The Overseer stalked between Alec and his target, without so much as a glance in his direction. Alec’s shoes skidded to a stop, and he froze in place as the alien turned to face him.
It was at least three feet taller than he was, and Alec’s eyes lifted to meet its stare, even though he kept his head still. Dark yellow almond-shaped eyes bore into him, and it let out a few chilling noises from its mouth. Alec had never been this close to one of them before, and his entire body turned to ice. The alien moved slowly toward him.
Alec could smell it; a powerful musty animal scent. Its long fingers reached its knees. Another series of sounds emerged from beyond the double-row of teeth, and Alec had to hold himself rigid so he didn’t run away and draw attention to himself.
Already, Beth was being dragged away by the human guards, along with Jackfish. Had the entire diversion been set up just to pass something to Alec? If it had, then Jackfish had sacrificed his own young life to get Alec the information. He couldn’t squander it. A tear fell down his cheek as he watched Beth’s lifeless form so casually disposed of. A red smear followed her off the floor as they pulled her away from the workers.
The alien had lost all interest in Alec and was stalking the line of human guards, its beak appearing to sniff as it went. It stopped near Crash at the end of the line, and the human averted his eyes to the floor. The Overseer paused a moment longer before finally leaving the room.
Simon arrived and his whining voice snapped Alec from the spell he was under. “Everyone back to work. There’s nothing to see here!” he shouted, but Alec caught the beads of sweat on his forehead and the ashen color of his face.
Beth was dead and there was nothing Alec could do about it. He glanced to where Crash was working at the end of the room and fought the urge to go and yell at the newcomer. If he hadn’t shown up, his best friend would still be alive. But if what they said was true, then he’d have every chance to talk to them about it tonight.
With a new level of dread, Alec returned to work, his emotions now burned out from his body. He couldn’t feel a thing, and for the time being, it was perhaps for the best.
The day had taken forever to end; the hollowed-out feeling in Alec’s chest only grew with each passing hour. He found himself scouring the job site every few minutes, hoping to catch a glimpse of Beth, like he’d done every day for the last few years, before remembering she was gone.
He wolfed down his slop, feeling it churn in his acidic stomach as soon as he swallowed it. Crash and Monet were at their own table, and he didn’t risk sitting with them. It was all done with. He was leaving this hell, and his pulse raced as he let it sink in.
Alec had left to go to his secret hideout at least once a month for the couple years since Tom disappeared, and every time, he’d considered leaving for good. Beth was the reason he returned to his room. Now there was absolutely nothing holding him there. He’d leave and never come back.
His resolve hardened as he let the dreams and realities of freedom coalesce inside him until a genuine idea took hold. He had no idea how to survive. Here he’d completed the work, and eaten the slop, slept in the bed, and done it all again the next day. He was strong but skinny, no experience of living outside of the complexes the Overseers ran.
Maybe Crash and Monet could help him, though he thought they were more likely to get him killed than keep him alive. Why had they chosen him to pass something to? Why not keep it themselves if they knew how to escape?
Dinner time ended, and they lined up, moving toward the bunks for the night. Alec glanced around, feeling like one of the aliens was watching him. He’d been terrified someone was going to find out he was carrying something illegal in his pants. If they caught him, he’d have to rat out Crash and Monet. It was the only way…
The only way to what? Survive? Alec was done with surviving. If they caught him, he’d happily let them end him. What did it matter without Beth?
“Alec!” Simon’s voice carried to him, and he instantly flushed red. They knew. Simon knew what he was carrying, even though Alec didn’t know what it was. “Alec!”
Simon arrived, the balding man out of breath. “I wanted to catch you before you went in.” He leaned closer. “I’m sorry about your friend. You and I may not always see eye to eye, but I’m doing my job. Beth… Beth was a good worker.”
Alec wanted to shout at the supervisor, to tell him she was more than just a worker, but he caught himself. Instead, he nodded solemnly and kept walking, leaving Simon with a perplexed look on his face.
He made his way to his room, and the guards paced up and down the corridor before locking the doors. Alec once again had blocked the electronic lock from fully depressing. For a powerful alien race, they weren’t too cautious with things like security. They were either ignorant or over-confident. He assumed the latter.
Alec sat on his bunk and peered around the room. It was devoid of decorations, possessions, or any character. He was nothing but another beast in the herd. “Beth,” he whispered, “I never had a chance to say some things to you, so I’m going to tell you now.” He leaned his back against the wall and propped his knees up, settling his forehead on them. “I’ve loved you since the moment I first saw you. There was a sparkle in your eyes I’d never seen before. It dwindled with every passing month we were here, but deep down, I know that girl was inside you.”
He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I didn’t get you out of here. I should have made a move sooner. I should have made you listen to me. We could have escaped together.”
Alec heard a banging on a door a few bunks over, and he sat upright. What was it? Were they doing a search?
Muffled noises carried through his metal door, and he staggered to it now, pulling the folded cardboard from the latch. He let it close with a click and rushed back to the bed. The handoff! The object was still in his pants. And he had the bracelet under the mattress.
