The Visitor: Alien Hunger Special Edition

The Visitor:

Alien Hunger

By

Kaitlyn O’Connor

( c ) copyright by Kaitlyn
O’Connor, July 2015

Cover Art by Jenny Dixon,
July 2015

Smashwords
Edition

New Concepts
Publishing

Lake Park, GA
31636

www.newconceptspublishing.com

This is a work of fiction. All
characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and
not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or
events is merely coincidence.

Prologue

Bill stared at the pale object on his
screen until it abruptly winked out. He blinked at the screen
several times, his mind perfectly blank with shock. No flare. No
explosion. No impact. One minute it was there and the next
second—vanished. Finally, he emerged sufficiently from his surprise
to run a frantic check on his equipment.

Every test came up negative for defect
or malfunction.

What the hell was he supposed to make
of that?

It wasn’t the equipment, but the
object had disappeared.

It occurred to him after a few moments
that he might try the infrared to look for a heat signature, but
that would require authorization from his supervisor and he doubted
Frank would go for it.

What to tell him?

For days, almost a week,
he’d been tracking a new object that had entered the system—an
object that
seemed
to be traveling far faster than anything ever detected
before—and then it had just disappeared.

Would Frank believe him? Or think he
was incompetent?

That thought brought him to his
data—his proof that he hadn’t been chasing ghosts on the screen—and
he pulled that up and checked it.

No doubt about it—the object was
there—and according to his calculations, the speed, size, and
trajectory made it a definite threat.

Or would have if it had gotten
closer.

Because it was huge—easily as big as
747 and it had been approaching Earth orbit at a frightening
velocity if it impacted.

“
Problem Bill?”

Bill jumped at the voice near his
shoulder and whipped a look at his supervisor.

Apparently there was something about
his expression that increased Frank’s alarm. “What is
it?”

Bill licked his lips. “I … uh … I
don’t know. I’ve run checks on the equipment three times. I don’t
see a problem with it ….”

“
Your equipment is
malfunctioning?” the supervisor asked with an obvious mixture of
irritation and relief.

“
That’s the problem! It
isn’t! Malfunctioning, I mean. Not that I can tell. Maybe
….”

“
Bill,” Frank ground out
with determined patience, “
why
do you think the equipment might be
malfunctioning?”

Bill stared at him
self-consciously.

“
Spit it out, man!” Frank
said impatiently. “You must have seen something that scared the
hell out of you!”

Bill shrugged. “I don’t know. I
thought it might be a glitch. That’s why I was checking everything.
I was … well I’ve been tracking this new object for the past
several days—spotted it last Thursday—way out near the ort cloud.
It was big—moving fast—and … well it entered the system like an
arrow and looked like it was headed straight for us.”

“
Good god! And you didn’t
think to mention it? Wait! What do you mean ‘was’?”

“
I was trying to verify my
data before reporting it!” Bill snapped indignantly. “It wasn’t
moving like anything I’d seen before.”

“
Explain!” Frank growled
impatiently.

Bill shook his head. “Well, it’s gone
now. It doesn’t matter.”

Frank frowned. “Hit
something?”

Bill shook his head. “No. It just …
vanished.” He struggled with his discomfort. “I was thinking about
asking you if we could recalibrate the infrared to check it
out.”

Frank stared at Bill’s computer screen
in silence for several moments, but it was clear his brain was
functioning at light speed. “Send your data to my computer and then
use your data to calculate where it would be if it hasn’t changed
course.”

“
Changed course?” Bill
echoed, stunned. “How could it …?”

But Frank was already gone.

When he’d gathered his wits, Bill
managed to focus on pulling up the data he needed and running the
calculations. He took his findings directly to his
supervisor.

Frank was studying his computer screen
when he arrived at his office. He didn’t even glance up when Bill
knocked. “Come!” he said absently.

Bill entered, hesitated on the other
side of the desk, and finally simply put his drive down on the
desktop. Deciding he’d been dismissed, he straightened.

“
Come have a look at
this,” Frank commanded before he could even step away from the
desk.

Curious, he rounded Frank’s desk to
stare at the computer screen.

It was his data! A mixture of
confusion, anger, and suspicion flooded him. “You already had the
data?” he asked.

Frank glanced at him.
“This looks like what you saw?
Just
like it?”

The questions threw him for a loop. He
looked at the screen again. “That isn’t my data?”

Frank pointed to the lower right hand
corner of the screen. There was a time stamp on the video. It was
dated nearly ten years earlier. He shook his head, as if by doing
so he could clear away some of his confusion. “I don’t
understand.”

