Embedded Files
Alien Invasion
The room the girl found herself in was very dark and very old. The girl had stayed there overnight or what she thought was overnight. Now she had to make an escape. She grabbed her lantern. The room was illuminated by the dim warm light of the candle. The walls were painted with scenes that you would find in a daycare. Giraffes were eating light green leaves in a savannah, a tiger was playing with another tiger in a jungle. A bear floated on his back in a river with a goldfish swimming underneath. A crib to the left of the room was made and ready for a baby that was most likely dead. Unfortunate. The blanket was neat and the pillow was still fluffed from a year without use. Flies buzzed around the whole room. Out of all the things that the aliens wiped out, why couldn’t it have been flies and spiders? It didn’t seem like a hard thing to do- ask the dinosaurs. She wandered close to the crib to take the blanket and pillow, she grabbed the soft green fabric that would do nicely as her new bed for the time being. At the beginning of the invasion, she considered living in the large farmhouse near her old home. It was a 20 minute walk along the road but when she got there the house was still occupied. She had tried a week later but by the time she got there the house was overrun with meaty spores and baby aliens. So that was a dud, so now, a year later, the girl wandered from place to place. City to city, at this house the floor creaked against her worn-out shoes, and she wondered when was the last time someone was in the nursery. She opened the door slowly as it was falling off its hinges, the door creaked louder than any other door she’d ever heard before and echoed in the silence of the house.
Along the hallway, half-broken pictures stared at her with blank smiles. With dead and soulless eyes. “Probably how the family looks now,” she thought. The girl entered the living room and found where the flies were all coming from, a bowl of fruit on the counter and another on the dinner table were all riddled with mold and rot and flies were having themselves a gorge.
“Oh, that’s disgusting.”She said. She walked away from the bowl. The smell was worse than most things in life. But the girl couldn’t quite smell it as well as she might have if she didn’t have the government- mandated masks. The air was dense with the spores and the government thought that the spores may be able to grow inside of you if you breathe it in. An old TV was still stuck on the screen asking, you have been watching Milena TV for 6 hours, are you still there? Nope, the girl thought. She considered grabbing the remote and clicking the no button and see if you could watch TV. Instead of that gloriously brilliant idea she peaked out the front door, the spores were peaking through the cracks of the concrete sidewalk. Little eyes, little teeth and tongues tasting the air around them, sucking up all the nutrients of oxygen. They lived off of carbon dioxide. But don’t tell Alaska, or the polar bears.
The air had grown colder and more frigid ever since the aliens came to earth, which was probably great for those people living in the Arctic Circle. If there was ever a time to bring back the wooly mammoths it was now. The girl carefully stepped onto the concrete, it sunk a little beneath her weight, like jelly. She took a deep breath and the air still smelled of rotten eggs. Ugh. The girl sighed. As she left little footprints that quickly disappeared in the concrete. She held her knapsack across her back like a hobo, but it had plenty of essentials, nasty non-perishable food, a baby's blanket, a pot for cooking, a lighter for firing, and a toothbrush. Dental hygiene is very important. As she was walking she saw plenty of usual city stuff, crashed cars, a very distant siren from a car alarm, trash cans overfilling with red fleshy spores all fighting to form one of the aliens off of the rotting trash. One of the spores had died on the concrete, it had turned brown and lumpy, the eye that it had formed was white and glossy, the spore was dry and stuck to the ground. The closest comparison to the dead spores was a beached, dried-up jellyfish. That made the girl wonder whatever happened to the beaches, the water was still watery as the earth had gotten cooler worldwide by 20 degrees. So the water was as clean as it was 100 hundred years ago. Yeah, good for the vegans and the environmental lawyers but kind of bad for everyone else. She had seen a river when she had walked to this city, it was very clean, algae had grown everywhere, according to the nature show her mom watched, that was a good sign. She had her mother’s pot in her knapsack which might have weighed her down, but she needed it and her lighter to purify the water even if it was perfectly clean. Just in case, bacteria, parasites, and all other unwanted creatures would probably kill her.
She made her way to the grocery store at the end of 4th Avenue. Inside, most of the normal foods such as bread, fruits, vegetables, and most importantly the flower bouquets had all been wiped from the shelves. The ice cream, cake mixes and fresh meats and fish were all gone as well. The candy was still underneath the place where the cashiers would make you pay. One of the windows was broken from the wave of homeless people, thugs and other thieves used to loot grocery stores. In the back there wasn’t a wide selection of canned food. Just the really bad tasting ones: Canned tuna, canned corn, and most horrifying of all…canned carrots. Whatever sociopath that made that one was about to save the girl's life. She greedily grabbed all of the canned foods that could fit into her knapsack and set off with them. She found a parking lot outside of the store, she wasn’t sure what it was called, all that was left of the sign was S A E W A in dim red letters. In the parking lot she grabbed 5 dry pieces of wood and rocks and lit them on fire. She heated up the tuna inside of her pot and watched it get warm. Behind her she heard the rustle of bushes. She looked behind her, she didn’t have any weapons but if push came to shove she would have to give up her food. She could always come back to the store and grab the remaining food. She peeked into the bush, she shoved a large stick into the bush and inside of the bushes was a kid. He had a rectangular mask with large black eye holes, he scrambled away from the stick.
