GREEN SLIME: EARTH WAR
VOICE LOG—RANKIN, J. CMDR. UN SPACOM
Three days ago, an asteroid was detected on a collision course with Earth. I personally led a team of astronauts from space station Gamma 3 to plant explosives on the asteroid and destroy it. The mission was a success. Unknown to us, a particle of a substance that I can only describe as "green slime" was brought back on one of our space suits. This slime, which was found all over the surface of the asteroid, soon fed off of electricity and any other form of energy it encountered. It then mutated into creatures with one eye and two tentacles. Before we knew it, the station was crawling with them. As the creatures were strengthened by any form of energy, we were unable to negate them by conventional means. In my opinion there was no other option. I ordered the evacuation of Gamma 3 and its destruction. Several crew were lost in this action, including Commander Vince Elliot, without whom I would not have been able to effect the evacuation. I recommend the highest commendation for Commander Elliot...posthumously.
Space is cold. Yet its frigid temperatures pale in comparison to the icy glare of a woman wronged. As Jack Rankin extended his hands, bound for the shoulders of Lisa Benson on a mission of comfort, Dr. Benson turned her back. Jack's arms recoiled while she stood staring out the porthole and at the Earth below. He could smell the steamy waves of hate radiating from her.
"I'm sorry about Vince, Lisa," Rankin said.
She did not reply.
The space shuttle dropped through the atmosphere and UN SPACOM HQ (United Nations Space Command Headquarters) came into view. The complex was a sprawling one. Covering several square miles outside of Tokyo, it had grown over its twenty years from a UN spaceport into a small city, containing schools, shopping malls, and a Seminole casino (the first overseas branch). With quiet grace, the short range orbiter touched down at docking bay 94 of the megaopolis.
As the Gamma 3 refugees filed down the disembarkment ramp, the ground crew met them with the mixed mood of a victory party and a wake. Those whose expressions were sullen were greeted with handshakes that pumped with slow speed but firm caring. The astronauts who laughed and nearly kissed the ground upon arrival were hugged and high-fived, depending upon gender. Those whose faces were blank with numbness and shock were avoided altogether as no one was really too sure what to do with them.
General Jonathan "Two-fisted" Thompson was there. As the commanding officer of SPACOM, it was an obligation, not choice. With the grim face that only a drill sergeant could love, he welcomed Jack back to Earth with a grunt of "Rankin."
"Sure can make a mess, Jack," Thompson said as his eyes took in the reception around him. "We got parts of Gamma 3 raining down all over the world. And that's in addition to the asteroid fragments."
Square-jawed Jack Rankin smirked and turned his face away to watch the scene of heartfelt condolences and relieved jubilation, appearing to him as a boy's birthday party the week after the kid's mother had died. Rankin had lost men before. Any space commander had. Yet none of them had been his best friend, estranged though he might have been.
"I heard about Elliot. How's his fiancée taking it?" Thompson asked.
A flat hand struck Rankin across the cheek. His head jerked sideways from the force and the skin around the impact area turned red, outlining the woman's hand.
"How could you let Vince die?" Lisa Benson cried. "You could have saved him and you didn't! Why didn't you do anything to help him?"
Like a professor about to expound upon an important point, Jack raised his hands with an open gulf between them. His mouth opened but no words were permitted to escape.
"Because you're jealous! You were jealous of us!" Benson said with tears running down her face.
With that, she stormed away in grief. Those who were in closest proximity to the event stood and watched in uncomfortable silence. Once all eyes had followed Dr. Benson through a door to the rest of the complex, they swiveled and came to rest on Jack Rankin. He felt them, watching, scanning, and waiting for his reaction. He would not give them one, the ungrateful bastards.
I save their hides and they want pathos entertainment, he thought.
Expressionless, Jack walked away until he became secluded behind the landed shuttle. His eyes scrunched shut and his teeth gnashed.
"Vince," he said in a whisper. "Why, Vince? Why?"
Jack knew tears were the fitting response, yet none would come.
