Alien Nation #5 - Slag Like Me

by Barry B. Longyear

  Matt looked down at his hands as the room beyond continued spinning. I don’t know, he thought to himself. Hell, every time I think I have a scrap of information, it turns out to be wrong. Now I don’t even know what species I belong to.

  There were sounds. Li Sinritu was talking.

  “. . . ship’s computer records. I’ve seen them. Since my family line was made part of the ship’s production unit, one hundred and nineteen males and females were born, wed, had children, lived productive lives, and died peacefully.”

  “It sounds really fulfilling.”

  “You want fulfillment, Matt Cross? In the few years we’ve been on Earth, half the adults in my immediate family have been refused work and the other half have been forced into demeaning and degrading occupations that make labor for the Stallahraj slave masters seem most satisfying.”

  “Lawyers, are they?” At the stony expression on the woman’s face, Matt glanced down. “Sorry.”

  “I’ll fill you in on a bit of reality, human. Compared to the ship, my family now lives in Hell, eleven are chained by the nightmare of illegal addictions, three have been victims of murder, and five of them have committed suicide. There are worse things than being slaves, nugah. If you want to know more, come to a meeting.” She stood and walked off, handing out fliers to other Tencts in the waiting room.

  “Come to a meeting,” Matt repeated. An electric tingle skittered across the back of his head.

  Come to a meeting. Keep coming back. That’s what they told him all those months ago.

  Matt. Keep coming back, Matt.

  Matt Sikes.

  Sergeant Matt Sikes, LAPD.

  He closed his eyes as it all flooded back: Cass, the endless operations, Danny Mikubeh, the city on fire, the beatings and the massacre on Seventh Street.

  All of the dead cops.

  All of the dead bangers.

  How it had felt to have a foot grind his face into the street.

  The rage.

  The look on Danny’s face.

  Matt coughed, a streak of pain fired through Matt’s left side, and he heard himself cry out. He didn’t know what was worse: the physical pain from his beating or the pain in his heart knowing he had gotten it from his fellow officers—that those officers were now either dead or wounded—that the city was burning down. Again.

  “Shut up!”

  He squinted his eyes open. No one appeared to be looking at him. “What?”

  “I said shut up!” The voice came from behind. Matt turned around, crying out again from the pain. There was a human wearing a white lab coat. He was young with a great shock of black hair above large dark-rimmed glasses. He had a clipboard in his shaking hands and his face was bright red. “You fucking slags burn down and loot the goddamned city then come in here and whine about getting a little bump on the head. Look, I’ll treat you crybabies because that’s the law, but I’ll be fucked if I’ll listen to you rubberheaded bastards piss and moan all night just because you got what you asked for! So, shut the hell up! Just shut the hell up!”

  The waiting room was tomb silent, both human and Tenct patients shocked into silence. The healer paused, turned on his heel, and stormed back through the emergency room doors. As a dreadful sadness overtook Matt, he used the chair’s armrests and pushed himself to his feet. For a moment he felt the blood drain from his head. The moment passed, and he slowly limped from between the rows of waiting patients.

  At the glass doors leading to the parking lot, Matt stared with unbelieving eyes at the skyline in the first light of morning. Columns of black smoke reached into the sky, reminding Matt of Saddam’s spiteful farewell when his forces retreated from Kuwait leaving behind hundreds of burning oil wells. The columns of smoke rising from the city, however, weren’t from oil wells. Instead they were from cars, buses, trucks, homes, businesses, schools, government buildings. How many of those dark pillars, he wondered, marked more dead. Before he had gotten into Danny Mikubeh’s car, the riot-attributed death toll had still been under one hundred. Where was it now?

  The Tenctonese girl had mentioned something about a meeting. Matt frowned as it brought something back. The memory brought another thing back and it caused him to blush. The blush was for stupidity, or was it a disease, he asked himself silently. Either way, how much of the flames and deaths out there were the responsibility of Matt Sikes?

