by Darien Cox
“But it’s bothering you enough you felt you had to mention it,” Elliot said. “And you’re a cocky asshole who’d never normally admit to being scared, so now it’s bothering me too.”
“Fuck off, Elliot,” Tim said, but couldn’t muster any real hostility. He and Elliot hadn’t always gotten along, because Elliot was a snarky prick and they had bad history. But he saw no disdain in Elliot’s green eyes now, only curiosity. “Sorry, Elliot. I’m just stressed out.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Elliot said. “Can you be more specific about what you’re seeing? These shapes in the woods. Can you describe them in any detail?”
“There isn’t much to describe, but I’ll try.”
“Everyone, sit back down,” Brett said.
“Oh, man,” Christian whined. “I’m starving! I want to go get breakfast.”
“Christian,” JT scolded. “Shut up, this is more important than your stomach.”
“I have a high metabolism!”
“I’ll order something in,” Brett said. “Everyone sit down.”
“I’ve got to head out,” Myles said. “Work to do in the village.”
“Okay, Sheriff,” Brett said. “We’ll fill you in later.”
Myles slapped Tim’s shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay. We’ll figure it out.” He walked over and gave Christian a quick kiss, then looked at Brett. “You will feed Christian, right? He does have a high metabolism and he gets really cranky when he doesn’t eat.”
“I promise I will feed Christian and everyone else,” Brett said. “Go on, Myles. We’ll talk later.”
After Myles left, Brett called and ordered breakfast and more coffee, then things quieted as everyone found a seat at the table. Tim was sweating, but he also felt relief. These people annoyed him, but he’d been keeping this bottled up. The fear. The shame at being afraid. But they seemed to be taking him seriously, and he had to admit, it was a nice feeling, not being alone in it anymore.
“So,” Brett said. “Tell us exactly what’s been happening.” He flipped a page on his notepad and picked up a pen. “Start by describing the shadows you’ve been seeing. The shapes. Any detail could be important, so be thorough.”
Tim wiped his sweaty brow, then glanced around the table. “They slither.”
Chapter Three
Tyler watched from on high at his perch, while down below in the trees, Lewis stealthily approached the extraterrestrial. Lewis was a skinny kid but starting to develop some muscle-tone from the rigorous training. He had the standard buzzcut, big brown eyes, and a smattering of acne dotting his skin because he was still so damn young.
At just sixteen, Lewis was the same age Tyler had been when Ogden first found him. Tyler sure as shit hadn’t felt young then, but couldn’t help viewing these recruits as anything but children. Children that don’t listen very well, he thought as he watched Lewis cross the twenty-foot barrier, edging closer to the alien in the dark woods.
“Dumb fuck,” Tyler whispered. “That’s too damn close.”
Hunched low with his weapon pointed, Lewis continued through the trees toward the creature. The alien was pink-skinned, only two-feet tall, with a gigantic bald head, tiny nose, and huge dark eyes. It appeared innocent with its blinking lashes and tiny puckered lips, like a pink, alien Tweety Bird. Short legs and arms, rounded belly like a toddler. The alien stood motionless beneath a tall tree, watching Lewis approach.
Tyler had hoped these recruits absorbed at least some of the training he’d given them, but based on Lewis’s actions, they hadn’t listened to a damn word he’d said. Wincing, he watched Lewis step even closer, stopping a mere ten feet from the alien, raising a hand. “Hey there,” Lewis said. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”
Tyler sighed, shaking his head. This kid was an idiot.
The alien squeaked at Lewis, blinking its big baby eyes, looking sad. It held its tiny arms out, a tear rolling onto its shiny pink cheek.
“Are you lost?” Lewis asked, taking two steps closer. He pointed to the sky. “Where is your ship?”
The alien’s tiny mouth stretched open shockingly wide, revealing long, black pointed fangs. With a growling shriek, it lunged itself at the recruit, knocking him onto his back. Lewis wasn’t ready, so his gun skittered from his grip, useless.
“God damnit, Lewis,” Tyler hissed.
