Zombies versus Aliens versus Vampires versus Dinosaurs Page 4

  “No, sir,” General Mitchell answered sadly. “It’s just, as of now, the only thing we can’t rule out.”

  “The whole world’s been hit, Mr. President,” added General Wong, the Army’s highest-ranking officer. “Every superpower and regional power. Unless it’s some—I dunno—James Bond-type super-villain.”

  The others began to smirk but were quickly shut down by the CIA Director.

  “It isn’t! No individual, corporation or entity of any kind has ever had the ability to accomplish this. That is a certainty.”

  “So then, it is . . . we are . . . talking about aliens?” Michael asked.

  The brass and their subordinates reluctantly nodded, murmured yes. It had to be that. Nothing else was possible. Right?

  “All right,” said the Commander in Chief. “Do we know how they pulled it off? And feel free to go sci-fi-crazy on my ass. We’re in unchartered territory, I get that.”

  “We have no idea, sir,” said Admiral Effington. “There was no radiation emanating from any of the destroyed facilities so we know it wasn’t nuclear.”

  “We also know they didn’t attack from space,” added General Mitchell. “Our world was hit before the alien vessel appeared in Earth orbit. Their devices—whatever they were—had to have been planted and detonated from inside.”

  “What are you saying?” asked Michael. “Like a suicide bomber? Are we talking interplanetary terrorism?”

  “That’s only our best theory, sir,” said General Wong.

  “But the precision,” added the CIA Director. “The timing. Something like this would have taken years to coordinate. Decades.”

  Gloria shot Raymond a look of daggers. Isn’t that precisely what Jean-François had been warning them about? You fool.

  “How we coming with that G8 call?” Michael asked his Chief of Staff.

  “Forty-five minutes, sir.”

  “Good,” Michael said as he took yet another moment to assess everything.

  Aliens. Goddamn aliens. Really?

  “Interesting they’d leave us with our communications,” he wondered aloud.

  “In what regard, sir?” asked General Wong.

  “They’re obviously trying to take us out,” Michael mused. “So why leave us with an ability to mobilize a united Earth front? They destroyed our weapons and soldiers. Why not our phone lines and TV stations too?”

  The room was silent for no one had an answer, then NASA administrator Raymond Saticoy plunged himself into the fray.

  “Because they want them,” he said simply.

  “Come again?” Michael asked, as startled as everyone else.

  “They want to live here, sir,” Raymond said as he rose and proceeded to pace the room. “They want our phones and our TV stations intact for themselves. They love our buildings, our freeways, our bridges, our entire infrastructure.”

  Jean-François and Gloria exchanged looks. Where was he going with this?

  “They love everything about our planet . . . except us! And soon they will begin their slow, methodical extermination of the human race.”

  “Raymond, what are you talking about?!” Jean-François shouted, no longer able to contain himself. “What you say is not supported by any of the data at all.”

  “There’s data?” Michael asked with growing anger. “You knew about this?”

  “Well, yes, Mr. President,” Raymond answered meekly.

  “Then why the hell didn’t you tell someone?!”

  “Frankly, sir, in order to maximize panic and confusion, we didn’t want any of you to know about us until we were completely ready to begin.”

  “What?” blurted out a confused Gloria.

  “We?” Michael demanded. “What are you talking—who’s ‘we’?”

  “Oh my God!” shouted Army General Wong, the first to solve the mystery.

  With no hesitation, the General dove in front of Michael as Raymond tore off his human skin to reveal the .44 Magnum he had concealed within his insect body. His first shot caught the General in the chest but that was not the primary target. His next shot nailed President Addison right through the heart. Mission accomplished.

  Within seconds, the room was ablaze with thunderous roars of smoke and gunfire. Jean-François dove under the table, weaponless, terrified. “Raymond” retrieved a second concealed .44 with his free arm, then a third and fourth with his two lower arms. He leapt across the room blasting four guns at once toward the stunned Secret Service and military men. In the short few seconds it took them to regain their wits, duck for cover and harness their weapons, half of them were dead.

  Raymond ripped one of the giant TV monitors out of the wall to use it as a shield against the onslaught. A Secret Service agent took advantage of the moment and blasted the alien in the leg. His crusty, chitin scale tore open and he roared in pain, but it did not stop him from spinning around to return a battery of fire, killing the agent, killing a Navy ensign, and killing Gloria Ames.

  Jean-François watched in horror from under the table as the shoot-out continued. It was one alien against tens of impeccably trained agents and officers, and the alien seemed to have the upper hand. For a brief moment, he locked eyes with the beast he had previously known as his boss. Raymond bared his nail-like teeth and curled his ugly, snarled lips into some sick, alien smile, then turned back to the gunfight as if to taunt Jean-François for his irrelevance, that he’ll kill him later when the shoot-out with the real men subsided.

  Jean-François watched another agent go down, another military man, another agent. He watched as a Marine colonel fell to his death, his pistol flying out of his hand only to land a mere inch from the terrified scientist’s reach.

  Jean-François didn’t know what to do. He had never fired a gun before—prior to today he had never even seen a real one. He was a pacifist, mon Dieu!

