Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 27 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

BOOK V

SCOTT AND THE SHIP

It was raining the day that they came to the ruins, which was nothing really new. It had been raining off and on for several days, but this was a whole new kind of rain. Dawn came, nearly as dark as dusk, and the wind that came with it was almost a warm one. The rain alternated between tiny pellets as harsh as hail and fat blobs of icewater that plastered Amber’s hair to her scalp and wormed freezing trickles underneath her clothes.

Walking in the rain was bad enough, but on this day, there were also hills to contend with. Not tall ones, but very steep and rocky as hell beneath the tangle of creepers and thorns that covered them. All day long, they trudged up and down, hunched against the weather, stumbling and swearing but otherwise not speaking. Throughout the morning, the clouds pressed claustrophobically close, smothering them with wet slaps of wind to make their already uneven footing even more treacherous, but when the dim smudge of the sun reached its highest point, the clouds suddenly lifted, as if Meoraq’s God had chosen to maliciously swoop back a curtain and show them their options.

Door Number One was the southwest, the direction of the odd, warm wind and its icy rain, where they could all see the real storm not just growing on the horizon, but filling it, overfilling it, seemingly motionless but as solid a thing as the land it crawled upon. In the east, Door Number Two opened half a dozen needle-thin rays of light over a crumbling sprawl of what her eyes tried to see first as stones, then as giant trees, before finally showing her buildings.

The city had been huge in its day, straddling both sides of what might be a picturesque river, if all the rain hadn’t turned it into this swollen, frothing nightmare. Most of the bridges that had joined the city together had fallen in, but at least two appeared to be all right, from this distance anyway. As for the city itself, it too had mostly fallen in. Grass grew right over the crumbled remains, forming hundreds more of those steep hills they’d been climbing all day. Toward the middle of the ruins, these hills grew taller, sprouting eroded chunks of masonry and metal, and occasionally whole walls held together by the small prairie trees that had rooted themselves in windows and along broken ledges. And here and there among the centermost section of the ruins were pockets of shocking normalcy where the roads were not only cleared and the buildings sound, but the lights were on.

Bluish lights.

Electric lights.

Amber had stopped walking when these two tableaus revealed themselves, and she had been staring back and forth between them for some time before she realized that everyone else had stopped too. On every face, she saw the same bewildered apprehension, as if both choices were equally disturbing.

Even Meoraq had stopped, she saw. He stood motionless ahead of everyone else, his spines forward and one hand toying at the hilt of the knife that hung around his neck while his gaze moved from east to west and back again. One by one, all heads turned to watch him. They waited, some drawing up into familiar groups, to hold their own low conversations until he came to a decision.

At length, he raised his hand, beckoning without bothering to look at them, and started walking again. From that first step, it was obvious he had no intention of taking them to the ruins. He was instead turning them south, not quite straight at the storm but certainly not away from it.

The murmurs gusted at once into a wave of alarmed babble. Nicci clasped onto Amber’s hand. Scott gestured for everyone to stand still even though no one—not even Amber herself—had made any attempt to follow, and quickly caught up with Meoraq. Amber couldn’t hear what was said, but it didn’t appear to go the way either one of them wanted. When Meoraq started moving again—south—Scott turned around.

“Okay, people, listen up!” he shouted, clapping his hands a few times. “We’re going down into that town there.”

Meoraq stopped and looked back at him, his head cocked in what Amber was coming to understand more and more was never a gesture of curiosity on a lizardman. Sometimes there was amusement in that look and sometimes irritation, but regardless of what emotion accompanied it, it was always a warning, always the way he silently said, ‘Stop and think about what you’re doing,’ usually with some variation of ‘you insufferable human’ at the end. Amber gave Nicci’s hand a squeeze and got a little closer.

“We’ve got plenty of time before the storm gets here,” Scott was calling, oblivious to the stare at his back. “Everybody relax. Let’s just stay close and keep moving. The storm will be over before we know it, but there’s no reason—” He paused and amended, “No good reason we can’t wait it out where it’s dry. Let’s go.”

People murmured in a relieved way, not without a few nervous glances at the distant storm, and drew themselves back into their sprawling approximation of a marching line.

“He doesn’t look happy,” Nicci whispered.

Meoraq had moved exactly one muscle: the one it took to lower his spines.