“
This looks like what you
saw?” Frank persisted.

Bill shrugged. “Yeah, pretty much.” He
frowned. “I’ve seen some freaky weird things in space, but this
takes the cake. What do you think it is?”

Frank stared at it.
“Visitors.”

Bill recoiled as if he’d been hit.
“Visitors?” he echoed.

“
Looks like maybe four to
six pods or landers or whatever they call them.” He turned to study
Bill’s face. “Looks like they’re back.”

Bill gaped at Frank, trying to wrap
his mind around what Frank was suggesting—but he just
couldn’t.

Because he couldn’t
swallow that they’d had alien contact a decade earlier and
no one
knew!

No one but Frank.

He was still trying to
figure out how to respond to what Frank had said—actually if
he
should
respond
or if he should go straight to Frank’s superior with his suspicion
that Frank might have had a psychotic break—when he discovered
Frank had grabbed his zip drive and inserted it into his computer.
That distracted him from his thoughts and refocused them on the
strange incident he’d recorded.

An hour later they were looking at
images from the infrared telescope—images of the object that had
disappeared from Bill’s computer screen—images amazingly like the
one Frank had shown him before with one significant
difference.

“
Only one,” Frank said,
voicing Bill’s thoughts aloud.

“
One,” Bill repeated like
a parrot.

“
The mother ship seems to
have taken up orbit around Jupiter.”

“
Mother ship,” Bill
repeated, trying to wrap his mind around what seemed to be
happening on the screen.

Frank picked up the phone on his desk
and dialed a number. “They’re back. Yes. Confirmed. Only one this
time. Coming in fast. You got it on your screen?” He was silent for
several moments. “Ok. Confirmed. I’ll take care of things over
here.”

When he hung up, he looked at Bill
assessingly. “Best thing you can do is forget this happened. There
will be no confirmation data if you decide to go
public.”

Bill stared at him. “That was a UFO.
Is.”

Frank shrugged. “I suppose if anybody
had seen it they might have thought it was.”

“
But it’s coming here.
Somebody’s bound to see it!”

“
Actually, they aren’t
bound to. These … visitors used a sophisticated cloaking mechanism
when they came before. No doubt they’ve got something as good or
better now. Unfortunately for our visitor,
we
have a lot better technology than
we had the last time. He won’t slip through our nets this time like
he did before. We’re going to nail the bastard and then we’ll know
what the hell they’re doing here!”

Chapter One

Chelsey paused in her attempt to apply
her makeup and studied the tremor in her hand that was making the
task nearly impossible. She didn’t think she would’ve minded it so
much if she’d known the shakes were from excitement rather than
plain old fashioned dread. Unfortunately, there was no convincing
herself that she felt an ounce of anticipation and her frustration
mounted at having to work so hard to prepare for something she
didn’t want to do at all.

She’d been so
angry
with Marla when
her sister had announced that she was throwing her an early
birthday bash! She didn’t know
why
Marla couldn’t get it through her head that she
just needed time to lick her wounds! She didn’t
feel
like partying! Maybe sometime
in the not too distant future she’d begin to feel alive again,
start feeling as if there was actually something to look forward
to, but not yet. She wasn’t ready yet!

She was still trying to
come to terms with the fact that her son—her only child!—had
brushed her off just like his father had, had
chosen
to live with his father! She
didn’t think it would’ve crushed her nearly as much if it had been
a matter of the money, of being practical. She knew she couldn’t
provide for Larry like his father could. It would’ve hurt that he
hadn’t loved her enough to be willing to live with a little
hardship to be with her, but it wouldn’t have hurt nearly as much
as it had to see him look at her like his father did—like she was
some kind of … lower life form like an … amoeba!

She was as angry with
herself as she was with Lawrence Sr.! She’d known he was waging a
psychological war with her, had been almost from the time they’d
gotten married. Of course she hadn’t really understood what
obsessive compulsive disorder was in those days. She’d thought
Lawrence’s ruthless determination to control everything around him
was just a manifestation of his machismo! If she
had
known, she might
have had enough sense to cut and run.

And maybe that was all it
really was, at first? Maybe the problem had grown with time
and
become
OCD?

Or maybe she was just
looking for excuses for herself for allowing him to crush her when
she should’ve refused to allow him to control every aspect of her
life? She’d known he was working to turn Larry against her almost
from birth, certainly from the time their son was old enough to
begin brainwashing him! She’d at least
suspected
it. She didn’t suppose
she’d actually acknowledged it until she’d seen that it was
working.