Lightspeed Magazine Issue 32

by Judith Berman

  “Fred!” Harvey whispered in horror. Fred dropped what he was carrying and wagged his tail.

  Dust, burrs, and thistledown clung to Fred’s copper-colored rump, and he smelled like rotten raw chicken. As he approached Harvey, his tail-wagging increased in frequency and amplitude until his entire hind end swung rapidly from side to side. Fred tried to nose Harvey’s hand, but Harvey shoved him away with the point of the rifle.

  The swellings and bare patches in the fur were unmistakable. The biggest swelling rose at the base of Fred’s skull.

  Just like the coyotes.

  Eetee cancer, Harvey called it. Ben said that was just more of Harvey’s paranoia. No other spotters had seen it.

  But their posts—the ones still manned, anyway—lay miles further from the shipwreck.

  Harvey had only one choice. It was pure self-defense.

  Fred lay down and smacked his tail on the ground. His eyes pleaded as if he knew what Harvey intended. But Harvey remembered the coyotes and their gleeful eetee hunts, and he hardened his thoughts as if pummeled by stormy weather. He slipped off the safety. His finger tightened on the trigger—

  Footsteps rasped behind him. He spun and found himself staring into the short, ugly red bore of another eetee gun.

  “Don’t you dare shoot Fred, you fuck,” Susan hissed.

  Oh, Harvey, stupid, stupid—the video monitors on the deck—Ben must have given her a gun, knowing she would someday use it—

  They stood there aiming at each other. Harvey could see in her face that this time she really would do it. She was going to splatter him over Fred, and Ben would get his way at last.

  The blazing July sun heated his skull like a roast in an oven. Susan’s gun did not waver. Harvey willed himself to breathe.

  Fred thwacked his tail another couple of times, then pawed playfully at Harvey’s foot. A lump pushed up suddenly in Harvey’s throat and he had to blink several times to clear his vision. In a thick voice he said, “Look at Fred, Susan! He’s sick! You don’t want us to catch it, do you? You don’t want us to get all freaky like the coyotes, do you?”

  “You,” Susan said, “already have.”

  Bleak inspiration came to Harvey. He forced himself to drop his rifle and eetee gun, slip the shotgun from his shoulder to the ground, raise his hands. “I could take Fred to Dr. King. Maybe she would look at him.”

  “She’s not a vet and he’s not sick.”

  “Yes, he is! Susan, look at those tumors!”

  Her gaze did flick toward Fred, growing the slightest bit uncertain. “Abscesses.”

  “Then he needs to have them cleaned. At least.”

  Something broke in Susan then. Her lip trembled. She blinked. She looked at Fred. Fred crawled toward her and wagged his tail some more. Tears began to roll down Susan’s cheeks. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a wave of sympathy rushed through Harvey. He had loved Fred, too.

  “What do we have,” Susan said in despair, “what do we have that she would take in trade?”

  And there it was: the first acknowledgement in months that their world had changed forever. Harvey’s hands were shaking again, but he managed to gesture at the garage. Susan looked at him askance, then, gun still trained on Harvey, backed toward it. Harvey followed, though he hated leaving his guns behind. Fred lay beside them, thumping his tail.

  When Susan pulled back the tarpaulin in his pickup bed, she gasped and jerked her hand back as if bitten. “Harvey, Ben will kill you! And me, too, you asshole!” Which was probably not just a figure of speech.

  Susan said, wiping at her tears with a filthy hand, “Promise me, promise me, Harvey, that you aren’t going to hurt Fred. That you won’t let her hurt him.”

  “I won’t,” Harvey lied, trying again to swallow the lump in his throat. “Promise me that while I’m gone, you’ll keep watch?”

  Susan said nothing, but this time Harvey felt as if she might actually do it. Donning his raincoat and gloves and now rubber waders as well, Harvey took Fred’s collar out into the yard to buckle it around the dog’s neck. As he urged Fred into the back of the pickup and chained him there, Fred tried to lick him in the face. Up close, the stench of carrion was enough to make Harvey gag.

  Two presents for Dr. King, just sitting in the back of his pickup for anyone to discover. What risks he was taking today! Harvey had survived this long by trusting his fears and keeping a close eye on the weather. By being infinitely careful. Today he was throwing all caution to the winds.

