by Scott Mackay
“Then let me give you some advice. You shouldn’t molest any of the local population when you go down. Humans hate that more than anything in an invading alien. Especially in good ole Georgia. If you’ve got to take over, just take over nicely, and try to help everybody.”
“Our survival will be our sole priority.”
“So you understand after all?”
Kafis gave him a double take. “Understand what?”
“How this is about survival.”
“Human, you exhaust me.”
“You exhaust me too, Kafis.”
Ian came to his room much later, just as he was going over the more recent views of the phytosphere, the ones with the toxin holes. Ian was like a caged animal and all he could do was pace in front of the twin beds, stopping occasionally to look at the dark lunar surface, or turning around and gazing briefly at the lamp, always with a look of bewilderment in his eyes. Gerry didn’t know if Ian was here for a reason, or if he was here simply because he had to be somewhere. Sometimes Ian just…showed up. Was he drunk? Gerry didn’t think so. He couldn’t smell any booze.
Ian finally looked at Gerry. “This whole thing is spinning out of control.”
The anxiety in his friend’s voice was like the news the doctor gave you when you had a tumor. Gerry tried to rise to the occasion. He struggled to mount some semblance of courage. But he couldn’t help remembering his wife’s words: If anybody gets too close to the house, that’s it, Gerry, I’m not asking any questions. And then there was Kafis, spinning out of control as well, his strange alien pupils twitching in fear as he considered the unviability of TMS life support. Gerry tried to show courage but, after a visit from the aliens, courage eluded him—the Tarsalans might go down to Earth; they might go to Georgia, which was right next door to North Carolina. And Glenda wasn’t asking any questions.
“I thought we were going to beat it,” said Ian, still pacing.
He didn’t have to say more because his implication was clear—maybe they weren’t going to beat it after all.
Then it was one non sequitur after another from Ian. “God, I’ve done some horrible things in my life.”
Just out of the blue, as if, with that thing knitting itself around the Earth, he had finally found it in his soul to feel remorse. It didn’t matter that Gerry had no context; he understood it well, how the alcoholic could become a beast, how he could black out for hours at a time and have no memory of the abysmal things he had done. “Remember Maggie Madsen?” A pathetic chuckle, as if Maggie Madsen had been one of the bigger lost chances in his life.
“Ian, I thought we agreed we would never talk about Maggie again.”
“Remember that night in the pool?”
“That was her idea, not mine. I had no idea she was going to come up to me that way.”
“Yes, but you didn’t do anything to stop her, buddy, even though you knew she was going out with me.”
“You see what a bad thing alcohol can be?”
“If it was just that one night…but you stole her away from me.”
“And I regret it. I told you that. That’s why we don’t talk about her.”
“What ever happened to her? I wonder how she’s making out down there in the dark.”
“Last I heard, she’d married a car dealer in Norfolk.”
“Really? She always struck me as the more adventurous type.” Then came a whole sequence of, “What am I going to do, what am I going to do?”—the same six words uttered again and again, nonstop, a bizarre refrain wrapped in regret and anxiety. And still the pacing. Wearing out the rug. The clock moved, edging past midnight. Ian got more and more worked up, haunted by ghosts only he could see, driven—so much so that he finally punched the mirror, broke it, and drew blood.
“Jesus, Ian.”
“Sorry, buddy.”
Ian walked to the washroom and cleaned himself up. Gerry heard running water. He tried to concentrate on the stills of the phytosphere, but thought of the damned Tarsalans instead, coming all this way, reminding him of born-again Christians because they were all so smug, so sure of themselves, as if they
had seen the Kingdom of Heaven. Ian came out of the washroom. He had a white towel wrapped around his fist. He radiated desperation.
“But there’s still time, isn’t there, buddy?”
“Time for what?”
Ian became distracted by his own thoughts. He went to the refrigerator, got a little booze bottle, twisted the cap off, sucked the contents into his mouth, but then spit the whole works out, not bothering to swallow, and uttered a string of obscenities, telling Gerry he had to stop that stuff, stop that stuff, stop that stuff, like a man with bipolar disorder in the manic phase.
