by KA Hopkins
I live on the outskirts of a large city, beside a busy highway. Given the amount of city light and vehicle traffic it was definitely a high risk landing zone, but for some unknown reason the alien mission planners decided the risk was worthwhile. Maybe it was the kids, as young children who are healthy and fit stand up much better to genetic modification and testing. How’s that for karma? My family’s life destroyed because we met some mathematical criteria in an alien computer.
Landing SOP was to saturate the surrounding area with a neutralizing beam of just the right brain wave frequency that forced all warm blooded higher cognitive beings into a deep REM sleep. To allow the snatch team to move around outside of the scout ship without being affected, the neutralizing beam was shaped around the house with a portable generator. SOP was followed to the letter, everyone in my house and the immediate neighborhood block were out cold.
Our cat Boris, a worthless twenty-four pound stray, liked to sleep on the top step of the stairs leading to the bedrooms. Being the size he is, he covered the entire stair and with his pure black coat he was almost invisible in the dark.
The snatch team entered our house with little difficulty as we seldom see the need to lock the doors given the lack of crime in the neighborhood. As the team made its way upstairs, the point man, at the top of the stairs stepped squarely onto Boris’s back. In his surprise (Boris is round and squishy not hard and flat as expected), the point man lost his balance and fell over backwards, which set off a domino-like chain reaction, like something out of a 1920s Keystone cops silent movie. Due to poor weapons discipline, he shot the alien Gray carrying the neutralizing projector behind him who in turn fell and knocked over the alien behind him. The unintentional energy beam discharge knocked out his companion and destroyed the neutralizing projector. Safety protocols automatically cut in to protect the crew from incapacitation and shut off the ship projected main neutralizing beam.
The neutralizing beam affects the cognitive functions of higher mammals more so than lower ones. Boris was the first to wake up when the beam shut off. The fact that the cat woke up first, should not be construed to mean dogs are smarter than cats…but I have fish smarter than that cat. Now, semi-awake, Boris decided to express his displeasure with being trod upon and attacked the eyes and face of the fallen Gray who had just shot his companion.
The Gray’s weapon of choice for snatch missions is a pulsed, wide beam energy disruptor. It works on the principle of disrupting all electrical currents within the target, so in a human being’s nervous system it’s effect is similar to a Taser, only a dozen times worse as the shock is distributed across the entire body not just the Taser contact pins. The resulting shock to the neural system will cause unconsciousness for several hours or longer, depending upon the pulse duration. Pulse durations more than five seconds are fatal and look exactly like a heart attack, as the pulse causes the heart to go into ventricular fibrillation.
If one is unlucky enough to experience the wrong end of the beam weapon, the feeling when you awake can be best described as your all time worst hangover, flu and cold experience rolled into one. Every joint in your body hurts, accompanied by a migraine headache that often causes short term memory loss. The weapon is equally effective on any device containing modern microchip electronics. The beam is similar to an Electromagnetic (EM) Pulse caused by a nuclear detonation - it causes a lightening like power surge that completely burns out all electronic microchips, effectively destroying any electronic device.
Natasha, who typically slept outside the kid’s rooms, awoke to Boris’s wail and decided that strangers in her house, late at night, that smelled funny were obviously up to no good. True to her protective nature, she took the initiative and bit through the leg of the next closest alien Gray coming up the stairs. Her bite as expected, caused intense pain to shoot through his leg, made worse by Natasha shaking his leg like a bone trying to separate it from his body. The team member fell backwards in an effort to get away from Natasha and fired a long continuous blast from his weapon into the ceiling, which blew a ten foot gash through the roof. The Gray team leader, surprised by the screams of his team and errant shots, panicked and shot one of his team members by mistake. If you’re keeping score, two aliens were shot by their own team members, one was down to Natasha, and one was down to Boris.
I have no idea why I woke up and no one else in the house did, as Boris and Natasha were making enough noise to raise the dead. Following the sound of the growling and snarling animals, I stumbled out of my bedroom into the hallway right into the middle of the fight. Upon seeing that I was in danger, Natasha attacked the alien team lead. He fired a long errant burst from his energy weapon, the beam missed me but killed Natasha.
I have never claimed to be the best or the brightest but I can be taught. When someone tries to shoot you in your own house at night without provocation, there are only a couple of logical actions to take - surrender or attack. Peacefully giving up is always a good option, but it was my house. Sure, it was a shock to see extraterrestrials standing on the stairway, but when their actions clearly demonstrated they meant to harm my family, coupled with the fact they had just killed my beloved dog, rage overtook fear…so I did the next best thing when cornered and outnumbered. I became unpredictable.
With little thought and even less hesitation, I took a superman flying leap down the stairs and hit the still standing snatch team members and the one struggling with Boris. It was not a pretty attack (I weigh 240 pounds on a good day if I lie to myself,) but with the help of gravity and a bad attitude it had all the right characteristics of a successful one: speed and violence. The outcome - all of us, including Boris ended up into a big mosh pile at the bottom of the stairs.
