Europa Journal

by Jack Castle

  #

  Date: Unknown

  Time: Unknown

  Location: Unknown.

  To anyone who finds this:

  As incredible as it might sound, I suspect that I am being held prisoner on an alien spacecraft. My abductors had encased me in some sort of amber liquid that hardens, but I somehow escaped. I believe it was with the assistance of one of my crew. Our captors are hideous creatures with black, soulless eyes, grayish skin, misshapen heads, and they appear to infest this ship. I killed one of them with my service pistol. I’m going to attempt to locate the rest of my crew. With their help, I hope to take over the vessel.

  May God have mercy on our souls.

  #

  The captain was about to toss the journal onto the seat but spontaneously stuffed it into his pocket instead.

  Just as he was contemplating his next move, he glimpsed something crawling across the windshield, and his mind went numb with fear.

  He suddenly felt what seemed like hundreds of cold hands — hands with long thin fingers — slide across the nape of his neck and over his face and shoulders, grabbing him from behind. They yanked him roughly from his seat and threw him to the flight deck.

  As he lay on the flight deck and looked up between the splayed blue fingers clamped over his face, he saw dozens of penetrating eyes staring down at him. He felt his will rapidly give way as more and more of the slender fingered hands enveloped him, and he began to slip out of consciousness. As he struggled to stay awake, he heard a muffled scream. He realized it was his own just before everything went black.

  #

  When Specimen 5924 came to, he was encased in a semi-transparent cylinder in the same room from which he had earlier escaped. The shock of cold fluid flowing over his body had startled him to consciousness. He slammed his fist into his cage and screamed for his captors to reveal themselves. He thought he detected a flash of blue.

  Amber liquid poured into the cylinder, swiftly rising to the level of his knees, hips, chest. His legs and arms flailed, trying to gain purchase on the slippery sides of the container. He pressed his cheek against the ceiling in an effort to keep his head above the rising liquid.

  Suddenly, his swishing legs began to feel more resistance. The luminous liquid started to thicken, rapidly turning from gel to solid. It encased his lower limbs and worked its way up his body, coagulating around his skin.

  The liquid now covered his face. Blinking madly, his eyes tried to adjust to the gooey fluid. His lungs threatened to explode, and he pressed his face up to the glass to scream at his captors. The gelatinous fluid seeped into his mouth and hardened, forever preserving his final act of defiance. As his mind began to shut down for what he believed would be the very last time, he finally remembered his name.

  It was Harry.

  Chapter 6

  Harry’s Island

  When Captain Harry Reed regained consciousness, he found himself sitting in the cramped cockpit of a plane he knew well: the Hail Mary, or at least what was left of it.

  His right temple throbbed. Touching his face, he felt dried blood that had trickled down from a two-inch cut over his eye. He winced in pain when he touched the wound. Harry’s face and eyebrows were covered with frost, but he was grateful for the numbing cold because he realized that it was probably the only thing that had kept him from bleeding out while he had lain slumped unconscious in his chair, his hands still gripping the steering column.

  Blinding white light, like that from a setting sun, shone through the shattered forward windshield. Harry neither felt motion nor heard engines roaring; his ship was grounded. The only sound he heard was that of a brisk wind whipping into the ruined plane and blowing snow inside.

  Harry slowly turned his head to the side. Even though he was hurt badly, he realized that he had fared far better than the man sitting on his right in the co-pilot’s seat. The windshield had collapsed, and the co-pilot and the right side of the cockpit had fused into one mesh of flesh and metal. Harry noticed that the co-pilot wore a flight suit, but the uniform was different than his own. The co-pilot wore a sky cap and a Mae West jacket, which led Harry to believe that the man was one of the TBM Avenger pilots for whom Harry and his crew had been searching. A blood-spattered name tag that read “BOOTS” appeared on the co-pilot’s uniform, but the name didn’t jog Harry’s memory. Regardless, Harry thought that this was no way for an aviator to die.

