Fatal Reaction, Survival

by M A Hollstein

  The men casually turned and walked away from the parking lot, towards a building to their right.

  Ellie couldn’t believe her eyes. She was staring at where the body had been lying on the ground. It was gone. With the men out of sight, Ellie left her hiding spot and quietly walked over to where she’d seen the body. Ashes. Nothing left but ashes.

  Deciding to get a better look at the men, she headed in the direction she’d seen them go. She stayed close to the building, stopping every once in a while to listen. Finally, she’d caught up to the men. She could see them up ahead. One of the men aimed his gun upwards at a body lying on a balcony. Ellie would’ve never noticed it up there, if she hadn’t been there, observing the men. All she could see was an arm, barely dangling over the side.

  Zap! Zap! Ashes sprinkled down on the sidewalk from above. One of the men turned his head and spotted Ellie. Her heart sank, and she immediately felt sick to her stomach at being discovered. She’d been so stupid following these strange men.

  Should I run? Will they zap me? She didn’t know what to do. Like an idiot, she froze.

  The other man turned and stared at her also. Both of them tilted their heads to the side while examining her. Ellie noticed the unnatural, wax-like appearance of their skin and odd color of their eyes. They didn’t look real. The taller man had bright green eyes and the short, heavier set man’s eyes appeared to be pure black.

  “Um, hi,” Ellie said, holding her hand up in a half ass wave. She did a mental head smack at how stupid she probably looked to them. “I’m Ellie.”

  When the men didn’t react, after a few awkward seconds of them staring at her, Ellie turned on her heel and hightailed it home. She raced across the street, and then glanced over her shoulder. The men hadn’t bothered to follow her. Her pulse raced as she glanced up at the dark ship above. Aliens, she thought. They were aliens.

  Chapter 9

  In a secret underground laboratory, Susan continued to run tests on Benjamin. She worked side by side with several humans; government-appointed scientists. Susan had been working closely with these people for the last eighteen months devising a way to keep the human population safe from the Scourge. Instead, even though she knew they weren’t ready to let the virus loose because it hadn’t yet been perfected, the human government took control. Time was of the essence with the Scourge on the way.

  Susan shook her head as she examined another blood sample. They still were nowhere near ready. She didn’t want to rerelease the virus on the survivors, refusing to be responsible for genocide. However, if she didn’t try, those survivors would be devoured by the Scourge. She needed more time.

  “Have you eaten?” Liam asked, coming up behind her.

  “No,” Susan sighed, pushing herself away from the microscope.

  “Take a break. Eat something. You need to refuel.”

  “There’s no time!” she spat.

  “If you don’t eat, you cannot perform at your best. You must keep your brain at top functionary performance. Eat something alive.”

  Susan closed her eyes. She’d been living amongst the humans for quite some time, observing them, acting like them, and eating like them. It had taken her years to learn to squelch the hunger from the Scourge blood running through her veins. Being that she was a mixed breed, she didn’t crave living organisms very often. And since her arrival on Earth, she’d learned to curb her hunger. She’d found other foods the humans consumed quite satisfying. Unfortunately, she’d had to consume more food than what she’d usually take in, to keep her hunger under control. That was why her metabolism had slowed down, and she’d put on a lot of extra weight. She eyed Liam who was tall and lean. They’d arrived together, and he hadn’t gained an ounce. But Susan knew, Liam was a closet flesh eater. Even though he claimed he no longer ate the living, she’d caught him once eating a cat in an alley not long after they arrived. He swore that was the only time, and no humans had seen him.

  “I don’t need anything alive,” she said, pushing past him. “I’m not weak. I’ll get something from the breakroom.”

  Liam followed her. “I never said you were weak.”

  “You implied that I’m like them! That I need to feed the hunger.” Susan flung open the heavy door and fled the lab. “I’m not the Scourge!”

  “Neither am I,” Liam said. “I’m a half-breed like you. I don’t need to eat humans. I don’t need to feed on the living. I can control myself. But I don’t deny that I work at my top performance when I give my body what it needs.”

  Susan stopped walking and turned to face him. “I am not like them!”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “The Scourge will continue to enslave us. They will feed on this planet until every last living thing is gone, humans first, and then the animals. We will be forced to breed the untainted humans and animals to feed them. We came here to escape the Scourge. Not to continue the cycle.”

  “I understand,” Liam said, averting his eyes.

  “I’m going to eat a sandwich. Is that all right with you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Go check on the boy.”

  Liam walked down the hall. He understood where she was coming from, but he also understood their genetics. There was no escaping genetic makeup, no matter what species you were.

  Susan pushed open the door to the break room, happy to see it was empty. Most of the scientists, military personnel, and government officials were tending to other duties. There were over two hundred humans that’d been handpicked to live underground, completely shielded from the virus. They’d been taken underground as a precaution before the virus was released.

  The only person in the underground shelter that was human that’d been in contact with the virus was Benjamin. He was being kept in a special room that only the half-breeds could risk entering. Susan didn’t believe that Benjamin was contagious. However, she wasn’t a hundred percent confident that he wasn’t contagious. Therefore, she was keeping him confined.

