19

Lila Easterlin

May 27, 2030. Atlanta, Georgia

Cheena held the clunky box with its fat antenna up to her ear and said, “Talk to me, Hoochie. Anything new happening?”

The reply came after an absurdly long delay. “All quiet on the eastern front,” a woman’s voice squawked, causing Lila to flinch.

“Music to my ears,” Cheena replied. “Death to fish.”

Hoochie responded with a “Death to fish” of her own. Evidently it was their sign-off.

They were perched on a catwalk far above the floor of a defunct factory. Huge tanks lined the floor and walls, some hourglass-shaped, others spherical, a few tubular.

A voice burst from the walkie-talkie, paging Cheena. Cheena retrieved it. “Walk, tell me what you’ve got.”

“I’ve got defenders,” Walk said. “Two platoons were released from the Cheshire Bridge production facility an hour ago. Reliable source.”

Cheena raised her fist in the air. She was eighteen. Her long legs and confident style made Lila feel twelve. “What do they look like? Tell me, tell me.”

“Huge,” Walk reported. “I mean, huge. And angry, like trembling with rage. It’s not a good day to be a fish.”

The three of them burst into cheers. Lila hugged Alfe fiercely, then Cheena. Finally, something to give them hope. More than hope, if the reports from Chile were true.

Cheena set the walkie-talkie down on its end. “I’d say this calls for a celebration.” She stuck a finger in her jacket pocket, fished around until she came out with a little white ball of Lace. Setting it on the catwalk, she squeezed it until it popped, shooting a cloud of particles into the air. She and Alfe craned their necks, inhaled deeply. Lila followed suit.

Lace was a memory enhancer. You were supposed to think back to a time in your life and the drug would draw out those memories, making them super-vivid. It was also supposed to make you feel light enough to reach the clouds. Maybe Lila wasn’t inhaling enough of it. She took another big breath, thought back to when she was ten. If she was going to relive a time in her life, she wanted to relive ten.

At first it only felt like she was reminiscing about the good times, which she often did.

At Tybee Island Beach with her friend Margot and their dads. Eating oysters. Her dad singing oldies after he’d had a few beers. She and Margot making faces, singing modern hits to drown him out, only to have him sing louder.

Lila, stealing Dad’s access code and reprogramming his phone to take on the voice of a porn actress from an interactive she found in his cloud. Then Dad, after toning down the language, leaving the voice intact for a week, so Lila had to endure lurid, “Ooh, you like that, don’t you?” comments from his phone.

The memories grew warmer, more vivid, washing over her in waves.

Loblolly School. Seeing it again filled her with a glowing warmth, a profound comfort. She and Margot created Loblolly using a virtual-world-building kit, filled with characters their own age. It took them all summer, but it was worth it. Every day after school they’d meet in Loblolly and hang out with kids far more interesting than their actual classmates.

“Lila?”

The voice was far away. Lila probably wouldn’t have noticed if the voice hadn’t called her name, if it hadn’t been so familiar, and so frantic.

“Lila.”

She tried to open her eyes, but she just couldn’t leave the place where she was. It was so perfectly where she wanted to be.

“Lila. Jesus Christ almighty, what the fuck are you doing?”

She was eating a big, gooey block of frozen strawberry taffy at her tenth birthday party. Annabelle Toynbee was laughing and poking her in the ribs.

She gasped, jolted back into the present by something. She wasn’t sure what. The side of her face felt warm, almost hot. Her father was leaning over her, his shirt soaked with sweat in the V of the neck, and where his belly bulged against it. His eyes were wild.

He raised his palm, smacked her hard across the face.

Lila shrieked in surprise and rage, jerked herself up, her head still light, wanting to go back to the party.

“Wake up,” Dad said. “Alfe, Cheena, you too. Jesus, what did you take?”

Dad smacked her again. Screeching, Lila swung, trying to hit him back, but missed. He grabbed her hand, yanked it.

