Intergalactic Terrorist (New Dimension Book 1) Read online

  “This is my…” the man said struggling, “erm… my… what do you call it?” He reached into a small draw that opened from the wall at the touch of a button, and pulled out a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary and began sifting through the pages.

  “You will have to excuse me,” he continued, “I only learned your language a few hours ago. Strange as I never even knew your language existed until a few hours ago. Ah! Here it is!” His finger stopped on one of the words and he read it out excitedly. “This is my… space…ship!”

  Spaceship. Charlie blinked. This was his spaceship? Charlie understood completely! This was a spaceship and the man with the slightly plastic-like skin and the moustache was an alien who had abducted him!

  “You’re a crazy person,” Charlie spluttered, “a genuine, real crazy person. What asylum did they release you from? Hmm? Forgotten to take your medication today have we Mr Alien? What planet are you from? Neptune? Mars? Venus?”

  “Zilzerbit actually.”

  “Zilzerbit! Of course you are! Shouldn’t you be saying ‘take me to you leader’ or ‘we come in peace’ or ‘beam me up Scotty?’”

  The man looked at Charlie with concern. “Are you alright?” he asked. “Have you forgotten to take your medication?”

  “No,” Charlie said firmly, “I do not need to take medication.” It was a lie. Charlie took sleeping pills every night and a strong form of headache tablets every morning. “Now if you would be so kind as to let me off your spaceship so I can return to my flat and get some much needed sleep. Or are we flying through space? Hmm?”

  “As I have already said to you Charlie, it is broken. That is why I brought you here. So you could fix it.”

  Charlie walked back to the door with the lock. “I cannot fix this spaceship because this is not a spaceship. Yes, you’ve done a grand job decorating the inside of the room to give the impression of a spaceship but I’ve seen more realistic sets on Buck Rodgers.”

  “But it is a real spaceship.”

  “Prove it.” This was Charlie’s chance. “Open the door. Let me out. Allow me to see your amazing ship!”

  “Very well.” The man pressed another button. There was a loud chugging noise as the lock on the door began to turn and twist. The clasp opened like an old steam train rolling down the track. A great vibrating rumble shook through the room, wobbling Charlie’s feet as the door slowly began to slide open.

  Charlie peered his head outside. It was dark and his eyes took a moment to adjust to the lack of light. He saw trees. Lots of trees. A forest! So this was the forest that this crazy bastard has mentioned on the telephone. But what forest? Charlie lived in the middle of the city. The nearest forest was miles away.

  This was Charlie’s moment. He had it all planned out in his head. He would jump out of the door and rush, probably screaming like a girl with his arms flapping, away from the forest and back to civilization. He would instantly report this ‘want-to-be’ alien to the police for:

  a) abducting him;

  b) somehow finding his address, which probably meant stalking;

  c) eating a poo-like substance from a can, which he was sure was illegal!

  Charlie looked one last time at the moustached man and was about to say something along the lines of ‘so long sucker’ but felt he neither had the muscles or the cheesiness of Arnold Schwarzenegger so instead just began to run. It was a shame that he hadn’t looked down or else he would have realised that there were a set of twenty-two steps leading from the door to the ground. He tumbled down them all, banging every bone in his body as he fell. He landed with a splash in a pool of mud of at bottom!

  Slowly and very carefully he stood, checking that none of his limbs had fallen from his body. By this time his captor had already descended the steps and was standing beside him. Charlie was cold, in pain and wet. He looked down at his clothes. He still wore his creased shirt, worn trousers and shoes with the holes in, although now they were caked in mud. His socks dripped and squelched between his toes.

  “I was about to say watch out for the steps,” the man said.

  Charlie tried to wring some of the mud from his shirt. “Thanks,” he muttered sarcastically. “Well… seeing as though my miraculous escape plan failed I might as well take a look at this spaceship of yours.” He turned around expecting to see an old wooden shed or an abandoned building. Instead however, what he saw made his eyes stretch so wide he looked like a rabbit startled by oncoming car lights moments before becoming a permanent fixture on the road.

