Cottonwood

by R. Lee Smith

  “I walked.”

  “I’ll send for a driver. You live on site?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Of course,” he agreed. “Then go home, get a good sleep, and try not to worry.”

  And that was that. An armed man in a flak vest drove her home. He didn’t say a word to her. She took a long shower, scrubbing her hair with the contents of an entire bottle of shampoo to get the smoke out, but the smell seemed to linger even so. She made some soup for dinner, drank two swallows, and gave the rest to Fagin, who ate even less before deciding it was gross and nosing the rest unobtrusively into a corner. He came and sat on her foot, whining, while she sat in her living room and stared at the mirror over the fake fireplace.

  The sun went down. The good stuff wore off. The sound of the eggs screaming haunted her. Sarah couldn’t stand it anymore. She got up, called Fagin, found her official IBI cap where she’d tossed it in the kitchen on her first day, and went for a drive.

  She didn’t want to go for a drive. Her head hurt and her vision had a way of occasionally…well, not swimming, but wanting to, which made driving intermittently terrifying, particularly in a strange town. No, she didn’t want to drive. She wanted to make a phone call.

  There was a gas station right outside of IBI’s residential area, but she ignored it. She ignored the community center and the clubs. She ignored everything in IBI’s happy little village and kept driving until she’d passed the outer gate and was thirty miles away in the sleepy Kansas town of Wheaton.

  Beautiful night. Hot and muggy, full of teens out for summer fun. They gathered everywhere—great whooping mobs of them—the children of IBI and the teenaged townies, mingling in a glorious intergalactic rainbow of mutual trust and respect. Integrating.

  Sarah found a McDonald’s and a few bucks in change, put on her hat so she wouldn’t scare the kiddies, and went to the phone bank. Old phones. No PAS hookups. No video screens. Just phones. Kate answered on the third ring, but sleepily. That sleepiness changed to sharp silence as Sarah began a calm retelling of her day that ended in fractured and half-hysterical tears after only a few minutes.

  “They burned them alive!” she sobbed, leaning into the phone to try and disguise her breakdown from anyone who might be watching. “Who could do that, Kate? For God’s sake, who burns up a houseful of screaming babies and laughs about the s-sounds it m-muh-makes?”

  “Calm down, Sarah. Is this your phone?”

  “N-no.”

  “Not your paz?”

  “No.” She hadn’t thought about that out in the open, but then again, she must have thought about it on some level, because she’d left her paz at home to drive thirty miles to a payphone. A safe phone. One IBI didn’t own. “I’m at McDonald’s.”

  “Good,” Kate said, again sounding distant. “Are you hurt?”

  Sarah pulled her hat down lower, feeling the sting and itch of her new stitches, the heavier ache of the gash they closed, and the whole rotten throb occupying the front of her face. “No,” she said.

  “No?” Kate’s sharpest voice came swooping down on her lie like a hawk. “They came and held you nicely while they burned that guy’s house, and then let you go and patted your head and said, ‘Take care,’ and left you waving them goodbye? I’m hearing you, Sarah, I know you didn’t stand there quietly, so how bad are you hurt?”

  She wanted to start crying again. Kate could always do this to her, always strip away the safe walls Sarah put up around her and leave her naked in the spotlight with all her weaknesses on display. “They knocked me down,” she admitted.

  “With what?”

  “That’s all!”

  “Jesus Hug-a-bear Christ! I may not be able to see you on this thing, but I can hear you! You’re talking at me through a mouthful of marbles and you’re slurring every third word, so how many teeth did they take out and how many pills are you on right now? You’re scaring the shit out of me, so cut the crap and tell me how bad they hurt you!”

  She did start crying again then—huge, blubbery tears like a little girl cries, hating them and hating herself for always falling into them. “He kicked me in the face and someone knocked me out, I swear that’s all! I didn’t lose any teeth! I barely got a scratch and Baccus’s babies were stomped to death and set on fire! Like you even care!” she choked out, swiping furiously at her eyes. “They’re nothing but a bunch of bugs to you, you’ve made that perfectly clear! I don’t even know why I called!”