While I was always pretty clumsy in the martial arts classes I took with the kids, I found it did not take a lot of skill to throw elbow or knee strikes. Since Boris and I were on top, I threw knee and elbow strikes at everyone within reach. Boris helped out by caterwauling and clawing the face of the Gray closest to him. I had to give the old fuzzy ball credit - for a useless beast he sure had game. Between the two of us, the alien Grays who weighed at most a hundred pounds each, didn’t stand a chance - knees, elbows and claws thrown with malevolent intent are devastating at close quarters, regardless of your size. Within seconds not one alien was left in any functional conscious shape.
As I looked around at the mayhem Boris and I caused, one would think at some point logic has to kick in - I’m afraid not. I should have been hiding in a corner closet shaking with fear, but instead I was consumed with rage. All of my thoughts were focused on one thing- kill them all. This was way out of character for me. Apart from the occasional duck hunting trip in the fall, killing was not something I had much experience with. I was perfectly happy to hunt all my meat in the local supermarket.
Slowly, it sunk in: I was dealing with real, live, out-of-this-world aliens…odds were, the six in the house had brought friends. Who were more than likely close by and about to show up. The smart move was to sneak out the back door and run away, which could have worked fine for me; not so much for my family. Since adrenalin and rage still called the shots, I decided to meet the alien’s deadly force with like force. I still don’t understand why I was not frozen with fear. I’m not a particularly brave man, I had no history of getting in fights and even when I played competitive sports it was hard for me to get my head into the game. Before every practice and game I always had a hard time with butterflies.
Given the likely probability that a bunch of hostile aliens were about to come through the front door, it seemed like a good idea to even up the odds a bit. The alien hand weapon each Gray carried looked pretty simple - a small box with a firing stud on top, one end had an aperture with a small recessed horn that you pointed towards the target. It looked a lot like a garage door opener, only a little heavier and better made.
During my service in the military, my primary job was running computer networks. Other than the yearly range qualificat
ion, I seldom touched weapons. However, all of the weapons I fired always had some sort of a safety to prevent inadvertent firing. Where Earth weapons have a mechanical safety, I reasoned that the alien weapons probably had something similar but of a biological nature. If I was an alien engineer, I would design my weapons with anti-tamper features so that any non-authorized being trying to fire my weapon would get a nasty surprise.
Working from the assumption that there was probably some sort of anti-tamper mechanism, I picked up one of the Grays after giving him another elbow in the head for good measure. “Thanks for dropping by,” I said. I grabbed his hand and used it to press down on the firing stud for a couple of seconds - much to my satisfaction the weapon blew a four foot hole in the kitchen floor and a smaller one in the basement floor below. Having worked out how to point, press and shoot the beam weapon, I quickly shot the entire snatch team. In the heat of the moment I might have held down the firing stud for several seconds longer than necessary…for good measure I shot the team leader a couple of times as payback for Natasha.
With the snatch team taken care of, an odd feeling of dread came over me - more aliens were about to join the party. Having seen how well thermal scanning technology works in the military, I laid on top of the Gray bodies stacked up on the stairs to camouflage my heat signature and used the reflection off a small mirror hanging in the hallway to see the open door. It wasn’t much of an ambush, but under the circumstances it was better to go on the offensive than try and hide.
The perimeter security team having heard the panicked shouts, wild shots and the confused communications calls for help over the command net, rushed into the house through the front door. Whether they realized it or not, they had entered a kill zone. As they stormed into the house, they bunched up in the hallway and paused for a few seconds to scan the house. The pause allowed me to shoot through the stairs and catch them all in the hallway. Their eye shield targeting displays had detected me, but could not clearly differentiate my exact position from the thermal signatures of their alien companions. If they had taken a few seconds to assess the situation, the outcome would have been very different.
Although badly outnumbered, I surprised the security team, because the suddenness and unexpected violence of my attack on the snatch team forced them to forget protocol and rush en masse through a single entry point to confront an unknown enemy without any sort of diversion. If it had been a human SWAT team assaulting the house, procedure called for a flash bang stun grenade to be thrown to act as a diversion before forcing entry. In the aliens’ haste to rescue their team members, they forgot to ensure their own safety.
With both the alien snatch and security teams incapacitated, the odd feeling of dread was back, this time it told me to look outside. I walked to the front door trying not to step on the alien bodies and saw the outline of their ship on the green. It was close enough to easily attack, but with my rage dissipated, my first thought was to run away. Having just killed twelve of their crew, the element of surprise was no longer in my favor.
As these thoughts ran through my head the feeling of dread came back, even stronger. This time, I heard a tiny voice, “You still have the element of surprise. Trying to escape on foot is futile; the remaining ship’s crew will use their superior sensor technology to find you. There is no sense in running, you will only die tired.” I tried to ignore the voice in my head but it was persistent, telling me the only way to save my family was to maintain the initiative and continue the attack.
I picked up a Gray and did my best to tuck it under my arm – it felt awkward, but the alternative was to try and cut off an arm which, without a heated blood supply, might not fool the anti-tamper features in the beam weapon. I did not have time to experiment, as the voice in my head urged me on: “Sometime today would be nice, just pick him up and carry him; by the way they’re called Grays.”
