Defenders

by Will McIntosh

Kai jolted. Her pocket. Suddenly he understood what the voice was saying. She smoked. The dead woman smoked. He’d smelled stale smoke in there, hadn’t he? The voice was telling him there was a lighter in her pocket.

  Yes.

  He didn’t want to go back in that room. She was dead; her eyes were bulging—

  Or you die. Go.

  Kai shoved the door open, peered into the bay, half expecting to see something crouching there, waiting for him, but there was nothing but concrete, shadows, the howling wind.

  Bent against the wind, Kai marched into the next bay, his heart in his throat. He climbed the steps, put his hand on the knob, twisted it partway.

  Maybe the voice lived in the bathroom. Maybe if he didn’t go back it couldn’t get him, couldn’t talk to him—

  Wrong. Go on.

  Kai gripped the handle tighter. It was ice cold. He twisted it, pushed the door open a foot.

  There she was. He pushed the door open farther, took a step into the room. She was old, maybe sixty, Hispanic or maybe Indian. The tip of her tongue was jutting from between her blue lips.

  He didn’t want to do this; he’d rather freeze to death than stick his fingers in her pocket and feel her body. Would it be squishy or stiff?

  The voice was silent, but he knew that if he waited it would speak to him again, would tell him to get the lighter. It might even yell at him. That would be awful. He had to do it. Quickly—as quick as he could. Kai’s breath was coming in quick, rattling gasps. He took a deep breath and held it, stood paralyzed for a moment.

  Do it.

  The voice was like a shove at his back. Kai scurried to the body, squatted.

  Other one, the voice said before Kai even had time to lift his left hand. He reached with his right, slipped two fingers into her pocket.

  Her hip felt stiff through the denim of her jeans. It didn’t feel as bad as he’d feared, but it was still bad. He felt the pointed tip of the lighter, but couldn’t reach it.

  Pull her flat.

  That would mean touching her, really touching her. Kai so desperately didn’t want to do that.

  Whimpering, he scooted back, grasped her feet by her tattered shoes, squeezed his eyes closed. As soon as he pulled, the shoes slipped off. His belly roiling with disgust, he half flung, half dropped them, then grasped her spongy, swollen ankles and pulled.

  The body slid forward inch by inch, then suddenly her head lolled to the left and she dropped, hard, to the floor. Not thinking, just wanting to get it over with, Kai shoved his hand into her pocket, closed his fingers around the long, thin lighter.

  A moment later he was in the bay, running.

  Trash for fire.

  The voice was right—this bay had much more trash than the others. Kai ran around picking up as much as he could carry before returning to the second bay.

  Moments later, he had a small fire burning. The heat felt marvelous on his fingers, his cheeks, his nose. The orange light pushed back the shadows and the darkness, made a place that was his in a way he couldn’t put into words.

  Better. Yes. Collect more trash.

  Kai did as he was told, checking the last bay and returning with another armful of trash, which he set in a pile near the fire.

  Now sleep. I’ll watch you for danger.

  The voice was horrible, but the words were reassuring, and they were growing clearer, less grating. Kai lay down, closed his eyes. He was so tired.

  It would watch over him. How would it watch? Where were its eyes, Kai wondered?

  He was drifting off, his front side warm, his back and feet still stiff with damp cold. The voice would watch over him.

  Kai jolted upright, suddenly knowing whose voice it was.

  I won’t hurt you.

  They knew what you were thinking. But Kai had never heard of one speaking to someone. Never. Not on the news, not from anyone.

  We can if we want.

  It heard everything he thought. There was no way for Kai to stop thinking, no shelter from it. It was in his head. They could read your mind until you were a few miles away. Kai pressed one hand to the cold ground. He had to—

  If you run, I will hurt you.

  Kai froze, a trickle of dread running through him.

  “Where are you?” he whispered.

  Close.

  Kai sat utterly frozen, afraid to move, afraid to breathe.

  Sleep.

  3

  Lila Easterlin

  June 30, 2029. Savannah, Georgia.