  “They’re not a bunch of bugs,” Kate said softly. “I never thought that, any more than I ever thought working with them was the dangerous part of your job. I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen to me, you just had to run off and—ah, Sarah, God damn it all, I wish you hadn’t done this!”

  Silence between them, but not quite. Sarah sniffled herself under control, her breath harsh in her ears, and there was a low hiss of static on Kate’s end.

  At last, her sister sighed. “Okay, Sarah, I’m going to ask you one question, just one time. I want you to think before you answer, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Kate took a few deep breaths, then quietly asked, “Can you do any good there?”

  “I—”

  “Think before you answer.”

  Sarah, miserable, thought. There was no good in Cottonwood. There were twenty-five thousand aliens packed into a landfill by men with guns, men who crushed their helpless children alive, men who dragged them out of their houses and threatened to shoot them…maybe did shoot them. Sarah couldn’t help them. Sarah couldn’t even bring them a burger and glass of clean water without getting fired. She was useless there. She was a part of the machine that ground them down.

  She thought of T’aki sprawling in the dirt, playing Trucks with milk bottles and rusty cans. She thought of Baccus with his hands on his head, flinching away from the gun while his house—his children—burned. She thought of Samaritan holding her down while he cheerfully told her about the boats and the girls and what they’d made him do just so he could have a hot shower with soap.

  T’aki, crawling up onto her lap. Giving her his precious Trucks to play with. Trying to tickle her, trying to be tickled. And Sanford, putting down his tools and laughing, actually laughing, over Aliens From Outer Space and the eyeball king. Going to movies, going to the Heaps, going back to sit in his house all together and just talk. Could she do them any good? She honestly didn’t know, but she didn’t want to give them up. And if she walked away now, wasn’t that the same as abandoning them? Who would ever come along who would try to do better?

  “I think so,” Sarah whispered, her heart breaking at the lie.

  There was a pause, and then Kate said, “Really?” in a dubious voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Well…okay. But I’m telling you this, Sarah, don’t argue with these people. If you ever decide you can’t hack it out there, don’t call me, don’t fight, don’t pack, don’t even get your dog, just leave. Get in your van and come right home.”

  “I—”

  “And don’t call me on either your home phone or your paz unless it’s to say happy birthday and what a great time you’re having out there. When people in the office tell bug jokes, you better laugh. And the next time they start breaking eggs, you stand back and let them.”

  “Kate!”

  “But don’t do anything stupid, like sneak in to take pictures or start blogging about how horrible it is inside the walls, and do not, I repeat, do not threaten to go to any newspapers if things get ugly with your boss. When it’s time to run, you tuck tail and run and don’t you even think of doing something Hollywood and heroic, you got me?”

  Sarah said nothing. Her eyes swam. Her throat felt tight.

  “I love you, kiddo,” Kate said, gently now. “And maybe I’m being paranoid about all this, but you are scaring the hell out of me tonight. My baby sister may have just put herself on IBI’s radar. IBI…nobody knows who these guys really are.”

  “They’re the—�
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  “No, I know who they say they are now, but seriously, they are bad people.” Kate sighed again, hard. “Twenty years ago, when they first show up and start penning up the bugs, you know what their tax status was? It wasn’t a charity, Sarah. They were gun-runners.”

  “That can’t be right!”

  “No, it’s true. That psycho warlord leader of theirs, Damek van Meyer, said IBI would take care of them as long as they got salvage rights to the ship. And then he went straight into the bedroom with a bunch of world leaders and fucked around until they figured out who’d get what alien-goddamn-gun in exchange for permission to build one of their roach motels. And today, they’re still selling guns, only they’re not doing so much buying any more and that means they’re making them, Sarah. These great altruistic friends of yours, who bought you a super hi-tech house in their cute little gated community, are sitting on the world’s most obvious money-laundering business in history, only instead of a restaurant or a laundromat, they’re hiding behind the public’s fear of bugs to build themselves into the largest uncontrolled and unofficial weapons development and manufacturing agents in the world, with a free license to ship and trade in any country with an immigration camp. They have their own airports, their own seaports—they are their own law!”

