Not One of Us

by Neil Clarke

  Several people applauded this impassioned speech, and Otis’s face grew red from embarrassment. But then Todd Myklebust, always a wiseass, said, “Ah, sedition. Is that right enshrined in the Constitution, too?”

  For a moment the meeting lapsed into nervous silence. Otis and Todd had spoken out loud what the others had only come up to the edge of saying. Then everyone started talking at once.

  Up to this point in the discussion Ben had stayed silent. That was his style: remain above the fray, the calm militia commander. Now he put down the footrest of Paula’s plush blue recliner and rocked into an upright position. The uproar stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Everyone turned to look at him.

  “George,” Ben said, “you’ve been doing some reconnaissance. Why don’t you tell us what you’ve learned?”

  Although no one would guess it to look at him, unshaven, shambling George Brainerd had once been an Army Ranger. His skills had immeasurably aided both Lewisville and Ben’s wartime ascent to the top of the town’s chicken-coop ladder. He was not, however, one of Ben’s acolytes. (Although George had not gotten up to offer that easy chair to the mayor, either! Reggie was squeezed between Dave and Flora on the sectional sofa.)

  Now Ben’s question made George look unhappy. “Their communications equipment isn’t much better than ours. I didn’t see anything fancier than off-the-shelf shortwave. No cell phones and they haven’t set up any dishes, so my guess is that the military hasn’t launched new satellites yet. No indication of aircraft, not even a recon balloon. They may patch the lines out of Lewisville for landline service, but that’ll take time.”

  “Until then,” Ben said, “we take away their radios and they’re completely isolated.”

  “Sure,” said George, looking unhappier. “If we take away all of them.”

  “Then we eliminate them,” Otis said.

  “You mean kill them?” Flora said. “Otis, you are a bloodthirsty son-of-a-bitch.”

  Otis shifted uncomfortably. “Well, probably they’d surrender long before that.”

  “What do we do with them when they do surrender?” George asked. “Or if they don’t? What will the Army do when an entire battalion disappears after going to look for a downed eetee ship?”

  “We could get the enemy to do the job for us,” said Otis. “We could send them into a trap. Then no one would know we were involved.”

  “So,” George said, “you want to set up your fellow human beings so aliens can kill them for you?”

  Silence fell on the room. Apparently even Otis felt that sounded nasty.

  Then George said, “What do you think, Mr. Mayor?”

  That was, Reggie knew, an appeal for his help. Reggie was flattered. And usually persuading people to a course of action was something he liked to do, something he was good at. But tonight the power of his words was far less important than their real-world consequences. When one boat was going to sink, and you didn’t know whether it would be Ben’s or the Army’s, you needed to make very certain you had a place on both boats.

  He sighed audibly and rubbed his forehead. “I agree with George that you have to think about the long term. Unless we have weapons that provide a decisive advantage over the Army—that would allow us to keep the Army and everyone else out of Lewisville for the foreseeable future—all an attempt at secession will accomplish is make our situation worse.”

  So far, so good. No one could accuse him either of pushing for Otis’s little revolt, or of siding with the evil invading Army. People were turning from Ben to Reggie. Ben looked sour but not yet angry.

  “You want to hand them a petition?” Jim said. “We, the undersigned, protest your wholesale abuses of civil rights, the U.S. Constitution, and common decency?”

  “Oh, sure,” Reggie said. “As a first step. But we need something that will make it worthwhile for them to negotiate—in earnest—instead of rounding us all up. I’ve been wondering, why is the Army spending all its resources to gather up not just every last piece of eetee salvage, but nearly every person who’s worked with it? Does anyone here believe this disease nonsense? I think instead they’re looking for something, but they don’t yet know what it is.”

  George had leaned forward and was listening intently. Flora said, “And you think that if we could figure out what that thing was, if we could find it first, it would give us an advantage in negotiations?”

  “Maybe they’re searching for a key that activates the fear guns,” said Dave. Jim objected, “We’ve been looking for it for a year and turned up squat. How do you propose we find it now?”

