by Nate Castle
“I support you, I want you to know that. But I’m going to be waiting in the other room while you do this, I can’t watch,” she said.
“Of course, I’ll come and get you when it’s done,” Logan said.
“Hey numbnuts, what makes you think that you can mosey around on my property?”
A man who hailed in Little Rock, Arkansas approached a disk team. The man on the team who he had spoken to remained silent.
“I asked you a question, big boy. The normal response is to provide an answer. Are you deaf?”
One of the Europeans standing twenty yards away from this incident raced over.
“Ayy mate, calm down, don’t getcha panties in a bunch. We’re just here doing some irrigation control work. We’ll be out of your hair in minutes.”
“Ahh a foreign fucker. You guys come over here with your fancy accents and people get duped by it. They think you are a better or more qualified or talented person than you actually are. Makes me sick,” he said and raised the shotgun that was resting by his side, to point at the European.
“Why don’t you hand me what you have in your hand?”
The European had no choice, but to hand one of the disks he was carrying.
“Tell me about this here disk.”
“I don’t know how it works, but it tells you information about the ground water supply.”
BOOM
The man from Little Rock, shot the European in the chest with the 12-gauge.
“Now let’s try again,’ the man said, this time talking to ‘numbnuts’ who was originally loitering on his lawn, given that the European wasn’t in any condition to speak after taking one to the chest.
“What does this disk do?”
The man pulled back the slide on the shotgun when ‘numbnuts’ didn’t answer, but just before he could get a shot off a beam of light flew across the sky and leveled him. Almost simultaneously, a net approached the ground, landed on the gunshot victim’s body and pulled him up into a Zyrgian craft that could now be seen overhead.
Minus this one little hiccup, the disk distribution went as planned.
“Your name is Tom right?” Logan was now in the box, holding the hot brand in one hand.
“Yup. I told the last girl that I don’t know what she’s talking about,” Tom said.
“The good news for you Tom is that we are going to be able to spell your name, it will be really cool looking,” Logan said.
“Huh?”
“You see, this cattle brand has the letter ‘M’ on it. I have two more brands that are being heated up as we speak, one with the letter ’T’ and the other with the letter ‘O’. So when this is all said and done you’ll have a T-O-M across your chest. It will be way more unique than any tattoo you could ever get.”
“You’re insane man, branding an innocent man? What is this world coming to?” Tom said.
“How about we do this? I ask a question and then I hold the brand on you until provide me with the correct answer,” Logan said, “Let’s do a practice round. Question 1, why did you want Clyde to drop you off in Baltimore, NYC or Philadelphia?”
Tom didn’t answer, so Logan pressed the hot brand onto his stomach, just below the pectoral muscles. By this point, Tom was strapped down to a chair so he couldn’t fight back.
“Oww!” Tom yelled.
Logan tried again, “What business did you have on the east coast?”
“We came here to bang your wife,” Tom said.
Logan pulled the brand up and placed it within inches of Tom’s eye.
From outside the box, Hank said to the others in the viewing area, “God damnit Logan. He’s letting his emotions get the best of him. He’s overdoing it. Should we go in there and stop him?”
“We can’t at this point or else we’re not going to get any information out of Tom,” said President Taylor, “Let’s just hope Logan doesn’t get even more carried away.”
Logan slowly lowered the brand over Tom’s left eye, but Tom put up his hand to surrender, not being able to handle the thought of losing his eye at that moment.
“Ok, ok, ok. You’re right I do work for the IHL. They have warehouses in those three cities. The organization is growing everyday, but last time I checked it was 10,000 people strong. The goal of the IHL is to become powerful enough to overthrow the US government. They haven’t been too fond of how you’ve handle the past two alien attacks. So by taking over the supply of water, gas, drugs, and various other entities, they hope to gain enough followers to overthrow you and then piece this country back together.”
“There ya go, Tom. I’m really glad I didn’t have to gouge your eye just now. I’m not one that enjoys inflicting pain on others. Now Noel is going to come back in here and for the next 30-60 minutes you are going to explain in detail how everything at the IHL works. If Noel senses that you are withholding information, she’ll pick up her handheld and request for me to come back. If I do have to come back, you can bet that I’ll bring all three cattle brands and won’t be as worried about your well-being. You feel me?”
Tom nodded and Logan knocked on the box wall to be released.
The disks were in place approximately six hours after the Zyrgian crafts dropped the humans on the ground. The crafts went around to all of the different zones and picked up the human teams in a similar manner to how they were dropped off. The main difference this time was the nets had a sticky substance on them; when they were lowered from beneath the craft, they would pick up anything that they touched.
The tablet devices that each team had spoke a message:
‘Stand shoulder to shoulder with your team and all must be standing within a 10 square foot radius. Too much space in between will result in a failed pickup attempt. You have five minutes to get to the specified location on your map. Again, failure to be within the required parameters will result in the whole team or individual members getting left behind’.
