by Neil Clarke
“But what could they possibly want to conceal? It’s not as if the eetees are a secret!”
“Look,” said George, “the Army comes here, to an enemy crash site, but instead of going after the eetees, they devote all their manpower and attention to this—whatever it is. It’s important, a real disease, a—a real something. Maybe they don’t know exactly. Maybe they know the symptoms but not the cause—maybe they don’t know whether it’s a disease or an effect of eetee technology. But whatever this quarantine is about, for them it is taking precedence over everything else. They are serious about it.”
Anna tried once more to dismiss George’s arguments. She found she could not. She gazed wistfully at the minutalis and her waiting culture plates. “Well, then,” she said, at last, “I suppose I should take a look at Harvey Gundersen’s dog.”
“His dog?!”
“Harvey claims the dog has an eetee disease.” Anna grimaced. “That the coyotes have it, too, and they have developed not just dementia but telepathic powers. Yes, I know what it sounds like—but today he brought in the dog, and it does have some odd lumps. I said I’d do biopsies and what blood work I have the facilities for.”
“You have it here? Jesus, Anna, get rid of the dog, get rid of the eetee. Now! I’ll help you. They will come here. Your only hope is to make sure they aren’t ever able to pin this on you. Trading drugs is only a nasty rumor. You have never dissected an eetee.”
“No, George. If the dog really has an eetee disease, it needs studying and I need to tell the colonel whatever I can find out. If people are in danger from it, I’d be criminally irresponsible not to!”
“You are not listening to me,” George said. “They will take your notes and your little jars and they will take you away, too, and if I’m right they’ll take you so far away I will never see you again.”
“That’s melodramatic.”
“Anna,” he said, taking hold of her shoulders. “Please.” It was a violation of their unspoken protocol. He never touched her when she was working. The warmth of his hands percolated all the way through her lab coat and sweater. She held her own messy hands away from him.
The thing about George, the thing that had made the whatever-it-was between them possible, was that he never seemed scared. Now he was showing his fear. She didn’t like it. She certainly didn’t want George to know what she felt: how terrified she had been since the eetees had come. How, maybe, she loved him. That would be making the emotions real. That would be letting a live monster into the morgue.
She said, coolly, “Suppose Harvey Gundersen is even halfway right? You’d be asking me to trade the health of perhaps everyone on Earth for my personal safety.”
“Yes,” George said. “Let someone else figure it out.”
She shook her head and glanced one last time at her beautiful, doomed specimen. “Help me with the dog. Then I’ll clean everything out of my lab, as you want.”
5.
The four humvees wound upward through the hills. Up on the mountain, about eight miles away now, the wreck sprawled like a giant trash-can lid someone had hammered onto the ridgetop. Corporal Denise Wyrzbowski watched it as best she could while wrestling her humvee along the unpaved road. No sign of activity at this distance. She distrusted the quiet, though; eetees were always busy with something.
The rolling terrain blocked the line of sight beyond the nearer slopes, but at least here it was grassland, dry and scant. Up ahead, pine trees accumulated with altitude until deep forest blanketed the highest ridges. Too much cover for the enemy.
She didn’t feel comfortable here. She wasn’t a country girl. She had fought house to house in the San Bernadino Valley with seized eetee firearms and makeshift body armor, but that was familiar freeway-and-subdivision country. You recognized what belonged and what didn’t. Up there in the forest, she wouldn’t know whether a sudden flight of birds was a nature show or an eetee ambush.
Not that she hadn’t seen new sights in the Valley: eetees roaring along Figueroa Avenue in a Lincoln Navigator; eetee muckamucks cavorting in a swimming pool full of yellow slime; eetee grunts dead and bloated in an alleyway, lunch for a pack of feral dogs.
Movement in the sky. She tensed, then recognized it as a vulture rising on an updraft. Roadkill nearby? “What’s that?” she asked the guide, a prim Nordic-looking local named Otis Redinger.
He turned to cast a disinterested glance in the direction she pointed. “Probably a dead gook,” he said. “Or maybe a jackrabbit.”
