They came for our dead Read online

  “I told ya they come for our dead,” Brian mumbled to himself, dunking his head between his hands.

  Blam! Blam!

  The shotgun erupted from the back seat.

  “Peter, that thing, that alien or whatever it is… It’s fast and strong! It just moved a car out of its way with one hand like it was nothing!” Dennis yelled.

  Meanwhile, I had other concerns to deal with. I collided with another dead thing, and its body hurled into the air and crashed down upon our windshield, shattering it. The front of the car was dented all over as I hit body after body, and the hood was soon bent and scarred. I slammed my foot to the floor, and the car shuddered as we plowed through the masses in front of us. All the while, Isabella blew holes in those who dared to get too close, and I continued punching through them with the Lincoln, till I was close enough to see the alien.

  It ran with great grace and speed, bounding over small mounds of debris as if they were nothing. It was tall enough to tower over an average man, and as it ran, it splayed its feet, propelling it onward. There was a greenish glow to its body, and a haze around it created an odd aura. Its two long arms moved easily by its sides, and it appeared to be garbed in some type of dark armor.

  Aren’t these things supposed to be hyper intelligent? What’s it doing down here with the dead? Surely it has to know that’s suicide, I thought as I saw the dead things converge on it, running after the alien simply because it was alive, something they could kill. I had to smile at that. “If our car doesn’t get it, they will,” I said.

  “It looks kinda reptilian, with blue eyes. The thing’s gotta be runnin’ over forty miles an hour, pretty darn fast for somethin’ that big. It’s got nowhere to go though. Them other things have almost got it surrounded,” Dennis relayed to us, looking through his rifle scope. “I don’t know about y’all, but I’m gonna enjoy this! If they don’t get that thing, I’m gonna take its slimy green head off!” With that, Dennis released the safety on the rifle.

  We were several hundred feet from it now, and I had to turn the car several times to circle the alien. Nearby, the rift slowly moved along, disgorging more and more dead, and the alien craft unnervingly moved over us, completely soundless, like something out of a very bad dream.

  The dead had to be tens of feet deep around the alien, but it just stood there, as if it wasn’t the least bit bothered. We were close enough for me to see its yellow eyes, and it blinked a couple times, as if pondering the dead coming at it, but it seemed unperturbed. Hundreds of reanimated dead engulfed it, clawing at it and gnashing their teeth, yet it dismissed them as if they were nothing more than grass at its feet.

  I kept spinning the car around the alien, taking great delight in its plight, eager to see it ripped apart. We drove in the cool shadow of the saucer, and I found it a bit easier to dodge the dead because they were aiming for a new target, an unmoving target that didn’t seem interested in running or putting up a fight.

  “They can’t get to it. Somethin’s stopping them,” Dennis surmised.

  “You’re right,” I said, because they were dozens deep around the alien, but they hadn’t yet torn it apart, as per their way.

  “Wait. He’s holding something, something soft,” said Brian, sitting up in the back seat and squinting for a closer look.

  Soon, I had nowhere left to drive, because the dead began jumping and running at us again. The crumpled hood caved in even more under the weight of each new attacker, and every hit, whether a glancing blow or full-on assault, really took its toll, slowing us down and damaging our vehicle.

  “Dennis do you think you can blow a hole in them, big enough for me to smack the alien with this car?” I shouted, wanting to ensure that I made our lives, our sacrifice worthwhile.

  “I’ll try,” he said.

  Blam! Blam!

  There was one explosion from the shotgun, followed immediately by another, and several dark figures were shattered on the passenger side. With no time to watch, I gunned the car forward, heading straight for the mass of dead. Dennis reloaded and leaned out the window, screaming as the creatures clawed his arms. With those bloodied limbs, he managed to discharge the shotgun again, clearing an enormous space around the alien.

  Just eighty feet…sixty…fifty…

  I slowed almost to a stop as the dead lumbered our way, their black bodies burning with hate and power.

  “We’re not gonna make it!” I cried, but I had to press on.

