Cottonwood

by R. Lee Smith

  Sanford went inside to the rear room where he lay down hungry beside his son and watched the boy’s limbs twitch, dreaming, until he slept.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Monday morning. All the confidence she’d had over the weekend evaporated with the buzzing of her alarm. Suddenly, the outfit Sarah had painstakingly selected the previous night was all wrong and she spent so much time picking out a new one that she didn’t have time for breakfast. Which was just as well; since there probably wasn’t room for food in her stomach, on account of all the butterflies. She fed Fagin, opened the glass door enough for him to pass back and forth from the yard, checked her reflection a final time in the bathroom mirror, and walked to the office. She hummed as she walked, although she was only peripherally aware of it. Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl, for no particular reason. Not the words, just the tune, although she did stop humming to sing the Whoa-oh-oh part, a place she frequently got stuck over and would sit for hours, whoa-oh-ing under her breath while crosswording or reading until either she realized she was doing it or Kate came along behind her and whacked her in the head.

  It was a warm morning already, warm and muggy, enough to make her wish she’d driven after all. The van was too big and used too much gas, the belts squealed and the engine rattled, the brakes were mushy and it took forever to get up to speed, but by God, the air conditioner worked fine. Growing up in western Oregon had given Sarah absolutely no defense against the kind of oppressive summer heat they apparently had here in the Midwest and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet.

  Immediately upon arrival at her building, Sarah ducked into the ladies room to freshen up before she sweated all over herself. She was therefore six minutes late checking in, but she had to stand in a long line anyway, so maybe no one noticed. They gave her a brand-new leather case with the letters I-B-I embossed on it, about twenty pounds of forms to go in it, her gate pass, and her permanent badge with her picture on the front, still warm from laminating. From there, she was sent up to the third floor, where she followed the blinking light on her paz’s flickering screen to her assigned cubicle. It held a little baggie of generic-looking candies with a plastic pick stabbed through it that read Welcome down the side.

  Sarah sat down, spent a few minutes adjusting the chair’s height, and logged herself in. Her paz chirped immediately, informing her that her client list and their case files were now available and ready for download. While that was happening—she really needed a new paz—Sarah located the third-floor lounge. She’d had hopes of a cup of coffee, but the machine was another KonaLuv. She stood in front of it awkwardly with her smiley-face mug in her fist but ultimately retreated, coffeeless. Never mind. She still had a desk and she could sit there and look professional until she had the opportunity to follow someone into the lounge and watch them make coffee.

  Her paz was chirping away when she got back to her cubicle. It was still downloading, but now she also had an alert from her floor supervisor. Several alerts, actually. Wincing, Sarah snatched up her paz and followed the blinking light to his office. The man waiting for her inside was forty-ish, pudgy, bald, and expensively attired in a very nice suit that did not quite encapsulate his neck.

  “Miss Fowler,” he said, except that he really said, ‘Miss Fowwer.’ All of a sudden, she was looking at Elmer Fudd in a three-piece suit, and Sarah had to bite down hard to keep from bursting out in horrifically inappropriate laughter. “I’m Edward Beechum. Welcome to IBI’s Social Services department. I hope you’re ready to jump right in.”

  Weady to jump wight in. God help her.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, biting her cheeks.

  “Excellent.” He picked up a thick stack of papers and held them out. “We want an updated census here in Cottonwood, so you’ll be going door to door and taking detailed reports from each of your clients. We’ve tried to keep the questions simple but don’t be surprised if some of the bugs act like they don’t follow. Trust me, they all know English. Most of them speak half a dozen languages by now, so if they give you the dumb routine, don’t try to argue with them, just call in a security team and watch them miraculously understand you.

