Invasion

Chapter Twenty-Six

“And you may rise.”

Joshua Bourjaily rose to his feet, his joints creaking, as the alien priest blessed them and shoed them out of the converted warehouse. The alien religion, Joshua had discovered, required plenty of forward kneeling, a pose that the aliens could hold almost indefinitely, but humans couldn’t hold for long. It was worse for the women; when they knelt, their hands held behind their heads, they pushed their breasts forward into prominence. After a pair of incidents, the aliens had apparently broken one of their own taboos and segregated the sexes for prayer meetings, even though they seemed to worship together. It was hard to tell; they’d seen very few alien females on the streets and they’d never seen the aliens in solo prayer.

He glanced towards the alien priest, thinking dark thoughts that he was careful to keep to himself. A couple of people — an old woman and a young black man — had attempted to challenge the aliens, praying out loud in their own style, only to be mercilessly gunned down. The aliens had regarded it with the same level as horror as most Americans would regard taking a dump on the American flag… and similar incidents had been nipped in the bud. The aliens, it seemed, weren’t taking too many chances with their prayers and their flock.

The priest, wearing a simple brown robe, nodded once to him as he left the warehouse. The alien religion was still a thing of mystery, despite the lessons; they were literally teaching him the prayers without bothering to explain the meaning. The only choice he’d had had been a question about which element — fire, water, air or earth — he favoured, a question he’d answered with ‘earth,’ trying to be clever. The aliens hadn’t even noticed; they’d merely ordered him and his fellow ‘earthers’ to report to a certain warehouse, every second day, or see their food supply cut off. Now that the aliens were feeding more of the population, somehow, it was a powerful incentive. A person without a valid feeding card, marked by one of the priest’s servants, simply wouldn’t be fed.

He looked at the card as he waited in line for the mark. It wasn’t alien technology, he was sure; they wouldn’t have bothered to bring that level of tech from their homeworld. It was human tech, a simple ID card with a picture, a brief level of detail… and a microchip mounted in the plastic that did whatever the aliens told it to do. He was pretty sure that what was really happening was that the aliens were building up a picture of who went where, and why, in their search for other insurgents. Austin might have been fairly quiet over the last couple of weeks, but there had been a handful of IEDs, several of which had killed alien collaborators. The insurgents were still out there, somewhere, but doing what? Joshua hoped that they were plotting new attacks on the aliens, but ever since the attack on Texas had failed, the population was starting to realise, in the cities at least, that insurgency was only going to get a few thousand more people killed.

It was a different story, he’d been told, out in the countryside; the Internet had been buzzing with stories of mounted Texans fighting the aliens. Joshua had dismissed at least half of that story as exaggeration, but Texas had literally tens of thousands of people who could handle guns and horses… and there might be a nugget of truth in there somewhere. The cities, however, were falling further and further under the alien control… and even those who hated the aliens had to eat, somehow.

“May God be with you,” the alien under-priest said, as he passed Joshua’s card through a scanner. To be fair to the aliens, they didn’t dally about like a drug-supplier lording it over a dependent flock, they just handed over the card with a benediction. “Eat well and give thanks.”

Joshua walked onto the streets and around the building. The women — which basically seemed to mean every woman over ten years old — were emerging from the other side of the massive building. The warehouse was nowhere near large enough to hold all of the citizens of Austin — although everyone knew someone who’d been killed in one of the bouts of fighting — and he’d heard that there were dozens of such places, all around the city. The aliens didn’t mess around… and he’d heard rumours that children — defined as anyone under ten years old — were being taken for special instruction. The Adair children, thankfully, were too old… but there were hundreds of others. No one seemed quite sure what the aliens were teaching them, but Joshua had determined to get to the bottom of it. Blogging from an occupied city was rapidly starting to lose its shine.

“Joshua,” a voice called. He looked up to see Loretta running towards him. He’d met her by sheer accident, a girl who actually had better computer skills than he had — which wouldn’t have been difficult — and was willing to assist him in navigating the remains of the internet. “How was your day?”

In Joshua’s admittedly sexist view, Loretta looked very good when she was at prayer, alien-style, but he knew better than to say that out loud. “Painful,” he said, rubbing his knees. Muslims, he’d decided, had it easy. They got to sit back. The thought reminded him of a group of Baptists whom the aliens had discovered holding prayer meetings… and executed them publicly for heresy. “And how was yours?”

“You old fogy, you,” Loretta said, slipping her arm through his. “I swear — a single twinge of pain and you men just curl up and die.”

