by Kris Ashton
“I hate those aliens,” Stan said. “I really, truly hate them. Sincerely.”
Hank had no reason to disbelieve the kid. He hated them a good deal himself, even though his emotional art had moved on from immature blacks and whites.
“They’re a virus that’s infected your parents,” Hank said, hating the hollowness of his conviction. “We just have to fight that virus any way we can.”
“There’s one.”
“There’s one what?”
“A virus. An alien. There.”
Slowing to a crawl, Hank followed the point of Stan’s finger but could see nothing. Then, like an optical illusion, the creature emerged to his startled eyes. A recently installed drainpipe ran down one side of the Log Shop and the creature had climbed part way up, its skin matching the aluminum in all but sheen. It scuttled up onto the roof in short, sharp movements and looked out over the town, like a silver pirate scanning the sea from a crow’s nest. Hank brought the cruiser to a full stop and its brakes squeaked. The high-pitched sound drew the creature’s attention and it got down on its haunches, uttering an alien cry that seemed to rattle the windows like a deep bass.
Without needing to be told, Stan passed the Uzi to Hank and pulled on the helmet of his suit, around so Hank could check it at the back. They looked at one another, man and child-man, then nodded and opened their doors. Hank shuffled around his door, not taking his eye off the creature, and leaned against the crook formed between the hood and the windscreen. He clicked off the Uzi’s safety and kept an eye apiece on Stan and the creature.
Stan sidled up to the trailer, not wishing to turn away from the creature, and slipped the elastic tether from three of the hooks. He folded back a corner of the tarp and took out the pump. They had filled it and primed it before setting off, and he now slipped one of its straps over his shoulder.
The creature had shown more interest in Hank and his Uzi up to this point, but as Stan made his first tentative steps towards the Log Shop, it addled their brains with another scream from its alien larynx and then leaped from the roof, landing on the concrete below with a nimble clink. Stan’s stride stuttered at this, just a single misstep, and then he went on. In fact, he picked up the pace. The kid wants to put some space between us, Hank thought. I wish I had half his gumption.
The creature cocked its head to one side and then the other, perhaps perplexed at this unfamiliar yellow creature, then fell into a suspicious half-crouch. Hank trained his gun on its ribbed chest, wondering whether he could hit it from such a distance. He wished Jim Coultier’s weapon stockpile had included a sniper rifle with a telescopic sight.
Stan got within ten feet of the creature and stopped. It glanced in Hank’s direction, probably to make sure he was not up to mischief, and then raised both its arms so the spurs pointed out like the horns of a triceratops.
Eerily calm in the face of this, Stan aimed the hose attachment at the creature and closed his finger on the trigger. A jet of misty water shot out and splashed against the creature’s arms, chest and neck. It let out a brain-melting wail and skittered backward, crashing into a wooden post. Stan pursued his advantage, moving in and waving the hose up and down to drench the creature. When the pressure in the pump began to wane the creature’s body glistened with radioactive water.
Stan looked at the creature. The creature looked at Stan. Hank looked at them both.
Then the creature straightened up, a good foot and a half taller than Stan. While it did not assume a threatening posture, the action awakened a panicked prescience in Hank. He tried to call out a warning to Stan, but a side-effect of foresight appeared to be paralyzed vocal cords. Instead, he let his finger do the talking.
The Uzi blustered in his hands, shattering the Log Shop’s front window to a thousand tiny fragments. Stan ducked away to one side and vaulted over the short pole-fence that divided the Log Shop from its neighbor. The creature fell to a lizard-like position and scrabbled forward on all-fours. Hank lowered the gun’s muzzle, not bothering to take his finger off the trigger. The line of bullets ripped up the concrete, leaving behind powdery craters, and wended their way closer to the creature. As the creature closed the distance between Hank and itself, it reverted to a bipedal stance, flitting over the ground like a mechanical ostrich.
Hank shut one eye and tensed his hands on the gun until they stilled. The trace of the bullets lifted from the ground and there came a tink! as one penetrated the creature’s shoulder. It flipped backward, its legs piking out in front, and then it flopped heavily onto the concrete. The creature cried out in pain, and Hank wished God (or whomever) would strike him deaf. If blood had hemorrhaged from each ear and trickled down his neck he would not have been surprised.
