The Complete Aliens Omnibus

by Michael Jan Friedman

  His desperation and excitement about the chance to leave confirmed what I had suspected—no matter what my mother said, these people needed rescuing.

  I reached over and pressed his arm, hoping to keep the conversation on an informative track. There was no telling when I’d get another chance for clarity. “Who else wants to leave, Rusty? Who else is afraid to speak up?”

  He parted his lips, and wasn’t I surprised when the sound was a steady electrical chittering noise, fast and frantic. Rusty jumped to his feet without even using his hands to push off, and yanked his blue hood over his head and all the way down over his face.

  Surprised, I bolted to my own feet. “What—what—”

  “Stand up! Back up against the wall! Over here, over here! Stand still! Stand perfectly still!”

  “Do I have to—do I turn it on?” Panic shot through me. “What do I do?”

  “It’s automatic! Pull your hood on!”

  He reached for the back of my neck and for a horrifying few seconds we were both tangled up in trying to get my hood over my face. When we finally got it down, I was illogically confused by the fact that the hood seemed almost clear from inside, even though I could no longer see Rusty’s face through his. More one-way-mirror fabric.

  “Stand still!” He shoved me backward against the wickery of spindly growth, which felt like a wicker fence. “And be quiet!”

  “Oh, shit!”

  “And don’t shit!”

  How was I supposed to be still with my lungs heaving and my limbs quaking with panic? With monumental physical effort I flattened against the wicker and nearly suffocated trying not to pant or heave. I never worked so hard in my life.

  Rusty, because he had to tend to me, ended up having to position himself right at the edge of the ravine, between the array tripod and a jagged finger of black rock standing straight up on the cliff’s lip. The rock was almost as tall as Rusty, and he pressed sideways against it to have something to brace against. With almost military poise, he came to attention and froze in place.

  I fixed my gaze on him in pure admiration and wished like hell I could get halfway that still. His suit began to glow softly, emitting something—sound, scent, I had no idea what—that would send some message or other to whatever was coming.

  Where were they? How close? Did we have enough time to run back the way we’d come, or was that the direction they were coming from?

  My mind flashed on the destruction I’d seen, on the punched-out ribcages and the acid-dissolved flesh, the impaled throats and dismembered limbs. So far I’d only witnessed the creatures’ power by proxy. What the hell was I doing here?

  This was one of those moments when every attraction for coming on this voyage suddenly dissolved and became microscopic. All I wanted to be was back home, being chased down a blind alley by some drug-crazed gang of Satan worshippers. That I could handle.

  That noise . . . there it was . . . the rolling, crunching slow approach.

  The noise was faint, purposeful. My feet turned hot and itchy. This path wasn’t covered with the cereal-like skulch, but was shear weather-shaved rock. The approaching noise was soft and hinting. In my head it turned loud, deafening, enough to set my ears to drumming.

  I was still panting! How could I stop? I fought to breathe evenly.

  Overcome by fear, I dared to whisper, “Am I glowing?”

  Rusty’s hand flinched. “Yes. Shh!”

  Suddenly a huge black form leaped out of the unseen area around the bend. With a whump it landed between me and Rusty, arms up in a dare, knees bent, ready to leap again, and there it hunched, looking, sensing . . .

  It had heard us. I’d tipped it off.

  I wanted to kick myself—to run, to draw attention away from Rusty since I’d stupidly drawn it to him.

  The alien was huge, bigger than the one Chantal had stuffed and mounted. Its elongated head was at least two feet above mine. Inside the smoked-glass skull rippled rows of cerebral sensors. The long anaconda tail drifted elegantly, held high and curled. Its outer jaws separated, drawing strings of saliva, and the creature began to sizzle in its throat.

  The alien’s shoulders rose, its knees bent more, long feet and claws scratching at the rock slab. The second set of jaws, the small square jaws, extended on their bony stick and made one decisive snap.

  I knew a challenge when I saw one.

