by Graeme Hurry
“Is this enough?” he asked.
Sal shook her head. “Nah, no way. This is just the beginning. I’ll post the pics of Jimmy, then spread it around he was bragging about the money, see if I can get him blamed for this. And I’ve got some other stuff planned.”
Turner smiled. The kid had a genius for making trouble. He didn’t envy her enemies. He wondered what could have made her so mad. “This friend of yours, the one they hurt …”
She turned her head and looked out the window at the swaying stalks of corn. “I don’t talk about that.”
“Right. Well, so long, Sal.”
He offered his hand and she shook it, then she reached down and opened the trunk. “So long, Turner.”
THE WEBER DEFENSE
by John Sies
Ahem! “Um…excuse me. I don’t want to freak you out, but I wanted to tell you that the end of the world will be starting in a few minutes.”
Ryan lowered his magazine, The Grillmaster Monthly. Grill cooking was a serious hobby with him, therefore, light bedtime reading was grilling tips and tricks. He was wistfully reading the reviews of different types of grills, fantasizing about which he would get, if he had a choice, when the voice spoke. The bedroom was empty and dim. He looked over at his wife, sleeping soundly next to him.
“Ah…this side. Over here.”
Ryan turned to the bedside table. The reading lamp not only illuminated his magazine comfortably, it also bled a small circle of light on the tabletop, highlighting the gecko sitting on his tissue box. It raised a foreleg and waved at him.
“Hello.”
Ryan blinked. He scanned the room again slowly, returning his gaze to the gecko.
“In the interest of time, I am dispensing with niceties and first contact protocols,” the gecko said in a small, clear voice. “First, you are not dreaming. Second, you are not crazy. Third, I am an alien life form that resembles closely the Terran gecko. Although, there are those who theorize that your geckos actually are a devolved descendant of one of our lost colonies. Sorry, I digress.”
The gecko cocked his head. “And fourth, a space ship loaded with alien invaders is on a landing approach, intent on conquering your world, enslaving and destroying you all. Even though you haven’t realized it, you have been really quite nice to us, and, well, we thought we would give you a heads up so you can make peace with yourself. Possibly followed by a joint suicide, so that we won’t have to endure the horror of the end.”
Ryan stared blankly for a long moment. He looked again at his wife, then turned back to the gecko.
“And you are…?”
“You cannot pronounce my language, of course. I am using translator equipment. It roughly translates to, ‘Gaztoot’.”
“Gas Toot?” Ryan snickered.
“GaZZZtoot. It’s a ‘z’, not an ‘s’. The emphasis is on the ‘Gazt’.”
Ryan put his magazine aside, slid out of bed, and headed into the bathroom. Turning on the light, he checked his eyes in the mirror, then opened his mouth and checked his throat. His reflection looked like a normal, average height and weight, thirty-something, fairly-good looking man, in striped pajamas.
“You are not having hallucinations, and you are not sick in any way,” Gaztoot said from the ceiling.
“But I’m talking to a gecko.”
“Alien,” Gaztoot corrected, as he scuttled along the ceiling and down the wall to Ryan’s eye level. “We’ve had a decent sized colony living under your garage for years. One of many across your planet in fact. It’s cozy and secure. Until now.”
“Until the alien invasion.”
“Right.”
“Which is happening now.”
“Yep.”
Gaztoot cocked his head as if he were listening to something. Ryan looked closer and realized that the creature was wearing a small headset and backpack.
“The Lechtillita mothership is descending through the atmosphere now. It will be landing in the backyard within minutes.”
“How do you know this?”
“We aren’t savages, we have technology. Our tech is more advanced than yours, but not extremely so. We monitor for alien signals, and detected the Lechtillita as they were starting their decent from orbit.”
“Why don’t you just fight back? Knock them out of the sky?”
“We don’t have heavy military weapons. What few weapons we have would be totally useless. We are rather a pacifist race. Besides, they have powerful magnetic shields to protect their ship from debris in space. Weapons, not even yours, would penetrate them.”
