In The Beginning

The hospital was pretty quiet that day. Riley sat in her bed, glaring at the sixty year old woman with a hole in her throat chain smoking cigarettes in the bed across the room from hers. You'd think she'd have some sense Riley thought, for probably the hundredth time of her stay at the hospital, to not smoke, now that she breathes through her throat like a backwards whale. Not to mention she's as fat as one. She's probably going to give me cancer, and then she'll be stuck with my music until I die, or the cure works.

Riley sighed audibly, then coughed after inhaling again from the smoke saturating the air, mixing with the smell of Windex and other chemicals with the unmistakeable smell of blood that always wafts around a hospital. She was happy just to know that she could go home tomorrow. She'd had a severe concussion from fighting at school, but she still remained undefeated, knocking out the boy (along with some of his teeth), but he'd fallen on her and her head had smacked into the pavement, she had touched the back if her head, her vision tripling and spinning, but even through that she could see her hand had been coated in blood. Then she'd passed out as someone tried to help her stand.

And she woke up next to the Elderly Idiot, aka Charlotte: chain smoker extraordinaire.

As much as Charlotte had annoyed her, Riley was grateful to have someone to irritate. Blasting her music from her EarPod would trigger Charlotte to smoke more and thus the battle of who could piss the other off more would begin. Riley always won.

Riley had two friends in this hospital, her designated nurse, Francine who was a twenty something woman with earrings that made holes in her ears that Riley could stick her thumb through, and naturally dark black lips, as native to her species. Her other friend was a boy, human, like Riley, named Ky. He was in the hospital because he set his arm on fire playing with chemicals in his school's chemistry lab. So basically, he was a rebel like her, and she liked that, so Riley took him under her wing. He was going home within the week, though his arm would always be slightly darker and patchy compared to the other one. Riley was surprised neither of them had visited today, and she supposed that's why the hospital was so quiet, because Francine was a chatterbox and she and Ky usually slid down the halls in their socks blasting old, loud music from the 2010s, over 150 years ago.

Suddenly, the only sound in the room wasn't Charlotte's wheezing, but a loud boom, and then screams. Instinctively, Riley leapt out of bed and, thanks to her cowardly human reflexes, ducked behind her bed.

But then, for the first time, she thanked her cowardly human reflexes. The walls behind her splattered with Charlotte's blood, dust from the wall, and rain blasting in from outside. Charlotte's scream of terror before she was obliterated echoed in Riley's ears and mixed with the heavy footsteps she heard coming closer. Suddenly, the door of her hospital room burst open, Francine standing in the frame. She was screaming, "Riley! We have to get Ky and get-", when suddenly there was a hole in the center of her torso. She looked down at the gushing wound, which Riley could see the wall on the other side dripping in Francine's blood, and then collapsed forward, dead. 

Riley slowly, carefully, peered over the top of her bed as she heard slurping sounds. With its back to her, was a creature she had never seen.

There were approximately five human-like species living on the earth. Humans, obviously, Barbs (which when they first came to Earth were nicknamed Barbarians as a racial slur), the Uliss, the Fari (which was what Francine had been, and the most human like, excepting their black lips, eyes, hair, and fingernails and tendency to regenerate limbs when unnecessary), and the Livea (who are the race with the most animosity directed towards them because of their attitude and what they... Eat.) but this creature was nothing like Riley had ever seen before. It was... Sort of human like, at least from the back. It either wore armor, or it was attached to its body, but either way, the armor was translucent blue, showing shadowy shapes of organs inside, pulsing, meaning it was part of the alien's body. It was taller than a Uliss, which had a maximum height of eight feet, but very thin, thinner than the Livea, who, if they were human, would be thought to be extremely underweight. It's five finger tips reached its first leg joint, one of two, making it more limber and a better runner, meaning it often chased its prey, when it was primitive in its first stages if evolution on its home planet. It was obviously not primitive, holding a weapon unlike any gun Riley had ever seen. It was a pale, pale grey color, the skin seeming to be stretched over its bones, slightly wrinkled at the joints from stretching. It turned slightly then, so Riley could see its eyelashes. In school, Riley's rule for passing notes was: "if you can see the teacher's eyelashes, you're going to be caught." She ducked back down behind the bed, but it had seen her. The heavy footsteps started again, and the slurping stopped. Only then did Riley realize it had been the creature eating the remains of Charlotte. The beast rounded her bed and she saw it full on. It had a mouth much to large, nearly splitting is face in half with white lips, now stained red from Charlotte's blood. The colors of its skin were obviously designed by nature to make it less terrifying, to calm its prey, with the lavenders, sky blues, silver, and white, but it was obviously meant for unintelligent creatures, because its featured alone terrified Riley. It's eyes were a cloudy lavender with abnormally long, sliver eyelashes, and when it smiled Riley saw it had two rows, top and bottom, of sharp teeth, indicating it was solely a carnivore.

"Hello little one." It said in a deep guttural voice. Time seemed to slow, Riley's senses seemed to sharpen. She heard everything, she could hear the alien's heartbeat, much faster than hers and in a strange rhythm, maybe it had two hearts? Colors seemed to refine, nothing blended, she was hyper aware of her surroundings.

"Hello." She answered, her voice calm, collected, though her brain was practically screaming at her to beg for mercy.

"You face death so well, Little Human." It smiles wider, and Riley has to stop a shudder at the piece of Charlotte's flesh caught in its teeth.

"Well, you ain't pretty, but I've seen worse." She shrugged, amazed at her suave attitude. She slowly stood up, though if she had hugged the creature, the top of her head would only reach the bottom of its ribcage, or where she supposed there'd be a ribcage. She leaned against a bedside table, on which was a notebook she wrote in from time to time. Under the notebook was a packet of matches she had hidden from Charlotte a week ago, behind her, her fingers fumble to get a match from the package.

