by J. Thorn
She'd been gazing out to sea, to the constant wash of waves over sand. She turned to him now, fixing him with fever-bright blue eyes.
"If Adam couldn't make it, if he just dies there like he was nothing at all, what shot would you have?"
"Not much, probably." He didn't know what else could be said. They sat in silence until she started shivering. He helped her inside.
Maybe her infection broke. Maybe lifting Adam's weight from her shoulders made each step a little lighter. Whatever the case, within days Sarah was up and about on her own, if visibly thinner and paler. Raymond fed her more spinach with her salads, slaughtered one of the chickens and left the fat on when he cooked it. She began to smile, to help them weed the garden at night, sprinkling water on the peppers and lettuce and herbs, sweeping out the ground floor and the back porch without asking.
She looked good. On the mend. Strong enough to walk, if not to ride a bike for more than a few blocks.
Just when Raymond thought he might be able to talk her into leaving with them—to Colorado, if not the BRR forces—the aliens came to the base of the hills, spraying long plumes of fire from their racketing, hemispherical tanks. The world erupted in heat and flame.
20
He wanted to kill them.
Cold, cruel vengeance. To kill every living thing in that alien city growing from Earth soil. Walt imagined wrenching their tough-skinned limbs right from their sockets and snapping them over his knee. Stabbing their bulbous squid-eyes. Slashing open their bodies and watching their knotty guts and mucosal blood soak into the desert floor.
Not very wise, attacking a camp of hundreds by himself, armed only with a pistol and a couple of knives. Not very wise at all. But he wanted it so bad it felt as if he'd already done it. He spun through the possibilities—rush in, shoot as many as he could, steal a ship, blast off—but he wouldn't know how to fly it, would he, and they would just track him down and destroy him. Sneak in under cover of darkness instead, knife them in their beds (did they have beds?), skulk away. That one was at least plausible. He had the idea their eyes, for all their size, weren't so good. Before killing it, he'd crouched immediately below the one he'd fought in the stream, and it hadn't seen him until he moved.
Still, risking his life to kill a handful of aliens hardly seemed worth it. The blue cones in the distance could house at least a couple hundred of them, and with no sign of their scout ships, let alone the mothership or invasion fleet that must have carried them here, he had to guess Earth now housed several thousand of the creatures at the very least. Not worth it. If he still had the itch to stomp some aliens after he made it to LA, he had the feeling they'd be around.
He rose to a low crouch, meaning to slink along the brush and weeds until he'd cleared line of sight, when a large, dust-spewing version of the hemispherical vehicles trundled to the edge of the buildings, parked a short ways from a tall, spindly cone-tower, and disgorged 25-odd naked humans into the sunlight.
Walt sunk back down behind a prickly brown bush. He watched as, in what he took to be the universal sign of oppression, three aliens with rods or guns of some sort herded the people into a simple pen—he couldn't see the wires, and for all he knew the creatures used force fields to fence off their livestock, but it was a rectangle set off by a series of twenty-foot poles, anyway, and the captives stayed inside even when two of the aliens disappeared into the nearby cone-tower.
The humans milled about, some cupping their hands over their genitals, others not bothering. A couple of people tried to talk, but from what Walt could see, nobody was much interested in chatting.
The first person to sit down did so after just five minutes, easing himself onto the flat dirt. He was joined over the next few minutes by a couple of others. The bulk stayed standing for nearly an hour until, within the span of a single minute, all but three of the captives lowered themselves to the ground.
Walt sipped water, chewed some crackers. The late afternoon sun had been plenty warm while he'd been walking but was now wholly neutral. He'd spent enough weeks in these high deserts to know that, an hour after sunset, it would be downright cold.
Maybe the woman who started throwing rocks had reached the same conclusion. Maybe she simply didn't like being penned like a human chicken. Walt couldn't say. He just watched as the woman knelt, scooped several somethings from the dirt, and began hurling the somethings—rocks, most likely, but it was too far to see—at the tall poles.
