Occupied Earth Page 27

“Three. Four. Wealthy, if their clothing is a sign. Your silk and linen. Vandash.”

  Vandash was a mock fabric. Like if you made pearls into cloth. Incredibly expensive. The only Earth people I’d ever known to wear it were collaborators.

  “What do you want to do?” I said.

  “Quoi?”

  “We can send you back where you came from—I mean, where you were kidnapped from, you know the word? Or we can make those who did it pay.”

  “I understand. You have authority?”

  “I don’t need authority.”

  At some unseen sign, the spokesperson role switched to another of the women. The smallest of the four, barely six-three and probably under two hundred. She said, “The Mahk-Ra or the Earthers will pay?”

  “Both, if you like.”

  It was rare to see a mock smile. They did it the same way we did—it never ceased to amaze how similar our physiology and facial expressions were—but they usually chose not to.

  The smile made her face stunningly beautiful. “Do you know why the Mahk-Re are treated as, what is your expression, second-hand …”

  “Second-class citizens.”

  “That. Do you know why?”

  I’d heard stories, but never from the source. “No.”

  “Nor do we. There are historical reasons, but they are ancient. It is one thing for them to despise us. It is another for them to treat us like animals. Yes, we would like to make them pay.”

  THE PROPERTY was Logan’s. I’d lived in the guest cottage in the back since a couple of years before the mocks arrived. After Logan vanished, I gave him three years before deciding he was gone for good. Then I started renting out rooms. Even under alien Occupation, you needed an income, and, aside from the occasional liberated wad of cash, freelance vigilantism didn’t pay much.

  I’d been modifying the place since. Logan was gone because he’d crossed swords with the wrong collaborator and, I was nearly certain, had to flee the country. It was only a matter of time before I did the same, and I liked it where I was. So I’d fixed up all sorts of hidden weapons and perimeter monitors and warning devices modified from liberated mock technology, and I’d dug the tunnel that started behind the closet and let out in the alley behind a 7-Eleven a block away. All of it built with redundant circuitry, redundant hardware, redundant everything. Because Murphy’s Law had survived the invasion.

  I let the Mahk-Re women clean up, fed them, told them to get some rest. I situated Gar-re on the sofa, the rest—the “short” one was Palkin-re, and I never caught the other two’s names—in sleeping bags. Johnny would get the floor. Or maybe I’d let him sleep in my bed. Nothing’d ever happened between us and nothing ever would, but it had been a long time since I’d had a warm body next to me and, long separation or no, I still trusted him more than just about anyone.

  We sat down in the kitchen nook. I asked him, “How in are you?”

  “Whatever you’re up for.” There was something in his eyes I hadn’t seen since the invasion. “Shit, Annie, I haven’t done anything worth talking about since they came. I mean …” He hooked a thumb in the women’s general direction. “The only reason I found them was I was robbing a warehouse. For Christ’s sake, a fucking warehouse. How shitty is that? But now—yeah, I’m in for whatever you want to do.”

  “Good.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “No fucking idea,” I said. “We’re not dealing with child molesters here. There’s organization and probably pulse rifles.” I thought it over. “I suppose we ought to go back to the warehouse and case the joint.”

  “I know someone that might be able to help.”

  “Who?”

  “A hooker.”

  “I don’t know …”

  “Also a mock.”

  “I know mocks too. I don’t think I’d count on—”

  “You don’t get it.”

  “What don’t I get?”

  “The hooker and the mock,” he said. “They’re the same person.”

  Living under Occupation, you circle your wagons and keep your friends close and don’t venture any farther from home than you have to. You absolutely don’t know who to trust. They say that war brings out the worst in humanity, but Occupation brings out far worse. Self-preservation takes over. Think about Marshall Pétain; a World War I hero who led the Vichy government during World War II on behalf of some of the worst evil our planet has ever devised.

  Yet whenever you think people have reached the depths, outposts of love give you hope. Japanese war brides after World War Two and cute little con lai after Vietnam.

