“You’re the one who wanted to get engaged. I was happy just chilling.”
Melinda smiled the way people smile when they are so angry they don’t know they are, her lips moved but her teeth stayed clenched as she said, “Well, lover, the joke is on you. I knew something was up the day you told me you liked Coldplay. You didn’t even know a single song of theirs. I would play you their songs and you would demand I change the station. But they were supposed to be your favorite band, because they were my favorite band! So I did some digging, because it was my job. Your file was too clean, too obvious. I’d scratched out Russian puppets like you plenty of times before. But I had to know what your endgame was. You know the saying, ‘keep your enemies closer.”
Derek didn’t pick the song. Melinda had. She unleashed the mellow crooning in his head, and it ran circles around the only part of the song he knew. The part he loathed. Imposter struggled to form sentences, began to sing the same part aloud.
“Everybody knows that song, you’re not a real fan!”
The imposter sang louder.
“Shut up! I never loved you and that mole on the back of your neck looks like cancer!” Melinda pounded the table over and over. “You communist scumbag! You would’ve worked your way close to the President and then assassinated him! For who? Who do you work for?”
“He could be trying to tell us,” one of the men said. “If the song was about the color red he’d be talking about the Soviets, but he’s saying…”
“That’s a little racist,” the other man said.
“He’s the one saying it, and he’s on their side!”
Melinda silenced the argument. “Tell me, Derek. Or I’ll go after everyone that you do love. You communists aren’t completely devoid of love are you?”
“I’m not communist,” the imposter managed.
This remark did not please Melinda at all. She gave the signal.
Derek’s arms stung. Bub’s face was a little too close for comfort, his big beady eyes hovered mere inches from Derek’s.
“Well, did it work?”
“Yeah, he started singing like an idiot. It’s really great for my street cred,” Derek said. He was still trying to wrap his mind around the idea that Melinda worked for some secret branch of the government and had only kept dating him because she thought he was a spy. He was more confused than angry, but he knew that would follow soon. “Maybe they’re just messing with us.”
“What?”
“I know Melinda. She was sweet and innocent and yeah she had hairy toes, but she was dainty and she liked reality TV shows. Maybe the aliens are messing with Beth and me. Maybe Beth’s fiancé isn’t dead. If they can pretend to be us what would stop them from making doppelgängers of our loved ones to confuse us?”
Bub shook his head. “That is why you must not focus on what they show you. You must not let them sway your mission.”
Derek nodded. He was almost 90% convinced, so he kept reminding himself, hoping the repetition would be enough.
The ground jumped. It didn’t shake or vibrate. It jumped. For a second Derek was weightless as the force felt like one of the zero gravity simulations done on an airplane at high altitudes. Only the landing wasn’t soft. Bub didn’t get back up. The little alien was knocked out cold, and Derek counted the alien lucky as he tried to stand up. Something wanted him to stay down. It was much bigger than Derek so he had no choice but to listen.
Derek knew this was the beast that had been chasing them. The beast Beth delayed. Derek knew she was dead now.
The beast spoke, “Get inside the mouth!” It raised a spiked claw and pointed towards a giant rendering of a lamprey’s mouth. The beast itself was almost thirty feet tall, a good thing the corridors were even more spacious. But it resembled a pug, as if it had once been bigger and all of its insides shrunk and left folds of scales and flesh with nothing better to do than bunch up like a stack of dishes.
“Get inside the mouth!” the beast ordered again.
Derek got to his feet, he was about to run when he stared straight into the beast’s mouth and saw a hand pushing upwards against the gums.
“It’s me! Hurry!” the beast said in a voice that mostly sounded like it belonged to Beth Bailey.
“Beth?”
The beast shuffled forward. “Hurry! They’re coming!”
Derek wished Bub was awake to tell him it was a dumb idea, that it was trap. Derek was just stupid enough to believe Beth Bailey had defeated the mammoth beast. He stepped forward, but couldn’t commit. Beth birthed herself a bit more, revealing her lips, chin, and shoulder.
“Come on, Derek, trust me!”
Derek stepped on the beast’s tongue.
It was a trap. The tongue activated the throat, a suction swallowed Derek whole. He rolled into a wet, rancid, and unsurprisingly dark chamber. This was the beast’s stomach.
“Keep quiet,” Beth whispered before Derek could regain his composure. She pressed against a wall of the stomach, peering through an opening no bigger than her fists, which held it open.
Derek slipped in the bile, the splash soaked him from head to toe, his eyes stung and watered. He moaned.
Then he heard voices. They didn’t speak English. They must’ve been the ‘they’ that Beth had said were coming. Derek crawled up to Beth’s side and peered through the same hole.
To describe the creatures Derek saw was like describing the texture of a Van Gogh painting. You had to really see it, a print wouldn’t do. You could make out how each stroke found its way onto the canvas. The aliens were like this. Their scales had purpose beyond being epidermal. They had manifested with the beauty of a conch shell, all mathematically plausible, less organic. They had long necks, but more like a great dane’s than a giraffe’s. The heads themselves were shaped more like a fork protruding from the muscular builds, the angle veering backwards over their shoulder blades. They didn’t appear to have eyes, but their mouths were like layers of mesh jerseys, only grotesque like stretched chewing gum. From there, six ovals raced up the front of their heads with a blue glow that scratched like the static on an old television set.