  Just then, visions of little gray men danced across Harry’s fragmented memory. These can’t be memories, he quickly told himself, just bad dreams. But the images kept coming. He envisioned himself running around a giant spaceship, just like Flash Gordon in the funny papers. Again, he told himself that these ‘memories’ couldn’t be real. The Hail Mary crashed somewhere, he thought, somewhere very cold, and everything else is the result of some fevered delusion, probably from my head injury.

  Summoning all his strength, Harry slowly got out of his seat. He was thankful that his body, though stiff, was in working order. He made his way to the rear of the plane and nearly toppled off the four-foot cockpit platform into the large payload area. He caught himself and, holding a bruised arm, carefully made his way to the ladder. As he climbed down into the cargo area, he noticed that the communications console, housed near the bottom of the ladder, was smashed and incapable of sending a signal.

  He scanned the vast, dimly lit fuselage and was startled to see a small gray body on the floor. The creature resembled the alien monsters he had seen in his visions, although its forehead had a small hole in the center. It looked as though the creature’s brains had been blown out the back of its head, for bluish-black blood and brain matter painted the wall behind it. The creature’s soulless black eyes stared vacantly at something across the fuselage.

  Harry didn’t want to look but did anyway. He saw the body of an older man, dressed in a crewman’s uniform, propped against the opposite wall. The crewman held a .45-caliber automatic pistol loosely in his right hand, and there was a fresh bullet wound in his temple. Strangely, the man’s left hand clasped his right wrist as though his left hand had tried to stop his right from carrying out his own execution.

  White hair stuck out of the pulpy mess that remained of the crewman’s ruined head. The man’s bare hands were unscathed but seemed old. He’s too old to be a trainee pilot or a member of my crew, Harry thought.

  The man must have been part of Dougie’s revolt. What? Dougie’s revolt? What the hell am I thinking about?

  Despite his jumbled memory, Harry made a promise to himself that he would carry out his mission and find any remaining pilots. He was a search and rescue pilot, and it was his job.

  Although Harry didn’t recognize the man, he nonetheless pitied him. Harry went to remove the pistol from the crewman’s hand, thinking that an additional weapon might come in handy later on. As he gently touched the man’s hand, he had another memory.

  They stood on a freshly cut lawn at some sort of picnic for servicemen and their wives. A young man in his late twenties tended the grill and cooked burgers and dogs. Nearby, the man’s young wife balanced a newborn baby boy on one hip, and a little girl in a Sunday dress chewed the end of an oversized hotdog. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the smell of the grill was enough to make Harry’s mouth water and stomach ache.

  “How do you like your burgers, Cap’n?” the young chef asked him. “Oh, that’s right. Chop off his horns, wipe his ass, and drag him across the flames.”

  For a moment, the memory was so strong that Harry felt as if he were reliving the scene, but the smell of the grill soon faded and was replaced by the stench of rotting corpses.

  Harry tried to sort out his memory. It seemed to be as full of holes as Swiss cheese. He remembered someone named Dougie Johnson talking about some sort of “jailbreak,” but it wasn’t Dougie as Harry knew him, rather an old-timer who claimed to be Dougie.

 
A freezing wind blew in from the ruptured cockpit and interrupted his thoughts. As he rubbed his shoulders and stamped his feet for warmth, he noticed that he could see his own breath. It just didn’t make sense. When they had left the Florida coast, it was over ninety in the shade.

  Regardless, he knew that the first order of business now was survival. Better get moving Harry, or you’re gonna freeze to death for sure, he told himself. As his Officer Training School survival instructor used to say, “You can’t rescue anybody if you’re dead.”

  Harry rummaged through the remainder of his ruined search-and-rescue plane and soon found a pack filled with survival gear. He removed a first aid kit and set it to one side, making a mental note to bandage his injuries, starting with the cut over his right eye.

