THE OCCUPATION
Lindy stared at the impenetrable wall surrounding the city, which lurked in shadows behind it and moved his throttle to full speed, his ship blazing forward. He heard the hiss of laser cannons from the guard walls. One hit cut through the bottom of his craft and sliced his leg in two, cauterizing it right below the knee. Lindy didn’t even hear himself scream as he focused on the tower.
“I’m sorry, Damon,” he thought.
His craft smashed into the tower, the explosion vaporizing him.
***
Damon looked at his “mother” who cried over Lindy’s casket. She was so stupid sometimes, and as much as he tried to convince himself that she really couldn’t help it, it still frustrated him.
“You’re all I have left,” Eve said to him. Damon always thought of her as Eve, not Mom.
He started to chuckle at how little she knew, but he realized that would be socially inappropriate. He just hung his head like he actually grieved over Lindy One.
One of the mourners came up to them. “A hero lies in that casket. He killed two of them. Be proud, Son.”
Damon said, “I’m not your son.”
Eve gasped, “He’s just upset –“
Damon said, “Shut the hell up. He’s not in that casket.” That wasn’t the right thing to say because they might ask him to explain what he meant or worse, make him see a psychiatrist. He couldn’t let anything or anyone delay his mission.
The mourner walked away. Damon heard him mumble. “Like father, like son.” Damon almost laughed at the irony. No one, not even Eve, knew what his father was, what he had done, what he would do. His father’s apparent suicide mission was a stroke of genius. Instead of thinking of Lindy as a turncoat, which he wasn’t or someone slowly going crazy, which he was, they believed him to be a hero.
***
It happened in the large cities first. Damon was eighteen before it came to his town. He sat at his computer absorbing the notes Lindy had left, thousands of pages detailing his work, when he heard the noise of the alien ships. These were not the flyover craft that snuffed out trouble spots in the resistance movements springing up all over the country. These were the heavily armed cargo craft, the ones they used to carry off the women.
Damon now knew that his father’s hypothesis was right: The aliens were dying, and they were desperate to find ways to ensure their species’ survival.
He stepped outside and noticed that about half a dozen ships the size of buses hovered over the city and then, spaced out like battleships on the ocean, descended. He walked through their midst toward the edge of town where his father had died.
When he reached the wall at the edge of town, doors on the cargo ships opened and ramps slid out and touched the ground. The human, turncoats, all carrying automatic weapons – not the lasers the aliens favored -- came down the ramps first. If resistors lurked in the shadows, the aliens would not be the ones killed first.
Gunfire exploded and cut the five turncoats to pieces. Laser blasts erupted from the ship, and several people screamed from the shadows and fell silent.
As the onlookers dashed for cover, the patriots charged the ships. One of them threw a grenade toward the ship before a laser vaporized him. The grenade exploded at the mouth of the ship.
Damon watched as several of the aliens charged, their lasers firing as they came. The aliens were beautiful in a crude sort of way. Smooth skin looked like copper, stretched tight across bones and cartilage, coarse black hair, and luminous green eyes. They had noses and a mouth, which seemed to be perpetually grinning.
In just minutes, scores of dead and nearly dead patriots littered the ground. The alien leader came from the ship last. Some people would have considered this cowardice, but Damon did not. There were leaders and there were soldiers. Soldiers were expendable. Leaders were not.
“You know what we’re here for,” he told his crew.
He pulled out what Damon recognized as a pistol. He pointed at one of the groaning patriots and shot him in the head.
“No use wasting lasers. We don’t want all of them. It wouldn’t do us any good if they became extinct.”
One of the alien grunts asked, “What about the men?”
“Obviously they’re cowards or they’d be here.” He shot another wounded patriot. “If any of them complain, kill them.”
Damon watched as they went house-to-house kicking in doors or vaporizing them, then going inside and dragging the girls out crying and screaming. Some of the women tried to fight them, but the aliens stunned them with lasers. Not many of the men left resisted, but those that did were killed.