“Put
down the cat,” Anne screeched, clumsily flourishing her red cape. “Amazing Anne is here to stop you, Mom!”
Mom
looked up at her daughter, a rare occurrence since her birth five years
prior. To compensate for her height,
Anne had clambered to the top of the coffee table, scowling at her mother on
the couch, who continued to stroke Buttons, their pudgy tabby.
“Not
so fast, Amazing Anne,” Mom said from the couch, putting on her best Snidely
Whiplash voice as she undid her ponytail, whipping her neck and letting her red
hair fall down in as intimidating of a manner as possible. “Mom is going to—“
“Momster.”
“Momster
is going to stop you!” Mom held Buttons by the chest, deeply laughing. “I will never
release Buttons!”
“YES
YOU WILL!” Anne screamed, jumping on the couch next to Mom and scaring Buttons,
who yowled and wriggled out of Mom’s grasp, scampering away. “Go, you’re free!” Anne screamed, tackling
Mom with her thirty-five pounds of jump rope-hardened muscle. “I’ll hold Momster here.”
“You
will try,” Mom cackled. Somehow unharmed
by her daughter’s shouts of “laser eyes!” and clumsy punches, she slowly
reached her hands towards Anne’s armpits.
“Because Momster has a secret weapon…”
“No
she…” Anne trailed off, and her eyes went wide when she realized what was about
to happen. “No!” she yelled, but it was
too late. Mom finished her sentence
beforehand and made her move.
“Tickle-claws!”
Even through her overalls and yellow shirt, the tickles were extremely
effective. Buttons crept back into the
room from the hallway, hoping to return to his coveted spot on someone’s lap,
but retreated right back into the hallway when he saw the small child thrashing
and laughing hysterically. In the
distance, the front door opened, and Mom stopped her onslaught of tickles.
“No
no stop no stop no,” gasped Anne, wheezing and blinking rapidly. “Why’d you stop—Daddy!”
Dad
had just come through the front door, his caterer’s apron slung over his
shoulder, looking weary but completely at peace. “Well,” he said, folding his apron and
setting it on the back of a chair in the kitchen. “What’s going on here?”
“Momster
had Buttons as a hostage,” Anne said, hugging her father’s shins, “and I saved
him, but then she started using her tickle claws.”
“What?”
Dad stared at Mom, aghast. “But…but
that’s so underhanded!”
“I
play to win,” Mom said.
“Well,
I knew that.” Dad knelt down and gave Mom a smooch. “How was your day?”
“Pretty
good. Managed to reschedule more
electrical work for the weekend, so you won’t have to take anymore “emergency
sick days” while I’m crawling around in some vent. Not for awhile, at least.”
“That’s
great!” Dad felt Anne yanking on his hand, and he absent-mindedly tousled her
hair and started to thumb wrestle with her as he spoke. “It’s no problem at all if you need me to
take more days off. You know Silicon
Valley people—they’re either rich enough that they don’t use their company’s
cafeteria, or they just work through lunch with some Oreos or something. I don’t know if anyone even noticed I was
gone. Hey, hang on a minute!”
It
was too late. Anne had managed to pin
Dad’s thumb, coarse and worn from years of nonstop cooking, using both of her
hands. “I win!” she beamed.
“That’s
against the rules,” Dad complained, but when he looked at Mom for support, she
just shook her head.
“When
two thumbs enter the ring,” she said solemnly, “rules, humanity, none of it
matters. All that matters is which thumb
leaves unbent.”
“Man. I have to give up my belt? I was the champ
for years.” Dad looked into the
distance a little wistfully. “Dang. Anyway, Anne, honey, you need to come pick up
your toys from the yard.”
Anne
had been excitedly hopping from foot-to-foot after her victory, but suddenly
she sagged, seeming devoid of energy.
“But it’s cold,” she said. “And
I’m tired.”
“I’m
tired too,” Dad said. “But it’s because it’s cold that we have to go
outside. We’re having a wet winter. All your toys are going to get soggy if we
leave them out.” He didn’t mention that
not all her toys would hurt from the
rain, certainly not the Spider-Man and Princess Leia plastic figures. Fortunately, Anne was five, and seemed
resigned to having to pick up every single toy.