  The spaceship was larger than a house! It was silver and shiny, albeit speckled with dints and burn marks. It was a dome-like shape sat upon six thick metallic legs planted firmly into the ground. Atop of the dome sat a number of large antennae-like towers. It truly did look like it was from another world!

  For the first time since the moustached man had told him, Charlie began to doubt his own disbelief in alien life. Could what the man have said to him be true? He slowly turned to him.

  “This is a joke right?” he said quietly. “I’m the star of some hidden camera show right? Some cheese infested television presenter with a smile as fake as my mothers breasts is going to jump from behind that tree right?”

  The man shook his head.

  “You really… are an alien?” Charlie asked.

  The man slowly nodded his head.

  “The ship is impressive,” Charlie continued, “but I still don’t believe it. I can’t. I won’t.”

  “You need more proof?”

  “Please.”

  The moustached man placed his fingers underneath his chin. He pushed hard until his fingers seemed to rip through his flesh. Charlie staggered. The man pulled outwards, stretching his skin until it began to detach itself from whatever was below. To Charlie’s horror he realised that the plastic-like face with the jet black hair and the moustache was in fact a mask! With a sudden slap, the mask flicked off, falling to the floor!

  Charlie’s mind reeled. Before him, still wearing the suit, was what Charlie could only describe as an alien. Pale grey skin, one large nostril were a nose should be, a large smiling mouth that spread from one side of his face to the other, two small and squinting yellow eyes, a bald head and no ears. Sitting on top of his head were two antennae that attached back at the top into a large boil of skin that seemed to act as an ear.

  “Hello Charlie. My name is Greebol. A pleasure to meet you,” he said grinning.

  This time there were no random images fluttering through Charlie’s head. This time he knew the best thing to do was close his eyes and drop to the floor as he was about to faint. But before he had the chance to close his eyes and drop to the floor, he fainted and his world once again went black.

  Chapter 4

  A fat badger crawled out from her burrow and began sniffing the ground in search of food. It was deep autumn and food was becoming scarce in the forest. It was lucky for her that she had eaten enough in Spring and Summer to keep her going through the long winter nights.

  She smelt something that was possibly edible from behind a fallen log not far in the distance. Quickly she hurried over to it before some rival creature stuck their snout in first. She recoiled quickly at the strange smelling rubber thing lying on the ground. Not food at all. Another one of those Human things that she didn’t understand.

  The badger continued her prowl across the forest floor. If she had been interested in the sky and happened to glance upwards at this exact moment, she would have noticed a small flicker as something punctured through the Earth’s atmosphere. It zoomed towards the ground, seemingly out of control, crashing in the forest not far from the badger, who looked up momentarily curious before carrying on her way.

  A crater several meters deep steamed like a hot turd in the cold. The trees above it and the grass and bush around it singed. Slowly, as the steam subsided, the item that had fallen from the sky revealed itself. Stuck at the bottom of the crater sat a small perfectly spherical dark metal object. What was it? Wher
e did it come from? No one could say… not that there was anyone around to witness it fall from the sky. In fact the only thing that did see it fall was a balding broken-beaked crow perched at the top of a large conifer tree some miles away. It wouldn’t cross the crow's mind again until several years later when, due to a toxic waste spill, the crow would develop a mild form of intelligence and, disguised as a parrot to make people trust him, would hijack an American space shuttle launch in search of where that falling object came from, becoming the first crow in space. Discovering that, as previously mentioned, there was no other life in their galaxy, he would settle down on a distant red planet, gorge himself on cherry flavoured rocks and die. Back on Earth the crows would hail their missing intelligent comrade as a god-like figure and, in a mass departure, would attempt to fly away from the planet to join their deity on the red world. Of course, unable to stand the immense pressure far above the clouds, the crow’s brains would explode sending them falling back to the ground like one great black sheet. Many Human cultures would mark this incident as the beginning of the apocalypse, starting a great war that would stretch the planet, lasting for over one hundred years and killing at least half of the world’s population.

