The small lobby of her apartment building smelled like burnt plastic and cooking grease. She climbed the cement stairs to the third floor. As usual the door to her apartment was wide open, as was the door to Mr. Fishman’s apartment across the hall. Staticky television laughter and applause carried down the hallway: It sounded like Mr. Sascha’s Celebrity Polka Fun-Time. Not even an invasion could pre-empt Mr. Sascha.
She knocked on the frame of his door. "Mr. Fishman," she called loudly. He’d never revealed his real name. "Mr. Fishman, would you like to come to dinner tonight?"
There was no answer except for the blast of the television. She walked into the dim hallway and leaned around the corner. The living room was dark except for the glow of the TV. The little set was propped up on a wooden chair at the edge of a large cast iron bathtub, the light from its screen reflecting off the smooth surface of the water. "Mr. Fishman? Did you hear me?" She walked across the room, shoes crinkling on the plastic tarp that covered the floor, and switched off the TV.
The surface of the water shimmied. A lumpy head rose up out of the water, followed by a pair of dark eyes, a flap of nose, and a wide carp mouth.
"I was watching that," the zooman said.
"Some day you’re going to pull that thing into the tub and electrocute yourself," Elena said.
He exhaled, making a rude noise through rubbery lips.
"We’re having dinner," Elena said. She turned on a lamp. Long ago Mr. Fishman had pushed all the furniture to the edge of the room to make room for his easels. She didn’t see any new canvasses upon them, but there was an empty liquor bottle on the floor next to the tub. "Would you like to join us?"
He eyed the bag in her arms. "That wouldn’t be, umm, fresh catch?"
"It is, as a matter of fact."
"I suppose I could stop by." His head sank below the surface.
In Elena’s own apartment, Grandmother Zita smoked and rocked in front of the window, while Mattias, nine years old, sat at the table with his shoe box of colored pencils and several gray pages crammed with drawings. "Elena, did you hear?" Matti asked. "A U-Man flew over the island! They canceled school!"
"It’s nothing to be happy about," Elena said. She rubbed the top of her brother’s head. The page showed a robot of Matti’s own design marching toward a hyper-muscled man in a red cape. In the background was a huge, lumpy monster with triangle eyes—an escaped MoG, she supposed.
"The last time the U-men came," Grandmother Zita said, "more than robots lost their heads. This family knows that better than most. When your mother—"
"Let’s not talk politics, Grandmother." She kissed the old woman on the cheek, then reached past her to crank open the window—she’d told the woman to let in some air when she smoked in front of Matti, to no avail. Outside, sirens wailed.
Elena had been only eleven years old during the last invasion. She’d slept through most of it, and when she woke to sirens that morning the apartment was cold and the lights didn’t work. Her parents were government geneticists—there was no other kind—and often were called away at odd hours. Her mother had left her a note asking her to feed Baby Matti and please stay indoors. Elena made oatmeal, the first of many breakfasts she would make for her little brother. Only after her parents failed to come home did she realize that the note was a kind of battlefield promotion to adulthood: impossible to refuse because there was no one left to accept her refusal.
Mr. Fishman, in his blue bathrobe and striped pajama pants, arrived a half hour later, his great webbed feet slapping the floor. He sat at the table and argued with Grandmother Zita about which of the twenty-one previous invasions was most violent. There was a time in the 1960s and seventies when their little country seemed to be under attack every other month. Matti listened raptly.
Elena had just brought the fried whitefish to the table when the thumping march playing on the radio suddenly cut off. An announcer said, "Please stand by for an important message from His Royal Majesty, the Guardian of our Shores, the Scourge of Fascism, Professor General of the Royal Academy of Sciences, the Savior of Trovenia—"
Mr. Fishman pointed at Matti. "Boy, get my television!" Matti dashed to the man’s apartment and Elena cleared a spot on the table.
After Mr. Fishman fiddled with the antenna the screen suddenly cleared, showing a large room decorated in Early 1400s: stone floors, flickering torches, and dulled tapestries on the walls. The only piece of furniture was a huge oaken chair reinforced at the joints with metal plates and rivets.
