Cottonwood (20 page)

“D-Don’t—”

“Relax, I keep saying. I won’t hurt you.” He stroked a few strands of hair back from her face. “I have never hurt a human woman yet. Not the way you’re thinking.”

“I’m not afraid of you!”

“Yes, you are,” he replied evenly. “But you shouldn’t be. We’re just talking, you and I. Anything we do later, well, that’s later…and I promise you’ll have a good time. I know exactly what to do and I’m good at it. Hang on.” He lifted himself up just enough to untuck his claspers and wrap them around her waist. He settled again, the hard angles of his hips wedged between her buttocks and the feathery tips of his claspers tapping and rubbing under her skirt. “That’s better.”

“Please get off me!”

“That’s right, please and thank you.” He drank. She could feel his hand splayed open between her shoulderblades, relaxed, comfortable. “So polite. Like that first girl on the boat and I’m not sure she really counts. I don’t think she spoke much English.”

“What g-girl? W-What boat?”

She felt him still and then he uttered a short, humorless laugh and pushed his can of beer to the far end of the table. “I’m getting drunk,” he explained. “Maybe you should do some of the talking for a while.”

“What boat?” she asked again, desperately.

“I don’t want to talk about that.” He started to push his claspers up her thighs again.

“Please! Let’s…Let’s at least get to know each other!”

He breathed, hot and wet and heavy on the back of her neck, and suddenly sighed. “Fine.” He retracted his claspers, but didn’t get off her. “But only because I like it when you beg. So, okay, they put us on a boat in the beginning,” Samaritan began with sour humor. “Eight of us in a room half this size. No window. Air through a fan in the ceiling. No place to piss but a bucket and no place to dump it out. Half a year, they kept us while they built their first fucking immigration camp.”

“Mr. Samaritan, can we sit—”

“Hush,” he said, giving her a light tap on the head, just exactly the sort of thing she’d seen Sanford do when T’aki got especially rambunctious. “I’m talking now. We got an hour on deck every few days. Thousands of us, pressed up there in the rain and the wind, looking up at the ship. They called it our shower and our exercise. Your sweat really, really smells good.” His claspers pushed at her thighs from behind and he laughed again. “It’s distracting me. Okay. My…fifth
shower
…I think. Some of your soldiers picked me out, offered to give me a little extra food if I went with them.”

“Mr. Sa—”

“Hush, I said. We’re talking, just like you wanted. Isn’t it cozy? Don’t you feel like you’re just doing worlds of good?” He cinched his claspers tightly around her waist, then bent down and rested on top of her. His whole hard body covered her back, his arms folded casually atop her head for a chinrest. “Where was I? The soldiers. They brought their own boat, a little one. They had a she-human, the first I’d seen. They said they’d give me food—and it wasn’t that canned shit back then either—to watch me fuck this girl. This baffled me. They didn’t know anything about us. They didn’t know if I had anything that could do the job, or even if I did, what it would do to her. They just wanted to see bug inside human, and I get the feeling that if I had hurt her, that would have been perfectly all right with them…maybe even better.”

She said nothing, could scarcely understand him. He lifted up his head and gave hers a tap. “Listening?”

She nodded.

“Fine. I fucked her. They made pictures of it. And it wasn’t bad. Like sticking my—” Clicks and whines the translator couldn’t make sense of. “—into hot soup in a sack. And she loved it. Nervous at first, but really got into it once I figured out what they wanted me to do. Polite. Every other word was please or thank you, but like I say…I don’t think she knew what she was saying. She called me Mister too,” he said thoughtfully and for a short time, he was quiet, but when Sarah shifted beneath him, he started talking again. “They came and got me a lot after that. Almost every time I was on deck. Different girl. Same boat. Sometimes they wanted to do things to her at the same time as me, things I can’t even call fucking. It was bizarre. I ate a lot. Real food. Bread. Meat. Chocolate.” He laughed. “Those were my best days, caseworker.”

“I’m s-sorry.”

His laughter stopped. Everything stopped. He clicked once or twice, but that was all. Slowly, he took his hands off her head and put them on the table to either side of her. He pushed himself up, not far. “Sorry for what?” he asked blackly.

“What they did to you was wrong,” she whispered.

