There was no time. If she stopped to check on everyone, her dad would die. At the bottom of the stairs, the transmitters had fallen from Mr. Cutler's hands, and she scooped one up. Liz got there and grabbed the other one. Heather dumped it into her back pocket.
“Here.” Liz shoved a knife at her and hefted the shovel on her shoulder. Heather nodded, and with sounds of yelling behind them, ran out the front door.
Too late.
Part of her was glad she didn’t witness the final moments of her father and Mr. Gardner. Two aliens had already swarmed and cut them to pieces. Beside the bodies, the gun sat on the ground, unfired. The aliens struck too fast. Her dad laid face down, his limbs blown apart from his body. The colors outside were so vivid it hurt her eyes. The morning sky was a deep, crisp blue that went on forever. Her father’s blood painted a vivid splash of red against the green lawn. Everything was sharp and in stark relief.
If her mom didn’t survive, both her parents would be dead.
The aliens had already opened their chest cavities, preparing to consume the corpses.
“Be sad later.” Liz pushed past her and charged the aliens. Screaming, she hit one with the shovel, resulting in a deep clanging noise that made Heather’s teeth ache. The alien paid no attention but continued the process of consuming Mr. Gardner. Liz threw her own body against the alien and pushed.
“Help me!”
Heather realized what she was trying to do. She rushed over and knelt beside Liz, being careful not to look at the bodies on the ground. Using her legs for leverage, she pushed at the first alien and flipped it over, revealing the opening underneath. Tiny, spider-like legs flailed in the air and Mr. Gardner’s arm disappeared into the cavity before being absorbed.
Liz struck downward with the shovel and yelled, “Fuck you!” It seemed to be her go-to kill phrase. The alien writhed, impaled, but because of the transmitters, it didn’t do anything to stop the attack. Their programming didn’t allow for alien-on-alien violence.
Liz struck again and again, and the alien let out that impossibly loud, low droning noise that meant it was dying. Because that also broke the node, the other alien consuming her father stopping moving and slumped down.
“Move, Heather.” Liz pushed her out of the way and squatted to flip over the other alien. With now smooth, practiced efficiency, she stabbed downwards into the chamber.
“Get the transmitters!” she yelled, prompting Heather into action. She used the knife to pry away at the robotics underneath while Liz killed the second alien. This time, she knew where to look, and it popped free easily. They had three.
Liz finished with the second alien and attacked third that had floated down closer. With so many nodes broke, the final alien hovered stupidly in the air, like a drunk after a night on the town. It had never opened its compartment though, so Liz had nothing to stab through. Still, she attacked it with the shovel, crying and yelling the whole time.
Heather turned off the part of her brain that worried about parents and dying and death and focused on moving. She dug into the second alien carcass and extracted the device from within. Four. They had four transmitters now.
“Liz, let’s go.” She deposited the devices in her pockets, the weight pulling at her pants. Liz wouldn’t stop attacking though, she kept hitting at the last alien, even though the shovel bounced off its side.
“Liz, it’s over. It’s all over. Come back into the house.” She grabbed Liz by the waist and pulled her back while Liz kept screaming and clawing. It was like pulling a whirlwind, Liz resisted every step. But Heather had a size and strength advantage, even with only one working arm, and she dragged Liz back into the house. She threw Liz inside and shut the door behind them.
Insanity reigned. Mrs. Cutler cradled her husband’s bloody head in her lap while Matt cried over Abby in the background. Heather couldn’t tell who was alive or dead. Liz screamed, an inarticulate, animal sound, and punched at the front door. Heather wrestled her with her one good arm and hugged her close until Liz’s screams turned into labored grunts and then fractured sobs.
“They killed my mom.” She cried into Heather’s shoulder.
“I know.” Heather couldn’t understand why her own eyes were dry.
She sat with her back to the door, surrounded by death and dying, and closed her eyes.
Matt
With only four devices and three badly injured people, there wasn’t much discussion about who would leave. His mom put Abby and his dad in the car while he went upstairs with Heather to get her mom.
In the short week they’d been trapped, Mrs. Keene had wasted away to nothing. Had it only been a week? That couldn’t be right, it felt like longer.
“I don’t know how to carry her,” Heather said, trying to figure out the best position.
“You take her by the legs, I’ll get her shoulders. Try not to disturb the bandage.”
Heather nodded. It was awkward, but between the two of them, they managed to pick her up and get her down the stairs. She was lighter than Matt would have expected. Through the whole process, she didn’t stir, which Matt took as a bad sign.
Downstairs, his mom had already put Abby and Dad into the car and was waiting for them in the hallway. She was close to hysteria.
“Give us the devices, Mom,” he said. “We need three.”
His mom nodded and he and Heather each took one. Heather put the last device in her mom’s front pocket. Liz watched them from the corner of the hallway, with her arms folded. Turquoise alien blood covered her forearms.
