Hell on Earth Read online

  “Back in the life, before her family moved here and accepted the faith, Jill was arrested twice for breaking into computer systems. She served six months in a juvenile detention center in Ojai; then her parents joined the Church and moved here.”

  All the time he was talking, he kept sneaking glances out of the corner of his eye. He seemed to be looking at the top of her head. She was pretending not to be interested but hung on every word.

  “Jill was embarrassed and ashamed of her arrest and conviction,” the President said very slowly, as if coaching, watching her all the time. “She was locked up with a girl who was a prostitute and drug dealer—”

  “She didn’t want to be a junkie-hooker,” said Jill, speaking about herself in the third person.

  The President pretended not to hear. “She still loves computers, but wants to be a security person now.” He took a breath, then concluded, “The aliens killed her parents, and only missed her because she was covered with blood and they assumed she was dead. She was frightened by the aliens, of course—”

  “I hate them,” she piped in. “I want them all dead.”

  “Good girl,” said Arlene, half won over.

  The Mormon leader approached Jill but was careful not to touch her. At least he finally looked at her. “You don’t like your former hacker buddies, do you?” he asked.

  “I hate them.”

  “Why?”

  She was uncomfortable about talking but couldn’t keep the words from spilling out. “Because they don’t care about what happens to anyone else. They don’t give a rat’s ass if they hack a hospital computer and destroy a patient’s records, by accident, or as a joke.”

  “Some joke,” said Arlene.

  “They’d only be upset if they did a sloppy job,” the girl replied, her voice monotonous. “They suck.”

  “God bless you, Jill,” said the President. “And you know what the aliens are?”

  Jill sure did. “A million times worse. I’ve got to kill them all.”

  Mother Mary, a regular little parrot! Did the President write the script out for her? I wondered. Or was she just adept at ad-libbing what he wanted to hear, what would get her on the job?

  “Don’t you think you should leave the killing to Albert and this other man?” asked the President.

  “That does it,” said Arlene, hackles smacking the ceiling.

  “I’m sorry, but there’s no alternative to taking her along,” said the President.

  “That’s not what I meant!” Arlene gave me her special look. I sighed, but didn’t shake my head or give her the shut-up signal. I’d had about all of the President I could take.

  “Mr. President,” she began, speaking slowly as if to a child—I realized we still didn’t know his name—“I respect your beliefs, even though I don’t hold them myself. But we are in a situation where every able-bodied individual must do his or her best. There are armed women outside.”

  “Yes,” he answered. “Adult women.”

  Arlene turned to Jill. “I apologize for doubting you,” she said. “I think you’ll do fine.” She glared back at the President, who shook his head sadly.

  I smiled, suddenly realizing we’d been had: he had put on the whole “Mormon patriarch” act just to get us to accept a little girl as a teammate! It was masterful . . . and I didn’t say a word to Arlene. Let her keep her illusions.

  “If you succeed,” concluded the President, “you will have redeemed yourself thrice over.”

  “And if we fail?”

  “You’ll be dead. Or undead. Either way, you’ll never have to think about your error again.”

  Gee. Thanks a lump.

  “What weapon do you have?” Arlene asked Jill. The fourteen-year-old picked up a slim box from the table; took me a moment to recognize it as a CompMac “Big Punk” ultramicro with a radio-telemetry port. That was some nice equipment; did she come with it, or did the President hijack it for her?

  “You’ll train her in the use of firearms,” the President said, turned on his heel and walked away.

  “I’ve fired guns before,” said Jill.

  Arlene touched the girl on the shoulder. Jill didn’t pull away. Arlene didn’t talk down to her. In a casual tone she asked, “Do you think there might be some pointers I could give you, hon?”

  The fourteen-year-old smiled for the first time. She didn’t answer right away. Then she said in a firm voice, “Want some pizza?”

  Now that she mentioned it, my mouth began to salivate.

