Cottonwood

by R. Lee Smith

  Yes, they did. And it really was funny, all things considered. He found himself staring at her arm around T’aki’s shoulder. And he found himself thinking of that night at the Blue House, and all his badly-grasped reasons for going, the clinging sense of guilt and shame that had followed him away.

  He liked her. He wanted to touch her. He wanted, Ko’vi help him, to be touched by her. Her human fingers in his joint-seams—his blood crawled at the thought, but his heart throbbed.

  A loud crash behind him broke him from these increasingly upsetting thoughts. He swung and saw more fighting at the farthest table, where several yang’ti were trying to steal the same plastic tub.

  “Oh jeez, look at that.” Sarah got out of the van with T’aki in her arms to stand at his side (his claspers darted out to taste at her air before he could stop himself; he compressed them tight, mortified). “They can have those, I guess. Can you tell them—”

  An air-splitting screech cut off the rest of her words, cut off damn near everyone’s. Sanford grabbed instinctively for his son and grabbed Sarah for good measure as yang’ti raiders armed with spears and clubs came streaking over the houses and down into the road. There were fifty of them at the very least, a larger party than he’d ever seen or even heard of, and surely they had thought it would be enough right up until they drew close enough to see that the feasters outnumbered them more than five to one. Raiders were, by and large, a cowardly bunch, but now the food was running out and it was now or never. They attacked, bashing through the sentries and falling on the crowd, weapons swinging indiscriminately at adult and child alike, fighting their way desperately to the tables for one handful of meat, one bottle of clean water.

  Pandemonium.

  Half the well-behaved and well-fed celebrants at the feast ran at once for their own homes. The other half either threw themselves screaming at the raiders or began snatching up anything they could carry to steal for themselves. In less time than it takes to click twice, hundreds of yang’ti were crushed together in riotous violence.

  The spy-light swooped down and fixed. The klaxons on the wall began to howl. Sarah beside him jumped and looked wildly around, but he didn’t need her to tell him they were coming. The cry was already going up along the gate; IBI had been waiting all night for the right reason to come back.

  “You better go,” she said, looking frightened. “Not home. Someplace safe—”

  He heard the whistle just a split-second before the explosion. Concussion shell. It struck the road less than two meters from him and blasted everyone and everything around it with soundwaves. Sanford was knocked down, and Sarah was raised entirely off her feet and thrown backwards into her own van. T’aki started squalling, both hands flat over his bruised ear; it was all Sanford could do to hold on to him as yang’ti scattered around them. He was kicked, stomped, trampled.

  Then the IBI van came racing up the road, smashing through tables and firing concussion bombs out both sides into the crowd. He could hear the humans laughing inside, calling out points as if it were a game, before they were swallowed by the sound of their own carnage.

  Sanford got up, but stood frozen, his son clutched to his chest. More and more yang’ti were swarming, now fighting over broken tables for scraps of lumber. Someone came at him screeching, perhaps thinking he held a bit of plastic sheeting in his arms, and Sanford kicked him back hard enough to feel chitin crack. Home. IBI was between him and home, but they were turning around even now and when they came back—

  A hand seized his arm and shook him. Sarah’s face swam before him, her eyes wild. “Get in the van!” she shouted, pulling at him.

  He obeyed, and she swung in after him and banged the sliding door shut. It dulled the sound, but the screams went on. A second IBI van rolled onto the causeway and opened fire. Yang’ti raiders leapt on the vehicles, kicking at windows and ripping at panels until they were blasted flat. The real guns would come out soon.

  “Get down!” she shouted as more concussion bombs burst in the street. “Oh God, they’re everywhere!”

