Invaders

by Vaughn Heppner

  What would have happened to me if their flashlight beams had caught me?

  I thought about priorities. I’d heard stupid stories about abducted people. In those, the extraterrestrials liked to practice experiments on their victims. If they caught me, would the tall men jab an insect growth into my gut? Would it grow while I ate ice cream at a prodigious rate? Would I have to watch my belly swell and see an alien burst out of me?

  Western Sunlight wasn’t paying me enough for that.

  I squeezed my eyes shut as hard as I could. Was this the right interpretation of what I’d just seen? The buzzing had been too wrong. I hadn’t imagined it, either.

  Back in the Marines during embassy duty, I’d faced screaming protesters waving knives at us. I had held my post and attacked on command with my buddies. I would never have let my squad down.

  No one would know if I slipped away now, though. Did I have an obligation to face these horrors? The two newbies were likely dead or long gone from the premises. How did my getting killed help them in any way?

  I drew up to my knees, climbed to my shaky feet and began to stagger away from the block buildings. I wasn’t sure of directions just then. But I knew I wanted separation from the freaks.

  I found breathing difficult and my eyesight kept blurring. I was dead tired and now I was frightened and confused.

  I—

  “What are you doing here?”

  I yelped as a tall man shined a flashlight beam in my eyes. I hadn’t heard him approach, had no idea how he’d gotten ahead of me.

  I raised an arm, shielding myself from his beam. He lowered it so the light shined on my chest. Then, he repeated the question. I squinted at him. He had the dead-eyed stare of a fish, but he hadn’t buzzed the words with an open mouth. He’d spoken English…even if he had the slightest of accents.

  “Who…” I took a draught of air and tried again. “Who are you?”

  He looked to be anywhere from forty to fifty. He had a round face, and he was taller than me, although not by much. He was skinny, though. His somber face told me he was a no-nonsense man—if he was a man.

  “This is private property,” he said. “You are trespassing.”

  I just stared at him.

  “Why are you here?” he asked for the third time.

  “Jeep,” I said, waving a listless arm.

  “You have a vehicle?” he said in his unemotional manner.

  I nodded.

  “It runs?” he asked.

  Did I detect a note of surprise? That helped me collect myself. Finally, my mind started whirling again.

  “My, ah, jeep broke down,” I said. “I’ve been looking for a gas station.”

  He studied me with his fish-eyes.

  “You are lying,” he announced. Without further ado, he reached under his jacket. I had no doubt he was reaching for a shoulder-harnessed weapon.

  With an oath, I lunged at him. I didn’t hit him, but I grabbed the arm going for the weapon. My hands latched onto a thin arm—thinner than it had a right to be. But that wasn’t the terrible thing. He radiated a dreadful heat.

  “Do not touch me,” he said in the same emotionless manner that he’d spoken everything else.

  He took his hand out from under his jacket as he flung his arm. I gripped the arm as hard as I could. That caused me to lift off the ground and launch away from him. I’d never heard of anyone with that kind of one-armed, standing strength. It was inhuman.

  I flew away, but I didn’t let go. My weight jerked him off his feet. I fell onto my back, pulling him over me as if I were some kind of kung-fu champion. I’d like to say I planned all that, but it was stupid luck. I let go then, and he sailed away from me.

  Adrenaline kicked in. Like a coiled spring, I bounded onto my feet, swiveling toward him.

  He hit the ground, and his flashlight flew from his hand. It landed and skidded, but managed to focus its beam on him.

  His face never changed expression. I saw the arm dart under his jacket again.

  My .44 was already in my hands.

  BOOM!

  The slug plowed the pavement beside him, blasting cement chips everywhere. That hadn’t been the plan. I concentrated, aimed the hand cannon on his necktie and squeezed the trigger two times.

  BOOM! BOOM!

  I blew chunks out of him as black gunk jetted upward. It was too gooey to be human blood. He didn’t have bones. At least, I didn’t see any. Instead, he seemed to be made entirely out of some kind of dense meaty substance.

