These Lifeless Things Page 4

  V. got a handful of my jacket and yanked me back. There are more, he whispered, and I barely heard him; in fact I did not realize what he said till later.

  But we both saw it. The thing, the monster, had a child in its mouth. Not dead. Alive.

  I pore obssessively over my memory of it, as if I am scrolling back and forth and zooming in on a photo on my phone, getting as close as I can till I can see nothing else. I’m shaking, my fingers are shaking.

  A red coat, dark pants, dark boots, bright blond hair. The hair killed me. Stopped my heart. Just like both I. and N. when they were little, before it began to turn mousy... bright, bright blond, like the hair of a doll.

  And the statue sprang away with a creak, the scream of its victim fading. A photo come to life.

  Somehow I found myself with V. in the arch of a doorway, breathing hard, unspeaking. At my ear, the Byzantine grid of scribbled letters and names on the buzzer pad, my head striking it again and again in my eagerness to bolt. Let go, I said, and tried to wrench my coat free, and he said, You’ll do something stupid.

  Yes. Yes. I will. Let me go.

  We waited far too long, perhaps half an hour, before moving again; the sun sank into full dark. I stared vacantly out at the long violet shadows moving across the buildings. We were in the oldest part of town, the medieval streets higgledy-piggledy, and if I had run after the thing, I would have fallen right off that stone drop and about ten meters into someone’s backyard.

  Have you seen Them eat people, I finally said, in what I was surprised to hear was a very normal tone of voice.

  V. thought. I don’t know, he finally said. I’ve seen the sentinels and the statues kill people with their mouths. But not eat the bodies. And I’ve never gotten a good look at Them. He paused. Then: Do you think They came here to Earth because people are food?

  I don’t know, I said. But if they aren’t eating people, what was that thing doing with that little boy?

  All the possible answers were too horrible to contemplate... and I really mean that, in this city where I have eaten, myself, human flesh, like a dog, like a fox creeping into the home of someone who has died, where I have killed my fellow man, been forced to kill, where I have seen the blood of my husband, where my children are gone from me, I can barely contemplate what the monsters are doing if they are taking children alive.

  There was an evacuation, I said.

  Yes, I remember that, V. said. Trying to get families out. About three months after the Invasion. And everyone died.

  Well, they couldn’t have known that would happen, I said.

  But you didn’t leave, he said. You thought it might happen.

  Yes.

  He paused: What should we do?

  We have to tell the others, I said. Someone will know something.

  He nodded. We’re having another neighbourhood dinner this week. A. is hosting. I don’t know why I have this faith that someone will know, but...

  I’m so angry that They have taken fellowship from us. We eat in secret fortifications because They inevitably find groups and leap in like a wolf in the fold, as if there is nothing They hate more than that we might find comfort and safety with one another. We tire of the same faces again and again, and then any strange face means we panic, not knowing who works for Them. If only there were ways to tell. If only we were a little less tired, a little more awake.

  That boy, that fading cry!

  THE DESCRIPTION OF the Invasion is the same everywhere. As ridiculous as it sounds to us, we cannot write it off as mythology; it’s history. And how strange, that Eva has noticed the usage of ‘Them.’ In every country, in every language, that’s what people defaulted to. Now, with the distance that allows us to be merely uneasy instead of terrified, we call them ‘the Invaders.’ But back then you’d be too scared to think. You’d just say ‘Them’ and everyone would know what you meant.

  I check the museums and galleries, and find the sandbagged statues that Eva and V. protected, the stashed paintings, and I race back to get the others. Panting, exhausted, we unbury them and stare. Light falls like chalkdust from the broken roof. Solemnly, one of the crawlers begins to climb the massed heap of sandbags, its claws digging into the rotten canvas, the only sound in the building. Dust filters down from the opened windows. Winnie nudges the robot down with her foot.

  “Oh my God,” she whispers. “You’ll be famous!”

  “We’ll all be famous,” I correct her, also in a whisper.

