Beachhead: Invasion Earth Read online

  “This ain’t class Waldo, you don’t have to raise your hand.”

  “Sir, my name is-”

  “Now look Waldo, do I look like I give a shit what your name is? I could call you damn near anything and you’re going to answer to it. Now why don’t you put your fucking hand down so I can get done with my speech. I memorized it and everything.”

  Waldo glanced at his own hand and slowly dropped it by his side.

  The tallest man behind him, a big hulk of muscle with black hair and thick eyebrows snickered.

  “You think that’s funny?” the LT shoved between Waldo and the soldier next to him.

  He came to the tall man’s chin, half his size in width.

  The soldier looked down at the part in the LT’s hair and snickered again.

  “Yeah,” he said in a thick deep voice. “I do think that’s funny. What you going to do about it?”

  The LT punched him in the nuts.

  As he collapsed to the ground, he drew back his foot and kicked him in the stomach.

  Now the tall man was laying in the mud, turning a weird shade of purple as he tried to breath but couldn’t.

  The LT bent down and rested his forearm on a knee as he watched the black haired man gape.

  “What about that? You think that’s funny?”

  He didn’t get an answer.

  “Ya’ll come here and watch this,” he said even though he didn’t need to.

  All of the other seven men had their eyes locked on the big man as he finally sobbed in a breath, one hand cradling his crotch, the other his stomach.

  “I want ya’ll to see this good.”

  The LT held out his hand.

  At first, the tall man flinched. After a moment, when he realized the hand wasn’t going to punch him, or slap him, he lifted up his own massive hand. The LT gripped him and helped him to his feet.

  “I got hit in the nuts with a fastball once. Wasn’t paying attention to the pitcher trying to take out a man leading off first,” the LT advised them.

  “Hurts, don’t it?”

  The tall man nodded.

  “You like baseball? You look like a damn football player, but those shoulders say baseball. I’m gonna call you Babe Ruth.”

  He got another nod as the man still struggled to get his breath back.

  “Alright, Babe and Waldo, you two are my right hand man. Mans. Men. Right hand men. Get these fuckers lined up so I can finish my speech.”

  The LT strutted back to the front of the group.

  Waldo waved three of the men into a straight line on the forward row. Babe grunted them straight in the back.

  “Sir,” said Waldo. “What is our job?”

  “Bushwhacking guerilla soldiers,” the LT shouted. “Your job is killing Licks.”

  “Ha!,” Babe muttered.

  “What’s that Babe?” Bonney marched in front of the short line of men, circled around them like a shark.

  “Do you think the Lick cares what you think? I know I damn well I don’t and if I don’t then the Licks sure as hell won’t. But we will make them care. We will make them know you by name Babe. When they put their little Lick babies to bed at night and pull the covers up tight, every fucking one of them will check the bed and closets to make sure the Babe isn’t hiding to get them while they sleep.”

  One of the men in the front row licked his sweating lip, eyes darting around as he searched for the Lt circling them.

  Bonney stopped in front of him.

  “What’s your name son?”

  “David,” the boy stuttered.

  “Davy Crockett? You don’t look old enough to shave son. How old are you?”

  He didn’t let Crockett answer.

  “Don’t answer that Crockett! You think I give a damn how old you are? You ever seen a Lick at war? They don’t care how old you are either. The Lick kills women. The Lick kills children. The Lick has no humanity because they ain’t fucking human. They are lizards. They are snakes. And growing up in the Ozarks, you know what we did with snakes Crockett?”

  “No sir,” the boy stammered.

  “We cut their fucking heads off. Every fucking one of them. Snake is good for one thing, Crockett. Making boots.”

  LT glanced down at the worn out hiking boots the boy wore, wool socks peeking through the threadbare top.

  “Looks like you could do with a good pair of boots, Crockett.”

  “Yes sir.”

  He turned to face the group and glared at them. His right hand strayed to a sheath on his leg and pulled out a twelve inch Bowie knife with a carved wood handle.

  “Jim Bowie hisself gave my great grandfather couple generations back this here blade,” he twisted it in the sunlight so the men could get a good look. “Said he was going to need it up in them Ozark hills before Jim run off to the Alamo and got killed defending our freedom.”

  He held the knife still so they could get a close look.

  “Freedom we don’t got no more. Freedom the Lick has taken from us. I aim to take it back and you boys are signed up to do it with me.”

  His ice blue eyes drilled into each of them, bouncing from one man to the next.

