The sun was reluctantly contemplating a rise over Scarborough, as if the early morning clouds ruffled up on the horizon were too cosy to leave. The high street was quiet. It was early, the high street had a lie-in on Sundays.
The spaceship slammed into the Cricket Club with an almighty crunch, arced over rows of brick terraced houses, bounced in an empty bus park and then ploughed down the high street in one long, crushing brake.
“You didn’t put the spinning blue lights on!” screamed one Alien, who later took the human name ‘Derek’, from the spaceship’s command room.
“Agh! I knew I’d forget something!” replied his superior above the noise of shops being pulverised beneath them, “How are they going to know we’re aliens?!”
The ninety metre wide purple ball bowled its way through the town centre. Water gushed from ruptured water pipes and sparks zipped from torn electric mains as buildings and cars were steamrollered beneath the vast glowing spacecraft. It came to rest in a dramatic plume of dust.
The effects faded.
A bird dared tweet.
*
Nothing stirred as the residents of Scarborough tried to make sense of this unexpected intrusion. Nervous people brandishing tennis rackets and fire pokers began to emerge out of smartly painted front doors – humanity’s first line of defence. The spacecraft towered over the twisted wreckage of the town centre in total silence.
Over the next hour, as crowds began to swell, the ship’s glow faded and its skin dulled.
Two more hours passed without any signs of further activity, so, typically, the Humans started to get cocky.
Makeshift weapons were replaced with smartphones as new arrivals began snapping selfies of this world-changing event. Plucky families posed for social media in front of the vast gumball, as teenagers daubed graffiti on its sides – the ultimate tag. One group of BMX-wielding youngsters, led by gang-leaders Gazza and Tracey, even managed to appropriate a couple of the ship’s purple panels that had been forced loose by the impact. They then set about systematically looting the crushed remains of Argos.
Tweets and Facebook posts proliferated. Push notifications demanded people see for themselves. As the crowd began to swell, the whole event was quickly turning into a carnival affair. The familiar dingle of ice-cream vans drifted through the luring smoke of sizzling hot-dogs stands. Spinning candy-floss and garish sticks of rock further stretched the definition of a wholesome Sunday breakfast. Vendors flaunted hastily made t-shirts and one chap, who only the week before accidentally over-ordered 800 purple beach-balls, began to do a roaring trade to eager souvenir punters.
The first news crews rolled into place between tentative police cordons, racing to set up and capture what would have been career defining coverage of the event. That was if the arrival of this, so far relatively innocuous Alien ship, had not led swiftly and terrifyingly to the collapse of the Human system as we knew it.
*
It took the Alien crew three more hours to work up the courage to attempt contact with the lifeforms outside. Until recently, the Aliens on board hadn’t even believed in, well… aliens. They’d been spinning round the universe for hundreds of years on what they thought to be a mission to disprove the existence of extraterrestrial life. Their theories unravelled when they picked up a weak, faltering radio signal beaming ‘Gangnam Style’ nonstop and realised there was no way such a noise was nature’s doing. The Alien-Latterly-Known-As-Derek had been frantically doing his research since then and thought he had worked out decent protocol for alien ‘invasions’.
By the time the ship’s speaker system crackled on, the carnival atmosphere had subsided. Heavy-handed British military personnel had piled in to ‘secure’ the site and now sat behind tanks, with rifles trained on the ship.
The Aliens were highly developed creatures. Over the passing epochs they had evolved into perfectly spherical, featureless grey balls, with no eyes, mouth or, for that matter, orifice of any kind. Each identical to the next, they simply looked like two foot wide, swollen cannonballs. They huddled in the ship’s command room, telepathically trading thoughts on their next move.
How does it go? asked Derek’s boss.
Hang on… ‘Don’t worry. We… er… come… in peace,’ replied Derek silently with information from Wikipedia.
Derek’s boss cleared his little-used ‘throat’, really more of a built-in organic speaker which most Aliens back home had lost the knack of. The ship’s tannoy burst into the announcement.
“Don’t worry… We’re common peas.”
The Humans weren’t buying it. A loudspeaker spat out a garbled reply, barely understandable even to its native speakers.
What are they saying? asked Derek’s boss.
Derek frantically scanned it through his database. It seems to be: ‘don’t far king move’, he thought back unconvinced. My results suggest the grammar is a bit off, but they at least seem to know who you are.
Now what? asked Derek’s boss, Open the doors?
That sounds like a terrible idea! gushed Derek, ever the neurotic one. Let’s just leave.
Not likely, Skip, said a senior technician, later called Gerald, as the ship’s levitation system screamed towards breaking point. Seems like we’re snagged on something.
Derek’s boss rolled towards the main door, his Alien adrenalin singeing the air around him. Come on, we’re doing this!
The doors started to creak open.
Oh my life! thought Derek, much more publicly than he’d hoped.
Pull yourself together will you, how bad can it be? Positions!
The eighteen crew members quivered with fear. Derek’s infectious neurosis fizzled through the airwaves. The Aliens were aware they didn’t look the part but they were still determined to do things ‘the right way’ – first impressions really count. They emerged from the open door holding aloft cardboard cutouts of your standard large-headed, long-fingered extraterrestrial downloaded from Google images.
The British army’s bullets instantly riddled the cutouts to pieces. Splinters of cardboard showered down on the crew as they cowered low to the ramp, too terrified to move an inch. The door settled onto the remains of the local betting shop with a grating crunch. Guns were pointed. The Aliens froze to the spot.
“Is this some kind of joke?” asked the Major of the army company, genuinely perplexed by the whole event.
“Where the hell are they?” someone shouted as murmurs began to creep through the crowd.
Derek’s boss, sitting on the ship’s ramp in plain sight was apparently not recognised as a living form.
“Permission to move in sir?” asked Lieutenant Ginnie Brooks, leader of the second platoon.
“Er, well I dunno… I guess so,” replied the Major, who had apparently never been involved in an alien invasion before. Sensing the frowns being cast at his appalling indecision, he issued the next order with emboldened gusto, “OK, Team Delta advance, Alpha offer cover!… probably…”
They did so, cautiously picking their way over shattered window frames and twisted lamp posts, towards the vast purple orb.
Derek’s boss sat frozen to the spot in the middle of the ramp. The soldiers passed the two-foot wide grey ball as if it was part of the furniture.
“Hello?!” called out Lieutenant Brooks, “Anybody in there?”
Derek and his boss traded signals of confusion, are these creatures blind?!
The soldiers stepped into the large spherical command room, gilded in shiny orange. It was empty except for four tubes leading away in opposing directions and a dozen and a half featureless grey balls.
The Aliens held still as the soldiers stepped around them with wary eyes.
Lieutenant Brooks leaned towards Derek, frown set. Her breath misted up the Alien’s unblemished skin.
“What are these grey balls?”
Brooks prodded Derek and, in doing so, became Patient Zero of the outbreak that changed the world.
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