The Darkside War

by Zachary Brown

  “The right?” Stafford looked pityingly at me. “You have no rights, Mr. Hart. You are involved in an act of sedition during war. Your parents are due to be executed, and you’ll be lucky to be back out in that cage if everything goes well.”

  I tried to jump out of my chair. I shouted at Stafford, and my manacles crackled with electricity. My back wrenched straight and every muscle in me clamped down hard enough that I tasted blood.

  My head struck the white table as I fell forward. I lay slumped, drooling out of the side of my mouth, every muscle in my body screaming.

  Stafford leaned forward so he could meet my stunned gaze. “The Accordance has been waiting for the right moment over the last few years. All the while, it has been modeling how best to stop threats to recruitment. Now, all over the world, movements such as your father’s have been raided and rolled up. There is no more antioccupation movement. Tomorrow morning, live broadcasts will show leaders of movements and cells being executed for treason. Your question, Devlin, is how you survive the next few hours.”

  “Tegna Gnarghf,” I spat as best I could, still trying to get feeling back into my checks as I moved my jaw around.

  “What’s that?”

  I took a deep breath and tried again. “Tentacle licker.”

  Stafford’s high cheekbones reddened. “Listen, whether you like it or not, the Accordance came here. They have superior weapons. They destroyed DC. They took Manhattan. They sit in every major world capital. We’ve ceded them the moon, and other planets because we’ve never even reached them. And in exchange for that legal grant, we get some autonomy. The fact that, under their agreement to follow some human protocols, you’re considered a minor and will not die with your parents: That’s all that keeps you alive. Time to shape up, now, Mr. Hart.”

  I could sit up now, though the room wobbled and spun around me. I rubbed my eyes and groaned as I tried to process all this. From betrayal to capture. Everything turned upside down so fast. My father had organized peaceful protests, not fought on the streets. This was protest, not the damn Pacification. “What . . .” I gritted my teeth. “What do we do?”

  “There are some options.” Stafford tapped the table, and documents appeared on the surface. “The main concern the Accordance has is that they’re in the middle of a war. It was why the Accordance was even created: defense. And they need recruits. You understand about the war, right?”

  “Yes.” I rolled my eyes. “We hear it all the time. About the Conglomeration. I’ve seen the propaganda. Five different species allied against the Accordance.” Hopefully Stephan was meeting with my parents right now, trying to think of ways to stop all this. My heart hammered against the back of my throat, and it wasn’t just because I’d been zapped. Every­thing settled onto me like a horrifying weight, trapping me in my chair. You knew the Accordance rule from on high. But then you encountered their boot on your throat, and it was suddenly too real.

  “Against us all,” Stafford corrected me. “The Accordance protects us. Anything that hurts recruitment, risks lives. Our lives. And your family, Mr. Hart, has risked many. However, recruitment is voluntary. The Accordance understands the value of good public relations. I think I can help you make a case to Accordance judges that executing a minor would be a horrible PR decision on their part.”

  “But not my parents?” I whispered.

  “Just you. I’m sorry.” Stafford’s lawyerly mask slipped for a moment. I fought to keep seated and still, not wanting another muscle-clenching explosion of electricity to leap through my body.

  I slumped farther down into my chair. “The only reason I won’t die is because they don’t want the bad PR.”

  “The war out there is real,” Stafford said. “Even if it hasn’t come to our world yet. If we’re lucky, it won’t. The Accordance needs fighters. From everyone it protects. We stand together under the Accordance umbrella, or we’ll fall to something far worse. So they are being very careful here.”

  I couldn’t imagine something worse than the Accordance. Something that destroyed cities from orbit and marched through the ruins in black power armor, ferreting out the remaining resistance with overwhelming force.

  But there was apparently something out in the universe that made the rulers of the Accordance, the squid-like Arvani, shit their tanks. Even if no one on Earth had ever seen it.

  And now my parents were going to die because of it.

  “My father thought peaceful resistance would work,” I told Stafford. “My parents saw what happened during the occupation; they thought this was a better path.”

  “The Accordance is ruled by aliens, not humans,” Stafford said. “The Arvani and the Pcholem do not tolerate dissent, violent or peaceful. And the other species have less power within the Accordance. Your father should have known this; he was jailed for his inability to follow guidelines when teaching Indigenous Mythology.”

  Indigenous Mythology. My dad taught History 101 at NYU before I’d been born. He still insisted on carrying the old pre-occupation textbooks, big paper-printed monstrosities, around with us as we moved from house to house.

  I blinked my eyes several times and looked away. I was so angry with them right now. Angry for spending my childhood never staying in one place. Angry because they always felt there was a higher purpose in their lives, a purpose far higher than anything I could ever mean to them.

  What was a child compared to the past glory of humanity that had once ruled itself ? I knew my place in the world. In my parent’s world.

  This was their fault, I thought angrily. They’d chosen this. It certainly wasn’t my fault. Fuck, I was still hungry because of their choices. Even if I got out of this room, all I had was a hot, smelly tent in Yonkers with its moldy history books to go back to.

  I clenched my fists.

  They’d stolen themselves away from me a long time ago. So why did this hurt so badly?