Most of the pickups went as planned, but two had problems. The maroon team didn’t hear the message, so when the craft lowered the net at the maroon team’s pickup coordinates and reeled it back into the craft with no humans attached, the craft moved on to the next pickup location. The turquoise team at least was organized in their 10 x 10 grid as instructed, but one member of the team had an emergency bathroom situation, the kind where he couldn’t hold it in. He ran into the closest house he could find, rather than make a mess in his pants. He assured his team that he would be back before the pickup ETA, but unfortunately was still on the pot when the craft lowered the net. When the team made it onto the craft, they pleaded and begged with the commanding Zyrgian to wait for Marcus to come out of the house.
The alien simply replied, “Sorry he’s on his own now. We have a strict timeline to follow.”
On Clearokyt’s craft everyone was calm until Ignacio realized that his friend Damon wasn’t on board.
“Are the same teams all on the same crafts as before?”
“Yes,” Clearokyt answered.
“I had a friend on the charcoal team, and I’m not seeing anyone on this craft with charcoal bracelets?”
“One team was left behind, they didn’t follow orders.”
“You’ve gotta be freakin’ kiddin’ me, who the heck do you think——“
Clearokyt used a snapping motion to temporarily paralyze Ignacio, to stop Ignacio from continuing his rant. This put an end to all human complaints from that point.
The crafts all met up and landed in a field outside of Minneapolis. Clearokyt and the pilots of the other crafts, got out, conversed for a minute and then pulled out an instrument to activate the force field. It could take up to an hour for them to know if the force field was active or not.
“I thought you were gonna burn that guy’s eye,” Clyde said, “Was that acting or did you lose control there for a minute?”
They were heading back to the Emerald Room with a group of others to discuss the ‘ash’ falling from the sky.
“To be honest, I lost
my cool,” said Logan, “Luckily the strategy worked and I didn’t actually have to burn the guy’s eye.”
The past few days none of them had paid much thought to the kratyriac when they passed by it, because they hadn’t been negatively impacted by it up to this point. Hank opened the entrance door to the Emerald Room to let everyone in. Logan was holding up the rear. Before he entered, he looked back over his right shoulder because he heard a ‘whirring’ sound. On the ground behind him was a small round object, about the size of a hockey puck. As Logan observed it for a moment he noticed its oscillation feature, its wheels and also its ability to ‘hop’ a few feet off the ground.
Logan tested the waters by taking a quick step past the door’s threshold. The object hopped forward with amazing speed. Logan stepped back out to his starting point in fear of letting the object into the Emerald Room.
“Shut the door quick!” he yelled to Clyde who wasn’t even aware that there was a situation going on behind him.
Clyde followed orders though and Logan could see him on the other side of the door looking back at him through the peephole. Logan was outside alone with this ‘ball’. At first, he thought maybe it was some sort of bomb that the kratyriac sent after him.
If it was a bomb, it would’ve have gone off by now, when everyone was still outside of the Emerald Room, right?
His next best guess was that it had picked a subject to follow, that subject being him, and now it would stalk him, recording audio and video of everything he did from here on out unless he found a way to get rid of it.
18
Black and Gold
“Thoughts on this trash situation?” President Taylor said.
“Christina went to follow up on a few theories she had. She’s real good at this sort of thing, let’s see what she comes back with,” Sierra said.
“I’m sorry to change the subject y’all, but I have to bring up the elephant in the room,” Clyde said, “Logan is locked outside and there is a tennis ball sized object following him. I don’t know if I did the right thing by shutting the door on him, but he seemed pretty adamant about not letting the ball get inside here.”
“You did the right thing,” General Kaplan said, “The only explanation I have is the ball came from the kratyriac. The Zyrgians didn’t mention anything about the kratyriac being able to cause any physical harm to us, just that it could perform surveillance tasks. So, although it’s unpleasant for Logan right now, he is likely not in any danger.”
President Taylor stood up from his seat and pushed a portable whiteboard from one corner of the room to the center.
“We’re gonna do this the old fashioned way. Let’s list the items we need to deal with in order of importance. Number one being most important.”
He grabbed a red dry-erase marker and wrote a big number ‘1’ and the word ‘Survival’ next to it.
He drew branches from the word survival.
“Alright give me some subcategories of survival as it relates to us.”
“Trash management,” Sierra said. “If we don’t figure something out, the air might reach extremely toxic levels.”
“Good,” the President said as he wrote down the words ‘Trash Fix’
General Kaplan presented his idea next, “Weapon development for the our crafts so that when the Fadothials do attack, we have a way to fight back.”
“Jee-zus Kaplan, do the words ‘Need to Know Basis’ mean anything to you? Now everyone in this room knows. Yes, we do have our own alien crafts people. And we do plan on using them if we end up in a battle.”
He wrote down the word, “Finish weapon-making”.
“Speaking of that, you're almost done making a missile that can be shot from a craft right Hank?”
“Yeah I could finish it in 30 minutes if needed, just a few minor tweaks,” Hank said.
