The three of them huddled in the living room, waiting to see what happened. Two, dressed in tailored suits, sat on the couch and the third, in shirtsleeves, stood slightly apart, smoking a cigarette and fingering the camera that hung around his neck. A small canvas satchel sat on the low coffee table.
On the wall, the clock fingers rolled up towards one o’clock in the morning. Outside, the late-spring night was clear and full of stars, with a big, pearly moon shining down. An unseasonable mist rolled by in wisps and walls. Insects ran around and flitted about in the shrubs out front of the Glendale sorority house—PKO in white paint on the red brick.
The house itself, sitting just on the outskirts of the campus, stood empty aside from the three men in the living room and their bag. All of the residents had been moved for their own well-being. None of the lights were on, nor were any fans. The house sat empty, and still, and waiting.
Edward pulled a pencil and small notebook from his jacket pocket and turned to his companion on the couch.
“Senator—” he started.
“Joseph, please,” interrupted the senator.
Edward scribbled a note and continued.
“Joseph, why is it you brought us out here?”
“I brought you here, Mr. Murrow,” said Joseph, “Because if I can convince you of the danger these . . . people pose to our country, our way of life, then I can convince anyone. I don’t think many would argue that you are my most vocal and die-hard critic, do you?”
Edward nodded as he jotted down the rest of his companion’s words.
“Furthermore, you’re the most trusted man in America. I’m a politician; when I say this is a bad thing, no one really believes me. If you say it, well, it must be true.”
“And why have you brought us to this particular house?” the newsman asked.
“This poison spreads most rapidly through liberal, self-important areas,” said Joseph. “And our information says that Occidental College is one of the most liberal institutions in Southern California, an area known for artists, non-conformists, and radicals.”
“I see,” said Edward, his pencil still wiggling away as he wrote. “And what do you make of all this, Mr. Fellig?”
“I’m just here to take pictures,” said the man in shirtsleeves as he tapped the ash from his cigarette. He polished the lens of his camera with a rag from his pocket.
Joseph and Edward chuckled at Fellig before sharing a match for their own cigarettes. Joseph looked up at the clock on the wall. Ten minutes had passed since one.
“Soon be time,” Joseph said, and he reached for the bag.
He pulled out the contents and arranged them into three piles, one for each man. Fellig, seeming disinterested, lit another cigarette. Edward looked at the piles and began writing down what each contained: a revolver, a copy of the U.S. Constitution, and a peace dollar on a chain. Joseph produced a box of cartridges and began to load them into his gun.
“What’s all this for?” asked Edward, writing as ever.
Joseph launched into a speech that sounded rote and rehearsed.
“The creature cannot stand our way of life. We have here some of the most American items available. The Constitution is your primary form of defense, for they cannot stand to hear any part of it. Should you lose it, the peace dollar—a sign of both American military might and capitalism—will hold them at bay.”
“And the guns?” asked Fellig, raising the camera to his face to capture the relics.
“The guns are Colt .45s, Peacemakers, the guns that won the West. The most American guns ever made. These were all carried on the Earp vendetta ride. The bullets are cast from nails taken from the Niña, the Pinta, the Santa Maria, and the Mayflower, forged in fires fueled by Pope’s Creek cherry trees and cooled in waters from the Mississippi, the Potomac, and the Colorado. The gunpowder contains genuine Minuteman powder. You won’t find more potent weaponry against the insidious communist!”
Edward made notes. In big letters at the top of the pad he scrawled “MADNESS!?”
It could smell the house from almost a half-mile away. The heavy red brick and gray mortar held tight to the scent of intellect, sweetened by virtue of being female. At the thought of intellectual women, its mouth watered, lips moistened. Such was the reaction every night as it drew close.
Tonight would be its third visit and already it could sense the dents and progress it was making with its victims. In short order, they, too, would be scouring the Hollywood nightscape, looking for ears to whisper into, minds open to the sweet, succulent seduction.
And so on, and so on, and so on, until their secret numbers swelled to a point where they need not remain secret. On that day, the hidden hordes would cascade down across the United States as a great red sea and join the countless others across the globe in a single, glorious empire. Then they would hunt no more forever, for there would be no more to convert.
Until that day, though, the hunt was on and its blood was high.
“It’s coming,” said Joseph. “Gentlemen, ready your weapons.”
