Under Darkness (A Sci-Fi Thriller) (Scott Standalones Book 1)

by Jasper T. Scott

  “Copy,” Dekker replied.

  Chapter 54

  “Wake up!” Don yelled, slapping Bill’s cheek repeatedly to rouse him.

  Beth watched with a wary frown. “Why don’t you interrogate your grandmother?”

  “Because she’s too old to take much of a beating,” Don replied.

  “I’m not going to let you torture him,” Beth said.

  “It’s not your dad anymore, kid. Anyway, don’t worry, we won’t leave any permanent damage.”

  Bill’s eyes cracked open, and his head lolled. He sat on the living room floor leaning against one of the couches. “Where...” He glanced around and appeared to work some moisture into his mouth. “Where am I?”

  “My place,” Don replied. He snapped his fingers at Commander Wilde, and the commander brought over the car battery and jumper cables they’d carried up from the storage room. “Get his shirt open.”

  Beth’s palms grew sweaty. “Did you hear me? I said I’m not going to let you torture him.”

  “You don’t have to be around for this,” Don replied. The commander set the car battery down beside him and handed him the cables.

  Beth looked to Wilde, her eyes pleading. “You’re a doctor. You have to take an oath, right? Do no harm or something like that. You can’t be okay with this.”

  Commander Wilde grimaced and shook his head. “I’m also a Marine, and I’m sorry, but Don is right. We need to know what’s going on. You can step outside if you can’t stand to watch.”

  Bill’s eyes were wide and darting now. “What’s going on? Why would you want to torture me?” He struggled to free his hands, but they were secured behind his back with three zip ties. His ankles were similarly bound. But he could still move his legs.

  Don hooked up the jumper cables and sparked the ends together. “Where should we start? Earlobes, or nipples? you pick, Bill.”

  “Fuck off!” Bill kicked both legs up, aiming for Don’s face, but Don caught them and forced them down by sitting on his ankles.

  “Get his shirt open,” Don said.

  Commander Wilde stepped forward and ripped open the shirt. Bill tried to bite him, but Don touched the sparking ends of the jumper cables to either side of his face, and he screamed.

  Blackened scorch marks appeared on Bill’s cheeks.

  “Stop it!” Beth yelled.

  “That was just a taste,” Don whispered darkly.

  “What is wrong with you?” Bill asked, shaking his head. “First you strangle me, and now you’re going to electrocute me?” His eyes flicked to Beth. “Bethy, it’s me, Dad! Don’t let them do this. Please.”

  She bit her lip and shook her head. “There has to be another way,” she said, catching Commander Wilde’s eye from where he stood behind her dad.

  “I don’t think there is,” he replied.

  “You’re not Bill,” Don said and sparked the jumper cables together once more. “So who are you?”

  “What makes you think I’m not Bill? Ask me anything!”

  Don turned to Beth with eyebrows raised. “Go ahead. Something only he could know.”

  “Uh...” Beth cast her mind back. “What was my favorite stuffed animal as a kid?”

  “Elle, the Elephant,” Bill said. “But it was actually Dumbo. We got him for you at Disneyland.”

  “That’s right!” Beth said.

  “Ask me something else,” Bill prompted.

  “Okay, what’s mom’s favorite restaurant?”

  “La Strega, an Italian place back in LA.”

  Beth frowned and slowly shook her head.

  “Is that true?” Don asked.

  “Yes, but... that doesn’t make any sense. Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe he really isn’t under the influence of anything.”

  Bill’s lips curved into a smug smile. “I told you.”

  “Look at him!” Don said. “He’s screwing with us.” He touched both ends of the jumper cables to either side of her dad’s chest. Bill screamed and all of his muscles spasmed at the same time. Tendrils of smoke curled off his skin, and sickening burnt smell reached Beth’s nose.

  “Stop it!” Beth said and ran over to Don. She pulled him back as hard as she could, knocking him over. The cables touched him in the process, and he yelped.

  Bill laughed. “Exhilarating, isn’t it?”

