Nancy Kress (9 page)

The night of Saturday, August 24, Keith felt restless. He had stayed too long at Andrews. Only a handful of parents were left, mostly mothers with an earning husband and no other children at home. He knew they looked at him askance: Didn’t he have a job? The parents that had left visited often. Most of them seemed to have decided that their children were away at the equivalent of boarding school, a feat of self-protective mental gymnastics Keith could not begin to copy.

The night was sultry, but it felt almost cool after the scorching heat of the day. Keith walked past Malcolm Grow, along Perimeter Road. Groups of soldiers headed toward the enlisted men’s club, laughing and talking. At the Officer’s Club there was some sort of formal event; cars went by carrying women in evening gowns and men in dress uniform or black tie.

He had reached the West Gate when an explosion shattered the sky.

For a moment he couldn’t see or hear. Then his vision cleared and he saw the smoke rising from beyond the Headquarters building. Possibly from the Youth Center.

He bolted in that direction, trying frantically to remember where Lillie had said she was going that night with Theresa. A dance? Or to the movies, on the other side of the base? Did she — oh, God, please —stay at the dorm?

Two smaller explosions sent debris flying into the air.

Keith dropped to the ground and covered his head. Nothing hit him. He stumbled upward and ran again, yelling senselessly. “Lillie! Lillie!”

The Youth Center was in flames. Keith heard the fire engines along with the base alert signal. People were running, hollering …an ambulance shrieked to a halt and EMTs leapt out and ran toward the building.

Like so much in Maryland, it was built of red brick. A hole had been blasted in one side but the walls still stood. Flames shot out the window and off the roof. It didn’t look as if anyone could be alive inside, but firemen in full fire-fighting suits moved into the building. Keith raced around back. There was less damage here and he saw bodies on the ground, blackened, a few moving.

“Lillie! Lillie!”

“Don’t touch her, you moron!” an EMT cried. He shoved Keith out of the way. Keith looked more closely; the charred girl wasn’t Lillie.

Sense took over. He ran up to a group of civilians. “Do any of you have a phone? My niece … please …”

A man stared at him hard, stony:
One of them.
But a woman immediately dug into her purse and pulled out a handheld. Keith punched in the number of the dorm. His hand shook.

All the frequencies were busy. Others had thought more quickly than he.

He keyed in Theresa’s handheld, and someone answered. “Lillie?
Lillie?”

“No, it’s Tess,” said Theresa’s scared young voice. “Lillie’s not here. She went out to buy Coke and—”

“Went where? When?”

“The superette. About five minutes ago. Mr. Anderson, what happened?”

“The Youth Center blew up. Listen, Tess, stay where you are. No, wait—are you in the dorm?” They might hit that, too.

“Yes! I am!”

“Then go quietly out the back and down the path to the inter-faith chapel, you know where it is. If you see Lillie, take her with you, okay? Do you understand?”

“Y-yes.”

He raced toward the superette, still carrying the handheld. The woman cried, “Hey!” and he tossed it on the ground. The superette was a mile away and he was out of shape. Panting, wheezing, he reached it and raced down its aisles. The base alert was still wailing and the store was pandemonium. He couldn’t find Lillie.

Why the hell hadn’t he kept the handheld?

He stopped to gasp for breath, and a young woman in a waitress uniform walked up to him. “Are you all right? Are you having a heart attack?”

“Handheld … please …”

She had one. He was barely able to key in Theresa’s number. It was answered immediately. “Hello?” Lillie. She was there. “Lillie …”

“Uncle Keith? Where are you? What should I do?” Scared, but calmer than Tess.

“Stay … in chapel …”

“We’re here. Reverend Duncan is here with us. Are you all right?”

“Yes…” He couldn’t say more. The waitress took the handheld from him. “Lillie? I’m with your father. He’s just out of breath, I think.”

“Who are you?”

“I just happened to be in the superette and loaned him my handheld. What happened?”

“He said the Youth Center blew up!”

“Oh, my God.”

Keith didn’t remember getting to the chapel. The waitress must have walked him there, through the mobilizing soldiers and running civilians. Then she vanished into the night.

He clutched Lillie, who patted his back as if he were the one needing comfort, as if he were the one in danger. Later, that would seem to him the strangest thing of all.

———

FBI. Military intelligence. Federal Emergency Management Agency. The State Department. Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms. Protesters. Counter-protesters. Editorials. There appeared to be no one in America not involved in the terrorist attack on the pribir children at supposedly secure Andrews Air Force Base.

The president went on television. “My fellow Americans, an event occurred today which cannot be tolerated in a free democracy. An attack on one of our own military bases, an attack aimed at children. Everything possible is being done to bring the perpetrators to a quick and relentless justice …”

It was very quick. The “terrorists” were caught within two hours. They were airmen at Andrews, three young soldiers who believed the pribir were going to destroy America and that her leaders were doing nothing about it. One of them turned out to be a white supremacist, one a generalized hater, one a follower with an IQ of eighty. They had learned to make their easily traced explosives from the Net.

The Youth Center had hosted a dance that night for Andrews dependent children ages fifteen through eighteen, which the attackers had not known. Fifteen “pribir children” were attending a separate bowling tournament in the basement. Nine eighth graders were playing a supervised chess tournament. Eleven boys were playing pick-up basketball in the gym. Three base dependents and one pribir child, Terry Fonseca, survived.

