“Alright. What is it today? Is it zombies again? I hate those.”
Moritz was pouring coffee for himself and the other three people around the table in his small cafe. He had to close it down when his best friend called for an urgent meeting. All the meetings Conradin called were labeled as urgent which didn’t help to keep his anxiety down.
“It’s not zombies. You’re not going to believe this one. It’s something we haven’t seen so far. Also, much less icky than zombies.”
For some reason, Conradin was beaming at them, eyes shining in excitement, while at the same time shuddering at the memory of the zombies. In his lap, Doerthe the rooster sat, relaxed. It was a regular old day for him.
“Get to the point. If something is killing people, we should really get out there and put a stop to it.”
As always, Leona was the voice of reason, although Moritz assumed that much of her apparent worry for the general populace was just her trying to sate her curiosity sooner.
“I’d get to the point if you’d let me finish talking.”
‘Here they go again,’ Moritz thought, going to the back of the cafe to grab brownies for everyone. He wouldn’t be missing anything important for a bit.
“If I just ‘let you finish talking’, you’re going to talk nonsense for the next hour, building up excitement and stringing us along, going on about how you’ve already got everything figured out, being the greatest hero in the world or whatnot. So I’d rather you just skip that bit, because everyone here knows it’s stupid, and get on with it.”
Yup. Leona was not having any of Conradin’s antics, and so the spiel went on.
“I would like to remind you about the time I took down the zombie that was trying to chew off your face, saving your life, in return to your claim that I’m not a hero.”
“That was one time and you only managed to do that because you got zombie ick splattered all over you and stumbled while having a freak-out.”
“Great heroes save people by accident all the time!”
When Moritz returned with the brownies, Conradin was no longer sitting at the table, but rather standing next to it, puffed up and ready to argue… well, something. Next to him, Doerthe strutted around angrily at having been banished from his seat.
Mia, who had been listening to the exchange quietly, had buried her face in her hands while sitting out the traditional bickering.
“Who wants brownies?”
At Moritz’ question, the tension broke and Conradin sat back down, accepting his brownie like the rest of them.
Silence followed and everyone busied themselves with the food for a moment.
“It’s aliens,” said Conradin finally, when he was halfway done eating.
Leona started laughing.
“No way.”
“Yes way. So what are we going to do about them? Do you guys think we should call the government?”
It was rare for Conradin to consider asking anyone for help. Naturally, Leona jumped at the opening.
“What do you mean, call the government’? Do you want to call the chancellor and go ‘hey, we got aliens, could you send the army, please?'”
Here, Mia piped up: “I like that idea. Wouldn’t it be nice if we let professionals take care of things just once? I don’t mean calling the chancellor, but, I don’t know, maybe there’s someone we could call. Aliens sound very… alien to me. How would we know how to fight them?”
While Moritz generally agreed with the sentiment, he was also pretty sure that nothing any of them could say or do would get anyone to go to their little town out in the middle of nowhere to help them fight aliens. After all, no one showed up when they had literal zombies running around.
“Well, I was just thinking that in the movies, the government is usually involved when there are aliens about,” Conradin started to explain. “And so I figured we’d team up with some special agents, like the men in black, and uh… I guess they probably don’t have men in black, do they?”
He deflated at the realization.
“Never mind. We got this. We’ll just handle this like we handle everything else.”
“We rarely ever handle things ourselves, to be honest. Usually we get help from these random people showing up in our lives.”
Mia was right with that. The amount of times some strangers showed up wielding weird powers and saving them was suspicious, to say the least.
For Conradin, the insinuation that he wasn’t in fact responsible for all of their heroic deeds was akin to blasphemy.
“That’s it. We’re going out on patrol. I know where they’re supposed to have landed. We’ll handle this. Without extra help. Just us and the aliens. Let’s go.”
With way too much drama, Conradin got up and strutted towards the exit, followed by his rooster. Moritz was sure that he would lead them into yet more trouble, but since Leona was already following, all he could do was exchange a tired glance with Mia before going after them.
“What are we even going to do against the aliens,” Moritz asked as they left the cafe, locking the front door behind them.
“For now, this is a scouting mission. We’ll see what they look like and figure out their weaknesses.”
Yeah. Scouting missions usually ended in fighting missions. Moritz wasn’t sure whether it was bad luck, or Conradin’s inability to back down whenever he felt his perceived heroism challenged.
Their town was small, but the buildings were spread far apart. It was a bit like someone took a bunch of suburbs and stuck them together. Still, they walked for almost half an hour, led by Conradin and his pet, towards the outskirts of town where meadows, fields, and forests took over instead of residential areas and shopping districts.
Moritz was relieved that the aliens’ landing site wasn’t anywhere too crowded. It would just make everything more of a mess.
Meanwhile, Conradin was spouting all kinds of nonsense that he had probably picked up from science fiction movies, spurred on by sarcastic remarks from Leona. Moritz prayed that they wouldn’t all die.
The landing site was hidden behind a small forest, and so they heard the aliens before seeing them. What was weird about the whole thing, was that it sounded like there was already a fight going on. This didn’t bode well. Or maybe it did. Maybe someone took care of it already.
When they rounded the last couple of trees, a horrific scene unfolded itself.
Smack in the middle of an open meadow sat a contraption, the size of a single-family home, that didn’t look like a flying saucer at all, but was easily identified as the alien’s spaceship.
Around it were easily over twenty creatures that, while vaguely humanoid, clearly disproved all of Hollywood’s theories on alien anatomy, locked into combat – with a much larger number of zombies.
“You said no zombies.”
It was a stupid thing to say, but the first that came to Moritz’ mind.