Gen. Thompson was indeed correct. Fragments of space station Gamma 3 fell to Earth all over the globe. One section of debris happened to land near Paks nuclear power plant in Hungary. Others ran aground in New York's Hudson Valley, Ratcliffe, UK, and Grovers Mill, New Jersey, just to name a few. Like bird droppings they came down, in clumps and in single pellets. Given human society's ever increasing demand for electrical current, much of the wreckage touchdown near power plants.
And on much of it clung droplets of that tenacious survivor of open space, green slime.
The scent of roses diffused through the third floor corridor of SPACOM's Giggitty Glen apartments. Jack Rankin had bought three of the flowers inside a floral shop in the mall and augmented them with a few more he had found after rooting through the store's dumpster. With a deep breath and a shot of Banaca to the mouth, he knocked on the door to what was once the home of Vince Elliot and Lisa Benson.
With a sharp pull the door swung open. Lisa was standing there, her eyes puffed and red. Her mouth turned further downward as she saw Jack standing there. Then her eyes narrowed. Undaunted, Jack held out the flowers to her as an offering.
"Thought we could talk," he said.
Lisa clenched her hand around the edge of the door and propelled it forward with great force. Before the wooden rectangle slammed shut, Jack caught a glimpse of someone sitting in the apartment. He appeared to be a large man of African descent in a SPACOM cadet uniform. Then the door closed and Jack was left alone in the hallway with his flowers.
Or at least he was until a Japanese officer of SPACOM came barreling down the hallway. The young-faced woman came to a stop in front of Rankin and reported that his presence was requested by General Thompson at Command and Control. Rankin tossed the roses over his shoulder and sent them to the floor. He then followed the Japanese girl's round-ripple ass all the way down the corridor and out into the open.
Jack Rankin walked the approach to SPACOM C&C. The area had dim lighting and metallic, clanking sounds rang out then echoed into oblivion. Every time he made the walk, the same noises reverberated. Jack always wondered what they were, but the question was invariably forgotten once his eyes came into contact with all the shiny things in the command room.
Thompson had been waiting for him. As soon as he saw Rankin enter, he rushed down the stairs from the mezzanine level and guided the man over to in front of the massive viewscreen.
"All due respect, General. Whatever you brought me here for better not suck," Rankin said.
After a directive wave of Thompson's hand, the viewscreen transitioned to a blurry, black and white photograph of a circular shape in an onyx but star-dotted void. It took on what Rankin saw as the color of Cookies and Cream ice cream, only with the colors reversed. Thompson informed him that what they were looking at was an object that space sensors had recently detected entering the solar system.
"Another flippin' asteroid?" Rankin groaned.
"It's not shaped like one," Thompson said. "Plus, the thing's slowing down. That makes it a spaceship of undetermined origin. Seems we're looking at a first contact situation here, Rankin. But I'll be go to hell if I know what we're faced with."
"Yeah, back to what I said about 'not sucking'..."
People across Southeast Asia stopped and looked skyward as soon as the enormous shadow fell over them. As it passed over, the ship, a saucer measuring an estimated one-kilometer in diameter, elicited both gasps and silence as the flames of re-entry trailed behind it. The crowded streets of Bangkok froze. A motorcycle messenger in Burma took his eyes from the dirt road to look skyward and ran down into a ravine. Even temple monks, isolated with their reclining Buddhas inside dense jungles stopped to gape upwards and utter obscenities. The ship's descent continued to slow until it came to a hover just over the Himalayan Mountains.
Chinese armed forces went on full alert. Two ATF (Advanced Tactical Fighter) jets were scrambled and sent to recon the object. As they circled it, the pilots reported no discernable features to the craft, save for its dark hue and the three ice-blue orbs in its aft section that were apparently the propulsion system. All the while a strange and intermittent signal was being detected as it was broadcast all over the world. Its point of origin...the newly arrived ship. Through the glorious invention of worldwide electronic media, news of the alien arrival spread in a matter of seconds.
And all the while the slime grew, mutated, and then stood fully erect.
"What the hell is that thing?" Gen. Thompson said, capping his question with a slam of his palm onto the mezzanine railing.