“That’s it, Gerry. I’m through with booze. I’m walking the straight and narrow from now on.”
“Sit down for a while. I’ll make some coffee.”
Gerry played a role he knew well—the role of sponsor—remembering his own sponsor, Pat Turnshek, an old guy he’d met first at Bellwood, then at all the meetings afterward. When his own demons haunted him, Pat would make coffee, the magic elixir of A.A. meetings, the thing that made everything all right, even when everything was horribly wrong. So he made coffee, and soon it was dripping into the pot.
Ian sat in one of the chairs and rocked, as nervous as could be. “I always manage to say the wrong thing, don’t I?” Another cryptic utterance, one Gerry couldn’t immediately make sense of. “How did you do it, buddy? How did you marry such a nice wife?”
How his wife got into it, Gerry wasn’t sure—Ian was all over the place.
He could have offered Ian the usual platitude, that he was lucky, but knew that it went far beyond luck, that it was his wife’s compassion and forgiveness, and that she wasn’t going to give up on him no matter how bad things got.
The test pilot motioned out the window. “I hate looking at it. It reminds me of all the terrible things I’ve done. I’ve got a lot to make up for, Gerry. I’ve got a whole list of bad things I’ve done to people. I’ve got to make things up in a hurry.” He motioned out the window. “Before we run out of time.”
Gerry stared at the coffeemaker. If they could all just drink enough coffee, maybe the phytosphere would disappear. Maybe the Tarsalans would go home. Maybe they would stay away from Georgia.
And North Carolina. Ian started talking about the Tarsalans: how they creeped him out, how it wasn’t natural for them to come all this way, and how sentient species were meant to stay on their own planets and make their own isolated homes surrounded by their own isolating light-years. And then it was back to Maggie Madsen again.
“In the pool, buddy. I couldn’t believe it.”
“Ian, I’m sorry about Maggie Madsen.”
But Ian bluffed, saying, no, that was all right, we were just kids, we didn’t know any better. “You’re unlikely to do the same thing again, aren’t you, buddy, steal a girlfriend out from under me?”
All Gerry could say was the same thing again. “Ian, I’m sorry.”
They lapsed into morose silence after that.
They sipped coffee.
Gerry tried to bolster Ian’s spirits by telling him it was never too late, and that Maggie Madsen wasn’t the only woman in the world.
But all Ian could do was sit there and shake his head. “That green thing over the Earth—it gives me a whole new outlook.”
23
Glenda stayed on the roof for close to a minute. Her heart pounded. Maynard didn’t move. She thought of the ramifications. Cop killer. What difference did it make? The cops weren’t cops anymore; they were just a band of desperate men in a land of kill or be killed. She didn’t have to worry. There were no judges. No juries. No penal system at all. And the court was closed.
She at last got up from the roof. She descended the ladder, then shifted it, sliding it over the side of the mudroom eaves. She went down the rungs to the backyard, wondering if it was safe to whistle yet, or if any more men would come, o
r if she had killed the body by killing the head. The mist thickened and the moonlight brightened. She walked toward Fulton.
She knelt next to him, half believing that he might still be alive. But he was dead, lying on his stomach, his arms straight at his sides, his rifle under him, his finger twisted up under the trigger guard. Her hands started to shake.
“You prize-winning piece of shit,” she said.
Tears flooded her eyes and she sobbed, a choking sound in the thick, stinky air of the dead woods out back.
“Mom?”
She turned.
The nightmare kept getting worse.
Buzz Fulton had a chokehold around her daughter’s throat, and a gun pointed at her head. The two approached out of the woods. As they got closer, Buzz glanced at his brother.
In the gathering moonlight, Glenda saw a strange emotion play over the younger Fulton’s face. His jaw protruded and the unshaven whiskers on his pale chin looked like a gunpowder tattoo. His eyes widened, then narrowed, then moistened, and for a few seconds he looked entirely unsure of the situation. He twisted his head to one side, as if he were wearing a too-tight necktie, then to the other side, and in the moonlight she saw a band of sweat glimmer down his left cheek like a silver ribbon.