  Don lay glaring at him. “Does he seem normal to you?”

  “No,” Beth said. “But we’re not going to get anything out of him like this. And he might not even know anything.”

  “She might be right,” the commander said.

  Ashley groaned, drawing their attention to the dining room table where they’d left her. All three of them hurried to her side. Ashley’s blue eyes cracked open to sleepy slits.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “They’re torturing my dad,” Beth said.

  Ashley’s eyebrows scrunched together. “What? Why?”

  “We need to figure out what the aliens are up to,” Don explained.

  “Torture doesn’t work. Don’t you idiots know anything?”

  Bill laughed. “Apparently not.”

  “In certain cases it does,” Commander Wilde said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Ashley insisted, rocking her head from side to side.

  “We could do passive torture,” Don suggested. “Don’t give him any food or water until he talks.”

  Beth scowled. “And what if he doesn’t know anything?”

  “Let’s forget about it for now,” Commander Wilde said. “Our priority is to get the word out about what we’re dealing with, and we’re not going to be able to do that from here. Ashley’s awake. She’s stable enough that we can leave her here with Beth.”

  Don nodded slowly. “You’re right. We’ll be back with help as soon as we can.”

  “Sure...” Ashley said.

  Commander Wilde grabbed Beth’s sidearm from the kitchen counter and handed it back to her. “If your dad tries anything, don’t be afraid to use it. And whatever you do, don’t cut him free.”

  Beth swallowed thickly and nodded, feeling the cold weight of the weapon against her palm. Both men headed front door. Along the way Don grabbed the car battery and disconnected the jumper cables. He stuffed the cables in his back pocket and went to join the commander. They grabbed their rifles and a lantern from an armchair near the door and then Don opened it.

  “Wait,” Bill said just as Don stepped outside. “I’ll talk.”

  Beth frowned, and Commander Wilde shot her father a skeptical look.

  “He’s stalling,” Don said from the front step of the cabin. “He doesn’t want us to go out and tell anyone about the infection.”

  “Maybe,” Bill replied. “But you want answers, right? And what are you going to tell people, anyway? Your story would be more convincing if you had something significant to say.”

  “All right, I’ll bite,” Don said, bringing his rifle up to aim it at Bill as he stepped back inside and shut the door behind him. “But you had better make it good.”

  Chapter 55

  “Everyone who is infected is part of a plan,” Bill said smilingly.

  Beth could hardly believe what she was hearing. “Who are you?” Holding her gun in both hands, she flicked off the safety, and pointed it at his chest. “What did you do to my dad?” she demanded.

  “He is still here, but he cannot speak to you as long as I am in control.”

  “Then let him go!” Beth said and shook the weapon at him. “Let him go, or I’ll shoot!”

  Bill cocked his head. “And kill your father?”

  Don walked over to her and gently pushed the weapon out of line. “Don’t,” he said. To Bill, he added, “You said the infected ones are part of a plan—what plan?”

  “We have no weapons. This was the only way to take your planet.”

  “No weapons?” Don snorted. “I don’t buy that for a second.”

  “Me neither,” Beth added.

  “It is true,�
�� Bill insisted. “We never needed weapons before. It is not our way. Direct conflict is too messy.”

  “We who?” Commander Wilde asked. “The Crawlers?”

  “We, the ones aboard the vessel you saw in the sky,” Bill said. “It is a colony ship. Your planet is the only one within many light years that is capable of supporting us. We have come a long way. We didn’t expect to find your world already inhabited, much less by an intelligent species.”

  Don began nodding slowly. “So you found Earth from afar with some kind of telescope, and you thought, that looks nice! Let’s go there! So why infect us? Why not just tell us all of this from the start? We could have made a space for you and shared the planet.”

  “How would we communicate? The only way I am able to speak with you now is because I am sharing the mind of the human you know as Bill Steele. That is also how I know that your people would never give up anything without a fight, and even if they did, they would only come against us later. As I said, this was the only way to take your planet.”

