Intergalactic Terrorist (New Dimension Book 1) (3 page)

Chapter 3

When his eyes opened, Charlie Pinwright found himself staring upwards at a very bright light that burned into the retinas. He sat up and rubbed his eyes and, very confused, took in his surroundings.

    He was inside some sort of metallic room with round circular walls. There were control panels scattered around the walls, which included bright flashing lights and millions upon millions of tiny switches and buttons. At opposite sides of the room were two doors. One was a simple plain metal door. The other was large and grand with a strange locking mechanism sticking garishly off the side of it. To his left was a tall, clear cylindrical pipe with remnants of bright green fluid running from the lighted roof to the carpeted floor. Charlie took a second glance at the carpet. It was dark red with flowery patterns spewed across it. It reminded him of the carpet in an old person’s home. Not really fitting with the rest of the room’s style.

    Charlie lifted himself off the cold metal table he lay on and moved over to one of the small portholes, attempting to look through it. It was black, almost as if some strange film had covered the glass. He stepped over to the door with the lock and tried to open it. Nothing happened.

    Where was he? What was he doing here? He tried to remember what had happened. He couldn’t really recall…

    The door opposite him opened with a slide and a swoosh, sounding like someone blowing through a gap in their teeth. Charlie turned around and saw the man with the plastic looking face and the moustache enter the room. Suddenly it all came back to him.

    “You!” he shouted. “Where am I? What do you want with me?”

    The moustached man smiled – a smile that was slightly too large for his face. “You are inside my electrical… and you are here to repair it,” he said happily.

    “
Inside
your
electrical
?” Charlie repeated. “What are you talking about you strange, freak of a man?”

    The moustached man walked around the edge of the room, flicking a number of the switches. Strange beeps echoed throughout the metal room. The lights began to flash. It reminded Charlie of a seventies disco. He imagined a big disco ball on the roof and John Travolta strutting his stuff in that white suit to that fine classic by the Bee Gees. He imagined flares, afro hair and the ground to be a large dance floor. Admittedly it would be a dance floor with the worst taste in carpet in the world. Again he thought of the old people’s home. Now it was a seventies old persons disco and that made a whole new set of images appear in his mind. Grannies in hot pants and roller-skates doing the hustle and the bump.

    Then suddenly all of the twinkling lights and beeps died. He shook his head and focused on the very real and worrying situation he had found himself in.

    “You see?” said the moustached man, “my electrical is broken.”

    “I… see…” Charlie said slowly, playing along. If he could keep this weirdo talking for long enough he might find a way to escape instead of being tortured, murdered and having bad things done to his rear that he dare not think of. Probably in that order. “So
this
is your electric appliance? A large… electrical… room?”

    “Hmm? Room?” the man said whilst opening a can of some strange looking food and pouring it into his mouth. To Charlie it looked like raw sewage. It
smelt
like raw sewage. In fact it rather looked and smelt like the contents of a toilet after one too many vodkas. Still, the man seemed to enjoy it.

    “Oh this is not just one room… there are many here,” the man continued, “all broken. As I said on your speak and listen device… my electrical is broken.”

    ‘Many rooms?’ thought Charlie. ‘Is this some sort of weird dungeon? Am I going to turn into this man’s gimp?’ He edged further away from the man until his back was against the wall. He had expected the metal wall to be cold but it was surprisingly warm to the touch. Soft too. Charlie wondered what type of metal was warm and soft!

    “What is this place?” he said eventually.

    “This is my…” the man said struggling, “erm… my… what do you call it?” He reached into a small draw that opened from the wall at the touch of a button, and pulled out a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary and began sifting through the pages.

    “You will have to excuse me,” he continued, “I only learned your language a few hours ago. Strange as I never even knew your language existed until a few hours ago. Ah! Here it is!” His finger stopped on one of the words and he read it out excitedly. “This is my… space…ship!”