The thought wasn’t as amusing as it seemed. The alien religion was complicated — as were most human religions — but one thing was clear; the alien females chose their mates. There were details that seemed to be beyond human understanding, at least as the aliens had explained them — and he’d gotten the impression that the aliens hadn’t wanted to discuss them with their human pupils — but it was clear that the women ran the alien families. The men might have been the breadwinners, insofar as alien society had that term, but they didn’t call the shots at home. They might be divorced at any moment if they didn’t behave themselves.

It had led to a whole series of new understandings. The alien society was full of Mrs Grundy-types. They would watch everyone from the cradle to the grave and they wouldn’t hesitate to report any misbehaviour. It reminded him of how Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia had encouraged their children to report their parents for anything remotely criminal — as defined by the state — and the horrors of 1984. If that was what they were teaching the children, they would have made progress on completely changing human society.

“Bitch,” he said, trying to avoid thinking about the future. They were just two lovebirds out for a stroll, as far as anyone knew. The aliens continued to snatch people off the streets if they were armed, or carry out the occasional random search, but otherwise they tended to leave the human civilians alone. They were trapped by their dependency on food and water from the aliens, now that the aliens had taken control of the latter. The entire supply of food left in the apartment, he’d calculated, would last them barely more than a week. “What do you want to do now?”

“Well, I thought we’d go for a big expensive lunch and then an afternoon at a swanky hotel,” Loretta announced, mischievously. “I suppose we’ll have to settle for a walk, a feed at the kitchen, and then perhaps an afternoon at the computer.”

“No arguments,” Joshua decided. If nothing else, having Loretta on his arm lead to a lot of envious glances. She was blonde, bubbly, and looked around nineteen years old, a tall girl with great legs. He wasn’t sure what she saw in him when she could have had hundreds of boyfriends, but maybe it was the shared danger, the sense that they were getting back at the aliens, even in a small manner. Accurate information from inside the occupied zone would be vitally important to the entire human race. “Come on then, let’s go eat.”

The aliens had, if nothing else, cut down on crime in the city. Between the rapid destruction of most of the street gangs, the curfew and their patrols, criminals found it harder to operate without being caught and either shot or dumped into a work gang. The aliens punished every misdemeanour, no matter how small, and the net result was that people could walk the streets in safety — apart from the risk of an IED, of course. They reached the soup kitchen in perfect safety, showed their card to the handful of aliens guarding the cooks — all human — and took bowls of soup and curried meat from the table. It was a far cry from the hamburgers and freedom fries his stomach was crying out for, but it was the best that they could do. He really didn’t want to think about what sort of meat was in the curry, but he was damn sure it wasn’t beef, chicken or pork. There hadn’t been a lot of cats about lately, he’d noticed.

Loretta chatted happily about nothing throughout the meal, almost monopolising the conversation on her own. Joshua had learned that she could switch from ‘girl genius’ to ‘dumb blonde’ in seconds, comparing notes on computing and reporting one moment, the next chattering away about pop stars and films. It was one hell of a disguise, he’d realised; men would tend to talk more to someone who looked attractive on their arms, but had nothing in their heads. As a reporter, Loretta would be a terror.

“I wonder what they did?” She asked, in a moment of distraction. Joshua turned and saw a bunch of chained humans being marched through the streets. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he recognised a priest — a human priest — among them. The aliens could have whisked them out of the city without having to make them walk, but he suspected that they were actually trying to make a point, rubbing the human race’s nose in its defeat. “Hey, boss, you wanna interview them?”

Joshua tried to scowl at her, but didn’t quite manage it. “I think they probably did bad things,” he said, very aware of the ears nearby. The aliens had too many collaborators working for them. The insurgents, he hoped, didn’t come to the soup kitchens. “Once you finish your dinner, we can go.”

Ten minutes later, they were on their way back to the apartment. “They probably got picked up at prayer,” Loretta said, the airhead act vanishing as soon as they were out of earshot. The streets were almost deserted now; the ‘airs’ were at prayer, and the remainder of the population was out of sight. “You want to ask around and see who knows something?”

“Not now,” Joshua said, as they reached the apartment. It had been easy enough to convince the others to allow Loretta to stay with them, despite the limited food; her very presence lit up the place. It was a sexist thought, but who cared? They were well past the stage of caring about PC thoughts. “If the aliens figure out that someone is interested in finding out… and if someone betrayed them…”

He didn’t have to finish the thought. The aliens had plenty of collaborators… and not all of them were forced into the role. If someone had tipped off the aliens about the prayer meeting, perhaps to settle some pre-invasion score, they wouldn’t hesitate to report two reporters as well, before their names and faces got onto the Internet. It had happened before… and those collaborators hadn’t lasted a week.

