The Terminal

by Amber Fallon

  The alien’s head had snapped up violently at the sound of Joey’s brilliant fucking outburst. Now he growled, low and guttural, as he tossed aside what was left of the Security guard’s badly mangled corpse. He didn’t belt out one of those horrible howls, however. But somehow that made it worse.

  I’d gotten the impression that those howls were their way of communicating. I was pretty sure that when I’d heard them before, they’d been calling for reinforcements, announcing their presence and inviting others of their ilk to join in the fun. The fact that this one wasn’t doing that set the hairs on the back of my neck to full salute. He didn’t think he needed backup. That, or he didn’t want to share his prey with anyone else. Either way, I almost wished he would cry out for his alien chums, even if it did mean more of them to deal with. It’s true what they say, confidence is everything. Right now, he had plenty and I had none.

  I turned away from the damnably pathetic sight of Joey, all pretense of sneaking forgotten in the face of my imminent death and destruction. I jumped over the pile of dirt lest I slip and broke into a run, bolting through the empty doorframe with Joey hot on my heels. For a bigger guy who didn’t exactly broadcast stamina or physical fitness, he could fucking move.

  “RUN!” I cried, catching the nearest group member, which happened to be Michael, and propelling him ahead of me. “Where?” Melissa called back. Really? Worrying about logistics at a time like this? Leave it to a banker. Figures.

  “Back up the escalators!” I called, having no other options immediately spring to mind. Our footfalls rang out in the still, now slurp free silence, the heavier, sharper footfalls of the alien close behind us sounded like they might actually be coming from an AT-ST from the Star Wars universe. We bolted towards the escalators, feet flying in an adrenaline fueled all out run as if we were preparing for our final flight from the enemy. Perhaps we were.

  The group split into two, Michael and I taking the westernmost escalator, while Melissa, Hannah, and Joey took the eastern one. I heard those horrible alien footsteps drawing closer and turned to look back over my shoulder, preparing for one of those huge pale hands to grab my ankle and drag me back down the escalator’s metal steps as my face bounced off each one. Instead, I saw the worst thing I had yet seen that day, if not the worst thing I’d seen, period.

  Melissa was leading the trio of other survivors. She was nearly at the top of the escalators, moving at full speed. Hannah was a pace or two behind her, eyes wide in frantic terror. Joey pushed his way in front of her, squeezing the girl against the opposite handrail as he jockeyed for position. A dick move, to be sure, but nothing compared to what happened next.

  Joey reached back and took a fistful of Hannah’s shirt in his meaty grip. The girl’s mouth opened in a shocked “O” of surprise and then terror as Asshole of the Century shoved her over backwards, using the momentum of the push to propel himself forward. I watched, feeling a mixture of shock, sympathy, horror and revulsion coursing through me as Hannah tumbled down the escalator and landed in a heap at the bottom, just as Captain Happy stomped up to meet her.

  “Asshole!” I spun on my heel, pushing past a stunned Michael as I tried not to trip on my way back down the escalator.

  Hannah had shaken off the initial shock of the fall. Adrenaline had probably helped. She scooted backwards on her butt and heels until she ran into the wall beside the travel kiosk. Her eyes were wide with terror, fixated unblinkingly on the alien monstrosity as it took its sweet ass time lumbering towards her.

  Even from behind, I could tell that the cruel alien fuck was toying with her. Joey’s asshole tactic had worked, Hannah’s would-be sacrifice had done its job; distracting the caveman alien while the rest of the group got away—only I was for damned sure not going to let that happen.

  I took the remaining 3 escalator stairs in one quick jump, landing on the ground with the gun already in my hand.

  “HEY! YOU!” I cried, trying to draw the alien’s attention away from Hannah, hoping she’d get the idea and sneak away to safety while his back was turned. “Yeah, you heard me, Tall, Pale and Ugly! Why don’t you pick on somebody your own size? Or was the Jolly Green Giant already booked?” I was hoping my false bravado was masking my sheer terror. I wanted to sound tough and badass, have that alien fucker quaking in his boots before he ever laid eyes on me. Mad Max meets George Nada.