  “So that’s the plan, is it,” Don said, nodding slowly to himself. “Kick us out of our homes and take them for yourselves. Then what? Kill us all?”

  “No. Our goal is to live in peace with you,” Bill replied. “We only sent down a small number of Seeders, and we picked a relatively unpopulated island to avoid unnecessary casualties. We are not the hostile invaders you imagine.”

  “Bullshit,” Don said. “Corporal Lee and his men were acting pretty damn hostile, and they shot Ashley.”

  “You fired first,” Bill replied, smiling patiently at them.

  Don shook his head. “He’s a snake. We can’t trust anything he’s saying.”

  “Maybe not,” Commander Wilde agreed. “But I think at least some of what he’s saying is true. If they had weapons they would have used them to invade us by now. Instead, they chose to invade our minds.”

  “That’s even better!” Don said. “Who needs to fight a war for Earth when you can turn the locals into mindless zombies and make them vacate their homes peacefully? After that, who knows, they’ll probably make us all walk into the ocean and drown ourselves.”

  “Our goals are peaceful, I promise you,” Bill said. “Once we are settled, and a proper government established, you’ll be released and allowed to go on with your lives.”

  Ashley interrupted from where she lay on the kitchen table: “If the goal was to infect us with something, why start with an island that’s easily contained?”

  “We could not afford to be careless,” Bill said. “In the past, other hosts have reacted badly to the... infection, as you call it. In some species, all of the hosts died. Others went insane. Mortality rates have been as high as ninety-nine percent. We have had time to perfect the symbionts since then, but we could not be sure of your reaction. That is why we had to start on an island. To make sure we didn’t accidentally kill all of you.”

  “So nice of you to think of us,” Don said.

  “It would be a lonely planet without you,” Bill replied.

  “You need us...?” Commander Wilde asked.

  “Need? No, but your species has a certain usefulness to us. No one can be king without subjects. Who would serve us if you all died?”

  Don snorted incredulously. “You want us to be your slaves.”

  “Is that not what you have done with the inferior species on this world? You raise them for food and keep them as pets. You hunt them for sport. I assure you, we will be far kinder than you have been.”

  Beth shivered. “You’re going to keep us as livestock?”

  Bill laughed. “No. We don’t want to eat you. That would be a horrible waste. No, all of our meat is grown artificially.”

  Silence thickened the air as they absorbed the implications of everything the alien controlling Bill had said.

  “Something just occurred to me...” Commander Wilde said. “Don, when you mentioned Ashley getting shot, he said that we fired first. But how would he know that? He was unconscious at the time. The only way he could know that is if he somehow knows what Corporal Lee and his men know. And if that’s the case, then your grandmother has been sharing what she knows, too. Does she know exactly where we are?”

  “Shit,” Don said. He shook a finger at Bill. “You were stalling for a reason!”

  Bill grinned at them. “I’m sorry. You know too much. We can’t allow you to escape.”

  Don hoisted his rifle to his shoulder, and Beth heard the safety click off.

  “Wait!” This time she was the one pushing the gun away from her father. “Don’t. He’s still in there.”

  “Assuming he was telling the truth,” Don replied. “There might not be any way to bring your father back.”

  “Forget about him,” Commander Wilde added. “We need to leave while we still can.”

  A rustling noise like dried leaves dragging sounded on the other side of the living room window. It was open. Beth recalled the commander opening it after they’d come up from the storage room.

  “Did you hear that?” Don asked quietly.

  Beth’s heart froze in her chest.

  Commander Wilde brought his rifle up to his shoulder, too. “It’s too late. They’re already here.”

  Chapter 56

  Corporal Gibson stepped into the alien lander carrying an arsenal with him: grenades, C4, an FN SCAR rifle with a grenade launcher attached, a whole belt of spare magazines, a bandoleer of grenades for the launcher, a combat knife, and two Berettas. The collective weight of all that ordnance would stagger a SEAL.