“I’m awake. Stop hitting me.” She took a huffing breath, trying to clear her head. He’d never hit her before, not on her worst day.

“Do you understand the situation we’re in?” Dad asked. “I mean, do you fully grasp what’s happening? Because you act like you don’t.”

Cheena sat up, looked groggily from Lila to her father. Alfe was blinking heavy eyelids, clearly still out of it.

“Yes, Dad, I fully grasp the situation,” Lila said. “We’re going to die. That’s the situation. I’m not sure what good it does me, but I grasp the situation.”

Dad stood, wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “Come on, get up.” Then in a louder voice, “They’re coming, for God’s sake.”

She, Cheena, and Alfe struggled to their feet. Lila was fully in the present, her pulse racing, hallucinogenically vivid visions of Luyten crawling in the back of her mind.

“They’re coming now?” Cheena asked. “We just checked in at all the outlying areas with the walkie-talkie.”

“They’re coming now!” her father shouted. “Through the sewers.”

Her father must have gotten hold of some insane rumor. The sewers? How could they fit in sewers?

“Dad, are you sure?”

“I saw one,” he said, his voice low, trembling. “Is that sure enough for you?” He grabbed her upper arm and pulled her toward the door. “Move.” He was almost crying.

They burst through the entrance, into sunlight. “Fast as you can run, Lila.”

She ran, already breathless from fear, fed by adrenaline. She felt her father, Alfe, and Cheena right behind her. The air was filled with the sounds of battle: booming explosions that vibrated underfoot, the rattle of gunfire, and, worst of all, the sizzle of lightning.

An image burst into Lila’s memory unbidden, of a Luyten coming out of the trees, cooking people along I-16 with its heater gun.

The front door of Aunt Ina’s house opened when Lila drew close, then closed as soon as everyone was inside. Aunt Ina, Uncle Walter, and a few others stood at windows pointing guns, waiting, watching.

Battle sounds were growing louder.

“The defenders are coming,” Cheena said. “We heard it on the walkie.”

Aunt Ina nodded from the window. “We heard the same on the TV. They’d better get here soon.”

A dozen soldiers came around the corner of Cherry Street, covered in body armor, turning in one direction, then another. They were carrying serious weapons. Lila didn’t know how to tell one sort of weapon from another, but she’d seen enough news footage to recognize the serious ones.

When they drew close, Lila’s dad and aunt Ina ran out to speak to them. Lila couldn’t hear what they said, but she heard the soldier who answered in a near shout.

“Get everyone to Brandon Elementary. We’re setting up a defense there, and that’s the only facility we’re defending in the area. Most of our resources are devoted to defending the production facility.”

“What about the defenders? Are they coming to help?” Lila shouted from the window.

The soldier, who must have been sixty at least, held up his free hand, gesturing that he had no clue. “We have zero communication with the defenders. Zero collaboration. We just have to hope they know what they’re doing.”

Just then, the emergency siren began to blow, startling the hell out of Lila. Just a little late to be of much help.

The soldiers continued on their patrol as Lila and the others headed toward the school.

They squeezed through a back door into one of the classrooms, where a hundred others were huddled, the smell of terror-sweat rife in the air. No one was speaking, save for the occasional murmur of assurance from parent to child, scattered whimpering from scared children. Lila and her people found a space near the windows, which looked out onto the playground behind the school.

Outside, soldiers squatted behind a mix of sleek new fighting vehicles and antique tanks that were spread in a semicircle to create a perimeter. Beyond them lay a ball field, then trees on all three sides.

Lila’s father handed her a canister of water. She took it, grateful, dehydrated from running.

Dad studied her eyes one at a time. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said, not sure if he was asking if she was scared, or still stoned from the Lace.

An old man near the window shushed loudly. He was peering out, his mouth hanging open, jaw trembling. The voices outside had taken on shrill, urgent tones.

Lightning surged from between the trees—three, then four bolts. Two soldiers were thrown into the air by the force of the blast. Others, farther from the impact points, vibrated violently before collapsing to the grass.

