Revolt of the Humans

by Jonathan Burke

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Time Travel

Synopsis

When his brother failed to return from a dangerous mission into the town dominated by Motils, Mathew knew that he must go after him. it was not only a question of rescuing Don, but of finding out just how far the parasite rulers had advanced in their plans for bringing their master mind, the Controller, down to Earth. If the Controller arrived, the future of the human race would be even darker than its present. It was not until Mathew made contact with a man who had been delivered from the power of the evil micro-organisms that he learned how close the Controller was, and just now imperative it was to strike a blow now.

Release date: September 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 105

Sample

My father had always hoped to write this. He wanted to be the one who would write the sequel to his original manuscript. But he will never do it now.

So it’s up to me.

Where do I begin? I wonder how he himself would have tackled it; or how, in the circumstances, he would have advised me to tackle it. Probably he would have had some pretty decided views about the whole thing, just as he had decided views about everything else. And if I disagreed with his suggestions or commands, I would have found some way of evading his strictures, just as I always used to do.

There was, for instance, that business of Don’s failure to return from Zopilotec, and my suggestion that I should go after him.

I remember that day. I remember it clearly. In many ways it marked the beginning of a new phase. Looking back, I see it as the beginning of a new campaign in the long war against the possessors.

“Your mother would never forgive me,” my father said, that day.

“I’ll never forgive you either,” I said, “if you can’t let me go.”

His brow darkened, but for a moment he did not reply. He looked away, and we both stared across the burning wilderness of the plateau towards the east—towards the distance where the plateau fell away at last to the coastal plain, and our conquerors worked away at their most ambitious projects.

Nothing moved. From the ruins of the old Toltec city that served us as a watch-tower, we could look out across the arid wastes and see anything there was to be seen: and there was nothing. There was no road, not even a regular path: whenever we journeyed out or in, we obliterated any trace of our passage.

Beyond the hazed limits of the plateau lay that city into which my brother had disappeared.

I said: “We can’t just sit back and——”

“Look!” said my father suddenly, tersely.

We saw it rise from the blurred distance. Against the hot sky it was fiery and savage, leaping up and up, a flare in the heavens.

“Another test rocket,” I wondered aloud, “or the real thing this time?”

“We know they’re getting very excited about something. If only we knew what it was … if only we could find out if they had really succeeded this time.”

“That’s what we sent Don in to find out,” I observed. “And as he hasn’t come back, we’ve got to try again.”

We both continued to stare at the fading arc across the sky.

My father said: “Someone will have to go in. Or at any rate some plan will have to be made. But you won’t be the one.”

“I insist——”

“You don’t insist on anything, son. We’ve lost one of our boys, and your mother isn’t going to have her heart broken by the loss of another.”

“We don’t know that Don’s lost,” I protested. “He may be alive.”

“Quite possibly.” My father’s eyes narrowed in pain. “In fact, I should think he almost certainly is—if you can call yourself alive when you’re possessed by the Motils.”

We turned, as though deciding it was time to call a truce to argument, and made our way back towards our underground home. We did not speak, but I had no doubt that both of us were thinking of the same things. Who ever thought of anything else? In all the nineteen years of my life, when had I ever given time to thoughts of anything but the best way of attacking Motils and eventually freeing the world?

I paid little attention to work that day. My job of attending to the cavern crops which provided our staple food was neglected. In my mind I reached out towards Zopilotec, trying to visualise it and to guess what had happened to Don. I thought with hatred—a hatred that was second nature to all of us—of the scaly travesties of human beings that walked in the streets of the city. Once, my father had told me, it was no more than a small town, a typical lazy Mexican coastal town drowsing on the plain down there; but now it had grown, spreading with the spread of the parasitical invaders from outer space, until it had become one of their most important operational centres. One day we would reclaim those streets and buildings. One day, clean and free from the hideous devouring growth, we would hold up our heads and walk proudly on the face of our own planet instead of skulking in caves and vainly chipping away at the enemy with our little, unrelated acts of sabotage.

One day …

I could not bear to be idle. I could not bear to think of my older brother trapped in that city while the rest of us wagged our heads and said that we mustn’t risk losing anybody else in that way. Whatever my father might say, I was determined to go in after Don.

In the afternoon it occurred to me to enlist the aid of Major Kline.

Sardonic and grim of feature, the Major was one of the mainstays of our community. He had known my father from the earliest days of the invasion, and their mutual respect had grown into a deep and lasting friendship. I had always looked on him as one of our family—I seem to remember calling him “uncle” at one stage of my growth—and I knew as well as anyone that behind his military brusqueness and occasional sarcasm he was a sincere and fine man. His hair had gone white in the time that I had known him, and his tanned face was as seamed with age as the faces of the Mexican peons we still saw occasionally.

