by Neil Clarke
At last Ben concluded the meeting by saying, “Now, folks, we’ve got to be off the streets before curfew. Be careful going home.”
Reggie left with George through the back door. Jim Hanover followed them. They skulked along the shadows between Paula’s raspberry patch and the Fortescues’ pole beans. Far away, a coyote yipped into the chill of evening.
“Good try,” George said to Reggie in a low voice.
Wondering why George had suddenly dropped his opposition to the ridiculous plan, Reggie glanced back at him. That was why, framed in Paula’s candlelit kitchen window, he saw Ben and Otis talking. Otis appeared to be very excited. So Ben had a second, secret plan, one catering to Otis’ enthusiasms.
“It wasn’t good enough,” said Reggie.
George went his own way, but Jim followed Reggie silently home, saying goodbye only at Reggie’s front door. Jim’s own darkened house stood across the street. Jim would now, Reggie thought, keep watch through his windows. Another of Ben’s deputies was no doubt already guarding Reggie’s back door.
4.
Annoyed, but not wanting to argue in the hearing of the security guard, Anna King buzzed George Brainerd into the morgue corridor. George was discreet and sympathetic to her work. But she preferred no witnesses, and no interruptions.
She waited to finish the last careful slice exposing the corpus minutalis—so she had named the organ, in honor of its resemblance to hamburger—before she buzzed George through the door of the autopsy room as well.
“Pee-yoo!” said George, and then, shambling closer to peer over her shoulder, “Holy shit, doc, that’s fresh kill.”
The sight of him kindled anticipatory warmth on Anna’s skin. Pavlovian conditioning. She firmly ignored it and turned away to pick up her digital camera. “Yes,” she said, snapping photographs of the minutalis, “and I want to keep working on it while it still is fresh. You know how fast they deteriorate. Now, what’s so important that it can’t wait until morning? Haven’t our Army friends instituted a curfew, and doesn’t it start in about five minutes?”
“I was kinda hoping I could stay here.” He grinned at her.
“You’ll be cold.”
“Not my idea of romance, either,” said George. “The drawers are a bit small for two people.”
He almost made her smile. At the same time—it must be fatigue that rendered her so vulnerable—his words caused her throat to constrict. Did he really think their trysts in empty hospital rooms, never the same one twice, deserved the term romance?
The glass partition on the far side of the table reflected its own judgement: herself, brown-haired and petite, neat in her spotless lab coat and face mask; him in unkempt flannel shirt and baggy jeans, face unshaven, hair uncombed. At least today he wasn’t sporting his usual assortment of firearms.
They had nothing in common outside of bed. She still felt awkward saying his given name. Her sleeping pill, was how she thought of him. Since the starship had crashed on Cortez Mountain, it was either George, Ambien, or a long wakeful night in the morgue.
“Doc,” he said, staring down at her prize specimen. He rocked back and forth on his heels. “This isn’t the best time to have an eetee in your morgue.”
She picked up her scalpel again. “What, is the sheriff on the warpath?”
“Ben—fuck no, it’s the Army you should worry about.”
“They’ve been here already,” she said, beginning to sever the major nerves leading from the minutalis to the brain proper.
“Here? In the morgue?”
“We gave them a tour of the hospital today. Don’t look so horrified. They didn’t unzip any body bags, and they were kind enough to give us diesel to run our generators. Is that all you came here about?”
George was still rocking on his toes. Usually he stayed relaxed, even irreverent, under the worst of circumstances. “Ben wants to know if we can have some kind of strong narcotic, like in a hypodermic or something.”
“What are you boys up to now?” she asked, but she didn’t expect an answer. She knew such little favors were the quid pro quo that enabled George to keep Ben from shutting down her research altogether. Still, she wondered if the timing of this particular request should give her cause for hesitation. Even she had noticed the discontent abroad in Lewisville.
“I can give you some Fentanyl. But I’ll have to get it from upstairs. Is tomorrow morning soon enough?”
