Are we REALLY alone? Maybe not even on our own green and blue rock.

 NO...You AREN'T GONNA KILL US...!!!

 I awoke with a piercing shriek and found myself covered with a hot lather of sweat and staring into THOSE EYES.
Wait...
 I know those eyes, those beautiful eyes. They belong to my wife Claire. She was looking at me with concern written all over her face. What had her eyes reminded me of? Something that could only be construed in those dreams, my nightmares. Something...Black, so black, twin pools of black. All I remembered were those...eyes? Were they even eyes? Seemed like they belonged to some voracious predator, with such a desperate hunger reflected in them. Didn't I know that hunger from somewhere? Somewhere close? Oh well, you should try never to dwell on your nightmares or your day turns to shit.
 I broke from my faux-Freudian interpretations with a start and still Claire was rubbing my back and whispering soothing things in my ear, trying to calm me. As the room came back into focus and I saw Claire there beside her husband, almost in a distant clinical sense, it seemed like the first time I'd seen her. She was standing silhouetted against a huge glass window in the Reno airport, dressed to kill in a flowing green dress, (hiding what I know now to be a stunning pair of legs), she had a green wool scarf wrapped around her shoulders, her arms were crossed across a black form-fitting blouse that did wonders for all the men's dreams in the airport and draped across her shoulders & torso was that silky black hair that seems to always frame her face in the most beautiful and fetching way. Needless to say, I was entranced.  Do I have time to tell the story?  Why not, I still have an hour before our strike meeting.
 I met Claire in an odd, but increasingly more common, way: over the Internet. I had written my first story throughout the entire previous night and I was feeling very snazzy. So, as many new writers do nowadays, I decided to share my scribblings with people over the Net. I got about 300 responses to the story over the next 2 days in my email box. Most of the replies were from the average Joe, saying "Right on, keep writing", and the like. But one letter. One letter reached out, pinched my ass and screamed "READ ME!" Well...not really, but the letter was intriguing and the woman behind it was one that I just had to meet. I'll always remember her first words to me:

... hi there Brendan
if you want to correspond with women than e-mail me. i
love to talk to people. your writing was beautiful, by the way.
but you have not seen God, you have seen death. and you haven't
experienced death, you have experienced pain. for neither heaven
nor hell, god nor the devil exists. it is only life and death,
pain and pleasure. hope to hear from you soon.
Claire

(What a woman!)