  But interspecies romance topped all that.

  Our Mahk-Ra overseers viewed it with disdain. But it happened, with both Mahk-Ra and Mahk-Re. There were stories of children, though I’d never seen one and my high school biology told me it was out of the question. But who knew? If the invaders so resembled us that we could have, and evidently enjoy, sex with them, were kids that much harder to believe?

  A lot of people considered anyone consorting with an MR of the opposite gender a likely collaborator. But it was hard to suspect my neighbor down the street with the Mahk-Re live-in when they were so obviously in love and when the woman made the best damned chocolate chip cookies you ever had.

  Once the Pandora’s box—pun intended—of interspecies sex was opened, no one was surprised when prostitution came next. It went both ways: Earth women who sold themselves to MRs and mock women who went after Earth men. In the topsy-turvy post-invasion world, many who wouldn’t have been caught dead visiting a human prostitute were just fine frequenting Mahk-Re ones.

  Including, I found out after some red-faced stammering, my old friend Johnny P. Jones.

  Once he got it that I wasn’t going to judge his choice of sexual partner, he proved more than forthcoming.

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “I mean, there are the things you expect, like the whole strangeness of it all. It’s like in the old days, going to a black hooker, or a Chinese one. It’s something different you don’t get in your regular life, but even more.”

  “And the things you don’t expect?”

  His flush returned. “It’s a turn-on how they’re bigger and stronger than you. And their pus—”

  “Enough,” I said. “So do you go up to Old Hollywood and let one wave you down, or do you have someone special?”

  The look on his face … and I got it. My old evil-fighting buddy was in love with an alien hooker.

  He saw I’d figured it out and suddenly became interested in finding something to drink in the fridge.

  I said, “It’s okay. None of us was ready for this world. What’s her name?”

  “Sammie-re. She likes me to call her Sammie.”

  “Is your thing with Sammie the reason you were so eager to rescue our new friends?”

  “Some of it.”

  We talked about the possibility that Sammie could be of help. But I doubted talking to a voluntary mock hooker was likely to tell us anything about those drafted into service. I got the feeling Johnny had only brought Sammie up because, for whatever obscure psychological reason, he wanted me to know about her. So I said we could talk to her later if checking out the warehouse didn’t give us any leads.

  When I told the gals where we were going, they wanted to accompany us and kick some ass. I convinced them it wasn’t ass-kicking time yet. That we wanted to shut the whole thing down and to do that we had to find whoever was in charge.

  I armed myself with a switchblade. The kind that won’t show up in a scan. It had cost me a ton and had proven its worth almost immediately. I slipped it into my jacket pocket, grabbed some other gear and threw it all in a gym bag. Looked everything over. Went back to my stash and ensured redundancy.

  I made sure they knew not to go anywhere, not even the patch of weeds separating the guest cottage from the main house. It wouldn’t do for anyone, even my tenants, to see them. You never knew when someone would turn out to be a collaborator, no matter how
well you’d vetted them. Or turn into one when the opportunity arose.

  I also showed them some of my home improvements. Not big stuff like the control center and tunnel behind the closet. Nor the cache of water purification pills, morphine, and the like. But I pointed out the switch for the metal shutters for the front windows and showed them a couple of guns hidden in innocent-seeming places.

  First thing when we got outside was having Johnny move the panel truck. It wasn’t particularly out of place on my nice little residential street, but like I said, when opportunity arose … people changed. I told him to park it around the block, near the 7-Eleven where the escape tunnel came out.

  I picked him up in Logan’s ’09 Impala, which I’d been tending since Logan had gone AWOL. Automobile maintenance was an unanticipated skill I’d picked up, and the car ran sweetly whenever I could get decent gas. I ignored the scratches in the paint, the four inch crack in the windshield, the missing wheel cover. A car that looked too good attracted attention.

  Johnny directed me back to the warehouse. It was in an industrial block in the foothills above Burbank. Somewhere along the way I said, “Tell me about your heist. I’m a little concerned you didn’t know it was a mock stronghold.”

