Alien or Alian

The two-story house had a scarce amount of places to hide, but the spots that could be used as hiding points were adequate enough to do the job.

Nina, Ozias, Ingrid, and the slimmer of the two uncles were stationed in the kitchen, which only had one entrance from the living room. Along with them was another spacesuit, disassembled into three main substantial chunks and draped on and around an exorbitant-looking table in the middle of the room. It was a protective measure to keep Sid warm after separation from the blob and until they returned to the lab’s chamber. The one in the house was going to need to be heavily decontaminated as soon as Sid left it, all the way down to its metal and wired bones.

Meanwhile, Ethen, Lyza, Dimitri, Kaine, and the other bulkier uncle were posted by the topmost wall of the living room, stealthily pressed against it while waiting for their cue. On the other side of the wall was the unlocked front door that Ezra was going to burst through any moment.

In the kitchen, a silver glossed wall clock ticked endlessly, almost mimicking Ozias’ jittery heart. Ozias gave a thorough glance at the other three around him, and no one else seemed bothered by the strident sounds. He shut his eyes and tried focusing on the silence that entrenched the house instead, though it wasn’t exactly a soothing thing to listen to either. The silence only reminded him of the inevitable uproar making haste towards the house.

In a last ditch effort to try and find peace, Ozias imagined Ezra telling him something offbeat but hopeful: ‘Don’t fret, smarty-pants. Even when it’s dark, there will always be light!’ And for a moment, it was working. His shoulders drooped, his body unwound, his heart decelerated, and the corner of his lip quirked optimistically. At long last, he was unequivocally certain that he was ready to face the impending storm. That was, until the storm actually hit.

“GET READY! It’s right behind me,” Ezra said, not too loud that it would wake someone next door, but loud enough for everyone inside the house to hear. He’d swung the front door open and charged down to the end of the hall till he reached the wide open basement door.

Waiting for him next to it was a detached, alabaster white spacesuit mounted on a tall bimetallic stand. Not a second was squandered as he raced to get the lower torso pulled on, then quickly but steadily squatted midway beneath the hard upper torso and shot through the top, swiftly stretching his arms through the sleeves and his head emerging at through the neckline. Half a second later, Ethen manifested before him and buttoned the two pieces together at the thin metallic waistline. Next came the gloves, and Ethen attached them one after the other as well with efficient speed. Last was the helmet. Ethen swiped it from the top of the stand and handed it to Ezra, who donned it with prompt precision.

More or less the spacesuit weighed about 280 pounds, but without the extra garments and layers, oxygen and water tanks, and the life support system, the suit was lighter by a little more than half of that, making movement much more nimble inside of it.

Ethen bounded back into the living room behind the wall, and he barely made it in time right as a disturbed and slow-moving shape became visible in the doorway. A bewitched Sid locked eyes with Ezra all the way across the hall for an adrenaline-surging second, but Ezra was defiant in holding it any longer and broke away to hurtle downstairs. As he lumbered down the steps, he raised the wrist mirror on his glove sleeve so he could see the control module fixed to his chest, and switched on the heater and insulator functions.

Sid doddered inside and down the hall, laggard but predatory. Nearly a minute went by before he finally reached the basement entrance and started his descent. The group positioned in the living room waited a minute and a half until it was deemed safe enough to follow. Ethen led the covert onrush through the hall, continuing downstairs. Nina watched as they did while spying from the kitchen, and motioned to the other three with her to hold back for one more minute.

“Alright, let’s go,” Nina finally said when the time passed. “Ingrid, help me with the upper torso. Mikkel, take the lower half. And Ozias, bring along the helmet.” Her instructions came fast and clear but the three were already moving as she stated them.

Ozias was the first to grab his assigned piece of the suit, but he was the last to follow out of the kitchen as he hesitated for the barest second. The climax of their risky plan was just around the corner and slowly but surely boiling to its highest point downstairs. Part of him feared what he might see — something irreparable to his mind, something irremediable to his heart. Even if either of those was the case, he still crossed a set of fingers on each hand while he clutched the helmet to his chest, and hoped for the best by the end of it all. He grappled to keep his eyes wide open and alert as Nina led them down the steps.

Ezra backpedaled until his back met the chamber wall, and when Sid stalked one step after the other inside, Ezra kept himself close to the wall and started sidling towards the right corner. The intensity of the insulators and heaters were set on low, but for one inconceivable moment Ezra thought it felt humid within the suit as sweat trickled down his face. By reflex, he reached up to try and wipe away the fluid, but then remembered he had on a helmet.