  "Our plan is to pull from the annals of history and become terrorists. We are going to borrow from our Native ancestors and hunt them in their sleep. We will attack their patrols. We will leave carnage and destruction wherever we go. And we will deliver a calling card with each rout. Every single one of you men owe me one thousand Lick heads. One for every day since they landed on my planet. You signed up to make them gone.”

  Babe coughed in the back row.

  “You want us to cut off their heads, Sir?”

  “Babe got his voice back fellas! All’s gonna be right in the world. Hell yeah Babe, I want you to cut off their heads. You ever seen a headless horseman before? Ain’t natural. Now I don’t know if Licks give a shit about their heads being gone. We ain’t got many scientists left to see if it grows back like a lizard’s tail. But Babe,” Lt smiled. “If that head does grow back, you bend down and cut that son of a bitch off for me again. We’re gonna call that a two-fer.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jake woke up with another headache.

  He lay strapped to a table, the hard metal surface cold under his numb skin. He was naked on the table, and had been since he woke up.

  The first time.

  It had been months, maybe years since then. He didn’t know. Had no way of knowing.

  He couldn’t remember.

  All he knew was they would come in, and the pain would start.

  That’s all he associated with being awake.

  For years or days, he would wake up, the door would slide open, two humans and a Lick would step through.

  The lizard man would stare at him with slitted eyes, tongue flicking in and out to taste the air.

  The humans would hurt him.

  He asked them why once.

  At least he thought he did.

  His voice, raw from screaming, begging, pleading, he asked them why.

  The small one flinched.

  A short, bald man with soft hands and a paunch.

  It made Jake wonder.

  Who had enough food to have a gut?

  Everyone he knew was on the verge of starvation.

  Not just soldiers, but every single person he met. Food was a luxury almost. Everything was soup. Lots of soup because once you boiled water, it was safe.

  Add leeks, add berries or nuts or grubs and slugs, anything from the wild and simmer it into a thin liquid stretched out among too many people.

  Not enough calories to get fat.

  Yet here was a fat man, hurting him.

  The other one had dead eyes.

  Jake stared at him once, until the pain began. The man might as well have been made of stone.

  He moaned as the door hissed open.

  But only the Lick came in.

  The alien came and stood at the head of the table and put his three fingered claw on th
e strap holding Jake’s arm down. Tongue flickering to taste the air, he undid the strap and stepped back.

  “Sit,” the alien invited.

  Jake propped up on an elbow, fought back a wave of dizziness and kept going when it passed. He made it to a full sitting position and held on to the edge of the table for support.

  The alien watched him, yellow eyes unblinking in the glare of the light panels.

  “Drink,” the Lick pointed to a tray next to Jake.

  He stared at it for a moment, then snorted. It was a tea set, a simple rounded teapot, white with blue flowers on the sides, with two matching cups on saucers on the tray.

  “I have developed an affinity for your tea,” the Lick explained.

  His claw reached out to take a delicate teacup.

  Jake did the same.

  He sniffed the weak brown liquid, then a small sip. It tasted like warm tea, bitter and sharp.

  It made him realize how thirsty he was, and he took a larger gulp.

  The Lick held the cup without drinking, though his tongue worked overtime in the steam filtering off the top.

  Jake looked around the room.

  His view for so long had been limited to the ceiling, plain light panels that burned into his retinas even though they only emitted a soft glow.

  The walls were medical grade steel and chrome that reflected nothing but soft blurry images and the ever present light. There was a tray opposite the tea set, this one covered in the instruments that had been used to torture him.

  He couldn’t recall all they had done, only the pain.

  “I feel we have reached a sort of break through together,” the Lick said through a robotic voice box around his throat. “And I am delighted you have chosen to work with us.”

  Jake nodded.

  Anything to stop the pain.

  “I have a mission for you,” said the Lick.

  His yellow eyes never blinked, but he studied the young man on the table all the same.

  This was the test.

  They had broken many human subjects before, but willpower was a funny thing. Once the threat of pain was gone, most humans reverted back to a pattern of thinking and behavior.

  This one however, had not.

  Perhaps it was his age.

  A pliancy in the pre-frontal cortex that allowed for post-hypnotic suggestion, reinforced through pain techniques.

  The Lick Commander held these thoughts in check as he watched Jake, even as he reminded himself to order more test subjects in this age range.

  Where one could work, a dozen would do so much better.

  “If you choose to accept it?” he asked Jake.