  The back window was smashed in, but I could not turn to look, even as I heard the screams of my friends. In a blur, I saw Dennis, his body almost torn from the car, his arms a bloody mess. The shotgun fell to the floor, and shards of glass rained down on my left shoulder as my window was shattered. Burning ensued at that shoulder as iron-hard talons ripped through my flesh.

  Pop! Pop!

  Isabella tried to stave them off by firing the handgun, but it did little good.

  I floored the pedal again, and the tires spun in the grass, throwing off smoke and rubber as the Lincoln Continental tried and failed to move through the mass of dead. All attempts to flee were futile. It was over, and we were done.

  Then, though, a power I had never felt before knifed through the air, penetrating our bodies. I closed my eyes and winced as it pulsed once, twice and then was gone. I opened my eyes and braked the car. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the dead cascading to the ground around us as piles of black dust. I turned my head and looked at my companions, and they were all hurt, bleeding, crying, and whimpering but alive.

  I slowly turned my head to look out the spaces where the windows once were, and only the alien was there amongst the freeway and the grass, standing in the cool, dark shadow of his craft above us. It was no more than forty feet from us, holding up a rod. It turned its massive head our way and looked at us, at our bloodied bodies and our smashed car. It took in the horror on our faces, our expressions of fatigue and loss and grief. Then, it turned as if we were nothing and simply strode away.

  I was surprised the car still functioned, but I moved it slowly to a small hill outside the line of saucer, away from the rift. Looking around, we saw piles of dark particles everywhere.

  “Look! There are still the dead down near the rift, and the alien’s heading their way,” Dennis said. “I guess he don’t want none of ‘em livin’ to tell about it.” He had picked up the shotgun and was again holding it out the window, but his arms were shaky with blood loss, so his aim would not be so true. “Ya all right back there, darlin’?”

  “Yes, we’re fine,” Isabella said as she did her best to bandage her own wounds and Brian’s.

  I turned and grabbed the rifle from the back seat, then held it up and looked through the scope. Just as Dennis said, there were plenty of dead there, flitting from one spot to another, all gathered around one of them. A leader perhaps? I wondered. I had no idea how many of the dead the alien had destroyed, nor did I understand its motives, but whatever it was and for whatever reason, it had saved our lives.

  I continued to watch while Isabella turned her attention to Dennis to wrap his injured arms and stem the bleeding. She was very skilled at such things, and I marveled at her deft touch and reassuring words, consolations she managed even though her own gray hair was matted with blood.

  The alien eventually made it to the rift and the remaining dead. More steamed through the black hole, but there seemed to be fewer of them. Again, the alien held its rod aloft, and again we felt the strange force, a sensation of power that blanketed the whole area. The dead near the rift did not move, and they were not destroyed like the others; instead, they reacted as if a strong wind had buffeted them, blowing them back. I also noticed that they were not like the others, because rather than animalistically attacking anything and everything that moved, they seemed to be waiting for something.

  The alien held up its rod, close to its yellow eyes, and looked at it questioningly. It seemed confused as the rod began to glow in a rainbow of neon colors. When the alien hel
d the rod out again, double the power seemed to rush from it, so strong that it caused us pain and took our breath away. It rattled down our spines like an electric shock, shaking our bodies.

  When I escaped the shock of that, I looked through the scope again. Once again, the dead were unharmed. The presumed leader, now surrounded by thirty or more of the lifeless, raised one claw and gestured in the direction of the alien. The dead near the rift obeyed, moving as one to head up a small hill, toward the alien.

  The alien, however, was implacable, immovable. It turned its head and looked at the oncoming throng of dead and did nothing, as if it was confident in its own power and protection, in whatever mysterious force that magic rod held.

  The dead, moving faster than they’d ever moved before, raced up the hill in a gibbering mass of darkness. The air around the alien no longer shimmered, no longer offered the protection it once did. Like hungry dogs, the dead began tearing at its legs, ripping through the scaled armor, biting the greenish flesh they found underneath. The alien titled its head back to release a roar of agony, a cry that told us it did not expect that, that it thought itself immune from any such mundane attacks. Somehow, from somewhere, something had dropped its force field.