  A small shaving/signal mirror spilled out of the rucksack. Harry stared at it for a moment. What if he had aged as the crewman who killed himself had? Harry’s hands looked normal enough. He tentatively scooped the mirror up in one hand. A man in his mid-thirties with dark wavy hair, traces of gray at the temples, stared back at him. Harry wasn’t sure, but he thought he was thirty-one, and he sure as hell didn’t remember having any strands of gray in his hair. It seemed as if he might have lost about five years of his life, and he reasoned it had something to do with the little gray bastards.

  Before venturing outside to look around, he switched out his flight boots for ground boots. Next, he pulled a lantern out of the rucksack, and to his surprise, it still worked. He danced the beam across the remainder of the fuselage and saw a second gray body, at least half of it anyway. It looked as though it had been sheared in half when the Hail Mary had closed its giant tail-bay doors.

  “What the hell happened here?” the captain muttered to himself. But where was ‘here’ anyway? Canada?

  He felt light-headed, and he knew he was beginning to lose control. He held onto the ship’s cargo netting for support, and when the netting suddenly turned in his hands, he saw a third alien folded up inside it, presumably flung there during the crash. Harry quickly let go of the net and heard a maniacal cry escape his lips. He muffled the cry with the back of his hand, knowing that he couldn’t take much more.

  After unfastening the locks of a nearby hatch, Harry stumbled through the hatchway and fell into a fresh patch of snow. He dry heaved (it seemed as if he hadn’t eaten in a while) and stared dumbfounded at the snow.

  What the hell? How is this possible? We took off from the coast of Florida in the middle of summer. The Hail Mary has a flight range of 300 miles on its best day. We can’t possibly be anywhere near the arctic poles.

  Harry drew himself up to all fours and then sat on his haunches. Looking at his immediate surroundings, he saw that his plane had come to a stop at the end of a small box canyon, which had snow-peaked mountains of rock and shale on either side. The canyon’s floor was little more than a barren, wind beaten stretch of land that sloped downward. The air was cool and the climate arid. When he looked toward the twilight sky, what he saw did not help him keep his grip on reality: he saw three moons and a setting sun.

  Harry knew that he could no longer deny the truth of his memories. He realized that the small gray creatures had held him prisoner and that was why he remembered trying to escape. Now, he had escaped, at least temporarily, but he had ended up on another planet. The two men inside the downed aircraft were probably all that remained of his crew and the Avenger pilots.

  Harry felt the temptation to give in to hopelessness, but he remembered what his wise old Uncle Tony told him after Harry had returned home from the war. After having witnessed so many of his friends fall to the enemy, Harry had had trouble leaving the house. He had lived as a recluse for several days until his uncle had come into his room one afternoon and said, “Son, you’ve got two choices: get busy living or get busy dying.”

  Captain Reed knew that he faced that same decision now. He could either accept the fact that he was marooned on another world and try and figure out a way to get back home, or he could put a .45 bullet through his skull as the crewman inside the downed plane had done.

  He decided to get busy living.

  He stood up slowly, his body still stiff, and decided that it was time to take a gander at his plane and surroundings. The plane had settled in the ice, and the heavily damaged nosecone was buried in a huge snow berm. He climbed on top of it to get a better view of the crash. The plane’s wings were in surprisingly good shape, but its propeller blades were bent and scorched as though they had been exposed to extreme speeds. Even the drawing of the Virgin Mary on the side of the fuselage was scorched.

  Jumping off the nosecone, Harry walked alongside the plane. When he reached the scorched emblem, he caressed it with a gloved hand. He remembered an old man telling him something about an escape plan — something about explosives going off the next time the aliens were in low orbit.

  Hallucinating from fatigue, stress, and hunger, Harry envisioned the old man standing before him in the snow. The old man, Dougie Johnson — that was his name, tried to speak to him. His lips moved but made no sound. Frustrated, Dougie pointed to the cockpit of the Hail Mary.

