Her family lived in Pittsfield, a small town just east of the Mississippi River. Not the Pittsfield in Florida, not the Pittsfield in Massachusetts, but the Pittsfield in Illinois. Her father was the youngest child in a family of martial artists—mostly jujutsu. But Rita didn't want to go to a military academy or play sports. She wanted to stay at home and raise pigs.
With the exception of the young men who signed up with the UDF, life for the people of Pittsfield was peaceful. It was an easy place to forget that humanity was in the middle of a war against a strange and terrible foe.
Rita didn't mind living in a small town and never seeing anyone but the same four thousand people or so. Listening to the squeals of the pigs day in and day out could get a little tiresome, but the air was clean and the sky wide. She always had a secret spot where she could go to daydream and look for four—leaf clovers.
An old retired trader had a small general store in town. He sold everything from foodstuffs and hardware to little silver crosses that were supposed to keep the Mimics away. He carried all—natural coffee beans you couldn't find anyplace else.
The Mimic attacks had turned most of the arable land in developing countries to desert, leaving luxury foods like natural coffee, tea, and tobacco extremely difficult to come by. They'd been replaced with substitutes or artificially flavored tastealikes that usually failed.
Rita's town was one of many attempting to provide the produce and livestock needed by a hungry nation and its army.
The first victims of the Mimic attacks were also the most vulnerable: the poorest regions of Africa and South America. The archipelagos of Southeast Asia. Countries that lacked the means to defend themselves watched as the encroaching desert devoured their land. People abandoned the cultivation of cash crops—the coffee, tea, tobacco, and spices coveted in wealthier nations—and began growing staples, beans and sorghum, anything to stave off starvation. Developed nations had generally been able to stop the Mimic advance at the coastline, but much of the produce they had taken for granted disappeared from markets and store shelves overnight.
Rita's father, who had grown up in a world where even Midwesterners could have fresh sushi every day, was, it is no exaggeration to say, a coffee addict. He didn't smoke or drink—coffee was his vice. Often he would take Rita by the hand and sneak off with her to the old man's store when Rita's mother wasn't watching.
The old man had skin of bronze and a bushy white beard.
When he wasn't telling stories, he chewed the stem of his hookah hose between puffs. He spent his days surrounded by exotic goods from countries most people had never heard of. There were small animals wrought in silver. Grotesque dolls. Totem poles carved with the faces of birds or stranger beasts. The air of the shop was a heady mix of the old man's smoke, untold spices, and all—natural coffee beans still carrying a hint of the rich soil in which they grew.
"These beans are from Chile. These here are from Malawi, in Africa. And these traveled all the way down the Silk Road from Vietnam to Europe," he'd tell Rita. The beans all looked the same to her, but she would point, and the old man would rattle off their pedigrees.
"Got any Tanzanian in today?" Her father was well versed in coffee.
"What, you finish the last batch already?"
"Now you're starting to sound like my wife. What can I say? They're my favorite."
"How about these—now these are really something. Premium Kona coffee grown on the Big Island of Hawaii. Seldom find these even in New York or Washington. Just smell that aroma!"
The wrinkles on the old man's head deepened into creases as he smiled. Rita's father crossed his arms, clearly impressed. He was enjoying this difficult dilemma. The countertop was slightly higher than Rita's head, so she had to stand on tiptoe to get a good look.
"They got Hawaii. I saw it on TV."
"You're certainly well informed, young lady."
"You shouldn't make fun. Kids watch way more news than grownups do. All they care about is baseball and football."
"You're certainly right about that." The old man stroked his forehead. "Yes, this is the last of it. The last Kona coffee on the face of the earth. Once it's gone, it's gone."
"Where'd you get ahold of something like that?"
"That, my dear, is a secret."
The hempen bag was packed with cream—colored beans. They were slightly more round than most coffee beans, but they looked ordinary in all other respects.
Rita picked up one of the beans and inspected it. The unroasted specimen was cool and pleasant to the touch. She imagined the beans basking in the sun of an azure sky that spread all the way to the horizon. Her father had told her about the skies over the islands. Rita didn't mind that the skies in Pittsfield were a thin and watery blue, but just once she wanted to see the skies that had filled those beans with the warmth of the sun.
"Do you like coffee, young lady?"
"Not really. It's not sweet. I prefer chocolate."
"Pity."
"It smells nice, though. And these ones definitely smell best of all," Rita said.
