Touched by an Alien

surprise me that his response was to let him know immediately if I was actually in trouble. He’d been given the nickname Conspiracy Chuck in high school, and, much as I hated to admit it, it was apt. Of course, all things considered, this seemed conspiratorial in some way, so maybe Chuckie wasn’t that far off.
    The trip from the lonely airstrip where we landed to our destination was fast, made in a large, gray SUV. I made a Men in Gray joke that also fell flat. Apparently these guys were not fans of humorous science fiction.
    We reached what I assumed was headquarters, possibly the most unexciting building I’d seen in a long time. Corrugated steel, which I figured made the place like an oven inside, painted in good old Navaho White, the most boring of paint choices. It was trimmed in taupe. Nothing could have said “industrial boredom” better.
    “Wow. If a building’s importance is directly proportional to how dull, dingy, and unassuming it looks, you guys must work for the most important agency in the world.”
    “We do,” White said quietly as he opened the thick metal door marked “Employees.”
    He ushered me inside, and I was treated to a spectacle of—not very much. Boxes and crates of all different sizes, mostly. It was a warehouse, and I had guessed the interior temperatures correctly.
    “Color me totally unimpressed. What is this, prank week at the mental institution? Or is this the Armani outlet, and you’re just letting me in on some super deals early?”
    “She can tell the designer,” Martini said under his breath. “Amazing.”
    “Focus, man, focus,” Gower said in the same tone. “Pull it damn together, Jeff. You’re freaking her out. And me, too.”
    “I think she likes it,” Martini replied with a grin.
    “So, the real thing’s underground, right?” I asked White, doing my best to ignore the other two for right now. “Or are you going to push a button and then everything will flip around and become all impressive?”
    “Neither,” White answered. He went over to one of the crates, nodded to Gower and Martini, and the two of them pried the lid off. “Take a look,” White said. It was an order, not a suggestion.
    I decided I was dead if they wanted to kill me anyway, so it wasn’t as though giving them the opportunity to push me into a big box was being more foolhardy than anything else I’d done all day. I went to the box and looked in.
    “Oh.” I wasn’t screaming, and I was really proud of myself. Martini moved next to me, and I knew without asking that he was ready to catch me if I fainted again. I found this comforting because what I was looking at wasn’t comforting at all.
    It was a man, dead, as far as I could tell. At least, I hoped so. He had long, sharp claws where his fingers and toes should have been, and his teeth were long and jagged and looked razor sharp. His expression was a contortion of fury and hatred.
    “He looks like the man I killed. Right before I killed him, I mean.”
    “They all look like that,” Martini said quietly. “The faces are different, some men, some women, but they all end up looking at humans like this.”
    “What are they? And don’t say mutants,” I added.
    “Superbeings is what we call them,” White replied. “It’s not a perfect description but it’s good enough.”
    “How?”
    “Roswell’s history is somewhat true,” White said. “In that aliens did crash-land here in the late nineteen-forties. However, when we opened the ship, the aliens were all dead. Our scientists studied them, of course, but they didn’t find anything of much interest. Different body structures, but they were more like humans than not. There were what we took to be books with them, and those were in a language so different from ours that it took decades to decipher.”
    “It took a supercomputer,” Gower interjected. “No one made any decent strides until the eighties.”
    “What did the books say?” I asked, wanting to stop looking at the dead superbeing in front of me but not being able to. This creature would never protect the weak and helpless, you could see it in every part of him.
    “Turned out the aliens were on a mission of mercy,” White said. “They weren’t the only ones sent out, just the only ones sent to Earth.” He let that one sink in for a bit before he continued. “Their planet had been invaded by a parasitic race. They’d learned how to fight against the parasites, but they knew this would only make