“Sure,” said George. “I guess.”
But he showed no sign of leaving. She thought she had made it clear that she had no time for him tonight. Unfortunately, she could not rely on the eetee itself, sliced open from sagittal crest to cloacal canal, to drive him away. Such sights and smells did not disturb George.
Anna leaned over the table for better access to the left posterior pseudothalamic nerve. It required concentration to sever cleanly, running as it did through a layer of tough and slimy dura. Naturally George chose that moment to pick up one of her scalpels and prod at the section of skin and skull she had sawed out for access to the creature’s brain stem. The mucous that protected a live and healthy eetee’s skin had dried to a hard, yellowish crust. As George poked at it, a flake of the crust dropped onto the table.
“Get your hands away!” Anna said. “You aren’t even wearing gloves!”
He pressed on the flake with the scalpel, crumbling it, and frowned. “Doc, I’ve handled a lot of dead ones in the last year. I’ve been covered in splat. I’ve had ’em keel over on top of me and vomit in my face. If they were going to make me sick, wouldn’t it have happened already?”
They had discussed this topic before, but today there was a new, speculative tone in George’s voice. “You’re wondering about the Army’s quarantine regulations?” she asked. Again George did not answer. “Well, perhaps they’re justified—in principle. There are plenty of diseases with a long incubation period, and if you didn’t know what to look for, you couldn’t spot the infection.”
“As you’ve said. AIDS. And mad cow disease.”
“Creutzfeldt-Jakob,” she corrected.
“And kuru.”
Surprised he had heard of an obscure disease of New Guinea cannibals, Anna glanced up. George had been doing a little research on his own? She knew George wasn’t stupid, despite his unkempt, sometimes goofy persona. In his own way, he was one of the smartest people in Lewisville.
“But those are hard to catch,” George said. “A quarantine wouldn’t have much effect. And no one here has been eating any eetee brains.” Then he reverted to form. He poked at the minutalis, making it quiver like Jell-O, and grinned again. “Sure looks like it would cook up good on a grill, though.”
Anna had not eaten dinner. The image was unfortunate. Her mouth watered and her stomach grumbled. She sliced away the last of the dura, and at last was able to slip her gloved hand beneath the minutalis and lift it onto the scale.
One-point-five-four kilos. A middling weight. From the accounts of Ben’s deputies and her own labors here, she had become convinced that variation in the size of this particular organ correlated with social or military rank. The eetees with the very largest minutalis were always the ones carrying the fear guns and directing the others. Her first theory had been that the minutalis manufactured dominance pheromones, but then she had begun to wonder about the magnetic anomalies, and the odd rabbit-ear deposits of metallic compounds in the sagittal crest—
George tapped his scalpel on the metal table. “Doc, we haven’t talked about it in a long time—have you or Joe Hansen made any progress on how the eetees use the fear guns?”
“Oh, sure,” she said, removing the minutalis to a tray under the hood. She started to wash it down with ethanol. “Molecular microwave transmitters. Proteins with encapsulated crystalline segments, manufactured inside specialized neural tissue. That’s how the eetees communicate with each other, too.”
/> “What?” The stark astonishment in his voice made her turn. “Have you said anything about this to anyone else?”
“I’m being sarcastic, George,” she said crossly.
“But you have a theory.”
“Guesses. Flights of fancy. I’m not a neurochemist or a molecular biologist, or, for that matter, a physicist, and I don’t have the resources—”
“But you have evidence—”
“Nothing worth the name.”
George gazed down at the eetee. “Too bad we couldn’t ever bring you a live one and do the CAT scan thing. See what lights up when they do different things.”
“No, on that particular idea I’m in complete agreement with the sheriff.”
The last thing in the world Anna wanted was a live eetee to experiment on. She did not even like George in her morgue. She wanted it cold, silent, and stark, filled only with her well-tended garden of the dead. She wanted to keep dissecting her specimen, taking it apart organ by organ, slice by tiny slice, protein by protein. Over the dead she had total control.