There were three of them, and if they had a way of telling each other apart, Derek wasn’t going to be able to figure it out through the little peep hole in the beast’s mouth.
They examined Bub, and convened on their next move. They signaled the beast and then took Bub with them on a floating gurney that they must’ve pulled from the pulsing walls somehow. One of the aliens turned to the beast. It spoke and gave a gesture and then turned its back and walked away.
Beth watched them intensely until they disappeared around a bend, then she turned only to be surprised by how close Derek had positioned himself.
“They took Bub,” Derek said.
“No, kidding. They would’ve killed you. Good thing you’re dumb enough to climb into the belly of the whale, Jonah.”
“I saw you, it took a second. You could’ve explained better, I assumed it killed you.”
“I wanted it to kill me, but it wasn’t fast enough at digesting me. I just kept beating it from the inside. It was too big,” she said. “And I think it was a pretty high level because it isn’t dead yet.”
“Wait. What?”
“I couldn’t kill it.”
“And we’re in its belly?”
“You didn’t think I move it on my own did you? If I twist this is starts thumping its feet, and then I just kick this or that and it’ll turn.”
“This is incredibly stupid.”
“Look, with this we don’t have to take out the security measures. We can go straight to where they broadcast the signal, take that out and not have to worry about them ruining our day slicing up our loved ones.”
Derek decided not to argue with that point.
“You know, I think it’s all fake,” he said, and produced a smile that he hoped Beth could see in the near dark of the belly. “Think about it. They picked us to be close to people who could make their invasion go smoothly. So they can
’t jeopardize our lives, but they also had the technology to create a duplicate of us, so why not duplicate our loved ones to show us they mean business by making us witness some horrifying end to them. I mean they made my fiancé into some secret government agent, can you believe that? Coleman, Melinda Coleman. She can barely operate a push mower, let alone an automobile.” Derek laughed. “Your guy is alive I guarantee it.”
“Did you just say Melinda Coleman?”
“Yes.”
“Did she go to Fairfax High School?”
“Yes.”
Beth let the hole close and they were plunged into darkness.
“I knew her,” Beth said. “All I ever heard were rumors so I don’t know if it is true or anything. But she didn’t go to school her senior year. I mean she showed up at graduation and graduated with all of us. People thought she had a kid, but that wasn’t it either. The one everyone claimed was that she tested so high on her SATs that she was hired on by the government as an analyst of some sort.”
“Right.”
“I’m serious. It made a lot of sense. She wasn’t really a friend with anyone. She was kind of a snob. I mean if it’s the same girl,” Beth said.
Derek didn’t know why he bothered frowning in the dark, but he did. “Are you just trying to hurt my feelings?”
“No, no. It’s just that. You know what? You’re right. It’s just those alien jerk wads trying to scare us. Come on. We can’t waste anymore time.”
Beth was confident she knew where the communications center was, but for Derek, anyone’s guess was as good as his, if not better. When they reached it Derek did not argue. He went to work bashing the glowing screens. There was no evidence that any of the destruction they did made any difference. Until Derek realized he might never see the real Melinda again. His last images of her were of the woman who claimed to be a special agent in the government, and she had really let Derek had it, calling their whole relationship a fraud.
Derek stopped pinching himself and waited for the imposter on earth to connect to him. But the connection was never made.
“Now they can’t use our loved ones as leverage,” Derek said.
“That, or we doomed them. They may just kill them all out of spite now,” Beth said. “This is bigger than you or I. And if they are going to take my family away from me, I’m going to make every last one of these ugly alien bastards pay.”
“But what now? Communications are down. Bub had a plan and I don’t know what he wanted us to do next.”
“Are you this much of a whiner on Earth, or should I cut you some slack because we’re trapped on a gigantic alien space craft that’s trying to invade our planet?”
Derek laughed. He liked the fire that empowered Beth now. “I apologize. Give me the order and I’ll do as you command.”
“We have to find out where they took Bub, he can tell us what to break next.”
“Maybe we should just break everything?”
5. LEFT HANGING
It was all going according to plan. Well, Beth and Derek’s plan. They smashed anything that looked important. They’d check every room. Sometimes they had to face a beast as a result of their vandalism, but they were getting stronger with every battle. It wasn’t a fight anymore. It was sport.
There were the obligatory high fives and fist bumps, Beth even gave Derek a tap on his behind after a particularly gnarly spin kick dislodged a beast’s head.
“Good work,” Beth said with a twinkle in her eye. They were both covered in the blood and guts of hundreds of beasts. The time when they desired showers had passed. They climbed back into the giant beast, it was still the best way to travel undetected through the corridors.
“We’re pretty much invincible now.”
“Don’t get too cocky,” Beth warned.
“I’m just saying. If we save the world and get back home we’re going to be superheroes. I mean if all this power we’re gaining lasts, right?”
“You’ve got to make it off this spaceship first.”
