Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

“Georgie,” Toivo said. “Come take a look at this.”

Toivo was on the other side of the wreckage-filled room. George walked over broken and fallen bits, careful to watch where he stepped.

Toivo’s eyes flicked in all directions, at the damaged ship, at the body parts scattered across the floor, walls, and ceiling. His hand, however, was pressed against what looked like a door—a door sealed with a heavy wheel, like something from a submarine.

“Find something, Toivo?”

The man nodded. “Sort of.” He made a fist, rapped on the door; knock-knock, the ring of knuckles on metal. Then, he moved his fist two inches to the left and rapped again: kund-kund; this time, two dull thuds.

George leaned closer. The door had been painted over, repeatedly. It was uneven, lumpy in parts.

“It’s Bond-O,” Toivo said. “Well, not Bond-O, but you know what I mean. It’s spackle, a patch job, and from way before da crash.” He pointed up, to the left, down and to the right. “It’s all over, Georgie. Looks like repairs and a lot of ’em. This ship? It’s a beater, eh?”

What did that mean? This ship—this alien ship—something that was the very icon of actual life on other planets . . . it was on par with a used car? Could that be why it crashed? Had something broken at the wrong time?

“A beater, I tell ya,” Toivo said. He rapped on the door again, knock-knock-knock.

The door opened.

No screech of hinges, no sound; it just swung inward.

The heat seemed to vanish; George was cold once again, frozen in place, motionless.

Inside the door, a short creature that had all the bits and pieces he’d seen scattered about the ship, but smaller, all the gore pressed back together into a tiny shape of stick-thin limbs and black eyes (three eyes, not two) in a big head, too big for the body, and—

Toivo fired, the barrel, only inches from the big head: The head blew apart in a clear water-balloon-splatter that splashed goop on George’s face. The creature dropped instantly, a lifeless sack of meat, a puppet cut free from supporting strings.

Toivo slid back the bolt, a metallic sound that seemed just as loud as the gunshot itself. As he pushed it forward, what lay beyond the door came into sudden clarity.

The bolt ratcheted into place, and the barrel came up for another shot.

George’s hand snapped out, grabbed the barrel, raised it up just as Toivo fired: the round went somewhere into the ceiling.

“Georgie, what are you doing?”

“ Stop! Just stop!”

George was aware of heat on his hand, where he’d grabbed the barrel, but distantly, because his brain was busy processing what he saw. This room, not as beat up as everything else. Heavy, curving girders running from floor to ceiling, and between them what could only be crash seats of some kind with heavy reinforced doors and thick padding visible behind thick windows. All of this, yes, all of it registering for him, but distant, like the heat on his hand, because in the middle of the room stood a dozen creatures, most smaller than the one Toivo had just killed, some so small they wouldn’t have come up to George’s knee, all clinging together in a trembling pile, black eyes (black alien eyes, not human, not at all, but fear is fear just like a hallway is a hallway) wide open and staring.

“They’re kids,” George said. “Fucking Jesus . . . kids. ”

Children. The aliens had put their children in the ship’s safest room, perhaps as soon as trouble started . . .

Goddamn car seats . . . alien spaceship car seats . . . they strapped them in, safe and sound and snug as a bug in a rug, same thing I would have done with my boys . . .

“Georgie, let go of da gun,” Toivo said.

“Same as I would have done,” George said. “Same.”

Toivo yanked his rifle barrel free, almost pulled George off-balance in the process.

Would he shoot another one?

George positioned himself between Toivo and the door, blocking Toivo’s line of sight to the aliens. George tried to close the door, but the dead body blocked it. He reached down, grabbed the bone-thin little arm and dragged the body into the corridor. He stood and again put his hand on the door, to pull it shut, but before he did he glanced into the room—the little creatures were watching him, their black eyes wide with palpable terror.

He knew what they had seen, how they had perceived it: an alien (because to them, that’s exactly what he was) pulling their dead friend away, leaving a streak of wetness behind, then sealing them in.

George again tried to close the door—this time, it was Toivo that stopped it from shutting.

Toivo stared at him.

“Georgie, are you nuts? We gotta kill them.”

“No, we don’t.”

“They’re bombing cities,” Toivo said. “Killing thousands, maybe millions.”

George heard this. He nodded.

“The ones in this room aren’t doing it,” he said. “They didn’t do anything.”

Toivo sneered in disgust, then tried to push the door open—George blocked him with his shoulder.

The two childhood friends locked eyes. Toivo seemed to study George for a moment, as if measuring the man’s will. Then, Toivo shook his head.

“I’ll go back and check on Mister Ekola,” he said.

Toivo walked to Bernie and Arnold. George saw those two looking back, Jaco as well—no one knew what to do, what to think, so they just stared.

George couldn’t meet their gaze.

Kids. Children. This ship, old and repaired and beat up . . . adults dead all over the place, but the kids, safe and sound. Had the one in the walking machine blown up the cabin just to kill, or was it trying to eliminate any threat to these little ones? Was that why the ship had come in the first place? To make a new home?

George didn’t know. He didn’t have any answers. All he could think about was what it would be like if a skinny-limbed alien had kicked in the door to his boys’ bedroom, aimed a weapon at their faces, shot one of them, dropped him like a bag of meat and bones while the other boy watched, helpless to defend himself. How horrible would that be? How life-shattering, how soul-rending?

Toivo was right: Before the phones stopped working George had read the news—the aliens were killing people.

Thousands, maybe millions.

But there were billions of people . . . billions that would fight back, fight back and kill the aliens.

“But not these ones,” George said to no one. “They didn’t do anything. They’re just kids. ”

He pulled the door tight. Hands on the wheel, he leaned back, making sure the door had a good seal, then turned it until he heard something click home inside.

“Just kids,” he said. “Just kids.”

He could protect them, but only because there was no one around for miles save for George's childhood friends. And even then, he wasn’t sure—if Toivo, Jaco, and Bernie all insisted on opening that door and shooting whatever they saw inside, how far was George willing to go to prevent that?

Would a stranger have even let him shut that door? What if it had been ten strangers? What if it had been a hundred? If a ship like this crashed or came down near a destroyed city, human survivors would kill any alien they saw—adult or child, it didn’t matter—the first chance they had.

Humanity would win. George felt that in his core, knew it at a base level just as his body knew how to breathe, just as his heart knew how to beat. Humanity would win because those billions of survivors would fight back, and there were millions of guns out there for them to use.

Bullets did the same thing to aliens that they did to people.