  “I’m not going to sugarcoat this,” he went on, returning to his side of the supervisor-sized desk and sitting. “You are probably about to have the worst first day of your young life. Try not to let it get to you. One thing you learn in a hurry around here: The bugs do not come in peace. Do not go in there expecting to make friends. Just do your job, be professional and polite, and never let them give you guff. I cannot stress that last part enough. If they realize they can push your buttons, they will never stop. Now.” He pointed at the papers she was holding and she obediently looked at them. “Your first priority is to make sure your clients are really your clients. Don’t just ask their names, get their numbers. It’s etched on the sides of their heads.”

  “It’s what?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay, I know how that sounds, but it’s fine. They don’t have feeling in their outer skin.”

  “That’s not…I mean…Etched? Like…cut?”

  “That’s right. With a laser,” he added, looking just a hair more impatient. In his mouth, it came out ‘waser’. The urge to giggle washed over her again and left her feeling a little sick. “It’s not like someone went at them with a machete. Look, we needed a reliable way to identify them. They don’t have fingerprints and putting together a DNA bank was just too expensive and time-consuming back when they landed. We tried to give them ID cards, but—” He flung up his hands and slapped them down again, shaking his head. “They made it impossible to keep track of them any other way. This is what we had to do, because they made it necessary.”

  Sarah said nothing, but her expression must said a few things for her because he rolled his eyes again.

  “Would you like to know how the bugs have responded to having their heads engraved with their registration numbers?” he asked, leaning over the desk with his hands folded. “As far as I’m aware, the only real impact has been that the three biggest forms of contraband inside the camps are unauthorized eggs, weapons, and heads.”

  “W-What?”

  “Heads,” he said again, smiling thinly at her shock. “We find them so often, in fact, that we had to designate one of the evidence rooms for heads only. See, they molt. Every few years, they split out of their old skin, which means they have to bring in the old head-plates to get their number re-applied. So whenever you get a bad bug who wants a clean slate, all he has to do is kill another bug, cut off his head, peel away the top plates, wait to molt, and there you go: Mr. John Smith becomes Mr. Bob Jones. The only thing we don’t find a lot inside the camps are headless bugs. Now, I suppose they could be burying them or burning them…but it’s odd that we’ve never found a grave.” He paused to gauge her reaction. “The only reasonable theory is that they’re eating each other.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “They are horrible. The sooner you come to grips with that, the better off you’ll be. Stop thinking of them as these super-advanced star babies in some kind of intergalactic prison. These are bugs.”

  Sarah didn’t know what to say to that, so she put the census papers in her briefcase.

  “You’re working in a pretty good part of town,” he went on, looking over his own paz where, presumably, her client details were displayed. “I doubt you’ll have much trouble, but just remember, if they think they can pull one over on you, they’ll try. Never give an inch. That’s the secret to working with them,” he said wisely, holding up one finger. “Never. Give. An inch.”

  “Got it.”

  “Section Seventeen is single-occupancy only, which means one bug per residence unless they have a family housing permit and then only one child per adult bug. Report all evidence of egg farming and make sure every child is licensed and has a legal residence. If they try to argue with you…” His pointing finger aimed itself at her.

  “Never give an inch?”

  “Right. Make sure t
he living conditions are safe and relatively sanitary. The bugs rent the lots in your section and they’re supposed to buy the housing units, but most of them build their own, so at the very least, make sure their power hook-ups have a valid inspection tag. Report all violations on the spot and…?”

  “Never give an inch.”

  “All right then.” He offered his hand and, with no comfortable way to ignore it, she shook it. “Good luck to you. Whose team will you be with today?”

  “Sir?”

  “The security team you’ll be accompanying,” he amplified, enunciating in that way that suggested he was running out of nerves for her to get on. “Are you with Hollister? Seeney? Lantz?”

  “No one told me I had to go with a team,” said Sarah, blinking.

  “What, you were planning to go in there alone? On your first day?”

  Sarah’s shoulders twitched, not quite shrugging. She didn’t say anything.

  He waved her off, shaking his head. “It’s your funeral. If you change your mind, just dial 99 and they’ll get a team out to you right away. Go on. Idiot,” he muttered as she was leaving his office. She chose to believe he didn’t think she could hear him.

