Journey Back to Mars: a sci-fi collection

by Hugo Huesca

  The sad part was, I should have seen it coming. There was this trait that separated Cooper from those crazy conspiracy nuts you see in movies, panhandling on the streets of New York with their signs and pamphlets. You never were sure how much he believed in the stuff he sputtered and how much he simply was making conversation and having some weird hobbies. No one worried that much when he called our local priest a Grey infiltrate because it was all in good fun. It never stopped him from living a normal –Cooper normal— life. But he wasn’t a kid anymore, and this wasn’t fun anymore. He was a drug addicted adult who had just made a fool of himself in a political rally, and now was trying to rope me in into his delusions.

  I made my mind in that moment. I couldn’t see him go down this road, because next he would be panhandling in New York with everyone else, and he would be no more Cooper Kaproc.

  What was I going to say to my boss? Probably the truth. I had to come home and help an old childhood friend who had a rough patch.

  Cooper was still looking at me, waiting for a reaction. So I settled into a neutral “Damn, Coop. That’s really something.”

  He nodded.

  “Yeah, it is. So I thought, ‘I should get Fred to help me out. We can’t allow these scaly monsters to run around pretending to be human, not when they are our politicians. He is a lawyer; he will know what to do.’ So we don’t end up disappeared, see. And now that you are here, we should go to the rally, so you can see it for yourself.”

  At least that made sense, but it still caught me by surprise.

  “The rally is still there?”

  “No! Haven’t you checked the news? They came to our town today; they are trying to travel the whole state. It’s kind of a big deal that they cared enough to appear here."

  I vaguely remembered something my parents had mentioned. I was celebrating my partnership then; the party last night had erased all traces of the rest.

  “So, you want me to come with you to this lady’s rally and what, check out her human suit?”

  “Yes!”

  You are not roping me into your LSD-fueled rampage, is what I should have told him. I’m not enabling any of this. You have a problem, you need help. That’s what I should have said. But we were best friends, once, and I just didn’t have it in me. I knew I had to do something, but I couldn’t just tell him to go to rehab like this.

  What I ended up saying was: “Well, I need to be back at work, but it won’t hurt if we go take a quick look.” If the rally was in town anyway, we could go, check it out and be back before night-time. I could be back tomorrow morning at my shiny new partner desk.

  Cooper lit up.

  “That’s the spirit!”

  He jumped out of the bed and started gathering his stuff. Camera, cell phone, wallet, and keys. He put on some sports shoes instead of his boots and he was ready to rumble.

  He said, “don’t you want to grab a bite before we go?”

  I wanted this to be over as soon as possible so I could scuttle off to my parent’s. But I hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday, and that had been mostly liquid, and that liquid had mostly been puked before bedtime.

  “Yeah, I could grab something.”

  So we went to his living room, “Don’t worry, Dad’s still in the shop” and while I cleaned out a table from junk and assorted pieces of machinery, he went to the kitchen. I heard the juicer buzz around for a minute and then he was back with some orange juice and some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on a tray. That was nostalgic. That combo had been more or less our fuel during middle school. We ate them in silence and I drank my juice in one go. It had been a while since I’d had the real deal, not the city made goo.

  “Right, then,” Cooper said after we were done. “You ready?”

  “Of course,” I lied. What I wanted was to lie down and sleep all day, but it was best to get this over with… which, I thought, was an apt metaphor for this whole Cooper deal.

  We took his car, which moved by a mixture of jumping, shaking like a flea-infested dog, and zigzagging around with determination. It was a bumpy road, but we got on the town’s main street. While he drove I looked around. Much had changed, I realized, while I wasn’t looking. New shops, more bars, fewer bakeries, and fewer people. Most of them I didn’t recognize. Once I had known by name almost everyone in the streets.

  The rally was near because we ran into a crowded street filled with parked cars and no space to pull over, so we knew that was the place. Turned out to be a park near the center of town. Next door to the Government Building and the pops-store that had managed to stay in business all these years by virtue of having the mayor’s son as the owner.