“A dead eetee?” Adrenaline stirred in her blood. “What could kill them out here? In the middle of nowhere?”
Redinger shrugged. “They lose their body suits, get a puncture, they’re pretty vulnerable.”
“Vulnerable, my gold-plated ass!” Wyrzbowski remembered how two of the mucousy little freaks had ripped apart Lieutenant Atherton with their bare talons while hopping up and down with glee. Silently: that was the really freaky part. Everyone knew they had some kind of mind talk.
Redinger said, “A ruptured body suit, and they’re only good for a few days in the heat. Sheriff thinks they’re short of water and fighting over it. We had a dry winter, no rain at all since May—and there’s only a few small lakes up there. In town, we get our water from 300 feet underground.”
“How often do you get expeditions coming after your water?”
He shrugged again and pointed. “Turn left up here.”
A narrower gravel road led away through the hills. Wyrzbowski swung the humvee onto it, the others followed, and they began to bounce along in earnest, raising a column of dust visible to any eetee on the mountain. She glanced back. At this distance, the town had almost disappeared. A line of trees followed the course of a single winding stream. Yesterday, she had glanced over a bridge and seen that streambed almost dry. Lucky Lewisville: a year of drought, a moat of waterless grassland ten miles deep.
She thought about the water jugs they carried with them, about a shipload of eetees dying of thirst, and despite the blazing heat she took a hand from the wheel to pull on the helmet of her body armor.
A fence had been running along the right-hand side of the road. Up ahead, it bent right again and marched away across the hills, dividing fallow farmland from patchy brush. The bushes looked green. Further on, she could see the silvery foliage of cottonwoods and willows. She wasn’t a Campfire Girl, but she could guess what trees meant out here.
Water.
She braked, and the line of hummers behind them did the same. In the back seat, Lieutenant Briggs glanced around nervously.
“What’s the deal, Redinger?” she snapped at the guide. “Your sheriff claimed there was a big cache of eetee machinery abandoned here. Unguarded. But there’s water here, right? And you still say there’s no eetees camped out?”
Redinger looked offended. He was pulling out a Ruger Mini-14 that the colonel had given him leave to carry today. “We poisoned it,” he said.
“Poison?” Briggs said, leaning forward.
“That’s right. We dumped fertilizer in the pond. They can’t take it. We saw ’em die when they tried to drink or swim in the creek, too much farm runoff. One of our doctors said it must be their, ah, electrolyte balance.”
Well, gee, that could explain what had puzzled idiots like Atherton: why the downed eetees hadn’t spread out into the California farmland. They’d stayed in the suburbs for treated water fresh from the tap.
“So if it’s safe,” she asked Redinger, “why do you suddenly need the gun?”
“Eh?” He looked at his firearm. “Oh. Sometimes one of ’em gets desperate. You get some sick gooks hanging around, waiting to die.”
Wyrzbowski glanced into the back seat. “Sir?”
Briggs leaned back, nodded. “We go in. Be careful.”
She put the hummer in motion again, slowly. Soon the road dead-ended in a dirt turnaround. Beyond that lay cattails and a sheet of greenish scum about fifty yards across, hemmed in by leafy brush and cottonwoods. Way, way
too much cover.
Along the shoreline at different points, she could see the hardware the locals had mentioned, gargoyle surfaces peeking through the foliage. From here she couldn’t recognize anything, but it was enough to give the colonel a real hard-on.
She personally wished he’d worry less about a few power cells falling into civilian hands than the vicious castaways on the mountain, every one of them as eager as the Terminix man to commit mass destruction on H. sapiens. Sure, the Army desperately needed all it could gather up, both to fight eetees and to keep control of restive civilians (and they did always seem to be restive). Everyone had heard about the hushed-up disaster at Yosemite: refugees so hungry they were eating eetees, who’d used some never-specified but terrifying eetee gewgaws to slaughter soldiers and loot their supplies.
Still, the colonel wasn’t the one who had to drive his ass around right under eetee sights.