“Wrong? No, what’s
wrong
—” He got up fast and dragged her with him, spinning her, shoving her hard against the wall. “—is that there’s no trade for it here. That’s wrong, human. In Buena Vista, I was guaranteed two rations of real meat every day for what I did to those girls. In Silverbrook, I about
lived
on the picture set. I had a bed, caseworker. I had my own shower with hot water and
soap
. Here? I could fuck you until the table breaks and I won’t see one extra can. All I get is
you
so don’t ruin that for me! You want to fight, fight, but don’t you fucking talk to me about what’s
wrong
!”

She stared at him, now shaking freely, the acrid bug food/beer/bile stink of his breath swimming in her lungs. “I’m sorry,” she said again. It was all she could think of. “I’m so sorry.”

His eyes narrowed. “Get out,” he said.

“Mr. Samaritan—”

She only wanted to ask for her briefcase, but she never had the chance. She said his name and in the very next instant, he seized her by the neck of her blouse, yanked open his door, and threw her out.

“I’m sorry!” she babbled, scrambling back, and he grabbed her and threw her again. Light stabbed her, spinning as she tumbled off the porch. Something huge and hard hit her head; she guessed it was the ground. Something else slammed into her chest; her official IBI briefcase, thrown after her.

“You don’t get to feel sorry for me!” the translator said evenly as Samaritan loomed over her, snapping and skreeing. She tried to sit up. He knocked her down again under his foot and shoved, sending her scraping over hot dirt and loose trash to smack up against his car. “I didn’t do anything wrong! Save your fucking sorries, you fucking bag of meat! If you ever—”

Then a crack like the world’s biggest egg breaking and he was gone.

Eclipse. What? Sky grey. Sun grey. No, wait, it was coming back. Ouch. Head. She fumbled up to try and touch it and hit someone else’s head instead. Little head. Focus.

“Jellybean,” she croaked, surprised.

“Get up,” T’aki clicked, tugging at her shirt.

“I don’t think I can, honey.”

More of that shrieking, fingernail-on-chalkboard, blatt-of-untuned-trumpet, clicks and snaps loud enough to hurt her ears. The translator brought it all to her calmly, dispassionately: “—kill IBI’s human in front of your own house? In front of
my
house!” Sound of eggs hitting eggs.

“Get up,” T’aki said again, now getting under her arm and pushing. He was stronger than he looked. They all were.

Sarah managed her knees and then had to wait for her stomach to settle. T’aki kept trying to heave her up. He could almost do it. She started to ask him where his father was, and then realized, of course, who was shouting.

She looked up against the metallic sun and saw Sanford punch Samaritan three times in the face—
pow pow pow
. She’d never imagined the aliens were punchers, not with those skinny arms, but those looked like nasty blows. Samaritan swung back at him; Sanford dodged it easily and socked him twice more, in the neck this time. And while Samaritan clutched his throat and hacked on air, Sanford jumped straight up and brought his thorny elbow down smack on top of Samaritan’s head.

She heard the crunch even through her haze. It was as good as an ice-water dip at sobering her.

Samaritan dropped to his knees, arms up like he was surrendering to IBI’s soldiers. Sanford drew back his fist, and Sarah shouted, “Oh God, no, don’t kill him!” and then immediately had to grab her head in both hands and stagger against the rusty car. Felt like her brains were splitting.

When she could straighten up, they were staring at her, Samaritan and Sanford both. “Don’t kill him,” she said again, trying to walk.

“Who said anything about killing?” Sanford spat, and put Samaritan on the ground with a disgusted shove.

There was a crack in the top of his head, oozing blood as red as hers. “Fuck off,” he said dully, rolling onto his back. “I’m fine. Sunbathing. You know I can see right up your skirt from here, caseworker. Your cunt wants out of its cocoon.” He laughed.

Sanford stomped on his chest before Sarah could even begin to feel offended. Another crunch. She and Samaritan shrieked together.

“She loves me,” Samaritan grunted, and vomited bug food and beer into the street.

“You’re a pig and I’m getting you a doctor!” she babbled, fumbling at her hips for her phone. Couldn’t find it. Right, no pockets. In her case. Where was her case?

