Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

  Maybe they have problems telling our sexes apart, she thought, although she suspected that it was unlikely. They could have learned the significance of breasts easily – it wasn't as if American women covered themselves up so completely that breasts couldn’t be seen, at least in outline – and besides, women tended to be different from men. Maybe the aliens had problems telling humans apart, though; they didn’t seem to realise that their Walking Dead were instantly recognisable to other humans. Or perhaps they just didn’t care.

  “Come on,” the minder said. She looked into his dead eyes and fought the urge to recoil. He might have been a typical asshole with power when he’d been operating of his own free will, but no one deserved to spend the rest of their life as an alien slave, whatever he’d been. She wouldn’t have condemned a lawyer to live as an inhuman human, although she’d always found lawyers to be pretty inhuman. “We have work to do.”

  The remainder of the tour was pure propaganda. The minder showed them the alien medical centre and talked about how hundreds of patients with incurable diseases, barely kept in check by human medicine, had already been cured and how thousands more would be cured in the next few months. The scourge of AIDS, Cancer and thousands of other diseases would be wiped out in America, along with hunger and poverty. For some reason, he didn’t point out that democracy and free will would also be eradicated. She saw thoughtful expressions on a pair of reporters she knew by reputation, two lesbians who’d made a habit of attacking the government at every opportunity, no matter which Party held the White House. They might have realised, at last, that whatever could be said about the Federal Government, at least it was American – and human. The alien-backed government was composed of Walking Dead.

  They passed a food station and watched as thousands of hungry citizens were fed. There was little new for her there – she’d been at the food stations in Washington to pick up her own rations – but the Chicago workers seemed to have a whole different attitude. Perhaps it was the late Mayor’s influence, but where the Washington servers had concentrated on feeding as many people as possible, the Chicago servers seemed to enjoy making people crawl. Abigail saw one of them hesitating just long enough to remind a father of four who was in charge, before handing over a ration of alien gruel and enough food bars to keep them going another day. She suspected, knowing what she knew about how the Quislings lived the high life, that most of the real food in the city had either been eaten or transferred to the secure areas, where it was eaten by those who collaborated enthusiastically. She remembered, with a sudden flicker of guilt, the buffet they’d been served at the first press conference she’d attended. It had been wonderful, the more so because she had believed that she would never have anything like it again. Bread, cheese, meat, salad…it had been a bribe, a threat and a promise. If she didn’t play ball, she would be going back to eating gruel and drinking cold water. None of the reporters had failed to take the message home.

  “It’s time for you all to return to Washington,” the minder said. “You can write your stories and scripts on the way home. Photographs and video records will be provided.”

  After you have ensured that anything that makes the aliens look bad has been removed, Abigail thought. It didn’t really matter. Everyone knew that the news was censored these days. She’d just have to bide her time and wait.

  She wrote the puff piece on the flight home. This time, the alien craft moved slower, although far faster than anything below a military jet, giving her time to think. One thing she had learned was that the aliens – or the Walking Dead – had no sense for presentation. The story she wrote howled about how evil the resistance fighters were – and how glorious the aliens were – to the point where it bordered upon parody. She was fairly sure, like Iraq a decade before, that if someone added all the death figures together, they would conclude that the entire American population had been exterminated several times over. Anyone who read the article would know that it had been written with tongue firmly in cheek. She submitted it to her minder and watched as he read it and gave it the seal of approval. He hadn’t noticed.

  It still puzzled her. The Walking Dead were loyal to the aliens, yet some of them seemed to possess a degree of free will and others…did not. The Vice President seemed only to appear at very formal ceremonies, which suggested that there was something wrong and the aliens were not altogether certain of their ability to control him. Others, General Howery among others, seemed to operate independently of alien supervision, serving the aliens with all the ability and experience they’d once used to serve America. Had the minder lost his sense of taste and judgement when they converted him into an unwilling collaborator, or was he engaged in a tiny rebellion of his own? There was no way to know.

  She was privately amused to notice that she was almost alone in the canteen when she ate. Most of her fellow reporters weren't used to such carnage and were trying to forget it in the bar. The Washington Green Zone had a very well stocked bar, but she had too many secrets to risk getting drunk. She ate a quick meal – trying to forget the families accepting food from the aliens, or what they had to eat to remain alive – changed her outfit completely, and walked out of the Green Zone. She still made a point of sleeping in her own apartment – it had once belonged to a lobbyist who had fled Washington before the aliens invaded, or so she believed – and besides, it made an excellent cover for her other work. The basement under her apartment block had a computer system that had been set up without any link to her at all. It also had something more interesting.

  The story she’d written in her head came out almost unbidden, creating a version of reality that might have been real. It wouldn’t matter what the truth actually was; people would want it to be real. She wrote about the policeman and his life, and his death. She wrote her version of how he had died and turned it into a real story. It would have won an award if awards were still being handed out – or at least she liked to think so. The Pulitzer Prize had become increasingly politicised in the last decade. She knew that stories that should have won the Prize had been ignored, in favour of inferior stories that never should have seen the light of day. She shook her head and pressed SEND. The story would be all over the internet by tomorrow.