    Spaceship. Charlie blinked. This was his
spaceship
? Charlie understood completely! This was a spaceship and the man with the slightly plastic-like skin and the moustache was an alien who had abducted him!

    “You’re a crazy person,” Charlie spluttered, “a genuine, real crazy person. What asylum did they release you from? Hmm? Forgotten to take your medication today have we Mr
Alien
? What planet are you from? Neptune? Mars? Venus?”

    “Zilzerbit actually.”

    “Zilzerbit! Of
course
you are! Shouldn’t you be saying ‘take me to you leader’ or ‘we come in peace’ or ‘beam me up Scotty?’”

    The man looked at Charlie with concern. “Are you alright?” he asked. “Have
you
forgotten to take
your
medication?”  

    “No,” Charlie said firmly, “I do not need to take medication.” It was a lie. Charlie took sleeping pills every night and a strong form of headache tablets every morning. “Now if you would be so kind as to let me off your
spaceship
so I can return to my flat and get some much needed sleep. Or are we flying through space? Hmm?”

    “As I have already said to you Charlie, it is broken. That is why I brought you here. So you could fix it.”

    Charlie walked back to the door with the lock. “I cannot fix this spaceship because this is
not
a spaceship. Yes, you’ve done a grand job decorating the inside of the room to give the impression of a spaceship but I’ve seen more realistic sets on Buck Rodgers.”

    “But it is a real spaceship.”

    “Prove it.” This was Charlie’s chance. “Open the door. Let me out. Allow me to see your
amazing
ship!”

    “Very well.” The man pressed another button. There was a loud chugging noise as the lock on the door began to turn and twist. The clasp opened like an old steam train rolling down the track. A great vibrating rumble shook through the room, wobbling Charlie’s feet as the door slowly began to slide open.

    Charlie peered his head outside. It was dark and his eyes took a moment to adjust to the lack of light. He saw trees. Lots of trees. A forest! So this was the forest that this crazy bastard has mentioned on the telephone. But what forest? Charlie lived in the middle of the city. The nearest forest was miles away.

    This was Charlie’s moment. He had it all planned out in his head. He would jump out of the door and rush, probably screaming like a girl with his arms flapping, away from the forest and back to civilization. He would instantly report this ‘want-to-be’ alien to the police for:

a)
     
abducting him;

b)
     
somehow finding his address, which probably meant stalking;

c)
     
eating a poo-like substance from a can, which he was sure was illegal!

    Charlie looked one last time at the moustached man and was about to say something along the lines of ‘so long sucker’ but felt he neither had the muscles or the cheesiness of Arnold
Schwarzenegger so instead just began to run. It was a shame that he hadn’t looked down or else he would have realised that there were a set of twenty-two steps leading from the door to the ground. He tumbled down them all, banging every bone in his body as he fell. He landed with a
splash
in a pool of mud of at bottom!

    Slowly and very carefully he stood, checking that none of his limbs had fallen from his body. By this time his captor had already descended the steps and was standing beside him. Charlie was cold, in pain and wet. He looked down at his clothes. He still wore his creased shirt, worn trousers and shoes with the holes in, although now they were caked in mud. His socks dripped and squelched between his toes.

    “I was about to say watch out for the steps,” the man said.

    Charlie tried to wring some of the mud from his shirt. “Thanks,” he muttered sarcastically. “Well… seeing as though my miraculous escape plan failed I might as well take a look at this
spaceship
of yours.” He turned around expecting to see an old wooden shed or an abandoned building. Instead however, what he saw made his eyes stretch so wide he looked like a rabbit startled by oncoming car lights moments before becoming a permanent fixture on the road.

    The spaceship was larger than a house! It was silver and shiny, albeit speckled with dints and burn marks. It was a dome-like shape sat upon six thick metallic legs planted firmly into the ground. Atop of the dome sat a number of large antennae-like towers. It truly did look like it was from another world!

    For the first time since the moustached man had told him, Charlie began to doubt his own disbelief in alien life. Could what the man have said to him be true? He slowly turned to him.

