Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

  We could kill him, he thought. We could put a bullet through his head…

  But it was futile. They were all tainted now.

  “You may have the women as a reward for your services,” the Walking Dead man announced, as calmly as if he were ordering dinner. Jason felt sick again. He had never really raped a woman, although he felt a spurt of guilt at what he’d done to his sweetheart. Had that been rape, even if no force was involved? “Choose the ones you want and take them now.”

  Jason didn’t dare disobey. He sighted a teenage girl who looked just a little like his old sweetheart and went after her. She fought – they all fought – but it was futile. He forced his way inside her and tried to pretend that he was enjoying himself. Her screams tore at his soul and left him silently pleading for a mercy that wouldn’t come.

  Afterwards, they burned the town, leaving the remainder of the women alive.

  It was, the Walking Dead man said, a good day’s work.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Mannington, Virginia, USA

  Day 155

  “Lidice,” the President said, bitterly. “It’s Lidice all over again.”

  The photographs had been scattered all over the internet, taken by resistance fighters, shell-shocked local residents and – for once – reporters and photographers working for the puppet government. The mildest was one of the most shocking things that Pepper had seen, while the worst…she felt her stomach heave as she glanced at it. The young woman was barely entering her teens and her body bore the marks and scars of a brutal sexual assault. The town itself had been burned to the ground, with the surviving women and girls forced to struggle to the next town, desperate for help. A town that had once had over seven hundred residents had been left with barely three hundred. The dead or dying had just been left where they lay.

  “No,” Pepper said, flatly. She couldn’t believe it. She didn’t want to believe it. “Why would they do something like that?”

  “To scare us,” the President said. She’d rarely heard him speak in that tone and it always meant trouble for someone. She remembered him chewing out a State Department official in the first year of his presidency and the young man had stumbled away, completely stunned. He wasn't used to being cursed in terms more appropriate for soldiers on deployment. “They wanted to intimidate us and force us to put down our arms. They wanted to force the civilians not to support the resistance any longer.”

  Pepper felt her blood run cold. Mannington wasn't secure in any conventional sense of the word. If either of the two people on the surface who knew about the bunker chose to call the aliens, they wouldn’t have much difficulty trapping and catching the President, if he didn’t have time to kill himself first. They should have enough warning, but no one knew for sure how Jacob Thornton had fallen into their hands. Pepper’s nightmare was that they’d somehow inserted one of the Walking Dead into the Vice President’s security detail, even though someone so badly…wrong would have been noticed. Or maybe they’d deciphered a secure communication from the days that humanity had believed that its encryption programs were perfect. There was no way to know.

  The Vice President was speaking on the standard broadcasting channel, his face flushed and clearly unwell. Pepper had never known the hard-charging Thornton to stutter or gasp in the middle of a speech – he’d once spoken for nearly an hour without showing any ill effects – yet the puppet that wore his body stumbled and flinched as he spoke, as if he were a puppet in truth. It occurred to her to wonder if she was looking at a clone, or a hologram, rather than the VP she’d known, but surely the aliens weren't that advanced. And yet the more she saw of their technology, the harder it became to visualise an Earth free of their influence. The best humanity could hope for was a draw.

  “…Ask you all not to panic,” the Vice President said. His voice was, if anything, growing weaker. “The punishment was carried out against a village that was caught in the act of supplying rebels against the Federal Government. One hundred and seventeen people known to be assisting the terrorists were killed after a fair trial and due consideration of their cases…”

  “That’s a good one,” Pepper muttered. “Tell us another one, why don’t you?”

  “Hush,” the President said. “I want to hear this.”

  “…Invite you all to report any insurgent or terrorist activity within your area,” the Vice President continued. “If you suspect your neighbour of aiding and abetting terrorist acts, contact the Order Police at once and report him. The Order Police will investigate and punish any terrorists captured as a result of your information. Accurate information will be rewarded; inaccurate or deliberately misleading information will result in severe punishment.”

  Jacob Thornton’s image vanished from the display, to be replaced by a mindless female talking head, who started to mumble inanities about the Meaning Of It All. Pepper allowed herself a moment of disdain – the talking head hadn’t been hired for her intellect – before she looked over at the President. He was staring down at the table, shaking with fury. If he’d been an older man, she would have said that he was on the verge of a stroke.

  “Those…bastards,” he said, his voice low and angry. “Those…”

  He treated her to several minutes of swearing in at least seven different languages, without repeating himself once. Pepper listened with a certain respect. She’d been called everything under the sun in her life, mainly by people who wanted to be where she was, yet she hadn’t heard half of the President’s collection of swear words. She guessed he’d picked them up in the army, or perhaps in politics. Politics, he’d once told her in an unguarded moment, was war carried on by other means…and with less honour.

  “But there’s no honour in war,” Pepper had pointed out.

  “Exactly,” he’d said. “And there’s even less in politics.”

