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Nine Months
===========
[I don't think that any of this was supposed to
happen. I don't understand how it is that things have
come to this. We're America, after all. Bad things
aren't supposed to happen here.]
The first explosion was in Richmond, Virginia, and it
was broadcast to the city, live as it was happening.
The blonde, pale-faced man simply walked into the
camera's range as Monica Sandler was telling the folks
at home about tomorrow's weather, and he interrupted
her explanation about the approaching storm front by
opening up a black briefcase, smiling, and pushing a
button. The nuclear blast barely even registered
before the station went off the air, and the last
thing that anyone could have seen was Ms. Sandler's
face as she realized the station manager she'd been
secretly fucking for months was ruining her segment.
White light. The bulk of the audience within broadcast
range of the TV station was incinerated in a
heartbeat.
Other places followed within the next ten minutes.
Hawaii. Las Vegas. Dallas. Chicago. The nuclear
weapons were small, all contained within briefcases,
all delivered by people who were good Americans with
no previous history of...anything at all, really. In a
final, ironic twist, every single one of the
'terrorists' had voted Republican in the last
election.
[I remember being afraid then. Who wasn't? When CNN
had started reporting about the attacks, all I could
think of was Steve and that trip to Dallas he was
supposed to make. I had no idea if he was there yet. I
had no idea if he'd even left. I tried calling anyone
I could think of. Steve. The police. The FBI. All I
got was busy signals or dead air. I saw on TV that
people were rioting downtown, and I could hear the
helicopters and police sirens from my apartment. I
wished I had a gun. Of course, I didn't have one
anymore. Steve had taken it when he'd moved out two
months before.]
It took three days for the authorities to restore
order and start treating the wounded. The scale of the
catastrophe was mind-boggling: millions had died in
the initial attacks, and tens of thousands more were
slowly dying of radiation poisoning. Cities like New
York and LA, both mysteriously spared, were hit hard
by panicked civil unrest, and the President's
televised address failed to have a calming effect on
the bloodied and terrified nation. This was hardly
surprising, since he delivered it from a bunker while
wearing a bio-chemical space suit.
Within a week, a picture of what had happened was
starting to emerge. As incredible as it seemed, the
enemies of freedom had somehow mastered mind-control
technology and had cleverly hidden their transmitters
in 'communications satellites' launched from a variety
of countries over a period of two years. Then, with
the satellites in place, the attack was launched with
calculating, inhuman patience.
People working in nuclear reactors were zapped from
orbit, sometimes twenty or thirty at a time, and
commanded to start stealing weapons-grade plutonium in
small doses. Though seemingly normal as far as friends
and family were concerned, these first victims were
gradually transformed into little more than puppets –-
prolonged exposure to the mind-control ray burned out
the centers of the brain which contained personality
and independent thought. Indeed, as time went on, the
puppets' facades began to crumble into zombie-like
blankness, and more than a few of the spouses began to
wonder if their significant others were seeing other
people. Some of the zombies were divorced and left
totally alone by those who had cared for them deeply,
though by this time the poor bastards were too
far-gone to care.
Once the plutonium was in the right hands and the
bombs ready, the puppets' strings were cut and new
puppets were recruited to deliver the devices. The
choices of vectors for the disease of mind-controlled
nuclear terrorism often reflected a perverse sense of
humor. Attacks on America had been committed before,
but never with such a gleeful irony.
[Of course, Steve went to Dallas, and he was there at
the NRA Convention when Charlton Heston turned it
into Ground Zero. The divorce papers came through
about a month later, and when I opened my mailbox and
got them, I cried for almost two hours. It was like
dying. It was as though everything else had died too.
I didn't know what else to do, so I just kept going to
work and doing things I normally would have done, and
it was like everyone was on the edge of cracking up
completely. It was about this time that everybody
started getting those little GPS things implanted into
their skin, along with the explosives. I remember when
my neighbor...what was her name? Mrs. Bridgewood. I
remember when there was some kind of mistake and Mrs.
Bridgewood's explosive implant blew up and killed her.
Just sent her head flying. It landed on the hood of my
car. I had to go out and put her head in a garbage
bag. There were a lot of things like that happening,
but we all accepted it because the President was on TV
telling us that it was all just 'growing pains'.
