EPISODE 12. RUN, NINJA. RUN.

Episode 12.
RUN, NINJA. RUN.

We stood on the old baseball diamond in Mc Carren park talking turns hitting bricks into the distance with a pipe. Neither of us spoke very much after watching those forty people die through the lifeform tracker earlier in the morning. There really wasn’t much left to say after that.

I kept an eye on the tracker for the rest of the day, checking it every ten minutes or so. I had too many questions that couldn’t be answered now. Who were they? How did they survive? Where were they coming from? Were there any more people out there?

Almost on cue, Carlos screamed and threw the pipe as far as he could, sending it crashing down on a fallen fence. Then he lit up a joint from his breast pocket and sat down looking completely exhausted.

“We’re doing this the wrong way…just sitting here like this. We need to re-think things, Carlos. We need to go farther out there and look for survivors, aliens, answers…I don’t know. There’s just no way that you and I are the only survivors of this,” I said to him.

Carlos stared at me. Even if he didn’t understand my words, he got my tone.

Right then, we both turned towards the life form tracker as it gave out its “bee boo boo” alert signal. I got up and looked at it.

There were seven red dots in the same area where the original forty had popped up. But, these were flashing in and out, like there was some kind of interference blocking their signals.

"Gente otra vez? Cuantos? Son aliengenos o humanos?" Carlos asked.

I showed him the screen. There were only three red dots showing now. Then a moment later, all seven were showing again, only to blink back out to a single one.

“This is fucking strange.”

By my estimates they were coming from somewhere near the Morgan Avenue stop on the L train, way out there in Bushwick again. I sat for a few minutes watching as the screen went blank again, only to pop back with five red dots.

I thought about it. It would take me between one and two hours to make it through the terrain if I hauled ass. However, if we were seeing these blips then it goes without saying that any aliens in the area with similar tech were probably seeing it as well.

Carlos and I both had our blockers on, so we were safe from detection excluding direct contact. The ships cloaking field also helped us out with that. But these people, If they were people, they didn’t have anything to help them. They were sitting ducks out there.

Carlos and I stood up at the same time.

“Shit. I’m going out there to see what’s up. If there’s anyone there, I’m going to bring them back here,” I said

"Que? Si vas a por ellos, voy yo contigo," Carlos demanded. "Porfavor espero que hay alguien que habla espanol."

“What? No. No. Carlos, you have to stay here with the ship. You stay, I’ll go.” I said, probably ten different ways to make sure that we understood each other. He didn’t like it, but he agreed.

I took a few minutes to quickly tape up my feet before packing up my bag. I took two of the laser pistols, seven blockers, and a length of sash that we had found in a hardware store.

Carlos ran over to me with a few more weapons.
“No. It’s okay,” I said, taking the big gun off the table. “I’m taking the big gun.”

He grinned.

We shook hands, and a moment after that I began running towards the direction of the fading red lights.

EPISODE 11. MORNING COFFEE

Episode 11.
MORNING COFFEE

I was feeling pretty cold as my eyes opened to thick grey clouds blanketed the sky. I tried to move, shifting my body, only to realize that I was completely submerged in water with my face only an inch away from having drowned.

The shock of my situation quickly came to me. I immediately tried to move, but my arms and legs were frozen. They had completely fallen asleep from being in the cold water overnight.

I tried to form thoughts as I slowly pulled myself along the shattered bricks. It was agony to move, but I only needed to drag myself a few feet, just enough to get me out of the water.

After a long and painful amount of time, I managed to pull myself out. I lied there shivering until the feeling returned to my arms and legs.

It was morning, and the thunderstorms had stopped. The sky was heavy, and everything on the ground was soaked. I looked down at the small pond that I had spent the night in. It’s amazing to imagine that so much rain could fall for that long of a time. Suddenly, I noticed that the alien life form blocker on my waist wasn’t blinking. I unclasped it from my waist and held it up as a long thin stream of pond water poured out.

“Shit,” I mumbled.

It was waterlogged and completely dead.

My mind started racing with the gravity of the situation, which basically was that I was completely visible to any other monster out there that had a tracker thingie.

“I’m fucked,” I said as I got to my feet and climbed up the jagged wall I had fallen down last night.

Several yards away, the ship sat untouched and perfectly fine. I took in a deep breath and smelled what I thought was coffee.