"How should we know? It's only been here for five minutes," replied Curtis, the diminutive subordinate before taking a sip of his coffee. He then looked down at the contents of the cup with a pursed and sour mouth and one eye closed. "Tastes like feet."
Thompson stared at the alien craft on the viewscreen for a moment more and then nodded his head as if having made a decision. Hands on his hips, he turned to his executive officer.
"Advise the General Secretary to gather every top scientist that she can. Astrophysicists, oh and maybe one of those chicks that work with the gorillas and chimps. You know, the ones that teach monkeys sign language and stuff? They might come in handy. And where the hell is Rankin?"
Outside of Lisa Benson's apartment building, Jack Rankin stood with a portable stereo held aloft above his head. From its speakers came a song in perfect digital quality, a song entitled "This Time I've Hurt Her More (Than She Loves Me)." Each warble of the vocal and every twang of the steel guitar filtered into the air and escalated the situation to critical mass. A window on the third floor slid open and Lisa stuck her torso through the gap.
"I've just suffered a death! Turn off that infernal..." she said before squinting her eyes. Recognition then boiled across her face. "Jack? What is that music?"
"It's the venerable Conway Twitty," Jack answered.
Her eyes and head cocked in thought while she tapped her fingers on the window ledge.
"Who is this... 'Twitty' of whom you speak?" Lisa asked.
"A favorite of mine. My way of wanting to make things better, babe," Jack smiled.
Lisa disappeared through open window and the glass pane slammed back into place. In slow movements, Jack lowered the stereo and pressed the "STOP" button. With a lowered head he turned around and walked in the direction opposite the apartment building.
"Let's fly home, Twitty Bird," he said as he kicked a rock from his path. "Let's fly home."
-The shock on the farmer's face as he set his beer can down and leaped from the tractor was impossible to describe. Out of the Indiana cornfields waved tens of dozens of flailing, bumpy green tentacles that were charged with electric current. Green slime monsters. All of them headed for his herd of cattle just beyond the fence at the edge of the woods. In anticipation of raccoon (or whatever other furry animal that might happen his way that could be termed as "them's good eatin'") hunting later in the day, he had left a vintage twelve gauge against a fence post. He knew it was still loaded from teaching his six year-old to shoot earlier in the day. If he could just reach it in time... Yet that would not come to be as the final thing he ever saw was the blue, springtime sky while the many tentacles dragged him down to his death.
-The Russians met their creatures splendidly and in the only way that they knew how: by blasting the holy hell out of them. Tanks, troops from armored personnel carriers, and missile artillery were all deployed after laser weapons were found to be more trouble than good (though the beam weapons knocked the awful green things down, a new creature eventually generated with each blast.) Even Russia's new Putin-class attack helicopters flew sorties against the green, lumpy, one-eyed people eaters. Detonations from explosive ordinance did scatter the creatures to pieces, but heat from the sun eventually helped them to regenerate and coalesce back into form. As the Russian army hid behind overturned cars and streetlamps while watching the towers of the Kremlin crawl with green...they knew a war of attrition was underway.
-A similar scene played out in New York City. A solid blockage of cars and trucks formed on the George Washington Bridge as the creatures advanced on the city. Motorists jumped from the bridge and into the water rather than face the oncoming horde as the wreckage of vehicles flew. With New York at risk and no other real option available, the military ordered an airstrike on the bridge even though civilians were still present. Missiles from air force fighters struck the bridge in two sections, blasting it apart and sending it into the sea.
This did little however to deflect any harm from the green slime creatures that had already made it across into Manhattan. The NYPD worked valiantly to keep the populace under control. But when people come face to face with green, slimy, tentacled, one-eyed monsters, there's only so much rational behavior one can expect. There was madness in the streets. Cars were smashed, trains were ripped off their rails, and still the things just kept coming. Panic ensued and people ran everywhere. They took shelter inside stores, strip clubs, or wherever they could. Several even jumped down open manhole covers for the imagined safety of the sewer system. Much to their surprise, the creatures followed them and even seemed to enjoy the new environment.