  Instantly, the alien brought forth its science, the knowledge gleaned from generations of traveling through the vacuum of space. Within seconds, a dozen or more of the dead were hit with such force that it shredded the very earth they were standing on. With huge fists, the alien pummeled all of those close enough, and each blow reduced one of the dead to dust, just as our shotgun blasts did at close range. It leapt into the air, at least thirty or forty feet straight up, trying to retreat from the rest of the ravenous dead, but it was sorely outnumbered. So many were grabbing it, biting it, and clinging to it while it jumped that it fell and rolled along the ground like a wayward, helpless tumbleweed. The alien’s armor reacted to that, coming alive and taking out a few more of the dead, flinging their bodies into the air with blasts of some brutish power.

  “Shoot it! Kill the damn thing!” Isabella shrieked behind me.

  I kept my eye on the alien as it stood, never moving the crosshairs off its face. Next, I clicked off the safety. “Almost…”

  “Don’t! For God’s sake, don’t!” Brian screamed, placing his wounded hand on the clawed part of my shoulder, causing me to wince in pain. “The saucer…”

  I stopped and turned my attention skyward, only to find that the saucer was perfectly still. I turned the scope on it and still found it difficult to look directly at the shiny thing.

  I turned the scope back toward the alien and the dead and saw that the alien was down, on the ground, with the few remaining dead on top of it. Then, in an instant, all those dead were gone, exploding in bright purple light, punished by the ship for attempting to kill one of their own.

  “See? Thank God you didn’t fire, or that woulda been us,” Brian said, once again pleased with himself for being right.

  The alien got up slowly. Its body was ravaged, leaking fluids, and parts were missing. Its face was badly scarred, and it was missing its lower jaw. It looked up at the saucer and raised its claw, and the rod flew through the air and landed in its grip.

  In all of that time, the leader of the dead never moved. It was still standing around the rift, summoning the newly arriving dead. Soon, it turned its head upward, as if noticing the saucer for the first time. It raised both arms and held them out over its head.

  As if in answer, the alien saucer titled from one side to the other, lurching through the air in some ungainly dance. It shuddered and bent its front lip down, then began to plunge to the Earth, burrowing the ground up in furrows.

  Around the leader, several dead illuminated and were consumed by fire, as I had seen before, but many survived. Half ran to where the alien was looking on in horror, as one of the dead was bringing down his ship. The other half ran back to the crash site, where the ship hull was violently ripped apart.

  “What the… What the hell’s going on?” I asked with a gasp.

  “What!? That can’t be… It isn’t possible!” Brian yelled behind me.

  “Unfortunately, I’m afraid it is, Mr. Wilson,” I argued as the ship splintered in two.

  Fire immediately sprang up, and the contents of the ship spilled over the ground, a plethora of sparkling things, bodies, snapping metal, and items I could not identify.

  Brian climbed out of the car and looked in disbelief at the event unfolding in front of us: the huge ship being pulled down and torn apart by the dead; the rift, no longer powered by the ship, simply hanging in the air, with no more dead coming forth; and, to our right, the wounded alien, running and jumping away from its dead pursuers.

  The alien was fast, but it was no match for so many. It turned and jumped sixty feet away, but the dead teleported right next to it in a blink, then descended upon it, always ripping and tearing. It fought back with science, calling up massive energy. It destroyed only two or three more dead before they brought it down permanently.

  One of the dead spotted Brian when he jumped out of the car. It turned its head, looked at us, and crossed the distance to us in mere seconds. One moment, it was hundreds of feet away, and in the next, it was within an arm’s reach. Above the quickly deteriorating saucer, another ship appeared, then another. The ground near the rift changed to violet as powerful forces erupted, and my eyes burned with the brightness of it.

  The dead thing was quickly upon us, its dark body quick and strong. As it reached the car, its face and body morphed from a terrible one of death and decay to that of a woman. Its twisted body donned skin and clothing, in flowing, nebulous strands. The woman it became was beautiful, with dark hair, bright eyes and a smile on her face.

