Apex 2: Rise of the Super Soldiers (2 page)

Cheyenne
Mountain Bunker

Commander Watson briskly walked down the dripping, frigid corridor towards the holding cells.
He had no illusions about the effectiveness of his interrogations; they hadn’t worked worth spit so far, and probably wouldn’t ever work. But he had to try.

He saluted the door guard and walked into the room. Sitting all along the back end of the room were
over a dozen grey headed, spindly limbed aliens. First contact with extra terrestrials hadn’t gone exactly how Hollywood had imagined. These guys had no intentions of opening up dialogue. They had almost succeeded in eradicating humanity when their mother ship blew up in Earth orbit. After that, they immediately surrendered. But just because they gave up didn’t mean they were cooperating. Not a single one of them had attempted to open a line of communication with their captors. That made the Commander uneasy. Why had they given up, and yet still acted so obstinate? What were they playing at?

He took a seat on the bench near the door and stared at the line of
grey faces. The aliens barely acknowledged his arrival. They’d been in custody for a month and yet no headway had been made.

He said, “Your comrade has died under interrogation. I’m so sorry for that.”

The aliens ignored him.

“We didn’t kill h
im though. We’d barely begun our interrogation techniques when he simply fell unconscious and died. Can you people do that? Can you simply will your bodies to fail?”

One head lifted and stared at him but it was only
a fleeting glance.

“Why have you attacked us? What purpose does it serve you?”

No answer.

“Why did you surrender? What defeated you?”

Silence.

“Is another invasion imminent?”

Crickets.

“If you’re hoping for a rescue, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

The alien on the far left got to its feet quickly and locked the Commander in an awkward stare. Its lipless mouth parted in a half smile, half snarl. It turned its back on him and stared at the wall defiantly. The others followed suit, standing and turning their backs on him.

“We have thousands of you under military quarantine all across the world. What do you think we’ll do to you if one of your alien ships appears again?”

The pervading silence only served to further anger the Commander.

“We’ll summarily execute every last one of you.”

A sound not unlike a snicker came from one of the aliens.

Watson sneered.
“You failed once and you’ll fail again.”

The pointless interrogation was in
terrupted by a squawk from the Commander’s radio.

“Sir, we think we’ve found out what caused the enemy to surrender. Come to the communications wing as soon as you can.”

Watson keyed the radio. “What do you mean?”

“It’s all over the news. You won’t believe it.”

“I’m on my way.”

Submissive

The Grey captain ordered her troops to resume their activities now that the human had left.

She said, “If I’d known that those enhanced Earthlings were so rare, I wouldn’t have ordered our surrender.”

“We were under attack, sir. We had no way to know what an anomaly they were. You had no choice. Even if we’d finished the species off, we had no ship to go back to. They
destroyed it.”

Another Grey added, “I wonder when the rescue party will get here?”

The captain sighed. “Maybe they’ve abandoned us because we failed so miserably.”

“You know High Command doesn’t operate that way. We were sent to cleanse this planet for a reason. They’ll at least come back to finish what we started.”

The captain said, “I’ll be executed for my cowardice.”

“You’re probably right.”

“But I’ll die happy knowing that these Earthlings will suffer the same fate. With any luck, I’ll get a chance to join in the slaughter before my execution is carried out.”

New Hope
 

Commander Watson watched the replay of the news footage. It made no sense to him. The young man on the video was exhibiting some bizarre abilities. Not only could he simply vanish and reappear somewhere else, but he seemed to be able to make other things vanish too.

A stampede of enormous dinosaur-like monsters was felled by him in a matter of moments.
He’d heard rumors about those dinosaur-like creatures but he’d dismissed the idea as another bizarre exaggeration brought on by the fevered minds of the survivors of the invasion. Many weird stories swirled around that were easily dismantled after a cursory investigation and the dinosaur attack was one such story because there was no evidence left to prove it had ever happened.

But the video evidence proved otherwise.

After the replay, he watched in stunned silence as Fox news broadcast a live interview with the boy.

He
looked to be around eighteen, muscular, and confident. He admitted that he had odd powers ever since he and his friends found a metallic sphere that had fallen out of the sky and spritzed them with a strange mist. He claimed responsibility for destroying the alien mother ship too.

To Watson, it
all sounded like hokum until the interviewer asked for a demonstration as proof.