  Lila’s toothbrush was wet. She studied the other toothbrushes in the cup, trying to figure out who they might belong to in order to rule out suspects, running through all of the people who now used this bathroom, and trying to decide who was most likely to use someone else’s toothbrush.

  None of the toothbrushes looked like it belonged to her cousin Alfe, the hick from West Virginia she had met a grand total of twice before he and his family showed up on their doorstep last month. Toothbrush in hand, Lila stormed through the house, skirting bedding and mats, piles of clothes and suitcases, until she found Alfe eating a bowl of Lucky Charms, her favorite cereal, which she’d been rationing for the past six months because it was probably the last box she’d ever have.

  Lila held her toothbrush in front of Alfe’s nose. His beard looked dopier by the day, all patchy and scraggly on his narrow, hawklike face.

  “Did you use this?” she asked.

  He ate a spoonful of her Lucky Charms, studying the brush. “I might have.”

  “This is my toothbrush.” She curled her lip. “I can’t think of anything more disgusting than brushing my teeth with a brush you just used to dislodge bits of food from your mouth.” She shook the toothbrush for emphasis. “This is mine. Don’t use it again.”

  “But I don’t have one,” Alfe said, raising his shoulders.

  “That’s not my problem,” she nearly shouted.

  Her father appeared in the arch between the kitchen and living room, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. “What’s going on?”

  Lila folded her arms defensively. “He used my toothbrush.”

  Her father looked at Alfe, who said nothing, then back to Lila. “Okay. Alfe, I’ll find you a toothbrush. You—” He pointed at Lila.

  “Don’t point at me. I didn’t do anything.”

  He kept his finger poised an inch from her nose. “Don’t talk like that to Alfe.”

  Lila sighed heavily, tempted to point out that Alfe was also eating her cereal, but she knew that would go nowhere.

  “Is he a starfish?” Dad asked, pointing at Alfe.

  Lila closed her eyes, willing herself to be calm. “No.” This was her dad’s favorite routine. We have to pull together, blah, blah, blah. She got it; she just didn’t want her toothbrush in Alfe’s mouth.

  “Then he’s on your side.”

  Lila nodded, knowing Dad would only belabor the point if she argued.

  Dad smiled, satisfied. “I’ll find you a toothbrush,” he said to Alfe. Lila watched him walk off, disturbed by how skinny he looked, how little he resembled the stocky, jowly man Lila had known all her life.

  “I don’t know how he can do what he does every day and still be so positive,” Alfe said, shaking his head in wonder as he watched Lila’s father walk away.

  Lila studied Alfe for a moment, deciding whether she wanted to reply. She decided she didn’t really have a choice, given that he’d said something nice about her father.

  “He’s always been like that. Three days after my mother left us to become a Fire Monk, he was helping me make a Halloween costume, and one for himself. Not that your wife leaving you to join a cult compares to disposing of thousands of bodies every day.” Lila used to be embarrassed by what her father did for a living, back when being a mortician was about applying eyeliner to corpses. Now that it was about finding locations for mass graves and collecting DNA samples so relatives might one day know where their loved ones were buried, she felt better about it. “Sometimes people ask me why
he’s not fighting in the war.”

  Alfe snorted. “That’s a pretty stupid question.”

  “I know.” It was the first time she’d said more than hello to Alfe since he arrived, and now she felt shitty for making a big deal out of the toothbrush. He might be okay.

  “Did you see your mother much?” Alfe asked.

  Before the invasion, he meant. That went without saying. “Now and then. She’s too serene for me. Puts me to sleep talking to her.” She didn’t want to talk about her mother, so she thought of another topic. “Was it hard getting here from Blacksburg?”

  Alfe nodded. “We had one really bad moment. We stopped at a lake to get water, and when we went down to the lake, there were two starfish standing in the water a hundred yards away, filling some of their weird sacks.”

  Lila felt a crawling sensation. “Holy shit. What did they do?”

