Occupied Earth Read online

  “You don’t even know him!” shouted Jemma.

  “I ask you, Doctor,” said Paylon. “Have you even met this MR before today?”

  Dr. Nyne’s fallen face answered her question.

  “I thought not,” said the reverend. “And yet you are willing to gamble the future of our entire civilization on this Mahktard.”

  “I know him,” said Valerie.

  “Are you questioning the judgment of a regional commander?” said Paylon.

  “No,” said Valerie sourly.

  Paylon gripped her crucifix and signaled for two guards to come forward to seize Scud-re. He struggled against the burly militiamen, but he was outmatched. Jemma jumped off the gurney and grabbed the articulated arm of the C-section Bot. She swung it hard, smacking it into the face shield of the nearest guard. He went down and Scud-re pulled free from the other. Scud-re wheeled toward Valerie who turned away to clear their path to the exit. Scud-re and Jemma took off.

  “For the love of God,” said Paylon, “do I have to do everything?”

  She extracted a concealed mini laser torch from the tip of her cross. Jemma smelled burning plastic as she and Scud-re ran out and Paylon wielded her weapon. They ran down a tubular hall. With the extra weight of the baby, Jemma was already losing steam. She could hear MR pursuers, not far behind and getting closer.

  “My body can’t do this,” she said. “You go on without me.”

  “I could never leave you here alone,” said Scud-re. “We’re going to get out of here together. You, me and our baby.”

  Maybe love wasn’t so foreign to him after all. He took her hand and led her into a service tunnel. She prayed they didn’t have far to go. Her legs were feeling weak.

  A stab of sunlight caught Jemma’s attention. She looked up and saw it coming from the grip-notch of a manhole cover. They were under the street.

  “There,” she said, pointing.

  A rusted iron ladder ran up the wall to the manhole. Scud-re scurried up and wedged his shoulder against the heavy steel plate, the tendons in his neck distending from the strain. The cover was starting to lift when a guard rounded the corner and fired a handgun. The bullet went straight through Scud-re’s chest. Jemma screamed.

  Scud-re’s eyes locked on Jemma’s, pain sculpting his face. But his pupils retained their fire. The through-and-through hadn’t killed him. She prayed it wasn’t just a matter of time. Dark green blood was blooming through his shirt at a frightening pace.

  Scud-re held a hand to his wound, as if he needed pressure to curb the pain, and gave another heave. The thick metal plate finally flopped over, revealing the sky through the manhole. Scud-re reached down for Jemma, but a guard grabbed her from behind. The other raised his weapon for a second shot.

  “Run!” shouted Jemma.

  “No,” said Scud-re. He raised his hands in surrender. “Not without you.”

  Paylon strode into the tunnel as Scud-re hopped off the ladder, landing unsteadily. His shirt was completely blood-soaked now, front and back.

  “You didn’t have to shoot him!” Jemma shrieked. “He’s on your side!”

  Paylon smirked. “When are you going to learn to act human? He’s not our kind.” She motioned at a guard: “Lock her up. When she goes into labor, strap her down.”

  Jemma’s fuse lit up, but before she could retort she was seized by a sudden contraction. She felt as if someone was wringing her womb. She had strayed too far; the anesthesia controller was out of range. Her agony doubled her over.

  “Captain!” barked Paylon. “Time her contractions.”

  That’s when Jemma’s water broke. It felt like the forty-day flood was surging from her womb. The service tunnel had become a chaos of babel and bodies in motion. Jemma heard Paylon shouting for the obstetrics team. Then Scud-re was somehow beside her, helping her gently to the ground, wiping her hair out of her eyes.

  Jemma was slammed by another spasm of monumental pain. An orderly came running down the hall pushing a gurney. Dr. Nyne and Valerie followed close behind, along with several nurses and, judging by their dress suits, a few Red Spear rebels.

  Paylon shouted at the guards, “Strap her down! Now!”

  The orderly locked the gurney’s wheels in preparation for loading Jemma.

  In a trough between tidal waves of pain, Jemma became aware of the hungry stares of the people surrounding. They looked like vultures. Every last one of them wanted to take her baby. Fuck. Them.

