The Fate of Nations Book II The Harvest (15 page)

“Shut the fuck up!”
Leslie shouted to the cold voice in her mind.
“You're going to get me killed!”

“No,”
it replied,
“I'm going to save your ass.”
Leslie felt her mind unhinge. Her rational mind couldn't be seeing what she was seeing outside, and who did that voice belong to? What was happening to her?
“You are
going insane,”
another, different voice in her mind, whispered calmly.
“Just go with it, just open the door,
Leslie, none of this is real anyway. It's all just a story
you made up for the paper. Open the door. Open the
door. Open the...

“WHOA!! Leslie!”
The cold voice shouted, as Leslie's hand reached for the dead bolt
.
“
You gotta
watch these freaks. They're putting thoughts in your
head. You gotta block them out”
Leslie's fingers gripped the dead bolt tighter,
“but since you don't seem to have
of all your marbles right now, you better let me take
over for a while honey.”
The cold voice mentally pushed forward in Leslie's mind, sending her to the backseat.

Leslie peered over this strange new presence’s shoulder as it peered from her eyes to watch the Grays.

She felt safer now, as she observed them. She didn't know what this entity was that had just taken over her mind, and at this moment she didn't really care. What she was sure of, was that she wasn't as frightened as she was before it appeared and that was good enough for her.

The Grays in her yard were tall and dark gray with darker vertical stripes arranged over their muscular bodies in much the same way as a tiger's stripes. Their arms were held akimbo. Their hands were host to long bird like appendages with red and purple striped talons on the ends. In their claws, they each held a long spear with a barbed end. As Leslie looked closer, her eyes bulged out, almost completely popping out of their sockets. A silent, mortified, scream filled her mind. It wasn't a spear they held.
It was their tails.
They had long, leathery tails with barbed ends. A yellowish liquid dripped sickly from the point of the barb. Leslie's mind reeled and lurched, staggering drunkenly in the back seat while the cold entity calmly studied the alien horrors.

Their legs were long and slim with ropy muscles running down the lengths, bulging obscenely at the calves. They stood on small round platforms that were attached to bird like feet. Their toes hosted more of the long striped talons. They wore nothing except for a wide strap worn across their chest bandoleer style.

Leslie saw that they were androgynous. They displayed no sex organs that she could see. Their heads had crazy, impossible angles on them, but their eyes were the worst part of them. They looked like living obsidian stones that were set deeply back into their skulls. They didn't blink or squint or show any type of expression from those cold black eyes that gleamed with an incalculable intelligence that was both crafty and cruel.

A ruthless malevolence emanated from them as they hovered there, not fifty feet from where Leslie stood, paralyzed with fear, watching them. They looked like hunters. They exuded power and domination in every movement they made. Leslie's primitive mind recognized them for what they were.
Apex predators
.

These things had to be at the top of every food
chain, everywhere,
Leslie's mind groaned. She had never seen anything like them on any science fiction movie depicting aliens. Nothing came close to the horrors she now watched.

They had a realness about them that made

everything else around them look surreal, as if they had been superimposed onto a picture. They had some nasty looking teeth, Leslie thought,
fangs,
and she shuddered when they gnashed them as they looked around. She could hear the rhythmic clicking of their long claws as they clenched and unclenched their long, gruesome fingers into fists.

She almost puked as one of them looked directly at her through the peep hole, as if the door that she stood behind of was invisible. The Gray looked straight past the cold entity driving her mind and into the backseat where she cowered.

Her bowels felt hot and loose and she struggled with her gorge and her continence. The alien Grays glided slowly,
deliberately slow
, she thought, out of her viewing range.

“That's right,”
the cold voice taunted,
“You had
BETTER get out of here, bird man, and yeah you better
take your buddy along too...that's right...and you
BETTER STAY GONE.”

Leslie knew she was safe for now. She new this but her legs stubbornly refused to move her away from the door. The entity that had taken over had receded back to wherever it had come from and she was paralyzed with fear.

Her mind couldn't accept what she had just seen, it refused to allow her legs to move and it refused to accept that the Grays were gone. She felt like a deer caught in the spotlight of a couple of hunters, but instead of being out on some deserted country road or field, she was frozen there at the door of her home.

It was an hour before was she able to will herself to move away from the door. She crept silently to her bedroom and placed herself in the corner of the room on the pile of quilts that had become her bed. She sat there for the remainder of the day and most of the night. She was in shock. She was terrified to look out of that peep hole again.

What if one of those things is on the other side of
the door looking back at me next time?
, she thought in horror. Her mind screamed. It was reeling in horror. She would
NOT
be looking out there again. She just had to stay still and quiet. It was the only way she would survive this nightmare, stay still, stay quiet, stay hidden.

She repeated this silently, over and over. She knew that the Gray saw her, sensed her. She saw it in its' eyes. It knew she was there.
It'll try to catch me
now,
she thought. It's waiting.
Oh my God, I am so
fucking afraid. “Ahhhh shut your trap”
the cold voice snapped.
“You whine like a girl.” “I am a girl, you butt
hole,”
Leslie snapped back.
“Now that's more like it,”

the voice chuckled.
“You might just make it out of here
alive kid.”
Leslie suddenly realized where she had heard that strange gravely voice before. That voice sounded just like like Humphrey Bogart. She asked it who it was and what it wanted, but the voice had once again receded to the furthermost depths of her mind.

“Whoever you are,
Leslie thought,
“thank you.”