One day, Wyrzbowski thought, the so-called liberation of Earth would become a reality. She would never again have to inhale the stink of eetee splatter on a hot day. She would never again have to wonder when the next fearmonger would flatline her brain. She would never again have to worry about restive civilians shooting her in the back, or about participating in sleazy deceptions like this quarantine scam of the colonel’s. She would go back to being a citizen of a goddamn democracy, all Homo sapiens are created equal, all eetees are vulture food.
She would lay in the shade, pop a cold beer, eat a hamburger.
“Let’s go,” said Briggs. Wyrzbowski pulled down her visor and rolled out of the hummer into low crouch, and the other five followed her. At least Briggs had enough sense to put on his helmet.
A trail led along the shore in both directions. Briggs sent one group right, another left; she got the left-hand job. Some soldiers stayed with the hummers to guard them; others headed away from the pond altogether, up the slope.
Her six worked slowly along the grassy trail. She sweltered inside her armor. The sun raised a sewage-y stench off the stagnant pond, and horseflies the size of mice dive-bombed their heads. Insects in the grass fell silent as they approached and buzzed loudly again after they passed.
They reached the first pile of hardware without incident. Wyrzbowski took off a glove and gingerly touched the squat, lobed central piece. It was cool to the touch and, on the shady side, sweated condensation. Still working, whatever it was. She duck-walked around it. On the far side, a tube four inches in diameter snaked through the grass toward the pond. Her guess: some kind of purification unit.
Further along the trail, other globby Tinkertoys shone inscrutably in the sun. A lot of working hardware here. It didn’t look all that abandoned, whatever the locals claimed.
Shouts. She twisted around. They came from the hummers, but she couldn’t see well through the foliage. A plasma rifle opened up, setting a tree ablaze. And then eetee fire caught a hummer and blew it apart like the Fourth of July.
Wyrzbowski dropped on her belly and elbowed swiftly back to the others. “Back!” she hissed.
Her soldiers spread out among the trees, belly-crawling through the grass. Now the whole pond side was jumping with eetees in body suits. No, the gooks hadn’t left their little water-treatment plant unguarded.
More fire from the soldiers at the turnaround, but not as much as there should be. She reached a rotting stump, balanced her rifle, whistled the signal over her mike. While Preston and Weinberg played rear-guard, the rest chose their targets deliberately. She sighted on the nearest of the eetees hopping toward Briggs, who stood as motionless as a department-store mannequin. She pressed the trigger. Got the hopper—whoops, a little splatter on the lieutenant. Other soldiers near Briggs had turned deer-in-the-headlights, too, perfect targets. Just like Atherton. There must be a mind-bender in this crew.
Wyrzbowski tried to sort out the pattern as she picked off a second hopper. Eetees descended the hillside beyond the humvees; more had popped up on the other side of the pond—but those soldiers were returning fire, so no mind control over there. A whistle from Weinberg to the rear. Enemy on their tail, too, but her group wasn’t pissing their pants in cold terror.
Up there, then. On the hillside. She whistled another signal as she splattered a third eetee.
The other five came crawling to her. She raised her visor and whispered, in case the eetees were listening to radio. “There’s an officer up there. We’re going to get it.”
The six of them spread out again, creeping through grass and brush away from the pond. The eetees attacking them from the rear didn’t figure out what they’d done and joined the action at the humvees. Now Wyrzbowski could see the muckamuck, resplendent in the egg-sack slime of its body suit, wielding its red fearmonger while flunkies covered its spindle-shanked ass. Poor freak: A year ago it had been one of the exterminator kings of the galaxy, and now here it was on guard duty at a polluted frog pond. She wondered if the eetee mind-benders could hear human minds, if they took pleasure in the terror they caused.
She wriggled forward, hoping she wasn’t already too close to the muckamuck. One of the hopper flunkies must have sensed something. It turned toward her soldiers. Silent communication and a rush of excited hopping. A bush in Phillips’s direction burst into a flutter of shredded leaves. Someone, she thought Merlino, fired back, burning two of the hoppers.
The flunkies had left their muckamuck exposed, but it had also turned its glistening head in their direction. Searching. Not much time, Wyrzbowski thought, and right then the terror boiled out of the back of her skull.