  “Who are you?” He turned and looked at the speaker. It was the Ahvin Rivak worker, Li Sinritu. “Are you a reporter?”

  “No.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Matt. Matt Sikes.” He looked back at the burning city, the memory of the faces of those in riot gear bringing down their batons on him—women, men, human, Tenct. Brothers and sisters.

  The Blue.

  “I’m a police officer. Homicide.” Matt closed his eyes as he felt himself blush again. It wasn’t just the mistake he had made, nor even its consequences. It was why he had made it.

  He turned his head and looked at the Tenct female. “Li, I have a headache that can digest rhino snot, my side is on fire, I can hardly walk, and I think I know who killed Micky Cass.”

  “So?”

  He squinted as he looked at her. “That’s what I was working on.” He gave a bitter laugh. “Yeah, that’s what I was working on when my brother officers dragged me out of the car, killed Danny Mikubeh, and beat the shit out of me.”

  “Danny Mikubeh, hivek of Nightshade?”

  “That’s the guy. You know him?”

  “I read about him. In Cass’s column, ‘Slag Like Me.’ The cops killed him?”

  “Yes. The cops killed him.” The images, the entire bloody ballet, flashed before Matt’s eyes. “He was beaten to death. Yes. The cops killed him.”

  Li Sinritu pointed at Matt’s face. “Cops did that to you, too?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Too bad you don’t have it on videotape. You could be another Rodney King, go on the talk shows, sell a book, help start another damned riot.”

  Matt reached his hand up and gingerly touched his scalp with his fingers. The skin was smooth and unbroken. He looked at the button on his jacket and jewel on his ring. Both microcameras were still there and still undamaged. “I just might have it on videotape.” He felt his inner face blanch as he said it.

  “You’re looking very weird, Officer Sikes.”

  “The whole massacre on Seventh Street,” he said, “the police dragging me and Danny Mikubeh from the car, the beatings, Danny being beaten to death, the Nightshade wasting the cops. All of it. It’s on tape.”

  He winced at the pains in his back and closed his eyes against the throbbing in his head. “Is there a telephone around here? I have to call in. Where in the hell is here, anyway? I don’t recognize this place.”

  “All the lines are down, cop. I just tried calling home a minute ago. Phone lines, power lines, the works. The hospital’s power comes from a generator. Do they have generators and radios at the police stations?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “Well, I imagine if you flashed your badge and got pushy enough you could force the hospital to let you use their radio communications system even though they’ll probably have to let a few lives slip through their fingers while you chat with your buddies down at the blue sty.”

  Matt reached to his back pocket. “My badge. It’s gone.” He patted the outside of his left jacket pocket. “I still have my gun.” Frowning, he looked up at Li. “The two bangers who pulled me in out of the street, they left me my gun.”

  Li rolled her eyes in disgust. “They’re not all thieves and killers.”

  Sikes held up a hand. “Oh, these two were both: thieves and killers. First rate, too. Now that I think about it, though, they were both carrying better artillery than this. They probably didn’t want to weigh themselves down with inferior firepower. God, one of them had a Micro Uzi. But I still don’t have any ID.”

  “And in the middle of a riot, cop, with the bodies stacking up
and every available resource stretched way beyond limits,” said Li, “what would you do if a beat-up Tenct without ID staggers up to you, claims to be a cop, and demands to use the radio on police business?”

  “I guess I’m not going to try the radio. Where is this? What hospital?”

  “Lafayette Emergency Center.”

  “Yeah,” he nodded, immediately regretting the gesture. “Lafayette. The new one on Wilshire. Near the park.” He looked at the young woman’s face, moistened his lips, and took a grip on a wall railing to keep from swooning. “Tell me, Li Sinritu, do you have a car?”

  “Why? You going to commandeer it?”

  “No. I couldn’t even drive. I’m going to be damned lucky to make it to the parking area without passing out. I’d like you to give me a ride.”

  “Why should I help you, cop? You just got a small taste of what the police have been doing to my people ever since we arrived on this love-forsaken planet. I’m certainly not taking you to any damned police station.”