  Cooper parked the car a couple of blocks behind and we walked most of the way over there. He kept trying to riff with me over how we could bring the fight over to these confirmed reptilian monsters, at the very least keep them out of our town. I was mostly thinking of the bag filled with narcotics he kept in his trunk for an emergency and running a mental countdown of the charges we would get if someone pulled us over.

  “Thing is; we have to be very law-compliant. Keep it on the down-low but let the Man know we won’t be intimidated. You have to look like more trouble if someone tried to disappear you than if they just let you be. So we need to raise a ruckus, but in a polite way, a smart way,” he went. I didn’t catch most of it, to be honest. We had already arrived at the park, which was guarded by a bunch of out-of-town policemen, armored so much that they looked like fantasy paladins, painted black and blue, and carrying high-powered rifles.

  Cooper looked at them suspiciously. I told him to pay them no mind, he mouthed an ‘of course’ and we got in. We could already hear the speech of the candidate over the polite chattering of the small crowd she had managed to gather around her podium. First, we had to pass a security check-up, where they patted us for concealed weapons. We were clean, of course, because I wasn’t an idiot and Cooper was a professional addict. Everything illegal was in his car. So they looked his camera over, then our phones; grunted a bit for effect and then gave us everything back.

  “We may reserve the right to check the pictures you take when you leave,” they told him. That was legal now, of course, so he had to shut up and act compliant.

  After that, we stepped over a portable full body scanner, and then we were clear. We approached the crowd, which was a mixture of old-timers from the town, new arrivals, and visitors the campaign bused over to make the rally seem more vigorous for the news crew. Those were everywhere, looking bored out of their minds.

  “Alright, man, we are here,” I told Cooper. I was uncomfortable now because I wouldn’t know what to tell him when the poor lady turned out to be a normal politician. Just as human as every other one and no more corrupt than most. I could lie to him, but I was a lawyer, God’s sakes. He needed to face the truth: What he saw was a vision powered by some gone-bad LSD and he was making a fool of himself. Maybe he would accept that he needed help after it. I only hoped he kept his composure. “I don’t see anything wrong—”

  But he waved me off, matter-of-factly. “Of course, we are very far away. It’s a good costume, we need to get closer.”

  I sighed, but we started moving around the crowd, trying to nudge our way to the front. Sweaty men and women blocked my view. They didn’t hear or didn’t care for our polite ‘excuse-me-am-sorry-passing-through’ and it was actually a bit packed for a crowd of this size, which was done on purpose, for the camera. I ate a fair bit of elbows and pushes and angry looks of disapproval, but I merely looked down, repeated that I was sorry and kept moving. And there is also this mantra in the back of the head of every lawyer when we see someone thinking of getting violent with us. “Try me mate, I’ll clean you up. Go on, make my day.”

  We arrived at the front, where the crowd parted and it was easier to breathe. I was already covered in sweat under my suit; my shirt probably looked like a wet rag. Cooper made way just a second after me, and then got at my side, eyes fixed up front.


  “Well, then?” I said to him, “are you satisfied? It’s only a lady, Coop; I think you must’ve already known that. Look, man, this is getting out of hand, those drugs you have been doing—”

  He shushed me with a wave of his hand and pointed to the podium with a nudge of his head.

  “Take a good long look, Fred. Tell me what you see.”

  After one moment, I humored him.

  She was a sturdy woman, in her fifties or sixties, I gathered. She talked about taxes. Or taking back our countryside, which is always well received in the countryside. She wore a dark purple suit, with modern seams and pointy shoulders and hips. High heels. I began to ask Cooper if he was satisfied or if he’d rather have me get to the podium and pinch her cheeks; then I saw it.

