Interest (20 page)

38

Len came to not knowing how much time had passed. Daylight. He found himself in his cot. His back was raw. It felt as though he’d been dragged from the arena back to the subcamp. Natalia and Octavia were huddled together by his side.

“Daddy, you’re awake!” Octavia exclaimed. “I saw you get in a big fight! You did a good job!”

“Thanks.”

“Hey!” Natalia said. “Are you OK?”

“No. I feel like I fell off a bridge.”

Len tried to sit up, but the pain from the broken rib made him tear up and groan.

“What Jefferson was talking about?” Natalia asked, trying to seem nonchalant.

“What do you mean?”

“He called you traitor. What he meant?”

“I don’t know.” But Len wasn’t a poker player, and Natalia could probably see it in his face.

“And Dranthyx said you are reason we’re here. What does it mean?”

“Natalia, what do you want from me?”

“I did not want to believe bad things about you, but I think it makes sense now. I think I begin to understand.”

“Understand what?” Len asked, shifting in his bed.

“Jefferson and Neith kidnap your little girl. Why, I don’t know. But you are angry, right? Who wouldn’t be? So you get yourself arrested at border on purpose and tell Dranthyx all about Neith and secret plans. I saw it happen, and only now it makes sense. You want to make deal with Dranthyx so they spare you, right? Only thing is, Dranthyx don’t make deal, and they try to kill you. Next thing, Jefferson captured, Neith stops contacting everyone and is maybe dead, last hope for humanity is over, and we all go to prison camp to die. Then you sabotage tunnel, our only chance to escape. Then you kill Jefferson, hero of revolution, when you don’t have to.” She paused. Len looked up and saw that others in the tent were listening to the conversation. “Is that right, Len?”

Len didn’t answer. He just stared up at the ceiling. He could feel everyone in the tent looking at him.

“What’s that old saying?” Abe said slowly from the corner. “Oh, yes: an appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”

“How could you do this to us?” Natalia said, her eyes fierce. “In bed one night at Freehold, didn’t you tell me grandfather was in Auschwitz? Now you are too. What would he think? Would he think you are noble man? I can’t believe I risked life of me and my friends to break you out of jail!”

Len avoided looking at anyone. An old lady walked over to Len’s cot, spat on him, and walked out of the tent. Two others did the same.

Once they were alone in an empty tent, Octavia put her hand on Len’s forehead and said, “It’s OK, Daddy. I still love you.”

Len couldn’t hold it in any longer. He broke down and cried.

39

The gate opened the next day at exactly noon. In strode Jacob Endicott and his entourage of Dranthyx shock troopers.

“Hello, everyone!” Jacob shouted, smiling a hideous smile that revealed the black beak under his lips. “Good news! Today’s the day. The reactor is now fully operational. Of all the subcamps in this great facility, I’ve selected yours to go first to test the functionality of the system. The distinction is one you’ve clearly earned. Now, please line up and make this easy on yourselves.”

Everyone ran in a hundred directions. Several of the prisoners tried to flee by climbing the fence; a few even tried to attack the Dranthyx with their fists. Len quickly grabbed Octavia and hit the deck, covering her eyes. Len reached up and yanked Natalia down to the ground with them.

All noncompliers were shredded with the lightning guns in short order. After an electrical storm of body parts and boiling blood raining from every direction, Jacob’s face curled wryly as he licked some blood spatter off his tentacle.

“Would you look at this mess?” Jacob asked, chuckling. “I say, I wish this paid as well as banking! I’d do it every day! All right, everyone, enough foolery. Time to get with the pogrom. Get it, pogrom?” Jacob belly-laughed at his own joke, once again making the disconcerting noise that sounded like oily bubbles popping inside an old tin can.

The Dranthyx troops went through the section methodically, pulling crying people out from toilet stalls and underneath cots. One of them walked right over to where Len, Natalia, and Octavia were taking cover on the floor. The Dranthyx soldier bent down and picked someone’s severed arm off the ground. The arm was still connected to a shoulder blade and a bit of rib cage. The monster looked Len in the eye—those goddamn sideways yellow cat eyes—then took a bite out of the dismembered arm.

Once they’d rounded up all the survivors in the section, the Dranthyx forced everyone into windowless white semitrailers. With the trailers full, they closed the doors unceremoniously, then drove the eighteen-wheelers to the enormous reactor in the center of camp. There they were, packed into the trailer, listening to people clawing the walls in the dark, hysterical with panic.

