Aliens and Ice Cream

by Michael James

  She threw the bag over her shoulder, finding the motion awkward with one of her arms constrained in a sling. Heading upstairs, she expected Liz to have finished packing. Instead, she sat on the bed, unchanged, staring at nothing. Heather approached on soft feet, holding her hand out.

  “We need to go, okay sweetie? Did you get anything ready?” A scan of the room showed that Liz hadn’t. For the second time in less than a day, Heather helped her friend change into new clothes, picking out sweat pants and a light t-shirt. The perfect outfit for dodging aliens in.

  “Liz, I never told you,” Heather said while she worked. “Pete’s alive. Can you believe it?” She turned, expecting a reaction, but Liz only stared. “Did you hear me? Pete’s been alive this whole time.”

  Liz rubbed her face, her movements in slow motion, like she was underwater. “Pete? How?”

  Heather told the story, how he survived in the junction box and how they all got back to the house. To her surprise, Liz showed no reaction. She continued with those half-asleep, almost-underwater motions. Heather realized Liz was too far gone into shock. The best thing would be to get her out of here.

  She pulled Liz down the stairs and into the garage, the bag of supplies thrown over her good shoulder. The garage had a door on the exterior-facing wall that faced Heather’s house, and better yet, it faced a side window that opened into Heather’s dining room. The houses stood so close together that only fifteen feet separated the two. One of them could use the device to get next door and then throw it back over to whoever waited in the garage. They’d never need to be outside at the same time. Heather explained the plan to Liz, who showed no emotion or reaction.

  "You go first," Heather said. "Make sure you hold the transmitter in your hand.”

  A low, keening moan leaked from Liz’s mouth and the look in her eyes changed from vacancy to panic.

  “No.” Liz coughed the word out, hoary and desperate. “Not outside. I can’t go outside, they’ll kill me.”

  "It’s fine," Heather soothed. "I’ve done it twice now. Matt was right about the transmitter. They don’t even look at you.”

  "No." Liz backed up a step, shaking her head. "No, no, no."

  Heather blocked her and held her shoulder.

  “You’ll be safe, I promise.”

  “NO!” Liz bucked away, and pushed and punched at Heather, trying to move backwards. One windmill fist connected, but Heather continued to pull her into an awkward, one-armed embrace, trying to settle her down.

  "I can’t, I can’t, they’ll kill me," Liz panted. "For Mom, for what I did to her. Everyone dies outside, even if you don’t want them to and it’s an accident, they don’t care and now they’ll kill me.”

  Liz bawled, her words tripping over themselves as she reared back. Heather hugged her tight around her sling, trying to hold Liz’s arms down where they couldn’t do any damage.

  “Sweetie, it’s fine. I won’t let them hurt you. And everyone’s there. Me, Matt, Pete, all the adults. I promise. Liz, I’m your best friend. I love you.”

  Some of that got through because Liz’s breathing slowed, and she blinked away the remaining tears.

  “Promise?”

  “I promise. Nothing will happen. You only need to run across. Watch, I’ll show you.”

  Heather opened the door and stepped outside, taking several steps toward her house so she was halfway between the two.

  “See?” She spun around and did a tiny dance to prove the point. In the trees above her, the aliens ignored her prancing. She ran to the window. Because of the warm weather, it was open, and it only took seconds to pop the screen off. Perfect.

  While Liz watched, open-mouthed, Heather transferred the supplies from the garage through the open window. She considered jumping through and throwing the transmitter to Liz, but realized that wouldn’t work, not with the state she was in. Better to get her to safety first.

  She jogged back and handed the transmitter over.

  “Your turn. Ready? You saw how safe it is. They don’t even notice you. Climb through the window and then throw the transmitter back.”

  Liz licked her lips, her face pale and drawn, but she nodded and wrapped her hand around the device. She put it in her back pocket and her breathing picked up.

  “You promise?” she asked Heather.

  “Promise.” Heather hugged her.

