The kid stopped for just a second as he turned to look at Daniel over his shoulder. And he smiled. Daniel couldn’t believe it. The little bastard smiled at him as if he had just accomplished something impressive. Then he started to run. One second later, Daniel ran after him.
The kid was overweight, but determined to get away with his loot. He took off faster than Daniel would have thought possible. All of the anger, guilt and shame from that Halloween long ago drove him forward like a lion. It was as if he was transported back to the past and he was chasing Billy the night he hurt Rebecca. Some part of his mind knew that this was different, but another part said it was the same.
It was always the same - human predators preying on the weak. And the weak were always decent people. Smaller, smarter, nicer, and unable or unwilling to defend themselves out of fear.
The bullies were always the same, too. Big, mean and dumb. Projecting their self-hatred on those they envied and could never be like. So they traded self-esteem for a sense of power; lying to theirselves that over-powering their victims made them somehow superior to those they victimized.
Daniel had never fought back before, but that was about to change. Something broke inside him. Something that kept him restrained within the bounds of society’s rules; the same rules that let bad guys get away with hurting people. No one was supposed to take the law into their own hands. You were supposed to take your beating, then report it to the officials who may, or may not obtain justice for you.
The image of that tiny Cinderella’s face hitting the pavement merged in his mind with the image of Rebecca’s mouth open wide in a silent scream and it pushed him over the edge. This little girl’s night of joy and candy harvesting with her mother turned instantly into a night of blood, pain and tears. With Rebecca, the bleeding was internal, so he’d never seen it. Maybe if someone had seen it, she would’ve been taken to the hospital sooner. Maybe if he had somehow fought back that night, she’d still be alive today.
Giving it no thought at all, Daniel leaped for the kid’s back as he stretched out his arms, aiming for the kids shoulders. Daniel connected and his weight brought them both down, skidding on the street with the kid serving as a buffer between Daniel and the blacktop.
“Get offa me!” the kid screamed. The pitch of his voice was high and close to tears. Daniel got to his feet, breathing hard through his clenched teeth. He reached down and picked up the pillow case. Some of the candy had scattered onto the street, but the case was still very heavy. It occurred to Daniel that the kid had probably stolen most of it. And that made him even angrier as he visualized little girls throughout the night being slammed from behind by this punk.
The kid turned over and pulled himself up into a sitting position and saw Daniel coming right at him. He started to scoot backwards, looking up at Daniel’s enraged face, first with cocky defiance and then raw fear as he began to understand that the tables had been turned. Someone bigger and stronger than him was the predator now.
Daniel stomped on the candy that had spilled from the pillowcase as he approached the kid, turning it under his boots. “You stupid, worthless, fat, little piece of crap!” he growled.
“Lea’ me alone!” the kid cried.
Daniel almost felt a second of pity for him. His chin was scraped badly from his slide on the street and was bleeding onto his ripped and stained t-shirt. His hands had pebbles embedded in them and blood was oozing out around the pebbles and gravel. Just when Daniel thought that maybe this kid had gotten enough punishment, the image of the little girl flashed into his mind again, followed immediately by the image Rebecca’s face the last time he saw her as his father had carried her out to the car on the way to the hospital; crying from the internal injury that no one knew was there.
“You think it’s cool to hurt people? Knock them down and steal from them? How do you like it now, you little bastard!?” he asked quietly, but with years of pent up rage boiling inside him.
Unbelievably, the kid started to deny any wrong-doing, “I… I didn’t… I didn’t…” and his words were cut off by Daniel kicking him once in the head. The kid flew back, his head hit the asphalt with a thunk, and he stayed there, not moving. Daniel turned around and ran back to his Durango. He got in, dropping the pillowcase on the passenger seat and put the truck in Drive with one hand as he pulled the door shut with the other. He drove past the kid who was still lying on the street apparently unconscious, and he used a side-street intersection to do a U-turn.
He saw the young blonde woman closing the rear passenger door on the driver’s side of the car she and her daughter had been approaching, and then she quickly opened the driver’s door.
Daniel turned off his headlights and came to a stop. The woman was startled and turned around, fearing that the young attacker had returned to inflict more harm upon her and her daughter.
“Please, don’t!” she exclaimed as Daniel quickly rounded the front of his truck and ran toward her. She backed up against the passenger door and held out her hands in front of her as if to ward off this Halloween evil and protect her hurt and scared little girl in the backseat. Daniel approached the still open driver’s door and tossed the bag of candy onto the passenger seat.
He wished he could say or do something to help them, but he knew there was nothing he could do. Besides, he had just committed a violent crime and it was stupid of him to have stopped and returned the stolen candy to the little girl.
He ran back around his truck, got in and took off, leaving his headlights off until he rounded the corner, hoping that his license plate numbers were not too visible. As he drove away, he was eventually able to unclench his jaw and his breathing slowed to a normal rate. Still later, his adrenaline wore off and his hands stopped trembling. And when he thought about it late, late that night, lying in bed, he felt good about what he had done. He felt really good.
