Now, Glenda Taylor only had contact with her daughter, everyone else had scattered when the hounds closed in. Using the hounds were humans, doing the aliens’ bidding in order to survive and not be eaten. So Glenda pushed Alesha to stay ahead of the pursuit.
Glenda had heard her sister Gloria yell at her daughter Donna, Alesha’s cousin, to “Run! Run away!” Both of their respective husbands already had been killed and slaughtered. They knew they had to escape. The dirty little secret was that human females were now being saved to be bred for a delicacy the Tschaaa enjoyed—human veal.
“How do we know we are going in the right direction, momma?” Alesha asked, as they paused to catch their breaths.
“Anywhere northwest is the right direction,” she answered. She gave a wry laugh. “Never thought we’d be reliving every runaway slave Hollywood epic in real life. But northwest should take us to the Unoccupied Area we heard about.”
“Think people are actually trying to set up safe areas?”
“Doesn’t matter, Alesha. It was get out—or be breeding stock for the Squids’ tables. This may be our last chance.”
The sound of a dog baying was uncomfortably close.
“Follow me,” Glenda commanded and began running through the brush again. They came into a partially logged out area, a clearing with fallen trees that had never been picked up for the sawmill. With the Tschaaa on Earth, large commercial operations had come to an end.
Mother and daughter began to scramble over the downed trees, walking along some of them as they created trailways through the brush.
Then Alesha fell into a hidden hole when she jumped off a log. She cried out as a sharp stick jabbed into her leg. Glenda scrambled over to her, and began pulling her out of the hidden danger. Alesha started to cry.
“Hush, honey. Let me look at that…” Protruding from her daughter’s left calf was a sharp stick that could have passed for an arrow.
“Shit. Okay. This is going to hurt.” Glenda grabbed and yanked back on the stick. It slid out smoothly, but it had gone in at least a couple of inches. Glenda pulled out a piece of cloth from her down jacket pocket. The nuclear winter caused by all the large rock strikes from space had put a premium on warm clothes, even in the formally warm and humid South.
“We’ll clean it later. I’ll wrap it up for now,"Alesha began to sob.
“Come on, honey. We’ll make it. Now, let’s stand up. We’ll find a branch to use as a cane…”
The sound of dog nails on wood told them a hound was coming down the log they had just left. Glenda yanked Alesha to her feet, pushed her towards the northwest.
“Run, honey. I’ll delay the dog.”
“No, momma. No. I won’t leave you.”
“Dammit, child…”
A Black Mask Cur hunting dog jumped from the log, snarling. Glenda pulled a carving knife from under her jacket and met the dog head on. Tall and slender like her daughter, she had a wiry strength that few noticed right off. She fed her left arm to the Cur’s teeth, as she struck with the knife again and again. She kept doing it even after the knife blade broke off in the canine. She extracted her arm from the dog’s jaws, as it finally died.
“Momma, you’re hurt.”
Glenda fell over to her knees.
“Damn. Just let me catch my breath.”
“Don’t move.”
A young sounding male voice came from atop the log.
“Fuck you!” Glenda spat. She looked up at him from her knees and glared, as Alesha was surprised by her mother’s uncharacteristically vehement language. “Go ahead and shoot us with that rifle. Then you get to carry us back as dead meat. Because we are not going peacefully.”
“Mister, please,” Alesha pleaded. “ Just let us go. We’re not hurting anyone. Just let us go.”
The figure jumped down off the log. Now closer, Alesha saw it was a teenage male, no older than she was. Then it happened.
“Alesha? Alesha Taylor, is that you?”
Recognition flooded over the young lady’s face.
“My God, Bobby Parsons. Momma, he sat behind me in math class. He also went to that church camp in Atlanta. Remember?”
Her mother stood up slowly, cradling her bitten arm. The young man reached around to his back and pulled out a small package, which had been attached to his belt.
“Here,” Bobby said as he tossed it. “First aid kit. I’ll tell them I lost it in the brush.”
