Do You Come Here Often?

"Even if they no longer resist?"

She answered, "Especially if they no longer resist." She leveled a cold stare at him. "Don't tell me you believe that crap. Slaves from another world," she sneered, "held in genetic bondage by a race of evil masters. Survivors of a crash here on Earth—that thing that went down in Canada. You must be joking." She snorted. "They're parasites. It gets harder to beat them every year, every new generation. They're becoming just like us. What's to keep them from taking over?"

"They say they don't need us anymore," Rodman said quietly. "They say they can reproduce among themselves—"

"They why are people still being killed?" She smiled demurely.

Rodman sipped his foul-tasting drink and grimaced. He wiped his mouth. "You said it yourself. They're becoming more like us. Which means there are good monsters and bad—"

"And why are they revealing themselves so brazenly—all this nonsense about a homeland and diplomatic recognition. Aren't they afraid their former owners will come looking for them?"

Now Rodman smiled. "They say they're too smart to be of any use as slaves now. They say—"

"They say, they say," the woman interjected, her tone suggesting real anger for the first time. "Are you playing devil's advocate or is there something else at stake? How do you know they aren't lying? They've lied before," she muttered. "Cunning little bastards. They've learned a hell of a lot from us; I'll admit that." She leaned forward suddenly, stabbing an index finger at his chest. "So all they want is a little place of their own, a place to call home and be left alone. And for that, they'll help us track down the bad seeds, the . . . oh, what was that word the monster used in its speech?"

"Anomalies."

"Yes," she said with a broad smile. "Anomalies. Now isn't that a nice word. Makes it all sound so clean and simple, doesn't it?"

Rodman shook his head. This wasn't what he'd expected. Not at all.

"And after that, who knows? We can open an embassy in their country. Establish trade. Videographs and airbikes and hydrogen—"

"Come on."

"Cultural exchanges!" she declared gleefully. "Monster stand-up comics. I can see it now: Is it safe to kiss that girl? It is if you're a dentist! Big laughs, just a big, happy family—"

Rodman shook his head.

She leaned away from him, suddenly looking tired. She sighed. "They aren't refugees from some interplanetary cotton plantation. They're monsters. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Thing. Monsters that want to kill us and eat us. Just like when you were a little kid. Remember the monster that hid under the bed, or the monster in the closet? You never saw it but you knew it was there and you knew what it wanted. You got rid of it by growing up. It's easy for adults to believe there's no such thing as monsters in the closet. And that's what we should do now. Grow up; face the reality that Mother Nature doesn't sign treaties. Could a treaty have stopped AIDS? Hell no. But an artificial antibody could. And it did. So now, do we kill this disease or do we sign a treaty? Do we grow up, or do we pull the covers over our heads and hope the monster goes away?"

She stopped. The room was silent. She watched him, as if she were awaiting an answer. He couldn't think of what to say, but he remembered a time when he would have agreed with her, when the early monsters were everywhere. He said in a near whisper, "I was almost bitten. . .."

She leaned forward, a wolf-like grin on her face, her expression alive with interest. "Were you?" she said. She clasped her hands as if to keep them from flapping about excitedly. "Did you kill it? Tell me."

"In Seattle," Rodman began. "I was at an airport hotel. This was just after the President told the world about—about them." The scene began to replay itself in his mind. "I didn't believe it, but a lot of people did. The airport was a madhouse. People were running—running away." He didn't like to think of that night, but the memory was too vivid and he couldn't stop it: the thunder of big jets an incessant, subliminal pounding in the background, the woman he took to his room, his thoughts whirling amid a haze of alcohol, her odd, cool flesh raising goosebumps wherever she touched him. He remembered not remembering where he he'd met her or who she was, only that she'd asked him for a light and asked him if he came there often and he was too drunk to see the difference in her. He remembers the sensation of suffocating, the first, needle-like diggings of pain finally soaking through the booze, his sudden, mindless horror. He remembers puking, then beating it, again, again, battering it even after it was dead.

He told the woman this, and he told her about the Bahamas and his vow to never kill one again, and when he finished he saw that an almost euphoric glaze had settled over her eyes. He'd heard of people who got their rocks off by teasing the things, working them into a state of reproductive frenzy and then killing them, then masturbating afterwards. He wondered if she was one of those people.

He finished his drink. The ice cubes settled with a delicate clink. He sighed. "I hated them. Just as you hate them. Although I didn't want to be the one to kill them, I wanted them all dead. It would be years before I'd change my mind."