Ryan looked in the mirror again. He still looked normal. Everything around him seemed normal. Except for the tech-laden gecko now on the wall. Ryan turned on the cold water and splashed his face. After toweling off, he checked the mirror again. Nope, no change. The gecko was now perched on his left shoulder.
“I’m still not convinced you are real,” Ryan said to Gaztoot, staring him down in the mirror. “Just for laughs, let’s go outside and see this spaceship.”
Gaztoot’s face showed as much surprise as a gecko’s could. “Hmm… I never actually considered watching the landing. I was just going to run away in blind panic and then kill myself. But, sure, why not? I’ll reschedule the panic for afterwards.”
“Considerate of you.” Ryan flipped off the bathroom light, stepped into his slippers, and quietly closed the bedroom door behind him. With Gaztoot firmly plastered to his shoulder, Ryan headed down the hallway, and out through the family room to the patio door. Ryan unlocked and opened the door, and stepped out.
It was a nice sized square of interlocking flagstones with the obligatory patio furniture, complete with giant umbrella. Large decorative concrete vases sat on each corner, exploding with colorful flowers. Ryan’s large kettle drum grill and accessory table sat, well tended, along the edge facing the yard. The landscape was clean, nicely trimmed, and largely empty, except for a couple of shade trees, his wife’s flower garden along one side of the patio, and the cord of firewood stacked next to it, braced up by several concrete blocks.
Ryan stood in the dark, examining the beautiful starry sky shining above him. “If there is an invading mothership landing, why is it so quiet? Why aren’t there sirens, or yelling and screaming?”
“Well, the Lechtillita are stealthy, and have some very major advantages.”
“I don’t see anything.”
Gaztoot made some sort of noise into his headset, then listened for a moment. “Okay, got it, turn to two o’clock and look up.”
Ryan did so. At first, he saw only dark sky and stars, then realized that one of the stars was moving, getting larger. He watched wide-eyed as the tiny twinkling light came closer. It became a recognizable round dark shape, blotting out the stars behind it. Various colors of lights were blinking around the rim, with a few underneath. A soft throb of power vibrated the air as the saucer-shaped craft neared the ground. Several columns of metal extended from the bottom, forming landing supports as it touched down.
“It’s amazing! It’s… so small! I thought you said it was an invading mothership. That thing is only about a third larger in diameter than the average trash can lid. And only, maybe, two foot thick.”
“Y-Yes, t-terrifying, isn’t it?”
“You can’t be serious! Look at that! It’s more toy than terrifying!”
“You’re not thinking. You don’t know anything about the Lechtillita. They are an intelligent parasitic race. They are about one-quarter the size of your Terran flea. There are hundreds of thousands of them in that ship. In a few minutes, they are going to come pouring out and start burrowing into any and all lifeforms on this planet. They will eat you from the inside out, lay their eggs in you, which will hatch in mere hours, and they will feed on you in turn. In twenty-four hours there will be millions upon millions of them. And they will spread. They will infect their hosts, use your eyes and ears to learn your technology, adapt what they want for their own, and discard everything else. Your p
lanet will never even realize they have been invaded and turned into fodder until they are laying in the compost heap.”
Ryan started to reply when a red spark caught his eye. On top of the ship, a bright ember steadily flared into life.
Gaztoot screamed in a tiny, shrill voice. “Oh No! They’ve seen you! That’s their prime weapon! RUN!”
Without a conscious thought, Ryan flung himself to the side. A deep, red, sputtering beam of energy flared from the ship, missing him so narrowly, he thought he smelled his pajamas smoking. Gaztoot swing past Ryan’s eyes, holding onto locks of hair with three limbs, waving his free limb frantically. “You’ve got to run! They are recharging. They will fire again in a moment. Go! Go!”
Ryan paused, heard something sizzling from behind. When he looked, he saw that his kettle-shaped, outdoor barbecue grill was quickly turning to slag, ash, and vaporizing into a sooty smoke. Ryan gasped.
Gaztoot kicked at Ryan’s face with his free leg. “Run!!”