    “This is a joke right?” he said quietly. “I’m the star of some hidden camera show right? Some cheese infested television presenter with a smile as fake as my mothers breasts is going to jump from behind that tree right?”

    The man shook his head.

    “You really… are an alien?” Charlie asked.

    The man slowly nodded his head.

    “The ship is impressive,” Charlie continued, “but I still don’t believe it. I can’t. I won’t.”

    “You need more proof?”

    “Please.”

    The moustached man placed his fingers underneath his chin. He pushed hard until his fingers seemed to rip through his flesh. Charlie staggered. The man pulled outwards, stretching his skin until it began to detach itself from whatever was below. To Charlie’s horror he realised that the plastic-like face with the jet black hair and the moustache was in fact a mask! With a sudden slap, the mask flicked off, falling to the floor!

    Charlie’s mind reeled. Before him, still wearing the suit, was what Charlie could only describe as an alien. Pale grey skin, one large nostril were a nose should be, a large smiling mouth that spread from one side of his face to the other, two small and squinting yellow eyes, a bald head and no ears. Sitting on top of his head were two antennae that attached back at the top into a large boil of skin that seemed to act as an ear.

    “Hello Charlie. My name is Greebol. A pleasure to meet you,” he said grinning.

    This time there were no random images fluttering through Charlie’s head. This time he knew the best thing to do was close his eyes and drop to the floor as he was about to faint. But before he had the chance to close his eyes and drop to the floor, he fainted and his world once again went black.

Chapter 4

A fat badger crawled out from her burrow and began sniffing the ground in search of food. It was deep autumn and food was becoming scarce in the forest. It was lucky for her that she had eaten enough in Spring and Summer to keep her going through the long winter nights.

    She smelt something that was possibly edible from behind a fallen log not far in the distance. Quickly she hurried over to it before some rival creature stuck their snout in first. She recoiled quickly at the strange smelling rubber thing lying on the ground. Not food at all. Another one of those
Human
things that she didn’t understand.

    The badger continued her prowl across the forest floor. If she had been interested in the sky and happened to glance upwards at this exact moment, she would have noticed a small flicker as something punctured through the Earth’s atmosphere. It zoomed towards the ground, seemingly out of control, crashing in the forest not far from the badger, who looked up momentarily curious before carrying on her way.

    A crater several meters deep steamed like a hot turd in the cold. The trees above it and the grass and bush around it singed. Slowly, as the steam subsided, the item that had fallen from the sky revealed itself. Stuck at the bottom of the crater sat a small perfectly spherical dark metal object. What was it? Where did it come from? No one could say… not that there was anyone around to witness it fall from the sky. In fact the only thing that did see it fall was a balding broken-beaked crow perched at the top of a large conifer tree some miles away. It wouldn’t cross the crow's mind again until several years later when, due to a toxic waste spill, the crow would develop a mild form of intelligence and, disguised as a parrot to make people trust him, would hijack an American space shuttle launch in search of where that falling object came from, becoming the first crow in space. Discovering that, as previously mentioned, there was no other life in their galaxy, he would settle down on a distant red planet, gorge himself on cherry flavoured rocks and die. Back on Earth the crows would hail their missing intelligent comrade as a god-like figure and, in a mass departure, would attempt to fly away from the planet to join their deity on the red world. Of course, unable to stand the immense pressure far above the clouds, the crow’s brains would explode sending them falling back to the ground like one great black sheet. Many Human cultures would mark this incident as the beginning of the apocalypse, starting a great war that would stretch the planet, lasting for over one hundred years and killing at least half of the world’s population.

    For now though, the crow was uninterested. Nothing seemed interested in the small metal sphere that had fallen from the stars. It sat, ignored, in the crater, as if it had always been there. For some time it rested. The singed leaves on the trees, grass and bushes had cooled. The steam from the crater fully dispersed. The full moon was raised in the sky, shining its blue light down on the motionless metal sphere.

    Then suddenly and without warning it moved.