Blurred Vision: Seven billion voices about to be silenced

by Chris Botragyi

  Hatfield turned to the General, slowly wiping the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his right forearm. ‘It’s all lies… it’s nothing but a game to them,’ he said nervously with a pale, blank expression on his face. ‘They’re already here.’

  Chapter 7: We Don’t Know

  SOMETHING caught Mark’s eye. He turned his head towards the door, staring hard as he began crawling on all fours across the room.

  ‘What are you doing, Mark?’ John asked with a deep sigh.

  The Professor could feel the wetness of the General’s blood clinging to his hands and knees. The liquid dampened his trousers, spreading like a fungus as it soaked itself deeper into the denim fabric.

  A glimmer spiked the mist as he approached. ‘What is that?’

  ‘What is it?’ said John as he trailed the direction of Mark’s voice. ‘What have you seen?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Mark fumbled around the floor before placing his hands on a solid metallic object. ‘Gotcha!’ He quietly slipped the cylindrical shape into his back pocket, and made his way over to the wall. ‘Look what I’ve got,’ he said as the others closed either side of him. He carefully pulled the gadget from his pocket, flashing it quickly.

  ‘What the hell is it?’ said John again, his interest heightened as he looked around the room with a sheepish nervousness.

  ‘I think it’s one of their weapons. They must have dropped it during the struggle,’ replied Mark.

  ‘That’s great. I hate to put a downer on things, but what can we do against them with one weapon?’

  James extended his fingers and ran them over the object’s metal surface. ‘It’s a start, John. We have a little leverage here. We might be able to at least kill one of these fuckers, eh?’

  ‘Exactly. There could be a number of ways in which we could use this,’ grinned Mark as he stared at them in turn.

  John pushed his head forwards. ‘How?’

  ‘Let me stew on this for a while, I’ll see what I can come up with.’

  ‘Yeah, well don’t burn the stew, Professor,’ rambled John with a serious look upon his heavy face, ‘we might not have much longer left to eat it.’

  The three of them sat in the grease and dirt, silent. The hunger and tiredness was beginning to really hit them hard.

  John’s stomach grumbled loudly, the sound pulling the other two from a drifting half sleep. ‘I don’t feel too good, I’m starting to feel faint,’ he said as he held his abdomen, trying to suppress the angry noise.

  Mark opened his eyes, startled at the intrusion before the words sunk in. ‘Ride it out, John.’ He sat upright against the wall, exhausted. ‘This is what happens when you don’t get your nutrients. Without hydration we’re all doomed, this is what the General was getting at,’ he said, himself starting to feel similar effects.

  ‘I’m not pissing and drinking it! I want some self-respect to remain at least.’

  ‘I think the time for self-respect disappeared long ago. If you want to last longer, then you’re going to have to bite the bullet – we all are.’

  James threw his arms up. ‘Anyway, forget about that,’ he said, now fully awake. ‘What the fuck are we going to do? We have a weapon here, we need to use it.’

  ‘Keep your voice down!’ whispered Mark as he looked around. ‘This is our only advantage, and I would like it to stay that way.’

  ‘Then we need to use it. You keep talking about hydration and drinking piss, yet by the time we get around to doing anything we’ll all be bloody dead!’

  Mark tutted. ‘James, haven’t you learnt anything?’ he said, sighing as he looked to the ceiling light. ‘Look at what has happened so far, it hasn’t panned out too well has it.’

  ‘What’s the point, the outcome is inevitable,’ added John, frustrated. ‘Why are we prolonging things?’

  The Professor shook his head. ‘If the whole world turned around and gave in to every situation in life, then the human race would have died out thousands of years ago.’ He yawned as he spoke. ‘This is why they’re testing us constantly, to break us down, to see what we are, to see what makes us, well… us.’

  ‘I don’t buy it,’ sneered John. ‘Besides, we have no idea how long they’ve been watching our planet.’ He wiped the drool from the corner of his mouth with his jacket sleeve. ‘Look at all these TV programmes. According to them, aliens have been scouring our planet for years, centuries even! Who knows, maybe we’re their experiment, and they’re our makers?!’

