Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse (First Contact) by Peter Cawdron

Author:Peter Cawdron [Cawdron, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-12-12T16:00:00+00:00

Goose Lake

“I hate all this waiting,” Captain Mackenzie says, sitting on the loose rocks near Alice. She’s quiet. He’s got his back against a boulder and is throwing rocks and stones and pebbles vaguely into the distance. For whatever reason, this section of the lake is almost entirely devoid of foliage. The odd bush struggles to survive among the rocks, but the treeline is well beyond the edge of the lake. The captain’s throws reach a creek running down the slope toward the sprawling shoreline, which is easily a hundred yards away.

Mackenzie is bored. He throws rocks and stones roughly once a minute. After examining a pebble and weighing it in his hand, he tosses it slightly up and down in his palm to get a better feel for its shape and then hurls it like a catcher throwing a baseball back to a pitcher on the mound. Most of the captain’s throws miss the nearby creek, but occasionally, a splash announces a pebble on target.

Behind them, the alien sphere rises hundreds of feet in the air like a blister on the land. Smoke drifts on the breeze. Far from a raging inferno, it seems the fire is smoldering, probably due to the lack of oxygen in the confines of the dome.

“Well, ain’t this just like being at war?” he says, tossing another stone into the creek.

“War is like this?” a curious Alice asks in reply.

“Oh, yeah. War is just like this.”

“How so?”

“Military deployments are a case of hurry up and wait.”

“Huh.”

“People think going to war is about shooting at the enemy, but that’s only a tiny part of it. Most of the time, soldiers are bored. We’re ordered here or there, and then we sit and wait. And wait. Or we patrol. Or we train. Or we march. We clean our weapons. We polish our boots. We set up observation posts. And then we take them down and move them over there. Oh, don’t get me wrong, when the bullets start flying, you’ll shit your pants, but the bullets rarely fly. That’s the thing about war. There’s an inevitability. Nothing happens for the longest time, and then everything happens at once. And it’s like a goddamn tornado has descended on the town.”

“So it’s not like the movies, huh?”

“It’s nothing like the movies.”

Alice is sitting against the severed trunk of a dead tree. The blackened wood suggests it was struck by lightning long ago. She picks up a pebble, but she doesn’t toss it far. She’s bored—lethargic. Most of her shots barely clear the end of her feet.

The captain says, “In the movies, there’s always a hero rising to save the day, but life offers no such guarantee.”

She understands what he is trying to do—he’s prepping her for the reality that they could die out here at Goose Lake, but Funk Meister’s still looms large in her mind. Sitting there in her black neoprene wetsuit, Alice knows she should be dead already.

“Ah, captain—”

“Mac, please. My friends call me Mac.”

“Do we

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