Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

“Hello,” she said, as one of the aliens turned to lead her out of the room. She pushed as much brightness as she could into her voice. “What are we doing today?”

  They didn’t answer. They never did. Instead, they led her though a series of twisting corridors – the complex seemed to be different every time they took her out of her cell – towards one of the alien chambers. She looked from side to side, trying to memorise the layout, even though it was futile. Hundreds of aliens swarmed about, some of them turning to look at her with cold dark eyes. The feeling in the air was almost surreal, as if it wasn't quite real. She had long since given up hoping that she was just having a bad dream. The nightmare was far too real.

  “Hey,” she said, suddenly. She’d caught sight of another human, a young woman she thought she recognised from the camp. “Can you hear me?”

  Her escort jabbed her in the behind with pointed fingers and forced her onwards before the other woman could react. She might not have been able to react anyway. She had had a slack-jawed expression that suggested that she was taking refuge in madness, falling into a state where her mind could no longer grasp what was happening to her. Dolly wasn't sure if she should envy her or pity her. It would have been nice to just let go of the world and forget everything.

  They stopped suddenly outside a blank wall. Dolly knew what would happen before it did, watching without surprise as the wall somehow moved out of the way, revealing…not another medical centre, but a garden. The scent of plants and flowers was almost suffocating, yet they were strange, utterly unfamiliar. She looked down at a long flower that looked like something out of a cartoon fairyland and shivered. The aliens had brought their ecosystem with them.

  But why, she asked herself, should that have been a surprise? Humanity had always brought their own plants and animals wherever they had colonised. She remembered watching movies about Native Americans before the coming of the Evil White Man and how they’d ridden majestically across the plains…except they’d never done any such thing. The horses they’d ridden hadn’t been introduced to America until the Europeans arrived and started to colonise the continent. They’d also brought smallpox and countless other diseases with them, diseases that had wiped out hundreds of thousands of Native Americans. The diseases, more than anything else, had ensured that a hardier breed of humanity would settle the continent. Had the aliens brought diseases of their own from their homeworld?

  Her escort paused and pointed one long cybernetic finger towards something moving in the plant life. For a moment, Dolly thought that she was looking at a massive tortoise, before it came out into the open and she could see it clearly. It was horrific, so alien that she could barely look at it, a mixture of spider, crab and dog. It moved on six clawed legs that worked to propel it from place to place, while a masticating mouth munched its way through the vegetation. A long tentacle with an eyeball on the end glided upwards to peer at her, almost disturbingly human. She stared at it, then reached out a hand and batted it away. The creature, whatever it was, emitted a high-pitched hooting noise and scuttled away. She watched it go, feeling sweat trickling down her back that had nothing to do with the warm air. The alien creature might have been able to catch her if it had come after her.

  They walked on into a clearing. One of the taller aliens was standing there, waiting for her. She thought that it was the one she thought of as the Doctor, the one who carried out the medical tests on her, but it was impossible to be certain. The aliens seemed indistinguishable from each other, as far as she could tell. They might have recognised one another through scent, or perhaps even telepathy. She was sure that they didn’t recognise each other by facial cues. They were just too similar for that to work.

  “This is our world,” the Doctor said. Dolly stared at him. It was the first time the aliens had spoken to her beyond issuing simple orders. “This is where we were born.”

  Dolly looked around, up into a bright blue sky that looked as if it was subtly the wrong colour. They couldn’t have been transported to the alien homeworld, could they? If the aliens had that sort of power, the war wouldn’t have lasted very long at all, nor would they have needed Earth. There would have been countless planets they could settle without invading the Earth. It dawned on her that she was inside a biosphere on an alien base, where their plants had been grown on Earth, and she felt stupid. Now she knew what she was looking at, there was an artificial tinge to the light burning down on her naked back, convincing her that she hadn’t left Earth at all.

  “It’s pretty,” she said, truthfully. There was something fantastically magnificent about the whole area. It was just…beautiful. “Why…?”

  “These plants will be introduced to your world,” the Doctor informed her. “They have been engineered to grow rapidly, perfectly adapted to your planet’s atmosphere, and spread through your biosphere. They will bring a little of home to this world and adapt it for long-term habitation. Your crops will share their world with our plants and other aspects of our ecosystem.”

  Dolly stared at him. “Why…?”

  “We wish to live on your world,” the Doctor said, flatly. “We are adapting it for our use.”

  Dolly felt her head spinning. The aliens had tricked the entire human race. They’d launched an invasion of the planet and mounted a massive attack on Chicago – she remembered the alien leader she’d killed and felt a surge of rage – just to decoy humanity, while the real invasion, the terraforming – alien-forming – of planet Earth got underway. She couldn’t remember much from her ecology classes – too many teachers had concentrated on the political aspects rather than the practical aspects – but a quote from a famous writer came back to her mind. If the introduction of rabbits to Australia had been intended as an act of ecological warfare, it would have been the greatest success in the history of war. The rabbits had been introduced into an environment that wasn’t prepared for them and they’d torn through it, breeding rapidly and nibbling away at the crops. She couldn’t remember if they’d threatened the Australians with famine, but they might well have done.