  The patented Johnny P. Jones sheepish expression. “I guess we did.”

  “You guess?”

  “Okay, we did. But we didn’t see any guards and I told you about the camera and there was supposed to be a shitload of vandash in there.”

  “Back at my place you said you thought it was TVs.”

  “I didn’t want you to know I was dumb enough to hit a mock warehouse on purpose.” He looked out the side window, up toward the OLLYWOO sign.

  “You’re not dumb. You’ve just got lousy judgment. Tell me how you got into the place.”

  “One of the guys was off-world for a while, a tech for the mock army. He knew all about their locks.”

  Johnny described the setup inside the warehouse, and it became clear that anyone working there would have known about the women. Which meant they were all involved … both Earthers and mocks.

  I parked a couple of blocks away. Johnny said, “You still got that gun underneath?”

  Logan had built a tidy setup beneath the driver’s seat. Even if you crawled down and looked, you wouldn’t see anything. But if you reached down and pressed a certain doohickey, a gun magically presented itself. I’d built one under the passenger seat too. Like I said, redundancy. Johnny didn’t know about that one and he didn’t need to. “I do,” I said. “But I’m not taking it. I don’t expect any shooting.”

  We went in on foot. Our route took us along one side of a warehouse. Once we turned the corner the loading dock was twenty yards on. Across the road was a big yard filled with girders and tanks and a lot of other crap that would probably sit there forever. One big tank lying on its side had a big red circle with an RIA on it. Some resistance fighter had climbed over razor wire to put it there.

  There wasn’t much activity. No trucks, no pallets. The big sliding doors were down. Two men stood by an open people-sized door, looking at a clipboard. A woman sat atop a forklift, eating a sandwich. One of the men nodded and both went inside.

  The woman crumpled her sandwich wrapping, tossed it at a trash barrel, fell way short. She hopped down, eyed the wrapper, decided it was close enough. She was thirtyish, with short blond hair and a swimmer’s build. She said, “Help you?”

  “We’re looking for Vince Bolívar,” I said.

  “Don’t know any Vince.”

  “He owes my brother here money.”

  “Sorry to hear that. What makes you think he’d be here?”

  “Gave me the address a while back,” Johnny said.

  “Sounds like you got burned. No Vince here. Fact is, the mocks run the place, so—”

  The door opened and out one came. A big one, seven feet plus. He said something in Mahkanese. The woman replied. A couple more back and forths, then the mock said, “No Vince works here. You are mistaken. Leave.”

  “Are you sure?” I said. “Because—”

  He let us see one of those green pistols of theirs, strapped to a wide purple belt. “I will not say it again.”

  Something I learned from Logan: When your plan runs up against a brick wall, don’t push it. Especially when it was a lousy plan to start with. Anyway, I’d already learned something. “Okay, thanks,” I said, grabbing Johnny by the elbow and hustling us out of there. At the corner we turned and headed back to the car.

  Half a minute later. “Stop.”

  I whirled, hand on the switchblade. It was the blond woman. Seven or eight yards behind. How the hell had she managed to get so close without me noticing?

  She had a Glock pointed at us.

  I said nothing. Watched for something that would confirm my suspicion. Johnny opened his mouth. I subvocalized, “Uh-uh.”

  No tells. Just a smile. She let us look at it for ten or fifteen seconds. Then she said, “Tell me who you are.”

  “You can’t make us,” Johnny said. The bravest idiot you’ll ever know.

  “I think I can,” she said, pointing the gun down and shooting off the tip of his right shoe.

  He looked down. His big toe wiggled in the sunshine. “Christ,” he said.

  “Let’s not fool around anymore,” the woman said. “That could just as easily have been your eye. So just walk and let’s get this over with. Van. Over there,” she said, chin-pointing at an ancient Econoline across the street.

  “Got it,” I said. We marched across the asphalt. “By the way,” I said, “Aren’t you afraid of blowing your cover?”

  “Keep moving.”

