Africa Story

This is the beginnings of a Story about a little boy in Africa, I won't say its trying to be culturally accurate or even historically, that's generally not my interest in writing. I want to create something interesting worth reading that becomes something unto itself, but is perhaps close enough to reality to fool you. I hope you enjoy it.

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Chapter I:

Carama stood on the ridge, hot dusty winds blew across the plains below and swirled up only long enough to powder his face, before returning to the land below. A line of trucks bounced down the broken road, reformed by seasonal mudslides and re-pounded into a level plain each summer. The white vehicles were a dull white in the obscured afternoon sun, its red heat still felt firmly on Carama’s skin. Their truck beds were filled with supplies in crates, tied down with strips of overlapping rope. Black lettering “U.N.” was stenciled on the sides, foreign to him, but still familiar in its commonality.
Carama ran in full sprint, feeling something like a sparrowhawk in the dive as he rushed down the slope of the ridge into the shanty village that was his home. The village was known as “Red River” by civil authorities, for in the wet season mud slides feeding the flowing river turn it a red color like blood.
Some of the other kids waiting at the edge of the village greeted him at his end of his boisterous return from the top of the ridge. He excitedly exclaimed to them, “Trucks are coming!”
Carama continued his run into the village, informing the adults who were busy doing the labor by the riverside that men in white trucks had come from the road. The village became a bustle of excitement. Carama’s mother pulled him to the side from the gathering crowd, now interested in the road and the peculiar dust cloud that grew nearer.
“You need to calm down,” she told him.
“But men in trucks are coming! I think they are bringing food,” Carama had been worried, the dry season’s plagues had ruined the crops and they had been mostly hungry for months.
“Yes, they may be here with good intentions, but white men often come before dark storms.”
Carama was ushered to their house and inside to his sisters. His mother laid out their best clothing. “When the men from the trucks come, dress your best and ask politely for food. Do not shove and yell like the other children,” she told them, suppressing her own hopes that came with the arrival of the convoy of dirty-white vehicles. She furiously washed dust from their hair and slicked it back in a nice style to complete the look of her beloved children.
The crowd had gathered from the whole village, ending all that afternoon’s work in anticipation.
Black men and white men in blue hats and vests climbed out of the trucks and began greeting everyone. Some of them threw candy to the kids. Carama watched his sister Abbo catch a candy and smile happily as she slipped it into her mouth.
The boy watched as his father, chief of their transient tribe, approached as a spokesman for his vast family and negotiated with the men in the blue hats. He remembered the story that his father told him and his sisters of their tribe,
“Long ago, when I was your age, the land we lived in far South from our current village came under attack. Men with guns had made deals with the Nnandenga, becoming wicked sorcerers who sought to pit brother against brother. Violence overcame the land and soon their evil fed the lindandosa, which dried up the rains and the fields. Nothing would grow and the ground itself cracked open. Dead fish lay on barren land and our tribe knew that darkness had defeated good. We had only one choice, we had to prove that we were worth saving from death to our ancestral mahoka. We did this by marking our bodies with tattoos, showing that our physical bodies were free from the vile effects of sorcery and hate which had overcome so many of our brothers and countrymen. That day a miracle came! An empty boat floated down the river towards the North past our village. My father, who was Chief then and spiritual advisor, took this as a sign that we must move north and so we did. We traveled as far as the river could take us, until we came to this land and found fertile soil. The mahoka had rewarded and preserved us. This is why you must always look to your tattoo to remind you that you are a human of pure heart.”
Carama looked at his tattoos, dominating his naked chest and arms. Each image held magical sway and protected him.
The men in the trucks were now unloading crates of food and jugs of water. At one point a mob of villagers struggled so hard to pull a palette of water jugs off the white truck that the bindings burst and jugs went rolling everywhere. Some people laughed, but Carama’s father was angry, some of the jugs had burst and dripped precious water into the dry dirt. He scolded them and whipped at them with sticks, they did little to promote the tribe’s image to their ancestors with actions like that.
Carama and his sisters crowded around one of the palettes as a white man in a blue helmet gave out packages of rice and other food products. They politely asked for food, holding out their hands. Their mother’s advice worked well, they were served first with the best food items, over the other rowdy children of the village. Carama confidently carried the boxes back to their house.
“You did good children. I told you this was wise. Now maybe you will listen to my wisdom more often?”
His sisters giggled and ran into the kitchen to prepare the food. Father entered with the water jugs under his arm, he grunted, “I’ll be back with more.”
As Carama looked out the doorway after his father, he watched a puff of dust from the road rise near the foot of a man with a blue vest. The man turned curiously to look up the Ridge across the river. Another few puffs of dust were kicked up from the road and Carama wondered if there was some animal trying to dig its way up from underneath. The man in the blue helmet yelled something in French and dove beneath the truck. Other men in blue helmets took cover and this time he heard the cracks of the rifle shots.
The village burst into an eruption of gunfire between the blue helmets and the mysterious killers across the river. Carama spent the hours of the tense night tucked between his sisters, his mother, and his father.
The morning light brought peace and quieted the guns of the hidden enemy. But something had changed with the men who came in white trucks.
The men had given all their food and water to the village, but despite the chief’s yells and angry talks with them, the men would not stay. They said they had more supplies but could not come back right away and they couldn’t leave men behind to make sure the village was safe. Carama’s father was not pleased. The men of the village got what weapons they could, mostly bows and rifles.
That afternoon the men in white trucks left. The men of the village were on alert.
Carama watched as night fell again, like a black crocodile swallowing the blue sky.