  But he couldn’t afford to nod off the way he had this morning. He needed Dr. King’s little pills. And he couldn’t let Susan keep Fred here.

  Harvey wondered whether on his return he should just shoot Susan before she learned he’d had Fred put down. She would try to kill him again when she found out.

  He didn’t want to shoot her.

  Maybe, he thought, looking at the happily panting Fred, just maybe he would turn out to be wrong about Fred’s tumors. Maybe Dr. King would tell him they weren’t contagious. The coyotes’ fur had grown back, after all, and most of the swellings had vanished.

  Or maybe that notion was just Fred trying, the way the coyotes did, to control Harvey’s thoughts.

  One last task before departing: Harvey picked up the thing Fred had brought home. He dropped it in his Weber. Up close, the lump of rotting eetee flesh looked like raw hamburger, had the consistency of custard, and smelled like the bottom of a Dumpster. Golden retrievers had such delicate mouths; Fred hadn’t left so much as a tooth mark in it.

  Sweltering in his raincoat and waders, Harvey poured on the gasoline provided by the sheriff’s office. As he dropped in the match, and flames sheeted up from the charcoal bed, Fred began to bark in agitation. So he did not hear Susan’s shouts until she rushed up to him waving the Nikons. “Look, Harvey! Look!”

  He dropped the lid on the grill to char Fred’s little present to a cinder. Then he pulled off his befouled rubber gloves, took the binocs, and peered in the direction she pointed.

  The highway had been dust-blown and empty for a year. Now, vehicles climbed over a rise three miles away, popping into view one after the other like an endless chain of ants: trucks, fuel tankers, humvees, and Bradleys carrying helmeted men and women. The convoy ground steadily along, heading toward Lewisville.

  Susan said, almost sobbing, “It’s the Army. Oh, God, Harvey, they’ve come to save us at last.”

  “Save us?” Harvey said. “What Army?”

  2

  Colonel Jason Fikes could see right away that something was fishy about the town. Since the liberation of Earth he had been traveling what was left of America—the devastated cities, the suburban wastelands dotted with grim encampments of refugees, the endless reaches of fallow farmland. The trip from Spokane, chasing the rumor of another downed ship, had been no different. They had passed mile after mile of fields grown up into weeds. At scattered houses and small towns, women stooped in gardens and men, shotguns in hand, sullenly eyed the convoy. Or sometimes they ran after the convoy, begging for gasoline, for medicine, for food, for rescue.

  The locals’ plight ought to have grown more desperate the closer he got to the mountains and the starship. Fikes had seen the classified reports from Yosemite: starving refugees reduced to eating eetees, then each other.

  But when the convoy came over a rise and Lewisville itself came into view, everything changed. Weeds gave way to neat furrows of golden wheat. Cattle grazed along the streamside meadows. And in the town itself, healthy children clustered in front of well-kept houses, staring at the convoy until adults rushed to herd them inside. Yes, most of the lawns had been dug into gardens, and only a handful of vehicles seemed to be working, and the grass in front of the county courthouse was dry and yellow now; but it had been mowed.

  You could suppose they had carefully rationed supplies since the war, that they had their own hydro dam or windmill farm. Or you could glance eastward to that mile-long wreck atop the ridge, and you could draw another conclusion.
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  “They’ve been scavenging,” said young Lieutenant Briggs beside him, eager as a preacher pouncing upon evidence of fornication. “We’ll have to search house-to-house.”

  Briggs had not seen the Yosemite reports and did not yet know the enormity of their orders. Fikes nodded wearily. “They’ll try to hide as much as they can.”

  During the approach to Lewisville he had spotted a feral cat crouched in the roadside weeds, a pair of crows pecking at a dead owl. But no eetees had showed themselves. On this brilliant summer morning, the distant shipwreck looked no more menacing than a junked car. In Fikes’ experience, though, the eetees didn’t surrender and they didn’t admit defeat. If even a single one had survived, sooner or later it would test his soldiers. Still, they would have to wait on more urgent tasks.

  Fikes gave the order to halt in front of the courthouse. There waited a knot of local men bedecked with an arsenal of rifles, shotguns, and semi-automatic small arms. Neatly dressed and clean-shaven, they looked like Norman Rockwell banditos who’d just staged their own revolution.