  For now though, the crow was uninterested. Nothing seemed interested in the small metal sphere that had fallen from the stars. It sat, ignored, in the crater, as if it had always been there. For some time it rested. The singed leaves on the trees, grass and bushes had cooled. The steam from the crater fully dispersed. The full moon was raised in the sky, shining its blue light down on the motionless metal sphere.

  Then suddenly and without warning it moved.

  Chapter 5

  The alien, going by the name of Greebol, smiled his unusually wide smile and wiped Charlie’s face with a wet cloth that he took out from the small drawer in the wall. Charlie was back inside the spaceship and lying on the metal table once again. He stared madly at the grey skinned alien as he moved about his ship. He dared not move, however a mad cramp struck his leg, probably due to the amount of steps he had fallen down only moments earlier. He tried to ignore it but the pain became too extreme and he was forced to sit up and rub his calf frantically.

  “Cramp?” said the alien with a genuine sound of concern. “Try this?” He reached back into the small drawer and pulled out a bottle similar to a flask and handed it to Charlie, who opened it cautiously. At once a small pink blob jumped from the neck of the bottle landing on Charlie’s injured leg. As he desperately tried to rip the peculiar slimy substance from him, it began to expand until it covered his entire leg. A warm sensation emitted from it and for a moment Charlie wondered if he had actually peed himself. Then, as quickly as it had attached, the pink blob removed itself from his leg and Charlie realised, to his embarrassment, that he had indeed peed himself!

  The pink blob bounced back into the bottle and the alien named Greebol popped the lid back on. Charlie discovered his leg no longer hurt. In fact his leg had never felt better.

  “Handy little fellow to have around,” Greebol said smiling. “Found him on the remote planet of Anterilax. He is some sort of healing fluid creature… little intelligence… an overpowering need to cure. As he absorbs your pain he appears to feed from it. I call him Bob.”

  “Erm… thank you?” Charlie responded, not really knowing what to say. “Can I go home now? Please?”

  Greebol placed the bottle back into the drawer and closed it. He slapped his hands together and smiled that large, uncomfortable smile once again. “You cannot go yet Charlie… you have yet to fix my electrical.”

  “I can’t fix your spaceship,” Charlie gibbered, “I am not a technician! I’m just a call centre agent and I’m not even that anymore thanks to you!” Courage began to take hold of him. It was all he had left. “You can’t go around abducting people,” he said sternly, “it is illegal!”

  “For your planet maybe,” Greebol said.

  “It should be illegal on every planet! I have rights you know! I have a life… albeit not much of one. I demand you return me to my home at once!”

  Greebol appeared a little shocked. “I never knew your species were so passionate,” he began. “Admittedly I never even knew your species existed until today! I crashed here you see. There I was, flying perfectly normally through space, when all of a sudden there was a bright golden light that expanded from the distance at a speed faster than a sheep chased by horny drunk man. It covered my ship, I was knocked off course, my engines cut out. The next thing I knew I was hurtling towards this remote planet! Luckily I managed to stabilise my electrical before it smashed into a million pieces!”

  Charlie crossed his arms and said, “That’s all very well but…”

  “And then the strangest thing happened…” Greebol continued, not seeming to notice Charlie had spoken. Something Charlie was more than used to, “…I spoke your primitive language! Not very well I admit… something I corrected whilst you were just unconscious on my table.” He picked up the dictionary and shook it with a smug look on his face. “I learned!”

  “I really don’t care,” Charlie said stubbornly, “I just want to go home…”

  “You cannot go home! You need to fix my electrical!”

  “As I have already said Mr Greebot or whatever you name is…” Charlie wondered if he was correct in calling this alien ‘Mr’. For all he knew it could be a Mrs. Heck, it could even be some sort of gender that he had never heard of, but he didn’t feel it appropriate to look down the alien's pants. Besides, he hadn’t known him long enough for anything like that. “I cannot fix this spaceship,” he continued, “I don’t even know how to fix the leak under my kitchen sink. I just stick a bucket under it! The level of water leaked from that pipe must match that of the river Nile! Could quench the thirst of an entire drought affected tribe for years! Would be enough to support the building of an ark! I cannot fix things! The light in my bedroom has been broken for months… although that’s probably not so bad the things those dirty Turkish butchers get up to… meat slapped in all the wrong places.” He shuddered.