  Dare you . . . Show yourself

  Know you’re here

  It was a scout. Its job was to tease out whatever was in the path of the others. There could be a dozen behind it, or a hundred. Did they swarm or herd? There was a difference.

  Rusty and I were only about seven feet apart. The alien stood almost perfectly between us. If it pivoted, that tail could hit either of us.

  Rusty held his ground right at the edge of the cliff. His blue suit glowed softly, emitting a pale silvery corona all around his body. He was masterful in his stillness and I envied his self-control. I wasn’t managing so well.

  The alien hissed and threatened, turning its long tubular head as if it were listening for clues. All its senses were being scrambled or confused by the supersuits and somehow it couldn’t tell we were here. I had to give a nod of approval to my mother’s research team. They’d done it—they’d found out what didn’t trigger the alien’s senses.

  I breathed a wow.

  The alien’s head snapped around to face me. I sensed it knew I was here—probably the same deep instinct that told it I was nearby.

  We sensed each other. Now the sheer terror helped me to freeze in place, the kind of reaction I’d spent my professional life avoiding.

  Rusty, a silvery man-shape a few feet away, made a scrape with his toe. Very short, very deliberate.

  The alien snapped around. So it could hear, for sure.

  Its spiny back twisted at my eye-level. Its tail floated past my face so close that I had to raise my chin to keep the spike from touching my noise.

  Rusty stood absolutely still in his silvery corona. The alien hunched its spiny back, its snorkels fanning outward as it moved in small serpentine motions, never quite still, not quite moving. The huge head came down as if to run its teeth along the glow of Rusty’s arm. If it pushed, nudged— it would find him.

  Could I scrape my toe and distract it the way he had done for me?

  But he was the expert here, the one who knew how to move among the grizzlies. If I took him into the crime district of a major metropolitan area, I’d expect him to let me make the moves.

  My upper arms twitched, aching. My thighs trembled. The alien’s tail whipped past my face again. I had no doubt that spike could take off my head.

  Then, just when I felt as if my legs were breaking from tension, the alien relaxed its shoulders and turned its face away from Rusty. The second set of jaws, on their cartilaginous extension rod, drew back into the elongated main teeth, and those teeth closed into their relaxed position. The tail fell lower and stopped whipping, instead moving in gentle balancing motions to the shifting of the body. The creature took on a poised grace, that cobra beauty my mother saw when she looked at them. At this moment of near-death, I saw it too. She was right—they were the dogs of Anubis.

  The supersuits were working. We had a chance to live. Our trust in technology was fulfilled.

  Turning its body again to the path, the alien changed its posture, bringing its snorkels parallel with each other again, and it began to move past us.

  I saw a flicker across the path. Heard something too. A crackle of electric surge. The silver corona around Rusty’s suit began to sizzle and change color from silver to a sick yellow. Rusty’s head moved, as if to look down at himself. In that deep place in a human mind that recognizes another human’s body language after a lifetime of practice, I knew from that small change that he was in trouble. From the other side of the path, I watched with the terrible realization that his suit was malfunctioning.

  8

  The alien’s bullet-shaped face snapped around tow
ard Rusty. Its lips peeled back on a warning hiss. Again the shoulders came up, the knees bent to spring and the tail whipped.

  Rusty’s hands twitched as he tried to decide whether to grab for his power pack or the controls in the thighs of the suit. With each movement he destroyed the finely constructed field of disguise. What the alien saw, I don’t know—ripples, flickers—but it saw something and it crouched into a threat position.

  My mind raced. What should I do? Distract it? Make myself the target? There was no jumping on it— that was suicide.

  Rusty shifted in burgeoning panic. His suit chattered and failed entirely with a weak final szzz. He ripped back the hood, and in that second the terror in his face was heartbreaking. I don’t know why he pulled the hood off— something about looking death in the face?

  “Oh, my dear Lord,” he murmured at the creature, as if it understood.

  The alien responded with a punctuated roar that separated its main set of teeth into a wide-open spiked weapon. This time the second set of teeth stayed in, but made a sharp snap at Rusty.

