DECIMATED (The Nameless Invasion Book 1) Read online

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  1

  Fucking aliens.

  Have you ever had one of those days where just about everything seems to go wrong?

  I always suspected the world would end in my lifetime, and I even thought aliens were one possible cause of that cataclysm.

  I just didn’t expect to be stuck in prison when it happened, with thirty-eight new holes in my body.

  At some point—while I was unconscious due to loss of blood—three alien ships had appeared in the sky above New York City, hovering there like disconnected skyscrapers, stretching into the clouds.

  No one could see what or who was inside them, nor how they managed to keep themselves aloft.

  They made no attempts to communicate with us—or none that we were aware of.

  Just floated there, regal and imposing, a display of monumental power we couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

  Before the human race collectively had a chance to ponder this unexpected occurrence, to debate how it was possible or why the ships were here, our attention was drawn back earthward, as the first alien attacks began.

  Out of surgery, and indifferently informed I would live, I’d been in a prison infirmary for two days now, after being shanked by four men who had attacked my cellmate, Gabriel.

  “Be the sword and shield,” he’d gasped, blood on his lips, as I’d held him in my arms.

  My side, back, and thigh had been on fire from where I’d been stabbed, but Gabriel’s wounds had been much worse.

  “Hold on buddy,” I told him, not knowing what he meant, thinking he was losing it. “It’s gonna be okay.”

  But I didn’t think it was. He’d lost so much blood.

  It pooled all around us, and though some of it was mine, most was his.

  By the time the guards got here, it would already be too late. And there was no one else to help him, as we were all alone in the woodworking shop we’d been cleaning.

  Except for the corpses on the floor.

  Corpses of the ones who’d ambushed Gabriel. The ones who I’d killed trying to save him.

  But not before they’d gotten me.

  There were four of them, and they’d each grabbed a shank that had been hidden in the woodworking shop—ironically, they were made of plastic. I was a good fighter, but there was only so much one man could defend against.

  I should have noticed something was up, should have noticed the tension, the fact that the guard who had been watching us had left at some point.

  But I had been focused on scrubbing away a pair of tits someone had lovingly drawn in wood-stain on the concrete floor, and so I hadn’t noticed.

  I could make excuses—about how no one knew who I was here, so why should I be a target, or how the four men had been talking and laughing with us not long before their attack—but what it came down to, was that I had been careless.

  And now Gabriel had paid for my carelessness.

  “Here,” Gabriel told me, pulling a stone—prismatic and slightly larger than a marble, the stone I’d seen him pray with every night since I’d been assigned as his cellmate when I first arrived almost two years ago—from his pocket, and placing it in my hand. “Take this.” His breathing was shallow and sharp. “Be the sword and shield,” he repeated. “The defender and de…” His words trailed off, then he closed his eyes.

  “Stay with me Gabriel. Come on.” I shook him, but his eyes did not reopen.

  Wrapping two fingers around the stone so I didn’t drop it, I reached up and felt for his pulse.

  There was none.

  For some reason, a snippet of the prayer he said every night came to me: ‘For I am Salvation and Wrath.’

  That’s when I heard the guards coming.

  Finally. After it was too late.

  I only had a second to look at the stone Gabriel had given me, and then, knowing what was coming next, that there was only one camera to cover the whole room, and who knew what our ‘fight’ had looked like to the guards who were rushing toward me, knowing what they’d assume, what they’d do to me, I made sure the cameras couldn’t see me, and swallowed the stone.

  I didn’t know why, but it seemed important that I didn’t lose it.

  Gabriel may have been crazy, may have thought every day was another chance for the apocalypse, but he was my friend.

  The only actual friend I had in here.

  And I knew how much he cared for that stone. He’d wanted me to have it for some reason, so I wasn’t going to lose it.

  2

  I was already on my knees, hands on my head, when the guards arrived, but it hadn’t mattered.

  One of them had kicked me in the chest, knocking me to the floor, then stomped on my neck to pin me down.

  I think the only thing that stopped them from beating me with their nightsticks was seeing how much I had been bleeding.

  Beating an inmate was one thing, having him die on your watch was another. Especially when there was a camera watching.

  I had been taken to the infirmary, stitched up, given minimal painkillers, then left alone.

  On day one, I had been too out of it to notice anything odd about this, but by day two, I realized the doctor had stopped coming to check on me, and that I hadn’t seen any guards in hours.

  And so now here I was, on the evening of the second day, watching aliens invade our world from a prison infirmary.

  There was a TV in here, a luxury that I normally didn’t have, and so I saw those initial reports, saw that shaky footage.

  Heard those screams.

  Saw in pixelated—for those squeamish viewers—HD those huge, grotesque monsters, tearing people apart.

  By the third day, it was clear things out there, in the free world, were not going well.

  But nor were they going too well inside. I had been paranoid about passing the stone I’d swallowed, lest one of the three remaining male nurses who were watching over me and the four other inmates in the infirmary think it was drugs and report it, getting my sentence extended.

