Defenders

by Will McIntosh

  They waited, listening.

  “Anya, shouldn’t we run?” the armed employee, a muscular guy in his thirties, asked the woman in charge. “We can’t hide from them.”

  “They can’t hunt down every person in every building,” Lila answered. “They kill people as fast as they can, so they’ll go after crowds in the streets.” If one of the starfish did want to get to them, Lila had no doubt it could. She’d seen them squeeze through smaller spaces than the double doors of this bank.

  “But if they’re here, they won’t ever leave. Once they take over the city they can take their time coming to get us.”

  Lila hadn’t thought beyond the next few hours. “Once they move past us, I guess we head out of the city.”

  “To where?” the old man asked, trying to control the panic in his voice.

  There was a crash, out in the lobby. It sounded like a table of trade goods being upended.

  “Shh,” Alfe hissed.

  All of them looked toward the door. It knew where they were. In a few seconds that door would fly open, and it would kill them all. Lila pulled her legs to her chest. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Alfe’s Adam’s apple bob.

  Muffled shouts erupted outside. The voices sounded surprised, alarmed, angry. Not terrified. They didn’t sound like people being killed.

  “What’s going on?” Anya asked, her voice low.

  “Maybe it’s more people looking to hide.” Alfe got to his feet, opened the door wider. “This way,” he called.

  “Who is that?” It was a woman’s voice. Footsteps clicked down the hall. Alfe stepped back as the door swung open to reveal a small, pudgy woman in her fifties or sixties. “Anya? Carl? What are you doing in here?”

  “The starfish are coming,” Anya said.

  The woman in the doorway shook her head. “It was a false alarm. Evidently porpoises strayed too far up the river, and someone thought they were a starfish.”

  Lila let out a burst of laughter. Porpoises? That stampede was started by some nearsighted putz who’d spotted porpoises.

  “The looters were real, though. I walked right in on them—they ran off with armloads of automatic rifles.”

  Lila felt incredibly foolish, but compared to what she’d been feeling a few minutes earlier, foolish felt good.

  8

  Oliver Bowen

  July 12, 2029. Washington, D.C.

  Oliver never tired of looking at her, at her dark eyes, the perfect slope of her jawline. That she was his wife never ceased to astonish him.

  Noticing his attention, Vanessa glanced at him. “What?”

  “Nothing. I’m just looking at you.”

  She smiled, dimples forming on either cheek. “Cut it out; it makes me feel self-conscious, like I’ve got something sticking out of my nose.”

  Oliver turned, watched the buildings pass outside his window. As they passed through the gate to the CIA compound, Vanessa said, “We did it.”

  Oliver tried to think of what they’d done. “What did we do?”

  She pulled over to the curb in front of his building. “We went a whole morning without once mentioning the war.” She held up her palm; Oliver gave her a high-five.

  “That’s right. I forgot all about it.” They’d made the pact the night before; by morning it had gone out of his head, buried by a thousand thoughts and worries.

  “In that case, you’re lucky.”

  “What was the penalty again?” Oliver asked.

  “Lip-synch to a song of my choice. In my underwear.”

  “That’s right.” Oliver laughed. He leaned in, kissed her goodbye.

  “It’s nice, getting a break from it. Almost like taking a vacation to the past, before it started.”

  “It is. We should do it every morning.” They needed to come up with ways to hang on to at least some semblance of normal life.

  “You’re on your own for dinner,” Vanessa said as he opened the door.

  “Oh?”

  Vanessa looked away, over his shoulder. “Paul and I are going to grab a bite after work.”

  A surge of adrenaline hit him. “Why can’t you grab a bite at lunch?”

  “Because then we’d have to hurry.” That familiar defensive tone leaked into her voice. “It’s not like I go out with friends often.”