Alec heard the guards’ footsteps stop in front of his room. They banged and opened the door just as he slipped the tiny item from his pocket into his mouth. He pressed it into his gums with his tongue and looked up from under his blanket with a groggy expression.
He knew the two male guards. The shorter of them had been there beside him today as the Overseer stalked the room, and the man gave him a tight nod. The other didn’t seem to notice as he stepped inside with a thudding stomp. “Stand up, worker,” the taller said without inflection. He could have been washing his hands for all the excitement in his voice.
Alec stood and thought about the bracelet between the mattress and the rear bed rail. It was thin and rolled out to be flat, so there was a chance they might miss it.
“What’s going on?” Alec asked, trying to sound normal with the small object jammed into his mouth.
“Routine check,” the shorter said.
“None of your business, worker,” the taller instantly called. “Check the bed,” he ordered the other guard.
Alec waited and closed his eyes while his mattress was lifted. There was a slight pause, and Alec peeked to see the friendlier guard stop for a second before letting it flop to the frame. “Nothing here. Let’s keep going. I don’t want to be doing this all night.”
“Out of my way.” The taller guard shoved Alec into the corner of the room before stepping out.
Then they were gone, and the door was closing. The door! He grabbed the cardboard from his pocket and jammed it into the latch as it was about to depress, and he slid his back down the door, his seat landing to the floor.
He was sweating, his nervous energy threatening to give him a heart-attack. Alec was certain the shorter guard had seen his bracelet. He had to have. Were there more good people around than he’d suspected? Was there a network of people defying the Overseers that Alec had only ever dreamed of? Until yesterday, he thought Tom was dead.
Today, Beth was dead, but he wasn’t going to let her death be a waste. He listened at the door until all sounds of footsteps and knocking were long gone. He clipped the
metallic bracelet around his wrist, locking it in place, feeling the familiar buzz as it operated.
By the time he stepped out from the room, the halls were completely empty, and as his feet landed on the grass, the moon was already descending into the night sky. He was late.
He ran toward the edge of the grass, hopped the fence, and started down the road, hugging close to the old abandoned building along the sidewalk as he went.
Chapter 11
Lina
Lina had no tears left to cry. Her mouth was so dry, and her head ached with such a dull intensity that she feared it would drive her insane. The heat of the first two days she’d tried to move through had driven her to the point of delirium, and twice she found herself sleeping in the dirt somewhere she didn’t recall choosing.
Given the direction of the sun in the sky when she’d passed out, she knew she’d lost hours at a time; hours that left her exposed to the harsh sunlight and the searching eyes of the flying machines.
As though some hidden instinct had been triggered deep inside her, she’d stumbled across a stream of running water, which was cool and refreshing. After lying in the running water for longer than she knew and having drunk enough to wake her nerves, her brain began to work again. She knew she had to stop trying to move during the hot days. She needed to find somewhere secure to sleep, to eat more than the dried milk powder that had sustained her for the last few days.
She maneuvered her way out of the tree canopy to the remnants of civilization and stopped as her boots made a different noise. She found herself on what had been a long, straight road. In the distance, she saw the heat haze shimmering for miles. She squinted at the bright orb in the sky before looking at her shadow.
The representation of her body stretched ahead of her, telling her that the afternoon sun was behind her head and heading west. To her left, the land ran roughly north, and Lina returned to the trees to take cover from the sunlight and rest before continuing in the cooler evening.
By the time it was fully dark, she wanted to get under cover where she felt safe. She tried the door handles of a dozen places before she walked a long loop around a derelict house and the toe of her boots kicked something circular ahead of her. She fumbled in the grass with her hands, using her other senses to understand the seed of a thought she was nurturing. She sniffed in through her nose audibly, finding the tickle of sweetness in the air as her hands located the thing she had kicked.
Her fingers wrapped around the shape of an apple, which she brought up to her mouth hungrily but stopped before she bit into it. Standing, she reached up into the branches and found others, dropping the one that had fallen and plucking others instead in the dark and holding an armful before feeling too exposed and running for the house.
The rear door, a flimsy thing with the remnants of thin, lacy drapes covering the upper glass section, all but fell in when she leaned against it. She set the apples down carefully, losing two that rolled off the wooden surface of the farmhouse table, and slipped off her pack before she tiptoed around the house in search of anything she could use.
Until very recently, Lina had never been in a house, not an old house like the one she was in that had been built way before, and her curiosity took her to the foot of the stairs. She placed a single booted foot on the bottom step, gave it only a fraction of her weight, and almost screamed in fright as the wood gave way in an explosion of dust. Scrambling backwards, she clawed her way to her feet and decided she didn’t need to go up to the second floor after all.
The front room had an open fireplace and the bone-dry tinder beside the hearth combined with the derelict, insect-eaten wood of the broken stairs caught a spark easily from the flint and stone she carried in her pack.
Careful to keep the flames modest, Lina sat in front of it and used a knife to slice open one of the apples and bite into it. Her eyes screwed shut and her tongue shot out to reject the sour fruit. She sat to clear the taste, using the last of her water in one bottle to swill her mouth out before returning to the kitchen to search for anything useful.