He looked around nervously. “You need to leave here, Alesha. When Dogman gets here, and sees your mother killed his hound…well, getting taken back will be the least of your worries.”
“Bobby…”
“Just go! I used to play sports with dark mea…” Bobby stopped when he realized what he was about to call them. Then he continued. “I went to school, played sports with you and yours. So, just take this as a favor, one fellow student to another. Go.”
“All right, Squid lover,” Glenda sneered. “We’re going.”
“Mother,” Alesha looked at her former classmate. “Bobby, what happened? Why are you doing this?”
“Because I have to.” He glanced away. “I have a mom, and a younger sister. Now, please, just leave.”
Before anyone realized it, Alesha stepped forward and kissed Bobby, her injured leg forgotten for a moment. She turned, grabbed a sling from the first aid kit and threw a bandage around her mother’s bitten arm. Bobby continued to look around anxiously, as she secured her mother’s arm in the sling. She stuck a wad of gauze down her jeans, pushing it over her leg puncture wound. She grabbed her mother’s good arm, then turned her head towards Bobby.
“We…”
“Just go, dammit.”
As the two women turned to leave, Glenda glanced at the young man.
“Thanks…Bobby.” Then she and Alesha began making their way through the brush once again.
The young hunter stood for a few minutes, as his former prey disappeared into the underbrush and trees. Then he turned around and looked at the dead dog. He shivered, but not from the cold.
“I always loved you a bit, Alesha,” Bobby said to himself. “From afar, like in Shakespeare. Then they came.” He looked up, as he thought he heard someone moving through the brush towards him.
“Now, it’s all fucked up.” He clambered onto the log and then whistled. An answering whistle came from far away.
“Godspeed, Alesha,” he whispered. “Hope you make it.”
He squared his shoulders, and accepted his fate. A man and his family had to live.
“They killed your hound, Dogman,” he said to the approaching figure. “Sorry.”
SURVIVING
Mary Lou Spencer stood in the shadows at the bottom of the basement stairs outside the old warehouse. She had been standing there for about half an hour, waiting for Guadalupe to return from her scavenging run. Every adult of the dozen members of Mary Lou’s group took turns sneaking out looking for food, medicine, and anything else they could use. Some sixteen months had passed since the Tschaaa aliens had announced their presence—first by launching projectiles from space, and then by harvesting humans as prey.
Since that time, humans in the Occupied Area—the aquatic and amphibian Tschaaa controlled areas along all the ocean coasts and large bodies of water—had been living on borrowed time. Initially, every human was subject to harvesting. Then, within weeks, the Tschaaa realized that some groups of humans had a darker pigmentation than others. Due to a complete trick of fate, on the Tschaaa homeworld, lighter skinned “white meat” was a signifier of prey that had been infected by a deadly disease.
The virus-based disease, brought from another world by accident, had not only made the infected primates—the primary meat source of their world—inedible, it also made it potentially poisonous. This had been especially true with the Tschaaa young, the most important segment of Tschaaa society. So, hundreds of years of space travel later, they were knocking on Earth’s door with large rocks in order to obtain a replacement meat sou
rce for their civilization.
Now, most humans hid from contact with the Tschaaa and their minions, both alien and human. In addition, mixed in with the surviving humans were the dregs of society who would sell out their own species, or enslave and abuse them for their own selfish desires.
Mary Lou heard footsteps approaching. She readied the pistol in her hand, preparing to shoot if the person was a stranger. Then Guadalupe Estrada appeared, wearing jeans and jacket, a small tote sack in her hand. She scrambled to the bottom of the stairwell where Mary Lou waited. As she reached the last step, the hispanic woman began a coughing fit.
Mary Lou instinctually reached out to her, but Guadalupe waved her off. She had a spasm and coughed up blood into a rag she held at her mouth.
