Beachhead Series Collected Adventures Volume One: Invasion Earth series box set

by Chris Lowry

  Back before the world died.

  He glanced over at the empty set of bunkbeds against the wall.

  Patrol was still out.

  Otherwise, two of his fellow rebels would be sleeping and Jake would be in a shallow foxhole, manning a .50 Cal aimed at the only dirt road that led to the cabin.

  He swung his feet over the edge of the cot and stood up.

  There would be no more sleep for him, especially as he didn’t want to return to the dream.

  Mark had been there too.

  Dad and Mark.

  He hadn’t seen either of them for three years. Maybe four.

  He thought he might be twenty, was probably twenty. Keeping time didn’t matter so much in the rebellion against their Alien Overlords.

  Jake moved to a five-gallon plastic bucket in a sink, a rubber house connected to the bottom that snaked outside to reuse the graywater.

  He used his hands to scoop water onto his face and slicked back his long hair.

  For a moment, he wished for a mirror. Something. Anything to look at his face, to catch sight of the eyes he knew looked just like his Dad’s.

  A way to connect with the man he remembered in the dream.

  The door to the room opened and the Captain stuck his head in.

  “You’re up?”

  “Don’t sound surprised,” Jake shot back. “Happens every day.”

  Captain Summerlin gave him a tight grin.

  “Patrol’s not back.”

  “Shit.”

  “Shit is right.”

  He looked back over his shoulder at the bunk beds beside his cot.

  “Rodriguez? Walker?”

  Summerlin nodded.

  The last time a patrol went missing was two weeks ago. Either picked up by the Licks, or gone AWOL.

  “We know either way?” Jake asked in a softer voice.

  Summerlin shook his head.

  “Gear up,” his commander instructed and shut the door.

  Jake shivered in the frigid air that still leaked through the cracks in the wood frame of the door.

  Winter was harsh, and had been harsher since the Licks landed.

  Something to do with the exhaust from their ships and its interaction with the atmosphere.

  Weather was funky all over, but winter was the worst. Freezing for months, water iced over.

  Unless you counted summer, he thought as he slipped into his boots and shrugged on layers of clothing.

  Summer was miserable too. The sun burned through the thin air, creating a hotbox of humidity and temps that soared into the hundreds.

  A killing heat, they called it.

  At least they weren’t at the equator, Jake picked up his rifle, and checked the ammunition. No one survived in the Tropics anymore. They were cooked out a long time ago.

  He pressed the door open and winced at the light outside.

  The wince made him stumble and he tripped over the doorframe, falling forward.

  Splintered wood chipped off the cabin and sprayed him.

  He heard the boom of a rifle seconds after and kept falling, turning it into a roll that carried him away from the door and under cover of the barracks.

  “Captain!” he screamed.

  Summerlin lay in the dirt on the ground in front of the steps, left hand holding a hole in his neck, the right clawing at the ground. He rolled his head toward Jake, lips moving like a fish gasping out of water, blood squirting between his crimson soaked fingers.

  His eyes locked on the man under the cabin and held there as light faded from them.

  It wasn’t like going to sleep, Jake grumbled as he fumbled his rifle up and aimed toward the woods where the shot had originated.

  Licks were bad.

  Just about the worst.

  But even with all of humanity on the brink of extinction, there were still pockets fighting each other.

  Or robbing, or killing, Jake amended as he snugged the stock to his shoulder and sighted down the barrel.

  The shadows under the tress were still dark.

  If they fired again, he could zero in on their muzzle flash and return fire.

  But they didn’t.

  He strained his ears to listen, for anything. The sound of boots, voices muttering, but he heard nothing.

  “Where is everybody?” he had time to wonder.

  Then a Lick stepped out of the trees.

  The sight of the alien froze his finger on the trigger.

  Licks used laser weapons, formidable foreign objects that Jake or any other human had yet to master.

  This one had a blaster in its clawed hands, aimed toward the cabin where Jake was hiding.

  A human stepped out of the woods behind it.

  This one had a rifle, maybe the rifle that killed Summerlin.

  Jake sighted on the man’s head.

  He stood next to the Lick, two feet shorter than the alien invader. His skin was smooth, young face brushed with black stubble, compared to the lizard like scales that covered the giant next to him.

  Jake danced the sight from one head to the next, practicing a move.