Ryan suddenly felt a hot flash in his face and neck. “I loved that grill, dammit. I won cooking awards with it! It was perfect!” He glanced around, grabbing a heavy cinder block from the edge of his wife’s garden. Snarling, he charged the invaders ship.
Gaztoot bounced around wildly, tangled in Ryans hair. “What are you doing?!”
The red spark relit dimly on the top of the ship, quickly becoming more intense. Ryan swung the block over his head with both hands, his rage propelling it downward will all his might. The block smashed into the top of the ship, denting it, causing numerous pops and sparks. The deadly red light went out, yet Ryan kept slamming the block into the vehicle over and over.
“That.”
“was.”
“MY.”
“GRILL!”
He ranted and cursed with each blow. The top of the ship caved in, the hull buckled as it tore open. Sparks and flashes erupted from inside like a spastic firework.
It was when Gaztoot grabbed Ryan’s left nostril with his free limb, that Ryan stopped beating the machine.
“Run!!” the gecko screamed at his eye, “Command reports you cracked the core! It’s going to blow!”
Ryan looked eye-to-giant eyeball at the little alien. A spark of reason transcended his anger.
“Explode?!”
Ryan did his ancestors proud as he immediately flipped into the latter half of the “fight or flight” response. He dropped the block squarely on the ship, and launched himself away. He had gone a half dozen steps when it dawned on him that he couldn’t outrun an explosion that a interstellar spaceship would cause. Sliding to an ungainly stop, he turned to watch the end.
The invading ship was a wreck. Small explosions popped like firecrackers inside it. A high pitched electrical whine set his teeth vibrating. The ship turned into a tiny star with a black center, expanded about one-third it’s size, and collapsed in on itself.
Ryan’s watering eyes could only see spots for awhile. He stood there, shaky and blinking his eyes. Lying on Ryan’s head, Gaztoot talked in his gecko-alien language, presumably to someone on the other end of the headset. Finally, Ryan’s eyes adjusted. Where the ship had been, sat a golf-ball sized lump of metal, in a five-foot irregular circle of bare earth. Ryan looked, rubbed his eyes, looked again. He scanned around the yard. Nothing seemed to be damaged. Well, except for his beloved grill, which was an ash pile next to the patio. Slowly, uncertainly, Ryan moved closer to the blast area.
“Stay back from there,” Gaztoot said, from atop Ryan’s head, “Command is still scanning the debris. They don’t know what type of reactor that ship had, but, wow! First impressions are that it punched a tiny hole in space-time, and the blast shot out that way, into somewhere else in the universe.”
“What happened to the ship?”
“Best guess is that it tried to suck through the tiny space-time hole. It compressed into that lump, but didn’t make it through. Heh…our scientists are having a holiday with this.”
“Good for them.” He walked in a wide semi-circle around the wreck, trying to see it in the dim light.
Gaztoot crawled down from Ryan’s scalp onto his shoulder. “Oh, good news! The radiation from the blast went out the other way also. Only a bit was present here. That blank area in the dirt is sterile, I’m afraid. The radiation levels are safe now, but you’ll have to replace the dirt if you want anything to ever grow there again.”
“This is just…unbelievable.”
“Don’t touch the ship remains. We have teams and scientists who will deal with it. It could still be dangerous. I’m told it will be removed by morning.”
Ryan just stood there, staring at the wreckage.
“Did…did I just stop an alien invasion? I thought they had force fields or something.”
Gaztoot was doing some sort of dance on Ryan’s shoulder. “Yes, they have shields, but apparently, they had shut them down as they were prepared to exit the ship. It seems you hit them exactly at the right moment, in exactly the right spot. Talk about fate! Talk about karma! Talk about Izgnat’s Conundrum!” Gaztoot tapped an excited rhythm with his hind legs.
“Nobody’s ever going to know, nobody’s ever going to believe this.”
“Well, we will. We will be singing your praises for a long time to come. Not to mention our other colonies. Word will spread to the other races among the stars of the human who fended off a Lechtillita invasion single-handedly.”
“Yeah, I suppose so.” He started shuffling back to the house, pausing to look at the ash covered spot where his beloved grill once stood.