  She scrambled for the driver’s seat and ignited the engines. He was thrown back into the chair by the velocity of her escape, and then onto the floor. Drink cans and bags of trash slid around him. Something exploded off the van’s right, peppering the windows with rocks and fire. T’aki screamed. The thought that, once they were out, they might never be able to get back in tried to assert itself—his house would be ransacked, the secret room uncovered, the code-bank stolen—but just then the sky itself seemed to split open and burn. Sanford curled up as tight as he could around his son and let Sarah take him away.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  She took them home. She didn’t think about it, but just drove, threading the van through the chaos and the explosions with a deftness she never would have believed existed in either her ancient Ford or her own reflexes. The checkpoint gate stood open, armed guards on either side, but they waved her through without letting her stop, shouting at her to just get out, go, get out of the way.

  So she took them home, her heart pounding and eyes staring, to her sensible little pre-fab in her pleasant little neighborhood. She drove right up into her garage and did not feel safe until the door had dropped behind her and everything was calm and black.

  Smell of smoke. Screaming, the way she’d always known there must be. Smoke and fire and screaming.

  “Is this where you live?” T’aki asked hesitantly.

  Sarah roused, realized she’d been sitting and staring at the dashboard for at least three minutes, her hands still white on the wheel, in her dark and empty garage. She made herself let go, rubbed her aching knuckles, and tried to smile for him, even if she couldn’t quite yet look at him. “This is it, jellybean. Kinda empty, I know, but I like it.”

  “You should put papers up,” T’aki suggested, and his father hushed him. “Or get a chair. What?”

  Sarah blinked and looked stupidly out the van’s window at the garage itself. She laughed. “No. Gosh, no. Sorry, honey, I’m…I’m really rattled right now.”

  T’aki made a soft rattling sound of his own, plucking at the seatbelt beside him. Sanford hushed his son with a touch and said nothing, but his eyes in the rearview mirror were strange and after a moment, it occurred to her why.

  She’d brought them out of Cottonwood.

  They stared at each other through the mirror while T’aki tried to entertain himself with the upholstery and since the world refused to stop spinning, at last Sarah got out and went around to open the side door. Neither of them moved until she’d done so, and it was obviously not an easy feat for Sanford to get out—his back didn’t bend, and even with his long legs clumsily scrunched up, his head scraped the ceiling as he shuffled toward her, feet still tangled up in trash bags. She put out her hand instinctively to help; they both paused to stare at it, perhaps even both wondering what she possibly thought she could do about it, pick him up? Then, to her mild surprise, he took it.

  His fingers were broad, long, flat, tapered to points, and covered all down its length with thin bands of hard shell on top and fine, spiky filaments on the bottom. The effect was like holding several fat centipedes at once, but oddly, not unpleasant. Perhaps because she knew it was his hand, just a hand. She closed her fingers gingerly around him, smiling, wondering if she should pull or what. He just crouched there, half in and out of the van, looking at her.

  His longest finger moved in her grip. The point curled in, pressed on her palm. He clicked softly, watching her. His eyes, those weirdly human eyes, seemed cautious.

  O…kay. Sarah moved her own thumb along the plates of his wrist and found a kind of ridge. Under the overlapping chitin was a soft, leathery patch of skin. His sensory pad, she thought, remembering orientation. Where he could feel her touching him. She smiled, raising her eyes to his, and pressed on it the way he pressed on her. ‘Shaking hands with an alien,’ she thought.

  His other arm, long and thorned, reached out to grip the door’s frame. He s
tepped down, his hand still easy in hers, and twisted his rigid torso nimbly out until he could straighten up. He didn’t say a word, just clicked now and then, very quietly. His breath was heavy and slightly wet to hear, the breath of a winded asthmatic, but he looked calm enough.

  Gosh, this was a long stare. Was she supposed to say something, do something? She thought back to her training manuals, but could not remember a single line of advice that began, ‘When shaking hands…’

  “I’m sorry things went so wrong,” she said. “It was pretty silly of me to think it wouldn’t.”

  “Yes,” he replied, so matter-of-factly that she felt her cheeks glowing a little. “But it was a good thing while it lasted. Even the smallest good things matter, Sarah.”

  And he gazed at her, his finger pressing on her palm.

  “Can I sleep in the blue van?” T’aki asked finally, sprawled spread-eagle on the concrete. “I don’t like this floor.”