She opened cupboards, peering at the contents of the packets and jars until she stumbled on a large container that was sealed. She pried open the lid expecting a foul smell to hit her, but nothing did. Tentatively, she reached inside to find a solid packed mass of tiny white granules. They’d formed a single, hard lump in the exact shape of the container, but a stab with her pocketknife broke a small piece away.
Carefully, prepared to spit it out as soon as she didn’t like what she tasted, she lifted the tiny chunk to her mouth. It tasted sweet. It crunched and broke apart to fill her mouth with an overwhelming assault of goodness that made her feel almost giddy as it melted away to nothing. A thought hit her, and she put down the container marked “sugar,” selecting a metal pot with a carry handle and tipping half of her remaining water into it. She added slices of the sour apple and chipped away more of the white crystalline substance to put it in with the water and the apple slices.
She carried the whole thing back to the fire and gently simmered it for a long time before taking the pot and leaving it beside the small flames. She slept on the dusty rug without even realizing how tired she was.
Lina woke in the morning to the sounds of birds cawing and chirping loudly outside the windows of the little house. Startled, unsure of where she was immediately, she sat up, fixating on the first thing she saw: the metal pot.
The fire had gone out and the pot held almost no heat, but the contents… the contents were pure, unadulterated bliss. She scooped the sweet mushy fruit out with her fingers as she cupped them into a kind of natural shovel. She ate feverishly, trying to get her whole face into the pan to lick the remnants from the metal, until a groaning, gurgling sound in her stomach made her freeze. She leapt to her feet, spinning almost on the spot before she ran to the bathroom. She hadn’t grown up with rooms exactly like these small private ones, but the functions were universal.
Afterwards, she surveyed the house in daylight and crept outside to collect more apples, more fearful of the empty, open spaces outside than of wild animals or the other things that could do her harm.
Since the day she’d tried to leave behind all of the terrifying memories the dark leaves had covered, she’d forced all thoughts of the shiny metal drones and screaming hovercraft from her mind. Instead, she’d been more focused on the fear of the many other things she hadn’t encountered before.
Like stairs.
The wooden structure connecting the ground floor of the dusty house to the magical promise of what was upstairs frightened her more than she would have thought possible if only for the fact that her second attempt at climbing them had resulted in much the same failure. Not to be dissuaded, she circled the small house around midday and found a set of metal steps that her mind had told her was a ladder. They were very different from the wooden versions her people had used to thatch the roofs of their hogans in the village. She manhandled it awkwardly against the side of the house, banging it hard into the upstairs window and smashing the glass accidentally.
Fearing discovery, she cowered for long minutes, waiting for any response to the noise of the damage she had caused. When nothing happened, she carefully climbed the ladder with shaking legs to see what was in the house above the level she had investigated.
Lina found clothes, mostly. Old and moth-eaten, but such clothes she had never seen before. There were dresses in flowered patterns and bright colors hanging beside black and red garments that showed just too much of her skin than she was comfortable with.
She spent the rest of the afternoon changing clothes, standing in front of the streaked, pitted mirror to stare at her reflection deep in thought. The light of the day was gone as she tried on tight blue pants that had been preserved in a kind of clear sack she’d never encountered before. She swayed sideways, admiring how she appeared in them and flicking her finger over the little red tab on the back pocket as though trying to comprehend its purpose.
I
n a closet, hidden on a high shelf behind a stack of blankets, a curious item rolled along the wood and dropped to the rug at her feet. She bent to pick it up, unable to make out the legend on the side of the small red cylinder. Investigating further, she found a box of them placed there on the shelf, and further back, her fingertips brushed along cold metal before changing onto warm wood.
She snatched her hand back in surprise, reaching up almost immediately to carefully pull out the item hidden there. It had a long barrel and the clasp on the top of it creaked against her touch to expose a single chamber to fit the ammunition. She’d seen one like this before, as a child, when one of the men in her village had left to fetch something from one of the towns on the edge of their reservation and had never returned.
“Shotgun,” she muttered to herself, as if saying the word out loud would make it real. She took it, slipped the box of shells for it into the clear sack she had found her new pants in, and checked the next room, leaning the gun against the doorway.
It had to be a child’s room; posters hung creased on the walls, depicting sports heroes from another time. She searched the table beside the unmade bed and found a metal box on top. Her fingers fumbled with it, and she saw the words Recorder 3000 etched on the lower half. She pressed a button, a sideways triangle, and a voice emerged from the device.
“I’m sorry…” a sob sounded through the speaker. The voice kept speaking but became drawn out and lower. She hit the device, wanting to hear what it had to say. Nothing. She flipped it upside down, and saw two batteries propped inside. They must be dead. Everything would be long drained. She opened the drawer beside her and saw more of the cylinders. She popped the two from the Recorder 3000 out, sending them clattering to the wooden floor, and placed the replacements inside.
She hit the play button again, hopeful. “Know that I loved my family. I held on as long as I could. If we ever make it through this, you’ll find their bodies buried beside the chestnut tree out back. God have mercy on my soul.” The recording ended, and Lina’s eyes lingered on the shotgun by the door.
Occupation: A Post-Apocalyptic Alien Invasion Thriller (Rise Book 1) Page 7