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"You're such a help. No, I mean it."
He saw that she was serious and shrugged. "I don't know, angel. We're people, that's all. We have a kid and a place in the. world.... I don't know what that means." He gri
She dimmed the lights with her watchphone. She didn't say anything more, and in a few minutes he was asleep.
The baby woke her, whimpering. This time Laura managed to force herself from bed. David sprawled himself over, into her space. Fine, she thought. Let him sleep in the wet spot.
She got the baby up, changed her diaper. This had to be a sign of something, she thought sourly. Surely avant-garde rebel enemies of the system never had to change diapers.
Laura warmed Loretta's formula and tried to feed her, but she wouldn't be comforted. She was kicking and. arching her spine and wadding up her little face... . She was a very good-tempered baby, in daylight at least, but if she woke at night she became a bag of nerves.
The sound wasn't her hungry cry, or her lonely cry, but tremulous, high-pitched noises that said she didn't know what to do with herself. Laura decided to take her out on the walkway. That usually calmed her down. It looked like a nice night, anyway. She shrugged into her night-robe.
A three-quarter moon was up. Laura walked barefoot on the damp boards. Moonlight on the surf. It had a numinous look. It was so beautiful that it was almost fu
She walked back and forth, crooning to Loretta, whose wails had finally died into crotchety whimpers. Laura thought about her mother. Mothers and daughters. This time around it would be different.
A sudden prickling sensation washed over her. Without warning, it turned to fear. She looked up, feeling startled, and saw something she didn't believe.
It perched in midair in the moonlight, humming. An hour- glass, cut by a shimmering disk. Laura shrieked aloud. The apparition hung there for a moment, as if defying her to believe in it. Then it tilted in midair and headed out to sea. In a few moments she had lost it.
The baby was too scared to cry. Laura had crushed her to her breasts in panic, and it seemed to have scared the baby into some primeval reflex. A reflex from cave times when voodoo horrors stalked outside the firelight, things that smelled milk and knew young flesh was tender. A spasm of trembling shook Laura from head to foot.
One of the guest room doors opened. Moonlight glinted on the gray hair of Winston Stubbs. A shaman's dreadlocks. He stepped out onto the boardwalk, wearing only his jeans. His grizzled chest had the sunken look of age, but he was strong.
And he was someone else.
"I hear a scream," he said. "What's wrong, daughter?"
"I saw something," Laura said. Her voice shook. "It scared me. I'm sorry."
"I was awake," he said. "I hear the baby outside. Us old people, I-and-I don't sleep much. A prowler, maybe?" He sca
Shock began seeping out of her. "I saw something in the air," she said, more firmly. "A kind of machine, I think."
"A machine," said Stubbs. "Not a ghost."
"No."
"You look like a duppy come ready to grab your child, girl," Stubbs said. "A machine, though.... I don't like that. There are machines and machines, seen? Could be a spy."
"A spy," Laura said. It was an explanation, and it got her brain working again. "I don't know. I've seen drone aircraft.
People use them to crop-dust. But they have wings. They're not like flying saucers."
"You saw a flying saucer?" Stubbs said, impressed. "Cru- cial! Where did it go?"
"Let's go in," Laura said, shivering. "You don't want to see it, Mr. Stubbs."
"But I do see," said Stubbs. He pointed. Laura turned to look.
The thing was sweeping toward them, from over the water.
It whirred. It. swept over the beach at high speed. As it closed on them, it opened fire. A chattering gout of bullets slammed into Stubbs's chest and belly, flinging him against the wall.
His body bloomed open under the impact.
The flying thing veered off above the roof, its whine dying as it slipped into darkness. Stubbs slid to the boards of the walkway. His dreadlocks had slipped askew. They were a wig. Below them, his skull was bald.
Laura lifted one hand to her cheek. Something had stung her there. Little bits of sand, she thought vaguely. Little bits of sand that had jumped from those impact holes. Those pockmarks in the wall of her house, where the bullets had passed through the old man. The holes looked dark in the moonlight. They were full of his blood.
3
Luara watched as they took the body away. The dead
Mr. Stubbs. Smiling, cheerful Winston Stubbs, all winking piratical wickedness, now a small bald corpse with its chest smashed open. Laura leaned on the wet walkway rail- ing, watching as the ambulance van cleared the cordon of lights. Unhappy city cops in wet yellow slickers ma
Laura turned and pushed through the lobby door. Inside, the Lodge felt empty, a havoc area. All the guests were gone.
The Europeans had abandoned their luggage in their panic flight. The Singaporeans, too, had slunk off rapidly during the confusion.
Laura walked upstairs to the tower office. It was just after nine in the morning. Within the office, Debra Emerson prere- corded calls for the Central Committee, her quiet murmur going over the details of the killing for the fourth time. The fax machine whined on copy.
Laura poured herself coffee, slopping some onto the table.
She sat down and picked up the terrorists' publicity release.
The assassins' statement had come online at the Rizome
Lodge only ten minutes after the killing. She had read it three times already, with stu
F.A.C.T. DIRECT ACTION BULLETIN-SPECIAL
RELEASE TO AGENCIES OF LAW ENFORCEMENT
At 07:21 GMT September 12, 2023, designated com- mandos of the Free Army of Counter-Terrorism carried out sentence on Winston Gamaliel Stubbs, a so-called corporate officer in the piratical and subversive organized- crime unit known as the United Bank of Grenada. The oppressed people of Grenada will rejoice at this long- delayed act of justice against the drug-ru
Marxist junta which has usurped the legitimate political aspirations of the island's law-abiding population.
The sentence of execution took place at the Rizome
Lodge of Galveston, Texas, U.S.A. (telex GALVEZRIG, ph. (713) 454-9898), where Rizome Industries Group,
Inc., an American-based multinational, was engaged in criminal conspiracy with the Grenadian malefactors.
We accuse the aforesaid corporation, Rizome Indus- tries Group, Inc., of attempting to reach a cowardly accommodation with these criminal groups, in an im- moral and illegal protection scheme which deserves the harshest condemnation from state, national, and interna- tional law enforcement agencies. With this act of short- sighted greed, Rizome Industries Group, Inc., has cynically betrayed the efforts of legitimate institutions, both private and public, to contain the menace of crimi- nally supported state terrorism.
It is the long-sustained policy of the Free Army of
Counter-Terrorism (FACT) to strike without mercy at the cryptototalitarian vermin who pervert doctrines of national sovereignty. Behind its mask of national legal- ity, the Grenada United Bank has provided financial, data, and intelligence support to a nexus of pariah orga- nizations. The executed felon, Winston Stubbs, has in particular maintained close personal involvement with such notorious groups as the Tanzanian Knights of Jah, the Inadin Cultural Revolution, and the Cuban Capitalist Cells.