The creature finishes laughing at her remark, "I'm not pretty, am I? Well, I suppose it doesn't matter, as long as I'm feared," a fleeting though crosses Riley's mind about how this creature could speak English so fluently, the other races had either known choppy English or none at all, "but you, Little One, you do not seem to fear me, why is that?" As it spoke it stepped toward her, so it was right in front of her. It ran one finger down her cheek. "Soft." It said to itself. She lit the match behind her, burning the tips of her fingers, but the pain didn't register with her brain, only the thought of survival. She gripped her can of hairspray. In one fluid movement, she brought both the lit match and the aerosol can level to the alien's face, lifting her arms high above her head, put the match in front of the spray can and pressed the trigger.

A jet of flame sprayed the beast in the face, and it roared in anger, instinctively lifting its hands to cover its face but only succeeding in burning its hands. Once the flame died, she quickly grabbed the pen she used to write, and using all her strength, drove it deep into the beast's eye socket, penetrating something vital, maybe a brain, and killing it.

Strangely, her heart wasn't pounding as she stepped over both the monsters body and Francine's, though a pang of grief did go through her looking at the bloody hole in Francine's middle, her three arms splayed out. She left the burnt body of the alien and her pen in the shattered hospital room, the wall blown in when the monster blasted it with whatever sort of gun it carried.

The gun. Riley skidded to a halt and went back, taking the large, heavy gun from the beast's loose grip. She ran back down the hall to the wing she knew Ky's room was in. There were three more of the aliens in the hallway, all three of them eating once-patients of the hospital, easy prey. Riley pulled the trigger, thrown back by the force of the blast, but smiling in satisfaction when she saw all three of the monsters splattered on the walls. Though it was gross. She ran into Ky's room.

"F**K. YOU." Ky was screaming, stomping twice on the creatures head, and grimacing when he broke the skull. Riley made a mental note that the head was a weak spot. He turned to her, ready to strike, but when he realized it was her, he grinned.

"Of course we'd be the ones to kill them, eh?" He laughed, taking a note from her and taking the gun from the alien he'd killed.

"Always." She smiled back.

"C'mon, we have to get out of here." Ky said, walking past her to the door.

"What about everybody else? We need to save them." Riley protested.

"Riley, we're on the bottom floor. They landed on the roof and scaled down the walls. There's no one left to save." Ky said, clasping her shoulder from behind her. She nodded solemnly, staring at the burn marks on the alien Ky had killed, and they left the room.

"Wait, Ky, why was that alien burnt? I burnt mine with hairspray and a match, but how did you do it?" Riley asked, catching up to him, his legs longer than hers. He doesn't get a chance to answer, though, because just then an alien pounces on him. Riley screamed, more from surprise than actually fear, though, but her brain was telling her she was insane for not being scared shitless.

She was at a loss for what to do. She couldn't use the gun without killing Ky in the process, and it was only a matter of time before he couldn't keep the monster's teeth from him any more. She was strong, but not strong enough to knock it out with the gun. Her hand played with her necklace, a habit she had, though there was really no time for habits.

Suddenly she found herself unclasping the necklace. She leapt onto the aliens back, straddling it, and as if she was going to put the necklace on the monster she held it in either side of its neck.

And then she pulled. She pulled with all her strength. The beast spluttered and clawed at the chain. Then it fell, jolting Riley and she stopped pulling, the sight she saw filling her with disgust. She had cut through the beast's neck and it was bleeding profusely onto Ky.

"Get this thing off of me!" Ky groaned, trying not to get any of the blood in his mouth. He pushed while Riley pulled and they managed to move it off. Ky stood up and tried to get the blood off him, but it was goopy and stuck to him like caramel. Riley looked at the monster she killed and saw that its neck was hanging on by only some skin and a few stretching and snapping tendons, the sight so gruesome she gagged, but held it down.

They continued down the hallway and left the hospital.

All different types of people were screaming, some in English, others in languages many humans couldn't begin to understand from the species' home planet, some just wordless shrieks. But there was not a single dead alien out there, only dead people.

"Ky, they're so easy to kill. Why aren't people killing them?" Riley asked, watching hopelessly as an alien devoured a Uliss woman. Briefly, the thought flicking across her mind, Riley wondered if the woman had children, a family, what her backstory was, where she had wandered, like the Uliss so loved to do.

The Uliss were travelers, and after exploring their entire planet, then their solar system, they'd gone in search of new places, exploring space in the process, and then finding earth, though they weren't the first intelligent life to live on earth.

"I don't know, Riley, I really don't know." Ky says, at a loss for something to say for once, not like Francine who was a chatterbox, but he was full of answers, or sarcasm. Sometimes a combination of the two, but never 'I don't know's.

Author's Note

reviews please!
Sorry I'm starting so many books, I keep getting ideas

Reviews

[Damien Davison]

This was amazing, I'm glad I read it. It was very interesting and your so creative. The beginning made me laugh at a few parts...
"now that she breathes through her throat like a backwards whale."
That was hilarious...
It's interesting to think of a world in the future if aliens reveal themselves/find us... How drastically our lives would be altered... Thanks for sharing, it was really good, very captivating!

[Dark and Mysterious]

Sorry! I love to read your writes. Start as many as you wish so long as you complete them ;)

[Dark and Mysterious]

Do I need to tell you that btw this was AWESOME!!!

[Sophie]

yay!

[Sylvana]

Very interesting. It reminded me of some crazy Doctor Who episode. xD I feel there could have been more detail however in describing the appearance of the other human-like alien races.

[The Invisible Girl]

This is so intense!!! Great chapter!! Can't wait for the next chapter!!
Defiantly send me a read request if you continue to write more!! :)