The boy sighed, looked over at his smiling mother, and then vanished. A few awkward seconds ticked by and then he reappeared in the same spot. The interviewer jumped out
of her seat and stumbled backwards. The boy caught her by the arm and laughed. “If you think it’s weird for you, just imagine how I feel.”

The screen changed and an anchor back at the studio said, “Very strange indeed, but if it’s true, it explains how the invaders were thwarted. We are receiving live footage of the young woman that helped discover the metallic sphere.”

A cute young girl sat at her kitchen table answering questions. She was fit too, with musculature not normally seen on a woman so young, bulging against her sleeves.

She reiterated the boys
bizarre account. Of course they could’ve cooked up the story in advance. It could all be an elaborate hoax as far as the Commander knew. But when asked for a demonstration, the girl came through. Her eyes squinted in concentration and her hands swelled pink as they were engorged with blood. And then a frying pan floated toward her. It came to rest on the tabletop gently.

The male interviewer laughed. “Nice trick, but you could’ve rigged something up before we got here. Try this instead.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and slapped it down on the kitchen table.

The young woman said, “I hope you’re not too attached to that.” Before the interviewer could answer her, the phone floated off of the table by a few inches and then it began to crackle. The faceplate cracked down the middle and the plastic casing shattered. Within ten seconds the entire thing had been crushed down to the size of a sugar cube. It hovered in the air like that and then it plinked onto the wooden surface. The cameraman moved closer to show the viewing audience the resultant destruction.

The interviewer picked what was left of the phone up and then dropped it right away. “It’s hot to the touch,” he said softly.

Watson looked around the room incredulously. His soldiers were staring at the screen in various stages of bewilderment and disbelief.

He said,
“This is worth investigating. Any additional intel on the Grey aliens is welcome and I think these two kids might know more about them than anyone else.”

The communications officer said, “I
knew you’d be interested.”

“Get me clearance to approach the news station
for their contact info. We need to bring in those kids. But we need to be careful not to appear too aggressive now that the entire world is watching them.”

Watson needed to find out where the kids were, what it would take to gain their trust, and then get them to the bunker to interrogate them
about the aliens. He had to know what they’d done to defeat them. He had to know what had happened to that alien sphere they’d spoken of too. If it had granted them powers, just imagine what it could do for a highly trained soldier. If a follow-up attack came, humanity would fall easily but maybe they stood half a chance if they could acquire super powers like those two teenagers.

Then he had another idea: if he could get those kids to show off their inhuman abilities in front of the Grey captives, it might frighten them enough to talk.

He was optimistic for the first time in a month. The news station was local. It was Fox News Denver, which meant the two teenagers were just a State away.

All Together

Two hours after the news trucks left, Jack called Melanie. “Do you want to meet out at the farm?” That meant, did she want to meet at Dan and Molly’s farmhouse. Dan and Molly had also been affected by the alien sphere. It had
fallen on their land and then sprayed all of them at the same time. The memory brought a pang of guilt with it too. He remembered Scott. Scott, Jack’s childhood friend, and Melanie’s first boyfriend, had died fighting the alien invaders. It had been a whole month since they’d buried him, but it still hadn’t sunk all the way in yet.

Melanie said, “I’ll come and get you. I can’t be out too late though.” Melanie and Jack had grown closer together
since Scott’s death. She’d always been a friend, but now she was more than that.

Jack added, for clarity, “I only want to test out our powers. It shouldn’t take long.”

“Okay. I’ll be there in five minutes.” Jack thought he detected a hint of disappointment in her voice. He hoped it was because she wanted to spend her time with him doing more intimate activities, but they hadn’t crossed that bridge yet so he had no way to be sure. Maybe she just wasn’t in the mood to practice. Or maybe he’d imagined it.

They had to practice though. Their powers were changing. While their initial powers were becoming familiar, the intensity was increasing, sometimes to a degree that they couldn’t control. And latent abilities had started to surface too.

Molly was super strong but lately she was convinced that she was having precognizant dreams as well. When Jack had lost control of his powers last month and vanished, feared dead, she was the only one to insist he was still alive because she’d dreamt it. Her husband, Dan, could emit heat from his body, but just recently he discovered that he could also become statically charged, able to direct little sparks from his fingertips. His aim was terrible, but he was practicing and getting incrementally better each day.