  He trembled as he nervously reached for the weapon. His two hands visibly shook as they held the gun pointed at the alien’s massive chest, the widest possible target. With sweat raining from his pores, Jean-François squeezed the trigger and fired a bullet right into the center of the alien’s head.

  It had all taken less than a minute, but virtually everyone was dead. Raymond, Gloria, the President, all gone except for Jean-Françcois and but one of the Joint Chiefs.

  General Wong, the first casualty of the gunfight, dragged himself across the room with his last ounce of life. He fumbled as he reached up to a desk to grab hold of a telephone, knocking it over and down to the ground. He turned his head weakly to face the receiver then uttered his final, breathless gasp, “Get the Vice President.”

  After that, Jean-François was the only survivor, and he cried.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was a beautiful afternoon on the subtropical paradise of Key West. Situated on the southernmost tip of Florida—hence the southernmost tip of the continental United States—the sleepy island town was an unparalleled blend of natural beauty, cultural diversity and a never-ending warm breeze of romance. The hibiscus-speckled streets with their conch houses crowned with twin roofs and gingerbread trims had once been home to Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, Tennessee Williams and Jimmy Buffet—only a few of the rich and famous who had fallen in love with the peaceful tranquility that the picturesque village inspired.

  The horrific news of the morning’s alien attack had been kept from the press in order to avoid global panic, although in some cases it was a matter of begging the more clever journalists and broadcasters to sit on the information that they had acquired on their own; and the President’s assassination was so recent that most of the staffers inside the West Wing didn’t even know about it yet, so the Key West locals and tourists went about their day as if it were any other day in Heaven.

  Two cyclists cruised along a charming, residential road. Children splashed each other in an inflatable wading pool on their front lawn. A husband and wife sat on deck chairs on their porch, sipping margaritas while browsing their favorite websites on their iPads. />
  With no warning, the ground shook hard and violently, the equivalent of a six-point-eight earthquake. A giant wormhole that spanned far beyond the road’s four lanes appeared from out of nowhere. Ten thousand human-sized, four-armed, biped-insect soldiers jogged out in perfectly coordinated groups of seven (called “swarms”) and opened fire the moment they entered our world.

  The first swarm took aim upon the cyclists—their massive cannon-like rifles held steadfast in perfect balance by their powerful upper arms. Their lower arms, having been their middle legs in the earliest stages of their insect evolution, were for pressing the series of buttons that unleashed the ferocious negative density energy.

  The weapons erupted in deafening explosions as they emitted solid beams of white light that created tiny voids in space and time, cleanly removing from the world anything with which they made contact.

  The second swarm gunned down the husband and wife with equal efficiency. The third swarm ended the children. Each victim lay dead on the ground, having received but a single shot per, dying fast with a perfectly circular, one-inch hole in the center of their hearts.

  The fourth swarm out of the wormhole jogged into the first house they encountered, the next swarm into the next, the next into the next, and on and on.

  And within each house, their mission was simple: find every human and kill them. They did so with mathematical precision.

  Men, women and children ran screaming but they were gunned down as they fled. People hid quietly but they were found trembling and shot. If they tried to fight back with their home pistols or shotguns, they were killed. If they begged for mercy, they were killed. If they were innocent little babies asleep in cribs, they were killed.

  Not until a swarm-of-seven deemed a home “clean”—and they had the equipment to know with scientific certainty—were they even permitted to move on, at which point they would scrawl a hideous alien symbol upon the front door then jog to the next unmarked structure.

  Speed was not a requirement of their mission, only perfection.

  The streets were littered with alien swarms-of-seven moving from one home to the next with the rhythmic exactitude of a ballet. They would pause only long enough to peek into the parked cars they passed just in case a human had managed to find refuge. If empty, they would mark the car “clean.” If “dirty,” they would kill the human within, then mark the car “clean.”

  Swarm upon swarm continued to spew out of the wormhole in relentless droves, along with giant tanks, roving high-tech cannons and rockets, and sleek, roofless vehicles on which stood alien officers barking out orders in a language reminiscent of a smoker’s cough, their soldiers receiving the orders from great distances via two tiny antennas that protruded from the top of their insect skulls.

  If a man or woman running down the street in an attempt to find safety had happened to glance into the massive wormhole, now fully exposed in the day’s sunlight, they could have seen into the alien world, and they would have seen a vast green meadow in which awaited infinite lines of biped-insect soldiers carrying their inconceivably sophisticated weaponry—and the man or woman would have stopped running because they would have known that their survival was hopeless.

  The floors of palatial, luxury hotels were consumed with alien swarms cleansing one room at a time. Guests and workers alike were running, hiding, jumping out of windows. None of it mattered. They were all as good as dead already.

  At the marina, men and women raced to their boats to escape on water only to be gunned down by the alien swarms assigned to them. For the very few who were fortunate enough to find sanctuary on their crafts, lucky enough to sneakily steer their way out of their slips and into the channel, the aliens merely fired upon their yachts and cruisers, converting their vessels into giant balls of fire.

