Lightspeed Magazine Issue 32

by Judith Berman

  The weight dropped from her limbs. The ice melted from her body and left her, gasping, in the hot sunlight. She managed to raise her head. The muckamuck was nowhere to be seen, though its fearmonger had come to rest in a rosebush. She grabbed a handful of grass to wipe the viscous blobs clinging to her visor, and then scooped up the fearmonger for her collection. Four officers and counting.

  The grunt eetees fled the hillside. She whistled. One by one, Weinberg, Preston, and Bernard appeared. Then Merlino dragged toward her through the brush. He’d taken a burn on the shoulder plate of his armor. “Phillips?” she asked. He shook his head.

  She couldn’t think about that now. She pointed down the hill, toward the single remaining humvee. As they ran at a crouch, Weinberg supporting Merlino, she took stock. It looked better than she’d expected. The party on the far side of the pond was still kicking, targeting the eetees trying to pick off survivors at the turnaround. The hoppers must have known their grand and mighty mind-bender was now only a nasty spray of goobers, because as soon as her party came up behind, they turned and fled altogether.

  Briggs was gone. It was Sergeant Libnitz who gave the orders: the wounded in the humvee, others to jog behind.

  Redinger appeared out of nowhere to lope beside her. He didn’t have so much as a singe-mark on him despite not being armored, but he was stinking wet from pond water. She raised her visor; she needed the air. She was soaked inside her armor, too, but from sweat.

  “How come you’re still alive?” she asked.

  “Jumped in the pond and swam to your side,” he gasped.

  “Clever,” she said. Redinger didn’t fool her. The Lewisville militia had sent them into the ambush. When the reckoning came, she would make sure to splatter this prick for Phillips. She wished, not for the first time, that she knew how to use her red souvenir. She would make this little fuckhead shit himself, she would make him weep, she would feed him suffering and degradation. Then she would splatter him.

  Adrenaline and the rush of hatred kept her moving until they reached the junction. And then the humvee in front of her stopped. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Libnitz was shouting.

  She stopped, panting and dizzy from the heat. Then saw what he swore at.

  Back in town, five miles away, black smoke coiled into the flawless blue sky. She made her way to Libnitz. “Can’t raise anybody on the radio,” he said.

  6

  Out the café’s back window, Alexandra Gundersen could see the Neanderthals coming out of their caves to beat their chests. It was the Big Noisy Machines the Army had driven into town; now Ben and his boys worried that their dicks were too small. So now they had to kill something, or make a big explosion. Nothing made your little dick feel bigger.

  “I’m so sorry, colonel,” she said to the Army man. “They’re all lent out right now. It’s been such a popular book. I’ll try to get one for you by tonight. In the meantime, let me check those other books out for you.”

  The colonel responded to her warm tone with a slight relaxation of posture. The lightening of his expression was not yet sufficient to call a smile. While Alexandra stamped his books, she glanced through her lashes at the window again. Ben and his unter-cavemen had separated and now walked in different directions. Her twin James aimed straight toward the café’s back door. It was, unfortunately, too late to escape.

  She handed Colonel Fikes his books and smiled again, and this time he did smile in return. He would be back. She knew her customers, and, for better or worse, she knew men.

  The colonel headed through the adjoining bookshop toward the front door, even as brother James pushed through the back into the café.

  “Good morning, Sandy,” James said cheerfully.

  Her twin used her childhood nickname only to annoy her. Since these days he preferred the proletarian Jim, she paid him back in kind. “Hello, James.”

  James stared at her customers significantly. Despite the Army’s prohibition on civilian assembly, and the loss of power that made it impossible to open her café (only locally grown herbal or mormon tea anyway, alas), she could still let up to seven civilians and any number of soldiers into the bookshop. She no longer sold books or videos these days, with no new stock arriving in the foreseeable future, but she did lend them out, and since the demise of TV and radio, her store had always been busy. “Can we talk?” said James.

  Alexandra waved at her assistant, deep in conversation with a soldier, to signal her departure. “Come on,” she said to James. She led him through the door marked Private, into her stockroom’s little office. “What do you want, James?”

