Alien Nation #4 - The Change Page 12

  He kissed her, escaped from her arms, and opened the door. After a quick check outside, he slipped silently into the night.

  Cathy pulled on her robe, sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the dark until the monsters that lurked there grew too real. She switched on the light and, picking up the remote control, turned on the room’s television and switched channels to the sci-fi network to see what was on. Matt had introduced her to the old science fiction movies, and she had been fascinated, when not amused. On the screen was yet another running of the immortal copper-bottomed pot and pan with the pistol-grip-handle commercial. Once more the battle between the aluminum pot and the stainless steel pot was reenacted. Once more the aluminum pot crumpled in defeat.

  When the commercial ended, it took all of half a second for her to recognize the film that was running. She punched off the remote and threw it on her nightstand. She didn’t feel up to another viewing of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. She looked toward the window and placed Matt in the hands of Celine and Andarko.

  C H A P T E R 1 6

  THE NIGHT AIR was thick and clammy as dark clouds rolled in from the Pacific, blotting out the moon. The street was silent, save only the barking of a dog and the distant wail of an ambulance siren. More than one of the officers guarding the Francisco home commented about the irony of sweating and shivering at the same time.

  Few of the officers had the slightest doubt as to his or her ability to defeat Maanka Dak. To some of the human officers, Dak was just a Newcomer. To all of the officers, he was just a convict: a loser; another crowbar crazy bent on revenge. Dak was a “them.” In any contest between “us” and “them,” of course, the thems had to lose. It was only fair, just, God’s will, and the right thing for reality to do.

  The ends of the street were blocked, and officers on foot were hiding in the shrubbery, pretending to be lovers, bikers, joggers, skaters, skate boarders. Supposedly there wasn’t a blade of grass that could move without at least three officers noticing.

  Despite that, there were many things the officers weren’t noticing. Six houses away toward the east, a burglar was disgusted at the state of the economy as he crept out the back of a darkened house and put an eight-year-old VCR into the trunk of his car. Two houses away a shadowy figure crawled into a ruptured storm drain and cursed as he ran into a spiny weed and jabbed himself in the eye. Across the street and two houses away in the opposite direction, Officer Ruma Kavit sat motionless, leaning against the rough bark of a palm, looking through the leaves and branches of a rhododendron bush at the two black-and-whites in the center of the residential street. The cars were close to each other, and the officers inside were talking directly, thereby avoiding their radios. Their efforts were so pathetic, she would’ve laughed or wept, always providing, of course, that Maanka Dak would run the programs that would allow her tear ducts to flow, her laughter to come.

  The pain from the wound in her left arm had spread over her entire shoulder and neck, while the pain from the wound in her left thigh seemed to have focused on the small of her back, despite the swelling that stretched tight the skin covering her thigh. She could feel the pain but could not cry out. Her captor had stopped the bleeding with his handheld remote control prior to bringing her along to the Radio Shack he had broken into. Even her severed veins and arteries seemed to obey Maanka Dak. He willed the bleeding to stop, he entered the proper program, pushed the proper buttons, and the bleeding stopped. The pain skyrocketed because the blood rushing to the wounds had no place else to go, but the bleeding had stopped. Ruma knew that Maanka Dak could stop the pain, as well, but had chosen not to do so.

  She tried to move her mind from her pain. It was an art the Tenctonese developed early on the ship. Pick up the mind, detach its connection to the pain, and plug it into something else. Ruma tried to focus on Dak’s plan.

  What was it?

  What role had Bill Duncan been assigned?

  What use had the old cop been to Maanka Dak?

  How had she spoiled the plan by gunning down Bill Duncan?

  Dak had taken very little from the electronics store. Most of what he needed was already sewn into his coat. Despite her pain and fear, Ruma had been astonished at the hundreds of tiny loops and pockets that had been hand sewn onto the coat’s lining. There were tiny tools, miniature printed circuit boards, and row after row of short, gleaming silver threads next to delicate needle-tipped instruments. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the short silver threads.

