Read Online Earth vs. Everybody by John Swartzwelder - Free Book Online Page A

were
even around. But we were. And they were under the impression we had
surrendered. But we hadn’t actually signed the surrender document yet. Oh no,
not yet. We also had a secret weapon they didn’t know about. It was a
Flame-Throwing Atomic-Powered Jumping Poison Rocket Cannon. It was six or seven
weapons in one, and was guaranteed by the company that had sold it to us and
then moved on to the next town to be utterly devastating. Our boys chuckled as
they loaded it. This was going to be good. Or we would get our money back.
    Unfortunately,
this superweapon was made of recycled materials, like just about everything is
these days, with the recycled materials guaranteed by the faulty printing on
the package to be every bit as strong as the real thing. That guarantee was the
first thing to fly apart when the cannon blew up. The explosion also leveled
what remained of our army. And knocked our navy over. It didn’t surprise me.
I’ve warned people about recycling. Our products are bad enough when they’re
made out of new materials. They’ve got to be even worse when we make them out
of garbage. Think people, think!
    After our
glorious counterattack had failed so miserably, Central City realized it was
all over and surrendered, becoming the first Earth city to do so. I guess we
shouldn’t have been proud of that, but we kind of were. Hey, only one city
could be first. And it was us.
    The aliens began
rounding up the city’s civilian population. I was one of the first, probably
because I kept waving my arms and yelling: “Me! Me! Pick me!” I’m pretty easy
to round up when I’m hungry. I figured wherever they were taking us there had
to be food there. I mean, they’ve got to feed us, right? Damn right, they do.
    I was penned up
along with a few thousand others from my area in a kind of large cattle
enclosure. It wasn’t bad. It certainly was better than the life I’d been living
recently.
    “Hey look,
everybody!” I said. “We’ve got a slop bucket!”
    I was just
getting myself settled in—I found a great spot between the slop bucket and the
branding irons—when I realized I had forgotten something. Something important.
    I headed for the
main gate and tried to push my way out through the crowd of people who were
being herded in. The guards roughly shoved me back.
    “I want to go
out,” I explained.
    They told me I
couldn’t go out. They had just gone to a lot of trouble to get me in. They said
I had to go sit back down where I was before. I argued for awhile, but it
didn’t do me any good. I went back to my spot and complained about the guards
to my neighbor. After he’d heard the whole story he agreed with me.
    As soon as it got
dark I made another attempt to get out. But this time I didn’t tell the guards
about it. I wasn’t letting them in on this one. I couldn’t trust them anymore.
Dressed in black, and with my face smudged so if they caught me they wouldn’t
know it was me, I stealthily made my way around to the back of the enclosure,
where I knew there weren’t as many guards posted because of all the poison ivy
and snakes and weirdos. I waited until the searchlights had passed by me, then
crashed through the fence and made my escape. Like I mentioned before, us big
guys get to make our own doors.
    Keeping to the
back alleys as much as I could, and only engaging in long philosophical
conversations with alien invaders when it was absolutely necessary, I made my
way back to my old begging spot near the courthouse, looked around on the
ground, found my toothbrush, and stuck it in my back pocket.
    “Where to now?”
asked one of the several hundred prisoners who had followed me.
    “Back to the
pen,” I said. “They’ll be slopping us soon.”
    The prisoners
were dissatisfied with this plan, which they felt wasn’t bold enough. They had
a brief discussion about whether to go back to the pen with me or elect a new
leader and follow him someplace better. Just as the second ballot was