I knew there was no point in trying to lead up to things nonchalantly. If you wanted to talk to Major Kline, you said what you had to say. If you tried to wheedle him or spring something on him, he was always several sentences ahead of you.

So this time I said bluntly: “I want you to help me. I want to go in and look for Don.”

“Indeed? What does your father think of this?”

“He’s afraid of what my mother will say.”

“Quite reasonably so.”

“Yes, but——”

“There’s also the fact,” he snapped, “that your father is very fond of you. It hasn’t been easy for him to face up to this blow.”

I felt myself flushing. I said: “But he ought not to hold up investigations for personal reasons.”

“Investigations won’t be held up. Somebody will be chosen to go into the city, when we’ve worked out a plan for their benefit.”

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t be the one. I don’t want to be sheltered just because my father is in an important position in the community.”

Major Kline leaned back against the wall of the cave that was his home and also the hospital, surgery and medical inspection room of our troglodytes’ world. I could not tell whether he was going to say something cutting or merely reproving.

“Your father himself is touchy on points like that,” he said in a level tone. “That’s why Don went on the job in the first place. The rest of us wanted to send somebody else, but Cliff said that he wasn’t going to have any favouritism, and insisted on his older son going. He’s done that, and that settles it. There’s no reason why he should sacrifice another son.”

“It won’t be a sacrifice. I’ll come back all right.”

“That’s what Don thought.”

There was a short silence. I knew that Major Kline was talking sound common sense; but I also knew that it didn’t make the slightest difference to me.

I said: “Instead of waiting about and discussing it, and wasting time, I want to go in there. We’ve got to find out what’s happening. I’m the one to do it.”

The Major grinned faintly. “You sound darned sure about it.”

“You’ve got to help me.”

“Have I?”

“Yes,” I said.

His grin continued to twitch at the corners of his sardonic mouth, and a light of amusement came into his eyes.

“Your old man will be pretty sore with me,” he said.

It was as good as an admission that he was won over.

“You’ll help?” I said eagerly.

“You’re so infernally like Cliff when he was younger: it reminds me of the early days.” He sighed and got up. I watched him as he opened the door of his big cupboard, filled with bottles and equipment that had been laboriously and dangerously acquired over years of guerrilla activity. “I suppose you want me to make you pretty?”

“That’s what I had in mind,” I said. “All pretty and green and purple.”

With the door wide open, he hesitated for another moment.

“What Cliff and Julia are going to say to me …”

“I’ll smooth it all over when I come back.”

He shook his head wryly. But then he reached in and took out the large bottles that he had used a few weeks before when my brother had set out to Zopilotec. I watched him as he laid out the brushes.

“Here we are,” he said. “It takes a couple of hours, as you know. Once it’s finished, you must get moving so that you can get into the city during the night. From all we’ve heard, they’re making a strong check on anyone entering the place from the main roads.”

“If they’re as wary as all that, it shows something big is in the wind. That’s why I’ve got to get in there and do some rooting about.”

He nodded wearily. “All right, all right. I’m convinced. But if you don’t come back——”

“I won’t let you down,” I laughed.

He dragged the heavy door across the entrance to the subterranean room, moved the lamp nearer, and then indicated that I should take my shirt off.

It was a long and irritating procedure from then on. My skin had to be painted over with the solution that it had taken us so long to develop—the solution that turned the skin to that hideous shade of green flecked with purple that characterised the human beings who had been attacked by the Motil parasites. The skin dried and puckered, and it was extremely painful. Considering what limited facilities Kline had, his development of the material had been little short of a work of genius. It had taken years. But he had doggedly plodded on, knowing that if we were to spy on the Motils and attack them and destroy their workshops we must be able to move freely among them.

I gritted my teeth against the itching, ravaging pain. I watched with a nausea that was difficult to keep down as my arm became scaly and reptilian. My heart beat faster. I was going to walk into a city of beings who nearly all looked like this. The greedy parasites that now ruled our planet had taken possession of the bodies of millions of human beings and spread all over them so that they had come to appear like this—alien, evil and revolting.

The brush paused. Kline looked up at me with a speculative twist of his mouth.

“Well?”

“Well?” I said.

“You want to go through with this?”

“Of course I want to go through with it.”

“They’re not a nice crowd,” he said with a sort of mock banality. “I don’t like to think of you acquiring a skin like this that won’t rub off the way this one does.”

“I’ll watch out for it. Once the Controller comes, there’s no hope for us. We’ve got to know.”

He sat back, studying the texture of the puckered flesh.

“Sometimes I wonder if we haven’t lost the fight,” he mused. His voice was as sharp and derisive as usual, as though he were sneering at his own words; but I detected a great weariness behind the facade. “How many of us are there, against how many of them? And what do we do?”

“We hit them wherever we can,” I said hotly, “as often as we can.”

“Yes, yes, I know. But what chance have we of rolling ’em off the planet altogether? Even without their worshipped master, the Controller,. . .