Lewis screamed, scrambling for his weapon, but it was too late as the alien’s tiny body jumped onto his chest and long fangs bit into his neck.
Tyler hit the button, and the simulation ended. He stared down from the window above, watching as Lewis flailed around on the floor, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the light. What had moments ago been a dark forest was now a gymnasium-sized room, brightly lit with a domed ceiling. “You’re dead, Lewis,” Tyler said into the microphone. “Be thankful it was quick and you weren’t abducted and peeled layer by layer like an onion as they chronicled your anatomy.”
Lewis climbed unsteadily to his feet and glared up at the window. “That wasn’t fair!”
“That what you gonna tell a real alien when it attacks you? Gonna stomp your feet and pout and cry ‘But this isn’t fair!’”
Seated in bleachers at the edge of the room, the six of Lewis’s fellow recruits snickered at his failure, which only enraged him more. He snatched his gun up, then tossed it to the floor again in frustration. After pacing a circle, he glared up at Tyler. “I was trying to make contact! Shouldn’t that be part of our goal? To establish a dialog?”
Tyler left the booth. He trotted down the stairs and entered the simulation room. The recruits along the wall stood. “Sit down, as you were,” he said and they all took their seats again.
Lewis glared as Tyler approached. “I suppose I’m about to get screamed at again.”
“No screaming,” Tyler said. “This is a learning experience, so answer a few questions. You say you wanted to establish a dialog with the alien. Why?”
He shrugged. “Could have learned something from it. It could have been friendly.”
“Was there any information in the dossier you downloaded prior to this exercise that indicated the being was going to be friendly?”
“No. But, there wasn’t any information saying it wasn’t. And it looked friendly. It was just little!”
“Its teeth weren’t little,” Frederick, one of the other recruits commented, and the rest snickered.
Lewis rubbed his neck, wincing “It could have been friendly.”
“But it wasn’t,” Tyler said. “Go sit down.”
Rolling his eyes, Lewis stomped off and took a seat among the other kids.
Tyler snatched Lewis’s gun off the floor, then paced back and forth in front of the group. “This is a high-powered stunner. It would have almost certainly incapacitated the alien if it hit the target. I’ve used this model myself to incapacitate an extraterrestrial four times the size of that little pink thing. It could have been retrieved and brought back for study without anyone getting killed. But there was no chance of that happening, since Lewis here never fucking fired.”
The kids shifted nervously.
“Can someone tell me one of the many rules Lewis broke just now?” Tyler’s eyes drifted over the recruits. “Anyone?”
Lucia raised her hand. “Always assume they’re hostile.”
Tyler nodded. “Correct. What else?”
“Never cross the twenty-foot barrier,” Frederick added. “Because they could have mind-control or could paralyze you or other abilities you can’t anticipate.”
“Correct,” Tyler said.
“Hey, Tyler,” Lewis said, then shrank in his seat when Tyler shot him a glare. “I mean...Sir.”
“What is it, Lewis?”
“Rumor on base is you teach a class on alien mind-control.”
“That’s right.”
“So why don’t you just teach us that before we do these exercises? Then we won’t have to worry about how close we get.”
“First of all, defending yourself ag
ainst extraterrestrial abilities isn’t one-size-fits-all. They’re all unique and must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. It’s not like flicking a switch. And second, that class is far too advanced for you all right now. You’re still novices. You’ve got to learn to walk before you can run.”
“We won’t be able to run if some alien paralyzes our legs,” Lucia said, and the rest chuckled.
“Stop getting ahead of yourselves, and stop trying to distract me, it’s not going to work,” Tyler said. “My point is, always assume the entity you’re approaching is hostile.”
“Hang on,” Lewis said. “You can’t assume all extraterrestrials are hostile.”
“They’re not all hostile,” Tyler said. “But plenty of them are. And the ones that aren’t usually know better than to be seen. To be caught wandering around the woods or in your yard or in your damn bedroom. You see one in that type of situation? One that confronts you directly? Assume it’s not there to make friends.”