Stars appeared in the nightsky and fell to earth in the village, erupting with thunder and fire. Pieces of metal skewered men, warriors, and others. Chaos filled the night and rifle shots could be heard. Carama stayed hidden in his house with his mother and sisters, but the light of the fires illuminated his chest and he saw the magical symbols. He felt he should fight alongside his father, he was a man and he needed to protect his family.
Carama found a long knife used for skinning and stalked out into the night, trying to find his father. Gunshots whizzed in the air like angry insects looking to sting. In the fire light he saw the Chief shouting and firing his hunting rifle towards the river, Carama saw the boats creeping across. Running up beside his father, he saw another burst of a star into a nearby storage shack, showering food the white trucks had given them like rain. He heard a shout of hateful men from the darkness. His father stood valiantly, firing shot after shot into the boatmen.
Between the crack of a rifle, Carama heard the rumble of the elephantine trucks once again, the blue helmets had come to save them!
“Father, the trucks, they’ve come back!”
“Our ancestors bless us!”
The Chief and his boy ran to the road and saw the silhouettes of trucks rumbling up to the village, their headlights suddenly turning on. In the blinding light of the headlamps, his father could not see to defend himself. The automatic rifles of the killers burst his skin as Carama screamed. The boy was seized by men covered in blood wearing mismatched blue armor and pushed into the truck, a bag forced over his head. He screamed and fought blindly with his knife, but the truck was already moving and his weapon was stolen from his small hands.
Carama felt himself being pushed out of the back of the truck and a bag covered his head.
Suddenly the black bag that covered his vision was pulled free, lifting a curtain to the fearful scene before him. Dozens of armed men in balcavas carrying assault weapons stood around a series of camo netted tents strung below Baobab trees on an overgrown savannah. A hard metal gun barrel was stuck to the side of Carama’s head by a tall man as he pulled his mask off. His face was covered in scars, almost as if a lion had mauled him. “Everyone you know is dead; you are part of the Viral Army now.” The men roughly pushed him towards one of the tents; every step he hesitated resulted in more harsh blows to his stomach and back.
As he was ushered in the tent, he found his captors who had followed him were disrobing. Two of them rushed him, holding him down. The man without the mask was quickly on top of him, pushing his weight into the stretched out mattress and pillow. He was helpless as the Lion-faced man raped him, laughing the whole time. “This is how we treat our new soldiers.” He said. The others quickly followed, joining in on “breaking” in Carama. At some point the young boy did his best to pretend he was somewhere, anywhere, other than where he was: gasping on the floor of a filthy tent.
The morning after, Carama was sore and violated in every way, but he had to leave his tent, which he eventually did. The men did not hold him at gunpoint, perhaps they weren’t afraid he would run away now? He intended to the first chance he got.
“You have nowhere to go to now, young one. You are part of the army now.” One of the guards told him.
“I am just looking for a tree to piss under…” Carama lied.
“You are dead now, don’t you understand?”
He didn’t know what that meant, but it sent a chill up his spine. Carama proceeded to head to the edge of camp and relieved himself. When no one was looking, he ran off as hard as he could. Soon after he left sight of the camp and the midday sun was scorching his bare-back, a rumble seemed to grow closer. At first it was like the pounding of an elephant’s foot, but as it got closer he could hear the chug of the engine as the speeding jeep pursued him. Carama expected to be shot as he ran, but heard only laughter.
The jeep was easily on top of him, but the men did nothing but stay just a ways behind him.
“You will get tired soon, young one,” said the familiar voice of that devil of a man.
Carama ran harder, but only got tired faster; soon he would be too exhausted to run. He stopped, turning flatly towards the jeep, prepared to fight. The vehicle just stopped, the men did not getting out, laughing.
“Little one, what is your name?” asked the Lion of a man.
“I am Carama!” he said defiantly.
“Your new name is Dead,” said the voice.
“Then shoot me, you have already done your worst!” Carama exclaimed.
“He knows then?” asked the driver.
“No, he hasn’t been told,” The scar-faced man said.
Carama was curious, “Know what, that you are demons?”
“No, that you are dead,” he repeated.
“I am still alive until you kill me!” Carama yelled, but the men only laughed.
“We already killed you,” the man said.
“There were many of you, you would not have succeeded alone! This time I won’t let you!”
Their laughter boomed.
“Boy, you don’t understand. We all have the virus and now you do too.”
“Virus?”
“The disease that kills all of Africa, you have it now. We raped you so that we would be sure that you would get it too,” he said, adding, “now you will die, just like all of us.”
“What? You have given me the illness?”
The men laughed, “Now he understands.”
Carama could hardly stand, he fell to one knee, and this was devastating news to him and only comedy to these cruel men.
“Fearless my son, you will be fearless now. The army has you.”
“Why would you do this?”
“You now know you are already dead, you have a few years at most.” The scar-faced man said.
“Who are you to do this to people?”
“I am Azibo and you are now one of the Viral Army. We are fearless because we are already dead.”
“Why would I be fearless just because I am fated to die?”
“Because any death would be a better one than the shame of sickness…”
“Am I really fated to die?” Carama thought this incredulous.
“Yes, did you think you were immortal to begin with?” Azibo asked, the men in the jeep laughing heartily.
Carama hung his head, mumbling a prayer in his native dialect.
“You have to look at the world anew; you may truly begin to live now that you know you are fated to die.” Azibo said, his words confident and persuasive to Carama’s ears. While the young man had never thought of death seriously, now that he knew he would die and soon, it somehow released a burden within him. He had no future so there was no use in working towards it.
Finally Carama returned to the camp and fell into the routine of exercise the men had prepared for him and the other boys. If nothing else, they were well fed from the stolen supplies from the U.N. trucks. Some of the soldiers wore blue helmets from the dead white soldiers.
“Why did you kill my family and my village?”
“They cooperated with the white men.”
“Those white men came to help us from drought and brought us food and water, why kill them?”
“Those men created this Hell at the point of a gun, now they try to fix it at the point of a gun. Africa is better without their help.”

