Then I noticed a girl staring at me. She sat on the bunk next to mine. Both of her flip-flopped feet were on the floor. Her right hand rested on the bed. The left hand and left arm were wherever missing limbs go when they die. She wore a Scooby Doo T-shirt with Scrappy Doo dancing on the cover. That damned dog ruined the franchise, of that you could be sure. She wore braces, although the wires were gone from them since the invasion. It was just there was no one to remove the rest of the metal. No dentists. No orthodontists. No one. Her round-cheeked face held old acne scars, but they did little to dissuade an observer that she would have been beautiful if she ever learned again how to smile. A pirate’s patch was over the place where her left eye used to be. Her right eye remained, and that single Japanese eye held me as she stared.
Suzie.
Suzie Yakihama.
I took her to see Matrix Reloaded at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. We’d messed around in the hand and feet prints. We’d laughed at how small William Shatner’s feet were and created a theme that would carry us through many a day. WWWSD. When posed with a difficult situation, we’d ask ourselves What Would William Shatner Do, channeling the overly-dramatic Captain of the Starship Enterprise, and we’d act it out, right there, wherever we were.
Like the time at McDonalds when they’d run out of stuff to make McMuffins. WWWSD and Suzie had slow-moed a performance where she commanded Sulu to put phasers on stun and prepare to fire. The look on the clerk’s face had been priceless.
Or the time we were at Wal-Mart and this fat guy fell off an electric cart and seven innocent bystanders were epically failing getting him back on, much to the sad hilarity of anyone who watched. WWWSD and Suzie slow-moed into the area and loudly commanded Scotty to set the tractor beams on full, then using her hands made a motion like she was pulling the fat guy up at the exact moment the seven got their act together and righted the man and his cart.
Or the time we scandalously made out at the back of a Nickleback concert until security came, and then WWWSD and Suzie slow-moed a comment to the clueless officers about how they wouldn’t kick us out if she were a green woman, because no man can deny a green woman her love.
Yeah. That was Suzie.
Then.
But not now.
Definitely not now.
“Was it Bosnia again?” she asked, voice flat, a dead-eyed stare.
A flash of a mass grave, bodies coated with lye, women’s faces stoved in, their dresses up around their waists, flash-banged through my mind.
When I recovered, I said, “Stranz,” then after a moment added, “the arm.”
She continued to stare at me, or through me, whichever, it really didn’t matter because you couldn’t tell. “That’s a bad one.” She lifted her left shoulder where no arm was attached. “I suppose I can relate.”
Progress! When I’d first arrived and mentioned what I’d done it had set her into a bout of depression that lasted days. Now this… this was almost, dare I think it, a normal reaction.
She reached over and grabbed a towel from the foot of my bunk and tossed it to me.
I caught it and wiped my face and neck. My shirt was drenched with sweat. I needed a shower. After a moment, I realized she hadn’t moved.
“What is it?”
“Mother. She wants to see you ASAP.”
“Know what it’s about?”
“Someone reported an alien presence.”
“Did they say where?”
“Malibu Hills. They said this one was different.”
That didn’t make any sense. There wasn’t anything up there. Just hills and abandoned homes. Unless…
I reminded myself of the black kudzu that produced the zombie spore. Was this another terraformed creation that was the next round in the Hey let’s fuck up all the humans game? I wasn’t working for OMBRA anymore, but I was working for those I loved. Suzie. Mother. The Family.
“Tell her I’ll get ready to do a recon after I get cleaned up and get something to eat.”
She stood, turned, and began walking away. “You tell her. And tell her that I’m going with you.”
I watched her, wondering for the thousandth time what her story was. What had happened to change her so much? Even I was able to function at a high level even though my mind was fractured like a kaleidoscope that had been crushed by a steamroller.
“Hey!” I called after her.
She stopped, then turned, so I could only see her right eye.
“What?”
“What would William Shatner do?”
She hesitated and in that hesitation I thought she might actually say something, but then she merely shrugged, turned, and left me to my own demons.
We were all locked in prison cells when the invasion came. The Cray came down on every major city, riding their hives — organic ships that became their homes once landed. When they swarmed free, they showed their true power. Already apex predators with their claws, fangs, and joint spikes, they had the bonus of having the biological capacity to produce localized EMPs. Planes fell from the sky as everything broke down. The power grid fried. Life as we knew it ceased to exist. The Cray did everything the masters organized them for, hurling us back into a modern Stone Age, leaving us wondering if we’d ever return to the land of reality television, blockbuster Hollywood X-Men movies, and fast food restaurants promising 2000 calorie cheese burgers.
Only OMBRA was prepared, finding us, hiding us, making us learn lessons from science fiction stories and movies until finally they let us free of our cells. Then they gave us the EXO — the Electromagnetic Faraday Xeno-combat Suit. It not only protected us from the EMP, but allowed us to fight the Cray, killing them first at Kilimanjaro, then Bruges, then Rio de Janeiro.
Soon we were fighting them on our own terms.
Soon we were winning.
Then the other intergalactic shoe dropped.
The Cray had been used to soften us up. Next came terraforming, giant vines reducing our cities to dust. Among this alien flora came a fungus similar but far worse than ophiocordyceps unilateralis that allowed the masters the ability to terraform our minds, turning us into zombies, listless, unmoving, except to infect others. That’s how the master controlled me, made me attack my own squad, dismembering one, and almost killing the others.
They excused my actions because I was under the influence of the masters. Plus, how could I be responsible? After all, I had PTSD. But of course, all of us had PTSD. All of OMBRA. It’s why they chose us. We were exactly what they wanted because as broken as we were on the inside from everything we’d seen and done in the name of war, the shattered pathways of our minds could possibly stand in the way of ultimate alien domination. If we couldn’t navigate our helter skelter brains, then how could it be possible for an alien species to do so?
“She can’t come with you.”
My mind snapped back to the present.
“What? Sorry.”
Mother sat in her green Lazy Boy recliner. She wore a blue and yellow housecoat and fluffy kitten slippers on her feet. Her hands were folded in her lap. Her face was stern, yet matronly. “She can’t come with you. She’s still on suicide watch.”
Even after all this time, whenever I looked at her, I couldn’t help but think of that old Hollywood actor, Kathy Bates — the one best known for sawing off James Caan’s foot in that Stephen King film all the while shouting I am your biggest fan. They could have been twins… or for all I know, she could have been her, I just never had the balls to ask. That was something about Mother. You couldn’t help but act different around her. She was like your real mother, a drill sergeant, and a swami all rolled up into one unassuming yet unapproachable person who preferred housecoats, loved cats, and drank tea.