Invasion: California

shots he gulped. These days, whiskey was not enough. He needed the blue pills to ease him through each tedious day. Unfortunately, these cost cash and he had begun taking more of them lately.

The desk buzzer sounded a second time.

Captain Wei straightened his uniform and marched for the door. It was time to fix the little traitor and pry information out of her.

He strode down a long corridor, a flight of stairs and passed several open windows. Mexico City seethed with traffic, with small cars thirty years out of date, with thousands of bicyclists and tens of thousands of pedestrians. Smoke stacks chugged black fumes into the air from coal furnaces. Yet farther away in the center of the city gleamed new glass towers, thanks to the latest construction boom with the influx of Chinese troops. Mexico was a land of extremes, with the basest poverty and the most incredible wealth.

Captain Wei left the windows behind, opening a door and descending to the basement. The first tendrils of drugged numbing soothed his bad mood. By the time he reached the patient’s door, the feeling had changed his mood altogether.

You are a meat-sack, Maria Valdez, one I will turn into a quivering hulk, a fountain of information.

Wei opened the door, expecting a number of quite predictable possibilities. The patient lay strapped to a table, naked, defenseless and primed for interrogation. An operative—a man—had shaved off every particle of the patient’s hair. Wei found that most effective with females. The operative had also attached a host of leads to sensitive body-areas. Maria Valdez should have pleaded with him now or glared in defiance or stared into space, in shock, or sobbed uncontrollably. She did none of these things. Instead, with eyes closed, the patient whispered, speaking to an imaginary entity, it appeared.

Wei scowled, with his good feeling evaporating. Invisible entities did not exist. There was only power and the scramble to be the inflictor of pain instead of the receiver. It was the law of the jungle, of tooth and claw.

“Leave us,” Wei told the operative.

The man bowed his head, hurrying for the door, never once lifting his gaze off the floor.

Wei listened for and heard the snick of the closing door. “Maria Valdez,” he said sharply.

The patient ignored him as she kept on whispering.

That would not do, no, no. Wei strode to the controls and tapped a pain inducer.

The patient grunted and her eyes bulged open. She twisted on the table. She was shapely, if too thin and bony for Wei’s tastes. She was also too tall, taller than he was—something he intensely disliked.

“Do I have your attention?” Wei asked in a considerate tone. It unbalanced and often unhinged patients to hear the solicitude in his voice and yet receive agony from his hands.

“I’m here,” she said, whatever that was supposed to mean.

They both spoke English, as Wei had taken language courses and become proficient in the American usage.

Wei now forced himself to smile. “I’m sure you understand the situation.”

“Yes! You’re one of the pigs invading my country.”

“My dear, please allow me to interject a factual point. You are the one who exudes a noxious odor. I refer to your sweat. We Chinese do not possess the same pig-like glands that you do.”

“Go to Hell!”

Captain Wei smiled, stepping away from the controls. He put a gentle hand on her left thigh, causing the patient to stiffen.

“You are in Hell, my dear,” he said.

“Wrong! In Hell, no one drinks beer.”

Wei frowned. What an odd statement. Was she already unhinged? “I do not care for your attitude.”

“That’s because you’re an invading hog,” she said.

“Maria,” he said, squeezing her thigh. It made her stiffen. He would teach her respect. Oh, she would learn to curb her tongue. First, he would begin her disorientation through soft speech. “You must not think of me as your enemy. I am here to help you.”

“You’re a worthless liar.”

A flicker of annoyance entered his eyes. “I can make your existence gruesome or I can ease your suffering. It is my choice. Fortunately for you, my dear, I am easy to please. All I ask is for a few tidbits of information from you.”

“I understand. I have what you want. But you have nothing I want except for your death, and I don’t think you’ll do me the favor of slitting your ugly throat.”

Wei smiled faintly. “You are a veritable she-tiger, but you are also a liar.”

“I curse you in the name of God.”

Wei’s smile slipped as he removed his hand from her thigh. Scowling, he went to the controls. He looked up at her. She grinned viciously, mocking him.

No, that would not do. He was in charge here. He would show her.

Captain Wei began to tap the controls hard with his fingertips. He winced once because he’d cut the nail down too much the other day on his left-hand middle finger. Then Maria Valdez screamed and thrashed on the table, causing him to forget about his own discomfort. Wei continued to inflict pain for some time, delighting in her various octaves. Finally, Maria slumped, unconscious.

Turning away, Wei stared up at the ceiling. What had overcome him? He’d never lost control of his emotions like this before. He was an interrogator, one of the best—no, the best in Mexico. He had a long list of questions his superiors wanted answered, yet now he’d needlessly tired out his patient. He should have already received a litany of her lies so he could compare her later answers and begin to pry out the truth. Never once during the torment had she cried out, offering to speak to end the pain. Obviously, the direct approach was the wrong method with this one. He must practice subtlety.

Wei cracked his knuckles and stepped beside a medical board. He selected a hypodermic needle and a vial of AE7. She was stubborn, possessing a core belief system that added to her rigid worldview. A double dose, yes, she would need a greater dosage to force her thoughts into a fantasy delusion. Then she would begin to tell him what he needed to learn.

Thirty seconds later, Wei slid the needle into her flesh, sinking the plunger as he pumped the drug into her bloodstream. It would take time before the AE7 brought her to the required state. Using his cell phone, he checked the time. Ah, he could go into the other room and smoke a cigarette.

Captain Wei slipped into the hall, entering an empty room. He found that his hands were shaking. How odd. Taking a pack of Lucky Strikes, he extracted a cigarette, stuck it between his lips and used his lighter. Soon, he stared blankly at the ceiling, occasionally watching the smoke curl. He refused to think about her words, her foolish curse or the way her body had contorted on the table. He had seen such things a thousand, a million times before. Instead, he smoked, emptying himself of thoughts, of emotions and emptying himself of the tedium of life. Mechanically, he shook out a second and later a third cigarette, enjoying them in the solitude of the basement.

The effects of the blue pill must have dulled his sense of time. Much later and with a start, Captain Wei took out his cell phone, checking it. Thirty-seven minutes had passed.

The small East Lightning officer rushed out of the smoky room and ran to the interrogation chamber. Sometimes, there were bad reactions to AE7. He had forgotten that and his dismissal of a watching operative.

Captain Wei threw open the door. “No,” he whispered. He rushed to the table. Maria Valdez lay still, with a serene smile on her face. He checked her pulse and snatched his hand away, horrified. She was already cold. He hated everything about corpses, their stiffness, their chill, their—

“No,” he said again. Wei blinked rapidly. What was he going to do? Higher command wished to know many things concerning her sabotage. Now—

Rushing to the computer, Wei sat down. He ran his fingers through his hair and logged in. Time. He had to register her time of death, her answers, her—

Wei licked his lips. What had he read about her earlier?

You need to think. You need to cover yourself. Is this her curse starting to work?

The thought sobered him. He needed a cigarette. No. He needed to use his years of expertise, giving High Command what it feared most. That way, they would worry more about the repercussions of her sabotage than