by Neil Clarke
“No? I brought him right here, on time.”
“Yeah.” She taps the screen. “You also said he’d sell you out.”
It’s true. Loot came through, unlike all the other squid I’ve so carefully betrayed. My voice, when I answer, is steady: “Kid’s an idealist, the real deal. Had to happen eventually, I guess.”
“Almost a shame we’re gonna kill him, huh?”
She’s watching me carefully.
“Almost,” I agree. If I do feel a pang, if the game is suddenly less fun than it used to be, how’s she going to know? I’m a serpent. I lie.
“Okay.” She smiles. “Time you scrambled. I’m sure you’ve got a hot date with a new identity.”
“I’m going after the spaceport in Tulsa,” I say. There’s no harm in telling. Everyone in the room took slow poison as soon as my squad passed the copy shop. The squid will overrun this position eventually—there’s no avoiding that. But they won’t be interrogating anyone but grunts.
She draws back the cover on another tunnel. “This one leads to the sewers. There’s a truck waiting.”
“Thanks.” Still barefoot, I ease onto the ladder.
To my surprise, Deb gives me a hug before I can go. “Thanks for setting the stage.”
“Make a good show of it,” I reply, squeezing back. For a second, the hard tissue of her muscles feel strange. Almost alien.
Letting me go, she salutes.
Then she turns back to her work and I start down the ladder, leaving my friends and enemies together, locked in the endless dance of mutual annihilation.
Judith Berman is a writer, anthropologist, and long-time aikido practitioner. Her fiction, which has been shortlisted for the Nebula and Sturgeon awards, has appeared in Asimov’s, Black Gate, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, Lightspeed, and the chapbook Lord Stink and Other Stories. Her novel Bear Daughter was a finalist for the Crawford Award, and her influential essay “Science Fiction Without the Future” received the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pioneer Award. She has lived in Philadelphia, Dubai, and northern Idaho, and currently resides on a hilltop on Vancouver Island, BC, in sight of the ocean.
The Fear Gun
JUDITH BERMAN
1.
The dawn found Harvey Gundersen on the deck of his house, as it had nearly every morning since the eetee ship had crashed on Cortez Mountain. There he stood a nightly watch for the fear storms. On this last watch, though, the eetees had worn him out—an incursion at the Carlson’s farm and the lone raider at his own well, where the black sky had rained pure terror—and fatigue had overcome him just as the sky began to lighten. When Susan shook him awake, he jerked upright in his lawn chair, heart a-gallop.
She gripped red plastic in her hand. For an instant, Harvey was sure that his worst suspicions had proved true, and his wife had learned how to bring on the bad weather. But even as he swung up his shotgun, finger on the trigger, he saw that what Susan pointed at him was not a weather-maker, not even an eetee gun about to blast him to splat, but the receiver of their landline phone. The cord trailed behind her.
Susan’s gaze riveted on the shotgun. Harvey took a deep breath and lowered the barrel. Only then did Susan say, flatly, “Your brother’s calling.”
“What does he want?”
She shrugged, two shades too casual. Harvey knew Susan and Ben plotted about him in secret. His pulse still racing, he carried the phone into the house and slid the glass door closed so Susan could not overhear. He stood where he could keep his eye on both Susan and the eetee-infested mountains.
As he slurped last night’s mormon tea from his thermos, liquid spilled onto the arm of his coat. Strange that his hands never shook while he held a gun.
“Hello, Ben,” he said into the receiver.
“Nice work last night, Harve,” said Ben. “Good spotting. You saved some lives there, buddy.”
Although Harvey knew better than to trust his brother’s sincerity, he could not repress a surge of pride. “I watch the weather, Ben. I can see it coming five miles off. And I look for the coyotes. They track the eetees. They keep a watch on them. The coyotes—”
“Sure, Harve,” Ben said. “Sure. I’ve never doubted it. You’re the best spotter we have.”
“Well, thanks, Ben.” Harvey seized the moment to describe how, two days ago, the coyotes had used telepathy to trick a van-load of eetees over the edge of the road to their deaths. As long as Ben was de facto dictator of Lewis County, for everyone’s good Harvey had to try to warn him what was happening out there in the parched mountains.
But Ben cut him off before he’d even reached the part about the eetee heads. “Harvey, Harvey, you sound pretty stressed. What about you come in and let Dr. King give you something for your jitters? You tell me all the time how jittery you get, keeping watch day and night. I’ll tell you honestly I’m worried, Harve. Come in before you mistake Susan for an eetee, or do something else we’ll all regret.”
