by Neil Clarke
“Down to half strength now,” Kramer grumbles.
“Pull back.” Loot still hasn’t let go. “We’ll dust the retail block.”
Bluto asks: “We’re moving on to the single-family dwellings?”
“Perhaps.” He shakes me. “Are there signs, Cantil? What do they say?”
“People don’t put signs on their houses. Numbers, names, sometimes, but—” I glance ahead. The other squads’ demolition ships are fifteen to twenty blocks ahead of us.
“What about that?” He unfurls an anger-white tentacle, pointing. Definitely worked up now, not so keen to believe the copy shop thing’s not my fault.
I swallow. “It’s an old ‘For Sale’ sign—the owners tried to sell the house.”
“And that?”
“Beware of dog,” I translate. “Look, pick any house. Any street. I’ll go in first.”
“And lead us into a trap?”
“You’ve seen my file, Loot.” I press my face mask against his armor, glaring into his cap. Sweat flows off me, soaking the sticky tentacles holding me up. “You know I hate everything Fiendish.”
Gollum scoffs. “Easy to say.”
“You want me to take point? I’ll take point. Fuck, you can take my vest off. Pick the house, Loot, send me in.”
No response. I let fury take over, popping catches on my protective vest. “I’ll go naked, how’s that?”
“Wait.” Finally releasing me, Loot knots a couple tentacles in a ritual gesture of apology and presses them against my shoulder.
“Cantil in front works for me,” Gollum snarls.
Ignoring him, Loot says: “Let’s move on.”
Five houses into the next block, we find a family chained to the pipes in their basement.
There are four of them: mama, papa, grandma, and a daughter who’s maybe twelve. They’re white, old Euro from the looks of them. This probably isn’t the first time they’ve been displaced.
The old woman shrieks in a foreign tongue.
“What is she saying?”
“Not sure—I think they might be Greek.”
“You don’t speak Greek?” Bluto asks accusingly. As if, you know, I’m a moron.
“American, Spanish, Mandarin, French, and Kabuva.”
This gets me the usual response. “But Greek’s just another Euro dialect, isn’t it?”
Sighing, I try the girl. “Come on, honey, you must’ve been born here. Speak American? ¿Habla Español?”
She does a burrow into Mama’s leg.
“We’ll cut them free,” decides Loot. “Apply taser patches.” Gollum gleefully presses the patches against the back of each human’s neck.
“One wrong move, we zap you into a coma,” he warns. I make gestures, trying to get the idea across via charades. Granny waves her evil-eye pendant oh so theatrically. The squid, forced to crowd together in the low-ceilinged basement, are nevertheless relaxing their guard. It’s cooler out here than in the sun.
Only Loot remains sharp.
Toady shoves Papa away from the end of the pipe, brandishing a mini-saw. Meanwhile, Bluto unrolls the first body restraint, his tentacles roiling fluidly as he flaps the net out like a rug.
The mini-saw bites into the pipe, sending up a stream of sparks. The whole family starts wailing and shrieking; you’d think they were being murdered.
Loot turns to me in exasperation.
“Sorry,” I say. “It’s all Greek to me.”
Just then Toady’s saw breaks through the pipes. Gas belches out. Loot reacts quickly, jerking Bluto and Gollum away from the billow of white fog.
The gas is high-end stuff, no improvised booby trap this time. Toady and Kramer collapse like punctured balloons. Granny and the girl fall atop them as Loot hits the tasers.
Mama and Papa Fiend must have ditched the taser patches somehow. They’re loose, armed and firing.
Quarters are close. Bodies, human and offworlder, are surging everywhere. I’m drawing a bead on Papa when four Fiends in sensor-clouding capes drop out of the T-bar ceiling. Gollum clamps his shell shut, a hair too late. The caped human drives a firespike into the carapace before it locks. A whoosh of heat—the smell of grilled seafood fills the air.
Nerve gas and flame spikes, I think. This little operation is well funded.
I’m aiming at a caped Fiend when I feel a flamespike against the nape of my neck.
“Guns down.” It’s Mama Fiend, speaking American.
“She’s telling us to surrender,” I say.
Loot and Bluto grope at each other, tentacles twining in the squid equivalent of nonverbal communication.
“Now,” Mama says. “Or I burn your head off.”
“Come on, they’re going to waste me.” I stare across the room at Loot. He’s a good-enough guy, in his way, but we’re not the same species. He’ll clamp his armor and take his chances. It’s what they do, every time.
But no. Flesh darkening with frustration and fear, they surrender.
“What now?” I ask, feeling oddly giddy. She thumps me upside the head, just a warning, no real damage. Loot, bless his weird offworlder heart, fluffs his cap protectively.
“It’ll be all right,” he tells me. “Tell her she has three minutes before our backup takes the roof off this dwelling.”
