I took a deep breath of the fresh air, shifting my weight slightly before settling back down. The sounds of birds chirping and the soft susurrus of the wind tickling the tree leaves above my head greeted me as I slowly woke up from my nap. Beams of light trickling in from in between the canopy of trees. And through the biggest gap, I could gaze upon the cloudless sky.

I was currently laying back on a small, me-sized slab of stone parked halfway into a small pond, located in the middle of a copse behind my house. I had fallen asleep thinking about my plans for the future after my high school graduation in a few weeks; the more immediate plans of summer, and farther plans beyond that.

This was my favourite spot to lay outside. Quiet, with only the sounds of nature to keep me company throughout my contemplations. It was a spot that saw frequent use, owing to the fact that for the first sixteen years of my life, my parents didn't allow television or internet in the house. Their ideas of childhood were a lot more, active, than contemporary conventions dictated.

They encouraged me, and my eight other siblings, to have solid and productive hobbies instead. I say 'encouraged', but there was nothing else to do besides picking up a couple of hobbies if only to relieve the boredom. Especially considering we lived a minute's walk outside the city limits of a small town.

My parents views on entertainment aside, they weren't bad, by any means. To make it up to us, they would allow me and my sibs to have our friends over whenever we wanted. And I mean whenever. With the high school being a minute's drive from us, our house became the unofficial official hangout spot for many kids, especially considering that mom worked from home and had no problems dropping kids off back home.

So when I say I grew up with eight siblings, what I meant was I grew up with eight siblings, and all of their friends. Every school day, and most weekends, our house was packed. My brothers' friends came over because of my sisters and their friends, and vice-versa. We also hosted a lot of sleepovers. Once my brother graduated, I was looking forward to being the only Baker boy around my sister's friends.

Then Covid hit.

There went the after-school gatherings and the teenage-girl sleepovers. What was shaping up to be the best years of my life, weren't. Honestly, the only good thing that came from that was my parents being forced to get us the internet so we could still attend online classes.

When I was first encouraged to get a hobby by my parents, I, being the lazy, smart-ass that I am, told them my hobby was philosophy—so if they ever catch me 'doing a whole load of nothing', I was actually deep in contemplation, practicing. Of course, being the awesome, supportive people they were, they turned it around on me by actually engaging me in thought exercises. I convinced myselfI had things figured out, but getting the internet a couple years ago opened my eyes. What I considered solid convictions turned out to be built on a house of cards. It immensely broadened my horizons. Much more so than when my parents started engaging me in adult conversation.

Besides that, I didn't have any serious hobbies. Instead, I would tag along with my brothers and sisters and whatever they were doing, or I'd help my mom and dad around the house. It led me to have nothing I could point out as being "me" and "my thing", not like outdoors stuff and Mikey, or guns and Joe, or the rest of my family and their things.

It did give me a lot of time to spend lounging around my favourite place outside. I had started using the copse as my hangout when our next-door neighbor cut down an expanse of trees between the rest of the woods on his property and that little pond. It was a watering hole for the local population of deer that was only ever full in the rainy seasons. My neighboor used the opportunity to shoot deer whenever they traveled out in the open for a drink. I was eight at the time. And horrified. So I chased the deer away whenever I could, staying vigilant for hours a day in the summers.

So, there I was, looking up at the sky lost in thought, when I finally realized what had been bugging me for the few hours before my impromptu nap; there hadn't been a single plane in the sky, nor were there any trails that typically followed a plane's passing. Except for a single aircraft, the sky was empty and had been for a hours. This was odd because I live in a small town between two large cities with international airports.

Before I could think too deeply about it, I noticed an object in the sky: a black speck. That speck was headed right for the sole plane around, striking it moments later. Seconds after that was when I heard the sound from the collision, and I stood up, watching as the impact changed the object's course to head right for me. Or at least, very near to me.

Meanwhile, it looked as if the plane had survived but was trailing black smoke, and was starting to fly lower toward the ground. That was all the spare thought I could give it and its occupants as the meteoroid came down with incredible speed. Several seconds later, I could feel the impact from when it struck the ground in the woods in Old Man Miller's land. Right afterward, I heard the sound of the crash, scattering the birds from the treetops.

It was only a moment's hesitation before I decided to check out the impact site. I reasoned that the collision had been so loud with the plane that I couldn't possibly have been the only one to witness it. A quick glance up at the plane confirmed it was still there, slowly heading downwards toward the ground. My calling 911 wouldn't have helped any. Besides, my phone was in the house, and I really wanted to check out the crash site. If that had been a meteor, I wanted it.

