Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

  Part of the psychologist’s report was composed of weasel words, but the overall meaning was clear. The Walking Dead man was aware of what had been done to him, but unlike a rape victim or any other kind of victim, didn’t seem to care, even though he had to be aware that even those feelings had been imposed on him. That made a depressing kind of sense, the President decided. A person normally wouldn’t act to change their lives unless they felt strongly about the need to change their lives and if the Walking Dead couldn’t feel strongly about anything…he looked over at Pepper and wondered how she felt. She’d been a test subject for experimental technology in her life. How did she feel about that?

  But it was the conclusion that really worried him. The doctors had considered attempting to remove the implant, but from what they’d found as they scanned his head, the implant had somehow grown threads that ran through his entire brain. An attempt to remove the implant, they decided, would probably kill the victim, or leave them permanently brain dead, even if the implant didn’t have some kind of failsafe mechanism wired in to prevent removal. It didn’t seem likely that they could disable it either. Any attempt to do so would definitely kill the victim. The Walking Dead would remain Walking Dead until they could force the aliens to undo what they’d done, if that was even possible.

  He looked down at the list of known Walking Dead and shivered. Some of them were unknowns, both to him and the country, the remainder were a list that could have come from any reception in Washington. There were political leaders and elected representatives, military and police officers, managers and business experts…the list went on and on. Some of them, according to Karen’s reports, had attempted to defy the aliens and had been rewarded by being transformed into Walking Dead, others had just been scooped up, transformed and then returned to their prior positions. The prospect was a daunting one. The aliens didn’t have to rely on collaborators with dubious motives. They could make as many collaborators as they liked. What was the value of a man standing up and defying the aliens if they could just implant him and learn everything he knew?

  The report from the underground CIA research centre wasn't much better. The CIA had been quietly spearheading a project into brain implantation – the President didn’t even want to think why – but they had never been able to produce anything as effective as the alien implants. Their implants worked by rewarding or punishing the victims for their thoughts, giving them orgasmic doses of pleasure or sharp blasts of pain as the situation demanded. It was little more than a crude form of brainwashing and results had been mixed, although the researchers had only had a limited number of Death Row prisoners to use as test subjects. They’d attempted to sell the program to the President’s predecessor as a way to prevent criminals from re-offending – an implant could be used to stun a criminal on the verge of committing a violent act – but he’d been appalled. The President held his predecessor in contempt, yet for once he was forced to agree with him. The whole process smacked more of Nazi Germany than the United States of America. It was grossly immoral to carry out research on human subjects…

  And yet, without such research, Pepper would never have had her artificial eye. There were soldiers, sailors and airmen who had survived, even returned to duty, because of research that had been originally carried out on prisoners who would otherwise have received a lethal injection. They’d even volunteered to serve as test subjects, knowing that it would give them a better chance of life. The question echoed through his mind. Was it right to experiment on serial killers and paedophiles?

  He read through the CIA report again, but found nothing helpful. The long-term CIA aim had been to develop implanted communications systems that could be used to contact agents in enemy countries, perhaps even to create agents in enemy countries, but they hadn’t even come close to achieving that aim. Their implants had always been noticeable – they would also have been detected by a simple ELINT counter-surveillance sweep – and they hadn’t always worked properly, even with the most basic objectives. The President thought back to the alien base that had been destroyed at the South Pole. The aliens had been performing medical experiments on kidnapped humans there, before the base had been raided and nuked…had they been learning how to create the Walking Dead? The bottom line was undeniable. There seemed to be no way to free the Walking Dead from their servitude.

  And there seemed to be no limit to their fanatical loyalty. The President had read reports of Walking Dead turning their families over to the Order Police, or ordering the most horrific atrocities, or even – when captured – shouting to the aliens even under threat of death. The President shook his head sadly. He’d hoped that the Walking Dead could be freed, perhaps even used as a fifth column inside the alien ranks, but it was clearly impossible. They would just have to be terminated on sight.

  He looked up at Pepper. “They’re all going to have to be killed,” he said. If some of the vaguer weasel words in the psychologist’s report meant what he thought they meant, the Walking Dead knew, at some level, what had been done to them. They’d probably find death at the hands of their fellow countrymen a mercy. “We’ll have to put them all on the list.”

  “Yes, Mr President,” Pepper said. The President rolled his eyes. He’d been telling her for weeks that she could call him Andrew, but she seemed unwilling to take that step. They were both confined in the bunker and people confined together either got very close or fell out spectacularly. The awareness that the aliens could break in at any moment kept them both alert. The President had quietly resolved to blow the bunker – with him in it – if there was a chance that they would fall into alien hands. He didn’t want to become an unwilling Judas Goat for his country. “People have been shooting at them for weeks, of course.”

  The President snorted. The List was an internet site established on a hidden government server. It had only one purpose, compiling a list of collaborators and encouraging their targeting by resistance or independent fighters. Karen’s name was on it, something that worried him even though there was little choice. If her name wasn't on it, an alien counter-intelligence officer might look at it and start wondering why she’d been excluded. He hoped that she’d be safe – the resistance didn’t have a strong presence in Washington – but it was a problem. The last thing any of them needed was their greatest source being plugged by an independent with a hunting rifle and patriotic motives.

