“Ew, I knew that guy was a weirdo,” said Jane
“W-what?” said Pebbles, shaking. He grabbed the side of the generator, and peeked out. “That thing hasn’t moved an inch.”
“Move out! Move out!” shouted a man in all-black tactical gear against the blaring of a siren. He grabbed a walkie-talkie clipped to his vest. “S-E Platoon, Squad Beta, rolling out!”
“Roger.”
A group of men in the same gear and helmets that read “A.D.M.” filed into a black SWAT van. They were in a large garage that housed military vehicles in the front and couches and a TV in the back and on the wall a rack of weapons.
“Intel on the suspect!” inquired the same man, now on the bench facing the doors. 12 other men settled into their seats, spread across two benches on each side.
“Name: Panopticon UFO. Current location: impossible to determine, since the sonofabitch is multiplying itself with a huge-ass 3D-printer. There’s no telling which saucer has the pilot, but one was sighted down in New Hope. I know that sorry shithole is D-turf, but the Delta-boys are busy now, so we need you for a stand-in.”
New Hope. Memories flashed through the man: the slump, rain, slope, angle grinders, big fat man, workshop, being grabbed, screaming. He gave off a stilted huff. “Roger.”
He produced a folded-up map from his pocket and wrestled it open. It showed a set of quadrants as a layout of the city. There were four more quadrants inside each quadrant.
“Hey, Serge, better keep up with the times, old man. This ain’t the 1950s anymore. Hehehe!”
“Hehehe. Well, private, your mother’s antiquated too, but that doesn’t stop me from giving her a ride every now and then. Ahahaha!”
“Hahaha!” “Serge really got you!” “Hehehehe!”
“Shut up!” the private cried in defeat.
Within the bottom-right quadrant, he placed his finger into the top-right one, and moved it down until he reached the one below it. In the center of that one was written “New Hope.”
“Serge! Are you okay going down there?” came the soft, kind-sounding voice of a soldier who was smaller than the rest. He gave you the impression that he was “still just a kid.”
The serge winced then moved his head around robotically, surveying his men, who seemed eager for an answer. “Jesus, private, do I look like a giant pussy to you?”
“No—”
“Do you wanna see me bleed, private?”
All the men laughed, except for one, who sat by the private and didn’t make a sound.
“No! Of course not! It’s just that … y-you shouldn’t have to go back there, given … I know I don’t wanna go back home…” The men were eyeing him like he was speaking in tongues. “I’ve read that trauma is triggered when you return to the place you got it, and—”
“Private! Just one more word, and I swear I’ll chuck your right out this vehicle!”
The men gave out some muffled snickers. “Sorry, serge” said the private, with an innocent, smiley voice. The one who wouldn’t make a sound turned to the private then back to the floor.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Hey, Kin!” chimed in a soldier. The private zapped up his head. “Didn’t ya know?”
“Know what?” he asked, perplexed.
“We have a don’t ask don’t tell on our fee-fees!” With that, the squad and the serge burst into hysterics. The private was laughing too, awkwardly and for no other reason than because everybody else was doing it—well, not everybody: the silent one didn’t even smirk.
“Shit!” the serge mumbled under his breath while the men kept cranking up and fooling around. “Trauma,” he shook his head, scoffed. “That’ll be the day.”
“They’re always doing this!” exclaims a man in the front of a bakery, burying his face in defeat; gangsters cackling, a woman crying out for help… “I’ve read that trauma is triggered when you return to the place you got it...” Trauma, my ass! Those are my memories! A man fried to death by rogue telephone wires; “Can you read this?” a boy asks, holding up an open book and pointing to the page; a young man caught up in cords on the floor looks up at the page and then up at the boy, confused and startled… And they make me who I am! So if those memories are a sickness, then that makes me sick… But I’m not sick! He shifted his eyes at the private, and saw the innocent boy laugh nervously with the others. Kinnedy! On the call of duty, nobody is sick but the dead. And you—he again surveyed all his men, and then turned out his palms and looked at them, we … we are not dead! No! We’re alive! And no sickness can take that away from us.
“ALL RISE!”
“YEAH!”
“ALL RISE!”
“YEAH!”
“ALL RISE!”
“YEAH! HAHAHAHAHA!”
The van made a sharp turn and they all sort of fell over onto a giant heap.
The van came to a screeching halt. “Vamoose, ladies, vamoose!” The men gathered their weapons and rose. One busted the door open, and out they shot.
The van had pulled over on a street normally busy but now evacuated. The street was littered with cardboard and trash, and it was walled in by rentals that needed facelifts. There was the general stench of poverty, and the sirens of crime.
The serge stood before his squad, eyeing the saucer. His arm was flung out to his side and bent into an L shape, and the hand was balled into a fist. The men knew they were to stay put.
The UFO was up there, with its hundreds of screens projecting various data: pictures, videos… The weather was not so happy now: nasty storm clouds began painting over the clear sky, and an odd thunderbolt struck down. Wind was picking up, whooshing, tossing papers. People holed up in their buildings closed their windows.
“I give you about 5 seconds to land that thing and prostrate yourself before the mighty A.D.M., scumbag.”
“Oh, the delinquent hunters! I’ve been waiting…” Jonas spoke, still in the dark room with the tubes. He was in some kind of control room with a PC and tons of monitors stacked on top of each other. Nobody knew where he was exactly. To the men, he was just a disembodied voice in the coming storm.
“Why of course, I’m not gonna do that. Besides, it’s already too late… Ever since I built that giant 3-D printer, and fed its own parts into itself, I have obtained an infinite array of printers, each copying more printers, which in turn produce even more UFOs… That means all the data I have stolen shall be infinitely multiplied … until, finally, it reaches information overload and collapses under its own weight!” He placed one hand on the other, and bent the fingers in until the hand collapsed into a fist. “Crunch!” Then, he looked up and smiled awfully. “Get it?”
The men scratched their heads. “No, no not really.” “Can’t say I do.” Some shrugged their shoulders, turned out their palms.
“Well … in that case, wait and see. Huhuhuh.”
That guy looks worrisome, thought Jonas, and ran a scrape on the serge’s profile. Hmm, let’s see what you got… He began to read aloud. “Before he attacks, he shreds his tactical gear, exposing his delinquent form. Hm? First, he takes off the hat, revealing a deep scar in the shape of an X running through his eyebrows, forehead, and scalp… He sports an undercut. On the left side the undercut, the hair is blue, and on the right side, it is pink. Between the lines of the X that cut through the scalp, where the apex of the head begins, tall spiky hair sprawls. On the left side, the hair is pink, and on the right side, it is blue. He pulls off the face mask, unveiling a blotch of white and silver beard on his chin in the shape of an angle-grinder disc with bristles. Then, he unbuckles the vest and disposes of the sweater, unraveling a blue, unzipped rain-coat, and a wife-beater, with chest muscles bulging through the white fabric. A buff, tall man… He swaps his work belt for one with a buckle in the same shape as his beard. He keeps the black pants and rubber boots, because they look cool enough. His name … Roddney Grindjaw.”