V 11 - The Texas Run

by George W Proctor (UC) (epub)

“Get ’em and let’s get out of here. ” Sheryl Lee rubbed her hand over her arms and shivered in spite of the Texas morning heat. “It feels like we’re entering a rattler pit. ” “We’re insulting Earth’s reptiles by comparing them to these things,” Rick said with a smile as he moved to the body of the Visitor in the co-pilot’s seat. “Ugly bastards, aren’t they?”

  Sheryl Lee shivered again as her gaze shifted to the extraterrestrial creatures that had piloted the skyfighter. Rick’s own reaction was a disgusted grunt.

  The human disguises the two aliens wore no longer concealed their reptilian faces. Tom and cracked in the crash, the plasticlike makeup dangled from forehead, cheeks, and chin. Beneath were faces that bespoke an evolutionary process far removed from the ancestral mammalian tree that gave rise to man.

  The aliens’ high protruding foreheads and thin noses with slitted nostrils were like something normally reserved for the blackness of human nightmares. Green scales, mottled with patches of black, covered the unearthly visages.

  Rick gave silent thanks that the aliens’ eyes had closed before they died. Those eyes were the invaders’ most hellish feature—fiery orange orbs with black slits for pupils. They were the eyes of an alligator or crocodile except they were alive with a smoldering intelligence.

  An involuntary shivery chill worked its way up the young man’s spine. If their scientific and technological advances were an indication of their superior intelligence, the possiblity provided no relief from Rick’s primal fear of them.

  Reaching down, he unsnapped the holster of the alien in the co-pilot’s seat and slipped a blue-black pistol from the scabbard. “You know how to work one of these?” He handed the weapon to Sheryl Lee.

  The flaming-haired Texan hefted the awkwardly designed firearm, flicked a switch near its handle, then moved the priming lever back and forth several times. “Full charge and primed.”

  Rick pursed his lips thoughtfully. Sheryl Lee’s graceful beauty was as deceptive as her charming accent. This was no pampered Southern belle, but a woman descended from strong pioneer stock. She displayed no awkwardness or hesitation with the weapon.

  A trace of an amused smile moved over her red lips when she noticed Rick’s stare. “My daddy took me quail huntin’ with him for the first time when I was five years old. I had my own twenty-two rifle by the time I was seven and a deer rifle at ten. I’m no stranger to rifles or pistols. This nasty little thing just fires a different type of bullet. Kind of like the snakes themselves, it hisses instead of giving a good healthy bark.”

  With a shrug Rick turned to the dead Visitor slumped in the pilot’s seat. Sheryl Lee was far more familiar and at home with firearms than he. He had never even held a rifle or a pistol until the Visitors’ first arrival on Earth.

  The Uzi that was now his constant companion had only been an exotic ornament of spy novels before he joined the resistance. In fact, the first time he had actually seen one of the machine pistols was in the hands of Secret Service agents during the repeated television newscasts of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.

  Opening the pilot’s holster, he extracted the pistol and checked the charge and primer lever. Like Sheryl Lee’s weapon, the energy gun carried a full charge and had not been damaged in the crash.

  His gaze traveled around the interior of the skyfighter before returning to his companion. “I don’t think there’s anything else we can use here. Let’s see if we can find that town now.”

  Sheryl Lee made no attempt to hide her relief when she turned and stepped from the crack in the downed craft’s hull. Rick took two steps after her when he heard a rustling behind him. He started to look around.

  A mountain of animated flesh—reptilian flesh— slammed into his side!

  “Ooomph!” Air exploded from his lungs under the impact. The weight of his attacker sent him sailing through the ragged rent in the ship’s side.

  He hit the ground twisting, but the living mountain remained atop him, an oppressive weight that crushed down on his lungs, making it impossible to breathe. Fingers, cold, scaly, clawed fingers closed around his neck. Thumbs pressed into his windpipe.

  Unable to think or focus, he balled his fists and struck out blindly. Again and again he hammered the blurred boulder of green and black that hovered above his head.

  Spitting hisses answered his rain of blows. The ever-increasing pressure choking his throat lessened.