  Alfe put his hand over his mouth, shook his head. “They turned and stared at us. They seemed as surprised to see us as we were to see them, although we know that’s not likely.”

  “What did you do?” Lila whispered, knowing she would have nightmares about this.

  “We ran like hell back to our truck.”

  “They didn’t chase you?”

  Alfe shook his head. “All I can think is, they decided we weren’t worth the trouble. Or maybe it was because it was a mother and three kids. Because, you know, sometimes they leave the kids alone.” Lila nodded. She’d heard stories of Luyten letting children go. “But while we were running away, I just kept thinking, I’m about to die. Any second now I’m going to die.”

  Lila studied Alfe’s face for a moment, then held out her toothbrush. “Here.”

  “Oh, no, that’s okay. Your dad said he’d get me one.”

  She kept the toothbrush out. “If he does, you can give it back to me.”

  Alfe took it and thanked her. Lila went off to see what her dad was up to.

  He was with Uncle Walter, whose burn scars seemed to get worse as he healed, rather than better. His face was nothing but a mottled red and white blur. They’d picked up the local news, which was now the only news, on the antenna her dad had fashioned out of junk car antennae. The picture was snowy, flickering in and out, confined to a small patch on the wall to conserve energy.

  The newswoman was broadcasting from what looked to be someone’s living room. She was a Clarise Wilde look-alike, from the brief period when it became fashionable to try to look as much as possible like one superstar celebrity or another, using plastic surgery. Now it just seemed embarrassingly old-fashioned and self-centered.

  Using a printed map pinned to the wall, she explained that the starfish had seized control of the Bluffton/Beaufort area, so travel between Savannah and Charleston was no longer possible. They also continued to attack and board ships leaving the port, usually coming across from Hilton Head. Sometimes they used their own craft, which resembled colored amniotic sacks spitting bolts of lightning; at other times they were in human boats they’d seized.

  The picture flickered and stretched, giving the Clarise Wilde look-alike a thin, otherworldly appearance.

  “Man, I miss satellites,” Uncle Walter said.

  So did Lila. All those channels, so clear you could barely tell the pictures from the real world. Much more than that, though, she missed her direct feed. She missed being connected to a hundred friends at once. It would be easier to cope with the terror that gripped her all day, every day, if she had her friends to lean on.

  She also missed being good at something. She’d been such a good VR engineer and navigator, better than any of her friends, anyone in her entire school. The feed had been her world, and then, suddenly, it was gone, and so was everything Lila cared about, everything that made her special.

  The TV image flickered and died, along with the overhead light. In a distant room, someone cursed.

  Uncle Walter checked the time. “Did we even get an hour that time?” He said it in an even, almost conversational tone. No one complained. Even when they were complaining, they used a tone that made it sound like they weren’t. Only Lila complained.

  Since it was going to grow stiflingly hot inside rather quickly, Lila went outside. She sat under the crepe myrtle—the only tree in their tiny fenced-in yard—and tried not to think about how close the starfish were. She put in her earbuds, played a song by Park Zero. Usually his voice lifted her spirits. Today, though, she remained tense, uneasy.

  They were surrounded now. For the longest time the starfish had kept to the wilderness areas, appearing only to sabotage a rail line, a power station—places Lila would never go, so she was safe. Now they were everywhere.

  Lila wandered toward the fence, trying to get her mind off the Luyten, although the knot in her stomach was always there, whether she was thinking of them or not.

  There was a truly impressive pile of junk in the alley behind the low stone wall. Someone had cleared all of the crap out of her pack-rat father’s garage—probably to make room for refugee friends and relatives—and dumped it in the alley. Lila went to the fence to take a closer look.

  Her dad must be heartbroken, to have all of his useless junk evicted after he’d spent thirty years letting it pile up. There were vehicle wheels and doors, engine parts, ancient video screens, busted solar panels from the time before the big solar plant was constructed south of the city. Lila hoped the starfish were enjoying all that power.

  The back door slid open. Lila would never get used to the harsh sliding sound it made when it was opened manually. Dad joined her at the fence.

