I shrug. “We’re alive, so Command can’t bomb.”
“We’re bait,” he agrees. “They’ll draw the other squads back to rescue us.”
“Into a trap.” I nod. This street lies at the bottom of a gently rising wave of cookie-cutter houses. If Fiends are dug in all along the hill, the slaughter will be unthinkable. “It’ll be kill at will.”
Flashes of blue-white fury bloom across his translucent, helpless body, but what can he do? It’s all been very neatly planned.
“It won’t work,” he says finally. “We’ll lose a few squads here, but you’ll all die.”
You. A bit of a chill.
“Tell them,” he says, and I realize he just wants me to pass the word along.
“What’s he saying?” asks Mama Fiend.
I let out a long breath. “Basically? They rock, we suck, we’re all gonna die.”
Mama laughs. “Let him know we don’t need a traitor on-hand to translate his bullshit.”
Loot fluffs again—probably caught the word “traitor.” “Tell them you’re a prisoner, Cantil. Say we forced you to help us.”
Poor guy. Impulsively, I knot my bony fingers into a sign of friendship, then press both hands into the flesh of his webbed-up tentacle, giving him a last taste of my damp palms and dirty fingers. “Thanks for everything, Loot.”
“Come on.” Mama Fiend drags me toward the door, leaving her minions to watch the hostages.
He bellows in fractured American as we disappear down the hall. “Don’t hurt! Not hurt! Cantil!”
But Cantil is flaking away, all but gone. He was never more than a false skin, and it is good to finally shed him.
Mama Fiend, whose name is Debra Notting, hits a remote on an antique iPod. The basement fills with the sound of me shrieking in agony. We pass through an old bedroom, where a redheaded girl is pouring two pints of blood—mine, donated a couple months back—onto a stained mattress.
Deb points at my shoes. I slip them off, along with my sweat-stained socks, and kick them into a corner. There won’t be a body, but there’s a lot of my DNA in here now. Given the way Dust can obliterate a person from existence, you can never know for sure if someone’s alive or dead.
“Spit your gum onto the floor?” the girl suggests.
“Can’t—it’s laced with drugs,” I reply, undertone.
Beyond the bedroom is a squalid john whose tub is full of broken tile. A crude tunnel has been hacked into its wall; we head down and then east for two hundred feet, coming up in another basement. The battle wranglers are here, crouched in a sensor-proof tent, peering into portable datascreens and murmuring orders into headsets. The others are tracking the incoming squid squads that are heading back to rescue Loot and his fry.
“Demolition ships are clearing off,” reports one old man.
“Told you, Deb,” I say. “They’re too pricey to risk when we’ve got surface-to-air.”
“What happened with the ship we hit?” she asks.
“Four survivors, pinned down in the Hamiltons’ backyard,” a wrangler answers.
“The squid receiving video of their captured platoon?”
“Affirmative.” He tilts a screen and we see Loot and the others, bound tightly onto the pallets, taser-patched and already drying out. I make myself smile. It’s always important at this point to look solid, loyal.
The mental shift of gears is harder this time.
“One squad’s almost back to Sycamore Drive,” a wrangler reports. “Permission to fire?”
“No,” Deb says. “Wait until they’re closer. We’re wasting five hundred troops here. To make it worth the blood, we need to draw in and kill as many as we can. I want lots of bait, well-placed bait.”
“They’ll deploy,” I say. It took me months of careful maneuvering to get onto Loot’s squad. Months of minty chewing gum that made me sweat like a pig and smell ever so faintly sweet. Months of shooting Fiends and telling dumb Dem jokes and worrying that Kabuva Intel would figure out I’d been behind the bloodbath last year in Atlanta. “The lieutenant’s mother will throw half the West Coast Command in here if she thinks it’ll get Loot back.”
“You sez,” Debra replies, but she’s smiling.
“Been right so far, haven’t I?”
“No,” she says.
“No? I brought him right here, on time.”
“Yeah.” She taps the screen. “You also said he’d sell you out.”
It’s true. Loot came through, unlike all the other squid I’ve so carefully betrayed. My voice, when I answer, is steady: “Kid’s an idealist, the real deal. Had to happen eventually, I guess.”
“Almost a shame we’re gonna kill him, huh?”
She’s watching me carefully.
“Almost,” I agree. If I do feel a pang, if the game is suddenly less fun than it used to be, how’s she going to know? I’m a serpent. I lie.
“Okay.” She smiles. “Time you scrambled. I’m sure you’ve got a hot date with a new identity.”
“I’m going after the spaceport in Tulsa,” I say. There’s no harm in telling. Everyone in the room took slow poison as soon as my squad passed the copy shop. The squid will overrun this position eventually—there’s no avoiding that. But they won’t be interrogating anyone but grunts.
She draws back the cover on another tunnel. “This one leads to the sewers. There’s a truck waiting.”
“Thanks.” Still barefoot, I ease onto the ladder.
To my surprise, Deb gives me a hug before I can go. “Thanks for setting the stage.”
“Make a good show of it,” I reply, squeezing back. For a second, the hard tissue of her muscles feel strange. Almost alien.
Letting me go, she salutes.
Then she turns back to her work and I start down the ladder, leaving my friends and enemies together, locked in the endless dance of mutual annihilation.
THE FEAR GUN
Judith Berman
Judith Berman is a writer, anthropologist, and long-time aikido practitioner. Her fiction, which has been shortlisted for the Nebula and Sturgeon awards, has appeared in Asimov’s, Black Gate, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, Lightspeed, and the chapbook Lord Stink and Other Stories. Her novel Bear Daughter was a finalist for the Crawford Award, and her influential essay “Science Fiction Without the Future” received the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pioneer Award. She has lived in Philadelphia, Dubai, and northern Idaho, and currently resides on a hilltop on Vancouver Island, BC, in sight of the ocean.
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.