Oh No, Aliens

“So Tommy also never mentioned that you’re practically Annie Oakley.”

“I’m a farm girl from Texas,” Hadley said, practicing taking apart and putting back together the massive rifle Tommy had given her to kill prowlers with. “My Daddy taught all of us to shoot.”

Brand was leaning against the table where she was working and she was trying to politely semi-ignore him. She had assumed when they made it to base that he’d go find someone else to use his charms on but apparently he’d decided he liked her. Lucky me, Hadley thought dryly. Once upon a time, she might have been flattered by the attention. But now she just kind of wanted him to stop talking so she could focus and prepare.

“Brand, I need your help.”

Hadley almost breathed a sigh of relief when Tommy called Brand away to help him prep the ships.

“Catch you later,” Brand said, flashing her another movie star smile. Hadley shrugged.

“If we don’t all die,” she replied. He laughed and headed off with Tommy to the hangar. Jack was somewhere with the nerd herd figuring out how to use the little green chip against the aliens. In two days they’d be waging their attack, likely their only shot at winning. Tommy, Brand, and a few other skilled pilots would take the small alien ships and head into the sky, Jack would be in the lab area helping them with the chip, and Hadley would be on the ground, facing down hundreds of prowlers.

She hadn’t really been joking earlier with Brand. She figured the odds weren’t exactly in their favor. She met up with Jack in the mess hall that evening; he actually seemed kind of excited about helping. Hadley didn’t think she’d ever seen him look so...proud.

“They’re going to hijack the signal that the big ship is putting out to control the prowlers,” he explained. “They can use the chip to help with that as well as amplify their ability to shut down the shields. They’re thinking they might be able to disable them for a bit longer now.”

“That’s great,” Hadley said quietly. The other people who’d be fending off prowlers with her had explained that the monsters appeared to have a sense of smell and hearing, but it was weak. They mostly operated with sensing heat. They also didn’t seem to like bright light but the signal that drove them would force them out even in daylight. She almost felt bad for them.

“Are you okay?” Jack asked. “You’ve been pretty quiet.”

“I’m just...hoping for the best but thinking about the worst.” She tried to smile reassuringly at his worried expression. “Don’t let me bring you down,” she said. “I always overthink. You’re gonna do great, and Tommy is a very capable pilot. You guys are going to be heroes.”

Jack seemed taken aback, like he couldn’t even consider the possibility. After a moment he looked at her.

“Tommy is going to blow up an alien ship and you’re going to fight off a pack of alien monsters. I’m just doing geek stuff.”

“It’s not geek stuff,” Hadley argued. “It’s important. We can’t win without the brainy part of this operation.”

“Okay fine, but we can’t win without the girls with big guns who are willing to throw themselves in front of killer alien dogs either,” Jack replied. Hadley felt her cheeks turn pink and quickly looked down at her plate. They finished eating in silence and walked together to the rooms they’d been assigned. Technically the blonde engineer girl was Hadley’s roommate, but she was almost never around so Hadley essentially had the place to herself. Jack also had a room to himself, just two doors down from where Brand and Tommy bunked. Jack had looked just delighted to make that discovery.

The next day all final preparations were made for the launch of the assault. They went over everything that could go wrong, tried to figure out the best contingency plans, rechecked the weapons and the ships to make sure everything was functional. There was a restless tension in the air. The blend of fear and excitement was palpable. Hadley couldn’t sleep a wink and ended up walking down the hall to knock on Jack’s door. She was worried she would wake him up but the door opened almost immediately.

“Hadley.” He seemed surprised to see her.

“Sorry. I can’t sleep and I don’t like just laying in that little bed staring at the ceiling. Can I hang out with you for a while?”

“Sure, come on in.”

She sat on the end of the bed. “We have to win this thing tomorrow.”

“We will.”

“Listen, I don’t want to get all dark and dreary here, but if tomorrow...I mean if I don’t...will you please check in on my family sometimes? They really like you, I can tell, and my mom will be a wreck if-“

“You’re not going to die,” Jack said, with surprising force. “That is absolutely not happening.”

“But if it-“

“It’s not.”

“Will you please just promise to check in with my family.”

“Hadley-“

“Promise, Jack.”

He sighed. “Fine. I promise. But you have to promise to stop talking like that, because you’re going to be fine.”

“Okay, I will try to only think alive thoughts from here on out.”

“Good.”

He sat next to her, and Hadley hesitated for a moment before leaning her head against his shoulder. He tensed slightly, then slid his arm around her shoulders. Hadley didn’t remember falling asleep but she woke up halfway sprawled across Jack, with her legs dangling over the edge of the bed. Blushing, she hurriedly scooted away and her movement woke Jack up.

“We’d better get ready,” Hadley said, smoothing her messy hair. She scurried back to her own room, tying her hair back and pulling on a pair of black jeans and a tank top. She ran into Jack, Brand, and Tommy in the hall, and they went down to the hangar together. The pilots were all suiting up and preparing to take off.

“Stay safe, dork face,” Hadley said, trying to put up a brave front. “If you die up there, I’m going to kill you.”