Scott waved at him gallantly. Lead on, O faithful native guide.

Meoraq’s head took on a distinctly deeper tilt. “God’s own Word forbids His children from dwelling again within the cities of the Ancients.”

“We’re not going to live there,” Scott said, rolling his eyes back at the others and letting everyone know how patient he was being. “We’re just going to hike through—”

“No.”

“—and wait out this storm where it’s dry—”

“You will obey the Word as it was given.”

“—and then we’ll use one of those perfectly good bridges—”

“You will obey me.”

“—to safely cross the river instead of swim it, which is what you apparently have in mind.”

“Watch your next words to me, S’kot, or I will show you exactly what I have in mind at this moment.”

Scott’s broad smile faltered. Meoraq’s stare did not.

Behind them, a low grumble of thunder reminded everyone of the storm slumping inevitably toward them. Scott took advantage of the distraction and deliberately started walking toward the ruins. A few people followed. Then a few more, breaking away in larger and larger groups until they were all trailing in Scott’s commanding wake. Nicci tugged at Amber’s hand once, then let go and walked quickly away to join the other women. Meoraq watched them go the way another man might watch a parade, but if Amber thought for even a moment that he was annoyed by this defection, that ended when he looked at her.

He was furious.

With a sigh, Amber trudged over to him. He took her arm and turned around, but that was as far as she was going and when he felt it, he stopped too.

He didn’t look at her again, didn’t speak, didn’t take his hand off her. She stood quietly behind him and watched the yellow come in on the side of his throat and fade slowly out again.

She said, “If it was you or Scott, you know it’d be you. You know that.”

His head turned, not enough to look at her.

“But you’re asking me to choose between you and my sister. And that’s not a choice.”

His head turned the other way, turned fully, staring after Nicci.

“Please don’t leave us here,” said Amber.

His hand on her arm tightened minutely, then let go. He started after Scott and the others, taking long strides but hardly moving, so that he seemed almost to be gliding through the grass like a hunting cat. She could not help tensing when he came up behind Scott, but he simply moved on ahead and took the lead.

Scott smirk was obvious even in his voice. “Glad you decided to join us.”

“Don’t talk to me,” said Meoraq curtly.

“You need to work on this attitude of yours. There’s no reason we—”

Meoraq swung around and slapped Scott clear off his feet, sending him crashing into Dag and Crandall. Then he drew his hooked sword. Without a word, he turned back around and kept walking.

After that, no one said anything. It made the mood, already low, that much worse, which in turn made the landscape around them seem even bleaker than it was. To Amber, the fallen towers looked like tombstones in some forgotten cemetery, and why shouldn’t they? She knew now that they had been walking across the burial mounds of this city all morning. For hours. And a city that size didn’t just curl up and die on its own. Something had killed it.

An unnecessarily theatrical turn of phrase, perhaps, especially considering the already bleak landscape, but no sooner had it taken its crawl through Amber’s brain than it was underlined by the first hint of rot in the air.

She wasn’t sure at first. No one else seemed to have noticed, or at least, no one else had reacted. The wind was at their backs (and pushing the storm steadily toward them) and the smell came and went with the force of its gusts. But the closer they got to the ruins, the stronger that smell became, until Amber finally turned to her sister in some desperation and asked if she could smell it too.

“It’s nothing,” said Nicci. And in a sudden, angry rush, “Stop trying to make trouble all the time! You always do this!”

Startled, Amber stopped walking. Nicci did not. If anything, she went faster. Even after Amber started moving again, the distance between them kept growing, until Nicci was up with the women from the Resource Tent and Amber was alone.

‘So let it go,’ she thought, watching some sympathetic Manifestor respond to whatever Nicci was saying with a sidelong, walking hug. ‘Let it go and she’ll come back. She always does.’

But something stank. Something was dead and rotting. Something big.

“Doesn’t anyone else smell that?” Amber called.

Immediately, half a dozen Manifestors groaned at her to shut up, but Maria turned around and called back, “God, yes! I feel like I’m going to puke!”

“It’s nothing,” said Scott.

Meoraq, his sword still drawn, threw a flat, unforgiving glance back at him.

Scott moved over to put a few more people between them. “Probably a dead deer,” he told Maria. “It won’t be as bad once we get into town.”