  Matt, still holding onto the railing, leaned against it and sighed. “Maybe. Maybe you’re right. This place—L.A.—looks like hell right now. Looks like it, smells like it, feels like it—it is hell, wall-to-wall shit.”

  “You’re not much of salesman.”

  “Yeah. I really ought to take a night course.” He closed his eyes against the pain, waited for a wave of nausea to pass, then opened them again. The woman with the fliers was still there. “There are a billion things wrong with this city, Li, but I think maybe I can straighten out one of the tiny ones—take care of one detail if you’ll help me. I think I know who killed Micky Cass. Something you said triggered it. I think I know who, but I don’t know why. If I’m right, though, someone else is in danger. I don’t want to go to a police station. I want to warn that person.”

  “What do I care about who killed Micky Cass? The Ahvin Rivak denounced ‘Slag Like Me’ when it first came out.”

  Matt thought for a moment as a wave of nausea came and left. “Look, Li, let’s say everything goes just the way you want. The government throws the deficit-reduction program out the window and gets behind your effort to go back to slavery with unlimited funding and technical assistance. The entire technological might of the world is dedicated to reinventing and assembling the communications equipment that will bring the Stallahraj hotfooting it to Earth. Let’s say they don’t enslave the human race, and let’s say slavery is just the way you remember it when you were a punk little kid. You want to guess how many decades it’s going to take just to make the components for the communications? And while you’re waiting, right here on Earth is where you’ll be. How do you want to spend the next thirty or fifty years? In the middle of a war with each side trying to out-stupid the others?”

  “I take it back, Sikes. You’re better at selling than I thought.”

  “Will you give me a ride? I’m asking. Maybe we can even stop a riot.”

  She looked around at the waiting room to see the cherry red fliers she’d handed out. They’d been left on seats, on the floor, balled up and tossed into trash cans. No one seemed particularly interested in the Ahvin Rivak. “I guess I’ve done all I can here.” She faced Sikes and asked, “If I give you a ride and the cops try to stop us, I’m not going to stop. You understand me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll drive right through the bastards and risk pulling bloody badges and blue fuzz out of my grill before I pull over for any cops in this town. Are we clear about that?”

  Matt looked into her eyes for a long time, then nodded. “We’re clear about that. No stopping.”

  “Okay. Where do you want to go?”

  He held up his arm. “Crutch me out to your car, kid, then you can drive me to Coldwater Canyon and sell me the Ahvin Rivak on the way.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Do you think I have a chance?”

  “Maybe. After today, a little vacation below decks pulling an oar looks pretty good.”

  C H A P T E R 2 5

  GONE.

  It was all gone. Just an oily stench left in the air. What did it smell like? Kerosene? Lighter fluid? Gasoline? That’s right. They were still trying to get the refinery fire under control between sniper shots.

  What the hell.

  Sitting in the dark of his den, Duke Jessup looked with dull eyes at the black and gray towers of smoke rising above the city toward the south and east, the break of day filtering through layers of dusty haze. He finished his whiskey, placed the empty tumbler on the corner of the end table, and listened uncaring as it tipped off the edge and fell to the carpet. It was silent in the room, save for the sounds of distant sirens, the squeak of someone with worn brakes parking in the turn-off outside. Duke shook his head in disgust.

  The city burning down, armies of looters and killers roaming the streets, still the turistas. Hell, the riot was a better draw than the Universal Studios tour and Rat Town combined. With real bodies, too. Danger, adventure. Check out the amazing special effects. Tickets for the week, only twenty billion dollars, including free identification of your remains.

  Duke wondered if he should check the locks on the doors and windows and put on the alarm. There really wasn’t any point, he concluded. The alarm required a working telephone system and the phones had been an on-and-off thing for days. It didn’t matter. There wasn’t anything in the house he cared about, including himself. Lois would be getting everything in any event. Screw her, wherever she was. Screw her and the lawyer she rode in on.

