by P P Corcoran
“Sweet Jesus...” Fischer swore.
Taylor shared the man’s sentiments. He felt nervous but yet did not fear for his own safety. He didn’t feel under threat at all. The way Taylor saw it, he’d come this far, and so he might as well go just a little further. It was as if the flying saucer and its inhabitants were calling out to him – inviting him to enter. The officer began to walk towards the open doorway, taking in every iota of his surroundings. He was irritated by the sudden interruption from Corporal Fischer.
“Hey Lieutenant!” said Fischer in a meek and nervous voice, “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. We don’t know what’s in there...they could be dangerous!”
“Fine.” Taylor snapped impatiently, “You can stay outside. I’m going in.”
He began to turn away before the soldier interrupted him once again. “But boss, Captain O’Neill gave me specific orders. He said we’re to stay alert, proceed with caution and take prisoners if there’s any survivors. Use lethal force only as a last resort, those are the Captain’s orders.
“Are they indeed?” Taylor replied thoughtfully. He found it interesting that O’Neill hadn’t communicated this order to him – what the hell was the man’s agenda?
“Well Corporal,” he answered, “O’Neill’s not here. I am in command and I’m going inside this vessel. Under the circumstances, I think its best you stay out here. Is that clear, Fischer?”
“Yes sir.” Fischer responded uncertainly.
Taylor detected a hint of relief in the Corporal’s voice. With this unwelcome distraction behind him, he ducked his head and entered the craft’s interior.
The heat was the first thing he noticed, that and the thick smoke. He could also hear a slight ringing noise, something like a fire alarm. With some difficulty he advanced through the dark and smoke-filled interior, climbing over assorted debris and wrecked machinery. He made his way towards a dim light at the front of the vessel, which he assumed marked the location of the cockpit. Taylor cast his eyes upon a control panel filled with monitors, switches and dials; almost all of which were dead and inactive, producing only the occasional spark of electricity from their broken circuitry. The only light emanated from the one cracked monitor which appeared to be working, although all the screen displayed was a black and white static.
The cockpit set-up was familiar to Taylor, given the hundreds of hours he’d clocked up flying B-29s during the war. That said, the equipment, instruments and controls of this vessel looked many times more sophisticated than the USAAF’s best bomber. But what really drew his attention were the three seats contained within the semi-circular cockpit. The trio of chairs all faced forward in the direction of the control panel. Taylor stood directly behind the seats so was unable to see their occupants. What struck him was how small the chairs were, as if they’d been designed for children. Come to think of it, the whole interior was compact, and his head almost touched the ceiling.
The Lieutenant felt anxious but also extremely curious – He needed to see what these creatures looked like. Taylor crept around the three chairs and cast his eyes upon the occupants. He could not believe what he saw. The aliens (and he was now certain they were beings from another world) appeared surprisingly human-like. As one would expect, they only had one head, two arms and two legs. They were small and frail in appearance. Taylor estimated their height at four foot at most. Their bodies looked slim and lean, and their skin was a light grey color. He noted how the aliens’ heads looked out of proportion, appearing too big for their diminutive bodies.
Three aliens in total, all still strapped into their flight chairs. He could only guess at their respective jobs on-board the ship. Presumably one operated as the pilot, the second might be a navigator and the third a weapons specialist, assuming the vessel was a military one. Two were undoubtedly dead since their eyelids remained firmly shut and their bodies completely motionless...But the third was clinging to life. Taylor saw its chest moving in and out, an indication of labored breathing.
The creature sluggishly turned its head and looked upon him. Taylor was astonished by its eyes – gigantic, oval-shaped and jet black. This being was obviously in pain; Taylor could sense it. In spite of the extraordinary circumstances the American veteran found himself reminded of another place and another time. He vividly recalled lying bruised and concussed inside the wreckage of his B-29, before the Kempeitai, the IJA military police, took him as their prisoner...And now, two years on, he was the captor.