  Darian snorts, and erases us with the flat of his hand, and goes outside, into the cleaner air. I’m not surprised.

  But something else bothers me, as we point-mark it and head back. It’s that any of these things should still be intact after the events described in the journal. No one’s touched them in fifty years. No survivors came in here seeking shelter or culture or scavenging for weapons or supplies. Half a century, and no one came back here? No one?

  I don’t like it. I mean, it’s useful for my research (hell, that could be my PhD when I’m done my masters—something something study of returning residents in siege cities, if any) but it goes against everything I know about the post-Setback years from the things I’ve read. People craved fellowship, company, comfort. They coalesced again in their tiny bands of survivors, and they found cities to reoccupy. No one could build anything again those first years; you had to find somewhere with a solar farm or wind farm or hydro plant or something—something where you didn’t have to drag in feedstock on trains or cars that no longer operated—so you could get electricity again. And that meant cities. And for some reason, it never meant the siege cities. Why? Once They were gone, They were gone. It would have been perfectly safe.

  I don’t get it.

  But that’s why we’re here, right? To study. To guess. Even if we can’t know.

  My ears are starting to hum. I’m guessing that’s from the enormous level of sodium in our food, and dehydration, and forcing my noodle-like legs to climb several flights of stairs an hour. Very strange though. And only at night.

  June 25

  Under the pretext of looking for dinner party food we returned to old town, swarming now with sentinels. Our waved pipes and thrown stones did not deter them (I’m a terrible shot anyway), and we fled, ignobly, our empty sacks whispering on our backs, like thwarted gnomes.

  We moved uphill, twenty blocks away, and went through the rich houses that had of course been looted first—broken glass everywhere, and the kitchens empty, not even curtains blowing in the wind. I ran my hands over silk gowns, thick wool jackets. You can’t carry all that, V. said from the other room.

  You can’t even see what I’m doing, I said.

  I can hear you.

  I fled any room with hints of toys or cribs, anything with little clothes or board books, I couldn’t bear it, it was like entering a room full of poison gas. I could barely look for a second before my eyes began to tear up.

  Everywhere we saw the signs of people succumbing to whatever They did to the brain in those first few days—empty nooses, guns, brain splatter, pill bottles. No bodies, for some reason. But the intricate sigils on the wall, drawn in ink or paint or blood, and the pitiful cries for help in ten languages.

  Do you think they all really died? I said.

  V. said, Or lost their minds and tried to join Them.

  How do you join something like that? I said. That’s like an ant trying to join a multinational corporation. Though I suppose that’s what the agents are doing. If they exist.

  I know, he said. But that happens in wars. Doesn’t it? People don’t just... knuckle under the conqueror and nurse their grievances. Not everybody. They fire themselves up, put on their nice suits, sign up for the party or whatever. Not just play along. If they’re genuine, they get, you know. Special favours. They survive.

  Yes, I said, for betraying and killing their own people. I know our history too, you know.

  I know, he said, dejectedly. It’s human nature to betray.

  Th
ey’re up to something, I said.

  They’re not up to anything more than a nest of wasps is up to anything, V. said. They don’t have intent. People just went crazy, that’s all. From the pull, and the noise, and that damn singing, and the nightmares.

  You don’t know that, I said.

  He shrugged; he was wrapping knives in a pillowcase and putting them in his sack. He said, They came here so suddenly. Maybe They’ll just leave as suddenly. Maybe Their intent was to... gather resources or something, like in the alien movies, and They’ll just leave.

  As we pondered this incredibly trite statement I thought idly of how interesting it is that you can hear the capitalization in the name. Well, They are gods, are They not? You get the capital letter whether you earn it or not, if you are a god.

  I want to know: How do we know They are gods?

  But that is a limitation both of the divine and of our language when speaking of the divine. And no one said all the gods were good.

  Anyway.