  But that hadn’t happened. And I could swear I felt the stone in my chest now.

  I knew that was impossible, you couldn’t swallow something into your chest. But that’s what it felt like.

  By the fourth day, the four other inmates had been released back into gen pop, and there was no one in the infirmary but me, and a new nurse.

  She was young and pretty, and the first female I’d seen in my entire time here.

  I’d never seen any female guards or administrators, or any other females whatsoever, except for brief glimpses when I would pass by the visitation area.

  An area I had never been in.

  The new nurse seemed distracted—which was understandable given the fact that we were being invaded by aliens—hardly paying me any notice, and I probably could’ve escaped, if it weren’t for the grievous wounds I had.

  Of course, even if I escaped from the infirmary, I’d still be in a prison, and there were guards with rifles outside, watching over the yard from their towers, ready to shoot down anyone who tried to escape.

  Which was rather barbaric if you thought about it.

  Making things even easier, at some point I had been un-handcuffed from the bed, and never re-handcuffed.

  But I could barely stand on my own, and even lying still, the wounds hurt.

  That’s what happened when you got shanked over thirty times.

  About the only thing the nurse had said to me so far, and this wasn’t even really directed at me, was to express surprise at how quickly I was healing.

  But I still had a long way to go yet.

  So, I laid in bed, watching the TV, which was tuned to the news 24/7.


  I would have preferred something less grim, like Dexter reruns, but it wasn’t up to me.

  Occasionally, the nurse would change the channel, but always to another news station.

  The reports each station gave, and even later reports from the same stations, conflicted with each other.

  Some said there were terrorists in mechanical suits, terrorizing cities and towns.

  Others said there were demons, come down to pass judgment.

  That would fit with Gabriel’s predictions. Well, except he was convinced it would have been the other side that would be the one to do the final tally.

  But I didn’t put much stock in either of these kind of reports, as there was no footage of them.

  What there was footage of, however, were the animals.

  Large, horrid beasts, that only vaguely resembled actual animals.

  Things that looked like lions, but which walked on two legs.

  Things with faces that were just a little bit too human—ironic given their alien origin—with eyes that tracked you with a maliciousness real animals just didn’t have.

  Giant snake-like creatures, monstrous buzzards, horrific things that bordered on werewolves.

  There was even footage from a beach of a shark swimming up onto land and attacking people.

  It would’ve been comical, if it weren’t so terrifying, watching that shark waddle around on its tail-fin as it chased after people, caught them, bit into them, eating only a few chunks, before moving on to the next victim, like some mindless zombie.

  I was just glad—for the first time ever—I was locked away safely in prison, in the middle-of-nowhere Ohio, behind forty-foot concrete walls topped with razor wire.

  The nurse must have felt the same, because she didn’t go home at the end of the day, when her shift should have ended and another nurse should have taken over.

  Either that, or she was working some killer overtime.

  I fell into a restless sleep, and when I woke up on the morning of the fifth day, I saw her passed out on one of the other beds, farthest away from me.

  I lay there, staring at the muted TV.

  The ships hadn’t moved, but the terror had. What had started in New York had now reached California, and had also crossed the Atlantic to Europe.

  I thought again of the shark.

  No one knew what was going on in remote, less-developed places like North Africa, or whole sections of the Middle East.

  I drifted back to sleep again, and dreamt of flying sharks.

  When I woke up, it was evening, and the pretty nurse was back at her station.

  “Hey,” I called to her, a news reporter on TV talking about government responses the only other sound in the room.

  She looked at me and blinked, as though seeing me for the first time.

  I realized it was the first time I’d said anything since the attack.

  Silence was a virtue. I’d learned that.

  “Something wrong?” she asked disinterestedly. I got the feeling she didn’t like me much. Not surprising, given where and what I was

  “That’s what I was gonna ask you.” I lifted my chin at the TV. “You’ve been out there, any idea what’s going on?”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t been out there since yesterday.” She frowned and tilted her head. “Or was it the day before?” She stared blankly into space.

  “What’d you see?” I asked, snapping her out of it.

  “It was nothing like that.” She pointed at the TV, which was showing pixelated footage of an attack by several large bird-like creatures on a crowd of people in a stadium. The footage was too blurry, shaky, and pixelated for me to tell which stadium.

  Why even bother showing it if you were going to have to pixelate so much of it?

  “Just people mobbing the supermarkets,” the nurse continued. “Buying water and cleaning out the shelves of food. Canned goods and stuff like that. But I never saw anyone get torn apart like…” She trailed off, looking back to the TV, her face a grimace.

  A few hours later, the nurse left me alone, mumbling something about a shower—which made me wonder where the hell she was gonna take a shower in a prison full of men.

  Not five minutes after this, I heard the door open, and even before I looked, I knew.

  Knew it wasn’t going to be the nurse. Knew it was going to be something… else.

  Something skipped in my mind as my chest throbbed, and I saw it was one of the guards.

