Page 17 of Overgrowth
The flight attendants reappeared as soon as the plane touched down, walking the aisles to make sure no one had been bounced from their seat or decided to get up and go for their carry-on. If they noticed the phone still held in a death grip in my right hand, they didn’t say anything about it. It was impossible to say whether that was compassion or a lack of comprehension. The pilot had sounded confused and annoyed. There was an excellent chance the crew didn’t know who had forced this stop.
Or maybe it wasn’t us. Maybe it really was some sort of fuel problem, and we were going to be just fine. I would happily apologize to Mandy for frightening her, if that was the case. I would get down on my knees and swear to being the worst housemate in the history of time. If they let us walk away from this…
“Folks, I’m going to have to ask you all to stay seated for the duration of our stop,” said the captain over the loudspeaker, his voice wavering. “We’re about to dock at our temporary gate, and we’re going to have a quick visit from local law enforcement.”
A murmur broke out around us, people looking at each other and then at their fellow passengers, trying to figure out who could have attracted the attention of the police. Jeff, with his bandaged face and his scowl, attracted more stares than Graham and I did, but nothing lingering enough to mean he’d been recognized.
“What the fuck ?”
Toni’s voice was like an icepick. I flinched. On some level, I’d been hoping she’d stay asleep until the plane was back in the air. Maybe they would have left her as they pulled us off, assuming a slumbering astronomer was a waste of resources. Probably not, but as I was running out of pretty lies to tell myself, I’d been hopeful. I’d been so damn hopeful.
David shushed her, murmuring something I couldn’t hear above the ongoing rumble of the engines. Toni leaned back, giving him a stunned look which transformed into a scowl as she leaned forward and focused on the three of us.
“This is your fault,” she spat. Several other passengers turned to stare.
“You’re the one who released that damn signal,” said Jeff.
“I wouldn’t have needed to release it if you hadn’t decided to invade my fucking planet in the first place,” she countered. Her voice climbed with every word, until it felt as if the entire plane had turned to stare. I shrank back against Graham, less out of fear, and more in an attempt to get all those eyes off of me. I didn’t want to look at them. I didn’t want them to look at me. I wasn’t their business. I wasn’t their concern.
Cultural literacy again, I thought, half-nonsensically. I only know how to feel shame because I’ve spent so much time among these mammalian monkeys. It’s not fair.
I should have been striding onto their soil, ready to take it for my own, to spread the seed of my own garden across the universe, colonialism writ large and finally coming home to roost. Instead, I was quailing away from them, like one of the weakest of their kind, and I hated—
I stopped, embarrassment fading in the face of cold realization. Somewhere in the middle of all that, it had gone from “us” to “them.” There had always been an element of that, but now… now it was complete. I looked at the faces around me, and found no fellow-feeling, no urge to keep them or their planet safe.
If my loyalty to the species that had raised me was that fragile, Earth was doomed.
“Toni, calm down,” muttered David.
“No,” she said. “I will not calm down. None of us should be calming down.” She looked at me again, and winked. Broadly and blatantly winked.
Slowly, I began to realize what she was doing. “Jeff’s right,” I said loudly. “You’re the one who released that signal, and now we’re sitting ducks, waiting for the feds to sweep in and make us all disappear forever. What the hell, man?”
“Both of you, shut up,” snapped Graham. “We need to stay calm.”
We didn’t look like any popular ideas about terrorists, and we were yelling at each other about aliens, labeling ourselves comfortably as kooks—at least for now. When the authorities hauled us off this plane, everything we’d said was going to loom a lot larger in the minds of the people who’d been seated around us. Suddenly, going home and looking up that supposed message from space was going to be a lot more appealing. It would spread. Even if we vanished for a while, the signal would spread.
And I wanted it to spread. I wanted everyone in the world to hear it. That, too, was important to me, although I couldn’t have explained exactly why. I wanted to know that when the sky went dark with ships from another world, it wouldn’t be a surprise. Everyone would have been warned. Everyone would know .
Next to me, casually, Jeff unbuckled his belt. He looked at me and nodded. I swallowed hard and nodded back.
Never hesitating, never moving with any real urgency, Jeff slid out of his seat and started toward the back of the plane. No one moved to stop him. No one said anything. Not as he walked; not as he reached the bathroom; not as he slipped inside. We looked too normal, and the things we seemed to be concerned about were too strange. Taken together, it was reasonable for Jeff to be moving away from our little nexus of weirdness.
