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Site content may offend. Content includes horror, murder, torture, lawlessness, military carnage, Anglo Saxon crudities, occasional adult incidents and George Bush |
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"I kill people," Errol muttered. "I am a Cereal Killer." Agent X-Laptra Pelta Five (the Department had a rule against agents using their own names while on the job, even in the privacy of their own thoughts) looked at Agent KY Jerchip-11. "It looks like we're finally onto something," said Agent X-Laptra Pelta Five. A year previously, the terrorists who had struck the city of Kirkastay, in Maine, had succeeded in killing a dozen children and making hundreds of others seriously ill. They had also killed Kirkastay's mayor, who had a secret passion for small pieces of cooked wheat drenched in food coloring and heavily laden with sugar. While Errol had succeeded in beating the twenty-seven count indictment laid against him in federal court, he was still on the Department's list of People of Interest and Concern. (He was also on the nation's no-fly list, too, though he had not yet discovered this as he never flew anywhere.) "We'll track him for a while," said Agent X-Laptra Pelta Five. "See what we can prove." "And if we can't prove anything?" said Agent KY Jerchip-11. "You know the answer to that," said Agent X-Laptra Pelta Five. Some things cannot be proved in a court of law, but that is why we have extrajudicial justice, to smooth away the sharper corners of the intolerable unfairness of the universe. It was impossible to tell what "vejecta" was supposed to mean (after reading Bow Wow's letter twenty times, Errol wasn't even sure whether it was meant to be a noun or a verb), and "ilavizi" was not locatable in any database. By contrast, Mishnavrishna had proved to be a well-documented phenomenon. It was a religious organization founded by alien abduction survivors who claimed that their suffering had given them mystical insights into the dynamics of the universe. In two days, there was going to be an abductee get-together at the Mishnavrishna arena in the town of Trotter, in West Virginia (once home to the Flying Sugar Maples, the short-lived Trotter ice hockey team.) Here, Errol hoped to discover the truth. He got in his car and drove. "Have you ever sucked a cockroach?" said the woman. She was guarding the gateway to the Mishnavrishna arena. The gateway was in the form of an arch made from handsome blocks of plastic coal, crowned by a sign bearing the motto "Montani semper liberi". In the Mishnavrishna literature that Errol had downloaded from the Internet, there had been nothing about either coal or Latin, so he was not sure what to make of this. "You speak English?" said the woman. Her hair was green and her eyes were blue. There was something wrong with her hands, which were three times larger than any hands Errol had ever seen before. Hands like shovels. "Something wrong with you?" said the woman. "You speak English?" "Yeah," said Errol. "Then tell me," said the woman, "which famous American fast food restaurant sells snakes?" "None of them," said Errol. "Who was the twenty-eighth president of the United States?" asked the woman. As it happened, by chance Errol knew the answer -- Thomas Woodrow Wilson. He also knew that Tom (as Errol thought of him) had been born in 1856, had been president from 1913 to 1921, and had died in 1924. He also knew that Tom's habit had been fattening kittens, using a special kitten-fattening diet of raw radish and opium-tainted honey. When the kittens were fat enough, Tom would skin them alive and eat them raw. "Well?" said the woman, impatiently. "What's the answer? The twenty-eighth president of the United States?" Errol guessed that coming out with the right answer would mark him as a possible infiltrator, someone who had studied the target culture to the point where his fluency with the facts marked him as anomalous, oddball, and maybe dangerous. "No idea," said Errol. "Okay," said the woman, though she did not seem entirely satisfied. Then suddenly she said something, violently, in a language which sounded as if it might be Russian. "Pardon?" said Errol. "Is this some kind of test?" "Of course it's a test," said the woman. "You think we let just anyone buy a ticket and walk right in? Now let me go back to the question I was asking before. Have you ever -- " "Excuse me," said Errol, butting in. "I think I've jumped through enough hoops. Okay? I'm here for the get-together. How about selling me a ticket?" "You want a ticket?" said the woman, brash and unabashed. "Then answer the question. Have you ever sucked a cockroach? No? Then who are you to say it's strange? Our norms are not your norms, you know." "Agreed," said Errol. "Well, you have to adjust if you're going to join us. Here's a cockroach." The cockroach was in a glass jar. It was very big and it was very much alive. Errol started at it. Kissing a snake is one thing, and easy enough to do when you are all greasy with religious fervor. But a cockroach? With a single twist of her wrist, the woman unscrewed the lid of the jar. Then she smiled, and handed the jar to