Maria shook her head. “I don’t get it, what’s a croatoan? Where are we?”
“Let me spell it out real quick. We’ve got about five minutes before these bastards return. We need to get you lot into cover ASAP. That,” he pointed to the great harvester, “is no goddamned ship. You’re not engineers or pilots or any other bullshit role they’ve brainwashed you into believing. That’s an alien harvester. You’re on Earth, your home. You’ve never left the planet.”
“So we’re not going to Kepler B?” Ethan said. “Is it still 2451?”
“No,” Charlie said. “2044. The shit hit the fan in 2014.”
Ben stepped down the gouge in the earth and knelt. He pulled up a bright orange root, its tip sheared off from the harvester. All down the gouge, more roots with the same sheared tips lined the dirt like a carpet, and in amongst them were the bodies of his two colleagues.
Ben placed his hands on the dead male’s back and bowed his head for a moment. After a few quiet seconds, he stood up and returned to the others, his eyes glossy with tears. “What do we do?”
“I don’t believe this,” Ethan said.
“Me neither,” Maria added, both of them on the verge of hysteria, the cold truth making it hard for them to comprehend.
Denver’s dog barked twice and ran up to Charlie, licking at his hand. The grey-haired gun dog was excited about its find. Denver followed close behind, dragging a small croatoan by the alien’s scrawny, leathery neck. Denver’s wiry, strong frame loped forward and deposited the four-foot-tall alien between Charlie and Ben’s group.
It collapsed into a huddle. Its weak, spindly arms, sufficient only to press buttons and type commands, huddled around its naked body. It shivered, and its widely spaced eyes narrowed. At one time, Charlie had pity for them. They were at the bottom of the croatoan hierarchy, but the slit for its mouth sneered, betraying its feelings for humans.
“Good job, Den,” Charlie said, patting his son on the shoulder. Denver stood nearly a foot taller than Charlie and bowed to the others. “Meet your captor,” he said.
Ben and the others leaned in but remained cautious.
“Holy fuck,” Ethan said as the croatoan let out a gurgled hissing noise and spat at the ground, choking up phlegm and blood, the earth’s oxygen already at work poisoning its lungs without the breathing apparatus needed to enrich the oxygen with root compound.
Denver kicked it forward into the dirt. “Shut up, scum.”
“Easy, son,” Charlie said. Denver nodded and stepped back, running a nervous hand through his red beard. He looked up into the sky, anticipating a croatoan scout group to arrive any second. Charlie had to fight the urge to dive into the forest this very second, but this group needed to see for themselves before they’d go willingly.
The last thing he needed was for a reluctant group of lambs to slow him down.
Ben looked from the alien to Charlie. “Where did you get him… it, that, whatever it is.”
“It’s your ship’s driver. Younger version of that fucker up there that killed your friends. It’s what’s taken over this planet. Well, I say take over; they were here long before we were, waiting deep inside the earth for when conditions were right.”
“My God,” Maria said, “It’s all true.”
“Evidence enough for you, Ethan?” Charlie said.
The younger man said nothing, his face pale.
“This is crazy,” Ben said. “I can’t get my head around it.”
“No,” Charlie added. “I suppose you won’t. But we really have no more time. They’ll know their harvester is damaged and send out a patrol. The one on the platform is one such member. The next patrol won’t be long. They have quotas and some such shit when it comes to harvesting the root. That orange stuff you see there. Here’s the thing, kids; that there is your enemy. Everything you knew was a lie. You’re nothing but meat and resources to them. You can stay and deal with them yourself, or you come right this second and earn a chance at living a true life.”
Charlie turned to his son. “Den, want the honors?”
Denver looked at Charlie with a grim expression before pulling his machete from the leather scabbard around his waist. He approached the mewling alien and cut him once across the throat, letting the creature bleed out into the dirt.
Its tan-colored leather skin hardened and crinkled to a grey, paper-like texture.
“Christ,” Ben said as the others gasped.
Turning his back to them and lifting his rifle to his chest, Charlie headed to the forest. Denver and his dog followed. “We’re leaving,” Charlie shouted over his shoulder. “Your decision on whether you follow or stay.”
Denver scouted twenty feet ahead of the group, hacking through the dense forest with the machete. His ever-faithful dog scurried along by his side, forever within a few feet of him. They were like siblings attached at the hip.
When Denver was just fifteen years old, he’d found the pup along with a dying mother in an old, crumbled apartment building. They couldn’t save the bitch, but the pup had survived after close attention by Denver.
Charlie thought it was a dangerous waste of time and energy. They needed to be able to move quickly from one safe shelter to another if they were to remain alive, and looking after a yapping dog didn’t aid general survivability.
But with Denver losing both of his parents when he was still a toddler back in the mini ice age times, Charlie saw a parallel there. He had taken Denver in, looked after him, made sure the croatoans didn’t find him.
Denver did the same thing for the dog.
“What’s he called?” Ben said, joining Charlie, helping to make their way through the thick foliage. Ethan and Maria had taken the flanks.
“Pip,” Charlie said. “The dog’s a she.”
“Nice name.”
“It has… sentimental value.” Charlie thought back to his Pip. Pippa. Even after all that time, it still hurt as fresh as the day she passed. He unconsciously reached up and fondled the blue bead wrapped in croatoan graphene thread that hung from a leather thong around his neck.
The day in the bar still shone in his memory. The look of Pippa’s beautiful face as she held up the bead in wonder and awe. How excited they both were at the discovery; how they didn’t realize it was an omen.
Charlie continued to trek in silence for the next fifteen minutes, occasionally stopping to check through a break in the tree cover, expecting to see those hover-bikes flying above, searching for them. With the GPS chips buried within Ben, Ethan, and Maria, every minute out in the open was another minute the scouts had to zero in on their location.
If they were found, he’d make their deaths quick to spare them the scouts’ torture. They seemed like good people.
Clueless and frightened, but good people.
Ben had adapted the quickest, focusing on tasks rather than worrying too much about the situation. Charlie recognized some of himself within Ben. Whether that was a good sign or not, he couldn’t say, but at least it’d keep the kid alive for a while.
As for Maria and Ethan—he gave them a couple of days, tops.
Denver took a knee and held his hand up. Pip sat by his side, her tail still.
“Wait,” Charlie said, pulling Ben to the ground. He looked to his side and indicated for Ethan and Maria to hit the deck. He pressed his finger against his lips to gesture to be quiet. He hoped they understood. It was difficult to tell what they had picked up or didn’t within the harvester.
They at least managed to read his body language and sat still. Charlie crawled forward to Denver, whispered, “What is it, Den?”
“Two surveyors, thirty feet up ahead.”
“Shit, that’s near the shelter’s entrance. Any others around?”