  “Look at your brother and sister officers, Ruma Kavit,” Maanka whispered into her ear fold. “Look at all the blind, stupid creatures. I tell you I can move through them as though I were as invisible as the wind. You believe me too. I can tell. You’ve seen me do it.” He smirked as he nodded his head once.

  “Yes, Officer Kavit. It’s like having a war of wits with a boxful of banana slugs.”

  He picked up his controller and attached a lead from it to a connector set just behind his right ear. He pressed a button, and suddenly Ruma felt an alien presence inside her, invading, surrounding her sense of self. He was in her mind. He was everywhere.

  Rape was only a body thing. It didn’t invade the self, the soul, unless allowed. Maanka had gone beyond that. He had invaded her self, had become her self, had taken and violated it all. There was no screaming; no sound; no way to flail against the pain; no way to bellow out her rage. Silence here was the ultimate torture.

  “Look at them,” she felt her own lips say as she pulled her weapon, cocked it, and aimed at the officer in the passenger seat of the nearest black-and-white.

  “I can kill them all. And see how I have improved your aim? There is no shaking, no wavering, no twitching, no blurring of focus. With me to help you, my dear, you could shoot a perfect score every time. Indeed, I—we—can kill them all. But they really kill themselves, don’t they? A fool who walks in front of a speeding car kills himself more certainly than any junkie seeking nothingness in an overdose.”

  Dak fell silent as he studied the dark windows of the Francisco home. “He’s in there, looking out, waiting for his son. I knew he’d stay home waiting for his son. He’s a magnet of care, drawing those who care for him out of hiding. They are so predictable. Duncan, Sikes, Diaz, Francisco, Grazer, Bradley. Cops. Predictable. They are biological machines following the orders of biological computers. Push the correct buttons, enter the appropriate program, and the machine does just what the operator wants. I’ve studied all of them in detail for years. I know them—knew them. Studied their programs. Designed new programs for them.” There was a chink in the smug calm of Maanka Dak’s presence.

  “Diaz, of course, died in the line of duty,” she felt her lips say as her forehead wrinkled in a frown. “In other words, he died the way I planned for him to die. You, on the other hand, Ruma Kavit, killed Officer Duncan much too soon. That was inconvenient. You are the one I didn’t know, Ruma Kavit. But now I know you—all of you.”

  Everything within Ruma Kavit that was still Ruma Kavit writhed in revulsion at what was within her brain. It was a thousand maggots, a reptilian thing coiled behind her eyes, a foul thing equal to anything driven from the depths of some human hell. It stank, it crawled, it carried with it the filth of a million festering sewers. It glistened with vomit, excrement, and drool.

  She lowered the hammer on her weapon, brought it down, and replaced it in her holster. Shade by gentle shade she felt the presence withdraw from her mind. “You listen to my idle chatter, Ruma, and you think I am some sort of deranged serial killer. That’s not true, you know. I am neither deranged nor a serial killer.” He pointed with his controller at the police officers on the street, jogging by, hidden in the shrubbery across the street.

  “I am not going to kill them all. Look at them. Most of those banana slugs in blue don’t even know Francisco, my dear. Hence, there would be no point in killing them. There would be no point in killing everyone. That would be murder. I am not a murderer. The vikah ta, you see, is
on Francisco; my brother Stangya; the traitor who took up authority’s bloody cause against me and executed my brother, Sita. Soon, now, you will gain me my access to Stangya. Then my treacherous brother of the Ahvin Yin will die. Perhaps you will die, as well, but you are part of the same authority. Anyone who stands against the vikah ta becomes its target. This we swore lifetimes ago on Itri Vi.” Dak’s voice was almost a growl, then he fell silent, his eyes studying the telephone headset and flashing circuit box on the water-starved grass.

  Itri Vi; it was a name from her childhood, a badly remembered nightmare. An older sister died there in a manner Ruma’s parents had always refused to discuss. So many pains in a life. So many more pains trying not to feel them.

  The heat from Ruma’s wounds filled her, blotting out the mutterings of the madman at her side. The madman, however, was still inside her head, watching her thoughts. The pain from her wounds eased. It eased more, and Ruma could feel herself want to cry in gratitude at the relief.

  Dak’s fingers traced circles about her right ear fold.