 She loves me. I know that. It's a weird sensation, being loved, almost as if it's ok to let go sometimes. With life sometimes beating you up and screwing you out, you need support. Hell, when you go to bed and wake up with only yourself to look at in the mirror, that support has to come from you and only you. It's like sleeping with your sister, sooner or later you get a kid with three eyes.
 When Claire gets mad, she doesn't get really ass-kickin' angry most of the time.  She has more a fiery nature, like a tempestuous waterspout, never quite turning into the dreaded tornado.  Even in the peak of her anger, with her eyes blazing, I'll be thinking in some small corner of my mind, of ways to make her smile and maybe, just maybe, to get myself out of the shit I had jumped into.
 Sometimes, I'll be lying next to Claire in bed and I'll look over at her sleeping face and my body just gets all tingly and goose-bumply.  On those nights, sometimes I'll just sit there beside her and listen to her breathing and watch her chest rise and fall.  Her draughts of breath are light and are as quiet as her car, a wraith in the night.  Every time she draws a breath, I hold mine, as I bear witness to her full and beautiful breasts rising and falling to the tempo her body beats to sustain her blood.  We are so aggressive about love.  We don't just sit back and let things in life happen to us.  Sometimes, I'll be out in the kitchen making bagels and she'll sneak up behind me, turn me around and kiss me with a passion that must shimmer in the air around us.  Claire sometimes doubts my convictions about her, almost as if she's afraid to believe someone can love her as much as I do.  I will do anything for her, it's that simple.  Yet I believe that love is so much more than just a chemical attraction with perks.  We are more than just animals put on this Earth to drill each other and procreate to our hearts content.  Claire is a beautiful woman, with the power to seduce, love and make me trust anything that leaves her sensuous lips.  She has this sparkling ... aura, about her.  Not an angel halo mind you, cause she isn't an angel or perfect ... to anyone else but me.  One of the only things I have ever truly wanted in my life was to be her husband.
 The nightmare bothered me all damn day, even when I tried to put it out of my mind. This was the 32nd night something "odd" had happened in my sleep.  The dreams were the only constant ... No, scratch that, one other thing plagues my sleep: those eyes.  Twin pools of black follow me in my resting hours and hound my every waking step.  The 9th or 10th night I woke up, lying in a pool of my own sweat in the cabinet under the kitchen sink, with a cleaver clutched tightly in my grasp.  I had that acrid taste of adrenaline in my mouth, almost as if I had been preparing for a fight to the finish.  I wasn't covered in blood or anything, but that wasn't the weird part, you understand. The oddest damn thing was that I'd locked and barred all the doors and windows.  But I guess I wasn't happy with just locking them, because I'd piled bureaus, bookshelves and just about anything else I could find in front of these portals into our home.  It was if I was defending my house and my wife against some unseen intruder, protecting against a shadow.  I got the feeling that this dark apparition had not yet arrived.  But it was coming, coming for us all.
 I must've been very quiet about the whole affair too because my light-sleeping wife never woke up during my midnight sorties. I was so damn scared. I felt as if I was prematurely succumbing to my family's urge to become "eccentric" in their golden diaper-wearing years. I decided it was time to seek help.
 I would have usually sought out Claire to talk to, but she was embroiled in a family fight with her mother and sister at the moment and I didn't want her worrying about me to boot.  Her family didn't like me one bit, they had always mistrusted me and I think they always would.  Still, I really respected her father.  He was one of those hard-working, give-everything-to-his-family types.  The only other person available to talk to was Josh.  He's a good friend of mine who I often turn to when one of those problems happens to a "friend" of mine, not ME of course.  Josh is a real generous man who'd give you the shirt off his back without a second thought but touch a morsel on his plate and he'll suck the skin off your finger like he was strippin' a chicken wing: extra crispy.  I remember these times Josh and I would go out to eat when we were kids, 16 or 17, and Josh would order a whole PILE of messy food.  I would just sit there and drink my cup of tea and watch as Josh drew a crowd of onlookers with his style of guttling.
 Josh showed up in his red sex machine the next morning to pick me up to go to work (we work in the same office). We usually have a cup of coffee and shoot the shit until our time of departure rolls around. Sometimes I have the time to eat a whole muffin before my friend pillages the fridge in his never-ending search for the perfect calorie.  Josh isn't a fat guy, he is just bigger than your average buffalo.  I decided now was as good a time as any to enlighten him about my problem and seek his advice on my next course of action.

 "Josh, do you ever have anything weird happen to you in your sleep?", I started.
 "Well, Bren, you'll have to elaborate on what 'weird' is ... I haven't woken up with a sheep next to me, if that's what you mean ... well, not since I was with in the Army at least.," he quipped with a broad smile.

He was going to be NO help, so I dropped it.

 After work, as I passed through the revolving doors on my way out of the building, I initiated the daily ritual of mine that might eventually lead to the end of me, maybe of every ant on this rock.  With a slide and a shake of my wrist, my mistress was in my hand. No enchanting veils or negligee, no arms to run into when my wife calls me a dick, just a good Ole American Cancer Stick.
 I turned to my left and right and picked out the shadowy forms of my brothers and sisters of the Order of the Dying Lung.  Everyone out here was trying to get their last hits of our Lord Nicotine before going home to those who did not worship our God.
 I identified Josh and his red-headed wife, Katie, sitting next to the fountain, looking deeply into each others' eyes as they took their vows of death together.  Over near the edge of the building was Mike DeOssie, alone, as was his custom during his nicotine blast-off stage.  We all worked in the same place and we were all vastly different people except for our one deadly vice.  We were the few remaining survivors of an age when the Marlboro Man's lips proudly slung a butt as he rode those ponies home.  For Chrissakes, doctors in my parents youth would take their message to their airwaves in praise of the "calming and healthful" cigarette. Of course, this was in the days where they had developed an all-glass car to let the family bask in the newly-discovered "salubrious" ultra-violet rays. ("What's that splotch Jimmy?")
 The next day, I was walking the halls on my lunch break and I turned the corner to check the bulletin board for announcements.
 Something caught my eye and I pulled off one of the flyers, advertising a AA-type group starting up within our office.  It was called the TTQ group, Trying To Quit.  They were to meet at some address downtown on the docks.  It sounded like every other "stop-smoking-now" scheme out there but this one didn't cost any money and a LOT of people I knew were signed up, mostly from the after-work smoking group.  I saw Josh, Katie, Mike, John and a whole cavalcade of others.  I figured, why the hell not, I didn't have anything to lose.  The first meeting was tonight at 8, and it would hopefully help me to start out on the road to a nicotine-free life.