First Contact

I was going to wait 'til tomorrow to post this, but I figure if I can't use this thing to tell stories, good or bad, it has no purpose.

There are two versions of the same Short Story called First Contact, one of them is the result of peer suggestions, the original is more minimalist. I don't know which I like better, so I'll put them both here.

FIRST CONTACT

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ORIGINAL

“I was a Colonel in the Air Force, everyone called me Boggs, Colonel Bobby Boggs that crazy son of a you-know-what who shot Hell into your soul with a glance.”
“Yeah, I read your record. But I have a feeling you called me here to tell me something off-the-books.”
The old man nodded, the plastic hoses in his nose restricted his head movement.
“I read an article by you once in the Times, real profession stuff about the end of the war and the Germans they’d brought over, used to make rockets for NASA.”
“Is that what impressed you enough to invite me here for this?”
“Yeah, the dark little print at the bottom,” He paused to cough, “It said: Tim Willis, Journalist and Historian from Harvard University. That really impressed me, Harvard, writing the truth about the U.S. military and their deals with the most infamous political group of the decade.”
“Maybe the most infamous in all of history,” he said.
“What are you a Jew?”
“No, just saying.”
“Well, what I’m going to tell you might make you rethink that.”
“Really?” Tim said. He moved his chair closer to the hospital bed.
“What you may not know, is I was also O.S.S. during the war. That’s the Office of Strategic Services. We helped do C.I. work and psyops during the war, that’s counter intelligence and psychological warfare. Dropping leaflets and spreading rumors by radio.”
“Hmmn, yeah I’ve heard most of the stories,” Tim said.
“Most of my wartime record is in the big offices in D.C., but what I did for the O.S.S. after the war and the fact that I’m not listed as ever belonging to them, is what you won’t find.”
“Why aren’t you listed among official personnel?”
“Because what I did for America, for this planet, cannot be documented officially.”
“Well, you’ve certainly got my attention. You mind if I record this?” Tim pulled out the tape recorder and set it on the nearby table.
“No, go ahead. Anyways, it was about 78, long after Roswell.”
Tim hit record and looked at the old man quizzically.
“Roswell?”
“Yeah the crash of the spaceship, I was brought in afterwards, we handled some of the moving of parts and the bodies…”
“So, Mr. Boggs, you’re saying you were at Roswell and the stories are true about an Alien spaceship landing?”
“Yeah, but Hell, that’s not what I’m trying to talk about, everyone knows that story. That’s the one they put on TV and talk about on History programs. Hah, weather balloon, like Hell!”
“What do the aliens look like?”
“Little green men of course…actually they are more of a grey color.”
The old Colonel paused for another cough and clearing of phlegm from his throat. The respiratory equipment hissed nearby.
“Anyway, what I have to say is after the fact. The U.S. government knew they were real, so like we do with any foreign government, we had to meet them.”
“You’re saying the U.S. Government had a sit down with alien beings? Like a diplomatic session?”
“Yeah, on U.S. soil and I was one of the many people present, including the President of the United States. It wasn’t until 1978, after we’d had more than two decades to study their technology and physiology that a cryptographer broke the code of a signal that had been picked up the world over since the 1947 crash. After he broke the code, we were able to establish communication with the aliens and arrange a meeting face-to-face. Good Heavens!
It was then we began to discuss the meaning of such a meeting and what it would mean for not only the United States, but the human race. We had finally contacted what was believed to be only science fiction before then: intelligent alien life forms. This fact alone conjectured the authenticity of our known history, our mythology, everything that is mankind.
How did we know they hadn’t come before, perhaps even visited us frequently in the past? There was certainly enough indication that it could be truth. The aliens of course, denied it, they said they had just arrived and that they wished to establish peaceful contact with man, to share technology and culture.
The meeting was at the place the media knows as Area 51 and it was pretty startling for everyone involved I think. That moment was perhaps the most historical event of our species, yet it won’t ever get recorded if the men who participated in it have their way. That’s why I called you here.”
Tim sat back, taking it all in. He didn’t know if he could believe what the old Colonel was saying. The man stared at him intensely, as if he could force Tim to believe merely with the harsh glare of his eyes.
“Continue please, I want to hear the rest of the story, what became of this meeting?”
“Hell Mr. Willis, I’ll tell you what became of it by telling you this story. It’s the same story I presented to men during a meeting we had prior to contact with the alien beings. It involved a fishing trip I had down in Tennessee. You see, before we went out on the boat, we picked up a bucket of guppies from the bait shop where they had them swimming around in a big tank. We got a whole bucket chock full of them and then headed out for a good afternoon of fishing.
It got me to thinking from the guppy’s perspective, what do they see of man? To them we’re benevolent gods giving them food and letting them grow up in a warm tank with all their guppy friends. Only now and again we take a few of them away, putting them in a bucket and taking them off. I might need to remind you, we knew about the abductions at this point, there had been plenty of them going on, more than what the public knew about at that time.”
“You’re saying the Alien Abductions are also real events and that the government had prior knowledge of them?”
“Yeah, they were well documented by the Air Force and particularly my division where all the memos stopped. We considered them to be a threat to American sovereignty along with the capabilities of their technology and their spacecraft, which repeatedly violated our airspace. Hell the existence of aliens was enough to challenge governmental authority itself and those were turbulent times.”
He paused for a fit of coughing before he continued, “We certainly feared the aliens’ intention, which is why I told this story, because I had to convince the Joint Chiefs of Staff that our plan of action was solid. This was a game you could only play once, and its result could change all of history. What if it turned out the aliens had altered our history? Had been Gods in the ancient times? What if Jesus was just an extraterrestrial? This is why I brought into the analogy of the guppies to the Joint Chiefs.
When I told the story I brought up the time when I spilled the bucket, the guppies and water were all over the bottom of the boat and as it moved forward across the lake with the motor, the water sloshed to the back of the boat with the momentum. The guppies were suddenly in peril as a life preserver kept them from moving with the fleeing water from the bucket. As the tiny fish flapped in protest I reached down, plucking as many as I could. One by one, dropping them back into the bucket I’d quickly refilled with water from the lake. Finally I had almost all the fish in the bucket except for the few guppies that still flapped their fins dying. I would have saved them too, but as it is, guppies are cheap and my back was sore from stooping over in the boat, so I just let them die. It wasn’t anything personal.”
Tim watched the energetic old man quietly, lost in his story and slightly bemused.
