Not One of Us: Stories of Aliens on Earth

THE FEAR GUN Judith Berman

The dawn found Harvey Gundersen on the deck of his house, as it had nearly every morning since the eetee ship had crashed on Cortez Mountain. There he stood a nightly watch for the fear storms. On this last watch, though, the eetees had worn him out—an incursion at the Carlson’s farm and the lone raider at his own well, where the black sky had rained pure terror—and fatigue had overcome him just as the sky began to lighten. When Susan shook him awake, he jerked upright in his lawn chair, heart a-gallop.

She gripped red plastic in her hand. For an instant, Harvey was sure that his worst suspicions had proved true, and his wife had learned how to bring on the bad weather. But even as he swung up his shotgun, finger on the trigger, he saw that what Susan pointed at him was not a weather-maker, not even an eetee gun about to blast him to splat, but the receiver of their landline phone. The cord trailed behind her.

Susan’s gaze riveted on the shotgun. Harvey took a deep breath and lowered the barrel. Only then did Susan say, flatly, “Your brother’s calling.”

“What does he want?”

She shrugged, two shades too casual. Harvey knew Susan and Ben plotted about him in secret. His pulse still racing, he carried the phone into the house and slid the glass door closed so Susan could not overhear. He stood where he could keep his eye on both Susan and the eetee-infested mountains.

As he slurped last night’s mormon tea from his thermos, liquid spilled onto the arm of his coat. Strange that his hands never shook while he held a gun.

“Hello, Ben,” he said into the receiver.

“Nice work last night, Harve,” said Ben. “Good spotting. You saved some lives there, buddy.”

Although Harvey knew better than to trust his brother’s sincerity, he could not repress a surge of pride. “I watch the weather, Ben. I can see it coming five miles off. And I look for the coyotes. They track the eetees. They keep a watch on them. The coyotes—”

“Sure, Harve,” Ben said. “Sure. I’ve never doubted it. You’re the best spotter we have.”

“Well, thanks, Ben.” Harvey seized the moment to describe how, two days ago, the coyotes had used telepathy to trick a van-load of eetees over the edge of the road to their deaths. As long as Ben was de facto dictator of Lewis County, for everyone’s good Harvey had to try to warn him what was happening out there in the parched mountains.

But Ben cut him off before he’d even reached the part about the eetee heads. “Harvey, Harvey, you sound pretty stressed. What about you come in and let Dr. King give you something for your jitters? You tell me all the time how jittery you get, keeping watch day and night. I’ll tell you honestly I’m worried, Harve. Come in before you mistake Susan for an eetee, or do something else we’ll all regret.”

What a lying fuck Ben was. Ben just wanted Dr. King to trank him stupid with Ativan. If Ben were truly worried, he wouldn’t force Harvey and Susan to stay out here in this horribly vulnerable spot, where Harvey was exposed to bad weather two or three times a week. That was what made him so jittery. But it was always, “Sorry, Harve, you can’t expect anyone in town to just give you food or gasoline or Clorox, or repair your phone line when the eetees cut it, not when supplies are dwindling by the day. We all have to contribute to the defense of Lewisville. Manning your observation post—the closest we have now to the ship—is the contribution we need from you.”

What Ben really wanted was for the eetees to rid him of his troublemaker brother. And on the day the weather finally killed Harvey, Ben would send a whole platoon of deputies out to De Soto Hill to take over Harvey’s house and deck. Ben would equip them with the eetee weapons and tools he kept confiscating from Harvey. Can’t hoard these, Harve, my men need them. Lewisville needs ’em.

Ben’s invitation to visit Dr. King, though: Harvey couldn’t afford to pass that up. Although the timing of the offer was a little too perfect…

“Ben, I’d rather have a couple of deputies to spell me than a pass for a doctor visit. What about it?”

“You know how short I am of manpower.” Ben sighed. “I’ll work on it, but in the meantime why don’t you come on in?”

“Okay,” Harvey said. “Okay, Ben, I’ll stop by Dr. King’s. If I can get Susan to stand watch for me. You know how she is these days. I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave the observation post that long, do you? How can you be sure eetees won’t come in daytime?”

There was a moment of silence at the other end. Then Ben said goodbye and hung up.

Harvey swallowed a few more gulps of mormon tea, feeling the ephedrine buzz now, and returned outside for recon. First he checked the weather. No fear-clouds on the horizon that he could detect. But lingering jumpiness from last night’s raid, and the scare Susan had given him on waking, might obscure an approaching front.

His video monitors showed him the view toward Lewisville, from the north and front side of the house. At this distance the town was a tiny life raft of houses, trees and grain elevators adrift on the rolling sea of golden wheat. The deck itself gave him a 270-degree view west, south, and east: over the highway and the sweep of fields below De Soto Hill, and of course toward the pine-forested mountains and that immense wreck.

Harvey cast around for the Nikons, only to discover that Susan had usurped his most powerful binoculars and was gazing through them toward the mountains. Anger stirring in him, he picked up the little Minoltas. Through them, the world looked quiet enough. The only movement was a hawk floating across the immaculate blue sky. But Harvey never trusted the quiet. The eetees might avoid the desiccating heat of daytime, but they were always stirring around up there. Plotting the next raid. And the coyotes—

If only he could spy into those mountains as easily as the eetees’ fear-storms roared into his own head.

The nape of Harvey’s neck began to twitch. “Do you see something?” he demanded. “Are the coyotes—”

“I’m looking for Fred,” Susan said coldly, without lowering the binoculars.

“Fred is gone.” Now the anger boiled in Harvey’s gut. “You should be watching for eetees, not pining after your lost dog.”

“Fuck your eetees! Fred is out there somewhere. He wouldn’t leave us and never come back!”

Her voice had turned flat and uncompromising, and Harvey knew one of her rages was coming on. But he could not rein in his own fury.

“If you care so much,” he said, “why did you let him loose?”

Susan finally turned to stare at Harvey. She was breathing hard. “I didn’t let Fred out.”

“Oh, so the coyotes unbuckled his collar?”

Deep red suffused Susan’s face. “Fuck you,” she screamed, “and fuck your coyotes!” She slammed the binoculars onto the deck, she reached toward the rifle—

Harvey grabbed his shotgun and aimed. How stupid to leave his rifle propped against the railing, out of reach—

Susan threw the rifle onto the deck, and then the tray holding the remains of his midnight snack; she kicked over his lawn chair and the tripod for his rifle, and upended the box of shotgun cartridges he’d been packing with rock salt. “Shoot me, Harvey!” she screamed. “Shoot me! I know you want to!”