  Suddenly, the destruction in front of us was gone. There was no sign of the burning spaceship, no dead huddled over an alien. Instead, we found ourselves standing in a field of stars. At our feet and over our heads they blazed, and I was not sure I’d ever felt more at ease or comfortable. I wanted to sit down and cry, for it was nearly too much to endure, too much beauty and peace after all I’d lost. I had not even had a chance to properly grieve, and I was overwhelmed with the need to do so.

  The woman turned and gestured toward a planet around a star. Some life form I did not recognize moved across the horizon. They were large, billowy creatures, glowing and moving in perfect unison. She indicated another planet, occupied by yet another form of life, full of peace, quiet, and harmony. These were creatures with immense patience and intelligence. She showed us three or four such images, all of them bearing a common strand: One image after another, I felt them coming closer to something I knew, to our Earth, to our starting point.

  In fact, the last image was on Earth, a small village populated by small tents, surrounding a larger one and much flowing water. I knew then that she and her family, dressed in animal skins, grew crops. They lived life and produced it without any of the modern conveniences I knew, in a time much purer than mine. She eventually died, but her soul, the one constant in all those images, moved on to other lives, in other areas. She was progressing, evolving. In each life, she grew, and she became something so far beyond us, almost perfect, blessed with experiences and abilities we could only dream of, gaining power and wisdom that was merely hinted at while I looked at her.

  Each time she sprang up in a new place, a different plane or planet perhaps, and she always evolved and matured. During those multiple lifetimes, she became something hard to understand, something almost unrecognizable to us. She harvested so much wisdom and insight. Nevertheless, she had now been pulled back by the cruel, hard, selfish science of the aliens. The first they brought back were the most recently dead, those who had just begun their journey in the afterlife. Their souls were forced back, their bodies transformed. They knew they were dead again and hated the living, hated being dragged back to where they started their first cruel existence. The aliens, for all their intelligence, did not foresee that, and they had reache
d too far. They pulled too hard, and they retrieved humans who had died many times over and were unfathomably powerful because of it.

  They couldn’t have known, I reasoned, recalling my conversations with Brian back at the veterans’ hospital. When they die, it’s just over for them. They’re just on one minute and off the next, like a light switch. I almost felt sorry for the cosmic fools. The further back in time they reached, the more powerful were the dead they grabbed, something so far beyond what I was, a thread of life that extended far beyond anything they could have imagined. Was Earth the beginning for mankind then? Did we start here and then move on, or was there another spot before this one? I had to question.

  I looked around and realized the field of stars was suddenly gone. All of us were quiet, looking in awe at the creature in front of us, perhaps a distant cousin of ours. She was once a sister, a mother, a human being like us, long ago, and that brought us some comfort in her presence. All thoughts of death and flight were gone, and the pain and the stress of running for lives diminished. Our weapons were in the car, and we felt no urge to grab them.

  I looked beyond her and saw that the debris left over from the ship was liquefying, running together to form some sort of square. The ships above hummed with power, the rift glowed again, and more aliens were standing about, after crawling out of their ruined vessel. More dead began to flood out of the rift and immediately headed toward the aliens, but the woman in front of us only smiled and bowed her head.

  “No way! The aliens will wipe them out. I don’t care how powerful we are, our dead are no match for the kind of science they have. Nothing trumps that. Nothing,” Brian whispered.

  At that point, once we returned from our pleasant and soothing vision, Dennis reached inside the car and picked up the rifle. He took off the safety, but instead of aiming at the incoming dead, he wheeled the weapon around and pointed it squarely at Brian’s head. “I’m tired of you always takin’ their side, mister. Are you part alien or somethin’? They destroyed our whole race, maybe even screwed up our chance to go to heaven once we die!” Dennis yelled, a tired, scared man with blood still running down his arms, staining his shredded clothes, furious that his wife was wounded and desperate to take back what had been taken from him. He glanced up at the ships hovering near us, the dead leaping at the aliens, and he was a man possessed, mad as hell and demanding a little control, if only for a few minutes.