  “This might be the only bright side to what’s going on. I finally had a reason to clean out the garage, and help carrying all the junk.”

  “I was just thinking about how heartbroken you must be. All of this good junk you might need someday.”

  “Yeah,” Dad said laughing. “Someday.”

  Lila reached over the fence and lifted up a cylindrical object. “What’s this?”

  Dad shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Lila dropped it. It clattered off a long-obsolete medical diagnostic fMRI kit and wedged against an old TV screen.

  “Find something productive to do,” Dad said, not unkindly, shooing with his hands as if she were a puppy. “If there’s nothing around here you can think of, go down to Civil Defense and volunteer. They’ll find something for you.”

  Lila didn’t want to go to Civil Defense. She didn’t want to be around a lot of people, have whispered conversations about which city the starfish had overrun, what human weapon they’d figured out how to convert for their own use. She picked up another piece of junk, an old solar panel, and turned it over, looking for a date. There was none.

  If only the war were taking place in the virtual world instead of the real one. She’d probably be in Washington, D.C., right now, designing weapons systems, or sabotaging the enemy’s capabilities. She knew VR tech inside and out. This hard tech—Lila turned the panel on its end, ran her thumb along its thin edge. It was a mystery.

  “So what’s it going to be?” Dad asked.

  Lila set the solar panel down, leaned over the fence, and fished an identical panel out of the pile. If she had to do something productive, maybe she should take a crack at this old shit, see if she could make it useful again. There must be similarities between tinkering inside the feed and tinkering with actual chips and circuits. The technology was fifteen years old—how complicated could it be?

  Lila spotted a bunch of solar panels, shoved aside a stuffed penguin doll she’d gotten for Christmas when she was six, and started stacking them along the fence. The satellites might be down, but they still had the standard home library downloaded on the handheld. Surely there were all sorts of old tech manuals available.

  Her father was waiting for some sort of reply.

  “Go away,” she said. “I’m working.”

  Dad walked away, shaking his head.

  4

  Oliver Bowen

  March 10, 2030
(nine months later). The South Pacific.

  There was nothing to do except read, watch movies, or talk to Five. If Oliver was home, he could at least be working on his comic collection. Spider-Man was complete, save for issue fourteen, the first appearance of Green Goblin. It was the early issues of The Hulk that were proving most difficult to locate.

  It was insane, utterly insane, to be seeking out old comic books with the world on the brink, but it was the only thing in his life that wasn’t depressing and seemingly hopeless.

  Oliver started when Five began to speak aloud. He still wasn’t used to the gurgling, hissing sound of his voice, so unlike the telepathic version.

  “All of that effort, just to move paper with colorful pictures into closer proximity to you. That’s all you’re doing, really.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you. I honestly don’t care what you think of my behavior.”

  “Of course you do,” the Luyten said. “You used to play online poker. You were very good, weren’t you?”

  “I was very good.” Oliver tried to control his rising impatience.

  “Now you collect comics. Why is that, do you think?”

  “Because poker takes other people, and without satellites I don’t have access to other good players.” He rubbed his eyes; he was tired, even though he was getting plenty of sleep. “Besides that, it takes energy. It taxes your cognitive resources. When I’m not working, I’m too tired, mentally and emotionally, for poker. There’s no thinking involved in collecting comic books.”

  “No, there’s certainly not. A child could do it.”

  Oliver poked at something caught between his teeth. “A child could do it. Yes. Provided he had a decent income.”

  The comment made him think of Kai, of the decision awaiting him when he got home. If he adopted Kai, they could collect comics together. He could teach Kai to play poker; that might inject him with fresh enthusiasm for the game.

  Was it foolish, to consider adopting a thirteen-year-old boy? He couldn’t imagine sitting Kai down to talk about sex, or disciplining him if he did something wrong. How did you even discipline a thirteen-year-old? His own upbringing would be no help on that front; his parents had met at an Asperger’s clinic, where they were both undergoing outpatient treatment.