  Or rather, Norman Rockwell meets the Sci-Fi Channel: half of them bore red splatterguns. Eetee weapons. That would make Briggs happy. A weight descended onto Fikes’ shoulders.

  As Fikes climbed out of his humvee, one of the locals stepped forward. This was a lean man in a sheriff’s khaki uniform and badge, with cowboy boots, a straw cowboy hat, and mirror shades to complete the ensemble. The only weapon the sheriff carried in plain view was a holstered .45.

  “Howdy, folks,” he drawled. “Welcome to Lewisville. I’m Ben Gundersen, Lewis County sheriff.”

  Fikes held out his hand. “Colonel Fikes,” he said. “U.S. Army.”

  Sheriff Gundersen put out his own hand, and the two of them shook. “What brings you fellows to Lewisville?”

  Under the circumstances, the question was an odd one. Fikes said, “Your community is in proximity to a downed enemy vessel, Mr. Gundersen. Assessing that threat and mounting an appropriate response is our immediate priority. But our long-term mission is to restore services and connect you to the outside world again.”

  “No offense,” said the sheriff, “but with all the satellites gone, we haven’t heard much news since last summer. Who’s the U.S. Army taking orders from these days?”

  “The President has installed a Provisional Congress until new elections can be held,” Fikes said. “Meanwhile, the Army is authorized under the Public Safety Act to take charge here.”

  “You’re talking about the U.S. President. The U.S. Congress.”

  “That’s right,” said Fikes.

  One of the other banditos called out, smirking, “Didn’t they nuke Washington? I thought that was one good thing come out of all this.”

  “Yes,” Fikes said. “Washington was destroyed. Now, may I ask if you have spotted survivors from the wreck? Has your town come under attack?”

  “Survivors?” Gundersen tipped his hat back and scratched his forehead. “Well, now. We shot us a few last winter. They come down near town and found we weren’t easy pickings. If there’re any of ’em left, they pretty much leave us alone. They’d be camped out in the mountains, I guess.”

  “Have you seen enemy aircraft at all? Any other vehicles?”

  “I guess most of their fighters crashed with the ship,” Gundersen said. “Lost their guidance systems or something. Haven’t seen any recently, anyway.”

  “But you think they still have some?”

  The sheriff shrugged, inscrutable behind mirror shades. “Could be.”

  Since his childhood in Baltimore, Fikes had learned there were large swaths of the U.S. where well-scrubbed white people said “gosh,” “shucks,” and “you bet” without irony. But this sheriff wasn’t just a folksy good ol’ boy.

  He was plain bullshitting.

  Fikes had already noted that Gundersen hadn’t addressed him as “sir” or “colonel,” and that the pole on the courthouse lawn bore no flag.

  Reluctant to take the inevitable next step, Fikes bent to read the plaque on a nearby statue of buckskin-clad men. Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, openers of the American West, passed through Lewis County on October 3, 1806.

  If the sheriff and his gang had been just your posse comitatus militia types hoping to secede from the federal government in its time of weakness, Fikes’ task would have been simple. Sooner or later he’d have won over the townsfolk with liberal bribes of booze, chocolate, condoms, antibiotics, disposable diapers, toilet paper. The sheriff he would have defanged first of all; in Fikes’ experience, those with a taste for power were easily seduced by another helping of the same.

  But the solution to the problem this town presented would not be so easy to accomplish.

  Not that Fikes’ orders weren’t clear or that he shrank from enforcing them. From what he had read in the Yosemite reports, from the panic still electrifying headquarters in Colorado, the rule he must now impose could not be too draconian. It was up to him, he had been told, to ensure that nothing like the Yosemite massacres ever became necessary again.

  Fikes knew, however, that he could end up as lost in a repeat of Yosemite as that hapless colonel had been. In the slaughter at Upper Pines, the Yosemite rebels had demonstrated unequivocally that human beings could wield that most dreaded of eetee weapons, the handarm of the eetee elite, the fearmonger. The Army, on the other hand, had never learned how to operate the weapon—had no defense against it. The rebels who had understood the weapon had all been killed. Army scientists, such as they were now, had offered only useless speculation: perhaps the ordinary silent communication of eetees was a form of telepathy; perhaps eetees operated their terrible weapon, too, with some kind of thought wave.

