I’m a good listener. So when Karen started screaming, “Run, run, run,” I took off like a bat out of hell.
I didn’t even turn around to see if she was alright.
Instead, I listened to the sounds that were echoing behind me, a ‘THWOOP THWOOP THWOOP’ siren that reverberated through the ground. The sound of the creatures. The aliens.
I hadn’t seen streetlights in so long that they were almost blinding as I ran down the dampened streets of the abandoned city. Snow bit against the ground under the beams of light and quickly dissolved as it hit the pavement.
The backstreets of my old neighborhoods twisted in sudden darkness like a maze. If I could make it to my old house, I would be able to escape through the woodlands behind my backyard. Back to safety.
The vibrations of the aliens who were no doubt still chasing me grew stronger. So strong that I thought I might lose my footing, but then I saw it. My old front door. If I had a moment for my brain to catch up with my sight, I might have cried then. But I just wanted to get into my backyard and hide.
I raced past the old wrought iron fence, a rotting black, and found myself in the middle of the wet back lawn, still covered with heavy rotted fallen leaves, freshly snowed on.
My breath was barreling out of me as I knelt down and pressed my back up against the shed, shaking against the wriggly metal. I heard a loud scream in the distance; down the road maybe. Something foreign. One of them.
I felt my teeth chatter violently and gripped my sidearm, waiting for the beast to come at me.
Make my day, bitch, I thought. But nothing happened.
Then suddenly ice-cold fingers were on my arm, and I flinched back, falling hard against the shed siding.
“Baxley, shit!” I swore and pushed my commander away from me; his black curls and stiff beard looking shiny under the motion-activated lights.
“Where’s Karen?” he said, his gravelly voice difficult to understand when he spoke in a whisper as he did then.
Karen, our lead scientist, was taken by them eight days ago. We being a small group of survivors. The revolutionists who hid and managed to keep out of sight long enough for the aliens to leave us alive; leave us alone, believing there was nothing left of our people. No one left to kill.
And then one day, Karen was gone, and everything changed. Twenty years of hiding all thrown to shit because she had a hunch to test.
Baxley and I went on a mission to get her back, but she didn’t welcome our rescue. Turns out she liked her cage.
“Not here,” I snapped back, pushing Baxley away from me.
“You left her?” the middle-aged man snapped at me, pulling me up and leading me instinctively toward the woods.
“Hey, she told me to run.”
“Yeah,” he said dismissively, raising and lowering his brows quickly. “Way to follow orders.”
I matched his expression and quickened my pace so that I walked next to him. “Hey, that’s what I thought.”
My commander rolled his eyes and held his gun close. “So, what? We just leavin’ her back there? With them?”
I shrugged, pre-annoyed. “She seemed pretty happy to me.”
We made our way into the thicket: a dense wood that sprawled on for miles. It was in here that we were first able to lose the creatures: shake them from us long enough to catch a breath. But that was a long time ago.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked quickly.
“Just what I said.”
Baxley sighed. “Will you stop bein’ snippy and give me a straight answer, for once? You’re the biggest pain in my ass.”
“You love it,” I teased. “B, we have to talk.”
“What, you breakin’ up with me, kid?”
I smiled his way, but neither of us picked up on the conversation offer. We had an odd relationship. Not only for commander and soldier, but for me being twenty-two and Baxley a cool fifty-five.
At first, I thought of him like a… not father. But like a plucky uncle. One that always had great stories and seemed to run into the zaniest people. But by the time I turned seventeen, I began having different feelings toward him. I went through a crisis then. An, ‘if this is all there is, why not?’ phase where I rebelled.
I rebelled within a rebellion, and it looked a whole lot like me sneaking into Baxley’s trailer—that’s where we hide, by the way: an abandoned trailer park on the outskirts of town—and kissing him deeply even as he protested.
Out of either instinct or routine, we both crouched for cover, hearing a distant hum that neither of us could identify as being close or far away.
Baxley drew his gun and traced it along the dark thicket, and I followed suit. We stayed deathly silent then until the hum disappeared for certain.
“When I said Karen looked happy,” I began again, “I meant… she was kissing that thing.”
“Rape?” Baxley asked in a furious whisper, his brows drawing together in confusion.
“He didn’t have her sprawled out on the sidewalk,” I offered in a tone that might as well have been a shrug.
“You know what I mean,” he warned.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Karen had a theory about the aliens, these Vithohn, that I found disturbing. I’d spent nearly my whole life fighting them. Learning to trap them. Taking cues from Baxley on how to handle myself in a militia. My father was part of Baxley’s militia, and when he died, Baxley took me under his wing. I was cocking guns since I was eight.
To me, the aliens were the ultimate enemy.
But Karen… she had different ideas about them. About ways to control them: change them.
“I’m not leavin’ her,” Baxley said suddenly, stoic.
“Then you’re risking your own life, not mine,” I argued, traipsing further into the wilds. “I’m not going back there.”
“She’s our second in command,” he snapped.
“And you’re first in command, so deal!”
Baxley didn’t like being our commander; he didn’t like others thinking he was in a position of authority. It was all a moot point, anyhow, since everyone revered and respected him. Everyone went to him when we needed someone to tell us how to survive.
