3questria

Prologue: Primary Contact

Graydon National Park, Vermont

November 14, 2002

0829 hours

A boy crouched in the underbrush and fiddled with the straps on his vest. He was well-built, about sixteen or seventeen years of age, with light brown hair and pale green eyes. An older man joined him in the bushes, his father, a man of forty-something years with fading hair and wrinkled hands. They both wore bright orange vests and caps and carried rifles, but neither made any noise. The forest was quiet, unnaturally quiet. No birds chirped. No woodpeckers drilled. Even the wind made no sound as it caressed their faces and scattered the leaves from where they stood, again, soundlessly.

The boy did not like quiet. He was not a patient teenager. Hardly any teenager ever is. His father caught sight of his son’s impatient scowl and nudged him softly, pointing in the direction of where their buck was supposed to be. The tracks had vanished long ago, but the father had knack for knowing where things would go. They’d been following the buck for hours, drawing deeper and deeper into the forest. However, the boy’s face did not change, so his father nudged him again.

“What’s the matter, Danny?” he whispered.

“It’s too quiet, Dad. You said we’d bag one today.”

“We will, son. It just takes time. But you’re right, it is too quiet. Strange…”

“How much longer are we gonna follow this deer?”

“Until we can get a good shot at it, that’s how long.”

The boy groaned. He liked hunting, but only the part where he got to pull the trigger. Not that he hated animals or loved killing things. He just enjoyed the thrill of having a target in his sights, its life in his hands. It made him feel powerful, to control when a creature could die and when it could not, without it ever being aware of his presence.

Something rustled across the clearing from where they lay. The father put a finger to his lips and readied his rifle. The rustling continued. It was the only sound apart from the hunters’ breathing and heartbeats. Many seconds passed. Too many.

Then the buck emerged from a grove of trees into the clearing, a huge six-pointer with an unusual stretch of white fur down its back. It stood stock still for several moments, observing its surroundings. The father smiled down at his son and nudged him. The boy grinned and readied his gun, resting the bottom of the barrel on a fallen log, lining up the deer’s flank in his scope. The crosshairs drifted toward the odd fur on the buck’s back.

He steadied himself.

Take the shot, Danny. Take the shot.

His sweaty finger slowly pushed down on the trigger.

BOOOOM!

A thundering noise, much too loud to be a gunshot, echoed through the trees. Startled, the boy fired and missed the deer, which ran back into the forest and out of sight. Before he could curse his luck, the boy caught sight of a strange glowing orb in the middle of the clearing, dazzling white and devoid of features, like a bowling ball made out of diamond. He looked to his father in hopes of understanding, but he was just as confused as his son, with his mouth agape and his eyes wide as saucers. The boy turned back to the orb.

Slowly, steadily, the sphere grew, and the light became blindingly bright, so much so that they had to duck down behind the bushes to shield their eyes from the painful whiteness. They heard another boom, then the crackling of electricity, and finally…voices.

Voices and the acrid smell of smoke and burnt hair. Either somebody had gone and set a raccoon on fire or…

“What the hell?”

The father grasped his rifle tightly as he and his son peeked over the bushes.

The orb was gone, replaced by three creatures that looked like dogs from another planet. They were short and had very unnatural looks about them, like they just didn’t fit in with the world around. The boy looked closer and saw that they were not dogs, but horses; three small horses, each with eyes wider than dinner plates and wings and horns.

Wings and horns?!

“Daddy,” the boy stammered, “what are those things?”

“I don’t know, son. Stay low. They’re…they’re talking.”

They were indeed. One of the horses, black-furred and red-maned, was impossibly addressing its companions, both red-furred and black-maned, with words.

“Talking horses,” the father said, dumbfounded. “My God…”

The boy hushed his father. He wanted to hear what these horse-things were saying. As he brushed away a bit of the undergrowth, the words became clearer.

“…fools! Dunces! I told you thrice that we are not prepared for a full-scale usurpation of Earth! Celestia still reigns supreme, and even with Chrysalis on our side, we would not last one day in combat with these beings! They are violent by nature! They kill each other in droves!”

“My Lord,” interrupted one of the red horses. “It was a mistake and nothing more. The tests…”

“To Tartarus with the tests! We accomplish nothing by attacking too early. Our technology is far inferior to that of the humans! We must…”

“But my Lord, the humans are incapable of magic!”

The black horse looked furious, or about as furious as a horse could look. “Firstly, Blood Spatter, if you interrupt me again, I shall have you fed to the manticore! Secondly, magic alone will not aid us. Humans have iron dragons that drop death from the skies! They have cannons that rain fire on their enemies! And they hold them in their hands! The humans may be a violent, sadistic, brutish species, but they are superior in war technology! We must…”

The boy and his father heard nothing more. They’d both seen enough alien movies to know where this was going. Not knowing what else to do, the father stood up and aimed his rifle. The boy looked confused and slightly anxious.

“You’re not taking Earth, whatever you are!” his father shouted, looking down the scope of his gun as the horse aliens reacted. “Surrender!”

He didn’t know what to expect, so he was surprised when the black horse thing slapped its own comrades. “You see, you fools?! We—wait, wait, wait. He holds a firestick. Perhaps…”

“I said surrender!”