He inched out from behind the cruiser and took a couple of cautious steps toward the creature, even as every fiber in his body told him to flee. His eyes flicked in Stan’s direction and he saw the alert-yellow radiation suit hunkered down near a mailbox a good fifty yards up the street. Knowing Stan had found safety, Hank crept forward six or seven more steps, wanting to get close to the thing, make all his bullets count. Blood like cream cheese squeezed from the creature’s shoulder wound in a fat yellow noodle.
He got within eight feet of the creature, close enough to hit a mouse…and paused. Something about its face captured his eye. It had a softness he had not seen earlier, or—was it familiar? His mind flicked through a lifetime of visages, trying to match them as a detective might match a fingerprint.
The creature stared back at him. “Hoooork,” it said.
That had not chafed his ears as its previous utterance had. As a matter of fact, it almost seemed to be—
“Haaaak,” it said, refining, honing, forcing its otherworldly voice box to make human sounds. “Haaank.”
Hank did not lower his gun, but he did say, “Denise.”
“Haank.”
Yes, he could see her face in its face now. Crude, perhaps, a lump of clay with only the roughest of features molded into it, but its lines were recognizably his wife’s. The high cheekbones curving down into a cute chin—her heart-shaped face he had once called it when they were dating. I love your heart-shaped face, he had said, tucking a finger beneath her chin and catching her sapphire eyes with his own.
“Help me,” the creature said. “Please help me, Hank.”
“Denise,” he said again, his voice and the Uzi barrel wavering.
“Please help me.” It—she—nearly sounded human again. The words had a metallic ring, as if they were being spoken into a tuba, but otherwise…
Hank shuffled a step forward. Then one more. Then one more.
“Denise, is that you in there?”
“Hank. Please.”
“We will. We’ll help you. Don’t worry, you’ll be okay.”
“I love you, Hank.”
“I l—”
The creature lurched forward, sluggish with its injury, and thrust its spur joust-like at Hank’s stomach. He closed his finger on the Uzi’s trigger.
A dry click.
The spur lanced through him; he felt its sharp point enter just to the right of his bellybutton and heard a popping sound, as though he had equalized the pressure in someone else’s ears. He also felt the spur extrude out his back but his body had already numbed to pain. Nearby, someone shrieked like a gull but Hank couldn’t think who it would be. The back of his thigh felt wet and warm. He took the creature’s spur between his hands.
“Denise,” he said. “Why?”
The creature burred a xenomorphic reply, the verbal equivalent of nails down a chalkboard, and withdrew its spur.
Somehow this dispelled Hank’s initial shock and the pain returned in a catastrophic tsunami. He dropped to his knees and clamped his hands over the wound in his belly, where he had seen things no healthy human being ever hoped to see outside a medical book. Something fell out of his exit wound and plopped onto his calf. A grey smoke haze filtered across his vision and from within it small black caps sta
rted to explode.
He did not feel the fatal strike.
6:29 p.m.
Small knuckles knocked at the church doors; too small to be adult (or creature). Derek, Sheriff Grayson and Father Bronson exchanged an uneasy three-way glance, and then Derek opened the door.
Stan, now stripped out of his radiation suit, stood there sullen-eyed. “It didn’t work,” he said.
“Come in, come in,” Father Bronson said, putting an arm around the boy’s shoulders.
“Where’s Hank?” Sheriff Grayson asked.
“Not now,” the father said.
“He’s dead, of course,” Stan said. “Just like the rest of us will be.”
“Now, you don’t know that,” Father Bronson said, ushering Stan to a pew. “Only God can know—”
“Oh, shut up about God!” Stan cried. His face crumpled up like a piece of paper and fat tears spilled out onto his cheeks. “I prayed to God with you and where did it get us? Nowhere! If there is a God, I think he hates us.”