“Then what is it there for?” Lucia asked. “Abduction? Experimentation? Always?”
“Not always, but it’s possible,” Tyler said. “And if not for that, if you stumble upon one in the woods or out in a field? You’ve likely interrupted it resting its craft on our planet for repairs. Or scalping minerals. And in that case, it’s just as dangerous, because it will want to silence you after being seen.”
“So how do we tell the difference?” Lewis asked. “Between friendly and hostile?”
“You can’t! That’s the point. You can’t have any expectations or preconceived notions that aren’t based on solid intel.”
“But...” Keegan, one of the shyest recruits in the back, raised his hand. “Never mind.” He lowered his hand again. “It’s a stupid question.”
Tyler was happy to see Keegan’s raised hand, even briefly. Keegan didn’t participate much in class. He’d been recruited by Ogden after having his own bad experience with a creature of unknown origin in the swampy woods near his family’s home in Florida. Much like Tyler had all those years ago, young Keegan fought back. But he was now quiet, jumpy, and didn’t sleep well at night.
In the outside world, someone like Keegan would be treated with standard therapy. But this wasn’t the outside world, and there was no therapist out there that would believe Keegan’s story. After Tyler’s own traumatic experience years back, Ogden had weaponized his rage and fear. Weaponized his trauma, just as Tyler was trying to do with Keegan. But while Keegan still possessed the fear, he was lacking the rage that helped save Tyler’s sanity in the years since. Tyler worried about him, so he wanted to encourage this rare show of participation now.
“Go ahead, Keegan, ask your question. I insist.”
“Okay. Um...you said you can’t tell if they’re hostile or not. But sometimes you can tell, right? By how they look? I mean, if they’re ten feet tall with big-ass claws, they’re probably dangerous. Least um...least from my experience.”
“Think, Keegan. Did that little pink thing that just made a meal of Lewis’s throat look dangerous?”
“No.” Keegan shrugged. “It was cute. Is that um...is there a real alien that looks like that out there?”
“Every simulation you’ll encounter in this training will be based on similar if not actual entities we’ve encountered.”
“What?” Lucia grimaced. “Is that fang-faced Tweety Bird fucker real?”
“My point,” Tyler said, “is that you can’t assume something that looks scary is hostile any more than you can assume something cute and cuddly is friendly. You cannot tell shit about them by visual appearance alone. Some of them are cute.” Tyler walked over and stood before the recruits, looking them each in the eye. “Some of them look like monsters, sure. But some of them don’t look all that different from us. Some of them are even sexy.”
Lewis snorted.
“You think that’s funny, Lewis?” Tyler asked. “The idea of a sexy alien?”
“A little funny, yeah.”
Tyler nodded, smiling. “One of my current comrades was pretty tickled too when a craft landed in the field near his house five years ago, before he was recruited. A beautiful silver being stepped out to greet him. She had a humanoid, female body. Big, pouty lips. Her eyes were kind of freaky and she had no hair, but hell, the breasts on her. The long, shapely legs.”
Lucia cleared her throat. “What happened?”
“What happened? The alien beckoned him to come to her. And he did. Next thing he knew he was on a spaceship, strapped face-down on a table while that same, sexy alien shoved a cable up his ass and shot a bolt of energy into his body so powerful he bit half his tongue off.”
Lucia’s jaw dropped. Keegan paled, and whispered, “Fuck.”
“Oh, come on,” Lewis said. “You’re just trying to scare us.”
“You’re damn right I am. Because you should be scared. It does not matter what they look like. You never get closer than twenty feet. And if one comes toward you? You shoot. No hesitation.”
“Have you ever encountered an alien that was friendly?” Frederick asked. “Personally, I mean.”
Tyler opened his mouth to speak, then hesitated. He had met friendly ETs. But he couldn’t tell the recruits that the reptilians living inside the moon were friendly, because he was forbidden from acknowledging their existence. And he wasn’t authorized to talk about the Whites either. Not that they were the friendliest bunch in the universe, but they weren’t technically hostile to humans.