  No one understood how eetees used the guns. How could he anticipate by what means human beings would acquire the skill?

  But he had to anticipate it. He had to prevent it. If possible, he had to acquire the power for the Army.

  At least his first items of business were clear: separating the townspeople from their eetee toys, disrupting their lines of communication, bringing them firmly under Army control.

  Fikes straightened. “Mr. Gundersen, may I ask how you dispose of enemy remains?”

  He thought he had pegged Gundersen, but the pride that lit up the sheriff’s face surprised him. “We’re real strict about that, colonel. I’ll show you our health ordinances. Can’t risk some kind of strange disease, I tell people. We built a special crematorium to incinerate the bodies. We use bleach to clean up anything we take from them.” He nodded toward a splattergun in the waistband of one of his deputies. “We could use more Clorox, now that you mention it.”

  Fikes nodded. “That’s all very well, Mr. Gundersen, but our scientists can’t yet say what potential disease vectors would look like, how they might spread, or how they could be destroyed. I must stress that anyone in your town who’s had contact with the enemy, living or dead, is required to report to us. Any items of wreckage that people have picked up must be turned over. That includes your weapons, I regret to say. The Army will assume the burden of protecting the town from this point onward. I have strict orders on this matter. And I do have the authority to search every house. It’s a vital matter of public health.”

  The sheriff opened his mouth to reply. Before he could speak, Fikes said, “After you hand over your splatterguns, I believe I’d like to start by taking a look at those pickup trucks over there. Is it possible you’re still running them on gasoline?”

  3

  The Army had kept Reggie Forrester awake all the first night with the roar of tanks and trucks and the stink of diesel exhaust, which over the last year had become unfamiliar and offensive. In the morning, he dragged himself two blocks over to the highway and discovered that, just as he feared, the soldiers had moved into his warehouses. Armed sentries already surrounded them. “Move along, sir,” the sentries had said. Chasing him—the mayor!—off his own property. Probably Ben had suggested the location, s
tone bastard that he was.

  Reggie headed out to learn what else was befalling his town. His dismay only compounded. Searches and detentions had started before breakfast. “Quarantine,” the Army called it, but they did not name the disease they feared.

  From Bob Fisher’s distraught wife, Reggie learned that soldiers had “quarantined” Bob, stolid city engineer, when he’d showed up for work. And they had abruptly confiscated the networked eetee power cells that since last winter had supplied the town with electricity and pumped its artesian wells. Municipal power shut off in midmorning, and tap water would cease flowing once the water tower emptied.

  They hadn’t consulted Reggie or anyone else at City Hall, or warned the townspeople what was coming.

  From Estelle Gordon, administrative secretary at the community college, Reggie heard that the Army was cleaning out Joe Hansen’s lab. Everyone brought their salvage to Joe, and it sat around while he and his students figured out what it was supposed to do. That morning the Army confiscated all of it, and all of Joe’s notes, and they hauled away Joe, too. But so far as Estelle had been able to determine, they hadn’t taken Joe to the so-called “quarantine facility” in the junior high school. No one knew where Joe was now.

  Joe’s students protested his detention. Angry townspeople joined them, demanding restoration of water and power. Shockingly, the Army tear-gassed them and hauled the lot off to quarantine.

  By afternoon, when Reggie went to lodge an official protest with Colonel Fikes, unease had rooted deep in his belly. He told himself, though, that if he didn’t try something, he would only prove his irrelevance. Ben might be the Big Man now, savior of Lewisville, but Reggie Forrester wasn’t going to allow anyone to outdo him when it came to looking after the everyday needs of Lewisville’s citizens.

  When Reggie pulled up in front of the courthouse, the soldiers first evicted him from his Ford Excursion, then confiscated it. “Contamination,” they said, when they found the black disk where the engine block had been. They refused to tell him what kind, but by now Reggie was certain that the disease issue was entirely fiction. No one in Lewisville had contracted an inexplicable illness, had they? Moreover, that morning, through the fence surrounding his warehouses, Reggie had spotted soldiers installing eetee power cells in their humvees. He now realized these must have been the ones confiscated from the town.