Eric Brown - The Serene Invasion

The two crowds, separated until seconds ago, now merged and mingled, embracing like survivors of some terrible natural catastrophe.

Someone called her name. “Dr Walsh!”

Sergeant Mesenevi was coming towards her, fighting his way through the tide of humanity. He gripped her hand. “Dr Walsh! Good news! Mr Allen is here. He thinks you are dead!”

“What?”

“I told him about the attack on the medical centre. Of course we didn’t know if you were alive or dead.”

“Just take me to Geoff, okay?” she demanded, emotion making her voice unsteady. She just wanted to hold him.

“Sally!”

And there he was, being dragged along by a posse of grinning barefoot schoolgirls, waving at her above the heads of the milling crowd.

She struggled through the press towards him and they collided and held on. She said his name over and over, inhaling the wonderful scent of his sweat, listening to his almost incoherent litany. “…told me about the attack… didn’t know what the hell had happened to you… feared the worst. Christ, it’s good to hold you!”

She gripped his hand and, watched by the beaming schoolgirls and the police sergeant, she dragged him back to the centre of town and Mama Oola’s.

BY UNSPOKEN CONSENT they made love on the narrow, squeaking bed in the shadowy room, both of them weeping and murmuring almost incoherently. It was a more desperate and tender coming together than Sally had ever experienced before — the usual animal need of sexual desire and something more, some affirmation of life after so much death.

She switched on the ceiling fan and the downdraft laved their naked bodies, cooling.

She had not meant to tell Geoff everything that had happened to her the day before; had intended to downplay the kidnapping and her subsequent escape. But in his company, when they had shared so much, it seemed pointless to hold back on the experience.

“The attack…?” he began.

“They took me and Ben,” she murmured. She pressed a finger to his lips. “I’m okay now. Don’t worry. They… they didn’t hurt me. They took us to a hut in the bush kilometres north of here.”

Geoff’s expression was set in stone.

“And when we got there…” She took a deep breath, her voice wavery. “Three things. A camera on a tripod, a chopping block, a sword…”

She wept, the tears coming in a heaving wave all of a sudden, unbidden, and she realised that she’d held in all the emotion, all the terror, until now, until she was safe with Geoff and could let it all out in a great cathartic damburst of retrospective fear.

He held her, kissing her sweat-damp hair, as she sobbed against him.

She took a deep shuddering breath, smiled up at him through her tears. “Oh, I was so frightened, Geoff. So disbelieving… that, that someone would do this to us. For ideological reasons. And film it, Geoff. I don’t know where this is rational, but that’s what horrified me more than anything else. Not the evil of their intent to kill us, but the callousness of their desire to film our deaths.”

He kissed her eyes, her mouth. “How the hell did you get away?”

She thought about it, ordering the events. The incidents had an air of unreality, like a film watched a long time ago and imperfectly recalled. All she remembered, with crystal clarity, was how she had felt at the time.

Slowly, hesitantly, she told Geoff about her kidnappers’ inability to kill her and Ben.

He said, “You were so lucky, Sally.”

She shook her head. “No. No, Geoff. It… I know this sounds ridiculous… but it wasn’t luck. Something was stopping the Somali from pulling the trigger.”

Geoff said, “His conscience.”

“No,” she said, “because when I got back to the compound, I found Dr Krasnic…”

And, despite her promise to Krasnic that morning that his secret was safe with her, she told Geoff about the doctor’s multiple suicide attempts. “And just this morning… Mama Oola told me that Papa had tried to beat her again, only he couldn’t , and when she tried to hit him… she said she was unable to do it.”

He reached from the bed, found his holdall and pulled out his softscreen. She watched him attempt to access the net, to no avail. “Still dead.”

She stroked his face with her fingertips.

“When I was on the plane,” he began, his eyes narrowing with recollection.

“Yes?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.” He laughed. “I just recall thinking how much I love you.”

Something rose in her chest, sadness and joy combined. “Whatever the hell happens, Geoff, whatever happens, we have each other.”

They came together again and, gently this time, made love once more.

THEY TOOK A cold shower together in the communal bathroom at the end of the landing, then descended to the dappled courtyard where Mama Oola served them piled plates of vegetable pilau and ice cold lager. She winked at Sally when she presented the plates with a flourish, as if to say that after such lovemaking a hearty meal was necessary.

Geoff was quiet during the meal, which was unlike him. She had never met a more talkative person; he was usually forever telling her, during their snatched time together, about everything he had done since he’d last seen her. She sensed that his taciturnity now was due to more than just a lack of sleep.

She said, “You okay?”

He forked his pilau, looked up. “I was just thinking, we don’t have to go to the reserve, if you’re not up to it after…”

She reached out and gripped his hand. “I want to get away from here. Anyway,” she smiled, “you have work to do.”

He nodded, and returned to his food.

“Geoff,” she said a little later, “you began to tell me something earlier, about what happened on the plane.”

He stared at her, smiling like a schoolboy caught out. “I didn’t think you’d pick up on it.”

“I can read you like a book,” she said. “What happened?”

He had an expressive face, a way of pantomiming what he was thinking with exaggerated facial gestures. He frowned heavily. “I don’t know. It seemed so real at the time, but now it seems like a hallucination.”

She listened as he told her a fantastic story of reality coming to a halt, and how he had found himself floating in a grey void and being visited by a silver spider…

He stared down at his meal. “The thing was, Sally, it all seemed so damned real. And then what happened with the domes, and…” He looked up. “It occurred to me that it might in some way be connected.”

She pursed her lips, considering. “I’d say… probably not. You’ve been working hard, and it was a late flight, and you hadn’t slept.” She shrugged. “And,” she smiled, “you did once tell me that you’re afraid of spiders.”

He laughed. “Was. When I was a child.”

She tilted her head and looked at him, dubious. “Thought you said tarantulas still gave you the heebie-jeebies?”

He smiled. “Touché,” he said. “I remember when I was in Singapore –”

Jenny appeared in the doorway to the lounge, clutching the frame with both arms and hanging forward. “Sally! Come and watch! Mama! Mama! Come now!”

Mama Oola squeezed from the kitchen. “What now girl?”

Jenny was goggle-eyed. “Amazing! Come and see!”

She vanished inside, and Sally exchanged a look with Geoff and rose from the table. Geoff took his bottle of beer. Sally found his hand as they entered the shadowy lounge.

It was a long, low room, hung with drapes and furnished with multiple ancient sofas, opening onto a balcony at the far end. In the corner of the room, incongruous amid such genteel shabbiness, a vast flatscreen TV pulsed out garish images.