'That so?'
'Took my boy. Threw my house down.'
'Many of them?'
'Dozen or so.'
'OK Eugene, you'd best get in with us.' Packard ordered a cop out of the back. 'You're going to be hot for them bastards, eh?'
Eugene turned to where Lucy had been standing.
'And I want her tried —' he said.
But Lucy was gone, running off across the desert: doll-sized already.
'She's headed off the road,' said Eleanor. 'She'll kill herself.'
'Killing's too good for her,' said Eugene, as he climbed into the car. 'That woman's meaner than the Devil himself.'
'How's that, Gene?'
'Sold my only son to Hell, that woman —'Lucy was erased by the heat-haze.
'— to Hell.'
'Then let her be,' said Packard. 'Hell'll take her back, sooner or later.'
Lucy had known they wouldn't bother to follow her. From the moment she'd seen the car lights in the dust- cloud, seen the guns, and the helmets, she knew she had little place in the events ahead. At best, she would be a spectator. At worst, she'd die of heatstroke crossing the desert, and never know the upshot of the oncoming battle. She'd often mused about the existence of the creatures who were collectively Aaron's father. Where they lived, why they'd chosen, in their wisdom, to make love to her. She'd wondered also whether anyone else in Welcome had knowledge of them. How many human eyes, other than her own, had snatched glimpses of their secret anatomies, down the passage of years? And of course she'd wondered if there would one day come a reckoning time, a confrontation between one species and the other. Now it seemed to be here, without warning, and against the background of such a reckoning her life was as nothing.
Once the cars and bikes had disappeared out of sight, she doubled back, tracing her footmarks in the sand, ‘til she met the road again. There was no way of regaining Aaron, she realized that. She had, in a sense, merely been a guardian of the child, though she'd borne him. He belonged, in some strange way, to the creatures that had married their seeds in her body to make him. Maybe she'd been a vessel for some experiment in fertility, and now the doctors had returned to examine the resulting child. Maybe they had simply taken him out of love. Whatever the reasons she only hoped she would see the outcome of the battle. Deep in her, in a place touched only by monsters, she hoped for their victory, even though many of the species she called her own would perish as a result.
In the foothills there hung a great silence. Aaron had been set down amongst the rocks, and they gathered around him eagerly to examine his clothes, his hair, his eyes, his smile.
It was towards evening, but Aaron didn't feel cold. The breaths of his fathers were warm, and smelt, he thought, like the interior of the General Supplies Emporium in Welcome, a mingling of toffee and hemp, fresh cheese and iron. His skin was tawny in the light of the diminishing sun, and at his zenith stars were appearing. He was not happier at his mother's nipple than in that ring of demons.
At the toe of the foothills Packard brought the convoy to a halt. Had he known who Napoleon Bonaparte was, no doubt he would have felt like that conqueror. Had he known that conqueror's life-story, he might have sensed that this was his Waterloo: but Josh Packard lived and died bereft of heroes.
He summoned his men from their cars and went amongst them, his mutilated hand tucked in his shirt for support. It was not the most encouraging parade in military history. There were more than a few white and sickly-pale faces amongst his soldiers, more than a few eyes that avoided his stare as he gave his orders.
'Men,' he bawled.
(It occurred to both Kooker and Davidson that as sneak-attacks went this would not be amongst the quietest.)
'Men — we've arrived, We're organized, and we've got God on our side. We've got the best of the brutes already, understand?'
Silence; baleful looks; more sweat.
'I don't want to see one jack man of you turn your heel and run, ‘cause if you do and I set my eyes on you, you'll crawl home with your backside shot to Hell!'
Eleanor thought of applauding; but the speech wasn't over.
'And remember, men,' here Packard's voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, 'these divils took Eugene's boy Aaron not four hours past. Took him fairly off his mother's tit, while she was rocking him to sleep. They ain't nothing but savages, whatever they may look like. They don't give a mind to a mother, or a child, or nothing. So when you get up close to one you just think how you'd have felt if you'd been taken from your mother's tit-'
He liked the phrase ‘mother's tit'. It said so much, so simply. Momma's tit had a good deal more power to move these men than her apple pie.
'You've nothing to fear but seeming less than men, men.'
Good line to finish on.
'Get on with it.'
He got back into the car. Someone down the line began to applaud, and the clapping was taken up by the rest of them. Packard's wide red face was cleft with a hard, yellow smile.
'Wagons roll!' he grinned, and the convoy moved off into the hills.
Aaron felt the air change. It wasn't that he was cold: the breaths that warmed him remained as embracing as ever. But there was nevertheless an alteration in the atmosphere: some kind of intrusion. Fascinated, he watched his fathers respond to the change: their substance glinting with new colours, graver, warier colours. One or two even lifted their heads as if to sniff the air.
Something was wrong. Something, someone, was coming to interfere with this night of festival, unplanned and uninvited. The demons knew the signs and they were not unprepared for the eventuality. Was it not inevitable that the heroes of Welcome would come after the boy? Didn't the men believe, in their pitiable way, that their species was born out of earth's necessity to know itself, nurtured from mammal to mammal until it blossomed as humanity?
Natural then to treat the fathers as the enemy, to root them out and try to destroy them. A tragedy really: when the only thought the fathers had was of unity through marriage, that their children should blunder in and spoil the celebration.
Still, men would be men. Maybe Aaron would be different, though perhaps he too would go back in time into the human world and forget what he was learning here. The creatures who were his fathers were also men's fathers: and the marriage of semen in Lucy's body was the same mix that made the first males. Women had always existed: they had lived, a species to themselves, with the demons. But they had wanted playmates: and together they had made men.
What an error, what a cataclysmic miscalculation. Within mere eons, the worst rooted out the best; the women were made slaves, the demons killed or driven underground, leaving only a few pockets of survivors to attempt again that first experiment, and make men, like Aaron, who would be wiser to their histories. Only by infiltrating humanity with new male children could the master race be made milder. That chance was slim enough, without the interference of more angry children, their fat white fists hot with guns.
Aaron scented Packard and his stepfather, and smelling them, knew them to be alien. After tonight they would be known dispassionately, like animals of a different species. It was the gorgeous array of demons around him he felt closest to, and he knew he would protect them, if necessary, with his life.
Packard's car led the attack. The wave of vehicles appeared out of the darkness, their sirens blaring, their headlights on, and drove straight towards the knot of celebrants. From one or two of the cars terrified cops let out spontaneous howls of terror when the full spectacle came into view, but by that time the attack force was committed. Shots were fired. Aaron felt his fathers close around him protectively, their flesh now darkening with
