I said, “Nothing for any of us. I know we’ve always been there, but now things are different.”
I didn’t have to say what I meant. Daddy’s eyes got that look he gets when anybody mentions the aliens. Eight years now since the oil rigs closed, and the gas drilling, and most important to us, the coal mines. Everybody I know is out of work since the Likkies gave us the Q-energy. Only they didn’t really give it to us, they gave it to the rich guys in Washington and San Francisco and Seattle and Oklahoma City, who just got a whole lot richer selling it back to the country. “A trade partnership” they called it, but somehow people like us got left out of all the trading. We always do.
I stumbled on. “I want more, Daddy. You always said to use whatever you—”
“What did you do?” he said, and his voice was quiet thunder.
“I enlisted.”
Sarah cried out. She’s only eleven, she don’t understand. Seth, who’s a pretty good stump preacher, pointed his finger at me and started in. “‘Mine own familiar friend in whom I trusted, who did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his hand against me!’”
Psalm four-something.
Mama said, “Did you sign anything? Come back and we’ll hide you!”
Jacob—and where did he come from? He shoulda been out digging bootleg coal for the stove—yelled, “Brightwater is good enough for the rest of us! We been here two hundred years!”
Mama said, all desperate, “MaryJo, pride goeth before a fall!”
Sarah: “Come home!”
Seth: “‘And the many will fall away and betray one another!’”
Jacob: “You always thought you were better than us!”
Mama: “Oh dear sweet Jesus, help this prodigal girl to see the light and—”
Then Daddy cut it all short with that voice of his. “You’re a traitor. To us and to your country.”
I cried, “I joined the United States Army! You fought in Afghanistan and Grandpa in—”
“Traitor. And not my daughter. I don’t never want to see your face again.”
A wail from Mama, and then the screen went black and dead, dead, dead.
The recruiter came back in. She was in a fancy uniform but her face was kind. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I warn’t about to talk on this with her. Anyways, she knew the situation. The whole fucking country knew the situation. If you have money, you’re glad the Likkies are here, changing up the economy and saving the environment. If you don’t have money, if you’re just working people, your job disappeared to the Likkies’ Q-energy and their factory ’bots and all the rest of it. So you starve. Or you join one of the terrorist groups trying to bring the Likkies down. Or, like me, you do what poor kids have always done, including Daddy and Grandpa—you join the army for a spell.
Only this time, the army was on the wrong side. The military was fighting our home-raised anti-Likkie terrorists in American cities, even on the moon base and in space. I was going to be defending my family’s enemy.
I went outside and got on the bus to go to basic training.
Basic warn’t too bad. I was at Fort Benning for OSUP, one stop unit training. I’m tough and I don’t need much sleep and after the first few days, nobody messed with me. The drill sergeants mostly picked on somebody else, and my battle buddy was okay, and silent. I had the highest rifle qualification score and so I got picked to fire the live round at AT4 training. The Claymore blew up with more noise and debris than anybody expected, but all I could think of was this: Daddy taught me to shoot, he should be proud of me. Only, of course, he warn’t.
I didn’t see no aliens at Fort Benning.
Once somebody suggested sniper school, and I was kinda interested until I found out it involved a lot of math. No way.
I had three days after OSUT before I had to report to my unit at Fort Drum. I checked into a motel and played video games. The last day, I called home—at least the phone warn’t cut off—and by a miracle, Sarah answered instead of anybody else.
“Hey, Squirt.”
“MaryJo?”
“Yeah. How you doing?”
“How are you? Where are you? Are you coming home now?”
“No. I’m going to my unit, in New York. Sarah—”
“In New York City?”
I heard the dazzle in her voice, and all at once my throat closed up. It was me who taught Sarah to shoot and about her period and all sorts of shit. I got out, “No, upcountry New York. Listen, you doing okay?” And then what I really wanted to ask: “They forgive me yet?”
Silence. Then a little whisper, “No. Oh, Jo, quit that army and them Likkies and come home! I miss you!”
“I can’t, Squirt. But I’ll send—”
“Gotta go Seth just come home. Bye!”
A sharp click on the line.
I spent my last night drunk.
The next day I got on my first plane ride and reported to Fort Drum. And right there was my first alien.
“Does anybody have any questions?”
Nobody did. The officer—a lieutenant colonel, the highest rank I ever expected to see talking right at us—stood in front of a hundred sixty FNGs—”fucking new guys”—talking about Likkies. Only of course he called them by their right name, Leckinites. I don’t know where the name come from or what it means; I mighta slept through that part. But I knew nearly everything else, because for a solid week we been learning about the aliens: their home planet and their biology and their culture and, a lot, how important their help was to fixing Earth’s problems with energy and environment and a bunch of other stuff. We seen pictures and movies and charts, and at night we used our personal hour to argue about them. Near as I could tell, about half the base thought the Likkies were great for humans. The other half was like me, knowing just how bad the aliens made it for folks on the bottom.
And now we were going to meet one for the first time.
“Are you sure you have no questions?” Colonel Jamison said, sounding like we shoulda had some. But in the army, it’s best to keep your mouth shut. “No? Then without further delay, let me introduce Mr. Granson. Tensh-hut!”
We all leapt to attention and the Likkie walked into the room. If its name was “Mr. Granson,” then mine was Dolly Parton. It was tall, like in the movies we seen, and had human-type arms and legs and head. (“This optimum symmetrical design is unsurprisingly replicated in various Terran mammalian species as well” one of our hand-outs read, whatever the fuck that means.) The Likkie had two eyes and a wide mouth with no lips, no hair or nose. It wore a loose white robe like pictures I seen of Arab sheiks, and there mighta had anything underneath. Its arms ended in seven tentacles each, its skin was sorta light purplish, and it wore a clear helmet like a fishbowl ’cause it can’t breathe our air. No oxygen tank and hose to lug around like old Grandpa Addams had when the lung cancer was getting him. The helmet someways turned our air into theirs. They’re smart bastards, I’ll give them that.
“Hello,” it said. “I am privileged to meet with you today.”
Real good English and not too much accent—I heard a lot worse at Fort Benning.
“My wish is to offer thanks for the help of the U.S. Army, including all of you, in protecting the partnership that we are here to forge between your people and mine. A partnership that will benefit us all.”
The guy next to me, Lopez, shifted in his seat. His family used to work at a factory that now uses Likkie ’bots instead. But Lopez kept his face empty.
The Likkie went on like that, in a speech somebody human musta wrote for him because it didn’t have no mistakes. At least the speechwriters still got jobs.
Afterward, there was a lot of bitching in the barracks about the speech, followed by a lot of arguing. I didn’t say nothing. But after lights out, the soldier in the next bunk, Drucker, whispered to me, “You don’t like the Likkies either, do you, Addams?”