A figure appeared at the far end of the room and strode toward the camera.
"He’s still alive, then," Grandmother said. Lord Grimm didn’t appear on live television more than once or twice a year.
Matti said, "Oh, look at him."
Lord Grimm wore the traditional black and green cape of Trovenian nobility, which contrasted nicely with the polished suit of armor. His faceplate, hawk-nosed and heavily riveted, suggested simultaneously the prow of a battleship and the beak of the Baltic albatross, the Trovenian national bird.
Elena had to admit he cut a dramatic figure. She almost felt sorry for people in other countries whose leaders all looked like postal inspectors. You could no more imagine those timid, pinch-faced bureaucrats leading troops into battle than you could imagine Lord Grimm ice skating.
"Sons and daughters of Trovenia," the leader intoned. His deep voice was charged with metallic echoes. "We have been invaded."
"We knew that already," Grandmother said, and Mr. Fishman shushed her.
"Once again, an American super power has violated our sovereignty. With typical, misguided arrogance, a so-called übermensch has trespassed upon our borders, destroyed our property ... " The litany of crimes went on for some time.
"Look! The U-Man!" Matti said.
On screen, castle guards carried in a red-clad figure and dumped him in the huge chair. His head lolled. Lord Grimm lifted the prisoner’s chin to show his bloody face to the camera. One eye was half open, the other swelled shut. "As you can see, he is completely powerless."
Mr. Fishman grunted in disappointment.
"What?" Matti asked.
"Again with the captives, and the taunting," Grandmother said.
"Why not? They invaded us!"
Mr. Fishman grimaced, and his gills flapped shut.
"If Lord Grimm simply beat up Most Excellent Man and sent him packing, that would be one thing," Grandmother said. "Or even if he just promised to stop doing what he was doing for a couple of months until they forgot about him, then—"
"Then we’d all go back to our business," Mr. Fishman said.
Grandmother said, "But no, he’s got to keep him captive. Now it’s going to be just like 1972."
"And seventy-five," Mr. Fishman said. He sawed into his whitefish. "And eighty-three."
Elena snapped off the television. "Matti, go pack your school bag with clothes. Now."
"What? Why?"
"We’re spending the night in the basement. You too, Grandmother."
"But I haven’t finished my supper!"
"I’ll wrap it up for you. Mr. Fishman, I can help you down the stairs if you like."
"Pah," he said. "I’m going back to bed. Wake me when the war’s over."
A dozen or so residents of the building had gotten the same idea. For several hours the group sat on boxes and old furniture in the damp basement under stuttering fluorescent lights, listening to the distant roar of jets, the rumble of mechaneer tanks, and the bass-drum stomps of Slaybot 3000s marching into position.
Grandmother Zita had claimed the best seat in the room, a ripped vinyl armchair. Matti had fallen asleep across her lap, still clutching the Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm. The boy was so comfortable with her. Zita wasn’t even a relative, but she’d watched over the boy since he was a toddler and so became his grandmother—another wartime employment opportunity. Elena slipped the book from under Matti’s arms and bent to put it into his school bag.
Zita lit another
cigarette. "How do you suppose it really started?" she said.
"What, the war?" Elena asked.
"No, the first time." She nodded at Matti’s book. "Hating the Americans, okay, no problem. But why the scary mask, the cape?"
Elena pretended to sort out the contents of the bag.
"What possesses a person to do that?" Zita said, undeterred. "Wake up one day and say, Today I will put a bucket over my head. Today I declare war on all U-Men. Today I become, what’s the English ... "
"Grandmother, please," Elena said, keeping her voice low.
"A super villain," Zita said.
A couple of the nearest people looked away in embarrassment. Mr. Rimkis, an old man from the fourth floor, glared at Grandmother down the length of his gray-bristled snout. He was a veteran with one long tusk and the other snapped off at the base. He claimed to have suffered the injury fighting the U-Men, though others said he’d lost the tusk in combat with vodka and gravity: The Battle of the Pub Stairs.