If Maria had a reply apart from the scornful look she gave him, Amber couldn’t hear it, but no one else said anything.

The grass began to thin. There was pavement beneath, so weathered that it looked more like gravel poured out and glued in place, but obviously pavement. A street. The hills to either side got steeper and lumpier as the grass receded, until suddenly they weren’t hills at all, but heaps of broken concrete, metal, glass, and all the wreckage one might reasonably expect to see when a city block has been demolished.

Except that the streets had been cleared. Had to have been. Buildings did not fall straight down and pile themselves up like that, leaving the weathered pavement beyond the curb largely uncluttered. And as they traveled deeper into the ruins, the streets not only got wider and cleaner, they also began to show signs of repair. Likewise, the devastation lining the streets gradually changed from piles of debris to hollow shells, missing one, two, or even three walls, but upright and recognizable buildings. And then even those were behind them, and they were there in one of those lamplit pockets which had looked so much like it might still be inhabited when viewed from a distance.

Scott stopped, so everyone stopped, bunching up there at the first intersection where things had gone from knocked down but cleaned up to empty but sort of functional. Meoraq alone moved on, a sword in each hand and eyes in constant motion, to check each of the crossing streets and peer through each broken window. He had almost made it back to them when Scott suddenly cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered out a hello. The wind, greatly deflected by the buildings now surrounding them, ate the echoes after one or two bounces, but that was enough.

No one came out to greet them and although the fine hairs on the back of Amber’s neck were standing straight up and prickling almost painfully, she got no real sense of being watched. There was movement—furry things scurried in the shadows, considerably smaller and less threatening than the rats Amber had grown up with—but no life. The city was dead; the last of its concrete bones, rotting; and whatever was keeping the power on and the streets swept probably did not want its rest disturbed.

Meoraq was staring at Scott, his head cocked, his throat striped with bright, bright yellow, silent.

“I think maybe we should move on.” Scott looked back at his loyal lieutenants. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s creepy as fuck,” Crandall replied with half a shrug, “but creepy won’t kill us.”

Eric seconded that with a firm nod. “That storm is going to hit us before we even get near one of those bridges, much less check it out and see if it’s safe to cross. Any salvage you expected to find here is long gone, but even if shelter is the only thing we get out of this place, that’s good enough for me. Having said that—” He glanced up, up, and up at the nearest tower. “—I am not comfortable bedding down right here.”

“Plus, it stinks,” Maria announced.

“Miss Alverez, this is an official debriefing, so please be quiet,” Scott told her, and to the rest of them, announced, “For now, we’re going to keep heading for the bridges, but we’ll be keeping our eyes open for a good spot to take cover. Don’t worry, people. We’ll all stay dry tonight.”

Exclamations of relief met this rather lofty promise, but looking around, Amber could see doubt for the first time in a number of faces as they eyed the height of the broken towers enveloping them and perhaps reflected on the fact that rain was not necessarily the worst thing that could fall on a person’s head.

But Scott had decided and there was no point in arguing. He chose a street and headed out. Eric followed him and Maria followed Eric, and that started the first group, which started the next one, and pretty soon they were all walking. Even Amber, so what did that say?

* * *

After so many days struggling through hip-high grass, wading streams and climbing rocky slopes, a little stroll down the street should have been an easy feat. Distance, like time, could be subjective without a mechanical means of assessing it, but Amber knew they couldn’t be much more than a mile from the first of the bridges and it was taking all day to get there. The ground still rose and fell, but gently, in city-hills that had been smoothed and paved and was unquestionably easier on Amber’s feet than Meoraq’s wildlands. It wasn’t what they were walking on that slowed them now, but what they were walking through.

It wasn’t quite silent. Passing too close to the dark shops made the windows sputter and light up, playing out the corroded remains of advertisements for whatever products had once been on display, but few of those recordings played for more than a few seconds before dying out and one of the windows shattered from the effort. On another street, the remains of what had obviously been a restaurant groaned out some of the daily specials and wheezed its door open at them, showing anyone who looked in the desiccated carcass of a saoq who had apparently wandered in and been unable to get out. Several furry heads poked curiously out of the nest that had been built in its dried belly.

