"What do you want?" Arnold sputtered, rising from his breakfast nook as three soldiers prodded his wife into the room at the point of fixed bayonets.
"Christmas tree!" one of them screeched. "Where is?"
"My tree?" Arnold blurted. "You want my Christmas tree?"
"Where tree?"
"For God's sake, Arnold," Mrs. Ziffel said shrilly. "Tell them!"
Arnold Ziffel decided that he could live with handing' up his Christmas tree.
"In the next room," he said.
"You show!" the leader demanded. He was Asian. As he pulled Arnold into the den, he recognized their People's Liberation Army uniforms. He was a regular reader of Soldier of Fortune magazine. The funny thing was, these folks didn't look Chinese at all.
"Here it is," Arnold said, waving to a stunted Scotch pine growing in a tree box. It was tastefully decorated with alternating red and silver ornaments.
"Stand by tree!" the Chinese soldier said.
"Come on, Helen," Arnold said, taking his wife by the arm.
"What can they want?" Helen Ziffel whispered.
"Shhh." Arnold put his arm around his wife's thin shoulders. He felt her tremble. Suddenly, despite her faded pink housecoat and rat's-nest hair, she seemed more precious to him than his beloved AR-15. He was about to tell her so when the leader shouted something in a foreign tongue and into the den came other soldiers, lugging camera equipment and lights. They set up the lights in opposite corners of the den and turned them on. They hurt Arnold's eyes. Then the camera was put into position, and Mrs. Ziffel said something that sent a wave of relief through Arnold's wobbly legs. "Arnold. These must be the movie people."
"Is that true?" Arnold stammered. "Are you with the movie they're shooting?"
"Yes, yes," the leader said distractedly. He conferred with a cameraman. They were holding up a pocket device and trying to read the meter. It looked exactly like the light meter that came with Arnold's thirty-five-millimeter Nishitsu Autofocus.
"Arnold, do you suppose we're going to be in the movie?" Helen Ziffel wondered.
"I'll ask. Hey, friend, are you going to shoot us?" The leader turned, his eyes cold black opals.
"Yes, we shoot you soon. Wait, prease."
"Did you hear that?" Arnold told his wife excitedly. "We're going to be in a Bronzini movie." Arnold Ziffel had seen all the Grundy's twice, once for the story and then a second time to count the technical mistakes.
Then the cameraman got behind his camera and the leader called out to the Ziffels.
"Adorn tree, prease," he said.
"Beg pardon?" Arnold said, blinking.
"Tree. You make rike you adorn with ranterns, okay?"
"I think he wants us to pretend we're putting the bulbs on, Arnold. That's what he meant by lanterns."
"But the dang things already decorated," Arnold hissed through a set-toothed smile. He didn't want to have a fight with his wife in front of thirty million moviegoers.
"Then let's pretend," Helen Ziffel said tightly. "This is a major movie, for goodness' sake. Try to go along, for once in your life."
Arnold and Helen got on either side of their Christmas tree and each removed a bulb. Helen took a silver one and Arnold took a red one.
"How's this?" Arnold asked, and he fumbled the tiny hook back onto the tree.
The leader barked something unintelligible and the ornament exploded in Arnold's surprised face. His wife screamed. The tree shivered manically, ornaments popping like flashbulbs, limbs snapping like brush.
Arnold Ziffel saw the raw ruin that had been his upraised hand and felt the sledgehammer blows of automatic-weapons fire punctuate his trembling body. He joined his wife on the floor. The new light fixture he had bought for the den shattered within its Santa Claus wrapping under the impact of his 195-pound weight. His surviving hand fell onto his wife's cheek, and even though he couldn't feel it, Arnold knew she was dead. The gunfire stopped.
Arnold Ziffel lifted his face shakily and tried to see into the blinding lights. Just before he died, he wondered why, if this were just a movie, the bullets had been real. And why, if, as he had suddenly suspected, they had finally come for him, were they filming it?
Mayor Basil Cloves wanted to know if this was in the script when the uniformed Japanese barged into his office and dragged him out of his executive chair.
He was still asking it five minutes later when they forced his head into the V of the curb in front of city hall and rolled a tank up onto the sidewalk. The left front track stopped just inches from his head.
Third A. D. Harachi Seiko demanded, "One rast time, I ask for your surrender. Do you agree?"
Cloves hesitated. "Is this in the script?" he asked again. Seiko barked an order in Japanese. The tank inched closer. Cloves felt the coldness of the curb against his face. A kneeling Japanese kept his face pressed to the gritty street. Another one squatted harpy-like on his legs. A third pinioned his arms behind his back.
"Tell me what you want me to do!" Cloves said in an agitated voice. "If the script calls for it, I'll surrender."
"Choice is yours," Seiko said flatly. "You surrender and terr citizens to ray down arms. Or you die."
Basil Cloves cringed from the spittle spraying from the Japanese's screaming mouth. Through the triangular frame of the arm of the soldier who had his head, he could see a video camera aimed at his own face. Maybe he should play the brave public servant.
Behind the video camera a man was walking down the street, looking dazed and crying in a voice choked with disbelief, "But this is America. This is America!"
He was quickly surrounded and bayoneted in the stomach.
It occurred to Mayor Basil Cloves that perhaps this wasn't a movie after all. That the explosions he kept hearing were not special effects. That the sporadic gunfire was not harmless.
Basil Cloves in that moment realized what he had done. And he made his decision.
"I'll never surrender," he said quietly.
The next sound he heard was a guttural order, then the clanking of the tank. The man holding his head down turned his face to the dirt-caked track, which gleamed at its wear points. The track inched forward.
"You change mind?" Third A. D. Seiko demanded.
"Never!" Mayor Cloves spat. He knew they could not run him down. Not with four men holding him down. They'd be run over too.
Yet the track continued gnashing toward him.
The man at his head suddenly released his hair. He stepped back. Cloves lifted his head. But that was all he could lift. The others kept his arms and legs down.
Then the track bit into the mayor of Yuma's nose. He screamed, but the sound was swallowed by the shattering of his teeth and the pulverizing of his facial bones.