“Good. Thank God.”

A moment later I dropped to the ground taking cover from a gigantic blast of blue light that exploded behind the ship. The explosion echoed out for miles, and left a crater in the ground that was as big as five houses.

“Oh shit. Oh fuck. Oh shit,” I stammered, getting up and running in a mad dash towards the ship. “They found us,” I thought to myself. “They found us because I fucked up the blocker. I have to get to the munitions room on the ship.”

Right then, with half the distance between the ship and I covered, another round of shots fired off into the same direction as the first.

I hit the dirt flat on my stomach, staring into the distance at the towering mushroom clouds of dust and smoke. The cloud was enormous. There was no way I was going to get to the ship. I started crawling on my hands and knees, leaving a trail of masking tape behind me as it peeled off of my feet.

A moment later, I heard laughter coming from the other side of the ship.

“Are they fucking laughing at me?” I thought.

I looked up to see a shape coming out of the falling dust clouds. I squinted my eyes. It was Carlos, lazily smoking a spliff while holding a giant black alien gun that blinked with pulsing blue lights.
“Carlos?” I screamed.

He turned his head to me with a smile.
“Hey Ninja! Allí usted es! ”He screamed. “Pensé que usted se ahogó. ¡Encontré el café y un crisol del café! ¿Usted quiere un poco de café? Venido conmigo.”

I stood up. He put his arm around me, patting my back a few times. We went around the ship to a small campfire with a beat up coffee pot brewing. A few feet beside it, Carlos had positioned every gun in the ship on a busted up door. As I got closer, I saw that he labeled each one. However, they were written in Spanish.

He came up to me with the big gun in his hands.
“Éste. Esto es impresionante. Es como una ráfaga atómica. ¡Puede hacer saltar un tanque entero! Es mi favorito!”

He placed it down on the door and picked up a small pistol.
“Solamente éste… éste es… un arma de rayo,” he said. Then he fired it at a pile of debris. A bright blue focused beam of light shot out and burned a hole through it.

“Niza derecha?” he said, smiling like a crazy man while handing me his spliff.

I sat down and inhaled. A moment later, Carlos handed me an empty soup can full of fresh brewed coffee.
“Thanks, Carlos,” I said, sipping. It was good, strong and hot.

I inhaled again, and then threw my busted blocker onto the table.
“I broke this thing,” I said.

Carlos looked toward it raising an eye, then he picked it up and shook it. He flipped it around and opened the back. Then he pressed a green button in its center, closing it again. A moment later it let out a series of electronic “pings” and the screen turned itself back on.

“Vea? Ése es todo,” he said.
I nodded, but had no idea how he did it.
“When did you figure this out?”

He stared at me, inhaled, and then smiled.
“Venido conmigo. Quiero mostrado le algo,” he said, and then gestured for me to follow.
We went into the ship to find that there were labels on everything. Carlos had spent the night labeling ship with notes and scraps of paper. He had something tapped to every control on the main board. It was amazing, but I didn’t have a clue what any of them said.

“This is what you did all night? You figured out the ship?”

He stared at me.
“No sé lo que usted acaba de decir, Ninja… sino que pasé anoche imaginar la nave. Estoy bastante seguro yo puedo moverla… pero soy un poco preocupante de causar un crash. Haremos quizá un funcionamiento de prueba mañana.”

We started laughing. What a weird relationship.

“Have you checked any of these while I was swimming?” I asked, pointing to the alien life detectors.
“Qué? No. Ésos están trabajando muy bien.” He shook his head.

I walked over to the charging bay and turned one on. It keyed the same sound that all of their tech made, and a moment later the screen lit up with an aerial view of our surrounding area for a ten mile radius.

About a minute later the screen lit up with roughly forty red lights probably about nine miles away.

I shot up.

“Carlos! People! Forty people!”
“Que?”
“There are people!” I showed him the screen and his eyes popped open.
“Gente? Tenemos que ir conseguirlo!” he said.
“We have to go and get them!” I yelled, but just then, ten new orange lights entered the screen. They moved towards the red lights at an incredibly fast speed. They covered the distance between them like it was nothing. Like it was a video game, until they overtook the red lights.

“No…” I said, as we both stood together in horror watching as the red lights began to blink away, one by one, until they were all gone.