What a lying fuck Ben was. Ben just wanted Dr. King to trank him stupid with Ativan. If Ben were truly worried, he wouldn’t force Harvey and Susan to stay out here in this horribly vulnerable spot, where Harvey was exposed to bad weather two or three times a week. That was what made him so jittery. But it was always, “Sorry, Harve, you can’t expect anyone in town to just give you food or gasoline or Clorox, or repair your phone line when the eetees cut it, not when supplies are dwindling by the day. We all have to contribute to the defense of Lewisville. Manning your observation post—the closest we have now to the ship—is the contribution we need from you.”
What Ben really wanted was for the eetees to rid him of his troublemaker brother. And on the day the weather finally killed Harvey, Ben would send a whole platoon of deputies out to De Soto Hill to take over Harvey’s house and deck. Ben would equip them with the eetee weapons and tools he kept confiscating from Harvey. Can’t hoard these, Harve, my men need them. Lewisville needs ’em.
Ben’s invitation to visit Dr. King, though: Harvey couldn’t afford to pass that up. Although the timing of the offer was a little too perfect . . .
“Ben, I’d rather have a couple of deputies to spell me than a pass for a doctor visit. What about it?”
“You know how short I am of manpower.” Ben sighed. “I’ll work on it, but in the meantime why don’t you come on in?”
“Okay,” Harvey said. “Okay, Ben, I’ll stop by Dr. King’s. If I can get Susan to stand watch for me. You know how she is these days. I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave the observation post that long, do you? How can you be sure eetees won’t come in daytime?”
There was a moment of silence at the other end. Then Ben said goodbye and hung up.
Harvey swallowed a few more gulps of mormon tea, feeling the ephedrine buzz now, and returned outside for recon. First he checked the weather. No fear-clouds on the horizon that he could detect. But lingering jumpiness from last night’s raid, and the scare Susan had given him on waking, might obscure an approaching front.
His video monitors showed him the view toward Lewisville, from the north and front side of the house. At this distance the town was a tiny life raft of houses, trees and grain elevators adrift on the rolling sea of golden wheat. The deck itself gave him a 270-degree view west, south, and east: over the highway and the sweep of fields below De Soto Hill, and of course toward the pine-forested mountains and that immense wreck.
Harvey cast around for the Nikons, only to discover that Susan had usurped his most powerful binoculars and was gazing through them toward the mountains. Anger stirring in him, he picked up the little Minoltas. Through them, the world looked quiet enough. The only movement was a hawk floating across the immaculate blue sky. But Harvey never trusted the quiet. The eetees might avoid the desiccating heat of daytime, but they were always stirring around up there. Plotting the next raid. And the coyotes—
If only he could spy into those mountains as easily as the eetees’ fear-storms roared into his own head.
The n
ape of Harvey’s neck began to twitch. “Do you see something?” he demanded. “Are the coyotes—”
“I’m looking for Fred,” Susan said coldly, without lowering the binoculars. “Fred is gone.” Now the anger boiled in Harvey’s gut. “You should be watching for eetees, not pining after your lost dog.”
“Fuck your eetees! Fred is out there somewhere. He wouldn’t leave us and never come back!”
Her voice had turned flat and uncompromising, and Harvey knew one of her rages was coming on. But he could not rein in his own fury.
“If you care so much,” he said, “why did you let him loose?”
Susan finally turned to stare at Harvey. She was breathing hard. “I didn’t let Fred out.”
“Oh, so the coyotes unbuckled his collar?”
Deep red suffused Susan’s face. “Fuck you,” she screamed, “and fuck your coyotes!” She slammed the binoculars onto the deck, she reached toward the rifle—
Harvey grabbed his shotgun and aimed. How stupid to leave his rifle propped against the railing, out of reach—
Susan threw the rifle onto the deck, and then the tray holding the remains of his midnight snack; she kicked over his lawn chair and the tripod for his rifle, and upended the box of shotgun cartridges he’d been packing with rock salt. “Shoot me, Harvey!” she screamed. “Shoot me! I know you want to!”
Harvey snatched up his rifle but did not shoot. At last Susan stopped her rampage. She stared with fierce hatred through her tangled, greasy hair, panting. “I didn’t let Fred out, you moron. You did.” Then she flung herself in her own lawn chair and picked up a tattered and yellowing issue of last summer’s Lewisville Tribune.
