J.M. Dillard - War of Worlds: The Resurrection

by J. M. Dillard

  "You aren't going to die, are you?" Harrison asked suddenly, reproachfully.

  Forrester did his best not to look startled by the question. "No, Harrison, I'm not going to die."

  "Promise?"

  Forrester nodded, realizing rather guiltily that he was making a promise he might not be able to keep. But Harrison needed some certainty in his life now, even if it meant lying a little. "I promise," Forrester answered, raising his hand solemnly as if taking an oath. "But you must promise never to forget your parents."

  "I can't forget them," the boy said with sudden fierceness. "I can't forget any of it."

  "I know. I can't either, son." God, sometimes I wish I could. He could see the father in the boy's face, could remember how, when the attack had begun in earnest, James had said, If anything happens to Sarah and me—

  Forrester hadn't let him finish. No need to. He'd been friends with James before Harrison was born and knew what was coming next. And already he knew the child well enough to see the man: others might try to forget, but Harrison would always remember. Forrester would trust him, train him to carry on his work.

  But others had already forgotten. Forrester had seen the idiocy of the government at work. He and other scientists at the Pacific Institute had begged for more money to do research, to study the aliens in detail, to discover where they had come from, why they had attacked Earth, how their ships and weapons worked. He had gone to Washington, D.C., and argued with members of Congress, with representatives of the military—all to no avail. The government wanted the "war of the worlds" forgotten. The hundreds of thousands of alien bodies remaining were stuffed into barrels and ignored. As he was now being ignored. And ignorance would triumph. The memory of what had happened would be actively forgotten, hidden from future generations, until, at last, no one remembered. ...

  Except Harrison Blackwood. Forrester patted the boy's shoulder. "Come on, cowpoke, finish your water."

  Harrison took two more sips and handed the glass back to him. "Can you stay a little while?"

  "Sure. But you've got to get under those covers and let me tuck you in."

  "Okay." The boy's face brightened. Just relief, not quite a smile; he hadn't smiled in six months, and Forrester expected it would be at least as long before he heard the boy laugh. Here it was, the week before Christmas, a time when kids were supposed to be eagerly awaiting a visit from Santa. With the solici-tousness of a new parent, Forrester had carefully wrapped and hidden away toys, even put up a five-foot pine tree in the living room. But Harrison wanted none of it. He showed no interest in helping to decorate the tree, refused to even acknowledge the fact that the holiday was approaching. Perhaps, Forrester reflected, because the boy knew that the one thing he wanted most in the world could never be given back to him. Harrison was not the only one to ignore Christmas. Not a single home in the neighborhood was strung with outdoor holiday lights this year.

  Harrison jumped into the bed with childish energy and pulled the covers up. Forrester tucked him in, then got a chair from the corner of the room—a comfortable adult-sized chair put there for just such emergencies—and settled into it. "I'm going to turn

  the light off, but I'll still be here, even though it's dark."

  Harrison seemed satisfied. "G'night, Daddy."

  Forrester smiled at his new title. "Good night, son." He turned off the pistol lamp. It wouldn't be the first time he'd spent the night in this chair ... or the last. Sometimes he sat and read Harrison stories; most of the time, the boy, with his quick, restless mind, became bored with the predictable plots and asked questions about the real world. Forrester discovered to his delight that the boy was brilliant, a born scientist, like his parents. Most of the questions were typical bright-kid questions about the color of the sky, about why it rained .. . sometimes, less often, he asked about the aliens. Why did they look so funny? How did their machines burn everything up?

  And somehow trying to explain them to Harrison made talking about them possible, provided Forrester himself with a means of dealing with what had happened. Science took the scariness out of it, made the fact of the invasion more tolerable . .. until Harrison asked a question Forrester couldn't answer, such as why the aliens would want to hurt his parents.

  Forrester sat in the darkness until the boy's breathing became regular. He was grateful to have a hand in raising Harrison, to have the chance to teach the child everything he, Forrester, had learned about the aliens. The world was going to need scientists like the one Harrison would become.