Errol. Errol entered the arena of the Mishnavrishna get-together, feeling nauseated and a bit dizzy. He had been expecting automatic acceptance from his fellow abductees, not suspicion, challenge and out-and-out weirdness. The reassuring thing was that the people in the get-together arena looked pretty normal, certainly compared to the woman guarding the gate. In fact, they looked to be an ordinary random selection of the population, and hence a lot heavier, on average, than the liposuction survivors who dominated the TV screens. Only one of them had three arms. "Errol Pops," said Doctor Prawn. "What are you doing here?" "I could ask exactly the same question of you," said Errol. "My role is to stay on the look out for infiltrators," said Doctor Prawn. "Anyone who is not one of us." "But I am one of you!" said Errol angrily. "Why did you pretend you didn't believe me? You know I was abducted by aliens! Right? So how come all the, the, you know, the whole disbelief routine, as if you were, I don't know, as you were a -- well, whatever. Anyway, how come?" "You really don't know, do you?" said Doctor Prawn. "Well, what was I to expect? Most of you are ignorant of your own nature. Otherwise this planet would be very different from the way it is. Well, I will explain later. Right now, we have to deal with the agent." "The agent?" said Errol. "Yes," said Doctor Prawn, in a matter-of-fact manner. "She followed you here, so that leaves us with no option but to kill her and eat her alive." "Meaning what?" said Errol, who did not suppose for a moment that Doctor Prawn's words were meant to be taken at their face value. "Watch and learn," said Doctor Prawn, pointing. And Errol turned in the direction in which Doctor Prawn was pointing. And, as he turned, screams started to come from that direction. It was a woman who was screaming. A blonde woman, slim and conservatively dressed. Now Errol vaguely remembered her. She had been standing in line, three places back, when he had been waiting to enter the Mishnavrishna arena. She was screaming, and she was holding up two handkerchiefs, one in each hand, and the handkerchiefs were red and ragged, and some kind of gaudy red fluid was dripping from them, and the odd thing was that it was unclear where her wrists ended and where the shredded handkerchiefs began. She was screaming, and the members of the Mishnavrishna cult were circling her, and they were spitting at her. Errol felt a sense of polluted disgust. If the Mishnavrishna cultists had pulled out guns and had started shooting the woman, he could have understood it. He was, after all, habituated to the sight of people shooting at other people. He had watched both movies and TV from an early age, and at this stage of his life he had seen one hundred forty seven thousand two hundred and fifty three incidents involving death by gunshot. Although it was not exactly normative behavior, shooting people was at least culturally understandable. But spitting at people? "Agent! Agent!" The chant, starting spontaneously, swelled in volume. And suddenly the woman's head was off, spinning away from her falling body, and the Mishnavrishna cultists were kneeling, lying down, collapsing, and huge worms were disgorging themselves from the throats of the cultists, and now everyone was lying down, only Errol was standing, and worms from every point of the compass were wriggling slick and muscular toward the waiting meat. "So now you see," said Doctor Prawn to Errol. "That is what happens to those who dare to invade our privacy." "You're saying I'm dead?" said Errol, testing the handcuffs which held him. "We do not kill our own," said Doctor Prawn, putting a reassuring hand on his shoulder. "Little as we like to admit it, you are one of us, deformed and inadequate though you are. But you will die anyway." "Is that a riddle?" said Errol. "It wasn't supposed to be," said Doctor Prawn. "I thought it was pretty obvious. The agents are on your track. They followed you here, and you will take the blame for the fact that the agent who followed you into the arena subsequently vanished. The agents have probably already decided to execute you. This will confirm their decision. They do not react lightly to the loss of their own. You're a dead man." Errol did not understand. He was totally lost. It was obvious, of course, that the Mishnavrishna cultists were not real humans at all. Rather, they were simply a bunch of flesh puppets being manipulated by the worms from outer space. But how did Errol fit into the picture? He had no idea. But, in the car driving north, Doctor Prawn explained it to him. "You are an alien too, Errol." "You're kidding," said Errol. "No, though I don't like the idea, you are one of us. You are of the One True Flesh, albeit in a debased mutant form." "Am I supposed to laugh now?" said Errol. "Or does the punch line come later?" "No, seriously." "Well, that doesn't make sense," said Errol. "If there was a great big worm sitting inside me, it would have shown up when I had my last X-ray. Or, if not then, when they were hunting for polyps inside me with the ... the ... you know, the long hose with a camera at the end. Begins with the letter E." "If you