 Claire and I drove up to the address I had written down and we were a bit surprised.  It was a nasty, old warehouse that smelled like it had been used to store fecal material and cadavers.  We walked through the gaping hole that I guess could be called a door, and took in our surroundings: a mostly empty building with a oil-encrusted cement floor, positioned in the middle of this cavernous space were about 30 chairs and a podium, dirty windows wrapped around the very tops of the walls, it seemed like there should be stone coffins strewn about in this massive mausoleum. I suppose we were the only ones there this early, but then who had set up the chairs and podium? All this pondering had made us itchy for a smoke (any excuse will do) and we exited out the back...door/hole. As we got out, it was like walking in London on a cool night, the fog was thick as pus on a child's knee. We had found our absent comrades, all out for a smoke. Introductions went round and we picked out our friends from my office and went over to talk to them. Josh and Katie were fighting as usual, Mike was sucking puffs over by a rotting dock, John and Justin were arguing about who was better in basketball and Corey was chatting with Jackie, trying to get her to check out the furnishings in his bedroom, if ya catch my drift.
 No one really had a clue about how these meetings were to proceed and we all went in and took our seats. A tall lean man stood at the podium and called for silence. He introduced himself as Sam Jurevitch, the President of our little club. He banged his gavel and the meeting got under way. The guidelines were simple: we were to share experiences we'd been having and support each other in the hope that it would make it easier for us to cut down and eventually quit our nasty little habit. One by one, we all stood up and introduced ourselves to the group, how long we had been smoking and how much we smoked.  I even got the shouted "Hi Brendan" back, like at every AA meeting you see on TV.  Claire and I were really having a blast listening to everyone's stories of love lost and their cravings over Philip Morris' product.  Maybe I was wrong about this thing, maybe it would help us to quit.
 For the next three weeks, Claire's and my schedule was pretty much: go to work, come home, make love and then smoke.  The TTQ meetings were becoming more frequent, now up to 4 times a week and the membership was slowly increasing due to the blast that we usually had.  And we all noticed that slowly, but surely, we were quitting our habit.  It was a fantastic feeling, this new control over my life, but still the dreams persisted.  They were starting to get more frequent and longer-lasting, hampering my performance at work and my enjoyment of this new life Claire and I were chiseling out for ourselves.  I felt that this unknown threat that haunted me was getting closer and stronger and sometimes at work I would daydream of this new evil in the world. I was going to mention this in session tonight at the TTQ meeting, I had to get it out.
 When it was my turn at the meeting to stand up and say something about what was going on in my life, I decided to just do it.

 "I've been having these weird dreams lately," I started.

 "When I say weird, well, I mean it. I've been hiding from something in my nightmares, something so terrible that the mere thought of it makes me barricade myself in my house. That's what I've been doin' these past two months, nearly every night now.," I continued, struggling to get it all out.

 I turned to Claire and looked deep in her deep brown eyes, "I've been hiding from those black eyes, those ..."

 "Twin pools of black.," I heard someone blurt out.
 "With a knobby head, that shines pale.," came another reply from somewhere behind me.
 "And three-fingered hands with toothed-suckers on the tips.," echoed another, given almost, it seemed, without thinking.

 We all were in some sort of memory trance and giving the words form made our thoughts clearer.  I looked around nervously and I saw scared people to my left and to my right.

 "A common nightmare?", I mused aloud.
 "No fucking way Brendan, last month when you asked me if anything weird had happened to me in my sleep, I lied.  I was scared out of my skull by those dreams and those eyes ... Sorry man.," Josh piped up.

 One after another every person in the group stood up and confessed to the dreams, but only the men did the barricading. I guess it was just something very deep, primordial instinct in men, the women had clearer dreams and nightmares of those eyes.  Even Claire had had those dreams and was thinking about telling me, but she didn’t want to unnecessarily worry me.
 The TTQ meeting that night was full of terrified people, the kind that hates being left in the dark.  That's what we all were: in the dark.  Or so I thought.
 A lone figure stood at the back of the room and we all quieted down as we realized who it was. We had learned that when Mike said something, it was always well thought-out and usually intriguing.

 He uttered a sentence, the words to which we had all been searching for: "Aliens. They come for us."