Father Bronson tried to pull Stan into a hug. He resisted at first and then fell against the priest’s shoulder as if he could no longer be bothered fighting. He sobbed into Father Bronson’s shirt, his arms limp and dangling.
“Jesus, what a mess,” Derek said. “What the hell were we thinking? It was like something out of a dumb science fiction movie.”
“It could have worked,” Barkley said. “We didn’t have enough data to know one way or another for certain. It only seems silly in hindsight.”
“Well, whatever. We need a plan B now and I don’t remember hearing any brilliant ideas from anyone.”
“Now don’t start…” Grayson began.
“What’s—”
“Shh!”
Grayson inclined his head towards the front of the church, listening hard. “Children, quiet!” he barked. The babble of young voices muted.
Now Derek heard it too. “Is that rain?” he said.
“I’ve been running this church for nearly forty years,” Father Bronson said. “That’s no rain.”
The noise grew louder now; to Derek it sounded like a handful of nuts and bolts being dropped into a glass over and over again. Then his brain painted an explanatory picture—dozens, perhaps hundreds, of metal feet striking the asphalt surface of Main Street.
“Arm yourselves,” Grayson said. “Father, can we get up into the steeple? Use it as a sniper’s perch?”
“It can be accessed. There’s a staircase behind the altar.”
“Okay. Barkley, you take an M-1 up onto the steeple. Father, you concentrate on getting these kids into the most secure part of the church you can find.”
Barkley and Father Bronson scampered off. Soon Father Bronson’s booming voice rumbled through the hallowed halls, directing the children into his private quarters.
“Brolin,” Grayson said, “get an M-1 and help me—”
The church window nearest the door shattered inwards. Blue, red and green shards rained down on the floor and the rearmost pews. The first creature landed between the wall and the pews with a gymnast’s precision. It noted Father Bronson disappearing into his quarters and then turned to Derek and the sheriff, warbling something in its own surreal language.
“Take it out,” Grayson said.
“But you—”
“Don’t worry about me.”
Another window blew in, as if the church was somehow depressurizing in small pockets, and a second creature landed in a hail of tinkling plate glass. It uttered a wavering whale song, alerting its mate to its presence.
Derek squeezed the trigger. The gun came to life in his hands, its nose issuing a lick of flame and the butt jiggering against his shoulder. The first fusillade of bullets ripped the corner off the top of a pew and sent a spray of woodchips into the creature’s face. It let out a shrill cry (Derek had the weirdest sensation of his brain trying to be sick at the sound of it) and made a grasshopper leap across the entire row of pews, landing in the aisle. Derek followed it with the M16’s muzzle and capped off another five or six rounds. Most of the bullets missed, but one grazed the top of the creature’s head, rocking it back, and a second dented its upper arm. It made a noise like an old witch trying to hit a soprano note and then dropped to all-fours and scuttled lizard-like towards the rear of the church. Derek tried to fire on it again but the pews’ backrests impeded his shot, and he only succeeded in exposing the raw pine beneath the stain. When the creature’s cover ended with the last row it sprang high in the air and came down like a living bomb, swiping its spur at Derek’s face. With no recourse, Derek fell back and landed hard on his bottom. A curt pain message relayed up his spine. Half blind with agony, Derek depressed the trigger and held it down, winding the gun around in small spirals. He heard the tink! tink! of metal on metal and then an anguished mewl followed by the clunk of retreating steps. Derek propelled himself forward onto his knees, his vision clearing, and emptied the rest of the magazine into the creature’s body. Its midsection split open like a can of beans left in a fire and white and yellow entrails plopped onto the floor. The creature fell into its own innards and Derek vomited on his shoes.
Grayson’s voice reached Derek’s ears the first time around but did not leave a message; it might have been the caw of a crow. Then the sheriff’s second delivery got through:
“Brolin, get down!”
Not even fear response could coerce Derek to throw himself down into the creature’s eviscerated guts, but he dropped his empty gun and crouched, hugging his knees and becoming a human pod.