  I clenched my jaw.

  “Our tentacled rulers want good PR,” I said softly. They needed the fight to fade away. They needed to hobble the protestors. They needed to kneecap the leaders of the movement.

  They needed to kneecap my parents.

  Death was one way. “There’s another,” I said.

  “Huh?” Stafford asked.

  “There’s another way they can neutralize my parents,” I said. I knew what it was. That anger I’d been building inside had steered me toward a solution, and now it faded to sadness.

  Stafford looked curious. “What do you mean?”

  “Me,” I said. “You can use me.”

  Stafford leaned back, then cleared all the documents off the table with a wave of his hand. “I’m listening.”

  “If I do this, I want to see them. I want to see them today,” I said. Because in order to save my family, I would have to first destroy it.

  “I can arrange something,” Stafford said.

  I took a deep breath and paused. Could I do what I was planning?

  Yes. To save their lives. I could do this.

  I had to. Angry as I might be, what sort of son would I be if I watched them die and didn’t try to stop it?

  + + +

  The electrified fence between us prevented any touching. My dad stood in the middle of his cell, avoiding the walls like I had. But he’d spent all day in the sun, and the bags under his eyes from lack of sleep, food, and drink made him look older and frail. His salt-and-pepper hair hung every which way.

  He licked bloodied, sun-cracked lips, and hung his head when he saw me enter.

  My mother, in the other cell, had managed to fold her legs into a tight cradle so she could sit down, but she also looked frazzled and exhausted. Her normally even brown skin was splotchy with dirt and streaked with blood from a cut on her scalp. Dried blood also stained her shoulders.

  “Oh God. Dev!” She tried to stand, but shrank back into her posit
ion when the cell sparked. Mine had just been hot, theirs was designed for maximum misery. “You’re alive.”

  “Mom.” I put a finger carefully between the spaces in the metal grid so we could touch fingertips gently. “I’m okay.”

  “I’m so sorry, Dev. We can’t even get to talk to Stephan. I’m so sorry. It’s very bad. All those Accordance soldiers in armor, they didn’t care. They shot people. Right in the street. Live, on camera.”

  She was shaking. In shock. It must be a war zone on 110th Street, I realized. Other prisoners in the cages looked worse than my parents. Blood-splattered clothes, distant stares. Gunshot wounds, jagged wounds. Ignored, without medics, some of the protestors trapped out here would die.

  “Mom, you know I love you,” I said tentatively.

  “Of course. They said there was a chance you might . . . not be in the same position we are.” Her brown eyes teared up. She whispered now, not wanting my father to listen in. “You have to take that. And don’t feel guilty about it. Anything we’ve done, it’s only hurt you. And I’m sorry about that. What we’ve done, it’s us. Okay? It’s us. You run, like I told you. You run from all this.”

  I closed my eyes. “I know.” My voice cracked.

  “Devlin?” My dad had cocked his head to stare at me. He used his teacher voice, strong and commanding attention even in his state. “What’s going on?”

  “I can save you.” I took a deep breath filled with the smell of blood, unwashed bodies, and sewage. “But I’m going to have to say . . . some things. I’m going to have to do things.” I closed my eyes, focusing on the unsteady pressure of my mom’s fingertip against mine. A single line of contact. All I would have.

  Sometimes I thought about why family members always fought so hard with each other; maybe it was because they were the only ones who could get fully into each other’s heads. Dad saw through me instantly. “Don’t do what you’re thinking,” he said. “That’s everything we’ve been fighting against. We’re trying to stop you from having to fight their wars for them. You know none of the recruits they’ve taken off-Earth have come back yet. We’re trying to build a different future for you.”

  “Well, that didn’t work too well, did it, Dad?” I snapped. “So what other choice do I have?”

  “You have choices. You always have choices,” he said.

  “Like letting you die? What the hell kind of human being would I be if I let my own parents be executed?” I shouted, my voice quavering. Hold it together, I told myself. I bit my lip and calmed down. “There is no choice. The only choice is what you do with the second chance I’m buying you. Maybe you both try to sneak more antioccupation activity in, and I come back and find you dead anyway. Or maybe you get jobs, keep your heads down, and I live to come back and see you again.”

  Or maybe, I thought into the silence, we all would die for nothing. I opened my burning eyes to look at my angry, confused, hurt parents. Just as I knew they would be.

  You’re welcome, Stafford, I thought. I’m breaking them. I’m taking it all out from under them. And in some ways, they would consider it worse than death.

  “You sign up to fight for the Accordance,” my mom said, “then they’ve trapped you. They’ve talked you into this. Don’t do what they tell you. Don’t collaborate.”

  That word. I pulled my finger back. “I’m sorry.”

  A struthiform guard opened the gate leading out. Stafford waited for me on the other side. “Time’s up,” he said, pointedly avoiding looking at any of the prisoners.

  “You’ll be under house arrest,” I told my parents. “You’ll get filmed going there. But it will be safe. And good.” And it would make them look utterly like they had made a deal, and would undercut their authority in the eyes of the anti­occupation movement.