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ, will the pair of you stop talking shit, you’re doing my head in!’ shouted James as he rose to his feet. ‘Give me that weapon, I’ll blast those gangly fucks!’

  He moved to grab the device from the Professor’s hand.

  Mark pulled his arm back. ‘Superb, the whole ship will come running then!’

  ‘Well it’s better than sitting here listening to you two talk crap!’

  Mark pondered the last two statements for a second. ‘Actually, that might not be a bad idea.’

  ‘What? What idea?’

  ‘If the worst comes to the worst, we could destroy as much of the circuitry and lighting in here as possible.

  ‘To gain what?’ interrupted John. ‘What good would that do us?’

  ‘Put it this way, they would certainly come running. You never know, with this weapon we could take the whole ship down.’

  ‘How and why would we want to do that?’ said James.

  Mark now climbed to his feet and stared through the haze towards James. ‘What’s around the corners of the corridor?’

  James rolled his eyes sarcastically. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Exactly – we don’t know.’ Mark pointed at the two men. ‘We could be close to a control room, another prison. Hell, there could be many more of us here somewhere, we don’t know.’

  ‘That’s right, we don’t know!’ replied James with a smile to suggest that the Professor was reaching.

  ‘Think about it. What if at the end of the corridor there were hundreds more rooms like this, thousands? There might be as many humans in as many rooms.’

  ‘Yeah, and your point is, Professor?’

  ‘If we could free enough of them, then we might be able to overrun these bloody things.’

  James puffed out his cheeks in disappointment. ‘I’m surprised at you, Mark. I think that you need to drink some urine, the dehydration is clearly affecting your brain!’

  John managed a sputtered laugh. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Now you’re cracking jokes. What have you done since we arrived, eh?’ asked Mark, obviously annoyed at the mocking. ‘I’m telling you, there are others here. I heard cries earlier, especially when Daniel made a break for it.’

  James growled in frustration as he turned away from Mark. ‘Please. Say for example there are others here, what are you going to do, create an army?’ He turned back and faced the Professor. ‘Six of us couldn’t defeat two or three of those bastards, so how the fuck do you expect an army to beat them?’ He paused for a moment to calm himself. ‘You don’t think that there’re only a few creatures on this ship, do you?’

  ‘Of course not! But again we don’t know how big this craft is, or where we are.’

  ‘Bingo, Professor. Give the man a prize – that’s the point!’ James clapped his hands in derision. ‘Think about what you’re saying. It’s suicide, and that’s before we’ve even got to the end of the corridor.’

  Mark dropped to the floor, his legs stretched out in front of him as he sat. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s happening to me. My thought… my rational thought is jumbled all over the place.’

  ‘It’s alright, Mark.’ James planted a hand upon the Professor’s left shoulder. ‘You said it yourself, it’s a lack of nutrients. Add to this no food, sleep, warmth – it’s shutting us down. Either that or it’s this damn mist,’ he said, waving his right hand through the red tinge.

  ‘I did wonder that myself,’ said Mark as he raised his head. ‘I s
till believe that it’s what kept us knocked out. I’d like to know the chemical compound of it, to know if it’s toxic or not.’

  ‘In fact, do you think this is what’s depleting us, weakening us?’ John asked as he moved in front of the two men.

  ‘No, I think you will find that this is good old-fashioned basics. As James said, it’s just our bodies starting to shut down due to our needs.’

  John scratched the back of his head. ‘But why is this mist here, what’s its purpose?’

  Mark shrugged. ‘It’s bizarre. If it’s nothing to do with our unconsciousness then it could just be that it’s an emission of some type, you know, like a car emitting smoke and fumes from its exhaust.’ He rubbed his hands together to warm them. ‘Could be the same principle, and we’re just unlucky to have been slung in here with it.’