  Rick threw his legs in the air and brought them down with all the strength he could muster. At the same time, his chest lurched upward and he twisted to the left.

  The unnaturally cold alien hands slipped from his neck, the grip of the scaly claws broken. He lurched and twisted again, unseating the massive weight perched on his chest. Then he rolled free. Finding hands and knees, he scuttled through the sand while he sucked cooling air into his burning lungs.

  “Rick, look out!”

  He heard Sheryl Lee’s warning, managed to turn and focus just before the lizard-faced monster plowed into him once more.

  He groaned as the weight of the collision carried him to his back for a second time. Not waiting for the viselike hands to close around his throat, he swung at the Visitor’s head.

  The reptile’s fingers snapped shut about his wrists. Like an adult holding the arms of a child, the alien pinned its human opponent’s arms to the ground. Above Rick the comers of a lipless mouth curled back in a grotesque mockery of a human smile. That mouth opened and a blood-red forked tongue serpentinely writhed as the Visitor hissed its anger.

  Repeating his earlier method of escape, Rick threw his legs in the air and lurched as he brought them down. He bucked and wrenched his body from to side to side. The reptilian nightmare remained firmly planted atop him.

  Another resounding hiss spat from the scaled mouth.

  With the tongue flicking like a lizard smelling the air, the alien’s head slowly lowered. The tongue disappeared back into the Visitor’s mouth, then in the next instant lashed out like a living bullwhip and wrapped itself about its victim’s neck.

  “Aarrraaarrrhhh.” A strangled gasp gurgled from Rick’s throat.

  The nooselike tongue tightened, a garrote of alien flesh and blood that would complete the task the Visitor’s thumbs had started.

  Thrashing, kicking, lurching, Rick struggled to free himself. His head jerked from side to side in an attempt to loosen the closing ring of death that tightened about his neck with each passing second. It didn’t help. He could dislodge neither the Visitor’s weight nor the creature’s hellish tongue as it gradually choked the life from his body.

  A high-pitched whine cut through the rush of the West Texas wind. A flare of blue-white light glared behind the Visitor. The alien jerked upright, body rigid.

  A heartbeat later the creature’s choking tongue went flaccid, uncurling from Rick’s neck. Atop the California freedom fighter, the Visitor jerked and twitched spasmodically before tumbling to the sand to lie there unmoving.

  Above him Sheryl Lee stood with a Visitor energy pistol held stiff armed before her. The muzzle of the weapon shifted, keeping a steady aim on the alien for any sign it might still live.

  “Thank you,” Rick managed to gasp-mumble while he inhaled deep, cool lungfuls of air and exhaled. He pushed the Visitor’s legs from him and stood, grateful that the young woman not only knew how to handle a gun, but knew how to use it as well.

  “How could it still be alive?” The barrel of the energy pistol dipped, and Sheryl Lee’s emerald eyes lifted to

  Rick. “We’re well north of the Visitors’ free zone here. If the crash didn’t kill it, then the red dust should have. ” Rick’s gaze moved back to the lizard man sprawled on the sand. Sheryl Lee was right; they were north of the free zone. He was so used to living in Los Angeles where the bacterial toxin had no effect on the Visitors that he hadn’t considered a living alien anything out of the ordinary. Here the red dust should have killed the snake within seconds.

  “I don’t know.�
�� He arched an eyebrow. “Maybe it takes longer for the poison to work here so close to the free zone.”

  Sheryl Lee nibbled at her lower lip and shrugged. “I never heard anyone mention a slower reaction time before.”

  “Well, it sure as hell didn’t knock him out immediately,” Rick answered. “It’s been at least a half hour since that Mustang brought down the skyfighter.” Rick pivoted and stared at the wrecked alien ship. “His friend!”

  Without another word of explanation, Rick snatched his dropped energy pistol from the sand and darted back into the ship. A flare of harsh blue-white light accompanied by the crackling hiss of released energy preceded his exit from the craft.

  “I made certain his friend wouldn’t suddenly come back to life,” Rick answered Sheryl Lee’s questioning gaze. “The last thing we need is the co-pilot radioing his position to his fellow snakes.”

  The coverall-clad redhead nodded.