  With our findings, I think I can feed the (appx.) eleven people left in our immediate neighbourhood; if A. is still hosting he’ll get the word out first thing in the morning. It’s good, it’s like a tiny census, and it’s harder to betray people when you know their face.

  I have a tuna, bean, and olive salad (like a Niçoise?) planned, with flatbread (oh, how I wish we had pasta; but I haven’t seen a single egg in two years), and a kind of tomato sardine soup, with pickle garnish. I even found a little tin of caviar; everyone can have a spoonful. There will also be braised cabbage, we need the vitamins, but that’s not really a treat. Maybe if we had some salo.

  In those first starving days, when we couldn’t get out to scavenge (‘shop,’ V. insists), I dreamed about meals far less elaborate than this; this would have seemed an impossible, fairytale feast. I thought about simple bread-and-butter, and plum jam from Baba’s ruthlessly temperature-controlled pantry, boiled new potatoes, varenyky, all the things we ate when the boys were little and we didn’t have much time to cook.

  And then, after a while, I stopped thinking about food at all, preferring sleep; I could never get my fill, I wanted to sleep forever, but between the screams and the Them and the trees and the bombs, I would go—what was it, that first time?—maybe two weeks without sleep longer than an hour or so, day or night. God! Remember that. Don’t forget that.

  Now, because everyone is dead, and the Army is gone, there is both food and sleep. But there is no escape. We may as well have our fairytale feast.

  If They are taking children alive, what are They feeding them?

  Stop, stop. Someone will know. Someone will have heard something.

  June 27

  Mmm. The long, slow breath of the few dinner guests that did not get out by sunset, and opted to spend the night. They lie like dogs, tangled in a warm heap in the other bedroom. V. has perched himself on top, a contorted lump in a quilt. How easily I could creep in there, and take his hand, and lead him back here. Don’t sleep there, I’d tell him. Sleep here.

  I would die of embarrassment if he ever found this book.

  But it’s nice to have something to... I almost wrote ‘live for.’ But I mean ‘enjoy oneself with,’ don’t I? I’m not staying alive for him, obviously. I am staying alive for me. But it isn’t much fun, this whole staying alive business. You need to have a secret or two in wartime. Even if it is a war of attrition.

  It’s funny. We are a walled city, but the walls are five hundred years old, and crumbling. I fight with V. when he calls it a siege. To have a siege, I insist, you need to have walls. No, he says, you just need to have no way out; and anyway, we do too have walls.

  Some walls. I can climb over them!

  We watched, briefly, too frightened to laugh, as They tried to repair the low, crumbling walls when They first arrived, fumbling with the medieval stones like a drunk man with his keys. They seemed to have trouble making things stick together. I don’t think that’s why they’ve recruited human agents (or slaves or whathaveyou) but at any rate, the walls made no difference in the old days, and they make no difference now. When people are starved into submission, anything is a wall, because we are too weak to climb.

  But he’s right that there’s a siege ring, and that since the Army abandoned us, it has quietly and completely closed. And he’s right that there’s no way out. The guards both day and night are not numerous, but they are fast, and they don’t like people near the river, or the lake, or the train tracks, or the highway or bridges. If they see people moving there, they chase and harry us, or simply gather in their packs and attack, as if teaching us a lesson. One I’ve learned; I stay put, thank you.

  I think of another famous siege, and I remember the Harvest Victory (ha! some name). But we didn’t get that. We didn’t get any warning, not a week, not a day, not even a minute. Just one second there was sky and sunset, and the next there was... Them.

  In the movies, we would have seen Them on radar moving towards us through darkest ocean, through deepest space. Here, it was as if They stepped in from the other room. And everything came to an end.

  Why here? Is there something special about here, our small city with its factories and its fields and its shoddy museums? We’re nothing. We’re a blister on the plain, surrounded by fields. Why do we not see Them in the distance, striding towards the mountains in the east?

  The Army left us, anyway; they escaped the siege before it became a siege, not singing their songs. We who stayed fielded a new one. V. admitted soon after we met that he was a draft-dodger in this small, desperate second army. I’d guessed as much.

