"If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans."
~Stephen Hawking
Humans are ignorant.
I don't mean that in the negative sense. Not necessarily. Years ago I might have argued that humans were actually quite intelligent. And we are. I'm not saying we're stupid. We excel at many things. Education, medication, law, politics, and much more that I don't have the energy to list. Point is, we're smart. Relatively so. But there are certain areas where we fall short. Places where humanity has yet to reach accomplishment.
Science, for instance. There's so much we know, but there's also so much that we don't know. Centuries of research and still no one knows how the first cell appeared, or how exactly the brain works, or how to manipulate genetic code.
Technology. Less than a hundred years ago, nobody knew what a cellphone was. But even in the present day, we toy with the idea of robotics, AI, hovering cars. So much we know, yet so much we don't.
But this isn't just about the physical limits of the human being.
No. We're ignorant, because of the blatant truth that we had been debating prior to this day.
Aliens. Who would have thought?
Sometimes I sit outside, rifle across my lap, thinking about how incredibly naïve we are as sentient creatures. It's that bad. All this time we imagined little green men with ray guns, or human-like androids coming to take us over, or scary black silicone-based beasts with two mouths and acidic blood. We've been creative with the idea, I'll give us that. But as broad as our interpretations have been over the years, nothing had come even remotely close to the reality. To what the aliens really are.
I was thirteen years old when they came.
Five years ago we would have laughed at the thought of an alien invasion. Now, it isn't us who're laughing.
Five years later, and my family may as well be among the handful of living humans left. The ones who fled to the most remote places we could, since the big scary aliens made their preference for big cities very clear. By that, I meant them wiping out millions upon millions of lives in the span of a few months to make room for themselves. Because they were far from anything we could have imagined coming from space. They were much bigger than what our narrow minds had come up with in the movies, back when movies still existed.
Literally. They really did need the room.
I just wish they didn't think that eradicating the tiny natives was the solution.
Funny, how we've committed that crime ourselves, against each other. Now, we're all the helpless, defenseless group and they're the all-powerful, land-stealing invaders.
No one knew for sure what they really were until a few years in. Rumors spread across the rural landscape, whispers from those who somehow lived through Mission City to tell the tale of the invasion and probably died shortly after. When I said big, I really did mean big, because that's what we kept hearing. I've never seen one in person, but the rumors have made me terrified to even think of a real sighting.
I've heard they reach up to fifty feet. Maybe even more. Massive titans, with red eyes that pierce your soul and armor composed of metal so hard that bullets bounce off like pitiful pieces of rubber. People have said they've seen them laugh as they squish poor little humans beneath their feet or flick us like bugs, except they're so powerful that doing so causes spines to snap. They capture survivors sometimes and play morbid games with them. Or maybe experiment on them. No one really knows.
Those who are taken into captured cities never make it back out.
These things only continued to defy humanity's science when it was discovered that they could disguise themselves. And no, I don't mean something you'd find in a Marvel comic, like superpowers. Although somehow I wouldn't be surprised if they could do any of that. I mean a disguise where people have come down to dismantling practically every vehicle in sight because they fear it could be one of them.
It's why we call them Transformers. That's what they do.
Some fly, others drive. I've heard that Vegas was overtaken by strange-colored F-22s. To the east, Chicago was mowed down by massive, self-driving tanks. Before they EMPed the planet, I vaguely remember news footage of a sentient police car leading its army eastward. Apparently, China attempted to fight back, but the smoke and fog covering their polluted cities were what allowed the Transformers to hide. The ones that flew, at least. A few bombs here, a few bombs there, and there goes about one third of humanity.
Ignorant. They never stood a chance.
The world became a deadly, lonely place. Those who survived are grouped together in isolated areas. Deserts. Forests. Little towns. Villages. Anywhere the Transformers didn't have an interest in. Not yet, at least. I suppose if there's one thing I could commend them for, it was targeting the hotspots all over the globe. Big cities. Metropolitans. The powerhouses of the world. To have control over them meant they practically had control over the Earth itself.
My family escaped before it was taken over. I don't remember much –I was only thirteen. But in the back of my memories I can vaguely hear the explosions, smell the smoke, taste the ash and see the destruction. But I try not to look that far back. It scares me, thinking about how doomed we were. Are.
It's still strange to this day, how empty the world is with two thirds of the human race gone. We've wandered miles upon miles across highways, and interstates, guns in hand. Not for the Transformers –because guns are a joke to those things. But because humans have this strange switch in the mindset. When all's fine and dandy, we're social animals. We crave company. The comfort of others.
But it's almost exactly how the books and the movies have portrayed it, funnily enough. The moment all hell breaks loose, we turn on each other. In a time where we'd benefit from working together more than ever, we develop this carnal instinct to defend ourselves, from ourselves. In a sense, maybe that's why the Transformers haven't bothered to kill us off after they got their precious cities.
