Welcome to the Greenhouse

by Gordon Van Gelder

  Then, thank God, he was gone.

  “Nice,” Bobby hissed as he left.

  “Yes. An interesting tactic,” MacClure noted on his way out. “

  Fuck you,” Taiesha told him.

  The town of Atwater looked far more attractive after dark.

  Walking the streets by the light of the moon, Taiesha could no longer see all the peeling paint, or the mismatches where some repairs had been made, using whatever was handy and not what was actually needed. She could, however, still smell the miasma born of mud and rotting wood and broken sewer lines. She could hear random gunshots, and live music—amateur stuff, but lively, involving a fiddle, at least two guitars, and a number of drums.

  They were holding a dance in the torch-lit parking lot of a minimall. At least thirty couples were stomping away in a reeling line dance. Where was Moreland?

  There. He fired a six-shooter into the sky, and then tipped a bottle back, draining it while other men crowded in to congratulate him.

  The sight of him burned her. She felt it most in her gut, where a tight knot of anger still nestled below her heart. With every indrawn breath, too, she felt red hot slivers of pain in her chest, as if she’d been hit by invisible shrapnel. “Damn you!” she whispered and fingered the butterfly knife in her pocket.

  Then, because no one had seen her as yet, she slid into the lengthy shadow cast by an abandoned Greyhound bus. She hunkered down beside a tire that reeked of old urine. About twenty minutes went by before she got her first chance at Moreland. He fired four more rounds and drank three more beers in the meantime, then snagged a fresh bottle and staggered away from his buddies. As he neared the shadows, he holstered the hog leg and started to fumble with his fly.

  Taiesha rose in a single smooth movement and placed herself in his path.

  “Hey!” Moreland exclaimed. “It’s my Ghetto Tech lawyer!” He grinned broadly. “How the hell are ya?”

  Taiesha smiled at him. “I’m just fine. I was wondering how you are.” Then, pointedly, she checked out the package he was still attempting to lay bare.

  The mayor’s surprise didn’t keep him from lurching a few inches closer. The stink of beer-breath enveloped her as Moreland leered. “I could show ya,” he offered.

  “Why not?” she replied. But when he tried to press her against the

  bus, Taiesha slipped out of his grasp and took his hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go somewhere a little more private.”

  With little urging, he followed her back toward the waterfront and a dirt towpath running alongside the water. Two and a half blocks was all, and he just barely made it that far before he dropped his beer bottle. “I gotta water m’lily,” he mumbled, and pawed at his crotch. He paid no attention at all to Taiesha.

  She stood there, staring at his sweaty neck while her fingers traced out the long sleek steely shape of the knife’s handle. Come on, she said to herself. The man is a kid-killer. He’s a thief whose stealing doomed an entire town. Even if he saved his own in the process, he did in hundreds of other people. Give him a power base here he can build on, and who knows what kind of a monster he’ll be?

  But if she cut his throat, they would know it was murder—the whole town of Atwater. At best, they’d blame the surviving Izquierdos. What little good she’d done for them would be undone again, and they probably wouldn’t survive that. The townies might very well blame the Queen’s crew for it too, and they’d come after everyone.

  Damn it all! She let the knife slide back into her pocket. This had to look like an accident, and it had to happen while the Izquierdos were still in protective custody.

  She reached for her injection gun, but then hesitated. In cold blood, it felt different. It felt wrong. In his drunken confusion, the mayor was nearly as helpless as Kayla, that day of the raid on her suburb. He wasn’t a child, but he wasn’t much of a man either.

  Then Moreland grabbed her and pulled her in close. “Come on,” he mumbled. “Help me out, honey. M’zipper’s shtuck.” And the smell of him did it. The combined effluvia, B.O., rotgut, gunpowder, and manly testosterone rolled off his unwashed expanses and brought back too much of that godawful day. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get any air past red splinters of agony lining her ribs.

  Gasping, she stuck the gun’s barrel into his armpit and fired twice.