Her face went slack. She said in a tired voice, "What?"

"I had to walk to work one day," he said. "The car wouldn't start. The buses weren't running then and you couldn't buy a cab. Even the towing service wouldn't send a truck unless the driver was armed, and all their units—they called them `escorted units'—were busy with other calls. I had no choice. I had to walk. Five miles to the office."

Rodman propped an elbow on the bar. "It was a shitty day. Cold and gray and sort of drizzling. It was supposed to snow later on, but at the moment it was just miserable.

"I walked past a CDC camp. I'd driven by that camp a hundred times before and never gave it a thought. You know how it is—you're on your way to work or you're leaving, you've got a million things on your mind, the traffic is bumper-to-bumper and the second you take your eye off the road the guy ahead of you hits the brakes. So I'd never gotten a good look at the place until the day I walked past it."

The woman was staring off into space, looking bored. Rodman began not to care. He went on.

"The yard was closed in by two layers of chain-link fence, with razor wire strung across the top. The fence inside was electrified. You could hear the insulators buzzing."

His throat seemed suddenly dry. "There were hundreds of them out in the yard." He drained his glass of melted ice, swishing it around his mouth before swallowing. "They were just standing there. In the rain. I think they were looking at me. I think they were watching me. The way caged lions watch the people walking by at a zoo."

"They wanted you," the woman murmured, still staring across the room.

"One of them fell down," Rodman continued. "The others looked up, across the yard, at a parking garage. I looked too. Somebody was on the roof, somebody with a rifle. I saw him aim; I saw the muzzle flash. Another one went down. I heard a little pop—I don't know if it was the gun or the sound of the bullet hitting the body. But it fell, and then another." Rodman felt his throat constricting. "They didn't scream; they didn't make a sound. They just moved around the side of the building, trying to get out of the line of fire. But they couldn't, and the guy just kept shooting. Nobody tried to stop him."

"Good," the woman said.

"One of them collapsed. It wasn't dead; it was holding its leg and just sort of squirming there on the ground. Some of the others tried to help it, but it couldn't stand. So they laid it back down on the asphalt. And then one of them—it looked like an old man—turned to me. And it stared at me." The room was eerily quiet. Rodman swallowed and the sound seemed gunshot loud. "It stood there in that shitty cold and rain, and it stared at me."

Rodman said nothing for a long time. Water dripped from the faucet at the bar, plinking against the stainless steel sink. A door slammed shut somewhere in the building, muffled and indistinct. All the sounds were muted, as if coming from afar. They barely intruded the silence.

Finally, Rodman said, "I used to hate them. But I'm not so sure anymore. Because what I saw in its face that day was . . . I dunno. Futility. To-hell-with-it futility. And no unthinking, unfeeling monster could understand futility. Some of them out there . . . some of them are people. Different than us, but people. And I can't help but think . . . we're making a big mistake. A terrible mistake." He shook his head. "One day, we'll look back on all this and we'll be ashamed."

The woman sat down her glass with a sharp thonk. A tongue of vodka slid over the rim and splashed the countertop. A change came over her—her nostrils flared, her eyes narrowed to sharp slits, and Rodman thought he was finally seeing her for what she really was. She said, "You're wrong," and there was no disguising the contempt in her voice. "You're wrong and you're stupid. Unbelievably stupid. You start feeling sorry for them and you're a dead man."

Somebody was coming into the room, the bartender, and he was hurrying along in quick, furtive steps, like a schoolboy who'd lingered at the water fountain until after the bell and now was trying to sneak into class without being spotted. The woman glanced at him and reached for her purse. Rodman thought she was reaching for her debit wand to charge another drink and started to reach for his, then changed his mind. The conversation had taken such a depressing turn he thought he might go back to his room.

"You can't trust the bastards," she whispered stealthily, unclasping the purse. "They don't even trust each other. You see them fighting among themselves. Like animals—for God's sake, they're animals."

The bartender slid behind the countertop and cast a worried eye at the cash register. He unlocked it and relief spread across his face.

The woman pulled out a machine pistol—one part of Rodman's mind coolly noted it was a little Nakamichi 15mm carbon-graphite composite; his only other thought was that she would kill him here in the bar, and his heart seemed to become his center of gravity, the rest of his body merely a nerveless appendage to terror. But she turned the gun to the bartender.

"Nice toy," she said, nonchalantly waving the gun. "It set me back six months' wand payments."

She fired at the bartender. He wasn't even looking.