“Do
we have to do it now?”
“Yes.”
“Can
I keep on my cape?”
Dad
looked at Mom, who shrugged from the couch.
“Yes,” he said.
“Will
you put on a cape, Daddy?”
“Yes,”
Mom said instantly. She pointed Dad to
their room. “Your cape is folded up in
the drawer.”
Dad
grumbled, but it was half-hearted grumbling.
In the moments it took to don his heroic garb, he had already given
himself to the spirit of the costume.
“Onwards!” he said, one hand on his hip and the other pointing towards
the door, about ten feet away. “To
adventure!”
Anne
grabbed the hand at his hip. “I love
you, Daddy,” she said, as they walked out of the house.
________________
“I
hate you!” Anne screamed, as Dad pulled the car into the driveway and pointed
at the door to the house. “Do you even know
what you did?”
Dad’s
hands were shaking as he opened the door of the station wagon. “Do you?”
he said, trying to keep his emotion out of his voice. “Do you have any idea how worried we were?”
“I’m
not a little girl anymore, Dad,” Anne said.
Rather than shaky, she was forceful, and Dad flinched as she slammed her
door shut and stormed towards the house.
“Okay? I’m not.”
“I
can see that,” Dad muttered. He
remembered being called a “filthy longhair” during a few marches he’d
participated in, and vowed to never become such a fogey. But this time it was different. This was his daughter, with her black hair—just
like his hair—half shaved off, and
set in tiny spikes! “You were only gone for a day, and you’ve changed so much.”
“Oh
my God, are we seriously going to have the hair conversation?” Anne grabbed the
door and yanked it open like she wanted to rip it off the hinges. “After all the times you—“
“You’re
back! You’re okay!” Mom literally hugged the breath out of her daughter,
sputtering as she was practically tackled by a mass of soft pink bathrobe and
fuzzy red hair. But in an instant, the
hug was over, and Anne was looking down at a bright red face, tears welling up
in the corners of Mom’s eyes. “What were
you thinking!?”
“Mom,
I—“
“Sit
down.”
“Mom,
I’m not a little kid anymore. You can’t
just—“
“SIT!
DOWN!” Anne jumped back, surprised at her mother’s decibel capacity, and
bumping into Dad as he closed the door behind her. She took a glance at his face, glaring before
following Mom to the couch. Dad looked
very sad, but patronizing and sympathetic, as though saying, I’ve been where you are, honey, but you’ve
got it coming.
Anne
took a seat, crossing her hands over her intentionally torn-up jeans, and
looked at her parents with defiance. Neither of them looked like they were going to
sit down. Mom, in particular, was
breathing heavily. If one hadn’t seen
her angry before, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to guess she was having a heat
stroke from her bathrobe. “There is a
national alert,” she began.
“It
was issued on Monday and nothing has even—“
“Don’t interrupt me,” Mom snarled. Anne shrank back. She was unaware her mother even had the
capacity to snarl. “There is a national
alert in place. There is an alien
delegation at the White House, and the aliens sent out probes, and one flew over our house.”
That could have been a plane, Anne was
about to say, but as she opened her mouth, Dad looked her pointedly in the eye
and shook his head. She settled for
thinking it and scowling.
“All
we asked was that you stay here, for
as long as the alert is in place. It’s
been on for five days. But apparently we
were asking too much.”
Anne
and Dad blinked, waiting for more, but Mom didn’t say anything. Anne spoke up. “Look, I understand where you’re coming
from.”
“Do
you?” Dad put his hand on Mom’s shoulder.
She took it in hers, clutching it tightly. “You were gone for a full day, Anne. No phone calls, no note, nothing. If Carmen’s mom hadn’t come back early and
called everyone’s parents, we would have called the police. We were frightened.”
“I
get it,” Anne said cautiously. “Mom, I
understand. You grew up in tornado country;
you saw houses get carried away. When
trouble happens you just hunker down and wait it out. But this isn’t the same. Nothing has happened yet.” She waited for her
parents to say something, but they remained silent. “Can’t you see? I’m fine.”