  12

  I took my cue from Arlene and reluctantly accepted the kid. The Mormon leader guaranteed the girl’s bona fides. Given the way he felt about the female of the species, if he wanted Jill on this mission that badly, that was good enough for me.

  “Welcome aboard,” I said, approaching Jill and putting out my hand. I didn’t expect anything, but she surprised me by shaking hands and smiling. Smart kid. She knew when she’d won a victory.

  “Thanks.” Jill sized each of us up, letting her glance stay on me a little longer—not exactly pleased with the effect, I noticed. “I won’t let you down,” she said to all of us.

  “How do you know?” asked Albert, but he wasn’t being belligerent about it.

  “Yeah,” said Jill, not losing a beat. “They talk that way around here. I won’t get anybody killed on purpose.”

  Arlene bent down and patted Jill on the head. The girl didn’t pull away, but acted surprised. Affection was something new in her experience. I hoped she would live long enough to experience a lot more of it. But I didn’t kid myself: once we entered Los Angeles, the mission was everything, and we were all expendable. It had been that way since the first monster came through the Gate on Phobos.

  “Come on,” said Arlene, taking Jill by the hand. “Your training starts now.”

  Jerry had stayed with us after the boss sauntered off. “There might not be time for that,” he said. He didn’t say it as if he liked it. So far, the only person I’d met who impressed me as something of a jerk was the leader, and even he was no fool.

  Arlene kept her voice even and calm. “We’ll make time,” she said. “Training is not a luxury.”

  Looking at the man’s face, I could see that he didn’t like arguing with facts. He shrugged and didn’t say another word.

  “How about it, Albert?” I asked the other member of our team. “What kind of time do we have?”

  “Plenty,” he said. “I’ve seen Jill shoot. She’ll do fine.”

  “Do I get a gun of my own?” asked Jill.

  “Does she?” Arlene asked Albert.

  “Sure as shootin’,” he said, letting a moment pass before we responded to his wordplay. He enjoyed the double take.

  We went to an aboveground arsenal. Seeing what they kept up top made me more anxious to see behind those doors downstairs. As it was, they wouldn’t notice the absence of Jill’s weapon of choice, though it was a little strange seeing the fourteen-year-old holding an AR-19 like she was used to it.

  Jill noticed my expression. “We need all the firepower we can get,” she said.

  “You’re right. Let’s see what you can do with it.” And thank God she didn’t have her heart set on an AK-47. The kick would knock her on her butt. At least the AR-19 was a small enough caliber.

  There were plenty of places to shoot. We went to a makeshift range where someone had gotten hold of old monster movie posters. Jill chose one already pretty badly shot up: a horns-and-tail demon from an old British movie. It looked a lot like a hell-prince. One of the horns was shot out, but the other was still intact.

  “I’ll take the bone on his head,” she announced. She missed with the first burst, pulling up and to the right; but she nearly shredded the target anyway.

  Arlene went over and whispered something in her ear. Jill smiled and tried again. This time the bursts were shorter and stayed on target. The demon’s second horn was history.

  “What did you tell her?” I asked Arlene. I always appreciate
a few well-chosen words.

  “Girl talk,” she said, arching her dark eyebrows.

  “Kind of a shame to destroy these collector’s items,” I observed when we ran out of ammo.

  “No problem,” said Albert. “We have hundreds of these. The President used to visit the church in Hollywood, and we have a lot of contacts.”

  “How did I do?” asked Jill, bringing us back to the original point of the exercise.

  “I thought I’d need to teach you something,” said Arlene. “Guess you’re mostly ready. Mostly.” The day was shaping up nicely. We could do a whole lot worse than Jill.

  I was still in a good mood when we had dinner with the President that night. They set a good table, and he boasted how they could keep this up for a long time.

  After dinner, Jill toddled off to bed in the female-teens quarter. Albert wanted to spend time with an older woman we’d been informed was an aunt, and I managed to get Arlene alone in the presidential garden.