Yeah, it was in Old Man Miller's yard, but he didn't deserve any of it, with how he's treated my father over the years. Besides, it had been so big I would probably only be able to pick up whatever chunks of it broke off from the impact. Old Man Miller would still get to keep the majority of it.

Mind made, I headed out of the copse through the open field towards the larger wooded area, my excitement muted–but present. Before I entered the tree line, I tried to gauge where I had seen the meteor land; I knew it would take me a bit to get to it.

The vegetation was heavier on the outskirts, and once I made my way past the beginning of the trees, I had an easier time walking through the woods. It was less than half a minute before I could spot the meteor that had crashed down.

It was large, taller than I was, and the path it had carved out of the earth as the momentum sent it skidding across the ground was surprisingly short, perhaps less than ten feet. The few trees in its path had either been broken up or uprooted, flung away from their impact with the meteor. It was a glossy black colour. As I cautiously approached it, I couldn't feel any of the heat I would generally associate with an object that had just come through the Earth's atmosphere. It didn't look like any pieces had come off, and I initially thought it was all still intact.

It wasn't until I walked halfway around it, facing the side where the dirt had piled up, encircling it, from the crash, that I realized that near the top of the object was a gap, an area that'd been bent. I hesitantly approached the thing, slowly putting my hands up to feel for heat, still not finding anything. Even as I touched it, all I could feel was cool metal.

At this point, I had to stop and evaluate the object; a few possibilities came to mind. It could be some derelict satellite with an orbit that had decayed enough to send it back toward earth. However, I didn't think that was it, considering it had hit a plane out of nowhere, and surely someone would be watching for that sort of thing. It could be some government's secret space project, in which case I wanted to get a look at the thing before sprinting away and pretending I had been in a different state that day if anyone asked.

Or it was something entirely alien. For that, I would take a look, then move to a different country and forget I ever spoke English.

I was considering just running away right now, but I'd already seen it. I don't think five seconds of looking at the thing versus five minutes would matter all that much to the Men in Black who came looking for me. Besides, I'd seen E.T., and I wasn't going to let some innocent alien dude be taken by the U.S. government and be experimented on. Or it could be a cute alien babe.

Mind made up, I took a firm grip on the bent metal and pulled.

It didn't budge.

So I pulled harder. It moved a few inches and then stopped. But that was all I needed to know that what I was doing was working. So I took a short hop to put all my weight into pulling the wall away. With a groan of metal, it moved about another inch before halting again. I made a second hop, putting my feet on the object's surface and tugging, unsuccessfully, a few times. I gave up quickly after that had failed to produce any results. Still buoyed by my earlier success, I looked around for something I could use to help pry the metal away from the construct.

Ultimately, I found a large, thick tree branch torn away from its trunk on the ground. Sticking the torn-off part into the hole, I maneuvered the branch into a lever to help me, although I got a face full of leaves for my troubles. I couldn't do much about that; I didn't have the time to strip it bare.

It took a bit of finagling, but I finally got the branch into a good position; then, I slowly started pushing and pulling on it, using it as a makeshift lever. Slowly, accompanied by the groans and screeches of metal grinding against metal, I was able to pull the wall down.

Suddenly, the branch snapped in my hands where I had been holding it, but not before the wall fell with a snap of metal and then a soft *whomp* as it hit the dirt. Looking closer, it was clear the 'wall' was actually a short ramp.

At that moment, I made a terrible mistake. Disregarding my previous cautiousness in favour of my curiosity to discover what the object held. Part of it was the pressure from the minutes creeping up on me. It had taken some time to arrive at this point, and I was afraid of someone crashing my one-man party.

Therefore, I stepped onto the ramp without hesitation to look at what was inside. I hadn't even elected to poke my head inside first!

What I saw caused me to stop and stare, slack-jawed.

It was, without a doubt, a man. Larger than I was by about a head and perhaps seventy pounds, I noticed that his skin was a pale, almost grayish blue. With his closed eyelids, I was worried he was on the verge of asphyxiation. The dark-blue liquid seeping from a cut on the corner of his forehead and left cheek was only noticed peripherally by me and shoved down the priority list in my mind.

When I took a step towards him—whether to give him the Heimlich or start untrained CPR to try to resuscitate him, I couldn't begin to say–he suddenly opened his eyes, showing two pupils on either edge of a completely white iris; his sclera was the same blue as a bright day's sky.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I had about a second to process this new information when the man lunged at me with startling speed; before I knew what was happening, I was on my back on the horizontal ramp. I had been knocked down with incredible force, kicking the wind out of me. He was now on top of me, his hands around my neck, squeezing incredibly tightly.