 Silence, as thick as a blanket covered the meeting, as we all sat in stunned consternation.  The silence broke, as a tsunami on a lonely Japanese shore, into bedlam as everyone yelled and struggled with this last puzzle piece that had fallen into place so suddenly.  Sam nearly broke the gavel trying to restore order to the entropic melee, but he finally regained an audience.
 For the next hour, we bled Mike of all the information he had on our would-be conquistadors. He had suffered and struggled with the dreams the same as everyone else had in the group for over a month and had only made the connection the day before.  He had been reading a magazine in his doctor's office and he had come across a story about the UFO phenomenon.  He turned the page and was faced with a full-page picture of the epitome of his (and our) terror: eyes, twin pools of black.  He raced from the office with a scream, seeking safety in the stairwell.  Yet he knew that nowhere was truly safe as he realized where he had seen that face and those eyes before: our office building, The CIA!  If they could be gotten to ...
 That was all Mike had to relate to us but it was the push we needed to send our memory snowball rushing down the slope.  It was getting really late and most of us had kids to tuck into bed but not a muscle twitched in the direction of the door.  We HAD to sketch some of this shit out. Everyone added his/her memories to the pot in light of this new information and we found that we all now realized that our office was the only place where we remembered these "Fishheads"( As Mike had so eloquently coined the term for these intruders).  We decided to break for home and meet the following night and see what could be figured out.
 I went to work the next day with trepidation and not a word was spoken between Josh or I, nothing COULD be said.  We didn't have long to wait for all our horrors to be realized.  As Josh and I walked through the revolving doors and through the metal detectors, we looked up and saw Pete. Except this wasn't the same old-man that had greeted us for 10 years. Dead, black eyes locked with ours and a hairless malformed head shone in the fluorescents. Two forms seemed to occupy Pete's body at the same time: Pete's saggy old-man frame and the Fishheads' lean thin one. Scared, blue eyes seemed trapped under cold, expressionless black ones; a testament to the theory of life after death.  The muscles around the eyes twitched, as if Pete was trying to escape the body that had become his very own Living Hell.
 Our surprise must have shown in our faces because the Pete-thing's eyes narrowed and it spoke in Pete's own wrinkled voice, "Are you guys ok? Brendan...Josh?"

 We were almost too startled to speak but fast-thinking Josh piped-up, "We were just wondering where your donuts were Petey."

 It was just like Josh to put aside thoughts to get the cheap laugh.  It saved our asses though.  With a laugh, Pete waved us through like he always did, except this time, we both took a little extra step away from his desk as we walked by.  We passed the usual crowds in the marble halls and atriums, yet we counted about one alien per hundred people, making the count about 10 or 12. It wasn't a lot, but every Fishhead we saw was a VP or Department Head.  They had control.  We had to do something.
 We went about our business for the rest of the day, finding errands to run that took us to every dept. in the building.  We had to gather intelligence, just what I had always wanted to do when I joined.  Our after-work smoking break was far shorter (I've never, to this day, seen people suck butts faster!) and we all huddled together, speaking in hushed tones, in the far corner of the building.
 At the meeting that night, people spoke quickly and nervously of their experiences of the day with the Fishheads.  We were all scared for our lives.  As frightened as little children upon hearing a sound and diving under Superman sheets to elude the inescapable monsters.  I put forward the motion that before we made plans, we had to learn more about them.  Josh and I volunteered ourselves to lead the rag-tag group of Intelligence Gatherers.  Our mission was to figure out how these Fishheads functioned, how they got here, what they wanted and how (God-willing) they could be stopped.
 The next day dawned true and blue, the kind you dream about flying above the clouds on.  I woke up with a determined face, full of purpose. I knew we had a job to do and that knowledge always dispelled doubt from my male mind. I woke Claire with a full breakfast and a kiss on her sleep-scented lips. I could tell she had been crying last night from her red, puffy cheeks That was an odd thing for Claire. You usually couldn't tell two minutes after the tears had dried that she had been sad. I tried not to worry her by talking about the job Josh and I had assigned ourselves at the meeting the other night but when I looked in those deep, clear eyes, I knew any deception was foolhardy as Claire was one of the sharpest razors in a Gillette plenti-pack.

 "What the hell are you guys going to do" she asked.
 "To tell you the truth, I haven't the foggiest.," I responded in a voice quaking with anticipation.
 "I'll come up with somethin' and run it by Josh and see what he thinks 'bout it.  Whatever I do, I'm gonna start today, so don't wait up." I said, trying my hand at humor.

 I took her hands in mine, pledged my love and with a flip of my coat, was out the door.

(Scene Break)

 Josh and I walked down the hall, talking as we went.
 "Josh, we need to do SOMETHING. Something that'll give us the edge." I said.
 "I say we capture one of them and see what he says. And if not, we throw him off the roof.  They killed my wife, and the mother-fuckers are going to PAY.  They're all going to die, and I'm going to laugh.," Josh told me in a quiet voice filled with rage.
 I was worried about him, he was starting to slip.  I just hoped he could last long enough to see this thing through.  I needed him.