  It wasn’t the end of her work. The other item in the basement had been salvaged from a school, a hand-operated mimeograph. It might have been old technology, but with a little effort, she could print out hundreds of copies of the story, without electric power. It took her two hours to produce enough copies to make it worthwhile, but eventually she packaged them all up in a bundle and carried them up to the ground floor. She didn’t know who used the apartment that had once belonged to the building manager – once, she would have tried to find out, but it was too dangerous now – but it didn’t matter. She left the pile of printouts in the arranged place and went back upstairs to her apartment, closing the door behind her.

  She’d arranged it all. The owner of the apartment worked for the resistance. He’d distribute the newssheets around Washington under cover of darkness, pushing the news around the city and embarrassing the aliens. They’d have to deny the story or ignore it, yet neither would be believed by the citizens. They might try to ban people reading the underground newspaper, but they’d rapidly discover that it would be impossible to enforce. They’d end up looking like fools. As long as she was careful, she could keep writing their lies and producing real news on the side, without ever being detected. Anyone could have written the original story. They’d never be able to trace it to her.

  Besides, she knew, it was the only way she could sleep at night. She'd had her problems with America in the past, but it was her country and she’d do what she could to save it from the aliens, even at the risk of her own life. If reporters in the more restrictive countries could brave the threat of torture and death, how could she do any less? With that thought, she slipped into bed and fell asleep.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (Occupied)

&
nbsp; Day 120

  “It’s not clear,” Sergeant Gavin Portree muttered. “We’ll have to go another way.”

  Sergeant Kalid Burke shook his head. “There is no other way,” he muttered back. He’d have preferred a throat mike and subvocalising his words, but there was too great a chance that the aliens would pick up on it. The general level of tech in Saudi Arabia wouldn’t have produced such equipment and none of the Saudi Special Forces units had had access to it. “We’ll have to wait.”

  Kalid’s mother had been from Saudi Arabia, born to a surprisingly liberal family. Educated abroad, she’d refused to return to the life of a Saudi woman – the lucky ones were second-class citizens – and had married an Englishman to gain citizenship and remain behind in the United Kingdom. Her family hadn’t bothered to press the point, giving her a considerable sum of money and wishing her luck. Kalid had grown up on a diet of hearing how unpleasant Saudi Arabia was from his mother and how important it was to cede no ground at all to extremists of all religions. Kalid’s own Islam was pretty nominal. The only reason he didn’t drink or smoke was because it would have upset his mother to see him indulging. When he’d turned eighteen, he'd joined the British Army and after a successful two years with the Rifles, he'd passed Selection and transferred to the SAS.

  He could pass as a Saudi and so he'd operated covertly in the country before the aliens had invaded, hitting terrorist bases and terrorist supporters as part of the Chalk Doctrine. Kalid had also come to realise that his mother had been right. Saudi’s prosperity was built on oil and slavery – they’d imported millions of guest workers to do all the dirty labour in the Kingdom – and growing undercurrents of change promised to sweep away the Princes and create either a democratic state or an Islamic Fundamentalist State. If the latter, he doubted that anyone would notice the difference, apart from the Princes. The entire country had been on a knife-edge for years and when the aliens had invaded, it had crumbled within a day. The aliens had crushed the Saudi military and occupied the cities. The remainder of the state had just rotted away.

  Kalid himself would have been quite happy to leave the Saudis in the mess they’d created for themselves, but the British Government had been keen to cause as much trouble for the aliens as possible. Kalid didn’t know why, but he guessed that it had something to do with the fact that the aliens wanted the entire world – and causing trouble for them in one place might buy Britain some time. His insertion into the country and passage to Riyadh had been surprisingly easy. The aliens hadn’t locked down the cities completely. If the population had fled out into the desert, they would have all starved to death.

  But then, Riyadh itself was an unnatural city. If the rest of the country had decided to stop supporting it, the city would have wasted away very quickly. The Saudis spent literally billions of pounds every year maintaining their castles of sand, everything from growing food to supplying water and power. The result was a metropolis that was far more fragile than most people guessed. The aliens held the life of the entire population in their clawed hands.

  His eyes followed the alien force as it moved down the centre of the road. Like Britain and – he’d heard – most of Europe, private cars had been banned from the roads. It was ironic to think of Saudi being short of fuel, but it was – besides, the aliens had a habit of shooting up any vehicle that came charging towards them. Saudi men were notoriously bad drivers – the women weren't allowed to drive at all, something Kalid knew for a fact was not supported by Islamic Law – and the remainder of the population probably considered it a relief. Besides, the aliens had made quite a few examples of people who’d dissented. Their bodies hung from stands they’d erected, purely to intimidate the population. It might have been working.