“Relax already…” he muttered to himself.

Behind Sid, Ezra caught a glimpse of five bodies scuttling past the chamber entrance and taking cover behind its giant door. From there, Ethen made strained eye contact with his brother and gave a single nod once the group was in position.

Ezra looked back just in time to see that Sid had at last made it to the center of the chamber. “Now! Close it now!” he yelled. Sid didn’t immediately regard the tip-off until the moans of a heavy door being impelled became apparent. “Hey! Over here you slimy piece of crud!” Ezra yelled again when Sid started to turn to the source of the noise.

On the other side of the door, arms and shoulders pressed as hard as they could against it, the door groaning alongside their effort. Halfway there. At the stairs, four sets of feet snuck down to the last step but kept their distance from the unfolding scene and stayed back near the last few stacks of boxes.

SLAM.

Arms and shoulders lifted from the colossal slab of metal as it shut.

“Off we go,” Kaine said to Dimitri, and they started away for a miniature control room enclosed in the corner across from the chamber.

Ethen went tense when he peeked through the chamber window. Ezra was out of inches and space to retract against, and Sid was closing in on him in the corner.

“Hurry!” Ethen shouted for Kaine and Dimitri to hear, but kept his eyes trained on the escalating situation inside.

In the control room, Kaine’s hands worked in overdrive across a massive keyboard with color coated extensions, while Dimitri moved like the wind handling levers and toggles that dangled from an overhead switchboard.

Two minutes felt like a millenia, but at last the great white machine whirred to life. The lack of tubes attached to its internal ventilators meant its activation was going to be turbulent. Everyone watched with rigid silence as the chamber belt out mechanical cries and vibrated hysterically. Inside, Sid had snatched a hold of Ezra’s wrist and was viciously trying to yank him forward. Ezra was mostly managing to keep his body planted, but his own robustness was coming close to losing the battle against the possessed predator.

The dozens of empty sockets on either side of the chamber gradually came alight, illuminating like an open flame. Heat began to flood inside, and for Sid, it was comparable to the sun itself slowly plunging to Earth. His grip on Ezra went slack, half a second later he immediately withdrew himself and bumbled backwards, but he managed to stay standing.

He staggered around frantically looking from both heated sides to the now closed-off entryway, then broke out into a determined hobble to get to the door regardless, but didn’t even make it halfway before crumbling to the floor. The convulsions came like a violent earthquake and it beastial grunts had converted to garbled gibberish. Ezra steadily peeled himself from the corner as pink-to-red blotches began materializing all over Sid’s skin, but retreated to it a minute later when the convulsions slowed down.

Stygian goo seeped through every hole on Sid’s face, and much faster than it had when it deserted Mr. Halton. Ezra’s immediate contact with the corner prevented him from moving back any further, but still he desperately tried as an even pool of dark slime convened on the floor just steps away from him and on the outskirts of Sid’s body.

The speed the blob moved at once it had itself all collected, was blinding. Ezra didn’t even have time to blink when it slithered towards his feet, but he didn’t miss the harsh way it recoiled back after failing to infiltrate his warming suit. Barely a second passed as it tried hurtling back to Sid, but that only elicited the same severe jerk away from his body. It hadn’t been long, but the minimal amount of exposed heat was still enough to make Sid’s skin feel like a lava to the blob.

With no other cold bodies around to snatch, the blob was left stranded in the high temperature. In an instant, it was no longer flat as it raised itself to Ezra’s height, transforming into a bumpy three-dimensional figure. Its form stretched and bubbled and quivered, as if it couldn’t handle being in its own ectoplasmic skin.

Ezra’s stomach bottomed out and was on the brink of imploding when a strangled yet shrill mumble reverberated from the blob. The space around him felt weightless and isolated; he was suddenly reminded of his first encounter with the entity back in Jupiter’s ether.

Its mumbling got louder — deafening, its quaking shape more tempestuous — until finally it disintegrated, its oozing form caving in on itself — some of it splattering against the floor, the rest of it evaporating into a coal-black haze. For a moment Ezra didn’t move from the corner, but instead observed the mess of gunk on the floor, half expecting the blob to regenerate somehow.

When nothing happened, he let his body relax and called out through the clamor of the chamber, “it’s over...It’s-it’s over! Hey, you guys, it’s over!”

Across the room through the window, he saw Ethen peering through for a moment before looking away to motion to the others outside. Ethen disappeared from the window so Ezra tore himself out of the corner and moved cautiously past the scattered beads of black goo. Almost all at once, the machine went quiet and still and the sockets dimmed down. The door groaned again being heaved open and the temperature was getting cooler.