Harvey snatched up his rifle but did not shoot. At last Susan stopped her rampage. She stared with fierce hatred through her tangled, greasy hair, panting. “I didn’t let Fred out, you moron. You did.” Then she flung herself in her own lawn chair and picked up a tattered and yellowing issue of last summer’s Lewisville Tribune.

The shakes took Harvey. While he waited for the waves of fever cold to recede, he gritted his teeth and said to her, “I’m going to do my rounds now. Just keep an eye out, okay, Susan? That’s all I ask? Watch for eetees, who want to kill us and steal our water, and not for your dead dog?”

When she did not answer, he heaved open the glass door again and stalked into the house. Susan might as well be using a weather-maker, the way she kept terrifying him. Harvey was jumpy enough today. He just had been lucky that last night’s raider had probably stolen its weather-maker from a higher-ranking eetee and wasn’t skilled in its use. And by now Harvey had learned to keep his distance and rely on his rifle and sniper’s night-scope. So the lightning strike of blind terror had fallen short. Harvey had caught only the peripheral shockwave—although that that had been horrible enough.

Weather-maker was what Harvey called the weapon. Other people called it a fear gun. Dr. King and Joe Hansen, putting their heads together, had suggested that the gun produced (as quoted in a bulletin distributed by the sheriff’s office) “wireless stimulation of the amygdala, mimicking the neurochemical signature of paralytic terror.” But no one had yet been able to figure out the insides of those whorled red pendants, and no one could do with them what the eetees did, not even Harvey, who was so hypersensitive from repeated exposure that the weapon affected him even when he wasn’t its target. Even when they weren’t being used. (When Dr. King told him that human researchers had for years been able to produce a similar if weaker effect with a simple electrode, Harvey had, next time he was alone, checked his scalp for unfamiliar scar tissue. But if Susan or Ben had had such an electrode implanted, they had also concealed the traces well.)

Harvey unbolted the connecting door that led from the kitchen into the garage. As angry as Susan’s abdication of responsibility made him, this was the opportunity he needed. She would read and re-read her Tribune for hours, trying to pretend that the entire last year hadn’t happened.

In the garage he quickly donned his rubber gloves and plastic raincoat. He raised the lid of the big chest freezer, long emptied of anything edible, and heaved out the large tarpaulin-wrapped bundle, humping it into the pickup bed. The raider’s corpse hadn’t frozen yet; Harvey just hoped it had chilled sufficiently to last until he reached Dr. King.

Then he stripped off his protective gear and gave it a swift rinse with Clorox in the utility sink. On the cement floor beside the sink, still at the end of its chain, lay Fred’s unbuckled collar of blue nylon webbing—a testament to Susan’s lies.

Harvey fetched last night’s newly scavenged eetee gun from the wheel well of his pickup, where he hoped this time to keep it hidden from Susan and Ben. Next, after checking the yard through the front door peephole, he bore the ladder outside to begin his daily inspection of the video cameras, the locks and chains, the plywood boarding up their windows, the eetee cell that powered the house (one of the few perks Ben allowed them).

It hurt Harvey to think about Fred, happy Fred, the only one of them unchanged since the days before the eetees had come to Earth. When he and Susan had been happy, too, in their dream house with the panoramic view atop De Soto Hill. Fred was just one dumb, happy golden retriever with no notion of the dangers out there in the mountains. More likely the coyotes had gotten Fred than the eetees—not that it made any difference.

Sweating, his scalp twitching, Harvey made his way downhill through dry grass and buzzing grasshoppers. He righted the black power cell (how he’d had to argue with Ben to keep two), slipped on a spare adapter to re-connect the cell to his well pump, and refilled the salt-loaded booby traps the raider had sprung. All the while he searched the trampled ground for the raider’s missing weather-maker, but still without success. Had the coyotes taken it? There couldn’t have been bad weather without a weather-maker…

Finally he was climbing the hill again, eager to return to his deck. On his deck he was king—at least, on the deck he had a chance of seeing death before it peered at him with its yellow, slime-covered eyeball.

He had nearly reached the house when a new sound stopped him in his tracks. A shape thrashed through the tall thistles along the driveway. Adrenaline and ephedrine together surged in Harvey’s veins, making his hands tremble like grass in the breeze.

But even as he pulled the eetee gun from his waistband and clutched at his rifle with his other hand, he saw that what rustled onto the driveway was not an eetee. It was not even a demented coyote come to grin mockingly at him and then zigzag wildly away into the fields, tongue flapping, while Harvey tried in vain to ventilate its diseased hide.

“Fred!” Harvey whispered in horror. Fred dropped what he was carrying and wagged his tail.

Dust, burrs, and thistledown clung to Fred’s copper-colored rump, and he smelled like rotten raw chicken. As he approached Harvey, his tail-wagging increased in frequency and amplitude until his entire hind end swung rapidly from side to side. Fred tried to nose Harvey’s hand, but Harvey shoved him away with the point of the rifle.

The swellings and bare patches in the fur were unmistakable. The biggest swelling rose at the base of Fred’s skull.

Just like the coyotes.

Eetee cancer, Harvey called it. Ben said that was just more of Harvey’s paranoia. No other spotters had seen it.

But their posts—the ones still manned, anyway—lay miles further from the shipwreck.

Harvey had only one choice. It was pure self-defense.

Fred lay down and smacked his tail on the ground. His eyes pleaded as if he knew what Harvey intended. But Harvey remembered the coyotes and their gleeful eetee hunts, and he hardened his thoughts as if pummeled by stormy weather. He slipped off the safety. His finger tightened on the trigger—

Footsteps rasped behind him. He spun and found himself staring into the short, ugly red bore of another eetee gun.

“Don’t you dare shoot Fred, you fuck,” Susan hissed.

Oh, Harvey, stupid, stupid—the video monitors on the deck—Ben must have given her a gun, knowing she would someday use it—

They stood there aiming at each other. Harvey could see in her face that this time she really would do it. She was going to splatter him over Fred, and Ben would get his way at last.

The blazing July sun heated his skull like a roast in an oven. Susan’s gun did not waver. Harvey willed himself to breathe.