At the reactor, the trailer door opened. The Dranthyx herded the prisoners into a fenced pen, a big yard right outside the building like the kind cattle were corralled in. The pen narrowed into a shiny steel door, which was closed.

“OK, we’re ready,” muttered one of the Dranthyx to Jacob in English.

“Let’s line up, people,” Jacob yelled, pointing with his tentacle. “That way, you’ll be going through that door.”

Len, Natalia, and Octavia were shoved into line by the octopuses in boots. It was either that or be shot. The steel door opened mechanically on its own: fluidly, silently. Inside was dark, too dark to see. Len strained to see what was beyond the doorway, but there was only utter blackness.

This is it,
Len said to himself.

Octavia looked up at her dad, somehow impervious to what was happening.

“Daddy, I had a silly dream last night.”

“Oh yeah?”

“The jellyfish man visited me. And he lived in a little moon. He said, ‘Don’t worry, Mommy didn’t really die, because dying is just imaginary.’”

Len hadn’t yet told her that Sara had died of the flu. He’d been hoping for a time when things settled down to break the news. With all that had been going on, that time had never come.

“Oh? What else did he say?” Len asked intently.

“He said,
‘Katsu!’
” Octavia giggled at the silliness of the word.

Len couldn’t help himself. He shrieked with laughter, beamed, picked Octavia up, and twirled around with her until the sharp pain in his broken rib made him put her down.

“Why are you so happy?” Natalia queried flatly, too emotionally drained to be disgusted. Even the Dranthyx standing nearby gave each other confused looks.

“Because that’s the signal!” Len yelled exuberantly.

“Signal?”

Just then there came a deafening roar, like a thousand thunderbolts going off simultaneously. Looking up, they saw the moon. No, wait, lots of moons. Huh? Thousands of glistening white spheres hovering at cloud level and forming a lattice from horizon to horizon. They’d appeared out of nowhere.

The Dranthyx, panicked, began yelling at each other and firing their weapons into the air at the objects, which absorbed the electricity effortlessly. Seeing their lightning guns have no effect, the Dranthyx ran in every direction. Two of them even collided with one another.

Then, from the white orbs, thousands and thousands of little dashes of green light fell toward the ground, like the sky was raining glow sticks. Only these little bits of green light didn’t fall randomly, they glided around corners and through doors and chain-link fences and then, with unerring precision, right to where each Dranthyx was standing. Several bits of light sliced through each octopus, through their tentacles and faces, dropping them right where they stood. The sky was alight in green as the projectiles strafed the entire countryside, expertly piercing every single vital area of each Dranthyx’s decentralized nervous systems while simultaneously missing every single human being.

The people in the massacre pen looked around, confused. The Dranthyx had all collapsed into heaps. Len walked up to Jacob’s body and cautiously kicked it. Nothing. Out of curiosity, he looked it over to see where the green light had hit Jacob. Both eyes were burned out of the creature’s head, holes straight through. Every tentacle was seared through and cooked from the inside out. A guidance system without par.

“What the hell just happened?” someone shrieked.

“Is it dead?” asked the engineer.

“Yes.” Len collapsed to his knees, his shoulders now relieved of the world’s weight.

“What the hell just happened?” the first person asked again.

“Those white spheres up there are the Ich-Ca-Gan,” Len said, trying to breathe through a tidal wave of upheaval. “They’re good guys. They’re aliens. They just killed all the Dranthyx.”

“The bad guys are dead! The bad guys are dead!” Octavia yelled, running in circles. “Now can we make s’mores?”

Everyone just sort of stood there, staring up at the sky in disbelief.

After several minutes of silent bewilderment, someone asked, “So if they’re dead, can we just leave?”

“Yeah,” Len said, choked up. “We’re done. We can all go home now.”

Len had never felt so tired or so relieved. Despite the emotional exhaustion, he and his fellow prisoners went around the camp, unlocking gates, freeing people, and explaining as best they could what had happened. As the subcamps emptied, prisoners flooded into the streets of the facility. Confusion and fear gave way to an atmosphere of raucous jubilance.

40

Walking toward the camp’s exit with Octavia, Len turned around to see Natalia running to catch up with them.

“Right before it happen, you say ‘signal,’” Natalia said, out of breath. “You knew this would happen? How did you know Ich-Ca-Gan are returning?”