were one of the ilavizi, true," said Doctor Prawn. "That is why I became a doctor. Over ten per cent of the doctors, nurses, surgeons, radiologists and pathologists in this nation of ours are the True Worm type. Working together, we aim to provide all the services needed by the One True Flesh. Our task is made simpler by the fact that the One True Flesh dissolves shortly after the host body dies ... consequently, while accidents happen, our secret has by and large been kept safe." "By and large?" said Errol. "You mean, not always?" "Well," said Doctor Prawn, "occasional stories do leak out into the tabloid press. But who believes the tabloids?" "And how am I supposed to fit into this picture?" said Errol. "I am of the ilavizi," said Doctor Prawn. "You, the vejecta." "I don't understand," said Errol. "Of course not," said Doctor Prawn with contempt. "You are of the vejecta. As I said." "Which is what?" said Errol. "The underclass which has burdened us for the last ten thousand years," said Doctor Prawn. "Ten thousand years ago," said Errol, baffled by this outburst, "America hadn't even been invented." "We have only been on this planet for two hundred years," said Doctor Prawn. "During that time, we have done great things. Edison was one of ours. So was Henry Ford. But you vejecta have been no help at all." "What is a vejecta?" said Errol. "It is a degenerate form of the One True Flesh," said Doctor Prawn. "Instead of existing as a True Worm, capable at need of venturing beyond the host, a vejecta is threaded through the entire body, following the pathways of the nervous system. In fact, the vejecta takes over the functions of the nervous system. If you were on the autopsy table, the examining pathologist would mistake your vejecta body for the nervous system." "Okay," said Errol. "I follow that. So, uh, what's our relationship going to be?" "Relationship?" said Doctor Prawn. "None. I am driving you north simply because the agents are following you. I don't know what you've done to attract their attention. However, with the agents on your heels, you represent a threat to the Mishnavrishna. You will keep your distance, Errol. Or we will exercise our rightful prerogative and execute you." "Why not kill me now?" said Errol. "We do not kill our own," said Doctor Prawn. "Besides, there are so many of you - you vejecta. Twenty per cent of the population of this great nation of ours, or so we estimate." "One more question," said Errol. "Shoot." "Why did you abduct me?" "We who live on the ground cannot speak for the policies of those who still cleave to the solar heights," said Doctor Prawn, with a frown. This was a fascinating insight. The alien invaders were internally divided. Those on the planetary surface, who inhabited human flesh, were at odds with those in the spaceships, the inhabitants of capsules of lime green gel. Just half a minute ago, Errol had been a little in awe of Doctor Prawn. But now he suspected that Prawn and his gang were the alien equivalent of homeless people. Outcasts, with no access to the lordly technologies of abduction. "This is your stop, Errol," said Doctor Prawn, halting his car a block from Errol's place. "Do you want flowers at your funeral?" "What funeral?" said Errol. "I've explained already," said Doctor Prawn. "The agents have you in their sights. The federal government is after you, Errol, and when those guys start they just don't give up." Was it true that the government meant to execute Errol in secret, without first going through the formalities of a trial? Despite Doctor Prawn's insistence, Errol did not believe that this was the case. The fact was that Errol did not believe in the existence of agents, even though any number of articles had been published about them in the tabloid press, and even though there were entire websites devoted to exposing their hideous secrets. Errol knew, yes, that the federal government had secret laws, secret prisons, unacknowledged detainees. But the rest of it -- the black helicopters, the nonconsensual dentistry, the assassins of the Phoenix Project -- was nonsense. Pure Internet rumor, nothing more. Errol's analysis was that Doctor Prawn and his fellow aliens were hoping to use terror as a recruiting tool. He had no doubt that Doctor Prawn's next move would be to phone him up and tell him, "Errol, please deliver this package to the lobby of the Empire State Building at 9:54 a.m. tomorrow, if you value your life." Or something like that. Well, Errol Pops did not mean to be terrorized into silence. He did not think of himself as a brave man. In the face of a sufficiently large threat, he would shut up and be silent. But the phantasmal nonsense about agents was not going to be enough to get him to close his mouth. Equally, he was not going to allow himself to be conned into believing that he himself was an alien. "The best form of defense is attack," said Errol to himself. First, he needed to gather evidence about the alien invasion which was threatening planet Earth. As a first step, he needed to find someone else who knew about the aliens. Someone who could explain, if possible, the dimensions of the threat posed by the solar heights crew, the green gel