Earth Fathers are Weird, Chapter 1 (Patreon)

Max woke on his back, his body aching, and the sound of that last explosion still echoing in his head. He definitely wasn’t in Kansas anymore—or even Iowa, which is where he had been flying over. No, this was new territory. He stared up at what might be alien pipes or intestines or electrical conduits or prison bars. He really had no way to judge because nothing looked like it might in a human ship. After feeling his ribs and determining that nothing was broken, he sat up.

The room was narrow—narrow enough that it might just be a section of corridor with doors at either end. Unlike the ceiling, the walls were smooth and looked like oiled gunmetal. Other than a deep ache, Max felt fine, even when he stood. He appreciated the lack of death since the last thing he remembered was an alien ship taking out the tail of his fighter. The resulting spin had created such g-forces that he hadn’t been able to eject or remain conscious.

So waking up at all was a surprise, but not necessarily a good one. Max had been prepared to die to defend his country and his planet, but he hadn’t signed up to be an alien lab rat.

“Hello?” he called. The walls deadened the sound. “I feel a need to make a Grabthar’s hammer joke,” Max said softly as touched the wall. Smooth, warm metal. 

Since the Air Force had failed to prepare him for alien abduction, he decided to treat this like any capture situation. So, he needed to check resources and assess his situation. Unsurprisingly, someone had stripped his weapons. He was left with his flight suit, a belt, and a couple of shoestrings in his boots. Unless he found a way to channel McGuyver, that wasn’t going to help. The room was serpentine with open arches on either end. Small spheres rolled along the wall from right to left every couple of sections, but nothing else moved.

“Hello?” he called again.

If Max was a prisoner, this was the world’s worst prison, so they couldn’t blame him for wandering. Bracing himself for whatever horrors he might find, he choose a direction and headed into the ship. Maybe they weren’t worried about him escaping, which made sense because he wouldn’t recognize an alien escape hatch if it had a flashing neon light above it.

And he knew that for certain because one of the doors had alien writing, and Max couldn’t even identify individual letters, assuming aliens used letters. All the doors he passed were arches—most taller than Max would expect on a ship, which made him wonder if aliens were eight feet tall. However, there were a number of shorter doors, and then tiny hatches near the floor where the spheres ran from room to room. The sphere hatches were open, but most of the others were all closed, and Max couldn’t find a latch.

When a door opened, Max flattened himself against the irregular wall, and a sphere hit his foot, rattled angrily, and then detoured around him. By the time Max looked back up, an alien stood in front of him. 

It was short—four and a half to five feet—and something appeared feminine, although that might have been the deeply colored mouth. It made her look like she had dark purple lips, but then her wide face was ringed with the same color with stripes of purple pointed at her broad nose. Her nostrils were actual set wider than the corners of her lips. But at least she was humanish. Max had feared he might run into tentacles or meat-eating blobs that considered him meat.

Max cleared his throat. “Hello.”

She answered with a wail that sounded like an opera singer imitating fingernails down a chalkboard. Max cringed as shivers ran up his spine. Fear might have also contributed to that feeling. After all, these were the assholes invading Earth.

“Ahh. Okay, I didn’t understand that, assuming you were trying to say something to me.”

She wailed again, and the sound was so bad it actually made Max’s mouth water, and he had no idea what the hell would cause that. Apparently frustrated with his inability to communicate, she turned and strode down the hallway on three legs. Max blinked, but that didn’t change the number.

She had one big leg in the center that had an undulating tentacle foot thing with two ballet pointed feet on either side, and those three legs could really move. Since he had no idea what he was doing in the alien ship, Max ran after her.

“That’s my planet down there. What are you people doing?” 

She didn’t respond, but she also didn’t stop him when he followed her through another door into a corridor with deep bronzy-red walls. Max stopped only when he realized that every six or seven feet, a tiny alcove created enough space for one… individual. Many of them were humanoid, but far too many had tentacles or lacked heads. Or both. 

“Oh shit.”

The short female stopped near an alcove, and wailed. A second later, another humanoid appeared. This one was taller and more bulky. The alien’s upper lip was huge compared to the lower one, making it look like the victim of a bee sting attack, but lavender and aqua coloring still gave an odd beauty.

“Communicate,” the alien said. The voice was tinny and high, but recognizable.

If this guy wanted to talk, Max could oblige. “Where am I?”