  The hair there would keep anybody from noticing the needles’ reddish entry points.

  He didn’t seem to even feel it. Moreland just jerked back a bit. Then, all of a sudden, he lost his grip on her, slid to the ground, and rolled onto his back.

  First things first, Taiesha told herself, wheezing a bit. Disarm the clown.

  She undid his gun belt’s buckle, letting the ends fall away on either side. The second belt, the one holding his pants up, she left alone. Then she found and pulled down the zipper on his Levi’s. She fished out his limp dick and clucked at it. Sizewise, not very impressive, she thought. Then again, it would certainly serve her present purpose.

  Once his clothing was rearranged, she tipped Moreland over the edge of the tow path and watched his ass slide down the muddy bank, into the water. A white froth of bubbles erupted as soon as his fat head went under, and once his lungs had emptied out, the man doubled over. He vomited some of the swill he’d been drinking when his body tried for that next breath but got only water. He opened his eyes too, and scared the hell out of her just for a second. Then it was too late. He was sinking down into the inky depths, his face as pale as the moon above. It got smaller and smaller, and then simply vanished.

  For four long minutes, she stood there and watched, but he didn’t come up again. Later, she thought. He’ll turn into a floater and wash up along the bank. Whether he does or not, someone will find him, and that’ll be that.

  Taiesha nodded, satisfied that Moreland would shoot no more children, would steal no more lifelines from other small towns, and would get no leg up to positions of real power.

  Down inside her, a tightness had eased up. She carefully pulled in a deeper breath, experimental and somewhat tainted by the warm fishy waterfront smell of the place, but the knot underneath her heart was gone, and the pain in her chest along with it. She pulled in two more. Then she bent down and used her scarf to erase her own footprints along the path, leaving only his and the bottle he’d dropped. She arranged the gun belt she’d taken off him beside it before standing back to inspect the results.

  Okay. Hopefully, the locals would stumble across all this first thing in the morning, and then go looking. When they located Mo-reland’s corpse, they’d also find his fly open and figure it out. Clearly, he’d gotten totally smashed and developed a powerful need to pee. He’d dropped his stuff in the course of relieving that need, and somewhere along the way, he’d fallen into the water and drowned, too damn drunk to crawl out again.

  Taiesha started to turn away from the little scene, taking care not to step off the grass, but she froze when a voice rumbled out of the darkness behind her.

  “Nicely done,” said MacClure.

  The words hit her amidships, like ice bullets. Oh, God.

  “In fact,” he continued, stepping into the moonlight, “I don’t think I could have done any better.”

  Say what? She made herself finish the turn so that she wound up facing him.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded, as if that part mattered somehow when he’d seen her do murder.

  The Scotsman smiled. “Completing my evaluation.”

  She stared at him with a certain dreadful fascination, waiting for the snake to strike. “And what,” she finally had to ask, “are you going to tell the attorney general?”

  “Nothing,” he answered affably. “I don’t work for him, or for the state.”

  “You’re a fed?”

  This evoked outright laughter. “I’m with the U.N.” he explained, “not the U.S.”

  So… did that mean she wasn’t dead? Or was this whole thing about to become “international”?

>   “I’m not really an auditor,” said MacClure, “as you’ve probably guessed.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “You.

  ” Hunh?

  Taiesha couldn’t make sense out of that. Did he mean to arrest her? All by himself? Or was this about blackmail, about using her? For what?

  He shook his head just as if he knew what she was thinking and said, “I’m a headhunter. I heard about you and needed a closer look.”

  More nonsense.

  He lost the grin. “Look, I have a position I’m trying to fill. A job that needs a very specific type of person.”

  She peered at him, half-minded to run. “And that would be?”

  “Someone who can handle herself and keep a cool head under fire. Somebody who understands the law, but also knows what’s truly at stake. Who’s not in it just for the rush or the money. I need people who can put on a show, but who can also think… and act… outside the box. Who can and will see justice done, whatever it takes.”