  Jake finished the tea and set the glass back on the tray.

  This was the part, the Lick Commander thought.

  They go for the knife on the tray, humans called it a scalpel, and lunge for him.

  One last desperate effort at revenge, or the hope for escape.

  Jake reached for the teapot and poured himself another cop.

  He drank it down as well.

  “When do we get started?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Lick Commander led Jake through a concrete hallway toward a lit room at the far end.

  The boy walked on bare feet, the freezing ground leeching into his bones, the air thick with moisture against his shivering skin.

  He did not ask for clothes or a covering.

  It never occurred to him.

  The Commander did not possess a name. It was sacrificed when he assumed command of the conquering of this planet. He was the supreme leader for this planetary invasion One of thousands of Commanders in the solar system. The rest were on the Red Planet.

  Waiting for his success.

  To say earth was a prize assignment made his tongue flicker in amusement.

  He was here as a punishment, for failing his last assignment.

  He didn’t even know what the planet possessed that his Eminence wanted.

  Only that he was ordered here when a scout ship went missing, and his orders were seek and destroy.

  His early success was met with accolades, but the last year those had disappeared.

  The humans had mounted a defense, using tactics he was unfamiliar with.

  He led Jake into a palatial hanger turned war room. There was an electric heating pod in the center of the room turning the temperature to a toasty eight five degrees.

  Uncomfortable to humans, but Lick Commander found it helped him move easier.

  A Lick soldier sat in a human chair by the pod, his back to the heat.

  His face was a misshapen lump of flesh over bone, covered in rips, scratches and welts. His arms were wrapped in bandages, as were his legs, all soaked with the purple black ichor Licks had for blood.

  He couldn’t stand.

  Lick Commander knew it.

  The bones in his legs were shattered by human bullets.

  But the soldier struggled to make the effort, and the Commander appreciated it.

  “Stay,” he hissed then reverted to human speech through the translator box.

  “He was the only survivor of a patrol,” the Lick Commander told Jake. “I have had a report of his story, but wanted to hear it for myself before I made a decision. I would like for you to hear it also.”

  Jake stood with a stoic face staring at the soldier.

  He felt no enmity, no empathy. He felt nothing.

  There were just facts.

  The soldier was an alien.

  He was injured.

  The Commander wanted him to know how.

  He nodded.

  “Proceed,” the Commander ordered.

  “We were taken prisoner,” the Lick hissed through a voice box that matched the one the Commander wore.

  "They don't take prisoners-"

  "But we were," the soldier answered. “They killed three of our number and tied up the rest.”

  The Lick Commander glanced at Jake.

  “A rebel group,” he explained. “They have been- troublesome.”

  He turned back to the injured soldier.

  “Continue.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Have you heard about the Babe?”

  Lt William Bonney bent a dirt and grime covered face over the Lick trussed up on the ground.

  “Waldo, get your ass over here and help me roll this sumbitch around.”

  Lt didn’t wait for Waldo to comply, just grabbed one of the Lick’s bound arms and started pulling.

  Waldo rushed over to help and together they spun him around and slid him against a tree.

  “Do you know why they call him the Babe?” Lt continued.

  The Lick soldier's tongue darted in and out of his mouth, circled his lips and tasted the air.

  It nodded.

  "Will you tell us what we want to know?"

  The slit eyes roved over the other four aliens trussed up on the ground.

  The alien shook its head, the tongue moving even faster now.

  "I'm going to have the Babe come out here and introduce himself to you right now, do you understand?"

  It didn't move.

  "He understands," Waldo grumbled.

  The Lt stood up and moved away from the alien.

  He sat on a log and unscrewed the flask to a growler and sipped.

  "Babe!" he called.

  The alien could hear the Babe shuffling through the leaves behind him. He didn't turn around.

  "This is dumb," said the Babe. "Why don't we just shoot 'em?"

  "Babe, I'm going for terroristic action here. I want the damn Licks to be afraid. I want them damn Licks to have nightmares about us when they go to sleep at night."

  "Do they sleep?"

  "Hell if I know. All I know is we're gonna kill every damn Lick we come across, and make every other one of 'em afraid that we might find them."

  "And you want to do that by me beating this one with a bat."

  Bonney nodded and made a motion with his hand for Babe to pro
ceed.

  "You know this is going to hurt, right?" Babe said to the Lick soldier.

  "Your shoulder bothering you?" one of the men called to the Babe.