Occupied Earth Read online

  Luc landed on his side on the snowy ground, gasping for air. Scarlet dropped down to cradle him, tears welling in her eyes. Luc’s head rolled to his shoulder in time for him to see Rickard approach Augustus. Tomo had the rebel on his knees. Rickard raised his revolver.

  “Thank you for your services, Augustus. They are no longer needed.”

  The darkness swarmed his vision, and Luc’s last thought was that it felt too warm. He slipped away to the sound of a single gunshot.

  THE PAIN started in his chest and spread outward like angry fire ants. It took a minute, but he was eventually able to open his eyes and make out a few shapes. Well, more colored blobs than anything else, but it was better than nothing.

  Luc tried to prop himself up on one arm, but the pain swatted him down. This wasn’t his mattress; that was immediately apparent. The normal lumps had been replaced by comfortable springs and new fabric. He settled back onto a pillow and fought down a wave of nausea. His stomach rolled and bucked.

  “Just too stubborn to die, aren’t you?” Rickard shuffled over, scratching at his beard. He looked relieved.

  “What happened?” He rasped.

  Rickard got a cup of water and a bendy straw. He stuck one end between Luc’s chapped lips and held the glass in place. “You did some stupid things, made some bad choices, and ended up with less than pleasant company.” He set the water aside.

  Luc brought his hand to his head and found an IV line running from his wrist. “You killed Augustus,” he said.

  “He was an arsehole,” Rickard said. “A useful one, but I never should have…Well, we all make mistakes. Now I’ve remedied that one.”

  The room spun faster. Luc gripped the sides of the mattress and held on tight. “I was shot.”

  Rickard smiled at this. He’d been waiting for the big reveal. Reaching behind his back he produced a familiar black disk and held it up to the light. One side was still as smooth and flawless as the day Luc had stolen it. The other side now had a sizable dent just off the center. “One in a million shot, kid. Lucky these things are so damn sturdy. Now, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little upset you kept this. But it saved your life.”

  “Sorry I lied,” Luc said.

  “I lied first,” Rickard said. “I never wanted this life for you. It’s too short, and damn if I haven’t grown fond of you.” Rickard placed a hand on Luc’s good shoulder. “Rest easy, son. Tomorrow, we can share secrets.” He lumbered off toward the living quarter, disappearing into the colorful network of tents and stalls.

  Luc understood there was a grain of truth in what Rickard said. He’d figure out it had been him to tell Scarlet and Augustus who he was and his expertise. That day he picked her pocket was a set-up, a way for them to “recruit” him for the job. Another hand appeared and caressed his cheek. Luc followed the arm up until he saw Scarlet’s bruised but beautiful face. Her lips parted, offering just the hint of a smile. “You’re just full of surprises.”

  “I try.” He grinned, but a surge of pain erased it. “I’m sorry about Lilith and Chen.”

  “They were amazing. I miss them already.” She wiped her eyes. “Thank you for saving me.”

  Luc nodded. “Any time.”

  Scarlet sat down on the edge of the bed. “A great thief and heroic?”

  He placed his hand on her leg and looked into her eyes. “And available.” He flashed his teeth.

  She laughed, covering her mouth. “Luc, I’ve got a resistance to plan. There’s not a lot of time for…anything else. Besides, after last night most of us in the Spear are going to do some serious laying low.” She stood up. “But I hope this isn’t the last I see of you.” Scarlet bent down and kissed Luc’s forehead. She started for the door.

  “You’ll be back,” he called out. “Won’t be able to stay away for long.” Luc watched her disappear around the corner. He snickered and held his hand to his face. There, in between his fingers, was the travel token he’d lifted from her pockets.

  He licked his lips and waited. “Yeah, she’ll be back.”

  I WAS twelve before I got to dress up for Halloween.

  Those of us born under Mahk-Ra rule knew October 31st as Union Day, the commemoration of the invasion and eventual conquest of Earth. We knew it as a day of military parades and speeches. We didn’t really celebrate it; we endured it.