  “Filthy quislings,” he heard Gavin say. Gavin’s mere presence in the country would have caused uproar before the aliens had invaded. He wasn't just an infidel. He was an atheist. Kalid couldn’t care less – he was halfway there himself – but he wasn't going to risk a religious disagreement with their allies. “Look at them, taunting the population.”

  Kalid followed his gaze. The quislings were former guest workers, men and women who’d been abused badly by their former masters, owners in all, but name. They’d been beaten, abused, raped and sometimes murdered, after being lured to Saudi with promises of good jobs and high pay. They’d formed the backbone of several Islamic movements in the country, yet they had never been organised into a rebel force, for the clerics were just as racist as the rest of the country. The aliens had shattered the previous power structure and found, in the chaos, that they were welcomed by the guest workers. No one could have asked for more cooperative allies. They’d even helped the aliens to root out and destroy the remains of the religious police, the Mutaween, although they were no loss. The religious police had helped to recruit young Saudis to go fight in Iraq, where he’d killed many of them back when the world had made sense. The part of him that still clung to Islam whispered that with their deaths, the average depth of Islamic belief in the country had risen sharply. No one with the slightest belief in divine vengeance could have done half the atrocities they'd committed over the years.

  “They’re not the target,” he reminded his friend. Truthfully, he didn’t care about the collaborators, provided that they didn’t get in his way. The aliens had handed out enough weapons – captured, he suspected, from a Saudi weapons dump that had fallen into their hands – to ensure blood on the streets, if they ever left. “Come on.”

  The alien patrol and the escorting quislings – and their handful of naked prisoners – had vanished into the distance. They’d passed without any attempt to bar their way, even by the most outraged citizens. Kalid knew why. Unlike Western troops in Iraq, the aliens had one simple response to any defiance; they opened fire. In the early days, he’d heard, the young men of the city had gathered to throw stones at the aliens, even a handful of makeshift weapons. The aliens had slaughtered them and that put a stop to that. Car bombs and suicide bombers had had more success, but the aliens were always on the alert. They didn’t hesitate to fire on any suspicious target.

  His mother’s family had once owned several businesses in Saudi Arabia, although they'd lost two when a Prince decided he wanted them for his own profits. He'd run the businesses into the ground the following year, according to his mother, and eventually sold them on to one of his cronies. The thought of giving back stolen property had never occurred to him, although his mother had said that her father hadn’t wanted them back afterwards. The Prince had made an Ayn Rand villain look clever and competent.

  “Here,” he said, finally. The house clearly belonged to a wealthy family, yet it hadn’t been looted by the quislings or raided by the aliens. It crossed his mind that it could be a trap, yet…he didn’t dare pass up on the opportunity. They had to make contact with whatever remained of the official resistance. “Keep your mouth shut, remember, unless it’s in English.”

  “Yes, boss,” Gavin said. “Remember not to drool too loudly over ankles and bright eyes.”

  Kalid elbowed him and walked up to the male entrance, knocking once on the door. It opened, revealing a male secretary who glanced at them both nervously, before silently beckoning them in. Kalid removed his shoes in the lobby and motioned for Gavin to do the same. There was no point in given offence when they needed help. It had been a year since he'd been in a similar house, but the layout was surprisingly familiar. His mother had brought more from her heritage than just a desire to escape and run free. Whoever had decorated the house had a similar eye for detail.

  “You would be Kalid,” a voice said, in unaccented English. “Welcome to my house.”

  Kalid took a breath as he studied his grandfather. He’d seen pictures, but he wasn't quite sure what he expected, even from a man so liberal that he didn’t beat his servants. That policy had probably saved his life. They’d watched from a distance as masters who had beaten or raped their servants had been hung, or simply gunned down by the al
iens. The old man had a long beard and signs of a lifetime spent at prayer, but his eyes were bright and he was clearly no fool. In a different environment, he would have become a captain of industry or the next Bill Gates.

  “Thank you,” he said, finally. He had no idea how the old man felt about him. Sure, his mother had been married for three years before Kalid had been born, but there was no escaping the fact that she had married an infidel and given birth to an infidel son. “My mother sends her love.”

  “She always was a wonderful child,” his grandfather said. “Let us talk of other matters for the moment.”

  A woman wearing a headscarf came in and silently served hot coffee and sweet honey cakes. Gavin didn’t look openly at her, but they were both very aware of her presence. They’d seen too many people injured or killed because they had respected foreign traditions and not realised in time that the person wearing the veil wanted to kill them. His grandfather didn’t seem to care. They spent the next hour talking about nothing in particular, something that he’d found maddening on deployment. Arabs could spend hours talking about nothing, enquiring after family and friends, before getting to the point. His grandfather, the businessman, didn’t take as long as some he'd known in Afghanistan.

  “So I understand that you’re here to help us,” he said, finally. “How could you possibly help us? What can you give us that we couldn’t already get for ourselves?”