Free Grunt Life by Weston Ochse Page B

contact with Mr. Pink, just as he lowered his pistol, and just as I stopped firing my own weapon at him. Except neither of us had loosed a shot. I didn’t check, but I was sure that my rounds were dummies, as were his. I put my pistol away with a shaky hand. Probably the reason the team wore their sensory-deprivation helmets.
    Mr. Pink passed by me, pulling me along as he went.
    We moved back through the dining room and living room and out of the home. I didn’t even glance at the family this time. My mind was on what I’d almost done. What I’d done. What would have happened had there been real rounds in our weapons.
    Back at the SUV, Mr Pink lit a cigarette. I hadn’t known he smoked. His hand shook slightly, but I made no comment. He inhaled half of the cigarette before he spoke.
    “The first teams killed themselves. We didn’t know why, until we were able to film the second team.” He shook his head, making the smoke swirl. “They know what scares us. They know how to get to us. Most importantly, and something we have yet to crack, is they can make us do things to each other, to ourselves.”
    “Is it always like this?” I asked, not knowing how to voice the thousand other questions I had.
    “Pretty much. I don’t normally carry, nor do I participate in the clean-up, but you had to see it. I knew this was going to happen.” His hand shook as he dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. “It’s fucking terrible.”
    I wasn’t sure if I liked the idea that this whole thing had been a lesson. Nor did I like the fact that I’d essentially killed Mr. Pink. Had there been rounds in my Sig, he would never have made it out of the basement.
    “Don’t look so pissed. Some lessons you can’t learn by tablet. You have to see them for yourself.”
    Finally I managed to say, “I had no control over what I was doing.”
    “They know so much more about us than we do them. We’re going to bring this one back for study, but it’s really just a show-and-tell. We’ve learned all we can about the Cray. We just don’t have the technology to learn more.”
    An ice cream truck rounded the corner and drove slowly down the street, musical chimes echoing from the clown-shaped speaker on the roof, returning me for a moment to my childhood. Down the block, two kids ran out of a house waving dollars in the air. Their mother came onto the porch and watched them, her arms crossed, a smile on her tired face. It took a moment for the transaction, then the kids ran back to the house, each carrying a red, white and blue Bomb Pop. They were oblivious of the alien in their midst, and that was the core of the problem. No one knew. And if they did, what would they do? Mr. Pink had said it: we’ve learned all we can.
    “You called them Cray. How do you know what they’re called?” I asked.
    “You’ll get this on your tablet, but I might as well tell you now. We don’t know what they’re called. As you saw, we have yet to discover a way to communicate with them. They’re named after Joshua McCray from Glasgow. He was the first to discover them.”
    “They’re in Scotland too?”
    “As far as we know, they’re all over the world. In every country, in every city, doing whatever an alien species does before it invades.”
    I thought about it for a moment, and said the only answer I could come up with: “Reconnaissance.”
    “Good a term as any. Although I don’t know how much they care about our way of life. Xenobiologists from Freie Universität Berlin posited that these creatures were determining the chemical composition of our planet.”
    “Like tasting the soup,” I said.
    “As apt a metaphor as any, I suppose.”
    I’d read about xenobiologists in an Orson Scott Card book, one of our required readings. At the time I read it, I’d romanticized the occupation, thinking of them as part Airborne Ranger, part Indiana Jones, part scientist, going to other planets to test flora and fauna and ascertain their base makeup. I