ALIENS
By Tom Olbert
2037 A.D.
U.S. / Mexican border
Billy smiled as his finger tightened on the trigger, the
barrel pressed to the old man’s head.
The old Mexie’s eyes were wild with fear, moist with tears as the search
light washed over his lined brown face.
“Por favor,” he said in a strangled whisper, his sweat glistening in the
sultry night as Billy pulled the trigger.
Billy howled with the rush as the old man’s head
exploded like a piñata, his brains and blood splattering across the sand. He laughed into the wild, black night.
“Papa!” the dead
man’s teenaged daughter screamed, looking away, tears streaming down her face,
her body trembling. Billy grabbed the
girl by her long dark hair.
“C’mere, Chiquita,” he whispered in her ear, nuzzling
her neck. She cringed and tried to pull
away. He laughed as he held the girl’s
face to the light. “Bonita,” he
whispered, licking his lips and feeling aroused as the search lights played
over her high cheek bones and moist doe-brown eyes. An amusing mix of fear and hatred played over
her pretty features. He had his men
shackle her. “I’ll handle this one,” he
said, dragging her toward his hut.
The drones buzzed about, their search light beams
playing off the great wall as it loomed against the night sky. He glanced up.
The muzzle flashes of the robo sentries lined up along the top of the wall
sparked in the black night as the automated plasma guns swiveled, targeting any
Mexies who’d somehow made it past the razor wire and land mines. The drones swooped in with flawless
coordination, launching their tactical rocket grenades. The militiamen hooted and cheered at the
sound of screams half-muffled by the explosions.
Stay the hell out of our country, Billy thought.
He slammed and locked the door to his hut, throwing the
girl roughly across his cot and shackling her to it. He drew his knife, tested the sharpness of the
serrated edge on his thumb and smiled.
An indulgence, he knew, but a damned sweet one. Why feel guilty, anyway? Who asked them to come here? He looked her over, his blood racing…
He swore as the grainy streaming video irritated his
eyes in the dim light. “What is it?” he
demanded, driving the knife into a wooden post.
“Skipper,” one of his men, Hanson stammered, his eyes
wide with terror, his face flickering in the vid. “There’s something moving out here…” Billy heard screams. Screams from his side of the wall. “Skipper…” Hanson screamed as something
grabbed him. The vid dissolved into
static.
Billy’s heart raced.
“Corbin. Briggs.” He switched to every terminal, but got only
static. “Someone…anyone…what’s going on
out there?!” The screams stopped. He could hear something, like…tearing. Chewing.
The blood drained from his face and extremities.
That’s when he heard it.
A sound like dried leather scraping across rocks. The girl.
She looked up from the cot, her face creased with wicked delight. The sound he’d heard had been her
laughter. He nearly fainted when he saw
the shackles crumbling to metallic dust around her wrists. He gaped, certain he was having a nightmare
as her face and body likewise decayed and crumbled, her once soft flesh dissolving,
her once beautiful features melting into a half-skeletal death mask. He drew his gun. He gasped as the weapon crumbled to dust in
his hand.
“Such primitive technology,” a grating, hissing voice
whispered. That’s when he knew, the word
forming in his mind. “No,” the evil
voice said. “We’re not aliens,” it said,
as though reading his thoughts. “You are. This is our planet. You don’t belong here.” He choked, paralyzed. “Five billion years ago, we realized another
planet would soon collide with ours. So,
we escaped by slipping five billion years forward, to a time after the planet
had congealed and cooled. A tick of the
clock to us. But, we returned to find
our home infested with you alien scum.
Evolved from bugs that crawled out of the primordial slime. Bugs evolved from the alien spores the
colliding planet brought to our world.
We had to live in these grotesque, loathsome bodies of yours to
acclimate ourselves to your bacteria…”
He screamed as a writhing mass of slimy, clawed limbs
tore out of the girl’s shriveling body, tentacles slithering in dark fluid as
the monstrosity lunged at him. Its
hateful thoughts shrieked through his mind.
Get out of our world.