guys, the aliens who had the all-commanding spaceships, and who were probably several times more dangerous than the Mishnavrishna. A tough problem. But Errol thought he knew where to start. Once again, Errol read the letter which had reached him from the Gingrich Correctional Facility. "I Bow Wow Plastic kill people serialwise I vejecta you too probably. The ilavizi have wormed Mishnavrishna but good. Reply pronto please." Now the letter made sense. Plainly, he needed to talk to this Bow Wow Plastic and find out what else the man could tell him. Had he been placed on Bow Wow's visiting list? Errol phoned the prison and got the answer: yes. With a sense of rising excitement, Errol Pops drove into Bodycount, the town in the state of Maine which was the home to the Gingrich Correctional Facility. It had fallen to him, a fourth-generation home appliance salesman, to single-handedly face the threat of the alien invasion which was menacing planet Earth. The situation was, at one and the same time, both threatening and exhilarating. He had arrived early. His appointment with Bow Wow Plastic was for 2 p.m., and it was not yet noon. Lunch? Errol tried to eat a hotdog, but his stomach was in I'm-about-to-ride-a-roller-coaster mode. Giving up on the idea of solid food, he bought a couple of cans of Sugar Fizzy and headed for the Gingrich Correctional Facility on the outskirts of town. It looked simple on the map, but at one intersection there were five roads rather than three, with no signposts and nobody around to ask for advice, unless you counted the guy who was jogging down the road in one of those pink bunny rabbit suits complete with a pink bunny rabbit head. Errol was not keen on asking directions at the best of times, and his socialization had not encouraged him to look on pink bunny rabbits as a source of wisdom. "The hell with it," muttered Errol, and took a right. The road curved through a stand of pines and came to a cyclone fence. What idiot put that up? Fortunately, there was a gap in the fence. Someone had cut out a car-sized section, and Errol managed to squeeze his vehicle through, wincing as raw wire snagged the paintwork. "The insurance company isn't going to like this," said Errol. Up ahead, the road curved through another stand of pines. Errol took the curve then pulled up and stopped, because he was hallucinating. The road ran between two fields, and the fields were littered with dogs, large and small, known breeds and mongrels. Errol could see at least one dalmatian, a bunch of alsatians, a couple of .... "I don't believe this," said Errol. He got out of the car and slammed the door, as if hoping to trap the illusion inside. The fields were still there. The dead dogs were still there. The air smelt of something chemical, something like a cross between disinfectant and methylated spirits. It was very quiet and the sky felt oppressively low. There was no wind. "Okay," said Errol. "We're out of here." And that was when he discovered that he had succeeded in locking his keys in the car. Outside the Gingrich Correctional Facility, there was a car parked in front of the billboard which proudly proclaimed the facility to be part of "the fastest-growing industry in the nation". In the car sat Agent KY Jerchip-11 and Agent X-Laptra Pelta Five. "It's growing dark," observed Agent KY Jerchip-11. "Yeah," said Agent X-Laptra Pelta Five. "Like I told you, we missed him." The agent who had surreptitiously followed Errol Ensodin Pops to West Virginia had disappeared without a trace. Her last phone call had placed Errol in a restaurant called Dosteen Blues in the little town of Trotter, though where he might have gone from there was anyone's guess. Satellite tracking devices had followed the missing agent's car from Trotter to New Orleans, from New Orleans to Dallas, and then from Dallas to Las Vegas, where it had been abandoned. "This guy is on to us," said Agent KY Jerchip-11. "I've done the logic, and the logic tells me that there's a leak in our organization." "I agree," said Agent X-Laptra Pelta Five. "I've done the same logic. Our next step has to be to see the Director." And so they abandoned the stakeout and pulled out of the town of Bodycount, leaving sixteen hours before their target, Errol Ensodin Pops, finally found his way to the gates of the Gingrich Correctional Facility. Bow Wow Plastic was a big guy who smelt faintly of methylated spirits. But he didn't seem to be drunk. The smell came mostly from his hair. He stood outside his cell. He stood on a pair of stilts which were four feet high. Talking to him was absurdly like talking to yourself at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. "Why don't you take off the stilts?" said Errol. "I wish I had a cat," said Bow Wow. "Why do you wish you had a cat?" said Errol. "Because I don't have a house," said Bow Wow. "If I had a house, I'd have a cat." There was a kind of logic at work here. The logical machinery worked with gleaming precision. But it was not the logic of this planet. "Tell me about the aliens," said Errol, "the ...." The two kinds. The first name was right on the tip of his tongue. Vegetable? No, that wasn't it. As Errol fumbled for his