“But to those guppies, imagine, a divine-like being saving their friends one by one, but leaving them there to die? If guppies were like men, they would try to rationalize their fate, what tenet of God didn’t I follow that he would let me suffer and die so? You see what I’m saying, mankind rationalizes the unknown. But yet what would be perceived by the guppy as punishment for some unknown sin, was really just that I had a sore back and was tired from picking up his friends.”
Tim sighed and nodded.
“Hope I’m not boring you, I’m getting to the point, I can go into all the details that will validate my claim, but I haven’t even gotten to the punch line yet, the punch-line of human history and the morality of your government.”
“What is that punch line? Is that the whole of the fishing story you told the Joint Chiefs?” the journalist asked.
“The moral of the fishing story is that the Guppies who were viewed as ‘saved’ by the dying guppies weren’t really saved. You know what we did to those guppies we saved? We hooked them and used them as bait to catch bigger fish. How would the Guppy comprehend that their benevolent Gods were only using them to catch some tasty dinner?”
Mr. Willis shrugged and Boggs paused to cough again.
“How do we begin to comprehend the goals of another species? Why were they abducting humans from Earth? We didn’t know and we couldn’t comprehend the aliens reasoning. That’s why we did what we did.”
“What is it that you did?”
“As I told you earlier, we’d known about their physiology since the late 40s, since Roswell. What you may not know, is that one of the occupants survived. He lived in our custody for nearly a year or more, with limited contact with humans. I actually met this alien more than a few times, but communication was strained at best. Eventually he died, you know what of?”
“You mean the government didn’t kill the alien?”
“No we thought he could be used like an interstellar hostage or prisoner of war, give us some sort of bargaining chips with the E.T.s, but have you ever seen War of the Worlds?”
“Yeah, I have, you’re saying he died of an Earthly disease?”
“The Hepatitis virus to be exact, apparently their alien organics had no resistance to the virus. It was kept in a backroom by the Air Force on ice for many years.
So when the meeting was close at hand, it was my job to convince the President and the Joint Chiefs that we had no way of knowing if the aliens are hostile or not, but knowledge of them alone would be enough to change mankind forever.”
“Why do you think it would change the public if they knew?”
“The aliens had advanced technology from us to such a degree that it appeared as magic to us. Humanity has a tendency to rationalize the unknown, to mythologize that which it doesn’t understand, assign it human values. The Greeks rationalized Volcanoes as their angry Gods punishing them cruelly with fire. We feared that a similar reaction would occur if their existence became assured. You can see that simply as a myth they have raised cults and religions, but to have living Gods is a far more terrifying possibility. It would make irrelevant everything mankind has ever done in one instant, our technological achievements, humanitarian efforts, philosophy, art, and landing on the moon, all trivialized by beings from another world. Hell, beings, I must mention again, that could be devils in disguise.”
“I can understand your reasoning, although I think the public could have handled it, we would have much to learn from them. They might have brought world peace.”
“They would have brought world peace, humanity does unite against what it sees as foreign, we were confident we could build an army sophisticated enough to fight the aliens and had plans in the works to ally with the Russians who had their own version of Roswell, but the losses would have been catastrophic because of their technological advantage. Their ships had infiltrated many of our military bases’ air space and even caused black outs on nuclear missile silos, there was a real fear that this was a precursor to invasion of our planet.”
“You really don’t trust them do you?”
“How could you? It would be naïve to expect anything but a potential predator from a species never encountered before. Mankind became the prey by their mere existence. That was something none of us could tolerate. Some of the more petty members of government were only interested in maintaining U.S. superpower status and were conflicted by the possibility of the aliens creating a world government with more authority. That’s why we planned for their extinction.”
“Are you saying you are responsible for killing an entire alien race?”
“Now you understand the importance of this information.”
“How? How could you kill a whole race of alien beings?”
“I mentioned before we had studied their physiology and that we still had the body of the dead E.T. incubating hepatitis in its body. We had our weapon. We knew it worked, just not how effectively.”
“You’re kidding me! You used biological warfare to exterminate a peaceful starfaring race?”
“The potential danger posed by their existence outweighed the chance they were sincere. After all, they were abducting our citizens. It was decided and the event wasn’t much different than the early Settlers contact with Indians in the Western United States. Only instead of a smallpox blanket, we simply returned their dead comrade to them, to take aboard their spaceship. Soon afterwards, they started falling out of the sky.”
Tim sat still for a while, not saying anything, the man seemed sincere about his whole story, no matter how implausible it was. Colonel Boggs coughed and had spasms in his bed, having a fit of pain while the pharmaceutical drip worked overtime. Tim waited until the man calmed down and cleared his throat again.
“The only thing this doesn’t clear up is, why do people still witness flying saucers? You couldn’t have killed all of them.”
“Oh, the ones we didn’t get with the virus, we shot out of the sky. They had a ‘city’ ship on the Moon, but that was quick to go from the disease. Roswell gave us enough time to reverse engineer some of their technology and make comparable craft, although the pressures and G-Force of the turns at that speed were enough to kill many of our test pilots over time.
After the E.T. threat was neutralized it was decided shortly before my retirement as a specialist in the field, a specialist of xenocide, that the flying saucer craft our government and other governments developed would continue to function and operate on sorties. We killed the intruders, but they already had their mythology. A God in the flesh is intolerable, but the myth of a God is a necessary part of the human psychology. We couldn’t simply have them disappear out of the skies now that we had eliminated them. We needed to maintain the presence in order to cover up our crimes.
I had some friends in the Air Force who flew the craft. They talked about how they performed abductions where ordinary citizens were drugged with LSD and techniques the CIA learned during their MK-ULTRA experiments back in the 60s. Those people came out really believing they were kidnapped by Aliens. It fuels these cults and groups of UFO crazies to this day. But the threat is long gone.”
“So you’re a mass murderer and the Government made this decision without the voice of the American people?”
“That’s about the jist of it, now you see why I called you here. I couldn’t live with this guilt on my conscience anymore. I know I’m going to die soon, but before I do, someone has to know, that the U.S. Government killed an entire alien species to protect the people of Earth. A crime not even the Nazis can compare up to.”
“So you feel remorse for it?”
“Absolutely,”
“Would you still tell that story and convince the Joint Chiefs if you had the chance to change things?”
“Yes, I would. My crime is a horrible one, but I still feel it was necessary. Man needs to believe in the potential of man, not be servants to Alien Gods,” said Colonel Robert Boggs. Tim shut off the tape recorder.
Thirty minutes later Bobby Boggs died in his hospital bed. Tim Willis asked the Doctor what he died of, “It was Hepatitis induced liver failure.”

