Killer Kittens from Outer Space

Chapter Two- The Centre of the World

Melbourne, Australia
380 Earth days post-invasion


Tommy

The air above the dark asphalt shimmered outside the Derrimut community centre, the November sunshine unseasonably harsh, a herald of hot, dry summer months to come. Over the top of the road that led into the centre, a hastily erected concrete gateway stood with foreign symbols scrawled across it in the scratchy lines of kespan script. There were signs in English and Mandarin too, and a handful of other languages, all punctuated with exclamation marks and warning symbols that promised a quick death for anyone suspected of insurrectionist activity.

Below the archway, in a short strip of shade that barely took the edge off the rising temperature, Tommy fidgeted under the gaze of an invader. His skin crawled as the slitted eyes of the pink-skinned and catlike security officer looked him over again greedily, her gaze lingering as it swept over his chest and groin, a sly smile quirking at the edges of the alien woman's lips.

"Am I free to go in then?" he asked, doing his best to keep his tone neutral as he held out a hand to retrieve his identification.

The alien woman's eyes roamed his body for a moment before returning to the boxy device in her clawed grip. "Mr Thomas Morgan. Is that right?" she asked, the long, high-pitched vowels of kespan dialect translating almost instantly to English in Tommy's mind as his new translator chip fed the information straight to the insular cortex of his brain. It worked for other human languages too, a small compensation.

"Meadows. Thomas Meadows," he replied, and her mouth twitched as she held the card out for him to take, her hands covering enough of the plastic rectangle that he was forced into skin contact with her when he reached to take it. She held onto it for another long second, and he shivered in poorly contained revulsion as she slowly uncurled one digit, running the claw of her index finger lightly over the skin on the back of his hand, leaving a light, almost invisible line where it met his flesh.

"Have a wonderful day, Mr Meadows," she smiled toothily, and another wave of disgust crawled across Tommy's skin as her tongue traced the tip of one of those needle-sharp teeth. "Oh," she paused, middle finger and thumb still closed around his identification. "I almost forgot."

She took the card back, easily plucking it from his grasp, and Tommy's jaw clenched in his mouth as he fought for control of his expression. The soldier retrieved another card of similar size from a pouch on her chest, then placed it over the top of his identification and held her hand out again. Tommy snatched them from her quickly, and the alien's smirk widened, sharp incisors gleaming predatorily.

"My card," she said, looking him over again. "Just in case you ever need help at the checkpoint. I'm here most days."

"Mhm," Tommy grunted, avoiding eye contact as he shuffled to put a little more distance between them. "I mean... thank you, ma'am. I'll be on my way now."

"Oh, of course," she grinned. "I wouldn't want to keep you from your important duties."

---


Tommy's face glowed like a furnace as he moved away from the checkpoint and towards the reproductive clinic. He held it together for the dozen or so steps it took to get inside the automatic double doors and then slumped up against a wall, breathing hard. It only took a moment for the woman— thankfully human, though for a time they'd been hard-pressed to keep the kespans out of the clinics— behind the counter to leap up and cross the room. She caught him just as the strength was about to leave his legs, the shaking becoming uncontrollable as the tears came in wracking sobs.

"You're okay, you're okay," she hushed into his shoulder as he found his feet, and she bundled him away from the door and the inquisitive eyes of the security guardswomen outside. "Let's get you around the corner and into the back. I'll fetch you some water, too. Did those bitches at the checkpoint give you trouble?" She winced as Tommy rubbed at his hand feverishly, then scowled darkly as she saw the fine white line just above his knuckles. "I'll have a word with their CO."

"No!" Tommy exclaimed, then cringed back, a flush creeping over the back of his neck as shame and disgust crawled down his spine like a black spider. "No. I... they'll put a mark on my record. It'll make things difficult for me. Please."

The receptionist looked him over for a moment, then something in her eyes changed, and she stepped back. "Okay. But you take some time in the rec room to breathe, okay? If any of those wrinkly old bints come around asking about you, I'll see them off."

"Bints?"

"Great word. From a bit before your time, but I think it fits." The receptionist tried for an understanding smile, but the corners of her mouth were still tucked into a distasteful grimace, and Tommy couldn't help but feel that some of that disgust should have been reserved for him. He shrunk in on himself again, and the receptionist caught it. "None of that now. You're not here on behalf of some shrivelled-up cat people from outer space. You're saving the world in that room, and no one thinks any less of you for it."

Tommy just stared at his hands, still shaking. "Where's the rec room?" he asked, mumbling his words.

The receptionist indicated with one hand. "To the left and down the hall. It's the room at the very end. This is your first time here, isn't it? I didn't think I recognised you, but I'm not great with faces, sorry."

"I just turned eighteen last week."

She swore lightly under her breath. "Bastards. You're just a babe. Don't you fret though; we have old Seamus on duty today. He's a good sort, always up for a game or a chat. You talk to him, you hear me? We've got a full entertainment suite back there with every console, and that's your space to use as you like. Seamus will look after you."

"Okay... Thank you."

"You're quite welcome, dearie. Now, if you're going to be okay on your own, I'm about to invent some anonymous complaints about that guard woman who was giving you bother. You catch a name?"

Tommy's hand flexed by his pocket, where the white contact card still sat next to his I.D. "No."

"That's all right. I'll figure it out later. And don't you worry— I'll give it a few days before I submit them. Did you want me to come and introduce you to Seamus?"

As if he needed to feel like any more of a helpless child. "No thanks, I'll go."

"Like I said, just down the hall on the left."