  He whirled on me, hands curled into claws, teeth bared, blood still caked all over him like he was Carrie on prom night. “That’s right, fucker. I’m here for YOU!” I was really starting to get carried away with this whole ‘action hero’ bit, but I couldn’t exactly turn back now, could I? Not when a little girl’s life hung in the balance. A little girl I’d promised to take care of.

  I raised the gun up in front of me like he was Dracula and I was Van Helsing, brandishing a cross or a little bottle of holy water. “You know what this is, tough guy?” I asked him in the most sarcastic, condescending tone I could muster.

  All that machismo must’ve done something, because the alien stopped in his tracks, relaxing his claw-like fingers and dropping his shoulders, his expression became something that almost looked like confusion. It was really rather comical on his big, ugly, misshapen face.

  “Yeah, it’s real easy picking on little girls and dead security guards, huh? Well, come on then! Let’s see how you handle a real man!”

  I was surprised to find that I actually did feel like the metaphorical ‘real man’. Maybe I was buying into my own hype, maybe the flood of chemicals in my brain had taken me on a rollercoaster ride to hell, or maybe I really was becoming some kind of action hero.

  The alien seemed unsure of himself, but I didn’t think that would save me forever, or even really buy me that much time. I doubted he’d seen any human beings stand up to him. They’d probably all fled in terror before his might. I was different. I could see where that would confuse or maybe even bother him, but like I said before, I didn’t think it would last for very long.

  Pale and Hulking took a step towards me, then another. I didn’t think, I just reacted. I hadn’t even realized what had happened until I felt the gun buck in my hand, heard the ringing in my ears, and saw a dime sized hole blossom on the alien’s upper left pectoral. Oh, man! Could you believe that aim? A heart shot on my very first try! I must be some kind of natural!

  The shot must’ve hit something vital, judging by the thick, tarlike blood that started running down his torso in gooey rivulets. His eyes widened. He looked down at the wound in surprise before swiping his pale fingers through his own blood and holding them up for inspection. It was like he couldn’t believe what had happened, that he’d been wounded by this puny little food source with a little piece of metal he could’ve crushed to scrap in his fist. But he didn’t go down instantly, which is what I had been hoping for after I’d seen the hole appear over where his heart should be. Maybe these things didn’t have their hearts in the left side of their chests like us humans. Maybe their hearts were in their feet or something. It wasn’t like I had the time or the equipment, or even the knowledge to give these guys a medical evaluation, even if I had managed to take this one out. Leave that to the eggheads in Washington. Right now I just wanted to survive, grab Hannah, and get the fuck out of dodge. But the big fucker, even though he was displaying an injury that I was pretty sure would’ve been fatal on a human, didn’t appear to be going down any time soon. In fact, he took another step closer, his expression quickly shifting through surprise, confusion, something that might’ve been pain, and anger. Oh, shit.

  I squeezed the trigger again, hoping against hope that I wasn’t out of bullets. The gun bucked in my hand. Once more, I’d demonstrated a remarkable ability to hit my target without even really aiming. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that these guys were so huge (like hitting the broad side of a barn?), maybe it was beginners’ luck, or maybe, just maybe, I was the second coming of John Fucking Wayne after all.

  The pale flesh between the alien’s
eyes seemed to disappear like a magic trick. Presto Change-o! Now you see it, now you don’t! In its place appeared a goopy looking black substance, speckled with greasy looking chunks of grayish stuff that slid down his bulbous nose and over his freakishly large lips. His eyes rolled back in his head, which had started to twitch like he was having some sort of small scale seizure. Less than ten feet away from me, the alien slime bucket fell to his knees, seconds before he crashed to the ground like a felled redwood. Score one for team Dirk!

  I let out a cry of victory, throwing my fist in the air and pumping it as I jumped up and down. “Oh yeah!” I sing songed, no longer caring about noise in the wake of gunfire, “Who’s the man?” I let out a final triumphant shout of “Hannah, did you SEE that?!” as I turned to my damsel in distress, ready to sweep her into my arms and blow this pop-stand forever.