Fellig picked up one of the guns in his left hand and held his camera in his right, both ready to shoot at a moment’s notice. Edward looked down at the last gun on the table, weighing it for a moment in his mind. The gun stayed on the table; he was a journalist, not a gunslinger.
“How do you know it’s close?” asked Edward.
“The crickets,” said Joseph.
Then they all heard it. Outside, in the bushes, the chirping insects had fallen into perfect unison. Rather than the cascading chorus of chirps and buzzes, they sang out as one, singing and silent together, a giant, solitary entity. A half-dozen owls hooted in harmony.
“Get ready,” said Joseph.
It came through the cracks in the windows and spaces in the door jamb, like a fine pink mist. The rolling, rose cloud hugged the carpets and hardwood, moving into the entryway. It coalesced together on the ground, rising up into a vaguely recognizable shape. The last remnants of the cloud fell away to reveal the creature.
“Lucy!?” asked Edward.
Fellig raised his camera and snapped off a shot. The sound of him winding the camera drowned out the scratching of Edward’s pencil on his pad as he jotted her description.
The creature turned and hissed, fingers hooked, teeth bared. She didn’t understand who these men were, but they scared her, especially the husky one with heavy eyebrows. She couldn’t smell her usual victims any more, except for faint scents still clinging to the building.
Had her need to spread the word not been so high, she would have left and tried to raid one of the handful of other, similar houses in the area. As it was, with the want to make more, to spread her way of life, pounding in her head, throbbing behind her eyes, she decided to go with what she had at hand.
The man in the middle, the one with the pad and pencil, looked the smartest to her. He lacked the solid bullishness of the one with the raised gun, or the trodden-in life-on-the-street look of the cameraman. The one in the middle: he was the one.
She leaped.
In the first step, she drew level with Joseph, one hand moving up toward his chest. The blow lifted him off his feet and backward over the couch. As he slammed against the wall, he fired a bullet into the ceiling. Then she was on Edward and he was falling.
Her breath didn’t smell, but it was hot and wet. Her weight bore down on his chest and she leaned down close to his ears. There was something under the sound of her heavy, loud breathing, some sort of language he couldn’t place. It sounded German and Russian and Spanish all at once. It seeped in through his ears and wrapped itself around his brain, which began to swim. The single voice under Lucy’s breathing became a chorus of words he didn’t understand, but the sense of it felt good, like a large, loving crowd waiting for him to join them, be part of the party.
The click and flash of Fellig’s camera snapped him out of it. The plush allure of the voices gave-way to a vast, uniform expanse of iron; an expanse Edward didn’t care for. He managed to get a hand to her face, pushing it away and the voices with it. His fingers smeared the pale greasepaint on her skin, revealing the ruddiness beneath, almost like a harsh sunburn.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right—” cried Edward.
She jumped back and covered her ears. Her screaming drowned out the rest of Edward’s rattled shouting.
Fellig let his camera hang on its strap and raised his revolver. He fired all six shots; five of them punched holes in Lucy’s chest, leaving bright red pockmarks on her silk slip. She twisted and dove through the bay windows, the falling glass slashing the silk, but leaving the skin. She rolled on the lawn and disappeared into the night.
Edward stood up, shaking. Fellig tossed his revolver onto the coffee table and helped Joseph to his feet. They all stood for a moment, quiet in the aftermath, listening to the chirping of the crickets collapse into a natural cacophony.
“I hit her with five of your magic bullets, senator,” said Fellig, nodding at the empty gun. “She shrugged them off like raindrops. What gives?”
Joseph smoothed his suit and adjusted his tie as he spoke.
“I’m sorry. I should have been more specific. The root of the problem is in the brain, the intellect. That’s where the problem resides, as I’m sure Mr. Murrow now knows. It is the brain to which we must deliver the solution.”
“So what you’re saying,” said Fellig, “is shoot her in the head.”
Joseph nodded.
“Even though she’s probably the most famous woman in the country,” Fellig continued. “Not to mention a smoking redhead?”
“Her hair is not the only thing about her that is red, Mr. Fellig,” Joseph said, then he turned to Edward, who had collapsed into the armchair.
“I don’t suppose that I have to further justify my concern about this threat to you, sir?”
Edward shook his head and clenched his fists to keep them from shaking.
“I am loath, though,” he said, “To condone genocide, no matter how distasteful I may find the target.”