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REVISED

Tim picked up the newspaper; the obituary picture seemed to stare him in the face and brought a sinking feeling to his gut. It reminded him of the interview just a week ago at the old man’s home, it was hard seeing him smiling on the page and in a healthy condition. The memories refused to come back and justify the emotion he felt. Tim looked through the drawer of his office until he found the tape recorder from the interview. Setting it on the table, he turned it on. The recorded voice began with a distinct tone the old man had,
“I was a Colonel in the Air Force, everyone called me Boggs, Colonel Bobby Boggs that crazy son of a you-know-what who shot Hell into your soul with a glance.”
The man had been excited, adjusting his hospital bed with the electronic dial to force himself to sit up for the interview.
“Yeah, I read your record. But I have a feeling you called me here to tell me something off-the-books,” he recognized his own voice.
Tim’s memory recalled the old man nodding awkwardly. The plastic hoses in his nose had restricted his head movement.
“I read an article by you once in the Times, real profession stuff about the end of the war and the Germans they’d brought over, used to make rockets for NASA.”
“Is that what impressed you enough to invite me here for this interview?”
“Yeah, the dark little print at the bottom,” there was a cough on the tape, “It said: Tim Willis, Journalist and Historian from Harvard University. That really impressed me, Harvard, writing the truth about the U.S. military and their deals with the most infamous political group of the decade.”
“Maybe the most infamous in all of history,” his words reminded him how naïve he was to think of the old man’s story as something mundane.
“Well, what I’m going to tell you might make you rethink that,” Boggs’ voice was distinct in its grimness.
“Really?” Tim had said. He heard his chair scraping on the floor as it moved closer to the hospital bed.
“What you may not know, is I was also O.S.S. during the war. That’s the Office of Strategic Services. We helped do C.I. work and psyops during the war, that’s counter intelligence and psychological warfare. Dropping leaflets and spreading rumors by radio.”
“Hmmn, yeah I’ve heard most of the stories,” Tim said.
“Most of my wartime record is in the big offices in D.C., but what I did for the O.S.S. after the war and the fact that I’m not listed as ever belonging to them, is what you won’t find.”
“Why aren’t you listed among official personnel?” He had asked him this.
“Because what I did for America, for this planet, cannot be documented officially.”
Tim remembered his fierce eyes, but still felt a churning sensation of doubt.
“Anyways, it was about 78, long after Roswell.”
Tim had looked at the old man quizzically. This was the first time the man brought up Roswell.
“Roswell?”
“Yeah the crash of the spaceship, I was brought in afterwards, we handled some of the moving of parts and the bodies…” the man’s voice faded on the tape.
“So, Mr. Boggs, you’re saying you were at Roswell and the stories are true about an Alien spaceship landing?”
“Yeah, but Hell, that’s not what I’m trying to talk about, everyone knows that story. That’s the one they put on TV and talk about on History programs. Hah, weather balloon, like Hell!”
“What do the aliens look like?” Tim’s voice sounded sarcastic at the time.
“Little green men of course…actually they are more of a grey color.” Tim had laughed at that, hearing it again, he realized it wasn’t meant as a joke.
He heard the old Colonel pause for another cough and clear the phlegm from his throat. The respiratory equipment’s hissing could be heard.
“Anyway, what I have to say is after the fact. The U.S. government knew they were real, so like we do with any foreign government, we had to meet them.”
“You’re saying the U.S. Government had a sit down with alien beings? Like a diplomatic session?” Tim was amazed at his own ability to ask focused questions, even though he didn’t fully believe the story then. Maybe he had been indulging him.
“Yeah, on U.S. soil and I was one of the many people present, including the President of the United States. It wasn’t until 1978, after we’d had more than two decades to study their technology and physiology that a cryptographer broke the code of a signal that had been picked up the world over since the 1947 crash. After he broke the code, we were able to establish communication with the aliens and arrange a meeting face-to-face. Goddamn!” Tim remembered the old man’s face, still wondering if he was hiding a smile as he said this.
“It was then we began to discuss the meaning of such a meeting and what it would mean for not only the United States, but the human race. We had finally contacted what was believed to be only science fiction before then: intelligent alien life forms. This fact alone conjectured the authenticity of our known history, our mythology, everything that is mankind.
How did we know they hadn’t come before, perhaps even visited us frequently in the past? There was certainly enough indication that it could be truth. The aliens of course, denied it, they said they had just arrived and that they wished to establish peaceful contact with man, to share technology and culture.” The vision of the man in his mind seemed somehow wrong, the words of Boggs sawed at his memory.
“The meeting was at the place the media knows as Area 51 and it was pretty startling for everyone involved I think. That moment was perhaps the most historical event of our species, yet it won’t ever get recorded if the men who participated in it have their way. That’s why I called you here.”
Tim sat back, listening. He still didn’t know if he could believe what the old Colonel had said. His eyes had stared at him intensely, as if he could force Tim to believe merely with will alone.
“Continue please, I want to hear the rest of the story, what became of this meeting?”