The shakes took Harvey. While he waited for the waves of fever cold to recede, he gritted his teeth and said to her, “I’m going to do my rounds now. Just keep an eye out, okay, Susan? That’s all I ask? Watch for eetees, who want to kill us and steal our water, and not for your dead dog?”
When she did not answer, he heaved open the glass door again and stalked into the house. Susan might as well be using a weather-maker, the way she kept terrifying him. Harvey was jumpy enough today. He just had been lucky that last night’s raider had probably stolen its weather-maker from a higher-ranking eetee and wasn’t skilled in its use. And by now Harvey had learned to keep his distance and rely on his rifle and sniper’s night-scope. So the lightning strike of blind terror had fallen short. Harvey had caught only the peripheral shockwave—although that that had been horrible enough.
Weather-maker was what Harvey called the weapon. Other people called it a fear gun. Dr. King and Joe Hansen, putting their heads together, had suggested that the gun produced (as quoted in a bulletin distributed by the sheriff’s office) “wireless stimulation of the amygdala, mimicking the neurochemical signature of paralytic terror.” But no one had yet been able to figure out the insides of those whorled red pendants, and no one could do with them what the eetees did, not even Harvey, who was so hypersensitive from repeated exposure that the weapon affected him even when he wasn’t its target. Even when they weren’t being used. (When Dr. King told him that human researchers had for years been able to produce a similar if weaker effect with a simple electrode, Harvey had, next time he was alone, checked his scalp for unfamiliar scar tissue. But if Susan or Ben had had such an electrode implanted, they had also concealed the traces well.)
Harvey unbolted the connecting door that led from the kitchen into the garage. As angry as Susan’s abdication of responsibility made him, this was the opportunity he needed. She would read and re-read her Tribune for hours, trying to pretend that the entire last year hadn’t happened.
In the garage he quickly donned his rubber gloves and plastic raincoat. He raised the lid of the big chest freezer, long emptied of anything edible, and heaved out the large tarpaulin-wrapped bundle, humping it into the pickup bed. The raider’s corpse hadn’t frozen yet; Harvey just hoped it had chilled sufficiently to last until he reached Dr. King.
Then he stripped off his protective gear and gave it a swift rinse with Clorox in the utility sink. On the cement floor beside the sink, still at the end of its chain, lay Fred’s unbuckled collar of blue nylon webbing—a testament to Susan’s lies.
Harvey fetched last night’s newly scavenged eetee gun from the wheel well of his pickup, where he hoped this time to keep it hidden from Susan and Ben. Next, after checking the yard through the front door peephole, he bore the ladder outside to begin his daily inspection of the video cameras, the locks and chains, the plywood boarding up their windows, the eetee cell that powered the house (one of the few perks Ben allowed them).
It hurt Harvey to think about Fred, happy Fred, the only one of them unchanged since the days before the eetees had come to Earth. When he and Susan had been happy, too, in their dream house with the panoramic view atop De Soto Hill. Fred was just one dumb, happy golden retriever with no notion of the dangers out there in the mountains. More likely the coyotes had gotten Fred than the eetees—not that it made any difference.
Sweating, his scalp twitching, Harvey made his way downhill through dry grass and buzzing grasshoppers. He righted the black power cell (how he’d had to argue with Ben to keep two), slipped on a spare adapter to re-connect the cell to his well pump, and refilled the salt-loaded booby traps the raider had sprung. All the while he searched the trampled ground for the raider’s missing weather-maker, but still without success. Had the coyotes taken it? There couldn’t have been bad weather without a weather-maker . . .
Finally he was climbing the hill again, eager to return to his deck. On his deck he was king—at least, on the deck he had a chance of seeing death before it peered at him with its yellow, slime-covered eyeball.
He had nearly reached the house when a new sound stopped him in his tracks. A shape thrashed through the tall thistles along the driveway. Adrenaline and ephedrine together surged in Harvey’s veins, making his hands tremble like grass in the breeze.
But even as he pulled the eetee gun from his waistband and clutched at his rifle with his other hand, he saw that what rustled onto the driveway was not an eetee. It was not even a demented coyote come to grin mockingly at him and then zigzag wildly away into the fields, tongue flapping, while Harvey tried in vain to ventilate its diseased hide.
“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.”