“Does this mean we can just go and let them do their thing,” asked Mia hopefully.
Conradin stood, frozen. Meanwhile, the aliens were defending themselves with what could only be laser guns, against the mass of brainless biting-machines. The sheer amount of zombies threatened to overwhelm them, as some of them snuck up on their prey to sink their teeth in appendages that Moritz couldn’t name.
“This can’t be. We were supposed to make first contact. Why are there zombies? I thought all the zombies were gone?”
For Conradin, the world collapsed on him. His hopes were shattered. All the scenarios he had made up on the way went out the window with this twist.
Moritz could see the disappointment threaten to cause another bout of drama.
Behind them, the shuffling of long grasses announced another spectator and they whipped around in unison. Upon seeing who it was, Conradin regained some of his vigor.
“Well, well, well. A vile villain shows his face.”
Tim Thyme, the man that had just made his way towards them, raised his eyebrows at him.
“I don’t know whether I should be flattered by that title, or annoyed. Maybe I should just be amused that your childishness is sticking to you well into your twenties. But to answer your earlier question: I’m the reason why there are zombies fighting off the alien invasion. I hid some for… scientific purposes, and it seemed appropriate to utilize them here.”
Moritz’ mouth had gone dry. While Conradin was overdoing it with calling the man a villain as if they were in some sort of superhero movie, the guy was responsible for killing at least one person.
And apparently, he also kept zombies for fun.
“Can you control them?”
Mia decided that this was the perfect opportunity to ask the weirdest question she could think of.
The man looked over to her, mildly astonished, before sighing.
“No.”
Then, Moritz understood. If he could control them, he could sic them on him and his friends. You could always trust in Mia asking the important questions. Establishing that there wasn’t a blatant imbalance of power made the situation a lot less terrifying.
“Great, so we can all enjoy zombies versus aliens together in harmony.”
While Leona’s words were laced with sarcasm, all of them knew that they weren’t just going to fight out here, next to laser-shooting aliens, which diffused the tension significantly.
For a moment, they all watched the spectacle together, hoping for the zombies to win.
Out of the two threats, zombies were by far the easiest to deal with. They were slow and brainless and their spread had been stopped easily, the last few times they popped up. It had made Moritz wonder how they always seemed to turn into a gigantic plague in the movies.
However, as things went, the zombie’s numbers were dwindling, and while the aliens took heavy hits as well, it soon became clear that they were going to come out on top.
“I’m going to need to restock on zombies after this,” noted Tim with heartfelt disappointment.
The fact that no one commented on what that would entail was probably due to the rising fear as to what would happen, when the zombies inevitably lost.
It took almost half a minute for Conradin to explode.
“What do you mean, restock? Did you restock those guys? Are those not leftover zombies from a previous outbreak? Did you infect a bunch of civilians? Guys, this is it. I don’t care that he’s supposed to be immortal or some crap. We’re four versus one – five if you count Doerthe – jump him and we’ll make sure-“
The rant was interrupted by a car pulling up next to the meadow, causing everyone to turn towards it. A woman jumped out of it, sword drawn.
“ARE YOU ALRIGHT?” She yelled while running at them.
“THERE ARE ALIENS TRYING TO INVADE THE CITY AND TIM IS TURNING PEOPLE INTO ZOMBIES. WHAT DO YOU THINK?” Leona shouted back.
“Thank goodness, you’re here.”
Mia was the first to manage a more proper greeting as Michelle, the woman with the sword, skidded to a halt in front of them, almost slipping on the grass.
“Are you aware that that guy is giving you guys the slip?”
She pointed behind them and they whipped back around to see Tim almost at the forest’s edge.
Conradin set off to follow him, but Leona grabbed his arm.
“Impending alien invasion, remember?”
By now, most of the zombies were destroyed and the aliens were busy killing any stragglers.
“Hey, Michelle,” Leona continued. “You’re an actual superhero or something, right? How about you go and do superhero things.”
Apparently, Michelle took offense at that.
“‘Or something’? I’m the hero of lights and lakes! I’m a protector of the good. I don’t just ‘do superhero things’, it’s my job to bring justice. You make it sound so simple, when really, it’s a lot of hard work and you don’t even get a thank you in the end. And it’s not like I chose to be a hero. It’s always just ‘this is how it is, Michelle, you’re the hero, go deal with this’. Have you ever considered how sick I am of arriving somewhere only to have people point at a problem and go ‘get on it and fix it’ as if it’s some sort of matter of course?”
When she finished, Conradin looked furious.
“Well, some of us actually take heroism seriously, thank you very much. So if you’re not going, I am. Come on, Doerthe.”
The rooster cooed, puffed up his feathers, and followed Conradin who stomped off.
“Amateurs,” said Michelle, before running after him, and clocking him over the head with the hilt of her sword. Doerthe followed her, angrily pecking at her feet for a few steps, before turning around to stick with his fallen master instead.
“I’ll be off. Saving the world from the alien threat or something!” She shouted back before running into the fray.
Her sword was glowing with its weird inherent magical powers and sliced through her enemies like butter. If Conradin were conscious to see it, he’d be jealous for weeks at the display.
As things were, Moritz was simply happy that the aliens had chosen their town for invasion and not any other. It was almost guaranteed that someone with the power to stop them would show up, and even if their group weren’t the ones able to do it, he was still glad to be in the middle of it all, to witness the daily struggle against all the strange and evil things out there.
Since this town dealt with zombies and monsters and rogue gods on a regular basis, an alien invasion didn’t feel too threatening anymore. It was just another Tuesday afternoon and if things went well, he’d be able to return his café back to business for a few hours in the evening.
NotHack Europa 