First Encounter Read online

  First Encounter

  A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller

  Kelvin Teo

  Book One of The Visitors

  Also By Kelvin Teo

  Dark Web: A Short Horror Story

  After Sunset: Six Scary Short Stories

  Available on Amazon

  This book is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places, events, organizations and incidents are either part of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2019 Kelvin Teo

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without express written permission by the author

  Before we begin, can I send you a gift?

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  1

  "Houston, come in. This is the ISS calling for Mission Control."

  I could hear Deb Cowlings in the command module trying to raise Houston, like she had been for the past five minutes. A delay of a few seconds in communicating with Houston was not uncommon, but for the past five minutes, there had been nothing. Not even a joke from those on the ground would have gone past twenty or thirty seconds.

  As I floated into the command module, Deb was staring at the radio equipment in front of her and had a dark cloud creeping across her face. After five minutes of trying to raise the space center on the ground, she was beginning to think something was dreadfully wrong.

  "Any luck?"

  She turned and looked at me and I could see the fear in her eyes.

  "No, sir. I'm getting nothing."

  "Run a full diagnostic on the system."

  "Sir, I've already done that."

  "Deb, please … do it again."

  "Yes, sir."

  I turned and looked back down the passageway, toward the crew quarters and could see three sets of eyes looking at me. Every pair of eyes harbored a look of fear I had never seen in my twenty years in NASA. It looked like everyone was beginning to succumb to their basest fears.

  "We're fine, sir."

  I turned back to her and looked over her shoulder at the readings.

  "So, the problem isn't here."

  "Correct. Whatever is causing this problem is happening on the ground."

  I pushed myself back from her and floated up to the wall in back of me and just stopped there. She turned and looked at me and I tried as hard as I could to make sure I looked like I was in control.

  "Have you tried Kennedy?"

  "Yes, with the same result."

  I turned and looked out the small, round window and could see we were moving over Europe and would be heading over Russia and China within a few minutes.

  "Try ESA. We're directly overhead right now, so we should get something."

  She turned back around and checked her freq sheet and changed the frequency on her equipment.

  "ESA Mission Control, this is the International Space Station. Do you read us?"

  The silence was absolute. There was not even the hint of static that you would expect.

  "ESA Mission Control, this is the International Space Station. Do you read us?"

  As I waited for some sort of response, I felt we weren't alone and I turned around to see the other crew members huddled near the hatch to the command module.

  Deb looked at her sheet again and changed the radio settings.

  "RosCosmos Mission Control, this is the International Space Station. Do you read us?"

  Silence.

  "Okay, commander, what’s up?"

  I looked back at the three in the hatchway and could see they were all looking for answers.

  "I’m not sure, Mike," I said to my second in command.

  Ariel asked, "Are we getting any signals at all from any of the space commands?"

  Deb shook her head.

  "It’s like there’s nobody there," she said, "on any freq."

  "What if we try some of the public freqs?" asked Phil.

  "What do you mean?"

  "NASA has twenty-four hour video feeds that go out over the internet, so fans of space travel can look in on Mission Control and see what they‘re doing. It may not be protocol, but we would at least be able to see they are there and trying to do something to fix the problem."

  I looked at Deb and she just shrugged her shoulders and turned back to the console. I could hear her tapping away on the keyboard as I looked at the other four.

  "Relax, guys. I’m sure it’s a glitch and we’ll get it sorted out."

  I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince. A glitch would be one thing, but to have it affect every, major space agency in the world was entirely another. Deep down I knew this wasn’t just some, run-of-the-mill comms problems that would be fixed with flipping a couple of switches. And I could tell by the looks on the others’ faces they didn’t believe that either.

  "Oh my god!"

  I swung back around as fast as zero gravity would allow. As I came around, I saw the video screen she was looking at and knew this had to be some sort of sick joke.

  I moved in closer, hovering just over her shoulder and stared at the screen. Deb had her eyes closed and I could hear her trying to control her breathing.

  "What the hell is going on?" I said softly.

  I could feel Mike float into the command module and come up behind me.

  "This can’t be real," I heard him say.

  The image on the screen was more horrifying that anything we could have imagined. The camera was the one that sent video of Mission Control out to the internet for the whole world to see if they wanted. Usually it was pretty mundane stuff, with men and women sitting and working at consoles, but that wasn’t what we were seeing right now.

  There were bodies scattered all around the room. Men and women slumped over their desks or laying on the floor. From the amount of blood we could see, no one was alive in the room we were watching.

  "Is this a still picture or a video?" I asked.

  No response.

  "Deb."

  "Sorry, sir. No it’s not," she said as she opened her eyes and looked at the screen. She pointed to the time counter on the upper right hand side of the screen and we could see the second counter was running.