“Don’t be sad. Your grill gave it’s existence to the salvation of the planet. It’s destruction inspired you to victory.”
Ryan rolled his eyes, continuing to the house.
Gaztoot jumped to the door frame. “I’ll get off here.” He turned, giving Ryan a thumbs up gesture, before taking off into the eaves. Ryan latched the door behind him, and returned to the bedroom. He sat on the bed, his mind a whirl with all that had just happened.
His wife stirred, yawned. “What’s going on? I thought I heard a noise, and you were gone.”
Ryan opened his mouth, then paused. What to say? He hesitated. “Ah, we had a burglar. Someone stole my grill. They were gone by the time I got out there.”
He felt his wife’s hand pat his back. “Aww, honey, I’m so sorry. Don’t worry, we can replace it.” She turned over and drifted back to sleep. Ryan climbed into bed, and lay there in the dark thinking for a long time before he drifted off.
* * *
Three days later, Ryan woke to a beautiful Saturday morning. He donned his robe and slippers, looking forward to his routine of a bowl of cereal and some Saturday morning cartoons, courtesy of a specialty cable TV channel. He left his wife reading in bed, while he plodded comfortably unkempt to the kitchen. As he pulled his cereal out of the cupboard, something in the back yard, shining in the newly risen sun, cast a piercing sparkle, blinding him for a moment. Shading his eyes, he looked out the window, but couldn’t quite understand what he was looking at.
He headed out the back door, crossed the patio, and his jaw dropped. Sitting there was a large kettle drum-shaped grill, reminiscent of his old one. It was made of brushed steel with bright chrome trim. Wings on the sides were fold up trays, and a short, wide-diameter pipe stuck out the bottom. An LED control panel box on the front glowed cheerily with temperature controls, cleaning settings, and a warm red button labeled ‘Help’. Lifting the lid, he saw there were several levels of removable cooking racks. Stuck to one rack was a yellow sticky note. Ryan took it, holding it close to his nose, as the writing was rather small.
‘Ryan, We voted to award for you for your heroic service. Taking scrap metal from the wrecked ship, and scrounging salvageable electronics, we made you this high tech grill. The metal will stay cool, no matter how hot the inside is. It uses charcoal or its own energy to cook. It is self-cleaning, vaporizes it’s own ash, and the power source will last a good two hundred years. Ho
pe you like it, and thanks again. - G P.S.: Leave samples of your cooking behind the garden gnome please.’
Ryan squinted, reading the note again. Then he smiled. Then broke out in laughter that danced through the morning sunshine.
Contributor Notes
Rhoads Brazos has had works published or forthcoming in Apex Magazine, Stupefying Stories, and a dozen other magazines and anthologies. .
Nestor Delfino is a software developer who lives with his wife in Mississauga, Ontario. In 1987, at fourteen, he coded his first computer game on a ZX Spectrum minicomputer. He is an avid soccer fan and loves to read science fiction stories with social commentary; stories that are entertaining and criticize our times. In 2014 he completed his first science fiction novel. Before embarking on the editing process, he began writing short stories to improve his craft. And he fell in love with writing short stories. He has been published at AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Saturday Night Reader, Aurora Wolf Literary, Far Orbit: Apogee anthology and The New Accelerator. nestordelfino.com
Martin Donnelly lives in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, writing a mix of horror and fantasy. He has previously been published in New Realm (Fiction Magazines, 2013).
Graeme Hurry edited Kimota magazine in the 90s and a horror anthology called Northern Chills in 1994. Now he has branched out by editing this kindle only magazine, Kzine. He has a story in Terror Tales of The Scottish Highlands anthology and an honourable mention in Year’s Best Horror 2001 for a story he collaborated on with Willie Meikle called The Blue Hag.
K. McGee has an M.A. in Creative Writing and currently lives and works in Tokyo, where she attends the Tokyo Writers Workshop. She writes poetry and fiction, and is currently working on a series of short stories about a drifting criminal named Turner. Her work has appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including Jabberwock Review and Heater. Her poem “Re-reading Chandler” will soon appear in Bête Noire.