“Yeah, but I mean think about it. We could win the UFC title or something. That would be awesome. Of course we’d have to downplay our abilities a little, so that it’s a good fight for the pay-per-view audience.”
“Sounds like a good plan.” Beth didn’t sound as enthused. “I hope you make it back.”
“You have to believe he’s still alive,” Derek said. He knew that was what was still eating away at Beth. Derek was certain the aliens were only trying to manipulate them into thinking horrible things had happened to their loved ones.
“I’d rather be happily surprised than to experience that again. You don’t know what I saw.”
Derek decided to avoid the subject. He liked the Beth who slapped his butt better than the one who wasn’t planning on surviving their mission. He knew that was the reason behind the twinkle in her eye, a last hurrah.
“Those are some big doors. What do you think is in there?”
Beth steered the beast closer, but the doors did not automatically open like all the others had. “They’re locked. Do you see a control panel?”
“Let me out, I’ll go check,” Derek said as he pried the beast’s throat open. He slid through and did a quick assessment of his surroundings. There were no yellow force fields that would alert the aliens of his presence. They didn’t mind their giant beast wandering around their ship, and that had made things easy for Beth and Derek. So far the aliens had no idea that was how they were getting around. If they found out they would surely alter their security measures. Unfortunately, there were things that could not be done within the belly of a disgusting beast.
Derek wondered if the aliens thought they were dead. Bub likely verified those theories before they killed him. Derek assumed they would kill him. Bub had told him early on, that the beasts were not just for security. They were here to help train the aliens themselves. That might be the only explanation for why it took the aliens so long to realize it was a couple of humans and Bub running around killing all their pets and also why the large wandering beast was able to transport Derek and Beth around without any suspicion.
Derek laughed at the aliens’ oversight.
“Anything?” Beth called from the beast.
Derek had been looking, but not as carefully as he should. His mind had wandered. The habit had probably kept him from becoming a real secret special agent. He was just a good lap dog. He hated that though. He focused his mind and scoured the door. There had been panels before, which Bub had manipulated. There was nothing on this massive door, and perhaps for the best. Derek imagined it as a set of bay doors that would lead to some massive flying saucer. He told Beth so much.
“Why would they need to fly their saucer through the rest of the ship? Whatever comes out of those doors isn’t going to have a lot of room in most if not all the corridors we’ve traveled.
“Well then, maybe they’re not doors!”
Derek kicked the doors. They immediately reacted, like the dropping of a silk curtain, the doors dispersed. Behind the large blackness, stars, and Earth, as green and blue as he’d always been told. It was beautiful.
“It’s a window,” Beth gasped.
From where Derek stood there were no wars or traffic, no racism or crime. If there was pollution and global warming, it was only adding to the beauty of the blue and green marble.
“Do you think the space ship is invisible? And maybe the would be astronomers and NASA folks can’t see us?”
“Maybe, come on,” she said hastily. “We need to get back to work.”
Derek held his gaze a moment longer. He had never truly loved his planet. There were so many things wrong in this world, but seeing it as a whole struck him with pride. It was his home. This is what they had to protect.
There wasn’t another breath Derek could waste. It was he who powered the beast. Beth couldn’t flex a muscle fast enough. Derek took control and shredded his way through the spaceship. He hoped to puncture the hull and allow the vacuum of spa
ce to do the rest of the work.
He could feel the energy as it surged through him. It paralyzed him. Slimy insides ran off his cheeks and shoulders. Beth stood before him, coated in the remains of the giant beast.
“You defeated it. You pushed it too hard,” she said.
The beast, which had barely survived Beth, had been their Trojan horse. Now that veil was lifted. If the newfound energy wasn’t pulsing through him, Derek might’ve felt guilty for destroying their guise. But he felt like he could destroy anything now.
“What’s wrong with you?” Beth asked.
“I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“No. I mean, why are your eyes glowing?”
Derek could not see his own eyes, not until he looked into Beth’s, did he catch the blue shimmer.
“I gained all of its power, I think I’ve done it. I can save us all now.”
Beth just stared.
“What?” Derek asked. “Don’t I look stronger?”
“No. You look… never mind.” She blushed.
“I’ll prove it to you, I’m going to punch a hole through this ship.”
“Uh, hold onto that thought.”
Derek turned to see what had attracted Beth’s attention behind him. Three aliens stood. They had waited on Derek and Beth’s reaction, but now the leader began distributing orders. The orders sent two of the aliens scurrying like spiders along the sides of the corridor. They reached Derek and Beth and dropped down behind them. In the time it took to adjust their defense, the third alien punched Derek, kicked Beth, and the fight began.
The aliens were tough. The analogy of a spider wouldn’t end at how they had scurried down the corridor walls; they pounced and sprung back with the same leg strength, their attack just as poisonous. Two strikes floored Beth. She threw up, and when she tried to stand she felt woozy. It felt better to stay down.
They couldn’t stop Derek though. He kicked one so hard, it must’ve traveled all the way back to the large window they’d opened minutes ago. Another popped and sizzled when Derek punched it through one of the pulsing lights in the corridor, whatever energy traveling through those tubes killed the alien.
Invasive Species Part Two Page 2