People didn’t believe in the invasion yet. That was going to change. Until then, we could use their unwillingness to accept what they’d been told was coming, at least long enough to give Jeff a fighting chance.
I had no idea what he could do to evade capture on an airplane, which seemed like the very definition of a closed system. Luckily, that wasn’t my problem anymore.
Unluckily, my problem had just walked in through the front door.
There were five of them, three in what looked like the uniform of the local police, the other two wearing black suits that could have come straight out of a Will Smith movie. We all stopped arguing to watch them warily. Maybe they weren’t here for us. Maybe we were going to be fine.
They walked down the aisle, two of them passing us by, while the other three stopped to look directly at us. My heart sank. We weren’t going to be fine.
“If you would come with us, please,” said the woman at the front of their small formation. She had skin a few shades darker than Jeff’s, with straight black hair pulled into a tight braid. She would have been beautiful, if she hadn’t been looking at me like I was some exciting new species of insect for her to dissect at her leisure.
“May we ask what this is about?” Graham couldn’t push himself in front of me, but he could sit up straighter and puff out his chest, all the hallmarks of the human male getting ready to defend his mate.
“You are being detained for questioning,” said the woman. “Please, don’t make this more difficult than it has to be. We’re prepared to use any necessary force.”
The unspoken threat was clear: if we made them use force in an enclosed space, people were going to get hurt, and it was going to be our fault, legally speaking. All we had to do was go quietly and no one would need to be any more inconvenienced than they already were.
“Why are you detaining us?” asked Graham loudly. “Is it because we listened to that signal from space? Are you here because aliens are real?”
The woman looked at him flatly. “Do you really feel the need to make a scene?”
One of the men grabbed me by the shoulders, hauling me to my feet. I squeaked as his fingers dug into my flesh, the sound a combination of pain and fright. He was hurting me. Maybe more importantly, he was putting the kind of pressure on my skin that could bruise—or tear. I had never been so aware of how fragile bodies can be.
If I was going to try to hide the damaged spot on my elbow long enough for us to get out of there, I needed to avoid additional injuries. That, more than anything, made me freeze rather than fighting against the hands of the man who held me.
On the other side of the aisle, goon number two was having considerably more trouble getting David to his feet. David was the larger of the pair of them, and while he wasn’t shouting like Graham, he wasn’t coming quietly, either. He seemed to have planted his feet in such a way that they had become inseparably bonded to the floor of the plane, creating a wall of flesh and scientist that would not be swayed. Toni…
Toni was crawling over the back of the seat in front of her, ignoring the protestations of the man sitting there. Well, that was one way to get around the problem. Graham was still loudly objecting to this treatment, and I was trying not to yank myself away from the man who held me. Yanking was another thing that could tear skin.
Was I going to spend the rest of my life feeling this fragile? I sincerely hoped not.
Toni made it over the back of the seat. The man shouted as she landed on him. The woman from the government snapped her fingers, and the two men who’d stayed with her moved to recover Toni before she could make it out of the aisle.
“Fascists!” shouted Toni. “Government goons! My father will hear about this!”
“Your father has already been notified of your un-American activities,” said the woman. She sounded almost bored, like this sort of thing happened every day. “If you would please calm yourselves, we can finish this unfortunate encounter with a modicum of dignity.”
David punched one of the officers in the nose. The man shouted. The woman sighed.
“Or perhaps we can make things worse. How unexpected.” She didn’t sound like it was unexpected. As she pulled the Taser out of her pocket, her expression betrayed nothing more than mild irritation, like she’d been hoping she could resolve this without doing anything that was going to wind up on social media. I could see phones out all around us, and many of them were in the hands of teenagers. That was a good thing. Even if the adults got their phones confiscated, the teens would be smart enough, and swift enough, to squirrel away at least a few in backpacks and seatback pockets. This would get out. Unless they wanted to detain the entire plane, this would get out.
“Please,” I gasped. “Please, what did we do? I just want to go home! I just—”
The Taser fired. Two electrical lines grounded themselves in my body, and the world became suffused with jittering power. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it robbed me of intentional movement, leaving me jerking uncontrollably in the hands of the man who held me. I was dimly grateful he hadn’t dropped me when the lightning came, and even more dimly concerned that I was going to hurt myself worse before the surge stopped.
There was one way to handle that. I closed my eyes.
I went away.