“One came to me one night at Salvatierra’s house,” Len said tersely. “We planned all of this together.”

“You planned this with them? How?”

“We linked minds. I told the Ich-Ca-Gan everything I knew about the situation, and vice versa, and we hatched a plan together.”

Natalia looked at him like he was insane. “But what kind of plan is this? Why did you let it go so far? Why did you let invasion happen? Our cities ruined! Millions of people dead! Why couldn’t Ich-Ca-Gan kill the Dranthyx before they invade?” Her eyes flashed with heat.

“Are
you
still alive?” Len asked.

“Yes. What’s your point?”

“Are
you
free now?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, then, shut up already and enjoy it!” Len said acidly. “Besides, considering what you do for a living, Natalia, it’s not like you’ve never had blood on your hands.”

Len could see in her face that she wanted to be offended. He turned and started walking again. Then, just like that, “I’m sorry for what I said before,” she said.

The contrition disarmed Len. He stopped walking.
That feeling you have is anger,
he told himself.
If she can swallow her pride and admit she was wrong, then certainly you can forgive her for not knowing what you didn’t explain.
Len turned around and locked gazes with her. Those eyes of hers: a warrior’s magnanimity, not a hint of pettiness.
If she can admit fault, old boy, then you should too.

“Look, I’m sorry, too,” Len said with a kind of run-down exhalation.

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” Natalia asked, exasperated. “I thought you were traitor!”

“The Ich-Ca-Gan and I decided to keep it secret. We didn’t want to put you at risk of being tortured for information.”

“Oh.” She paused, searching for what to say next. “Well, thanks.”

“We let the invasion happen because that was the only way it could have worked. The Ich-Ca-Gan come from a gaseous planet with no liquid surfaces. Their weapons don’t work underwater because they never developed that technology. In order to kill off the Dranthyx, we had to draw as many of them as possible out of the water and onto land. We determined the best way to do that was to tell the Dranthyx what Neith was up to and that their Tchogols had been killed off on purpose to prevent the cull. At the same time, I’d tell the human world what was going on so they’d try to fight the invasion. We needed the Dranthyx to think there’d be a massive human resistance. That’s why I got myself arrested, and why I asked you to give the manuscript to my editor. At the airport, I was carrying a manuscript similar to the one I gave you, except that copy mentioned the exact location of Neith’s operations, and was tailored to piss off the Dranthyx without giving away too much other information.” Len barely took a breath as he recounted the plan in full, rapidly spilling details he’d kept to himself for so long.

“Well, whatever you said worked.”

“In that version, I wrote that Neith was working on a new virus that would wipe out the Dranthyx.”

“Was she?”

“I have no idea. I made it up to scare them. I planted the seed that they were losing control of the situation, and they’d have to destroy Neith. With the Tchogols gone, the Dranthyx had no choice but to fight their way inland to do the cull themselves, which required pretty much all the manpower they had. Also, I wanted them to think I was a traitor to Neith’s cause, and that I was trying to defect and curry favor with the Dranthyx.”

“So why did you want Dranthyx to kill Neith? I thought she was on our side.”

“The Ich-Ca-Gan and I didn’t think she was any better than the Dranthyx. Apparently, neither she nor they had any qualms about killing hundreds of millions of people, and both seemed to think humans only existed to do their bidding. In jail, right before you saved me, Samuel Endicott told me that Neith was some NSA computer gone rogue. She wasn’t even human. She was a blinking machine in a data center somewhere, which meant she was completely dependent on humans for survival. We figured once she overcame Dranthyx control, she’d next work on getting out from under human control. The whole damn war was a psychopathic, drug-dealing, terrorist supercomputer versus psychopathic banker octopuses. Why live with either when we can remove both problems, you know?”

“You don’t think Neith would want to work with humans?”

“Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know,” Len said. “Sooner or later, someone would try to pull her plug, and she’d exterminate the rest of us just as blithely as she annihilated the Tchogols. So yeah, the plan had a lot of collateral damage: cities, millions of people, Neith. Maybe it wasn’t the most finely tuned scheme, but, well, saving the world isn’t something I do on a regular basis. I kind of got roped into it, like jury duty. Anyway, the net result is that we destroyed most of the Dranthyx. Millions of people were killed, but because of that, billions will continue living. It’s something that I’ll have to live with the rest of my life.”