  You do what I do enough years, you learn to recognize a cop. The tone of her reaction had told me I was right. Now the only question was whether she was working undercover or whether she was in on it.

  The van’s rear door opened as we approached. Inside was a Mahk-Ra. He too had a gun pointed at us, another one of those green things.

  We climbed in. They made us lie down on the floor. The woman frisked us. There went the switchblade in my pocket.

  The Mahk-Ra climbed into the driver’s seat and we pulled away from the curb. We didn’t go far. Maybe half a mile. Then we made a left and there was the quick bump of a driveway and the light outside went dim. Then a rolling door rumbled down, it smacked into the ground, and we were in darkness.

  The mock got out and turned on a light. The back door opened. The woman told us to exit the van and followed.

  An auto repair shop. A Tesla was up on a lift, a VW Beetle on the ground. A couple of windows high up in the walls were covered with sheets.

  They directed us to a small office off to one side. Two chairs inside. I went left, Johnny right. I expected ropes or electric cords or cable ties, but they seemed satisfied to have us off our feet.

  “Who are you?” the woman said.

  “I was about to ask you the same thing,” I said. “The way I figure it, either you’re a collaborator or we’re on the same side.”

  My turn to get the tip of my shoe blown off.

  “Damn it,” I said. “I’ve had these Vans since before the invasion.”

  “Don’t ever call me a collaborator,” the woman said. A good thing, I judged, because the “ever” implied there was going to be more to our future together than a few questions and a shallow grave. “Now tell us who you are.”

  “Speak, woman.” The first thing the MR had said. “My colleague has little patience.”

  More good news. Contrary to what you saw in crime movies back when, bad guys seldom referred to each other as “colleagues.”

  I saw no point in anything but the truth. Tried to make it as succinct as possible. “Four Mahk-Re women were held in that warehouse and forced into prostitution. My friend here set them free. We came back to try to find out who was behind it.”

  The woman frowned. “I think you’re lying.”

  I considered a reply, decided “No, I’m not�
�� wasn’t going to help.

  “Helen,” said the Mahk-Ra man. “I think it is the truth.”

  Helen said, “You’re an expert judge of Earth people’s character now?”

  “No. But I have been trained to tell when the truth is being told.”

  “And I wasn’t?”

  “Your training is insufficient.”

  “Yeah, well—”

  “Children!” I said. “Don’t fight.”

  “Mocks,” said Helen.

  “Earthers,” said the Mahk-Ra.

  Johnny finally found his voice. “Honey, you’re wrong and he’s right. I rescued them and we’re taking care of them. Look at this face and tell me if you think I’m lying.”

  She did. Shook her head. “Must not be. You look too dumb to fool me.”

  “Agreed,” the mock said. He sheathed his gun and, reluctantly, Helen followed. “I am Kone-ra,” he said.

  “Helen O’Brian. We’re on a joint task force. L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and Mahk-Ra security forces.”

  “Talon?”

  “God, no. They can’t be bothered with little stuff like a few missing women. Especially Mahk-Re. We’re with Vice.”

  Mocks and Earth cops teamed up? Not so long ago, such a thing would have been unthinkable. But my father, who was shacked up with some Romanian woman up in Tacoma, had mentioned he knew a guy whose nephew was in the FBI in Seattle with a mock for a partner.

  “You will take us to the women,” Kone-ra said.

  “We will indeed,” I said. “Can I have my knife back?”

  No answer. I didn’t push it.

  I rode with Helen and Kone-ra in the van. Johnny followed in Logan’s Impala. I said, “How long have you been undercover?”

  “Four months,” Helen said. “But we’ve been watching that place for nearly a year. We know some of the players, but we don’t plan to move until we find who’s at the top.”

  “You knew those women were there, and you let them get pimped out every few days and you let it go on?”

  “What can I tell you? The greater good, some such shit.”

  “You sound jaded for a woman who can’t be more than thirty.”

  “I’m sixty-two.”

  “And I’m the Queen of England.”