  “You can’t do that,” she protested. “You’ll wreak havoc!”

  “The process is already underway,” the Doctor informed her. Dark eyes rose to meet hers, staring into her very soul. “You are part of that process. The child you carry within your womb will bind our two races together.”

  She felt her entire body go numb. He couldn’t mean…he just couldn’t mean that they’d made her pregnant, could he? They couldn’t have impregnated her. They’d never had sex with her – the thought of having sex with one of the aliens caused her to feel queasy – and yet, they could easily have inseminated her with sperm during one of their experiments. The thought was disgusting, sickening. What would a human-alien hybrid look like? Was it even possible to create such a being? It seemed impossible, yet if the aliens could live on Earth, and introduce parts of their ecosystem into Earth’s biosphere, why couldn’t they start adapting the human race as well?

  “You made me pregnant?” She repeated. Hysterical laughter bubbled up within her throat and she found herself giggling helplessly. “I’ve been raped by a bunch of creatures out of a bad science-fiction movie?”

  “You are bearing one of our children,” the Doctor said, severely. He hadn’t laughed at her joke, but she was starting to think that the aliens had nothing reassembling a sense of humour. She touched her belly and wondered if she’d feel anything, before realising that she was being silly. It would be months before she could feel the baby inside her. “You will help bring our races closer together.”

  She caught herself and stared at the alien, wishing she could feel real anger. Just for a second, just long enough to lunge at the Doctor and snap his neck. The anger refused to form in her mind. The drug, or whatever it was they’d done to her, was hellishly effective. It was all she could do to form one question.

  “Why?”

  “Your race must learn to fit in with the People of the Races,” the Doctor said. “The children
will be a step towards total synthesis of the Races. You should be honoured to be part of the grand design.”

  “I don’t want children,” Dolly said, very definitely. She’d had her life planned out for years. She would win sharp-shooting competitions, become an instructor herself and perhaps marry and have kids later in life. She had been quite happy to enjoy herself with her boyfriends, but children…no, not yet. “Get rid of it.”

  “I cannot do that,” the Doctor said. “You should be honoured to be part of the grand design.”

  “I'm not honoured,” Dolly said, angrily. Her mother’s advice on sex had been simple. Think through it before you commit yourself, she’d said, and always take precautions until you wanted to get pregnant. It saved months of agonising over having an abortion or an early baby. “I don’t want this kid. Get rid of it.”

  For a moment, she could have sworn that the alien hesitated. “I don’t love the child,” she said. She could bluff. Why not? Perhaps the aliens could be tricked. “My body might absorb it or reject it without my love. You’d end up without a child and perhaps without me.”

  There was a long pause. She looked down, away from the dark alien eyes. If they could look into her mind, they'd know she was lying. Women had carried unwanted children to term ever since the human race had appeared on Earth. There was no way she could force her body to abort the hybrid child.

  “No,” the Doctor said, calling her bluff. He made a complex hand gesture to the two workers and one of them gripped her arm, pulling her back towards the door. “You will carry our child. That is beyond dispute.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Mannington, Virginia, USA

  Day 184

  “The reports aren’t that clear,” Pepper said, “but we’re looking at over five hundred captured or killed, and at least a dozen resistance camps destroyed. It doesn’t look good.”

  The President nodded. He was not unaware of the irony of his position. A day ago, a company of Order Policemen had moved into Mannington, taking over a school and a couple of other buildings and using them for billets. They were right on top of the man they most wanted to catch and they didn’t know it. It worried him more than he let on, despite the growing cabin fever. If they stumbled across the bunker, they’d have no route of escape. The designers had never built a tunnel leading out of the bunker that came up somewhere outside the town’s borders.

  “No, it doesn’t,” he agreed, dryly. The resistance was flexible, spearheaded by men who’d been through the toughest training courses that the United States had designed, yet losing so many people had to hurt. The countryside was a network of interlocking families and relations who might serve as the base of a new resistance network, yet the aliens and their collaborators were clearly moving to capitalise on their success. The news bulletins announced new regulations and controls on movement every day, binding the American population into a trap made of red tape. There was another irony there, he concluded; the people who elected him had told him, time and time again, that there was too much red tape from Washington. He’d even cut as much of it out as he could. Now…the entire country was drowning in red tape. “What do we do now?”

  Pepper looked down at the latest report. “We wait,” she said, firmly. “There’s no way we can sneak out of the town now, but they can’t keep that force on our heads forever. Sooner or later, they’ll have to pull it out and then we can breathe easier, for a while.”

  The President shrugged. The latest electronic edition of Committees of Correspondence had included a set of pictures of Jacob Thornton, taken by someone who had sneaked a camera into one of his few press sessions. It was easy to see why such images had been banned; the Vice President of the United States looked as if he was on the verge of collapsing into a drooling moron. On one hand, the President was silently relieved that his old friend hadn’t betrayed the country willingly; on the other, it was a reminder of the fate he could expect if he fell into enemy hands. No one knew why Jacob Thornton had become…that, instead of another of the Walking Dead, although the doctors had had several theories. The one the President suspected was correct was the most depressing; the process didn’t always work perfectly and the other failures were simply disposed of by the aliens. They took far more prisoners than emerged as Walking Dead. The Vice President couldn’t simply be removed, not if they wanted – needed – to use him to give their government some form of legitimacy.