  If by that he meant what he’d just seen…

  “I am not an assassin,” Taiesha told him, although her right hand had already reclaimed her injection gun.

  “If I thought you were, you’d already be dead.”

  Her hand paused, the gun still mostly holstered. She thought about those extra scars of his, hidden by hair on his neck and his jawline, the way he’d snuck up on her here in dead silence, and his current air of complete self-assurance.

  He watched her make that reassessment, and then the decision to hold off. He smiled again. “If you like, you can go on this way, one case at a time, one killer at a time. Or…”

  She waited him out, determined not to take the bait, and he finally gave in, saying, “… you can expand the scope of your work to a somewhat larger scale.”

  Meaning… what?

  “I’m starting a new agency at the U.N.,” MacClure told her. “It’s going to handle mass-casualty situations. The things that are too large for cops to take on and too small to need armies. Its focus will be on the larger pirate bands and the cannibal cults, which are mostly run by people much worse than our poor Mr. Moreland.” He nodded toward the dark waters beside her, gently lapping at the bank, where there was no longer a single sign of the mayor’s passing. “We’re going after the men and women who run the meat markets.”

  Who slaughtered whole families, Taiesha thought. Men mowing their lawns on a Saturday. Little girls who tried to hide under their beds. Women washing the dishes.

  Her left hand contracted to make a fist, remembering the water glass that she’d been rinsing out when they struck, how the shards had sliced into her own flesh as well as the man she’d decapitated that day. Would she now have a chance at the ones who’d sent him?

  She let the injection gun settle back into its holster. She took a tentative step toward MacClure, then another three around him. The Scotsman didn’t even try it, despite the big fat opportunity she’d offered him. Instead, he fell in beside her, keeping pace in perfect silence. As they began the long walk back to the California Queen, Taiesha told him, “All right, let’s talk.”

  THAT CREEPING SENSATION

  Alan Dean Foster

  “Code four, code four!”

  Sergeant Lissa-Marie nodded to her partner and Corporal Gustafson acknowledged the alarm. It was the fourth code four of what had long since turned into a long hot one—both temperature-wise and professionally. She checked a floating readout: It declared that the temperature outside the sealed, climate-controlled truck cab was ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit at two in the afternoon. Happily the humidity was unusually low, floating right around the eighty-percent mark.

  “Gun it,” she snapped. From behind the wheel Gustafson nodded and floored the accelerator. Supplying instant torque, the electric motors mounted above each of the panel truck’s four wheels sent it leaping forward. As the sharp acceleration shoved her back into her seat she directed her attention to the omnidirectional pickup mounted in the roof. “What is it this time?” she asked.

  “Bees.” The human dispatcher’s reply was as terse as it was meaningful. “Nobody dead, but two teens on their way to Metro Emergency.”

  “They’re getting smarter.” Gustafson chewed his lower lip as he concentrated on his driving.

  “Manure,” she shot back. “You’re anthropomorphizing. That’s dangerous in a business like ours.”

  Her younger subordinate shook his head as much as his contoured seat would allow. “It’s true.” He refused to drop the contention. “They’re getting smarter. You can sense it. You can see it. They don’t just crawl around and wait to be smoked anymore. They react earlier. They’re…” He glanced over at her. “They’re anticipating.”

  She shrugged and returned her gaze forward, out the armored windshield. “Just drive. If you insist, we can continue with your insane speculations after we’ve finished the job.”

  The streets of Atlanta’s outer ring were nearly deserted. Few people chose to spend money on an expensive personal vehicle anymore. Not when public transportation was so much cheaper and a steady stream of workers kept the rails and tunnels free of the insects that obscured windshields and clogged wheel wells after barely twenty minutes of driving. The lack of traffic certainly made things easier for the exterminator branch of the military to which the two people in the truck belonged. Lissa was musing on the vilm she had been reading when a sudden swerve by Gustafson caused her to lurch and curse. Her partner was apologetic.

  “Sorry. Roaches,” he explained.