  She was one of those randomly searched on her way out of the building, chatting nervously with the security guards whose job it was to scan her for electronic devices. She offered up her paz when they asked for it, accepted the inevitable teasing about its age with good grace while they made sure the video apps and upload functions were still locked down, showed them her translator, signed the digipad where they told her to, and then went on her way to take the elevator down to the tracks.

  It was a fun ride, zipping through the cramped tunnels with orange safety lights flashing by every twenty seconds—very Bladerunner, very futurific. There seemed to be a lot of soldiers standing around on the platforms, not just in uniforms, but in flak vests and helmets, carrying all kinds of guns, but they smiled when she smiled, so it must be okay. They let her out at Station Seventeen and she climbed the stairs to the surface, humming under her breath.

  Outside, she was waved down almost immediately by a soldier standing by a white security van with handful of nervous-looking civilian-types inside. He was vaguely familiar to her—the same soldier who had been at the orientation seminar with Mr. van Meyer—and he already appeared to be completely out of patience with the van-load of caseworkers he was babysitting. “You Fei Yen?” he asked, jogging over to her.

  “Do I look like a Fei Yen?” she asked, amused.

  He looked her over, shook it off. “Shit like that don’t matter like it used to. You her or not? I want to get started sometime today.”

  “No, I’m Sarah Fowler.”

  He pulled out a paz and keyed that in, his frustration visibly mounting. “I don’t see you. Who’s driving you?”

  “No one. I’m walking.”

  “Jesus, lady!” he exploded, and just as swiftly fought it down again. He took a few stabilizing breaths, then jerked his thumb over his shoulder and said, tight-jawed, “Wait over there. I’ll get you on a van.”

  Sarah was perfectly capable of scheduling herself a driver if she thought she needed one. For that matter, now that she had a badge and a gate pass, she could have driven her own van right through and into Cottonwood, but it seemed silly to drive clear across the village when her stretch of road—her causeway—was right off the Checkpoint. She’d studied it on the map all weekend, she felt like she’d been there already: The road ran left/right out of the gate, she would turn right and follow it about two hundred feet around a tight curve, and then it went due west right up to the aqueduct wall. All of her clients were south of that road. To the north lay a culvert and an open field with four or five concrete reservoirs and sanitation stations. And she didn’t mind walking even if she did have a couple hundred doors to knock on. She wore sensible shoes. Anyway, she felt it sent the wrong impression to show up on her first day in an armored car driven by a guy in a flak vest.

  She said none of this, of course. Instead, speaking in a variation of the same soft, soothing tones she was apt to use when approached by large, unfamiliar dogs, Sarah said, “I appreciate what you’re saying, sir, but I think I’ll be okay. And if I get in trouble, I’ll be sure to call in. I think I see Fei Yen.”

  He looked back with a scowl that froze the diminutive Asian lady approaching him in her tracks. “Fine,” he said. “You want to walk, walk. But let me tell you something, Pollyanna—”

  How he got that from Sarah, she could not begin to fathom, but she sensed this was a bad time to correct him, so she put on her ‘listening’ face and stayed quiet.

  “I lose men to those fucking bugs every year. Men with training. Men with guns. You think you’re gonna walk in there and the buggies will want to run up and be your friend? All they’re gonna see is what you are: a dumb bitch with no one to protect her.” He pushed his face close to hers, close enough that she could smell the sharp, weirdly metallic tang of his sweat. “They’re gonna pull your fucking arms and legs off and eat you while you’re still screaming. Can you appreciate what I’m saying now?”

  Without waiting for an answer, even if she could have thought of one, he turned around and went back to his van. Sarah waited for him to drive off before she started walking again. The checkpoint guard asked her twice if she wanted to call a car, but finally let her through after making her show him the security fast-page setting on her paz (Dial 99 for Danger, just like on the outside) and telling her he thought she was making a huge mistake. She swiped her card—God, that felt official!—and walked through into Cottonwood.

