Christopher Nuttall - Invasion

I probably look like a vampire , he thought, absently. The mixture of malnutrition and the limited supply of light had probably made him look very unhealthy. He couldn’t remember, off-hand, how much time it would take in the dark to leave someone with pale skin, but he was sure that he had passed that time, even if he hadn’t been in the dark. It was getting harder to think properly, although he wasn’t sure if that was because of the limited food or because of the way his horizons had shrunk to the four walls of the cell. How long had it been, after all?

He looked at one of the guards. “How long have I been in the cell?”

The guard didn’t answer. He just rammed the barrel of his weapon into Joshua’s chest. The pain was incredible and he almost collapsed on the ground, steadied only by an alien hand. In a movie, he would have captured the rifle and shot his way out, but in real life… the pain made it impossible to think. He dry-retched, wishing that he’d had enough in his stomach to throw up all over the aliens, but nothing came. Coughing and wheezing, feeling like a two packs a day man, he found himself being herded into a waiting room. A line of human prisoners, some of them looking much worse than him, waited there. No one spoke to one another, not to Joshua or to anyone else; they were all trapped in their own private hells.

Joshua felt reporting instincts coming to the fore and tried to study his fellow prisoners. Just seeing a human face after so long was a relief, but he didn’t see anyone he wanted to see, not even Loretta. There were girls, some barely entering their teens, handcuffed and waiting for the aliens. There were young men, some of them wounded badly, left to wait as well. Several of them looked as if they were going to die unless they got some medical treatment, but the aliens didn’t seem to care. The handful of older people in the room tried to ignore the aliens and Joshua himself, keeping themselves to themselves. The stink of hopelessness and sour death was everywhere.

He looked back towards the impassive aliens and shivered. What the hell was going on?

An alien caught onto his arm. “You will accompany us,” he said, in an accented voice. He almost sounded German. After everything else he’d seen, that made Joshua giggle, feeling right on the edge of sanity, but the alien ignored it. He pulled Joshua to his feet, escorted him through a pair of doors, and thrust him into another room. Three aliens faced him, all unmasked… and one of them, he saw, was a female. The breasts had to mean a female, right?

It almost sent him into another fit of giggles. If the aliens were going to enforce bare breasts on the human population, he wouldn’t mind in the slightest… and most young men would probably feel the same way, as long as it wasn’t their sisters, or girlfriends, or even mothers… but it would be. The people who believed in modesty and chastity would have several different kinds of shit-fit over the whole idea… and the aliens would probably be bemused. Did they really understand humanity, after all this time?

“You are the human… reporter Joshua Bourjaily,” the lead alien said. It was the male who spoke and the sound of his voice snapped Joshua back to full alertness. The situation was incredibly dangerous for him personally… and yet, he was fairly sure that he wasn’t going to get out of this one. Being interrogated by military police or spending the night in the cells after a demonstration suddenly seemed like a minor issue. “You have spread propaganda against us and spread perversion through the land.”

Joshua blinked. He actually had few kinky sexual tastes… and he certainly wasn’t one of those reporters who followed Hollywood stars and pop singers around, not least because he’d never had any of the contacts needed to gain admission to those scenes… and even then, he wouldn’t have defined them as perverted. Sure, they had silly lives and couldn’t sing, but they were hardly perverted. How could the aliens have assumed he was perverted? They might have read one of those books where all reporters were worthless weak-chinned liberals, out to sabotage the bravery of the granite-chinned Marine/Soldier/Spy/Republican, but even so…

He wasn’t getting out alive. Who cared what happened to him? “I did my duty,” he said, and tried to plaster a determined expression on his face. A human observer would have probably recognised the terror hiding under the expression. “The free press is a vital tool for keeping the country honest and the government’s nose firmly clean…”

“You were not operating under the laws of your former country,” the lead alien said. Joshua stared at him; had the aliens overrun the remainder of America? He didn’t think they could have done it so quickly, but if the internet was to be believed, they had smashed most of the army during Operation Lone Star. “You operate as a subject of the Theocracy, one who has accepted the Truth.”

Joshua didn’t — quite — speak the words that came to mind. “I still have little idea what the Truth is,” he protested. “I know some of your prayers, but nothing else! How am I supposed to abide by the tenets of a religion when I don’t even know what I’m not allowed to eat?”

“You were brought into the Theocracy by right of conquest,” the alien informed him. “You are not a soldier, one expected to remain loyal to an old ideal. You are not a leader, one expected to maintain the old ideal. You are not a priest, one expected to…”

“I know what I’m not,” Joshua burst out. “I was raped !”

The alien regarded him blankly. Weeks of pent-up frustration burst up within Joshua’s mind. If he was going to go out, he was going to tell them exactly what he thought of them.

“You seem to think that just holding some of us in your clutches means that we will convert to your religion,” he snapped, expecting every moment to be his last. “What value does such a conversion have when we don’t even know what is required of us, or why we should choose your religion over the others…”

“It is The Truth,” the alien thundered. “We are its guardians and its proponents. We have replaced your religion with our own. You will follow it or accept the fate of those who commit heresy.”

“And you have perverted others,” the alien female added. “The female we arrested with you has developed a quite unseemly attachment to you and believes that she is yours. You have… corrupted her into believing that she belongs to you.”

Joshua stared at her. “Loretta,” he asked. “Is she all right?”

“She appears to have been a minor partner in your treason,” the alien leader informed him. “She will be treated in a camp and, eventually, permitted to rejoin society. You, on the other hand, betrayed your religion and served as a spy within our land. You will be treated accordingly.”

“You don’t understand us, do you?” Joshua asked. “Each and every one of us makes his or her own decision in the matter of religion. We all do. How can you convert us all? Do you think to punish everyone who steps away from your beliefs, beliefs they don’t share because they don’t even know what they are…?”

“The act of worship pleases God,” the alien said, firmly. Joshua realised, grimly, that he wasn’t even getting through to the alien. They were speaking the same language, but they didn’t mean the same things. “You have a choice. You may work for us, spreading the word throughout the land, or you can die. There are no longer any other alternatives.”

“Join you or die,” Joshua mused. The old Joshua, he was ashamed to admit, would have probably accepted the alien offer and sold his soul for survival. The aliens wouldn’t have had anything to complain about with him. The new Joshua, who knew what was really important and what wasn’t, had other ideas. He wasn’t going to bow down to them any longer. “No.”