  Because deep in his bones, Forrester knew that it wasn't over, wasn't over at all. It had scarcely even begun. ...

  October

  1988

  ONE

  Urick sat in the tractor-trailer's cab and watched the dark landscape fly by. Next to her, Chambers held the rig at a steady fifty-five; no point in tempting the cops by speeding. There was nothing to see in the desert at night, and after Urick's initial terror subsided into restless impatience, she began to find the drive boring, to become eager to reach their destination.

  The plan was in motion now. She glanced over at Chambers and thought, What would happen if I asked him to pull over, if I jumped out of the cab and hiked my way back to town? Would she go back to being the same person she had always been: Lena Urick, perennially broke, overage college student, always pushing back graduation another year because she had to work overtime to pay the rent? Was there still time to stop this before things went too far?

  You've already gone too far. You've broken the

  law—stolen a truck, carried a weapon without a license—and then there's conspiracy . . . There was no going back to the way things used to be. And there was no point in lying to herself—she couldn't back out if she wanted to. Chambers wouldn't let her go. She thought of the Uzis hidden behind their seats; an image flashed in her mind of her fleeing from the rig into the desert, of Chambers calmly pulling the Uzi from the backseat and taking aim....

  Would he kill you? Could he really kill you? The answer was undoubtedly yes, and in Urick's mind he would be entirely justified in killing her: she would not have respected him if he were not prepared to kill for the cause. Yet another part of her—the weaker, timid part of herself she thought of as Lena, her old self—felt the opposite.

  Urick thought of her former self, Lena, as another person, no longer a part of Urick, free soldier of the People's Liberation Army, but someone else, a coward, always afraid. She insisted her comrades call her only by her last name, Urick, and Urick was cool, dedicated, unafraid, just like Chambers, who radiated perfect calm sitting there next to her. She considered for an instant that he might be as frightened as she, but dismissed the idea as ridiculous.

  She'd been through their route a thousand times before, but she pulled the map from the glove compartment and unfolded it, leaving the compartment open so that she could read by its faint light. She didn't even consider asking Chambers to turn on the overhead. The less seen of their faces, the better.

  She stared once again at the route underlined in red:

  cast, into the desert, though the map was unnecessary; she could have drawn it from memory. She looked down at her watch, the one present from her father she'd ever permitted herself to keep. She would have thrown it out the window right then if she hadn't needed it to carry out the plan. No point in anything lying her to the past, to the old Lena, and certainly not Jo her father. Besides, it was expensive, gold, a symbol of everything she stood against now. When Lena was fifteen, her family had left Germany to come to the United States; her father, a working-class man, a firm believer in the capitalist dream, had opened a deli... then two, then three, until he was a rich man who owned an entire chain. Nothing narrowed a person's mind faster, Lena learned, than the acquisition of wealth.

  What would her father say if he knew what she was doing now? You think you know it all, don't you, Lena? She could hear him start with that lecturing tone. So

  quick to judge. . . thinking only in shad
es of black and white. But the world isn't that way; it's all shades of gray, and you shouldn 't judge a man until you've been in his position.

  I know what's right, Papa, and you'll see. Someday I'm going to save the world.

  From what?

  From itself. From political oppression.

  A sigh, a shake of the head. My daughter the martyr. There's more than one way to save the world, Lena.

  Lena might have listened. But Urick knew better; the only shades of gray came from those people who lived corrupted lives. She was here to cleanse the

  world from unscrupulous men like her father . . . and from corrupt, decadent governments like the one in Washington, whose morality was dictated by the almighty dollar.