Lillie, pale and red-eyed, insisted on going to the funeral for those whose parents wanted them buried in Arlington. Theresa couldn’t face it. It didn’t matter; neither of them was permitted to attend. The forty-five remaining pribir children were immediately airlifted to the Marine Corps Base at Quantico and installed in a heavily guarded secure dormitory that looked to Keith like a prison. When Terry Fonseca got out of the hospital, he would go there, too.

The parents who rushed to their kids from all over the Northeast went through checkpoints more stringent than those surrounding the president.

The Justice Department and the Air Force Advocate General jointly announced they would seek Maryland’s newly reinstated death penalty for the three airmen.

The pribir, inexplicably, were silent. Of course, they might not have even known about the attack and the deaths. Communication, as far as humans knew, was one-way. The pribir dispensed molecules full of genetic information, the children gave it to the scientists, and nothing went the other way.

Keith didn’t believe it.

Lillie sat on her bed at Quantico, fresh from another session with her grief counselor. No barracklike dorms here; each child had a separate room. Some kind adult had tried to make them inviting. Lillie’s bed was covered with a red blanket, and a vase of flowers sat on the bureau.

“Uncle Keith, I have to say something.”

“What, honey?”

“I want to go up to the pribir ship. I’ll be safe there.” He looked at her hopelessly.

“I told Major Fenton. I told everybody. We’re going. Not all of us, some people want to stay here.”

“The government won’t let you go. Now more than ever.”

“We’re going. But I need to tell you something first. This is necessary sometime, even if it isn’t the right way. Genes are the right way.”

“What’s necessary sometimes? What are you talking about?”

She got off her bed, walked to his chair, and awkwardly kissed the top of his head. It had been nearly a year since Lillie had permitted physical contact; he held her gratefully.

“I love you, Uncle Keith.”

“I love you, too.”

She moved away from him and pulled something from under her top. A cheap locket on a long chain. Flipping it open, he saw that the two portrait hollows held tiny pictures of him and Barbara, both portraits at least fifteen years old. Barbara smiled radiantly. Keith looked solemn and impressive, still with all his hair. He couldn’t remember ever looking that young.

Lillie closed the locket and put it back under her top. All she said was, “They keep the air conditioning too high here, don’t you think? Everybody opens the windows at night to let heat
in.”

He nodded, and the moment was over.

When he woke in his room at the Quantico visitors’ center the next morning, he was surprised to see how bright out it was. Nine o’clock—he never slept that late! Standing, he was surprised to find himself staggering a little. Quickly he dressed to meet Lillie for breakfast.

She was gone. Twenty of them were gone. Overnight, they had vanished from the middle of Quantico while surrounded by marines, FBI agents, and military police. “They made you fall asleep, and us, too,” the remaining twenty-five children explained, over and over. “Everybody around here. With the smell we breathed in. Then the pribir sent another smell to wake us kids up, and they took the ones who wanted to go. It was the right way.”

It wasn’t possible, screamed everything from White House staff to barstool commentators. No trace of sedative was found in the bloodstream of anyone at Quantico. No ship or shuttle or
anything
irregular had been detected coming in from space, or launching up from Earth. Not by any facility anywhere in the world. Something else must have happened, with or without the complicity of the government. Those children had been taken somewhere by ground, and had been … what?

Deprogrammed.

Murdered.

Secured somewhere really safe.

Sent on one of our shuttles to the still uncompleted International Space Station. Cloned.

Brought to NORAD, under Cheyenne Mountain, where they wouldn’t be able to “smell” anything.

Genetically “restored.”

Experimented on.

“They made you fall asleep, and us, too,” the remaining twenty-five children went on repeating. “But it’s okay now. The kids are all with the pribir now. They’re fine. From now on, they’ll just do the right way.”

Keith believed the children. On the evidence, or because he wished to? No way to know.

He wasn’t permitted to leave Quantico; from the intensity of questioning going on, it seemed as if no one might ever leave Quantico again. But he was at least allowed outside. That night he stood in the shadow of the dining hall and gazed upward.

The sky, clear, glittered with thousands of stars, although the lights of Quantico dimmed them slightly. The moon was at the quarter. He didn’t know enough to tell if it was first quarter or last.

How did you do it? How did anyone do it? Fathers had once sent twelve-year-old sons as midshipmen on three-year sea voyages. Princesses had been sent at fourteen, or twelve, or ten, across oceans to marry distant princes, their parents knowing they would never see their daughters again. Countless mothers had sent young sons to war. In 1914 half the youth of Europe had been sent to die in trenches full of mud. Kids Lillie’s age had made up the shameful, futile Children’s Crusade. As recently as a century and a half ago, Irish and German and Italian children had emigrated, alone, to America’s lush promise. All voluntarily sent away from their homes.

How did any of the parents do it? Lillie wasn’t even his child, and yet he felt as if some necessary organ had been ripped from his body. Lung, liver, bowels.

Heart.

“
We’re
going. But I need to tell you something first. This is necessary sometime, even if it isn’t the right way. Genes are the right way.”

There was no right way for this.

He stood there a long time, staring at the sky, until a young MP, very nervous that nothing questionable should happen on his watch, told Keith to move along.