  I’d taken out a good portion of his upper chest. Even so, the bastard sat up. A part of my mind screamed at me to run as far and as fast as I could away from this zombie. Another part of me told me I’d better keep my act together or I was a dead man.

  Deliberately, I retargeted.

  BOOM! BOOM!

  I blasted his head, spraying gunk and bone in two shattering globs, and sending the hat spinning from the wreckage of his skull.

  He fell back with a thud.

  The shakes hit and I dropped my Smith & Wesson so it clattered onto the pavement. Weird alien noises—buzzing—came from several different directions.

  “Logan,” I hissed to myself in warning.

  Despite the hammering in my chest and my shaking hands, I picked up the revolver. I had one bullet left. I shoved the big gun into its holster and clicked the strap into place.

  Three steps brought me to the dead thing. I picked up his flashlight and shined it on him.

  He was one ugly corpse with the black gunk bubbling out of his chest and shattered head.

  I had one thing going for me, a curse, you could say. I screwed up easy jobs and pleasant relationships, finding it hard to do what everyone else found easy. Maybe as compensation, I found it easier to do the things that froze others. I could think and act normally in crazy situations.

  With a grunt, I reached into his sticky suit and yanked out the weapon. It was pistol-shaped but wrong. There was no orifice for a slug to eject from—the end was solid. It reminded me of my raygun toys as a child.

  I clicked off the flashlight, gripped the raygun harder than ever and listened. Approaching feet struck pavement and crunched on the gravel nearby.

  The others were closing in on me. They were aliens. I might be the only human who knew about their existence, and I was alone out here at Station 5. The two newbies I’d come to see were either dead or long gone.

  I knew one other thing. For the good of the human race—for my own well-being, too—I couldn’t let the aliens find me.

  -4-

  I backed away from the corpse. Then, I turned and ran. As I did, I realized that might cause me to panic.

  The funny thing about the human psyche is that it often follows what your body is doing. I’d learned that during my year in college. I’d been a waiter in a fancy restaurant. I’d often come to work angry, but I’d never left like that. The reason was simple. I’d forced myself to smile at the customers in order to get good tips.

  “Hi, I’m your waiter, Logan,” I would say, grinning or smiling if the woman at the table was particularly cute.

  That smiling put me in a good mood. I know. That sounds shallow, like, what kind of goof was I? But try it sometime. When you’re bummed or depressed, force yourself to smile and mean it. Sooner than you realize, you’ll be feeling better.

  This principle could also work negatively, as it was doing to me at Station 5.

  Panic welled up in me as I sprinted from the extraterrestrial’s corpse. I found myself breathing hard, with an itch crawling along my spine. I could imagine a red ray beaming me in the back, burning me down. That made me sprint faster as the gibbering monkey-brain in me tried to take over.

  I swore softly at myself. With a stronger effort of will than it should have taken, I made myself stop.

  Even then, I found myself trembling.

  I swore to myself again, clenching my teeth together so they wouldn’t chatter.

  I wouldn’t survive the night if I co
uldn’t start thinking. Panic could kill a man faster than just about anything else. I might accidently dash myself against a collector strut if I wasn’t careful.

  “You gotta think this through, Logan,” I whispered.

  I wiped sweat out of my eyes, which caused me to gouge my forehead with the solid tip of the raygun clenched in my right hand. The pain made me flinch, and that made me mad.

  Deliberately, I set the raygun and flashlight on the pavement.

  My forehead throbbed. I touched it, feeling wetness there. I couldn’t believe it. I’d cut myself with the end of the raygun.

  Head wounds bled the worst. If I wasn’t careful, I’d leave a trail of blood for the freaks to see.

  I blotted my forehead with my jacket sleeve. In the old days, a man had a handkerchief in his front suit pocket. I could have used one about now.

