Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

  Don’t ask, don’t tell, she thought with wry amusement, and settled back to listen to him. He had no surprises for her, merely trading a few snippets of information and hinting at more, in exchange for favourable reviews in the newspaper. It wasn't quite up to the standards of bribery practiced before the invasion – most newspapers had had ethics policies that were supposed to prevent reporters from accepting favours, gifts or bribes, all of which were widely ignored – but he probably didn’t want much from her. A few favourable mentions would help him to rebuild his shattered staff and help him to serve the aliens – and perhaps the country.

  She leaned back in her chair, feeling a sudden wave of depression that must have showed on her face, for he looked concerned and even worried. The longer the occupation lasted, the more and more Americans who would be forced into collaboration, willingly or otherwise. They wouldn’t be men and women drawn from the dregs of society like the Order Police, but the men and women who made society work, collaborating because there was no other choice. The memories of an independent America and a world without alien life forms would fade away, replaced by tolerance, acceptance and finally accommodation. The United States would die, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Resistance would become pointless and futile.

  “I shouldn’t worry about it,” she said, finally. “I’ll make sure you get all the mentions you could possibly want.”

  They shook hands firmly and he allowed her to lead him out to the door, before she walked downstairs and into her own car, savouring the luxury for a long moment. There were few cars left running in Washington now – the fuel shortage had seen to that – and those that were running belonged to the elite. She wasn't unaware of the dangers – someone had shot an antitank rocket into a collaborator’s car in Los Angeles, destroying it utterly – yet not using the car would have looked suspicious. She leaned back and breathed in the smell of the leather seats, trying to relax. It was going to be a long day.

  It was hours later when she was finally allowed to leave the Green Zone, having been given her marching orders, without even a trace of politeness. Daisy Fairchild – the collaborator-in-chief – had been bad enough, but coming face to face with the former Vice President had been worse. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought that she was looking at a man with severe learning disabilities, not one of the Vice Presidents of the United States. The Vice President was normally about as useful as tits on a bull – hence the many jokes about them having been chosen for the wrong reasons – but whatever had happened to him wasn't funny. It made her wonder how many other men had been converted into Walking Dead…and how often the process went badly wrong.

  Her driver drove her back to her apartment and escorted her up the stairs. Now that she was formally part of the collaborator government, she was probably entitled to much better quarters, but she simply hadn’t had the time to organise a move. Besides, the hidden printing presses and other equipment in the basement would have to be destroyed or moved before someone else was moved into the apartment. She checked her laptop quickly, consulted a pair of trustworthy web forums discussing the implications of the alien operations against Israel, and jumped into the shower. It was such a relief to just allow the warm water to run down her body and forget everything else. She wanted to remain there forever. Sadly, she turned off the shower, dried herself, and headed for bed. Tomorrow was going to be another busy day.

  She was half-asleep when she heard the knock at the door. It wasn't soft, but hard, loud enough to send a chill down her spine. Men and women in Washington had learned to dread the sound of someone knocking at night, knowing that it meant that the Order Police had taken an interest in them. She thought about hiding under the covers, or trying to sneak away, but it would do no good. They had authority to knock down the door if she didn’t open it quickly enough for their liking. She pulled herself out of bed, picked up her blue nightgown and donned it quickly, suddenly aware of how revealing it was. The knock came again and she pushed the thought out of her mind. If she didn’t open the door quickly, she’d be lucky not to be arrested on the spot.

  “I’m coming,” she said, as she pulled the sash around her midriff and walked to the door. She’d installed bolts as well as the standard lock, but they wouldn’t stand up to a determined attempt to break down the door. “I’m coming…”

  She opened the door to see four Order Policemen standing there. She opened her mouth to demand to know what they thought they were doing, but two of them stepped forward, grabbed her and pushed her backward into the wall. She squawked in protest as rough hands spun her around, pushed her face against the hard wall, and cuffed her hands behind her back. She kicked out before remembering where she was and was rewarded with a boot in the rear that left her gasping in pain. Cold gloved hands searched her rapidly, before a hand returned to her back and held her firmly in place.

  “Stay where you are,” a voice growled, in her ear. Abigail could barely hear him over the racket. It sounded as if an entire army had barged into her apartment and was searching the place roughly, tearing their way through her clothes and supplies. “You’ve upset the Big Eyes and they aren’t very happy with you.”

  She caught her breath, feeling pain trickling down her cheek from where it had been banged against the wall. The cuffs felt as if they were cutting off her circulation, leaving her hands feeling numb, reminding her of her sudden helplessness. The Big Eyes were the alien leaders, slang that Abigail herself had helped spread through America. If they weren't happy with her…what did they think that she had done? Several answers suggested themselves and she shivered, feeling cold air blowing through her nightgown. If they knew everything she’d done, she’d be lucky not to be simply turned into one of the Walking Dead and then put back to work.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, finally. “I have their permission…”

  A rough hand pushed her head against the wall, hard. “I said be quiet,” the man hissed. Abigail opened her mouth to point out that he hadn’t said any such thing, and then closed her mouth, knowing that it would just earn her a beating, or worse. “They told us to arrest you and search your flat. Is there anything you want to tell us?”