  But our parents had known it as something different and they’d told us stories about a holiday in autumn when they’d put on costumes and gone to neighbors’ houses and collected candy. Dad had even taught my little brother Marcus and I how to draw pumpkins on that day; we didn’t have real pumpkins (the Mahk-Ra didn’t consider them an efficient food source) but we had paper and orange and black pens. Sometimes it was strange to realize just how different the world had been for our parents. How the world had been a place where joy was freely celebrated on special days, not ground out of us by the dull stomping of army boots.

  All the time I was growing up, whenever my parents talked about how things had been before the invasion, their voices got soft, almost whispering. They were afraid, of course, because the Mahk-Ra were always listening, but I think it also made them sad; sometimes you could hear them choke up a little. In that way, they seemed like most of my friends’ parents. Some, like my best friend Teryn, had only a mom; or there was our friend Steve, who was being raised by friends because both of his parents had been taken away. They had plenty of other reasons to be sad, so why dwell on a past they couldn’t have back?

  Even though they still had each other, my mom and dad didn’t seem so different from anyone else. My dad had fought in the war twenty years ago and had lost part of a leg; he still had the same fake foot they’d given him back then, although now it was so scuffed and chipped that it made him walk with an uneven stride. My mom always said that the missing leg had probably been a good thing because the Mahk-Ra didn’t conscript humans who were already injured. And they’d never taken Mom because she was a few years older than Dad and they only took young people.

  I knew they’d probably take me some day. They’d decided early on that I was “special” because I did better on a lot of their tests than other kids did. They pulled me out of my school and put me in a different one where, aside from the usual stuff like math and science and English, we also learned how to speak, act, and fight like the Mahk-Ra. At first I hated being separated from my friends and forced to work harder than them, but after a while I got used to it. We were taught their history and learned about their “great campaign to unify the cosmos.”

  But at night, when they sent us home, we learned other things.

  We lived in a two-room apartment in a big complex, along with a lot of other families. Teryn and her mom lived across the hall from us. All of our apartments were outfitted with monitors that supposedly watched us as much as we watched them, but a lot of them had broken down years ago and had never been fixed. Dad said we had it easier nowadays than the first few years after the conquest, when the Mahk-Ra had locked down everything. “They used to arrest people for just humming old songs,” he said.

  We sometimes thought we were happy in our little rooms. At night, kids played with each other and made fun of their Mahk-Ra teachers while the adults traded memories from the old days. But they did it in those quiet voices while glancing over their shoulders.

  It turned out they were right to do that because not long after I turned twelve, the Mahk-Ra started cracking down again. Teryn and I traded stories we’d heard, about friends of friends suddenly disappearing. We gossiped and chattered because we knew it would never happen to us.

  Except it did.

  Every few weeks, there was a big market held in a different place in our neighborhood. The new location was passed orally; computer networks weren’t safe. People found an empty building or neglected vacant lot somewhere and set up tables where they traded everything from home-grown vegetables to memory sticks full of forbidden music and movies. I’d never been allowed to go (“too dangerous,
” Dad had told me), but sometimes one of my folks found out where it was and went to get something. Mom had heard it was going to happen in an old parking structure one Saturday night in October, and she’d gone down there with some herbs she’d picked in an overgrown field a few miles away. She’d meant to swap them for some meat, but then she found something she thought was even more important than food:

  An old book. The kind printed on paper pages and bound between heavy pieces of board. The kind the Mahk-Ra had destroyed by the millions when they’d taken over.

  We never even knew what book it was, because about the time Mom was handing her canvas sack of leaves over in exchange for the book, Mahk-Ra over-sheriffs came charging through. A lot of people ran. Some screamed and hid. The Mahk-Ra shot three people trying to escape and everybody who was left – including Mom – stopped and put their hands up. The Mahk-Ra rounded up 32 people, led them to a waiting hover-truck, and took them to a detention center to await trial. Which of course was a joke, because a Mahk-Ra “trial” for human conspirators consisted entirely of a computer assigning a sentence.