  The guards moved in and she thrashed out furiously, her violence fueled by her pain. An inhuman shriek came out of her mouth that stunned the guards.

  Suddenly the tunnel was filled with the rapid-fire sound of serial bursts and five guards went down like bowling pins. The others turned, weapons rising, to see a rogue guard, pulse rifle vibrating. His aim was true, every shot hitting its mark in the throat, just below the face shield. Only one guard got off a responding shot and it was wayward. The others died with their weapons cold. Only the unarmed went unharmed.

  Paylon’s hand crept toward her crucifix.

  “I’ll take that!” shouted the guard, and ripped the cross from Paylon’s neck.

  Jemma’s heart did a loop-the-loop at the sound of his voice. “Ozzie?”

  The guard raised his face shield to reveal her son. He’d survived the streets. She looked around at the carnage and appreciated, for the first time, the hand-eye coordination he’d developed from his endless hours of gaming.

  She was still stooped in pain so Ozzie crouched before her.

  “You okay, Mom?” he said.

  His lip was split and his forehead scraped and scabbed. His hair was greasy and knotted, his face streaked with filth. She’d never seen anything so beautiful.

  Paylon glared at Ozzie. “We saved your life,” she said. “You would have been eaten alive out there. We gave you a home.”

  “You lied to me,” said Ozzie. “You said you wanted to save humanity. Then you treated my pregnant mother like shit and tried to kill the one guy who was protecting her.”

  Ungrateful as always, thought Jemma proudly.

  Scud-returned to Jemma. “We need to get out of here.”

  “The MRs will kill you,” said Paylon. “They’ll take the Christ child.”

  “No one’s taking my baby,” said Jemma. “Not them, not you.”

  She rose to her feet and Scud-re helped her painstakingly climb the ladder, the girth of her belly forcing her to ascend sideways. Ozzie came last, his weapon trained on the rebels left standing.

  Scud-re pulled himself onto the street, then helped Jemma crawl from the manhole.

  Ozzie stopped on the last rung and called down: “You try to follow us, I’ll waste you, I swear to God!” Then he, too, scrambled onto the street. As Scud-re pushed the manhole cover back in place it suddenly heated and burned his hand. Someone’s vain attempt to pierce the steel with a bleater.

  “We’re free,” said Ozzie.

  Jemma and Scud-re exchanged a glance that bespoke the unfathomable hurdles they had yet to clear before they were likely to feel any semblance of freedom.

  “At least we’re together,” said Jemma.

  They’d come out in an empty alley, strewn with rat-hole riddled garbage bags spilling rancid food and unidentifiable waste. The stench was overwhelming. Jemma felt like throwing up. They heard the manhole cover rattle as the guards tried to force it open. Scud-re wrestled a hunk of concrete onto the circular plate to weigh it down.

  “Where can we go?” said Jemma. Another contraction hit her like a wrecking ball. The cramping knocked her back into a pile of garbage twice her height.

  Scud-re knelt between her legs and spread them wide. Ozzie watched stupefied as Scud-re ripped the crotch of Jemma’s panties to reveal the dark, wet crown of a large infant’s skull straining against an opening half its diameter. Scud-re tried to push his little finger between the vaginal opening and the baby’s head but Jemma’s flesh was as taut as a snare drum.

  She fought to st
ay conscious through the pain. Her nervous system was in overload, her eyes almost popped out of their sockets and her voice was stuck on auto-scream.

  “She needs an episiotomy,” Scud-re said in a panicked voice. “Give me that cross!”

  “What?”

  “Lasers cauterize as they cut.”

  Ozzie looked confused.

  “Just do it!” cried Scud-re.

  Ozzie handed over his weapon.

  Jemma couldn’t understand what was happening. Or why the hell it was happening now. The baby wasn’t due for weeks. Why did she feel like the wrath of God was inside her, trying to pry its way out with a crowbar? And in that unbearable moment, she saw the light: the Son of God was coming early to defend his mother.

  Scud-re pulled the laser from the cross and laid the barrel against the skullcap to aim the beam at Jemma’s perineum without hitting the infant. And then, even though the fetus was still bottlenecked, something caused him to change his mind. He tossed the weapon and dropped his hands beneath the baby. A moment later the Holy infant slid out of Jemma like a bobsled on ice.