The community centre had been built as an open-plan space for a combination of leisure and administration, filled with leafy vegetation and colour. When it had been converted into an emergency clinic, partitioned sections had been installed to divide the space into a rabbit's warren of plain white corridors. He'd been here once before, right before the invasion, and walking through it now felt like his brain was stuck playing catchup, small reminders of the past hidden in the dull grey.

The rec room entrance was one such blast from the past. Once a small library, the door was still decorated with some of the colourful children's artwork that had graced the walls of the old space. Hesitating at the entrance, Tommy looked back down the corridor, but the receptionist had returned to her post, and the furious click-clacking of keys was drifting around the corner. He hesitated, then knocked at the door.

"Come on in!" a gravelly voice called from inside.

Seamus was, fortunately, just as pleasant a soul as had been promised. Bald, squat and a little tubby around the stomach, he looked up from a deeply wrinkled leather couch as Tommy entered, immediately exited out of the video game he'd been playing by himself and passed a controller over without a word. Less than a minute later, the pair had settled in to play through a few levels of a co-op platformer that Tommy had heard of but never tried. It was easy enough to pick up, and he soon found himself engaged.

It was half an hour before Seamus spoke to him beyond pointing out weak spots on enemies or the fastest way through a stage. They'd both been annihilated by a single sweeping claw attack from an enormous spider boss and after collectively crying out in indignation at the unfair move combination, they'd just booted up the stage again when he turned to Tommy.

"It's okay to cry you know."

Tommy's hands stopped, and the oafish figure he was piloting on the screen froze above a dark pit of spikes, plummeting to his death. The older man winced. "Oops, sorry," he grunted, picking up the slack with a series of fast button inputs that made short work of the mob enemies before coming back to revive Tommy.

In Seamus's brief period of focus on the game, Tommy's hand came up to his cheeks. Wetness. He brushed the tears away angrily.

"I know that" he finally mustered, "It's meant to make you feel better. But I feel like once I start, all I do is keep on crying. It sucks."

Seamus' eyes stayed fixed on the game as the teen cleared his face. "It doesn't make me feel better either," he said.

"What?"

"Crying. It doesn't make me feel better either. It's like taking the cap off a shaken-up lemonade bottle, but someone keeps filling it and shaking it up all over again."

"I guess."

"It's still the right thing to do though. If you bottle it all up, you'll explode eventually. You don't cry to feel better. You cry to feel. To relieve pressure."

Not knowing what to say to that, Tommy went back to gaming. Then he missed a jump, and he slapped the controller down onto the soft leather in frustration as Seamus leapt back into the fray to revive him again. When he glanced over, the older man was still fixated on the game, appearing for all the world not to be paying any attention to Tommy.

Once he was on his virtual feet again, Tommy picked his controller back up. "Well, maybe I'm done feeling so much."

"Who did you lose?"

"Excuse me?"

"My son, Kieran," Seamus continued, nodding to a tiny picture tucked inconspicuously into the corner of a nearby bookshelf. "Took his first big international trip a week before the wrinklies arrived. He always wanted to see New York. You don't sound American, but I don't think you're an Aussie. Canadian?"

"From Ontario. I was here on exchange."

"Shit, I'm sorry."

"Yeah, me too."

The conversation lapsed again, and only the jostling of joysticks and the mashing of buttons kept the silence at bay as Tommy switched his loadout and re-entered the fight armed with comically large bombs. He hefted them at the stage boss but caught a rogue tentacle that whittled his health back to zero. Groaning, he sat back to see how Seamus would fare.

But instead of pulling a clutch save out of his hat, Seamus paused the game, then rattled off a complicated series of button presses and unpaused. Tommy was back up.

"Cheats, really?" Tommy rolled his eyes, but for the first time that evening, the ghost of a smile crept onto his face.

"Gotta do what you gotta do to win," Seamus said, shrugging. The boss' remaining health fell quickly, thankfully without needing any more cheats, and the pair sat for a while as the lobby music began to play again.

Seamus looked sideways at Tommy, eyeing him up. "Say."

"Hmm?"

"How do you feel about them, the wrinklies? I mean, obviously some of them are raging bitches, but overall, I mean."

"They killed my dad—both of my cousins. I was always sad I never had an older brother, but if I had one, he'd be dead too. I can't even go home because just being a guy over there isn't safe anymore."

Something hot rose like bile in the back of his throat. "I'm about to go and wank into a cup to save humanity, and a year from now, I'll never know if the next baby stroller that rolls past is my fucking kid or not. I hate them. I wish they didn't exist." The words came spilling out as freely as the tears that he couldn't keep from falling down his cheeks. Then, a dark red cloud descended. "I wish they'd all just die."

Seamus' eyes stayed glued on Tommy for a few seconds. Then he nodded. "I agree with you."

"Huh?"

"I said I agree. Something needs to be done; someone needs to hold them accountable. You hear about those recent data leaks?"

"I don't—"

"Turns out there's a lot of worlds out there. Whole systems of aliens living under the wrinklies' thumbs. They tried to keep what happened here on Earth under wraps, but of course, word got out. Now there's trouble brewing in the Imperium's galactic paradise."

Tommy shrugged. "I mean, good? I guess. That's all a long way from here."

"You seem like a pretty switched-on kid, Tommy," Seamus nodded at the screen. "Good at identifying weaknesses. Why'd you change to bombs at the end?"

"The boss was easy to read. She taunts you every three attacks and her speed drops. Plus, she seemed resistant to piercing damage, so I thought explosives might work better."

"So pattern recognition, with a good helping of logic," Seamus said, and Tommy nodded hesitantly.

Tommy's blood ran cold. Holy fucking shit. Where did that come from?

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