Fred thwacked his tail another couple of times, then pawed playfully at Harvey’s foot. A lump pushed up suddenly in Harvey’s throat and he had to blink several times to clear his vision. In a thick voice he said, “Look at Fred, Susan! He’s sick! You don’t want us to catch it, do you? You don’t want us to get all freaky like the coyotes, do you?”

“You,” Susan said, “already have.”

Bleak inspiration came to Harvey. He forced himself to drop his rifle and eetee gun, slip the shotgun from his shoulder to the ground, raise his hands. “I could take Fred to Dr. King. Maybe she would look at him.”

“She’s not a vet and he’s not sick.”

“Yes, he is! Susan, look at those tumors!”

Her gaze did flick toward Fred, growing the slightest bit uncertain. “Abscesses.”

“Then he needs to have them cleaned. At least.”

Something broke in Susan then. Her lip trembled. She blinked. She looked at Fred. Fred crawled toward her and wagged his tail some more. Tears began to roll down Susan’s cheeks. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a wave of sympathy rushed through Harvey. He had loved Fred, too.

“What do we have,” Susan said in despair, “what do we have that she would take in trade?”

And there it was: the first acknowledgement in months that their world had changed forever. Harvey’s hands were shaking again, but he managed to gesture at the garage. Susan looked at him askance, then, gun still trained on Harvey, backed toward it. Harvey followed, though he hated leaving his guns behind. Fred lay beside them, thumping his tail.

When Susan pulled back the tarpaulin in his pickup bed, she gasped and jerked her hand back as if bitten. “Harvey, Ben will kill you! And me, too, you asshole!” Which was probably not just a figure of speech.

Susan said, wiping at her tears with a filthy hand, “Promise me, promise me, Harvey, that you aren’t going to hurt Fred. That you won’t let her hurt him.”

“I won’t,” Harvey lied, trying again to swallow the lump in his throat. “Promise me that while I’m gone, you’ll keep watch?”

Susan said nothing, but this time Harvey felt as if she might actually do it. Donning his raincoat and gloves and now rubber waders as well, Harvey took Fred’s collar out into the yard to buckle it around the dog’s neck. As he urged Fred into the back of the pickup and chained him there, Fred tried to lick him in the face. Up close, the stench of carrion was enough to make Harvey gag.

Two presents for Dr. King, just sitting in the back of his pickup for anyone to discover. What risks he was taking today! Harvey had survived this long by trusting his fears and keeping a close eye on the weather. By being infinitely careful. Today he was throwing all caution to the winds.

But he couldn’t afford to nod off the way he had this morning. He needed Dr. King’s little pills. And he couldn’t let Susan keep Fred here.

Harvey wondered whether on his return he should just shoot Susan before she learned he’d had Fred put down. She would try to kill him again when she found out.

He didn’t want to shoot her.

Maybe, he thought, looking at the happily panting Fred, just maybe he would turn out to be wrong about Fred’s tumors. Maybe Dr. King would tell him they weren’t contagious. The coyotes’ fur had grown back, after all, and most of the swellings had vanished.

Or maybe that notion was just Fred trying, the way the coyotes did, to control Harvey’s thoughts.

One last task before departing: Harvey picked up the thing Fred had brought home. He dropped it in his Weber. Up close, the lump of rotting eetee flesh looked like raw hamburger, had the consistency of custard, and smelled like the bottom of a Dumpster. Golden retrievers had such delicate mouths; Fred hadn’t left so much as a tooth mark in it.

Sweltering in his raincoat and waders, Harvey poured on the gasoline provided by the sheriff’s office. As he dropped in the match, and flames sheeted up from the charcoal bed, Fred began to bark in agitation. So he did not hear Susan’s shouts until she rushed up to him waving the Nikons. “Look, Harvey! Look!”

He dropped the lid on the grill to char Fred’s little present to a cinder. Then he pulled off his befouled rubber gloves, took the binocs, and peered in the direction she pointed.

The highway had been dust-blown and empty for a year. Now, vehicles climbed over a rise three miles away, popping into view one after the other like an endless chain of ants: trucks, fuel tankers, humvees, and Bradleys carrying helmeted men and women. The convoy ground steadily along, heading toward Lewisville.

Susan said, almost sobbing, “It’s the Army. Oh, God, Harvey, they’ve come to save us at last.”

“Save us?” Harvey said. “What Army?”

Colonel Jason Fikes could see right away that something was fishy about the town. Since the liberation of Earth he had been traveling what was left of America—the devastated cities, the suburban wastelands dotted with grim encampments of refugees, the endless reaches of fallow farmland. The trip from Spokane, chasing the rumor of another downed ship, had been no different. They had passed mile after mile of fields grown up into weeds. At scattered houses and small towns, women stooped in gardens and men, shotguns in hand, sullenly eyed the convoy. Or sometimes they ran after the convoy, begging for gasoline, for medicine, for food, for rescue.

The locals’ plight ought to have grown more desperate the closer he got to the mountains and the starship. Fikes had seen the classified reports from Yosemite: starving refugees reduced to eating eetees, then each other.

But when the convoy came over a rise and Lewisville itself came into view, everything changed. Weeds gave way to neat furrows of golden wheat. Cattle grazed along the streamside meadows. And in the town itself, healthy children clustered in front of well-kept houses, staring at the convoy until adults rushed to herd them inside. Yes, most of the lawns had been dug into gardens, and only a handful of vehicles seemed to be working, and the grass in front of the county courthouse was dry and yellow now; but it had been mowed.

You could suppose they had carefully rationed supplies since the war, that they had their own hydro dam or windmill farm. Or you could glance eastward to that mile-long wreck atop the ridge, and you could draw another conclusion.

“They’ve been scavenging,” said young Lieutenant Briggs beside him, eager as a preacher pouncing upon evidence of fornication. “We’ll have to search house-to-house.”

Briggs had not seen the Yosemite reports and did not yet know the enormity of their orders. Fikes nodded wearily. “They’ll try to hide as much as they can.”

During the approach to Lewisville he had spotted a feral cat crouched in the roadside weeds, a pair of crows pecking at a dead owl. But no eetees had showed themselves. On this brilliant summer morning, the distant shipwreck looked no more menacing than a junked car. In Fikes’s experience, though, the eetees didn’t surrender and they didn’t admit defeat. If even a single one had survived, sooner or later it would test his soldiers. Still, they would have to wait on more urgent tasks.

Fikes gave the order to halt in front of the courthouse. There waited a knot of local men bedecked with an arsenal of rifles, shotguns, and semi-automatic small arms. Neatly dressed and clean-shaven, they looked like Norman Rockwell banditos who’d just staged their own revolution.

