Homicidal Aliens and Other Disappointments Read Free

foreign to me before the aliens came, feel less foreign now. And the cities feel more foreign. Like graveyards, empty and haunted.
    I notice something as we walk. A faint hum in the trees and bushes. I feel my muscles tense.
    “Do you hear that?” I whisper.
    Lauren listens and looks at me with something close to that little girl’s look when I told her to eat her vegetables. “Bugs?”
    “Oh, right,” I say. But then I realize that bugs mean more than just bugs. Bugs mean everything didn’t die when the aliens conquered us. Score one for the home planet. We have bugs.
    “I saw a squirrel earlier,” Catlin says. “I asked someone if I’d really seen what I thought I’d seen, and they said there were some animals out here. I guess the aliens focused their killing ray on the cities. The damage doesn’t seem as complete here.”
    “Killing ray?” I say, raising my eyebrow in a Spockian way. Or trying anyway. No one could raise a single eyebrow like Spock.
    “What would you call it?”
    Both Catlin and I like retro science-fiction movies. We’ve talked about them before. We like the good ones or the ones that are so bad they’re good. I quote from one that falls in the latter category: “Death ray.”
    She thinks about it and smiles.
“Teenagers from Outer Space.”
    “Exactly,” I say. “A classically bad, really bad, movie.”
    I see a scene from the movie in her mind. It’s when a dog gets zapped into a skeleton by a ray gun. This telepathic power we have is totally weird, but on the plus side, we get to share a truly awful scene from
Teenagers from Outer Space.
    “You shouldn’t joke about it,” Lauren says, glaring at Catlin, though she manages to save enough of the feeling to give me a quick look of disapproval.
    She walks faster so she gets ahead of us. I’m surprised by her reaction. She must know we aren’t joking because we think it’s funny ha-ha. We’re joking because it’s too terrible not to joke. But then I feel bad, like I’ve laughed at a funeral or something.
    “I’m sorry,” Catlin says to Lauren.
    I apologize, too, but the whole thing makes me realize that Lauren and I don’t really know each other all that well. I mean, we have a connection and all. From back at Lord Vertenomous’s. And we kissed once in that abandoned grocery store in West Texas when we were traveling here. But things seem different now. Maybe I just need to try harder to understand the way she sees things.
    The light is dim, almost gone. Our campsite is only a few hundred yards up from the clearing where the meeting is, but I still worry about finding it in the dark. Funny how a big, horrible worry doesn’t wipe out all the little worries. They’re like bugs. They survive no matter what.

Bluish lights spread around the edge of the clearing, creating a glow that resembles moonlight. It’s just enough to guide me and Lauren and Catlin through the clearing without bumping into anything or anyone. Even in the dim light, I can see that a lot of people are already here. I can feel them, too, even more clearly than I can see them. They feel confused. And suspicious. And hopeful. And scared. Some of these thoughts come from the same people, one right after another like machine-gun fire. Being telepathic doesn’t exactly clear up the human psyche. In fact, there’s a lot of confusion and contradiction in most people, which is both comforting (at least I’m not the only one) and disturbing (we’re totally messed up).
    Now that the sun’s down, the temperature is falling fast. A fire would be nice. A fire should be our right as human beings. Even cavemen and cavewomen sat around fires and discussed caveman and cavewoman things, like maybe the best size for a club or whether a leopard skin was better than a bear skin on cold winter nights. But here we are back in the forest, this time the hunted and not the hunters, without even a fire to keep us warm.
    I hate them,
I think.
I hate them so