That Halloween was the first time.
###
When Everything Changed
Have you ever noticed how sometimes just before your life changes in a really big way, you kinda sense a change coming, but you don’t know what it’s going to be exactly? It’s almost like there’s a hint of something in the air, but it’s not really in the air. It’s something you can feel, but you don’t know how. At least that’s the way it is with me, so I’m guessing other people might experience it too.
Sometimes I feel it in the weeks before I’m about to lose a job, or shortly before the end of long-term relationship but at a time when everything seems to be going just fine. I feel like something, somewhere behind the scenes has changed, like in a copy of our universe where the designing takes place, but the effect hasn’t reached our world yet. It’s as if a grand architect made a decision and now it’s just a matter of time until the execution takes place.
And since the change is inevitable and it’s going to happen no matter what, it’s like there’s a ripple that moves through the ether and you can sense the pending change. Or maybe it’s just people who are sensitive to that sort of thing - whatever it is.
I don’t know really, but the thing is – I didn’t sense any upcoming change in the weeks or days before the aliens came and everything changed.
I really shouldn’t be referring to them as aliens though. The word is actually banned. The Guardians, as they prefer us to call them, say it causes division. They’re really smart about a lot of things, but I wonder how they can be concerned about the possibility of problems arising between us and them over a mere word, but they don’t seem to care about everything else they’ve done that divides us - like banning words for example. I don’t know about other countries, but in America, we’re used to being free. Well, we were anyway.
They also say that we shouldn’t refer to them as aliens because they claim they aren’t aliens, and that they lived on earth long before we did. They even offered proof. They showed us some of mankind’s oldest hieroglyphics and drawings of spacecraft and cosmonauts and then compared them to images of their anci
ent pilots and ships.
They also pointed out where they’re mentioned in our Bible and demonstrated how easy it was for them to build the pyramids, the heads at Easter Island, and explained other things we’ve never understood like the Nazca lines and stuff like that. But that doesn’t change the fact that when they arrived, all we saw were alien space ships coming down from the sky. You can’t just order people to not think the way they do or to not have the feelings they have.
I think they know that though, so what they do is make changes that result in us thinking and feeling differently. Like using buildings for their operations centers instead of their ships that they used when they first came. And wearing suits, which is kinda funny. I mean, sure, they already look a lot like us, and wearing suits and ties kinda makes them look like typical office workers – except for the fact that the shortest among them is eight feet tall. But you can tell they’re trying. When you see them walking down the street or in restaurants sitting in custom-made, oversized booths, they’ll be doing things like walking Great Danes or reading newspapers.
As for our freedom, or lack of it really, they say we’re not responsible enough to govern ourselves and that if we were, they wouldn’t have come and taken over. So for now, we’re not exactly living like slaves, but we live under a lot of restrictions. In some ways, nothing is like it was before, but in other ways, everything is like it always was, but better. I know that sounds confusing, and it sounds like what they’ve done hasn’t been bad for humanity. I mean, why am I complaining if everything is better, right?
Everybody who is able to work has a job now, if they want one. There is always something that needs to be done, so there’s no shortage of work. Just retrofitting houses and buildings with their energy efficient technology will take decades. And speaking of energy, we’re still in the process of replacing the entire electrical infrastructure, and that’s a enormous job.
No one is forced to work, but if they choose not to, they are only provided with the bare minimum essentials for sustaining life. And I mean seriously bare minimum. When they told people that they were free to work or not work and either way they’d be provided for, a lot of people didn’t want to work and they celebrated. They thought life was going to be a party.
As it turned out, a lot of people who had never worked before suddenly changed their minds and developed a work ethic. Instead of food stamps, cash and free housing of their choice, non-workers get a “nutritious and edible substance in sufficient quantity to satisfy their biological needs.” I’m not kidding. They don’t even use the word “food” anywhere in the description.
The housing, if you want to call it that, was just as dismal. All of the “non-producers” were relocated to areas far from the cities where the Guardians built large structures to serve as living quarters. I’ve never been in the military, but I’ve seen barracks in movies and these places were much worse. Rows and rows of cots separated by some kind of partition to make separate living quarters and a few wooden chairs in each partitioned area.
No televisions or radios were allowed or provided. The only activities for people living in the residential centers were either sleeping or learning in the education pods, or I suppose, they could twiddle their thumbs or stare at things. If they didn’t want to work or live in the residential center, they could choose to be exiled to a non-inhabited location of their choice. The point was that almost nothing would be given to anyone who was capable of providing for themselves but chose not to. So if they wanted to rough it in the Amazon or the Sahara, they could. It only took a few months before the residential centers emptied out.