  His hands were squeezing the table hard enough to generate an ugly mottled pattern on his fingers. “I need to get up there and hit the bastards,” he snapped. Pepper recognised the symptoms of cabin fever and shuddered. No one liked to spend a week in a bunker, let alone several months. The USAF had had real problems recruiting men and women to man the nuclear missile silos, and they hadn’t carried the whole weight of the nation on their shoulders. “I need to get out of here.”

  “You can’t,” Pepper said, feeling a moment of pity and rage, rage at the aliens who had turned the world upside down. She wanted to join him, to take her rifle and collection of interesting tricks and kill as many aliens as she could, but it was vital that the President remained alive. He was far more important as a symbol than as anything else, certainly not just another soldier. “Mr President…you have to stay here.”

  The President swung around and fixed her with an icy glare. “Until we run out of supplies, or we are found by the aliens, or until we kill each other?”

  “Until the aliens are defeated and the nation is ours again,” Pepper said. She held out a hand and prayed that he’d take it. “It won’t be forever.”

  “They’re killing my people,” the President thundered. “They’re killing them. Man, woman, Republican, Democrat, white, black…they’re killing them, and I have to stay here in this bunker and pretend that I’m directing events!”

  “As long as you remain alive, there is a legitimate government in existence,” Pepper said, firmly. The Secret Service frowned on arguing with one’s principal, but there was no choice. Besides, she understood what was at stake for both of them. “If you were confirmed dead, Jacob Thornton would become the legitimate President of the United States, and he’s one of the Walking Dead.”

  “No one would follow him,” the President said, without conviction. He still hadn’t taken her hand. “We left orders that anything said by captive superior officers was to be disregarded.”

  “He would still have considerable influence,” Pepper said, gamely. She leaned forward and grasped his hand, surprised at her own daring. “We couldn’t run the risk of the aliens creating a
new government based around the legitimate President, either of them. You have to stay here, please.”

  She saw the President's expression and hated herself. He deserved better, but then, they all deserved better. The men and women of the modern-day Lidice deserved better than they’d gotten. No one would dare to go back and bury the dead for fear of being thought a resistance supporter. The survivors would be traumatised, yet who would take them in and help them? Americans pulled together to help one another in the wake of a disaster, but this…this was the dawn of a new dark age.

  A vision ran though her mind, one of Americans turned against one another by the aliens and their puppets. They’d shown the stick and now they were offering the carrot, rewards and promotions for those who helped defeat the resistance. Who could be trusted when anyone could betray his or her friends, for money or safety or even just for a quiet life? Who would not look upon the pictures and consider doing anything, even selling out, to save their wives and daughters from such a ghastly fate?

  She pulled him into a hug, which he awkwardly returned. The President’s wife had died before he’d entered the White House and there had been no children. As far as she knew – and the Secret Service knew almost everything about how their principals lived their lives – there had been no lover, not even a casual encounter, since the day he’d taken the Oath of Office. Becoming involved with her principal was against both regulations and common sense, yet she felt the same cabin fever he felt. She was drawing closer to him, almost against her will. It would have been easy to take the final step…

  “And they want me to send Karen orders to help the resistance,” the President said. Pepper fought to keep herself under control, cursing her sudden burst of irrationality. She’d liked Karen when she’d met her. “How can I put her in such danger?”

  Pepper let go of him and took a sip of her reconstituted coffee. “She’s already in danger,” she said. “She was in danger from the moment she sent you the first email. If the aliens cotton on to her activities, there’s nothing we can do to save her from their wrath.”

  “I know,” the President said. “She never volunteered for this. She never took an oath to serve and protect the United States. She…just started to send messages and information out of the Green Zone, information we need to help people. We don’t even know if she can do what they’re asking.”

  Pepper said nothing. She knew that Karen’s messages had been gold. The aliens – working through their puppet government – had been sweeping up humans with valuable skills and putting them to work. Some of their choices had been understandable; others had been more than a little odd - why would they want engineers, doctors and astronauts? Karen had helped them to save countless scientists from going into alien hands, sent instead to Britain or up into secret redoubts in the mountains, and if she took a more active hand, all of that was placed at risk.

  But on the other hand, accessing and understanding the alien computer network was important as well, vitally important. They had to learn how it worked so that they could defeat it, or use it as a source of information. If it required moving someone into Washington, near the Green Zone – perhaps in the Green Zone – it would have to be done, whatever the risk. Pepper wasn’t blind to the possible dangers, but the possible benefits were fantastic. Did they have any choice?

  “Then you could ask her,” Pepper said, seriously. “If she can’t do it, she can tell us so and we can think of another plan. There must be other ways to get someone into Washington and close to the Green Zone.”

  “Perhaps not,” the President said. “They have Washington locked down pretty tight these days.”