  How had the alien popped in front of me before? The original three hadn’t spotted me. They’d played their flashlight beams everywhere but where I was hiding—

  I hissed at my stupidity. That was it. That had been the giveaway—if I’d been awake to what had been going on. They’d spotted me and had made a show of looking everywhere but where I’d hid. They had played me.

  Did that mean the extraterrestrials had better night-vision than humans did?

  I listened intently, but couldn’t hear them anymore. I imagined the tall, skinny, human-looking aliens moving silently in the dark. How hard would they look for me? Had they found the dead alien—

  I spotted a glowing red light and whipped my head around so I could see more clearly.

  The image of what I saw stamped itself into my memories. One of the expensively suited men—an alien, I told myself—held a similar raygun to the one I’d taken. And it was a raygun, all right. I saw a red beam stab from the solid orifice and strike the corpse. The corpse glowed, reminding me of a bad 1960s TV special effect. Then the body began to slowly disintegrate. A dark oily smoke drifted from the glow, and an oily residue stained the pavement where the corpse had been.

  After the entire corpse had vaporized, the raygun beam disappeared. It left afterimages on my eyeballs.

  I looked away, closing my eyes, desperately wanting my night-vision back.

  That clinched it for me. No way did the U.S. have hand weapons that could vaporize a body with a beam. We had red laser lights that kids used to drive cats crazy and flash on movie screens, but nothing lethal like I’d just witnessed.

  I wasn’t a math whiz, but I could do simple arithmetic. A red teleporting beam from space, boxlike tanks, buzzing instead of speech, fantastic strength from a rail-thin arm, radiating heat and lastly, a real raygun: that all added up to extraterrestrials on old Planet Earth. Worse, for me, they were in Nevada at Station 5.

  Once more, I blotted my bleeding forehead with a sleeve.

  The aliens had teleported down three tanks and a squad of goons from space to a remote desert location. My jeep and cell phone had died. The aliens must have blanketed the area with a—

  I don’t know what they’d used to do that. But as I said, I’d watched a ton of science fiction TV shows and movies. I’d read my share of SF novels, too. The aliens had arrived on Earth in spaceships no doubt presently orbiting the planet. That implied a Faster-Than-Light Drive, an FTL starship.

  I looked up at the stars. Humanity wasn’t alone. Right now, I wished we were.

  If these bastards had a starship, was it scanning Station 5 for me? Would it work like that? Maybe the collectors made a scan difficult. Maybe if I ran out into the desert, I’d show up like a neon light on their scanners.

  I listened more intently, straining to hear any telltale sounds.

  What did it mean that the aliens looked and dressed like humans? That seemed to imply that they were trying to blend in among us. One of them had even spoken to me in English. These aliens had clearly studied mankind.

  I began to feel lightheaded.

  In the starlight, I examined my purloined raygun. The aliens appeared to have hands and fingers just like us. Were those their real bodies, or were the bodies…a disguise?

  I noticed a stub where the trigger should be. With the lightest of touches, I depressed it a tiny bit.

  I heard the faintest of whines inside the weapon as it started to vibrate just a bit in my hand. The tip glowed with an almost invisible red color.

  I jerked my finger off the stub. Clearly, that’s how I could fire it.

  The faint whine cycled down. The vibration stopped.

  I blotted my forehead again, mopping away blood and sweat.

  I had a weapon to use. But what good would my one raygun do against their many?

  I grimaced, determined to make a fight of it. I’d already killed one of the bastards. I could kill more if I had to. What right did they have to come down onto our planet and start destroying property? Maybe they had killed my two men, as well.

  I had another thought. If their scanners were so good, why had they teleported down while I was here to see them? Did that mean they were arrogant, sloppy or less capable than I thought?

  A noise to my left caught my attention. With deliberate slowness, I turned my head, staring, trying to see something other than indistinct black shapes.

  I thought I could see something moving over there.

  My heart began hammering and I started trembling. What should I do? Had an alien seen me? If he had, why hadn’t he fired at me?