“Fine,” the dark-haired man seethed through gritted teeth. “Then as commander, I say we’re going back!”
“B, trust me, she wants to be there.”
Baxley’s eyes darted back and forth from mine in a fury, and he grabbed my arm: the second time he’d ever been aggressive with me. The first time was when I kissed him that first time; he’d shoved me back and grabbed me by the shoulders, shaking me. Then he kissed me again, just to be sure it was wrong.
Before he had the chance to scold me, a crashing came down hard in the distance; tree branches thudded to the ground in a sure signal that we’d been spotted.
I waited to see what Baxley’s play would be: steely silence and an excellent hiding place or pure panic and run. He chose the latter.
We took off, shooting in opposite directions as the Vithohn let out a terrifying shriek. Baxley had just enough time to make eye contact with me to let me know I would be used as bait this time.
The air went warm; even in the cold, the alien’s diamond textured, snake-like skin drew a heat to the surrounding area and I knew he was close.
I dug my spiked boot into the ground and spun on it, running left, breathing in the sharp winter air and feeling it hit my lungs like daggers.
Swerving west, I had a jolt bump up in my stomach as I felt the smooth grip of the creature against my leg. My heart thumped against my chest, and I just managed to get away from his grasp, plucking my leg from his grip like I was watching myself from afar.
I heard Baxley fire off his weapon, probably aware that the thing was getting a little too close to me and I fired back, smoking the Vithohn in his thick arm and watching as his self-induced force field sparked up instinctively.
I goaded him toward me, watching my feet as they danced on tiptoes to avoid our carefully dug holes.
Suddenly, I realized he wasn’t alone, but the two other sets of footsteps shrank back as we all watched the smooth, tight-faced creature rocket down beneath a shallow covering of leaves: a thin façade of ground covering, one of our carefully calculated traps.
My militia had dug holes around here; a drippy pink acid we concocted set in pools of thick plastic that would hopefully be good enough to roast off a limb or two. Anything to keep them on unstable footing would work fine for me, especially now.
I couldn’t help but bellow a small laugh as the creature went splashing down below into the bubbling acid, unable to activate his shield.
The creature emitted a piercing, rhythmic sound that sent the hairs on my neck shooting upward. I gritted my teeth, wondering if it might be a war cry and that I was totally screwed.
I looked down in the pit and watched as the taupe-skinned foreigner thrashed around and grabbed the side of the pit, attempting to pull himself up.
Cocking my gun, I laid a bullet into the alien’s face and watched as his flesh parted against the slug before collapsing into the pink depths and dissolving.
I crouched quickly, flattening my body against the frozen ground as I heard the other footsteps nearing.
“Where is he?” the Vithohn alien seethed. He had the same taupe skin and a large head, bald, that came back into a rounded point. His bone structure was harsh and chiseled; a wide-bridged nose and brown eyes that were always shrouded in blackness; his armor glowing with blue lines that scattered along black fabric.
“I can’t be sure,” the female said—whispered.
Her voice was familiar: human. I instantly recognized her as Tiffany Caites. Our communications officer. Looks like she was communicating just fine.
The Vithohn looked around the forest furtively. “You said there are traps.”
“Oh yeah,” she said, almost laughing. “We didn’t leave an inch.”
“That’s comforting,” the creature said with a quick lower of the brow: his tone almost comical in nature.
I swallowed hard, unfamiliar with the Vithohn being anything but mindlessly aggressive. I didn’t even know they could talk, I was so unaccustomed to their ability to converse. Now here he was being… sarcastic? Playful?
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, putting his arm around Tiffany protectively.
“What about Dreicant?” she asked, leaning into him.
I assumed they meant the alien I’d just smoked.
The man looked around, sniffed the air, and the dismissed her.
“He chose his own fate,” he said.
“We could help him,” Tiffany said in her childlike tone: feminine and soft-spoken. “Karen is here now; she led our science team.”
The man laughed, surprised. “There’s that many of you, is there?”
Tiffany shrugged into him, and I peered up through the grass just long enough to see the alien’s face turn sour: saddened somehow. His large eyes seemed to slope down as though he’d been disappointed, though by her, by the humans making it out alive, or by his friend’s death, I couldn’t be sure.
My former crewmate, the long-haired brunette, stepped up on her toes and grabbed both of the creature’s hands, bringing them in-between their bodies before offering him a sweet, soft kiss. He met her halfway, and I nearly recoiled.
I began to shiver then and decided I’d seen enough. I longed to be back at my trailer-park, back in the safety of the militia, of Baxley.
My boots hit the leaves in a sharp sloshing noise, and I knew instantly I’d moved too quickly; I froze in place, crouching back down as Tiffany and her alien partner began to look around with weapons drawn.
They began walking away from one another, slowly, to cover more land, and as the creature met my eyes, I felt my stomach drop.
My hand shook against my gun, and I looked up at him, big eyes bugging out.
“You see anything?” Tiffany called, pulling back the hammer on her weapon, just in case.
He looked down at me, just four or five feet away, and we exchanged a long stare. I knew he saw me because his eyes roved across my entire body before locking on my eyes.
Then his wide lips parted, and he said, “Nothing here.”