Untitled (29 page)

  I'm moving. Someone brave is dragging me towards the comparative shelter of a nearby garden.

  "Are you all right?" says the voice I most love in all the world. Mo's face is right in front of mine.

  I can't respond.

  "Oh no!" she says to someone next to her. "He must be hurt. Where does it hurt? Have you been paralyzed my love . . . Oh. Paralyzed. Oh. That's all right then. Jezzer's immobilized him . . . Brian, darling. I'll have to leave you here for a moment. We have to get the children out. I'll come back to you in a minute . . ."

  Someone shouts from the far side of the green, telling Jezzer to surrender before anyone gets seriously hurt.

  Jezzer gets up and fires another grenade.

  He doesn't dive back to cover immediately. He stands in full view and rests the butt of the gun on his hip and surveys the town contemptuously.

  Although he's an easy target, everyone stops shooting. Maybe they're impressed, or want to savor this moment before the mad dog's last stand. I am certain that for most of the people here this is a game; there may be plenty of worried, terrified people elsewhere in the village, but the idea that guns and grenades maim and kill hasn't occurred to anyone who's come to play tonight. They've seen too many movies not to know that the good guy always lives in the end.

  Suddenly, I am in pain.

  I can move again.

  I slowly, carefully, get to my knees.

  Jezzer is holding the remote up high. "Brian, where are you? You're not much of a hostage, but you're all I've got. Come here, come to Uncle Jeremy."

  I'm willing. Maybe I can talk him out of this lunacy. I get up to a crouch and wave my arms around in the air to show everyone where I am.

  Someone lets off a shot at Jezzer from close by.

  The remote held aloft in his hand disintegrates like a clay pigeon.

  He looks at the hand where the zapper used to be, shaking his head in bemusement.

  And that is all the chance I need. Like a jungle cat, I spring from my haunches over the wall and onto Jezzer before he can bring the gun to bear on me.

  I get him on the ground. He is bigger than me, fitter than me, and more bonkers than me. But I am mad as hell, and to his K-addled brain, I look like the Lord of Darkness himself. So within moments, he's wailing in existential despair because he thinks that Satan himself is going to be kicking him in the bollocks like this for all eternity.

The citizens were all for hanging him from the remains of the olde oak tree, but it wasn't high enough, and then the police SWAT team helicoptered in to rescue him.

  There were a few bruises and scratches, and lots of ringing ears, but no major injuries. Hinton Lea feted me as the hero of the hour, though you could tell a lot of them were a bit disappointed that the drama had not achieved a fitting conclusion.

  You'd think they'd be sufficiently grateful to petition for my early release, or at least a few months' parole. But oh no. Fair and grateful people don't get to live in places like Hinton Lea.

  The trial was straightforward enough. I'd got rid of the chip back on his suit visor in the garden, and everyone thought he'd just scored a bad batch of pills. So he was sentenced to tagging for life, but the legal squabbles over Jezzer and his property were another matter.

  The judge made some very fine calculations according to all the people Jezzer had harmed. A big piece of him went to Wayne Roberts, another slice to Hinton Lea as a whole. Other individuals who had been injured or whose property had been damaged won minor portions.

  Hundreds of others claimed his actions had stressed them so much they were on tranks or in counseling and entered claims for a morsel of Jezzer or his property. Also, Natasha filed for divorce, demanding half his stuff.

  While the lawyers argue, Jezzer and I belong to Hinton Lea, our labors administered by the Community Council. I don't know who the official remote-holder is, but I've not seen one since that night.

  Jezzer sleeps in the attic of the Parish Hall.

  I'm sharing Wayne's family caravan with Mo.

  Wayne wasn't keen on this arrangement, and still fears for the caravan's suspension. Mo quietly explained to him how complicated things might become if she were to tell the police about how she had been the one who got Jezzer sacked. Wayne might lose his nice, new, and better-paid job (the one that Jezzer used to have), and it would mean that Jezzer would have to have a retrial and . . .

  Wayne saw that she spoke with great wisdom and caved in gracefully. On what we think of as our "wedding night," he left a half-bottle of Happy Shopper champagne by the bedside. See? A considerate gesture doesn't have to cost much, does it?

  Wayne understands that you've got to meet people in the middle, even if they are taggies.

We've just been sweeping the streets. Jezzer's changed a bit.

  "I've done a Pareto Analysis," he said. "I don't expect that'd mean much to you, but it's an extremely powerful business tool that helps you direct resources more productively. Now look at this graph I've drawn. It shows how there are slightly more sweet wrappers in Elm Close, but a considerably larger concentration of cigarette ends – but, interestingly, almost no cigar butts – down in the park. The cigar butts are more randomly scattered, though they tend to be . . ."

  "Jezzer," I said (I'm on rather more familiar terms with him these days), "shut up."

  "Anyway, I've designed these survey forms for us to record distribution of litter according to area, time of day, and season. As you can see I've already coded them up, so's we can borrow a spreadsheet and database package with a view to optimizing our . . ."

  I walked away. Mo was waiting for me on a garden wall.

  This is all still wrong. Us being here. But Mo makes it okay. We will get out of here one day. And we will win.