  Licks were fast, so better to shoot him first.

  By the time the sound reached the man next to it, he would be splattered in head juice and gore, flinching away.

  Jake practiced one more time, lined up on the Lick, and squeezed the trigger.

  His shot was thrown off when clawed hands grabbed his ankle and yanked him from under the building.

  A second Lick held him upside down, chest heaving in what Jake could only describe as a laugh. Hissing issued from its pointed snout, forked tongue tracing the air.

  Jake tried to lift the rifle to shoot it, but the clawed hand batted it away.

  The human yanked his pistol out, fired two shots into the alien’s knee and was dropped.

  Jack crashed to the ground, folding in half and got the wind knocked out of him.

  No time to breathe, he rolled over, struggled to his knees and sent a third shot into the yellow slit eyes glaring at him.

  He turned to fight some more, to kill the next Lick, but it was too late.

  The human from the woods pounded up behind him.

  Jake turned, tried to bring his gun to bear and stop him, but the man cracked him across the side of the skull with his rifle and everything went dark.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “I wish you would make my job easier. I am going to have my drones come in here and conduct a thorough search,” the voice was robotic, sent through a translator box worn around his throat.

  “Were my drones to find anything it would certainly make you look bad in the eyes of the overlord. If you do this for me, if you make my work go easier, then I assure you my men will no longer return to harass your family.”

  The yellow eyes stared at him.

  The Lick sat at the table he had built with his own two hands from fallen trees on the edge of his property.

  He had milled the wood, planed it, sanded it soft, just so his daughters would have a place to eat their dinner, meager though it was. Soup mostly.

  There was a lot of soup.

  And now this interloper was sitting at his table.

  Drinking tea.

  Not really drinking it, he amended. Aliens didn’t consume human food, not that any had seen and shared.

  The Lick asked for tea as a power play.

  Do this for me.

  There was no refusal.

  “You will have proven yourself loyal to the Order,” the voice continued. “But I also will assure you Mr. Rubenstein that should you now choose to make my job more difficult, you will have proven yourself an enemy of the Order and an enemy of mine."

  The three-fingered claw reached across the wood plank table and set the delicate tea cup down with a tiny clink in the saucer.

  "Do you wish now to declare yourself an enemy of mine?"

  Rubenstein stared at the claws on the tip of each finger, razor sharp and this close, he could see the grooves in the nail, cha
nnels that funneled flesh up and away when it scratched.

  He thought about those claws against the skins of his three children, ripping into them as they carved out chunks of skin and muscle.

  He thought about their screams that would echo across the peaceful farm he had carved on the edge of the wood, and the glee in the Lick Commander’s slit yellow eyes.

  Rubenstein did not wish to see anyone harmed. He said so.

  “I don’t want to see it.”

  The Lick nodded, the gesture looked strange on his alien visage.

  “Of course,” he said in the robotic voice. “There would be no need to watch if you have proven your friendship to me.”

  Rubenstein glanced at the floor.

  There was a hidden room beneath the house, used as a stop on a sort of underground railroad for rebels and anyone the new Order deemed an enemy.

  His wife had demanded they participate.

  “Our duty,” she had whispered into his ear many nights as they lay together and she stroked his hair.

  Since the alien’s invaded, there was no more work, no more television, nothing to distract from each other except the extinction of the human race.

  His three children were their fight against that.

  But her death, he blamed solely on the Licks.

  A simple cold.

  Antibiotics could have cured her. But they were no more.

  He had tried on the black market, but those were reserved for soldiers injured in fighting the invaders. A kind medic had given him seven pills.

  It wasn’t enough.

  She died because the Lick’s invaded.

  Which is how he ended up with three men in his basement.

  For the memory of her.

  But how did the Commander know?

  Who had betrayed him?

  He kept his eyes drilled onto the floor.

  He could imagine the men below, eavesdropping on the conversation as they stared at the wood plank ceiling.

  They had not shared their names, nor had he asked.

  Just a knock on the door in code.

  He sent his daughters into the only other room in the house with instructions to shut the door, then opened the one to the outside.

  The men stepped through, and he ushered them to a trapdoor in the floor, closing it after them.

  That was it.

  No words exchanged.

  Hardly a look.

  And now, the Lick Commander was here, threatening his daughters over men he didn’t know.

  Rubenstein licked his lips.