  #

  Like the flash of a lightning bolt, Captain Reed had another memory. He was back in the cockpit of his plane, which was parked in a cavernous hangar with honeycomb walls. Martians crawled all over the plane, trying to get in. He started the engines and was relieved beyond description when the last engine turned over and sputtered to life. He heard the rat-tat-tat of .50-caliber guns going off on both sides of the fuselage, and a quick look back confirmed that two of the TBM Avenger pilots he’d been sent to rescue manned the big guns. One of them stopped to reload and was yanked from his post by long gray arms. The shooter opposite him drew his pistol and unloaded it into whatever was trying to crawl through his buddy’s gun port. The crewman turned toward the cockpit and shouted, “What are you waiting for? Get us out of here!” The man fought off two more aliens and hit the button to close the rear doors.

  Harry turned and suddenly heard a loud explosion that startled him so badly he nearly fell out of his seat. He then heard rushing wind and alarm klaxons that sounded like none he had ever heard before.

  An alien crawling across the cockpit window was suddenly whisked off and carried upward, and the Hail Mary followed. As Harry looked out the cockpit window at the alien ship’s ceiling, which had cracked open like an eggshell after the explosion, the Hail Mary was ejected out of the Martian’s spaceship into space.

  Captain Reed saw a planet below, impossibly far below, and the Hail Mary was falling rapidly toward it. He gasped for air and quickly donned an oxygen mask. The plane began shaking like never before. He gripped the vibrating controls and …

  #

  Harry found himself standing in the snow next to his plane, reeling from the distant recollection.

  Looking back behind the tail of the plane, he saw the huge swath the Hail Mary had cut through the frozen tundra as it had skidded to a stop. It must’ve been one hell of a landing, he thought. Too bad he couldn’t remember any of it.

  The captain felt a huge gust of wind batter him from behind. Looking back, he saw the ridge at the canyon’s edge, snow swirling in the wake of the wind’s bombardment. He decided that, before the sun set completely, it might be a good idea if he got a look at the other side of that ridge.

  Even though the ridge line was only a hundred feet above him, it was slow going through the deep snow. For the last couple of feet, Harry had to crawl and spread his body weight out evenly, so he didn’t sink. When he finally reached the top, what he saw on the other side nearly made him lose his tenuous grip on sanity.

  “Oh, my God!” Harry said, nearly toppling off the bluffs he lay upon. Looking down, he saw at least a 10,000 foot drop to the ocean’s surface. Even worse, he realized that the landmass upon which he had crashed was moving. He was on some kind of giant floating island. And his w
asn’t the only floating hunk of rock either. In the distance, Harry saw more floating islands at different heights and of different sizes. Some were stationary, and others were propelled by invisible forces.

  Get busy living or get busy dying. Get busy living or get busy dying.

  Chapter 7

  Harry’s First Contact

  Date: Day One (since arrival)

  Time: Evening

  Location: A floating island approximately 10,000 feet above an alien planet’s surface

  …

  To anyone who may find this journal:

  I’m not sure that anyone will ever read this, but I feel compelled to leave an account of what happened to my crew and myself. I believe that writing in this journal will also help my fragmented memory and help me put these impossible circumstances into perspective.

  To begin, as unbelievable as it may sound, I seem to have crash-landed on another world. I recognize neither a single constellation in the sky nor any of the three moons orbiting this planet. Even the sun looks wrong.

  My memory is sketchy at best, but I do remember that my crew and I took off from Ft. Lauderdale Air Force Base on December 5, 1945 in search of five missing TBM Avenger bombers that had vanished in the Bermuda Triangle.

  I only have a slight recollection of being on the Martian spaceship, but the former journal entries that detail my captivity are written in my handwriting, so it must be so.

  I can only speculate that the members of my former crew and I did battle with our abductors. The three alien bodies I found in the plane’s payload bay support my assumption. The bodies resemble those of the creatures that haunt my dreams with what I now believe to be fragmented memories. The aliens appear to have died either by gunshot wounds or injuries from the crash.