  Sanford took his hand back. “This is not our home,” he said. “Do as you are told.”

  “Honey, you can do better than the van, I promise. Come on. Let’s go inside.”

  “We are inside.”

  “Well, then let’s go inside again.” She bent down to take his tiny hand, and once he’d hopped up, opened the door into the kitchen.

  T’aki’s long, low rattling whistle as he stepped wonderingly onto the cheap linoleum made her see it all as he did: the huge open rooms, empty floors and clean walls, the shiny rust-free surfaces, undamaged appliances whose very basic function he might not be able to guess, and lighting everywhere. She looked at him and felt suddenly and bitterly ashamed.

  “Is this whole place just for you?” T’aki asked, opening a cupboard as if to check for roommates.

  “Not exactly. Fagin! Now don’t be scared, jellybean,” she said as Fagin’s distinctive howling yawn and lazy pawsteps heralded his arrival from her bedroom. She stood back and watched closely as canine met alien in her kitchen, very aware of Sanford leaning tensely forward, ready either to snatch or kick at a moment’s need. ‘But he trusts me,’ she thought as her dog’s muzzle passed sniffing over his son’s small, vulnerable head. ‘If he didn’t, there is no way he’d be letting this happen.’

  Impulsively, she reached and slipped a finger between his wrist and arm plates, just a little stroke, to ease his mind.

  His breath hitched. He looked at her, even tenser.

  Having determined that the child was neither a hamburger nor a vacuum cleaner, Fagin gave Sarah his best labradoodle, ‘What the hell, woman?’ stare and then went over to his food dish, grumbling to find it empty.

  “What kind of animal is it?” T’aki asked curiously, taking a few steps after the scruffy tail.

  “It’s a dog.”

  “I thought dogs looked different.” He stretched a finger out, drew it back fast when Fagin glanced at him, and bounced in place, wringing his hands. After a few false starts, he crept around to the other side of the floor-sniffing dog to finally venture a pat. Fagin did not react; T’aki made that rattling whistling sound again.

  “There’s a lot of different kinds of dogs. His name is Fagin.”

  “Hello, Fagin,” T’aki said, patting with great confidence. After a short pause, he looked up at Sarah. “Does he talk yet?”

  “Dogs can’t talk, honey.”

  T’aki looked surprised. “But I’ve seen them!”

  “Do you remember what I told you about human programs for pretend?” Sanford asked.

  “Oh.” T’aki patted the dog some more. She couldn’t tell if he were disappointed or merely curious, but at least he wasn’t scared. “Are you going to eat him later?”

  Sanford glanced at her.

  She guessed it was a fair question, all things considered. “People don’t…well, some people eat dogs, but not me. Fagin is my…” Ugh, did she want to explain about keeping animals in captivity for the amusement of humans? “Friend.”

  “But he doesn’t talk.”

  “No.”

  “Well, he can’t be much of a friend,” T’aki remarked, still patting. Fagin finally gave up on phantom kibble and turned around to slather the boy in tongue. Sanford twitched hard, but T’aki only laughed and clapped his hands to his face. “I like his breath!”

  “There’s a first time for everything,” Sarah said, and all at once, as if the resolution of this last uncertain meeting were all that had been sustaining her, felt like dropping down on her knees and just bawling. She looked away, blinking fast to keep the tears back, and when she was sure she could keep her voice steady for a few moments more, pasted on a big smile and said, “I bet if you go out to the yard there, Fagin will be happy to bring you his ball for a few hours of Fetch.”

  “What’s Fetch?” T’aki asked, leaning forward to offer his face for more swabbing.

  “It’s a game. He’ll teach you.” Sarah opened the glass door a little wider, still smiling. Her face felt hot and brittle. She could smell the smoke from here. “It’s dark and the fence is pretty high. I don’t think anyone can see you.”

  “Stay close,” Sanford said. “And play quietly. No squealing.”

  “Yes, Father. Come on, dog!”

  Out they ran together, where the first thing Fagin did, Sarah saw to her weary mortification, was teach the boy to pee on the fence post.