  “We need your help,” he said.

  We meant Ben, of course. How flattering that when Biggest Dick caveman needed a woman’s help, he still thought of his ex-wife—though he was too cowardly to show up in person.

  “I can’t imagine what use I could be to you deputies.”

  “The Army stole some things from us,” James said, “and we need to get them back.”

  “You mean your weapons.”

  “Sandy,” James said, “we’ve been protecting you with those weapons.”

  “Isn’t the Army going to take over that job?”

  “Are they acting as if they came here to fight eetees?” James’s foot jittered suddenly as Alexandra fixed him with a frown. “And what will you do when you need protection from the Army?”

  The soldiers had come yesterday: hard men, and a few women, too, in desert camo and heavy boots, laden with guns. She hadn’t liked them. But they hadn’t dragged her off to “quarantine.” When the very first tanks rolled into Lewisville, Alexandra had undertaken serious thinking on the subject of boss cavemen and the very biggest rocks. By the time the soldiers showed up at her door, her shop and house had been cleared of all eetee artifacts. She had smiled and offered them tea.

  They had frightened her nevertheless.

  “I don’t particularly like this … occupation,” she said. “But the soldiers are acting under orders from our government.”

  “Our government?” said James. “The eetees nuked our government. These folks are enforcers for a military dictatorship.”

  “And just what is Sheriff wonderful Ben Gundersen setting up? How much has he been promoting your precious civil rights and rule of law?”

  James’s foot jittered again. Poor James. He fancied himself such an independent thinker. But when the other cavemen start heaving around rocks and grunting, you have to join in. Otherwise they might think you have a really little dick.

  Okay, so it wasn’t the actual, physical dick (obviously, in Ben’s case!) that determined where you stood in Neanderthal hierarchy. It was all the subtle, almost imperceptible inflections of display, of action and reaction, dominance and deference, intimidation and submission, and meanwhile the metaphorical dick grows bigger and bigger. Fear, manipulation, and mind control. The boss caveman is created by attitude, his, theirs. Hers—although she had at last won free.

  “I grant you,” James said, “Ben’s gone overboard sometimes. But he’s kept the town together in difficult times, he’s really done a tremendous job. He’s preserved … civilization here, when the war turned the rest of our country into rubble.”

  Alexandra knew there was some truth in what her brother said. Behavior that was bad for a marriage might be less bad for a town. Because of Ben’s diligent ruthlessness, she could sleep at night, she could still open up her store and serve customers. But it wasn’t the whole story, was it?

  “Order,” she said, “is not the same as civilization. Order is about the strong controlling the weak. Civilization is about protecting the weaker from the stronger, about us all living together in empathy, cultivating the connections between us—”

  “Sandy,” said James, “empathy is what we’re after. We want the Army folks to empathize with our point of view.”

  “With the aid of weapons,” she said sharply. James made no reply, but he jiggled his foot again. “I don’t want part of it. I’m a civilized per
son. I won’t participate in violence against fellow human beings, moreover against people who are serving my country. And I thought I had made myself clear. I have no interest in doing anything for or because of Ben, ever, I want to have no connection with him at all, ever again, and this is his plan. Don’t tell me it isn’t.”

  “Don’t make this personal—”

  “It is personal. It’s all personal. You want to belong to a cause that’s bigger than you and, and—then you don’t have to think about your actions. Your violence is good, theirs is bad. And then it’s a big flashy Hollywood story, small-town heroes fight off aliens and the bad Army guys at the same time. But it all begins with you, James, and me, and Ben. Good and evil begin in each person’s heart and mind. That’s the story.”

  James began to laugh. “You and Ben were a Hollywood story, all right. The problem was, you both wanted top billing.” Alexandra flushed, enraged at his mockery, yet another betrayal of her, his twin sister. He ducked his head and said, hastily, waving his hands, “No, no, forget about Ben, okay?”

  “How can I? This is all about him, and his ego. He just can’t stand not being the one on top!”