  It leaped at him. Rusty let out a single yelp as the animal sprang. Its long limbs made quick work of the few steps between them. As Rusty yanked backward, the alien’s teeth clapped shut on the flopping blue hood instead of his head, but its long fingers and claws cupped his head and sank into his shoulder. His arms came up in defense and the two bent into a wicked embrace.

  A bird in the claws of a young cat, Rusty bellowed in agony and terror. Even in the middle of his desperation, he found the empathy to shout, “Run! Run, Rory!”

  And he began to scream that bone-breaking high-pitched scream that can’t be faked.

  Moving was almost a relief. But I didn’t run. I pushed off the wall and grabbed the alien by the tail. My hands, in the blue gauntlets, fitted into the spine-like segments and I put all my weight into pulling backward. The animal had Rusty by the hood with its mouth, and its hands had him by the ribs. When I dropped backward, almost dipping my butt to the ground, it parted its teeth, dropped the blue hood, and growled at me.

  And I almost crapped my trousers. That was some sight. The dead one in the blind had been hideous enough, and now this.

  I tucked the animal’s tail under my left arm and clamped my arm down so I could use my right arm to go after my plasma pistol. I drew on it and fired instinctively. The plasma blast blew a hole in the alien’s braincase a little forward of the middle, splattering acid on Rusty, who threw his arms up to shield his face. Acid droplets began to eat away at his sleeves, causing streams of green smoke to rise from the fabric. He made an awful gasping noise and writhed back toward the cliff’s edge, and one foot went over the side. He toppled over like a bottle knocked off a table.

  His weight took the alien with him. I would’ve fired again, except the first shot caused my supersuit to fritz and spark. Damn! The energy flush must be disrupted by the plasma bolt!

  A jolt of shame struck as I realized there really had been good reasons for telling us not to take weapons along.

  As the alien’s tail whipped powerfully in my arms, coiling around the back of me, I dropped the plasma pistol. It fell between me and the cliff’s edge. Now bearing the weight of Rusty and half of the alien’s body, I fell to the ground and used my heels to dig in. That wasn’t going to last—the physics weren’t there.

  Over the cliff, Rusty gasped and cried out in panic, still in the grip of the alien, and the damned thing wasn’t dead yet. As their weight dragged me to the edge, I braced my left foot on the embedded housing for the video unit, clamped my left arm down as tightly as possible, and grabbed outward for my plasma pistol with my right hand—and caught it.

  I brought it up shooting. Three bolts flew wild, arching down into the ravine two-thousand feet below us in what would’ve been a real pretty display if only somebody had been around to appreciate it. Rusty and I, we were busy.

  Just as my legs started to inch over the cliff’s edge, I gritted my teeth and aimed, and fired.

  This bolt went right into the back of the alien’s long head and powered through to the front, then took out it’s entire excuse for a face. The skull case broke in half the long way and fell to the sides in two unevenly cut pieces. In a final convulsion it dropped Rusty.

  With one long pitiful howl, Rusty tumbled into the ravine, his arms flapping and legs pumping. I dropped the animal’s big tail, and it went over too. Together they spun into the depths. I twisted around and looked over in time to lose them both in the toupee of overgrowth below. Another second, and Rusty’s cry abruptly stopped.

  Not only had I lost a good man, I’d now lost the only other person who knew this was no paradise about to be born. Would anyone else believe me?

  And then, I heard the crunching sound. The rolling sound. The advance scout was dead, but his roars had been heard.

  * * *

  I got up and ran. Somehow I still had my plasma pistol in my right hand, but my left gauntlet was missing, probably over the cliff, caught in the alien’s tail. My suit stopped fritzing because I wasn’t shooting. I ran down the grade, hearing the clicks and hisses of aliens—no idea how many—behind me all the way. I tried to tell myself it was my imagination, that I was just spooked, overwrought, scared—but, no, they were there, coming for me.

