thought Neil should have figured out the pitfalls ahead of time.
After that, he slept for a while—at least as much as he ever slept in this perpetual night—a light doze that never released him into the sweet oblivion he craved so much.
Fernandes came for him three hours later. “We’ve got a full alert, sir.”
Neil took up a position with Louise and Morgan in his study on the second floor. The only light came from the control panel of the communications equipment, but it was enough so that he could see their faces—and their faces were tired and thin and, most of all, fearful.
He lifted the light-gathering goggles and strapped them to his eyes, then raised himself to the windowsill and looked out at the grounds.
He could see them. Yes. Sketched in the ghostly green of the goggles’s light-gathering properties.
Aliens.
Inoculated and biologically adapted to live here, the first Tarsalan immigrants, maybe surprised that they were now soldiers, perhaps baffled by human intransigence, and certainly distressed, the way they all were. The goggles magnified. He saw them clearly, five altogether, their huge, bicephalic heads covered with shaggy black hair that reminded him of a bison’s pelt, visible among the dead yew trees.
He saw a small burst of light from the right, out beyond the six-car garage, like sparks from a welder’s torch. The sparks rose toward the mansion, and as they got closer to Marblehill they drew apart, and pulsated, like the flickering radiance of a pulsar. Chatter drifted up from the radio on the floor. Lenny’s voice, the voice of command, but also the voice of desperation. Through the goggles Neil watched the Tarsalans shift to the left, where they took cover behind the stone wall. Then the tattoo of Montclair Repeater fire erupted from the house, with every fifth round a tracer. Louise and Morgan looked at him.
He gave them a nod, and they tentatively rose to the window and, with shaking hands, pulled their triggers.
He did the same.
The whole thing seemed surreal. Especially watching Louise shoot her Montclair. She was a housewife, for God’s sake, not a combat soldier. And Morgan was a ten-year-old grade-five student with Attention Deficit Disorder who had to take medicine just so she could concentrate. And he was a fifty-two-year-old physicist and biologist, a university professor with a spreading paunch and a taste for fine wines. Yet now he was blasting away, praying that the VMs wouldn’t get anywhere near him. Their light shifted against the ceiling, making green and blue squares, like geometrical ghosts. As they got closer, they began to whine and shriek. They floated with a not particularly urgent velocity toward his study on the second floor, and he shot at them, and they were easy to blast out of the air, but there were just so many of them, as if the Tarsalans believed that the basis for all successful technology was redundancy to the Nth degree.
How it happened he wasn’t sure, because he was too busy shooting out the window, too much in the grip of his own frantic combat mania, shooting but not even looking where he was shooting. Yet…yet the next disconnect was framed in the context of Morgan screaming at him, tugging at his sleeve, pointing at Louise, who was lying on her back on the handwoven Moroccan rug, quivering in the oddest way. At first he thought she was having a seizure, but she was quivering so fast she actually looked blurred around the edges. When he placed his hand against her chest it was like placing his hand on the hood of a car, because his hand vibrated the same way. He saw a tiny, bloodless hole on her neck. Her eyes were half closed, and she didn’t seem to be in any particular pain.
But then she got a nosebleed.
And shortly after her nose bled, she died.
He didn’t immediately feel the overwhelming grief he knew he would later feel. He just felt…disappointed. Disappointed that all the plans they had made for their sunset years were coming to nothing.
“Is she all right?” Morgan kept asking.
“No, sweetie,” he said. “She’s not all right. She’s dead.”
He said the words slowly because he felt he always had to say things slowly for Morgan, just to make sure she understood.
Morgan was not, as Lenny might have said, a combat asset after that, because she simply clung to her mother, crying and crying, occasionally trying to wake her mother up as if she still didn’t understand that Louise was dead.
His initial disappointment faded, and was replaced by a…a knowledge and certainty that he had nothing left to live for, except…except as Louise’s avenger.
He lifted Louise’s Montclair from the floor and checked the little electronic monitor on the side. Two hundred seventy-two rounds left. His own weapon had 234 left. Armed with two weapons, one in each hand, their butts pressed against his biceps, he stood up like a thriller-action hero, heedless of whether any more VMs were coming, and fired away. Through his light-gathering goggles, he saw the alien bastards moving through the dead forest and, in the nanoseconds it took him to squeeze both triggers, he had a memory of Louise out there in the woods picking wildflowers; because that’s what she did when she came here, picked wildflowers, put them in a vase, and tried, with varying degrees of success, to paint them with watercolors.
Every fifth round was a tracer, and the ammo arced over the grounds like hot little hornets in the light- gathering lenses of his goggles. He killed one of the alien bastards, and then another, and finally a third, and saw the remaining two scatter into the woods, their bodies like human bodies, but the proportions different so that the arms were too long and the legs too short; yes, alien bodies, human parodies, and they all deserved to die now that they had taken away his sweet Louise.
He fired until he stopped feeling the kick from his weapons. And shortly after that he realized it was extremely quiet. He looked down at Louise. Morgan wasn’t there anymore. He took a deep breath.
What was he going to do now?
He dropped the Montclairs to the floor. Their barrels smoked. He was hot. Drenched in sweat. He collapsed to his knees. His eyes moistened, yet the guttural howl that tried to escape from his throat simply wouldn’t come, especially not now, not when Morgan came back into the room with the other girls. He knew he had to keep it in, make his girls understand in a calm, reasonable way that things like this happened in the Apocalypse; children lost parents and parents lost children.
Ashley came to him. Melissa came to him. And Melissa was still clutching her Montclair, as if she had forgotten she had it in her hand. They cried, but they didn’t wail—the Thorndike family wasn’t given to excessive displays of emotion—but in their quiet sobs he felt an especially keen agony, something that seemed to grab all his internal organs and drag them downward. Here was the family, what was left of it, the two older girls clinging to him while Morgan fussed around Louise like the strange child she was, trying to wake Louise up.
“Morgan, come here.”
When Morgan came to him, he clung to her tightly, because Louise had always been so worried about Morgan, and Morgan always needed a lot of support, and yet it was now Morgan, a ten-year-old girl, who stroked his hair, even as his own tears came faster, and said to him, “It’s okay, Daddy. It’s okay.”
She showed a strength that surprised him. Portrait of a family in great grief. With only the father left now.
And that was the worst of all possible situations because he wasn’t sure he knew how to be a father. He had always been a professor and a scientist, too focused on his career, and hadn’t even really watched his kids grow up.
He heard combat boots coming along the hall. He looked up. Lenny stared at him in the light coming from the communications apparatus. Lenny had a scratch on his face, not a deep one, but still angry and red. The airman glanced at Louise, then back at Neil.
Neil said, “Sorry. I tried.”
And Lenny responded by saying, “They got Douglas and Sinclair.”
“How long before they try again?”
“Who knows?”
“There’s a cave,” he volunteered. “Did you find the cave? It’s all limestone along this ridge.”
Lenny’s eyes narrowed. “Like for a fallback position?”
