Christopher Nuttall - Invasion

Like most other boys in Riyadh, he’d been brought up in a very conservative household. As the oldest male child, Naseer had a degree of freedom denied to his sisters, or even to his younger brothers, one that he’d used to ensure that he had very little actual work to do. Along with most of his contemporaries, he’d gone into an Islamic school when he was very young, and through that school, had gained a near-perfect knowledge of the Qu’ran. He could recite a surah on command… but he didn’t understand it. His learning had been learning by rote, a mixture of the form of Islam officially practiced in Saudi Arabia and hatred, hatred of the Great Satan, the Little Satan, and the other official Enemies of Islam…

And it led him nowhere. He’d found out fairly quickly that there was little chance of a job without training or connections… and he had neither. He considered the Saudi military to be beneath him — and, besides, an older cousin he looked up to was in the National Guard and told him that it wasn’t a pleasant job. The highly-paid — and without doing any actual work- posts were denied to someone without the right blood, or the right connections… and, again, he lacked them. The American and European companies doing business within Saudi Arabia wouldn’t hire someone who could offer them nothing, not even introductions to the right people, and the Saudi companies reserved most of their slots for princes or their lackeys. At eighteen, he found himself unemployed and, it seemed, stuck.

He’d drifted into the radical fringe merely for something to do. He couldn’t swear to any kind of devout belief, merely a conviction that the Americans, or the Jews, or the British were to blame for his troubles. He’d certainly enjoyed the trip to Bahrain he’d made with his father as an eighteen-year-old birthday present, where he’d tasted alcohol and lost his virginity. He was nineteen… and unmarried, unemployed, and completely without prospects. No father or brother would consider him as a possible relative… and, caught up in his need to blame someone, he’d gone radical. The teachers and contacts he’d met in the radical mosques had singled the young Naseer out — there was little wrong with his intelligence, only his learning and application — and played on his fears and beliefs until he was willing to do almost anything for them. They’d seen it a thousand times before; the products of the Saudi educational system, designed to co-opt or keep down the Saudi population, found themselves in a world where their skills were worthless. The recruiters gave them a cause and something to die for.

The radical mosques had praised the aliens to the skies, at first, for running roughshod over Texas. Cartoons of former President Bush performing oral sex on one of the aliens had been passed around the mosques for weeks, despite Wahhabi bans on images of human beings, while the radicals had delighted in the Royal Family’s discomfort. They held the whip hand for once; as long as they seemed to speak for the people, the Royals didn’t dare move against them. Naseer had learned to hate the Royal Family — he’d been assured that they kept the job rate down just to prevent people like him from having their own chance at reaching power — and he’d joined in the protests and demonstrations with the others, seeing for the first time the weakness of the regime. A power that could — and had — lock up all the believers in democracy couldn’t cope with the forces of hatred and revolution seething up from the deepest, darkest part of their nation. Their time was coming…

And then the news had sunk in, slowly, that the aliens were coming to destroy religion, human religion. Naseer hadn’t wanted to believe it, but the internet-based service which had replaced Al Jazeera — it had been knocked off the air by the destruction of their satellite, although Naseer knew, of course, that it was a plot of the wicked Zionists — had passed on images of the destruction of churches, synagogues… and mosques. The radicals warned, changing their tune slightly, that Islam was in as much danger as the other religions… and, when the aliens had landed in the north, Naseer had realised that the aliens were coming for Riyadh.

The young men — women were expected to remain in their homes — had gathered in their mosques as the aliens approached the city. The sounds of battle could be heard in the distance, although rumour, spreading from person to person and growing wilder with each telling, claimed that the Royal Family had cut a deal with the aliens, or the Shias had come out in favour of the aliens, or even that the Jews had nuked the aliens before they could land. The only news that seemed at all reliable was that the aliens had punched through the Saudi Army and broken it like a twig, advancing on the suddenly unprotected cities. Naseer had been given a bottle of petrol, a match, and ordered to take to one of the rooftops. The aliens were about to enter the city… and they were going to give them a warm welcome.

“ Allah ,” he breathed. Suddenly, as he saw the aliens for the first time, from the distance, the religion seemed more important to him. They weren’t advancing into the city, not yet, but were spreading out around it. He wanted a gun, one that could be used to shoot at them, but the leaders had refused to give him one. His duty was to throw the Molotov Cocktail and then as many stones as he could, before the aliens retreated, faced with the determination of thousands of young men to defend their city. A handful of aliens were walking without their masks, their reddish faces exposed to the hot desert air, and he saw them… and knew that they weren’t human.

Behind the lead alien vehicles, there was a line of prisoners, some of them bleeding and battered. He wondered, desperately hoping that it was not so, if his cousin was among them, but he couldn’t recognise him among the beaten men. They were mainly high-ranking officers, which, to his mind, suggested that they had remained well behind the fighting when brave soldiers like his cousin had gone out to fight the aliens. He watched, grimly, as the aliens came closer… and then someone opened fire.

They’re not supposed to fire , he thought, horrified. The plan had been simple enough; wait until the aliens were well within the streets, then close in and beat them to death. Instead, someone had fired early… and, judging from the sparks bouncing off one of the tanks, completely without any use at all. The aliens on the ground dropped and, for a moment, he thought they’d been hit… before they unslung their weapons and returned fire. A second later, the remaining fighters with weapons opened fire… and the tanks returned fire. In seconds, what should have been an orderly attack, at least according to the leaders, disintegrated into a bloody screaming mass of bleeding flesh. Hot bullets tore through bodies — clothes and even makeshift armour were no protection — and sent chunks of blood and gore everywhere.

Naseer just stared. He had completely forgotten the bottle in his hand as he watched the scene unfold. Calmly, dispassionately, the aliens were slaughtering anyone who even looked threatening. He hadn’t seen any real violence in his life, not even on the American cowboy films that his father had loved — and his teachers had disapproved of so strongly — and suddenly coming face to face with it scared hell out of him. He was barely aware of the sudden hot rush trickling down his leg as he tried to move, but his legs failed him. He was supposed to throw his bottle at an alien — no, he was supposed to light his bottle and then throw it at the aliens — but he couldn’t even remember that. He was rooted to the spot as more aliens appeared, flushing out fighters from the surrounding area, streaks of light thundering from the sky and smashing a handful of buildings, just to make the point. The shockwaves sent him stumbling, his building shaking as if it were going to collapse, other buildings across the city collapsing like dominos. The princes whose firms had handled the construction costs hadn’t bothered with minor details like safety… he saw a skyscraper collapse inwards, coming down with a rumbling noise audible over the entire city.