  I heard a scraping noise from that direction. I estimated the black blot to be about sixty feet away. A low-sounding beep and a faint green glow were coming from it.

  The primitive monkey-brain part of me screamed with certainty. The alien had a detector. The creature from another planet had spotted me with it.

  Before I was quite aware of making any plans, I aimed the raygun at the greater darkness and firmly pressed the trigger stub.

  The alien gun whined just like before, but louder and brighter this time, then vibrated and shot a pencil-thin beam. The light illuminated a tall alien in a human suit. It held a device that could have been a detector. I saw all that as the beam flashed past him, hitting a collector farther behind him to the left.

  I adjusted, bringing the red ray onto him. The alien had lousy reflexes. The beam struck him square in the chest area just as he began to lower the device. He hadn’t ducked, sidestepped or done anything more than move his arms a bit.

  He glowed immediately, finally made a convulsive effort to escape and collapsed onto the pavement. That caused my red ray to overshoot him.

  I lifted my trigger finger. I could hear something new in the distance. I didn’t need to disintegrate him all the way—I just needed to take him out of play, which I’d done.

  My heart raced. My gut boiled. I wanted to sprint like a mad fool for the desert and get the Hell home. Instead, I began walking to the right.

  I was certain I would be an easy target in the desert. And I wanted to live. Despite the fuzziness of my thoughts, I actually had a plan. Now, it was time to see if I could pull it off.

  -5-

  As far as I could see, the trick was surviving the night. Later, I would have to tell someone what had happened.

  Clearly, people would think I was nuts…unless I had incontrovertible evidence. The evidence would be my raygun. I didn’t plan to use it again tonight, as I didn’t want to drain whatever juiced the disintegrating beam.

  The plan was simple and elegant. I’d learned in the Marines that complicated plans usually went awry because of friction.

  In military terms, friction was all the little things that went wrong, often at precisely the worst time. A man named Mr. Murphy had a law about that, the kind of law few people could ignore and get away with it.

  Because of friction, easy plans were usually the best ones. The more people one involved in a plan, the more friction it caused.

  I was going to hide in a basement—in a battery storage area. I would go to one of the places that they’d already raided. In hide-and-seek,
one of the best spots to hide was in a place a seeker had already searched. In hide-and-seek, doing the opposite of what the seeker expected was also a good bet.

  The aliens would surely expect me to run away.

  I heard one of them to the right. Slowly, I lowered myself until I was crawling across the pavement on my belly. In the interest of survival, I’d taken off my shoes. I held one in each hand along with a rolled-up sock stuck inside each. That made holding the flashlight and raygun harder, but I could manage for a while.

  I was going to have to walk out of here later, tomorrow, most likely. I didn’t want to do that in my bare feet or without socks.

  I stopped, badly out of breath under a collector. Belly crawling was hard, sweaty work. It had also been too long since I’d had a drink of water. I was beginning to feel dehydrated, and I was definitely hungry.

  It took me several tries to swallow and a few more seconds to focus again. I could see the block buildings from here. Three of the dress-suited aliens were carrying huge boxes through one of the smashed-apart doors.

  I would skip that building.

  After a minute of observation, I began to crawl again. Thirty seconds of it left me panting too hard. I was never going to get where I wanted at this rate.

  It bothered me that I couldn’t force myself to stand right away. Fear had a lot to do with that. Maybe it would be better to head into the desert after all.

  “No,” I whispered. “Stick to the plan. Don’t chicken out.”

  Trembling, I climbed to my feet. Crouched over as if that would help keep me hidden, I crept from one solar collector to another. Finally, I neared the building opposite the one the three beings had entered.

  I would first have to cross an open area to reach my building. I looked around and didn’t see or hear any aliens.

  I grimaced to myself, but I knew that the sooner I started, the sooner I’d be safe. I tottered into the open. My stomach clenched and my spine tingled. I felt as if an alien sniper had a bead on me. The bastard was playing me, knowing my fear was eating up my nerves.