  James’ mouth curled downwards as his eyebrows raised, pondering the thoughts. ‘Well, it would make sense to a degree. But then why would the emissions be here in this room, and not flowing out into the atmosphere from an “alien” exhaust pipe?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ wondered Mark. ‘We haven’t conquered space or its long-term travel yet. We’ve only scratched the surface of what is possible. There could be a thousand reasons why.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ replied James as he looked around again, ‘we’re only speculating.’

  ‘Absolutely, I agree. It’s only speculation, but it doesn’t hurt to try and have some understanding of what we are dealing with. The more we know, the better the chance there is of doing something.’

  ‘Of course, you’re right.’ James tip-toed to his full height. His head pushed aside a layer of the mist; it swirled around his head like clouds atop a mountain peak as he reached upwards. ‘Maybe it’s like emissions, from emissions?’

  ‘That’s interesting, but the ventilations are there, trust me. If it is emissions leftovers, you still need ventilation for the waste to waft through into this room,’ said Mark. ‘If they weren’t, then the whole room would be swamped in the stuff.’

  ‘Yeah, but it is,’ frowned John.

  ‘No, I mean really flooded in the stuff, like being trapped in a burning building; the thickness that blinds you, the toxins that choke you – that level of smoke, or in this case, mist.’ Mark grimaced as he scratched his head. ‘Even though the visibility in here isn’t great, there is still a degree of it, we can just about see. No, the more I think about it the more it makes sense – we are where we’re meant to be.’

  James rubbed his stubbled chin. ‘Okay, how do you know for sure?’

  ‘For a start there is breathable oxygen in here – if there wasn’t then we would be dead. Add to this the fact that if these are smoke or fumes from an emission, then without some form of ventilation we would have suffered from the effects hours ago.’

  ‘Yes, but if they’re much more technologically advanced, then isn’t it also possible that they would have solved these problems? Would they not know how to disperse dangerous toxins from their own ships, or to convert these toxins into harmless emissions, if what we are talking about is indeed the cause.’ James rubbed hard at the back of his slim neck, it ached. ‘And what if the aliens have the same, or a similar respiratory system to what we have? Surely it would affect them in an identical way if they breathe the same air as us?’

  ‘Hmmm, I hadn’t considered that,’ replied Mark, thinking on the questions. He now began rubbing the back of his own neck. ‘It’s possible. Just because they come from a different planet it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have a different atmosphere to ours. This could be why they are interested in the Earth.’

  ‘Now that definitely makes sense,’ said John, pointing at the Professor.

  Mark shook his head as he looked to each of them. ‘Again, most of this is guess work. If these intelligences are far more advanced, then I imagine that they would be powering their crafts by some form of nuclear power. It depends where they come from and how their chemical elements differ from ours. Though I imagine that their intelligence would allow them the freedoms to devise many different types of reactors capable of producing various energy sources.’

  ‘Think about it,’ said James as he smiled. ‘The aliens have strutted up and down the corridor and in and out of the room since we woke. They either breath the same air as we do, or the mist is only harmful to us.’

  ‘You’re right,’ yielded Mark, ‘it’s that simple.’ A curious look spread over the Professor’s face. ‘How do you know all of this stuff anyway, and why didn’t you speak up earlier?’

  James stared at the Professor, as much baffled by the question as he was the answer. ‘I don’t know, bits and pieces. Like you said, fragments come and go.’

  James awoke with a start as the nightmare threatened his light sleep. He looked around, still dazed before his vision cleared slightly. Flesh, urine, faeces and sweat – the odour clung to the air like a putrid disease. He winced at the stench as he cupped his oily face, massaging the skin firmly as he sought to loosen the tension in his muscles.

  ‘You okay?’ asked John. He too had been dozing lightly.

  James looked at the equally exhausted man. ‘Yeah, where’s Mark?’

  John looked around, waving the mist out of his eyeline. ‘Mark,’ he called out in a deep voice.

  The tin-like sound of liquid trickled against metal, echoing off the walls around them followed by a gagging, retching noise.

  ‘Mark?’ called John again, concerned.

