All Hail The Power! (634 hits)
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Submitted by Jack McCallum (View user info) at 2004-11-03 12:30:22 EST
This post was an official UberMadness! entry. Click here to view the original matchup.
The dancing Moey raised his cooker and I thought I was done for, but I brought up my Remington and fired a wild shot. Blood that looked like chocolate syrup oozed out of the Moey's right thigh and he went down on his knees.
I got in close and kicked his weapon out of his hands. Nasty things. Cookers work in two quick phases. First, they stun you for a moment, and then when you're unable to move a finger, they cook you. Not all of you of course. Just a little bit. Your heart. Your lungs. Your brain. Hell, even your balls. It kind of takes the fight out of a man when he smells his gonads cooking like a couple of squabs in the oven.
Out techs are still working on some decent shielding that we can wear like armor (they figure the weapons use microwaves but no one knows much more than that), and they need fully functional cookers to work with. I had one now. I just had to get it away from the Moey.
I watched the big head search this way and that. It was getting twitchy. Starting to panic. That's why it had been dancing. Moeys are claustrophobic, and we were underground in a narrow corridor of raw stone. When their feet start going like they're standing on hot coals you know the threads on their ruck are starting to fray.
The Moey looked up at me with his big white eyes, and I nearly hesitated. Nearly. I've seen Resistors look into those eyes and pause just long enough to lose everything.
Old Man Gareth thinks the Moeys must have evolved fighting species much like ours, and that's why they have the big 'why me?' eyes, helpless eyes, puppy dog eyes, infant eyes. But the eyes are just a false front, like a threatening pattern on the wings of a butterfly. I know for a fact that those eyes are just a membrane, a film over the eye socket, and beneath that membrane are their real eyes, the cold eyes of an insect, compound eyes made up of hundreds of slender tentacles, writhing like a nest of baby snakes.
I reversed my rifle and raised it in a firm two-handed grip. Bullets were scarce. I only had about a dozens shells in my rucksack. I drove the butt down into the Moey's oversized head. No mercy.
We welcomed the Moeys to our world in 2058 when their damaged and disintegrating ship crash-landed on the moon. My granddaddy was six years old then.
In the family lockbox we still have an old Wheaties box that shows some long forgotten kid and a Moey with their arms around each others shoulders. The human kid is smiling. The Moey isn't. It would be decades before we started uncovering the secrets and oddities of Moey biology, one of them being the fact that Moeys are incapable of any facial expression. Maybe that should have told us something, I don't know.
Along with the faded cardboard box is a little cloth patch for the Global Rescue Mission (Wheaties was the official breakfast cereal and one of many sponsors of the American team) that was put together in under a month, launched (three ships from Earth and two from the space stations), reached the moon, and shuttled the surviving Moeys back to terra firma.
We didn't know what to call them. Their own language, made up mostly of nasal sniffs and whistles and pops (you could almost walk around in their roomy sinuses) was beyond us, but after some anthropologist pointed out the similarity in the faces of the big-headed aliens and the big-headed Moai statues on Easter Island, the name Moey stuck.
The butt of the Remington hit the Moey's thick skull and there was a sound like heavy glass splintering or thick ice cracking. The Moey's massive head rocked backward. It made a grab for me and I jumped out of the way.
Those little limbs look kind of scrawny, but they are strong. Real strong. Moey muscle outperforms ours by a country mile. That's how they can get through life with that big old head on a small body. Their bodies are layered in sinewy super-muscles. Sounds crazy, until you see two unarmed Moeys grab a Resistor and literally tear him in half. It ain't pretty.
I raised the rifle again. No mercy.
2060 was the year now known as the Expansion. That was when the old United Nations and many states no longer part of that feeble organization, like the United States and Canada (which will now and forever be known simply as 'Northwest' after the two countries merged and became one strong continental force to be reckoned with), the Euro nations, and Australia and New Zealand, opened their borders to the Moeys and welcomed them.
Of course, at that time we thought there were only a few thousand survivors from the moon crash. We had no idea they were just scouts.
We had no idea that the smaller Moeys were not Moey children but just, well, smaller Moeys, and that they come in all kinds of sizes, the same basic shape, but lots of variation in height and weight. I've seen Moey imps leaping against the walls of a sealed glass jar like trapped grasshoppers, and I've seen twenty men go up against a single Moey Mega and have the fight of their damned lives.
The Moeys went out across the world.
The old tarnished metal of the Remington's butt hit the Moey's skull again. There was a deep cracking sound, and more of that dark syrupy blood appeared. The Moey tried to stand, but he was dazed, and went down on all fours.
I raised the rifle a third time. No mercy.
In 2070 granddaddy was eight years old. I remember my father telling me of the things his father saw at that time, the time of Occupation.That's when Moey ships began falling from the skies and Moey scouts turned on their friends. They took over the world and hardly a goddamned shot was fired. In 2080 the Resettlement programs began. On every continent people were moved out of their homes, away from the cities and resources and roads and rivers and oceans. We were locked up in fenced camps and abandoned mines. Siberia. The African deserts. The outback. Death Valley. The Canadian tundra.