  There was something wrong with the way the skin of her face hung over her skull. It seemed loose, somehow, like a cloth thrown over her head and then painted really well. Stunned, I took a couple steps forward, almost into the security perimeter the police had set up around her. Yeah, her skin did hang over wrong. Her eyes were slightly out of position, like half an inch. I could see green down her eyelid. A scaly kind of green. Her speech was lost in the air as if someone suddenly pressed the mute button. But I saw her mouth forming words. Saw her teeth, normal, fifty-year-old lady teeth; just like you would expect. But behind those…

  Stunned, as if in a daze, I turned back towards one random man who was near me checking his phone, with his red, fat face squinted in concentration. “Man,” I said to him, “that lady has fangs.”

  He looked at me like I was insane. Which was probably true. I turned back towards her to check again. Yes, still there: fangs, green scaly skin near the corner of her eye, getting tugged along her facial expressions and loose skin on her face. Like a skin-suit.

  I took two steps back, and almost stumbled over a woman, who was clapping loudly when the politician made some good point against taxes.

  “Hey,” I said to her, “did you see the green scales she has at the corner of her eyes? She is wearing a disguise, right? It’s right there, she is not even trying to hide it.”

  Someone else had to see it too, otherwise, I had suddenly gone mad. The woman looked at me like I was some kind of sexual predator and I scurried away.

  “It’s okay, man, I saw it too,” said Cooper behind me, but I ignored him. He would see anything, believe anything. I needed confirmation…

  “Hey, mister, when you see her mouth do you see anything weird? Like, I don’t know, fangs behind her normal teeth?” I told one old man, covered in sweat and with a tired look. He turned to me with a kind smile and I saw loose skin hanging off his head like a suit, and green scaly skin near the corner of his eyes, and his breathing seemed jagged.

  “Why, that’s ridiculous young man. I don’t see anything of the sort,” he said. I stared at the yellowed fangs under his teeth. His breath smelled of rotten fish.

  I want to say that I managed to react to this revelation in a proper fashion. Instead, I screamed and jumped back, smashing right into Cooper. He grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me around, so we were face to face.

  “Have you gone insane, Fred?!” He said, which was hilarious given the circumstances. “You are making a scene, now. We need to get the hell out of here before… Oh, before them!”

  A couple of suited up bodyguards with black sunglasses and chests the size of barrels were making their way towards us in the crowd. I felt the blood drain from my face. This could not be happening.

  Cooper pushed me with urgency. “Move, dude! Don’t let them catch us alive!” So I managed to pull my wits back together and we made our way towards the other side of the crowd, towards the exit.

  The bodyguards moved fast, but they were too big to close the distance with the crowd so packed, and soon we were leaving them behind. I saw them bring their fingers to their ears and start talking furiously.

  “They are calling for back-up!” I warned Cooper.

  “I know! Move!”

  A woman the size of a refrigerator stepped in front of my way so I pushed her to the ground without thinking. She flailed about hollering with rage, and everyone around us turned to me, but Cooper and I were already out of the packed part of the crowd. We started running like cats chased by every dog in the neighborhood. We ran towards the exit, but it was a dumb idea, the police were already talking to some men in black suits and eyeing us maliciously. They walked toward us. We stopped instantly, as one, and looked around.

  “The fence, Coop!” I yelled. It was the rusty park fence, the kind we used to jump over, in middle school. We said nothing more, just rushed towards it and clawed at the chain links. I propelled myself upwards, climbing it like it was a horizontal surface, and jumped to the other side two seconds after Cooper. I heard my trousers tear over a ragged edge on the way down, but I didn’t give one damn. “We have to get to the car!”

  “Forget that!” He told me, “They will just chase us down or note the drive plates and get us later; we have to lose them!"

  I was too terrified out of my wits to argue, but it was a good call. A bunch of policemen was already out of the park, coming towards us with half a dozen bodyguards to be sure. We started running in the other direction and across the street, Coop on top yelling anarchist mottos like a madman and me whimpering behind him.

  I hadn’t run like that in a long time, or even at all. It felt like my lungs were constantly about to explode, two bellows filling to the brim every time and threatening to tear apart. My feet screamed inside the expensive dress shoes and my jacket tore at the armpits. But I followed my insane friend for dear life, while the henchmen of the lizard people chased after us.