“Hell! Mr. Willis, I’ll tell you what became of it by telling you this story. It’s the same story I presented to men during a meeting we had prior to contact with the alien beings. It involved a fishing trip I had down in Tennessee. You see, before we went out on the boat, we picked up a bucket of guppies from the bait shop where they had them swimming around in a big tank. We got a whole bucket chock full of them and then headed out for a good afternoon.”
Tim remembered his impatience at the rambling of the old man, now hearing it again, he listened more carefully.
“It got me to thinking from the guppy’s perspective, what do they see of man? To them we’re benevolent gods giving them food and letting them grow up in a warm tank with all their guppy friends. Only now and again we take a few of them away, putting them in a bucket and taking them off. I might need to remind you, we knew about the abductions at this point, there had been plenty of them going on, more than what the public knew about at that time.”
“You’re saying the Alien Abductions are also real events and that the government had prior knowledge of them?”
Tim’s voice had changed on tape, drawn in by the man’s story, as he was now.
“Yeah, they were well documented by the Air Force and particularly my division where all the memos stopped. We considered them to be a threat to American sovereignty along with the capabilities of their technology and their spacecraft, which repeatedly violated our airspace. Hell! The existence of aliens was enough to challenge governmental authority itself and those were turbulent times.”
More coughing could be heard on the tape. Tim remembered the image on the man’s hospital table, a framed picture of himself in Air Force uniform, shaking hands with Eisenhower.
“We certainly feared the aliens’ intention, which is why I told this story, because I had to convince the Joint Chiefs of Staff that our plan of action was solid. This was a game you could only play once, and its result could change all of history. What if it turned out the aliens had altered our history? Had been Gods in the ancient times? What if Jesus was just an extraterrestrial? This is why I brought into the analogy of the guppies to the Joint Chiefs.”
Tim thought about why guppies would be likened to man.
“When I told the story I brought up the time when I spilled the bucket, the guppies and water were all over the bottom of the boat and as it moved forward across the lake with the motor, the water sloshed to the back of the boat with the momentum. The guppies were suddenly in peril as a life preserver kept them from moving with the fleeing water from the bucket. As the tiny fish flapped in protest I reached down, plucking as many as I could. One by one, dropping them back into the bucket I’d quickly refilled with water from the lake. Finally I had almost all the fish in the bucket except for the few guppies that still flapped their fins, dying. I would have saved them too, but as it is, guppies are cheap and my back was sore from stooping over in the boat, so I just let them die. It wasn’t anything personal.”
Tim had become silent on tape. He remembered being focused on the man’s features, looking for that crack in the mask that revealed the liars he’d spoken with before.
“But to those guppies, imagine, a divine-like being saving their friends one by one, but leaving them there to die? If guppies were like men, they would try to rationalize their fate, what tenet of God didn’t I follow that he would let me suffer and die so? You see what I’m saying, mankind rationalizes the unknown. But yet what would be perceived by the guppy as punishment for some unknown sin was really just that I had a sore back and was tired from picking up his friends.”
He had sighed on tape.
“Hope I’m not boring you, I’m getting to the point, I can go into all the details that will validate my claim, but I haven’t even gotten to the punch line yet, the punch-line of human history and the morality of your government.”
“What is that punch line? Is that the whole of the fishing story you told the Joint Chiefs?” Tim had asked.
“The moral of the fishing story is that the Guppies who were viewed as ‘saved’ by the dying guppies weren’t really saved. You know what we did to those guppies we saved? We hooked them and used them as bait to catch bigger fish. How would the Guppy comprehend that their benevolent Gods were only using them to catch some tasty dinner?”
He remembered, he had shrugged, Boggs paused to cough again.
“How do we begin to comprehend the goals of another species? Why were they abducting humans from Earth? We didn’t know and we couldn’t comprehend the aliens reasoning. That’s why we did what we did.”
The old man had compared these creatures to gods, Tim thought.
“What is it that you did?”
“As I told you earlier, we’d known about their physiology since the late 40s, since Roswell. What you may not know, is that one of the occupants survived. He lived in our custody for nearly a year or more, with limited contact with humans. I actually met this alien more than a few times, but communication was strained at best. Eventually he died, you know what of?”
“You mean the government didn’t kill the alien?”
“No we thought he could be used like an interstellar hostage or prisoner of war, give us some sort of bargaining chips with the E.T.s, but have you ever seen War of the Worlds?”
“Yeah, I have, you’re saying he died of an Earthly disease?” Tim was surprised by his own voice, he felt more objective listening now, without the man’s eyes upon his face.
“The Hepatitis virus to be exact, apparently their alien organics had no resistance to the virus. It was kept in a backroom by the Air Force on ice for many years.
So when the meeting was close at hand, it was my job to convince the President and the Joint Chiefs that we had no way of knowing if the aliens are hostile or not. Knowledge of them alone would be enough to change mankind forever.”