When the whole crowd of them stopped at an empty intersection so that Scott could ‘get his bearings,’ the remnants of some ancient public address system fired up and blatted out noise. What little she could make out through all the audial corrosion were mostly unknown words, peppered with odd, random-seeming numbers or verbs. The longer she had to stand there and listen to its tortured, droning gibberish, the easier it became to imagine how the blanks could be filled: system pressure rising warning warning severe storm watch in effect until nine hours and three error trafficeye six reports all lanes open on Cinoq Bridge please drive safely error trafficeye seven reports error error error no lanes visible on Jaavi Bridge please drive with caution the current time is three hours and sixteen contagion risk seven percent error error threat level high but stable tune to error error error for news and updates—

“This way,” Scott decided, and set off.

Amber lingered as the group moved on, reaching out to touch the cracked, dead window of a kiosk on the curb. It flickered and came on, spilling writing and static across its face until the whole window was filled and then going black again after voicing the grim message, “No response. No arrival,” in a dead, metallic voice. She shivered and moved around to the next window, reaching.

Meoraq caught her wrist. “Don’t.”

“What happened to this place?” she asked as they went together after Scott and the others.

He shrugged his spines, but they snapped pretty flat when he was done. He looked okay and he sounded okay, but he was still pissed, clearly.

“Do you even know where we are?”

“It was a city once, is that what you need to hear? No longer. The Ancients fell and all of their works fell with them. There is nothing to find here.”

“That smell is getting worse!” Maria called, trying to cover her face in her sleeve. “Can’t we just leave?”

“We are leaving!” Scott said irritably. “We’re just…taking a shortcut!”

“How can this be a shortcut when you don’t know where we’re going?”

“I know it’s shorter to go through something than to go around.” Scott gave Eric something of a dirty look and turned up another street, seemingly at random. It took them to the bottom of a long hill lined on both sides with clean, burned-out buildings.

“Oh my God, really? Uphill?”

Eric put his arm around Maria’s shoulder. “Ease up, baby. We’ll be out of here in just a sec.”

“You’ve been saying that forever. God, what is that smell?!”

Amber tried to exchange glances with Meoraq, but he was looking down another street. “We’re not going to see a huge pile of bodies over that hill, are we?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been here before.”

“But is that what a huge pile of bodies smells like?”

“It would depend on what they died of,” he said, sounding distracted and a little annoyed with her, but not particularly bothered by the idea.

“You don’t believe in ghosts on this planet, do you?” said Amber, only half-kidding. At his puzzled glance, she added, “Dead people…walking around after they’ve died? Ghosts?”

“Ah.” He glanced down another side-street. “Yes, we do.”

“You do?”

He grunted.

They walked.

“Do you think this place is haunted?” Amber asked, just as a soft, cool hand slipped into hers.

She didn’t scream, but what she did was bad enough: grabbing at Meoraq’s arm, who already had a sword in his other hand and aimed over her shoulder at what turned out to be just Nicci.

His head cocked. His sword did not immediately lower.

“You scared the ever-loving Christ out of me!” Amber snapped.

“I was just…I only…” Tears, the big, slow kind, dribbled down her baby sister’s pale cheeks one at a time and dropped off her chin. “I don’t like this place,” she whispered. “Can’t I please come walk with you?”

Amber took her hand at once, pulling her into an awkward hug as Meoraq slowly let his sword-arm drop. “Yeah, of course you can, you know you can.”

“You’re always yelling at me!” Nicci wept.

Meoraq flared his mouth open at Nicci’s shaking back and exhaled soundlessly through his teeth.

“I don’t mean it,” said Amber, glaring at him. “You know I don’t mean it. We’re sisters, Nicci. I love you. You’re all I’ve got.”

Thunder clapped and rolled, not on top of them yet, but close enough to echo in the empty streets. Nicci jumped in her arms and wailed even louder.

“And now it’s going to rain,” groaned Maria, somewhere at the head of the crowd. “Perfect.”

“Baby, please. You know I love you, but please.”

At the top of the hill, Scott suddenly stopped walking.

Maria threw up her hands. “Fine, I’m shutting up!”

Scott didn’t answer. He didn’t even turn around right away and when he did, he looked greyish. He looked at his people, and then he looked past all of them at Meoraq. He didn’t say anything.

“Stay here,” Meoraq said and ran, jostling people roughly aside and reaching the top in maybe half a minute. He saw what there was on the other side. His spines came forward. He slowed to a walk, sheathing his sword.