 "Well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it." I whispered quietly.

 Pushing open the double doors that led out of the empty weight room, we heard a grunt and a shout. We ran as hard as our exhausted bodies could carry us and turned the corner into horror. There was a Fishhead crouched over the limp, prostrate body of Harry, the janitor. This one was different than every other nasty alien we saw though, he was nude. Nude and not hidden in human form!  We took in the scene quietly, as a deer caught in the headlights sees the Dodge Ram emblem bearing down on him. And yet he stands, hooves planted.  In the corner was the bloody, twitching husk of one of our top execs. in the Canadian-section of the Foreign Affairs Dept.  He had been one of the "taken" on our list.  Josh and I locked eyes and I saw a brutal hunger in his brown, red-rimmed eyes.  I nodded. We were at that bridge.  It was on.
 I rushed at top speed at the invader, trying to cover the 20 or so meters to the demon before he looked up. My legs pumped furiously and my heart rate shot up, my body pumping blood to every yearning muscle and fiber in my body.
 Pump, Pump Pump. 15 meters, 10, 5...My throat birthed a primal scream as I leapt through the air at the monstrosity.  I hit it high on the shoulder/neck area and we fell to the ground in a tangle of limbs, hands and suckers. He was trying to get up and I was trying to stay on the ground, where I had the advantage.  He was screaming, it seemed in pain, but I couldn't figure out why, I hadn't hurt him ... yet.  The creature was dripping this bloody mixture of flesh and green goo onto me and the floor, it came from wounds around his neck and shoulder area.  "Hrrrmmmm, interesting.," I thought to myself, in entirely the wrong time and place.  He shrugged me off swiftly and easily, as a bronco would a timid cowboy and gained his feet.  Looking down at me, he thought my end had come. Little did he know that I saw something out of the corner of my eye: movement ... the large, white-skinned kind.  Josh slammed into the monster from the side and tackled him to the ground, stabbing with his knife as he went down.  The knife made a wet, squelching sound as it drove time and again into the soft underbelly of the creature. Before I could get to them, Josh was pushed off the creature and slammed into a wall, HARD. The Fishhead stood and looked at me.
 We faced off across the 3 meters or so separating us and we circled, each looking to get the advantage. I looked at his body and it was covered in fist-sized welts that popped and fizzed like coke and fizz-pop did when you added the two together. It was me!  Something about my fist had made this happen.  The only thing on my skin was sweat ... That's It!!  It had to be!  My sweat must somehow destroy the thing's skin.  And Claire thought it was bad when I gave her a sweaty hug after working out.  Little did she know it was a killer.

I had a plan.

 There was no way I could take this thing in hand-to-hand, as I was too hurt and my body was too exhausted to keep this up more than a few minutes.  I took off running in the opposite direction and sure enough, when I looked to check my six, Big 'n Ugly was only a few meters back.  I slammed into the double doors, grabbed a barbell and waited.  The Fishhead followed 2 seconds behind and stopped, looking.  His vision must've been poor in the dark room as he couldn't see me a meter to his left.  I swung with all my might with the 45-lb slab of iron at his face and the connecting sound was a sickly melding of bone-snapping and tendons ripping.  He fell to the ground and moaned and gurgled, twitching as he did.  I maneuvered around his flopping body and grabbed a towel, rubbing my face and neck down with it, until it was sopping with sweat.  Twisting it up as I walked back over to him, I wrapped it around my hands like a garrote.  Sitting astride his back, I looped the towel right below his neck and pulled it tight.  The screams that came emanated from his ruined mouth were inhuman and piercing.  They made me wince, thinking about Josh’s wife and how she must have screamed just this way, and I pulled the noose tighter.
 The cloth cut through his neck with amazing speed and the screams abruptly stopped.  His head came loose in my hand and an artery in his neck squirted a massive quantity of warm, oily blood all over my face and chest.  I rolled off him and crawled over to the wall, anywhere away from that corpse. A huge form burst through the doors with a rebel yell and stopped when he saw the body.

 Josh looked over at me and asked, "You ok, Bman?"
 "Yah, Just Fucking peachy" I replied with a croak.
 "Forrrrrreeeeeeee", Josh yelled, running at the creature's head and kicking it away.

 A little bit of flesh and blood squirted onto his pant-leg and he turned to me, smiling. The deed was done.
 
 
 

And the Story WILL go on....

 
 

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Page last updated: April 28, 2003

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