Usually, I'm good at holding my breath. Still, my back hitting the ramp had knocked every last bit out of me, and now not even a smidgen could pass by my constricted esophagus.

I flailed frantically at his face, slapping and punching ineffectually, which only caused him to flinch a tiny amount before he closed his eyes. This prompted me to try to shove my thumbs into his eye sockets; he only screwed his eyes shut harder and ignored my weak self-defence.

At this point, black had started to creep into my vision, and my mind was filled with adrenaline, but my lungs were empty and on fire. I was screaming internally, HOLY SHIT HE'S KILLING ME, I'M GOING TO DIE. THIS BLUE FUCK WAS GOING TO KILL ME. FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK...

At this point, I was back to slapping and hitting impotently, and if I hadn't kept my nails so short, I would undoubtedly be clawing at his face and hands. Then an errant thought crossed my mind about the tree branch I had dropped after the ramp had fallen to the ground. I seized that thought like a lifeline, groping around with my right hand, frantically searching for that branch.

I didn't find it.

Instead, I found a rock slightly too big for my hand. As soon as I felt it, I latched onto it desperately. It didn't fit my hand comfortably at all, and I was afraid it would slip out of my grasp at any moment, but as soon as I had it in my grip, I bashed it into the side of his head. The grunt that came from him at that point startled me, but it didn't stop me from bashing him in the head again with the rock once more.

The only sound I could hear at this point was my heartbeat pounding in my ears. While the only thing I could see were the four pupils glaring back at my two, above a slight snarl.

I gave up at that point. I didn't have the energy to fight anymore. I was lying motionless on the ground, my arms splayed to my sides, darkness creeping further into my vision. I don't know how he hadn't crushed my throat yet. The feeling of the rock shifting in the palm of my hand was what drew me out of my stupor.

With my last burst of strength, my final conscious thought was to bash it directly into the cut on the side of the bastard's head.

I slammed home into his open wound with a jagged point that I hadn't realized the rock possessed.

With a groaning cough, he loosened his fingers from their place around my neck. His left hand touched the cut on his face, now bleeding even more densely. He was still leaning over me while I inhaled a gasping, sputtery breath. When I did, I started coughing heavily, flecks of spittle launching into his face. Then, I took the second most challenging action I had that day, after the third hit with the rock; I brought my knees up to my chest and slammed my heels into his stomach to push him off of me. I expected to be able to kick him away from me, but it felt like I had shoved a brick wall.

Instead, I slid down the ramp on my back while he stumbled sideways, catching himself with his right hand before he completely fell over. I quickly crab-walked backward until my back hit a tree. There, I tried to get my breathing under control. It felt like every pain receptor in my neck was screaming at me.

I watched the alien across from me swaying back to his feet. I realized that his eyes had trouble focusing, especially his left eye. He wasn't standing still—wobbling side-to-side, acting drunk—but hadn't yet moved towards me.

'I think this sick-fuck has a concussion...

Good.'

Instinctually, I knew this would be the golden opportunity to make a counter-attack. But I couldn't move; my body was still desperately trying to gulp down oxygen past my damaged throat.

I sat there staring at him as his eyes slowly started to refocus. I laboriously started sliding back up the tree, using it to support myself–when he charged at me. I did the only thing I could do with as limited energy as my body had. I took a pratfall.

When I was twelve, I stumbled and fell in front of one of my older sister's hot friends, who had laughed so hard she couldn't breathe. Afterward, she told me I was "so cute." I latched onto that sentiment like a puppy with a new bone: constantly following her around the house, pretending to stumble and fall in these ridiculous displays to get her to laugh and call me cute again. This continued for an exceedingly embarrassingly long time before my sister caught on to what was happening. She told me in no uncertain terms that one: I was being an idiot. Two: I was embarrassing her. Three: I was being a moron. Four: she knew she had called me stupid twice; she just wanted to reiterate how mentally deficient I was being. And five: I wasn't valuing myself enough when I tried to catch a stupid teenage girl's attention like that.

Since then, I stopped using a pratfall as a pickup method. But I never stopped entirely. Instead, I would use it to get laughs from my friends, although it'd been a couple years since I had last done it.

Maybe that was my hobby.

When I did it this time, I was unprepared on uneven ground. I felt a sharp snap, which only worsened when the alien stepped on my foot as he crashed into the tree. By pure reactionary reflex, I lifted the leg he wasn't standing on and stomped on his knee. It felt like I was just stepping on the ground. He didn't even act as if he noticed. Instead, he leaned on the tree as if to catch his breath. Luckily, I was able to yank my foot out from underneath him.

