We thought he would end the starvation. We thought he had the answer to the famines. What we didn't think, what we couldn't imagine, was that the alien aristocrat we had put our hopes in did not come to earth to save it. He came to enslave it.
My home had grown sick somehow. Plants wouldn't grow. Animals died. Little by little, the world starved, and no one knew how to stop it. Then Rafeahd arrived. He looked just like us, perhaps a bit taller, a little greyer and thinner, but no one saw him as much of a foreigner. The only reason anyone really believed he had come from space was the spaceship he flew in with. He had come on a diplomatic mission, he said. His world had long known of Earth but had never had enough to offer us to make contact until now. He could heal the planet if only we'd let him. How could we say no?
The first step, he explained, required that we all be vaccinated in case the alien terraforming proved dangerous to humans. We should have been suspicious then. We should have asked how he knew about our biology. We should have looked at his terraforming equipment. Starvation, however, makes men stupid.
A few hours after the vaccinations started, the eggs started to grow. It was amazing how fast the microscopic things turned into clots in the bloodstream, bulges in the muscle, swarms in the organs. A few friend and I were late in the vaccination line up. We saw what was happening, and for all Rafeahd's reassurances, we weren't quite that blind. We hid, collecting all the stores of canned food we could find. For a month or so, we lived in a bunker and just waited. Finally, we ran out of food and had to search for more. When we did, we could not believe our eyes.
The land had all turned into sand, and every so often, you could see the shapes of giant arachnids on the prowl. As we traveled, armed with a few tools we had thought to take with us, every so often a spider would swoop down from overhead or burst up from the sand beneath our feet and attack with razor legs and pinching, clacking mandibles. A crack to the head will kill one sure enough. However, a spider's eight eyes are quite useful at detecting sneak attacks. The apocalypse is full of useful instructions like that.
After what seemed like an eternity, we stumbled across a metal structure beneath the sand. We banged on the doors until a man came and furtively led us inside. The room seemed simple enough, a bunker just like ours. However, after the man performed a quick scan to make sure we weren't incubating spiders, he opened a secret back door that connected to a massive complex filled with people and scientific equipment. In the center of the room stood a seemingly complete rocket.
It turned out, as the man explained to us, Rafeahd only used a third of the population to create the spiders. They needed living bodies in which to grow, so he kept a stock of humans alive to serve as wombs. The harder you worked building Rafeahd's palace or tending to his whims, the longer you got to live. However, an underground still existed, in this case literally. They had discovered that Rafeahd took a medicine that kept the spiders from laying in him. He kept his stock on the spaceship orbiting Earth, so if we could get up there, we could find out how to make it and destroy the only real source of power he had over us.
Thus, three companions and myself volunteered to go up with the rocket. The day of the launch finally came. The flight went perfectly, from lift off to docking against the spaceship. However, we had not prepared for Rafeahd to greet us when we came out. One of my companions and myself had the second visor down to protect against the sun. We pushed passed Rafeahd and went along with our mission anyway. The other two, poor souls, had their visors up and could see Rafeahd straight in the face. He told them to remove their helmets, and they did. He casually drew two infant spiders from his pocket and told the men to stay still. They did, even as the creatures burrowed through their faces, they stood still. However, he had said nothing about screaming. I don't know what terrified me more, their cries, or when they stopped.
All I knew was that I only had so much time before Rafeahd found me. My companion and I had split ways to search faster. Finally, I found it, a vile of magenta liquid. I turned to run back to my shuttle, when I came face to face with a human holding a pistol. He forced me to hand over the vile and escorted me back through the ship. Another human guard appeared as we went. He started to giggle to himself about the deaths of the men that had been my friends. I wanted nothing more than to kill him, but I had a gun to my back and a hope that my final companion would get out alive. The first guard at least had the taste to make the other one shut up. At last, I was forced into a prison cell. My hopes died there, when I saw my final friend already sitting in a corner, dead.
Rafeahd hasn't killed us yet. Perhaps he's thinking of how best to get information about the rocket from me. Perhaps he just wants to experiment with psychological torture for a change. After all, sitting in a room with a corpse for days does things to you. All I can do is write this down. The nicer guard who's just trying not to die took a risk and gave me some paper and a pen when I asked him for it. He said he'd return it to someone on the surface when he goes down next. When you can't fight, and you can't flee, all that's left is to tell others what happened. Besides, knowing someone might hear this someday makes me feel a little less alone.
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