Like the cold from the icy ground had leached into our bodies, we stopped in our tracks. All of us were lost. Our infrastructure had fell apart at the hands of the invaders, and yet they were calling for surrender. None of us knew what to do. But the beings on the ship were much more controlled and prepared for this than us. Their whispering voices lingered in the air like winter fog.
'We mean you no harm.'
Far away in the distance, a man called Traylor shouted back: 'If that's what you mean, then how come some of us are dead or dying right now!' I saw him standing about half a mile away on a small hill, thrashing accusing fingers at the crewless ship. A mutter escaped from the person next to me, something along the lines of 'Show off.'
'We bring the cure.'
Assuming that we wanted them to, they began to rise from the hide spots on the outside of the ship. I began to heave, along with half of the rest of us. The beings we saw now were not human. If they were, it was some sort of sub-human. All of them consisted of melting flesh. It looked like rubber that was left in fire for an hour. Their skin was as green as the cloud from which they came. One person I saw in particular had a face so melted that his left eye was sunken down his face and the nose was barely recognisable. However, they looked... patchy. In random places, the skin was more firm, more healthy: the skin looked closer to ours than to the degrading look of their own.
On the bow of the ship, where the two infected sides met at the point, stood what appeared to be the leader. He whispered another passage, all the while ignoring the fact his skin was flaking away as he moved.
'This is how we survived,' he motioned to a patch of firmer skin, 'the Youthful Flesh. We derived it from the stem cells found inside embryos.'
That final word I recognised. I begin to vomit.