"He is the hero," Mr. Rimkis said. "Not these imperialists in long underwear. They invaded his country, attacked his family, maimed him and left him with—"
"Oh please," Grandmother said. "Every villain believes himself to be a hero."
The last few words were nearly drowned out by the sudden wail of an air raid siren. Matti jerked awake and Zita automatically put a hand to his sweat-dampened forehead. The residents stared up at the ceiling. Soon there was a chorus of sirens.
They’ve come, Elena thought, as everyone knew they would, to rescue their comrade.
From somewhere in the distance came a steady thump, thump that vibrated the ground and made the basement’s bare cinderblock walls chuff dust into the air. Each explosion seemed louder and closer. Between the explosions, slaybot auto-cannons whined and chattered.
Someone said, "Everybody just remain calm—"
The floor seemed to jump beneath their feet. Elena lost her balance and smacked into the cement on her side. At the same moment she was deafened by a noise louder than her ears could process.
The lights had gone out. Elena rolled over, eyes straining, but she couldn’t make out Grandmother or Matti or anyone. She shouted but barely heard her own voice above the ringing in her ears.
Someone behind her switched on an electric torch and flicked it around the room. Most of the basement seemed to have filled with rubble.
Elena crawled toward where she thought Grandmother’s chair had been and was stopped by a pile of cement and splintered wood. She called Matti’s name and began to push the debris out of the way.
Someone grabbed her foot, and then Matti fell into her, hugged her fiercely. Somehow he’d been thrown behind her, over her. She called for a light, but the torch was aimed now at a pair of men attempting to clear the stairway. Elena took Matti’s hand and led him cautiously toward the light. Pebbles fell on them; the building seemed to shift and groan. Somewhere a woman cried out, her voice muffled.
"Grandmother Zita," Matti said.
Elena was grateful that she could hear him. "I’ll come back for Grandmother," she said, though she didn’t know for sure if it had been Zita’s voice. "First you."
The two men had cleared a passage to the outside. One of them boosted the other to where he could crawl out. The freed man then reached back and Elena lifted Matti to him. The boy’s jacket snagged on a length of rebar, and the boy yelped. After what seemed like minutes of tugging and shouting the coat finally ripped free.
"Stay there, Mattias!" Elena called. "Don’t move!" She turned to assist the next person in line to climb out, an old woman from the sixth floor. She carried an enormous wicker basket which she refused to relinquish. Elena promised repeatedly that the basket would be the first thing to come out after her. The others in the basement began to shout at the old woman, which only made her grip the handle more fiercely. Elena was considering prying her fingers from it when a yellow flash illuminated the passage. People outside screamed.
Elena scrambled up and out without being conscious of how she managed it. The street lights had gone out but the gray sky flickered with strange lights. A small crowd of dazed citizens sat or lay sprawled across the rubble-strewn street, as if a bomb had gone off. The man who’d pulled Matti out of the basement sat on the ground, holding his hands to his face and moaning.
The sky was full of flying men.
Searchlights panned from a dozen points around the city, and clouds pulsed with exotic energies. In that spasmodic light dozens of tiny figures darted: caped invaders, squadrons of Royal Air Dragoons riding pinpricks of fire, winged zoomandos, glowing U-Men leaving iridescent fairy trails. Beams of energy flicked from horizon to horizon; soldiers ignited and dropped like dollops of burning wax.
Elena looked around wildly for her brother. Rubble was everywhere. The front of her apartment building had been sheared off, exposing bedrooms and bathrooms. Protruding girders bent toward the ground like tongues.
Finally she saw the boy. He sat on the ground, staring at the sky. Elena ran to him, calling his name. He looked in her direction. His eyes were wide, unseeing.
She knelt down in front of him.
"I looked straight at him," Matti said. "He flew right over our heads. He was so bright. So bright."
There was something wrong with Matti’s face. In the inconstant light she could only tell that his skin was darker than it should have been.
"Take my hand," Elena said. "Can you stand up? Good. Good. How do you feel?"
"My face feels hot," he said. Then, "Is Grandmother out yet?"