  Susan opened the refrigerator and sighed. No sandwiches. She knew supplies were running low underground. Why’d she think there’d be a sandwich? Because, she thought, I’ve been eating roast beef sandwiches every day up until the release of the virus. Now all the bread was either moldy or stale.

  Opening a pantry cupboard above the counter, Susan grabbed a beef flavored cup of noodles. As Susan prepared her noodles in the microwave, she watched the glass plate turn, as the radiation cooked her meal. She suddenly wondered if they were going about things the wrong way. They were trying to taint the food source by introducing Scourge DNA into human hosts since the Scourge were not cannibalistic. However, that plan backfired and almost caused the human race to go extinct. What if there was another way to defeat them? She needed to think. Maybe Liam was right. Maybe she needed to tap into her Scourge bloodline in order to think like them. Releasing another virus wasn’t the answer. She had to think deeper.

  Susan eyed the coffeepot and switched it on. She’d been becoming dependent on caffeine to keep her energy levels up. She refused to acknowledge and give in to the hunger that had been nagging at her.

  The break room door flung open, and a balding man with a bad comb-over, and dark tufts of straggly hair around his ears stared at her over thick, black-rimmed, plastic glasses. Susan had worked with the man briefly. Being he was human, she kept to herself and others of her species, unless it was business related.

  “You need something?”

  “The boy!” he said, out of breath.

  “What about him?”

  “I was told to come get you.”

  “Can this wait?” Susan asked, pouring freshly brewed coffee into her thermos. She then popped open the microwave and took out her noodles.

  “I don’t think so…”

  Susan screwed the lid on her thermos. “Why? What’s happened?”

  “I-I don’t know,” the man said, obviously nervous about talking to her. She’d noticed the humans she’d been working wit
h, still didn’t trust her. They only worked with her, and the few other scientists of her species, because they’d been ordered to by their government. “I was told it was urgent.”

  Susan glanced at her noodles, placed them back in the microwave, and shut the door to trap the heat. Dinner would have to wait. Thermos in hand, she pushed past the man and rushed down the hall.

  ***

  Bill decided it was time to take inventory of what they had and what they still needed. He hated feeling helpless due to not knowing what to expect. However, he’d be damned if he were going to go down without a fight. Susan and Liam had already explained to both he and Amanda about their people in the spaceships being sent down to inhabit the earth. They were also aware if what Susan told them was true, if they kept to themselves, the aliens would keep to themselves as well. Bill didn’t buy that. He felt it was all a load of bullshit. The aliens purposely infected the human race so that they could take over the world without a fight. But since Liam and Susan were the only ones he felt could save his son, his hands were tied.

  The only thing he did know for certain, was that this other alien race, the Scourge, seemed to scare the hell out of Liam and Susan. If they were frightened, what the hell kind of chance did any human survivors have against them? And supposedly this so-called Scourge, consumed their food while it was still living, and they had a preference for humans.

  “Fuck!” Bill swore, staring at the yellow pad of legal paper.

  “What’s wrong?” Amanda asked, rushing to his side. She stared down at the notepad. Bill tossed his ballpoint pen onto the table, and it rolled off onto the tile floor.

  “Everything’s wrong,” he said. “It’s not just one thing.”

  “I know.” Amanda nodded. She gently placed her hand on his forearm. She was feeling just as frustrated as he was feeling. “I’ve gone through all the cupboards and the bedrooms. I placed the ladder you brought back from one of your rounds under the crawlspace. Do you think we’d be able to pull it up there with us?”

  Bill shook his head. “Probably not, but let’s give it a try. Worse case, scenario, if we need to escape, we just crawl as fast as we can before someone follows us up there.”

  Amanda’s apartment had high-vaulted ceilings. It was one of the things she loved about living upstairs. The high ceilings made her apartment feel larger than it was. Above her bathroom door, in the master bedroom, was what looked like an oversized cupboard door that could only be reached by a ladder. Bill brought home a ladder from scavenging and had decided to see what was in that mysterious cupboard above the bathroom. Behind the cupboard door was a crawlspace into the attic for workers in case of a leaky roof or electrical problems.

  Since neither Bill nor Amanda knew what to expect, they felt that a hiding place, as well as another escape route, would be a good idea. Amanda packed two backpacks with essentials if they needed to flee in a hurry. She also stocked a bunch of supplies such as a couple of cases of water, bags of trail mix, beef jerky, and dried fruits, sleeping bags, flashlights and a few other items up in the crawl space in case they needed to stay hidden for a while. Amanda hoped the crawl space wouldn’t be needed, but it made her feel safer knowing they had a place to hide or an alternate escape route.

  Amanda followed Bill down the hallway to the master bedroom. She watched as he climbed the ladder into the crawl space. Bill tried to pull it up after him, but it was too bulky and was banging against the drywall. Amanda cringed. After several attempts, Bill managed to pull it up there.

  Bill then carefully put the ladder back in place and climbed down. “Well,” he said. “It’s do-able. Doesn’t make it very comfortable for us and it’s a pain in the ass to get up there, but it can be done.”

