The End Has Come

“You’re different because you’re like me,” she says. “Nobody else here is. Not really.”

My free hand moves back from my jacket pocket. I say cautiously, “I am? How?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice is troubled. “Well, yes, the sex . . . I never felt any of that wanting before, not like . . . . Jake, why did I feel like that about you but never before? Who are you, really?”

All at once, to my own astonishment, I want to tell her. But I can’t, and I don’t want her thinking about my differences from her people. So I pull her toward me and say, to distract her, “Someone who’s falling in love with you.”

But if it’s really to distract her, then why do I say it so softly that maybe I don’t want her to hear?

Then I see them under the trees, standing beside Jenna’s father.

* * *

Dant16 waves one tentacle, vaguely in time with the music. Dancers stomp and whirl on the flattened grass. The river murmurs, shining in the moonlight, reflecting the bonfire flames. From somewhere comes the sweet odor of wild mint.

How can I be thinking what is gnawing at my brain?

Jenna and Jake come along the path from the bungalows. She tries to pull him toward the dance; he shakes his head, smiling. There’s something wrong with his smile but I don’t know what. The bonfire behind them haloes both their heads with dancing gold. The fiddles sing; crickets chirp in the grass; the rising moon shines every moment brighter in the darkening sky.

Jenna turns to talk to Kay Caruthers. Jenna looks as if she is introducing Jake, but he is no longer there. He moves quickly toward me, not running but with no sign of his limp. Closer, and I can see his wrong smile. “Hello, Larry,” he says, pulls a ceramic knife from his jacket and plunges it into Dant16’s forehead.

I can’t move. My heart slows and vertigo swoops over me.

Dant23 lets out a shrill, prolonged shriek I have never heard before. He tries to run but Jake pulls the knife from Dant16 and drives it, lightning fast, into Dant23. Both aliens crumple to the grass, oozing foul-smelling liquid.

People rush over, freeze, sway or crumple or stare, eyes wide, mouths gaping, oxygenation and heart rate falling.

All but Jenna.

She runs to Jake and beats him — beats him! — with small, ineffectual fists. “Why? Why?”

He grabs her arms and pins them to her sides. His shoulders shake — this has cost him, too, but not enough. Not nearly enough. “Carl,” he gasps, “Kaylie, Jerome, Matt . . .”

“Why?”

Neither of them show any signs of EIFB. I don’t wonder about the reason. I know.

“Listen, Jenna,” Jake says. He has control of himself now. He’s wrestled her against him so that she cannot strike. “They’re the enemy. They fucked up our biology, made us —”

“They made us better!”

“No. They made us sheep, passive and fearful so that we won’t interfere while they take over Earth. They want our planet.”

“They gave us the Blessing! No more violence, no more wars —”

“No more progress, no more discoveries, almost no more sex! How many more generations before humans disappear completely? And all without the violence they can’t stand face-to-face, any more than these people can.”

“But you —”

“I what?” He holds her more gently now; she struggles less. My breath comes more normally.

Jenna says, “You were able to — how?”

“Because I had to. We have to — listen, there are more of us. More than you might think. We want the Dant to leave. With enough violence, they will leave. We’ll convince them that Earth will never be free of humans. If the fuckers don’t wipe us out first.”

“The Dant don’t —”

“Yes,” he says grimly, “they do. They laser us from space, like the cowards they are. But we will succeed.”

Zane and Ted are coming out of EIFB. Uncertainly, they step toward Jake. He raises his fist and both retreat.

I find my voice. “You don’t know what success is.”

Jake says savagely, “I know what it isn’t.”

Jenna — my Jenna, bewildered and upset but not nearly enough frightened — says, “But I still don’t understand why the —”

“Jenna, I don’t have time for this! Don’t you understand? I have to leave now, before whatever trackers these bastards use finds me. I have to go.”

They look at each other. I don’t understand the look. I have never been in the place they are now: wild, challenging, hot.