  Only Hannah wasn’t responding. She was still crouched up against the wall, curled into a protective little ball, and she wasn’t moving. Maybe the gunfire had been too much for her, combined with everything else? Maybe she’d fainted? I took a step towards her, dead alien and major victory already all but forgotten.

  “Hannah?” I asked, in a smaller, almost timid voice. “Hannah?” I knelt down beside her, turning her chin up to face me. That’s when I noticed that the front of her shirt was soaked with blood. Her face was ashen, her lips deathly pale and slack.

  I felt myself losing some of my control as I frantically felt her throat and wrists, checking for some sign of a pulse before giving up on that idea and holding my palm against her chest, hoping to feel some kind of movement, some faint breathing, but there was nothing. Just a tiny hole in her shirt about the size of a dime.

  And blood. There was so much blood. How had that much blood come out of such a small hole in such a small person in such a small amount of time? It didn’t seem possible. It shouldn’t be possible.

  It appeared that in my great berserker rage of heroic glory, I’d forgotten one important thing about bullets; they traveled through the things they hit, sometimes into whatever was beyond them. I knew it, of course. Dylan had been a great CSI junkie and we’d watched Grissom and crew dig spent lead out of many a wall in our time together, but action movies never seemed to take those physics into account unless it suited them. One of the bullets must’ve either gone right through the alien or else ricocheted off something and hit Hannah square in the chest. How about that trick shot, Annie Oakley? Was that one for the record books? Through a creepy ass fucked up alien and straight into a poor defenseless little girl? A little girl I’d only been down here in the first place trying to save? That’s right, two for one! I’d fucked up big time. And now Hannah had paid the price for it. My heart sank into my shoes.

  “Oh, Hannah.” I said, feeling tears well up in my eyes, obscuring my vision and making Hannah’s lifeless body appear momentarily doubled. “I’m so, so sorry.” Warm, salty liquid trails ran down my cheeks, much like the alien’s blood had run down his. A grim comparison.

  “I was just trying to save you. I didn’t know what would happen.” My words sounded hollow even to my own ears. A little girl was dead and I was responsible and all I could come up with was “I didn’t know”? Poor Hannah. She wasn’t going to make it out of this nightmare now. She’d never go to prom, get married, or have kids. Her story ended here, cold and lifeless on the floor of a besieged airport, surrounded by me, the man who’d pulled the trigger, and a bunch of other corpses.

  I brushed her cheek, much the same way I had Dylan’s, my finger leaving a smeary streak of her own blood on her pale, lifeless skin. It looked like Navajo war paint. I wiped the snot running down my upper lip with the same hand, probably leaving another smear of blood there like a gristly moustache. I didn’t care. A little girl was dead and it was all my fault. I was supposed to have saved her, god damn it! Where was Hannah’s happy ending? The one where we ride off into the sunset together and look into the rearview mirror just in time to see the airport get nuked? This wasn’t fucking fair. None of it. Not the attack on the airport, not Dylan’s death, and certainly not Hannah’s. Yet here I was, still alive and (physically) well, even with the blood of an innocent little girl literally on my hands. I didn’t belong here, standing upright, looking down on the body of someone I’d come to care about a great deal in just a few short minutes. She did. But there wasn’t a single goddamned thing I could’ve done about it. If I’d had the power to touch her and transfer my life force into her broken little body, I would’ve done it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately for both of us, it doesn’t work that way. Life isn’t given to the deserving or taken from the undeserving. It just is.

  I could feel Hannah’s skin beginning to cool beneath my fingers. I’d been holding her head, trying to will air into her lungs, force her heart to start beating again by sheer force of wanting it, but it wasn’t working. Hannah was most definitely dead.