  Urick registered the time. At least they were on schedule. She felt a tightness in her chest and practiced breathing slowly, methodically, then glanced out of the corner of her eye at Chambers, knowing that the sight of him would calm her. The lights on the highway reflected off the lens of Ms wire-rimmed glasses; they were still close enough to the city for there to be occasional traffic this late at night. He was older than she, in his early forties, a quiet man possessed of incredible determination, and he had a strange way of sensing when she was thinking about him. He caught her sly glance, tilted his face toward her—a handsome face, with compelling eyes and thick brown hair that was swept back to reveal a high forehead. The sign of great intelligence, her mother had always said. Chambers gave Urick a slight, encouraging smile. She returned it; she was not afraid to die, she decided, so long as she died with him.

  A brilliant man, Chambers. A political science professor at UCLA unlike any other college professor Urick had known—for Chambers possessed strong beliefs, and he believed in acting on those principles. From the first lecture Lena Urick had been mesmerized. Yet it was more than just a schoolgirl crush—no, it was a political awakening for her, and she refused to let their relationship be cheapened by such emotions. For his part, Chambers maintained a scrupulously paternal attitude toward her. Urick thought of him as the man her father would have been had greed not corrupted him.

  She forced herself to look back down at the map. They were less than an hour away from their destination, away from the line Urick knew she must cross, after which there could be no turning back.

  "Damn," Chambers said softly in his deep voice. The rig shuddered and whined as he downshifted.

  She looked over at him, startled. "What's wrong?" The instant she said it, she saw the flashing light reflected off the side mirror. Her heart began thumping wildly.

  "Don't know." Chambers eased on the brake and pulled over to the shoulder. The rig groaned to a halt. Urick stared at the police cruiser reflected in the mirror, then at Chambers.

  He didn't look at her; he was busy watching the uniformed policeman walk up to the driver's side of the cab. Urick moved to reach for the guns behind the seat. Chambers held up his hand.

  "Not yet," he said softly. She drew her hand away and forced herself to sit still, to not look panic-stricken.

  Chambers peered down through the open window of the cab and smiled at the policeman.

  "I'll need to see your operator's permit and waybill," the cop said with the voice of a man in his early twenties. Theoretically, Urick hated the cop because of the role he played in repressing society; personally, she had nothing against him, and was unsettled at the thought of using the Uzi this soon, against someone so young. When she thought of killing, she pictured herself killing corrupt old men her father's age, not kids barely out of school.

  "Is there a problem, Officer?" Chambers was playing it just right: polite because he didn't want to get a ticket, with the barest hint of irritation at being pulled over. In the midst of her fear, Urick felt a surge of admiration for him.

  The cop didn't reply, he gestured for Chambers to hand over the documents. As Chambers sighed and reached for the glove compartment, Urick caught his eye with a look that said Do you think he knows? Shall I reach for the Uzis? She didn't dare whisper it with the cop so nearby.

  Chambers shrugged. No. Not yet.. . She helped him find the forged permit and the waybill. Chambers handed them down to the cop. There was a pause, and then: "Please step out of the vehicle, Mr. Chambers."

  Urick held her breath as Chambers opened the door and complied. She caught a brief glimpse of the cop before Chambers slammed the door shut—a blond-haired kid who looked too young to shave and was giving Chambers that stern chip-on-the-shoulder stare. There was no reason to be so near panic. Cops always made you get out of the car. But why the hell had they stopped the rig? Chambers hadn't even been speeding... .

  "All the way to the rear," the cop said.

  Chambers' boots crunched against the gravel as he moved to the rear of the truck. Urick slid over to the

  driver's side and craned her neck out the window to watch. The blond cop followed Chambers to the back of the truck, where a second cop was waiting. They were going to make Chambers open it.

  And they were going to get one hell of a surprise.

  Urick peered into the side mirror and strained to listen; the young cop was still talking, though he and the other cop had stepped out of view. Chambers, slightly off to one side, was just visible. "Waybill doesn't list your freight, Mr. Chambers. Just says one metric ton."

  Chambers sounded indignant. "Company didn't hire me to do the paperwork."

  "Any objection to us having a look?"