Then he thought of Baz, the gentle humanoid hybrid who’d sought their aid last year and aided them in return. Helped them wake the Whites from their involuntary slumber and blow the Greys’ fleet to dust. Tyler had never trusted any aliens, even Baz. But anyone who hated the Greys as much as Tyler did was all right in his book, so that opinion had changed. But he couldn’t say that to the class.
“No,” he lied. “I’ve never directly encountered a friendly alien. Ever.”
“But you just said not all aliens are hostile,” Lucia said. “Those were your words. So you must know of some friendly aliens at least. Tell us about them.”
“Friendly encounters are too rare to even consider here,” Tyler said. “For your purposes, there are no friendly ETs, period.”
“But—”
“Forget about it!” Tyler shouted. “We are the top line of planetary protection here. Do you get that? At this organization and in this academy, risk management is our first priority; we will not roll the dice with human lives just in the hopes of gaining some new playmates. If you don’t want to end up at the mercy of hostile extraterrestrials who have no problem skinning you alive or shoving cables up your ass or sticking needles in your eyes or digging around in your body to steal your reproductive material, then do as I fucking say and assume they’re all hostile! Am I getting through to you idiots?”
The recruits stared silently, eyes wide.
“Well?”
“Yes, sir,” they said in unison, though rather unenthusiastically.
“Tyler,” came a female voice through the intercom. “You’re needed in the control room. You have a visitor.”
Tyler turned from the students and looked up. Watching him through the window from on high was a tall handsome black man in a suit, high forehead, flecks of gray at his temples, big brown eyes and a smirk curving his lips.
Shit. What the fuck is he doing here?
“Ogden,” came the hushed voices of the students. “It’s Ogden!” they whispered with reverence, like they were witnessing an obscure rock-star sighting.
Tyler waved up at Ogden, then turned back to the recruits. “Gonna have to cut this short. For those of you who didn’t get to perform an exercise today, study your dossiers. We’ll pick up where we left off tomorrow. Dismissed.”
The kids left the room, muttering.
Taking a deep breath, Tyler headed upstairs. Nothing good ever came from Ogden showing up unexpectedly. He’d sent Tyler here to headquarters months ago to train the new recruits. And whi
le he knew Ogden was likely in and out of the facility often, the place was huge, and the boss had his own shit going on. He rarely checked in on Tyler. It wasn’t unprecedented, just unusual. Unease prickled the back of Tyler’s neck, telling him something was wrong.
And that sucked. Tyler would take whatever assignment Ogden gave him of course, but after years of field work, he was enjoying teaching the kids, fighting simulated aliens rather than real ones. He’d been fighting dangerous shit since he was a kid, and while he was still just in his twenties, it felt like a lifetime of having to be on alert. He’d been enjoying being able to sleep well at night, safe here at headquarters, deep underground with the best security-system on the planet. He hoped he wasn’t about to be asked to give it up again.
“Hi, Ogden.” He stepped into the control room and closed the door behind him.
“Good morning, Tyler.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Watching your class. You put the fear of God into those kids.”
“Fear of the truth, maybe.”
“The truth.” Ogden grinned, squeezing Tyler’s shoulder affectionately. “A bit of a one-sided truth, don’t you think?”
“One-sided? How so?”
“That there’s no such thing as a friendly alien? That you’ve never met one?”
“Telling the recruits there are friendly aliens won’t serve them well. Safer to leave them thinking they’re all bad, so they can be prepared. These kids are sloppy and stupid enough without thinking ET’s gonna buy them pizza then teach them the secrets of the universe.”
Ogden nodded. “I suppose you’re right. Guess I’ll be getting a troop of mini-Tylers once their training is done.”
“You got a problem with that? Rather I tell the recruits there are nice, gentle aliens that make great party guests? Should I start going soft like your fringe team in Singing Bear Village? If so, you have to buy me a big house on the mountain like you did for Elliot and Nolan.”
Ogden laughed hard. “When you get married, I’ll get you a gift just as nice.”