"Ah, then there's hope for you yet. What do you say, care to take over my shop when I retire?"
Rita's father, who until then hadn't looked up from the coffee beans, interrupted. "Don't put any ideas in her head. We need someone to carry on the farm, and she's all we've got."
"Then maybe she can find a promising young boy or girl for me to pass on my shop to, eh?"
"I don't know, I'll think about it," Rita answered with indifference.
Her father set down the bag of coffee he'd been admiring and kneeled to look Rita in the eye.
"I thought you wanted to help out on the farm?"
The old man hastily interjected, "Let the child make up her own mind. It's still a free country."
A light flared in the young Rita's eyes. "That's right, Dad. I get to choose, right? Well, as long as they don't make me join the army."
"Don't like the army either, eh? The UDF isn't all bad, you know."
Rita's father scowled. "This is my daughter you're talking to."
"But anyone can enlist once they turn eighteen. We all have the right to defend our country, son and daughter alike. It's quite the opportunity."
"I'm just not sure I want my daughter in the military."
"Well I don't wanna join the army in the first place, Dad."
"Oh, why's that?" A look of genuine curiosity crossed the old man's face.
"You can't eat Mimics. I read so in a book. And you shouldn't kill animals you can't eat just for the sake of killing them. Our teachers and our pastor and everyone says so."
"You're going to be quite a handful when you grow up, aren't you."
"I just wanna be like everybody else."
Rita's father and the old man looked at each other and shared a knowing chuckle. Rita didn't understand what was so funny.
Four years later, the Mimics would attack Pittsfield. The raid came in the middle of an unusually harsh winter. Snow fell faster than it could be cleared from the streets. The city was frozen to a halt.
No one knew this at the time, but Mimics send out something akin to a scouting party before an attack, a small, fast—moving group whose purpose is to advance as far as possible then return with information for the others. That January, three Mimics had slipped past the UDF quarantine and made their way up the Mississippi River undetected.
If the townspeople hadn't noticed something suspicious moving in the shadows, it's doubtful the scouting party would have taken particular notice of Pittsfield, with its livestock and acres of farmland. As it turned out, the shot fired from the hunting rifle of the night watch led to a massacre.
The state guard was immobilized by the snow. It would be hours before a UDF platoon could be lifted in by helicopter. By then, half the buildings in town had burnt to the ground and one out of three of the town's fifteen hundred residents had been killed. The mayor, the preacher, and the old man from the general store were among the dead.
Men who had chosen to grow corn rather than join the army died fighting to defend their families. Small arms were no use against Mimics. Bullets only glanced off their bodies. Mimic javelins ripped through the walls of wooden and even brick houses with ease.
In the end, a ragged bunch of townspeople defeated the three Mimics with their bare hands. They waited until the Mimics were about to fire before rushing them, knocking the creatures into each others' javelins. They killed two of the Mimics this way, and drove off the third.
Dying, Rita's mother sheltered her daughter in her arms. Rita watched in the snow as her father fought and was killed. Smoke spiraled up from the flames. Brilliant cinders flitted up into the night. The sky glowed blood red.
From beneath her mother's body, already beginning to grow cold, Rita considered. Her mother, a devout Christian, had told her that pretending to cry was a lie, and that if she lied, when God judged her immortal soul she wouldn't be allowed into Heaven. When her mother told Rita that if Mimics didn't lie they could get into Heaven, the girl had grown angry. Mimics weren't even from Earth. They didn't have souls, did they? If they did, and they really did go to Heaven, Rita wondered whether people and Mimics would fight up there. Maybe that's what awaited her parents.
The government sent Rita to live with some distant relatives. She stole a passport from a refugee three years older than she who lived in a run—down apartment next door and headed for the UDF recruiting office.
All over the country, people were getting tired of the war. The UDF needed all the soldiers they could get for the front lines.
Provided the applicant hadn't committed a particularly heinous crime, the army wouldn't turn anyone away. Legally, Rita wasn't old enough to enlist, but the recruiting officer barely even glanced at her purloined passport before handing her a contract.
The army granted people one last day to back out of enlistment if they were having second thoughts. Rita, whose last name was now Vrataski, spent her last day on a hard bench outside the UDF office.
Rita didn't have any second thoughts. She only wanted one thing: to kill every last Mimic that had invaded her planet. She knew she could do it. She was her father's daughter.