  “It’s only about Ben for you, Sandy. And doesn’t that mean you’re making it all about you?” That stopped her. James went on: “It’s the town that needs your help. Your neighbors. Individuals. It’s your choice to do good and not evil to them.”

  “And you,” she said coldly, “are so sure this is for their own good.”

  “What good has the Army done for Lewisville so far? What happens to your business when they’ve locked away half the town? Do you think they’ll go on differently than they’ve begun?”

  No, that did seem unlikely. Alexandra looked away.

  After the divorce, exhausted and alone, she had convinced herself that what she had most wanted was the opposite of her life with Ben. She wanted to live quietly. She wanted a loving world founded on empathy, not conquest. Starting up her café-bookstore had been part of it, a microcosm of her ideal of civilization, bringing people together for the exchange of ideas and fellowship. And hadn’t she been successful at that, at least in a small way?

  But, to tell the truth, it was boring. And while she dwindled into a mousy spinster, the bookstore lady, the war came along and metamorphosed Ben into gun-toting action hero. Not that she could ever have fought the eetees the way he had. She had no physical courage and would sooner pick up a poisonous viper than a gun. But—admit it, James was right—she hated being out of the spotlight. She hated Ben hogging the stage.

  And now, wriggling up from the dark depths of her psyche, came this self-destructive impulse to prove herself to Ben. To the town. To prove she was useful in this new caveman world of fear and guns, and not just in the sad, lost world of civilization, where she had known she was Ben’s superior.

  Had Ben known she would feel such an impulse? Had he known she would be more afraid of the strange cavemen, the Army soldiers, than the cavemen she knew?

  Fear, manipulation, and mind control. Good old Ben. Once she had admired that will toward dominance.

  Then, James said, “Maybe you’re afraid you won’t measure up.” Reading her mind, too—he was her twin, after all.

  Strange how knowing what was in someone else’s mind ought to give you empathy for that person. Instead it seemed as if only the weak could sustain empathy. The strong couldn’t resist the temptation to use their knowledge to get what they wanted.

  Defeated by James and Ben, by her own attitude, Alexandra said, “All right. Tell me what you want me to do.”

  And so that afternoon, clad in a clingy flowered sundress and straw hat, her long blond hair spilling over her shoulders, Alexandra walked up to a pair of beefy soldiers and smiled. “Excuse me? Officers? I wonder if I could get into the warehouse.”

  One of the soldiers swiveled his head toward her, so she could see her reflection in his sunglasses. She still looked pretty damn good. The soldiers’ guns turned her stomach queasy and her hands cold, but, she told herself firmly, what was in their minds mattered more.

  “We’re not officers, ma’am—” the soldier began, politely.

  “Oh!” she said. “Of course! How silly of me! You’re not the police!”

  “—but no,” he went on, “we can’t let you into the warehouses.”

  “But you see,” she said, “I rent space in one. For some of my overflow.” He was staring politely but blankly at her. “I own a bookstore, you see? The only one in town. And your colonel, Mr. Fikes, came in today and we started talking about Lewis and Clark, and whether they should be admired as brave explorers, or whether they were just the vanguard of genocide and colonial oppression, and he asked for a book about them.”

  She smiled again at them. Their body language was changing subtly but unmistakably: shoulders relaxing, faces turning towards her. Excitement mixed with terror rose in her. They were falling for it …

  “I recommended Undaunted Courage to start with, but, as you can imagine, it’s a popular book around here, at least since there hasn’t been any TV. I didn’t have any copies left in the store, but I know there are some out here in the warehouse. So I came out here to pick up a copy for the colonel. You can check with him if you like.”

  Part of her still hoped the soldiers would send her away, and she would be able to tell James she had done her best. But she was also fiercely willing them to submit.

  He nodded. “All right, Ms.—?”

  “Alexandra Hanover,” she said, using her maiden name.

  “I’ll have to accompany you.”

  “Oh, that’s fine!” she said, and smiled her most glorious smile at him. And she followed him across the parking lot between the tanker trucks, and through the big roll-up door.