  One hand slipped down to her buttocks and gave them a squeeze. “Or is there anything you want to do for us?” He asked. “We can be quite…accommodating to anyone who treats us right.”

  Abigail shook her head slowly. “No?” He asked. “Very well. Don’t say we didn’t make the offer.”

  Another Order Policeman entered from her bedroom, holding one of her laptops in one hand. “We only found this and two other laptops, sir,” he said. “The bitch has quite an interesting taste in underwear, but we found nothing else incriminating.”

  Abigail found herself blushing furiously. She hated it when she blushed at the best of times, let alone when leering men were holding her captive. She’d been arrested before – it was one of the risks of being a reporter who went where the story was – but even the most repressive regimes had thought twice about hurting American civilians. The worst she’d had was a week in a Columbian jail with a pair of sadistic female guards. She would have almost have had preferred male guards.

  But the Order Police…they could do anything to her, anything at all, and they wouldn’t face any punishment or sanctions. The one holding her could drag her to the bed and rape her, or do anything to her. Her mind kept racing through the question, over and over again; how had they found her? How had they known what she was doing? How had they known?

  “What a disappointment,” the one holding her said. She guessed that he was the leader, or at least the others seemed to take orders from him. He pushed two fingers up between her legs and she yelped in pain. “Perhaps we should inspect your cavities and see what you might be hiding there…?”

  Abigail cringed, but a new voice spoke before she could say anything.

  “That will not be required,” it said. It was cold and utterly inhuman, yet oddly familiar. “You will merely p
repare her for prisoner transport.”

  Strong hands gripped her and turned her around. The Order Policemen were wearing masks, perhaps intended to terrify, or merely intended to hide their identities from the resistance, but the Walking Dead man wore no mask. Somehow, she knew who he was before she saw his face, remembering him as a living human being. It all made sense now. They’d taken him away in handcuffs and converted him, only to discover that he’d been innocent all along. It wouldn’t have taken them long to deduce who was truly to blame.

  “Percy,” she said. The cold eyes were nothing like the ones that had gazed upon her body with lust, yet the face was the same, if expressionless. No, there was an expression there, something she’d never seen on the face of a Walking Dead man before. “I’m sorry.”

  “You betrayed me,” he said. His voice was almost emotionless, but she could hear the faintest trace of…anticipation, perhaps even gloating at her downfall. “They altered me. Made me better. Told me of you and what you’d done for me. We allowed you to run free for a time so we could watch you, learn who you would bring into your newspaper, see which reporters could not be trusted. You have been selected for something special.”

  Abigail stared at him, knowing what that meant. She’d become just like him. “You will prepare her for transport,” Percy ordered the Order Policemen. “You may not have your fun with her. Her destiny lies elsewhere.”

  She cringed back as the Order Policeman holding her produced a knife and cut through her nightgown, leaving it lying on the ground behind her. Her panties followed a moment later, leaving her completely naked and exposed. She tried to bring up her knee to knee him in the groin, but he just slapped her down and then slapped her face, hard. She fell to the ground and he grabbed her feet, shackling them together and making it hard to walk – and impossible to run. There was no way out of her position. They helped her to her feet – taking the opportunity to run their hands over her body as they did so – and gently pushed her towards the door. She’d have to walk downstairs in the cold completely naked. Under other circumstances, the thought would have humiliated her beyond belief. Now, it hardly seemed to matter.

  “Keep moving,” the Order Policeman snapped, when she looked back at her door. A handful of her neighbours had looked outside, saw her and her escorts, and looked away. She wanted to ask them to lock the door, but it was the least of her worries. She’d never see the flat again, or if she did, a stranger would be looking out of her eyes. She looked over at Percy’s expressionless face and shivered. Was that what she would look like, after the aliens had finished with her?

  “Do not fear,” Percy said, as she was pushed into a van and forced to sit on a cold metal bench. “Soon, all your fear will be gone.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Alien Base, Western USA

  Day 183

  Dolly lay on the bed the aliens had provided and tried to distract herself from her thoughts. It wasn't working. The aliens had given her a small room – shaped rather like an egg – and had made it clear that she wasn't allowed to leave. The door seemed to open in a different place each time and she hadn’t been able to figure out how to open it for herself, which made sense if the aliens considered her a prisoner, or perhaps even less than a prisoner. She had a nasty feeling that the real word was ‘experimental animal’ as that seemed to suit her circumstances perfectly. Every so often, they took her out of her room, ran her through a series of tests that made little sense to her, and then returned her to her quarters. She’d lost count of how many times they’d tested her, or even how long she’d been in the alien installation. Her previous life was starting to seem like a dream. Had she really been a sniper battling advancing Arabs, Order Policemen and Warriors – and killing an alien Leader – or had it just been a fantasy?