“Great, why don’t you get to that right now and when that’s done, we need to make four more duplicates of that missile, so we have one for each craft. Can you do that?”
“Yes, it will take me about a day to have everything done. Once I get this prototype finished, the manufacturing of future ones is all automated.”
“Very well then. Let me know if you need anything.”
Hank left the room.
“Back to our list.”
Clyde’s hand shot up and when called on he said, “The IHL. Stopping them is crucial to our survival as well. Using the knowledge that Noel is gathering, we can determine the best course of action,” Clyde said.
President Taylor wrote, ‘IHL’ as the 3rd bullet point, under the category of survival.
Below that he started a new category called ‘NRD’. Below that, as the first bullet point he wrote ‘Logan’s ball’.
“Is your hand getting tired from writing?” said General Kaplan, “Is that why you’re abbreviating words now. ‘Da hell does NRD mean?”
“NRD means ‘Nonrelated. Nonrelated to survival,” President Taylor said, trying to ignore the fact that Kaplan was acting like a prick for some reason.
“Anything else right now?”
No hands went up.
“One final thing we also need to pay attention to is ‘Why are the Zyrgians helping us, and why do they need us?’ We have to figure out what we have that seems important to them and so on. Does that make sense?”
Everyone nodded.
The final bullet point he wrote down was ‘Zyrgians Need Us?’
“Okay you’re free to go. Let’s meet back here in two hours though to see if we can start answering some of these questions. Two or three of you should go see if Hank could use a hand.”
When the President release them, Clyde looked through the peephole of the front door to see if Logan and the ‘ball’ were still out there, but they weren’t.
“Hey girl, you find out anything about the garbage?” Sierra went straight to Christina after she was released from the Emerald Room.
Christinia replied, “I’m still piecing it together. Did you know Congress passed a bill in 2022 that allowed for the dumping of our waste into outer space? With all of our landfills full, the options were between upping the amount of waste that was currently being dumped in the ocean or use our space shuttles to get rid of it for good.”
“A lot of things happen in Washington that the average citizen never hears about. That’s crazy!” Sierra said.
“This theory is out of left field, but tell me what you think. We’ve been dumping all of our waste in space for the past +/- 22 years. Do you know how many billions of tons of garbage that is? Well maybe our trash continued on after it left our atmosphere and reached the Fadothial’s planet. They tolerated it for a long time, but eventually reached a breaking point, so now they are sending it all back our way. And finally, as a reaction to all of the trouble we caused them, they plan on wiping us out?”
“I hate to say it, but you might have hit the nail on the head,” Sierra said.
“Usually when I make a discovery it’s exciting, but that’s obviously not the case here. One more thing that you can relay to the others is: the trash may pollute our air to toxic levels which we can live with for a while using gas masks and whatnot, but if it gets into our water supply, that could be catastrophic.”
One by one the Zyrgian crafts appeared on the lawn.
“Oh great I wasn’t expecting them back until at least tomorrow,” President Taylor said, “Talk about one distraction after the next.”
The teams from the crafts nodded at the President as they walked by and continued on to their living quarters.
Clearokyt appeared and asked the President if there was somewhere they could talk. President Taylor, not wanting to take Clearokyt into the Emerald Room and possibly have him see something he shouldn’t, chose the Presidential Library. It wasn’t a soundproofed room, but Clearokyt didn’t know that.
In the library Clearokyt summarized the trip and told the President how one human team was left behind because time management was important. If they didn’t
reach the detonation spot by a certain time, then the barrier could not be turned on. Adding to the already bad news, Clearokyt described how the barrier was working, but only in sections. There was a ten mile long gap in the barrier over Michigan.
“So you’re telling me that not only did you leave eleven of my men stranded, but the Fadothials can still fly a craft through the barrier if they find this gap?”
“Yes but the chances of them finding the gap will be low.”
“I don’t like leaving things up to chance,” President Taylor said, “What do you have in mind for an alternative plan?”
“You’re not going to be a fan of the alternative plan,” Clearokyt said.
“What is it?”
“You send a craft with fifty humans to the Fadothial planet. These men will be sacrificed and serve as a ‘tribute’ to the Fadothials. They will accept this tribute and move on to bigger better things with no further conflict.”
“And you know this how?”
“Don’t ask me questions like that, it’s complicated.”
“You’re right on one thing, this plan sucks! You expect me to sacrifice fifty more of my men after you basically sacrificed eleven for me? The ones that you left behind are as good as dead.”
“I think you humans use the phrase ‘kill two birds with one stone’? They don’t have to be your men, they can belong to the IHL. Do you see what I mean?”
“Yes that makes the plan slightly better, but it’s still not acceptable. All this time the past year we have spent learning how to fight you guys and developing things that will assist in fighting. We can’t just roll over now and surrender to the Fadothials. We haven’t even seen them fight yet, for God’s sake.”
President Taylor continued, “Why don’t you take care of the IHL for us, and we will come up with a better plan for fighting the Fadothials?”
“Like I said before, this is the best plan available,” Clearokyt said.
