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

One day, returning home after checking the snares he’d set in the woods, Lucas climbed to the top of the levee and saw two men waiting beside his boat. Both were dressed in brand-new camo gear, one with a beard, the other with a shaven head and rings flashing in one ear. They started up the slope towards him, calling his name, and he turned tail and ran, cutting across a stretch of sour land gone to weeds and pioneer saplings, plunging into the stands of bracken at the edge of the woods, pausing, seeing the two men chasing towards him, turning and running on.

He knew every part of the woods, and quickly found a hiding place under the slanted trunk of a fallen sycamore grown over with moss and ferns, breathing quick and hard in the cold air. Rain pattered all around. Droplets of water spangled bare black twigs. The deep odour of wet wood and wet earth.

A magpie chattered, close by. Lucas set a ball-bearing in the cup of his catapult and cut towards the sound, moving easily and quietly, freezing when he saw a twitch of movement between the wet tree trunks ahead. It was the bearded man, the camo circuit of his gear magicking him into a fairy-tale creature got up from wet bark and mud. He was talking into a phone headset in a language full of harsh vowels. Turning as Lucas stepped towards him, his smile white inside his beard, saying that there was no need to run away, he only wanted to talk.

“What is that you have, kid?”

“A catapult. I’ll use it if I have to.”

“What do you use it for? Hunting rabbits? I’m no rabbit.”

“Who are you?”

“Police. I have ID,” the man said, and before Lucas could say anything his hand went into the pocket of his camo trousers and came out with a pistol.

Lucas had made his catapult himself, from a yoke of springy poplar and a length of vatgrown rubber with the composition and tensile strength of the hinge inside a mussel shell. As the man brought up the pistol Lucas pulled back the band of rubber and let the ball bearing fly. He did it quickly and without thought, firing from the hip, and the ball bearing went exactly where he meant it to go. It smacked into the knuckles of the man’s hand with a hard pop and the man yelped and dropped the pistol, and then he sat down hard and clapped his good hand to his knee, because Lucas’s second shot had struck the soft part under the cap.

Lucas stepped up and kicked the pistol away and stepped back, a third ball bearing cupped in the catapult. The man glared at him, wincing with pain, and said something in his harsh language.

“Who sent you?” Lucas said.

His heart was racing, but his thoughts were cool and clear.

“Tell me where it is,” the man said, “and we leave you alone. Your mother too.”

“My mother doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

Lucas was watching the man and listening to someone moving through the wet wood, coming closer.

“She is in it, nevertheless,” the man said. He tried to push to his feet but his wounded knee gave way and he cried out and sat down again. He’d bitten his lip bloody and sweat beaded his forehead.

“Stay still, or the next one hits you between the eyes,” Lucas said. He heard a quaver in his voice and knew from the way the man looked at him that he’d heard it too.

“Go now, and fetch the stuff. And don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean. Fetch it and bring it here. That’s the only offer you get,” the man said. “And the only time I make it.”

A twig snapped softly and Lucas turned, ready to let the ball-bearing fly, but it was Damian’s father who stepped around a dark green holly bush, saying, “You can leave this one to me.”

At once Lucas understood what had happened. Within his cool clear envelope he could see everything: how it all connected.

“You set me up,” he said.

“I needed to draw them out,” Jason Playne said. He was dressed in jeans and an old-fashioned woodland camo jacket, and he was cradling a cut-down double-barrelled shotgun.

“You let them know where I was. You told them I had more of the dragon stuff.”

The man sitting on the ground was looking at them. “This does not end here,” he said. “I have you, and I have your friend. And you’re going to pay for what you did to my son,” Jason Playne said, and put a whistle to his lips and blew, two short notes. Off in the dark rainy woods another whistle answered.

The man said, “Idiot small-time businessman. You don’t know us. What we can do. Hurt me and we hurt you back tenfold.”

Jason Playne ignored him, and told Lucas that he could go.

“Why did you let them chase me? You could have caught them while they were waiting by my boat. Did you want them to hurt me?”

“I knew you’d lead them a good old chase. And you did. So, all’s well that ends well, eh?” Jason Playne said. “Think of it as payback. For what happened to my son.”

Lucas felt a bubble of anger swelling in his chest. “You can’t forgive me for what I didn’t do.”

“It’s what you didn’t do that caused all the trouble.”

“It wasn’t me. It was you. It was you who made him run away. It wasn’t just the beatings. It was the thought that if he stayed here he’d become just like you.”

Jason Playne turned towards Lucas, his face congested. “Go. Right now.”

The bearded man drew a knife from his boot and flicked it open and pushed up with his good leg, throwing himself towards Jason Playne, and Lucas stretched the band of his catapult and let fly. The ball bearing struck the bearded man in the temple with a hollow sound and the man fell flat on his face. His temple was dinted and blood came out of his nose and mouth and he thrashed and trembled and subsided.

Rain pattered down all around, like faint applause.

Then Jason Playne stepped towards the man and kicked him in the chin with the point of his boot. The man rolled over on the wet leaves, arms flopping wide.

“I reckon you killed him,” Jason Playne said.

“I didn’t mean—”

“Lucky for you there are two of them. The other will tell me what I need to know. You go now, boy. Go!”

Lucas turned and ran.

He didn’t tell his mother about it. He hoped that Jason Playne would find out who had killed Damian and tell the police and the killers would answer for what they had done, and that would be an end to it.

That wasn’t what happened.

The next day, a motor launch came over to the island, carrying police armed with machine guns and the detectives investigating Damian’s death, who arrested Lucas for involvement in two suspicious deaths and conspiracy to kidnap or murder other persons unknown. It seemed that one of the men that Jason Playne had hired to help him get justice for the death of his son had been a police informant.

Lucas was held in remand in Norwich for three months. Julia was too ill to visit him, but they talked on the phone and she sent messages via Ritchy, who’d been arrested along with every other worker on the shrimp farm, but released on bail after the police were unable to prove that he had anything to do with Jason Playne’s scheme.

It was Ritchy who told Lucas that his mother had cancer that had started in her throat and spread elsewhere, and that she had refused treatment. Lucas was taken to see her two weeks later, handcuffed to a prison warden. She was lying in a hospital bed, looking shrunken and horribly vulnerable. Her dreadlocks bundled in a blue scarf. Her hand so cold when he took it in his. The skin loose on frail bones.