Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

“Oh!” she said. “Of course! How silly of me! You’re not the police !”

“—but no,” he went on, “we can’t let you into the warehouses.”

“But you see,” she said, “I rent space in one. For some of my overflow.” He was staring politely but blankly at her. “I own a bookstore, you see? The only one in town. And your colonel, Mr. Fikes, came in today and we started talking about Lewis and Clark, and whether they should be admired as brave explorers, or whether they were just the vanguard of genocide and colonial oppression, and he asked for a book about them.”

She smiled again at them. Their body language was changing subtly but unmistakably: shoulders relaxing, faces turning towards her. Excitement mixed with terror rose in her. They were falling for it…

“I recommended Undaunted Courage to start with, but, as you can imagine, it’s a popular book around here, at least since there hasn’t been any TV. I didn’t have any copies left in the store, but I know there are some out here in the warehouse. So I came out here to pick up a copy for the colonel. You can check with him if you like.”

Part of her still hoped the soldiers would send her away, and she would be able to tell James she had done her best. But she was also fiercely willing them to submit.

He nodded. “All right, Ms.—?”

“Alexandra Hanover,” she said, using her maiden name.

“I’ll have to accompany you.”

“Oh, that’s fine!” she said, and smiled her most glorious smile at him. And she followed him across the parking lot between the tanker trucks, and through the big roll-up door.

The space inside was cavernous, dark and cool. The soldiers had shoved aside quite a few of the pallets and shelving units to make room for their equipment, and the smells of diesel oil and sweat mingled with the older dusty scent of dried peas. The guard accompanying her paused to explain their mission to a man leaning over a trestle table—probably a genuine officer.

The man at the table looked her up and down with a hard, suspicious stare, but Alexandra smiled at him, too, with just the right mixture of hopeful inquiry, submission to his authority, and winning, wholesome cheerfulness. (Oh, it was going to work. All those years with Ben had been good for something after all.) Then he, too, nodded.

She and her guard threaded their way around pallets laden with sacks of dried peas, heading toward the back of the warehouse. The shelving units that she rented stood against the wall at the back, next to a locked metal door that led outside.

Next came a part that depended on her own physical quickness, something she had never had to rely upon before. But excitement propelled her now. She no longer wanted to turn back.

“Could you help me?” she asked the guard. “I have a bad back.” The guard glanced at her. She pointed. He still wore his sunglasses, so he wouldn’t be able to see the nervous tremor in her hands. “It’s in that box there, on the second shelf.”

He bent over, reaching for the box. Alexandra opened her purse and took out the vet’s tranquilizer dart that James had given her. The guard started to pull the box off the shelf. She reached over and stabbed his neck with the dart.

“Hey!” he yelled, turning swiftly toward her. She backed up, but before he could take a single step, his knees buckled and he pitched face forward onto the concrete floor.

That looked as if it hurt. But she could not help smiling. She had done it!

She reached in her purse again and took out the key that James had given her, doubtless Reggie Forrester’s. She slid back the deadbolts and opened the door.

The gravel lane behind the warehouse was deserted except for a skittering stray cat. For a moment she thought the soldiers must already have arrested Ben’s deputies. Then behind her, inside the warehouse, a commotion erupted: people yelling, booted feet clomping at a run across concrete.

And then brother James rose out of the brush on the far side of the lane and ran toward the back door. A line of Lewisville deputies followed him. Two tremendous explosions detonated at the front of the warehouse, one right after the other. A blast of heat and smoke and a rain of debris rattled across the interior of the warehouse. Alexandra jumped outside through the doorway.

Alexandra thought: People were being shot, even killed. She had helped it happen. It was a betrayal of everything she thought she stood for. Why was she so excited?

But then, at that same moment, moving so unbelievably fast that she barely had time to register what happened, a dark shape roared across the sky, shrank into a distant speck. Another deafening explosion—

The deputies all ducked belatedly. “Raid! Raid! Eetees!” James shouted. Now gunfire and screams echoed from inside the warehouse.

Then a band of eetees, all thin heads and long froggy legs, came around the corner of the warehouse and started shooting.

She had never seen them in the flesh. They weren’t supposed to come out in daylight! Terrified, she flung herself back inside, crawled away among the pallets into the darkest corner she could find, and wedged herself behind a row of fiberboard barrels, arms over her head. Smoke filled her nose and mouth. Explosions echoed through the warehouse, more yelling and screaming, the crash of metal shelves overturning.

Then she heard a sound right nearby.

She looked up. One of the aliens squatted atop a stack of barrels. It apparently hadn’t seen her yet. It gazed out from its high vantage point into the chaos of the warehouse. The alien wasn’t any larger, really, than a Great Dane or a teenage boy. It had long legs and arms and wore some kind of glistening translucent all-over covering like a wetsuit, and its taloned glove held a long-barreled red pistol. It smelled like slightly rancid raw chicken. Alexandra looked at its narrow chest for one of those red whorled pendants James had once shown her, carried by the high-ranking eetees, that could paralyze this entire warehouse full of men. She did not see one.

She must have made a sound—whimpered, perhaps—because the eetee turned and glanced down at her. Its narrow face was unreadable behind the slimy protective sac. Its pistol was aimed at her negligently, as if she were no threat at all, but she really did not like guns.

As angry as if it were Ben, Alexandra threw her weight into the stack of barrels. The eetee toppled to the floor along with all the rolling, tumbling sections of its unstable perch. The pistol flew from its hand, fell and struck Alexandra’s hip. Her first instinctive reaction was to bat the horrible object away from her; then, fumbling, she grabbed for it and caught the wrong end.

The eetee scrabbled to its feet, heaving barrels aside. Alexandra reoriented the pistol with two clumsy, shaking hands, and took aim. She clearly did not inspire fear: Instead of ducking behind a barrel or throwing itself to one side, the eetee fixed Alexandra with its egg-yolk gaze.

Icy blackness swept her mind, it stopped her breath and froze her limbs—

But the eetee didn’t, it surely …

The overwhelming weight of her terror crushed the half-finished thought toward nothingness, and all that Alexandra could grab hold of was her desperate rage. She was so tired of being on the sidelines, the one not in control. She realized she had squeezed her eyes shut. She forced herself to open them. There was no blackness except on the backs of her eyelids.

Mind control she understood.