  “Ruma, my dear, do you have any idea how long it’s been since I’ve made love to a woman?” He pushed a button, and Ruma felt her head turn toward Maanka Dak as her lips were forced back in a seductive smile. Something within her tore, flooding her universe with pure, evil hatred. She watched as the hatred ate her alive, and no longer cared.

  “Ah, you feel the same as I do. How convenient.” He began unbuckling her gun belt as he continued. “There were two human convicts at China Lake who served adequately as my sexual partners until they became homicidal. It’s a pity the effect the neural controllers have on humans. In any event, there have been no women, human or otherwise, for far too long.”

  He put his lips close to her ear fold, his breath moist and foul. “Dare we to make love here?” he whispered. “Here, on the grass, in the midst of all this oppressive authority? Dare we?”

  He grinned and leaned forward. “I’m guessing that we do.” He reached out, put on the telephone headset and adjusted it. “You won’t mind if I watch the phone, will you, my dear? I’m expecting an important call. Wasn’t it thoughtful of Captain Grazer and the authorities to route all calls to and from the principals through one command center? It’s enough to renew an old cynic’s faith in human nature.”

  He cackled beneath his breath as he unbuttoned Ruma’s trousers and pulled out the tail of her uniform shirt. Inserting his hand beneath her shirt, he ran his fingers up her spine. She could feel her mind shatter as she felt herself forced to become sexually aroused. As her soul twisted in agony, she longed for the blessed, blotting occupation of the pain of her wounds.

  “Now, Ruma, we wouldn’t want to be too mechanical about this,” Dak said, then laughed quietly and his fingers began to probe between her legs.

  There was a cry that no one could see, a scream that no one could hear. Ruma Kavit whirled down a smoking blackness, deep within the infinity of herself, where no one, nothing, could ever touch her again. There she was alone. There she could hide. She wrapped her mental arms about herself and became very very still. Outside of her there was motion, sound, Maanka Dak talking into the headset with a strange voice, but it was over there: not connected; nothing to do with her.

  C H A P T E R 1 7

  “IN A FEW MOMENTS viewers will see this amazing home video taken by Ruby Begonia, a customer at the Bucky McBeaver’s on Soto, scene of the massacre earlier today . . .”

  George stood in his darkened living room, at the window next to the telephone table, and searched the shadows of his small front yard for his son Buck as Amanda Reckonwith and the sounds of the “Slagtown Beat News” came from the kitchen television set. He didn’t concern himself about seeing the Begonia tape about to be shown. It was the kind of thing the media would play and replay in ghoulish delight, over and over again, morning, afternoon, evening, and all night long, endlessly and forever, until the next horror came along.

  George kept the set in the living room dark for two purposes. First, it made him less of a target from outside. Second, it allowed him to keep his eyes adjusted to the dark so that he could see outside. Buck was still out there, scared, lost, not knowing who to trust. Where once his thinking processes were jammed with feathers, George could now see his son’s options very clearly.

  Once he had seen his dead classmate sitting in his seat and had gotten a glimpse of the campus security cop who had done the job, Buck wouldn’t have needed a detective to figure out his life was in danger.

  Buck would have called his mother’s office, first thing. There, he would’ve either gotten nothing or the news that Buck’s old baseball coach, Detective Mark Diaz, had killed everyone at his mother’s office, including himself. Would he have tried to get in touch with his father? The command center had reported no calls. Would he come home? If he was smart, he wouldn’t. Buck was smart, but he wasn’t that kind of smart. More important than his own life would be the knowledge of what had happened to his parents and sisters.

  Then why hadn’t he called home? Twice George had checked the telephone company to make certain that everything was functioning. He would have done it more often except for fear of having the line busy if Buck finally did call. Captain Grazer down at the command center had assured him that Susan and the girls were safe. But George knew that such assurances meant little when the threat was someone who had walked out of a federal maximum-security facility by operating the warden like a Tonka Toy.

  Buck was smart. Maanka Dak was beyond genius. His hate was beyond hate, his capabilities beyond comprehension. Survival on Itri Vi had required nothing less. A familiar voice, the voice of Warden Tom Rand, came from the kitchen television set.