They didn't have to. We'd kill each other off.
Because what's worse than humans losing their planet? Simple. Humans losing their humanity.
And as my mother and my siblings sleep in a run-down cabin we were lucky to find deep in the woods and I sit perched in a hunter's nest up above with my finger on the trigger, I hate realizing that this is what we've come down to. Fighting over the petty things –food, water, territory – when it doesn't even matter in the end. We're dead. Deader than dead. We're royally screwed. In fact, no one's alive anymore. We're either dead or dead-to-be.
And yet here I am. Willing to take human life. Waiting for it. I'm no better than anyone else.
They might not be human, I keep telling myself. Because, yes, that's a thing.
Nevada. That's where we first heard the rumor of the Pretenders. Transformers who've mastered the ultimate disguise –not as cars, or trucks, or planes, or jets, or tanks, or whatever the hell else we made the horrible mistake of inventing for them to imitate. No, Pretenders exist to look like us. They infiltrate. They mimic. They pretend. And then, they kill.
The most prominent story I've heard is the story of Alice. A girl who wandered into some town a few years back, when humans didn't hate each other so much. She was scared, and alone, and pretty. She looked innocent, so she was taken in. That was probably one of the biggest mistakes in human history. Legend says it took a fair amount of assault rifles and explosions before Alice went down in a mass of angry spiraling metal. But by then, she'd already wiped out hundreds of lives in that town.
And now, pretty little Alice is why humans are more prone to shooting first and asking questions later. People you might see roaming about might not be people at all.
I shuffle around in the nest. It's cold, but I welcome it. It keeps me awake and aware. The moment I fall asleep is the moment I risk my family dying, whether it be a Pretender or a much bigger Transformer or other humans deciding they want this cabin for themselves. I reach at my neck, and touch the dogtags that dangle there. My father's dogtags.
"I want you to keep them, sweetie," Dad had told me, the day before he had to be deployed to Qatar. The last day I'd ever seen him.
"But why, Daddy? Aren't they yours?"
"I can always get another set. I want you to keep them, so that whenever I'm gone, you can look at them and remember that I'm not actually gone. I'm still here. I always will be, sweet pea."
Sweet pea. What I wouldn't give to hear him say those words again.
Sometimes, though, I think he's lucky he's dead. He doesn't have to struggle to survive, when surviving is now a hopeless thing. Funny how we do it anyways. Humans have a weird tendency to do a lot of pointless things.
Sometimes, I think back to the typical alien movies my dad and my older brother used to watch, and I laugh. I laugh at the irony of it, of how quickly we've come from debating and imagining extraterrestrial life to running from it. Fearing it. Being slowly destroyed by it.
Sorry Ripley. Xenos have nothing on these guys.
See this, Terminators? This is the real deal.
Something rustles in the woods and I jerk to attention. I grip my rifle and glance through the scope. Something is near, I can feel it down to the hairs on the back of my neck, standing to attention. My skin flares with goosebumps, my breath shakes from my lips. In the back of my mind, I wonder if I'm going to see my first and last Transformer, or just a deer passing by.
It's neither.
It's a man. Limping. He's closing in on the cabin, and my crosshairs centers on his head.
You see anything out here, you shoot it. That's what Mom said. That's what she's trained her kids to do –to do what everyone else does. Shoot first. Always shoot first. In a world where aliens and Pretenders exist, take no chance.
But I don't pull the trigger.
I freeze. I can't. In a moment where I need to be the most focused, my mind slips away.
You're weak, a voice hisses to me. You can't handle killing even when you're family's in danger. Weak.
Maybe my subconscious is right. My brother would do it. My mother would do it. My three younger sisters would do it, from sixteen-year-old Shareeka down to ten-year-old Sheleeka. Five long and dangerous years allowed us time to learn how to kill. That kind of thing happens in an alien apocalypse with a former Marine Sargent as your mother.
And my Marine Sargent mother bursts outside with her assault rifle in her hands, doing what I failed to do. Maternal instinct keeps her from sleeping much.
The man isn't as helpless as he seemed. Somehow I hadn't noticed the double barrel shotgun slung over his shoulder until he wields it against Mom in return. It's a showdown like no other. Mamma bear against predator. Marine Mom against potential Pretender.
"Get back," my mother snarls, like a feral animal.
The man lowers his gun, surprisingly. He holds a hand up –in the previous world it meant "not a threat". In this world, it means nothing. Not to us.
"I don't want to hurt you," he says, "I didn't –I didn't know anyone was here."
"I don't believe you," Mom says, leveling her gun.
"Why don't you stand down for a moment, and we talk this out?" the man tries, but he has no idea who he's talking to. There's a very important thing he'll come to know in the next few moments. You don't tell my mother to stand down.
Sargent Monique Nadia Epps does not stand down.
She lunges at him, and the man aims his shotgun up again.