“Why do you think it would change the public if they knew?” Tim thought his question foolish now, but it had pleased Colonel Boggs.
“The aliens had advanced technology from us to such a degree that it appeared as magic to us. Humanity has a tendency to rationalize the unknown, to mythologize that which it doesn’t understand, assign it human values. The Greeks rationalized Volcanoes as their angry Gods punishing them cruelly with fire. We feared that a similar reaction would occur if their existence became assured. You can see that simply as a myth they have raised cults and religions, but to have living Gods is a far more terrifying possibility. It would make irrelevant everything mankind has ever done in one instant, our technological achievements, humanitarian efforts, philosophy, art, and landing on the moon, all trivialized by beings from another world. Hell. Beings, I must mention again, that could be devils in disguise.”
“I can understand your reasoning, although I think the public could have handled it, we would have much to learn from them. They might have brought world peace.”
“They would have brought world peace, humanity does unite against what it sees as foreign, we were confident we could build an army sophisticated enough to fight the aliens and had plans in the works to ally with the Russians who had their own version of Roswell, but the losses would have been catastrophic because of their technological advantage. Their ships had infiltrated many of our military bases’ air space and even caused black outs on nuclear missile silos, there was a real fear that this was a precursor to invasion of our planet.” Boggs’ voice was intense and almost angry.
“You really don’t trust them do you?” he had said to the Colonel.
“How could you? It would be naïve to expect anything but a potential predator from a species never encountered before. Mankind became the prey by their mere existence. That was something none of us could tolerate. Some of the more petty members of government were only interested in maintaining U.S. superpower status and were conflicted by the possibility of the aliens creating a world government with more authority. That’s why we planned for their extinction.”
“Are you saying you are responsible for killing an entire alien race?”
Tim had jumped out of his chair at the time, his voice was erratic.
“Now you understand the importance of this information.” Boggs’ response seemed coy now.
“How? How could you kill a whole race of alien beings?” Tim really sounded upset.
“I mentioned before we had studied their physiology and that we still had the body of the dead E.T. incubating hepatitis in its body. We had our weapon. We knew it worked, just not how effectively.”
“You’re kidding me! You used biological warfare to exterminate an alien race?”
“The potential danger posed by their existence outweighed the chance they were sincere. After all, they were abducting our citizens. It was decided and the event wasn’t much different than the early Settlers contact with Indians in the Western United States. Only instead of a smallpox blanket, we simply returned their dead comrade to them, to take aboard their spaceship. Soon afterwards, they started falling out of the sky.”
Tim was quiet again on tape. Colonel Boggs’ voice had sounded so sincere. More coughing filled the tape. He remembered the man’s spasms and fit of pain while the pharmaceutical drip had worked overtime. Tim cleared his throat.
“The only thing this doesn’t clear up is, why do people still witness flying saucers? You couldn’t have killed all of them.”
“Oh, the ones we didn’t get with the virus, we shot out of the sky. They had a ‘city’ ship on the Moon, but that was quick to go from the disease we think. Roswell gave us enough time to reverse engineer some of their technology and make comparable craft, although the pressures and G-Force of the turns at that speed were enough to kill many of our test pilots over time.
After the E.T. threat was neutralized it was decided shortly before my retirement as a specialist in the field, a specialist of xenocide, that the flying saucer craft our government and other governments developed would continue to function and operate on sorties. We killed the intruders, but they already had their mythology. A God in the flesh is intolerable, but the myth of a God is a necessary part of the human psychology. We couldn’t simply have them disappear out of the skies now that we had eliminated them. We needed to maintain the presence in order to cover up our crimes.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Tim had said it then and felt it now.
“I had some friends in the Air Force who flew the craft. They talked about how they performed abductions where ordinary citizens were drugged with LSD and techniques the CIA learned during their MK-ULTRA experiments back in the 60s. We had developed them in order to ensure our control on the population, should something like this happen again. Those people came out really believing they were kidnapped by Aliens. It fuels these cults and groups of UFO crazies to this day. But the threat is long gone.”
“So you’re a mass murderer and the Government made this decision without the voice of the American people?”
“That’s about the jist of it, now you see why I called you here. I couldn’t live with this guilt on my conscience anymore. I know I’m going to die soon, but before I do, someone has to know, that the U.S. Government killed an entire alien species to protect the people of Earth. A crime not even the Nazis can compare up to.” The man’s voice seemed sincere.
“Would you still tell that story and convince the Joint Chiefs if you had the chance to change things?” Tim’s voice had been judgmental.
“Yes, I would. My crime is a horrible one, but I still feel it was necessary. Man needs to believe in the potential of man, not be servants to Alien Gods,” said Colonel Robert Boggs.
Tim shut off the tape. The man’s obituary listed the cause of death as, “Hepatitis induced liver failure.”