  “Those three or four kids I could’ve hired . . . instead of working for me, they’re out there on the streets, getting into trouble, mugging, taking down their despair with chemicals, killing to get more, lashing out in frustration and hate against the universe! I can’t hire them! I can’t screw with W-2 forms, withholding, child labor laws, liability insurance, worker’s comp, (bleep) bureaucrats, goddamned lawyers, idiot after idiot after idiot! No! I’m not all right! I don’t know anyone who is all right—”

  “There are, between the gunman’s lines, wheels within wheels,” Amanda Reckonworth interrupted. “Before he went berserk, Thomas Rand was the warden of one of the nation’s newest federal prisons, in daily contact with the results of our welfare, economic, and law enforcement systems. Listen as he tells his victims his assessment of it all.”

  Tom Rand’s voice came through some kind of reverb unit, making it sound deep, thundering, the utterance of Judgment itself:

  “—all a cesspool: courts, bureaucrats, politicians, lawyers. It’s the wrong kind of people, their heads filled with the wrong kinds of ideas, killing the country by sucking it dry to implement unworkable solutions!”

  “Madman or social critic?” Amanda Reckonwith demanded. “We’ll never know, because the only man who could have answered that question is . . .”

  The street beyond the white picket fence was well lit. An officer George didn’t recognize jogged by, being ultracareful not to look at the Francisco house. To George, the bogus jogger looked as though he wasn’t looking because he shouldn’t look like he was looking. He shouldn’t look like he was trying not to look either, George mused. It didn’t matter. Such games were as nothing to Maanka Dak. As Tom Rand’s rage-crazed voice screamed from the television for everyone to kill a lawyer for Jesus, George no longer saw the jogger. He saw, instead, the pain ministers of Itri Vi. The horrors inflicted upon them by the beastly Niyez, the physical pain as well as the pain of hearts and soul.

  Was it some odd coil of DNA, some part of the stuff of life that they had used to engineer a race of slaves, that had balked at the treatment of the Niyez? He remembered the look in the eyes of the Niyezian pain minister he had killed as part of the vikah ta in revenge for his dead parents; his initiation into the Ahvin Yin. The rightness of what he did, when he d
id it, had not been in the slightest doubt. When the creators had removed them from the control of the Niyez and they were back on the ship, however, the doubts began.

  “—a thing we haven’t touched on yet is the Diaz slaughter on Wilshire,” Amanda said. “Here we have Mark Diaz, a Hispanic, a detective on the LAPD, who goes seemingly mad and kills almost the entire staff of an advertising agency. The average age of detectives in Los Angeles is thirty-seven, yet Detective Diaz was forty-nine. It is no secret that Newcomer officers, men and women of just a few years service, have been promoted over other officers. Add to this that most of the employees at the ad agency on Wilshire are Newcomers, and maybe we can see a glimmer of the real problem.

  “Is the Wilshire Boulevard Massacre happening only scant hours after the killings on Soto only a coincidence? Or are our social chickens finally coming home to roost? Only time will tell.”

  George looked for the remote control for the kitchen set as Amanda Reckonwith injected a thick, dramatic pause. “During the riots of the Sixties and the nineties,” she continued at last, “large portions of this city’s population stood up and with vehemence argued for and justified vandalism, robbery, arson, assault, and murder, in the name of unfocused rage. Now, when portions of the city leveled in the Watts riots of the sixties and the Rodney King riots of the nineties have yet to recover, are we getting a preview here of yet the next horror?”

  “If you have anything to say about it, it is,” George muttered disgustedly as he punched off the kitchen TV with the remote control. “One thing you have to admit: a city eating itself alive sells a lot of hemorrhoid ointment.”

  He thought about Amanda Reckonwith’s phrase, “murder in the name of unfocused rage.” Was murder ever justified? If it’s justified, it’s not murder, he answered himself. In the ’92 riots, dozens were killed supposedly to protest a single instance of injustice. As time passed, the excuses, justifications, and rationalizations expanded and multiplied to fill the available talk-show time, because nothing less than more reasons could even hope to outweigh the horrors that were committed. Few called the murders murders, however.