So it couldn’t be that bad. Amber gave Nicci a squeeze and let go of her. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

By the time she got to the top of the hill, a crowd had formed, thick enough to shield whatever they were looking at from view, but loose enough that she could slip through it without pushing too many people. She heard Scott (who sounded just as grey as he’d looked) asking if this was bad, if they were in trouble. Then she saw it for herself.

It wasn’t a pile of bodies after all.

It was a pit of them.

It looked like it was miles across, although it probably wasn’t. It was just the shock of seeing something so big thrown down in the middle of the city which had followed such neat, orderly lines. It was perfectly round in shape, with a raised lip of broken pavement all the way around it. The sides appeared smooth but uneven, melted. It had partially-filled with water—if it could be assumed that black foulness had started out as water—and although that might smell bad enough on its own, there could not have been less than a hundred bloated corpses mushed together along the sloping sides.

Somehow worse than what was in the pit was what was around it: small triangular flags had been set around the lip, outlining the whole thing in a hundred shades of fluttering yellow. Whatever had caused this crater had happened long ago and the animals might be falling in on their own, but someone had planted those flags.

Staring at them, trying to estimate how many hundreds or even thousands of flags she might be looking at, it dawned on Amber that the only reason she was able to see the pit at all was because virtually everything between it and the top of this hill had been flattened. There were no more buildings down there, no kiosks, no lamps—only the grey crazyquilt of their foundations and the nice, clean streets that ran between them. It was not perfectly flat; the ground buckled at regular intervals, forming concentric rings around the pit, almost like ripples in a pond after someone has dropped a rock in it.

‘Or a bomb,’ thought Amber, creeping forward in sick fascination.

Meoraq pulled her back, started to push her toward the crowd, then yanked her around and gaped at her, all his spines up and quivering for a split-second before they slapped loudly flat. “I told you to stay where you were!”

“I, uh, thought you were talking to Nicci.”

He thrust a finger in her face, leaning close enough that she could feel his breath against her skin. “That is a lie and it had better be the only one you ever tell me!”

Amber looked back over her shoulder at the pit…the crater…and felt Meoraq blow a fuming snort against her throat. “What killed them?” she asked, eyeing the bodies. From here, she couldn’t be sure, but she thought they were all animals. She just didn’t know yet if that made her feel better or not. “Did they…Did they just fall in?”

“I don’t know.”

“Shouldn’t we go check it out?”

A flash of far-off lightning made his red eyes spark. “Why?”

“I want to make sure the animals fell in and then died instead of, you know, the other way around.” She gave the pit another backwards glance, as if to make sure it wasn’t creeping any closer. “And I want to make sure they’re all animals. And not people. Especially if it was the other way around.”

“I’ll go with her,” said Crandall, stepping forward.

Meoraq immediately swung her around and behind him, as if Crandall had been offering to cut her throat instead of walk with her down to the crater, but when the thunder caught up to the lightning, he seemed to shake out of it some. He didn’t let go of her, but he grunted and raised his other hand to rub at the yellow patches on his throat. “No one is going anywhere.”

“Meoraq—” she began.

“Insufferable human, I said no! Mark me, if there are men who feed that place of death, they are men to stay well away from. If it is a trap of Gann’s making, so too should you stay clear. And if it still holds the poison made at the time of the Fall, we are too damned close already!”

“Okay! Jesus, okay! Now will you please let go of me?”

“No!” he shouted.

Thunder groaned.

“Okay,” said Scott. He still looked a little grey, but he sounded more like himself. He turned around, raising his hands to get everyone’s attention. “Okay, I’ve made my decision—”

Meoraq hissed, then clapped his free hand to his throat and started rubbing again. Amber could hear him muttering under his breath as Scott listed all the reasons why everyone was still perfectly safe but they should all get the hell out of here as quickly as possible. Meoraq muttering at himself was hardly a new phenomenon, but he didn’t seem to be praying this time. He was counting.

“Are you okay?” Amber whispered.

He looked at her and for a second—a very long second—there was absolutely no recognition in his eyes. Then there was, but it wasn’t a better moment. His head tipped slightly; his spines flicked forward; his hand stayed knotted in her shirt and even clenched a little tighter.