  Liz grit her teeth and with a small yelp, ran to the opposite window. She leapt when she reached it, her legs pumping. She scrambled up the side of the house and tumbled through the open window. Something glittered and thumped to the ground behind her. A weight settled into Heather's stomach. Through the window, Liz turned around and gave a shaky smile.

  Heather licked her lips. “Did you drop the transmitter?”

  The smile melted from Liz’s face and she dug into her pockets, turning her head left and right. Her lips made an O of surprise.

  “I had it the whole time.”

  Heather wiped her mouth, tasting sour fear. Her hands shook. The device sat five feet from the window, at least fifteen feet from the garage. Fifteen feet. She’d have two seconds, at most. She’d need to clear seven feet a second.

  “I’m sorry.” Liz wailed from the safety of the house and Heather tried to swallow her anger.

  “I can do this,” Heather said to herself, rubbing her hands together. She backed up, giving herself room for a running start. “Two seconds. No problem.” Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking and even though she clenched her bladder, she could feel drops leak out. She moaned.

  “I can do this,” she said again. If she spent any more time thinking about it, she’d never move. With a final breath, she ran at the door and jumped as far as she could.

  The jump was difficult with her arm and she landed funny and tumbled to the left, twisting her body to put the impact on her functioning arm. Down on one knee, she half-dove, half-rolled forward, still several feet away from the transmitter. Her ears registered a keening wail, and she realized it was her. The device sat six feet in front of her. A second had passed and Liz screamed.

  She dove forward, no longer caring about her arm and landed on top of the transmitter, yelling in pain as the full weight of her body came down on her bad shoulder. She curled herself around the transmitter, hugging it to her body. Liz's screams gathered intensity, a thick and inarticulate sound that had no end. Heather lifted her head and opened her eyes.

  An alien hovered two feet from her.

  It was close enough to touch. Heather put her hands over her head, an instinct born from hundreds of hours of TV. She was unable to breathe, unable to blink.

  The alarm went off.

  Right in front of her, it was so much worse than she ever would have imagined. Pain ripped through her head, but she didn’t dare move, didn’t dare so much as blink for fear the alien would attack her. She nearly dropped the transmitter but forced herself to keep a tight grip on it. Her eyes watered from the noise and now her bladder did release, and hot moisture ran down her legs.

  With a pop, the alarm stopped, and only pale silence remained.

  “Leave her alone!” Liz yelled from the window.

  Heather tried to swallow. With agonizing slowness, she got to her feet, the pain in her shoulder forgotten. Her eyes remained anchored on the alien. It made no noise, gave no outward sign it noticed her. She stepped backwards until she was underneath her dining room window. Still keeping one eye on the alien, she turned to face Liz and said, “Help me up.”

  Liz reached down through the window and pulled. She used her good arm to scramble up and into the living room. They collapsed together on the floor in a heap. Liz sobbed into her hands, shaking her head. A shaky laugh escaped Heather's lips.

  “I told you. No problem.”

  Pete

  Incredibly, Heather got her out. Somehow, against any probability of success, she had done it, and now his Liz was here. Even seeing her provided a sliver of hope.

  As she crawled out of the hole between the
houses and stood up, he took in her appearance. Everyone held flashlights and candles, providing enough light to see. He grimaced at the purple welts on her neck and face, and the blistered skin on her forearm. A vacancy lived in her expression and her unseeing eyes took in the room without reacting to any of it.

  The adults gave hugs and kisses and 'are you okay' and 'it’s all going to be fine now' but they were only doing what life trained them to do. Lie to the kids, treat them as less, keep them buried under bubble wrap and hope they don’t think. Nothing would be okay. Okay didn’t exist anymore. Their new reality was the sniveling cowardice of inside and the grovelling of hiding.

  But there was his Liz, damaged and battered, but upright. Heather orbited around her like a protective shield, but her eyes kept going to Matt. Liz stared at the ground, not reacting to the surrounding noise. She hadn’t noticed Pete yet, and he pushed forward through the crowed.

  “Hi, bright eyes.” He used the secret name they had, and her head snapped up as if on a string.