  Although night had fallen, the security lights in the garden were bright, thanks to the generators of our hosts. I saw Arlene frowning in thought. “Albert may have an extra mission,” she said, “scouting out new converts for the Church.”

  I laughed. “Hey, don’t make it sound so sinister. We should ask any survivors to join us, male or female.”

  “Unless they’ve gone insane,” she said, “and there are parts of Los Angeles where it would be difficult to know.”

  “Well, I’m glad we have Albert and Jill with us.”

  She brightened. “Me too. That young lady impresses the hell out of me. Maybe she’s lucky to be going off with us to face demons and imps.”

  Arlene never lost her ability to surprise me. “Lucky?” I echoed. “Why do you say that?”

  “She’s past puberty, Fly. They’d probably marry her off to one of these . . .” She didn’t finish.

  I recognized that the conversation was on the slippery slope to more trouble than a barrel of pumpkins. Arlene’s prejudice against anything and everything religious, and especially against Mormons, was disturbing; the people in this compound, Mormons and others alike, had done nothing to warrant such anger. Time for a strategic retreat. “So, what do you think of the President?”

  “What do you think?” she threw it back at me.

  “Well, as I’ve said before, you don’t have to like someone in power to recognize that you need cooperation from the boss. This man is no fool; he’s playing his own game.”

  Arlene shook her head, but it wasn’t because she disagreed with me. “I always understand a leader,” she said. “It’s the followers who confuse me. This man is a master of transferring authority. His followers won’t argue with someone who says he gets his marching orders direct from God.”

  “Yeah, but in the war we’re about to fight, let’s hope God really is on our side. Or we’re on God’s side, I mean.”

  She took a stick of gum out of her pocket, popped the contents in her mouth, and gave forth with her considered opinion: “Agreed. Any god, any goddess, anything to give us an edge is fine by me.”

  I ignored the blasphemy. Honestly, she does it just to needle me. “Where did you get the gum?” I asked.

  “Jill,” she said between chews. “Want a stick?”

  “No thanks.” Gum is not one of my vices. But I was impressed with how quickly Arlene had been won over.

  We went back in the compound, expecting to return to the room we’d been in before. A matronly woman we hadn’t seen before greeted us. “Hello, my name is Marie,” she said. “I’m here to show the young woman to the female quarters.”

  Arlene and I exchanged knowing glances. I think we both did a commendable job of not bursting out laughing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept without Arlene taking watch. We’d already been through the sexual-tension zone and popped out the other end with the understanding that we were buddies, pals, comrades.

  But now we were back in the Adam and Eve department. The only question that really mattered was, did we trust these guys to keep us alive while we slept? The fact that they were still here was pretty good evidence.

  “What kind of security do you have here?” I asked the woman.

  She didn’t understand. “Good enough to keep you out of the henhouse,” she answered with a slight smirk.

  I rolled my eyes. That wasn’t what I meant, but—ah, skip it.

  “See you in the morning,” I said to Arlene.

  For the first time in a long time, I was alone. Maybe the President still had doubts about me, but they put me on a long leash.

  Suddenly I realized I didn’t know where I was supposed to sleep. The room we’d been in before made sense. We’d been allowed to use it when we freshened up, but we were under guard then. I wished I’d thought to ask the woman if that was where I was supposed to go.

  I didn’t know anyone in the hallways, but they didn’t pay any attention to me as I went past; they weren’t afraid . . . what a strange concept that had become. I could have asked them about a men’s quarters, but I wasn’t in a rush to have the old YMCA experience if I could avoid it. If I wasn’t going to bunk with Arlene, then I wanted to be alone.

  Privacy suddenly exerted a strong appeal: to be alone without a hell-prince stomping on my face, to sleep without worry of a zombie who used to be a friend cuddling up next to me and sharing the rot of the grave, just to enjoy silence and solitude, without spinys fudging it up. Yeah, the more I thought of it, the better I liked it.