“Dad, what are you doing?” the boy whispered, reaching for his gun. His father didn’t react, keeping his eyes on the aliens.

Then the black horse chuckled. “Foolish human. You underestimate our power. Blood Spatter, Death Rattle, prepare the portal. I shall deal with this human.”

“Yes, Lord Blade,” said its comrades simultaneously. They pointed their horns at each other, and soon sparks were flying from their foreheads, intertwining and forming a small orb like the one the boy had seen before. The black horse approached the father.

“Your kind is only strong in numbers, human. One of you will not kill me. One thousand will kill us all. But this is the moment that changes. Surrender your weapon to me, and I shall let you live when this world becomes mine.”

The father couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The black horse wanted him to drop the gun. He almost laughed.

“You’re stupid for an alien. You don’t have anything to threaten me with!”

“Oh, but you’re wrong,” the alien sneered. “You see those two? Their horns are producing magic, magic that can kill as well as heal. I can make every cell in your body explode, human, but I really don’t want to. I’d rather not waste my magic on a lowly human, at least for now. But your weapon…I desire it. Give it to me, and I shall spare you and whatever family you possess.”

“I’ve heard enough,” the father said, taking aim again. “No one threatens my planet.”

The black horse sighed. “As you wish.”

Suddenly, inexplicably, the father screamed in pain. The boy caught a glimpse of a red aura around the alien’s horn, but was then distracted by his father’s cries of agony. The boy screamed as well, not sure of what to do, but the black horse just smiled. The father clawed at his own leg, retching and shrieking, and as his son watched in horror the flesh of his father’s leg began to rot. A necrotic virus spread up the man’s leg, turning it black and green with decay. Soon the rot had reached his neck, and by then his legs were nothing more than blackened bone, devoid of blood, muscle, or any other form of organic matter. The meat on his body was being melted clean off.

“DAD!” the boy screamed, rolling around, trying to find something, anything, to help his father with. But he didn’t touch him. Something told him not to touch his father, and when he saw that the necrosis was spreading to the leaves around his father’s writhing body, he stumbled away, dropping his gun in a thicket of bushes.

The black horse saw him and approached, its horn still glowing red. All the boy could hear of his father was the sounds of retching and choking. The smell of rotting meat filled the air, making the boy vomit on the forest floor. As he looked up, black hooves met his eyes, and suddenly he was face-to-face with the black horse alien, which had already picked up his father’s gun.

“I do hope you don’t grow up to be as stupid as your father was,” the alien sneered. “Perhaps you will put up more of a fight.”

With that, the glow around its horn vanished, and the choking noises stopped. The alien turned away and rejoined its comrades, who had apparently succeeded in creating the portal orb.

The alien hadn’t seen the second gun.

Everything else vanished from the boy’s mind at that point. He dared not look at what remained of his father’s body, nor did he let the smell of filth and decay overwhelm him. He crawled to the thicket where his gun lay, picked it up, and looked through the cracked lens of the scope.

The first two horse aliens were already gone. The black one was last, surveying the woods around it before approaching the orb. The boy stood up, leaning against a tree trunk, and aimed.

“HEY!”

He didn’t know why he yelled. Maybe it was because he was angry, or because he wanted a better shot. The horse alien turned around, and a perfect opportunity presented itself in the boy’s crosshairs.

BLAM!

He never saw the bullet. He only saw a cloud of red and a dark hole that swallowed the horse alien’s right eye, but that was it. The alien fell backward, roaring, and the white orb gobbled it up, taking with it the chunks that had been blasted off its face. The orb spun and pulsed before disappearing in a flash of white light, nearly burning out the boy’s retinas.

And then silence. Again. And that awful smell.

He forced himself to look, and what he saw burned itself into his mind.

His father was beyond dead. His charred skeleton lay in a pool of his own liquids, a clumpy, coagulated mixture of blood, muscle, marrow, and other fluids. His mouth was still open in an everlasting cry of fear. Flecks of orange netting still lay around his ribcage. He’d been melted dead.

The boy collapsed to his knees, unable to process what was happening. He was in the middle of the Vermont forest with a melted father and a closer encounter. He didn’t know what to do.

He turned around and, picking up his rifle, inspected the clearing where the aliens had stood. Nothing. No trace of anything except for the deer that had run off. He looked around in his pockets. All he had were a few matches, a pack of cards, some gum, and a couple of shell casings. There was no way he could contact anyone. He had no food or water. Rescue wouldn’t come for days. He was trapped.

But if there was one thing that could be truthfully said about Daniel Rothman Jr., it was that even in the face of a dilemma as tragic as watching his father die before his eyes, he was still a resourceful son of a bitch. And he had an idea.

Taking the matches, he looked for a dead tree and, finding one, lit a match and tossed it into the brush. Surprisingly, they caught fast and began to burn, slowly inching up the tree and spreading across the forest floor.

He started crying. But eventually the fear of burning to death usurped his grief for his father. Pulling his shirt up over his nose, he tore the orange net vest to shreds and wrapped the pieces around his hands, then approached the drying bones of his father. Gulping and wiping vomit from his cheek, he grabbed the ribcage and began to drag the skeleton away from the growing fire, crying silently as he went.