Or rather, Norman Rockwell meets the Sci-Fi Channel: half of them bore red splatterguns. Eetee weapons. That would make Briggs happy. A weight descended onto Fikes’s shoulders.

As Fikes climbed out of his humvee, one of the locals stepped forward. This was a lean man in a sheriff’s khaki uniform and badge, with cowboy boots, a straw cowboy hat, and mirror shades to complete the ensemble. The only weapon the sheriff carried in plain view was a holstered .45.

“Howdy, folks,” he drawled. “Welcome to Lewisville. I’m Ben Gundersen, Lewis County sheriff.”

Fikes held out his hand. “Colonel Fikes,” he said. “U.S. Army.”

Sheriff Gundersen put out his own hand, and the two of them shook. “What brings you fellows to Lewisville?”

Under the circumstances, the question was an odd one. Fikes said, “Your community is in proximity to a downed enemy vessel, Mr. Gundersen. Assessing that threat and mounting an appropriate response is our immediate priority. But our long-term mission is to restore services and connect you to the outside world again.”

“No offense,” said the sheriff, “but with all the satellites gone, we haven’t heard much news since last summer. Who’s the U.S. Army taking orders from these days?”

“The President has installed a Provisional Congress until new elections can be held,” Fikes said. “Meanwhile, the Army is authorized under the Public Safety Act to take charge here.”

“You’re talking about the U.S. President. The U.S. Congress.”

“That’s right,” said Fikes.

One of the other banditos called out, smirking, “Didn’t they nuke Washington? I thought that was one good thing come out of all this.”

“Yes,” Fikes said. “Washington was destroyed. Now, may I ask if you have spotted survivors from the wreck? Has your town come under attack?”

“Survivors?” Gundersen tipped his hat back and scratched his forehead. “Well, now. We shot us a few last winter. They come down near town and found we weren’t easy pickings. If there’re any of ’em left, they pretty much leave us alone. They’d be camped out in the mountains, I guess.”

“Have you seen enemy aircraft at all? Any other vehicles?”

“I guess most of their fighters crashed with the ship,” Gundersen said. “Lost their guidance systems or something. Haven’t seen any recently, anyway.”

“But you think they still have some?”

The sheriff shrugged, inscrutable behind mirror shades. “Could be.”

Since his childhood in Baltimore, Fikes had learned there were large swaths of the U.S. where well-scrubbed white people said “gosh,” “shucks,” and “you bet” without irony. But this sheriff wasn’t just a folksy good ol’ boy.

He was plain bullshitting.

Fikes had already noted that Gundersen hadn’t addressed him as “sir” or “colonel,” and that the pole on the courthouse lawn bore no flag.

Reluctant to take the inevitable next step, Fikes bent to read the plaque on a nearby statue of buckskin-clad men. Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, openers of the American West, passed through Lewis County on October 3, 1806.

If the sheriff and his gang had been just your posse comitatus militia types hoping to secede from the federal government in its time of weakness, Fikes’s task would have been simple. Sooner or later he’d have won over the townsfolk with liberal bribes of booze, chocolate, condoms, antibiotics, disposable diapers, toilet paper. The sheriff he would have defanged first of all; in Fikes’s experience, those with a taste for power were easily seduced by another helping of the same.

But the solution to the problem this town presented would not be so easy to accomplish.

Not that Fikes’s orders weren’t clear or that he shrank from enforcing them. From what he had read in the Yosemite reports, from the panic still electrifying headquarters in Colorado, the rule he must now impose could not be too draconian. It was up to him, he had been told, to ensure that nothing like the Yosemite massacres ever became necessary again.

Fikes knew, however, that he could end up as lost in a repeat of Yosemite as that hapless colonel had been. In the slaughter at Upper Pines, the Yosemite rebels had demonstrated unequivocally that human beings could wield that most dreaded of eetee weapons, the handarm of the eetee elite, the fearmonger. The Army, on the other hand, had never learned how to operate the weapon—had no defense against it. The rebels who had understood the weapon had all been killed. Army scientists, such as they were now, had offered only useless speculation: perhaps the ordinary silent communication of eetees was a form of telepathy; perhaps eetees operated their terrible weapon, too, with some kind of thought wave.

No one understood how eetees used the guns. How could he anticipate by what means human beings would acquire the skill?

But he had to anticipate it. He had to prevent it. If possible, he had to acquire the power for the Army.

At least his first items of business were clear: separating the townspeople from their eetee toys, disrupting their lines of communication, bringing them firmly under Army control.

Fikes straightened. “Mr. Gundersen, may I ask how you dispose of enemy remains?”

He thought he had pegged Gundersen, but the pride that lit up the sheriff’s face surprised him. “We’re real strict about that, Colonel. I’ll show you our health ordinances. Can’t risk some kind of strange disease, I tell people. We built a special crematorium to incinerate the bodies. We use bleach to clean up anything we take from them.” He nodded toward a splattergun in the waistband of one of his deputies. “We could use more Clorox, now that you mention it.”

Fikes nodded. “That’s all very well, Mr. Gundersen, but our scientists can’t yet say what potential disease vectors would look like, how they might spread, or how they could be destroyed. I must stress that anyone in your town who’s had contact with the enemy, living or dead, is required to report to us. Any items of wreckage that people have picked up must be turned over. That includes your weapons, I regret to say. The Army will assume the burden of protecting the town from this point onward. I have strict orders on this matter. And I do have the authority to search every house. It’s a vital matter of public health.”

The sheriff opened his mouth to reply. Before he could speak, Fikes said, “After you hand over your splatterguns, I believe I’d like to start by taking a look at those pickup trucks over there. Is it possible you’re still running them on gasoline?”

The Army had kept Reggie Forrester awake all the first night with the roar of tanks and trucks and the stink of diesel exhaust, which over the last year had become unfamiliar and offensive. In the morning, he dragged himself two blocks over to the highway and discovered that, just as he feared, the soldiers had moved into his warehouses. Armed sentries already surrounded them. “Move along, sir,” the sentries had said. Chasing him—the mayor!—off his own property. Probably Ben had suggested the location, stone bastard that he was.

Reggie headed out to learn what else was befalling his town. His dismay only compounded. Searches and detentions had started before breakfast. “Quarantine,” the Army called it, but they did not name the disease they feared.