Once they were back in his apartment, with the door firmly bolted, he dug up the new laptop from where he’d hidden it, under the bookshelves. A quick search of the apartment would miss it, but he had no illusions about how well hidden it was if the aliens searched his room thoroughly; they’d find it within moments. His old laptop had failed the night of the big human attack — he suspected EMP, although entire swathes of the city had been undisrupted — and Loretta had found him a new one, although it didn’t work as well. He’d lost most of his secure files when the old laptop failed, but luckily he’d kept the passwords to the blog in his head. It was a matter of moments to read through the comments for his last post, make a few notes of questions that needed answers, and then started to write the next post.

Loretta draped herself over the bed and winked at him. “Can’t I distract you, even for a few minutes?”

“I have to make this post while everything is fresh in my head,” Joshua said, absently. “Besides, this game of Solitaire won’t finish itself.”

“Nerd,” Loretta said, pulling herself off the bed and wandering over to him. “What are you telling them?”

Joshua smiled. The one thing they’d disagreed upon had been that Loretta’s name hadn’t been mentioned at all. If the aliens caught him, they wouldn’t know about her… and he’d given her his passwords. If he got carted off to their work gangs, or whatever, Loretta would be able to carry on. He’d written mainly about the religious ceremony, in hopes that someone with a bigger brain than he had could work out how it worked, but he’d also mentioned the work gangs and other alien innovations. The aliens might not have believed in hearts and minds, although they obviously believed in souls, but they certainly believed in grabbing people by the nuts.

“The truth,” he said, and smiled. The aliens called their religion the Truth. It probably had a subtle meaning in their own language, but so far the only people who’d heard the alien language had been a handful of collaborators, who’d reported that it seemed to be impossible for human throats to duplicate. “What else do you think I should tell them?”

“How many aliens there are here,” Loretta said. “Is it just me, or are there fewer aliens these days?”

Joshua frowned at her. “No,” he said flatly, and then he stopped. It was true that the aliens had been patrolling heavily, but what did that prove? It only proved that the aliens were patrolling heavily. It was odd, but in a sense, she was right; there did seem to be fewer aliens on the streets. “They could all be in the Green Zone…”

“Yes, they could,” Loretta agreed. The name for the alien-controlled centre of Austin had stuck, somehow. The insurgents occasionally lobbed mortar shells and homemade rockets into the complex, an irony that the aliens probably didn’t appreciate. “Do you believe it?”

“I think it would be crazy to jump to any conclusions,” Joshua said, considering it. It was possible that she was right… but if it were true, what could they do about it? Could they use it as a chance to mount another attack… and, if they did, what would the aliens do in response? It was a moot point, in any sense; he was pretty sure that the insurgents read his blog page, but he didn’t know any of them personally. “Do you want to post it as an observation…?”

“That’s not the point,” Loretta said. “If the aliens aren’t here, then where are they?”

“Good point,” Joshua agreed, and then it hit him. “You think they’re preparing another strike against the outside world?”

“It’s possible,” Loretta said. “They could also be conducting anti-partisan operations, or… hell, boss, I don’t know. I just think that its something you should post and see who agrees with you, or not.”

“There could be people — hell, there will be people — agreeing with it because they want to believe,” Joshua warned, but she was right. “I’ll post a note to that effect and see who agrees, or not. For all we know, they’re barracking thousands of aliens in the green zone, just waiting for us to get uppity again.”

“Maybe,” Loretta agreed. “In fact…”

She broke off as a crashing noise echoed up from downstairs. Joshua knew what that sound meant; they’d taken a few precautions to warn the residents of an alien raid, precautions that weren’t triggered by anyone with the right to live in the apartment. He heard the sound of harsh alien voices as they flooded into the apartment, running up the stairs, and froze in panic. Loretta, quicker thinking, dived for the laptop and tried to hide it again, before the aliens burst in, weapons ready.

“Halt,” the leader snapped. Loretta fell on the floor in shock. “Do not attempt to escape.”

The aliens marched forward, their black helms hiding their faces, and grabbed Joshua with their gloved hands. Before he could make a single protest, they tied his hands behind him and thrust him against the wall. A moment later, Loretta joined him, a nasty bruise developing on her face where she’d hit the ground. Joshua tried to meet her eyes as the aliens searched the apartment, smashing their way through everything to find all of his secrets, but she kept her face turned away from him. He could hear her sniffling, just loud enough to hear, but he couldn’t even touch her to comfort her.

“You will accompany us,” the alien leader said, finally.

A handful of aliens carried the evidence — the laptop, Loretta’s computer junk and his handgun — as they were hustled down the stairs. Joshua saw a pair of residents, staring at them… and then he saw Mr Adair. One look was all it took to know what had happened; he had, for some reason, betrayed them. Joshua couldn’t think why, or even care, not when they were being hustled off to some unknown fate.

Bastard, he thought, and let the aliens drag him onwards.

There was no escape.