by Greg Keyes
It was nearly over. In the early stages of the war, the aliens had expanded away from the ship, foraging for food—and breeding, planting cocoons in stands of trees and lowland marshes, spreading their own insidious vegetation. The cocoons contained fetal aliens which absorbed the vegetation around them for nourishment.
Not long after Dikembe returned, the tide had begun flowing the other way. The cocoons were hacked to pieces, the alien flora burned, the perimeter of their occupation pushed steadily back. Now the creatures had been driven back almost to the ship.
For Dikembe and Bakari, their present mission was to reconnoiter the west, to make certain they wouldn’t have any nasty surprises when they made their final push, which was planned to begin a few days from now.
But something was wrong.
Dikembe stepped to the edge of the slope they had just come up, and looked down.
At first he thought it was nothing, just the wind rustling the grass.
But it was no wind.
There were hundreds of them, maybe every single remaining alien, and they were coming from every direction. The mass of them had kept their distance, so he had only sensed the nearer ones. The bait.
They swarmed up the hill in a constricting ring. It looked as if someone had kicked open a termite mound in reverse. The aliens ran up the slope, and they died by the dozens. Dikembe fired his rifle until it felt like it was going to melt in his hands, until at last a mass of aliens breached their lines, screeching and scrambling over soldiers, the viridian flash of energy weapons everywhere. He dropped his rifle and drew his machetes. Hitting an alien in the middle of the head, he split it open, revealing a smaller, more delicate head inside. He slashed his weapon into it.
Bakari was behind him, cutting like a dervish.
The thing to do was to get behind them, cut their tentacles off at the source and then split the unseen seam of their exoskeletons. Dikembe had become quite good at it, but now the press was too great to maneuver.
He and Bakari managed to rally the remaining men into a fighting square, a formation at least as old as ancient Greece. Those on the front of each line knelt and cut at the aliens’ legs, while the second rank slashed at the horrid, mouthless faces. Still there were too many of them. They plucked men from the square and hurled them back to their comrades behind them. They snapped arms and broke necks. Bodies piled so thickly that footing became first difficult, then impossible.
Eventually, the square fell apart, and it was Dikembe and Bakari alone, back to back.
Suddenly, the aliens drew back, leaving the two brothers panting, standing amid the foul-smelling corpses. To his horror Dikembe looked around and saw that everyone else was dead.
Then he realized that wasn’t true. Two other men still lived. Both were wrapped tightly in alien tentacles. One of them was Pierre, a man from Gara village. The other was Zuberi. Pierre opened his mouth. What came out was a human voice—Pierre’s voice—but with a distinctly alien intonation.
“You are alike,” Pierre said.
Two dozen energy weapons were trained on them.
“We are twins,” Dikembe answered.
“Don’t,” Bakari cautioned. “Tell them nothing.”
“Two minds, much alike,” the possessed Pierre continued. “Sons of the leader.”
“Why aren’t we dead?” Dikembe whispered to his brother.
“I don’t know,” Bakari said, “but I don’t like it.”
“The leader must die,” Pierre said.
Bakari frowned. “I don’t like this at all,” he said. “Are you ready, brother?”
“I suppose,” Dikembe sighed.
“I love you, Dikembe,” Bakari said. “I’m proud to die with you.”
“What do you mean?” Dikembe said, lifting his chin and waving contemptuously at the enemy. “Look at them. They don’t stand a chance.”
“Of course not,” Bakari agreed. “I’ll see you after, then. You bring the Scotch.”
Then they charged the aliens.
They didn’t get far. Dikembe’s mind filled with a thousand voices screaming for him to stop in his tracks. His mind fought, but his limbs succumbed. Then, mercifully, everything seemed to dissolve.
* * *
He woke surrounded by aliens, but he had been moved into the shade, on flat ground. In the distance, he saw rain moving across the savanna, slanted streaks of gray against a yellow sky. Nearer, a herd of wildebeest grazed as if nothing unusual was happening.
Then he understood what was casting the shadow.
The ship, rising above them, unimaginably huge. If he didn’t know what the alien craft looked like from television—if he hadn’t seen this one from afar—he knew he would never even be able to guess at its shape, any more than a flea in the folds of an elephant’s skin could comprehend the appearance of the entire animal. They were near one edge of it, and from there it seemed like a vast gray sky that faded in the distance behind them.
Bakari sat to his left, Zuberi across from him.
“What’s going on,” Dikembe groaned. “What are they doing with us?”
“Waiting for us to wake up, I think,” Zuberi said.
The words had hardly fallen from his mouth when Dikembe felt a tentacle wrap around his neck. He grasped it with both hands, but it might as well have been made of steel for all that it gave to his strength.
His entire body suddenly felt pins and needles.
Then the pins and needles pushed all the way to his bones, and he was distantly aware of his own voice, a thing apart from his body, a scream that was like a living thing. The pain was like nothing he had ever felt before; it was total, without relief. His blood vessels were rivers of fire, his marrow was magma. He felt his skin splitting like an overcooked sausage and his flesh liquefying. A thousand voices mocked him, insisting he was nothing, lower than the lowest worm. He hoped only for death, for the release it would bring.
