Short Story: Aliens

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.