  Sarah listened, staring sightlessly into the corner of the phone bank, wishing she could disbelieve any of it.

  “And in addition to turning out millions of undocumented weapons into God knows whose hands, your boss is also employing something like fifty thousand ‘security guards’ armed with top-of-the-line IBI-brand weapons and armor. This is not a security force anymore, kiddo. This is one man’s private army. And speaking of weapons, where are all those alien weapons they supposedly took off the mothership, huh?”

  “They’re all locked down. Humans can’t use them.”

  “We’re already using them,” said Kate. “Twenty years ago, there was no such thing as a concussion cannon or a plasma rifle or an ionizing particle blaster! Where do you think they came from? The International Bureau of Immigration holds the patent on every piece of practically every weapon used in the last three wars! Open your eyes, Sarah! They could have put all the bugs together in a bunch of apartment buildings if all they wanted was to house them. Instead, they spread them out over the globe in these dink-ass little shacks and why? So they could spread out with them and hide a couple of refineries and manufacturing plants right out in the open! And don’t tell me that’s not what’s going on, because there is no other reason on God’s green earth for anyone to have that many technicians around.”

  “They could be building—”

  “But they’re not,” Kate interrupted. “They’re not building anything. They put the bugs in a slum and they’re ignoring them. Jesus, if we’re lucky, they’re ignoring them, but the point I’m making is they aren’t building them a damned thing. IBI doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the bugs, they only want their stuff! And you had to go running out there and put yourself right in the middle of it all! Jesus, Sarah!”

  Sarah’s head ached. She rubbed and felt fuzzy skin instead of hair, puckered scabbing stitches. She pulled her cap down lower.

  “Be careful, okay?” Kate blew a sigh into the receiver, the intensity gone from her voice, now only tired again. “Be careful out there. Do good, but be careful. I love you, but you’re scaring me so bad. You’re all I’ve got.”

  “I love you too,” Sarah managed.

  “Go home. Go to sleep.”

  “Yeah. I will.”

  Kate hung up first, but gently. Sarah wiped her eyes (the left one ached, even though it was unhurt, as if her cheekbone were outsourcing its pain to other parts of the body, just to be sure she felt it all) and went back to the van.

  Fagin was waiting patiently on the seat to wash her down and wonder if McDonald’s would mind giving a starving dog an ice cream cone. Sarah patted him down and dutifully promised one, but had to sit for a while behind the wheel and not think. Not think about Mr. van Meyer and Piotr coming up to see her at her desk, not think about that shiny and well-stocked medical wing in IBI’s basement, not think about Sanford shoving his son down into a hole and hissing, ‘That means nothing to these people!’, or Samaritan saying that doctors took people away and didn’t bring them back. What she thought about instead was herself, her own stupid self, walking in through the gate on her first day of work, all smiles and clean sheets of paper, ready to do some good, to be a part of the great intergalactic rainbow connecting humans and aliens in glorious integration.

  “What joy,” croaked Sarah. She looked at herself in the rearview mirror and saw a gargoyle with half her face, only half. She sighed and started up the van.

  Fagin got his cone and Sarah bought a burger purely by habit, but she didn’t bother trying to eat it. Her face throbbed abysmally now; it was bound to be old Fagin’s breakfast in the morning. Right now, she didn’t care about anything except a handful of pills and her bed, but as bad as she felt tonight, she was only going to feel worse tomorrow and Fagin was going to need another bag of kibble before the weekend was up, so when Sarah finally started up the van, she aimed it, not towards Cottonwood and home, but towards the ShopALot.

  There, she bought a bag of Fagin’s current favorite—he snubbed food like a cat, dumb dog—and a few cans of meaty chunks to mix in, plus some self-pity candy bars and a bag of cookies she knew she’d never be able to chew, and a stack of soft-looking frozen dinners and ice cream. She got almost halfway back across the parking lot when the flimsy grocery bag split, spilling dog food and junk food all over the pavement. A car ran over her cookies as she was picking everything up. She cried and got them anyway. She’d paid for them.