  “How do we launch the pod?” Gibson asked. He cast about quickly, looking for the launching mechanism that the engineers had ultimately found behind one of the panels inside the pods.

  “Here.” Dekker slid open a panel, revealing a recessed compartment with a simple lever inside.

  “Hold up, Deks. We’d better secure ourselves first.”

  “It’s on a ten-second timer.”

  Gibson frowned. “How do you know?”

  “I overheard the engineers talking about it,” Dekker said. “Ready?”

  Gibson blew out a breath and dropped into one of two seats inside the pod. He grabbed web-like straps and looped his arms through them. “What about the hatch?”

  “Closes during the launch sequence,” Dekker replied just before throwing the lever. The hatch slid shut, and Dekker hurried to sit in the remaining seat. Gibson regarded him with a knitted brow. “You overheard the engineers talking about that, too?” he asked, jerking his chin to the hatch just as it sealed with a loud hiss.

  “Yeah, why?”

  Gibson shook his head. “Just curious. I guess it’s a good thing you’re a nosy bastard.”

  Dekker grinned and said something else, but his words were stolen by the deafening roar that began underneath them. The lander leapt upward violently, squashing them into their seats. Vertebrae popped and ground together in Gibson’s spine, and his back arched painfully. Blood rushed into his feet, and he saw stars. The sensation eased sometime later, and Gibson realized that he’d blacked out. He came to, and his vision cleared, only to see that they were soaring freely through the air. The pod had vanished, all except for the black webbing of alien restraints that he clung to.

  “Fuck...” he muttered, staring down at the dwindling speck that was Kauai. Wisps of cloud concealed the water and ground like the lingering drifts of snow at the end of spring. All around them, flickering golden specks blazed against the black velvet of the ocean—ships on fire. Our ships.

  “It’s some kind of hologram or projection chamber,” Dekker said, shaking his head as if to clear it.

  Gibson nodded wordlessly, still staring at the ruined fleet.

  “Mother of...” Dekker trailed off with a whistle. “You see what I’m seeing, Gibs?”

  Gibson followed his gaze to the sky. A blue outline hung above them, shaded to reveal details—a massive spaceship hovering over the North side of the island.

  “That wasn’t th
ere before we took off,” Gibson said.

  “It must be cloaked or something,” Dekker said. “We’re headed straight for it. I told you it was there!”

  “Yeah.” They’d all heard about the strange cooling effect over the water on the North side of the island.

  As they drew near the spaceship, the blue-shading that marked its position took over the entire sky. The shivering and shaking of friction with the atmosphere gradually faded, and Gibson looked down once more. Now he could see the whole planet curving away darkly below them, the far edge limned in sunlight.

  “Here we go...” Dekker said.

  Gibson looked up to see what looked like a shaded blue city rushing up—or down?—to greet them. The pod stopped accelerating, and suddenly he was weightless, bobbing around in the air as if it were water. Gibson’s stomach flipped threateningly. He ground his teeth and clenched his fists around the webbing until the sensation passed. Moments later they went sailing between towering structures on the underside of the spaceship. There were no glittering lights to mark the hull, but a dark, funnel-shaped portal opened up directly above them.

  “Into the belly of the beast...” Dekker remarked.

  “Ready up,” Gibson said, grabbing his SCAR in both hands. It was blessedly light in zero-G.

  “Oorah,” Dekker whispered as the alien spaceship swallowed them and hazy, blue-shaded walls streaked by them, growing narrower and narrower with every passing second. Unseen forces gripped the pod, nudging it down the throat of a tunnel that looked no wider than the head of a needle...

  And then they shot out into a vast, spherical chamber lined with thousands of pods just like theirs. A pale silvery light illuminated the interior. Landers, packed together like eggs clung to the walls and ceiling. The spaces between them looked like the hexagonal cells of a honeycomb. “They could have landed thousands of Crawlers,” Gibson said, slowly shaking his head as their pod angled for a tiny gap in the honeycomb of landers. “But they sent down less than a hundred. Why?”

  “Who cares?” Dekker countered.