On the day the aliens came, I was sunbathing in Frist's Quad, earbuds blaring, mindlessly happy and infinitely helpless.
It was hot, that day, the sun half way between zenith and sunset, blazing down. I was lying on a towel in the grass, waiting for a friend, thinking about which party to go to that night and if I should withdraw from a class about Melville I knew I'd hate, whether I should go ahead and have sex with a guy I knew had a crush on me. Innocent, in a weird way. Still full of childish hope and the expectation that the future held great things.
The screams blended with the music. At first I didn't notice them, just thought the song got weird. It wasn't until running people kept blocking out my sun, moving faster than was normal, and the screams got louder, pinpointed with feral shouts, that I realized something was off. Really off.
I sat up, mouth dropping.
Lia Greven, the girl from my ethics class who always wore seven or eight bangles on each wrist and spun her pe during tests was tackled to the ground by a man the size of a building. She screamed, facedown in the grass on a Tuesday at 4pm, in the middle of one of the safest cities in one of the safest countries in the world. The sound cut through the air. He laughed, white teeth flashing, joyous as a kid on a slide, and tossed his long, braided hair over his shoulders and looped her hands together with a gray belt. When she bucked under him, he swatter her on the ass, and looped a second belt around her ankles. Like she was nothing, just an animal. Less than an animal. A thing.
More people ran. Guys. Girls. Some I recognized. Some I didn't. More building-sized men in kilts, with bare chests strapped with knives and swords, following them, calling out to one another like this was nothing new for them. Just a fun day in the sun. They chased down my classmates as casually as a frat boy might toss a frisbee.
Oddly, the running men weren't the thing that terrified me most. One of them wasn't moving. He was staring at me, standing in the middle of this screaming, chaotic frenzy, his head cocked, eyes locked on me like there was no one else in the world. Like he had forever.
I didn't know much, but I knew whatever it was he was thinking, it meant nothing good for me.
I stood slowly, my breath leaving my body with a full body shudder.
He started walking.
I took a step away from him. Frist Hall was twenty yards behind me. I could run. I could make it. Maybe.
I turned in my heel and ran, pumping my arms, straining my legs, pushing off with my feet with all I had, as fast as I could. I ran for my life, put every single thing I had inside me into that run.
I made it five steps.
Something closed around my biceps and spun me full circle.
Him. He was bigger up close, shoulders that blocked out the sun, a jaw like iron, inscrutable eyes, and a nose that had been broken a few times over. Scars on his forehead. Scars on his chin. Scars down the massive pectoral muscles of his bare chest. Inhuman. Cold. Expressionless. Animal.
I slapped his face as hard as I could. It was a reflex. I think it was that or shit my bikini.
A grin spread across his face, white teeth flashing in a swarthy unshaved face. He looked like I'd surprised him. It was the way people look at dogs that can sing or cats that ride on skateboards, like I'd performed some clever and unanticipated trick for him.
My brother and I used to do this thing to each other. We'd stare over each other's shoulders, widen our eyes, try to convince the other something horrible was behind them. I don't know why, but that's the only thing that occurred to me to do in that moment. I looked at the air behind him, the screaming girls and the chasing men, and let my jaw drop, the horror fill my eyes. I ducked like something was coming our way fast, screaming.
He frowned. His free hand went to the belt at his waist, wrapped around the handle of the sword there. He let go of my arm, crouching and spinning in a one smooth move, fluid, like watching a jungle cat or a wolf preparing to jump, muscles bunching and coiling above the leather arm bands around his forearms to face the imaginary foe charing behind him.
The second his eyes left mine, I was off and running, because he wasn't my brother and this wasn't a game.
A second later a loud bark of a laugh followed me and that was all the warning I got. This time, he jumped on me. I fell forward, face in the grass, his massive body holding me down, the cups of my bikini sliding off my breasts, baring them to rub in the dirt. He got a knee wedged between my thighs, rammed it up so hard I grunted. He dragged my hands together, wrapped them in one massive, inexorable fist, and flipped me over, forcing my legs apart against, kneeling between my parted thighs. He studied my wobbling breasts, the laughter fading from his face and being replaced with something far more terrifying.
"Get off me!" I twisted in his grip, tried to lift my legs to kick him, but he blocked me, pinned me down with his weight, and spoke in a language I couldn't understand. Urgent words. Angry words. Commands I couldn't hope to understand and if I had wouldn't have obeyed. I didn't stop fighting. I would not be bound up with belts and carted off like cattle.
"Let me go."
When I squirmed and bucked, his eyes narrowed. Gagara. Na. Na graya.
Whatever that meant, I didn't care. "No. No gagara!" I shouted up at him.
His eyes crinkled. I'd amused him again
Still holding me pinned beneath him, he stroked a hand over my hair, held up a long, blond bunch of it. "Spayada. Leean."
"No spayada," I hissed, trying to yank my head away from him, but all I succeeded in doing was smashing my skull against a rock on the dirt beneath me.