From Bob Fisher’s distraught wife, Reggie learned that soldiers had “quarantined” Bob, stolid city engineer, when he’d showed up for work. And they had abruptly confiscated the networked eetee power cells that since last winter had supplied the town with electricity and pumped its artesian wells. Municipal power shut off in mid-morning, and tap water would cease flowing once the water tower emptied.

They hadn’t consulted Reggie or anyone else at City Hall, or warned the townspeople what was coming.

From Estelle Gordon, administrative secretary at the community college, Reggie heard that the Army was cleaning out Joe Hansen’s lab. Everyone brought their salvage to Joe, and it sat around while he and his students figured out what it was supposed to do. That morning the Army confiscated all of it, and all of Joe’s notes, and they hauled away Joe, too. But so far as Estelle had been able to determine, they hadn’t taken Joe to the so-called “quarantine facility” in the junior high school. No one knew where Joe was now.

Joe’s students protested his detention. Angry townspeople joined them, demanding restoration of water and power. Shockingly, the Army tear-gassed them and hauled the lot off to quarantine.

By afternoon, when Reggie went to lodge an official protest with Colonel Fikes, unease had rooted deep in his belly. He told himself, though, that if he didn’t try something, he would only prove his irrelevance. Ben might be the Big Man now, savior of Lewisville, but Reggie Forrester wasn’t going to allow anyone to outdo him when it came to looking after the everyday needs of Lewisville’s citizens.

When Reggie pulled up in front of the courthouse, the soldiers first evicted him from his Ford Excursion, then confiscated it. “Contamination,” they said, when they found the black disk where the engine block had been. They refused to tell him what kind, but by now Reggie was certain that the disease issue was entirely fiction. No one in Lewisville had contracted an inexplicable illness, had they? Moreover, that morning, through the fence surrounding his warehouses, Reggie had spotted soldiers installing eetee power cells in their humvees. He now realized these must have been the ones confiscated from the town.

At least the soldiers did not march Reggie away at gunpoint. In fact, when he indignantly identified himself as Lewisville’s mayor, they led him inside to their colonel. Reggie enjoyed a moment’s relief at this belated acknowledgement of his importance. The fact that the colonel now occupied Ben’s office also tickled him. Ben would not like that at all.

But then the interview, if that was the word for it, started. The colonel threatened Reggie with the ridiculous quarantine, stressing its indefinite nature. He then cited Reggie’s warehouses, filled with wrecked fighters and heavy weaponry that had not yet been stripped or adapted to human use. Sweating, Reggie denied having anything to do with the contents of his warehouses. He had never touched any of it. He just rented space to people. But the colonel showed no interest in his protests.

Then Fikes suggested that detention was not inevitable. He offered Reggie an incentive for cooperation, an unspecified place in the new administration. The sort of position, Colonel Fikes said, that Reggie deserved.

Flattering. But Reggie was not naïve. The world was piss or be pissed on, and right now Reggie Forrester, sad to say, was not in a position to piss on anyone. His status had been on a dizzying downward slide since the start of the war, and now he would have to wiggle hard to avoid the hot yellow stream that gravity was pulling his way. To escape it, he’d have to make himself not just useful but indispensable to the new regime.

Which was fraught with its own dangers. He wondered if the colonel had interviewed Ben yet, and what incentives he might have offered Ben.

That evening, Reggie slipped through backyards to Paula’s house. He was shocked to see how few people had evaded the Army’s tightening net. Those who’d made it to the meeting perched on Paula’s sofas and chairs and shared their news. The Army had rounded up the network of spotters guarding Lewisville, including Ben’s own brother, and replaced them with their own people. The colonel had posted new rules at the county courthouse. Electricity would be down until the town was reconnected to the national grid. Drinking water would be distributed between 8 and 11 a.m. at the corner of Main and Third, no other uses of water except as authorized for agricultural production. A blanket curfew would be enforced between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m.; no civilian was allowed on the streets during those hours for any reason at all. No assembly of more than eight civilians except under Army auspices. Reggie counted: including himself, this meeting numbered nine.

“The right to assembly,” Jim Hanover fumed, “is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution!” Jim had been a lawyer.

Flora Bucholter was distraught. “Just how long will it take to hook us up to the grid? How do they think they’ll be able to protect the lines? What’s the point of taking away our electricity?”

“That salvage doesn’t belong to the Army,” said Dave Sutton, whom Ben often used to float ideas. “It belongs to the people who risked their lives bringing it back—who’ve fought to keep the town safe!”

That predictably set off the ever-volatile Otis Redinger. “Dave’s right! We’ve worked hard just to survive! We’ve been listening to other folks on the shortwave, we know what it’s like in the rest of the country. It’s totally lawless. Now these people show up and say, ‘We’re from the government and we’re here to help you—’” (that drew a chuckle) “—but they’ve brought their lawlessness with them. All they’ve done is destroy or steal everything we’ve fought to preserve. This is an illegal military occupation by an illegal government. We’ve managed to protect our community from aliens. Now we have to protect it from dangerous human beings as well!”

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.

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.”

“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.”

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.

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.”

James stared at her customers significantly. Despite the Army’s prohibition on civilian assembly, and the loss of power that made it impossible to open her café (only locally grown herbal or mormon tea anyway, alas), she could still let up to seven civilians and any number of soldiers into the bookshop. She no longer sold books or videos these days, with no new stock arriving in the foreseeable future, but she did lend them out, and since the demise of TV and radio, her store had always been busy. “Can we talk?” said James.

Alexandra waved at her assistant, deep in conversation with a soldier, to signal her departure. “Come on,” she said to James. She led him through the door marked Private, into her stockroom’s little office. “What do you want, James?”

“We need your help,” he said.

We meant Ben, of course. How flattering that when Biggest Dick caveman needed a woman’s help, he still thought of his ex-wife—though he was too cowardly to show up in person.

“I can’t imagine what use I could be to you deputies.”

“The Army stole some things from us,” James said, “and we need to get them back.”

“You mean your weapons.”

“Sandy,” James said, “we’ve been protecting you with those weapons.”

“Isn’t the Army going to take over that job?”

“Are they acting as if they came here to fight eetees?” James’s foot jittered suddenly as Alexandra fixed him with a frown. “And what will you do when you need protection from the Army?”