A school bus full of kids on a class trip would become the stuff of legend in the years to come. With a McDonald's as their Alamo, the kids held off wave after wave of creatures using whatever weapons that they had available. Cooking knives, hot grease, week-old McNuggets, and even a rocket launcher that a child had procured from a fallen soldier helped them to hold out even when the creatures swarmed the fast food restaurant and nearly caused the roof to collapse under the weight. Sadly, the U.S. military saw the congregation of green creatures as a juicy target of opportunity and razed the area with missiles from attack helicopters...totally unaware of the little squirms inside.
The creatures then seemed to use Central Park as a rallying point. Thousands of them packed themselves into the grassy, wooded area...leaving only flames and slime in their wake.
-It was Opening Day in Major League Baseball. In honor of the sports commentator's retirement, St. Louis had proclaimed it to be "Joe Buck Day" at Anhueser-Busch Stadium as the Cardinals took on the Chicago Cubs. Just as Buck was about to roll out the first pitch, hundreds of creatures overran the stadium. As players and fans alike ran and in some cases even jumped from the upper decks, Joe Buck was ensnared by two sets of tentacles and then summarily torn in half in a grotesque tug-of-war. Though there was the benefit of one of the worst sportscasters in history coming to a just end, Cubs fans were forced to mourn yet another baseball season that was over before it even began.
-To the North of St. Louis, in a suburb of the Cubs' hometown, Romeo Rodriguez packed his family and as many of his friends as he could into the basement of his Aurora home. The tattletale sound of sharp red claws dragged along the aluminum siding of the house rang out the news the creatures had found them. His sister's baby started to cry and that tipped the things off. The things pried their way through the basement window and flooded through.
Romeo's cousin Julio opened up on them with an automatic pistol. The .9mm slugs did damage but were nothing against the sheer numbers. Romeo's uncle slammed a garden rake into one of them while Romeo himself brought a lawnmower blade to bear on a creature. Still, he knew it would not be enough.
The Pentagon was hesitant to use any more military force to stem the onslaught after seeing so many civilian causalities in New York. But when the President learned that it was Aurora that stood between the creatures and Chicago, a nuclear strike was immediately approved (oddly enough, when radiation-suited emergency responders rolled into the area, little difference could be seen between the town as it stood and the way it looked before the blast.)
-At sea, a green slime monster of titanic proportions rose up from beneath the waves. An asteroid fragment had hit the ocean floor and the slime upon it was fed by the thermal energy of a volcanic vent. Given a constant feed of energy, the creature grew to a Godzilla-like height. As it broke the surface, a Japanese whaling ship was capsized by the ensuing waves. The whalers, having been knocked overboard, were all spared a demise at the hands of the creature. Of course with the waters being so shark infested, they were then equally screwed.
News from all over the globe streamed onto the viewscreen of SPACOM HQ. So voluminous was the flow that a split-screen was necessary in order to take it all in. In Italy, the creatures scaled and crawled over the Tower of Pisa while fighter-bombers streaked by, disgorging their ordinance. In Washington D.C., the Secret Service fought a desperate rear-guard action against the things so that the President and her family might be evacuated while the White House burned. London and Nairobi were likewise in flames, people by the hundreds and thousands turned into savaged, electricity charred corpses by the one-eyed creatures. Eventually, even the CNN news studio was overrun and the desk anchors ran from the tentacled assailants. It was the rout of humanity.
"All we know is, as soon as they begin to move...no more news comes out of that area," Curtis said as he emptied nearly an entire container of sugar into his coffee. He sipped the java and grimaced. "Still tastes like feet."
The metal of the console felt cold to Cmdr. Rankin's touch as he leaned on it. Gen. Thompson stood next to him, arms folded and eyes turned down. Flatulence escaped from Rankin's posterior with the sound of a balloon losing air. Thompson's eyes jolted open. Both men looked at each other...and then simply nodded their heads in understanding. Times of crisis can bring such an understanding between brothers-in-arms.
