Cottonwood (23 page)

She thought of T’aki sprawling in the dirt, playing Trucks with milk bottles and rusty cans. She thought of Baccus with his hands on his head, flinching away from the gun while his house—his children—burned. She thought of Samaritan holding her down while he cheerfully told her about the boats and the girls and what they’d made him do just so he could have a hot shower with soap.

T’aki, crawling up onto her lap. Giving her his precious Trucks to play with. Trying to tickle her, trying to be tickled. And Sanford, putting down his tools and laughing, actually laughing, over
Aliens From Outer Space
and the eyeball king. Going to movies, going to the Heaps, going back to sit in his house all together and just talk. Could she do them any good? She honestly didn’t know, but she didn’t want to give them up. And if she walked away now, wasn’t that the same as abandoning them? Who would ever come along who would try to do better?

“I think so,” Sarah whispered, her heart breaking at the lie.

There was a pause, and then Kate said, “Really?” in a dubious voice.

“Yes.”

“Well…okay. But I’m telling you this, Sarah, don’t argue with these people. If you ever decide you can’t hack it out there, don’t call me, don’t fight, don’t pack, don’t even get your dog, just leave. Get in your van and come right home.”

“I—”

“And don’t call me on either your home phone or your paz unless it’s to say happy birthday and what a great time you’re having out there. When people in the office tell bug jokes, you better laugh. And the next time they start breaking eggs, you stand back and let them.”

“Kate!”

“But don’t do anything stupid, like sneak in to take pictures or start blogging about how horrible it is inside the walls, and do not, I repeat, do
not
threaten to go to any newspapers if things get ugly with your boss. When it’s time to run, you tuck tail and
run
and don’t you even think of doing something Hollywood and heroic, you got me?”

Sarah said nothing. Her eyes swam. Her throat felt tight.

“I love you, kiddo,” Kate said, gently now. “And maybe I’m being paranoid about all this, but you are scaring the hell out of me tonight. My baby sister may have just put herself on IBI’s radar. IBI…nobody knows who these guys really are.”

“They’re the—”

“No, I know who they say they are now, but seriously, they are bad people.” Kate sighed again, hard. “Twenty years ago, when they first show up and start penning up the bugs, you know what their tax status was? It wasn’t a charity, Sarah. They were gun-runners.”

“That can’t be right!”

“No, it’s true. That psycho warlord leader of theirs, Damek van Meyer, said IBI would take care of them as long as they got salvage rights to the ship. And then he went straight into the bedroom with a bunch of world leaders and fucked around until they figured out who’d get what alien-goddamn-gun in exchange for permission to build one of their roach motels. And today, they’re still selling guns, only they’re not doing so much buying any more and that means they’re
making
them, Sarah. These great altruistic friends of yours, who bought you a super hi-tech house in their cute little gated community, are sitting on the world’s most obvious money-laundering business in history, only instead of a restaurant or a laundromat, they’re hiding behind the public’s fear of bugs to build themselves into the largest uncontrolled and unofficial weapons development and manufacturing agents in the world, with a free license to ship and trade in any country with an immigration camp. They have their own airports, their own seaports—they are their own law!”

Sarah listened, staring sightlessly into the corner of the phone bank, wishing she could disbelieve any of it.

“And in addition to turning out millions of undocumented weapons into God knows whose hands, your boss is also employing something like fifty thousand ‘security guards’ armed with top-of-the-line IBI-brand weapons and armor. This is not a security force anymore, kiddo. This is one man’s private army. And speaking of weapons, where are all those alien weapons they supposedly took off the mothership, huh?”

“They’re all locked down. Humans can’t use them.”

“We’re already using them,” said Kate. “Twenty years ago, there was no such thing as a concussion cannon or a plasma rifle or an ionizing particle blaster! Where do you think they came from? The International Bureau of Immigration holds the patent on every piece of practically every weapon used in the last three wars! Open your eyes, Sarah! They could have put all the bugs together in a bunch of apartment buildings if all they wanted was to house them. Instead, they spread them out over the globe in these dink-ass little shacks and why? So they could spread out with them and hide a couple of refineries and manufacturing plants right out in the open! And don’t tell me that’s not what’s going on, because there is no other reason on God’s green earth for anyone to have that many technicians around.”