  His ploy was at least half working, Reggie thought. They were listening. They were beginning to think twice. Reggie the voice of reason, Reggie the idea man. When he saw George opening his mouth to add to the discussion, he even began to hope they two could convince the others to forego the uprising altogether.

  But then George abruptly shut his mouth. And Otis burst out, “Reggie’s right! We force them to negotiate! We do it right away, while we still have some weapons. If we get back what they’ve taken, they’re at a disadvantage. Look: a few hundred of them, fifteen thousand of us. Ben, they can’t keep control if we don’t let them—”

  “No, no,” Reggie said, “that isn’t what I was saying—” But like Otis, Jim, Dave, Todd and even Flora had turned back toward Ben. They looked to Ben to decide the fate of Lewisville.

  Oh, how that burned Reggie.

  And now Ben spoke. “I’ve heard some good points. We can’t throw away the lives of our men. We do have to think about the long term. But we can’t let things go on the way they’re heading. We take our weapons back, we force new terms on the Army, but no big battles. That’s not a winning proposition.”

  So that was the decision. They fell to planning how they were going to break into Reggie’s warehouses. Reggie had a physical sensation of sliding uncontrollably down the hen house ladder toward the guano at the bottom. And here he had thought the Army’s arrival might make Ben a little circumspect.

  To ensure his own survival, he had to get rid of Ben one way or the other. But how to do so safely? He couldn’t simply go to Colonel Fikes and report tonight’s meeting. For one thing, Reggie had made no secret of his afternoon visit to the colonel. Ben would be keeping a close eye on Reggie now.

  It was amusing to imagine Ben sweating at hard labor in “indefinite quarantine,” somewhere deep in a government reservation with nothing but sagebrush and jackrabbits for a hundred miles in every direction. It was considerably less amusing to contemplate what Ben might do to avoid such a fate. A bullet, say, speeding into Reggie’s back from out of the shadows. Such things had happened in the last year.

  At last Ben concluded the meeting by saying, “Now, folks, we’ve got to be off the streets before curfew. Be careful going home.”

  Reggie left with George through the back door. Jim Hanover followed them. They skulked along the shadows between Paula’s raspberry patch and the Fortescues’ pole beans. Far away, a coyote yipped into the chill of evening.

  “Good try,” George said to Reggie in a low voice.

  Wondering why George had suddenly dropped his opposition to the ridiculous plan, Reggie glanced back at him. That was why, framed in Paula’s candlelit kitchen window, he saw Ben and Otis talking. Otis appeared to be very excited. So Ben had a second, secret plan, one catering to Otis’ enthusiasms.

  “It wasn’t good enough,” said Reggie.

  George went his own way, but Jim followed Reggie silently home, saying goodbye only at Reggie’s front door. Jim’s own darkened house stood across the street. Jim would now, Reggie thought, keep watch through his windows. Another of Ben’s deputies was no doubt already guarding Reggie’s back door.

  4.

  Annoyed, but not wanting to argue in the hearing of the security guard, Anna King buzzed George Brainerd into the morgue corridor. George was discreet and sympathetic to her work. But she preferred no witnesses, and no interruptions.

  She waited to
finish the last careful slice exposing the corpus minutalis— so she had named the organ, in honor of its resemblance to hamburger— before she buzzed George through the door of the autopsy room as well.

  “Pee-yoo!” said George, and then, shambling closer to peer over her shoulder, “Holy shit, doc, that’s fresh kill.”

  The sight of him kindled anticipatory warmth on Anna’s skin. Pavlovian conditioning. She firmly ignored it and turned away to pick up her digital camera. “Yes,” she said, snapping photographs of the minutalis, “and I want to keep working on it while it still is fresh. You know how fast they deteriorate. Now, what’s so important that it can’t wait until morning? Haven’t our Army friends instituted a curfew, and doesn’t it start in about five minutes?”