Amanda spotted the alien late Friday afternoon outside the Video Center, on South Main. It was trying to look cool and laid-back, but it simply came across as bewildered and uneasy. The alien was disguised as a seventeen-year-old girl, maybe a Chicana, with olivetoned skin and hair so black it seemed almost blue, but Amanda, who was seventeen herself, knew a phony when she saw one. She studied the alien for some moments from the other side of the street to make absolutely certain. Then she walked over.

  "You're doing it wrong," Amanda said. "Anybody with half a brain could tell what you really are."

  "Bug off," the alien said.

  "No. Listen to me. You want to stay out of the detention center, or don't you?"

  The alien stared coldly at Amanda and said, "I don't know what the crap you're talking about."

  "Sure you do. No sense trying to bluff me. Look, I want to help you," Amanda said. "I think you're getting a raw deal. You know what that means, a raw deal? Hey, look, come home with me, and I'll teach you a few things about passing for human. I've got the whole friggin' weekend now with nothing else to do anyway"

  A flicker of interest came into the other girl's dark, chilly eyes. But it died quickly, and she said, "You some kind of lunatic?"

  "Suit yourself, O thing from beyond the stars.
Let
them lock you up again.
Let
them stick electrodes up your ass. I tried to help. That's all I can do, is try," Amanda said, shrugging. She began to saunter away. She didn't look back. Three steps, four, five, hands in pockets, slowly heading for her car. Had she been wrong, she wondered? No. No. She could be wrong about some things, like Charley Taylor's interest in spending the weekend with her, maybe. But not this. That crinkly-haired chick was the missing alien for sure.

  The whole county was buzzing about it: Deadly nonhuman life form has escaped from the detention center out by Tracy, might be anywhere, Walnut Creek, Livermore, even San Francisco, dangerous monster, capable of mimicking human forms, will engulf and digest you and disguise itself in your shape. And there it was, Amanda knew, standing outside the Video Center. Amanda kept walking.

  "Wait," the alien said finally.

  Amanda took another easy step or two. Then she looked back over her shoulder.

  "Yeah?"

  "How can you tell?"

  Amanda grinned. "Easy. You've got a rain slicker on, and it's only September. Rainy season doesn't start around here for another month or two. Your pants are the old Spandex kind. People like you don't wear that stuff anymore. Your face paint is San Jose colors, but you've got the cheek chevrons put on in the Berkeley pattern. That's just the first three things I noticed. I could find plenty more. Nothing about you fits together with anything else. It's like you did a survey to see how you ought to appear and then tried a little of everything. The closer I study you, the more I see. Look, you're wearing your headphones, and the battery light is on, but there's no cassette in the slot. What are you listening to, the music of the spheres? That model doesn't have any FM tuner, you know.

  "You see? You may think that you're perfectly camouflaged, but you aren't."

  "I could destroy you," the alien said.

  "What? Oh, sure. Sure you could. Engulf me right here on the street, all over in thirty seconds, little trail of slime by the door, and a new Amanda walks away. But what then? What good's that going to do you? You still won't know which end is up. So there's no logic in destroying me, unless you're a total dummy. I'm on your side. I'm not going to turn you in."

  "Why should I trust you?"

  "Because I've been talking to you for five minutes and I haven't yelled for the cops yet. Don't you know that half of California is out searching for you? Hey, can you read? Come over here a minute. Here." Amanda tugged the alien toward the newspaper vending box at the curb. The headline on the afternoon
Examiner
was:

"You understand that?" Amanda asked. "That's you they're talking about. They're out there with flame guns, tranquilizer darts, web snares, and God knows what else. There's been real hysteria for a day and a half. And you standing around here with the wrong chevrons on! Christ. Christ! What's your plan, anyway? Where are you trying to go?"

  "Home," the alien said. "But first I have to rendezvous at the pickup point."

  "Where's that?"

  "You think I'm stupid?"

  "Shit," Amanda said. "If I meant to turn you in, I'd have done it five minutes ago. But, okay, I don't give a damn where your rendezvous point is. I tell you, though, you wouldn't make it as far as San Francisco rigged up the way you are. It's a miracle you've avoided getting caught until now."

  "And you'll help me?"

  "I've been trying to. Come on. Let's get the hell out of here. I'll take you home and fix you up a little. My car's in the lot down on the next corner."

"Okay."

  "Whew!" Amanda shook her head slowly. "Christ, some people sure can't take help when you try to offer it."

  As she drove out of the center of town, Amanda glanced occasionally at the alien sitting tensely to her right. Basically the disguise was very convincing, Amanda thought. Maybe all the small details were wrong, the outer stuff, the anthropological stuff, but the alien
looked
human, it
sounded
human, it even
smelled
human. Possibly it could fool ninety-nine people out of a hundred, or maybe more than that. But Amanda had always had a good eye for detail. And at the particular moment she had spotted the alien on South Main she had been unusually alert, sensitive, all raw nerves, every antenna up.

  Of course it wasn't aliens she was hunting for, but just a diversion, a little excitement, something to fill the great gaping emptiness that Charley Taylor had left in her weekend.