That's what he called it. Growing pains. I still
wanted a gun to protect myself, but nobody was allowed
to own guns anymore. Some people didn't like this,
especially the NRA because they'd helped the President
get elected. A lot of them got blown up for that. A
whole lot of them. They stopped complaining after
that, and everybody else did too.]
Nobody knew which group had launched the attack, but
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia. Syria and, for good reasons,
France were first bombed and then invaded by the
United States Military. Though 'regime change' in the
target countries was the goal, this proved
problematic, with the French offering so much
resistance that the population had to be brought under
control by tactical use of anthrax and the 607th Rape
Battalion. 'Better Dead (Or Raped) Than French' became
the slogan of the hour, and French enemy combatants,
not to be confused with POWs, were given lobotomies
and made to wear clown uniforms and dance on American
children's television programs. On world maps, the
name 'France' was replaced with 'Freedom,' and history
books were re-written to teach the youth of the nation
how Napoleon was not really French because the French
were genetically incapable of winning any wars.
All of this made the world a better place, but the
threat of terrorism still loomed large in the public
mind. It seemed obvious that sterner measures must be
taken, and that the existing governmental structures
and agencies were too slow, traditional and
bureaucratic to do the job properly. By executive
order, the President authorized the creation of a new
body charged with the Herculean task of making America
the kind of nation able to repel terrorist threats
before they were even launched. In his oft-quoted
speech, the President declared that America must
become a New Sparta, or else be overwhelmed by the
Persian horde. Freedom was Strength. Strength was
Freedom. The transformation of America was to begin.
Thus was born the Initiative.
[I had always wanted a child. Steve didn't. I think
that was what finally drove us apart. When the
Initiative director came on television and explained
how freedom was the job of the next generation, I knew
that he was speaking to me.]
Genetic engineering. If the Spartans had possessed it,
they would still be ruling the world today.
[I remember that there was a line of women stretching
around the block. A lot of them were young, at or near
the minimum age of 16, and I heard that a lot of
parents had forged birth certificates so that their
under aged daughters could be inseminated by the
Initiative. It took me about two hours before I was
inside, and nurses in black leather Initiative
uniforms took me to a small, stainless-steel room with
a gynecologist's couch in the middle of it. A man with
a gas mask came in and pulled down a hose from the
ceiling. It didn't hurt, and even if it did, I knew
that I was doing it for America and for freedom.]
Millions of women volunteered for Operation: Sparta,
which was fortunate since plans were in place for
conscription if insemination quotas were not met. As
it turned out, the quotas were exceeded, and the next
nine months were busy ones as the Initiative built its
OBGYN clinics in every community and began recruiting
gynecologists and midwives who could be trusted with
security clearance.
[I didn't enjoy being pregnant. It felt...strange.
Painful. I kept thinking of that movie, 'Rosemary's
Baby,' and how Mia Farrow kept getting sicker and
sicker and paler and paler as the devil's child grew
in her womb. There were times when it hurt so much
that I thought of Steve's gun and how much I wished I
still had it. I wasn't thinking that clearly, but even
when things were really bad I was sure to smile and
act happy whenever I went outside and had to deal with
other people. A friend of mine who'd also joined the
program couldn't take it anymore and tried giving
herself a miscarriage by falling down the stairs.
Initiative agents took her away in a black leather
straightjacket and I never saw her again.]
The death rate for women enrolled in the program was
just below five percent, which was well within
projected figures. The number of women who became
unstable and had to be detained was about four percent
higher than the analysts had expected, but again, this
represented a slim margin of error and could easily be
absorbed by existing Initiative facilities.
As the first wave of recruits neared the nine-month
mark, breaths were held all over Washington. So much
depended on the success of the project. The future of
the nation was quite literally at stake.