“If we don’t wipe them out, they will wipe us out,” said Joseph. “Mr. Fellig, I believe we may need your car to track this one to her lair.”
Fellig drove a ’39 Studebaker with a police radio and a fair amount of rattling from the trunk. Joseph rode shotgun, reloading the guns. Edward sat in the back, scribbling notes in his pad and mopping the cold sweat from his brow.
“You mind telling me where we’re going, sir?” asked Fellig.
Joseph looked up just long enough to say “Her studio, Mr. Fellig,” before going back to his guns.
“Why the studio?” asked Edward.
“She’s been wounded,” said Joseph. “Her pride, anyway. We found her out and out-maneuvered her, proved her vulnerable. She’s going to go somewhere she feels powerful and in control: the hub of her nefarious emanations, the studio.”
Edward looked at the folder Fellig had on the back seat of the Studebaker. He flipped it open to a picture of a clutch of children sleeping on a fire escape with a kitten. The next page had a man lying dead in the street, blood on his head and a grinning policeman standing over him. Another page and a pile of drunks sleeping on the sidewalk. A body buried under newspapers and coats in front of a movie theater. Edward wondered for a moment if the communists might not have it right. . . .
He looked up from the folder to see the gate to the studio coming up. Fellig cruised up to the guardhouse and got a wave through the gate after a glance from Joseph to the guard. They pulled up and parked in the lot, piling out with dollars around their necks and Constitutions in pockets. Fellig still carried his camera.
“Where are we headed, gents?” asked Fellig.
They looked around. The large, square buildings of the studio loomed around them, dark and imposing. All three of them were used to studios and Hollywood, but the lot at night, knowing what was out there, seemed alien and unfriendly. Without the bustle and lights, the whole place felt dead, like a castle made of ash. Fellig didn’t seem bothered, but the others didn’t like it.
“There,” said Edward, pointing at one of the buildings. Light spilled out from one of the doors, casting a glow against the wall opposite.
As they walked over, Joseph handed a gun to Fellig, and offered the other to Edward. Again, the journalist declined, raising his pad and copy of the Constitution. Joseph shrugged and thrust the weapon into the waistband of his pants.
The door was unlocked and led into a rear hallway with offices and staircases leading away. The lights inside felt harsh after the soft nighttime outside. In the clear light, the men looked tired, pale, and worn, their clothes wrinkled.
Joseph made to speak, but Edward grabbed him by the elbow. Everyone paused and held their breath. Sounds echoed down through the hallways, voices, peppered with Lucy’s affected wailing and the odd burst of laughter. The noises came from one of the halls up ahead. Joseph took the lead, gun at the ready, waving the others on after him.
They found her in the living room, dancing around the set.
She laughed and bounced all over the furniture in a polka-dot dress, greasepaint smeared from Edward’s hand and flowing tears. The speakers in the set blared the canned sounds of an old episode, full of applause and laughter and love. Under the sound of the rerun and the bawling laughter, she hadn’t heard the three men enter.
Joseph stepped forward while Edward, his composure long since regained, sat in the front row of the bleachers, pencil and pad at the ready, Constitution near at hand. Fellig handed Edward his camera and stepped up to join Joseph.
She twirled off the couch and landed with a soft thump in the middle of the living room. As she rose, she saw them and froze. A look of pure hatred flashed across her face, contorting her beautiful features into something even Fellig would later wish he’d never seen. She spat at them and snarled a canine snarl as the audience laughed through the speakers.
Under all the noise, the hammers on the .45s clicked back. The two gunshots cut through it all and struck the creature exactly where they needed to. It fell to the carpet and lay there twitching, hissing. A red, smoky foam churned up out of its mouth and ran down its cheeks. The creature convulsed once and then lay still.
The audience on the tapes continued to laugh as the recorded actors cracked wise. The foam on the carpet slowly popped and crackled. The corpse rattled wetly from the throat.
Fellig retrieved his camera and snapped a shot of the body as it still twitched and foamed.
“What will happen now?” asked Edward. “She’s a celebrity.”
“The body will be wrapped in an American flag and buried in a casket sealed with pulped bills, to prevent seepage into groundwater,” said Joseph. “She will be interred in a national cemetery. Much past that is up to you, my friend; depending on how you handle this situation, either you make us brave patriots or gutless killers in the mind of the public, and so in the mind of the government.”
Fellig looked uncomfortable. Edward thought for a moment.
“This is America,” he said.