"Turns out Halvorsen was right," Thompson said of the research doctor who perished aboard Gamma 3 at the clawed tentacles of the creatures. "It doesn't matter what it is. Exposure to ANY energy source causes these things to grow out of even a drop of the slime substance. And we still got that flippin' alien ship hovering over the Himalayas, spewing out that goofy signal all over the globe! I do not need this crap! I DO NOT NEED THIS CRAP!"
"Calm down, chief," Rankin said plainly.
Command and Control erupted into chaos. Electronic alarms sounded, techs rushed from console to console, and a nonstop babble of voices ensued. Mercifully before Thompson could blow a gasket or have a stroke, Curtis dropped the bottle of honey that he was squeezing over his coffee to elucidate on the situation.
"That thing just launched a smaller object. Pod-shaped," he said.
"Fine. Where's it headed?" Thompson asked.
Curtis delayed a moment and wiped the sweat from the bridge of his nose.
"That's just it sir," he began. "It's on a direct heading for SPACOM."
Military forces and biohazard teams converged on SPACOM while as many government officials as could be rounded up did the same. Thompson and Curtis escorted the only dignitaries who could be located (which consisted of a UN consultant on agriculture, the Japanese Cultural Minister, and an aging Bono) to a hastily built, laser-proof shield from which to watch what was to be mankind's first contact with an alien race.
The pod, shiny red and with a multitude of pulsing orbs of light encircling it, dropped in a slow and effortless pace to come to rest on its designated landing area: an open area of SPACOM encircled by hovertanks. Then the pod seemed to fold outward until becoming a flat circle of metal on the concrete, like a bloomed flower. In the center of the unfolded circle stood a bulky, robotic construct.
It stood on two legs that were ridged and rippled. Floppy, accordion-like arms that ended in what could best be described as gloved claws hung at its sides. Its head was bulbous and housed a single red sensor in the center of its forehead. Just barely visible behind the sensor, a network of circuitry hitherto unseen by human eyes hummed and surged. What looked like a green vinyl surface formed the hide of the entire robot.
"Holy crap, it looks just like one of those things," Thompson remarked. The Cultural Minister agreed with a sharp hai and without removing her eyes from the mechanical construct.
"Greetings people of Earth," the robot spoke in perfect monotone. "Apologies for our delay in contact. Time was needed to learn your various languages."
Dead silence fell over the observers.
"I am Stereotype, robotic emissary of my race. The creatures that are currently decimating your world...and doing a fine job of it I might add...are a weapons system developed by us. Yes, they are demons of our own planet's creation. The creatures were created to be the ultimate in portable, durable engines of destruction for interplanetary war. Our initial experiments with the green slime were carried out on what you termed the asteroid Flora. When a comet passed the asteroid belt at a near right angle, Flora was ripped from its location and sent on a collision course with your planet. As you know, the slime went with it."
"Why the hell did you people create something so dangerous?" spat Thompson.
"Why did your race create nuclear warheads and mustard gas?" the robot pointed out.
Thompson's eyes ping-ponged back and forth as he considered the question.
"That's completely different," he said.
"It may interest you to know that a genetic failsafe was built into the bio-weapon. Should the mutated creatures stop receiving a signal from our ship, they will revert back to slime form."
"Amazing," Curtis said as he stirred marshmallow fluff into his coffee. "Our genetic scientists have tried to get something like that going. Never could make it work."
All assembled waited for the robot to provide the logical extension to its revelation. Nothing came.
"So, uh...when you all thinking about cutting off that goofy signal?" Thompson finally asked.
"What's it worth to you?" the robot replied in monotone.
"The man's talking about human extinction," Bono said and took three steps closer to the robot. "And that affects the whole damned planet!"
Just then, a French junior grade officer ran through the lines to reach Thompson. Between gasping breaths, he informed the General that the monsters had overrun Tokyo and were now headed for SPACOM.
"Well, gotta go," the robot stated.
The metal pod structure expanded and then reformed itself, encapsulating the robot. With no visible propulsion or exhaust, the pod lifted off once more and then shot off into the sky.
"Where the hell is Rankin?" General Thompson asked.