[I first realized that there was something wrong when
the contractions began. I'd never been pregnant
before, so I really had no idea what it was supposed
to feel like, but somehow I knew it wasn't meant to
hurt this much. I managed to call the Initiative hot
line, and five minutes later the black ambulance was
taking me to the hospital. I barely even remember the
trip there. It was in so much pain that the paramedics
had to put something in my mouth so I wouldn't bite
out my own tongue. The next thing I knew, I was in a
room with a big bright light over me, and the doctor
was telling me to push, PUSH, and I was PUSHING, and
then a nurse made a strange noise and everyone took a
step back and I felt something just shoot out of me,
shoot out from between my legs, and the doctor started
screaming and flailing around and there was something
attached to his face. The last thing I saw before
passing out was that whatever was burrowing through
the doctor's head with its razor-sharp fangs, it was
still attached to me by a slimy umbilical cord.]
When the first Operation: Sparta babies were born, it
quickly became clear that things were not going
according to plan. Our agents and tactical units tried
to contain what was happening, but the enormity and
speed of the disaster took all of us completely by
surprise. The creatures were thick-skinned. Bullet
proof. Hungry. Containment efforts crumbled and the
President, on the verge of panic as the White House
itself came under siege, ordered immediate termination
of every human-looking individual under the age of
one. All this drastic measure accomplished was that
those normal human babies who hadn't already been
killed and eaten by our creatures were shot or burned
alive by hysterical military units. Nothing seemed to
do any good. More and more of the Sparta babies were
being born every hour, and, as the wave of killer
babies burst into the oval office and began
disemboweling the President, those of us who could do
so escaped in a Presidential helicopter. Below us, the
streets of Washington burned.
[When I woke up, the people who had delivered my baby
were lying in pieces on the floor, and the walls were
painted red with their blood. The door, which had been
thick steel, like a bank vault, had been ripped off
its hinges and the hallway behind it was on fire.
Getting up and out of that room was something I don't
like to think about. All I can really say is that I
must have walked through most of the building looking
for an exit, and I didn't see a single person there
who was still in one piece or alive. Outside, on the
street, I saw groups of newborn babies, prowling like
wolves, attacking anyone they came across and eating
them alive. At first, I tried hiding from the
newborns, but when I ducked behind an overturned car
and saw three of the babies eating the passengers, I
thought it was the end. Only it wasn't. They just
looked at me. One of them actually smiled and made
little cooing baby noises. I got up and backed away
slowly and almost tripped over another baby. It didn't
try to hurt me either. I later realized that I was
safe, and I also realized why. I was a mommy. None of
the babies would attack a mommy.]
The plan had been to create a generation of Americans
with feral instincts that could be used to defend the
nation against terror. Armies had become obsolete.
When anyone on the street can be a terrorist, the
forces of freedom must be equally egalitarian. If
nationalism or religious fanaticism could shape the
enemies of America, then why not make love of country
and hatred of the enemy hard-wired into the genetic
code of our citizens? A 'killer' is just a soldier
slaughtering the wrong people. A psychopath is a
patriot if he defends freedom for us all. It was a
good notion. A patriotic notion. It should have
worked.
[I made it home. I've hardly left since then. For a
while, the TV showed pictures of babies, millions of
them, destroying everything, killing
everyone...except, of course, the women who birthed
them. The footage was horrible. The reporters started
to look really, really scared. Eventually, one by one,
the stations started showing test patterns, and then
they all went off the air completely. Now there's just
static. I sometimes just sit around and watch it. It
stops me from thinking about anything.]
I don't understand how things have come to this.
[I sometimes go out now, to see if I can find any
canned food. I don't worry about seeing bodies now.
Most of the corpses have been picked clean. The only
sound is the pitter-patter of little feet. I sometimes
meet another mommy out there, some woman with a
strange and crazy look in her eyes, though we all
usually just avoid each other. There just doesn't seem
to be any point in saying hi. I also sometimes see the
babies, just kind of hanging around or rooting through
the rubble. They don't look as much like babies now.
They're starting to grow into children. Some of them
are even walking on two legs, falling down a lot like
that baby on 'The Simpsons'. They look at me and move
out of the way if I'm coming. Kids. Their teeth are
shiny and their eyes glow in the dark, but sometimes,
when I'm really lonely, I think about talking to them.
I think they'd listen to me if I ever did. They may
not be human, but they're kids. American kids. And
every kid needs a mother.]
There's nothing wrong with trying to protect the
motherland. Is there?
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