  "It’s a live video," she said, not wanting to look at it anymore than she needed to.

  "What in God’s name went on down there?" asked Mike.

  Then he pointed to the screen and said, "Right there, see it?"

  At first I didn’t see what he was pointing at, but then it became clear. One of the techs, laying on the floor, was moving slightly. She was only moving her hand and arm, but it seemed like she was trying to push herself up.

  "That’s Kelly," said Ariel, as she joined us in the command module.

  "Is it?" I said as I looked closer at the screen.

  "Yes, I recognize the ribbon in her hair."

  As we watched, we could see she was struggling to get up. Her other shoulder was covered in blood and that arm appeared to be useless to her. With a lot of effort, she was able to push herself up and sit back on her heels. From our angle, we could see she was covered in blood and it appeared most of it was hers.

  Without warning, the reason for the mayhem we were seeing on the video became much more clear. Kelly turned her head quickly to her right and, even though we couldn’t hear any sound, we could tell she screamed.

  Her terror was cut short by the appearance of a dark figure moving through the room and heading straight for her. In its hand was a ragged blade, glistening with the blood of many people and the figure raised it as it approached Kelly. With a quick slice, the blade took Kelly’s he
ad off at the base of the neck and her body fell forward, ending in a heap on the floor.

  Deb screamed. Ariel cried out and I’m sure Mike said something, but my eyes were so focused on the screen nothing registered, but the figure as it turned around. There was no face to be seen in the dark hood. No eyes, no nose, no mouth.

  The figure’s hand was nothing more than a bunch of claws gripping the sword and I could see its feet and they were nothing more than stumps with gnarled toes.

  The part that scared me the most was when the cloaked figure stopped, then looked directly at the camera that was filming the whole event. It didn't take too long to realize this dark figure knew exactly what it was looking at and for some reason, I felt a cold chill run through my body, thinking this creature knew he was being watched.

  "Deb, turn it off."

  I looked down at her and she was just staring at the screen and shaking so hard I thought she was going to hurt herself. Seeing I was getting no response, I reached over her shoulder and flipped the switch and turned off the monitor.

  "What the hell was that?" asked Phil.

  As I looked around the cramped module, all I saw were four terrified faces looking back at me.

  2

  "So, what now commander?"

  All five of us were crowded into the crew sleep module and I could feel every set of eyes on me. I was the commander of the mission and they were looking to me for our next move. I wished they would quit looking at me, because I had absolutely no idea what to do next.

  I looked at Deb and asked, "Did you get anything new from the shortwave channels?"

  "Nothing that we didn't hear before. Just the same repeating broadcast that said something had allowed an army of demons to invade the Earth."

  "I still don't believe that," said Mike. "Demons? Really?"

  "Mike, you saw the same thing we all saw. Whether that was the textbook definition of a demon or not, it was something none of us had ever seen before," I said. "And it sure looked like what I would call a demon, even though it could have been a Halloween outfit."

  "I don't think someone would have gone to that much trouble to wear a demon outfit," said Ariel.

  "They would if they wanted to stay anonymous."

  "Look," I said, "costume or not, we've already figured out that whatever happened at Mission Control has happened at all the control centers around the world and I think it would be safe to assume this attack has not confined itself to the various space agencies. It sounds like it was a world-wide event."

  "So, we are going with demon attack?" asked Phil.

  "Until we hear otherwise, I think that would be a fair assumption."

  The silence overtook the room again, as everyone was waiting for me to say what we should do next.

  "Look, guys, I know you're expecting me to come up with a plan here, but as I am sure it is for you, this is my very first, world-wide demon apocalypse. I am very much open for suggestions."

  Mike spoke up, "I think we first need to see if we can contact anyone on the shortwave. Anyone. With all the survivalists around the world, I would assume there are a few still alive that can tell us what we face if we go home."

  Ariel looked at him with wide eyes and said, "If?"

  "Sorry," he said, "obviously we're going home sooner or later. Three of us were scheduled to head back in two weeks, but with what we've seen, you'd have to put us on the return capsule at gun point. That's assuming the return capsule even gets here."

  "You don't think it's going to come, Mike?" asked Phil.

  "Who's going to launch it or crew it? As far as we've seen, there's no one down there that will be coming up here and to tell you the truth, if someone did come up here, I'd be meeting them at the hatch with a gun."

  I saw a few nods around the other four.

  "Okay," I said, "we need to get a handle on our supplies and we need to begin rationing the food immediately. With the three of you NOT going home in two weeks and no supply ship coming up, we're going to hit a point where our food stuffs will run out. At that point, staying here becomes a non-issue."

  I looked at Phil and asked, "What would you say our supplies look like in longevity?"

  He looked at his notepad and then at me, "If we begin rationing now, cut our intake by half each day, we can stretch our stores to about eight weeks."