  In the police precinct, brave men and women in blue fought valiantly against their alien invaders. They held their ground for almost a minute before they, too, inevitably perished. It required only two swarms to complete the task.

  An alien swarm was jogging out of a recently cleansed home as one of them accidentally brushed against a table by the front door, knocking over a beautiful, glass vase. The alien in question dropped his weapon in a heartbeat and lunged for the vase just in time to catch it in his lower arms before it crashed upon the floor, attracting dirty looks from the others. All seven breathed deeply—that was close. The alien smiled his hideous alien smile for a moment as he admired the exquisite, subtle beauty of the vase, then gently put it back in its proper place and jogged out with his comrades.

  A local news helicopter appeared in the sky to record the massacre. Six of the seven members of a swarm quickly dropped to their knees and took aim, their free lower arm pressed to the ground to secure their balance like a tripod, while their swarm leader raised her unguis (her insect-y hand) to the air. The six remained motionless, having been perfectly trained for just such an encounter. They stood steadfast on their knees, holding their target in scope, waiting patiently for the swarm leader’s command, waiting, waiting. Then, for no discernible reason to the human eye, the swarm leader flung down her unguis and coughed out an order. The six fired, and the helicopter and its passengers were no more.

  Bringing up the rear of the seemingly endless battalion was the high command vehicle, an alloy flatbed roughly the size of a billionaire’s master bedroom. The vehicle hovered just slightly above the ground as it breezed forward as if of its own volition for there was no cabin, taxi, or driver. High-ranking officers huddled around a three-dimensional holographic map of the city—complete with moving representations of their soldiers in action—as they discussed and debated the progress of their onslaught. Other officers stood by the alloy railings with high-powered scopes, coughing out orders to their subordinates on the ground through holographic communication systems that floated in the air beside them. But all showed an unmitigated deference to the most senior among them, who stood over nine feet tall and weighed more than a ton.

  The Alien Commander was pleased with the day’s events. The destruction of the Earth’s military installations had been accomplished without a hitch; the assassination of the planet’s leaders had an almost sixty percent success rate (a tad less than he had hoped for but still respectable), his spies were in place all across the globe, and even the exercise transpiring before him—little more than a drill, really—was showing his soldiers to have the same meticulous aptitude they had shown in the simulations. He could barely wait for the real challenge that lay ahead.

  He tapped on the symbols on the keypad strapped to his lower forearm. The ground shook violently, and the giant wormhole vanished as if it had never been there at all.

  The Commander couldn’t believe that he was actually, finally here. It was like a dream. He took a deep breath to soak in the beautiful Earth air—not nearly as clean as the recirculated synthetic variety on his vessel but far sweeter because it was natural, real. After a lifetime on an alloy ship in deep space, natural was good.

  He had been born for this mission. Literally. His genes had been spliced and altered while still in embryo to ensure that he would possess all the physical, mental, and psychological attributes of a great leader. Enormous size to garner an immediate, primordial respect from those who would serve under him, a sharp brain designed for strategic thinking with the agile flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances, and an overly competitive spirit with just a hint of insecurity to make defeat wholly unacceptable. Human DNA (less than two percent) had been carefully blended into his genetic makeup while still in the pupal stage to render a small bump on one of the lobes of his brain—a mini-human-lobe, so to speak—giving him natural intuitive insight to the thought patterns of his future enemy, an unexpected byproduct being flabby human flesh surrounding his insect neck and thorax.

  His training had begun at the age of one. He had been forced to play every known game until he had mastered them all. By six, he was laughing at recordings of Earth’s greatest chess master
s and the simplicity of their thinking. By eight, he had devised his first battle plan, complete with footnotes and annotated sources. His proposal was to introduce a certain virus into the Earth’s water that would prove fatal to mankind while having no profound effect on the Vessel Dwellers, thereby obliterating the enemy while keeping the planet’s infrastructure intact.

  His instructors dismissed his work out of hand, explaining that life will always give way to new life and that such a tactic could theoretically produce an unpredictable ripple effect ultimately fatal to their own kind. (In fact, the Dwellers were already in the process of taking measures to cleanse themselves of all microbes foreign to the Earth ecosystem, as well as immunizing themselves against all Earth germs and bacteria.)

  His hard work so easily tossed aside by such intellectual inferiors, the pampered young prodigy did not take a tantrum, did not take a fit. He did not lash out at his instructors or at anybody else. He merely hung his little insect head in shame and cried softly because he had missed something so obvious.

  He studied every detail of human cultures and civilizations. He led one simulated battle after another—the terrain, climate, and technological conditions constantly changing to keep him on his toes. In a short time, his instructors were unable to come up with new ways to surprise him, so he designed his own simulations, then took medication to induce a temporary amnesia, then battled against his own plan. Sometimes he couldn’t conquer himself, and it enraged him.

  Upon reaching adolescence, beautiful females would be brought to him upon his request—all volunteers, because what girl wouldn’t want to have the great future leader inside her? But he was only permitted to have his way with them in rooms that had been filled with rotting human corpses (brought to the vessel through wormholes) to condition him to grow sexually aroused by the very smell of human death.

  On this day, he was very aroused.