GIVE ME CORNBREAD OR GIVE ME DEATH
N. K. JEMISIN
The intel is good. It had better be; three women died to get it to us. I tuck away the binoculars and crawl back from the window long enough to hand-signal my girls. Fire team moves up, drop team on my mark, support to hold position and watch our flank. The enemy might have nothing but mercs for security, but their bullets punch holes same as real soldiers’, and some of ’em are hungry enough to be competent. We’re hungrier, though.
Shauntay’s got the glass cutter ready. I’m carrying the real payload, slung across my torso and back in a big canteen. We should have two or three of these, since redundancy increases our success projections, but I won’t let anyone else take the risk. The other ladies have barrels cracked and ready to drop. The operation should be simple and quick—get in, drop it like it’s hot, get out.
This goes wrong, it’s on me.
It won’t go wrong.
Shauntay makes the cut. Go go go. We drop into the warm, stinking, dimly lit space of the so-called aerie—really an old aircraft hangar, repurposed since commercial air travel ended. There’s the big trough on one side of the hangar, laden with fresh human body parts. It’s horrible, but I ignore it as I rappel down. We’ve seen worse. Touchdown. No sounds from the pit at the center of the hangar. We get our little trough set up in near silence, just like we rehearsed. My girls are on it like clockwork. The barrels come down and we dump load one, load two, load three. Stirring sounds from the hangar behind us. Ignore them. I signal the other soldiers to back up. Nothing left but the payload. I unsling my canteen, not listening to the sounds behind me, concentrating on my fingers so I don’t fumble the cap, remembering to unseal the pressure valve so the vacuum effect doesn’t clog the whole thing up and—
A warm, sulfur-redolent breath stirs my fatigues. Right behind me. Shit.
I turn, slow. They have cat eyes; fast movement excites them. The smell of fear excites them. Dark skin excites them.
She’s huge—maybe the size of a 747, though I’ve only seen husks of those, lying scattered around the edges of old killing fields where the world was remade. She’s not quite green. Her scales are prismatic, slightly faceted, which makes them nearly invisible at night. That was an accident, I’ve heard, some side effect of tweaking the genetic base to make them hyper-focused on shorter wavelengths of visible light—or something; I don’t know the science. I know beauty, though, and she’s lovely, scales shimmering as she moves, iridescent blue–black–golden brown. They probably mean for her to be ugly and scary, dark as they’ve made her, but they forget there’s more ways to be beautiful than whatever they designate. Red eyes. Fangs long as my whole body. Those are just there for the scare factor, I know; our scientists have proven they don’t actually use the fangs for eating. Do a good enough job killing without them.
A few of the others stir behind her, some coming over, all of them following her lead. She’s the dominant one. Figures. I’m not scared. Why? Suicidal, maybe. No. I think—and it’s just in this moment, looking at how beautiful she is—that I see a kindred spirit. Another creature whose power has been put into the service of weaker cowardly fools.
So I smile. “Hey, there,” I say. She blinks and pulls her head back a little. Her prey doesn’t usually talk back. Still dangerous; curiosity plus boredom equals me being batted all over the hangar like a toy till I’m dead. Time to divert her interest. Slowly, I move behind the trough—stuff’s still steaming from the barrels—and start pouring out my payload. The hot, sharp smell catches her attention immediately. Those lovely slit pupils expand at once, and she leans down, sniffing at the trough. I’m irrelevant suddenly.
“Getcho grub on, baby,” I whisper. My beautiful one flickers her ears, hearing me, but her eyes are still on the prize. Mission accomplished. I rappel back up to the roof, and we head homeward as the flock chows down.
Dragons love them some collard greens, see. Especially with hot sauce.
The first attacks were the worst. Nobody was ready. I remember a day, I couldn’t have been more than six or seven. I was sitting in the living room. Mama came running in, not a word, just grabbed me and half-dragged me out of my chair and across the house to hide in the bathroom. I felt the house shudder and thought it was an earthquake, like I’d read about in books. I was excited. I’d never felt an earthquake before. We curled together in the bathtub, me and Mama, me giddy, her terrified, with the sounds of screaming and the smells of smoke filtering in through the vents.
It was so terrible, the Towers said, amid news stories with two-faced headlines like SAPPHIRE TOWNSHIP RAIDED BY DRUG-SNIFFING DRAGONS and OFFICIALS DENY DRAGONS INTENTIONALLY BRED TO PREFER “DARK MEAT.” So terrible indeed. Maybe if we didn’t hide things from the police, they wouldn’t need to use dragons? The dragons only attacked when people attacked them—or ran as if they were guilty. Why, if we’d just turn out every time there was a police patrol and point out the folks among us who were causing trouble, the dragons would only bother those people and not everybody.
Motherfuckers always want us to participate in their shit. Ain’t enough they got the whole world shivering in the shadows of the Towers. Ain’t enough they’ve got our boys and men tagged like dogs and preemptively walled off over in Manny Dingus Prison, only letting ’em out for parole now and again. (Only letting some of ’em out—the ones they think are meek, ’cause they think eugenics works. If they had any sense, though, they’d be more afraid of the quiet ones.)
This latest front in the long, long war started because they didn’t like us growing weed. Ours was better quality than that gourmet shit they grew, and also we sold it to their people over in Americanah. Not that those were really their people, white men as poor as us and the few women whose pussies the Towers haven’t grabbed, but they gotta try to keep up the illusion. Gotta have somebody as a buffer between them and us, especially whenever we get uppity.
They’ve been engineering the End Times. The Plagues were supposed to be about salvation. Trying to get all the townships and ghettoes and reservations to go evangelical, see? So they poisoned the water—turned it red—and killed a whole bunch of men over in Bollytown. Got them dependent on bottled-water deliveries from the Tower, forever. The dragons are supposed to be the Second Plague, engineered from frogs, with a little dinosaur and cat spliced in. That’s bad, but they tried to start a Plague of boils, big enough to kill, in Real Jerusalem. Didn’t spread much beyond their patient zeroes, thank G*d, because Jewish people wash. (They’ll try again, though. Always do.) Anyway, we got the point when they rained hail and fire on the Rez, even though they claimed that was just a weather-control satellite malfunction.
We’re all heathens to the Towers. All irredeemable by birth and circumstance, allowed to live on the sufferance of those on high. They don’t want to kill us off, because they need us, but they don’t need us getting comfortable. Rather keep us on edge. Keep us hungry. Best way to control a thing, they think, is through fear and dependency.
Gotta mind, though, that the ones you’re starving don’t start getting their needs attended to someplace else.
The next raid goes off right when our hackers have said, but we didn’t need the warning. The Towers are predictable, complacent, and lazy in their power—same mediocre motherfuckers they’ve always been. We’re ready. Got countermeasures standing by, but they don’t even bother to send observation drones. Stupid. It’s been years since that first raid. We’ve been living under siege so long that fear stopped making sense a long time ago.