“Cut me some slack. I’m doing my best here. You try and carry a hundred or so pounds of dead weight and see how easy it is!” I thought to myself, “I’m losing it, I’m now arguing with voices in my head!”
I slipped out of the front door as quietly as I could and jumped sidewise off the porch into the front garden, only to cut my feet on the roses planted in the front flower bed. The pain caused me to let out a profanity to which I heard a response in my head: “Could you be any louder?” The voice in my head was probably caused by the shock of having just killed twelve aliens, so I decided to ignore it.
The alien scout ship had the classic appearance reported in many UFO sightings. It was dull silver in color and looked like two half flattened circular domes, each joined in the middle with a band of windows between the top and bottom halves. Lights ran around the entire circumference where the domes joined. Both top and bottom domes had transparent observation blisters, which may have contained weapons but I could not tell in the poor light. The ship sat on three thick landing legs with a hatch that formed a large ramp to the interior, still wide open. A couple of hundred feet past the ship, I could see what appeared to be a shimmering wave in the night air like you see over asphalt on a hot day. My guess was it was some sort of security field to keep unwanted visitors out. Luckily I was already on the inside of the field…not so lucky for anyone onboard the ship as I had no intention of exchanging social pleasantries.
The boarding ramp appeared to be unguarded. Muttering to myself, “God hates a coward!” I stumbled across the seventy-five yards to the ship and staggered up the ramp, before anyone onboard could close it. I was thoroughly winded by the effort; for such a small being, the Gray was a lot heavier than it looked.
The ship appeared to be about fifty feet in diameter. Inside it seemed much bigger than the outside would suggest. It was surprisingly spacious and empty, not anything like pictures I had seen of Earth submarines or spacecraft where equipment took up every inch of available space. As I started to search the ship the voice in my head returned and told me where the crew could be found. I found two in what looked to be the engine room on the lower deck, one in a kitchen on the mid-level deck and two beside the kitchen in a storage area. I killed them all without so much as a second thought, which is kind of scary, considering my previous experience in the art of killing extraterrestrials before tonight was zero.
The voice in my head directed me to the command deck where I would find the last alien Gray. As I made my way up the spiral stairwell to the top deck, the voice told me, “You’re doing fine there’s only one left; he’s behind the command chair to your left when you enter the flight deck. This is the command deck so please shoot straight and go easy on the beam duration as there is lots of sensitive equipment hidden in the walls.”
“Enough already, aliens break into my house, try to kill me and now I’m hearing voices in my head of how best to kill them!” While I could explain the voice as a result of the stressful situation, why did it sound like the female voice on a GPS navigator, with an Australian accent?
The last Gray had been around a bit. He was the Captain of his ship and under no illusions as to what my intentions were. Never before had a human escaped from a snatch team, let alone killed the snatch and security teams and nearly an entire ship’s crew. He ordered the ship to self-destruct in five minutes. After five minutes he would either disarm the self-destruct, or it would not matter anymore. Either way, his ship would not fall into human hands. The massive crater the explosion would leave did not concern him, someone from headquarters could deal with it. This latest development was passed to me by the voice in my head; I was on the clock so to speak.
With the ship self-destruct armed, I needed to do something quickly. Only quickly and an armed enemy in a barricaded room seldom works out well for the attacking party - unless you really know what you are doing. I was winging it, using rage to make up for training and tactics. Without a diversion or covering fire, I rushed into the control room and repeated the same mistake the security team had made in my house not five minutes before.
I shot several tim
es where I thought the Captain should be, only to find he anticipated my intentions and moved just as I entered the room. That will teach me to trust voices in my head! As I moved around the bulkhead behind the control seats, we ended up facing each other, maybe ten feet apart. At that distance it’s hard to miss - and neither of us did. We both fired at nearly the same time. I was just a touch faster.
The Captain died defending his ship, but not quite fast enough for my liking. He had a different weapon from the one I picked up from the snatch team - his shot explosive projectiles. His shot hit me center of body mass and exploded. Nothing was left of my body just parts of arms, legs, and my head scattered all around the room.
The last image I remembered was the flash from the barrel of the alien Captain’s weapon and then I died…
When you die due to sudden trauma to the body, your brain continues to function for a couple of seconds before all signs of consciousness are lost. Some who have experienced near-death events and were resuscitated, claimed that they saw lights or pictures of loved ones or a collage of their favorite memories. Not me. The last thought in my head was, “This sucks!” So, being dead, one would expect peace and quiet…not so much; the voice in my head continued to nag me. It explained who it was, what it had done to guide me and that the self-destruct sequence was terminated. It told of how it had been modified during the last space dock upgrade to have more reasoning powers, allowing it to be more interactive with the crew. On and on it seemed to drone in my head, mocking me on how clumsy I was to get myself killed and that being dead was going to cause me big problems. No shit, try looking at it from my point of view! Then finally I fell into nothingness…