Wild things the british.., p.1
Wild Things (The British Invasion Book 2), page 1
Hadwin Fuller
Wild Things
The British Invasion - Book Two
First published by Evil Dinosaur 2023
Copyright © 2023 by Hadwin Fuller
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
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Chapter 1
I spat blood. It rained down onto the floor of the training arena, mixing in with the dirt and the rain and all the other blood I had spilt so far. Who would have thought taking out a training droid would have proved to be about as much fun as getting into a bath full of razors with Nicolas Cage?
“Gahhhhhhh!” I wailed as the droid circled through the rain, getting ready to make another pass. When General Dusk had said that he wanted to improve my skills with the battle armour, I had imagined some sort of holographic target shooting, not this merciless bloodbath with R2-D2’s evil twin brother. This metal fucker was intense, and if I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn he had a special disliking for humans.
Actually, come to think of it, it wasn’t such a crazy idea. After all, the droid was designed to be used to train V’Kral warriors, not scrawny, semi-evolved apes who had spent the past five years mucking about in the London sewers. Sure, I might have been handpicked (ahem, out of all the people in the world) by the V’Kral leadership to operate the mind-blowingly powerful battle armour, but that didn’t mean I was suddenly some sort of cross between Jesus and Goku. (Actually, thinking about it now, Goku pretty much was Jesus, except with an alarming eating habit.) Besides, seeing as how there were less than thirty-thousand humans left alive (after an alien invasion had knocked us flat on our asses), being handpicked out of the remaining rabble wasn’t exactly the same as being chosen out of a population of fifty billion (or however many fleshbags there were kicking around on the Earth before the Nith came and ruined the party).
Ah, the Nith.
The Frog-faces. That was what I had called them, back when I had been little more than the brave, noble leader of a community of sewer-dwellers. And how we had feared the Nith back then, when the sewers had been our only refuge from the life-ending annihilators. Back then, we had thought that we were the only ones left alive, but after five long years, I had finally emerged from my sewer kingdom, called by destiny to fulfil my role as The Mighty Savoir of the Planet Earth™ (trademark pending, but I’m going to use it anyway).
But it had not been the Nith with whom I had been forced to do battle. They had fucked off three years ago, blown out of the park by the combined human-V’Kral forces - the other, other aliens having chosen to align with us because of a joint hatred of the Grorgroth: merciless crimson triangular bastards who acted as arbiters of life and death after a planetary invasion (apparently, not illegal in the intergalactic courts of law) reduced the invadees population to around one percent. The Grorgroth were supposed to play fair and give each race a fair shot at survival, but in recent years, they had got greedy, their eyes (not that they had any eyes, but that’s beside the point) turned by the dollar (or rather the Standard Intergalactic Token or SIT). That had resulted in the near-total destruction of the V’Kral race (only a handful had escaped on a battle cruiser) and the almost total-destruction of the human race, were it not for a plucky, young upstart with a winning smile and a glint of battle-readiness in his eyes that hadn’t been seen on this Earth since a certain Alexander of Macedonia once put on his sandals and decided to go start some shit with his neighbours.
It was an admittedly complicated situation - a situation that had been far easier to get a handle on when there had been just one alien race. Now there were three - or rather two. The Grorgroth had, as far as I or anyone else was aware, been destroyed by none other than yours truly after a tremendous, cinematic affair that would probably have been directed by Peter Jackson and scored by Hans Zimmer. (Who would have got to play me in the picture, I couldn’t say. Maybe I would have just had to play the part myself.)
The Nith would return. At least, that was what we had been able to glean from the low-key parting message they had left engraved on the Moon in 8,462,129 point Courier. Oh, and it had been written in human blood too. For some reason, that little detail always seemed to slip my mind.
What would happen when the Nith got here, no one knew. Sure, we were stronger now. With the Grorgroth out of the way - and their body-crippling pain ray along with them - the V’Kral (who had been especially susceptible to said pain ray) were now free to help humanity with the full force of their remaining battle contingent. As far as I had been able to glean from my conversations with the V’Kral leadership, they felt confident that they could handle the Nith.
But they were far more concerned about other alien factions currently plotting courses through the stars to get to our little backwater planet.
And that made perfect sense. After all, the V’Kral themselves - wielders of the shitkicking battle armour that had turned me into Goku-Jesus - had themselves been subjected to an invasion by an alien race who had walked all over their creepy grey bodies.