  “Peter.” She breathed his name, an exhalation that contained all her despair, followed by tears as she threw herself into his embrace. He clung to her, trying to hold her together while she shuddered with enough force to send tremors through his arms. He guided her to the couch while the adults stood around shuffling their feet, but he didn’t pay them any attention. The whole of him centered onto Liz, onto her pain and what he could do to remove it.

  She cried into his shoulder, and he leaned over with his face in her hair and they stayed like that for moments that turned into minutes. Matt said something to his dad and with heads down, the procession shuffled upstairs, leaving him in the dark with his shattered girlfriend and endless memories of his family that stung like paper cuts.

  To break the silence, he told her about his ordeal, how he survived. He tried to keep emotion out of it and soon she engaged and asked questions. They talked for hours, exchanging sentences and words, but it didn't matter what they said, because every line contained the same meaning. I love you. The alien alarms broke them apart at regular intervals, but down here in the basement, the sound wasn’t quite as piercing.

  Eventually the words stopped, and they leaned into each other. At some point she fell asleep. Her jagged breaths smoothed out and became more regular. He must have dozed off too, because when he opened his eyes, no sunlight came in through the submerged windows of the basement and the house was quiet. Liz no longer snuggled into his shoulder, but instead stared into the darkness with her legs hugged tight to her chest. He reached out and found her hand.

  “I killed my mom.” She let the words drip out, looking straight ahead.

  “No, you didn't.” Hollow words, but the only ones available to him at this point. Secretly, he was glad Alexandra was dead. A secret he’d tell no one, not even Matt. She was a horrible woman, a horrible mother, and the world was a better her place without her in it. Probably not what his girlfriend wanted to hear now.

  “I wanted her to stop hitting me. That’s all. I didn’t want her to die, or even get hurt.” Her voice contained a flat and gray monotone that worried him more than the words.

  “None of this is your fault.”

  “I could have hidden. Or stopped provoking her. Something.”

  “This is on her, not you.”

  The dim outline of Liz’s head swiveled toward him. She didn’t speak for several long moments and then she clasped his head in her hands and kissed him on the mouth. He tasted salt from her tears.

  “I’m so sorry about your family.” She hugged him tight and what he meant to say was, “It’s not a big deal,” but instead the words tripped and then he was sobbing into her shoulder, wrapping his arms around her waist. She stayed silent, letting him live in the moment. He was tired of crying. He was tired, period.

  “I want to kill them.” He lifted his head from her body. “More than anything, that’s what I’d like. At least you got the one that killed your mom. You did something. I fucking hid like a coward.”

  “None of this is your fault.” She threw his words back at him and he realized how futile they were. Words did nothing. His hands shook, and he made them into fists.

  “I ran, you didn’t.”

  That ended all conversation, and they both sat in the darkness. The house had a quiet stillness that only came after midnight, the silence of sleeping.

  “We could lure one in.” Liz said after a minute. “If we could get one to open again and somehow be underneath when it happened, we’d be able to kill it. That’s how I did it.”

  “There’s no way to do that though. They only eat us.”

  “That’s not true. The meat from the barbecue is gone.”

  At first, he didn’t understand her meaning, but it soon landed.

  “What, you think they go after anything that’s meat?”

  “Protein, anyway.”

  "Maybe." He rubbed his chin. "Matt said it has something to do with energy, like they convert the biomatter."

  “Between this place and Heather’s house, there must be twenty pounds of spoiling meat. At least.”

  Pete realized she might be right. All the food from the freezers was spoiling with the electricity out and earlier in the day, John worried about the smell. Steaks, chicken fingers, packages of chicken breasts, everything was thawing.

  “The harder part would be getting underneath,” Liz continued. “Even if we put it close to the door, they’d kill us. We’d have to be below them somehow, and that’s impossible.

  “Abby’s room.” Pete snapped his fingers. “The skylights. If we put all the food outside on window and waited underneath, we’d only need to break the glass when the alien came and then stab it. I bet it would be easy.”