The woman stopped a moment later and tipped back her head toward the blue cone-tower. She slung out her arms, waving violently, possibly shouting, then knelt for more rocks. When she resumed throwing, it was at the tower.
A blue line speared from the structure, so brief and faint Walt couldn't be certain he'd seen it. The woman crumpled straight down. Around her, the others leapt up screaming, crowding away from the sudden death.
The sun was most of the way to the hills before the aliens went in the pen to bring out the body.
Activity elsewhere in the city calmed down, the ground vehicles parking along the unpaved streets, most of the aliens dispersing into the steep, conical buildings. The people gathered into a huddle just before sunset. After, most of them filed one by one to a corner of the pen, where each squatted for a minute before drifting away to a seat in the dirt.
Walt already had his plan, so much as you could call it that. He watched through the settling darkness. A single light popped on from a high corner of the pen, casting the field in a twilight of long shadows. The rest of the camp or city or whatever the hell it was sat under a similarly half-hearted light. Lack of resources? Or already complacent that nothing and no one would be coming at them from the darkness?
Walt napped. He woke a couple hours later, watching the tower while his brain and body woke up. This time, he took his pack with him.
He moved past the camp, then cut across the open field, pausing at intervals to scan the grounds through his binoculars. No searchlights fanned out from above. No alarms wailed through the night. When Walt was within a quarter mile of the pen, one of the vehicles lumbered from the far side of the city heading for the highway. He dropped prone, waited for its bluish lights to swing onto the road and fade into the distance.
He crawled the last hundred yards on his belly. Dust swirled in his nostrils. Rocks jabbed his stomach. This close, he could make out the wires enclosing the pen, electric or something like it.
Everyone inside looked asleep. As he crawled up to the pen's edge, a young woman lifted her head, arms barred over her breasts.
"Who's out there?"
"Shut up," Walt hissed. "Put your hands above your head."
Hesitantly, she raised her hands, shivering. With her back to the light, it was too dark to get much of a look, but Walt smiled anyway.
"I'm kidding. My name's Walt. I'm—"
"What are you doing out there?"
"No time for questions. This fence—"
"I asked first. What are you doing here?"
"Getting you out of there." He pointed at the wires enclosing the grounds. "Is that electric? How does it work?"
"How should I know? For all I know it's sorcery."
Again Walt smiled. "How many of them are in the tower?"
Her shoulders rose to meet the edge of her dark hair. "Three? Nine million? I haven't been making them sign in and out."
That jibed with what he'd seen, though who knows what they'd been up to while he'd slept. "Listen. I'm an idiot, so I'm going to go inside that building and try to disable the fence. I need you to wake up the others and tell them to get ready to move. If any of them makes a peep, I'm running away without looking back."
She squinted at him, leaning closer to the wires, long legs silhouetted. With some will, he stopped himself from glancing at her crotch.
"Who are you?"
He put a finger to his lips. "Take care of business. I'll take care of mine."
She watched him turn away. By the time he crawled to the deep blue face of the
tower, he heard her whispering to the others, shushing their confusion. He drew his longest knife, a Vietnam-era-type combat knife with a seven-inch blade and a broken compass in its pommel. The door was just a little too wide and a little too tall and sported a T-shaped handle on its right-hand side. Purely mechanical. It opened without trouble; either their door technology wasn't up to par with their interstellar travel, or they were way out in their version of the boonies. Walt supposed that sort of limitation explained why they'd only managed to kill 99% of humanity so far instead of the whole damn thing.
The door opened to a tight, spartan entryway with a bulky, fridge-shaped object to his right and a spiral staircase to his left. He paused, listening. An electric hum just soft enough to drive you crazy. Elsewhere, further up or possibly outside, the shuffle of a large creature's weight. Oddly gloomy, like the twilight of a theater before they turned the lights down all the way (an experience, some distant part of him registered, that he'd never have again). He stepped onto the stairs.
