Survivors

Holly and Luke had been straining their ears to hear what was being said between Joe and the Dane, but almost none of it made any sense. There was a long period of silence and then Joe crawled back to them.

“The Danes dead” he said flatly.

Holly gasped and started to sob quietly.

Luke gulped hard and did his best to fight back his own tears.

“What did he say” he said in a broken halting voice.

“He said... He said it was Jacob who shot him”

“Jacob! Why?”

“I don’t know”

“Why didn’t you ask him?”

“Why don’t you shut your stupid great mouth!”

And Luke, for once, did. Possibly a sign he was growing up and possibly because he could see just how upset his brother was. So instead of arguing he gently laid his arm across Joe’s shoulder and said “Come on, let’s get back to the camp”.

Joe looked deep into Luke’s eyes and in that moment he felt the bond between them grow even stronger.

“Thanks” he said “Are you okay Holly?” She sniffed and nodded.“We’d better get back”

More nodding and sniffing.

I’ll go first, you two follow after a couple of seconds” said Luke.

One more bout of nodding and sniffing.

And with that they were off. This time they ran rather than crawled, but kept hunched low. It was fantastically uncomfortable way to travel but it was quick and made it really easy to dive for the ground if danger threatened. They reached the clearing without incident and waited for a few seconds making sure that nothing was moving. Then just as they were about to move off, Holly suddenly tensed and whispered

“Stop! Don’t move, something’s wrong”

Joe and Luke looked around straining to see or hear whatever it was that had spooked Holly. Nothing, they could see nothing.

“What is it?”

“Can’t you feel it?” She said. “Isn’t your skin prickling just a little? Can you really not feel it? It’s like something in your ear, like a low level thrum that you can feel but you can’t quite hear. It’s been getting stronger and stronger the closer we’ve got to the clearing”.

She would have gone on to say “It feels like some sort of electrical static feedback from a semi-fusion stasis field”, but if she had she wouldn’t have know what she was talking about, which is unfortunate because she would have been absolutely right. In reality all she said was “I don’t like it, it feels really creepy!”

“All the more reason to get back then” said Joe and he went to make his way across the clearing.

“No” said Holly and she dived at him grabbing him round the ankles bringing him crashing to the ground with a noisy thump. The sound startled a rabbit that had been cowering in a bush slightly to their left. It bolted from cover and darted straight across the clearing. Or at least it would have done if it hadn’t crashed into some sort of barrier after only a couple of frantic hops. It briefly appeared to hang in the mid air surrounded by a crackling blue halo of energy. There was a sudden waft of burning fur before the rabbit slumped not dead, but very very dazed to the floor. It lay on the ground twitching and gently smoking.

They stared wide eyed at the rabbit, then at the emptiness that had stopped it. After a few seconds Joe picked up a stone and threw it into the clearing. The stone travelled a few feet on a gentle arc before it stopped in mid air. Again there was the crackling blue halo before it too dropped to the floor. It bounced off the rabbits head with a dull thud, which in any other circumstances would have been funny!

“Oh shit!” Said Joe

They knew what this was; it was a Alien force field. The Aliens sometimes used them as moving cages to herd the people they had rounded up into the labour camps. It needed a good number of Aliens working together to generate the force field so the questions were:_

What on earth was one doing here near their home? ... and ...

Where the hell were all the Aliens?

Then without warning the second question was answered, above their heads the whole sky was suddenly swarming with Alien transporters, scouts and hunter killers. All of them were streaming noiselessly and ominously in one direction, and that direction was directly at the camp. The engines throbbed with their pale blue lights and the deadly laser tubes gently glowed. The silence of the Aliens was always unsettling but this time there was so many of them in one place going the same way that the sheer amount of turbulence they caused in the tree tops set the leaves shaking and the branches vibrating in a growing harmonic that made the whole forest sound like it was groaning.

The camp would have no warning because their lookouts weren’t here.

Nobody in the camp would escape because their lookouts had left their posts.

Nobody in the camp would even be awake when the Aliens arrived because their lookouts wouldn’t raise the alarm. This certainty began to settle on them. It felt like a giant weight on their chests crushing their hearts. They all began to realise that they would never see any of their friends alive again because they had failed each and every one of them.