Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

  And she was as guilty as the rest. She’d written stories for the Committees of Correspondence, yet how could she tell them that, or encourage them to do the same? Her name was linked to articles that praised the aliens and lied about how much devastation they’d brought in their wake, leaving her branded as a collaborator or worse. She thought – again – about fleeing, but where could she have gone? The Canadians no longer took in refugees from America. Mexico was in the midst of a civil war. What did that leave? It wasn't as if she could swim the Atlantic and reach Britain. Besides, if some of the underground reports were accurate, the British were no longer accepting immigrants.

  Damn you, she thought, looking at the minder. She wanted it all to be over, so she could go back to her room and have a drink. She wanted to drink enough to smash her brains out and dull the pain, but she didn’t quite dare. Someone who was drunk might blab all their secrets to the world, and that would have been the end of her. The aliens might kill her, or they might take her onboard one of their ships and then someone else would look out at the world through her eyes. No one would care what happened to her afterwards. The Committees of Correspondence had been clear on that point. The Walking Dead were to be killed on sight.

  Despair welled up within her and she found herself blinking away tears. Percy had promised her a new position, yet with his arrest, she no longer knew if she’d get the position…and she wasn't sure if she wanted it. How long could she carry on working for the aliens openly, and sabotaging them behind their backs? She no longer wanted to live.

  ***

  Dolly looked down bitterly at her hands and saw the shaking. They had once been as steady as a surgeon’s hand as he prepared to cut open a patient and start mending whatever damage they’d suffered, but now…now she trembled all the time. She felt dirty, filthy and violated, hoping and praying that her contraceptive implant had lasted long enough to protect her from carrying one of their children. Dull rage welled up within her, matched by fear and hatred. No one had ever even tried to rape her before. The closest she’d ever come had been an ex-boyfriend – Mathew, she thought his name had been – with wandering hands and a nasty disposition. She’d kneed him in the balls and told him never to come anywhere near her again, before walking off and leaving him moaning in agony on the ground. She hadn’t even landed a blow on the Arabs before they’d had her helpless and worked their will on her. The pain…

  The Arabs had marched her back through the streets and handed her over to a group of alien warriors. Dolly had been almost relieved to see them, rather than the Order Police or other human collaborators. The Arabs hadn’t bothered to give her back her jeans and the cold air had been a stark reminder of her vulnerability. The aliens had put her in one of their vehicles with a dozen other prisoners and eventually transported her out of the city into one of their POW camps. A kindly nurse had cut her hands free and given her what medical treatment she could, but the camp was overflowing with wounded prisoners. The only good sign was that the camp was strictly segregated by sex. The male prisoners went elsewhere.

  There was nothing in the POW camp to inspire confidence, apart from the aliens who guarded it and Dead Arab Tree, which they could see in the centre of the camp. Five Arabs had been hung on it only a day ago by their own people – the stink didn’t seem to bother the aliens – for crimes against the civilian population. She couldn’t tell if her Arabs were hanging from the tree, but she liked to hope that they were. It suggested that the aliens did have some idea of justice, or perhaps it was just punishment for soldiers who broke discipline in the field.

  She wandered back over to the showers and undressed rapidly, standing under the hot water until she felt scorched. She hadn’t felt clean since the attack and had been showering several times a day – hot water was one thing the camp never ran out of – yet it made no difference. She’d scrubbed herself until the skin was raw, washed soap all over her body, but she still felt dirty. She wanted the Arabs in her sights and a chance to pull the trigger personally. The way her hands shook, she might not be able to pull the trigger.

  There were a handful of other women in the camp who had been raped as well, and two of the nurses had tried to organise a circle where they could talk about their experiences in the hopes that it would help them come to terms with it, but it hadn’t helped. The entire population seemed to be in shock. Things like that didn’t happen in America. They just didn’t happen…except they had. Bad times had come and the civilian population was bearing the brunt of the suffering. It didn’t matter that she was an American, she had come to realise; there was no natural law that promised her a good life, free from suffering. She dressed slowly – the camp had a stockpile of clothes, collected from the city – and wandered back out into the open. It wasn't as if there was much to do in the camp, but some of the kinder Order Policemen had passed in game boards, footballs and other things they could use to distract themselves from their fate. None of them believed that their treatment would be pleasant.

  A whistle echoed over the camp and she found herself running towards the assembly ground. They’d been told, firmly, that when the whistle blew they were to drop whatever they were doing and assemble for inspection, or else. Latecomers received a single stroke from a whip-like device an alien warrior carried, somehow causing terrible pain. Very few dared be late twice. She joined hundreds of other women as she stood in line, waiting to see what was about to happen. If nothing else, it would break up the monotony. Along with all the others, she placed her hands on her head and waited. No one wanted to know what the aliens would do if their orders were not obeyed.

  The gate opened and a line of alien warriors marched in, carrying long swords and other bladed weapons. They looked like a science-fiction writer’s nightmare come to life, yet she could see the underlying reason behind the choice of weapons. If the prisoners overwhelmed them and took the swords, they wouldn’t be able to escape the camp and threaten the aliens’ security. She winced slightly as a faint spicy smell drifted across her nostrils. The aliens stank of spice, and decay, and corruption. They were very far from human.

