The War

A short story

“Hurry!” Gabrielle poked Mateo’s arm. “Incoming, ETA three minutes!”

Mateo withdrew from the binocular microscope, which left two circular indentations around his eyes. 

I fell asleep on a microscope? 

He tried to will his legs to action, but gravity behaved as if it were ten times stronger than normal, his limbs barely responding.

“Wake up and get a move on!” Gabrielle snapped.

Shrill air raid sirens did for Mateo what Gabrielle’s urgent pleading could not. He stood straight, took a deep breath, shouted, “Oh my god,” and then ran out of the lab. 

With no time to wait for an elevator, the two scientists bolted down the ten stories, breathless, their lab coats flapping, taking the steps two at a time, balancing themselves on the handrail. They reached the bomb shelter on basement level four just as another scientist started closing the blast-proof door. 

The group’s senior scientist, Janet Lange, greeted them inside the shelter with, “I have important news.” Not, “Are you okay?” or “I’m glad you made it in time,” but right to business, which was Dr. Lange’s way. 

“You found the alien’s weakness? We’re going to win the war?” Gabrielle resisted smiling. She wouldn’t smile until victory against the beings from Proxima Centauri b was assured. 

Ten years ago, scientists sent a laser greeting to Proxima Centauri b, an exoplanet four-point-two light years distant: “Hello from planet Earth.” The aliens, who had developed faster-than-light travel, got the message and responded by invading Earth.

They came for—and took—the coffee.

All of it. Everywhere. Coffee shops were the easiest targets, falling first. Then grocery stores that sold mass-produced beans, followed by siphoning coffee machines at diners, rest stops, and fast food restaurants, and finally, uprooting coffee farms, massive ships carting away entire plantations. 

They transformed Hawaii, Kenya, Brazil, Columbia, and other places into sorrowful, acrid deserts. 

Nothing stopped these creatures. The more caffeine they acquired, the less there was for humans, which tilted the balance of power in the aliens’ favor.

The irony was that soon there would be no coffee anywhere on Earth, the aliens having denuded the planet of what they desired most. But even advanced beings didn’t always make perfect decisions. 

Gabrielle rubbed her forehead. Her caffeine withdrawal headache was worse than last week, despite her doctor’s reassurance it would last no more than a week. 

Mateo reported a popcorn popper igniting kernels inside his skull. 

In addition to coffee, ibuprofen, aspirin, and acetaminophen were all gone. Half the population spent the day with their faces buried in pillows while the other half walked the streets zombie-like, chanting, “Coffee, coffee.” 

“We found a miracle.” Janet nodded, her eyes drooping in sync with her head. She yawned. 

Mateo and Gabrielle yawned back. 

With her thumbs and forefingers, Gabrielle pried her eyes open. 

“You finally found something to blast those ships out of the sky?” Mateo grumbled. 

“Can we go somewhere?” Janet asked. “There’s a comfy couch in the staff lounge, and if I can just lay down for a minute, I’ll explain it all.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. If you lay down—”

“You're probably right.” Janet bit her lip so hard it bled, a trick everyone used when they had to—pain was a temporary wake-upper. “There’s a java expert in New York, Richard Larson, who knows his way around coffee biology like nobody else. According to my contact at Homeland, Larson’s figured out how to grow coffee underground in caves, like Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, which would mean the aliens would never find our coffee farms. We will build a secret network of tunnels to transport coffee around the country. He should be here any moment, courtesy of the United States Army.”

Gabrielle smiled wistfully as she remembered the sensual aroma that woke her every morning, the cup of joe warming her hands, then her belly, then within seconds like a car shifting directly from first to fourth gears, her mind and body fully alert. She took Mateo’s hand and squeezed it. He squeezed hers back as they shared the same thoughts about the days when they both didn’t agree, “too sleepy for sex.”

An alarm blared, and a red light flashed overhead, signaling that the outer door was about to open.

“He’s here!” Janet said. “Our savior, Richard Larson, will show us how to grow coffee in darkness.”

Three armed Marines escorted a gangly twenties guy with a thin mustache in a plaid t-shirt and flat cap. 

Richard’s mouth opened wide as he looked around the bomb shelter, closing only after he popped in a stick of Trident and chewed. “Wow,” he said, “This place is amazing. Where am I exactly?”

“You’re four levels under Cobalt Labs, where we do advanced coffee research.”

Richard rubbed his hands together. “Oh great. I so miss coffee. I thought the aliens got it all, but”—he took in a long, slow sniff—“take me to it.”

Janet scrunched her eyes. “You’re here to figure out how we grow coffee plants in caves, an imperative if civilization is to continue. The world is out of coffee and you, Richard Larson, are our only hope.”

“What are you talking about? Some guys in uniforms picked me up at my apartment five days ago and drove me like maniacs across the country. It was a gorgeous drive, I must admit, the Rockies and all that ‘cause I’m a New York City boy, but they never explained why I’m here.”

“You’re here because you are a coffee expert.”

“Yes, but I don’t think I am what you think I am. Somebody must have been half asleep when they plucked my name out of a database hat. I was a barista at Starbucks.”

Faces turned ghost-white, and everyone stopped breathing for several beats. 

Richard spoke again, “We’re doomed, aren’t we?”

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If you enjoyed The War, I think you’ll also like my short story, Lawbreakers.