  I had to find her family once I made it out of this mess—if I made it out. Someone deserved to know that Hannah was here and what had happened to her. But what the hell would I say to someone who knew her? “Gee, sorry, I accidentally shot your daughter in the chest and left her body for aliens to nosh on.”? I didn’t think that would earn me anything but a bloody nose if I was lucky. I thought about trying to take her with me for a second, but dismissed the idea almost immediately. That was probably 70 or 80 pounds of dead weight, literally. That would be a lot to try and haul around while evading aliens and doing my best to get the fuck out of the airport in one piece. I couldn’t take that kind of hit to my mobility. Besides, would presenting Hannah’s parents with her dead body really be much better, all things considered? No, I’d just have to leave her there and hope her body remained relatively intact so they could recover it and she could have a decent burial once all this was over. Poor kid.

  My eyes traveled down from Hannah’s still, lifeless face to the half heart pendant that hung around her neck. It struck me then that it looked almost like an upside down tear made of gold. Gingerly, I lifted it from her small throat, turning it over to peer into the face of the father who’d lost his little girl to my carelessness. I couldn’t make out much detail, though, as the picture was soaked with blood. I began rubbing it with my thumb in an effort to clear some of it off, and that’s when I heard them—a pair of alien howls erupting almost in unison.

  They were different than the howls I’d heard before, however. They sounded surprised, maybe even saddened. They carried none of the aggression or fury of the war cries that had erupted all over the airport during the initial onslaught.

  I shot a glance towards the source of the sound, back in the direction where the partially eaten corpse of a TSA agent lie behind a white particleboard podium. Two of the alien fuckers stood there staring right at the body of their fallen comrade. One of them was shorter than the other, but stockier. He had a clean shaven head, red tribal type tattoos emblazoned over his chest and down both arms, and wore only some kind of sturdy looking black loincloth. He carried a club that was easily 5 feet long with serrated metal blades sticking out of it at irregular intervals. It was his buddy that really worried me, however. He was wearing thick boots made from some type of shiny armor. A huge axe, easily capable of cleaving me in twain, hung at his side. His long white hair was still wet—undoubtedly from our previous encounter in the men’s room.

  They hadn’t seen me yet. The travel kiosk blocked their line of sight. They both looked around, sniffing. Their lack of notice gave me the element of surprise, that’s for sure, now if I could just figure out what to do with it. Every second that passed made it increasingly more likely that they’d see me and once that happened, I was pretty much done for. I could probably try taking a shot at them, but at best I’d only hit one of them, leaving the other to rip me to pieces once my cover had been blown. Or I could run as far and as fast as I could, all the while hoping not to run into any more of those things. Where would I go? I had no idea, but I decided my best option was probably to make a
break for it, hoping that the few seconds’ worth of head start I’d get would be enough to save me.

  I yanked Hannah’s necklace free and tucked it into my pocket. The same pocket where Dylan’s necklace lay coiled against my leg. My jeans were becoming something like a living graveyard full of necklaces of people I’d cared about. People that had died, at least in part, because of me. That was a morbid thought.

  I barely had time for a muttered “Sorry.” as I shoved Hannah’s lifeless corpse aside and heaved myself upright, already breaking into a run before my feet had actually touched the ground. I still had no idea where I was going, but anywhere really was better than here.

  The escalators were straight in front of me, but I decided against taking that option. I didn’t want to bring this kind of doom down upon the heads of the other survivors. Joey, maybe, but not Michael or Melissa. I had no way of knowing where they’d gone. I didn’t see them in the second or two I had to glance up as I ran by. I hoped they were safe. Selfishly, I hoped they hadn’t seen what had happened to Hannah. What I’d done to her.

  Instead of going up, I ran between the escalators and made a bee line for the food court. It was probably my best bet, as I figured there would be plenty of places to hide and maybe even a few weapons in the form of knives or other food preparation tools. Speaking of weapons, I was surprised to find the gun still in my hand. After everything that had happened over the last few minutes, I’d sort of forgotten I was holding it. I thought about all those action movies I’d seen in which the hero turns back and fires behind him while running away from the bad guys. Ok, I thought, let’s give that a try. After all, my very first two shots had hit their marks pretty solidly, so why not? I didn’t want to risk turning around and running headlong into a wall or something, or tripping over a body or any of the other debris that littered the floor, so I decided to keep my attention in front of me. What’s the worst that could happen?