  He’d kept the Walking Dead off The List, at first. They’d had hopes that whatever had been done to them could be reversed, or perhaps the aliens could be induced to free them – they hadn’t asked to become Walking Dead. If they couldn’t be freed, however, they became targets, people to be killed in the hope of impeding the aliens as much as possible. Somehow, with the report of the aliens gearing up to smash resistance in Chicago and expanding the Order Police as much as possible, he doubted that anything would impede them for long. The mass evictions continued in Flyover Country, allowing the aliens to expand their cities on the ground.

  There’s a billion of them, he thought, coldly. He still got reports from the observatories and the remains of the Deep Space Tracking Network, using bases in Canada, Britain and Japan. The aliens seemed to be unloading their mothership as much as possible, spreading out their population down on the ground, displacing the human population as they expanded. They were doing the same in North Africa and the Middle East. Sparsely populated regions were becoming alien cities and industrial bases. The local population was being displaced, or exterminated. Rumour had it that the aliens had established bases in China and India as well, but with chaos spreading over the subcontinent, no one knew for sure. The Chinese Civil War raged on, while North and South Korea were struggling for supremacy and Pakistan dissolved into chaos. The years since 9/11 had seen significant improvement in the region. It had all been washed away by the invasion. Where are they going to live?

  “Put them on The List anyway,” the President said. “We may as well make it official.”

  Pepper nodded. �
�And that brings us to Chicago,” she added. “Are you ready to record a message in their support?”

  The President felt a wave of shame and rage that was more profound than anything he’d ever experienced, even before he had resigned from the army over Iraq. He could make speeches, and try to encourage people to resist, but he couldn’t do anything else to support them. The resistance might be nominally directed by him, yet he had no way to enforce his orders – and, in any case, moving more men and material into the area would be tricky. The aliens controlled the vast continental network of roads and railroads now. The resistance had strong links to the truckers and they were quite happy to transport men from place to place, but with random spot checks by the Order Police underway, it risked discovery and being captured. The Order Police…

  He ground his teeth. He couldn’t believe that there were so many Americans willing to sell out their country and serve the aliens. Some probably had no choice – it was work for the aliens or starve – but others seemed to have jumped into it willingly. It wasn't as if the rewards weren't considerable either; the aliens not only paid in their own money, but whores and supplies were freely available to the traitors. No matter how many of them were killed by the resistance, hundreds more would come forward to take their place, at least until the aliens were defeated. The President felt a moment of sympathy for the French and any other country that had had to survive under occupation. The aftermath had almost torn them apart. It would do the same to America.

  “I better had,” he said. He’d urged the local resistance to choose the best course of action, hating himself even as he’d spoken. It had sounded weak, even to him, a suggestion that he wasn't willing to grasp the buck with both hands. Truman had once said that the buck stopped with the President, yet how could he, in a bunker, decide the best course of action. Only the men on the ground could do that. “Do you have the camera ready?”

  “Of course,” Pepper assured him. “Just give me a moment to warm it up and you can make your speech.”

  The President looked over at a map he’d hung on the wall. Blotchy red marks showed where the aliens had landed and started to set up their bases and cities. The more he looked at it, the more he suspected what the aliens were really trying to do. They could hammer alien collaborators all year without really impeding the aliens at all. The aliens might even intend to force the humans to burn off their combat power by fighting each other. Bringing in Arab troops to America was guaranteed to spark off an explosion – the ravings on the internet proved that, if nothing else – and humans would be killing humans, expending war materiel that couldn’t be easily replaced. The resistance had vast numbers of tiny production plants for bombs and other weapons, but mass production was no longer an option. How many Arabs and Americans alike would be killed because of the aliens? The latest reports suggested that over fifty thousand Arab troops were on their way. A SSN had taken the risk of firing cruise missiles at an Arab detention camp in Saudi, but there had been no way to obtain post-strike information to determine what had happened. The aliens had hunted the submarine ruthlessly, yet it had escaped. The President found that bitterly amusing. At least the human race was ahead in one area…

  Yet even that might not matter. In his research after the UFO had crashed, the President had read an oddly-dated science-fiction novel about alien invasion. The aliens had been remarkably primitive by some standards, yet they’d crossed the gulf of interstellar space and occupied Earth’s high orbitals. As long as they’d held that control, they couldn’t be beaten…and the situation he faced, in some ways, was comparable. The aliens had hundreds of spacecraft in orbit around Earth. They could administer the final sanction at any moment if they came close to defeat. Firing missiles from an SSBN probably wouldn’t harm them in the slightest. How long could an insurgency sustain itself without outside support?

  “There is the other piece of information from Karen,” Pepper said. The President, silently glad of the change of subject, looked over at her. “What do you intend to do about it?”