“They could be building—”

“But they’re not,” Kate interrupted. “They’re not building anything. They put the bugs in a slum and they’re ignoring them. Jesus, if we’re lucky, they’re ignoring them, but the point I’m making is they aren’t
building
them a damned thing. IBI doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the bugs, they only want their stuff! And you had to go running out there and put yourself right in the middle of it all!
Jesus
, Sarah!”

Sarah’s head ached. She rubbed and felt fuzzy skin instead of hair, puckered scabbing stitches. She pulled her cap down lower.

“Be careful, okay?” Kate blew a sigh into the receiver, the intensity gone from her voice, now only tired again. “Be careful out there. Do good, but be careful. I love you, but you’re scaring me so bad. You’re all I’ve got.”

“I love you too,” Sarah managed.

“Go home. Go to sleep.”

“Yeah. I will.”

Kate hung up first, but gently. Sarah wiped her eyes (the left one ached, even though it was unhurt, as if her cheekbone were outsourcing its pain to other parts of the body, just to be sure she felt it all) and went back to the van.

Fagin was waiting patiently on the seat to wash her down and wonder if McDonald’s would mind giving a starving dog an ice cream cone. Sarah patted him down and dutifully promised one, but had to sit for a while behind the wheel and not think. Not think about Mr. van Meyer and Piotr coming up to see her at her desk, not think about that shiny and well-stocked medical wing in IBI’s basement, not think about Sanford shoving his son down into a hole and hissing, ‘That means nothing to these people!’, or Samaritan saying that doctors took people away and didn’t bring them back. What she thought about instead was herself, her own stupid self, walking in through the gate on her first day of work, all smiles and clean sheets of paper, ready to do some good, to be a part of the great intergalactic rainbow connecting humans and aliens in glorious integration.

“What joy,” croaked Sarah. She looked at herself in the rearview mirror and saw a gargoyle with half her face, only half. She sighed and started up the van.

Fagin got his cone and Sarah bought a burger purely by habit, but she didn’t bother trying to eat it. Her face throbbed abysmally now; it was bound to be old Fagin’s breakfast in the morning. Right now, she didn’t care about anything except a handful of pills and her bed, but as bad as she felt tonight, she was only going to feel worse tomorrow and Fagin was going to need another bag of kibble before the weekend was up, so when Sarah finally started up the van, she aimed it, not towards Cottonwood and home, but towards the ShopALot.

There, she bought a bag of Fagin’s current favorite—he snubbed food like a cat, dumb dog—and a few cans of meaty chunks to mix in, plus some self-pity candy bars and a bag of cookies she knew she’d never be able to chew, and a stack of soft-looking frozen dinners and ice cream. She got almost halfway back across the parking lot when the flimsy grocery bag split, spilling dog food and junk food all over the pavement. A car ran over her cookies as she was picking everything up. She cried and got them anyway. She’d paid for them.

With her groceries loose in the van and distinctly the worse for wear, Sarah drove around to the back of the ShopALot to look for a cardboard box she could pack them into. If she hadn’t done that, if she’d just gone home…but she didn’t. She drove out of the well-lit parking lot and into the muddy loading dock, where the van’s headlights caught an alien up against the ShopALot dumpster with nowhere to hide.

She braked and stared at him, blinking hard to make him go away. She’d hit her head. She’d hit her head and apparently the good stuff hadn’t all worn off because there was no way she was seeing this.

The alien slowly raised his arms over his head and got down on his knees.

On the other side of the ShopALot, the human side, metal carts crashed together, making the alien jump and look around. He raised his arms higher.

He was really here. In Wheaton. In the ShopALot.

Sarah got out of the van.

Funny, how quiet it was back here. Her shoes crunching over the cracked pavement and pot-holes made echoes against the side of the building. The alien’s breath—thick and snotty and way too fast—scratched at her ears. His eyes darted up to read the letters on her official IBI cap. He said, “I’m not resisting.” The clicks and rattles of his speech were loud as gunshots; they both flinched.