“Stay back, Mary. I’m pretty sure this is TB I have, and I have no idea how infectious it is. Goddamn Doc just had to get himself killed.” Guadalupe was referring to Matt, the medical student who had been a member of the group until last month. During a scavenger run, he had run afoul of a random harvester robot. Being that he was a dark-skinned African exchange student, he became dark meat. Matt had been a wealth of information, which was now gone.
The coffee-skinned woman finally regained control of her breathing and leaned against the cement wall of the stairwell. “I found cans of food, and a bottle of water in some of those cars in the parking garage. Not all of them have been burnt out, as I guess previous people thought. Then I had a loud coughing fit and had to cut it short.”
Mary smiled, then rubbed her back, ignoring Guadalupe’s warnings.
“Let’s get inside, and let you rest. I can go out later to hit the rest of the cars.”
“Mary, you’ve been out twice as much as the rest of us. That’s not fair.”
Mary laughed. “I am also the only certifiable pale skin in the group. So far, harvester robs and our friendly cyborg robocops seem to ignore me. Right now, being ignored in San Diego is a plus.”
Mary Lou helped Guadalupe carry the recovered items into the warehouse basement and then barred the basement door. A year of living in the basement had shown it to be safe, compared to the other locations the group members had tried. As safe a place as it could be in the post-Invasion world. Plus the natural San Diego warmer weather had helped offset some of the effects of the Long Winter, caused by all the crap thrown into the air by the rock strikes, not to mention about a dozen nukes and a few exploding volcanoes.
The two women made their way into the large central living area they had set up. Guadalupe collapsed on a sofa in another coughing fit. Mary Lou set down the bag of recovered goods, helping her out of her jacket.
“Mommy!” A voice turned into a five year old little girl, grabbing Mary Lou in a bear hug.
“Hey, Susie. How’s my little girl?”
The little dark-skinned girl looked up at her mother, a large grin plastered on her face. “Daddy and I have been reading to each other. He says I’m way head of the curve.”
Mary Lou laughed. Kamal Sharma, her East Indian husband, still forgot he was no longer working with a bunch of engineers and scientists in the computer tech industry, so he still tried to talk to children as if he were in a planning meeting for some new project.
“How did it go, my love?” Kamal walked up with their seven year old son, Johnathan. She and Kamal had agreed on western names when their children were born, even though both had inherited the darker pigmentation of their father’s people. Of course, as they both had basically black hair, so did their children. Mary Lou had kept her maiden name, due to her established business connections. She smiled at her husband, then hugged him and her son.
“Guadalupe found a few items in the parked cars around that parking garage. I plan on going back there today.”
“Mom, why you?” Johnathan asked. “You go out twice as often as anyone else.”
Mary Lou kissed her son’s forehead. “We all to do what we can to help. The aliens and their helpers seem to ignore me. So, I go out more often.”
The seven surviving women and children then came and clustered around to see what the others had found.
“I grabbed what I could, but then this damned coughing got the best of me,” apologized Guadalupe.
“You made it back,” said Grandma Jackson, the oldest of the survivors. “That’s what is important.”
“Well, I see Bettie made it back in one piece.” The comment came from Tyrone Jackson, Grandma Jackson’s grandson. The young black man had a tendency of making sarcastic remarks to everyone. He had been able to save his grandma, then found this group. But he seemed to have a permanent chip on his shoulder, as if bad things that happened were a personal affront to him.
Mary Lou looked at him, and sighed. “For the umpteenth time, that’s not my name.”
“Well, Grandma said you are a spitting image of that pin-up model, Bettie Page. Then I found the magazine with those photos, and damned if you don’t… Bettie.”
The magazine in question had been from Bettie Page’s days with photographer Irving Klaw and featured bondage, catfights and nudity. Not exactly what a mother of two and former software engineer wanted to be compared to, as time passed.
Mary Lou began to get angry. “Look—I can’t help you have some weird fantasies that float your boat. Just leave me out of them.”
“Hey, Bettie, I was just paying you a compliment.”
Kamal then jumped in. “Do you have to work at being an obnoxious pain in the ass, or does it come naturally?”
“Hey chief, you want something? If not, stay out of this for your own good.”