Now Taylor understood what was happening. The USAAF, the government – they wanted this alien alive. Surely, they would do to him what the Japanese had done to Taylor and so many others during the war – cage him up like an animal, torture him, run sick experiments on him...probably dissect him. Taylor wouldn’t accept this. He couldn’t inflict this suffering upon another living being, even if that being was not of this world. He locked eyes with the alien creature and experienced an intense wave of empathy. Taylor had no way of communicating with this lifeform but somehow, he knew what it wanted – to be free...free from pain, free from fear.
He reached down to his leather holster, carefully removing his Colt .45 pistol and making the gun ready to fire. They’d probably court martial him for this, maybe throw him in prison, but Taylor no longer cared. He raised the gun and held it against the creature’s forehead. It or he didn’t flinch...this was what it wanted. Taylor wondered whether these beings believed in an afterlife. Hope you make it there, buddy.
He pulled the trigger. BOOM! The sound of the gunshot reverberated around the vessel’s interior and dark, hot blood splattered across his uniform. The ugly task was completed, but Taylor did not know how he should feel. Suddenly he could no longer bear to be inside this damned spaceship. He felt claustrophobic, as if the walls were closing in on him.
Taylor darted back to the open door of the craft, nearly tripping over debris as he went. Soon he found himself back out in the open air and experienced a great relief. Corporal Fischer stood there, shouting something about gunfire and prisoners. Taylor ignored him. Dawn had come. The exhausted Lieutenant looked to the far horizon and saw the bright yellow sun rising; its light and warmth spreading across the land. Taylor savored the immense beauty of the scene and, for the first time in years, he felt at peace.
- THE END -
About Mark Lynch
Mark Lynch was born in 1983 and hails from the beautiful coastal town of Holywood in County Down, where he lives with his wife Jackie and cat Jet.
Mark studied History & Politics at Queen’s University Belfast and maintains a keen interest in these subjects. His fascination with the ‘What ifs?’ of history and his love of the genre classics (such as Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Robert Harris’s Fatherland) inspired him to develop his own alternative history timelines and transform them into works of fiction.
Mark currently works as an information analyst in the health service and writes in his spare time. His long-held ambition was to become a science fiction author and he achieved this goal in 2014 with the publication of his first novel, The Rogue Colony. This publication was closely followed by the first book in his Red Ulster Trilogy, imagining a 1960s Ireland controlled by the Cold War superpowers. His 2016 novel Reich of Renegades reached the top 30 ranked alternative history books on Amazon US.
Connect with Mark here:
www.castrumpress.com/authors/mark-lynch
Another Day, Another Dollar
by Juleigh Howard-Hobson
Now that we've got ourselves a Federal Alien Replicant Disaster on our hands, we have what the government refers to as emergency measures all over the place. Which aren’t as fancy as they make them sound on the news sites, with their talk about all the registered Centre for Disease Control humane holding units implemented for the collection of infectious non-earth-based animated materials related to replicated posthumous human remains showing anthropomorphic mutations. We call them trap trenches. Like I said, the reality doesn’t match much.
Tr
ap trenches are long holes we dig anywhere there’s been infection introduced into an area. I was given a rule book which says to dig them 6 feet deep, but we dig them 9 feet deep. By we I mean any of us employed by the Fed to catch these suckers.
The official procedure is to bait the traps with material containing the aroma of formaldehyde-infused corpses. We aren’t given actual pickled people, no. This is some soy-based stuff that comes in a can, like cat food. We’re supposed to open the can up, leave it like an aromatic lure in a snare—which these are, sort of—and come back in a few days and see what we managed to catch.
Of course, the cans don’t work. These ET-things can tell embalmed body scents from whatever smelly gluten-free garbage the authorities give us. I made an arrangement with my local funeral parlor. I only need a little dab at a time, so I can last a few weeks on one embalmed foot, and no one is any wiser because nobody looks in the shoes of the departed, especially when they are laid out in their coffins. I buy feet cheap, because the owner/operator over at Holmes Funeral and Mortuary wants to get rid of the problem just as bad as the powers that be do. Plays hell on his business.
Citizens, such as me, are hired to stand at the edge of traps, where we fire guns at the funny looking aliens. At their necks. With rubber bullets. Shooting doesn’t kill them, nothing does except pulling their eyes out and stabbing them in the optic nerves. But shooting them in the throat shuts them down. And it’s fun. About the most fun thing about all of this, really.