The soldiers had come yesterday: hard men, and a few women, too, in desert camo and heavy boots, laden with guns. She hadn’t liked them. But they hadn’t dragged her off to “quarantine.” When the very first tanks rolled into Lewisville, Alexandra had undertaken serious thinking on the subject of boss cavemen and the very biggest rocks. By the time the soldiers showed up at her door, her shop and house had been cleared of all eetee artifacts. She had smiled and offered them tea.

They had frightened her nevertheless.

“I don’t particularly like this… occupation,” she said. “But the soldiers are acting under orders from our government.”

“Our government?” said James. “The eetees nuked our government. These folks are enforcers for a military dictatorship.”

“And just what is Sheriff wonderful Ben Gundersen setting up? How much has he been promoting your precious civil rights and rule of law?”

James’s foot jittered again. Poor James. He fancied himself such an independent thinker. But when the other cavemen start heaving around rocks and grunting, you have to join in. Otherwise they might think you have a really little dick.

Okay, so it wasn’t the actual, physical dick (obviously, in Ben’s case!) that determined where you stood in Neanderthal hierarchy. It was all the subtle, almost imperceptible inflections of display, of action and reaction, dominance and deference, intimidation and submission, and meanwhile the metaphorical dick grows bigger and bigger. Fear, manipulation, and mind control. The boss caveman is created by attitude, his, theirs. Hers—although she had at last won free.

“I grant you,” James said, “Ben’s gone overboard sometimes. But he’s kept the town together in difficult times, he’s really done a tremendous job. He’s preserved… civilization here, when the war turned the rest of our country into rubble.”

Alexandra knew there was some truth in what her brother said. Behavior that was bad for a marriage might be less bad for a town. Because of Ben’s diligent ruthlessness, she could sleep at night, she could still open up her store and serve customers. But it wasn’t the whole story, was it?

“Order,” she said, “is not the same as civilization. Order is about the strong controlling the weak. Civilization is about protecting the weaker from the stronger, about us all living together in empathy, cultivating the connections between us—”

“Sandy,” said James, “empathy is what we’re after. We want the Army folks to empathize with our point of view.”

“With the aid of weapons,” she said sharply. James made no reply, but he jiggled his foot again. “I don’t want part of it. I’m a civilized person. I won’t participate in violence against fellow human beings, moreover against people who are serving my country. And I thought I had made myself clear. I have no interest in doing anything for or because of Ben, ever, I want to have no connection with him at all, ever again, and this is his plan. Don’t tell me it isn’t.”

“Don’t make this personal—”

“It is personal. It’s all personal. You want to belong to a cause that’s bigger than you and, and—then you don’t have to think about your actions. Your violence is good, theirs is bad. And then it’s a big flashy Hollywood story, small-town heroes fight off aliens and the bad Army guys at the same time. But it all begins with you, James, and me, and Ben. Good and evil begin in each person’s heart and mind. That’s the story.”

James began to laugh. “You and Ben were a Hollywood story, all right. The problem was, you both wanted top billing.” Alexandra flushed, enraged at his mockery, yet another betrayal of her, his twin sister. He ducked his head and said, hastily, waving his hands, “No, no, forget about Ben, okay?”

“How can I? This is all about him, and his ego. He just can’t stand not being the one on top!”

“It’s only about Ben for you, Sandy. And doesn’t that mean you’re making it all about you?” That stopped her. James went on: “It’s the town that needs your help. Your neighbors. Individuals. It’s your choice to do good and not evil to them.”

“And you,” she said coldly, “are so sure this is for their own good.”

“What good has the Army done for Lewisville so far? What happens to your business when they’ve locked away half the town? Do you think they’ll go on differently than they’ve begun?”

No, that did seem unlikely. Alexandra looked away.

After the divorce, exhausted and alone, she had convinced herself that what she had most wanted was the opposite of her life with Ben. She wanted to live quietly. She wanted a loving world founded on empathy, not conquest. Starting up her café-bookstore had been part of it, a microcosm of her ideal of civilization, bringing people together for the exchange of ideas and fellowship. And hadn’t she been successful at that, at least in a small way?

But, to tell the truth, it was boring. And while she dwindled into a mousy spinster, the bookstore lady, the war came along and metamorphosed Ben into gun-toting action hero. Not that she could ever have fought the eetees the way he had. She had no physical courage and would sooner pick up a poisonous viper than a gun. But—admit it, James was right—she hated being out of the spotlight. She hated Ben hogging the stage.

And now, wriggling up from the dark depths of her psyche, came this self-destructive impulse to prove herself to Ben. To the town. To prove she was useful in this new caveman world of fear and guns, and not just in the sad, lost world of civilization, where she had known she was Ben’s superior.

Had Ben known she would feel such an impulse? Had he known she would be more afraid of the strange cavemen, the Army soldiers, than the cavemen she knew?

Fear, manipulation, and mind control. Good old Ben. Once she had admired that will toward dominance.

Then, James said, “Maybe you’re afraid you won’t measure up.” Reading her mind, too—he was her twin, after all.

Strange how knowing what was in someone else’s mind ought to give you empathy for that person. Instead it seemed as if only the weak could sustain empathy. The strong couldn’t resist the temptation to use their knowledge to get what they wanted.

Defeated by James and Ben, by her own attitude, Alexandra said, “All right. Tell me what you want me to do.”

And so that afternoon, clad in a clingy flowered sundress and straw hat, her long blond hair spilling over her shoulders, Alexandra walked up to a pair of beefy soldiers and smiled. “Excuse me? Officers? I wonder if I could get into the warehouse.”

One of the soldiers swiveled his head toward her, so she could see her reflection in his sunglasses. She still looked pretty damn good. The soldiers’ guns turned her stomach queasy and her hands cold, but, she told herself firmly, what was in their minds mattered more.

“We’re not officers, ma’am—” the soldier began, politely.

“Oh!” she said. “Of course! How silly of me! You’re not the police!”

“—but no,” he went on, “we can’t let you into the warehouses.”

“But you see,” she said, “I rent space in one. For some of my overflow.” He was staring politely but blankly at her. “I own a bookstore, you see? The only one in town. And your colonel, Mr. Fikes, came in today and we started talking about Lewis and Clark, and whether they should be admired as brave explorers, or whether they were just the vanguard of genocide and colonial oppression, and he asked for a book about them.”

She smiled again at them. Their body language was changing subtly but unmistakably: shoulders relaxing, faces turning towards her. Excitement mixed with terror rose in her. They were falling for it…

“I recommended Undaunted Courage to start with, but, as you can imagine, it’s a popular book around here, at least since there hasn’t been any TV. I didn’t have any copies left in the store, but I know there are some out here in the warehouse. So I came out here to pick up a copy for the colonel. You can check with him if you like.”