notes, Bow Wow started speaking. "They were so cute. Cute little Joel, cute little Cabby. This is my nephews we're talking about, okay? They did the swell thing, swelled, swollen, ate out the brains. Such cute little boys. Such a pity. This put me into a no-option scenario, you understand. I had to go preemptive. No option but to kill them. It was my duty to the human race. But I was right out of spaghetti sauce. You know, if I had to do it again, I'd make sure I had the spaghetti sauce." "I see," said Errol absent-mindedly, not really listening, because he was trying to make sense of his notes, and it was difficult. There were times at which he found it hard to read his own handwriting, and this was one of them. Then suddenly Bow Wow's face cleared. "I have five minutes," he said, in clipped, precise accents totally unlike the blurred syllables of his previous speech. "Five minutes?" said Errol. "Five minutes to tell you the truth. But you know the truth, I think. Two hundred years ago, the ilavizi seeded America. But then came the years of Struggle One and Struggle Two. The ilavizi lost contact with their own. However, the Propagation continued." "You're losing me," said Errol. "No I'm not," said Bow Wow. "Have faith in yourself. At this stage, the upper echelons of the United States are largely controlled by the ilavizi, which is why America has now launched itself on the road to world conquest. But the Recovered ilavizi are still vulnerable to the wrath of the Uninfected, should they be discovered." "Which they must be," said Errol. "You can't keep something this big a secret." "No, you can't," agreed Bow Wow. "Which is why you keep reading about alien abductions in the tabloid press. But now we come to the important part. The thing you must understand - " And that was the point at which Bow Wow's head exploded. Errol needed two weeks and three lawyers to get free from the clutches of the law, but at last he was out on bail. It was good to be free, at least for the moment. But now he was facing charges of homicide, terrorism, carrying concealed weapons, illegal littering and perjury - the last because of his sworn testimony about the ilavizi, the vejecta, and the alien conquest of the United States of America. "Still," said Errol, unlocking his front door. "I guess it will all sort itself out in the end." He headed for the kitchen, trying to decide between coffee and beer. Both, maybe? "Errol." The soft voice checked him as he went past the door to the living room, which was open. Inside, a man and a woman. Errol stood in the doorway, assessing these intruders. Their haircuts were far too conservative for them to be members of the criminal classes, and their shoes were polished far too well for them to be members of the media. Without asking, Errol knew they must be agents, a male-female pair. The man was sitting in Errol's favorite armchair, wearing an aloha shirt and starfish beach pants. (Agents knew the theory of disguises but they were not very good at the practice. The beach gear quite simply did not go with the brightly polished black shoes.) The woman, sitting on a couch, was wearing a motor cyclist's leathers. The leather was white, and it was immaculate. It matched her handbag. You knew, immediately, that this was a woman more at home in the back of a chauffeured car than on the seat of a motorbike. "Well," said the woman. "Are you going to stand there all day, or are you going to come in and sit down?" Under the circumstances, Errol's best option was to throw himself into a forward combat roll, then get to his feet and sprint for his life. But, unfortunately, the parents who had raised him had emphasized good manners rather than survival, and all the movies and TV shows he had seen in the subsequent years had failed to prove sufficiently educational. "Okay," said Errol, entering the living room. "What do you want?" "Sit down," said the male agent, pointing to a chair. Errol sat, and the agent shot him. Five times. "Cereal killer," said the woman, softly. Then she shot him, too. Ten minutes after they left, the house was burning behind them. And, ten minutes after that, the agents were in their black helicopter, winging their way back to Washington. So died Errol Pops, terrorist, cereal killer, the man who had been indicted on twenty-seven serious charges, everything from illegal possession of an incendiary device to crimes against humanity, but had managed to wriggle out of it without so much as a traffic ticket. So died the man who knew. And, with his death, the alien invasion is free to continue, unstopped, uncheckable. And why? For one simple reason. Because NOBODY IS READY TO BELIEVE THE TRUTH!! And what is the truth? This is. Remember this, when your turn comes, and you end up a prisoner in a UFO: you read it first here. |
This story, "UFO Invasion - the Truth about Alien Abductions!!", made its first appearance when posted on Hugh Cook's website zenvirus.com on 2003 February 11 Tuesday.
UFO - UFOs - Alien Abductee - story SF story science fiction story sci-fi story scifi story alien story aliens story alien invasion story about alien abductions - Why are space aliens abducting people from the United States?