  With her groceries loose in the van and distinctly the worse for wear, Sarah drove around to the back of the ShopALot to look for a cardboard box she could pack them into. If she hadn’t done that, if she’d just gone home…but she didn’t. She drove out of the well-lit parking lot and into the muddy loading dock, where the van’s headlights caught an alien up against the ShopALot dumpster with nowhere to hide.

  She braked and stared at him, blinking hard to make him go away. She’d hit her head. She’d hit her head and apparently the good stuff hadn’t all worn off because there was no way she was seeing this.

  The alien slowly raised his arms over his head and got down on his knees.

  On the other side of the ShopALot, the human side, metal carts crashed together, making the alien jump and look around. He raised his arms higher.

  He was really here. In Wheaton. In the ShopALot.

  Sarah got out of the van.

  Funny, how quiet it was back here. Her shoes crunching over the cracked pavement and pot-holes made echoes against the side of the building. The alien’s breath—thick and snotty and way too fast—scratched at her ears. His eyes darted up to read the letters on her official IBI cap. He said, “I’m not resisting.” The clicks and rattles of his speech were loud as gunshots; they both flinched.

  “What are you doing here?” Sarah asked. She didn’t know what else to say.

  He stared at her, panting in that wet way. The ground around him was littered with bits of paper and plastic tubs from the ShopALot’s greasy deli. When he saw her looking at them, he quickly scraped them together and put them back in the dumpster. It wasn’t easy for him. He was shaking.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I’m not resisting.”

  “How did you get here?”

  He breathed, breathed, and finally said, “They took me out in the van. I didn’t do anything wrong. They took me.” He breathed, faster and faster, then blurted, “I don’t know where I am,” in a rush of shrill buzzing and snapping antennae. “I followed the road to the lights, but this isn’t home!”

  Another shopping cart clatter made them both jump.

  “You’d better get in the van before someone sees you,” Sarah said. “No one’s seen you yet, have they?”

 
“I don’t think so.” The alien stood up slowly, keeping his arms high.

  “Why did they take you out of Cottonwood?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t do anything wrong. They just took me at the Heap Station and put me in the van.” He looked at her, his palps twitching nervously. “Are you taking me back?”

  Not until he said it did she realize that was in fact exactly what she’d had in mind and it horrified her. Back? She was taking him back? After everything she’d seen today, everything she knew they were doing…

  She was taking him back.

  Without warning, Sarah bent over and threw up. It was more of a messy belch than anything else and it made her head hurt so much that for a moment, she thought she was going to fall over in the foamy puddle and pass out, but she didn’t. She didn’t cry either, although the strain of trying to puke made her eyes water. She’d cried over her stupid cookies, but not this.

  She retched again and grabbed the van to steady herself, coughing. The alien could have run. He could have gotten away easily. He didn’t. He just watched. He wasn’t resisting.

  “Get in the van,” Sarah whispered, wiping her mouth. She opened the door for him. “Please.”

  He did, cringing back when Fagin came wagging over for a sniff. He sat down on the very edge of the back seat, wrists together and raised slightly, very quiet. Sarah got in and sat down beside him. She shut the door.

  His antennae kept jerking, betraying his anxiety. Sarah’s head hurt; she took off her hat and rubbed tiredly at her stitches. Fagin lay down on his blanket at their feet and closed his eyes.

  “Do you want to go back?” Sarah said finally. It was easier to say out loud than she imagined.

  He clicked hard, looked at her, at the loose groceries all over the floor, at Fagin. Slowly, he lowered his arms, but he didn’t relax any. The sound of his palps grinding and snapping in his barely-restrained state of panic was almost more than she could bear at the end of this awful day. He thought it was a trick; it would have been, coming from anyone else. He probably thought these were the last minutes of his life, and she couldn’t think of a thing to say to convince him otherwise. She just kept talking, and hoped that he would somehow trust her.