  My dad grabbed the wire mesh. Sparks danced around his fists. He was crying, out of pain from the electrified wire or from my betrayal. I didn’t know which. “You don’t let them change you, Devlin. You find ways to fight them. In your own way. Like I raised you. You stay human!”

  3

  A human policeman in yellow uniform opened the van door with a crunchy squeak. I looked out warily. Leftovers from the protest filled 110th Street. The ripped pieces of the command tents blew up against stacked metal barricades, along with the detritus of protestors who’d fled.

  Or been dragged away.

  “You’ve got two hundred feet to walk on your own.” Stafford directed me forward. “We’ll be watching you.”

  The door slammed shut behind me. For the first time in twenty-four hours, sunshine hit my face and free air blew past me. I was free. Free for the two hundred feet between me and the gates of the Accordance Administrative Complex.

  I picked my way around the trash and the barricades.

  Halfway to the great legs of the administration buildings, I wondered if I could still run.

  No. My parents were still in Accordance hands. Running would do nothing. I wasn’t really free. These two hundred feet I walked on my own were as much a cage as the heated cage I’d been penned in.

  Other volunteers straggled down the street toward the two-story skeletal gates that locked down the forest of the Accordance Administrative Complex against the world around it. Four or five of the volunteers rubbed their wrists, now free of their shackles. “Volunteers.” They’d spent time in the fenced cells as well.

  I wondered what horrible choices they’d had to make.

  A drone buzzed overhead and blasted hot air into my face. We were live for the world to watch. Earth volunteers, signing up to join the Accordance’s war against the Conglomeration. Rise, you sons and daughters of Earth, to help the Accordance defend a vulnerable world.

  “Look at them,” one of my fellow travelers said, acid in her voice. She nodded her head across the street. Ten well-dressed volunteers ambled down from the Harlem gates, where their parents clustered near struthiform guards, waving.

  The volunteers waved back at their families, then at the drones in the air.

  “I want to punch the shit-eating grins off their entitled faces,” the girl next to me muttered. “Our future officer class. My dad says Harlem used to be all human-held. He grew up there. After it was all evacuated and the buildings seized, it became just collaborators and aliens. You look familiar; do I know you?”

  “No,” I said. Then, “I don’t know.”

  “Keep moving!” Human soldiers in gray uniforms with no sign of rank on their shoulders waited on the other side of the black, bony gates. They herded us into lines that snaked through three booths in the middle of the glassy road, shoving us until we stood where they wanted.

  Struthiform officers in red armor with oversize eyes and bobbing heads trotted up and down our lines, their necks undulating this way and that. “Walk through the scanners, hold your breath. Do not move,” they ordered.

  “Where are the scanners?” I asked.

  A feathered arm shoved me forward until I stood on a blue circle in the road between two booths.

  A blast of air hit my groin. I gasped. As I crouched and swore, a spinning tube of glass shot up out of the ground around me, then dropped right back down. A struthiform technician in the booth on my right glanced briefly at a three-dimensional skeleton that appeared in the air between him and me. My skeleton. Visible to everyone in line. Then it turned into an image of my skeleton with internal organs. Then my skin filled in. I was naked in front of everyone behind me in line until the technician waved the image away.

  “Move!” he ordered.

  My embarrassment hadn’t even had time to form when the struthiform behind me shoved me forward so that the next recruit could stand in my place.

  “Run! Run!” Pushed forward by other recruits and struthi­forms yelling at us, we jogged under the shadowed roads and around the great twisted legs of the lower buildings.

  A hundred of us
stopped as one on a patch of grass. A plaza in the heart of the alien forest of a city buried in the heart of New York. A human sergeant in gray marched up to our front.

  I’d seen his type before: on commercial breaks between sports, on public service announcements on screens in delis.

  “Listen up, you useless maggots,” he shouted, amplified words ringing out throughout the plaza. “There are many aliens out there. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. . . .”

  Fuck. This was really happening.

  I was going to become one of those people who disappeared off into deep Accordance space and had yet to come back.

  Sweat trickled down the small of my back as I focused on an orb-shaped drone flying around the crowd for close-ups. I half listened to the description of our five enemies and what they could do to us.

  I was going to let myself get shot across space. I was going to leave Earth far, far behind, and go fight a war that would be light-years away. With creatures that I’d never seen with my own eyes.

  And I was going to do it for another bunch of alien creatures.

  The human sergeant finished his well-rehearsed speech and left. The cameras flew away. Struthiforms yelled at us again. A line formed.

  “Hold out your forearm.” The man in front of me held what looked like a nail gun.

  I did, and then winced as it punctured my skin with a sharp pneumatic hiss. I looked down. A single bead of blood welled up in the center of a tattoo of a stylized Earth with a triangle in the middle. My skin sizzled around it for a second.

  “What’s this?”

  “Your rank and ID. Welcome to the Colonial Protection Forces. Move along.”

  I stumbled forward. Another annoying orb camera dropped out of the air to eye level and circled around me as a man stepped forward. “Mr. Hart, I’m Vincent Anais, with Colonial Broadcast Agency. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to have a moment.” His voice indicated he wasn’t asking a question. I noticed he had a CPF tattoo on his forearm as well. His had two dots underneath the triangle.

  “Um . . .”