“Your
hair is different,” Dad muttered, and both Mom and Anne glared at him. “But that’s not the issue,” he added,
hastily. “We asked you to do something,
out of serious concern, and you lied to us and ignored it.”
“But
you were wrong,” Anne said, instantly regretting it when Mom started breathing
hard again.
“What
if we hadn’t been?” she asked her daughter.
“What if war had been declared? What if there had been rioting and you
got caught up in it somehow?”
“There
wasn’t, though—“
“What if you were wrong!” Mom shouted,
her hands trembling and clenched into fists.
“You could have died, Anne.”
“Oh
come on—“
“And
even if nothing happened,” Dad said, “the fact that our concern means so little
to you is still very disappointing.” He
took a deep breath, exhaling slowly, as though reluctant to form another
sentence. “You’re not just staying here
until the alert is lifted, honey. You’re
grounded. Indefinitely.”
Anne
was so shocked it took her a moment to remember she was in a conversation. “I’ve never been grounded for anything
before,” she said.
“You
never did anything we had to ground
you for,” Mom said. Dad nodded.
“This…this
is…” Anne silently debated whether there was any point in moderating her
language, and almost instantly ruled against the idea. “This is total bullshit. I mess up one
time and you’re coming down on me like I’m not even your kid.”
“You
know we love you,” Mom said, reaching out towards her daughter, but Anne
slapped her hand away. What had happened
was sinking in, and it was her turn to lose control.
“Well,
I sure wouldn’t know it,” she said, standing up and stomping towards her
room. “You talk a lot about your concerns, but what about me? Did
you even think to ask me why I left
the house? Why I did what I did?”
Mom
and Dad exchanged glances. They had
agreed beforehand that there would be no leniency for this kind, but they were
new to these scorched-earth tactics.
They didn’t know the protocol for when the kid made a good point. “The reason doesn’t matter,” Dad ventured,
instantly regretting it when Anne started glaring daggers at him.
“I
can’t believe you!” she
shrieked. “My reason doesn’t matter? You’re both being assholes right now! You’re both a bunch
of—“
Mom
and Dad never found out what they were a bunch of, because before Anne could
finish her sentence, the living-room windows shattered. A robot, the size and shape of a printer,
silently floated in and hit Anne with a thin, green laser. She froze, her face a mask of fury and
righteous indignation, before turning green herself and suddenly
vanishing. The robot chirped, spat a
leaflet on the floor, and zipped away.
Dad
was frozen, blinking in confusion. He cautiously
stepped towards the spot where Anne had been, waving has hands through the air
as though she were a fly buzzing around the room. “Anne?” he called out. No answer.
“What… what happened?” he asked, turning to Mom. Mom had bent down to the floor and opened the
leaflet. Her face had turned white, and
she was gripping the paper so hard that it started to tear at the edges. “What does the paper say?”
“It’s
the aliens,” Mom said, her voice shaking.
“They took her. They took all the
children.” She looked up at Dad, who was
blinking back tears. “There’s going to
be a war.”
______________
In
the ten years after Anne, and all earthlings under the age of twenty, were
taken, 70% of the human population died.
It
wasn’t the war. Mom and Dad never saw a
battlefield; no humans did. The war was
between the aliens, the bipedal, blue creatures with skin like sandstone and
eyes like shining obsidian, and another species that humanity knew nothing
about. Earth had no quarrel with either
species, until the Quartz, the species that had visited humanity, dragged them
into it, with dozens of other planets inhabited by races that hadn’t yet
discovered extraterrestrial life. The
Quartz needed manual labor, and they needed resources, and after almost three
hundred years fighting for their survival, they were desperate enough to start
enslaving any species too weak to fight back.
The
war was near its ended when the Quartz took the children as hostages, and it
was during the five years that the Quartz used to finally locate and destroy
their foe’s home world that most of humanity perished. Mom and Dad were moved all around the world,
helping to extract oil, metals, minerals, water, anything the Quartz deemed of
use, and send it to them in space. The
conditions were brutal, and only got worse when the Quartz decided they needed
oxygen, and started harvesting it from Earth’s atmosphere. They gave some back after the war had ended,
but it was too late for the billions that weren’t in a “priority” facility with
breathable air and suffocated.
