Directive: Continue about your business, human citizen. Wait patiently for the appointed day. Shop, work, eat, sleep. Stick to routine. And stay calm
. This mandate came with teeth. The aliens suggested that one out of every thousand humans on Earth be appointed to the noble task of enforcing. They left the details to our local governments. When Italy, France, Switzerland, and Mexico formed a coalition protesting this tyrannical treatment, their heads of state were promptly vaporized on the spot.
After that, no one resisted. As directed, local governments staged lotteries. One in a thousand.
Of course, my number came up; it always does.
• • • •
It was 8:34 p.m. on Tuesday. I sat at the bar, running my fingertips across the polished wood, sipping whiskey that burned like fire all the way down.
This was typical behavior for a Tuesday evening; I was in the clear.
Across the bar sat a frumpy middle-aged white guy in a neon sweater vest, tossing me dirty looks. Finally he stood up, strode over, and slammed his glass on the bar beside me.
“Lady… You must feel like a real hero,” he hissed. “You must be really proud.”
“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” I said, taking another measured sip.
“You know exactly what I mean.” He gestured to the standard-issue ray gun—we called them “misters”—hanging at my waist.
“Well, why don’t you try using your words?”
“You’re a traitor, that’s what I mean. A murderer. Killing your own kind. You people make me sick.”
“Hmm,” I said, nodding. I’d gotten used to this kind of thing.
“And I’ll tell you what else. If there is a paradise on Planet X, I sure wouldn’t want to share it with the likes of you.”
A tense silence had fallen over the bar. The other patrons were listening, observing with a kind of desperate curiosity. They wanted to know if I was going to enforce him, of course.
I didn’t see any reason to; a pissed-off guy from Brooklyn insulting some random woman at the bar was the very definition of “business as usual.”
“Go fuck yourself, you self-righteous piece of shit,” I said, and turned back to my drink.
A group of kids trooped into the bar. It was a regular’s bar, filled with old timers quietly mourning the world’s slow decline and their own gradual loss of hope; it had been that way for a long time, long before the aliens arrived. These kids were out of their element, but too drunk to notice. There were six or seven of them: white kids, the girls so young they looked like children, dressed in their spangled thrift-store finds, their gladiator sandals and embroidered leather cowboy boots. They gulped PBR and downed double shots. They were celebrating a wedding. The bride pulled the groom up onto a table and they began to dance. The wedding party cheered them on while the rest of the patrons looked on in disapproval; it was not that kind of bar.
“Just married, huh?” the bartender said to the friend who was buying a fresh round of drinks.
“Yeah,” she shouted, her voice hoarse. “We said—we don’t know if we’ll ever be able to like, get married, or do it, or anything like that, in that other place, so we’re all getting married this week.” She pushed her bangs away from her eyes. “We’re taking turns. They just did it today. Tomorrow it’s me and Pete.”
I pulled out my mister and enforced them all.
After that, the bar was much quieter. The frumpy white guy spit on me and walked out. I sipped my drink and watched the door, waiting for Sara Grace.
• • • •
Sara Grace was a nursing student at Columbia. She’d been raised in the suburbs of some sleepy Minnesota town. She hated New York.
We’d been assigned to each other randomly, like everyone else. It was part of the deal: all enforcers had a partner. That way, if anyone got squeamish, there was always someone to do the deed.
Sara Grace was dressed in a pink cardigan, khaki slacks, and kitten heels. Her blonde hair was tied away from her face with a silk polka-dotted scarf. Her mister hung at her waist.
“May I have a Cosmopolitan, please?” she asked the bartender. “Easy on the vodka, and could I have an extra slice of lime, if you wouldn’t mind?”
She sat beside me and we went over our numbers for the day.
“I just enforced an entire family,” she said, sipping her Cosmo. “The husband was buying a bunch of those suicide kits out the back of a van on Flatbush. They were planning to do it all together. Mom, dad, two girls, a little boy, even the dog and cat! Like, hold hands, pray, and die.”
“So what happened?”
“Oh, I followed him home. Then I enforced them all. Even the dog and cat. I wish I knew what happens to dogs on Judgment Day.”
“I wish you would stop calling it that.”
“Sorry, just a reflex from Bible school. We’re due for a meeting at headquarters, you know,” she said, checking her slender watch and suggestively eyeing my full drink.
“I know, I know,” I said. “I’m chugging.”
I chugged.
• • • •
Headquarters was set up inside a warehouse in Red Hook. Twenty thousand square feet of concrete floors, and the ceilings yawned high overhead so the acoustics were terrible. The Brooklyn Division Enforcement Team gathered here to report our numbers and receive feedback on our performance. Our managers gave us little pep talks about how essential our efforts were toward ensuring a smooth and pleasant transition toward the end of the world.
On one wall was a whiteboard scribbled with encouraging messages and enforcement data. On the opposite wall was a countdown clock.
There were several thousand team members in our division. We filled the room to the brim with breathing and sweat and chatter and stink. We divided our attention between the stage at the front and the countdown clock, which was a handy measure of how late we were getting started.
Finally the meeting was called to order.
“Your numbers are down,” the boss shouted at us. He had reason to be nervous; managers with poorly performing teams tended to find themselves on the wrong end of the ray gun. “You’re down compared to Manhattan; you’re down compared to Queens. Shall I go on?”
There was a muttered undercurrent of rebellion.
“I don’t care, I don’t care, from now on I don’t want to hear any excuses,” he bellowed into the microphone. “We’re almost there. Three days from now—we’re in paradise. Seven virgins, clouds and harps, free beer, gold-plated toilet seats—whatever floats your boat. Just keep your goddamn numbers up.”
From now on, we’d be reporting every hour. Checking in, every hour, on the hour, and if we hadn’t enforced anyone, there would be some explaining to do.
“Just three more days,” he said. “Just three more days and this will all be over. Now go home, get some rest, and I want to hear from everyone at 9 a.m. sharp.”
Sara Grace and I walked to the subway together. “Wanna come over for a nightcap?” I asked. “I bet you need one. I sure as hell do.”
“Thank you,” she sighed. “I really shouldn’t. I need to get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Yeah. No problem. See you then.”
That night I lay awake thinking about her. It had been a long time since I’d let myself fall for anyone. Now I had it bad. And I didn’t have much time left.
• • • •
The Aliens: most people called them The Travelers, but I thought of them as The Mickey Mouse Club, because of the human mouthpieces they’d chosen. They were all washed-up child actors and stars of reality TV shows. They all had those bland good looks, and none of them had ever said anything remotely interesting on their own terms, so they were the perfect avatars to relay the message.
Apparently, the aliens’ physical manifestations were repulsive to human sensibilities; I’d never seen one in the flesh, but I’d heard stories. These long-lived rumors started and spread with a twisty life of their own. From what I’d gathered, the aliens resembled something like scaly seahorses or obese horned toads.