The Alien Chronicles

by Hugh Howey

  “It’s all right,” I said, still watching Blake’s supple body move as she spoke.

  “It was a little while later…” Blake continued.

  Eight months after they were captured.

  “… that I started going on raids with them.”

  My chest clenched and I damn near dropped my drink. This beautiful girl, going on those raids, helping her enemy, was just damn evil. She might have been shot by the army or any one of the other rebel groups.

  A general murmur broke out.

  Precious asked, “With the CLF? How could you?”

  “Not big raids,” she said. “Just food and equipment raids. Stuff like that. They didn’t give me a scoopy gun. I was just muscle to carry stuff. Ellis wouldn’t go on the raids. He’s more moral than I am. They knocked him around for it, but he wouldn’t go.”

  “So they forced you to,” Chess Jock said.

  Blake said, “I was trying to find us some human food, too. The Chitterers need different concentrations of nutrients than we do. Ellis and I got pretty skinny eating their tortillas and puddings. There was just something missing in their food, like an essential amino acid or a vitamin, and we ate all we could and yet we still lost weight. I’ve gained twenty pounds since I got back. I was skeletal those last few weeks. Seriously, we looked like we were on one of those hunger artist game shows.”

  “Could you have gotten away?” Precious asked.

  Blake puckered her face in intense concentration. Her hands fluttered in The Fingers Like Butterflies Alight Upon a New Idea.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Blake said. “I wouldn’t have left Ellis there alone. And we only raided government installations and opposing rebel camps. There are seventy-three Chitterer factions in mutual civil war. If we had left our CLF cell, another group probably would have scooped us for being with the CLF.”

  At the party, I pictured hunks of Blake’s body carved away by the Chitterers’ force field guns, and I shuddered, ill. My skin shivered. The tremor grew in my body. Even my teeth knocked together. “How did you finally get away?”

  “A government guy came to negotiate a truce,” Blake said. “There was a temporary cease-fire, one of many between the CLF and the Chitterer government. The government guy was a squirrelly little yellow bug who perpetually did The Chitterbug Jitterbug of Nervous Nellies.

  “Again, they lit up the camp like we were standing in the middle of a cold emerald bonfire. Squirrelly Yellow Bug talked with Orange Bug and Big Black Bug forever. They pushed tablets at each other, then talked some more. The negotiations were falling into the black hole of useless windbaggery at light speed.

  “Ellis and I finally stopped listening through the translator apps because even that excitement finally wore off, so we made more tortillas.

  “Orange Bug sat in The Attacking Kitten of Righteous Defiance Stance the whole time. Squirrelly Yellow Bug couldn’t even get Orange Bug to agree that the civil war was a problem.

  “Ellis turned to me and said…”

  Blake paused and looked at me.

  Her sad gray eyes broke my heart. Damn those bugs for introducing such an exuberant soul to such sadness. The sadness felt familiar, felt normal.

  I said, “We’re going to die in this hole.”

  Blake’s smile softened. She performed The Exhalation of Existential Relief. “Yes.”

  The circle at the party became an oval around Blake and me. A bubble of orange Jovian gas belched past the crystalline windows, tinting everyone at the party tangerine.

  I shuddered again. Words spoke themselves in my mouth. “This civil war is never going to end. They’re never going to let us go. We’re going to die here in this cave, miles underground. Either we’ll starve to death or the bugs will eventually rupture something when they beat us.”

  Blake’s body stilled in the Pause of Silent and Gentle Expectation.

  I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. This wasn’t a Chitterer Dance Language maneuver. My own fear had reared up and dragged me to that place where I couldn’t move, where I could remember nothing, where the pain dulled.

  Blake said, “Squirrelly Yellow Bug asked, like they all eventually did, ‘Who those two Soft-Shells over there?’ Orange Bug told Squirrelly Yellow Bug about how we dropped into their camp.

  “‘What you feeding them?’ asked Squirrelly Yellow Bug.

  “Orange Bug stomped in irritation. ‘What we eat.’

  “‘Their shells look dull. You feeding them enough?’

  “‘They eat like they’re molting.’