  Seeing as how I was the only one in the ward, I assumed he was here for me.

  But I wasn’t healed yet. Not even close.

  Yes, the wounds had healed faster than they should have, and yes I could now stand with only extreme—instead of agonizing—pain, but I had a while yet to go here.

  Then something skipped again, my chest twinging, and I noticed his face.

  Or, where his face should have been.

  Because instead of a face, instead of eyes, nose, and a mouth, there were simply two vertical red slits, approximately where his eyes would be. They stretched from just above his eyebrows, to about the level of his mouth.

  If he’d had eyebrows or mouth.

  The ‘eyes’, had no irises or pupils, or anything like that. Just red slits, a bit wider and rounder at the center, yet I got the uncanny feeling that he was staring right at me. That his eyes were locked onto mine and trying to burrow into my mind, to invade me.

  He took a step in my direction, the door swinging shut behind him, and I saw that the shoe on his right foot had torn, and something scaly and brown oozed out the side.

  Something which slapped wetly on the floor as he approached.

  I got off the bed as quickly as I could—which was very slowly—to put something between us, and looked around for anything I could use as a weapon.

  I didn’t have an IV needle or tube to stab or strangle him with, or even better, one of those movable poles I could have used as a bō staff.

  By force of habit I had studied the infirmary for weapons as soon as I was conscious enough to, but hadn’t seen any.

  As I looked around again now, I still didn’t see any.

  Then the eyeless guard was there, right in front of me, the bed the only thing between us.

  He stared at me, but didn’t move. Was unnaturally still, in fact.

  I crouched, hands on the railing, back and sides screaming in pain from my stab wounds, thinking, my brain racing through possibilities to get me out of this situation in one piece.

  Or at least alive.

  The bed was a big heavy thing, and its wheels were locked, so I didn’t think I could push it into him, especially in my weakened state.

  But he was between me and the only exit. I had to get by him somehow.

  Normally I would risk outrunning him, but I doubted I could outrun a toddler in my current condition.

  Behind me were a few more beds, and high on the wall the TV, below and to the right of which was a door, not one that led out of here, but only into a cleaning supply closet.

  Cleaning supplies.

  I had only a vague memory of nurses opening that door to get out bottles of spray cleaner and clean off the trays we ate from—which were taken away after each use—but I thought I remembered seeing a mop in there.

  I turned and hobbled toward it, glancing over my shoulder.

  Following me, not running, but walking, the brown scaly thing that protruded from his right shoe slapping the floor with every other measured step, the eyeless guard made his slow way after me, in no apparent hurry.

  I reached the closest, yanked it open, and was greeted with darkness.

  I glanced over my shoulder again. He was ten feet away.

  I fumbled for a light switch, felt nothing, then moved my hand to the other side of the door, where it caught on something and shocked me as the light flickered on.

  “Fuck,” I muttered, in surprise rather than pain, as that little shock was nothing compared to what I was feeling in my side an
d back right now. I had also been stabbed once in the thigh, but if that wound was hurting, it was being masked by the greater agony from the thirty-seven other stab wounds I’d sustained.

  Directly in front of me was a mop sat in a bucket full of remarkably clean-looking water.

  I grabbed the mop, trying to swing it around, but it felt like it weighed a thousand pounds and I swore I felt my side rip open as I pulled.

  Ignoring the pain, I finally lifted the soaked mop out, then placed it on the floor with a wet slap, angled it away from me, and kicked, snapping the head off, and leaving me with a makeshift bō staff, one end jagged and sharp.

  I spun around.

  He was standing right there, not a foot away from me, staring at me with those red vertical serpentine slits.

  We ‘stared’ each other down.

  “What do you want?” I asked him.

  It was always best to make sure your enemy was actually your enemy.

  He raised his hand slowly and pointed at me.

  That was creepy as fuck.

  “Get out of here. Leave me alone.”

  He didn’t. Instead, he stepped toward me, invading that bubble of personal space you didn’t breach with another man unless you intended to fight him.

  Or hug him, I suppose.

  This thing didn’t want to hug me.

  He reached out and wrapped his fingers around my neck before I could react.

  The speed with which he moved was shocking after his slow pursuit of me.

  I pulled back my makeshift staff and slammed it into his chest, realizing my mistake instantly.

  The guards here always wore stab vests, and this alien was no exception.

  Don’t react Gage, I heard in my mind. Action, not reaction. Don’t let others dictate your movements.

  Shut up old man, I thought at the memory, but heeded him and calmed myself, even as the fingers tightened around my throat, cutting off my breathing and blood flow.

  I already knew I was too weak to pry the guard’s hand off. I could tell that by how strong his grip was.

  He tilted his head at me, like a curious dog, as though he expected me to react.

  I got the sense that he was straining, putting all his effect into his grip.

  The edges of my vision started to turn purple, and before I could pass out, I carefully took aim at one of those slits, the right one, and stabbed the broken end of the mop into it.