In the car, Abby wheezed in the front seat, her head between her legs. She stared at him with wide, terrified eyes. His Dad was in the back, half crying. His head was covered in a blanket and it was soaked with blood. Matt still didn’t know how badly he was hit, but he was alive. The immediate priority was Abby. How long could she last?
With Heather’s help, he put her mom in the car, and did up the seat belt. Heather leaned over and hugged her mom tight.
“I’ll see you soon, Mom. I love you,” she whispered into her mom’s ear. They rushed back into the house.
“Go to County,” Matt told his mom. “The city hospital is a twenty-five-minute drive on a good day, but we don’t know what the highways are like.”
His mom nodded and gave him a one-armed hug.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can, alright?” Tears ran down her cheeks and she wiped them away with her hand.
“We’ll be fine, Mrs. Cutler,” Heather said. “Go.”
With a final look, his mom nodded again and rushed out the front door. They heard the car start and pull out of the driveway.
The silence left behind was oppressive. Only three of them left. Heather gave him a grim smile and squeezed his hand.
Epilogue
Matt
Much to his surprise, his mom returned only a few short hours later. He thought she’d be gone longer.
She’d gone to county, the closer hospital, like he suggested. Miraculously, three people were alive inside, one of whom was a Doctor. Abby was taken care of easily, as there was medicine on hand for Asthma attacks. His dad would also be fine. Mom said the bullet took his ear off and left a nasty wound on his cheek, but it wasn’t fatal.
Heather’s mom was a different matter. The Doctor hooked her up to an IV, gave her painkillers and worked on stabilizing her. It would be touch and go, but the Doctor was optimistic. The leg would probably need to come off, though.
While she had been gone, they gathered up everything they could think to bring. The leftover, non-perishable food, containers of water, all the toiletries and spare changes of clothes. It made for quite a pile and it took them almost fifteen minutes to load everything into the car. With Heather and Liz in the back seat, there was hardly any room to move.
Liz barely said two words. She scared him now. Every so often, he’d catch her staring upwards at the aliens, licking her lips. A problem for another day, he supposed. He wanted to see his family again.
As they drov
e down the street, Matt was able to finally get a clear view of the sky, and what he saw made him sick with fear. So many aliens. They dotted the sky in the thousands. They were everywhere, and he realized he could spend the rest of his life killing them and there would always be more left. Was the entire planet like this? Was there any safe space that would be left to them?
They were all quiet during the drive, lost in their own thoughts. Liz stared out the window and Heather’s lips moved, as if she was talking to herself. He realized how easy it would be to lose himself to despair and focused on the positive.
Abby and his dad and Heather’s mom would be okay. They now had a way to move outside and they’d discovered a weakness in the aliens. If they were able to do it – a ragtag group of small-town nobodies – then surely, others had discovered other weapons. They wouldn’t be the only ones.
He was able to find hope in that thought. They all needed time. Everyone was fragile, like a thin sheet of ice over a lake. It looked sturdy, but it would only take a single step to collapse it. And despite the progress they were making, the aliens would be back. That, more than anything, worried Matt. If this was an extermination, eventually someone would come back to check the traps.
Still, he thought about all the ways humans could bounce back. Whatever would come next, they'd be ready. He managed to make himself smile. Hope.
He didn’t need to solve forever. He only needed today.
Matt and the gang will be back in “Aliens and Teddy Bears”, coming out late 2019.
Acknowledgements
I’ve always wondered how long I could last in my house if I was unable to leave. A week? Two? What would I do? How would I pass the time? Those thoughts were the genesis for this book.
Why aliens though? Well, stories that contain elements of the fantastic only have three real plots. It’s either science, the supernatural or aliens. The supernatural was out, I wasn’t trying to rewrite The Walking Dead. Science was too much work, I’d need to research and figure out a plausible explanation. But aliens? They can be whatever you want. Perfect for a lazy part-time writer.
The original plot for this book was going to be about a group of circus clowns who were trapped in an abandoned funhouse. It was going to be called “Funhouse Disaster and the Clown Hereafter” and, in retrospect, that’s the book I should have written.
I thought writing a book would be easier the second time through. It wasn’t. Thankfully, I had a ton of help.
Thanks, as always to my awesome beta readers, Mom, Brady and Phil. You are all the best. Yvette, I know you really only wanted to go for coffee and complain about Cyprus Hill, but I kept forcing you to come up with plausible alien scenarios. Thanks.
To the Tiny Group, my writing partners I met on Scribophile: thank you all so much. Thanks for letting me into your group and thanks for working with me to get to the conclusion. Ruby, Tate, Claudia, you are all the best.
A very special and heartfelt thanks to Mimi. You read every single draft page and every week, like clockwork, you’d provide wonderful, thought-provoking feedback. You helped shape every single ounce of this book. Thank you so much. Please get Joe out into the world so everyone else can discover what a great writer you are.
And lastly, thanks to Cat of www.yourbetareader.com. Your feedback helped smooth the edges off the story. And you kind of came up with the sequel.
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