In the beginning, no one at all had television. They announced their presence over every type of electronic communication available; TVs, radios, computers and cell phones. Then when they released their control over most of those devices, they didn’t give back television and said it would be a while before we would be allowed that privilege. A lot of people were outraged at that and riots broke out. But the rioting only lasted about two minutes before people began falling to their knees and vomiting. Some people passed out. A few in every crowd died.
I looked out my window and it was like seeing a non-violent massacre taking place. People were dropping to the ground and rolling around covering their ears, but I couldn’t hear a thing. Bodies littered the street until whatever it was stopped and people slowly got back up looking sick and dazed. No one knows what the Guardians did, but there hasn’t been another riot since that day.
One rioter I talked to said he’d rather die than feel that sick ever again. People are still not happy about missing their movies, sports, game shows, soap operas, and reality TV, etc., but they’re doing what’s expected of them. They’re probably only doing it for the promise that everything will be returned once the education is complete. The Guardians know this is a forced compliance, but they probably figure that people will learn despite themselves.
One of the greatest benefits we’ve had since their arrival is that anyone who needs medical treatment gets it immediately. And they’ve cured most of the diseases that our doctors and researchers weren’t even close to understanding. There’s no more cancer or AIDS or several other previously incurable diseases that I’d never even heard of before. We’re supposed to live nearly twice as long as we did before.
People often complained in the past that the earth’s population was too much for the planet to sustain, and with our previously over-crowded cities and the fact that seven billion people live on the planet, I always assumed they were probably right. But the Guardians said that we only use a small fraction of our land mass and that our real problem is that we’re overly condensed and we try to support too many people in too few locations. So they started an expansion project, building new cities and spreading out the population.
They explained that having people live in smaller communities instead of metropolis sized cities enhances the quality of life for everyone and reduces crime and antisocial behavior. In a big city, everyone is anonymous and doesn’t fear committing a crime against the strangers they live amongst. But in a smaller town, everyone is at least familiar with everyone else and they’d know for example if one of the residents robbed the pharmacy or raped someone.
Another thing that’s really cool is that there are more artists now than ever before. If you have real talent, or even potential talent, then that becomes your job with full training and education – at no cost. But even though you might call that “subsidized art” it’s not like people are putting a crucifix in a jar of urine and calling it art. I’m talking about real amazing paintings and music and sculptures and new forms of art we never had before. I can spend an entire day in an Art Centre and not even notice the time passing.
When you go outside now everything looks fantastic. It’s like our cities are brand new with fresh paint everywhere and no broken down or abandoned buildings. There’s no graffiti on buildings or signs. Trash doesn’t blow down the streets or accumulate in the gutters like it used to. Everywhere you go there are trees and flowers and streams and ponds and birds and animals. And fruit grows everywhere. If you get hungry while you’re walking down the street, you can always grab fresh fruit right off a nearby tree.
The fact that we had people around the world dying of starvation is one of the things that made them very angry with us. They said food grows naturally, but instead of planting seeds everywhere that food could grow, we constantly reduced and consolidated the number of food producers while always increasing the number of consumers. And because of our greed and self-centered way of living, in our country we literally threw away tons of good food every day that no one purchased, while others would forage in garbage bins outside of restaurants to stay alive.
Crime is practically non-existent. The way they eliminated crime from our cities is a perfect example of how they didn’t change us directly, but they caused us to become different by altering other things that affected us. They told us that personal crime and national crim
e were among the primary reasons why they came here. They were disgusted by how we treated each other. They called us “functionally insane.” They said we not only failed to come up with solutions that should’ve been obvious to a child of average intelligence, but even worse, we failed to adopt solutions that our few wise ancestors gave to us long ago.
As far as violent crimes against people go, you could say they have a zero-tolerance policy. And it’s not like the stupid version we had before they came. They don’t arrest children for bringing plastic soldiers to school because the soldier has a tiny, plastic gun, for example. In our pretense at “doing something” about crime, we’d arrest harmless children with harmless toys as if they were dangerous criminals, which did nothing but demonstrate what awful role models we were and did nothing to solve real problems.
At the same time we turned homicidal maniacs loose upon society after they “served their time,” knowing they’d kill and maim again.
They say we are like blind, greedy children, only worse, because children don’t typically act with such calculated stupidity. They said solving crime and making people safe from criminals was an easy task that we never even tried to accomplish. Then they proved it. The first thing they did about crime was abolish all of our laws. Sounds crazy, I know. But they said that everyone already knows right from wrong and so our laws were nothing more than a complicated bureaucracy to determine how much punishment a criminal should get while maintaining an illusion of justice.
The new system would be easily remembered by everyone. The punishment for violent crimes against other people was death. And they meant sudden death. Not years of languishing in a prison at taxpayer expense while teams of lawyers worked on over-turning the sentence of a guilty person on either a technicality, or by confusing a jury.
Undermind: Nine Stories Page 12