I scrambled backward away from him once more. I was back by the drop-ship or pod or whatever the fuck it was, gingerly getting to my feet. I refrained from putting much weight on my crushed foot, still trying to catch my breath. It looked like little boy blue was the same as he ponderously turned around and looked straight at me. I knew he could see me, but he still seemed out of it. He slowly stumbled towards me, not charging this time. I slowly walked backward away from him, keeping some of my attention on my injured limb, still pulling rasping breaths into my lungs.

The area we were fighting in was filled with debris kicked-up or knocked-down from the asshole's spacepod crash-landing. I had to be careful where I stepped or risked losing my balance. Eventually, I mistakenly looked down when I stumbled on something underfoot; the next thing I knew, the blue alien rushed me. I didn't even think to defend myself when he threw a punch at me. I flinched, then watched as it sailed right past my face, missing it by a–well–quite a lot, actually. It would have been insanely comical in most other circumstances. Especially combined with the expression on his face—like he couldn't believe he had missed—if I hadn't been absolutely terrified and fighting for my life.

Although, when he swung a second time with his other fist and missed me again—with that stupid look on his face—I couldn't help it; I laughed. Hell, the laugh surprised me as much as it did him, going by his expression. It also, apparently, made him livid as hell.

He started swinging wildly back and forth with both fists as he chased me down, looking like a madman. I finally understood what was happening as the look on his face went from rage to frustration, tinged with confusion. He honestly didn't know how he kept missing. It seemed his depth perception was off, combined with that concussion—or whatever the alien equivalent was. I didn't know how long that luck would last, so I took every opportunity to get more air through the pain in my neck. Simultaneously I looked around on the ground hurriedly for anything I could use. I finally spotted the branch I had used previously, lying on the ground to the side of the ramp where I had dropped it.

Seeing that, I became frustrated with myself for discarding such an obvious makeshift weapon as that and for disregarding the martial arts training my big sis had given me, limited as it was. I knew, however, with how messed up my foot was and how little energy I could muster, coupled with how strong the alien in front of me was; I didn't have anything that could give me a solid chance to fight back.

The big blue bitch had eventually stopped flailing around like a drunk at his first bar fight and took a moment to examine me, so I opted to do the same. I could see now that he had some stupid futuristic jumpsuit on, but it was torn up and damaged on his left side. I could also see that he was favouring that same side heavily.

Before I could do anything with this information, he lunged for me, probably realizing that I couldn't do any credible damage to him. That thought led him to disregard his defence to grab ahold of me.

I tried to dodge out of the way, but he caught my right arm and spun me around. He and I switched places; the pod was now at his back while I had the entirety of the woods to mine. I would have booked it back home if I could stand up on both legs steadily. As it was, his face suddenly lit up; he gave me a shit-eating grin that I really didn't like because he kept it up on his face as he reached back to just inside the doorway and pulled out a big fuck-off knife.

This thing easily was the width of my palm; it was overkill.

My heart sank. My big sis had told me in no uncertain terms, explicitly, that if I were to ever find myself in a knife fight, I was going to get cut. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. I could have been an expert CQC specialist against an amateur knife-fighter, and I still needed to expect to be cut. I was also now expecting to get stabbed. To death.

I may have started hyperventilating, causing fresh waves of burning pain to shoot through my throat. Or it may have just been normal breathing with fresh waves of burning pain shooting through my throat. The jury is still out.

Either way, a surge of dizziness passed through me, and I started to cough up more spittle, except when I took my left hand away from my mouth, it was flecked with blood. The alien was stalking toward me slowly with that same shit-eating grin on his face. I tried to put more distance between us, but he just shifted his position to keep up with me. Before I knew it, we had switched places; the pod was now at my back again while the woods were at his. The entire time, he had been playing with me, confident, now that he had a weapon.

Suddenly, I heard what sounded like a voice coming out of the pod, distracting Mr. Alien McCuntface. He shifted his posture as if he was about to head into the pod while ignoring me, causing me to curl my hands into fists to defend myself. I discovered the rock still in my right hand, in a death grip. I had had it that entire time without realizing it.