  “That was one hell of a Second Coming,” said Scud-re.

  Jemma barely noticed the release of pressure and pain, she was so stunned by the event. Ozzie’s childbirth had been natural but it had torn her vagina to shreds. This baby was noticeably bigger than Ozzie had been, yet this birth had left her unscathed, immaculate. The second time around was supposed to be easier, but this seemed too easy. Could it possibly be a miracle?

  They all stared at the baby. Waiting for a sign.

  “He’s not breathing,” said Ozzie.

  Scud-re lifted the infant aloft and gave it a swat. They all listened intently, as if expecting a Heavenly choir.

  Instead, the Son of God began to wail.

  ELIJAH-RA WAS the head of security for the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. The Senate and House still held meetings there regarding domestic affairs only, although any Act of Congress had to be authorized by the Mahk-Ra’s Seattle command center in order to carry any weight. International affairs didn’t really exist. Resolution of any such conflicts had been usurped by the overlords. It behooved the nations that remained to play nicely. Mahk-Ra intervention was invariably ugly, at best.

  Elijah-ra’s given name was Sorhi-ra. He had been in the second contingent sent to Earth, after the invasion was over and the decisive victory for the outer space warriors had been secured. He had learned most of the languages spoken by mankind before setting foot on the planet. His formal training had been in classrooms with live tutors and furthered at home with electronic media. For idiomatic proficiency, he watched copious amounts of television programs, easily obtained from the intelligence unit’s library. From these, he learned that he preferred English and French and so he requested, and was happy to be assigned to, the once United States. Eastern Canada may have been a little better for practicing his spoken language skills since he could have used both languages there but he was a fan of the television programs Friends and The West Wing, and so had looked forward to seeing what was left of either New York City or Washington, D.C.

  He began calling himself Elijah after reading the Old Testament, a storybook he knew humans called the Bible, which he had found in his Washington hotel room, before he had found permanent housing. He had used the Mahk-Ra search engine to learn more about the prophet Elijah. He read about the Jewish tradition of leaving a cup of wine for Elijah on the Passover table, as well as opening the door to let him in, should he wish to slake his thirst. He learned that sometimes there was agreement that the wine level in the cup had diminished and that Elijah must have invisibly sipped from the cup; children were especially susceptible to this belief.

  Elijah-ra loved the idea of a dinner guest who was invisible to the other diners. Although he was seven feet tall, he did sometimes imagine himself as a bit of a stealth peace-keeper, casting a benevolent eye over the motley assortment of humankind assigned to his care, just as Elijah kept an eye over those at the Passover table. The creatures should be grateful that a race as superior as the Mahk-Ra had been thoughtful enough to take over their planet, Elijah-ra believed. It had brought order to a disorderly planet and had stopped the squabbling between nations and saved many more lives than it had cost.

  There were no rules against changing one’s name. The powers that be liked it, if they didn’t overtly encourage it. They thought it made their representatives appear to the vanquished Earth citizens to be a little more like them, with names they could pronounce. It made them appear to be just that little bit less foreign.

  Despite his chosen name, Elijah was not a prophet like his Biblical inspiration, but a soldier in this Mahk-Ra’s army. He was happy in his work. Each day had just enough routine to make him secure in his abilities and just enough variety to keep him on his toes. He even had developed a cadre of friends from his co-workers, both Mahk-Ra, Mahk-Re and humankind. There were all sorts from each species who were thrilled to work on Capitol Hill. Nor was it that unusual any more to see the species mingling. Mixed marriages were few and far between but even that had become less stigmatized. Mahk-Ra highers-up scrutinized the pairings to make sure there wasn’t some sort of ill intent in the cross-fraternization. Humans tended to similarly study each couple to try to ascertain whether the human half was in danger of forgetting that he or she was part of the conquered, not the conquering race.