  “Ellis walked over to Squirrelly Yellow Bug, who was doing The Frond-Waving Palm Trees of Endless Exasperation, and Orange Bug, who was still in The Attacking Kitten of Righteous Defiance Stance.

  “All the Chitterers around us stopped pretending they weren’t listening and stood in the The King Tut Posture of Rapt Attention.

  “Ellis stood in front of both of the Chitterers and assumed the Bad Shakespearean Actor’s Pose of Endless Oration. He said, ‘Hey, Orange Bug. You could release us to the Government Agent as an act of good will.’

  “I couldn’t breathe,” Blake said, and she stared right at me. The party froze around us. “I thought he was committing suicide, barging in on the negotiations like that. They’d beaten the snot out of us for far less, like looking at them when they didn’t like it. I thought Orange Bug would cut Ellis’s head off for daring to speak to them or just to show Squirrelly Yellow Bug that he killed for no reason, to scare him. If I had known that Ellis was going to walk over there, I would have tackled him, dragged him away, begged him not to.”

  She said, “He was so brave, and he showed none of the fear that must have been killing him. He pushed it all down inside where it wouldn’t show. My heart would have burst if they had killed him.”

  It wasn’t bravery. It was desperation. Blake was melting away. She would have died.

  Blake said, “Orange Bug performed The Shimmy of Whateverness and said, ‘Sure. You take them.’

  “So we left with Squirrelly Yellow Bug, went back to their embassy, and caught the first freighter back to Ganymede.”

  I took a deep breath. The human-balanced air slid easily into my bruised lungs. I said, “At the embassy, the Chitterer staff all danced The Waltz of I-Told-You-So.”

  “Yes,” Blake said.

  No one at that party could read the Chitterers’ Dance Language. With a lift of my chin and rolling my arms outward, I performed, for Blake, The Opening to Hideous Truths.

  Her pale, thin hand turned upward in a very human gesture that beckoned me to her. “Ellis,” she said.

  Fear of dying in a hot, clammy hole full of crawling bugs caught me. “No. I’m not Ellis. I’m not your Ellis. I’m Wellington Smyth, the Eighth.”

  Blake blinked her lovely gray eyes. Her pale cheeks flushed soft peach. “Ellis, come back to me.”

  I performed a four-legged Soft-Shell version of The Deflation of Crushing Despair.

  Blake grabbed my hands. “No, Ellis. I love you. We went through all that together, and I still love you. Come back to me.”

  We all handle trauma in different ways. Blake picked up a mild case of Stockholm Syndrome, and her ebullient personality turned being held prisoner by terrorists into a great bar story.

  I am Wellington Smyth.

  Wellys, for short.

  Ellis, between lovers.

  I couldn’t joke about it. I’d been beaten nearly every day and had a year of my life stolen. I’d had twelve surgeries since I’d returned to try to put my body back together. I looked nothing like the carefree, handsome youth in Blake’s photo from Earth.

  When I went over to Squirrely Yellow Bug, Big Black Bug had shoved one of those scoopy guns past my broken teeth and pulled the trigger. When it turned out that the gun wasn’t charged and I was still alive, they all did the Paso Doble of Unbounded Mirth.

  Blake screamed every bit of that foul and filthy air out of her lungs when she thought they had cut off my head.
/>   I stumbled, falling against Blake, and she caught me. If the memory destroyed me, at least I would die in her arms.

  A Word from Blair S. Babylon

  Like many college stories, this story begins with alcohol.

  It was the weekend in graduate school that I went three rounds with Cthulhu in the bottom of a vodka bottle. The next day, I was destroyed. I was lying on the couch, shaking with a skull-splitting headache like I had never had before and whining about how my viruses were going to eat all my cells and two weeks’ worth of research was going to die and I was too sick to go to the lab to feed my pets. My roommate, who was a medical student, took pity on me, or maybe she got tired of listening to my whining. She dragged me to the hospital, hooked me up with a unit of Ringer’s lactate solution, and stuffed an oxygen cannula up my nose, gently instructing me to “Breathe deeply and quit moaning about it.” In half an hour, I was fine. Really fine. It’s an old doctor’s trick to beat a hangover, and it works way better than tomato juice or the hair of the dog.