Before I can translate, we hear the whump of surface-to-air packets. A high-pitched shriek and a thunderclap follow; a few seconds later, the ground shakes. Upstairs, windows shatter.
“That’d be your air support biting dirt,” explains Mama Fiend unnecessarily.
Loot’s strange, moist skin mottles in an unreadable roil of emotions. “Tell her we’ll send missiles.”
“He says they’ll bomb you from orbit.”
“They aren’t going to dust their own people,” Mama Fiend says. Her pals are gleefully using the squad’s own restraints to bind the surviving squid onto wheeled palettes. One of them is setting up a webcam, pointing it at Loot’s face as they wrench off his mussel shell and the hydrator that keeps his skin moist.
“It seems Intel was right for a change,” he says calmly.
“Sir?”
“A new-hatched fry could see this neighborhood really is Fiendish. What do you suppose their plan is?”
I shrug. “We’re alive, so Command can’t bomb.”
“We’re bait,” he agrees. “They’ll draw the other squads back to rescue us.”
“Into a trap.” I nod. This street lies at the bottom of a gently rising wave of cookie-cutter houses. If Fiends are dug in all along the hill, the slaughter will be unthinkable. “It’ll be kill at will.”
Flashes of blue-white fury bloom across his translucent, helpless body, but what can he do? It’s all been very neatly planned.
“It won’t work,” he says finally. “We’ll lose a few squads here, but you’ll all die.”
You. A bit of a chill.
“Tell them,” he says, and I realize he just wants me to pass the word along.
“What’s he saying?” asks Mama Fiend.
I let out a long breath. “Basically? They rock, we suck, we’re all gonna die.”
Mama laughs. “Let him know we don’t need a traitor on-hand to translate his bullshit.”
Loot fluffs again—probably caught the word “traitor.” “Tell them you’re a prisoner, Cantil. Say we forced you to help us.”
Poor guy. Impulsively, I knot my bony fingers into a sign of friendship, then press both hands into the flesh of his webbed-up tentacle, giving him a last taste of my damp palms and dirty fingers. “Thanks for everything, Loot.”
“Come on.” Mama Fiend drags me toward the door, leaving her minions to watch the hostages.
He bellows in fractured American as we disappear down the hall. “Don’t hurt! Not hurt! Cantil!”
But
Cantil is flaking away, all but gone. He was never more than a false skin, and it is good to finally shed him.
Mama Fiend, whose name is Debra Notting, hits a remote on an antique iPod. The basement fills with the sound of me shrieking in agony. We pass through an old bedroom, where a redheaded girl is pouring two pints of blood—mine, donated a couple months back—onto a stained mattress.
Deb points at my shoes. I slip them off, along with my sweat-stained socks, and kick them into a corner. There won’t be a body, but there’s a lot of my DNA in here now. Given the way Dust can obliterate a person from existence, you can never know for sure if someone’s alive or dead.
“Spit your gum onto the floor?” the girl suggests.
“Can’t—it’s laced with drugs,” I reply, undertone.
Beyond the bedroom is a squalid john whose tub is full of broken tile. A crude tunnel has been hacked into its wall; we head down and then east for two hundred feet, coming up in another basement. The battle wranglers are here, crouched in a sensor-proof tent, peering into portable datascreens and murmuring orders into headsets. The others are tracking the incoming squid squads that are heading back to rescue Loot and his fry.
“Demolition ships are clearing off,” reports one old man.
“Told you, Deb,” I say. “They’re too pricey to risk when we’ve got surface-to-air.”
“What happened with the ship we hit?” she asks.
“Four survivors, pinned down in the Hamiltons’ backyard,” a wrangler answers.
“The squid receiving video of their captured platoon?”
“Affirmative.” He tilts a screen and we see Loot and the others, bound tightly onto the pallets, taser-patched and already drying out. I make myself smile. It’s always important at this point to look solid, loyal.
The mental shift of gears is harder this time.
“One squad’s almost back to Sycamore Drive,” a wrangler reports. “Permission to fire?”
“No,” Deb says. “Wait until they’re closer. We’re wasting five hundred troops here. To make it worth the blood, we need to draw in and kill as many as we can. I want lots of bait, well-placed bait.”
“They’ll deploy,” I say. It took me months of careful maneuvering to get onto Loot’s squad. Months of minty chewing gum that made me sweat like a pig and smell ever so faintly sweet. Months of shooting Fiends and telling dumb Dem jokes and worrying that Kabuva Intel would figure out I’d been behind the bloodbath last year in Atlanta. “The lieutenant’s mother will throw half the West Coast Command in here if she thinks it’ll get Loot back.”
“You sez,” Debra replies, but she’s smiling.
“Been right so far, haven’t I?”
“No,” she says.
“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.
