Doomed (7 page)

Race Against Time

They ran as fast as the mechanized suits would go.

Sure enough, the camp was in ruins just like Paul had said. Half of the houses were demolished and bodies littered the ground. Some were the Talls but most of them were human.

They made sure to stay far enough away from the bodies so that the chest cameras couldn’t see them.

If this was entertainment to their alien abductors, they had a lot to answer for. Mike was kind of looking forward to hijacking a ship and killing its occupants.

Melanie said, “Are you sure this will work?”

Mike laughed out of frustration. “Of course not. I’m taking the word of an alien crab monster that I met less than an hour ago. Not only that, but the plan he had wasn’t thought all the way through either. He was just toying with the idea before we took it as our own. Maybe he missed some detail that’ll get us killed. I just don’t know. But if we do nothing, then the best we can hope for is a terrible existence of hiding and running on this crappy, barren planet. I’d rather die than live like that.”

Melanie said sadly, “Well, I’d rather live, given the option.”

“Yeah, that’s the plan.”

They crouched down in a still
intact house and waited for what seemed like an eternity.

Melanie asked, “What
if the aliens find out that we escaped and they chase us back to Earth and kill us anyway?”

Mike sighed. Before he could explain that they had no other option and that it was worth the risk, they heard thrusters rumbling, getting closer by the second.

Mike’s heart was hammering. He was angry that Melanie was so negative about the plan. It meant she’d be worthless in the fight to come because she wasn’t invested in it. He’d just have to fight for both of them.

Hijack

The ship was small and cigar shaped with antennae jutting from the top and tiny pock marks all over it. It was perfectly black just like the ship that had dropped them on the planet.

To Mike’s utter surprise and elation, it landed just a dozen feet from the house they were hiding in.

A few seconds later, a hatch opened in the side with a slide-out ramp and two aliens in plain green clothing appeared.

They looked as terrifying as he remembered from Melanie’s room. In the sunlight, he could now see they slithered along the ground like oversized slugs.

They were each carrying a silver canister covered in alien markings.
He assumed the markings were like HazMat symbols.

Just then he realized his error in judgment. He couldn’t read the alien language so if the ship didn’t respond to his voice, he couldn’t fly it. But the plan was already set in motion. If they did nothing, the alien bio-weapon would kill them soon.

He reached back to tap Melanie’s shoulder and tell her to get ready to attack but she was already gone from that spot, moving past him, weapon raised.

She fired two quick bursts and both aliens exploded like water balloons, pink blood and slimy guts gushing all over the place. She was already running past them into the ship before Mike had even left his mark.

He took off towards the ship, and halfway there, heard another bang and the sickening sound of slime and entrails slapping against the floor of the ship.

He rushed inside and saw her standing there
in a pool of alien slime, hyperventilating and frightened.

He approached and she jerked when she sa
w him. Then she started to come down fast. The adrenaline dump made her woozy and tired in an instant. She dry heaved on the floor right into the gore she’d created.

Mike said breathlessly, “Holy fucking shit. Good work.
” Then he tried to remember the alien language he’d heard in Melanie’s room when he first met these aliens. If the ship was voice activated, they stood a chance at getting home.

The alien consoles had no seats. It had
square white plastic pads to stand on instead. He stood on one and the ship said, “Returning to base captain,” and then the door closed up tight and the thrusters shot them upwards.

This wasn’t how he’d envisioned their daring escape at all. Now they were headed
into the belly of the beast.

He said to Melanie, “I hope you’re ready to kick the shit out of some more of these guys.
”

She tried to smile but her eyes were already welling up with tears.

Belly of the Beast

The atmosphere in the little ship became too thick to properly breathe so they were forced to snap their head armor into place. The artificial gravity was too strong too. Without their new, more powerful bodies, it would have been debilitating.

They watched as a holographic monitor appeared, showing a huge mother ship getting bigger and bigger as they neared it.
It was blocky, angular and top heavy like the one that had transported them to the planet but it was much bigger and much uglier. The sight of it scared the crap out of them.

Only then did they realize they had to come up with a plan of attack.

Mike frantically looked around the ship for additional weapons. When he laid eyes on several canisters he said to Melanie, “As soon as we dock and the doors open, we’ll kick these things out and give them a taste of their own medicine.”

“You’ll need to set a timer or something then.”

He said out loud, “Ship, can you hear me?”

“Awaiting commands captain.”

“Remind me how to set the timer on the um, uh, little canister thingies with the biological agents inside them.”

Melanie rolled her eyes, but the ship said,
“I can activate a kill tube when you’re ready.”

“I’ll need all remaining tubes activated.”

“I just need a time to input.”

“Hold that thought,” he said as a mammoth hatch opened in the mother ship and their small cigar shaped ship landed gently inside.

The monitor showed the hatch close up again and then aliens inside the mother ship’s hangar began to approach their ship.

Mike said, “Open the door to the ship and set the timers for thirty seconds.”

He didn’t know how his alien translator had interpreted what a second equaled for the aliens, but he hoped it was equivalent.

The hatch opened up and the slide-away ramp descended
. Then he and Melanie started to throw canisters out as fast as they could.

An alien freaked out and tried to rush them but Melanie shot it right above its frontal eye.

The other aliens were stunned by the outburst of violence. Apparently violence against their own kind was more shocking than the mass killings they perpetuated against alien peoples because they turned around and tried to flee for their lives.

With the last canister off the ship Mike said, “Ship, close the damn door as fast as you can.”

The ramp disappeared and the door slammed shut just in time.