  He looked down at the list and smiled at the faint image of a Japanese man carrying a executioner’s axe. The Little List section of the newspaper included a list of known collaborators and Walking Dead, urging every halfway decent member of American society to execute all collaborators without mercy. The list bothered him more than he cared to admit. He had no objections to executing traitors and collaborators, but some of the people on the list – including Karen – were sources for the resistance. Karen had been a stroke of luck, but others had been deliberately inserted by various resistance commanders, hoping to gain inside information. It had worked from time to time; others, less lucky, had ended up as Walking Dead and become false informants leading their superiors into traps. The intelligence war with the aliens was the nastiest such war humanity had ever fought, one where people could be induced to change sides almost at will. It was not a civilised time.

  The newspaper’s advice on the Walking Dead was simple. Forget, it urged, that they had ever been friends or family. Forget, even, that they’d once been human. Whatever the aliens had done to them could not be reversed, leaving them trapped inside their own bodies while the aliens manipulated them to use them against their own people. The readers were urged to kill them as mercifully as possible – they hadn’t asked to become alien slaves – while slaughtering the willing collaborators with as much brutality as possible. Some of those words were already being heeded. He’d read reports of several Order Policemen vanishing, only to turn up days later with their genitals cut off and stuffed into their mouths. Others had been shot at from a distance, or been poisoned by their slaves. One girl, who’d somehow tempted them into taking her as a sex slave, had poisoned an entire platoon of Order Policemen and escaped in the chaos. She’d get a medal if the United States was ever free again, the President decided, assuming she survived the war. She’d be well advised to go somewhere well away from civilisation and hide out there until the end of the war.

  “I just feel helpless,” he admitted. As a soldier, he’d been able to act or react, according to circumstances. In the White House, there had been far more restraints on his actions than outsiders had realised, yet he’d always had options. Now, trapped in a bunker, he was President only in name. “How the hell do we get out of this one?”

  Pepper smiled at him, dryly. “As I have told you every time you bring up the subject,” she said, not without a certain trace of irritation, “you serve the resistance far better by remaining out of sight and free of alien control. How many of them would turn in their arms and surrender if you told them to surrender? The aliens could make you stand up and tell them all to surrender.”

  “Very few,” the President said. “We did order that any such orders were to be ignored until the aliens evacuated America and called it a day.”

  He looked down at the pair of white books resting on one of the desks. Total Resistance had been written by a Swiss Army Officer in the years following World War Two, the world’s first guide to insurgent warfare and civilian resistance to occupation. The Swiss had been ready to fight to the last against Hitler, Stalin or any of his successors and everyone had known it. It had helped keep Switzerland neutral. The second book – War To The Knife – had been highly classified until the aliens had started the war. It was the brainchild of an American officer who’d started to compile a manual on insurgency tactics, ones that could have been used just as effectively against the federal government as against any invader. The Pentagon had forbidden its distribution outside the military until the moment when they’d known that the USAF would be defeate
d and America would fall to alien occupation. Millions of copies had been printed out and distributed all over the country, teaching American civilians how they could best harm the aliens.

  The President hadn’t been too impressed when he’d read it – most of it had been in the public domain, one way or the other – but he had to admit that it was comprehensive and interesting. The author had drawn on the American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as British, French, German and Russian experiences in their wars, and used them to note what worked and what didn’t work. An aspiring insurgent could learn how to form a resistance group, how to limit their exposure to an enemy police state and all the other tricks of the trade. They could learn how to produce explosives, mine roads, interrogate captives…the book explored everything. The mere act of possessing it in some countries would be enough to have someone arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist. If terrorists had gotten their hands on it…

  He shook his head. It hardly mattered. Quite apart from the fact that terrorists knew most of what was in the book, the main priority was to throw the aliens out of America. He would sooner surrender to radical Islam than to aliens – at least Muslims were human too. If being a figurehead was the best he could aspire to, he’d be the best figurehead he could be.

  And he knew that no one would accept an order to surrender. He’d made that clear back during the official briefings for the first resistance leaders. No one was to accept surrender orders that purported to be from the federal government or any of its personnel. Each cell was to resist until the aliens were evicted or they were wiped out. A Walking Dead Andrew Chalk wouldn’t be able to force a surrender – he hoped – but it would mean the end of him personally. Perhaps it would be the best outcome.

  “And there is the British plan,” Pepper reminded him, breaking into his thoughts. “Can we get it to work?”

  “We don’t have any other choice,” the President said. The promise of a biological weapon that might take out the aliens was tempting, but he knew enough about the reality of biological weapons to know that it wouldn’t guarantee victory. There was too much chance that large parts of the alien society would avoid infection before the disease became apparent. They’d take a horrible revenge on Earth. The same could be said for the Yellowstone nuke. It would be blowing up the planet and calling it a draw. It wouldn’t be much of a victory. “The question is…can we organise our side of it?”