  Her reaction sent a chilling shudder through the Californian. The nod, the casual acceptance of his act, was like viewing a mirror reflection of himself. He had just placed the barrel of a gun to the head of a sentient creature and pulled the trigger. The war they fought defined the action as a matter of simple survival. Yet he could not escape the feeling he had acted as an executioner, not a soldier.

  There should be guilt, a sense of loss, he told himself, trying to detect a hint of those emotions within him. He found them in neither himself nor the Texas beauty who lifted the water bottle and thermos from the ground. It was as though he had swatted an annoying insect rather than killed a sentient being.

  He sucked at his teeth in disgust. At twenty-two life should only be filled with beauty, not hard, cold bitterness. The Visitors were robbing humankind of more than just their home world and their lives. They were gradually leaching away man’s humanity.

  “If we’re goin’ to find that town, we’d best be headin’ out, Surfer Boy.”

  Sheryl Lee’s voice brought him from his bitter reflections. He looked, smiled weakly, and started walking northward over the sandy flatlands.

  Chapter 7

  Rick Hurley’s gaze scanned the country that swept north before them. In the five hours and estimated fifteen miles that had passed since they left the Wanda Sue behind, it had changed little. Wind-gnarled mesquite trees, an occasional scrub cedar, sand, rock, and flatness were all that met the eye.

  A southern wind blew across this land Sheryl Lee called the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains. Coming directly up from the Mexican deserts, the wind seared the skin like a blast from an open kiln.

  Rick glanced at the unmerciful sun that scowled overhead. A few high feathery clouds wisped on the wind offered no hope of even a brief respite from the broiling heat.

  “Must be ninety-five if it’s a degree.” He swiped at a sheen of sweat on his forehead with a forearm. The effort did nothing more than mingle the perspiration on his arm with that on his face. “And you people call this autumn? It’s late September, for Chrissake!”

  “Why do they still wear the human masks?” Sheryl Lee asked from out of the blue, as though she hadn’t heard his complaints.

  “What?” Rick glanced at the woman. Her khakis were unstained by even the slightest trace of sweat. “Masks?”

  “The Visitors—why do they maintain their human charade? It doesn’t make any sense. The whole world

  knows what they look like. Do they think we wake up each day and it’s a whole brand-new world to us?” Her eyebrows dipped over her emerald eyes and her brow furrowed. “It really doesn’t make any sense, does it?” “I think the sun’s getting to you more than it’s getting to me. Your brain’s slowly cooking. Why don’t we take a breather?” Rick waved an arm toward the sand. One spot was just as good as the next. Shade was a rare commodity in this harsh country.

  “It’s too dry here to be hot. You want hot, then imagine these temperatures mixed with high humidity— that’s Dallas,” Sheryl Lee answered.

  However, Rick noted the young redhead made no objection to his suggested rest. She sank to the sand, opened the water bottle, took a swig, then passed it to him when he lowered himself beside her.

  The water was hot and tasted like plastic, but it was wet trickling down his parched throat. He was tempted to take another swallow but replaced the container’s cap instead. Sheryl Lee had restricted herself to one sip; he could manage on the same amount.

  “Why do you think the Visitors still wear their human makeup?” she rephrased her original question.

  “Come to think of it, it really doesn’t make much sense, does it?” He shrugged and glanced at her. “Why’d you bring it up?”

  “Those two snakes in the skyfighter today with their masks ripped away just started me wonderin’.” Sheryl Lee leaned back, supporting herself on her elbows. “The masks don’t seem to make much sense anymore, not with the whole world knowin’ what they look like.”

  Rick agreed, but in truth he had never thought about it before. The lizards had been unmasked, yet they still maintained their human disguises. “Maybe it’s a matter of public relations.”

  “Huh?”

  “Maybe they’re trying to play with our minds. You know, if they look like us, it will make them more acceptable in the long run—easier for us to deal with aliens that appear human. If they ran around looking like the snakes they are, it would be a constant reminder of the differences that exist between us. You have to admit it would be hard for Diana to convince the world she was all love and light if each time she went on television the world saw those damnable orange reptile eyes and watched her lizard tongue flicking the air.”