  “How would we get the stuff onto the skylight though?”

  “It opens with a crank that’s on the side of the wall. It drops into the bedroom like a ramp, it only opens to about a forty-five-degree angle. We could open it, put the stuff on and when we -closed it again, it would be outside.”

  He imagined what it would be like, driving something into the guts of an alien, watching it flail and shut down. A small part of his brain yelled at him that this was a dangerous, suicidal idea, but after a week with no sleep, forming clear thoughts was almost impossible. Besides, his heart galloped with excitement and he realized how badly he wanted to kill one.

  “They killed my mom,” Liz said.

  “Mine too.”

  “Those things need to die.”

  “Yes.” Pete nodded in the dark, almost reverent in his responses.

  “It will be easy.”

  “So easy.”

  “And once they’re dead, we can get another transmitter.”

  It made sense. Everyone was asleep, the plan was doable. They could tell Abby to sleep with Matt, so she’d be out of the room and safe. The tiny voice screamed at him some more, told him to slow down, to think things through. The voice sounded like Matt, but Matt still had a family. He had Liz, his pain, and maybe, revenge.

  “Let’s get to work.” For the first time in days, he smiled.

  Matt

  Matt shouldn't still be awake after the day he had and in truth, he struggled to keep his eyes open. But too many thoughts sprinted through his head, like Heather doing crazy Heather stuff and rescuing Liz. He should be ecstatic, but no one reacted the right way. Even after Liz came through the hole, and everyone was safe, his parents and Heather’s dad bickered in the kitchen. His dad raised his voice and Mom needed to step in to calm everyone down. Dad said, “Figures you’d take his side,” before storming out, and then his mom looked like a kicked puppy, so who knew what was even going on? And why was his dad’s face all smashed to hell? His mom wouldn’t talk about it. Was there a fight?

  After a sad dinner of nearly-spoiled food and cold canned goods, they all turned in. Once the sun dropped, there wasn’t much to do anyway, unless they felt like burning a couple dozen candles to keep the light going. Anyway, none of the adu
lts seemed to be in a mood to talk further.

  By unspoken agreement, they stayed in the single house. No one wanted to be together, but no one wanted to be alone. Mr. Keene went back up to be with his wife and Heather said she’d sleep on the couch in the den. Pete and Liz stayed in the basement, and Mr. Gardner took the other couch in the living room. His mom and dad didn’t seem delighted to have to stay in the same room together and Matt didn’t know what to make of that, either.

  He sighed and punched at his pillow. Even sleeping seemed off now, without Abby beside him, or without Heather’s light breathing, her body pressed up against him. His bed seemed too soft compared to the solid wood floor of the treehouse. As he resigned himself to a long, sleepless night, his door creaked open.

  “Matt?” Abby’s harsh whisper cut through the air. “Are you awake?”

  “What’s up? Are you okay?”

  “I can’t sleep. Can you…” Her voice trickled off and Matt smiled.

  “Get in here. I have a spot waiting for you.” His double bed had room, and he threw the covers on one side open. Abby didn’t ask twice, she hopped across his room and into the bed, Fuzzy Bear secured under her arm. She snuggled up beside him.

  “I’m not afraid,” she clarified.

  “I am. I’m glad you’re here to protect me.” He poked her once in the belly, enough to pry out a small giggle she buried in the pillow.

  “Mom and Dad are acting funny and daddy’s face is hurt,” she said.

  “Yeah. I don’t know what’s going on between them.”

  “Parents are weird,” she agreed. She rolled over and burrowed herself in closer. In moments her breath leveled out and he thought she might have already fallen asleep. Lucky her. His mind still wouldn’t shut down, and he returned to the problem of the transmitter.

  It was like one of those logic puzzles with intertwined sections. They had a transmitter, allowing one of them to get help. But then, how would they come back? The transmitter covered two small people, at least. Would it work with a pairing of kids and adults? They'd only get one chance to be wrong. They needed more transmitters, but that was impossible. They’d have to kill more aliens but how would they do that?