“When we get home, I’m telling mom you were mean to me,” Tommy replied. Trying not to cry, Hadley hugged him tightly and he kissed the top of her head.

“I’ll keep him alive,” Brand promised and Hadley looked him in the eye.

“You better. If he doesn’t come back in one piece I’ll kick your ass.”

Jack snorted behind her, half-assedly trying to pretend he was coughing instead of laughing. She watched the pilots climb into the ships and prepare to launch. She gripped Jack’s hand as Tommy saluted her and closed the shield that covered the glass on the front of the ship.

“He’s gonna be okay,” Jack said.

“The same goes for you, you know. Stay alive.”

“That was my plan.”

Hadley started to walk away and Jack called her name. She turned, and he suddenly looked uncertain.

“See you on the other side.”

Feeling oddly disappointed, Hadley forced a smile and nodded. Katherine came to collect Jack and Hadley went to gear up, watching the ships take off and fly over her head. She couldn’t hear it, but she sensed that the pilots had started broadcasting the signal that would lure in the prowlers. The scientists in charge of that project had gotten an instrument inside the ships to work, but it wasn’t going to last once the mother ship was destroyed.

They had to give it some time, so the prowlers would be where they wanted them before they lost the signal. Hadley was on a slightly raised walkway around the perimeter of the base. A swarm of prowlers came charging across the ground as the sky exploded overhead. The pilots had successfully fired on the mothership. Around her, a few people cheered but the victorious feeling was short lived. They had assumed the prowlers would become confused and agitated when the signal controlling them was lost, but that was an understatement.

They went completely Cujo.

The prowlers went wild, slamming up against the gates with enough force to break them open. The platform where Hadley was standing shook from it; there had to be at least a hundred of them down there. Someone lost their balance and toppled off the platform into the mass of snarling bodies below and Hadley flinched as they screamed. She crouched down, trying to keep her center of gravity low so she wouldn’t fall. She started firing and others followed suit; all she could hear were rabid growls and gunshots.

The prowlers were surprisingly hard to kill; they were shockingly fast and you basically had to nail them in the head or throat to really put them down. Bullets tore through their flanks and sides and they kept going. It just seemed to make them more manic. They eventually scattered, running toward the warehouse. Hadley raced along the walkway, trying to get closer to the building. If they got inside, all the people in the building would be trapped and torn to pieces.

As Hadley approached the end of the walkway, a prowler below her leaped up, snapping its jaws. It clung with its weird paw-hands to the metal, swiping at her. Hadley fired, practically taking its head completely off at point blank range. She was going to have to leave the relative safety of the walkway to get to the warehouse doors, and there were a dozen prowlers gathered in front of it.

A violent jolt knocked her feet out from under her. She looked up to see part of the walkway had been collapsed with the force of prowlers trying to climb over each other to reach the people firing on them. Hadley struggled to her feet as some people came running her way; another jolt collapsed the walkway even further and Hadley found herself tumbling to the ground below in a tangle of limbs. Dazed, she rolled and found herself beside a man whose head had struck the pavement. His eyes stared up lifelessly as blood oozed from his broken skull.

Hadley cringed, trying to keep her hands out of the blood. But then the noticed that beside him was a grenade that he must have been holding when he fell. The base was in anarchy, prowlers and people running every which way. Her ears were ringing from all the gunfire. She grabbed the grenade and tried to get her bearings.

A green light, almost painfully bright, shine down from somewhere above her. Whenever it got too close to a prowler it would flinch away as through in pain. She remembered that the prowlers didn’t like bright light. They retreated back from the doors of the building, but they couldn’t let any of them escape the base. Hadley had an idea. She darted out into the open, running toward where most of the prowlers had fled, backing up to avoid the glowing green light. There were too many to shoot, and since they seemed to grow so irritable when the guns fired she worried they’d brave the light just to mow them all down.

A group of soldiers were preparing to close in on them, firing on the closest prowlers. Hadley raced past them. “Get back!” she shouted. “Back up!”

They looked at her like she was crazy until she brandished the grenade. Then they backed up in a hurry. The prowlers zeroed in on Hadley as she ran closer. One lunged from the shadows to her right; she twisted and fell back, avoiding the teeth but it’s claws raked down her leg, tearing her jeans.

Hadley swung her rifle around and shot it in the face, and the rest began to charge her. She scrambled to the edge of the ring of green light, and pulled the pin on the grenade. Everything was just noise to her; the prowlers were snapping their jaws, the smaller ships were descending back to the base, people were shouting somewhere behind her.

Hadley threw the grenade with all her might, into the center of the prowler mass. Then she ran, trying to dive behind one of the Jeeps before the grenade went off. The force lifted her off her feet and more or less threw her against the Jeep. She thumped against the ground and rolled onto her back, the wind knocked out of her and her head throbbing. She just lay there with a shrill ring in her ears for she didn’t know how long.

Tommy, she thought. And Jack. Where are they? She struggled to sit up, swooning. She could barely comprehend what was happening around her; all she knew was that she desperately hoped Jack and her brother were alive.