boot heel sunk down on Lila’s toes. Pain coursed through her foot; she was nearly knocked down as people pushed backward.
“Where? Where is it?” someone closer to the river shouted.
“They’re coming, oh God, they’re coming.”
Suddenly people were stampeding. Jostled and pummeled, Lila turned and struggled to stay on her feet. Someone had spotted Luyten. They must have come down the river, maybe underwater.
She he
ard Alfe calling her name, spotted him ten feet away, weaving in the tightly packed mob. He shouted something, but she couldn’t make it out.
The crowd carried her across River Street, up a steep cobbled road. When they reached Bay Street there was more space to move. Her heart racing, Lila jogged up Whitaker, watching for starfish, expecting one to appear behind her at any moment.
“Lila!”
It was Alfe, pressed against the First Citizens Bank building up ahead. Lila ran to join him.
“We have to hide,” she said.
“That won’t do any good. They’ll know right where we are.”
She grabbed Alfe’s wrist. “Remember when you saw them by that lake? They’ll know, but two people aren’t worth chasing.”
They ran into the bank. It was deserted, save for three or four employees, one of them armed, and an elderly couple. It was less a bank now, more an exchange center, where people swapped gold, gems, ammo, anything that still had value.
“They’re coming!” Alfe shouted.
“Why didn’t the siren sound?” a woman in a blue and white business tunic asked. She looked to be in charge, was beautiful in a way that made Lila think of mannequins.
“I don’t know,” Alfe said.
Outside, someone shrieked. Crowds were still running past.
Lila looked around for a place to hide. Somewhere tight, where Luyten couldn’t easily reach. An inner room, or better yet, if there were stairs leading down into a cellar… or a vault.
“Does this bank have a vault?” she asked.
“A vault?” the beautiful woman repeated.
“Come on,” Lila said. Alfe followed her behind the row of teller stations, down a wide hallway. It was an old bank—it might have one of those vaults full of safe-deposit boxes.
“There,” Alfe said. She’d been looking for a big, round opening, but it was a narrow, heavy door.
They waited by the entrance to see if the others were following. Two of the employees appeared, the old couple a dozen steps behind them. A moment later, the woman in charge followed.
“It won’t lock,” Alfe said, pointing at the edge of the heavy door, where the bolts had been soldered in place. They pulled the door closed as far as it would go. Despite lacking a lock, being in the small steel room in near darkness gave Lila a sense of safety. She and Alfe sat on the floor with their backs against the far wall. The others sat as well.
Defenders Page 5