“You touch that fucking phone and I’ll snap your fingers off,” Samaritan said, and took a foot to his chest again, splitting the crack in his chitin wider. He lay gasping, both hands pressed over the wound, then hauled himself upright and threw up again. “Doctors don’t come to Cottonwood,” he said, and spat a few times. “They take us away and they don’t bring us back. Just think of how sorry you’d be then.” He cocked his head and studied her. “You look terrible. I don’t even want you anymore.”

“Fuck you!” she shrilled.

“Some other time. Not feeling too well for some reason.” He spat black chaw at Sanford’s feet, then laughed as he limped woodenly toward his house. “But you come back again, caseworker. You know I love it when we talk.”

Sanford caught her arm. He didn’t look at her, just started walking. T’aki took her other hand, gamefully holding it over his head as he ran along beside her. “I think I’m okay,” she said. Neither one answered.

His computers were on. His workstool had fallen. Wires, screws, and pieces of a circuit board laid a path to his door. He helped her over it and sat her down in the wheezy green chair. T’aki immediately climbed into her lap and Sanford just as immediately lifted him off and set him down again. “Go outside,” he said. “Watch for humans.”

T’aki went.

Sanford righted his seat, picked up a few things, then simply sat and stared at her. “I would give you water, but it isn’t clean,” he said finally. “You will have to wait to wash your wounds.”

“I have wounds?” She reached up to feel delicately at the throbbing place at the back of her head and looked in surprise at the blood on her fingers.

“Have you had a tetanus shot?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He looked at her some more. His breath sounded very loud, louder than usual. Of course, they all sounded like they were breathing through a thin layer of tomato juice, but still… “What did he do?”

“Nothing.”

He snorted disgustedly at her and swung around to throw things at his computer.

“I think he was just trying to scare me,” she said. “Then he threw me out. I fell bad, I guess. That’s all.”

Slam. Smack. Solder.

“Honest, Sanford,” she said, wondering why she was insisting. “He knocked me down, he didn’t really hit me. And the next I knew, you were hitting him.”

He clicked sourly. “Why did you stop me?”

“Being a jerk is not a capital offense,” she argued.

“Is that all?”

“What else would it be, for God’s sake? Well, okay, I’d hate to do the paperwork on a dead client, but mostly, I just don’t want to see even a jerk like Samaritan get killed.”

“Do you think every
bug
is a killer?”

Taken aback by this furious attack, she could only stammer, “You broke him open, Sanford!”

“He won’t die from that.”

“I thought…I mean, if you stab a scorpion or something, they don’t heal…”

He shot her a hot, venomous stare and snapped, “We are not
scorpions
!”

She felt herself blush. “I know that. I just thought—”

“I know what you thought!” He swung back and tinkered with his machines.

She shrank back a little, then ventured, “Are you mad at me?”

He stilled for perhaps two seconds, then continued working. “No. I just don’t want to see humans sprawled bleeding over my doorstep.”

She started to stand up, thinking numbly to leave, or at least to get out of his house before she started crying.

He reached back without turning and put his hand on her arm. He didn’t grab her, just touched her. His head bent slightly. In a much gentler voice, he said, “Sit down, please.”

Sarah obeyed, one hand pressed to her still-aching head, the other rubbing at her stomach, which had begun to cramp in misery. ‘Bad day,’ she told herself, and tried to think of all the other bad days she’d had and now could shrug off—the fry machine bursting out the bottom and flooding the burger station where she worked with boiling oil during lunch rush, landscaping jobs in the rain when she had to dig up and replant three dozen trees because the owner couldn’t decide where he wanted them, family reunion day at the diner when that kid threw up in her pocket and doused all her tips, the list went on and on and she hadn’t shriveled up and died yet. This was just another bad day and she’d get through it.

‘At least it can’t get any worse,’ she thought, then shivered for no reason at all.

* * *

Sanford tried to work, but neither his mind nor his hands would steady. Behind him, Sarah sat, so quiet that were it not for the smell of her filling up his house, he would have believed himself alone. Now and then, he looked her way, but she never seemed to be sleeping, only leaned back against the torn cushion of the uncomfortable chair with her head between her hands. Her hair was matted, stiffly jutting as antennae, stained with blood, but the wound did not seem to be worsening. It had been an hour by his computer’s time, and he began to believe the altercation had gone unnoticed.