  A couple of weekends later, I was watching something on PBS about the Carboniferous Period, a time when two-meter-long scorpions roamed the Earth, and how insects don’t grow that big now because the oxygen concentration of the air was so much higher back then. The Carboniferous Period would have been a really good time to party.

  That idea, two-meter-long scorpions roaming an oxygen-rich atmosphere that would cure a hangover, stayed with me for years, until this story came about.

  In addition to science fiction, I write in several different genres. My urban fantasy series, some of which are based in the world of SM Reine, are available on my website.

  If you like thrillers about police snipers vs. terrorists, you might like to check out The Angel of Death (Police Snipers and Hostage Negotiators, An Angel Day Novel). If you like a lot of romance with your death-defying thriller action, you might want to check out the list of my several long series on my website.

  I also plan to publish a couple new science fiction and urban fantasy stories in the next year. If you’d like to get a quick email when they come out, please sign up for my mailing list. You get four free Blair Babylon ebooks as a gift to you immediately just for signing up!

  I love to chat with readers. Please feel free to email me or hang out with me on Facebook or Google Plus. Thanks for reading.

  Uncle Allen

  by Will Swardstrom

  The air was crisp and clear, a little off kilter for a late August day in the bottoms of rural Southern Illinois. The soybeans were almost waist-high and the corn still clung to all the green it could, but the advancement of fall was evident by the drying of the plants. A few fields still held the vestiges of farm life from the early part of the twentieth century—crumbling silos, dilapidated barns, and hog houses virtually undone by the ravages of time and nature.

  The slight chill made Rachel wish she’d brought more than just a few long-sleeved shirts to Grandma Naomi’s house. Actually, the twenty-seven-year-old wished she wasn’t heading to her grandmother’s homestead at all—the past few years hadn’t been kind to Grandma Naomi. A fractured collarbone, a urinary tract infection, dementia, and all sorts of issues in between… lately it seemed as though if it wasn’t one thing, it was another.

  Rachel absentmindedly turned on the radio. Not a lot of choices on her dial. There were perhaps ten to twelve stations that were at least mildly free of static, but nine of them played country, and the rest were hit or miss depending on the weather. Luckily, Rachel always made sure her phone was stocked with some decent music for trips like this—her own personal jukebox.

  Just as she synced her car’s sound system to her phone, her phone chirped. She fumbled with the volume on the dash for a moment before answering.

  “Hello?”

  “Rachel?”

  Rachel recognized the voice immediately. “Hello, Uncle Allen. Yes, this is Rachel. I’m on my way, if that’s what you’re checking.” Her tone contained a touch of sarcasm.

  “Of course I wasn’t checking,” Uncle Allen responded. “I was just calling to see how my favorite niece was doing.”

  “Allen?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m your only niece,” Rachel said, a grin creeping onto her face.

  “That doesn’t make it less true,” Allen chided. “But since you brought it up, what time do you expect to be here tonight? I’ll see about having dinner on the table when you do.”

  Rachel glanced down at the clock on her now-silent radio and mentally plotted out the remainder of her trip. “Oh, I’d say about seven o’clock? Maybe later if I get caught in a traffic jam.”

  Uncle Allen guffawed. If there was anything more unlikely in Southern Illinois than a traffic jam, it was a skyscraper, or perhaps Godzilla. “Okay. Sounds good. I’ll tell your grandma. She’s really looking forward to seeing you.”

  Rachel felt a pit in her stomach. “She’ll see me, but will she remember me? Will she even know I’m there?”

  Allen went quiet, and Rachel realized she should have been more sensitive. She knew that Uncle Allen felt personally responsible for his mother’s health—after all, he was the one who lived close by, and he was in charge of her care. Yet most days Allen was needed in the field, so he’d had to rely on a cobbled-together series of nurses, family members, and friends to come by and watch over her while he worked.

  This week, it was Rachel’s turn to help. And in addition to keeping an eye on her grandmother, Rachel had also promised to purge the clutter in Grandma Naomi’s attic. It seemed that Grandma had never forgotten Rachel’s long-ago promise to clear out the mess—even though there was no guarantee that Grandma would even remember Rachel’s name when she pulled in the driveway.