  The space inside was cavernous, dark and cool. The soldiers had shoved aside quite a few of the pallets and shelving units to make room for their equipment, and the smells of diesel oil and sweat mingled with the older dusty scent of dried peas. The guard accompanying her paused to explain their mission to a man leaning over a trestle table—probably a genuine officer.

  The man at the table looked her up and down with a hard, suspicious stare, but Alexandra smiled at him, too, with just the right mixture of hopeful inquiry, submission to his authority, and winning, wholesome cheerfulness. (Oh, it was going to work. All those years with Ben had been good for something after all.) Then he, too, nodded.

  She and her guard threaded their way around pallets laden with sacks of dried peas, heading toward the back of the warehouse. The shelving units that she rented stood against the wall at the back, next to a locked metal door that led outside.

  Next came a part that depended on her own physical quickness, something she had never had to rely upon before. But excitement propelled her now. She no longer wanted to turn back.

  “Could you help me?” she asked the guard. “I have a bad back.” The guard glanced at her. She pointed. He still wore his sunglasses, so he wouldn’t be able to see the nervous tremor in her hands. “It’s in that box there, on the second shelf.”

  He bent over, reaching for the box. Alexandra opened her purse and took out the vet’s tranquilizer dart that James had given her. The guard started to pull the box off the shelf. She reached over and stabbed his neck with the dart.

  “Hey!” he yelled, turning swiftly toward her. She backed up, but before he could take a single step, his knees buckled and he pitched face forward onto the concrete floor.

  That looked as if it hurt. But she could not help smiling. She had done it!

  She reached in her purse again and took out the key that James had given her, doubtless Reggie Forrester’s. She slid back the deadbolts and opened the door.

  The gravel lane behind the warehouse was deserted except for a skittering stray cat. For a moment she thought the soldiers must already have arrested Ben’s deputies. Then behind her, inside the warehouse, a commotion erupted: people yelling, booted feet clomping at a run across concrete.r />
  And then brother James rose out of the brush on the far side of the lane and ran toward the back door. A line of Lewisville deputies followed him. Two tremendous explosions detonated at the front of the warehouse, one right after the other. A blast of heat and smoke and a rain of debris rattled across the interior of the warehouse. Alexandra jumped outside through the doorway.

  Alexandra thought: People were being shot, even killed. She had helped it happen. It was a betrayal of everything she thought she stood for. Why was she so excited?

  But then, at that same moment, moving so unbelievably fast that she barely had time to register what happened, a dark shape roared across the sky, shrank into a distant speck. Another deafening explosion—

  The deputies all ducked belatedly. “Raid! Raid! Eetees!” James shouted. Now gunfire and screams echoed from inside the warehouse.

  Then a band of eetees, all thin heads and long froggy legs, came around the corner of the warehouse and started shooting.

  She had never seen them in the flesh. They weren’t supposed to come out in daylight! Terrified, she flung herself back inside, crawled away among the pallets into the darkest corner she could find, and wedged herself behind a row of fiberboard barrels, arms over her head. Smoke filled her nose and mouth. Explosions echoed through the warehouse, more yelling and screaming, the crash of metal shelves overturning.

  Then she heard a sound right nearby.

  She looked up. One of the aliens squatted atop a stack of barrels. It apparently hadn’t seen her yet. It gazed out from its high vantage point into the chaos of the warehouse. The alien wasn’t any larger, really, than a Great Dane or a teenage boy. It had long legs and arms and wore some kind of glistening translucent all-over covering like a wetsuit, and its taloned glove held a long-barreled red pistol. It smelled like slightly rancid raw chicken. Alexandra looked at its narrow chest for one of those red whorled pendants James had once shown her, carried by the high-ranking eetees, that could paralyze this entire warehouse full of men. She did not see one.

  She must have made a sound—whimpered, perhaps—because the eetee turned and glanced down at her. Its narrow face was unreadable behind the slimy protective sac. Its pistol was aimed at her negligently, as if she were no threat at all, but she really did not like guns.