Invasion полностью

Joshua walked onto the streets and around the building. The women – which basically seemed to mean every woman over ten years old – were emerging from the other side of the massive building. The warehouse was nowhere near large enough to hold all of the citizens of Austin – although everyone knew someone who’d been killed in one of the bouts of fighting – and he’d heard that there were dozens of such places, all around the city. The aliens didn’t mess around…and he’d heard rumours that children – defined as anyone under ten years old – were being taken for special instruction. The Adair children, thankfully, were too old…but there were hundreds of others. No one seemed quite sure what the aliens were teaching them, but Joshua had determined to get to the bottom of it. Blogging from an occupied city was rapidly starting to lose its shine.

“Joshua,” a voice called. He looked up to see Loretta running towards him. He’d met her by sheer accident, a girl who actually had better computer skills than he had – which wouldn’t have been difficult – and was willing to assist him in navigating the remains of the internet. “How was your day?”

In Joshua’s admittedly sexist view, Loretta looked very good when she was at prayer, alien-style, but he knew better than to say that out loud. “Painful,” he said, rubbing his knees. Muslims, he’d decided, had it easy. They got to sit back. The thought reminded him of a group of Baptists whom the aliens had discovered holding prayer meetings…and executed them publicly for heresy. “And how was yours?”

“You old fogy, you,” Loretta said, slipping her arm through his. “I swear – a single twinge of pain and you men just curl up and die.”

The thought wasn't as amusing as it seemed. The alien religion was complicated – as were most human religions – but one thing was clear; the alien females chose their mates. There were details that seemed to be beyond human understanding, at least as the aliens had explained them – and he’d gotten the impression that the aliens hadn’t wanted to discuss them with their human pupils – but it was clear that the women ran the alien families. The men might have been the breadwinners, insofar as alien society had that term, but they didn’t call the shots at home. They might be divorced at any moment if they didn’t behave themselves.

It had led to a whole series of new understandings. The alien society was full of Mrs Grundy-types. They would watch everyone from the cradle to the grave and they wouldn’t hesitate to report any misbehaviour. It reminded him of how Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia had encouraged their children to report their parents for anything remotely criminal – as defined by the state – and the horrors of 1984. If that was what they were teaching the children, they would have made progress on completely changing human society.

“Bitch,” he said, trying to avoid thinking about the future. They were just two lovebirds out for a stroll, as far as anyone knew. The aliens continued to snatch people off the streets if they were armed, or carry out the occasional random search, but otherwise they tended to leave the human civilians alone. They were trapped by their dependency on food and water from the aliens, now that the aliens had taken control of the latter. The entire supply of food left in the apartment, he’d calculated, would last them barely more than a week. “What do you want to do now?”

“Well, I thought we’d go for a big expensive lunch and then an afternoon at a swanky hotel,” Loretta announced, mischievously. “I suppose we’ll have to settle for a walk, a feed at the kitchen, and then perhaps an afternoon at the computer.”

“No arguments,” Joshua decided. If nothing else, having Loretta on his arm lead to a lot of envious glances. She was blonde, bubbly, and looked around nineteen years old, a tall girl with great legs. He wasn’t sure what she saw in him when she could have had hundreds of boyfriends, but maybe it was the shared danger, the sense that they were getting back at the aliens, even in a small manner. Accurate information from inside the occupied zone would be vitally important to the entire human race. “Come on then, let’s go eat.”