The
death and suffering washed over Mom and Dad like waves on a stone. They took their toll, but it would take a
very long time for them to get worn down by it.
They were holding out for the end of the war, when the Quartz promised
to return the children they had taken.
When the announcement came that the Quartz had won, that Earth would now
exist as a colony of their newly gotten empire, and that the children would be
returned, Mom and Dad waited in their barracks with bated breath.
But
they were one of the unfortunate seventy-five percent. Instead of receiving their child, or even the
remains of their child, they received nothing.
No information of any kind. The
return of Earth’s hostages, like those on other worlds, had been deemed a “low
priority.”
Dad
wept for days when it sunk in that they weren’t getting any news. He cried while he slept and cried while he
ate and cried while he was working. The uncertainty,
the despair that Anne was almost certainly dead but that they couldn’t even see
her body, was too much for him. After
nearly a week of sobbing, Mom, who had joined him at first, stopped crying, and
sat in silence. She didn’t move for a whole
day, and finally stood up, and turned to Dad, lost in grief in his bunk. She slapped him.
“Get
up,” she said. There weren’t any tears
in her eyes, but the grief was there. It
burned bright, simmering and stewing, feeding a much more destructive emotion
than sadness. “Sitting there and crying
is not productive.”
The
tears still streamed down Dad’s face.
“Productive for what,” he choked.
“Making
Anne proud.”
It
took time, but with Mom’s prodding and decisiveness, the grief in Dad shifted
its focus too. The pair spent five years
working their way from their barracks in Mexico City, the place they had been
stationed when the war ended, back to California, where they searched for any
pre-war friends that had survived. They
found a few, and used them to secure a place to live and a steady supply of
food. They labored day and night,
building new infrastructure for the Quartz, acting as perfectly loyal
subjects. They made connections, with
the more sympathetic of the Quartz and the humans with slightly more power than
themselves. They bided their time. And, ten years after Anne had been taken,
their opportunity emerged.
Mom
fought the urge to sneeze with all her might as she crawled through the dust
and grime underneath the Quartz administrative building. Opportunity was dank and musty, and probably
riddled with asbestos. She didn’t care.
“No,
I’m telling you, I know how to cook with entirely salt-free ingredients,” she
could hear her husband say, tinny and nervous, through the small radio in the
pocket of her electrician’s jumpsuit.
“Before the war, I cooked in this very building, for a very discerning
clientele. A lot of vegans, a lot of
people who believed the invention of agriculture or whatever was a
mistake. I don’t even know if we had salt in our kitchen.”
“Keep
them talking, baby,” Mom whispered. It
wasn’t like she could talk to him through the radio; getting a one-way device
that could broadcast through layers of metal and concrete had taken years of
favors upon favors. A proper
communicator might have taken decades.
“I’m almost there.” She was. Mom was staring at a massive metal strut
covered in wires, inches from her face, and grinning wider than she had for a
decade. “It’s been a while,” she said,
fondly rubbing the mass of wiring she had helped install in her husband’s
workplace. “You were one of my favorite
jobs. These techie guys didn’t know anything about you, so I got overpaid
like crazy.” She reached into her
pockets, pulling out the tiny charges Dad had received from their contact in
the resistance. “They’re not paying us
as much for destroying you. Just a
shuttle ride to one of the liberated planets.” Mom didn’t mind. When these charges went off, the entire
building would lose electricity, completely open for attack by the rebels. The knowledge that she would be responsible
for a few dozen Quartz deaths was more satisfying than all the money in the
world.
“Wait,
er, where are you going?” Mom froze as the radio picked up. Dad sounded surprised. “No, no, you can’t go back to your stations
yet! I haven’t even read you any of my recipes! No salt, perfectly fine for
Quartz to eat!”