“You good?” Ethen asked his brother as soon as the door was open enough. He didn’t wait for Ezra’s answer and pulled him in by the nape of neck, wrapping his other arm over his shoulder to his back. The embrace was awkward due to the inflated inconvenience of the spacesuit, but Ezra still returned as best as he could by throwing his own arms around Ethen.

“I’m good,” Ezra said belatedly. “It worked...it seriously worked.”

Behind them, Mikkel slipped inside next with Ingrid and Nina following close. Mikkel continued to Sid’s side with the lower torso in his clutches, but Ingrid had to stop when Nina did near Ezra. She sent him a look loaded with disconcertment.

Reinforced with a whittled smile, he responded with, “I’m fine, mom, really.”

Nina accepted it for now and gestured for Ingrid to keep moving. The second of the two uncles, Lyza, and Dimitri rushed in right after, but only Dimitri slowed long enough to spare Ezra a comforting pat on the back, which Ezra acknowledged with another trimmed smile. As Ethen pulled back from Ezra and made way to Sid’s aid, Kaine entered, pointing a skeptical eye at the mess of slime on the floor.

“Is it really deceased? Truly?” he asked no one in particular.

After some time away from being so close to the blob, Ezra put on a more heroic bravado. “Does it look alive and kicking to you?”

Kaine stared a little longer at the befouled ground before offering an assenting nod and shrug, again, to no one in particular. Ozias padded in behind him, the helmet still clasped against his chest. He moved around Kaine and met Ezra’s eyes, and Ezra straight away did the same as he removed his own helmet, but neither said a word or made a sound as they did.

Kaine, who was only a step away from standing directly in between them, gave each of them a brief and dubious look and said, “I’ll leave you two, to be…” He made sure to leave a loud enough emphasis for the two to hear as he trailed off, then continued towards the small troupe forming around Sid’s body.

The reticence cracked at last as Ezra asked, “you okay?”

“Are you okay?” Ozias insisted back.

Neither explicitly answered each other, but instead edged into each other’s grasp where they could tie their arms around one another without delay. Ozias had swiftly relocated his grip on the helmet to the rim so he could better hold it as he hugged Ezra. Despite the slight disharmony with Ezra still wearing the spacesuit, Ozias thought they could stay interwoven for ages, and notably so far, Ezra showed no signs of disagreeing with that pipe dream.

“Shit! No… Come on!”

Ethen’s dire pleas tugged Ozias and Ezra from their bubble, and pulled their attention to the scene on the floor: Sid’s body still laid stiff and unconscious, Ethen’s hands pressing up down on his chest trying to resuscitate him. Kaine had brought out a mini flashlight to assess Sid’s pupillary response to light. Nina had two fingers on Sid’s neck just below his jaw, searching for a sign of a pulse. Dimitri and Lyza were on either side of their cousin, doing the same with his wrists, while the uncles had gotten Sid’s shoes off to check the pulses at the tops of his feet.

“Come on!” Ethen repeated as he rotated between chest compressions and rescue breaths. But Sid didn’t twitch or moan or move an inch, and by now even Ozias was fearing the unthinkable.

“Ethen…darling...” Nina reached out for Ethen’s arm, trying to stop his strenuous momentum, but Ethen shrugged it off without a glance.

Kaine warily looked between the two, then at Sid’s still unconscious figure, then back at his cousin. “Ethen...it’s too late. Sid is-”

“Shut up!” Ethen growled.

A heartbeat, a pulse — Sid’s life — Ethen was only beginning to realize that it was no longer within reach. He couldn’t bring himself to stop though, and meeting anyone’s eyes was only going to brutally spotlight the horrible new reality.

Lyza was crouching next to him. She held onto Sid’s hand with a loose grip and looked to Ethen with tears staining her cheeks. “Ethen…” She couldn’t finish as a choked out sob escaped her, but hearing her cry was more than enough to break through to Ethen.

His hands slowed as he finally turned his head to look at someone. Only one of Sid’s eyes was open (the one Kaine had checked) and it was focused on the humdrum ceiling. Ethen felt a bloated pang in his chest that that might’ve been the last thing Sid saw.

A hand emerged behind him to clasp the scruff of Ethen’s neck, and Ethen didn’t have to look back to know it was his brother. Ezra didn’t say anything, but he gave a sparing squeeze at the base of Ethen’s neck, and that was the last push Ethen needed to finally extract his hands and admit the grisly truth draped lifelessly before him.

“...he’s dead.”