The alien turned his head to the side and Max could see a half dozen nostrils all going up the bridge of something vaguely noselike. He wailed at the smaller alien who wailed back.

When neither spoke English again, Max said, “I want to go back to my people.”

That earned another set of wails and a third alien came out of its cubicle. This one looked like a helmet with hundreds of tentacles coming out of the bottom. The three of them spoke, and Max was quickly developing a serious headache from the screeching.

“Are you listening to me?” Max asked. None of these creatures seemed interested in hurting Max, so he was going to push as hard as he could to make himself understood. He had a life. Not a great one, but still.

“Listening. Hard not be to listening. You communicate many words.” The lavender and aqua alien said.

That was a start. “I am Captain Maxwell Davis, United States Air Force. Your ship came into our territory, and you had no right to take me.”

The lavender one wailed and the short female responded. Maybe the lavender and aqua lip man was the boss because he listened for a time before turning his attention to Max.

“Your ship damaged. You dead.”

“I seriously hope you’re saying that I would have been dead if you hadn’t brought me here because if you’re telling me that I died and this is the afterlife, I want to complain to my parish priest.”

“Computer translation matrix failure,” the boss said.

Max gritted his teeth for a second before using the simplest English he could. “I am not dead. I am alive. I want to go home.”

The boss turned and walked away.

“Hey!” Max followed him, weaving to the side when short alien tried to grab his arm. “I want to go home. Put me back on my planet.”

The lavender lip alien stopped at another alcove. A tentacle alien sat at a computer display of some sort. Code flowed from top to bottom, many in different colors. A set of codes in blue flashed and then the display went dark. Max wondered if that was a dead fighter. One huge ship had pierced Earth’s atmosphere, triggering massive storms that started over the ocean and then swallowed the West Coast. It was like a hurricane and a Biblical plague had a baby. But dozens or hundreds of small fighters had followed, screaming after the mother ship until the whole mess had ended up over middle America. So maybe the good guys had taken out one of the alien ships.

The two aliens shrieked at each other, this time sounding a little more like cats in heat and less like screaming babies.

“Who are you people?” Max demanded.

The alien boss turned. “Enforcement of laws,” he said. He wailed, and the helmet with tentacles slid closer to Max.

“Come. Communicate,” it said.

“I want to go home.” That was the only message Max planned to communicate.

The lavender alien shrieked, and the helmet wrapped a tentacle around Max’s leg. Horror made Max jerk back, but the tentacle was stronger than it looked. Max didn’t pull free. He lost his balance. Windmilling his arms, he tried to recover, but he ended up grabbing lavender alien. That was a mistake. The boss alien shoved Max, and he fell to the ground hard enough to lose his breath. Luckily the floor was the consistency of a wrestling mat, so he didn’t injure anything beyond his dignity.

Lavender alien walked away without a look back, but helmet dude hovered near Max and chittered.

“Come. Communicate.”

“You’re annoying,” Max said as he stared at the ceiling. Of all the shitty parts of military service that his recruiter had managed to gloss over, alien abduction topped the list. 

Tentacles tugged at him gently, and Max sat up. The corridor was narrow, and an alien had to press up against the wall to get past helmet-head and Max. 

“Come,” it said again.

Max climbed to his feet and spoke slowly. “I want to go home.”

Tentacles waved. “Come. Communicate.”

Sighing in defeat, Max allowed his short escort to pull him down the winding corridor into a central passage. The ship reminded Max more of a submarine than any aircraft carrier he’d been on. The corridors were narrow with heavy doors separating sections of the ship. If they were in space, that probably made sense.

“Look, Spaceballs, I need to get home. Home. Can you put me back on planet Earth?” he asked. An arched doorway opened in front of helmet dude, and he ushered Max into yet another tight space. The alien sat in the middle of a half-circle table which promptly lit up. Various languages showed on each screen. Max recognized the Spanish although he couldn’t read it, but he pointed at the English.

“That’s how I communicate.” He tapped the English display, but considering that the aliens were using English, they should have already known that. Suddenly dozens or hundreds of voices filled the small room. It took a second for Max to realize the alien had turned on television broadcasts. Most were news programs reporting on the repelled invasion.

Repelled.

Max’s legs turned watery as he realized his planet was safe. They had repelled the alien invaders. Only Max knew that wasn’t true. He’d been in the air, and nothing Earth owned would touch the alien fighters. Those bastards had been fast. Deadly fast. One took off the tail of Max’s plane without even slowing down. But in the end, Max didn’t care as long as the planet was safe.