Hanna was wheezing and wheezing, like a punctured bagpipe, and looking at her with wide, scared eyes.
“You killed him?” asked Buzz.
How to explain it to him? What lie would he possibly believe?
“Bullets started flying, Buzz, and I—”
“I heard only two bullets. And they both came from the same rifle. Yours. Poor Bren is dying back there. So don’t go lying to me, Glenda.”
She saw that the whole situation was at a bad dead end.
“I didn’t want to, Buzz.” And then she remembered what that guy in the supermarket had said to her during the Stedman’s looting. “But it’s every man for himself.”
“Guess I’m going to have to shoot your daughter, then.”
“Buzz, please…” She threw her weapon down, got to her knees, and clasped her hands in entreaty. “I was only trying to protect my children, like any good mother would. And if you’ve got to shoot someone, shoot me.”
Buzz’s lips stiffened in barely controlled anger. “Does that make sense to you, Glenda? That I should give you the easy way out and shoot you dead right now? While I’ve got to stay alive and suffer like this?” His voice was shaking now, and his eyes had clouded over with tears. “Doesn’t it make better sense that I shoot your daughter so that you can suffer like I’m suffering?”
“Please don’t shoot her, Buzz. I’ll do anything. I swear I’ll do anything. I’ll come and join the girls at headquarters if you want.”
“I don’t hold truck with what the boys are doing with those girls at headquarters.”
“Then I can give you food, Buzz. We’ve got food. All kinds of it.”
This stopped him. Then he said, “Why is it that people like you got food, and I don’t have any?”
“I’ve got some hidden in the forest.”
Buzz nodded, then grinned, even as tears thickened further in his eyes. “We knew you had it.” He seemed to dwell on something for a few moments. He came out of his reverie with a businesslike squaring of his shoulders. “We might have a deal, Glenda. Get Maynard’s flashlight. It’s attached to his belt.”
She knelt beside the dead sheriff and unclipped his police flashlight. Her hands shook so badly she could hardly manage the small task. She wondered if Jake was dead somewhere in the woods.
“You’ve got to promise that you won’t kill us if I give you food.”
“I promise.” He flicked his head toward the woods and said, “Move.”
She spoke to Hanna. “Honey, it’s going to be all right. We’ll just do what Buzz says and this will all be over.”
“You listen to your mama, sweetheart. Uncle Buzz ain’t going to hurt you.” Buzz’s slightly licentious tone reminded Glenda of how Buzz had come on to Hanna at Marblehill when she was twelve years old.
She walked ahead of them into the forest, hating to turn her back on the whole situation, cursing herself for being so stupid. She feared that at any moment she would hear a gunshot behind her, and that would be it; Hanna’s short life would be over. She prayed to God, but she couldn’t sense Him right now.
They walked to the end of the yard out past the shed. As she passed the shed and was heading toward the dead sycamores, she heard a noise—the slide of a foot along the dead grass behind the shed, the soft whisper of shoulders shifting inside a T-shirt—and, turning, saw Jake emerge from the shadows, Leigh’s pistol held up straight in both hands, just like she had taught him, his face so scared in the moonlight that his pale blue eyes bulged.
“You let my sister go or I’ll blow your head off, Buzz.”
Her first instinct was to curse him for being such a fool, and for now endangering his own life; but when Buzz jerked to a stop and flicked his head a fraction to the left, and his eyes narrowed with sudden tension, and fresh sweat popped out of his pores like water out of a newly divined well, she thought that, yes, she had to learn to trust Jake, and that she couldn’t do this by herself, not in a world gone mad with hunger and darkness. She was going to have to count on her children.
“Easy there, son,” said Buzz. “I can’t believe your mama gave you a gun.”
“Let my sister go or you’re a dead man.”
“Son, I guess it comes down to nerve. Who’s got more of it? Me or you?”
Jake fired straight into the air, and Buzz’s nerve crumbled.