  Pepper remembered the bunker they’d used as a hiding place after the aliens had landed in Washington and the White House had been destroyed. She’d seriously considered remaining in the bunker, yet that would have eventually guaranteed their discovery, with no hope of escape. Now, everyone in Washington had an ID card and worked for the aliens, either as collaborators or grudging workers. The city itself was actually being cleaned up as thousands of men were put to work clearing rubble, rubbish and bodies from the streets, although the aliens were still keeping people away from the wreckage of their crashed ship. Pepper had a private suspicion that the aliens feared that humans would learn something useful from the wreckage, even though the monstrous spacecraft was now a burned-out wreck.

  And the President was right. The Order Police and the aliens patrolled the streets of Washington carefully, checking and rechecking papers. Anyone caught without papers was immediately arrested and taken to a detention camp, where their identity would be checked and, if they were lucky, they were released and fined some of their rations for losing their prior identity cards. There was a steady stream of horror stories about what happened to young men and women who fell into the Order Police’s hands, with rape and daylight robbery – and bribes – being common. If Karen could get someone papers and an ID card without setting off any alarms, it would make getting someone within that cordon easy. If she couldn’t…they’d have to think of an alternative plan.

  “Ask her,” she repeated. “If she can’t, we’ll think of something else. Washington can’t be the only command node on the face of the planet.”

  The President shrugged. The mothership still floated in high orbit, unloading its passengers in a steady stream. Karen’s latest report still suggested that the aliens were going after Israel, perhaps in preparation for landing more of their population in the Middle East. She concluded by noting that there were rumours of even more invasions and expansions being planned, perhaps taking Canada, Australia and Russia. If they landed in China, with the civil war underway, part of the population would welcome them. The remainder would fight to the death.

  And even without the mothership, there were three massive command ships, floating within Earth’s atmosphere. They were easy to track; one was over the Indian Ocean, a second was over the Atlantic Ocean and a third was high over Antarctica. The British analysts had suspected that they were trying to recover material from their wrecked base, although a minority opinion was that they intended to colonise Antarctica as well. Pepper rather doubted it. The aliens seemed to like it hot, not cold. They’d certainly landed enough of their people in warm countries.

  “I’ll ask her,” the President confirmed. “And now…now, we have to make another broadcast.”

  Pepper nodded, concealing her own feelings. She’d never thought of herself as a reporter before, but she was now pretty much serving as the President’s Press Secretary, along with several other roles. It wasn't easy to record footage of the President and every time they transmitted a message, it reminded the aliens that they were still at large, even though it was necessary. The country had to believe that their President was still alive.

  She reached out and gave the President another hug, feeling him sagging against her. If there had been something she could do…but there was nothing. All she could do was be there for him, and hope that she could keep back the darkness. There was no other choice.

  “Yes, Mr President,” she said. “What are you going to tell them?”

  The President’s voice was savage. “What I’ve always told them,” he said. “I’m going to tell them the truth. I’m going to tell them what happened, and why, and who did it to innocent American civilians. I'm going to urge them to make it very clear that such acts of terror do not work! I’m going to tell them to give the bastard Orcs hell.”

  ***

  The news had been all around Mannington even before the official broadcasts had deigned to mention it, but then, everyone in the area had friends or relatives in the destroyed town. Two of the women and their children – all of the male children had been killed in the brief bloody massacre – had limped into Mannington to stay with their relatives, telling their stories to anyone who cared to listen. The Mayor had held a Town Meeting and invited one of them to talk, discussing details that had made Greg blanch. As soon as he could decently leave, he’d left. H
e hadn’t been alone.

  He’d stumbled home feeling as if he were drunk. No one did that in America, no one…and yet someone had! He’d chosen to live in Mannington for a number of reasons, but security had been among the highest. His father had taught him – and Nicolas had added to the lessons – that big cities would be the first to suffer catastrophic effects if the country had a major crisis. The old man hadn’t envisaged an alien invasion, but he’d been right nonetheless. Anyone who had remained in the big cities was trapped and under close supervision by the aliens.

  The ID card in his pocket seemed to burn against his flesh, a reminder of his – and Nancy’s – vulnerability. They couldn’t leave Mannington or the surrounding area without permission, and it hadn’t taken long to discover that such permission cost a fairly heavy bribe. Some of the Order Police had taken it in goods to barter; others had made the oldest transaction of all with female petitioners. The images of what had happened to some of the female children in the nearby town rose up in front of his eyes and he felt his gorge rising. It was all he could do to vomit into a flowerbed, rather than on the pavement. He wasn't sure how he’d made it home, but he finally opened the door and saw Nancy sitting on the sofa, watching the second Simpsons Movie. Sideshow Bob was prancing across the screen and she was giggling happily, but when she saw his face, she sobered.

  “Dad?”

  “Never mind,” Greg said. Nancy wasn't his, yet he loved her. He’d always hoped to have kids of his own one day, but even so…he loved his little girl. Her father loved her too…

  Her father…

  The thought of Nancy’s body, broken and spread-eagled, rose up in front of his eyes and he ran into the toilet, throwing up everything he'd eaten until he was left doing dry heaves. The thought refused to fade, taunting him, reminding him of how he could keep her safe, at a cost.

  Her father’s life.