  She closed her eyes and tried to think of the last film she’d seen, carefully nitpicking away at the plot. It had been a drama about the war in Afghanistan, written by someone who hadn’t been closer to Afghanistan than Kansas and directed by someone else who knew about as much of the military as Dolly did about the far side of the moon. American soldiers had been portrayed as killers, slaughtering the local population for shits and giggles, while the Taliban fighters they’d engaged had been noble heroic men defending their homes and families from the thugs the President had unleashed upon them. It had been nothing less than enemy propaganda intended to smear American soldiers. Dolly liked to think that she wouldn’t have fallen for it anyway, but Chicago had played host to a few Afghani refugee families and some of their girls had gone to High School with her. The tales they’d told of life under the Taliban had been horrific. Dolly knew that there were plenty of jocks in High Schools who thought of girls as nothing more than attractive social symbols, but they didn’t come close to matching the murderous misogyny of the Taliban. And she had been intended to think of abusive bastards like that as heroes!

  And she would almost have welcomed the Taliban now, for the aliens simply didn’t care about her. They took her into their labs, ran their tests, and then returned her to their room. She’d tried to talk to them and they hadn’t replied – hell, she wasn't even sure that they’d heard her voice. The larger aliens, the leaders and the other castes she didn’t know, seemed to watch as she was put through her paces, ordering a handful of changes from time to time. One test had caused her to orgasm suddenly, with an intensity that had brought her to the brink of collapse, while a second had made her feel as if her body had been ducked into acid, leaving her convinced that she was on the brink of death. She’d worn her throat raw screaming, yet the aliens hadn’t cared. They’d repaired the damage, somehow, but she knew that they hadn’t done it for her. They’d repaired her for their own reasons, and somehow she was sure that those reasons weren't good ones.

  It would have been easier to bear if she’d had human company, or even something to distract her from her predicament, but the aliens hadn’t allowed their different human captives to meet and talk, let alone share their experiences. She’d seen a handful of other humans – including women she was sure hadn’t come from the prison camp – in the alien compound, but only from a distance. The aliens hadn’t allowed them to even exchange more than faint smiles. They’d just hurried their captives on and continued with their experiments. The racial diversity among the human women was worrying. She’d seen women who looked as if they came from Africa, the Middle East and even India. Had the aliens extended their hold as far to the east as India? Endlessly, she tossed possibilities around in her mind.

  She stared down at her bare breasts and wondered why being unclothed permanently didn’t worry her. Her mind didn’t seem to be damaged, yet she should have been on the verge of madness or hysteria, and she hadn’t lost her mind as far as she could tell. It had occurred to her that if she had lost her mind, she wouldn’t know about it, but she was sure that she was still sane. The aliens had done something to her to ensure that she would be permanently calm and compliant. Logic suggested that they’d drugged her or implanted her with something – perhaps a post-hypnotic command of some kind – to ensure that she didn’t get out of hand. They might even have inserted a tracker implant into her to make sure they didn’t lose their experimental subject. Her hand twitched down between her legs, but she pulled it away, convinced that the aliens were watching her. They might have her under observation permanently, just to see how she would react.

  And her period hadn’t come.

  She didn’t want to think about it, but she’d been three weeks into her cycle when she’d been captured and raped. The medics at the camp hadn’t been able to tell her if the Arabs had impregnated her or not, but she’d had a contraceptive implant inserted ever since she’d become sexually active and it should have been impossible. She certainly hadn’t become pregnant when she’d been sleeping with her last boyfriend before he’d dumped her for a blonde with bigger breasts and a nicer smile. She should still have had at least a mild period, however, and it hadn’t arrived. Was it
stress…or something more sinister?

  Her mother had been very frank with her, perhaps too frank. Her period could be delayed if she became very unhealthy, or if she was under considerable stress. She’d been healthy before she’d been transported to the alien base and she’d been fed human foodstuffs, including fresh fruit and other luxuries. She shouldn’t have become unhealthy and while it was tempting to speculate that her body was refusing to have a period to avoid giving the aliens something to gawk at, she knew better. Perhaps she’d only been their captive for two days or less – it was impossible to know for sure – or perhaps…she didn’t want to think about the other possibilities. They were just too scary, even if it seemed to be impossible for her to get scared. She wanted to escape and get back home, but how? There was no way out of the alien base without their help. What, she wondered, would Buffy the Vampire Slayer do?

  The wall flowed silently back, revealing a pair of the little worker aliens, who looked at her with expressionless eyes. She’d felt revulsion when she’d first seen the augmented cyborg aliens, but now she was almost used to their presence, preferring them to the Arabs who’d taken advantage of her. The lead alien beckoned her to her feet and she reluctantly complied, remembering the time she’d lain on her bed and refused to move. The aliens had jabbed her with an electric prod and forced her to move before they jabbed her again. The experience had been unpleasant beyond words.