All You Need Is Kill

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?”