The Moeys kept us in check with cookers. They had hand-held ones of course, and massive versions of the same weapon, mounted on floating platforms that moved faster than anything we had ever known. They could take out whole cities with those.
They made their bases on remote islands and high mountains, places we couldn't reach as quickly. One of their big bases was at Rapa Nui. Easter Island. Among the statues. Maybe they found it funny, who knows. The only bases they set up in pre-existing cities were one here in Paris, and one in Rugby, North Dakota.
We were being starved to death and used as cheap labor. My dad was born in a resettlement camp, as I was. We were tailors and metal smiths and farmers. We were bakers and truckers and plumbers. We were maids and waiters and janitors. We were slaves.
Well, thank God for crazy Charlie Tsosie. One drunk Indian and one loaded pistol and a whole lot of Navajo pride equal the beginnings of resistance. That was in 2095. Charlie had driven a load of produce into Albuquerque, and got slapped around because of some wilted lettuce. After that he got drunk. Got his hands on a gun. Got a Moey in his sights. And shouted.
The official version of what Charlie said, told to little kids by their elders, goes like this: "My grandfathers are smiling on me today!" Bang!
The unofficial version is more likely the real one; "This is one Indian who has been pushed too far and now I'm fucking pushing back!" Bang!
Charlie lived about six minutes after that. His family and close friends were fertilizer by the end of the week.
But the seed had been planted. People started talking, hiding food, collecting weapons. That was the beginning of the resistance.
The Moey's skull collapsed under the butt of my rifle. Its head split open on one side and a lot of fluid that looked like dirty dishwater started spilling out onto the dusty floor of the tunnel we were in.
Moeys didn't seem to have a brain like most living things. Instead they had a skull full of that filthy-looking liquid. I heard tell that the liquid was full of brain cells, all free-floating, and that the Moeys seemed to use their brains just as well as we used ours.
I doubted that. I know a man who took a stray bullet in the eye. The shot took a silver dollar sized chunk out of the back of his skull. He got bandaged up and went right back into the fight. He was half-blind, and had a limp and a stutter, but he was still a good shot, and he played a mean game of screw your neighbor. Never seen a Moey survive a head shot that penetrated their thick skull bones. Not one.
The Moey reached out a hand, scrabbled at the dirt. Maybe he thought he had some place to go. I had to set him to rights.
I raised the rifle one last time. No mercy.
These are the dates we Northwesterners now grow up with. Independence, 1776. Pearl Harbor, 1941. WTC, 2001. Moey Arrival, 2058. Occupation and resettlement, 2070 and 2080. Uprisings... Northern California, 2097 (good-bye San Francisco). 2102 Southern Ontario (goodbye Toronto). United Kingdom, 2104 (goodbye Dublin, Glasgow, Liverpool). The Burning of the East, 2120. The Culling of the Americas, 2133. Eurowar I and our first real strike back against the Moeys (at Rapa Nui), 2139. The Battle of Prague and the sacrifice and decimation of the ANZACS, 2143. Eurowar II, 2145. The Siege of Paris, 2150.
Well, maybe that last one won't go down in history. It's still happening.
We've gathered from across planet Earth to stop the European continent from falling completely, and Paris is one of the last holdouts, along with Rome and a few other cities.
Older cities. Cities where we can hide underground, the one place the Moey's don't want to go.
As a kid I always felt safe growing up in Dain City, an old rock salt mine in Kansas made into an internment camp.
I like the solidity of rock, the protection it gives us, and the constant reminder that we are fighting for our right to keep on walking this old world. And it is our world. It gave birth to us. The Moeys are the outsiders, the aggressors, the ones in the wrong.
We have to remember that, and never weaken, never quail, never give up the fight.
There are Americans and Canadians and Frenchmen here in Paris. Irishmen. Englishmen. Ten completely mad Scots. There are Chinese and Japanese and Koreans. There are Aussies and Kiwis, and they are out for blood, believe me. There are Israelis and Germans and Iraqis and Egyptians and Moroccans and on and on. There are just under two thousand of us, hiding in the sewers and forgotten places of this ancient city.
The last I heard, there are about forty thousand Moeys either here, or on their way.
I looked around, at the walls of bones. Femurs and skulls set in massive stacks. We were in the catacombs of Paris, my Moey friend and I, surrounded by the human dead taken from putrid cemeteries hundreds of years ago and re-interred here, a forgotten tourist attraction.
Some of these bones ended up down here because of a long-ago revolution. There's another revolution underway now, and there could be worse things than ending up down here among these silent bones one day. I'd be in good company.
I brought the rifle down one last time. The skull shattered like a broken clay jug and liquid brains washed across the floor.
On worlds all along this arm of the galaxy, all hail the power of the invading Moeys. Artifacts stolen from Moeys and studied by folks a lot smarter than me seem to indicate the Moeys have been in this business a long time, and most of the worlds they have absorbed have been more primitive than ours, so no super-advanced aliens with big heads are gonna come to our rescue like in one of those old science-fiction stories.
This war has gone on a long time. My grandfather fought it. My father fought it. And now I'm fighting it. But I can only kill one Moey at a time, so I had best get on with it.
Wish me luck.
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