  She nodded her understanding and relaxed anew. One three-foot roach wouldn’t damage the specially armored truck, but if they’d hit it full on they would have had to explain their carelessness to the cleanup crew back at base.

  As they neared their destination she lifted her reducer off its hook and made sure it fit snuggly over her nose and mouth. Like everyone else she hated having to wear the damn things. No matter how much they improved and miniaturized the integrated cooling system, you still sweated twice as much behind the device. But it was necessary. It wouldn’t do to consistently suck air that was nearly forty percent oxygen and still rising. That might have been tolerable if the runaway atmosphere hadn’t also grown hotter and distinctly more humid.

  At least she’d never been in a fire, she told herself. Like most people she shuddered at the thought. Given the current concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere, the smallest fire tended to erupt into an inferno in no time. Leave those worries to the fire brigades, she told herself. The multinational she worked for had enough to do trying to keep ahead of the bugs.

  As studies of the Carboniferous Era, the climate in Earth’s history nearest to that of the present day, had shown, the higher the oxygen content of the air, the bigger bugs could grow. Mankind’s loathing of the arthropods with whom he was compelled to share the planet had grown proportionately.

  “We’re here.” Gustafson brought the truck to a halt outside the single-family home.

  They didn’t have to look for the bees. They were all over the one-story residence they intended to appropriate. A cluster of civilian emergency vehicles was drawn up nearby. Occasionally a crack would sound from one of the tightly sealed police cruisers and a six-inch bee would go down, obliterated by a blast of micro bugshot. Operating in such piecemeal fashion the cops could deal with the bees, but only by expending a lot of expensive ammunition and at the cost of causing serious collateral damage to the immediate neighborhood. Buttoned up in their cruisers and guarding the perimeter they had established around the home, they had hunkered down to await the arrival of military specialists.

  That would be me and Gustafson, she knew.

  Already half dressed for the extirpation, she wiggled around in the truck cab as she donned the rest of her suit. An ancient apiarist would have looked on in amazement as she zipped up the one-piece reinforced Kevlar suit, armorglass helmet, and metalized boots. Once dressed, individual cooling systems were double-checked. Ten
minutes trapped inside one of the sealed suits in the current heat and humidity would bring even a fit person down. The coolers were absolutely necessary, as were the tanks of poison spray the two exterminators affixed to their back plates. When both had concluded preparations they took care to check the seals of each other’s suits. A few stings from the six-inch long bees contained more than enough venom to kill.

  “Let’s go,” she murmured. Gustafson shot her a look, nodded, and cracked the driver’s-side door.

  The bees pounced on them immediately. Exhibiting a determination and aggression unknown to their smaller ancestors, several dozen of them assailed the two bipedal figures that had started toward the house. The swarm covered that edifice entirely. From decorative chimney to broken windows it was blanketed by a heaving, throbbing, humming scrum of giant bees. Lissa grunted as one bee after another dove to fruitlessly slam its stinger into her impenetrable suit. Walking toward the house through such a persistent swarm was like stumbling around the ring with a boxer allowed to hit you from any and every angle.

  As they reached the front of the overrun house a nervous voice sounded on an open police channel on Lissa’s helmet communicator.

  “We think the queen’s around back, near the swimming pool.”

  “Thanks.” She didn’t have to relay the information to Gustafson. The corporal had picked up the same transmission.

  Working their way around to the back they found the swarm there even thicker than what they had encountered out front. Surrounded by increasingly agitated workers, the queen had settled herself into a corner of the house where workers were already preparing hexagonal wax tubes to receive the first eggs. She never got the chance to lay them.

  “You know the routine,” she muttered into her helmet pickup.

  “Start with the queen, work back to front.”

  Holding his sprayer, her partner nodded even as he opened fire.

  The killing mist that would render the house uninhabitable began to send bees tumbling off the walls, roof, and one another. Most staggered drunkenly for a few seconds before collapsing in small black and orange heaps. Lissa kicked accumulating piles of plump, boldly striped bodies aside as she and Gustafson finished up in the back yard and started working their way around to the front.