  “I need a shower,” she said. “Can you…I mean…do you need anything or…?”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No, I’m just…” She didn’t know how to end that without sounding unbelievably elitist, which she supposed she was, relatively. “I need a shower,” she said finally.

  He made a curiously evocative gesture with one hand and crouched down in the kitchen to watch his son and her dog in the yard. “I’ll be here.”

  Which made very little sense to her, but freed her to hurry to the bathroom, strip off her smoky clothes, and turn out a hot and tear-disguising spray of water.

  Stupid, she was so stupid! What a great idea, to throw a party in their faces, just like it couldn’t possibly come back to hurt anyone! Because of her stupidity, people had been hurt, had maybe been arrested, could even have been killed! She’d thought, she’d really thought, that just because it wasn’t illegal, IBI couldn’t hurt her. She really was a fucking moron. Why would they need to hurt her, when they had a whole camp full of people they could shoot at will? They had driven armored cars down the middle of a crowded street, throwing bombs at unarmed people, at children. They didn’t need to hurt her, they just wanted her to see who they could hurt. They wanted to slap her mischievous little hands for her, and if they weren’t stinging enough already, they would be happy to slap her again.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah whispered, pressing her face to the tiles. “I am going to make a full and immediate apology. I’m going to agree with everything they say when they say the aliens started it. I’m going to take responsibility. I’m going to offer up my hands.”

  The shower drummed, non-committal.

  Sarah bathed her face, washing slowly and with head bent, for penance. She scrubbed the smoke from her hair and down the drain. She pulled on her threadbare robe and tied it shut and stared at herself in the steamy mirror. She wanted to see a child there, a scared and stupid child who was ready to cry her apologies, but she didn’t and she really didn’t know why not.

  Because even the smallest good things matter.

  “Oh bull,” she whispered. She touched the fading bruise under her eye, felt the dull throb of the cracked bone beneath, and then looked at her hand, the palm of her hand, where Sanford’s finger had lingered so long.

  “It was worth it,” she said to herself.

  That was the dead-wrong attitude to have.

  “It was still worth it.”

  Maybe, but she’d better not sound that way when she called IBI or the riots were never going to be allowed to stop. Nobody cared what the aliens did to themselves inside the containment walls. This was all about making sure Sarah Fow
ler learned her lesson. Had she?

  “I can say I did.”

  Kate had always told her she was a good liar. She hoped she could be as persuasive even when no one could see her huge, honest eyes.

  Sanford was just as she’d left him when she returned to the living room in her warm cotton robe. His antennae twitched in her direction, but he didn’t speak, not even when she dialed the office, gave her name, and asked to be patched through to the Alien Incident division. It seemed a very long wait on hold, devoid of music, and when it was over, she was unpleasantly surprised to hear Mr. van Meyer on the other end of the line.

  “I am so glad to hear you made it away,” he said by way of greeting, his voice coffee-dark with concern. “We thought you might have been trapped inside.”

  “No, sir. Your security response team was very thorough.”

  “I shall pass along your praise. Piotr will be pleased.”

  “Mr. van Meyer—” Here are my hands. “—this is all my fault. It was my idea and I…I just thought I could throw it all together and I didn’t know what I was doing and I was way in over my head before I knew it. I’m so sorry.”

  Sanford’s head turned slightly. That was all.

  “Ja?” Calm. Mildly concerned. Waiting.

  “I was only trying to help. The community center here in the neighborhood has all these events on the calendar and…I thought it was such a good idea. I’ve been having so much trouble getting all my census reports and I thought…I just thought a little party with my clients and their families could show them I was working for them. I just wanted to meet them and be…”

  Sanford could hear her. He was right there, listening.

  “…and be their friend instead of the enemy,” she said, her gut twisting. She wished he’d look at her, even glare at her. He just crouched there, silent, watching T’aki and Fagin running back and forth in the yard. She turned away, facing herself into the corner and shutting her eyes. “It all got out of hand so fast. It’s my fault, Mr. van Meyer. I take full responsibility.”