“Name, question,” the alien said.

“Are you asking my name? Captain Maxwell Davis. Who are you?”

“Captain Maxwell Davis, welcome. I am….” and the alien finished with another set of wails. 

“I may just call you Spaceballs,” Max said. The alien had the ridiculously oversized helmet, after all. “I want to go home.”

“Define home.” The words on the display vanished and dozens of pictures appeared, each of a different sort of house. Max sighed. This was not going well.

“I want to go home to my planet.”

“Define planet.” This time hundreds of images replaced the houses, each of a planet.

“These are all planets. I want my planet. Earth. My home.” None of the images appeared to be Earth, not that Max could be sure. The beautiful blue-green images he’d seen of the planet were decades old and didn’t show pollution or the massive storm the damn aliens had unleashed on the West Coast. 

A dozen tentacles moved over the controls and a star chart of some sort appeared. Max didn’t recognize one inch of it. It was all random star clusters to him, but Spaceballs waved his tentacles over the image. “Which planet do you claim ownership, question.”

“I don’t claim ownership. It’s the planet where I was born.”

“On which planet born were, question.”

Max barely avoided pounding his head on the table. Instead he braced both hands on it and let his head hang as he fought for control over his temper. Trying to strangle a tentacle alien was both impractical and counter-productive.

“I was born on the planet you were just fighting over.”

More tentacles waved. “We fight over planets. Planet, question.” This time the display showed the familiar rings of Saturn and a stormy-looking Earth.

Max rested his finger on his home planet. “This is home. This is my planet. Take me home.”

Spaceballs did more of his tentacle waving and text replaced the other planets from Earth’s solar system. After a pause, the alien said, “Not scheduled to return to that planet.”

“What?” Cold fury bubbled up in Max’s chest. He was the most laid back guy in the world. Hell, his call sign was Pinto after the guy who had been the voice of Sleepy in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. He was the epitome of go-with-the-flow. However, his very long fuse was about to detonate one hell of a reservoir of anger.

“No scheduled return.” 

“I heard you,” Max shouted. Spaceballs tentacles waved madly, and Max forced himself to take a slow breath. He had no idea if waving tentacles meant fear or aggression, but since Max was outgunned and unarmed, it was in his best interest to not annoy the aliens. “You kidnapped me. You have to take me home.”  

“The planet of yours is no trading area.”

“You came to Earth and grabbed me. Go to Earth and put me back.” That seemed perfectly logical to Max.

“We pursued the Nish. They sought atmosphere to hide. No trade on plant of yours. Unpopulated and uncharted areas lack land or trade facilities.”

Max closed his eyes and wished he hadn’t understood that because it made too damn much sense. The fighters had been after the big ship, and Earth was just the damn canyon this Nish ship had tried dodging into to avoid the pursuing fighters. God damn them all. 

“Earth is not unpopulated. I need you to put me back on Earth.” Max tried to keep his voice even because if he started yelling he wasn’t going to stop.

“Unprofitable. No money in transport to planet of yours.”

“Profit? You want profit? Just head back to Earth and I’ll hit up an ATM.”

Spaceballs spun ninety degrees and considered Max out of a different set of eyes. “Translator matrix fail.”

Max rubbed a hand over his face and mentally chanted ‘Don’t kill annoying aliens’ a few times before he said, “Take me back and I will pay you.”

“What form would payment take?”

“Money. Dollars. Currency.” Max had no idea how much it took to run a spaceship, but he already suspected that these guys wouldn’t go out of their way for the amount Max had. He might have gone into the military to make money and create a stable financial future, but he actually sucked at leaving money in a savings account.

“Planet of yours not in currency treaty. Trade rejected.”

Max’s temper snapped. “You took me. You can’t just grab my ass out of my plane and fucking kidnap me. I have a life. I have a fucking career. I have a baby brother and a pain in the ass ex-boyfriend and a fucking life. Do you get that, question? Take me back where you fucking found me you slimy piece of sushi!” Max ended up screaming so that spittle landed on the display. The last image Max had was the way a drop of spit on the image of Earth created a tiny rainbow inside the drop, and then the world sort of turned gray around the edges and he sank down to the floor. 

“Apologies. Sorries,” Spaceballs was saying as Max fell unconscious.