No additional abilities had sprung forth from Jack or Melanie but that didn’t mean they were in the clear.

Melanie met Jack out by the railroad tracks and they walked across farmland until they got to the little farmhouse.

Dan and Molly’s old house had been demolished during the attempted invasion a month ago so they were still settling in to their new digs. The house was a bit smaller than the last and it had that old dusty smell to it still but it was getting better each time they
visited. Because of the fall of civilization, they didn’t even need to pay for it. Financial institutions had all but vanished from public influence during and after the invasion. If there was a silver lining, that was it, and it wasn’t much of one.

Dan looked up from his paper and smiled. “I saw you two showing off on the news. You’re a couple of bonafide celebrities now, I suppose.”

Jack knew how private the couple was so he made sure to say that they hadn’t mentioned them during the interviews, on-air or off.

Molly had an apron on with a bunch of
crudely drawn farm animals printed across it. That type of attire no longer suited her now that she’d changed. The mist from the sphere had made them all stronger, more muscular, with skin that was nearly impenetrable. Molly didn’t try and hide her buff physique like Melanie did. She was proud of it but she still didn’t know how to showcase it with the proper clothes.

She was baking bread when they all came inside. She pulled her apron over her he
ad and gave Melanie and Jack a tight hug, nearly knocking the wind out of them. “Hi, super-stars. I saw you guys all over the news. How did it go?”

Jack said, “It went okay, I guess. We had no choice. Someone let the cat out of the bag.”

Dan sat and rested his beefy arms on the kitchen table. “It was probably a Godsend, you know. The government won’t touch you now that your faces are plastered all over the TV.”

Jack snickered. “That’s what my mom said too.”

Molly said, “I heard they might open the schools next month.”

Jack shrugged. “By then we’ll be thinking about college, if they ever open their doors again. Melanie and I already graduated. All the seniors got a diploma in the mail.”

“But no one earned it, right?”

“We survived an alien invasion when most people didn’t. That has to earn you something in life.”

“I suppose. You two are bright kids anyway.” Her voice dropped an octave as she changed the subject. “I had another one of those dreams.”

Jack sat up straighter. “Which one?”

“The one about that evil Grey leader, General Shaylo.”

They had come to view Molly’s dreams as portends of coming doom. She’d been right in her predictions too often now for them to dismiss them as fantasy.

Molly continued, “He’s almost here. He’s furious and he’s a brilliant tactician. But he’s having some reservations. He thinks his superiors have sent him on a mission without the appropriate intel. Because he’s smart, he’s reevaluating his plan of attack. The second wave might not come as soon as I first thought because he’s going to take the time to figure us out before he moves in.”

Melanie said, “That’s good, right? It will give us more time to get ready for him.”

Molly nodded absently. “I suppose you’re right.”

An uncomfortable silence followed.

Melanie broke it when she asked, “Is it alright if we go out back and practice?”

Molly’s eyes came back into focus. She sucked air between her teeth and said,
“Not until you eat. You both look like shit.”

They might have argued but the smell of fresh bread had their stomachs rumbling.

During the meal of warm bread, butter, and marmalade, Dan’s hair stood on end. When he smoothed it back down, little sparks jumped between his hand and head, making his hair stand to attention even more. No one mentioned it though because it clearly embarrassed him.

Dan wiped his mouth with a cloth napkin and said, “I’m going to join you. I need to get this under control before I accidentally electrocute Molly in her sleep.”

Molly didn’t smile. “You’re a deathtrap, Dan. I used to just have to worry about you burning the house down, but now I can’t even take a bath with you in the same room. I might as well take a bath with a toaster in the tub.”

Dan shrugged and said to the teenagers, “We’ve gone through two TV’s already and I blew out the motor in the blender this morning.”

Jack added, “I phase out now even when I don’t mean to. We all should practice before this gets out of hand.”

“I’m fine just the way I am,”
argued Molly. “I’m strong and I can dream the future. There’s no need to rein in those abilities.”

They all nodded and left Molly to her baking.

She smirked as the scene outside her kitchen window became chaos. Flames lit up the sky as garden objects flew around. Small pops either meant Jack was teleporting or Dan was blowing stuff up. The sound of laughter almost convinced her to join them, but someone had to act like a grown up.