  I retraced my way back to the room. After the corridors on Deimos, this was almost too easy. The door wasn’t locked. Then I noticed that the lock had been removed. Now that I thought about it, there were no locks anywhere. But the room was empty, gloriously empty, and that was good enough.

  I went in, closed the door, flipped on the light. There was a miracle. The light came on. No conservation or blackout measures in this small, windowless room. Which meant I could do something more important than sleeping.

  The book was where I’d left it. Normally, the Book of Mormon would not be my first choice of reading material; the sisters would not approve. Under the circumstances, I was grateful to have it.

  I started at the beginning, with the testimonies of the witnesses and the testimony of the Prophet Joseph Smith. This told the story of the finding of the gold plates with the Holy Book written thereon. Reminded me of the old joke about the founding of the Unitarian Church: a prophet found gold plates on which was written . . . absolutely nothing!

  As I read, I remembered an old Hollywood movie about Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, founders of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. Hollywood . . . where we would be going. Hollywood was in the hands of the monsters. Vincent Price starred in the Mormon movie and also in a million monster movies. I was sure this all meant something.

  I started the first book, made it to the second and the third; and kept reading until I reached Chapter Five in the Book of Alma, Verse 59:

  For what shepherd is there among you having many sheep doth not watch over them, that the wolves enter not and devour his flock? And behold, if a wolf enter his flock doth he not drive him out? Yea, and at the last, if he can, he will destroy him.

  That seemed like a good place to stop because I doubted I would find a more agreeable sentiment anywhere else in the Mormon scriptures.

  13

  Did you sleep well?” Arlene asked, winking.

  “Not bad,” I said. “I think it’s the first night I didn’t dream about monsters.”

  The sun was up, the sky was clear, and for a moment it was possible to believe that none of this had ever happened. A dog ran by, a healthy mutt that someone was feeding—not a sign of impending starvation, but perhaps an overgenerous use of resources.

  “Guess what?” she said with an impish smile. “I didn’t dream about monsters either. But I did dream.”

  Teasing was simply not Arlene’s style. She really surprised me. “Maybe that’s why they segregate the
boys and the girls,” I said. “To make everyone think about it.”

  “We can’t keep any secrets from you,” said Albert, joining us outside the main cafeteria.

  “Except the ones that count,” I replied, not altogether innocently. I was still thinking about secrets and closed doors, and an unknown, upcoming mission.

  “Where’s Jill?” asked Arlene.

  “Already inside, having breakfast,” he said. “We should join her. Afterward, we’ll receive our briefing.”

  It had been a long, long time since I’d eaten pancakes, with real maple syrup yet. I didn’t think I’d be able to get coffee in Salt Lake City, but there was plenty of it for those with the morning caffeine monkey on their back. This was a pretty trivial monster in the grand scheme of things.

  And then we got down to business. We returned to the ops room from the day before. The President was waiting for us dressed in a conservative black suit. He could’ve passed as an undertaker, not the most inspiring image to send us off to California.

  “The entire state of California is in enemy hands,” he said, then led us over to a map of the relevant states. Red lines marked all the existing train tracks. “There used to be a high speed train between L. A. and Salt Lake City. We destroyed the train to prevent the aliens from sending us a cargo of themselves. I refuse to refer to those creatures as soldiers. We also thought the train might be used to send us an atomic bomb.”

  “Would they even know how to use the trains?” asked Arlene.

  “You fought them, didn’t you? They can use anything we can. Machinery is machinery. It offends me how they used our own, God-given atomic weapons against us. We are fortunate the radiation and poisons have not contaminated this area. God has intervened.” Atomic, not nuclear; an interesting word choice.

  “We’ll be going into radiation?” asked Jill. She had not thought of this until now.

  “You’ll be entering undestroyed areas, and our scientists tell us that the invaders have neutralized much of the fallout in the areas they control.”