I'm frozen again. I need to do something. Say something. But I don't, and all I can do is watch as my mother as she disarms him with long-practiced skill. Some little thought in my head goes, damn, five kids and she can still do that?
In the old world, one might say she's overreacting. That she's being too irrational, too bloodthirsty. But now, it's perfectly reasonable. The man is possibly a Pretender, and there's only one way to find out. You can't let a guy go and risk him coming back with his bigger buddies. That's a big no-no. He has to die. He has to.
They fall to the ground. I'm immediately alarmed when I see my mother overtaken with such ease, like no effort was needed to take on a soldier like her. She's hissing and spitting and biting and he's trying to wrench her rifle away, so that he can empty a clip through her skull. He's too strong. Too fast. He's a Pretender.
And that voice in my head says, this is it, Moza. Time to stop being weak.
And I do stop. This is the night where I aim at my first Pretender, pull the trigger, and fire. His head explodes, and he slumps off of my mother. She snaps up, and heaves and glances up at me.
And she smiles. A near death experience, and she smiles.
A part of me feels proud. The other part is terrified. Of her? Of the Pretender? Of myself? No idea. But something in this moment scares me.
I realize what it is when I get to the forest floor. My knees grow weak and I struggle to make it to her. But I do –I tough through it, because that's what they do in the movies and that's what you're supposed to do during an apocalypse in a dead country. You tough it out. You killed something. Big deal, Moza!
I'm surrounded by death and destruction. But causing it is a whole different and disturbing feeling. Never mind it's a Pretender –I ended a living being's life. Is this what Mom feels, every time she took a life in the past? Is this how Dad felt?
But then I see the guilt melting away Mom's tough-Sargent face. Guilt is something you never ever see in this day and age anymore. Nobody regrets. No one. So why now, Mom? What's the problem?
I find out when I look.
I blasted the guy's head alright. If anything, Mom should be proud of my precision. But there are no wires, or sparks or metal. I see the blood and the brains and suddenly I'm turning away and hurling up the stale bread and gamey deer we ate earlier. I vomit violently enough for my stomach to ache and my throat to burn, but the only real pain I feel is in my heart, where it constricts, mourning for the life I've so mercilessly taken.
He tried to kill Mom, the voice says.
"He was human," I say out loud, "Oh my God, Mom. He was human."
Mom embraces me. My siblings file out, but they don't ask questions. They see the dead body and they know enough. They just crowd around and try to comfort me as I come to the realization that this truly is what we've become. Shooting first. Always shooting first. It's come down to us killing each other off –just what the big scary aliens want.
I hate them. I hate them so much. I wish I could walk into Mission City where it all started, look the Transformers in the eye and scream, "This is your fault! This is all your fault, you stupid, ugly, evil, non-feeling robotic bastards!"
So that's how it's going to be, Moza? Crying and screaming and blaming the aliens for his death? You pulled the trigger. Not them.
The human mind sucks. Sometimes I wish we weren't so smart. Less complex brains equal no voices in my head. Maybe we would have died out quicker, too.
But nope. Homo sapiens just had to be top dog. Had to be the ones to suffer the aliens' wrath. Lucky us.
"Moza," my mother says, but I don't answer. I'm trapped in my head, drowning under the waves of doubt and fear and grief and self-hatred.
She grabs my shoulders and makes me look at her, "Mozambiqua. Look at me."
I do. My eyes drip with tears.
"You did the right thing," she whispers, "You saved me. Saved all of us. Human or not, he would have killed us."
I just nod. I don't say anything else for the rest of the night. I don't sleep either.
And when we leave only a few hours later, with the cool air biting and the sun blooming with golden light over the horizon, I think about what Mom said. You saved me. Saved all of us.
Yes, Mom, I did. But at what cost?
The cost? My humanity. I can feel it slipping away like a life line breaking, leaving me to fall deeper and deeper into a hole I won't be able to escape from. A hole the Transformers dug for us, but didn't bother to force us down. They knew we'd do that ourselves. I wonder how that conversation went.
Hmm, what should we do now?
Oh, I know! Send out the Pretenders, and let the humans exterminate themselves!
Gee, great idea, fellow killer robot! Let's do it!
Disgustingly smart sons of bitches, they are.
So, here we are. Trekking across land that isn't even ours anymore. The clock is ticking. It's only a matter of time until my family adds to the billions of lives already gone.
We're walking along a dead interstate when Dad's voice whispers to me, "Sometimes, sweet pea, you've gotta be a little scared to be a little brave."
I touch the dogtags. Damn right, Dad. Damn right.
And with each step I take, the rifle in my grip, the one I've used to kill, gets heavier and heavier. That was the first life I've taken. Somehow, I know it won't be my last.
I'm going to need reviews for this one, guys. This was just a pilot chapter, so your feedback will really help. Continue? :)