“What are you doing here?” Sarah asked. She didn’t know what else to say.

He stared at her, panting in that wet way. The ground around him was littered with bits of paper and plastic tubs from the ShopALot’s greasy deli. When he saw her looking at them, he quickly scraped them together and put them back in the dumpster. It wasn’t easy for him. He was shaking.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m not resisting.”

“How did you get here?”

He breathed, breathed, and finally said, “They took me out in the van. I didn’t do anything wrong. They took me.” He breathed, faster and faster, then blurted, “I don’t know where I am,” in a rush of shrill buzzing and snapping antennae. “I followed the road to the lights, but this isn’t home!”

Another shopping cart clatter made them both jump.

“You’d better get in the van before someone sees you,” Sarah said. “No one’s seen you yet, have they?”

“I don’t think so.” The alien stood up slowly, keeping his arms high.

“Why did they take you out of Cottonwood?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t do anything wrong. They just took me at the Heap Station and put me in the van.” He looked at her, his palps twitching nervously. “Are you taking me back?”

Not until he said it did she realize that was in fact exactly what she’d had in mind and it horrified her. Back? She was taking him
back
? After everything she’d seen today, everything she knew they were doing…

She was taking him back.

Without warning, Sarah bent over and threw up. It was more of a messy belch than anything else and it made her head hurt so much that for a moment, she thought she was going to fall over in the foamy puddle and pass out, but she didn’t. She didn’t cry either, although the strain of trying to puke made her eyes water. She’d cried over her stupid cookies, but not this.

She retched again and grabbed the van to steady herself, coughing. The alien could have run. He could have gotten away easily. He didn’t. He just watched. He wasn’t resisting.

“Get in the van,” Sarah whispered, wiping her mouth. She opened the door for him. “Please.”

He did, cringing back when Fagin came wagging over for a sniff. He sat down on the very edge of the back seat, wrists together and raised slightly, very quiet. Sarah got in and sat down beside him. She shut the door.

His antennae kept jerking, betraying his anxiety. Sarah’s head hurt; she took off her hat and rubbed tiredly at her stitches. Fagin lay down on his blanket at their feet and closed his eyes.

“Do you want to go back?” Sarah said finally. It was easier to say out loud than she imagined.

He clicked hard, looked at her, at the loose groceries all over the floor, at Fagin. Slowly, he lowered his arms, but he didn’t relax any. The sound of his palps grinding and snapping in his barely-restrained state of panic was almost more than she could bear at the end of this awful day. He thought it was a trick; it would have been, coming from anyone else. He probably thought these were the last minutes of his life, and she couldn’t think of a thing to say to convince him otherwise. She just kept talking, and hoped that he would somehow trust her.

“I don’t have a place to take you,” she admitted. “But I can drive you someplace, if you want.”

Nothing. He shifted, one hand picking at the other. His antennae kept striking the van’s roof. He was probably still pretty young…he was a bit shorter than her, sitting down. In his fourth molt, by IBI’s reckoning. There was a license number etched in his head, hard to see by parking lot lamps, but of course, no name.

“Or I could take you back inside safely,” she said. “I have a passcard for Checkpoint Seventeen. Do you know where that is?”

He nodded. Human gesture. She’d only seen the young ones nod. T’aki could nod.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. “Please. Tell me what you want me to do.”

Fagin apparently decided this was going to take a while. Grumbling, he got up to fluff his blanket and lay down again, curled tight. Soon, he was snoring. The air inside the van was stifling, a typical Kansas summer night.

“I have to go back,” said the alien suddenly.

Sarah looked away.

“My father is starving.” The alien rubbed his fingers restlessly through his mouth palps. “He cut his feet on the Heaps. Then his…his feet fell off. He can’t work anymore and I don’t know when he’ll molt next. He needs me. I have to go back. It’s been days!”

Sarah covered her face.

The alien scraped his palps anxiously, looking around, and finally said, “Please. I don’t know what you want me to say. Please!” His words were getting louder, underscored by a high-pitched, weirdly cat-like yowl. She’d heard the little ones make that sound in Cottonwood, too. He was crying. “Please, I just want to go
home
!”