Part of her still hoped the soldiers would send her away, and she would be able to tell James she had done her best. But she was also fiercely willing them to submit.

He nodded. “All right, Ms.—?”

“Alexandra Hanover,” she said, using her maiden name.

“I’ll have to accompany you.”

“Oh, that’s fine!” she said, and smiled her most glorious smile at him. And she followed him across the parking lot between the tanker trucks, and through the big roll-up door.

The space inside was cavernous, dark and cool. The soldiers had shoved aside quite a few of the pallets and shelving units to make room for their equipment, and the smells of diesel oil and sweat mingled with the older dusty scent of dried peas. The guard accompanying her paused to explain their mission to a man leaning over a trestle table—probably a genuine officer.

The man at the table looked her up and down with a hard, suspicious stare, but Alexandra smiled at him, too, with just the right mixture of hopeful inquiry, submission to his authority, and winning, wholesome cheerfulness. (Oh, it was going to work. All those years with Ben had been good for something after all.) Then he, too, nodded.

She and her guard threaded their way around pallets laden with sacks of dried peas, heading toward the back of the warehouse. The shelving units that she rented stood against the wall at the back, next to a locked metal door that led outside.

Next came a part that depended on her own physical quickness, something she had never had to rely upon before. But excitement propelled her now. She no longer wanted to turn back.

“Could you help me?” she asked the guard. “I have a bad back.” The guard glanced at her. She pointed. He still wore his sunglasses, so he wouldn’t be able to see the nervous tremor in her hands. “It’s in that box there, on the second shelf.”

He bent over, reaching for the box. Alexandra opened her purse and took out the vet’s tranquilizer dart that James had given her. The guard started to pull the box off the shelf. She reached over and stabbed his neck with the dart.

“Hey!” he yelled, turning swiftly toward her. She backed up, but before he could take a single step, his knees buckled and he pitched face forward onto the concrete floor.

That looked as if it hurt. But she could not help smiling. She had done it!

She reached in her purse again and took out the key that James had given her, doubtless Reggie Forrester’s. She slid back the deadbolts and opened the door.

The gravel lane behind the warehouse was deserted except for a skittering stray cat. For a moment she thought the soldiers must already have arrested Ben’s deputies. Then behind her, inside the warehouse, a commotion erupted: people yelling, booted feet clomping at a run across concrete.

And then brother James rose out of the brush on the far side of the lane and ran toward the back door. A line of Lewisville deputies followed him. Two tremendous explosions detonated at the front of the warehouse, one right after the other. A blast of heat and smoke and a rain of debris rattled across the interior of the warehouse. Alexandra jumped outside through the doorway.

Alexandra thought: People were being shot, even killed. She had helped it happen. It was a betrayal of everything she thought she stood for. Why was she so excited?

But then, at that same moment, moving so unbelievably fast that she barely had time to register what happened, a dark shape roared across the sky, shrank into a distant speck. Another deafening explosion—

The deputies all ducked belatedly. “Raid! Raid! Eetees!” James shouted. Now gunfire and screams echoed from inside the warehouse.

Then a band of eetees, all thin heads and long froggy legs, came around the corner of the warehouse and started shooting.

She had never seen them in the flesh. They weren’t supposed to come out in daylight! Terrified, she flung herself back inside, crawled away among the pallets into the darkest corner she could find, and wedged herself behind a row of fiberboard barrels, arms over her head. Smoke filled her nose and mouth. Explosions echoed through the warehouse, more yelling and screaming, the crash of metal shelves overturning.

Then she heard a sound right nearby.

She looked up. One of the aliens squatted atop a stack of barrels. It apparently hadn’t seen her yet. It gazed out from its high vantage point into the chaos of the warehouse. The alien wasn’t any larger, really, than a Great Dane or a teenage boy. It had long legs and arms and wore some kind of glistening translucent all-over covering like a wetsuit, and its taloned glove held a long-barreled red pistol. It smelled like slightly rancid raw chicken. Alexandra looked at its narrow chest for one of those red whorled pendants James had once shown her, carried by the high-ranking eetees, that could paralyze this entire warehouse full of men. She did not see one.

She must have made a sound—whimpered, perhaps—because the eetee turned and glanced down at her. Its narrow face was unreadable behind the slimy protective sac. Its pistol was aimed at her negligently, as if she were no threat at all, but she really did not like guns.

As angry as if it were Ben, Alexandra threw her weight into the stack of barrels. The eetee toppled to the floor along with all the rolling, tumbling sections of its unstable perch. The pistol flew from its hand, fell and struck Alexandra’s hip. Her first instinctive reaction was to bat the horrible object away from her; then, fumbling, she grabbed for it and caught the wrong end.

The eetee scrabbled to its feet, heaving barrels aside. Alexandra reoriented the pistol with two clumsy, shaking hands, and took aim. She clearly did not inspire fear: Instead of ducking behind a barrel or throwing itself to one side, the eetee fixed Alexandra with its egg-yolk gaze.

Icy blackness swept her mind, it stopped her breath and froze her limbs—

But the eetee didn’t, it surely…

The overwhelming weight of her terror crushed the half-finished thought toward nothingness, and all that Alexandra could grab hold of was her desperate rage. She was so tired of being on the sidelines, the one not in control. She realized she had squeezed her eyes shut. She forced herself to open them. There was no blackness except on the backs of her eyelids.

Mind control she understood.

She pressed the button on the red pistol and the eetee exploded, showering the wall above her with great gobs and ropy drips of what looked like snot.

“Take that, Ben,” she whispered.

Civilization is a wonderful thing, but survival trumps it every time.

Then a human soldier, a black woman, pushed through the barrels toward her to offer a hand. “The warehouse is burning! Come on!”

The soldier took the red pistol from Alexandra’s now nerveless hands and tugged her through an obstacle course of tumbled communications equipment, pooled blood, dead human and alien bodies, and furiously burning sacks of dried peas. At last they burst onto the smoke-filled parking lot. The remains of the Army’s fuel trucks still blazed brightly. Soldiers pushed her down behind a tank.

“This the one who let the militia in?” one of them said.

“She splattered the froggy with the fearmonger,” her rescuer told them. “Lucky for you.”

But there had been no fearmonger.

