Damage Control - ARC (7 page)

T
he Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs and a dozen other officials watched the landing from
the safety of a bunker deep in the Pentagon. On the opposite wall,
feeds from over 20 news cameras played on large monitors while
technicians chose which views to send to the networks at any given
moment.

Right now, gamma camera was included, and
Major General Elton Chang was not entirely comfortable with that.
It was a typical Frenck shot. Frenck was a good photographer, but
he was a cynic, and he always managed to find a way to make an op
ed piece out of any news story. This time he had his lens aimed at
a kid named Coleman who seemed to have an alien phobia. Either that
or the flu.

There were three different angles on the
president and four on the alien landing craft. Echo cam was the
fallback: if the president picked his nose, if a breeze blew
somebody's skirt too high, one of the techs would hit the escape
key and the networks would get a shot of the children from Mrs.
Gardner's third grade class, instead. None of them was wearing a
skirt, and they could pick their noses without losing the next
election.

Fire shot out behind Coleman as his weapon
deployed. "Switch to echo!" Chang ordered. His voice mingled with
several others, their words identical to his.

On large and small screens all over the
world, 18 adorable eight-year-olds fidgeted in the chilly air,
while twenty people in the belly of the Pentagon watched the
inevitable.

The chairman, Rear Admiral Devon Amos, broke
the breathless silence. "ET struck first, and you will do whatever
is necessary to make that fact clear in the feed. Is that
understood?"

There was a chorus of affirmations from the
techs.

"Admiral, the president—"

Secretary of Defense Shawna Mackin didn't get
four words out before Louis Ember, the liaison from the Federal
Reserve Board, cut her off. "The president will be MADE to
understand!"

Mackin shot him a look but kept her mouth
shut.

When Coleman fired the rocket, the president
was walking across the speakers' platform toward the visitor.
Secret Service agents stormed the platform immediately, and by the
time the weapon hit its target, they had the president locked in a
very ordinary-looking silver-brown sedan with Maryland plates,
tinted windows, hidden armor plating and a long list of special
features.

One minute later, the car was safely away
from the Mall, which now could only be described as a battlefield,
or more accurately, a massacre. The aliens had the position of
advantage.

After five minutes, the Secret Service agent
in the front seat turned around. "I'm afraid I have bad news, Mr.
President. The Pentagon's been hit."

"Christ! How bad is it?"

"There's nothing left of it, sir."

Brooks Massilon braced himself on the edge of
the shower with his left arm, wincing. He inched his way down to
the lever that worked the tub stopper, and with his right hand
yanked it up and turned on the hot-water faucet. Another day of
work missed. 2:00 and just now able to walk, barely. Walking was
good, but thinking was even better. His head was starting to clear
now.

It felt like someone was squeezing his head
in a vice while jolts of electricity darted at random through his
body. He limped out of the bathroom with the faucet running,
grabbed his basketball shorts from the back of his bedroom door and
returned.

It wasn’t easy, but he got into the tub. His
skin turned nearly scarlet, but he was used to that. It wouldn’t
burn him. And it wouldn’t feel like it was burning him unless he
believed it would. He sighed as the intense heat began to soften
the painful tension in his muscles.

“DADDY, DADDY, DADDY!” The apartment door
slammed and every sound assaulted Brooks’s head like a pickaxe.
“Daddy, I got the part! I get to be Lily A-nnnnunnnn-zio!” she
announced, dragging out the Ns like she was trying to imitate the
sound of a motorcycle engine. “Where are you?”

“I’m in here,” Brooks managed, when there was
finally a bit of silence.

But she didn’t keep quiet long enough to hear
him. “DADDY?” She was still yelling, and it still hurt.

“I’m in here,” he said again, but not loudly
enough, apparently.

After more slamming and thumping, she yelled,
“Oh, are you in the bathroom?” Then she laughed. “I guess you are.
The door is closed. Guess what?” she called, loudly as ever, “I got
the part.”

“Guin,” he said, “you’re yelling.”

“What?” She was even louder now. “I can’t
hear you.”

“You’re yelling.”

“Oh, sorry,” she said. “Oh, do you have a
headache?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, sorry,” she said again. “I got the
part.”

Brooks smiled in the tub. “So I heard.
Congratulations. Proud of you.”

The bath helped. He released the drain, got
out of the tub, dried himself, put on his shorts and came out.

“How are you feeling?” Guin asked him.

“Better,” he answered. “Definitely better.”
He gave her a hug. “Welcome home, honey. Congratulations on getting
the part.”

“Thanks. You’re still hurting, though,
huh?”

“Yeah. What are we gonna eat? Are you
hungry?” He got to the fridge with an odd gait that wasn’t quite a
limp but wasn’t normal, either, and opened it.

“Starving,” said Guin. “I don’t know, roast
beef?”

“You used up the roast beef last night,
remember?”

“Oh, yeah. Chop suey?”

“Well, let’s see,” said Brooks. “No hamburg.
Won’t be very good chop suey.”

“I meant the other kind of chop suey.”

“Chinese food?”

“Yeah, remember when Monica took me to
lunch?”

“Oh. I think that was sukiyaki. I threw it
out: it was moldy.”

Guin gave the fridge a quick glance. “I can
go shopping.”

“I would really appreciate that.”

“So would I,” she retorted. “You can barely
even walk to the fridge, and I still like to eat.”

Brooks smiled. “Can you check if there’s
still a pound of elbows in the cupboard, please?”

There wasn’t still a pound of elbow macaroni
in the cupboard, but only about a half pound left in the bottom of
the big economy box. Behind it was a forgotten cellophane bag of
corkscrew-pasta, though. It had been part of a Christmas present.
“Fusilli,” it said on the front. Brooks had no idea how you were
supposed to pronounce ‘fusilli’ and didn't care, either. He bet
Jade would know. And care, too.

