The Interplanetary Missile Defense System

The City Council was pretty clever about letting the Army build the first IPMDS here. They could build all they wanted, on one condition: they build it somewhere public, so people could watch the missiles launch; and that they take efforts to employ community members, rather than just latching onto the town like a tick to a hamster. Nobody else wanted to host the thing, so they eagerly complied, and one morning Dad found one of those little dorknob pamphlets. At first we thought it was a hoax, but we found cranes surrounding the old abandoned lot next to the Wal-Mart, and pretty soon we all realized it was the real deal.

Everyone was real excited when the first missile went off. Some scientists gave a presentation in a nearby building, explaining how it tricked gravity into letting it pass through the Haze, and how its targeting computers could make it show up anywhere, even dozens of links away. And we all sat down with lawn chairs and blankets and wine, and we watched fire billow out of the missile's exhaust port as it flew off to somewhere we'd never see. It was magical; like we'd gotten our own miniature Cape Canaveral, right of Milton Road. I remember how Jack finally got to kiss Sarah right as the glare from the rocket faded away.

Of course, pretty soon Cape Canaveral got old. They shot off so many missiles so frequently that there wasn't really any magic to it anymore. Folks started to complain about how every time they shot off a missile, half our little town started rattling like an earthquake. I was fortunate enough that the juice factory I worked at was a little bit outside of the tremors' radius, but Arnold told me how, if you wanted to do anything requiring any kind of precision, you had to put down everything as soon as the tremors started and just wait for them to pass. People started to call the gigantic metal spire an "eyesore." Of course, it was just as beautiful and terrifying as it was that magical night when it launched its first rocket, but the Army didn't keep its promise about bringing jobs to the community, the bars started to get clogged with engineers from Kentucky and Virginia and Texas, and sometimes, in the middle of the night as they blew some community to hell, the glare from the rocket would somehow reach all the way across town to remind you that another missile was soaring into the Haze. Some older residents, with more free time on their hands, tried to convince the city council to make the Army tear the damn thing down. The next week's meeting, dozens of soldiers in full dress sat in and, so Grandpa says, gave the speakers a look that made an overflowing septic tank look like an upscale hospital.

So, the IPMDS—Jackie liked to call it "Limpdick," and you could see the boyfriend she always dragged along shudder every time she called it that—was here to stay.

For a little while, anyways. Then, one day, Timmy from down the street rings the doorbell a dozen times in a row. Dad goes to the door and asks him what the hell's the matter, and the kid says, "The monsters are here!"

If you ever watched TV or went on the Internet, you knew what they looked like. You had pictures, photomanipulations of the pictures, memes of the photomanips and photomanips of the photomanip memes, and soon enough not a single person on the planer Earth, except probably the folks in the Army, took them seriously. But one day, I walked out onto Main Street, just about the only place you'd find foot traffic anymore, and the streets were blocked off with things that looked a little like blockades you might put up during a fair, except the colors were all wrong: instead of black and yellow stripes, they had these weird blue-and-red circles, like something you'd see in a 90s TV commercial. I recognized them as soldiers; they had these assault rifles that looked just like AK-47s, only the grip was coming out at the wrong angle and the magazine was a weird shade of green and the sights didn't even look like anything. A couple of them barked at me in their weird language, then one of them, in a pretty good imitation of English, told us that this town was now under Glurk control and that resistance would be met with deadly force. I bolted like a bitch.

Grandpa wanted to put together a militia. Turns out Bart down the street was saving a few dozen boxes of slugs in case of a Citizen's Revolution. This wasn't exactly what he'd planned to use them for, but he figured that killing a couple worms was as good a reason to use them as any. Grandpa clasped me on the shoulder and asked me if I wanted to defend my country. I can't even describe the look he gave me as I shook my head and stepped away and ran out of the house. I stayed with Alex for a couple of days. I thought we might all end up dying, so I finally told her how I felt about her. She got an odd look on her face, and told me not to joke about that. I decided to just be friends, for now. A week later, my Grandpa phoned me; told me he didn't blame me for running. To take care of myself. Alex and I climbed up the ruins of the IPMDS tower to watch Main Street at 6 PM, when Grandpa said they'd march on the Glurk and take back our hometown.

The militia was just a couple of souped-up pickup trucks driving South on Castle Drive, then they turned East onto Main Street and moved into the alleys around town. I could see Grandpa down there, with an old milsurp Kevlar vest and the under-over shotgun that he said his dad had given him after the first World War. Never knew if he was bullshitting or not until I saw him with it; he carried it like you'd carry a golden idol. I saw them crawl through the town's alleyways, then I saw the worms move into position, and suddenly there was a POP! I let out a squeak and grabbed onto Alex as tightly as I could and started crying, because Grandpa and Bart from down the street and Dad and Jenny, the cute clerk at the gun store, they were all down there, going up against worms with high-powered assault rifles and top of the line body armor and bulbous helmets that regulated the nitrogen in the air so they could breathe in our atmosphere. Pop, pop, pop... it sounded like a bunch of kids had gotten together and started throwing those little bags with rocks and gunpowder in them on the ground, but it was so fast and you could see little white dots of muzzle flare and I could barely tell what was what I was crying so hard. I think I saw Grandpa die with my own eyes; but maybe I was blubbering into Alex's shoulder so hard that I couldn't see the streets below. Alex had these long fingernails,

"It's over," Alex told me, and I didn't stop crying for a minute before I wiped my tears on her sleeve and looked out onto main street. Grandpa and Dad and Bart and Jenny from the gun store and Ted who always went to the gym on Sundays and a few other people that I'd see at the grocery store were laying in the middle of the street, motionless. The Glurk went around and put an extra meatgrinder into every corpse, except for one. One guy, I had a couple classes with him in high school, they surrounded him and pulled out some kind of saw and chopped his arm off. I could hear his scream all the way up on the IPMDS tower. One of them leaned over him and did something to him. I heard that they paraded him up and down the streets after that, their guns held proudly in the air. He's still alive, they say. I didn't see any of that. I'm glad I didn't.

At the end of the next month, helicopters buzzed through the air and fighter jets roared through the sky and the entire garrison of Glurk was wiped out in a matter of hours by a joint Air Force-Army action. I went down to Main Street, where they'd built a little concrete bunker right in the middle of everything, and saw their corpses laid out on the road. These crosses between centipedes and earthworms, with their circular mouths all twisted into sick grins. We were free. And the Army tore down the IPMDS tower, because there would have been another rebellion if they didn't. The Interplanetary Missile Defense System never again graced our town, and I'm glad about that, because if I ever saw the twisting struts and steel tubs soaring into the air again, and if I ever went to its inaugural launch and sat on the grass with Alex at my side, all I'd ever think of was Grandad's body lying on Main Street, like a plastic figurine dropped on the floor from my perch atop the ruined tower.