Like target practice.
The thing is, before this outbreak, this space borne infection, whatever they call this invasion, there wasn’t much about the rest of the world I liked anyway. I always hated other people, and they didn’t like me much back either. All the time, getting in the way, telling me what to do, how to do it, nagging, nagging, nagging me to get a real life. Like somehow being a loner was a one-way ticket to Loserville. They don’t understand me. I like the way it is now. People leave me alone. I’m paid to do what I like to do. Be alone. And I get to shoot Furries. Sorry, extra-terrestrials. But hey, they look like freaks in furry suits. For a few days at any rate, before they start falling apart because they replicate themselves on corpses injected with formaldehyde. No one knows why they start to replicate embalmed human bodies then add on other anatomical stuff from different creatures, they could end up with pig snouts in the middle of their faces, or antlers on the top of their skulls. Some do the whole anamorphic thing—and come off looking like cartoon dogs and squirrels. Isn’t my problem. My problem is they can do a lot of damage in the few days they have to run around on our planet before the embalming chemicals break down and they literally fall apart.
The immediate damage they do is negligible. Unless you are the family of the corpse. People don’t like when you copy their deceased uncle and add on bear paws and some sort of lion tail. No, the problem is the Furries tend to bite people.
People who are chomped on—even a small nip—swell up, like they got stung by something massive and venomous. After a while they begin to turn purple—makes zero difference what color skin they had to begin with, every one of them goes violet and lavender streaked with yellow in a couple of hours. Then comes the complaining about how much they burn inside. Some rave and rant, others fall silent. In the end, they simply drop dead. The internet sites say it’s like they were drowning in embalming fluid from the inside out. No agency has confirmed or denied this.
People who die alone, before anyone realizes they were chewed on, are duplicated faster and they have weirder add-ons than the formaldehyde-soaked bodies in the funeral parlors. No one knows why this is. Let me repeat, no one knows why or how; seems like we only know what happens.
Not that the government is doing much research to find out why. They hire people like me, and pass legislation against putting preservative chemicals in dead people anymore.
Embalming happens, though. On the side. For the families.
I don’t blame the embalmers, most aliens these days are made through mastication. And more are made every day.
I counted four of the Furry weirdos in my trap this morning. And, dang if one of them didn’t appear to be the spitting image of my nephew’s Little League coach, Mr. Karrol. If Mr. Karrol was a huge brown dog who walked on his hind legs and had two sets of horns on his head. This one wasn't pleasant to look at, seeing as how the original Mr. Karrol died about three days ago, and the corpse lifestyle had been rough. The left ear, right under the first of the horns, was half torn off, flapping away. And the fingers, excuse me, toes because dogs don’t have fingers—well, I couldn't see them. Its front paws sort of stopped at two raw meat looking black dog pads. I imagine the Furry wore them off somehow. Probably trying to burrow back into the funeral home to infect somebody else’s embalmed coach. Not this season, Karrol-copy. Not on my watch.
I loaded my grandmother’s Enfield rifle with the rubber bullets the current administration issued for us to use. Grandma had gotten the rifle from my great grandfather who went to fight in France back in Double U Double U Two. I never got to go to Europe, and now I never would—too many Furries in Europe these days. Serves them right for laughing at us and saying the space-bugs couldn’t cross the oceans when we said it would. The Europeans simply left us here, to deal with the first outbreaks of infection by ourselves. Their official view being we only had ourselves to blame. Just desserts. For Area 51 and our general arrogance about the Moon Walk.
Of course, the Europeans forgot about the cruise ships already headed out their way. Cruise ships loaded with senior citizens, and every one of those ships has a nice working morgue, tucked away below decks. Old people get sick quickly and die on cruises all the time. Only took the one bad port of call on the Texas gulf where some enterprising interlopers looking like over-fed pet chihuahuas got on board after a few elderly women ate dodgy shrimp, one of which wanted to be laid out in her coffin up on deck (the old lady, not the shrimp).