Three Luyten surged out of the trees from the opposite direction, barreling over swings and slides, their free arms pointed forward. There was a blinding flash, the screams of burning soldiers, who’d been facing the other way, toward the lightning blasts.

Lila squeezed her eyes shut as a half dozen more Luyten broke from the woods.

“Where are the defenders?” someone asked as they huddled on the floor.

Lila tried to think of something else. Anything else. Loblolly School, where she and Margot had gone to escape in that long-ago summer. Lila would keep her eyes closed and think only of Loblolly until it was over. Until she was dead. She whimpered, squeezed her eyes shut more tightly.

Someone in the room with Lila began praying. Her voice grew louder, more tremulous, as the sound of lightning bursts outside grew louder.

“Oh, no. No,” someone moaned.

“We have to help them.” It was her father’s voice. “Anyone who can fight, we have to go now.”

Lila’s eyes flew open. Her father and half a dozen others were headed toward the back door, toward the smoke and the bodies and the starfish, so close now.

Then her father was outside, running, because the soldiers were dead and the Luyten were coming. He raced for the makeshift bunker where the dead soldiers’ weapons lay amid their toasted bodies.

She saw a tall, balding man in a suit swing a fire ax at a charging Luyten. It cut him in two at the chest with a whip of its cilia.

Over soon. Think of Loblolly School. All over soon. Lila felt a warm wash of pee run down her thighs. She clapped her hands over her ears. One of them was speaking to her. She’d never felt something so awful, had never heard an accent so foreign, so evil and wrong.

Aunt Ina covered Lila’s eyes, her trembling fingers not doing a thorough enough job, because Lila saw between the slats of her fingers, saw her father raise one of the big rifles as a Luyten galloped at him.

It gripped the arm holding the rifle and pulled it off.

Lila howled as her father spun out of the bunker. He landed at the foot of a toppled slide.

“Daddy!” Lila screamed.

She pressed her face to the window, suddenly unable to see her father because something was blocking her view. It was a pillar, bone white at the bottom, black above, that hadn’t been there a second before. Just as quickly, it was gone.

The center of one of the Luyten blew out, leaving a trail of black meat behind as it toppled to the pavement.

Everyone was cheering. It was deafening. For a moment Lila was confused, because her father was dead and everyone was cheering. Then she saw them, impossibly tall on three knobby white legs. A defender leaped from the roof of the school above her, landed right behind one of the Luyten, and slashed it with the razor-sharp knife edges that ran down its arms and legs.

One of the defenders threw up its hands as a Luyten turned a heater on it. It took a heartbeat longer for it to die than it took a human soldier, but as it crumpled, black and smoking, to the ground, the Luyten wielding the heater was blasted by a weapon that was built right into a defender’s forearm. The Luyten burst into half a dozen pieces.

Three surviving Luyten fled into the trees, a handful of defenders in pursuit.

The room went wild. Everyone was leaping in the air, kissing, hugging, laughing, crying, shouting. This was something they’d never seen before: Luyten being beaten. Being slaughtered by these giant warriors, these fearless, powerful creatures who were on their side.

Lila understood the rush of joy and hope they felt, the relief after being so close to death, but she didn’t feel it herself. She ran outside, ignoring Aunt Ina’s calls that she come back.

She stopped a dozen feet from her dad, who was lying awkwardly, one leg bent under him, the other splayed up high, close to his face. The bloody hole, the bone jutting where his arm used to be, made her turn away, hand over her mouth. How could he be dead? How could he die now, just when there was hope? Lila wanted him to see what had happened to the Luyten.

It struck her that on the last day she’d ever see her father, she’d disappointed him. She’d gone off and gotten high, and he’d been forced to slap her out of her stupor. When she finally opened her eyes, he’d looked so disappointed in her.

Lila wanted to go to him now, stroke his hair, tell him goodbye, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, not with him like he was. Where was his arm, she wondered?