But she also wanted George to stay. She wanted to touch his warm flesh and feel his hands on her own skin. It was the only thing these days that made her feel like a human being.
“What’s really on your mind, George?” she asked.
“Doc,” he said, “I know you aren’t going to like this. You need to clean out your lab. Tonight. Get rid of your friend here. Destroy all your samples and slides. Remove all your files. Hide them—incinerate them.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Anna said.
“It’s not Ben you’re dealing with anymore. The Army is confiscating everything that came out of that ship—”
“So I’ve heard. They want the goodies for themselves.”
“They are also quarantining anyone who’s worked with eetee goodies, and anyone who’s had contact with eetees dead or alive.”
“Not to mention anyone who protests the policy,” Anna said. “It’s not a real quarantine, George. If the Army was serious about an outbreak, the first people they would isolate would be those with the greatest exposure. And that’s you deputies.”
“I disagree that they’re not serious,” George said. “They are extremely serious. And very soon someone will tell them about Dr. Anna King and how she trades pharmaceuticals for eetee corpses in good condition. How you have a whole fucking eetee research project down here.”
“I keep a very clean lab,” Anna said. “They can check it if they want. I can’t believe the Army could be less sensible than the sheriff on the subject of basic research.”
“Oh, yes, they could be,” said George. “You know, don’t you, that Joe and all of his files have disappeared?”
Anna had heard, but she’d dismissed it as a wild rumor. The thought of ignorant soldiers ransacking her lab, her refuge, her life—destroying a year of work—terrified and enraged her. She tried to push the thought away. “I’m happy to share everything I’ve learned, though I’m sure people elsewhere with better equipment have found out a whole lot more than I have.”
“Suppose,” George said, “sharing is not the goal. Suppose they want to know everything you’ve learned, and then make sure no one else ever sees that information.”
“But what could they possibly want to conceal? It’s not as if the eetees are a secret!”
“Look,” said George, “the Army comes here, to an enemy crash site, but instead of going after the eetees, they devote all their manpower and attention to this—whatever it is. It’s important, a real disease, a—a real something. Maybe they don’t know exactly. Maybe they know the symptoms but not the cause—maybe they don’t know whether it’s a disease or an effect of eetee technology. But whatever this quarantine is about, for them it is taking precedence over everything else. They are serious about it.”
Anna tried once more to dismiss George’s arguments. She found she could not. She gazed wistfully at the minutalis and her waiting culture plates. “Well, then,” she said, at last, “I suppose I should take a look at Harvey Gundersen’s dog.”
“His dog?!”
“Harvey claims the dog has an eetee disease.” Anna grimaced. “That the coyotes have it, too, and they have developed not just dementia but telepathic powers. Yes, I know what it sounds like—but today he brought in the dog, and it does have some odd lumps. I said I’d do biopsies and what blood work I have the facilities for.”
“You have it here? Jesus, Anna, get rid of the dog, get rid of the eetee. Now! I’ll help you. They will come here. Your only hope is to make sure they aren’t ever able to pin this on you. Trading drugs is only a nasty rumor. You have never dissected an eetee.”
“No, George. If the dog really has an eetee disease, it needs studying and I need to tell the colonel whatever I can find out. If people are in danger from it, I’d be criminally irresponsible not to!”
“You are not listening to me,” George said. “They will take your notes and your little jars and they will take you away, too, and if I’m right they’ll take you so far away I will never see you again.”
“That’s melodramatic.”
“Anna,” he said, taking hold of her shoulders. “Please.” It was a violation of their unspoken protocol. He never touched her when she was working. The warmth of his hands percolated all the way through her lab coat and sweater. She held her own messy hands away from him.
The thing about George, the thing that had made the whatever-it-was between them possible, was that he never seemed scared. Now he was showing his fear. She didn’t like it. She certainly didn’t want George to know what she felt: how terrified she had been since the eetees had come. How, maybe, she loved him. That would be making the emotions real. That would be letting a live monster into the morgue.