  At the bottom of the grade I skidded to a halt and, lungs heaving, tried to stand-pet again, to stand perfectly still and let the suit reboot itself and begin the masking technique it was developed for. If it fooled one of them, it could fool several. A whole herd. Right?

  I tried to stand still. Maybe I didn’t do it right. The suit began to glow and make that faint hum, only to fritz and crackle just when it got going. I’d wrecked it! I’d ruined the effect by shooting my plaz! The electromagnetic pulse had completely fried my only hope.

  I had to live through this hour. I had to save these people. If there were more like Rusty, but afraid to speak up—and I had to save Clark and Bonnie, so close to falling under my mother’s spell. The message of the slaughter fields had to be delivered.

  At the top of the grade, in the last vestige of the setting sunlight, I saw them. They were black silhouettes against the crest of the hill and the evening horizon, a solid line of undulating heads and tails, hands and snorkels, as if dozens of aliens were being melted into a black stew.

  The suit fritzed again, as if to say, “Go!”

  I fired twice over my shoulder as I ran. Shrieks rewarded my shots, but also howls of anger. The suit crackled one final time, overwhelmed by the energy flush from the pistol. It was all done.

  I rounded a bend, went through the stick-like field, jumped and dodged the seemingly endless carpet of corpses in all their many stages of decay, racing the best I could in the fading light through the killing field that would soon describe the whole planet, if these creatures had their way. If I survived, what could I say to the others? Were there more like Rusty, but afraid to speak up? His suit had failed—that was no coincidence. Fresh power pack, sure! It didn’t take a forensic team to add that up, did it? This was what my mother meant by “a last walk.”

  They were on me the whole way back. I didn’t know whether they could outrun me or whether they had the inclination to and wasn’t interested in clocking them, but I’ll bet I set a record or two that I could wave under the noses of a few high school acquaintances. I traveled down two slides on my ass, which shaved off seconds and put a whole new definition to thinking with my legs, like Clark said.

  When I hit familiar territory I was rewarded with a surge of victory, like maybe I’d actually get out of this alive. Only then, when I caught sight of the patch of landscape which I knew was the projector drapery, did I skid to an insane halt and catch myself on a glassy stump.

  I couldn’t go in there! I couldn’t blow everybody else’s cover! If just one alien saw me run through the opening, every person inside was doomed.

  With a sinking stomach I veered away from the hiding place. I hoped I’d turned in the direction
of the ship, like possibly I could make it back there and hope somebody would open the ramp for me, hope they were on their toes, because I had no idea how to make the ramp open from the outside. Nobody had ever taught me that—who’d have thought I’d need to know it?

  Before I even made it up the flume, while still in sight of the projector curtain, they rounded the bend and closed on me. They swept past the hiding place and up the flume toward me. I fired again with my plasma pistol, repeating the shots, hoping to discourage them. My plaz was beginning to weaken, almost out of power. It was never meant to be an assault weapon, fired more than eight or ten times. It was just for self-defense.

  Self-defense—what a joke!

  The rank of Xenos were behind me, and now two of them appeared in front of me. They’d headed me off.

  Skidding to a halt, with nowhere to run, flanked by glass columns and trapped on every side, I shouted wildly in that last moment when all I could do to save my life was shout, even knowing it wouldn’t work. And they were on me.

  One of them came out of the circle as they closed on me, possibly a leader or just the one that got to me first. I threw my drained plaz at its head. The gun made a silly pok on the creature’s skull and bounced to the skulch. The animal looked down at the gun, and at that moment I leaned back on a broken glass stump and brought my foot around in the best kick of my life.

  I knocked out some of its teeth. Good for points, but it had no effect except to make the creature mad at me.

  “Come on!” I screamed. “Come on!”

  It tilted its head at me and hissed. The jaws parted and the second set made a quick series of snaps at me. The other aliens closed around us, making an unbreachable fortress for my demise. My pounding heart slowed and I could suddenly breathe again as I accepted my fate.

  “Make it fast,” I said.