  "Eight weeks is good, but it is a moot point," said Deb.

  I looked at her, knowing what she was getting at.

  "How long do you figure?"

  "In less than six weeks we'll start to drag and it will only take a few hours after that for us to go down."

  "Not exactly the way I intended to get back to Earth."

  I could see Ariel and Phil weren't sure what she was talking about.

  "What she means is that without Mission Control, we have no real way of making course corrections. Without those, in less than six weeks we'll start dragging through the atmosphere of Earth and it will slow us down to the point we will fall out of the sky within hours, so obviously, we're going to need to be off this station before that happens."

  Phil asked, "We can't make those course corrections ourselves?"

  "We can, but without someone at Mission Control to give us precise numbers for burns, who knows where we'd end up? We'd just be guessing and being off by even one degree, we could crash sooner or we could mess up our orbit to the point we might fly into some elliptical orbit that would put us God knows where."

  "So," he said, "we're going home in less than six weeks whether we want to or not."

  "Correct."

  Mike said, "So let's hope we get in touch with someone down there so we can find out what we're flying into."

  "Alright, let's get to work. I want to go through this entire station, checking for anything that needs to be repaired that we can repair. I want to know the status of every last nut and bolt on this tub. If it's our home for the next five weeks, then it would be nice to know that it's going to last us that long."

  The little meeting broke up and everyone headed off to their assigned areas to begin checking the station. Everyone except Mike.

  "Trev, obviously we're going home in about five weeks. What are we going to do when we pop the hatch on the return capsule and stick our heads out?"

  "Mike, this is as new to me as it is to you. I have no clue what waits for us down there. We could all be dead five minutes after stepping out of the capsule or we could find the demons have left and we're the only five people left on the planet."

  "Or we could just ride the station into the atmosphere and go out in a blaze of glory."

  "Well, like I said, not the way I intended to go home."

  3

  "Commander! We got someone!"

  I was in the sleep module, trying to get a few zzz's after pulling an all-nighter in the command module. The sound of Deb yelling back through the station was enough of an alarm to cause me to bounce right out of my rack.

  It had been two weeks since we saw the video of the devastation at Mission Control and other than a repeating broadcast on a shortwave channel, we had heard nothing from Earth.

  As I floated into the command module, I could see Deb was shaking with excitement.

  "Commander Donovan, meet Todd Causey."

  Just then a voice crackled from the speakers.

  "Commander Donovan, how are you today?"

  I could tell from the voice, we were talking to someone that was a bit older than us.

  "Mr. Causey, our day just seems to have gotten a whole lot better. How are you, sir?"

  "Well, better than most of the planet, I would say."

  I looked at Deb and asked, "How long do we have?"

  "Probably no more than ten minutes."

  "Mr. Causey, we may only have about ten minutes before we go out of range. We need to get some information before we lose you."

  "Okay, I'll tell you what I can, but what do you mean you will lose me?"

  "Didn't you tell him, Deb?"

 
"No, sir. I hadn't gotten to that point."

  "Told me what?"

  "Mr. Causey, you are talking to the International Space Station. We're a little over two hundred and fifty miles over your head right now."

  "So, this is the government talking to me."

  "Well, NASA, so yes, I guess that would be the government."

  "You're the ones that brought this apocalypse on us!"

  "Sir, we've been on the station for more than four weeks now, some of us three months. I can assure you we didn't have anything to do with what is happening right now."

  "Likely story. One day everything is just fine around here and then, BAM! We got demons from Hell running around killing everyone. I'm pretty sure it was the government that caused it."

  "Sir, what happened?"

  There was nothing, but silence.

  "Mr. Causey."

  Nothing.

  "Sir, please talk to us."

  I looked at Deb and she said, "We shouldn't be out of range yet."

  "First of all, stop calling me sir. I worked for a living."

  I almost wanted to laugh when I heard him say that.

  "So, you wore the uniform."

  "Yes, I did. Korea, 1953. So, that would be Master Sergeant Causey to you, sir."

  "Well, Sergeant Causey, we are going to be running out of food here in about four weeks, but we will need to abandon the ISS in less than three weeks. We'd sure like to know what we're going to be dropping into."

  "Hell, Commander Donovan. That's what you'll be dropping into. Hell."

  "We have less than two minutes, sir," said Deb.

  "Sergeant, our time is fast coming to an end. Can you tell us quickly, what happened and how many people are left alive."

  "We don't know exactly what happened. Some government lab in Illinois started up some sort of experiment that was supposed to allow them to see into another dimension and rumor has it, it got out of control and opened the door to Hell, allowing the demons from that awful place to come into our world. As for how many are left, that's impossible to say. I am the only person I've seen alive in the last three weeks, though I have talked to others on the radio."