The Lost Planet of Ko'sstahn (Winner - SFSD 8 Collection)

Alien Invasion (SFSD 8.1) Ch 1

(Author's Note - Written for Round One of the SCi-Fi Smackdown Number 8 - Prompt was "tell the tale of an ordinary lad or lass who gets caught up defending Earth from invading aliens" Choose three photo prompts from the selection of eight. I have used #2 - the cavedwellers, #3 the spooky aliens in the misty ruins, and # 6 the shark-like spaceships)

Word count - 3436 (maximum 5000)

I saw my first alien when I was five years old. Of course I didn't realise it was an alien back then, he was just someone who looked different.

I was with my mother at the time, on our way out of the local deli with the carton of milk and loaf of bread we had just purchased, and he held the door open for us.

"Why is your head so big?" I asked him, innocently curious. Too young then to have learned to keep my mouth shut. My mother yanked my arm, hard.

"Gabriella!" she hissed. I looked up, bewildered. She was hurting me. Her face was red with embarrassment. "I'm so sorry," she apologised to the strange looking man. "Say you are sorry immediately!" she told me.

"But-"

She shook my arm again. "Now!"

"I'm sorry," I muttered, not really understanding what I was apologizing for. It wasn't my fault he had a big head. His eyes were huge too, and he had a tiny mouth but I guessed I shouldn't say anything about that, either.

The stranger smiled politely but his eyes were staring at me, as if he was trying to see inside my head.

Suddenly shy, I hid behind my mother.

"Thank you," she murmured to the stranger, who was still holding the door open.

"I'm so sorry," she said again, filling the awkward silence. She pulled me around to her other side, away from the stranger, and we left the shop and walked very fast down the street. I had to half-run to keep up.

"That was very rude, Gabriella," she continued in a low voice. "You should know better than to make personal remarks, you're not a baby any more. And I don't know what you meant, either, his head was no bigger than anyone else's. No television for you tonight, young lady."

I turned once, to see the stranger still staring after us.

That was the first time I saw an alien, but it wasn't the last.

~~~

It wasn't as if they were limited to a racial type or even a gender. They were scattered throughout the population of Adelaide, in all walks of life, apparently going about their business just like ordinary people. But where I saw a grey being with a large head, huge eyes and a small mouth, everyone else saw a Vietnamese waiter, a Sikh taxi driver or a white woman behind the shop counter. There was one odd thing though, I never saw any aliens disguised as children.

Looking back, I'm surprised at how long it took me to realise that I was the only person who could see them.

I tried to report them to the authorities, honestly I did, but no-one would listen. My own parents didn't believe me, nor did the busy policewoman at the Port Adelaide Police Station. My whispered call to the National Security hotline, resulted in an irate call back to my father about me being a public nuisance, and no internet access for a month .

When I turned sixteen, I gave up trying to tell anyone else about them. I was sick of counsellors and psychologists. The last psychiatrist I saw, put me on medication that made me feel like I was fighting my way through thick fog every day. This couldn't go on, I thought, rubbing my aching head - I needed a new strategy.

So I stopped talking about aliens. I stopped talking about grey beings disguised as humans. I agreed with feigned reluctance that I had been pretending, that it had all been a game to attract attention. I apologised to my parents and the psychiatrist. I had a feeling Dr Ford wasn't convinced, but to my immense relief, my parents were so grateful to have an apparently rational explanation for my behaviour, they overrode him and put an end to the therapy sessions.

All I could do now was to watch them, to try and discover what they were doing here on Earth. Why were they here? What were they doing? How long had they been here? It dawned on me with chilling certainty, that if I was the only person who could see them, then I was the only person who knew they were here, that Earth had been invaded.