  “But do you not work at King George’s Electric Repairs?” asked Greebol hopefully.

  “Not any longer! And even when I did my job was to answer telephones. Other people did the fixing!”

  Greebol looked as though someone had kicked him in the groin – presuming he had one. His small, squinting yellow eyes almost filled with tears. The strange antennae on top of his head drooped as though he had suddenly received a cold shower.

  “But… how will I ever get home?” he said sadly, “I do not want to be trapped here… forced to wear my Image-Rendering Mask for the rest of my two hundred year long life!”

  A pang of pity hit Charlie. Even though this alien had abducted him, he felt sorry for him. A thought occurred to him that Greebol wasn’t actually that different to him. Apart from the obvious fact that his face looked like a grey cows udder.

  “There must be some way of fixing this thing,” he said, patting Greebol on the shoulder. For someone who had just met an alien for the first time, Charlie thought he was handling it rather well. “There must be someone else that can help?”

  Greebol’s yellow eyes turned slowly, stopping as they met Charlie’s. “Someone… else?” he said meekly. Then with a sudden new blast of gusto he sprang forward, planting a large sloppy wet kiss on Charlie’s lips. Charlie fell back disgusted as he tried to wipe the cold dead feel of those extraterrestrial lips from his. Being abducted by an alien was one thing… being embraced in a somewhat passionate lip-lock with one was another thing altogether. He hoped he hadn’t caught anything. He hoped he wasn’t pregnant!

  Greebol bounded over with a head achingly amount of enthusiasm and switched on a small screen where one of the porthole windows had previously been. Instantly television appeared. Not alien television but full colour Human television! Charlie almost wailed with joy at seeing something familiar! There was a cornflakes advert… and an old re-run of Starsky and Hutch! There was Unive
rsity Challenge and Trevor McDonald on the news! And there… there was Geoffrey George in his ridiculous advert!

  Greebol had been flicking through the various channels and had now found what he was looking for.

  “The King you can trust,” said Geoffrey George, dressed in a royal cloak and crown, sitting on a large throne, whilst the sound of trumpets blasted in the background. “You can trust my electrical repairs!”

  A jester appeared on the screen trying to juggle a number of items: a television, a radio and a toaster. He slipped on a banana skin, dropping the electrical items, which smashed on the floor. Forced canned laughter filled the air.

  “Don’t trust any old joker,” Geoffrey George continued, “trust me! King George! Call me today! At King George’s Electrical Repairs we can fix anything electrical!”

  As the advert came to a close, Geoffrey George was surrounded by children holding electrical goods, staring up at him like some sort of electrical god whilst a Michael Jackson song played on a bontempi organ.

  “Prick,” Charlie muttered as the advert finished and Greebol switched off the screen.

  “Perhaps,” the grey skinned alien said, “but he is a prick who knows his stuff! His stuff about electrical repairs! I finally understand it now. You were just part of a large organisation… just one little worker in a huge working world!”

  “That’s right.”

  “You were just a pawn… a drone… at the bottom of the ladder… the last man to know anything… a nobody-“

  “Alright, alright we get the picture,” Charlie grumbled crossing his arms and tapping his foot.

  “There is someone else who can fix my electrical,” Greebol exclaimed with joy.

  “Well…” said Charlie looking around at the button-clad room, “at least someone who is better qualified than I am.”

  “Then I shall fetch them!” Greebol replaced the mask back onto his face. For a moment it sat there, bright white, not a feature upon it. Greebol pushed something underneath the chin and instantly a nose and ears began to form, followed by eyes and a mouth. Eventually, after all of the features appeared, the skin turned from the bright white to the plastic looking peachy colour, the hair turned jet black and the moustache, the one that made the man mask look like an Italian car salesman, grew under the nose.