She said, coolly, “Suppose Harvey Gundersen is even halfway right? You’d be asking me to trade the health of perhaps everyone on Earth for my personal safety.”
“Yes,” George said. “Let someone else figure it out.”
She shook her head and glanced one last time at her beautiful, doomed specimen. “Help me with the dog. Then I’ll clean everything out of my lab, as you want.”
5.
The four humvees wound upward through the hills. Up on the mountain, about eight miles away now, the wreck sprawled like a giant trash-can lid someone had hammered onto the ridgetop. Corporal Denise Wyrzbowski watched it as best she could while wrestling her humvee along the unpaved road. No sign of activity at this distance. She distrusted the quiet, though; eetees were always busy with something.
The rolling terrain blocked the line of sight beyond the nearer slopes, but at least here it was grassland, dry and scant. Up ahead, pine trees accumulated with altitude until deep forest blanketed the highest ridges. Too much cover for the enemy.
She didn’t feel comfortable here. She wasn’t a country girl. She had fought house to house in the San Bernadino Valley with seized eetee firearms and makeshift body armor, but that was familiar freeway-and-subdivision country. You recognized what belonged and what didn’t. Up there in the forest, she wouldn’t know whether a sudden flight of birds was a nature show or an eetee ambush.
Not that she hadn’t seen new sights in the Valley: eetees roaring along Figueroa Avenue in a Lincoln Navigator; eetee muckamucks cavorting in a swimming pool full of yellow slime; eetee grunts dead and bloated in an alleyway, lunch for a pack of feral dogs.
Movement in the sky. She tensed, then recognized it as a vulture rising on an updraft. Roadkill nearby? “What’s that?” she asked the guide, a prim Nordic-looking local named Otis Redinger.
He turned to cast a disinterested glance in the direction she pointed. “Probably a dead gook,” he said. “Or maybe a jackrabbit.”
“A dead eetee?” Adrenaline stirred in her blood. “What could kill them out here? In the middle of nowhere?”
Redi
nger shrugged. “They lose their body suits, get a puncture, they’re pretty vulnerable.”
“Vulnerable, my gold-plated ass!” Wyrzbowski remembered how two of the mucousy little freaks had ripped apart Lieutenant Atherton with their bare talons while hopping up and down with glee. Silently: that was the really freaky part. Everyone knew they had some kind of mind talk.
Redinger said, “A ruptured body suit, and they’re only good for a few days in the heat. Sheriff thinks they’re short of water and fighting over it. We had a dry winter, no rain at all since May—and there’s only a few small lakes up there. In town, we get our water from 300 feet underground.”
“How often do you get expeditions coming after your water?”
He shrugged again and pointed. “Turn left up here.”
A narrower gravel road led away through the hills. Wyrzbowski swung the humvee onto it, the others followed, and they began to bounce along in earnest, raising a column of dust visible to any eetee on the mountain. She glanced back. At this distance, the town had almost disappeared. A line of trees followed the course of a single winding stream. Yesterday, she had glanced over a bridge and seen that streambed almost dry. Lucky Lewisville: a year of drought, a moat of waterless grassland ten miles deep.
She thought about the water jugs they carried with them, about a shipload of eetees dying of thirst, and despite the blazing heat she took a hand from the wheel to pull on the helmet of her body armor.
A fence had been running along the right-hand side of the road. Up ahead, it bent right again and marched away across the hills, dividing fallow farmland from patchy brush. The bushes looked green. Further on, she could see the silvery foliage of cottonwoods and willows. She wasn’t a Campfire Girl, but she could guess what trees meant out here.
Water.
She braked, and the line of hummers behind them did the same. In the back seat, Lieutenant Briggs glanced around nervously.
“What’s the deal, Redinger?” she snapped at the guide. “Your sheriff claimed there was a big cache of eetee machinery abandoned here. Unguarded. But there’s water here, right? And you still say there’s no eetees camped out?”