  ‘I’m okay,’ he said as he came through the haze, fiddling with the button fly of his jeans. ‘It’s quite difficult to urinate, catch it, and then drink it at the same time!’

  John looked at James. They both simultaneously pulled the same screwed up face in disgust. ‘Each to their own,’ said John at the thought.

  Suddenly, the glow from the triangular panel burst through the smoky atmosphere. The three men each closed their eyes as they shuffled their bodies out of reach of the luminescence.

  Two Greys appeared to hover as they entered the stenchridden box. Their deep eyes scanned the room menacingly as they hunted the humans. The men crouched within the mist, crawling from side to side as alien feet clattered closer.

  ‘The weapon, Mark,’ whispered James loudly, ‘use the weapon!’

  John scrambled into view, desperate to evade the hunters. Mark could see the man’s gritted teeth as his face searched the room. The haze circled around John’s frightened features, teasing them cruelly as beads of sweat dropped from his thick, anguished face.

  Mark gently moved his hand around to his back pocket and pulled out the small tubular gadget. His hand trembled as he held the metallic object out in front of him. His heart skipped a beat, causing him to nearly drop it as James’ shoulder collided with his own.

  ‘Fuck,’ said James as he gripped Mark’s left forearm with his right hand.

  John’s head came hurtling through the haze, breaking its curling rhythm. The same clenched teeth and wrinkled expression accompanied it. ‘Christ, th-th-there you are!’ he stammered, fear coursing through his body.

  James gestured frantically for John to join them, to become a single unit. John smiled, relieved as he made his way towards them. Without warning, his scampering body stopped in its tracks. The blood drained from his face, changing into one of white horror.

  ‘Come on,’ begged James, extending his arm out to help.

  John’s head plummeted to the floor, exploding like a melon as it slammed into the grating. The others watched as the creature lifted John’s mangled head. Blood poured from his mouth, followed by several broken teeth that floated over the red surface. They slid over his glistening lips, and down his chin. His nose lay bent across the side of his right cheek, as parts of bone protruded through what was left of the skin. His meaty tongue – bitten almost clean through – hung by a stringy thread before its weight forced it to the grating with a wet slap. His legs kicked out with an instinctive reflex, as though desperate for someone to grasp
them as he began sliding backwards, and out of view.

  Mark and James tightened their hold on one another. ‘I’m sorry,’ muttered Mark under his breath. They looked to the floor, both ashamed yet scared in equal measure.

  A tall thin silhouette remained; it stood quiet, still. Its head turned upon its bony shoulders as it scanned the room. With lightning speed it dropped through the mist onto all four limbs, and began prowling forwards like an animal preparing to strike. The two men instinctively leapt backwards. With nowhere to go, their heads smashed against the wall as the creature’s face intruded upon their space. They could feel its slimy skin as they trembled, forehead to forehead; its nostrils quivered as it absorbed their human scent.

  Mark’s fingers desperately pushed every button and switch on the device. A loud crackle snapped in the air as green streams of electrical charge fizzled, lighting up the mist that tried to smother it. He rammed the weapon into the alien’s skeletal neck; its face contorted – grimacing with pain as it clamped its vein-covered eyelids shut.

  James clasped Mark’s arms, adding extra strength and leverage behind the weapon as they forced it deeper into the creature’s neck. It parted its lips as the power surged through its body. The colourful charge glowed through its thin skin, flickering as it shot to the roof of its small mouth.

  Mark used all of his remaining strength, almost breaking his fingers as he forced the buttons down on the weapon. The alien shook violently as its flesh began to sizzle and burn. In a desperate last effort it crashed its arm down upon the device, causing the men to break their grasp. The weapon skidded across the grating, hitting the wall. The alien fell backwards, clawing at the grease before climbing awkwardly to its feet. It regained its bearings and staggered out of the room.

  The door zipped shut behind it. The men breathed a sigh of relief, all the while digging their nails into each other’s flesh.

  ‘Oh fuck, my God,’ panted James as he tried to collect himself. ‘It’s alright, its gone.’