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Unfortunately, humans were big and
violent. They needed one human to act on their behalf to implement their
plan. Louis was their man. They told him he would be Emperor of the World,
Master of the Universe. He loved it. Except for one time, he always dealt
with them through his computer. The one time he saw one, he told Alice
the guy was pathetic; a puny wimp. Louis thought he would be in
charge.
Weeks went by. She rarely saw her
husband. He was in his study with the door locked but she could hear the
computer keys. The date was set for Armageddon. Louis told Alice to prepare
herself for something big. He didn't tell her what. She was sure he was
completely mad.
Then something changed. Until then,
he had only been told what he would be doing. He never asked exactly
what their plans were. At the very last minute, they told him.
They were going to totally annihilate three small cities, all on the same
day. Lou would then go on television and radio and demand that the humans
concede control. If they refused, three more cities would be destroyed.
And so on until victory was achieved.
Alice did not know if they planned
to use poisons or contagious disease. She did know that Lou had had extensive
training in germ warfare while he was in the military. He had been convinced
that they were more than capable of executing the plan. He told her they
had toxins that the CIA believed were not known to anyone other than our
own military. And they had toxins of their own that he had never even
imagined.
Lou, Alice said, shaking her head
and smiling. The womanizing self-centered, arrogant, crazy SOB did have
his limit. Killing two hundred thousand people was it. And crazy or not,
he was a crafty old weasel. The Emperor of the World was going to do the
right thing.
He claimed he needed more details,
more face to face meetings with the Blues. Lou had leverage; they needed
him. Alice doesn't know exactly how he did it, but he got video of the
Blues leader in a compromising situation. He also had audio recordings
of them discussing their plans. Of course the evidence he collected would
have been useless for humans. Who would see anything credible in a crazy
ex-military man and an equally crazy little person rambling on about ruling
the world?
But Louis knew that the Blues were
not the majority in their own species. He took his evidence to their other
political factions. God knows how he found them, but the Blues had a very
low estimate of human intelligence and Louis was in his glory when he
had a challenge he could get his teeth into.
There was a great uproar. The Blues
were overthrown. Some were penalized very severely in whatever way they
do. But Lou was a dead man and he knew it.
 e and Alice moved
from city to city, changing their name and appearance. Wherever they were,
he was sure he was being followed. He told Alice the whole story and wanted
to show her the video but she wasn't interested. Now, she wished she had
paid more attention. At the time, she was convinced that he was unwell.
She thought, then, that he had been the victim of an elaborate hoax. Possibly
some of his old enemies in the army were getting even.
Finally Lou got tired of running.
He bought a little single story brick house and stocked it with canned
food and bottled water. The entire house was filled with provisions. He
boarded up all the windows and sealed them with caulk.
One night he nailed all the doors
shut. When Alice tried to call for help, he ripped the phones out of the
wall. Another night he became convinced he heard someone on the roof.
He took a pair of scissors and put out his own eyes, telling Alice that
the Blues could tell where he was so long as he had vision. This was where
she now believes he truly lost his mind. In his paranoia, he claimed ‘they’
could see through walls.
Here Alice paused for a long time.
Then she continued.
His eyes were terrible. They became
infected. Whenever she tried to remove the nails from the doors he would
hear her and stop her. She hid the hammer and, in time, she escaped. She
had nothing. At the first phone booth she found she dialed 911 and told
them to send an ambulance for Louis. Alice doesn't know why the rescue
squad didn't get Lou, but she suspects he had nailed the door back. The
house looked abandoned. She saw on the news two days later that the house
had been firebombed. The paper said the fire had been set in five different
places on the outside of the house. The firemen had to break in the door.
Her life was gone. Louis had erased
all trace of them both. She worked as a waitress at first, moving from
city to city as much out of unhappiness as fear. At that time she still
did not believe that Louis's stories were true, but she knew someone had
killed him and that Lou, who never feared anything else in his life, feared
whomever this was. She had two dogs, a Golden and a Lab. They kept her
sane.
One night she was sitting in her apartment
on the rug, leaning back against the couch. She had maps spread out on
the coffee table. She was so tired that she fell asleep right there. The
dogs were sleeping on the couch. She woke with a start about two hours
later and one of ‘them’ was standing right next to her. She
had slipped sideways when she dozed off and was curled between the coffee
table and the couch. The person or creature, as Alice called him, had
his back to her and was looking intently at her bedroom door. The instant
she opened her eyes, he tensed up, but all Alice had to do was reach out
her hand to catch him. And she did.
She hit him over the head with the
remote control. To her astonishment, it killed him. He was tiny, delicate.
And incredibly homely. She was extremely upset at what she had done until
she found that he had killed her dogs. They were still lying just where
she had last seen them, as if they were asleep.
The police would have believed it
was self defense. They would have assumed that the victim was human, of
course. But Alice didn't want to wait around.
cont. on page nineteen
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ou
had been a retired military man, a former four-star general. He always did
everything more and better than anybody else did. He drank a lot. Women,
including Alice, found him irresistible. He had not been happy about retiring
but had been ‘encouraged’ to do leave. Alice didn't know the details,
but Louis stopped associating with all his old friends. He stayed home and
spent his days exchanging messages with right-wing extremist groups on the
Internet.