Elena didn’t answer. She led him around the piles of debris. Once she had to yank him sideways and he yelped. "Something in our way," she said. A half-buried figure lay with one arm and one leg jutting into the street. The body would have been unrecognizable if not for the blue-striped pajamas and the webbing between the toes of the bare foot.
Matti wrenched his hand from her grip. "Where are we going? You have to tell me where we’re going."
She had no idea. She’d thought they’d be safe in the basement. She’d thought it would be like the invasions everyone talked about, a handful of U-Men—a super team—storming the castle. No one told her there could be an army of them. The entire city had become the battleground.
"Out of the city," she said. "Into the country."
"But Grandmother—"
"I promise I’ll come back for Grandmother Zita," she said.
"And my book," he said. "It’s still in the basement."
All along Infinite Progress Avenue, families spilled out of buildings carrying bundles of clothes and plastic jugs, pushing wheelchairs and shopping carts loaded with canned food, TV sets, photo albums. Elena grabbed tight to Matti’s arm and joined the exodus north.
After an hour they’d covered only ten blocks. The street had narrowed as they left the residential district, condensing the stream of people into a herd, then a single shuffling animal. Explosions and gunfire continued to sound from behind them and the sky still flashed with parti-colored lightning, but hardly anyone glanced back.
The surrounding bodies provided Elena and Matti with some protection against the cold, though frigid channels of night air randomly opened through the crowd. Matti’s vision still hadn’t returned; he saw nothing but the yellow light of the U-Man. He told her his skin still felt hot, but he trembled as if he were cold. Once he stopped suddenly and threw up into the street. The crowd behind bumped into them, forcing them to keep moving.
One of their fellow refugees gave Matti a blanket. He pulled it onto his shoulders like a cape but it kept slipping as he walked, tripping him up. The boy hadn’t cried since they’d started walking, hadn’t complained—he’d even stopped asking about Grandmother Zita—but Elena still couldn’t stop herself from being annoyed at him. He stumbled again and she yanked the blanket from him. "For God’s sake, Mattias," she said. "If you can’t hold onto it—" She drew up short. The black-coated women in front of them had suddenly stopped.
Shouts
went up from somewhere ahead, and then the crowd surged backward. Elena recognized the escalating whine of an auto-cannon coming up to speed.
Elena pulled Matti up onto her chest and he yelped in surprise or pain. The boy was heavy and awkward; she locked her hands under his butt and shoved toward the crowd’s edge, aiming for the mouth of an alley. The crowd buffeted her, knocked her off course. She came up hard against the plate glass window of a shop.
A Slaybot 3000 lumbered through the crowd, knocking people aside. Its gun arm, a huge thing like a barrel of steel pipes, jerked from figure to figure, targeting automatically. A uniformed technician sat in the jumpseat on the robot’s back, gesturing frantically and shouting, "Out of the way! Out of the way!" It was impossible to tell whether he’d lost control or was deliberately marching through the crowd.
The mass of figures had almost certainly overwhelmed the robot’s vision and recognition processors. The 3000 model, like its predecessors, had difficulty telling friend from foe even in the spare environment of the factory QA room.
The gun arm pivoted toward her: six black mouths. Then the carousel began to spin and the six barrels blurred, became one vast maw.
Elena felt her gut go cold. She would have sunk to the ground—she wanted desperately to disappear—but the mob held her upright, pinned. She twisted to place at least part of her body between the robot and Matti. The glass at her shoulder trembled, began to bow.
For a moment she saw both sides of the glass. Inside the dimly lit shop were two rows of blank white faces, a choir of eyeless women regarding her. And in the window’s reflection she saw her own face, and above that, a streak of light like a falling star. The UM flew toward them from the west, moving incredibly fast.
The robot’s gun fired even as it flicked upward to acquire the new target.
The glass shattered. The mass of people on the street beside her seemed to disintegrate into blood and cloth tatters. A moment later she registered the sound of the gun, a thunderous ba-rap! The crowd pulsed away from her, releasing its pressure, and she collapsed to the ground.
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