“Still can’t understand the difference between misguided Columbus and real Indians, can you? Must be due to your limited mental capacity.”
“Listen, fucker…” an angered Tyrone began, as he stepped forward.
“Stop it!” It was Grandma Jackson. As probably one of the oldest surviving humans, she had a gravitas others did not. “Grandson, quit being such a pain in the butt. We have to live and work together. Now let’s just all see what Guadalupe found, and see what plans we have to make.”
An angry Tyrone turned and walked off without a word.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry,” Kamal said. “But…”
“No need to explain, Kamal. My grandson has a whole lot of anger and frustration bottled up inside. Some of it was there before the Squids came. But now, it’s worse.” Grandma Jackson sighed. “Now, let’s look at what we have…”
An hour later, after a small lunch, Mary Lou prepared to go out again.
“I really wished you wouldn’t, love,” Kamal protested.
“It has to be done, and I’m the best candidate. Besides, harvester rob activity seems to have decreased over the last month or so. They might be moving on to greener pastures.”
“Or, those radio transmissions on the AM and FM dial about some guy called the Director having made a deal with the Squids may have some truth to them. That ‘Cattle Country’ is going to be their source of fresh meat, leaving the rest of us alone.”
Mary Lou snorted. “What’s that old saying? ‘Hi, we’re from the Government. We’re here to help you, trust us. Now give us your money!’ I’ll believe that we are no longer meat on the hoof when I see a pig fly by.”
She shook her head. “How anyone could make a deal with someone’s nightmare version of a combination octopus and squid, with a little crab thrown in, is beyond my belief. They didn’t even try to talk to us before they started raining hell on us. Why talk or make deals now?”
It was Kamal’s turn to shrug. “Who knows? Maybe the Squid Lord in charge of North America found religion.” That produced a wry laugh from Mary Lou. Then she kissed her husband.
“When I get back, let’s see if we can arrange some quality time together, no kids.”
Kamal smiled, then nibbled her neck, causing her to giggle and push him back.
“I said later, my love. Now, who’s playing stair guard?”
“The Rodriguez family are up for it,
I think. I don’t know which one will watch the three kids while the other…”
“I’ve got it.” The voice was Tyrone. “I volunteered. Nothing better to do but sit around and get more pissed.”
Mary Lou and Kamal looked at him.
“No funny business…,” Kamal began.
“Hey, survival is business. I don’t fuck with that.”
Mary Lou sighed. “Alright. Then let’s get the show on the road. I want as much daylight as possible.” She kissed Kamal again. “Watch the kids.”
“What else is there to do? Visit the local topless bar?”
She slapped him on the arm. “You are such a creep sometime. Okay, love. I’m off.”
“Be careful, Mary Lou.”
“Always.” She and Kamal made their way to the outside door and stairwell. As quietly as possible they removed bar from the door, then stepped out into the stairwell. Mary Lou looked at Tyrone.
“Hey…”
“Just go. I know my job, I have a pistol. I may piss you off, but I won’t let some Squid get you.”
“Thanks, Tyrone.”
“Look for some weapons and ammunition while you’re at it. We don’t exactly have a lot. Maybe some gangbanger left their ride double parked.”
Mary Lou smiled. “Will do. I’ll be back soon.”
“You’d better.”
With practiced ease Mary Lou snuck out of the basement stairwell and onto the street. She stopped behind the large dumpster a few yards away and looked around. Nothing. So far, so good.
The parking garage and lot was a few blocks down, by a former mid-range hotel. When all hell broke loose, some people had managed to make a run for it in their cars. Many did not, as a few rocks had hit in and around San Diego. The resulting fires caused many to stay in place until the roads were cleared, or until they were able to try and catch mass transit, or maybe hitch a ride with someone else after leaving the damaged areas on foot. Stories about the sudden appearance of small gangs of vandals and saboteurs had made others stay at work, or at the local bar.
Free Range Protocol- Tales of the Tschaaa Infestation Page 18