  Oliver clutched the door, wanting to think of something to say that would change her mind, but came up blank. “It’s not your going out at night that bothers me; it’s your going out with Paul. If he’s just a friend, why can’t I come?” Paul was a charming, handsome, muscular friend, the sort of man Vanessa would look very natural standing beside.

  Vanessa leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes, and sighed heavily. “Can we not have this argument now? Why can’t you trust me? Have I ever given you the slightest reason not to?”

  “No.” His voice was low, his tone leaking the defeat he felt. “It’s just that—” What could he say, that he hadn’t already said a hundred times?

  “I’ll see you when you get home.” Oliver turned and headed for the gate as Vanessa pulled off.

  Her friendship with Paul was the one thing their marriage couldn’t seem to get past. Oliver wanted to trust her, and he did with anyone else, but she and Paul seemed to share an intimacy that Vanessa didn’t share with Oliver. One of these days he was afraid she’d realize she was with the wrong man, and he’d lose her. He didn’t think he could handle this without her; she brought out the best in him, gave him courage he wouldn’t otherwise possess.

  The Luyten was exactly where he’d left it, lying flat in the center of the cell, looking remarkably like a beached starfish.

  “Good morning.” There were five angry red abrasions on the Luyten’s side, just under one of its limbs. Oliver squinted, trying to see them better.

  They were almost perfect circles, like burns. Oliver turned, waved the room’s comm awake, and connected to Ariel.

  “Do you know how the Luyten sustained these injuries?”

  “Yes, we took it through a session of enhanced interrogation last night.”

  The answer threw Oliver. He’d half suspected that was the case, but Ariel’s matter-of-fact tone surprised him.

  “All right. Can you tell me what happened?”

  “Nothing,” Ariel said. “It was in obvious pain, but it didn’t communicate with anyone. We kept Kai in an adjoining room, in case it would only speak to him.”

  It surely wasn’t the first time they’d tortured a Luyten. Oliver went back to the cage. “Why did you choose that spot on its body?”

  “Autopsies show there’s a high concentration of nerve endings there.”

  Oliver nodded, trying to act as blasé about it as Ariel clearly was, though the thought of torturing the creature made him queasy.

  “Hi.” Kai was hovering in the doorway.

  “Come on in. You doing all right?”

  Kai nodded vaguely, looking uncomfortable. Oliver tried to think of something to say to put the kid at ease, one of those snappy things adults said that made kids laugh, let them know you weren’t so different from them. His mind was a fat blank.

  He went back to studying the Luyten. He wasn’t surprised that torture was ineffective. They were tough bastards. Given their telepathic nature, Oliver guessed being cut off from communing with its own kind was more distressing than electric shocks. Maybe it drew some sustenance from tapping into human minds, the way an amphetamine addict might draw meager sustenance from a cup of coffee.

  “Kai, when you and Five were communicating, did he seem, I don’t know, like he was glad to have you to talk to?”

  Kai bit his bottom lip. “I guess. He told me we had a lot in common.”

  “What did you have in common?”

  Kai scrunched his face, thinking. “I don’t remember the exact words, but it was how we were both scared and lonely. Or something like that.”

  “You haven’t mentioned that before.”

  Kai looked at the floor. “I forgot about i
t until you asked. Sorry.”

  “No, not a problem. Thank you for remembering.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  If loneliness was unpleasant for it, what would happen if it was completely isolated? If the Luyten reached out to Kai not only as a means of getting food, but for companionship, it meant it could fulfill some of its social needs through contact with humans.

  “I think I may know a way to torture it for real,” Oliver said.

  9

  Lila Easterlin

  July 16, 2029. Savannah, Georgia.

  Lila was in the backyard working on the solar array she hoped would soon power their house, when the emergency siren sounded.

  It was a mournful sound, a giant dog who’d been put out on a cold night. Her terror found another gear, one she hadn’t known existed. There were no drills; if the siren was sounding, the Luyten were coming.

  She raced inside to find out what was going on.

  Her father met her inside the door, holding both of their emergency evacuation bags.