It spilled like ice into her guts, congealed her limbs into stone. Time stopped. The hillside sharpened into impossibly sharp focus, cutting itself into her consciousness: light and shadow on a patch of wild rose; the gym-socks smell inside her helmet; a horsefly crawling across the visor.
She knew she just had to focus. Sight on the chest. Press the trigger. That’s all she had to do.
An eetee landed on her back, then exploded drippily onto her armor. Concrete encased her hands, her arms. She heard someone whimpering and knew, from experience, that it was herself. Your buddies cover your back, but you have to face down your fear by yourself. Just focus. Breathe. Press the trigger, press press press. And her finger moved—
The weight dropped from her limbs. The ice melted from her body and left her, gasping, in the hot sunlight. She managed to raise her head. The muckamuck was nowhere to be seen, though its fearmonger had come to rest in a rosebush. She grabbed a handful of grass to wipe the viscous blobs clinging to her visor, and then scooped up the fearmonger for her collection. Four officers and counting.
The grunt eetees fled the hillside. She whistled. One by one, Weinberg, Preston, and Bernard appeared. Then Merlino dragged toward her through the brush. He’d taken a burn on the shoulder plate of his armor. “Phillips?” she asked. He shook his head.
She couldn’t think about that now. She pointed down the hill, toward the single remaining humvee. As they ran at a crouch, Weinberg supporting Merlino, she took stock. It looked better than she’d expected. The party on the far side of the pond was still kicking, targeting the eetees trying to pick off survivors at the turnaround. The hoppers must have known their grand and mighty mind-bender was now only a nasty spray of goobers, because as soon as her party came up behind, they turned and fled altogether.
Briggs was gone. It was Sergeant Libnitz who gave the orders: the wounded in the humvee, others to jog behind.
Redinger appeared out of nowhere to lope beside her. He didn’t have so much as a singe-mark on him despite not being armored, but he was stinking wet from pond water. She raised her visor; she needed the air. She was soaked inside her armor, too, but from sweat.
“How come you’re still alive?” she asked.
“Jumped in the pond and swam to your side,” he gasped.
“Clever,” she said. Redinger didn’t fool her. The Lewisville militia had sent them into the ambush. When the reckoning came, she would make sure to splatter this
prick for Phillips. She wished, not for the first time, that she knew how to use her red souvenir. She would make this little fuckhead shit himself, she would make him weep, she would feed him suffering and degradation. Then she would splatter him.
Adrenaline and the rush of hatred kept her moving until they reached the junction. And then the humvee in front of her stopped. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Libnitz was shouting.
She stopped, panting and dizzy from the heat. Then saw what he swore at. Back in town, five miles away, black smoke coiled into the flawless blue sky. She made her way to Libnitz. “Can’t raise anybody on the radio,” he said.
6.
Out the café’s back window, Alexandra Gundersen could see the Neanderthals coming out of their caves to beat their chests. It was the Big Noisy Machines the Army had driven into town; now Ben and his boys worried that their dicks were too small. So now they had to kill something, or make a big explosion. Nothing made your little dick feel bigger.
“I’m so sorry, Colonel,” she said to the Army man. “They’re all lent out right now. It’s been such a popular book. I’ll try to get one for you by tonight. In the meantime, let me check those other books out for you.”
The colonel responded to her warm tone with a slight relaxation of posture. The lightening of his expression was not yet sufficient to call a smile. While Alexandra stamped his books, she glanced through her lashes at the window again. Ben and his unter-cavemen had separated and now walked in different directions. Her twin James aimed straight toward the café’s back door. It was, unfortunately, too late to escape.
She handed Colonel Fikes his books and smiled again, and this time he did smile in return. He would be back. She knew her customers, and, for better or worse, she knew men.
The colonel headed through the adjoining bookshop toward the front door, even as brother James pushed through the back into the café.
“Good morning, Sandy,” James said cheerfully.
Her twin used her childhood nickname only to annoy her. Since these days he preferred the proletarian Jim, she paid him back in kind. “Hello, James.”
