Thinning the Herd

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright 2011 Plot Roach.

Thinning the Herd

By Plot Roach

In the years before the invasion, we thought ourselves alone in the universe. Even the smartest among us proposed that the nearest sentient life forms would be long dead before they could ever make contact with us, much less cross the universe to meet us. They were wrong.

They came swiftly, and with almost no warning. The government failed to warn us, thinking that the mass panic it would cause before the invasion would be worse than was what to come. People with wealth and power were able to escape for a time. But before long, no amount of money or guns could keep you safe from the Hunters.

All modern technology above a basic gun was rendered unusable due to alien control. People tried to leave the cities in dead cars and planes dropped from the sky. At first it was just our fears, and what we did to one another that caused all the chaos. You would be surprised what the most patient and peace loving among us could do when faced with an unknown threat. Churches begged their followers to abandon their communities and live in compounds to serve the lord, promising protection from these “heathens from space”, only to fall into violence as supplies dwindled. Other groups formed suicide pacts. The streets were littered with the bodies of innocents who had gotten in the wrong person’s way.

Then the first reaping began. The creatures, dressed in camouflaged armor, began to take the Earth, city by city. The human residents disappeared -but not without leaving evidence of their predators behind. The first news footage, taken from a civilian’s camcorder, showed one of the Hunters catching a homeless man and gutting him on the street, like one does a prey animal, taking him back to its ship. One by one, the major cities fell, streets were empty of life except for flies feeding on the rotting human offal left behind.

Those of us that were left took to the country, hoping to evade the fate of those who refused to leave the city. It was hard to live in the wild, now trying to survive on what was almost a lost knowledge of the wilderness. Cody, our best hunter, took me out into the winter snows with him, to teach me how to hunt with a crossbow. We brought back anything we could, from rabbit to porcupine. One day we tracked deer into a box canyon. Cody instructed me to only shoot at the bucks, since the does would be pregnant and would provide us with more meat in the future. He told me that he could remember a time as a child when his own father had taken him hunting. “Not because the food was in short supply, but because there were too many deer for the land to support throughout the winter. We had to thin the herd, you see. So that the others could live and prosper later in the year.”

Years passed, and we thought ourselves alone in the world. All radio communication, email and telephone service had ended with the first scout ship’s planet fall. Then there were signs posted along the abandoned highways. Leaflets were dropped from the sky.

Papers written in various languages proclaiming that the world was free from the alien invaders. Yet the wording was off, as if pieced together by someone who didn’t know our language. We still saw the ships pass by overhead. Had the aliens come to know enough about us to try and trick us out of hiding?

We tucked ourselves even further into the mountains, hoping that we could keep ourselves safe. Our lives followed the cycles of nature and it was three more years since the last pamphlet had fallen from the sky, when we ventured out into the open, seeking food for our little village.

We stalked across the land made white with winter’s cold oblivion, a herd of deer in our sights. Cody raised his crossbow, but was unable to let the arrow fly. The deer spooked and ran into the tree line. Meanwhile, Cody was thrown back by the force of a blast. It left a neat, tennis ball sized whole in his chest which was cauterized closed before his body ever hit the snow. Knee deep in the snow, I could only watch as the Hunters approached. I knew that Cody was dead beside me. One of the Hunters raised an arm in my direction, ready to shoot at me and end me like my fallen lover. The other hunter pushed the first alien’s arm into the air and motioned to me. It then gestured to itself, miming a mound over its belly. They moved forward and I backed away into the trees, watching as they gutted Cody like we prepared the deer in order to bring them back to camp. They knew that I was pregnant, or maybe just guessed at it. In either case they spared me for the season. Perhaps they too were only thinning the herd.