Well, Europe was over run fast. The remainder of the world quickly followed. It’s completely infected, chewed up and reanimated in that half-ass way the off-worlders work. The gerbil-faced sharp-fanged hoof-waving duplicates are biting everyone, before falling apart in droves as their copycat bodies break down, covering the streets from Paris to Algiers, Edinburgh to St. Petersburg. And I mean this quite factually: they are laying on the streets. Their eyes wide open. And no one has any idea what they are going to do next, besides rot into mush and bones. Which is what they are doing right now. Add to that the chaos of each of them having the capabilities of the organisms they resemble as well (and some resemble quite a few all at the same time) ...and there’s a whole bunch of problems to deal with.
We are not going to let that happen here though. I don’t care how many traps we need to dig. No planetary invasion is going to be able to take hold and stay here. That's where my job comes in. I clear them out of Washington State and send them on—to wherever unwanted visitors from outer space who look like cartoon animals go. First stop CDC lockers. Second stop Hell.
Or, is hell only for human beings? Somehow, I doubt it.
I took stock of what I had in the hole this morning. Three males. One female. I mean, to me they seemed like male and female whatever they were. Who knows what genders they really were? We say gender is fluid now, could be they were saying those things all along.
Either way, I aimed for the neck of the female-looking one; a faithful representation of somebody, doubled right down to the bright yellow sports suit outfit the original corpse had on. You know... the kind some women buy in shopping malls to wear to the supermarket but not to the gym. I couldn’t figure out why anybody would want to bury the real departed person in that hideous outfit until I remembered that the odds were, she never got to the embalming table. The original lady was more than likely bitten by whatever was walking around looking like her now. She sported a beak where her nose should be and fluffy canary feathers were coming up out of her neck line, and where her feet should be, I saw what
looked a little like yellowish snake tails. One coming out of each pant leg. They reminded me of a pair of ripe bananas—-black spots and all. The Furry stared at me; maybe the original lady was a decent person, but there was nothing in those bird-brained copy eyes but raw anger now. I squeezed the trigger. Bingo, right between the dirty chin and the dirty collar. Feathers flew. Bird-woman dropped like a yellow sack of sand.
One more space nasty hit the dust. For a little while at least.
The other three Furries started shuffling around in that weird jerky way they do. I think it’s because they can’t get their unnatural legs to move as fast as they want, so they push their chests out as if puffing up will send them where they are going any quicker.
I don’t know why they do. They just do. They seem only interested in three things: being able to run around our planet, looking like people who somehow merged with local wildlife, and gnawing on warm bodies. The one thing they sure as heck don't want is to be shot at. Even though shooting them can’t kill them, they don’t want any part of it. And that’s why my traps are 9 feet deep. Furries check in but they don’t check out.
I lined up my next shot. The Mr. Karrol-look-alike was digging away at the walls of my trap. Trying to tunnel out, I reckoned. Without any dog claws on the end of those paws, things weren't going too well though. I decided to let it keep itself busy while I took aim at the one that wasn’t moving around as much as the other two.
This Furry replicated a hipster and a fish: lumberjack beard, flannel shirt, skinny-assed jeans, motorcycle boots and greenish speckled scales on its face. Webbed fingers, no eyelids, the whole aquatic get-up. Gills too. It was ugly. Granted, the whole rotting briny flesh thing didn't help... but... man-o-man, what with the groper profile and the beard...hipster fashion gone bad.
Bang!
Good riddance sushi man.
Only Mr. Karrol and a wrinkled old-man wannabe remained. The old man Furry looked like a living version of them Easter time battery operated toys. You remember, the kind that came with the cheap thin ‘pink fur’ cloth and a drum to bang. That’s what the old guy looked like. Long ears on his head, a little peachy colored fuzz covering his exposed body parts. Twitchy nose. I guess he had a cotton tail, but he was dressed. Nobody would want to play with him though, not with those blood shot rolling non-mammalian eyes, creepy rodent-paw hands and all the lurching around. Given the general dilapidated appearance, the space-invader dug the original body up and out of its own grave, before it took the form and added essence of bunny; it wore a Marines uniform, with dirt and splinters all over its filthy self.