“Most of Dranthyx? There are more?”

“The Ich-Ca-Gan estimated that we’d kill off about 99.7 percent of them with our plan. There are far too few left to rule the world anymore. We’re in charge now.”

“Weird. When I read manuscript, I figure Ich-Ca-Gan were maybe pacifists.”

“I think they are, mostly, but they’ll come to the defense of other living beings, using deadly force if necessary. They felt the need to intervene before billions of Xreths were killed in the cull. See, the Dranthyx are biologically incapable of empathy, so they’ll never be anything but evil. The Ich-Ca-Gan felt there was no hope for them and decided it was time to allow the human race to flourish without control. So they exterminated the Dranthyx. Also, the Dranthyx signed their own death warrant when they broke the truce agreement by attacking the temple in Tokyo.”

“OK, but I don’t understand why you destroyed tunnel.”

“Because I couldn’t guarantee anyone’s safety that way. I knew we’d be liberated, so what was the sense in risking an escape?”

“I guess that almost makes sense.” Natalia was quiet for a while as they walked toward the exit.

“And why you kill Jefferson?” she asked.

“Survival. It’s horrible, but it’s true. Sure, I could have shown some mercy, but think what would have happened if Jefferson had survived. Ever talk to that guy? Jefferson was the sort of angry control freak who wasn’t capable of letting go of a grudge. Had I let him live, Jefferson would have hunted me to the edges of the world. I’d have spent the rest of my life in hiding. He didn’t strike me as the type who was capable of setting aside philosophies and hatred of authority for the benefit of humankind. He was hung up on past wrongs. He’d never get past me selling him out; he’d never understand the greater good behind it.”

“Yeah,” Natalia said, raising her eyebrows in agreement as they walked, “that’s probably true. OK, but one last thing I don’t understand about plan. It could not work if you are still stuck on Salvatierra’s island. If I did not come, how would you escape Salvatierra’s island to get arrested by immigration agents?”

“The Ich-Ca-Gan told me you’d come to pick me up. Didn’t they talk to you?”

“What? No! I did not talk to alien.”

“Huh? Then why did you come?”

“I got text message from Salvatierra. He said he want to buy boat.”

“So they didn’t contact you?” Len asked, confused. He thought it over, then asked, “Wait a second, what exactly did the text from Salvatierra say?”

“It say he want biggest boat possible, with full weapons assembly. Destroyer class.”

Len stared at her in befuddlement, then guffawed so hard that he could barely catch his breath. Natalia gave him a confused look. “Those clever little bastards! The Ich-Ca-Gan must have sent that somehow. A spoofed text message. Of course a text message—they can’t talk! I asked the Ich-Ca-Gan for details about your arrival, but they wouldn’t tell me anything. They just said to be patient and wait and that they’d take care of that part themselves. They wouldn’t discuss that part of the plan with me…”

“Holy shit. So Salvatierra was telling truth? He really didn’t order boat?”

“So of course you show up with a full crew and a floating arsenal. The Ich-Ca-Gan wanted Salvatierra to be outgunned!” Len continued laughing, despite the stabbing pain in his rib.

“We killed him for nothing?” Natalia couldn’t help herself. She started giggling too.

“Do you feel bad?” Len asked, trying to catch his breath. “I don’t.”

“Fuck no. I don’t like him anyway. He was asshole. He always underpay me.” Natalia was now laughing so hard that tears were coming down her cheeks.

They both chortled until they were wheezing and had to stop.

“Look, I’m sorry that you lost your investment on the boat,” Len said once he caught his breath. “I’ll make it up to you somehow.”

“Len, I am sorry too,” she said softly. “Truly, deeply. I should have known you weren’t traitor. I feel terrible for what I said in camp.”

“Forget it. I’m a journalist; my whole career has been people hating my guts. I’m used to it. Please just give me the benefit of the doubt from now on. OK?”

“Deal,” Natalia said, and hugged him. Len kissed her. “So now what?” she asked.

“I have no idea. I was thinking of going back to Pittsburgh to see what’s left of my life there. Wanna come along?”

“Might as well. I don’t know what hell else to do.”

“What about your business?”

“If I think about it, with no more Tchogols or Dranthyx, maybe there will be no more war. Who will buy weapons? There is no fighting if only reasonable people are left. Also, Russian government does not exist anymore, so who will I buy from? Maybe it is time for new career.”