I am not athletic, but I am a young, healthy male who grew up eating two homemade meals a day, plus school lunches. For the past two years, it had been three hearty homemade meals a day. On top of that, except for the past couple of years, I have been reasonably physically active. Even within those two years, it was not that drastic of a change in activity during the pandemic. I am in good shape. I can't throw a high-speed baseball, and my accuracy deteriorates the closer I get to thirty feet and above. But tall, blue, and ugly is within ten feet of me and paying me zero attention, which is how he got the jagged end of a two-pound rock to the left eye at eight feet away. It was the first time I heard him cry out loudly.

It also got his attention.

My sister was right; I am a dumbass.

His attention on the pod had fled after being nailed in the eye with a rock, zeroing back in on me. He was in front of me in three quick, subconscious strides. On reflex, I jabbed out with my thumb into his left eye, which I was hoping had just become a blind spot. It was. I could feel my thumb dislocating as it entered his eye socket, eliciting his first words since I had opened the pod door—I assumed they were words since they seemed to have actual syllables.

He stumbled backward with both hands covering his left eye in pain, leaving the knife embedded in my stomach.

I didn't realize it at first. It was only as I looked down for the branch that I noticed the hilt sticking out of my body just below my rib cage. I immediately swayed on my feet, dizzy, and had to steady myself on the edge of the pod's entranceway. It was too much for my mind to process; too many implications. While my brain rebooted, my body bent down to grab the tree branch on reflex, probably doing more damage to the wound.

With the tree branch solidly in my grasp, I looked up at the asshole before me. He was still holding his hands up to his left eye while he glared at me with his right. Then, mind made up, he stepped purposely towards me. Still suffering from his concussion, he didn't notice as I jabbed the pointed, broken end of the tree branch into the ruined side of his jumpsuit like a spear, causing it to sink in a few inches. When I pulled it out, it was coated in blue blood.

At this point, I had made a decision.

Typically, you wouldn't want to move around a lot and exacerbate a knife wound, like, at all. But I had quickly come to several conclusions, fueled by the shock of seeing the knife playing Excalibur with my gut.

For one, I had just been stabbed; two, the closest fire station was spitting distance from my house; three, that fire station was only really staffed with volunteers during the dry season; four, it was not the dry season; five, the next closest station was six minutes away; six, it would take me more than three minutes just to reach my house; seven, the candidate for the galaxy's biggest asshole was currently in front of me, and injured; eight, people had seen him hit the plane; nine, the asshat would need a place to recover and hide; ten, the only place close-by would be the Miller's, and my house; eleven, even if I had been trying to steal from him, I didn't hate Mr. Miller or his wife–I didn't want to see them dead; twelve, I was not going to let this motherfucker anywhere near my family; and thirteen, I was going to die, but I was going to die while taking this psycho down with me.

With my decision firmly made, I hefted the branch in my hands like a bat and took a giant swing, like I was going for a home run, right into his side where I had just speared him. The sounds the branch made as it impacted his side were pleasant to my ears but not as pleasing as the grunts of pain he made that told me I was doing actual damage to him. I got three good thwacks in before he realized he could drop his hands from his eye to his side to protect himself. That's when I switched to hitting him in the head alongside his initial injury. The feeling of the impacts against his skull were so divine that I knew I should've been worried if I had not been about to die.

The first couple of hits to his head, he tried to shake off. The third caused him to stumble to one knee. The fourth and fifth found him resting on his hands and knees. My sixth and last good hit was to the back of his skull. This was too much for my branch-turned-bat; it broke in halves, causing me to stumble forwards. When I went to correct myself, I overcompensated and fell backward. I had expected to fall flat on my ass, but I landed on the sole seat inside the alien pod instead.

My head was swimming, and I couldn't focus on anything for very long. Darkness was creeping back into my vision once more. I had the fleeting thought that my seat was remarkably comfortable.

Making an effort, I refocused and saw that the alien in front of me had crawled closer into the pod while reaching for something before finally passing out or, hopefully, dying.

'I probably should have used the knife in my stomach to kill him,' I thought.

I was disappointed in myself for not thinking of it earlier. It definitely would have ended the fight sooner, even if it had killed me far more quickly. That's one bad thing about my big sis drilling it into me to not remove a stuck knife for fear of bleeding out. Because it would've been a great weapon to have, but my mind had discarded the possibility before I could even think of it. Even now, I didn't know if I would have the energy to pull it out and stab the unmoving alien.

My last thought before I died was of shame that I may not have been able to kill the threat to my family. Which is when I noticed a big, red, glowing button to my right. My oxygen and blood-deprived mind immediately leapt to the conclusion that it must have been a self-destruct button. Hope flared through me that I may not have yet failed to protect my loved ones.

With what seemed to be the last of my strength, I immediately pressed the button.