When oblivion finally arrived, he was grateful.
* * *
He woke, still in the shadow of the ship. His body was whole, untouched, but he still remembered its destruction.
Bakari was awake also, starring at him, glassy-eyed.
“Why?” Dikembe managed to wrench out. His throat was raw, and when he spat, his phlegm was bloody.
“They tortured all of us,” Bakari said. “And then they released Zuberi.”
“They’re trying to make Papa come here,” Dikembe suddenly understood. “They think if they kill him, this will end, and they will be unopposed.”
“I believe you’re right,” Bakari said.
“He’ll know it’s a trap,” Dikembe said. “He won’t be stupid enough to come himself. The smart thing would be to use our remaining surface-to-surface missiles to take all of this out.”
“That would kill us, too,” his brother said.
“We’re dead already,” Dikembe replied.
Bakari started a reply, but instead his eyes went wide.
“No!” he said. “Not again!”
Then the tentacles wrapped around their necks once more, and the pain became everything.
* * *
David managed to keep it in until they got home and he had mixed himself a gin and tonic. When Connie came in to sit with him, he had to let it out.
“You knew!” he said. “You knew they were going to ambush me with this.”
“I hardly think asking you to be the director of the organization you want them to build for you constitutes an ‘ambush,’” she said, sipping her Scotch calmly.
“It’s not about me,” he said. “That’s the point.”
“Oh, David, come on. You’re like a kid in the biggest toy box in the world. You’re loving it.”
“Sure,” he said. “But director? That’s politics. That’s bureaucracy. That’s red tape. That’s not the toy box.” He frowned. “Is this the thing again? You always wanted me to be a part of something bigger, more important. I have to be director of an international agency now?”
“David,” she said, “I’m not pushing you into anything. You saved the world. I don’t think you have anything to prove to me or anyone else. But I do think you would make a hell of a director.”
He absorbed that, feeling a bit sheepish.
“You did know they were going to spring this on me, though.”
“I suspected,” she said. “I didn’t know.”
“You should have told me,” he said.
It wasn’t often he couldn’t read Connie at all, but this was one of those times, and he was suddenly very, very worried.
“Well,” she said quietly. “You won’t have to worry about that anymore.”
He sat up straighter. “What? About what?”
“I quit my job,” she said.
“I may be having a stroke,” he said. “It sounded like you just said you quit your job.”
She smiled and shifted forward in her chair. “David, whatever issues you ever had about me working for Tom—you should have gotten over that by now.”
“Over, yes, completely,” he said.
She gave him the look.
“Okay,” he said. “Some reservations. About the secret stuff.”
She smiled and nodded. “I’ve been ready to move on for a while,” she said, “but after the Fourth he needed me more than ever. Everyone was gone. But now…”
“Now what?” he asked. Then he saw it.
“Wait,” he said.
“What?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “It’s the look. You’ve got the look.”
“What are you talking about?” she said. “There’s no look.”
“There is most certainly a look, and you’ve got it right now.”
“Damn it,” she said. “How do you do that?”
“Native intelligence,” he said. “Long years of practice. Spill. Before you explode.”
“Okay,” she said. “Don’t make too much of this, but I was talking to Alice Tillman this morning—she asked me to coffee—and she said that they had been discussing me.”
“Discussing? Discussing sounds good. Discussing how?”
She was actually flushed. He hadn’t seen her like this in years.
“They think I should run for the Senate,” she said. “Crazy, huh?”
It hung there for a moment as David processed it.
“David?” Connie said. “Say something.”
“No,” David said, snapping out of his daze. “Not crazy. Not even mildly deranged. It’s terrific. You’d do a hell of a job.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Just think—I could be Mr. Senator Levinson. This calls for a drink. In fact, this calls for champagne. Which, ah—we don’t have, but I can go get some. Or better, let’s go out.”
She grinned, and her eyes flashed.
“I wasn’t sure you’d be this happy,” she said.
“Seriously?” he said. “Why wouldn’t I be? I’ve finally found my calling, so to speak. You found yours years ago. Like you said, it’s time to move on. If you want my opinion, I say go for it.”
“You know what?” she said. “I think I will. Thanks, David.”
“You never needed my permission,” he said.
“I never asked for it,” she replied. “I just wanted your blessing.”
“So blessed,” David said. “Now, where should we go for that champagne?”
“I’ve got some in the fridge,” she said.
“Of course you do,” he said.
* * *
How long it went on, Dikembe did not know. His brain began to refuse signals. Thoughts would not cohere. His existence became binary—pain, rest, pain, rest. The rest only because they did not want to kill him.
Yet.
And then, something changed.
He felt pain that was not his own.
In a red haze, he realized that he heard gunfire, and the aliens were screaming.
He also realized that he wasn’t in the grip of a tentacle anymore.
He came swaying to his feet, although his body was numb and he had trouble controlling his limbs. Across the squirming sea of exoskeletons he saw his father, standing upright on top of a tank, flanked by soldiers, many soldiers.