“Am I in trouble?” she asked, trying to laugh.

He didn’t smile.

“You look like you’re going to bite me.”

His gaze shifted to her shoulder, lingered, and came slowly back to her face.

Another flashpop of lightning distracted him before Amber could make the leap from concerned to nervous. He looked up as the thunder rolled, a whole lot closer than it had been, and closed his eyes while the wind blew over him. He took a deep breath. He took another one. He let her go.

The urge to run was extremely strong in those first few seconds.

“All right.” Having consoled the masses, Scott was back and at his most in-charge. “I think we should go around this, um…new development and keep our distance as much as we can.”

Meoraq grunted. His eyes were still shut.

“So what we’re going to do is, we’re going to turn around and go that way for a bit, see if we can’t find a building that’s more or less intact and hole up for the night.”

“What, here?” asked Amber.

Meoraq began to count again, very softly.

“Do you see that storm blowing this way, Miss Bierce?”

She looked. Lightning obediently forked.

“That’s going to catch us before we’re out of this place. No one’s going to want to walk in that.”

“Want to…” Meoraq murmured. He took a very deep breath, held it, let it out, and began to count again.

“So we need to find some shelter, preferably before it starts dumping directly on our heads. All I want from you, Meoraq, is a little help finding our way out of here without accidentally getting any closer to that, um…thing.”

The yellow patches on Meoraq’s throat brightened fast and slowly faded. “Accidentally…” he breathed.

“Why can’t we just go back the way we came?” Amber asked. “There were lots of buildings back there that were still standing.”

“Because I don’t want to lose ground, Miss Bierce, and I’m not going to stand here and argue with you. All I want right now is for the liz…Meoraq here to do his job.”

Amber cast a cautious glance up at Meoraq to see how he was taking the news that he was now in Scott’s employment. Meoraq did not appear to have reacted in any way. He breathed, counted slowly to six and started over again. The yellow stripes on his throat fluxed, but seemed to be dimming overall.

Scott waited, growing first an impatient frown and then a puzzled one and finally the worried one that Amber had been working on for some time. “Is he okay?” he asked in a low voice.

“I don’t know.”

The storm crawled steadily closer. The smell of the crater stayed pretty much the same. The people watching them began to whisper at each other.

“Okay,” said Scott at last. “You stay here with him and I’ll take the others—”

Meoraq tipped his head forward and opened his eyes. He looked at Scott with a solemn, vaguely curious expression as the rain came down harder and the lightning worked its way closer. He said, “I really don’t like you,” in the way of a man who has suspected this for some time but only recently found it to be true and perhaps worthy of some response.

Scott took a step back. So did Amber.

Meoraq started walking back down the hill. He didn’t tell them to follow, didn’t look to see if they needed to be told. He showed no sign that he even saw the humans shuffling out of his path, just marched himself through them and onward.

“What’s his problem?” Scott demanded, but he made sure to ask it well out of earshot.

“We are,” said Amber, her heart sinking.

“Can’t you talk to him?”

“And tell him what?” she asked. “That he’s not doing his job?”

“I didn’t mean it like that. Besides, you pissed him off before I even opened my mouth.”

“Yeah. I know.”

They started walking together, well behind all the rest of them, side by side and silent. The rain came—fat, infrequent drops that became a pouring downfall in seconds, plastering her hair to her skull and her clothes to her body—and the thunder got louder and longer. Lightning came in spears and sheets and sometimes just going off in crazed sky-broad flashes deep behind the clouds. It was going to be a bad one, all right, and she guessed it was silly to camp in it when there were all these empty buildings lying around.

“Truce,” Scott said, angrily enough to make the offer a lie at its inception. “Truce, okay? Look, Bierce, I have got to know…Is this guy safe to have around?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t even think about it.”

“It doesn’t do a whole lot of good to ask when you don’t trust me.”

“Why should I? I know you and I know what the two of you are doing,” he added in a petulant sneer. “I don’t know why I thought that you might actually put the safety of your own kind—”

“What the hell do you mean, you know what we’re doing?”

“Don’t even try to deny it, Bierce. He doesn’t. The only thing that matters is whether we can trust him to look out for us or not, because the last few days, all I’ve seen is an armed, dangerous alien getting increasingly hostile and unbalanced.”