Joe Haldeman - Work Done for Hire

From researching my first novel I knew how to engage a proxy cell host, to make it look like we were calling from New Orleans. It wouldn’t fool a government agency—or the Enemy, presumably—but it would cover our tracks on the domestic front.

Dad wasn’t home, so I left a message saying Kit and I were leaving the New Orleans heat on a road trip up to New England. Kit’s father answered and she improvised a little, saying that we’d probably visit an uncle up in Maine, verifying his address. Didn’t know when we’d get there; she’d be in touch.

I checked my e-mail one last time and there was a note from my agent saying hey, no big rush, but Duquest wants to know how the monster story is coming along.

“Let’s get into Mississippi,” I said. “Find a place in the middle of nowhere and stay for at least a day. I’ll write up another little chapter.”

“And maybe print it out?” she said.

“Yeah, if we find a place.” I was getting nervous, too, not having a paper copy. I did e-mail the manuscript to myself every couple of days, but the dime store computer’s word-processing program was Neolithic and had a small mind of its own. I eased the thing shut and for about the thousandth time regretted not spending a few bucks more, for a machine that could talk to a thumb drive or something.

I’d mailed a paper copy home when we first got to New Orleans, but I was at least thirty pages past that now, and had made changes in the earlier chapters as well.

“Should you call the Underwood woman or somebody?”

I wasn’t sure. “Maybe not. Let’s see what happens if we don’t make it easy for them. But maybe…”

“Maybe what?”

I opened the phone and contemplated it. “We’ve got nine thousand some dollars. Enough to go maybe nine months?”

“I think so,” she said, “living simply, under the grid. With no emergencies.”

“Still not enough. Let me call my agent, see if she can wire us another ten grand or so.”

She was with another client, but called back in a couple of minutes. I told her I was in a real jam, a legal problem I was advised not to tell anybody about.

“Ten grand?” she said. “Jack, if I had ten thousand dollars to spare it would go to the rent on this god-damn place. I’m way overextended.”

“It’s really serious.”

“Life or death?”

“I think it could get there.”

“Want me to try your movie guy, Ronald Duquest? He’s got millions, and I can pretend he owes me a favor.” I said sure.

Hooray for Hollywood. Duquest told her he’d consider it an additional advance against the movie rights—pretty generous, considering that ten grand was all he’d actually paid anyhow. He took a penny away for some IRS thing, and deposited $9,999.99 in my PayPal account.

I couldn’t exactly shake the computer until the cash came out, but it would stay there until we needed it. Once in Key West, I could use nested firewall proxies and retrieve at least 80 percent of it without leaving any trail.

Outside the motel room I gleefully stomped the cheap phone and bundled its mortal remains with our trash and tossed it in the parking lot dumpster. Pure paranoia. There was no way the Enemy could have put a tap on a random phone from a convenience store—but could our benevolent government? Every phone in every cheesy little store? Could the Enemy know everything the government did?

I could worry about it or I could get a new phone next week.

Hunter slept for twenty hours and awoke around midnight, pale lunar light filtering through drapes. The warm trailer still had a stale smell of roasting meat. Sharp sweat tang.

He had a painful small erection, which he couldn’t see over the mound of his belly. He pulled on it until it emptied, and lay thinking, calculating.

There was enough meat in the freezer for about ten days of his normal diet. Two weeks if he stretched it, but he knew if he got too hungry he might do careless things.

The woman’s purse held enough money for months of food, five or six sides of beef. The idea of nonhuman meat turned his stomach now, but when he was hungry enough he would eat anything. Anything animal. The closest he could come to a vegetarian diet would be eating vegetarians.

Which he had probably done. Not Ms. Cooper. Out of curiosity he had squeezed out the contents of her large intestine, and could see that she had been a meat-eater. Too little fiber in her diet. It would have killed her one day, much more slowly.

What had he lived on before he came to Earth? His dentition was similar to a human’s, though presumably a dentist could tell he was different. He could crack bones with his molars, and his jaws were strong enough to tear apart humans and other animals. Clothing was sometimes too durable; he could break a tooth on a zipper or bra clasp. Though it was peculiarly satisfying to tear into people through their clothing, and it made the remains look more like an animal attack.

But his little talks with them were probably more interesting when they were naked. They were more frightened, which made them taste better. He knew the Chinese would beat dogs before they butchered them, partly to tenderize the muscle, but also for the endocrine tang of fear. When he had taken humans by surprise, killed them without warning, their flesh had been relatively bland. Much better to play with them for a while, and let ductless glands work their magic. The taste of hope, and the loss of hope.

Thinking made him hungry. In the back of the refrigerator he had a pair of hands in a large jar of dill pickle juice. He fished one out and had it with bread and butter, gnawing around the small female bones. Then he threw the bones into the stockpot simmering on the stove.

That pot had enough evidence to hang him four times over, in this state. He would ask that they do it without the hood. He wanted to see their faces when he plunged through the trapdoor and hung there alive, smiling, at the end of the tether.

He grinned and picked bits of Ms. Cooper from between his teeth.

Kit quietly closed the top of the computer. “Maybe let’s not have breakfast.”

“Oh, come on. It’s not that bad.”

“Okay. Just don’t order a hand sandwich.”

“Or finger food?”

“Seriously… don’t tell me that scene’s going to be in the movie.”

“I guess not,” I admitted. “Wrong genre. No chainsaws or goalie masks. But the book has to go a little further than the movie.”

“So what does he eat in the movie?”

“Well… that particular scene isn’t in it. Later on, he ladles a spoonful of broth and sips it.”

She smiled. “That’s a distinction. You’re grosser than Ron Duquest.”

I shrugged. “Different medium. Besides, you want to be over the top on the first draft. Easier to cut stuff than to add it.”

She nodded microscopically, not looking at me. “Yeah, you explained that.”

Storm signals. “It bothers you that I would even think of such horrible things.”

She didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds, lower lip between her teeth. “Really, it’s all right. You’ve seen worse, I keep forgetting.”

I tried not to think of yards of intestine unspooled across a dusty road, the owner festering in a ditch, arms wide in dumb supplication. Why was that so close to the surface?

She put her hand over mine. “If you want to talk about it, we could.”

Actually, we couldn’t. There was no vocabulary. Smell, heat, pain, always the edge of nausea. Just the smell of diesel exhaust made me clench my teeth. The somatic memory of it back behind the sinuses, shit burning in diesel, rot, the buzz of fat flies. Mud spatter, blood soaking desert sand. The guy had looked like a Matthew Brady daguerreotype, mouth open in dark bloated features. The second dead man I had seen, but the first had only been a dusty bundle.