On the holographic monitor they watched as a light mist evacuated
from the canisters.

The aliens
immediately started to scream but their screams soon became gargles. Their flesh melted before they could escape.

It was horrific, but it gave Mike a thrill. Those aliens were sadistic perverts and they got what was coming to them.

Before they had a chance to celebrate, the hatch to the mother ship opened up and a ship identical to theirs landed softly beside them.

When the hatch closed
up tight again, Mike said, “Ship, open up.”

The aliens from the cigar shaped ship stepped out and then froze
at the sight of their dead comrades.

There was shock and confusion on
their hideous faces until Melanie shot those looks clean off. Then she rushed inside their ship to see if there were any stragglers.

When Mike didn’t hear the report of her gun he knew she’d already killed them all.

For someone who had called him a murderer she sure wasn’t rising above his level. She’d probably taken more lives now than he had.

He admired her for her ferocity though. It was exactly what they needed to get the job done. Now they just had to figure out how to get home in one piece.

Exploration

They went through the open door into a labyrinth of corridors. The walls were multi-colored, like modern art or something equally gaudy. They had bulky protrusions all over their surface. Mike knew in his heart that none of it had any functionality. It was all for show. He wondered just how spoiled and bored these aliens were.

They passed soppy puddles of gore every so often. The canisters had deployed their poison throughout the entire ship and killed every alien
they came across. The stuff was more lethal than they could properly comprehend.

After ten minutes of fear induced searching, they settled down in the knowledge that nothing onboard the ship was alive except for them.

The ship had smooth white plastic floors, perfect for slithering around on and hidden lighting that glowed yellow.

They came to a huge room littered with
dissolved bodies. There was a massive holographic image showing the surface of the planet they had nicknamed Nova. This was the command hub of the ship.

Melanie asked, “Could we take this ship back to Earth or is it too big and important? What if they miss it and come looking?”

“Yeah, we probably wouldn’t get away clean with this big bastard. But I bet that little cigar ship wouldn’t draw much attention if it went missing.”

“That’s assuming it has the capabilities to get us all the way back to Earth.”

They wandered back to the cigar ship. Before they got in, Mike saw a whole cluster of canisters standing against the side wall in the hangar bay of the mother ship. There must’ve been ten thousand of them. He wondered how many alien creatures the aliens planned on exterminating in the foreseeable future and the thought made his blood boil.

He said, “I have a plan
to make sure they never follow us home.”

Revenge

He spoke to the mother ship. “How long will it take to get back to the home world?”
He was referring to the alien home planet.

“At top speed, seven minutes and twenty seconds.”

He said, “I want you to set timers on all the canisters in this ship to eight minutes. I want the ship opened five seconds before the canisters deploy.”

He must have been standing on the captain’s platform because it said, “Yes captain.”

Then he turned to Melanie and said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

She whooped and smiled. “Fuck those alien bastards. I
can’t wait to watch them all die.”

He said as gently as he could, “I think you might be overreacting a little bit.”

“How so? They changed our bodies against our will and abducted us. They lied to us so they could watch us die, all for their own sick amusement. I can’t wait to turn the tables.”

He said, “
I know. You’re right. Let’s just hope this works.”

They wasted no more time. They ran to the cigar shaped ship and
Mike ordered it out of the mother ship.

After a lot of guesswork and questions,
he figured out where Earth was so he said to the ship, “How long to get to Earth?”

“At top speed, three days.”

So Coalic was right. The aliens had lied about traveling for seventy six million years. The lie was to trick them into desperation which would inevitably lead to added aggression when the fighting erupted with the other race of tricked aliens.

Mike wished he could’ve brought Coalic with. He deserved to escape as much as they did.

Melanie said, “Can you ask it if the Earth is still in one piece?”

To the ship, he asked,
“Has the Earth been destroyed?”

He held his breath while it
paused, searching for his answer. “It appears to be intact,” it finally responded.

“
It’s still there.”

Melanie laughed and hugged him tight. “I can’t believe it. We’re going home.”

“You know we’ve technically only been gone a few days, right?”

“Well until just recently I thought we’d been gone for millions of years and our planet was long gone. At least let me celebrate the fact that we escaped certain doom.”

He didn’t want to dampen her enthusiasm so he smiled and yelled at the ship, “Take us to Earth.”

“Yes captain.”

He added, “I’d like to see a close-up view of the home world,” but only because he knew Melanie wanted the twisted satisfaction of seeing their would-be murderers dead.

The holographic image appeared, sho
wing the surface of the orange planet. There was no movement at all. There were shiny spots here and there, the melted remains of the dead aliens.

Mike was surprised that the plan had actually worked so well.
In his heart, he just knew it would be botched somehow, but this time his pessimism was unfounded.

Melanie tried to give
him a high five but when he didn’t reciprocate she punched him on the arm good naturedly.

He was glad to be going home. He missed his mom. He missed his old life. He looked forward to dating Melanie, if she would have him.

She must have read his mind. She said, “This sure turned out to be a crappy first date. You owe me one.”

He smiled. “If the governments of Earth don’t shoot us out of the sky
when we get there, and if we can avoid being taken away to an underground lab to be experimented on by mad scientists, I’d love to go on a do-over date with you. I don’t have much money though so I hope you’re a cheap date.”

“How much do you think we’d get for this ship?”

He smiled again.

She laughed and hugged him. “Let’s keep the suits though.”

He wondered what it would be like to have sex in space. He had three days to figure it out.

It was going to be a fun three days.