He must have brought them all, Dikembe realized, every single man and boy in arms, and those men—his people, his soldiers—were dying in ranks, stepping over their own dead, moving implacably toward the knot of aliens clustered around him and his brother.
He felt a tentacle at his neck, and despaired. He knew what they were going to do. They had what they wanted, his father in front of them. He felt their minds all bending in the same direction, toward the leader.
He heard a savage cry, and realized it came from Bakari, who bodily threw himself at the alien attacking Dikembe. Bakari slammed his head into the alien mask—once, twice, again. It staggered back, and Bakari went after it, his eyes empty of sanity, fists swinging like sledgehammers.
Bullets began to spray all around them. Dikembe desperately tried to pull his twin down, but Bakari was pushing the monster back, slamming it to the rough earth of the savanna. An alien reaching for Dikembe staggered as bullets smacked into its exoskeleton.
“Bakari!” he shouted. He finally got hold of his brother and pulled him to the ground. A mortar shell went off, not too far away.
Dikembe rolled over and saw an alien weapon pointed at his face. He lurched up, finding more strength than he thought remained in him, and took hold of it, pushing it so the blast went over his head. He hurled the monster back and staggered away as AK-47 rounds chewed it up.
Then all of the aliens near them—all of the aliens, period—rushed toward the army, toward his father. Dikembe sagged back against the spaceship and slid down to the ground.
“Brother,” Bakari wheezed. He was lying on his back, a hand on his chest. Blood was leaking through his fingers.
“Bakari!”
“Hold my hand,” Bakari said.
Dikembe did so, although his own was trembling. He glanced at the front, where the aliens were piling into Umbutu’s forces.
“Let me try and find a medic,” he said.
Bakari only gripped his hand more tightly.
“Papa is wrong,” he said. “There is use in beauty, in creation. Leave this place, big brother. Go far away. Do what you were meant to do.”
“Maybe we should go together,” Dikembe said. “I know a good pub in Oxford…” He trailed off, feeling helpless and numb.
Bakari nodded, but he didn’t say anything else. Blood frothed on his lips and Dikembe sat with him, his heart breaking, afraid to leave him.
Long before the fighting was over, Bakari’s fingers relaxed and began to grow cool. The rain came, gently.
6
AUGUST
Steve Hiller was just giving the sauce another stir when Boomer lazily pricked his ears up and offered a muted woof.
“Ah, yeah,” he said to the yellow Labrador. “Is it that time?” He glanced at the clock, then went to the front door and opened it just as Jasmine and Dylan were getting out of the car. Dylan made a beeline for him. Hiller scooped him up and spun him around. He felt a twinge in his ankle, a souvenir of his time in Russia and the last active fighter mission he’d flown.
“Ah, shoot,” he said, setting him down. “What’s your mama been packing in your lunch, bricks? I can hardly pick you up anymore.”
Back on the ground, Dylan looked around with a slightly worried expression—probably hoping none of the kids in the neighborhood had seen him hugging Hiller. He was getting to be that age, wasn’t he?
“Go on in and put up your backpack and lunch box,” he told Dylan. “Do you have any homework?”
“Yes sir,” he said.
“Take an hour of downtime, okay? And then we’re on that sh—stuff. You and me. Okay?”
“Okay,” Dylan said, and he scurried off.
“I hope it’s not sentence diagramming,” he told Jasmine as she put her arms ar
ound him. “It really ain’t my strong suit.”
She kissed him, and he gave his full attention to that for a bit—and he didn’t care who was looking.
“You’re home early,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you until Tuesday.”
“I could tell,” he said. “That dude I found here when I showed up was surprised, too. I had to put a whoopin’ on him.”
“Well, good,” she said. “I’m glad to know you’ll still fight for me.”
“Every time,” he said.
She crinkled her nose.
“What’s that I smell?” she asked.
“Mama Hiller’s house special spaghetti,” he said. “Figured you’ve had a long day and might appreciate the evening off.”
“You’ve got that right,” she said. “My thoughtful man.”
“And how about you, young lady?” he asked. “Do you have homework?”
“Actually, I do,” she said. “Anatomy and physiology.”
“Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about,” Hiller said. “I’ve got an advanced degree in that. I can think of several topics to assign you right off the top of my head.”
“Really?” she said. “You think you can just bust in here, givin’ out assignments—you best go stir that spaghetti sauce, or it’s gonna burn.”
“I’m gonna stir somthin’,” he said, but then he smelled the char in the air. “Shoot,” he said, and he hurried back to the stove.
“It’s all good,” he said, stirring. “That’s how mama did it. Brings the flavor.”
He turned off the burner.
* * *
After homework, they had supper. The sauce was a little burnt, but no one complained. Dylan claimed to like it better that way. When they finished eating, he and the boy did the dishes, while Jasmine did her reading.
“I can’t get over it,” Steve said, rinsing a plate and handing it to Dylan to dry. “You’re shooting up like a weed. Can you dunk yet?”
“Not really,” Dylan said.
“Well it won’t be long,” Hiller told him. “Then watch out. So how do you like third grade?”
“It’s okay,” he said.
“Okay? How bad can it be? You know, back in my day, if you couldn’t answer a question you got blasted by a fire hose.”