  “Where are we going?” Lila asked.

  Her father handed Lila her bag. “Atlanta.”

  “Atlanta?” Atlanta was hundreds of miles from Savannah, all of it starfish territory. He might as well have said Mars.

  Dad headed toward the front door. “They’re coming, Lila. Savannah is going to fall. Atlanta’s the closest place that’s safe.”

  That couldn’t be right. “There’s nowhere between here and there?”

  “No. There’s nothing left but the cities. Let’s go.”

  “Can I—” She was going to ask if she could grab a few more things before they left, since they were never coming back, but the look on his face silenced her. He was terrified, his eyes wild.

  She climbed into their Toyota, her knees shaking as her father set the gearshift to emergency, overriding the governor. They sped off.

  Interstate 16 was packed, with everything from bicycles to militarized land yachts pressed into the six lanes, crawling along. They’d been on the road four or five hours and had gone maybe fifty miles.

  “It’s going to take days to get there at this rate.” Lila peered out the window at a family of four perched on a scooter, bulky packs strapped across their shoulders, even the kids. “How many miles is it to Atlanta?”

  Up ahead, a Luyten stepped out of the trees.

  Lila screamed, the sound bursting from her. The Luyten crossed the high grass along the side of the highway, stopped on the shoulder, and pointed the blue-green, mushroom-shaped head of a heater at the nearest vehicles.

  Through the sealed window Lila heard shrieks of agony as vehicles cooked, the exteriors warping and bubbling, black smoke pouring out at the seams. The air filled with the stench of burning rubber and steel.

  The Luyten swung the heater toward the next cars in line, and the next. Paralyzed, her breath caught like a knot in her throat, Lila stared as the vehicles melted.

  “Run,” Dad howled.

  His voice broke the spell. Lila burst from the passenger door and instinctively headed across the highway, in the direction everyone else was running.

  “This way,” Dad called.

  Lila stopped and changed directions, following Dad toward the nearer trees, moving closer to the Luyten instead of away. Shoulders knotted, she waited for the Luyten to turn the heater on them, but it went on down the row, focusing on the vehicles, but catching most of the fleeing people as well. The people caught in the path of the heater blackened in seconds, their clothes disintegrating without a flame as they dropped to the ground, writhing and twitching, then going still.

  Bursting into the tree line, Lila was immediately tangled in thick brush. She dropped to her belly and crawled, squeezing beneath vines and clinging branches.

  A few dozen feet to her left, branches snapped and foliage shuddered as a second Luyten pushed toward the highway. Lila froze, head down. It knew she was there—she knew that—but the urge to hide was too powerful to resist. She waited, praying for it not to pause and turn toward her pathetic hiding place.

  It crashed out of the trees, toward the cacophony of screams and the stench of burned bodies.

  Lila’s father called her name, his tone low and urgent. She answered, crawled toward him until she was in his arms, his whiskers scraping her cheek.

  She followed him as he wove through the woods, finally breaking through into the back lawn of a housing complex. The grass was waist-high, the complex deserted. No one had lived there for a year, at least. They were in Luyten-controlled territory.

  They sprinted around to the side window of one of the units; Dad pulled a flagstone off the top of a low landscaping wall and used it to smash out the window.

  In the distance, Lila still heard screaming.

  Her father shimmied inside, then reached out and helped Lila.

  “Look for a vehicle password,” Dad said, out of breath. “People always write them down somewhere. Check in drawers, the insides of kitchen and bathroom cabinets, in notebooks.” He headed into the kitchen.

  Lila wanted to find a heavy blanket and curl into a ball beneath it, try to replace the images of those people dying with something, anything else. Instead she headed upstairs to search for a code. She dug through the dresser, tossing some woman’s socks and panties on the floor, sweeping her costume jewelry off the bathroom counter.

  After ten minutes they gave up and went to try another unit. Across the street, Lila spotted a door standing partially open.