  Rick lifted a hand and rubbed at his neck. He could still feel the alien tongue that had wrapped itself about his throat like a noose.

  “Maybe you’re right, but I don’t know.” Sheryl Lee shook her head dubiously. “Surely they don’t think we’re that stupid. That we’d be taken in by a bit of powder and rouge.”

  Rick brushed back a strand of blond hair the wind tossed across his forehead. “I believe that’s exactly what they think. They see themselves as creatures bom to rule the universe, and we’re merely cattle to be bred and slaughtered. ”

  “Slaughtered,” Sheryl Lee repeated with a shiver. “That’s what they did to my father. He was a geologist caught up in the scientist conspiracy the Visitors foisted on the world when they first arrived. He was arrested, tried, and convicted on charges of conspiring with other scientists in a plot to horde oil supplies. That was here in Texas of all places, where oil’s always been important to our economy!”

  Rick saw the tears that welled and misted her green eyes, although her voice neither trembled nor quavered.

  “Shock troopers shot him down as he was led from the courtroom,” she continued. “They claimed he attempted to escape. It made good headlines for their propaganda machine. And believe me, it made every Texas newspaper and television channel.”

  Sheryl Lee paused and swallowed hard. She stared at the horizon, her eyes never meeting Rick’s. “That’s when my mother and I joined the resistance. Lord, we thought we had won with the red dust. We thought we had won!”

  Rick reached out and rested a hand on her shoulder. “I know. I was a student at UCLA when the Visitors first appeared. Like the rest of the world, I thought our saviors had arrived from the stars.”

  His chest constricted and his throat grew tight as memories he had tried to bury burst from their neat niches and flooded his mind. “My family—mother, father, and sister—lived in a small town on the coast north of Los Angeles. One night every resident in that town disappeared. They were there one day, then the next they were gone.”

  “Processed by the Visitors?” Sheryl Lee’s gaze shifted to her companion.

  “Yeah,” Rick nodded. “Like canned meat, the Visitors stuffed them into those gelatin capsules and placed them in cold storage in a Mother Ship.”

  “Then there’s a possibility they’re still alive.” Encouragement filled the redhead
’s voice.

  “Perhaps. But I don’t know which Mother Ship they were taken to.” In Rick’s voice there was only helplessness.

  He knew the immensity of the Visitors’ Mother Ships and their numbers. Each vessel had the capacity of storing millions of captives. To find his family would mean capturing the whole fleet of five-mile-diameter ships. Bringing the moon to the Earth would be a far easier task.

  “We’ve both drawn a sorry hand from life,” Sheryl said. “But those are the cards we’ve got to play with. ” “And right now we still need to find a town . . .” “Or a road,” she concluded. “We don’t want to be stuck out here tonight. It might be hot at the moment, but soon as the sun goes down, we’ll both be shiverin’.”

  Pushing up from the ground, Rick stood, stretched, then offered the khaki-clad girl a hand. She accepted, pulling herself to her feet and unscrewing the top to the water bottle again.

  “One for the road, Surfer Boy.” She smiled, took a swig, and passed the plastic jug to Rick.

  “Surfer boy?” He licked at his lips to moisten their cracking surface after wetting his mouth with another sip. “How in hell did you come up with that?”

  “All you boys out in California are surfers, the way I hear tell,” she answered as they resumed their northward trek.

  He chuckled and shook his head.

  “Come on, you can ’fess up. You have blond hair, a dark tan, and look muscled enough all over to fit the part.” She grinned. “I can just see you ridin’ the waves at Malibu or one of those beaches we’re always hearing about.”

  “Actually, I’ve only been on a surfboard a few times in my life,” he replied. “Tennis was my sport. Before the Visitors came I had hopes of eventually giving it a try on the professional circuit. Wasn’t too bad a player in school.”

  Her smile widened to a grin. “Beach bum, tennis bum—same difference. California, land of the idle rich.”

  “I thought that was here in Texas? You know—cattle barons and oil millionaires everywhere you turn.”

  It was Sheryl Lee’s turn to laugh. “Always wanted to be a poor little rich girl. But my momma and daddy didn’t cooperate. Never could understand why, either.”