  Elijah was not part of a mixed-race couple; his wife, Alina-ra was also Mahk-Ra and she too was stationed in Washington, D.C. Her job was far less exciting than his, he thought. Alina was a curator at the New Alexandria Library. This was the name the Mahk-Ra had bestowed upon what was formerly known as The Library of Congress. The Mahk-Ra archives had recorded the loss of the original Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt, a library which had been a repository of many books and the destruction of which was considered a great loss to the documentation of culture. The re-naming of the modern dominant nation’s repository of all works, great and small, was a sly nod to mankind’s early efforts at recording the achievements of its civilization. The proximity of Alexandria, Virginia to the Library of Congress and a sense of humor in the Mahk-Ra Regional Commander in the District of Columbia combined to suggest the new appellation. Alina was a curator, not a librarian, because no one other than a Mahk-Ra was allowed to view or read those books.

  At night their routine was familiar to married couples the universe over. They would exchange stories of how their day had been, whether anything of special interest had happened. They might talk about whom they saw at lunch or who didn’t show up at work and whether it was due to an appointment, an illness or discipline by the Commander’s office. They had a comfortable apartment near Dupont Circle, convenient to work and convenient for their days off, too. They could cross into Maryland or Virginia in no time, to go hiking or shopping at a department store. Occasionally there were outings to the Pentagon, which was less of a pentagon and more of a triangle since the war. L’Enfant had been a clever architect and engineer, instrumental in the layout of the city of Washington, D.C. centuries ago, but his use of traffic circles was more efficient in fooling armies on foot than armies in the air and so not a deterrent to the Mahk-Ra, which had easily attacked the military’s headquarters from the airspace above it. There were plans to rebuild in order to provide offices for authorized personnel and to house documents especially germane to sites below the Mason-Dixon line. Some of the Mahk-Ra had even acquired a slight southern accent.

  Each workday morning, Elijah and Alina would walk, hand-in-hand, to the Metro stop. They would ride together and alight at the Capital South exit. After seeing Alina to her desk, Elijah would finish his commute by walking through the underground tunnels that linked the buildings. It pleased him that both the Metro and these subterranean passages had been repairable after the Battle of the District of Columbia ended.

  All in all, this was just about as great a gig as he had hoped for.

  CHRISTMAS WAS no longer a
government-sanctioned holiday but most organizations, whether private or public, were closed. That included Alina’s work, but security never sleeps. Elijah reported to work Christmas night to supervise the evening detail.

  The entire city was blanketed with snow and, seemingly, with calm. It was pretty nice of the Mahk-Ra, all of the Mahk-Ra thought not to be hard-nosed about snuffing out the celebrations of any religion. While they completely agreed with the human political philosopher Karl Marx that religion is the opiate of the masses, they disagreed with him as to whether the effect of that opium is for good or for ill. The Regional Commander thought that things were much better when humankind believed some supreme being was looking out for them and would restore a world in which they ruled the Earth once more.

  “There is no news to report,” Junior Adams, the young day shift guard said to Elijah and his relief, Gene Nohm, a 35-year-old mid-career man. Junior was six feet tall, 23 years old, sandy haired and, by now, sleepy-eyed, having been on duty since 6 a.m. He stood to leave, exiting the chair at the security station by the Capitol’s front doors. Elijah and Gene wished Junior a good evening and a happy holiday and then Gene settled in at his post, expertly examining the video monitors in front of him. Gene, also tall at 6 feet, two inches, dark haired and dark eyed, was human; an American native, as was Junior.

  It was wise to give indigenous people a sense of control over their own affairs, Elijah reflected. That included having a human/Ra/Re mix in police and security forces. The key was to vet each applicant thoroughly and to repeat the vetting process at least annually. Troublemakers would occasionally manage to beat the system, but not often.

  Elijah walked to his office nearby, produced a thermos from his satchel and placed it on the desk, alongside the container with his dinner he’d packed at home to relieve the boredom of being in what was usually a bustling hall. He was already a little hungry. Christmas lunch had been hours earlier and a walk with Alina around their quiet neighborhood had burned at least a few calories. He was constantly watching his weight. It was important to stay trim and healthy in this line of work and so his appetizer was a mix of raw carrots and celery sticks. He didn’t feel sorry for himself. He enjoyed this sort of plain and nutritious food. He found Earth-farmed food appealing; he preferred it to the staples of his old diet back on Ra-Prime.