“Let my sister go, or the next one’s for you.”
“Easy, boy, you don’t want to have an accident.”
He let Hanna go. Hanna hurried to Glenda. Glenda took her in her arms and stroked her hair.
“Now put the gun on the ground,” said Jake.
“Jake, that’s the only weapon I have. You don’t want to leave a man defenseless with the shroud up there.”
“I said, put the gun on the ground. I’m giving you a chance here, Buzz.”
Buzz hesitated for close to five seconds, and in the light of the Moon Glenda saw the frantic thinking that was going on behind his eyes. Despite this scrutiny of his options, he at last put the gun down and stood up slowly.
“Now beat it,” said Jake.
Buzz lifted both arms into the air and backed away. “It’s okay, son, I’m on my way.”
“Shoot him, Jake,” said Hanna. “Don’t let him get away.”
“Don’t you listen to your sister, Jake. Miss, I apologize for what I done to you.”
“Jake, just shoot him. He’s going to come back.”
“Mom?”
“Let him go.”
“But, Mom,” said Hanna, “he’s going to come back, I know he is.”
“Buzz, I’m real sorry I had to kill your brother.” And the tears came back because she really couldn’t believe she had killed a cop.
“The Lord will make His judgment, ma’am.”
“Shoot him, Jake!”
But Jake didn’t shoot.
And Buzz finally disappeared into the dark woods.
Ten minutes later, as they were carrying food back to the house, they heard his truck out on the highway, its bump and rattle a sound that now terrified Glenda.
Back in the house, she foned Gerry, and he answered on the third ring.
“I wouldn’t stay in the area,” he said. “You don’t know Buzz the way I do. He’s a vindictive son of a bitch. When I was a regular at the Crossroads, there was barely a night that went by when he didn’t get in a fight. Hanna’s right. You should have killed him when you had the chance. Revenge is one of his main motivating principles. And now you’ve gone and killed his brother. In self-defense, admittedly, but that’s something Buzz isn’t going to understand.”
“But where would we go?” asked Glenda.
“I’m told there’s still limited cell-phone service in certain parts of the
United States.”
“We’re getting partial service here, but it’s a bit sketchy.”
“See if you can phone Neil on his cell. Tell him what’s happened. Maybe you can go down to Coral Cables. Do you have anywhere to recharge the car?”
“The nursing home pump is still working. At least the last time I was there.”
She followed her husband’s advice. She recharged her cell phone by shining a flashlight at it for a few minutes, then tried Neil.
She tried throughout the night, but kept getting service interruption messages.
A little after midnight, service resumed and she was at last able to get through. It turned out he wasn’t in Coral Gables at all. He was at an Air Force base, Homestead.
The change in Neil’s voice took her by surprise. He usually spoke so confidently, as if he had the world in the palm of his hand. But now he sounded distracted. And more than distracted… what was the word?
Yes… he sounded diffuse, as if all his energy and concentration had been scattered.
“I’m working on a new approach.” But his words lacked confidence. She heard what sounded like gunfire in the background. “A virus. It actually works on a kind of interesting principle. It attacks the Tarsalan genetic component of the xenophyta directly, but… I… Jesus, Glenda, you shot a cop?”
And she explained to him how Maynard wasn’t really a cop anymore but just a kind of feudal lord. Then she began to explain about Buzz.
“That idiot Gerry brought to Marblehill a few years back?” he asked.
“That’s him.” Then she explained that Buzz was a vindictive son of a bitch.
“Look…” Neil cut her off, as if the zany details of her war with the sheriff and his brother were beside the point. “I want you and the kids heading to Marblehill. One thing this whole exercise in futility has taught me… it’s all about family. I’ve got some airmen stocking the place. And guarding it. We’ve got a bit of a situation down here at Homestead. And if this virus thing… if it doesn’t pan out… me, Louise, and the girls will be heading up to Marblehill. I’ve got enough food up there to last a year. And I’ve got the place well stocked with medicine…. How’s Hanna? How’s she managing the heat?”