His foot missed. He fell forward, knee banging into the surface. He gripped his knife and froze. By the time he'd convinced himself nothing was on its way to investigate, he'd seen the stairs weren't stairs at all—just a long, smooth, inclined ribbon of some rubbery, sandpapery material that these things apparently oozed right up.
Between strings of mental swearing, he gave long thought to backing out the door and running west as fast as he could. He couldn't, of course. Someone in the pen would shout out at him, calling down the aliens. He should have thought of that beforehand. Everyone was in this for their own survival. Those human cattle in the enclosure out there, they wouldn't give a shit if he died running away. All they'd care was some coward hadn't died trying to save their own pointless lives.
He smiled, angry. This was why you never try to help.
There wasn't even a handrail. He planted one foot on the ramp, preparing to crawl, but found the hard, rubbery surface gripped his shoe as firmly as a handshake. He leaned up another step, then straightened until he was nearly upright. A strange vertigo hit him—his feet felt sturdy as roots, but his upper body felt dangerously unbalanced, as if he might topple over if he blinked in the wrong direction—and he lowered himself to a crouch. Above, the ramp spiraled along the wall all the way to a dim hole in the ceiling and an unseen room beyond. The center of the tower was empty, just disturbing, dizzying empty space.
He crawled up on an improvised combo of hands, knees, elbows, and feet, proceeding with the speed of a hungover turtle. Some fifteen feet up, the ramp flattened out, giving way to a short landing and an oval alcove set into the wall. A single glance at the recess told him all he needed: empty space, just large enough for one of the many-legged creatures to insert itself within, and two narrow windows facing black mountains and pinpricks of stars. And, a couple feet to the left of the windows, a rack of what were recognizably guns.
He picked one up. Pistol-like, with a short, fat barrel and a grip like the handle of a sword, a slightly flared cylinder with a round knob at the end. One button on either side of the barrel. Holding the grip, he could just reach the buttons with his thumb and forefinger. It was surprisingly heavy and he saw no obvious sign of a clip. He carried it in his left hand, knife in the right, and continued up.
More landings. More alcoves. He paused often but heard nothing beyond the background hum. He was more than halfway up the ramp and was certain he'd be incapable of safely moving up or down any faster than a literal crawl. If one of those things came in from down below or up top, he'd be a squatting duck.
His luck, if you could call it that—he didn't think any such term applied when you'd deliberately chosen to clamber around an alien guard tower manned by hostile monsters—held to the top. The ramp rose to a wide, round hole. Above, the same dim lighting showed little besides a wide window and a curved ceiling another fifteen feet up. No visible aliens. Walt straightened, inch by inch, until his eyes cleared the ledge.
The hole opened into the corner of a room as barren as the rest of the tower. Windows paneled a circular space some thirty feet across. One of the creatures was inserted into an alcove, its back to him, curled up more tightly than he could have imagined. Another stood twenty feet from the first in front of something that looked like a computer designed for slobbery dogs: its graphics were Atari ST-simple, and they changed little despite the at-times frantic typing, twisting, sweeping, and signing-like gestures of the limbs waving and poking at a combination of keys, trackballs, and empty spaces above gleaming black pads.
Neither turned his way. Guided by a growing hunch, he crept towards the one at the computer even more slowly than his scuttle up the ramp. The alien tapped and jabbed at its terminal. He drew up behind the alien, smelling its odor of fish oil and drying kelp. Its claws and tentacles twitched above the motion-pads, poked keys, massaged knobs. For a minute, Walt just watched its motions; he had every doubt he'd be able to replicate them and navigate the system, but who knew. Besides, there was something very sweet about this moment, of knowing the alien's fate while it remained clueless. He wondered if one of them had felt the same way when they'd unleashed the virus on Earth.