  For trading in black market items, the sentence was usually five years in a RZ camp. Most people in labor camps died before they completed their sentences.

  We heard about all this third-hand. We knew it must be true only because Mom hadn’t come home. The next day we saw her picture on the news channel.

  It was October 27th. Union Day was four days away. Dad found out from a friend in the FBI that Mom would receive sentencing on November 1st and be moved immediately to the camp three hundred miles away from where we lived in Sacramento. We’d probably never see her again.

  I suddenly hated the Mahk-Ra. Up until then they’d seemed almost like big jokes that we didn’t really take seriously. I knew they’d hurt my dad during the war, but those were surely different Mahk-Ra’s, not like the ones who taught us and read us the news and handed us our weekly rations at the Distribution Center.

  Now I began to fantasize about killing them. I’d steal one of their pulse rifles, gun down the guards around the Detention Center, and get my mom out. Then I’d kill more of them, just to teach them a lesson.

  After that, I’d lead a rebellion to get them off our planet forever.

  Dad was gone a lot during the days after Mom’s arrest. Sometimes he came home with other men we’d never seen before. They’d huddle together over our kitchen table, going over plans they’d gotten of the Detention Center. Apparently it had once served another purpose, as some kind of office building; one of Dad’s new friends had worked there and still remembered the layout pretty well. The men and my father talked all night, about how many guards there’d be and how to get a pass-card for the locked doors and how to get Mom out before more Mahk-Ra arrived. My dad got big black circles under his eyes because he never slept.

  On the 30th – the day before Union Day – all the Mahk-Ra at my school were involved in preparing for the big celebrations. In honor of the day, school would be closed, but we’d be expected to attend the festivities.

  Like hell I would.

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I got up and came out into the main room. Dad was alone, sitting, looking at something. He was crying. That scared me almost more than anything, because I’d never seen either of my folks cry before. I was glad Marcus was asleep, because he was only eight and the sight of Dad crying would’ve freaked him out.

  “Dad...?”

  He looked up, sniffling. “Oh, R.T.” Everybody except the stupid Mahk-Ra called me “R.T.”; only the aliens insisted on using my real name, which was Artemis. I hated that name, and couldn’t believe my parents had given me something so dumb, although I did like the stories I’d heard about the Greek goddess of the hunt.

  Dad said, “Hey, come over here, I want to show you something.” Dad gestured at something on the table. I joined him and saw an old-fashioned photo printed on paper; it showed a boy about Marcus’s age dressed in black with a white face and holding a big round orange thing with a jagged black grin. The boy was kind of baring his teeth, which looked big and fake and pointed.

  Dad had shown us this photo before, and it had always made us laugh, especially when we realized the kid with the crazy teeth was him.

  “That’s you on Halloween, right?”

  Dad sniffled and nodded. “Yep. I was Count Dracula. Back before we had Union Day – before the invasion happened and the Mahk-Ra came – it was the best day of the whole year. You could dress up however you wanted on that day. And neighbors gave you candy.”

  I never knew what to say to that. Candy was a rare delicacy in our world. Today, the Mahk-Ra had given each of us one piece of state-sanctioned sugar candy, wrapped in little papers that read “Celebrate Union Day!” on them. The candy wasn’t very good – it was just crystallized sugar – but we cherished it like it was the most amazing thing ever.

  Dad gazed down fondly at the photo. “We’d eat so much chocolate it’s a wonder we didn’t explode. I really miss chocolate…”

  I tried to imagine a world where you could be whatever you wanted to be – a hero or a monster or a princess - and in return you were rewarded with an unimaginable variety of exotic treats, but it was too far away from anything I knew. “Sounds like fun,” I said, knowing how weak that sounded.

  “It was the best. Sometimes we’d play pranks, run around like little demons throwing eggs at houses or hiding behind bushes and suddenly leaping out to scare our friends. Your mother loved it, too. She told me she once dressed as the Bride of Dracula, so I guess we were meant for each other.”