  He reached for his own cup of tea, untouched this whole time and took a long swallow.

  He placed it back on the table with a tiny clink and pointed at the floor.

  The Lick followed the end of his finger and looked down.

  Rubenstein moved his finger twice, to emphasize the location of the alien’s quarry.

  The Lick’s tongue flicked out, tasted the air, and flicked back in. His yellow eyes moved over Rubenstein.

  “Take your daughters outside,” the translated voice hissed.

  Rubenstein pushed back from the table and gathered his children around him.

  The Lick Commander opened the door to let them out, and once they were outside, hissed a command to the four Lick soldiers that had accompanied him to the clearing.

  They tromped into the house.

  The Commander pointed to the floor and stepped back.

  The Soldiers watched him with their eyes, blasters aimed at the floor. He made a motion with one of his claws and they opened fire.

  Smoke filled the small home, leaking through opened windows.

  Rubenstein listened as the blasts scorched their way through the floor he had laid himself, where he had watched his children learn to walk, where he had sat and taught them to read in front of the crude stone fireplace.

  The Lick’s blasted through it, and into the narrow room below.

  He heard three shots fire back, the sound of gunpowder loud and crude next to the almost elegance of the laser pews.

  “Run,” he whispered to the girls and sent them scampering into the woods.

  He gave them a few steps head start, remaining behind to tackle any alien that came through the door.

  But the noise of the firefight inside kept them occupied, and hid his family’s escape.

  Rubenstein sprinted after his girls.

  He watched the oldest almost make the trees before a red beam lanced into her torso and sent her into a sprawling skid to fetch up against an oak.

  He drew a breath to scream as a second bolt hit his second child and knocked her into a dead heap.

  Rubenstein didn’t feel the blast that hit him and cooked the inside of his torso in a miniature explosive geyser of boiled blood and steamed organs.

  He plopped down onto his knees in the mud, and had just enough oxygen left in his brain to register that his youngest child would make it to safety before he pitched over.

  She did not.

  The Lick Commander stepped out of the cabin and motioned his soldiers to follow him.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Lieutenant William Bonnie was average height with whipcord muscles outlined under his thin skin stretched taut.

  He gathered eight men in front of him in a dirt scrabble courtyard set away from a warehouse.

  The warehouse looked abandoned and derelict, the work of many to keep it that way. It was designed to be ignored.

  It was staged to be overlooked.

  It was an HQ of sorts, one where what was left of High Command of Planet Earth gathered to plan raids, sorties and battles.

  There was much planning from the men who had assumed leadership roles when the first and second batches of leaders were rounded up and shot by the Licks.

  The aliens landed, used the oft joked about phrase, “Take us to your leaders,” and promptly blasted them into bits and pieces of boiling steam.

  Just to be sure there was no mistaking their intent, the Lick shuttlecraft lifted off the ground and strafed the crowd as it took out the military accompanying the world leaders, almost two companies of soldiers from different countries.

  Then they turned on the crowd.

  The second batch of leaders were less auspicious in their meeting with the alien invaders, but they were hunted and found and destroyed.

  The third group didn’t call themselves much, and if they did, it was only among solid walls and blacked out windows, lest a satellite pick them out for destruction.

  They led by proxy, planning large and small-scale battles.

  The trouble was they had few men left trained to carry out their battle plans.

  It became an exercise in theory that evolved into a war of attrition.

  The Licks hunted.

  The Survivors hid, or cooperated or died.

  There was a lot of dying.

  The aliens seemed intent on ridding the earth of humans, and had halved the seven billion population in three short years.

  That was a lot of good people gone, thought Bonney as he stared at the eight men assembled in front of him. They were of varying ages, all dressed in rags and cast offs that were common among survivors still living that day.

  The weapons were scratched, battered, most second hand like the clothes.

  But he liked the gleam in their eyes.

  “I am Lieutenant William Bonney,” he told them his blue eyes blue eyes squinting in the harsh sunlight.

  “You may be tempted to refer to me as Billy the Kid because of the moniker I share with that particular historical figure. I will encourage you not to yield to that temptation. You may call me lieutenant. You may call me sir. You will not call me Billy. You will not refer to me as the Kid. Any of you got a problem with that?”

  No one answered, though there was a stirring among the ranks that felt like they were on the verge of laughter.