  A whisper ran through the crowd as another set of aliens stepped in. Two of them looked to be crosses between the Leader and Worker castes, the third was very definitely a Leader, just like the one she’d killed. His dark eyes swept across the gathered women and she flinched back. If they could read minds, he’d know what she’d done to his fellow Leader and take her away…she tried not to think of it, but it kept bubbling to the surface of her mind. The dark eyes flashed over her and kept going, running right down the line. The sense of relief was so profound that she almost fainted. They couldn’t read minds!

  One of the smaller aliens stepped in front of her and grabbed her arm, lifting it up and examining it. If it had been a human, even a human doctor, she would have screamed after everything she’d been though, but somehow the dry alien touch was bearable. She turned around as he poked her gently and felt his hands running down her back. It was a cold and dispassionate examination, one that made no sense to her. Other women were getting the same treatment and a handful were becoming hysterical, struggling to get away from the alien. One of the nurses took her hands off her head and tried to help one of the victims and an alien warrior started forward, whip in hand.

  The alien doctor – she thought of the newcomers as doctors, although she wasn’t sure why – held up a hand and hissed something in their language. The warrior bowed once and stepped back to the line, allowing the doctor to continue his work with the nurse’s assistance. They moved down the line, examining some – but not all – of the women. Dolly tried to concentrate on the puzzle and realised that all of the women they were examining were young, the youngest being around fifteen. There were no children in the camp. Where, she wondered, did they go?

  An alien stepped back in front of her, looked her up and down, and held up a hand in a beckoning motion. Dolly stepped forward and was pointed towards one of the alien warriors. Slowly, reluctan
tly, she kept walking forward until the warrior held up a clawed hand – they’d be fearsome hand-to-hand opponents, she realised – and stopped her. One hand grasped her arm, turned her around, and secured her hands behind her back. She was so stunned that it took her a moment to realise that other young women were getting the same treatment. She felt herself being pushed to her knees and shivered, twisting at the uncomfortable position. It was hard to see, but it looked as if the aliens had collected over thirty women, all young and reasonably pretty.

  “They’re going to give us to the Arabs,” one woman shouted. She broke down and cried, while others pulled at their bonds, trying to escape. Chaos was spreading through the camp when one of the alien doctors walked up to the first woman and touched her forehead with a small stick-like device. She let out a gasp and collapsed to the ground, completely out of the world. Dolly stared in amazement. She’d never seen anything like it before. The unbound women, the ones who had not been chosen, were waved away with threatening swipes of the whip, leaving the bound women alone.

  “Stand,” one of the aliens ordered, in oddly-accented English. Dolly tried to get to her feet, but with her hands bound it was almost impossible. One of the aliens came up behind her and helped her to her feet, pushing her into a line of bound women. “Follow.”

  Dolly followed as the camp gates swung open, allowing them to step outside and start walking. It was the first time she’d been outside the camp since she’d been put inside it, yet nothing seemed to have changed. Arab soldiers still swaggered around, escorted by the Order Police, taking sly glances at the women while they could. They didn’t try anything stupid – the presence of the alien warriors would have deterred anyone, but a man with a death wish – but they hooted and cat-called. A pair of Order Policemen joined in with wolf whistles. Dolly hunched herself down as best as she could, ignoring the noise as they rounded a corner and saw an alien craft resting lightly on the ground. The hatch somehow flowed open and the aliens encouraged them into the craft. They were taking them away from Chicago!

  She wanted to run, but there was no way she could outrun one of the aliens, even without her hands bound. She looked back, towards the drifting smoke clouds that covered her hometown, and felt new tears trickling down her face. They were taking her away from everything she’d ever known – and she’d never see what remained of her family again. An alien hand pushed her towards the hatch and she stumbled onboard, feeling the world spinning around her. The alien compartment was little more than a cargo hold, allowing them all a place to sit, but nothing else. There was no way out.

  “Where are they taking us?” One of the women asked. She sounded as if she were on the verge of panic. “Why…?”

  “I don’t know,” one of the other women said, “but they singled out the young specifically. They didn’t take anyone older than twenty-five. That bodes ill for our future, doesn’t it?”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Washington DC, USA (Occupied)

  Day 165

  “Excellent work, just excellent,” Daisy exulted. “With Chicago crushed, it will be a long time, a very long time, before anyone dares to question us again.”

  Karen said nothing. Keeping her face blank was becoming an art form for her – after all, if she showed any trace of her real feelings, the best that would happen was that she’d be sacked and thrown out to spend the rest of her life as a common labourer. The worst…well, General Howery showed exactly what could happen to her if the aliens suspected her loyalties. She didn’t want to become one of the Walking Dead.

  “That is not entirely accurate,” General Howery informed her. Daisy listened attentively. She could be a real bitch to anyone lower on the pecking order than herself, but when her superiors spoke, she listened. “A considerable number of known resistance fighters remain unaccounted for.”

