other airmen
At one point Lenny tried to tell him something, but the helicopter was too loud, there were only enough headsets for the three airmen, and, try as Neil might, he couldn’t make out a word Lenny was saying.
He asked one of the airmen, Douglas, what was happening, and Douglas had to shout to be heard. All he said was that they were being engaged—sporadically—then added that it was amazing what those fatheads could do in the way of weapons, given a minimum of materials.
Neil just smiled; and this was the other thing that bothered him—the smile on his face, the one he couldn’t seem to shake. It was an apologetic grimace, a bewildered one, like the smile of a man in the first stages of Alzheimer’s, fighting to remain polite even though his life was in flames. He couldn’t look at Douglas. As if he had failed Douglas in some way.
And then there came another disconnect. He zoned out. He didn’t know where he went. It was another big blank. Until the third airman, Fernandes, swung the big side door open and started firing his fifty-caliber machine gun at the ground. His children cowered. His wife looked catatonic. And the repeated muzzle flashes from the big gun lit up Fernandes’s face as if with a strobe, so that Neil saw the light-collecting goggles over Fernandes’s eyes, and the way the sweat dripped down his cheeks and off his chin, as if manning the big gun was hard work, like operating a jackhammer. Fernandes didn’t look particularly worried that he was in the middle of combat, though occasionally the corners of his lips twitched downward, as if involuntary spasms of the face were necessary to work the big machine gun.
Louise said something to Neil, but she had such a soft, delicate voice that she couldn’t make herself heard, so he just nodded… and then… and then…
Another disconnect.
They were on Marblehill’s big front lawn, and he had the distinct sense, as Lenny helped him out of the helicopter, that he had crossed over into another era, and that he was now in an age where only bad things happened, so different from the previous age of smiling good fortune. He was sure he heard Lenny say, “Your girls will have to learn how to shoot, of course.” And then he said something about tactical advantage and strategic value, words Neil didn’t understand because he had that smile on his face again, and when he had that smile on his face the whole world became opaque.
He caught sight of Marblehill. Huge bullet holes pocked its stone facade. Were they bullet holes? No.
The Tarsalans didn’t use bullets. How did the translating device put it? Vibration modules? VMs for short? Was that it? A weapon that did its damage by shaking materials beyond the point of their molecular-cohesion tolerances? Yes. It was coming back to him. Those long talks he had had with Kafis by the pool. He glanced toward his pool, the deep end visible behind the west wing of his house, but could barely make out the diving board in the glow coming from the helicopter. Then the helicopter shut down, the lights went out, and another airman, Sinclair, came from behind one of the stone pillars of the drive-through portico with a flashlight and waved them in.
“So?” said Lenny when they reached the portico.
“Nothing,” said Sinclair.
“We need food,” said Louise.
Sinclair gave her a look, and it wasn’t a nice look; it was a look that said, why are you here, what good are you—you’re nothing but extra baggage.
Lenny, on the other hand, was polite, and it was,
And… disconnect again… because it was late, it was early, but it was neither late nor early because these two qualifiers didn’t apply anymore. It was dark—the only qualifier. As a result of his two miserable failures, it was dark all the time now. They sat in the second-floor games room—five remaining airmen, his three daughters, himself, and his wife; and they had the gas generator hooked up so that they could have some electrical lights, and he heard the generator humming at the back of the house. Lenny was giving them all a lecture on how to use the airman weapon of choice, the Montclair Repeater, a nasty little submachine gun about the size of an umbrella.
“The rounds are more like darts, but they explode on impact. The thing you have to remember about Tarsalans is that they don’t kill as easy as we do. Rib cage like a rhino. That’s why an exploding round is an advantage.”
He disassembled the weapon, reassembled it, snapped the banana clip in place, then said, “Four hundred rounds a clip. Ingenious.”
He passed it around. Neil could hardly believe his girls were handling one of the most vicious military weapons ever devised, that it had actually come to this; his precocious, bright, pampered, pretty, and innocent daughters being forced to protect themselves from alien invaders with military-style firearms.
When it came his turn to try, he smiled his idiotic smile, and briefly—ever so briefly—broke into tears.
He caught Fernandes and Rostov looking at him. Neil handed the weapon to Morgan. A bloody Montclair Repeater in Morgan’s hands when she couldn’t even read.
“When you’re not engaged, hold the barrel pointed toward the ceiling, hon,” Lenny reminded Morgan.
The gun went to Ashley, then Melissa. Neil remembered this from the Air Force. Standard weapons training. But what he didn’t remember was little girls with guns.
Melissa went first, walking to the window with a strange fire in her eyes, pointing the Montclair out the casement, and shooting out into the grounds. Melissa, the oldest, was like him, ready to try new things, embracing this harsh new world as the status quo, accepting it readily.
Then it was Ashley’s turn, and Ashley was petulant about it, rolling her eyes a time or two as she took the weapon and walked to the window. She fired the Montclair without even looking. An involuntary squeal escaped from her lips as the weapon jumped in her hands.
“You’ve got to grip it, kitten, if you want to stop that recoil,” was all Lenny had to say.
And finally it was Morgan’s turn. Neil was hard-pressed not to intervene, because this was just a ten-year- old girl after all, but what if it came down to just Morgan at the end of it all—just her, and a handful of aliens trying to harvest the countryside without due regard for human life? So he gave her a chance. And she did okay with it, seeming to understand with a profundity that apparently escaped the other two just why Lenny was asking her to shoot the weapon in the first place.
And then… another horrible disconnect. Where he just sat there with Rostov on guard duty, with headsets on, listening through the various microphone plants in the forest beyond the perimeter, hearing crunches and cracks, and the trees settling bit by bit into decrepitude. Hearing the wind blow through the once magnificent Chattahoochee National Forest. Occasionally going to the back to check on Louise and Melissa, who scanned the grounds to the rear through light-gathering goggles. Bits and pieces of the long, perpetual night of the shroud gluing themselves together out of one disconnect after another, until finally Lenny told him how the senior airmen on their little staff, Harmon, Earl, and Scott—Neil’s old friends, Greg’s old friends—had fought brilliantly, but had finally succumbed to the Vibration Modules, the VMs, those insidious Tarsalan weapons they had all grown to fear so much.
“Buried them out by the pool. I hope you don’t mind.”
And in Lenny’s voice he heard a letting go of hope.
Later, near the end of his shift with Rostov, Lenny came to the front and asked, “What went wrong?”
So Neil became Dr. Thorndike again, and tried to explain some of it to Lenny, how with the hydrogen sulfide, the xenophyta had gone into a state of suspended animation; and how, with the virus, the carapace had surprised everyone by jailing the virus during its lytic phase. Lenny stared but said nothing.
And in that stare, Neil saw doubt and, aggravatingly, some Monday-morning quarterbacking, as if Lenny
