Free Cottonwood by R. Lee Smith Page B

should have been Jamil Konde’s house. There was an alien sleeping in the corner, under a charred piece of plywood, but he wasn’t one of her clients and when she woke him to ask if she could help in some way, he just staggered off down the street and took the plywood with him. The next few houses were standing, but empty, although she was fairly sure someone was home and just hiding in the last of them. She thought she could hear the thick, oatmeal-sucking breath of one of them on the other side of the door, but Mr. Che Baccus (and that name was as bad as Good Samaritan) refused to answer, and after ten minutes of knocking and talking, she gave up.
    Her paz’s clock-app interrupted her with a chirp as she turned back to the causeway, a cheerful reminder that her day was almost done and she had half an hour before it was time to punch out. She had one house left on this road—still the first road! After eight hours, she’d seen less than a quarter of her clients—and Sarah, the stink of Cottonwood in her nostrils and vomit caked on one leg, hot, tired, and feeling ten years older than the woman who’d come humming her way through the checkpoint gate into a brave new world, seriously considered going home, not just for the day, but forever. Let them sue.
    But sitting in front of the house on the corner—God alone knew how long he’d been there, because she hadn’t noticed him before she’d walked up to Mr. Baccus’s house—was one of their children.
    And he was cute.
    He was little, that was the first thing. Standing up, he might only come to her knee, but otherwise he was a perfect little scale-model in miniature. His shell was a kind of bright bluish-green, cheerful in the sunlight, and his tiny antennae jittered like the wind-up arms on a tin toy. He was wearing a toddler’s tee, pulled up and secured with bands of electrician’s tape into something like a cotton harness. His pants were pajama bottoms, dark blue with rocket ships and stars on them, pulled up and fastened at the knee-joint with neon-colored hairties in pink and green. He was sitting in the dirt, in between the blade of a lawnmower and some massive soot-black engine, with half a milk jug and some tin cans before him, playing Trucks.
    This was so obvious—his tiny palps were going triple-time to make the fundamental mmbbbbt sound—and so unexpected that for a moment, Sarah just stood and watched. The rest of this horrible day did not exactly disappear, but she found that with the help of a cute kid, she could put it aside and find it in herself to take one more census report. She headed over.
    “Hi,” she said.
    He looked up, then sprang up, popping an easy three feet into the air and coming down on all fours in a squealing panic.
    “Jumping jellybeans!” Sarah blurted, almost as badly startled as the kid.
    The door banged open and one of the big ones came out fast. “Inside,” he said, and the little one scooped up his ‘toys’ and ran. The door shut with the big one on this side of it, holding it closed with one hand. He looked at her.
    He wasn’t as big as some of the others, but he was plenty big enough, and as much on edge as he clearly was, he managed to appear both intimidating and terribly alert without so much as moving an antennae. His eyes were brownish, piercing as he stared her down in this motionless stance. His chitin was a kind of olive-green, deepening to brown on his arms and lower legs, somewhat greener on his neck. He wore a flannel shirt, worn to rags and patched with duct tape, and a pair of canvas cargo shorts so threadbare that the spikes along his thighs poked through, probably helping to hold them on. He had two carpenter’s belts, crisscrossed and slung low over his hips like a gunslinger, to carry a dozen tools—among them, a screwdriver, a dentist’s pick, two remote controls, and a flashlight—and an old army-surplus ammo belt across his chest, loaded with batteries. He had no shoes; the plates of his