  We would never outrun them, not a scrawny man and an out-of-shape lawyer; we knew we had to outsmart them. So we ran towards a back-alley, climbed piles of cardboard boxes and jumped clean over a wall, then we ran across an open field towards the houses. And they may have been many, and faster than us, but this was our town. It always was.

  There was no need to plan a route, no need to check the buildings around us. We never ran into a dead-end, no matter how deep we went into the shops back-alleys. We never lost our way, not even when we got inside the old junkyard by a hole in its fence. We traveled around mountains of trash until we reached the other side, faster than if we had just gone around it.

  We scurried like rats over the back of the closed radio station and exited near the old butchery. We ran to the maze of the suburban homes where every block was painted the same friendly yellow, and we jumped over Mr. Harrison’s fence, and passed-by his ancestral Rottweiler, who had chased us many times before. Now, the dog just watched us with his elderly eyes and panted as we went. Seemed happy to see us.

  Strange, that I too wasn’t panting. I didn’t feel tired at all, even when running for our lives. That might be an exaggeration because we had had no sight of police since a while ago, but we were possessed by terror, exhilaration, and this mad energy that would not let go.

  And it wasn’t summer, but autumn, and it was a cool day with the sun clear in the sky, huge and orange-gold; and you could look at it for an instant without harm. So we ran like two madmen among the gardens and the sidewalks and the yellow and auburn leaves dancing around us. And I could recognize the stores, the houses, my old school, even the trees in the forgotten parks where we used to chase ghosts the days after it had rained.

  We were laughing at top of our lungs when we arrived at the back garden of Cooper’s house, our persecutors long lost. We were still laughing when we reached his living room, exhausted and out of breath. My suit was a sad ruin of scratches, mud, and tears at the seams. I collapsed on his couch after throwing to the floor the rusty gears on top of it, just like I had done a thousand times before.

  “Ah, that was fun,” I panted after we both calmed down and caught our breath. “I can’t believe we lost them like that.”

  “They never had a chance,” said Cooper, with confidence. He jumped on another co
ach, his feet over the tea table.

  I felt exultant with triumph as if we had struck a mighty blow against our lizard overlords that day. Panic had given way too nervous, tittering excitation, but even then I started to worry when I began to calm down.

  “Man, what about the car?” I asked, “If the rally is over and it’s the only one left… They might find us anyways.”

  “Good call, Fred,” he said, “I’ll have to call my dad, ask him to pick it up. He will get mad, but it’s better than them finding out who we are.”

  Them. I couldn’t believe there was really them. I especially couldn’t believe they were fricking lizard-men. Of all things. Government Lizard-men.

  “Those suits they are using, how long has that been going on? That lady didn’t even look that human when we got close, there is no way someone didn’t report this before."

  “There are a few old sites on the web calling them out, but no one paid them no mind. Mostly they keep their distance, those reptilian-men,” Cooper guessed, “stay around their own kind, and use lighting and photo editing to help smooth it out. Then the hallucinogens in the air take care of the rest. It’s devious, really.”

  I kept quiet for a moment, thinking. Something nagged at me.

  “What about the chemtrails? You said they were there to hide the truth, but I had no trouble seeing the disguise of that woman, or the old man in the crowd.”

  He kept one of his dramatic silences that he liked to try before making a big reveal, and then went over to the kitchen, and said:

  “Yeah, I kind ‘of already took care of that.”

  He returned with something on his hand, one second later, and handed it to me. I looked it over and noted coldly that it was a small, inconspicuous, white bottle of pills.

  “Same pills I took when I first saw her. I knew you wouldn’t believe me,” he explained, “you’ve been away too long, see? That’s the city for you. It has a way of imposing its own reality on you, and breaking you down and making you believe it was what you wanted all along. I mean, you wanted to be a journalist before your dad talked you into law school… But never mind that, Fred. I knew you would pull through in the end. I knew it!”