As the flood of paralytic terror receded, dragging cold shakiness in its wake, Alexandra’s last thought but one rose back into sight. The eetee hadn’t carried a fear gun. It hadn’t needed one to shoot her full of abject terror.

Noise and commotion went on for a long time after that: the burning diesel, eetee aircraft sweeping overhead, explosions, missiles screaming into the sky, shouts, rattling gunfire. Alexandra knew Ben’s plan had gone entirely wrong, and she was, plainly and simply, screwed. Ben and his deputies were even more screwed, if they weren’t already dead. Now Lewisville really would suffer a military occupation. They would all be herded into camps.

Still, right at the moment she felt like God looking down on creation. She had killed an eetee.

Her brain could not leave alone the image of that clouded alien face at the moment she had pressed the trigger.

All this time she’d been hearing about Ben and his deputies—so brave to venture out, over and over, against such a terrible weapon—and it turned out there was no such thing as a fear gun.

The red pendants must be just some kind of officer’s insignia. It said you were authorized, you had the ability or the training to wield terror. But as for the fear itself—

It all begins and ends in the mind.

Fred crossed the dry, thistly lawn and stopped in front of the old brick building with the flagpoles that Harvey would never let him piss on. In hot weather the children stayed away and the building usually sat empty, but now the strangers had brought grownup people there. Fred hoped Harvey might be one of them.

Fred dropped his burden to sample the air for Harvey’s scent. The air was still heavy with the acrid taste of yesterday’s conflagration. He reared on hind legs to put his nose to the windows. No one had opened the mesh coverings, but the sashes had been raised so he could smell all the guests packed inside. There were even more than at the big barbecues Harvey and Susan used to hold. The people were not enjoying this party, though. Many stood in line in front of a table. The rest sat around on cots or folded blankets, glum, angry, or fearful.

Fred recognized some of the people. Mister Mayor drifted along the line of people, talking. Fred could tell that Mister Mayor felt glum and fearful, too, but he soothed the others with his warm smooth voice that had always reminded Fred of cow fat.

At the table at the head of the line sat the woman vet who had kept Fred tied up in the cold hard room. With her was the otherwise nice man who had helped with the big, long, nasty needle. Now the vet-woman had a lot more needles with her, and the nice man—as well as some of the strangers—were helping her, sticking needles in each person and writing things down.

Near the table Fred noticed Alexandra, who had stopped coming out to Harvey’s a long time ago. Alexandra hadn’t liked Fred’s nose, even when he’d sniffed her crotch in the friendliest way. Alexandra had already gone through the line and now she was smiling and being friendly to some of the strangers.

Ben was not talking to the strangers or to Alexandra. Ben had a leash between his feet and hands and he could only shuffle along. Several strangers led him forward to get stuck with a needle. Fred hoped Ben would be okay. The night before, he had smelled Ben, angry and afraid, through a basement window in the building with the big statue.

At last, in the far corner, Fred located Susan, and nearby, Harvey. Harvey sat on a cot and stared miserably at the wall.

Fred remembered the old days when he and Harvey had romped for hours in the cool of the evening, when the two of them had been joyously happy together. Then Harvey had grown afraid: so afraid of the world and of Fred, he thought he should kill Fred, even though he didn’t want to.

Fred so much wanted Harvey and Susan to be happy again. When Harvey got the present Fred was trying to give him, he would quit being so miserable and alone. He would know that he didn’t have to be afraid of Fred.

Fred picked up the present in his jaws again and loped around the corner of the brick building. A couple of the strangers’ trucks pulled out of the driveway. Their occupants paid no attention to him.

Toward the back of the brick building it was cooler and shady. A cat turd lay under a bush. For a moment, he thrust his nose against it, intrigued. Then he recalled his mission. He would not be able to go home if he failed, not while Harvey and the vet-woman wanted to kill him.

He continued to the back door of the place where the children used to eat. The sweet odor of old garbage lingered here, but there were also fresh smells where cans of oil, bags of potatoes, and crates of stale crackers and raisins had rested on the cement for a few moments. Most interesting was the delirious scent of raw meat. Someone had recently killed a cow.

From inside the building, Fred could smell boiling potatoes. He trotted up to the door itself. Two sweaty strangers guarded it. Fred put down the present and wagged his tail.

Hello, he said to them, in the new way he had learned.

They glanced down. “Hey, boy,” said one of the strangers. Fred wagged his tail some more and the stranger patted him on the head. The stranger liked him. Most people liked Fred.

I like you, too, Fred told him, wagging some more. Will you open the door, please?

The stranger pulled open the door. He didn’t look down as Fred picked up his present and trotted inside. It was just the way it had worked with Harvey and Susan, and at the big building that was kind of like the vet’s. The nice man hadn’t noticed he was letting Fred out. It was because he had wanted Fred to be happy, even though he was afraid Fred was sick.

None of them would be afraid of Fred anymore if they understood that Fred wasn’t sick, he had just learned to do some new things.

They would learn new things, too. They would all be happy once they understood each other. They would stop being afraid of each other, and hating each other, and trying to make each other do things. Like him, they would take off their leashes and run joyously, rapturously free.

At least, that’s what he hoped they would do. But people were sometimes unaccountable.

Fred followed the scent of raw meat into a big kitchen where there was a lot of stainless steel. Men and women chopped potatoes and onions, and big pots of water steamed on the burners. More strangers with guns stood around, making sure the men and women didn’t go outside. The strangers were looking forward to the meat, too.

Don’t bother about me, Fred told them, and no one did, because they didn’t want to. It was a little sneaky, a coyote trick.

Off to one side, one of the men was spilling a bowl of stinky chopped onions into a big vat of ground-up raw meat, ruining its smell. Why don’t you stop and talk to your friend? Fred asked him, knowing, because of the new way, that it was what the man really wanted to do.

He couldn’t do this to the coyotes. They would have caught on right away. But, except for Harvey, the humans didn’t know yet that Fred was talking to them, or that he was trying to get them to do things, just for their own good. Until then he could be a little sneaky.

Fred trotted over to the vat of ground-up cow and dropped in the present he had carried all the way from the vet’s.

“Hey!” the man yelled, suddenly noticing him. “Get away from there! How’d you get in?” But he wasn’t really mad.

Fred backed away and lay down, wagging his tail. The man began mixing the pungent onions in with Fred’s present. By the grill, a woman shouted, “You almost done with that hamburger?”