Grayson had set himself up at the altar, an M-1 propped up on the pulpit. From the spot where Father Bronson had delivered a thousand sermons to Bald Eagle’s faithful, Sheriff Grayson now delivered a barrage of gunfire. Some bullets socked into the stout wood of the church walls and there was the familiar tink! tink! as others found their mark. The creature screeched, such a freakish banshee wail that Derek clapped his hands over his ears and indulged a traumatized fantasy of poking out his eardrums if only to stop the noise.
When silence came it was far from pure. Derek seemed to have a mosquito whining in each ear (he had experienced something similar when standing too close to a speaker at a music festival twelve months earlier) and the muffled pepper of gunfire came through the ceiling. Derek lurched to his feet and snatched up a box of M-1 magazines, tucking it beneath his arm. He set off towards the altar at a staggering, unbalanced run and did not look back, even when he heard the smash of another window and the deep clack of metal feet on floorboards. Grayson’s gun lit up again and set off an alien wail that went on and on well after the gun’s magazine was spent. Derek dropped the ammo box next to the pulpit and when he looked up, he saw Grayson grimacing at the creature’s abhorrent cacophonic voice.
“I got it in the leg,” he said over the din. “Quick—reload and then go and get more guns.”
Derek slapped another cartridge into Grayson’s M-1 and did the same for his own. When he looked up, another creature had perched on the broken window, its feet impervious to the triangular chips of glass in the frame. It hopped down like a blackbird and another took its place, a third smashing in through another window. Derek laid down a spray of fire and the creatures took cover, trilling warnings at one another. Grayson capped off a dozen rounds of his own to keep the creatures chaste as Derek collected up two Uzis and another M-1, stacked them on top of a box of Uzi ammunition, and sledded it all along the polished church floor. Grayson fired another dozen shots to keep the creatures at bay and Derek arrived safely at their holy base of operations.
“What’s the plan?” Derek shouted over the creatures.
“Point, shoot and pray,” Grayson said.
6:44 p.m.
The church’s bell tower and steeple did not match the rest of its modest country grandeur. The stairs had led to a hatch so small it would not have looked out of place in a mini-submarine. Barkley had to put the gun in the belfry first so he could pass through the hatchway. He wondered
if someone Sheriff Grayson’s size could have fit at all.
Now, with his left elbow propped on the edge of the belfry arch and one eye shut, he selected his fourth target from the dozens on offer and fired the M-1. The spray of bullets found their mark around the creature’s neck and it fell onto its back, wailing. Two others in the immediate vicinity scatted off with cries of alarm. Even from his eyrie, their voices made Marcus’s ears itch and creep. The hit creature rolled forward and staggered to its feet, its neck now dented and wattled. Marcus took another careful aim and pulled the trigger, bracing his knee against the wall for stability. The bullets found their mark, but from such a distance he had to empty the remainder of the cartridge before he saw the telltale spume of sick-white blood.
Fortune, it seemed, had finally smiled on them. In both architecture and geography the church provided the perfect defensible bastion, with narrow laneways limiting attacks on its eastern and southern sides and a blank concrete wall facing west. The front of the church looked to the north, the direction from which the creatures had launched their assault. It had heavy oak doors, so only its windows provided swift means of entry. And from his belfry-cum-machine-gun-nest, Marcus had managed to stymie that as well. A few creatures had slipped past his suppressing fire, but judging by the roar of guns down below, Brolin and Sheriff Grayson were holding their own.
He sent out a wide arc of bullets at the creatures’ front line, more to discourage their assault on the church than to injure them. It had the desired effect—several fell back and others retreated to the fringes of the line, taking cover behind parked cars and anything else they could find.
His clip spent, Barkley ejected it and picked up another. As he smacked it in, he heard what sounded like someone smashing pottery with a hammer. His eyes darted right and he saw a creature pounding across the roof towards him, its feet cracking the tiles with each hard, agile step and its spurs pointed forward like elephant tusks. He swung around to face it, but the muzzle of his gun clucked against the bell tower’s arch. The creature bore down on him like a streak of silver lightning. When he stuck his gun out the eastern arch the creature was no more than eight feet away and closing; he could see the bell tower reflected in the curved mirror of its head.