DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN X-COM APOCALYPSE OR ANYTHING CONTAINED WITHIN SAID GAME.
Chapter Two
"Great!" Thomas exclaimed. "We're not going to regret this!"
"How do we get in touch with the Cult to let them know we want to join them?"
He fished a piece of paper out of his pocket, "One of the guys at the door gave me this. It's the address of the local HQ. We can go down there anytime."
"Tomorrow?" I suggested. "I'm pretty tired; I just want to go to bed now."
"OK," he said. "I'll come over for you in the morning and we'll go down together."
We agreed on that and began walking the rest of the way home. We had about a mile to go, when both of us gave a surprised jump at the loud explosion in the sky above us.
"Look!" Thomas yelled, pointing upwards. "An alien ship!"
Shielding my eyes against the glare of the streetlights, I peered upwards. One of the smaller alien ships, the one I'd christened 'the flying teapot', was passing overhead, pursued by two or three Megapol hovercars. The cop cars looked to be fitted with simple laser weapons, while the alien ship fired back at them with vivid purple energy bolts. I'd never seen anything like them before; I decided they had to be from some advanced alien weapon.
Thomas and I cheered as the alien ship fired at the nearest police car, shooting it out of the sky, sending it crashing into a nearby building. The other two cop vehicles kept their distance from then on, cruising along behind the alien ship, firing lasers in its direction, but scoring very few hits.
"They're going to get away!" I exclaimed.
"Nice try, assholes!" Thomas shouted joyfully, showing two fingers to the police cars.
Suddenly another ship appeared from nowhere, powering its way on to the scene, joining the pursuit against the aliens.
"It's an X-Com ship!" I realised.
The four ships disappeared from view, and we hurried to the next street to get a better view. We were just in time to see the X-Com ship firing a salvo of missiles at the alien craft, scoring several direct hits, sending the alien ship spiralling down towards the ground, hopelessly out of control.
"Hey, that's coming down in our neighbourhood!" Thomas yelled. "Let's go! We might get to see the aliens!"
We ran at full speed through the remaining streets towards our own neighbourhood. My heart pounding with excitement, I continued running along beside Thomas, getting ever closer to the rising plume of smoke that marked where the aliens had crashed.
"Hell, it's in our own street!" he shouted as we got near.
We rounded the corner into our street, and got our first close-up view of the alien ship. It was lying at a 45 degree angle to the ground, half-destroyed, still-burning fires belching out smoke from within. As I got closer, I saw it had come down right outside my own house. I saw three or four shapes running from the ship, holding weapons, entering my house…
"Oh no…" I breathed.
My brother and sister were home. They had to be. My sister had got pregnant, though she wouldn't tell us who the father was, probably since my brother had threatened to kill the man, but now both of them stayed home most of the time when they weren't working. I broke into a run towards my home.
"Neil! Where are you going?" Thomas shouted after me.
I ignored him and began to run faster. My heart leaped right into my mouth as I heard the sound of weapon fire from inside the house.
"Please let that have been a weapon going off by mistake," I heard myself saying to no-one in particular as I sprinted along. "Please don't let that have been my brother or sister being shot. Please let them be all right. Please let that have been a weapon going off by mistake!"
I repeated my mantra twice more as my anxiety rose, stopping only when I reached the house and opened the front door. The scenes I saw within would stay with me for the rest of my life.
My sister lay on the kitchen floor in a pool of her own blood, her face forever etched in a silent scream of horror. An alien was cutting at her abdomen with a knife of some kind, spilling even more blood on to the white floor tiles. My brother was curled by the foot of the stairs, his dead fingers still on the shotgun that he kept in his room to guard against intruders. One of the blue-skinned aliens lay beside him, unconscious or dead, evidence that he'd put up a fight before they'd got him. There were three other aliens, all of them in the kitchen, two of them conversing in the same language I'd heard spoken at the Cult meeting earlier that night. The third was still cutting at my sister's stomach, removing pieces of tissue to place in small boxes.
"YOU BASTARDS!!" I screamed at the top of my voice.
The three aliens looked up in surprise, but they were all unarmed and I was already running towards my brother's shotgun. The box of ammo was also by my brother's body, the cartridges spilling out on to the floor. I rammed two of them into the waiting chamber of the shotgun, cocked it, and fired at the first blue alien that came running out of the kitchen towards me. It gave a loud scream of pain, and fell backwards on to the floor. Without thinking, I slammed two more cartridges into the gun, and finished another of the aliens, letting it fall dead beside the one my brother had killed.
The third alien had managed to grab one of their weapons from the kitchen floor, and raised it to fire at me. I didn't have time to reload; instead I slammed the butt of the shotgun down on to the alien's head, knocking it off balance. That blow would have knocked any man unconscious, but the alien shrugged it off, and swung its own weapon towards me. I managed to duck aside, hitting the alien over the head with the shotgun once more. It gave a grunt of pain, and I felt a surge of vengeful satisfaction. These monsters had killed my only family, and I'd be damned to hell if I'd let them get away from me. I brought the shotgun down on the alien's head, screaming, "Bastard!" as it crumpled to its knees, swinging its big powerful arms, trying to knock me aside.
"Bastard! Bastard! Filthy blue bastard!" I screamed, hitting it on the head over and over again with an unstoppable savagery, even after it became clear that the thing was dead.