  “I was kinda hoping I could stay here.” He grinned at her.

  “You’ll be cold.”

  “Not my idea of romance, either,” said George. “The drawers are a bit small for two people.”

  He almost made her smile. At the same time—it must be fatigue that rendered her so vulnerable—his words caused her throat to constrict. Did he really think their trysts in empty hospital rooms, never the same one twice, deserved the term romance?

  The glass partition on the far side of the table reflected its own judgement: herself, brown-haired and petite, neat in her spotless lab coat and face mask; him in unkempt flannel shirt and baggy jeans, face unshaven, hair uncombed. At least today he wasn’t sporting his usual assortment of firearms.

  They had nothing in common outside of bed. She still felt awkward saying his given name. Her sleeping pill, was how she thought of him. Since the starship had crashed on Cortez Mountain, it was either George, Ambien, or a long wakeful night in the morgue.

  “Doc,” he said, staring down at her prize specimen. He rocked back and forth on his heels. “This isn’t the best time to have an eetee in your morgue.”

  She picked up her scalpel again. “What, is the sheriff on the warpath?”

  “Ben—fuck no, it’s the Army you should worry about.”

  “They’ve been here already,” she said, beginning to sever the major nerves leading from the minutalis to the brain proper.

  “Here? In the morgue?”

  “We gave them a tour of the hospital today. Don’t look so horrified. They didn’t unzip any body bags, and they were kind enough to give us diesel to run our generators. Is that all you came here about?”

  George was still rocking on his toes. Usually he stayed relaxed, even irreverent, under the worst of circumstances. “Ben wants to know if we can have some kind of strong narcotic, like in a hypodermic or something.”

  “What are you boys up to now?” she asked, but she didn’t expect an answer. She knew such little favors were the quid pro quo that enabled George to keep Ben from shutting down her research altogether. Still, she wondered if the timing of this particular request should give her cause for hesitation. Even she had noticed the discontent abroad in Lewisville.

  “I can give you some Fentanyl. But I’ll have to get it from upstairs. Is tomorrow morning soon enough?”

  “Sure,” said George. “I guess.”

  But he showed no sign of leaving. She thought she had made it clear that she had no time for him tonight. Unfortunately, she could not rely on the eetee itself, sliced open from sagittal crest to cloacal canal, to drive him away. Such sights and smells did not disturb George.

  Anna leaned over the table for better access to the left posterior pseudothalamic nerve. It required concentration to sever cleanly, running as it did through a layer of tough and slimy dura. Naturally George chose that moment to pick up one of her scalpels and prod at the section of skin and skull she had sawed out for access to the creature’s brain stem. The mucous that protected a live and healthy eetee’s skin had dried to a hard, yellowish crust. As George poked at it, a flake of the crust dropped onto the table.

  “Get your hands away!” Anna said. “You aren’t even wearing gloves!”

  He pressed on the flake with the scalpel, crumbling it, and frowned. “Doc, I’ve handled a lot of dead ones in the last year. I’ve been covered in splat. I’ve had ’em keel over on top of me and vomit in my face. If they were going to make me sick, wouldn’t it have happened already?”

  They had discussed this topic before, but today there was a new, speculative tone in George’s voice. “You’re wondering about the Army’s quarantine regulations?” she asked. Again George did not answer. “Well, perhaps they’re justified—in principle. There are plenty of diseases with a long incubation period, and if you didn’t know what to look for, you couldn’t spot the infection.”

  “As you’ve said. AIDS. And mad cow disease.”

  “Creutzfeldt-Jakob,” she corrected.

  “And kuru.”

  Surprised he had heard of an obscure disease of New Guinea cannibals, Anna glanced up. George had been doing a little research on his own? She knew George wasn’t stupid, despite his unkempt, sometimes goofy persona. In his own way, he was one of the smartest people in Lewisville.

  “But those are hard to catch,” George said. “A quarantine wouldn’t have much effect. And no one here has been eating any eetee brains.” Then he reverted to form. He poked at the minutalis, making it quiver like Jell-O, and grinned again. “Sure looks like it would cook up good on a grill, though.”