  Karen smiled inwardly. The official reports continued to paint a rosy glow over the whole affair, claiming that every last resistance fighter had been either killed or captured. She knew better – the aliens knew better – even though she understood why Daisy and the Public Relations people were pushing it so hard. If enough people believed that the resistance was finished, it would be done for, yet how could anyone believe that Chicago was the whole nation? Even if the aliens had been telling the truth, even if they had obliterated Chicago and the surrounding area, they wouldn’t have wiped out the entire resistance. The only way to do that would be to wipe out America itself, yet with tens of thousands of their own people on the ground, it would have been suicide.

  “They’re not important,” Daisy informed him. “Who cares if some of them are hiding in basements somewhere?”

  “We care,” General Howery said, firmly. “The problem with dealing with an insurgency is that if you take the boot off the back of its neck, it rapidly recovers and grows stronger and then you have another insurgency on your hands. We have hurt the beast badly in Chicago, yet we have not impeded the growth of other resistance groups. The…the…the…”

  Karen looked at him, concerned. She’d liked him before he’d become one of the Walking Dead, and for a moment, he’d sounded almost normal, as if he was trying to get words out that disagreed with the alien programming. General Howery staggered slightly, before he recovered himself. She wondered if he was on the verge of a breakdown.

  “The…misstep in Virginia might have terrified many, but it also made them furious and angry,” General Howery said, finally. Karen realised that he had been trying to criticize the aliens directly, something that his programming would not allow him to do in front of others. “The insurgency in Virginia and the surrounding area will have grown – has grown – into a far more serious threat. Attacks on the Order Police and even patrolling units have become more common. It won’t be long before they start hitting bases again, and then…and then, we’ll be back where we started.”

  He sat down heavily. “Counter-insurgency warfare is often confusing,” he admitted. “You need to win hearts and minds, yet you cannot afford to be too gentle; you have to be strong, and clearly fair. There are places where the mere provision of effective public services would win you as many friends as you wanted, and places where you couldn’t do anything to please them, places where the only real cure is mass slaughter.”

  One hand waved vaguely in the air. “It’s a balancing act,” he said. “You have to offer the stick and the carrot in equal measure. Too many mass slaughters and people will think that they have no choice, but to fight you, believing that you’re going to kill them anyway. Too few and they won’t fear you. We cannot afford to lose that balancing act.”

  Karen felt sick. She had never seriously thought about the military as a career, yet she was sure that normal – unaltered – American officers would never casually propose mass slaughter as a solution to all their woes. The Walking Dead didn’t care about morality, or even anything else, but efficiency. How long would it be, she wondered, until they brought out the poison gas and started deploying it against the insurgents?

  “Very well,” Daisy said, tightly. “What do you intend to propose to our lords and masters?”

  If General Howery heard the underlying tone in her voice, he gave no sign. “We start by targeting a specific area and crushing the insurgency there,” he said. He studied the map for a long moment, nothing the red dots that marked resistance attacks. There were a lot of them. “Virginia is probably the best place to start. They’re already disposed to believe the worst of us. We start rotating new Order Police units into the area and surge them forward, occupying the towns and villages, before we start chasing the insurgents all over the state. We establish checkpoints, secure areas and keep pushing them outwards. The insurgents can either fight or concede the game to us.”

  Daisy frowned, considering it. “Why not one of the other areas that seethes with terrorist activity?” She asked. “What about Texas or New Mexico, or even California?”

  “We don’t want to bite off more than we can chew,” General Hower
y said. “As we continue to expand the Order Police, we’ll start taking them down into Texas and up into the Rocky Mountains, but the territory there favours the insurgents. It’s a question of resources. Ethos may provide us with additional warriors to back up the Order Police, or it might just be us on our own. If the latter…”

  “I’ll provide whatever support I can,” Daisy said. “Thank you.”

  General Howery nodded, saluted her, and left the room. “A pity he didn’t show that level of thinking earlier,” Daisy commented. “It would have made our lives so much easier.”

  “Yes,” Karen agreed, neutrally. “He’s an experienced commanding officer.”

  “That was beyond dispute,” Daisy snapped at her. “Do you have the figures for reopening the industrial plants?”

  “Here,” Karen said, passing over the folder. “We can have the country back at roughly eighty percent of pre-war production within a month, and then we can start working on the various orders we received from the aliens and overseas.”

  “Thank you,” Daisy said, absently. “Take a seat and wait.”

  Karen nodded, keeping her thoughts to herself. Americans had been complaining for years about jobs being outsourced to China or India or other countries where the international corporations didn’t have to pay their workers a living wage, but the truth was that America still produced a vast amount of material that the rest of the world – and the country itself – needed desperately. With China in a state of civil war and India threatening to launch nuclear strikes against Pakistan, America needed to build up other industries again, forcing Daisy to work to organise a massive reclamation effort. It would bring the puppet government considerable support if they actually managed to lower the unemployment rate to nothing, yet how efficient could a command economy be, in the long run? The answer, history suggested, was not very efficient at all.