  “Dad.” She pointed at the door.

  “That makes things easier,” Dad said. They headed across the street.

  Lila stood behind him as he pushed the door open.

  The living room walls were draped in thick layers of what looked like brightly colored fabric. Heavier semi-stiff fabric bisected the space, cutting it into a number of chambers at forty-five-degree angles. It was strange, beautiful, and absolutely awful, all rolled together. There was no doubt about what it was.

  Her father took two stiff steps backward, out of the doorway. He was pale, the corners of his mouth twitching.

  “If it was in there, it would have gotten us by now,” Lila whispered, aware of how stupid it was to whisper. If you were close enough to a Luyten that it could hear you, it had known about you for quite some time. Whispering wasn’t going to save you.

  They headed toward the far end of the complex to continue their search, as Lila digested what she’d just learned. The starfish were living in houses. If the starfish won, they’d fill neighborhoods and cities, as if they’d built it all themselves and had been there all along.

  “I didn’t know they lived in our houses. I thought they lived underground, in those tunnel systems they dig.”

  Dad nodded. “I did, too. I’m sure the people in charge know how they live.” He shook his head in sad wonder. “We used to know everything as soon as it happened. Now everything outside our neighborhood is a mystery.”

  Lila’s attention was drawn toward a pile of parts squeezed between two of the units. Some were engine parts; the biggest pieces—leaned up against the side of one unit—looked like wings.

  Lila stopped short. “Hold on.” She trotted over.

  It was a solar ultralight—not much more than an adult toy, but it seated two.

  “If we could put this together, we could fly it to Atlanta.”

  Silently, her father examined it.

  “I can do it,” Lila said. “I can build this.”

  10

  Oliver Bowen

  July 16, 2029. Washington, D.C.

  As the elevator descended, Oliver felt a tingling in his belly, like he’d just hit the apex on a roller coaster and was headed over the drop. It went on and on. It was hard to conceive that he was dropping eight miles below ground. All that stone and earth pressing down on him. Oliver wasn’t particularly claustrophobic, but it was distressing nonetheless.

  The elevator opened onto a conference room, with a long, thin black table and a dozen c
hairs. Framed pictures of President Wood and Premier Abani Chandar, leader of the World Alliance, were the only decorations.

  The rest of the facility was set up as an apartment, functional and comfortable, but far from luxurious. It was intended to house a team of strategists who knew things even Wood and Chandar didn’t, who communicated with other teams in similar bunkers through sealed, written documents, their minds out of range of any possible Luyten interception. Now it housed Five, whose cage took up half the living room.

  Oliver sat on a couch facing the Luyten’s cage, crossed his foot over his opposite knee. He’d waited five days, hoping that was enough isolation.

  “You know what I’m thinking, so you know I intend to keep you down here until you talk to me. If you do talk, there’ll be no reason to keep you down here any longer, and we can move back to the CIA compound.” He looked up at the low ceiling. “Personally, I’d prefer to be there.”

  He waited, not exactly sure what it would feel like if Five did speak to him. Kai said it was unpleasant at first.

  When nothing came, Oliver went to the kitchen. He paused in the doorway. “Can I get you something? Maybe some tea?” He waited a beat, then smiled. “I’m a tricky one, aren’t I? You’d have to talk if you wanted something. You’re not falling for that, eh?”

  He didn’t really feel like tea, but he made some anyway, brought it back to the couch. Sipping a hot beverage made the place, and this company, seem less creepy. Maybe it was the everydayness of it.

  He was all alone down here, with a creature who evidently knew his every thought. If anything went wrong, no one would get here in time to help.

  What could go wrong?

  The mug slipped from his fingers, spilled scalding tea into his lap. Oliver leaped up, jerked open the buttons on his pants, and yanked them down. Gritting his teeth against searing pain he hobbled into the kitchen, turned on the faucet, and splashed cold water across his thighs.