  Anna had not eaten dinner. The image was unfortunate. Her mouth watered and her stomach grumbled. She sliced away the last of the dura, and at last was able to slip her gloved hand beneath the minutalis and lift it onto the scale.

  One-point-five-four kilos. A middling weight. From the accounts of Ben’s deputies and her own labors here, she had become convinced that variation in the size of this particular organ correlated with social or military rank. The eetees with the very largest minutalis were always the ones carrying the fear guns and directing the others. Her first theory had been that the minutalis manufactured dominance pheromones, but then she had begun to wonder about the magnetic anomalies, and the odd rabbit-ear deposits of metallic compounds in the sagittal crest—

  George tapped his scalpel on the metal table. “Doc, we haven’t talked about it in a long time—have you or Joe Hansen made any progress on how the eetees use the fear guns?”

  “Oh, sure,” she said, removing the minutalis to a tray under the hood. She started to wash it down with ethanol. “Molecular microwave transmitters. Proteins with encapsulated crystalline segments, manufactured inside specialized neural tissue. That’s how the eetees communicate with each other, too.”

  “What?” The stark astonishment in his voice made her turn. “Have you said anything about this to anyone else?”

  “I’m being sarcastic, George,” she said crossly.

  “But you have a theory.”

  “Guesses. Flights of fancy. I’m not a neurochemist or a molecular biologist, or, for that matter, a physicist, and I don’t have the resources—”

  “But you have evidence—”

  “Nothing worth the name.”

  George gazed down at the eetee. “Too bad we couldn’t ever bring you a live one and do the CAT scan thing. See what lights up when they do different things.”

  “No, on that particular idea I’m in complete agreement with the sheriff.”

  The last thing in the world Anna wanted was a live eetee to experiment on. She did not even like George in her morgue. She wanted it cold, silent, and stark, filled only with her well-tended garden of the dead. She wanted to keep dissecting her specimen, taking it apart organ by organ, slice by tiny slice, protein by protein. Over the dead she had total control.

  But she also wanted George to stay. She wanted to touch his warm flesh and feel his hands on her own skin. It was the only thing these days that made her feel like a human being.

  “What’s really on your mind, George?” she asked.

  “Doc,” he said, “I know you aren’t going to like this. You need to clean out your lab. Tonight. Get rid of your friend here.
Destroy all your samples and slides. Remove all your files. Hide them—incinerate them.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Anna said.

  “It’s not Ben you’re dealing with anymore. The Army is confiscating everything that came out of that ship—”

  “So I’ve heard. They want the goodies for themselves.”

  “They are also quarantining anyone who’s worked with eetee goodies, and anyone who’s had contact with eetees dead or alive.”

  “Not to mention anyone who protests the policy,” Anna said. “It’s not a real quarantine, George. If the Army was serious about an outbreak, the first people they would isolate would be those with the greatest exposure. And that’s you deputies.”

  “I disagree that they’re not serious,” George said. “They are extremely serious. And very soon someone will tell them about Dr. Anna King and how she trades pharmaceuticals for eetee corpses in good condition. How you have a whole fucking eetee research project down here.”

  “I keep a very clean lab,” Anna said. “They can check it if they want. I can’t believe the Army could be less sensible than the sheriff on the subject of basic research.”

  “Oh, yes, they could be,” said George. “You know, don’t you, that Joe and all of his files have disappeared?”

  Anna had heard, but she’d dismissed it as a wild rumor. The thought of ignorant soldiers ransacking her lab, her refuge, her life—destroying a year of work—terrified and enraged her. She tried to push the thought away. “I’m happy to share everything I’ve learned, though I’m sure people elsewhere with better equipment have found out a whole lot more than I have.”

  “Suppose,” George said, “sharing is not the goal. Suppose they want to know everything you’ve learned, and then make sure no one else ever sees that information.”