  Rachel was almost sure her call had dropped when Allen finally spoke again. “You know she loves you. She can’t help it, and whether or not she remembers, it’ll be good for you to be here.”

  Rachel nodded, even though Allen couldn’t see her. “I guess you’re right. I better get off the phone and focus on the road then. I’ll see you in a couple hours. Love you, Uncle Allen.”

  “Love you, Rach.”

  * * *

  The trip took a bit longer than she’d estimated, but at last Rachel pulled onto the road leading to what had been her favorite place to visit as a little girl. It had been several years since Rachel’s last visit here; after college, she had moved up to Indianapolis, a land full of metal and noise. Now, just turning onto the gravel road gave her goose bumps, reminding her of all the memories she’d shared with her cousins at the farm.

  Her sports car kicking up dust behind her, Rachel maneuvered down the gravel road and then up the long driveway belonging to Grandma Naomi. Surrounded on three sides by a thick grove of trees, her grandmother’s house was typical of early twentieth-century farmhouses in the Midwest: four bedrooms on the top floor, a large living room and dining room attached to the kitchen on the main floor, and a basement that followed the same basic floor plan of the house. The only difference in the basement’s layout was that it lacked the additional bathroom that Naomi and Grandpa Henry had added to the main floor back in the late 1950s, when they were first lucky enough to get running water. Rachel’s mom still talked about using the outhouse in the winter when she was a child.

  From the outside, the house looked almost like a big cardboard box with the flaps slightly open to form the roof. A hailstorm had devastated the area the year before, and the aging shingles showed the evidence of it. Uncle Allen had promised to take on the repairs, but farming took him away from the task nearly every chance he had. Still, the roof was in decent shape, and everyone knew Allen would fix it immediately if it ever leaked anywhere in the house. Uncle Allen was busy, but he took care of his family. In fact, he was the kind of guy who was everyone’s favorite, whether he was your favorite uncle, brother, friend, or farmer. He just had a certain magnetic personality that kept people entertained.

  As Rachel parked, she saw her grandmother
out in front of the house, watering her small flower garden. Rachel wouldn’t say Grandma was a hoarder, but the years she spent living in the Great Depression had taught her never to be wasteful. That was particularly true with clothes: if there was any use to be gotten out of an old item, she would squirrel it away for a rainy day. Her clothing, therefore, was a mix of styles gathered from across decades. Today her top bore a definite resemblance to the homemaker blouses Rachel had seen in a few reruns of Leave it to Beaver, while her slacks were 1970s polyester through and through.

  “Hello, Rachel!” Grandma Naomi called out as Rachel stepped out of the car. “We’ve been waiting for you to get here.”

  Whew. At least she remembers my name.

  “We?” Rachel asked, hoisting her suitcase out of the back seat.

  “Oh, yes. Me and your Uncle Allen, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “We had more visitors, too, but they left just a minute or two before you got here,” Grandma Naomi said. “Funny-looking. Kinda glad they didn’t decide to stay.”

  That stopped Rachel. She knew she’d been all alone on the gravel road coming into the farm. And while the road continued on past the driveway, it was rarely used, and Rachel hadn’t seen any dust kicked up. Well, she had been distracted listening to the music on her phone. Perhaps she’d simply missed them.

  “Really? What were they here for?”

  “Hmm… now that you ask me, I can’t quite remember. I’m sure they were here for your Uncle Allen, though. They always are,” Naomi said, putting her watering can down next to a row of marigolds. She bent down—an amazing feat considering her advanced age—to pluck off a few dead flower heads.

  Rachel was still concerned about these visitors to the farm. “Who were they, Grandma? You say they’ve been here before?”

  “Oh, yes,” her grandmother replied. “Those men have been coming here for a long time. I wish they would just go away, but they won’t leave me and Henry alone. They just feel… off. Like they’re here, but not here at the same time. Strange clothing. And their accents… I’m not even sure they’re from this country. Could be spies. You know: the Soviets.”