  I was ashamed, he said. I thought you’d think less of me.

  I do, I said, but I understand.

  What a cruel thing to say, I thought even then, and I should have apologised or not said it at all, but we could not lie to each other; already we had survived too much.

  Most everybody said yes to the recruiting squads. The few people that said no, my boys told me, were still dragged along to the shoddy training centres, in school auditoriums and the big stadium downtown. And then they went to defend the city. And they never came back.

  So I never asked why. V. knew he would not come back.

  No one knew anything about the missing children, not A., not B., not T1 and T2, who (being old women) usually know everything.

  Alive? said A., fretfully. His eyes in that dark, wrinkled face seemed to recede some infinite distance, thinking perhaps, as we all were, of children we had known. Even I, who barely dare to say the names of my children even in my head.

  At the market, said B. briskly. Someone will know.

  Do you think so? I don’t. But maybe when there’s another one. I keep thinking, There’s something I can do, there must be something. Why is everyone out there sleeping instead of combing the streets with me?

  I ask this rhetorically. But. I’m so helpless and frustrated I’m shaking, I can’t write. Even with my full stomach. I’m shaking.

  I think of the boys, saying goodb

  No. Think of something else. Sleep.

  REPEATEDLY, QUIETLY, IRRITATEDLY, Darian reminds me that I’m doing very different research from the three of them. He hasn’t said out loud that I don’t belong on this trip—I got my funding same as they did, dammit—but he thinks it. And he keeps pointing out that aside from those first few triumphant days, we aren’t finding evidence to really corroborate the things I find in the journal (which he keeps calling a ‘diary’—and I don’t know why it bothers me but it does).

  And he’s forbidden me, not in so many words, to continue asking the others for help.

  He’s right, though. They’ve all got their projects to complete, and we were only given twelve days here. Any time I take away for my own project has to be repaid, but they don’t want what I’ve got to offer; as an anthropologist, they seem to think I’m essentially only useful to take notes, or as an extra pack bot.

  Gloomily I feed Winnie’s rats, scrub dirt out of her crawlers
, sluice the smelly cleaning solvent through Victor’s sampler heads. I feel hotly embarrassed in my silence that I came with no real tools except the document scanner. Look at you, Darian’s silence seems to say, as they carefully perform routine maintenance on their tools at night. We came here to do real science, and you came to read a diary. Like a teenage girl. And maybe write a novel about it.

  In penitence, or maybe just humiliation, I leave the journal alone during the day, and I tag along with the others as an extra body. Mostly Victor and Winnie, of course. The detection rats scamper ahead on their filament leads, their little silvery bodies blending smoothly into all the shattered concrete. “They used to use dogs,” Winnie says as we follow them.

  “Weird. How did they get into small spaces?”

  “Right?”

  Not very subtly, I steer us into the only reasonable spaces that it seems you could have staged a revolution. But even the drones and their LIDAR dongles cannot distinguish between the ordinary rubble and what might have been the mountain V. climbed up on. Wave your flag, I cry into the past. But of course, that’s not scientific.

  I beg the use of Darian’s software to see if I can clean up the data and find a mountain, but after a couple of hours of the processor screeching and grinding, he comes over and grimly shakes his head. I haven’t looked at the cleaned-up data yet. Where was their single, failed stand? Maybe I will never know.

  I join Eva in her horror. Absolutely I am there with her and V. in that doorway, gasping for air. Kidnapping of children was hinted at but not confirmed in the few other primary documents. It was understood, it seemed, that children were both the most valuable thing in wartime and the hardest to keep safe. I wonder how old Eva’s sons were, little I. and N.

  The failure of the evacuation, I could have predicted that too. Diffidently, and couching it strictly in terms of data gathering offsite, I suggest that Winnie go check outside the city along likely routes; she agrees to send out the crawlers, but not her precious rats.