“Wait, wait, wait. I was just in the bushes,” he said, he got up and brushed the dust off his brown tattered overalls.
“Sure, you were just in the bushes, what do you want?”
“I assure you I don’t want anything! Forget I was here, I’ll be leaving.”
The girl watched him walk back into the trees, she then threw him a can of carrots. If you are sharing might as well share the worst kind. Lots of sodium. He looked back and grabbed the can and vanished back into the brush. The girl turned back to her pot and scooped the tuna with her can and began eating. She took off her mask, the sun was barely visible behind the thousands of spores in the air, they buzzed around hair, and she had to eat quickly. The air was so disgusting that you could actually taste the flesh of the aliens. It tasted like a rat's butt to say the least. The tuna didn’t smell or taste better, but it was better than nothing. The good stuff, the canned soup, was in her knapsack. She then heard another sound, this time it was much quicker than the boy.
The girl looked over quickly and there was the alien, the Aranot, as a matter of fact, which was its official scientific name. The girl jumped which triggered the Aranot. It launched forward, like a bullet, but the girl had already started rolling away. The Aranot scurried away from the fire, the girl got up again, all she could do was stop looking at the Aranot but it was very hard to. They were the same red fleshy substance as their spores, they had eyes all over their body. There were more than eight eyes on its face alone, although it didn’t have any ears it could probably hear the sound of the girl's heartbeat.
She started to run away but she would have to sneak back over there and grab her mask which was still lying abandoned on the concrete. God, she had kept her mask clean for so long now it was going to get trampled by a weird freaky alien. She ran as fast as her legs could move but she heard the quick pattering footsteps on the concrete catching up to her. She closed her eyes, this is how she’s going to go, is it? Killed by an alien whose arms were about as wide as the 4 inch balance beam at her old gymnastic gym. Until glass shattered behind her. She turned around and the alien was set ablaze. Behind it the boy seemed to have thrown something on its back. She stopped as it melted into a little puddle of sadness, like a wicked witch from the west. The girl stopped, breathing heavily. Behind the alien was the same boy with his box shaped mask and his brown tattered overalls. He tugged on the straps awkwardly and then walked around the sizzling remains of the alien and toward the girl. He held out his hand and the girl stared at it, he took back and took off his mask. He had large brown eyes and matted brown hair, very normal looking and unfortunately normally unattractive.
“Um hi, I saw you get attacked by this thing and uh, I wanted help.”
“Um, I see that.” She looked at the bubbling pool of dead alien. “Thanks.”
“Yeah, no problem.” The girl stood there awkwardly.
“Sorry I used your lantern.” The boy said,
“Excuse me!?”
“I’m sorry but without me you’d be dead!” The boy yelled defensively,
“Yeah but I’ll be dead without that lantern, what am I gonna do at night, wander around blindly until I fall into a sinkhole and die! What would I tell my grandchildren!?”
The boy backed up, he looked around awkwardly at the shattered glass,
“Well, at least for you, things could always get better, you know, get a new lantern. It's cool.”
The girl laughed a toneless laugh, “Cool? It’s cool!? For me, this probably could not get any worse!”
A drop fell on the girl's nose, she screamed in outrage, the rain was coming and the spores would be weighed down by the water. It was the most dangerous weather. She stormed back to her fire and shoved her mask back on, the boy followed.
“I know a building,” he suggested, “It used to be a hospital so there are beds and everything, if you’re, uh, interested.”n
“Well if it's the least you could do.”
“Cool, but we’re gonna have to exchange some names, I’m Casimir.”
“Alright then, I’m Chessa.”
“Hey both of our names start with a C, that’s funny.”
“Hah hah.”
She trudged off to the dirty old hospital with a random guy and no light source.
End of Chapter 1
The Texter is Still Typing
The texter is still typing
The flickering of the bubble
The apprehensiveness of words
The texter is still typing
The first message was I see you
No it’s not a prank
A game really
Too hard to understand
Blondie?
But now the texter was still typing
You get up and look through the doors and windows
The stormy weather fogs the window
You look down
The texter is still typing
Outside the front door is a phone light
You type again
The luscious lullaby of typing
The only sound in the room
You sent it
Then it was all done
The message was sent
And the window shattered
And the texter is still typing
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