The Handheld Disaster

The Tiller household donned a blue, red and white intermittent dress, borrowed from the dozen FBI cars and vans sitting in the driveway, which had their police lights on. Oliver, the man everyone waited for, walked out of a black SUV, already wearing his personal hazmat suit. The soft rain seemed to dance around him as he walked forward with cautious steps. If one looked attentively through the visor in front of his face, one might notice a thin layer of tinfoil that covered his forehead.

Soft voices could be heard all around Oliver as he walked through the garden with soft thumping steps. He hand-cleaned the visor that was covered with droplets. A big apple tree towered over the crowd at the center of the garden. Two bodies lay five feet to the left of the tree inside a crater; a little boy and a little girl. And at the center of the crater, a baseball-sized sphere, the reason he was called on scene, called his attention. He walked forward. A hand rose to meet his chest.

“Do not approach any further, Mr Carter”, a man’s voice resounded to his left in the calm night.

“Well, what am I doing here if I can’t examine the surface of the ball?”, complained Oliver, disappointed. He then took the man’s hand off his chest and took another step forward, seeing that nobody seemed truly worried. He didn’t notice that the crater was right in front of him and the difference in ground heights destabilized him. He plunged forward into the crater and on top of the sphere. He tried to avoid it, but right after he fell on his hands, the sphere seemed to move a centimetre to the right and pricked his thumb.

He jumped up in fright and gazed at the dead children to his left and flinched. He didn’t want to die, but he didn’t want to be taken into quarantine by the FBI’s biohazard team.

“Wheew! That was close”, he said playfully. “I examined the surface of the ball, it seems to have a rocky texture and some weird scribbling. I could…”, he said and almost looked at his hand, but his survival instinct saved him as he barely finished the sentence. “I could examine the writing if you want”

“We have linguistics experts, Mr Carter. Is that all?”, the agent coldly retorted.

“Yeah!”, Oliver replied instantly, “Why were these children here?”

The agent looked to the left toward a couple of adults who were standing on the street, the man consoling the woman.

“Their father, Mr Martin Tiller, told them to bring the asset home to play. He thought it would be cool”, the agent almost barked, seemingly affected by the matter. It was the first time on the scene that Oliver had seen an agent show any emotion.

A yellow light flickered to the rhythm of a slapping sound that reverberated through a cramped, dim-lit room. The choir seemed to be accompanied by constant gasps and the squeals of an old mattress that could barely stand the weight of two overweight people shaking it back and forward.

“Oh là là, Oliver! You had never come home so active!”, exclaimed Anne-Marie, his loving wife, the only lucky strike he’d ever had in life, while lying next to him on the double bed. “What’s so different about today?”

“I… I had to… repro… reproduce?”, Oliver replied. He thought deeply for a second, then opened his eyes in extreme shock and got up from the bed. “Stay here! I have to bring something!”

He got up and ran to his study. He looked at the shelves full of boxes and picked the third shelf to the bottom, the fifth box to the right and, toward the back, he found a little bottle that carried his self-developed anti-alien antibiotics. He grabbed it, then switftly picked a syringe from his desk. Right at that moment, he heard the front door opening. He threw the box down and ran to the living room. There, he saw Anne-Marie running at insane speeds to the car. She opened the door, got inside, started it and drove away to the west.

Oliver removed the cap from the syringe, extracted some of the yellow liquid from the bottle and immediately stuck the needle into his arm. He didn’t mind for proper techniques or safety measures. He just injected the liquid, put the cap back on the needle, put all the items back into his little bag and ran to the motorcycle. The keys were always in a secret compartment beside the front wheel. He turned it on in a hurry and pursued the fleeing lights of the SUV where he had come in an hour ago.

It was terribly cold. He had never driven a bike at full speed while naked and sweaty. He still drove on. He could never let his wife stay a victim of these mind-controlling beings. Half an hour passed. The SUV and the bike’s full speed seemed to be the same. Oliver felt his face frozen and his hands trembled on the handle. Anne-Marie turned right and drove the same way Oliver had driven in the late afternoon to go to the scene.

The SUV came to a loud halt and, right as the agents were noticing the car, the door opened and the agile figure of a fat lady came out and ran like a gazelle toward the apple tree in the center of the garden. Oliver drove the motorcycle behind her into the garden, to the dismay of the dispatched team. As he rode the bike toward her, he somehow used his left hand to extract more liquid from the bottle into the syringe. The bike stopped and fell on the wet grass and he was already running ready for the attack. He raised his right hand holding the syringe and stabbed forward.

His hand stopped mid-air. He was not in control of his body anymore. He could see through his own eyes, feel the smell of the air coming from his nostrils, see his Anne-Marie taking the sphere in her hands, opening it and moving the insides with her index. Oliver's fingers opened, letting the syringe go.

“The antibiotic is taking effect, I need to die before I’m free”, he thought. Why had he thought that? His heart started racing in panic. Only a few seconds had passed since they had driven into the garden and the agents were gathering around them. He opened his arms toward them.

“Everything is ok. Stay back”, Oliver said, then walked toward the center of the crater. His wife left the crater and walked toward the yellow-clad crowd. He sat with crossed legs in the center of the crater and closed his eyes. He wasn’t calm at all. He was screaming in his mind.

NOOOOO! NOOOOOO!

But nothing could be done. He somehow knew this was his end. The sky lit up. A tear left from his eye. Anne-Marie succeeded at handing the sphere to an agent, who had a pain-stricken face as it punctured his hands with a thousand needles. The second ship came to Earth, carrying another fleet of invaders into Oliver’s body, which blew up on the impact, splashing everything around him with his flesh and blood.

@nomadicsoul told me of this contest and I could not hold my hand. I had to participate. I wrote this story in about five hours, not twenty-four, but I'm sure that's OK.

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