Day 87 -

Two days later, Leslie still hadn't heard the cold voice again. The day was long and hot, and as silent as a graveyard at midnight. She sat on her pallet of quilts and read the old newspaper, turning the pages silently.

Her cats were sleeping more and more now. Bene was curled up beside of her with his large paw resting on her leg, while Bootsie and Mystery sat in the window beside of her. Leslie couldn't sleep at all. She was terrified of closing her eyes. One month, and three days left of this...one month, three days. She leaned her head back and rested it against the wall.

As Leslie looked at the old newspaper she had clutched in her hands, she thought back to the beginning of it all, when the Scientists at the Los Alamos Observatory had disclosed the news about the alien ships approaching. They had been watching them for years, tracking them, after some amateur astronomers in Australia had alerted them about their discovery of a massive group of objects hurtling toward the small planet Earth.

Los Alamos Observatory didn't notify the public until the final four days of their approach, and by then, the first ships were beginning to enter the Earth's orbit.

They stated in a live press conference on the day of the Grays' arrival, that the reason they had waited was that they were unsure of whether the objects they had observed were asteroids, or space debris and weren't even sure that the objects would come close to the Earth's orbit. They didn't want to be responsible for causing a planet wide hysteria.

By the time of the press conference, it was obvious that the Earth was going to be visited by these objects that turned out to be an entire armada of ships.

They were assuming orbit around the tiny planet, blocking out the sun in some areas by their numbers.

Aircraft were scrambled to intercept them as they descended, but offered little resistance to their advanced technology.

All of the Sci Fi movies had it wrong
, Leslie thought. There were no pockets of resistance, no long hard battle with these beings. It was quick and decisive and over in less than a week. Their technology was so advanced, they were able to disassemble every military force on the Earth on their approach.

By destroying the orbiting satellites, they were able to quickly render the modern military, who depended so heavily on computers for information via up link to the defense satellites, and their weapons systems, that relied on the same computers to operate, guns, missiles, plasma weapons, useless.

All weapons for defense lay useless and humans were rendered defenseless. Aircraft were vaporized by their ships particle beams, ships, tanks, submarines, all useless against their weapons. Power grids were destroyed, power plants, obliterated.

Once the Earth's primitive weapons for defense were destroyed, they began the harvest. Large groups were their first targets. Millions of people around the world flocked outside to see the aliens and their weird looking ships. It was easy pickings for the aliens.

People, with their natural curiosity, stood in crowds, gawking at the ships as they descended and hovered there 10,000 feet above the surface, and walked right into their trap. They were sucked up into the overhead ships by the thousands, before they had time to think about what an unwise decision they'd made. Up they went, arms and legs flailing uselessly, eyes wide with terror, to an awaiting team of Grays, ready to rack em and stack em in the ship like luggage.

There were people who even wanted to go with them, thinking that this was the Rapture, the second coming or something. They ran outside waving their arms up at the ships screaming “take me!! “take me!!!

OH HALLELUGHIA!!! TAKE ME!!!”
Easy pickins.

Scientists tried to communicate with them at first, assuming that since they were so technologically advanced, that they would be able to reason with them.

The fatal mistake of the human mind at work. It just didn't enter their minds that this wasn't a battle, it was a Harvest. It just wasn't a very human way of thinking after all.

Every conflict in the history of mankind had been fought and either won or lost. It just wasn't human-like to think that humans couldn't at least fight for their survival, bargain for their lives, appeal to a higher intellect, it just did not make any sense.

The fatally flawed human mind – These were Aliens. The very word implies strangeness, difference, not human, yet the scientists stubbornly attempted to rationalize, while the Grays moved along, methodically Harvesting the human population.

The brave, but flawed, Scientists used signs and symbols, lines and dots in the same configurations that appeared on the weird chrome colored ships, not having the least idea what those lines and dots represented.

They used geometric shapes and harmonic

sounds, in a futile effort towards peaceful communications. They used ancient Indian gestures and even sign language to get a response from the Gray beings who were floating back and forth from the sky to the ground collecting samples of this and that to take back to their dark world.

The Grays had no interest whatsoever in talking to their dinner. The Scientists who bravely ventured outside to communicate got sucked up by the ships parked overhead. They soon stopped trying to communicate at all and hid themselves in their underground bunkers to survive.

The scientists had been able to gain some useful information about these Grays from the story of a ten year old girl named Sarah Ellis. During an interview that had been requested by a small town Police Department in North Carolina, she had claimed to have had contact with these same Grays who were now blotting out the sun with their ships.

She had given them the story of an interplanetary visit that no one could quite believe at the time. She said that an alien named Mikel took her to a distant planet where people were penned up awaiting slaughter. She said, for the Grays, it was Harvest Time.

Humans were their food supply. They visited every three to four thousand years when the world's population was at its' peak and reaped the harvest of humans, leaving only enough to repopulate in the next three to four thousand years.

Exact numbers were never given as to how many they would leave behind, but it was hinted strongly that only a couple of hundred thousand, would be “spared”

and by spared, Sarah meant those who were fortunate enough not to be captured.

It was noted during her interview by these Scientists that the Grays hated all animals, in particular, dogs and especially cats. Sarah also confided that they could not go into someone's home.

Sarah gave them a long bizarre list of instructions that she said her alien friend Mikel had told her to relay to all humans. They faithfully listed them in the paper for all of the world to see now.

Leslie had reported all of this in the paper the last week, before the population began to dwindle drastically. It was the last paper to ever be published.

Leslie kept it and read the front page article over and over again, looking for any reassurance in the last words of Sarah Ellis and the Scientists, and memorizing the long strange list of items not to do.