  That’s right, he reminded himself. She’s gone. Liberation day. He looked around and sniffed at the air. It was time to do something about that filthy gasoline smell.

  He reached to his shirt pocket, took out a cheroot, and lit it up, allowing himself an especial wallow in carcinogenic luxury. As he puffed and pulled the sweet smoke deep into his lungs, he thought again about locking up. No point, really. He had locked up the day before and hadn’t gone out at all. At least he couldn’t recall going out. So everything should still be locked up, he reasoned.

  Besides, none of the rioting or looting was taking place anywhere near the canyon. Didn’t matter anyway. It was all gone.

  Out there, the city. It was gone.

  In the distance the sky was a reproach. The screams, the dead, the flames, the never-ending smoke. The city, all of those lives, the school, the marriage, the money, the home, the children, the life. All gone.

  Somewhere along the line he had lost Duke Jessup, too.

  Micky Cass gone, as well.

  Too much to think about.

  He picked up the remote and pressed a button. The dim red lights on his entertainment center stereo went on. After a pause the melancholy cadence of Siegfried’s funeral music filled the darkness. He had played the Wagner piece many times, each time berating himself for the low production values of his wallow in self-pity, yet wanting to hear it one more time.

  The music.

  There was something in it that pulled at him. The piece began in sadness, but it moved to uplifting hope, even a possibility of victory. Out of death comes life, the end is the prelude to new beginnings, there really is a light at the end of the tunnel.

  Then it perishes. The hope is fantasy, the victory illusion, the light the open door to the eternity of the underworld. Damnation. In the end it is the end. Death. That mournful cadence.

  A squeal came from the sound system, making him sit up straight. The squeal ground to a growl and then silence. Duke Jessup eased himself back into his chair and muttered a quiet, “Shit!”

  He knew what the noise meant. He’d heard it before. As he sat there the tape deck was eating his Wagner cassette alive. He should have cleaned the roller and capstan some time ago. It had been, however, too much bother.

  “Ah, hell,” he muttered. He took a deep breath, sighed, and shrugged. “It was an old tape anyway.”

  Fourteen, fifteen years old. Used to be important to him. That was a long time ago, though. A lot of things used to be important,
a long time ago.

  He looked down at the roof of Cass’s house. It was still dark. The Newcomer girl Cass had for a wife, Tian Apehna, had failed to turn on the strobe lights ever since Cass’s death had been reported. She was alone in her house; Duke was alone in his. She probably missed Micky Cass. Jessup frowned as a truth worked its way through the haze. He missed Micky Cass, as well.

  He barked out a laugh as he surprised himself with his realization: he missed Micky Cass.

  No, he corrected himself. He missed hating Micky Cass. With Cass in the world, Duke Jessup was a cause, a warrior, a man with a mission. Without the irritating bastard, Duke Jessup was nothing but another bitter old drunk waiting for another lonely death.

  “Ah me,” he said to no one in particular. “Who would have thought it would come to this?”

  Something below crossed his line of vision, hazy though it was. A gray sedan pulled up next to Cass’s house and Duke watched as the two Tencts who had questioned him the previous week climbed out of the car and disappeared around the front. There was a third person at the back of the house doing something in Tian Apehna’s rose garden.

  Duke turned and reached to the table for his glass and found it missing. When he remembered it falling to the floor, he decided against looking for it and flopped back in his chair, wondering if he ought to turn on the air-conditioning. It wasn’t very warm, but the stench from outside seemed to make the air seem very close.

  He reached out, picked up the beautifully puckered bottle of Haig & Haig, and took a long swallow. As the liquid drug burned its way down to his gut, he rested the bottle on his belly, placed his head back against the chair, and closed his eyes.

  Murdered.

  Micky Cass murdered.

  The media and the police didn’t know who, they didn’t know why, but there was a hint about how. There had been a telephone call, not logged as usual, then he wandered out into the night without his car and was not seen again until his remains were discovered in that dry lake bed, eaten away by acid. “Once we have our who,” an FBI spokesman had said with great confidence, “we’ll have our why.”