Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

He watched the two girls walk away.

Two days later a terrorist claiming to act in the name of the pribir struck again, blowing up a DuPont subsidiary in Texas. Four people died.

The pribir went on insisting, through Lillie and Theresa and Mike and Jon and Hannah and DeWayne and the others, that everything which damaged genes be “corrected.”

“It’s the right way,” the children said, and even though they never talked to anyone outside Andrews, many people who weren’t there nonetheless heard “The Right Way.”

The night of Saturday, August 24, Keith felt restless. He had stayed too long at Andrews. Only a handful of parents were left, mostly mothers with an earning husband and no other children at home. He knew they looked at him askance: Didn’t he have a job? The parents that had left visited often. Most of them seemed to have decided that their children were away at the equivalent of boarding school, a feat of self-protective mental gymnastics Keith could not begin to copy.

The night was sultry, but it felt almost cool after the scorching heat of the day. Keith walked past Malcolm Grow, along Perimeter Road. Groups of soldiers headed toward the enlisted men’s club, laughing and talking. At the Officer’s Club there was some sort of formal event; cars went by carrying women in evening gowns and men in dress uniform or black tie.

He had reached the West Gate when an explosion shattered the sky.

For a moment he couldn’t see or hear. Then his vision cleared and he saw the smoke rising from beyond the Headquarters building. Possibly from the Youth Center.

He bolted in that direction, trying frantically to remember where Lillie had said she was going that night with Theresa. A dance? Or to the movies, on the other side of the base? Did she — oh, God, please —stay at the dorm?

Two smaller explosions sent debris flying into the air.

Keith dropped to the ground and covered his head. Nothing hit him. He stumbled upward and ran again, yelling senselessly. “Lillie! Lillie!”

The Youth Center was in flames. Keith heard the fire engines along with the base alert signal. People were running, hollering…an ambulance shrieked to a halt and EMTs leapt out and ran toward the building.

Like so much in Maryland, it was built of red brick. A hole had been blasted in one side but the walls still stood. Flames shot out the window and off the roof. It didn’t look as if anyone could be alive inside, but firemen in full fire-fighting suits moved into the building. Keith raced around back. There was less damage here and he saw bodies on the ground, blackened, a few moving.

“Lillie! Lillie!”

“Don’t touch her, you moron!” an EMT cried. He shoved Keith out of the way. Keith looked more closely; the charred girl wasn’t Lillie.

Sense took over. He ran up to a group of civilians. “Do any of you have a phone? My niece… please…”

A man stared at him hard, stony: One of them. But a woman immediately dug into her purse and pulled out a handheld. Keith punched in the number of the dorm. His hand shook.

All the frequencies were busy. Others had thought more quickly than he.

He keyed in Theresa’s handheld, and someone answered. “Lillie? Lillie?”

“No, it’s Tess,” said Theresa’s scared young voice. “Lillie’s not here. She went out to buy Coke and—”

“Went where? When?”

“The superette. About five minutes ago. Mr. Anderson, what happened?”

“The Youth Center blew up. Listen, Tess, stay where you are. No, wait—are you in the dorm?” They might hit that, too.

“Yes! I am!”

“Then go quietly out the back and down the path to the inter-faith chapel, you know where it is. If you see Lillie, take her with you, okay? Do you understand?”

“Y-yes.”

He raced toward the superette, still carrying the handheld. The woman cried, “Hey!” and he tossed it on the ground. The superette was a mile away and he was out of shape. Panting, wheezing, he reached it and raced down its aisles. The base alert was still wailing and the store was pandemonium. He couldn’t find Lillie.

Why the hell hadn’t he kept the handheld?

He stopped to gasp for breath, and a young woman in a waitress uniform walked up to him. “Are you all right? Are you having a heart attack?”

“Handheld… please…”

She had one. He was barely able to key in Theresa’s number. It was answered immediately. “Hello?” Lillie. She was there. “Lillie…”

“Uncle Keith? Where are you? What should I do?” Scared, but calmer than Tess.

“Stay… in chapel…”

“We’re here. Reverend Duncan is here with us. Are you all right?”

“Yes…” He couldn’t say more. The waitress took the handheld from him. “Lillie? I’m with your father. He’s just out of breath, I think.”

“Who are you?”

“I just happened to be in the superette and loaned him my handheld. What happened?”

“He said the Youth Center blew up!”

“Oh, my God.”

Keith didn’t remember getting to the chapel. The waitress must have walked him there, through the mobilizing soldiers and running civilians. Then she vanished into the night.

He clutched Lillie, who patted his back as if he were the one needing comfort, as if he were the one in danger. Later, that would seem to him the strangest thing of all.

FBI. Military intelligence. Federal Emergency Management Agency. The State Department. Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms. Protesters. Counter-protesters. Editorials. There appeared to be no one in America not involved in the terrorist attack on the pribir children at supposedly secure Andrews Air Force Base.

The president went on television. “My fellow Americans, an event occurred today which cannot be tolerated in a free democracy. An attack on one of our own military bases, an attack aimed at children. Everything possible is being done to bring the perpetrators to a quick and relentless justice…”

It was very quick. The “terrorists” were caught within two hours. They were airmen at Andrews, three young soldiers who believed the pribir were going to destroy America and that her leaders were doing nothing about it. One of them turned out to be a white supremacist, one a generalized hater, one a follower with an IQ of eighty. They had learned to make their easily traced explosives from the Net.

The Youth Center had hosted a dance that night for Andrews dependent children ages fifteen through eighteen, which the attackers had not known. Fifteen “pribir children” were attending a separate bowling tournament in the basement. Nine eighth graders were playing a supervised chess tournament. Eleven boys were playing pick-up basketball in the gym. Three base dependents and one pribir child, Terry Fonseca, survived.

Lillie, pale and red-eyed, insisted on going to the funeral for those whose parents wanted them buried in Arlington. Theresa couldn’t face it. It didn’t matter; neither of them was permitted to attend. The forty-five remaining pribir children were immediately airlifted to the Marine Corps Base at Quantico and installed in a heavily guarded secure dormitory that looked to Keith like a prison. When Terry Fonseca got out of the hospital, he would go there, too.

The parents who rushed to their kids from all over the Northeast went through checkpoints more stringent than those surrounding the president.

The Justice Department and the Air Force Advocate General jointly announced they would seek Maryland’s newly reinstated death penalty for the three airmen.

The pribir, inexplicably, were silent. Of course, they might not have even known about the attack and the deaths. Communication, as far as humans knew, was one-way. The pribir dispensed molecules full of genetic information, the children gave it to the scientists, and nothing went the other way.