“Why don’t you sit down?” Oliver gestured toward a chair.
Kai sat on the edge of the chair like a kid in the principal’s office. The room didn’t help things; it was bland and oppressive, windowless, nothing on the walls but an American flag in a wooden frame, and the ubiquitous population tracker, doggedly ticking back the dwindling world population.
“So it looks like we’re going to be working together.”
Kai swallowed, nodded.
“Maybe we should discuss procedure and strategies?” When Kai didn’t respond, Oliver forged ahead. “Here’s what I think might work best: Once the prisoner regains consciousness, repeat anything it says to you out loud. This way we won’t have to rely on your memory later. It’s important that you repeat word for word…” The boy was looking past Oliver, his lips forming a tight O.
Oliver looked over his shoulder. The Luyten’s eyes were open. It was watching them.
“Is it speaking to you?”
Kai shook his head.
Oliver stood, inched closer to the Luyten. “Say something to it. Out loud, like you did when it was under the church.”
It was clear Kai had no interest in speaking to the Luyten. He licked his lips and said, “I just wanted to get you help. You were hurt.”
Oliver studied the Luyten, then turned and watched Kai. “Anything?”
“No.”
Feeling simultaneously foolish and very uneasy, Oliver moved within a few feet of the flimsy-looking mesh that separated them from the creature. “My name is Oliver Bowen. I understand that you can communicate with us. Are you in pain? If you are, I may be able to arrange relief.”
He had no idea if the medical people had administered a painkiller. Probably not—they knew next to nothing about the creature’s physiology. He’d made the offer more as a generic gesture of concern.
Oliver turned and looked at Kai. “Anything?”
Kai shrugged. “No.”
There were a few possibilities. The Luyten might be staying silent because Kai could no longer help it, or because it knew they wanted to communicate with it to seek some advantage in the war. It was also possible the Luyten was communicating with Kai, and Kai was lying because he was on its side. Oliver thought that was unlikely.
“What’s that?” Kai asked, eyeing the population counter on the wall. At the moment it read three billion, seven hundred thousand and change. The numbers went on rolling backward, counting down.
“It’s an estimate of the world population.” The number shrunk by several hundred in the time it took Oliver to answer.
Kai studied it. “How does it know when someone dies?”
“It’s just an estimate, based on updates people here receive.”
Kai pressed his tongue to his upper lip, stared at the readout, mesmerized.
“Why don’t you try talking to the Luyten again?”
“He told me to call him Five.”
The idea of it having a name unsettled Oliver in a way he couldn’t articulate.
“It’s a he?” Oliver asked.
Kai shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems like a he.”
“Why Five?”
Looking sheepish, Kai shrugged yet again. “I don’t know.”
Luyten tended to congregate in groups of three, when they congregated at all, so Five probably didn’t correspond to his place in a group or family, although it might. It was a prime number, but Oliver couldn’t see how that mattered. Maybe it wasn’t his real name, only one he’d chosen for Kai to use.
“Does the number five hold any special meaning for you?” he asked Kai. “Your lucky number? Your birthday?”
Kai couldn’t take his eyes off the Luyten. “Not really.”
Oliver stared at the Luyten. Looking at it was unpleasant, not only because it was large and terrifying, but because of the wound, the ragged stump.
Oliver folded his arms across his chest, leaned closer, counted its limbs.
Five. There had been six, now there were five.
It was a tiny insight, but it provided a glimpse into how the creature thought.
“Why don’t you try talking to Five again?” he said.
“What should I say?”
“I don’t know. Anything.” Oliver waved his hands, trying to come up with something. Topics of conversation were not his strong suit. “What did you talk about before?”
Kai shrugged. “Where to find food, how scared we were.”
That wouldn’t work now. What else could you talk about with an alien? Maybe they should try to win it over, with pleasant topics. Small talk. Fall back on standard CIA interrogation procedures.
“Tell it about your hobbies.”
“My hobbies?” Kai said it as if he’d never heard the word before.
“Things you liked to do. Before, you know, you couldn’t do them anymore.”
Haltingly, Kai began to talk about a water park near his house, where you surfed up a stationary fifteen-foot wave.
The Luyten remained silent.
7
Lila Easterlin
July 2, 2029. Savannah, Georgia.
It had once been an indoor flea market. The battered sign by the road, hanging from a rusted pole, read KELLER’S FLEA MARKET. It sported an image of a cartoon flea. Now it was an enormous morgue, a body factory. Lila hated the place, dreaded going in there, but her father was too busy to bring the containers out, and there were too many for Alfe to carry on his own. Plus, Alfe didn’t look any more eager to go inside than Lila.
“You ready?” He was already holding the balled-up T-shirt close to his mouth and nose.
“Shit. I’m never ready to go in there.” She stepped out of the two-seat open buggy she’d salvaged and converted to solar.
Inside, she tried to keep her eyes on the concrete floor, three feet in front of her, but her peripheral vision picked up a bit of the horror show that was all around, and her imagination filled in the rest. The bodies were on tables, on the ground, some literally stacked in piles along the walls. Many were badly burned; most had gaping wounds. The ones who’d been killed by the Luyten’s lightning gun had the soles of their feet blown out.
Even if she were wearing blinders, the rancid stench would have made the place intolerable. Even with the T-shirt covering her mouth and nose, she held her breath as long as possible before taking a quick, gasping breath and holding it again.
Lila wondered if you ever got used to the smell and sight of bodies. Maybe she had, to a degree, only so gradually she hadn’t noticed. Wouldn’t the sight of hundreds of bodies have sent her screaming and gibbering three years ago? Probably.
She spotted her dad, wearing a transparent mask that covered his whole head. He was collecting DNA samples, moving from body to body with a handheld DNA harvester. He spotted Lila and Alfe a moment later, and pointed toward the back of the immense, low-ceilinged space. Lila waved with her free hand, hurried to the back where she found half a dozen battered, filthy red gasoline canisters.
It was difficult to carry three canisters each while keeping the T-shirts in place, but they managed. As soon as they were outside, Lila let the arm holding the T-shirt and one canister drop to her side. She exhaled heavily, trying to drain every ounce of the rotten air out of her lungs before inhaling the relatively fresh outside air.
“I don’t know how he does it,” Alfe said, breathless, hands on his knees. “It’s like being in a pit of hell.”
Lila nodded as she turned and headed for the buggy. The sooner they got downtown, the sooner this hellish errand would be finished. Discovering the taps were not working that morning had shaken Lila, for surely if there was one thing you could count on, it was water.