  She stopped humming without ever really being aware she’d started.

  It didn’t look like the maps. That is, it did—here was the left/right road, the sharp turn, the open field beyond it on the north side, and the aqueduct wall dead ahead in the west—but it was all…wrong.

  Hearing her supervisor tell her that Section Seventeen was all single-occupancy housing, she’d been expecting…well, houses. What she saw laid out in orderly rows were railroad cars, single-wide trailers, pre-fab sheds and storage pods, all of them decayed, rusted out, fallen in, and heavily patched with rotting plywood, aluminum panels and sheets of plastic. Doors were largely improvised, badly hung, with loops of rope or metal hooks for latches. There were no trees anywhere that she could see, no grass yards, no green growing things of any kind, only dry dirt and garbage stretching out for miles on every side.

  The garbage. She couldn’t stop staring at the garbage. She’d smelled it, of course—even from her house, she could smell that sharp, acrid fugue hanging in the summer air—but she’d thought it had to do with the sewage treatment plant, or maybe even IBI’s own research and development wing. After all, big smells could come from strange places; there had been a paper mill back in Brookings, and on rainy days when the wind was right, it was enough to make a girl gag. She’d never imagined it was actually garbage, but this…this was a junkyard sprawled out over twenty square miles. This was a landfill, dried out and gone to rust. This was…This was awful.

  Something roared—a deep, almost metallic rip of sound that made her jump and turn wildly around. She saw three aliens running behind the rows of houses. One of them stopped and crept around to watch her from the shade, but seeing that she was looking right back at it, let out another of those deep, honking bellows and took off, leaping easily up to the roof of his hiding place and from car to car in impossible strides before leaping down again, gone. The call was echoed at some distance, then again, closer, and then it was quiet.

  Sarah realized her heart was pounding. God, they moved fast. And jumpers, wow. No wonder the wall was so damned high.

  Now wait, what? Why did there have to be a wall at all? They were integrating, weren’t they? The ultimate goal was to bring the walls down.

  She started walking again, all the way down that dusty, garbage-strewn road and around the corner. The culvert on the south side of the causeway was an open sewer,
the liquid trickling along its rusty banks as black and oilsome as tar. Beyond it, the reservoirs were stagnant, fly-thick mires from which rotting cardboard, doorless refrigerators and chunks of machinery surfaced like dead hippos. The sanitation stations were skeletal pipes, most bent out of any useable shape, all rusted, without a wall for privacy or any kind of laundry services.

  “I don’t get it,” she whispered.

  Maybe this was why they needed the caseworkers so badly…to help clean up.

  Sarah approached her first house and stood outside, staring at it. Two railway cars, side by side, patched together with plywood. It looked old, older than Cottonwood had even been standing. She opened her case, fumbled out her clipboard and census sheets, and checked the number painted on the house’s side against the checklist. Number 201040: John Byrnes.

  She hummed softly, caught herself, and stepped up to knock on the pressed-wood door. She heard something move inside. Someone, she corrected herself. “Hello?” she called, and knocked again. “Sir? My name is Sarah Fowler, and I’m from IBI—”

  The door yanked itself open inwards, and there he was—the alien. Seven feet, dark brown with black streaks, snapping mouth palps, twitching antennae, and dull red eyes, glaring at her. He spat out a curt series of grumbles and clicks. “Fuck off,” said an electronic voice in her ear. He slammed the door.

  Her first instinct was to leave. She stifled it, nerved herself, and knocked again.

  “Hello? Can you please tell me if I’m speaking to Mr. John Byrnes?”

  A second spurt of insectile noise, one with no translation. Then he said, “No, you’re speaking to—” Here was what obviously had a name in it, cut up by clicks and grunts. “—but you couldn’t chew it with your mushy human mouths so you call me John Byrnes. Happy? Now fuck off.”