Mom
swore as she squeezed past the strut, crawling as fast as she could to the exit
on the other side of the building. Two
of the guards Dad had distracted by requesting an audience with the facility’s
supervisor (after the first uprising four years ago, no human was allowed near
a Quartz of high authority without a complete security detail) had stations
with thermal sensors that could detect her under the building. If they got back before she got out, they’d
investigate the underground, and find the bombs. The past ten years would be pointless.
Suddenly,
Dad’s radio completely cut out. The
static was the only sound as Mom crawled towards the vent. She punched it a few times and it came loose;
they’d given that kid a week’s worth of rations, and he had done his job. She crawled out, gasping in breaths of fresh,
outside air, and waved with relief as she saw Dad sprinting towards her. “It sounded like you were in trouble,” she
said, but Dad just took her arm and kept running.
“We
gotta move, sweetie,” Dad said. “The
good news is that I kept the guards from figuring out you were under there, but
the bad news is I had to use the gun the black-market guy gave us with the
charges to do it. We’ve got maybe five
minutes to get to the rendezvous before—“
“We’re
not going to get there,” Mom said, quietly.
She didn’t need to explain why. A
dozen Quartz were waiting on the road in front of them, all readying their
plasma rifles. She could hear the shouts
of the Quartz behind them. “They won’t
find the bombs, though. We did a good
job.”
Dad
could hear the click-click-click that
meant the plasma rifles were warming up.
“I love you, Elizabeth,” he whispered.
“I
love you too, Brandon,” Mom whispered back. They kissed.
The wind suddenly picked up and they stopped, surprised that they hadn’t
been vaporized. “What,” Dad began, but
almost threw up when he realized they were both zipping through the air,
hundreds of feet off of the ground.
“Look!”
Mom shouted, pointing up, and Dad eagerly jerked his head away from the
vertigo-inducing view of the distant Earth below them. There was a small shuttle well above them,
slowly growing bigger. “We’re in a
personnel tractor beam!” She barely got the sentence out when the bottom of the
shuttle folded open, and the two were suddenly sucked inside. They embraced; shaking in relief, but
completely froze when the door to the cockpit opened and their rescuer stepped
into the cargo bay with them.
“Don’t
worry,” she said, “the shuttle’s on auto.
We’re in the clear. You two are
damn lucky I flew over you on the way to the rendezvous; I’m Anne Yokoi, the
pilot.” Mom and Dad were still
frozen. The young woman standing before
them looked very different than she had ten years ago. She didn’t have any hair. An eye was missing, replaced with a black eye
patch with the rebel’s insignia, the tiny fists of the children, stitched on in
white thread. Her flight suit, dark blue
and singed with laser fire near the breast and shoulder, was less torn up than
her jeans had been. She had been through
a lot. But it was unquestionably Anne
standing before her parents, blinking in confusion as the two burst into tears
at her feet. “You two can relax,” she
said gently, awkwardly patting them on the head. “You’re safe now.”
“Anne,”
Mom sobbed, “Anne, honey, look at me.”
Anne
had already looked at her charges through her shuttle’s targeting system, as
she performed an impromptu rescue with the tractor beam. They were skin and bones, like most of those
she had ferried from Earth into the arms of the rebellion. Their eyes were sunken into their skulls,
their clothes were filthy and tattered, and the woman’s hair was a fading gray. By looks alone, she never would have
recognized them as her parents. But her
Mom’s voice, heavy like it always was when she was overcome by emotion, was
instantly recognizable. It was Anne’s
turn to tear up.
“Mom,”
she whispered, sinking to her knees.
“Dad…Dad, is that you?”
Dad
nodded. “Anne, I’m sorry,” he croaked. “When you got taken, we were arguing, and—“
“Shush,”
Anne and Mom said simultaneously, before looking at each other and crying even
harder. Dad blinked, and burst out
laughing, tears streaming down his face.
“Oh
Anne,” he croaked, shaking with emotion as his wife and daughter stared at him
in confusion, “don’t you see? It doesn’t matter. You’re missing an eye and we’re half starved,
and already it’s like I told that joke about oranges one too many times. We’re going to be fine.”
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