They had the elbows and corkscrews mixed
together, with a little leftover chicken, the rest of the cheese
ends and the leftover stir-fry. Along with salt and pepper and a
little thickened half-and-half, it made a good supper. While they
ate, they made a shopping list and talked about Lily Anunzio and
the war.

“Mr. O says they don’t make them like that
anymore,” said Guin.

“Make what like what?” Brooks asked.

“Sugar.”

“Don’t make them like sugar?”

“No, Lily.”

“What about Lily?”

“We need sugar. Write down ‘sugar.’”

Brooks wrote down ‘sugar.‘ “What does Mr. O
say?”

“He says they don’t make girls like Lily
anymore. I asked him what she’s like and that’s what he said. He
said, ‘They don’t make girls like her anymore.’ What does that
mean?”

Brooks rolled his eyes. “It could mean a lot
of things.” He was about to put his mind to it, make some guesses
about what Mr. O might have meant by that comment, but Guin seemed
to have moved on, so he didn’t bother.

“Guess what?” she said.

“The cat jumped onto the stove and knocked
the teakettle out the window, where it hit the rooster, causing the
rooster to crow and wake the owl, who decided to put on the kettle
for tea?”

“No,” Guin laughed. “You’re supposed to just
say, ‘What?’”

“Good thing I don’t do what I’m supposed to,
then.”

It was Guin’s turn to roll her eyes. “I heard
on the radio on the way home, a bomb went off and when it cooled
they went into the crater, and they found—“

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, slow down,”
Brooks interrupted. “A bomb went off where?”

“I don’t know, Iran, Afghanistan, Peru,
Indonesia, some place like that. And when it cooled they went into
the crater and they found some kind of ancient writing.”

“So the bomb unearthed an artifact?”

“Yeah, I guess. They don’t know if it’s real,
though. They said it could be a hoax.”

“Who found it?”

“Some soldiers.”

“American soldiers?”

“Yeah, I think. They don’t know what it says,
yet. One soldier took pictures, though.”

“Your aunt should look at those pictures,”
Brooks said. “I wonder if she knows about this. We should tell her.
Are the pictures public on the internet?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s find out. Jade would want to see
them.”

“Okay.” Guin wrinkled her nose. “But why
Jade, specifically?”

“Because, I bet she could translate them.”
Brooks wrote down ‘bacon, potatoes, eggs’ and ‘cream cheese.’

Guin's nose wrinkled up again. “Does she know
that one?”

Brooks looked up from the shopping list.
“Know that one what?”

“That language. What language is that?”

“How would I know? You’re telling me about
this, remember?”

“Okay, I’m confused,” said Guin. “Why do you
think Jade could translate the writing they found in the bomb
crater, if you don’t even know what language it is?”

Brooks shrugged. “Because she translates a
lot of stuff that’s written in languages she doesn’t ‘know.’” He
made quotation marks in the air with his fingers.

“Really? Like what?”

“Off the top of my head, Italian.”

“But she knows Spanish and French,” said
Guin. “Isn’t Italian related?”

“It is,” Brooks admitted. “That was a poor
example. She’s done Arabic, though, and modern Greek. Not really a
hundred percent accurate, I guess, but enough to get the idea of
what it was saying.”

“I don’t get it,” Guin balked. “How can you
translate something if you can’t even read it? I mean, don’t you
have to learn a language, before you can read it?”

“I don’t really get it either, to tell you
the truth,” he admitted. “She says it has something to do with
looking for patterns, though. I don’t know. Maybe she can read the
instructions on the new air filter.”

“You need the instructions? I thought you
knew how to fix cars.”

Brooks laughed. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I can
replace the air filter.” He slid his chair back and half-stood,
only to realize he couldn’t walk. He’d been in the chair too long,
and grown stiff.

“I don’t know,” Guin teased. “You’d have to
learn to walk first.” She went to the fridge and got out the orange
juice and refilled his glass for him. “Is that what you wanted?”
she asked.

“Yeah, thanks,” Brooks replied, and began to
stretch, working his way toward walking again.

When Guin came back from shopping, Brooks was
feeling a lot better, and they were both hungry again. They put the
groceries away together but left out some fish sticks and French
fries and heated them in the microwave. Brooks cooked mushrooms and
peppers in a frying pan to eat with lots of sour cream. For Guin
there was store-bought tartar sauce, and for Brooks the kind he
made himself, because it didn’t have onions in it.

“Want to eat on the roof?” Guin suggested. It
wasn’t the roof, exactly. The roof was made of slick dark-red
metal, the color of drying blood, and had what builders call a
12-inch pitch, or a 45-degree angle. But someone had built a nice
deck up there, accessed by climbing through the window near the
table and going up some steps.

They took their plates up to the roof-deck
and ate there, sitting on fold-up canvas chairs with cupholders in
the armrests. It was a beautiful clear night, and hard to believe
that tomorrow it was supposed to be overcast and drizzly. Guin
would need to take an umbrella with her, just in case, when she
went to meet her friends.

“Some girl at the auditions today thought you
were a drug addict,” Guin laughed. “Did you bring up the salt?”

He handed her the shaker. “Why’d she think
that?”

“’Cause I told her I couldn’t wake you this
morning. I said I hoped you were okay, because I couldn’t wake you
and I had to get to the school. And she sort of freaked and I said
it happens sometimes. So she asked what else, and I said sometimes
you get up but you’re sort of not really there, and—“

“Not really there?” Brooks repeated,
interrupting because sometimes that was the only way to have a
two-way conversation with her.

“Yeah, like, you can’t think sometimes. And
you can’t walk sometimes, and you’re in a lot of pain a lot, and
you take stuff for the pain but it doesn’t really work.”