I spat on the alien's corpse, kicking its weapon aside, and dropped the shotgun. I ran into the kitchen, hoping against hope that my sister might somehow be alive, despite the huge amount of blood she'd lost. I cradled her body in my arms, and shook her, in the hope that her eyes might open and she'd know I'd killed her tormentors. It was no use. I knew she was dead; in truth I'd known it the second I'd entered the house. I let her body fall gently to the floor, burying my face in her limp shoulder, crying the first tears I'd cried for four years. My brother and sister had been my only family, two of the few people I'd ever truly been able to rely on for support, and now they were dead. Taken from me. Stolen from me. Grabbing the knife the alien had been using, I made a small cut in my index finger, letting the blood drop on to my sister's cold white face before stammering through my tears, "I swear on my sister's dead body that I won't rest until I've killed every single alien bastard who dares to set foot on my planet."
I'd thought all of the aliens in the house were dead. I'd obviously been mistaken, as something suddenly gripped me about the head. I whirled round to face my attacker, but there was nothing there. I suddenly realised there was something sitting on my head. I reached up to pull it off, but it held on with four powerful claws. I screamed with horror as I understood what it was doing. Something sharp, something painful and terrible, was slowly inserting itself up my nose.
"Get off me! Bastard!" I yelled, swiping at the thing with my fists, grabbing the knife and stabbing the creature.
It shuddered with pain but continued its attack. I felt the intruding – thing – sliding further up my nose, and went into a frenzy of trying to tear the thing off my head. It was all to no avail. I couldn't knock the thing off. It was going to kill me.
There came the sound of machinegun fire and the creature flopped off my head on to the floor, dead. The horrible pain in my nose was gone, and I fell forward on to my hands and knees, gasping for breath. After a moment or two I looked over to see my rescuer.
"You all right?" he asked, loading a fresh round into his machinegun.
"I – I think so," I gasped, feeling the top of my head with both hands to make sure the thing was definitely gone.
"You were lucky. Another couple of seconds…" he said, and shivered, letting me know how bad the outcome would have been.
"What was that?"
"Nasty little beggar – we call them Brainsuckers," he explained. "When I first joined X-Com, I could barely sleep at night for thinking about one of these things attacking me."
I noted the grey body armour and the badge on his shoulder, and asked, "You're X-Com?"
"That's right. Squaddie Dean Bridges, at your service."
"You were in that ship – the one that shot down the aliens?"
"Yeah. We had to back off and find a safe place to land, since the aliens have been known to self-destruct their ships after being shot down. We've lost two good ships and a lot of good people that way."
"They killed my family," I said, pointing to my sister. "My brother's lying out in the hallway. Why'd they do it? My sister didn't even have a chance to fight back."
"Hell knows why they do it," soldier said, kicking the dead alien. "They just kill people. It's what they do. Sometimes they take the bodies away for research, but most of the time they just kill for the sake of it."
"I hate them. I want to kill every last one of them."
Squaddie Bridges knelt down by my sister, "She was pregnant? That would explain it."
"Explain what?"
"There's been a spate of alien kidnappings or killings of pregnant women in recent weeks," he said. "We don't know why. Either they want to study how we reproduce, or they're trying to wipe us out by killing all our pregnant women. They've bombed two Procreation Parks."
"Those the places where the rich have babies outside the womb?"
"Yeah. One of the worst things I ever saw was one after it was destroyed. How the Commander managed to break the news to the parents…"
I said nothing, and just looked at my sister's body. What would have happened if I had arrived at the house a minute or two earlier? Could I have changed the outcome? Would I have been killed too? I knew it was pointless to think that way, and I forced myself to stop it. But if I had only been able to run a little faster…
Then another thought struck me. I'd been cheering when the alien ship had shot up the police hovercar – the ship that was being flown by the aliens who'd just murdered my family. I'd been cheering them for shooting down the people who had been trying to protect my family and the thousands of other people who it might have happened to instead. How many other people had had to come home like this to find their loved ones killed by aliens for no reason other than they liked killing? Too many. I made up my mind that there would be no more. I looked up at Bridges. He'd removed his helmet, and I could see he had fair hair and a lean, hard expression.
"I want to join X-Com," I said suddenly. "I want to kill the aliens. All the aliens."
He nodded slowly, "I'll talk to my Sergeant. I saw you kill those three just now, and I'll tell you this: what you did wasn't easy. Anthropods are incredibly strong and difficult to keep down."
"Anthropods? Is that what those blue things are called?"
"That's what our lab gurus call them, anyway," he said. "I almost envy them, getting paid to take these monsters apart, piece by piece."
"I want to kill them. All of them," I said once more.
"Come out and talk to the Sergeant. I'll clean up here, then call the police to report your family's deaths. They'll get a decent burial."
Unable to say a word, consumed by the horror of my loss, and the deep, unrelenting anger I felt within my soul, I walked out of the house to find the Sergeant. A group of people in grey armour stood at the downed alien craft, most of them holding machineguns like the one Bridges had had. I went over to them and said, "I'm looking for the Sergeant."
A man toting a rocket launcher looked over, "That's me. Sergeant Hawks. What is it?"
"I want to join X-Com. Your man Bridges told me to talk to you."
"Your family?" he guessed.
I nodded, "Dead."
"I understand," he said. "A lot of people like you join up for revenge. Tell you what: we'll finish up here, then you can come back to base with us to sign up. You are over eighteen, right?"
"Yes."
"We can leave immediately or you can call us later if you want to wait a bit…"
"No. I want to go now. I don't want to stay here. There's nothing here for me any more."
"All right. Grab whatever you need and meet me here in twenty minutes. What's your name?"
"Hunter. Neil Hunter."