  In the flashing light she could see Chambers' silhouette shrug and pull the key from his chest pocket. There was going to be shooting. She should have scrunched down inside the cab to protect herself, but Chambers was talking. She was frightened for him, and wanted to hear what he would say.

  His tone was casual as he proffered the key. "If you don't mind, I'll wait in your car while you poke around. Stuff in there's low-grade nuclear waste. They usually pack it up real good, but... me and the missus still plan on having a few kids." It was the story they'd rehearsed a thousand times for this very emergency, but the line about the kids and the request to sit in the cruiser were ad-libbed.

  She could have laughed out loud. Perfect, Chambers! That way he could hide in the safety of the police car ... i/the cops still felt like poking around.

  She grinned in the dark cab and waited. There was a long pause as the cops presumably took notice of Chambers' clean white jump suit and made the desired connection; then the cop's partner spoke.

  "Reason we pulled you over, Mr. Chambers, you've got a short in your taillights."

  "I'll check it out right away, Officer."

  "Do that," the young one said. "Drive careful now, okay?"

  A door slammed; the flashing light was replaced by headlights and the sound of the cruiser wheeling away at top speed. She climbed out of the cab and joined Chambers, who stood watching them leave. She wanted to gloat, to congratulate him on his cleverness, but, as usual, he was thinking only of what had to be done.

  "Taillight's out," he said shortly, dropping the key back into his pocket and giving it a pat. "Check the fuse and let's roll. We're behind schedule." He headed back to the cab, slapping the rear door of the trailer as he passed by.

  On the nine-foot chain-link fence that ran alongside the road, the sign read:

  Jericho Valley Disposal Site

  authorized personnel only

  Entrance 1000 Yards

  A strange little song began to repeat in Urick's mind, a song she hadn't thought of in years: Joshua in

  the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho . . . Joshua in the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumblin' down.. .

  Chambers downshifted and maneuvered the rig past the sign and onto the narrow gravel path leading to the first gate. They'd driven along in silence after the taillight incident. At some point, even in the darkness, Urick could tell that Chambers was nervous. For some strange reason the thought calmed her, and the closer they drew to the disposal site, the stronger her sense of unreality became.

  Cham
bers sounded the air horn. Urick looked down at the glowing numbers on her watch: right on schedule. Two helmeted soldiers stepped out of the guard shack on the other side of the gate; one of them hit a switch, and the outer gate slid open.

  Chambers put the tractor-trailer in low gear and eased it past the gate, which closed behind them. Urick read more signs on the guard shack: federal

  reserve, no trespassing allowed, nuclear and toxic wastes stored here.

  Urick didn't glance at her surroundings; she'd already memorized them. It was a tiny base, consisting of nothing more than a small barracks, a guard shack, and stack after stack of steel barrels.

  One of the soldiers came up to the driver's side of the cab, and without a word reached up for the paperwork Chambers handed down. Unlike the cop, the soldier seemed satisfied with what he read; he nodded at his partner, who responded by pressing another switch. The inner gate behind the guard shack slid open. Chambers rolled the tractor-trailer past it and let go a shaky sigh.

  So he was terrified after all, Urick thought with a twinge of disappointment. Not that it mattered; not that anything mattered, except what she had to do.

  And it was almost time. She reached into the space between the seat and the back of the cab and carefully pulled out the Uzi. Chambers was already out as she climbed down, keeping the hand with the Uzi behind her back.

  The soldiers had come out the rear door of the guard shack and were approaching the rig with smiles on their faces. Young corporals, clean-shaven, barely twenty years old. This is the enemy, Urick told herself. These are dead men. In every revolution, Chambers had explained, there had to be deaths. We don't relish killing. . . but to achieve our goals we must sacrifice some on the altar of world freedom. Perhaps, if our victims knew the good their deaths would bring, they would volunteer . . . Urick studied their leering faces and doubted it. Typical army types. Probably enlisted for no better reason than to get a free education. Suddenly, she was filled with overwhelming hatred for them.