  In the olden days, before the invasion, the US President would have been very involved with the Middle East and its endless conflicts. Now…it was hardly on the list of concerns and the thought that he could do anything about it was absurd. He couldn’t control what took place on American soil, let alone the Middle East. The last of the American carriers had been interned in Britain. The remainder had been sunk. The American soldiers on deployment in the Middle East had either gone into the camps or into the underground – or had been killed by the Arabs. The only other option was a nuclear strike, against…what?

  “Nothing,” he said, finally. “Pass the information on to the Brits. They can pass it on to the next set of victims. They’ll have to handle it themselves.” He rubbed his eyes angrily. “We’re out of the world policing business.”

  Pepper didn’t argue. “Yes, Mr President,” she said. “Smile for the camera?”

  ***

  “We have to go there,” Michael Francis Carey snapped. Nicolas rubbed the side of his head. There was always a rivalry between the Marines and the SEALs, even though they worked together fairly often, but this was something different. “My family is in the suburbs in Chicago!”

  Nicolas counted to twenty under his breath. He could understand his subordinate’s concern – Nancy was only a few miles away, even if he couldn’t go visit her for fear of drawing attention to her location – but he wasn't thinking straight. The resistance team was on foot. Chicago was hundreds of miles away. They’d never get there in time to do more than see the rubble.

  “And there is nothing we can do to help them by going there,” he said, tightly. “We couldn’t even get there without being picked up by the Order Police!”

  “So we shoot our way through them,” Carey snapped. “We’ve done it before.”

  “We lost three people over the last week,” Nicolas reminded him. “We ran into that checkpoint and we had to fight our way out of the trap. If they had known we were coming, none of us would have gotten out alive. We pissed them off pretty badly, as you may recall. How do you intend to get there in time to help?”

  He watched as his words sank into Carey’s head. “But we…”

  Nicolas nodded. “The best thing we can do is continue hurting them as best as we can,” he said, softly. “That’s what we’re going to do. There’s a genuine alien base not too far away and when they’re being ground to sausage meat in Chicago, we’re going to hit it. There is nothing else we can do?”

  Carey wasn't happy, he saw, but he knew that Nicolas was right. What other choice did they have?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chicago, USA (Occupied)

  Day 140

  Edward Tanaka lay on a rooftop and peered towards the Arab camp. The mismatched force’s weaknesses were all-too-evident, but it was becoming clear that their commander, whoever he was, wasn't entirely a slouch. Edward’s experience with Arab commanders had been decidedly mixed; the New Iraqi Army had had its fair share of good commanders, while the Kuwaiti and Saudi armies had had too many officers who’d won their positions through patronage rather than competence or even time in grade. The Egyptians, Libyans, Saudis, Syrians and Yemenis shared nothing beyond Islam – sometimes not even that – and fights had been common, but their commander was steadily breaking them down into a fighting unit. Discipline was harsh. A pair of Egyptians had been hung for molesting an American woman and a Saudi had been publicly flogged for breaking into a bar and getting stinking drunk on the moonshine inside. He probably regretted that more than the flogging. Edward’s private opinion was that some of the home-brewed beers were probably in violation of international treaties against chemical warfare.

  I wonder who you are, you bastard, he thought, not without a certain degree of respect. For all the talk about how Northerners were different from the Good Old Boys in the South, Americans shared a common culture and attitude that transcended race and religion. The Arabs were united only by name and hat
ed each other more than they hated Israel or America. It had its odd moments – his father had served in the Gulf War, where fights between Arab units had been common – but all the dreams of a united Arab nation were just that; dreams. The Egyptians thought the Saudis were degenerates. The Saudis thought that possessing Mecca gave them the right to rule all of Islam. The Jordanians suspected that the Egyptians and Saudis had sold them out to Israel and the Americans. The Yemenis hated the Saudis with a white-hot fury. Anyone who could get them to work together had to be a remarkable diplomat, if nothing else. God alone knew what would happen when they came over the wall and advanced into Chicago, but it wouldn’t be for lack of preparation. The Arabs were historically bad at logistics, yet with the aliens and Walking Dead handling those, they might be able to avoid outrunning their supply lines.

  He winced as a shadow passed overhead, heading for Midway Airport. Chicago had enough urban sprawl to make landing troops difficult, even with alien technology, but they were using all the space they could to build up their forces. He wished for a MANPAD as the alien craft headed towards its landing zone, but he’d brought nothing apart from his pistol. If the Order Police caught sight of him, he’d have to escape or kill himself. He wasn’t going to become one of the Walking Dead.

  The Arabs had done a lot of boasting, but they hadn’t been very specific about what they had in mind. The Bitch Queen’s source had been much more helpful. The Arabs didn’t intend to try anything fancy. They’d massed their forces beyond the alien line – at IL50, Cicero Ave – and would be advancing on a wide front, aiming to crush the resistance against the Lake. It was brute force on a colossal scale and he couldn’t fault the plan. It showed a mind that had few illusions about how capable his forces actually were, or just what they could accomplish. The Green Zone and the other secure areas within the city would, he assumed, be held firmly by alien forces.