Long Overdue Introductions

If you follow my blog at all, you should know my name is Joe Klemann, I live in Indiana, I write creative fiction, uncreative fiction - also called Journalism to the nonprofessional, and I work on material for a variety of roleplaying games under the name Citizen X (you might check out some of my stuff at Datafortress 2020, http://datafortress2020.110mb.com/)

If you want to talk with me about anything, you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, or even AIM (TheUnholyRavager). My Email is joe.crazyperson@gmail.com

The bad part about submitting a new post is that it kicks back the old ones...which are far more interesting than this...

Katrina Story

This is the beginning to the First Chapter of a short story I started writing about a group of men who bond together after Hurricane Katrina...

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It was a big smelly sewer. It used to be a street. Now boats crossed it like they were cars on the road. Godawful terrible shame, those little boys bobbing fat in the water. An alligator was at home, but no man or woman. Soloman was small enough to have climbed the antenna on the roof. It was just enough to get him air time from the filth that had become the flooded lanes of New Orleans.

Soloman hated this place already, too many friends had died and too many women left him because of his height. It was a cesspool long before the levies broke. It was the worst neighborhood of the big easy. The Lower Ninth Ward, a terrible shit-storm of poverty, a rancid lake of violence and drug abuse. It was a breeding ground for the blues, a Darwinian test to see which survivor would grow prosperous. Culture always feeds on the razor’s edge.

God shunned the place because no one could get to his churches. Their doors were all under waves from the ocean. Their steeples still stood tall and their reverends and pastors tried their damnedest to preserve the spirit, risking life daily to deliver supplies to the desperate rooftop tenets. Jesus suffered beneath black waters, invisible to the faithful with their own crosses to burden.

Soloman had only one friend, one real friend, Felix, Felix “the cat.” A former gang member just like him, Felix hit a lucky string. He could get into the Marine Corps. He passed the physical. No more peddling dime bags and drinking late nights only to be brushed off by cunning ghetto whores, aiming for pocket books and alimony. Soloman had been hooked by a kid, although he was far from a father.

When Felix returned he had a new good friend, but it didn’t change their relationship much, a man named Ramos. Ramos was 6’ 7” and built like a Mack truck. Ramos always had a knife collection from the Philippines that he showed off, a couple curvy knives and strange hilted machetes. Ramos always bragged he cut a man in Afghanistan, slit him from his collar bone to his ear.

Damien was his neighbor and shared some ink with him, on his bicep, a black cross made of syringes. They had worked together, but never really liked each other. Damien was just too talented with tattoos and sketches, not too mention his accuracy during a ride always trumped his fellow travelers. The drive-bys in Ninth Ward were made famous by post-levee destruction documentaries. Soloman preferred the shadows than the open streets and front windows of drug houses. Damien’s 9mm was too effective for them to be eager compatriots.
There was of course Michael, he ran the “fiends,” of Ninth Ward. Sold them poison and didn’t mind killing. He survived long enough to sew the initials of the dead among his Sistine Chapel of Ink across his back. Michael was living history, every memory a pillar of his infamy and of his ego. He had no tolerance for life, the memory of success was more important. Damien had criticized him, which got him beaten and almost won him a morphine drip.

Coby had been back from a tour of duty, he was Soloman’s cousin, but they knew each other worse than acquaintances. It didn’t stop Felix from bringing him around; after all he was a fellow jarhead and he could justify the family reunion. It was all going great, Soloman stopped even worrying about the drug game, stopped worrying about his girlfriend, stopped worrying about Jacob, his kid. But the relief was washed away with his son, with his girlfriend, with his grandma, with his mother, with his dog. There wasn’t much of shit left for Soloman, other than the friends and neighbors he shouted too. It had been nearly half a week, the most he’d seen was a promise of safety at the dome, and some white actor in a bullet proof vest throwing him a bottle of water. Fuck this city. The marines even almost got washed away, guess they should have joined the Navy, maybe they’d have better swimming lessons.

Felix had been working with the others, they had been able to survive in it, and the roof was their desert. They were used to going without potable water. Michael’s house had got the worst of it, he had to swim to Damien’s roof. The two had made up old sores quick, none of the “game” mattered when no gang tags could be seen on submerged walls. Only survival mattered. We bullshitted, mostly at night, a lot of shouts from roof too roof, songs, war stories, and old girlfriends we’d shared. Personal information was no longer held back, we shouted every dirty secret across the filthy waters where our family’s drowned bodies bobbed like lifesavers.
Our life story was all we had to starve off the madness of our environment. Somehow the flood made sense, the lack of help made sense, the stinking corpses and the alligators all made sense. We’d already been written off from the black book of civilization. America no longer called us or sent text messages. We had considered them enemies long earlier. At least us non-patriots, those in the marines only confirmed our suspicions though. None of them earned a medal in the corps, or had a building named after them. They starved, and thirsted, and nearly died in slums no worse than our own, eighteen hours from Wall Street.

Somehow they knew that too much water was the same as too little, at least that’s what Ramos had said. Felix knew the corpses had poisoned it, he said he saw it when the rivers of Baghdad had filled full of republican guard berets. Soloman just knew he was thirsty and that dead dog didn’t make it easy to drink from the submerged streets.