  Amanda wrapped her arms around Bill’s waist and pressed her ear to his chest. Bill ran his fingers through her blonde hair. “About last night…” he said and then hesitated.

  Lifting her head from his chest, Amanda looked into his baby blue eyes. They still held a sense of sadness. “What about last night?”

  “I, um,” Bill cleared his throat, “I shouldn’t have let that happen.”

  Hearing Bill’s words of regret stung. Feeling hurt, Amanda pushed away from him. “Shouldn’t have let what happen, Bill? We shouldn’t have made love?”

  “Amanda, that’s not what I meant.” Bill shook his head. He reached out to touch Amanda’s cheek, and she swatted his hand away.

  “Don’t touch me!” she spat, feeling both used and ashamed of being so damn gullible when it came to men.

  “Amanda, with everything going on,” Bill tried desperately to explain, “and my wife… and Benjamin…”

  “You feel it was a mistake?” Amanda’s eyes clouded with tears. She turned her back to him. She didn’t want him to see her cry. “That I’m a mistake?”

  “No. No, baby,” Bill said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “I don’t think that.”

  “Then, what?” Amanda’s voice cracked as she fought back tears. “What is it? You’re not the only one who lost someone, you know? I lost my boyfriend. He was a son of a bitch, and I was going to dump his ass for cheating on me with his ex-wife, but I still had feelings for him. And my family, I haven’t a clue if they’re even still alive. My mom, my sister, my nephew… I’m all alone.”

  Bill slid his arms around Amanda’s waist from behind and pulled her body into his. He gently kissed her neck below her ear. “Amanda, it’s not that. It’s… oh, God, I’m so mentally fucked up. With Benjamin killing Joanna, everybody killing everybody, aliens taking over our planet, and I’ve, well, I’ve fallen madly in love with you. You’re not alone. I’m with you.”

  Amanda’s breath caught in her throat as her heart skipped a beat. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the warm trail of kisses Bill was leaving on her neck. His hands moved to her hips and gently squeezed her flesh. “I’m in love with you too,” she whispered, turning around and staring into his eyes.

  Bill placed his hand lovingly against her cheek when a sudden deafening crash, unlike thunder, shook the walls around them. Amanda screamed. Bill pulled her into his arms. “You okay?”

  Amanda nodded.

  Bill rushed to the bedroom window and looked outside. Amanda peered over his shoulder. The colossal silver spaceship that had been hovering over Oceanside for the last several weeks was gone. In its place was a jagged black ship that almost looked like a strange boot-shaped building floating in the sky. Popping noises from static electricity zapped throughout the heavens, snapped and sparkled, around the ship.

  “What the hell?” he breathed.

  “Oh my God,” Amanda said, grabbing hold of Bill’s hand. “Scourge.”

  ***

  As Ellie ran back to her condo, she could see Mike, heading her way. He was driving the Corvette through the parking lot. He stopped and motioned for her to get in. Ellie opened the passenger side door and hopped in.

  “You’ve gotta stop taking off,” he chastised. “When Max came running home without you, I thought the worst. We all started combing the grounds looking for you. What the hell, Ellie?”

  Mike’s tone upset her, but at the same time, she understood where he was coming from. “They’re here, Mike.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mike asked, backing into a parking space, he was using to turn the car around. “The Crusaders?”

  “No! The aliens.” Ellie pointed upwards. “They’re here.”

  Mike glanced up at the spaceship hovering above them. “Yes…”

  “No!” she said, aggravated. “They’re here! I saw a couple of them. They have these guns…”

  “Shit!” Mike said, racing through the parking lot. He skidded around the corner and stopped in front of the garage. “Where, Ellie? Where’d you see them?”

  “Across the street. They were using their guns to clean up bodies. Some kind of electricity was coming out of them.”

  “Guns?” Mike switched off the ignition and shook his head. “Ellie, you’re not ma
king sense.”

  “Yes, guns,” Ellie stated. “I think they’re getting rid of the bodies. You know, cleaning up. I watched them shoot some bodies, and they disintegrated. Left nothing but ash.”

  “I noticed Brad’s body was gone,” Mike said, looking out his windshield at where the body once was lying. “So was that Crusader. I was wondering who moved them.” Mike frowned. “You sure they were aliens?”

  “Yes, I’m sure! You don’t believe me?”

  “Of course, I believe you,” Mike said. “I’m just trying to figure things out. How’d you know they were aliens, besides the strange guns?”

  “I could just tell.” Ellie shrugged and scrunched up her nose. “I mean, they look like us, but their skin was different. I don’t know how to explain it. Kind of waxy looking. And their eyes were weird. One had really brilliant green eyes and the other one’s eyes were pure black.”

  “You were close enough to see their eyes?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Okay,” Mike said. “We’ll have to be more careful when approaching survivors.”

  “I don’t think they want to hurt us,” Ellie said.

  “What makes you think that? You said they have guns.”

  “Yes. Some kind of ray gun,” Ellie explained. “But they were using them on the dead bodies. If they wanted to hurt us, they would’ve shot me.”

  “They saw you?”

  “Yes. But they didn’t come after me. They just stared at me.”