  That brought reality crashing back down. We were no longer in the world in that photo, but in one where mothers could be arrested just for trying to bring a book home. “What’s going to happen to Mom?”

  Dad sagged. “I don’t know, baby. A group of us are going to try to get her out tomorrow. If we wait any longer, they’ll move her to the labor camp and we won’t have a chance. But what with it being Union Day tomorrow, we’re hoping maybe enough of the Mahk-Ra will be distracted that we’ll have a shot.”

  “Won’t they still be guarding the Detention Center?”

  “Only the outside, and our sources tell us there are only four of them scheduled. If we can just get past them and get in, we know where she is. And if we can get her out, we can alter her identity chip so they won’t be able to I.D. her. But...”

  “But what?”

  “There are only three of us. Even with Union Day happening, it’s going to be pretty slim chances.” Dad cleared his throat and turned to me, very serious. “If anything happens to me tomorrow, I’ve already talked to your Aunt Marcia about taking you and Marcus…”

  I made a face – I didn’t like Aunt Marcia. She was Dad’s sister, but they didn’t look anything alike and I don’t think he especially liked her, either. She worked for the Mahk-Ra as a Community Leader, which basically meant she finked on anybody she didn’t like and the Mahk-Ra paid her for it. She always had a fake smile that creeped me out and I didn’t doubt that she’d turn me in if she thought she could get an extra helping of milk for it. “Dad, we’re not going to live with Aunt Marcia.”

  He said, loudly, “Artemis, listen to me!” I did, because he’d used my full name, and he only did that when it was bad or important. “You’re twelve; your brother is only eight. You can’t live alone. Now Marcia didn’t have to agree to look after you, but she did –”

  I interrupted him. “Dad, did it ever occur to you that maybe Aunt Marcia’s why Mom got arrested?”

  It took him about three entire seconds to say anything. “Why would you think that?”

  “Because a few days ago when she came over for dinner, she mentioned how much she missed fresh eggs and Mom made a comment about the upcoming market in the parking lot.”

  I watched as the pieces clicked together in Dad’s head. “Damn. Damn. Damn.” He got up and walked away, keeping his back to me. I looked down at the table, at the picture of him in that silly outfit, and
I thought about what he’d told me. About Halloween, and kids running around in costumes and playing pranks, and –

  “Dad!” I jumped up as he turned to look at me. “Dad, we can help - Marcus and me. We’ll do just what you did on Halloween – we’ll wear costumes and throw silly things and run around. I’ll bet we can distract those guards at the front of the Detention Center enough for you to get in.”

  Dad smiled, but it was a sad kind of smile. “R.T., I appreciate the creative problem solving, but your mother would never forgive me if I put you in that kind of danger –”

  “We won’t be in any danger! We’ll just run in, scream and jump around, and run off again. We’ll have stuff over our heads so they won’t be able to I.D. us.”

  “Masks.”

  “What?”

  Dad sauntered up. “A disguise for your head is called a ‘mask’.”

  “Right. We could make some masks out of bags or cardboard.”

  Dad was really thinking it over now. “You know, that kind of distractions not a bad idea, though. I’ll bet I could get one of the guys to-”

  I cut him off. “The Mahk-Ra would just shoot an adult who did it – but even they won’t shoot little kids.”

  He didn’t say anything, so I pressed my advantage. “Let us do this. Marcus and I – well, we want Mom home as much as you do. We should be able to help.” When he still didn’t say anything, I added, “And if the Mahk-Ra do catch us, maybe they’ll just send us all to the same labor camp. That’d still be better than living with Aunt Marcia.”

  Dad gave one quiet laugh before gesturing at one of the kitchen chairs. “Okay, I’m not saying I’ll let you do this, but let’s talk.”

  I sat down.

  An hour later he said yes.

  In the morning, I told Marcus all about Halloween. By the time I was done, he was screaming, “I WANT HALLOWEEN!”