Fast as a viper, he raised his knife. The alien stuck up its two antennae-like limbs, swiveled its head, and fixed him with giant squid-eyes that looked like the perfect image of cartoon surprise. Walt barked out a laugh and slammed the blade down into its right eye. The knife plunged easily, sending a spray of clear, watery liquid followed by thick inky goop. The alien hissed and jerked away, limbs spasming, clubbing Walt's face. The knife slipped from his grasp, embedded in the creature's brain. It fell, tentacles slapping the rubbery floor, one bony leg sweeping Walt's feet from under him.
Feet thumped behind him. He reached for the knife waggling in the dying alien's eye but was driven back by a wall of writhing limbs. The alien from the alcove bore down on him, its eyes as widely, comically angry as the other's had been surprised. Walt leveled the alien pistol and jammed down the buttons, bracing himself for the bang and the kick. A beam of electric blue light appeared between himself and the alien. Skin crackled, sending fat sizzling into the air with the smell of fresh battered cod. The alien didn't make a noise as Walt waved the beam back and forth, severing limbs, slashing black gouges across its body and the pink, strappy thing it wore around its middle. It collapsed in an avalanche of charred parts that slammed into Walt and drove him back into the still-twitching body of the first.
Because there didn't seem to be anything else to do, he swore.
He arose from a mess of singed limbs and briny goo. The first alien hadn't sensed him until he'd jerked up the knife. The one by the stream hadn't noticed him until he'd moved, either. So they could sense bodily motion, but imperfectly. He remembered reading that sharks and some other species could sense the electrical charges of contracting muscles or something like that, but all the animals that could do that lived in water, which Walt was pretty sure could carry a charge much better than air. On the other end of things, he wasn't certain the aliens could hear at all. They seemed to communicate through motion, too, and they sure as hell didn't do any shouting or screaming when they died.
Walt shoved bits of dead alien away with his feet and turned to the computer. The screen meant nothing to him, abstract rods and squares and zigzag lines with no clear icons, pointers, or even text. Within seconds of fiddling with the controls, he was ready to walk outside and simply laser through the wires around the pen.
A pen that was rectangular. Just like the leftmost object on the screen. And the rods were the towers and the zigzags the mountains—could it be that easy? Experimentally, he moved his hand over one of the motion-pads, hoping to conjure up a pointer he could drag to the pen. Instead, the screen switched to a wall of glyphs which he couldn't turn back no matter how he waved his hands. After a minute of conducting an orchestra that wasn't there, he went to the hole, lowered himself onto the ramp, and scooted down to the ground floor.
He could hear the
gasps from the pen as he walked outside, hunched his back to shield the light as best he could, and simply lasered through the lower wires.
"You were in there a long time," the young woman whispered.
"Did you miss me?"
"Who would miss a failure?"
"Get the others over here," he smiled. She went and whispered to the crowd of two dozen, who ducked under the clipped, still-smoking wires and stood shivering in the night air.
"Now get down and crawl until we're outside the light," Walt whispered to the group.
"We're naked," hissed a stocky man with a hairy stomach.
"Would you rather get a thorn in your balls or a laser in your back?"
"Can't you steal a car?"
Walt raised the laser. "Crawl."
They did. Through weeds and rocks and dust, through whimpers and soft yelps, pale asses bobbing in the moonlight. After a hundred yards, Walt stopped them and pulled out his binoculars. The camp was as still as it had been before he'd approached the pen. He rose to a stoop and gestured the prisoners on. Men and women rose and followed, knees and elbows rubbed raw and pasted with dirt. They ducked along with their hands splayed over their breasts and genitals, hissing through clenched teeth when their feet struck a stone; once, a young man fell and had to be helped along on the shoulders of two others. They reached the highway with no sign of alarm from the colony. On the blacktop, Walt dug out four bottles of water and handed them to the young woman and three others, watching with mild interest as each escapee glugged down as much as they thought they could get away with before passing it on.
"Well," he said, "good luck."