Although that in itself was strange, I thought as I watched the training droid dart about in the nighttime storm like a metal football (or ‘soccer ball’ to you Americans) with a couple of nail guns strapped to its underside. During my time on the Grorgroth mothership, I had learned (from a racist, sexist Jew-hater who I was in no way sorry to have incidentally killed during my battle with the Grorgroth and their aptly named death orb) that invading other planets was allowed by intergalactic law, but only if the species being invaded hadn’t yet achieved intergalactic travel.
Which the V’Kral already had…
How then was it that a race was allowed to invade the V’Kral homeworld when they already had branches of KFC (or the V’Kral equivalent - probably Kentucky Fried Rat, if my observations of the V’Kral were anything to go by) established on planets other than their own?
“General Dusk,” I said, speaking my native tongue and knowing that the battle armour would translate my words for the general to hear. I looked around, squinting my eyes to peer through the storm at the collection of observing figures gathered under an open-air tent on the ground. In amongst the smatter of military uniforms and black business suits, I could just make out (actually, it was quite hard to miss) a lanky, grey wraith in a black trench coat. From this distance, I couldn’t see the enormous pointed spikes on his shoulders, or his creepy obsidian eyes, or his bald scalp, or his pointy ears (ears that were pointy enough to make Spock suffer from some serious ear-envy) - but I knew all that was there. When you had seen a V’Kral in the flesh, it was hard to forget it.
“Concentrate on the droid,” came the general’s reply. I heard - or rather felt I heard - the strange scraping noises that passed for the V’Kral language, but the battle armour somehow translated the message into my own language. Or at least, I thought it did. It was hard to tell if I was hearing translated English or understanding native V’Kral. (I didn’t stress about it too much.)
“I want to ask you something,” I said, ignoring the general’s recommendation. Up ahead, the droid zig-zagged through the rainy darkness, trying to shake my attention (no doubt in search of an opportunity to make an attack).
“Now is not the time for questions, toilet lord.”
I winced. The general was using that name again. It had come about when I had explained that I was once King of the Sewers, but whenever
“Don’t you have sewers on the V’Kral homeworld?” I asked, letting myself get sidetracked.
“There is no V’Kral homeworld. It was destroyed by-”
“Yes, I know. It was destroyed by a race with unbelievable powers, ‘the likes of which you humans have never even dreamed possible’.” I said, quoting the general word for word. He had alluded to this monster race several times, but never elaborated. “But before that happened, didn’t you have some kind of sewer system?”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. The droid climbed up towards the floodlights, no doubt hoping to hide itself in their glare.
“I do not understand the word ‘sewer’, toilet lord,” said the general. “It does not translate.”
“Look, there’s not much to translate. It’s just a tunnel filled with piss and shit. You build it under the surface of your city so it doesn’t stink up the place.”
“The V’Kral do not produce excrement.”
I frowned. “No kidding.”
“We expel our waste in liquid form only into a device similar to your toilet, except that the solution is sent off to a processing plant through a series of small tubes where it is then converted into a form of fuel. It is this fuel that powers our ships.”
“Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. The V’Kral turn their piss into rocket fuel?”
“That is, in a sense, correct.”
“Well, this isn’t the kind of thing we were led to believe about aliens by E.T.”
“E.T.? Is this another one of those instrumental groups from the decade you refer to as the 1980s?”
“No, it’s from a film, dammit,” I said, annoyed that the V’Kral hadn’t at least watched all the major Hollywood movies of the past fifty years as part of their research on the human race. “Look, as much as I’m enjoying freezing my tits off in this rain, can we please call it a day?”
“The training session will end when you end it.”
“By destroying the droid?”
“Or by dying. The choice is yours.”
“Well, that’s very kind of you.” The droid fluttered about around the edges of the floodlight, no doubt preparing itself for some kind of brutal attack that would leave me pulling more bits of metal out of my already pincushioned side. “I don’t suppose you’d care to give me any advice?”
“Use the battle armour.”
“Yes, well, I didn’t think I should be using a pogo stick with a condom on the end.”
I heaved a heavy sigh. Raindrops splattered on my forehead, forcing me to narrow my gaze. I imagined if Clint Eastwood was ever strapped to a piece of alien battle armour and thrown out into the rain above Wembley Stadium, he wouldn’t have looked too dissimilar from what I looked like right now.
The stadium was one of the only monuments in London to escape the carnage laid down by the Nith on their arrival on Earth five years previously. Along with Big Ben (real name, the Elizabeth Tower, but everyone just refers to it like it was some sort of 1970s porn star for some reason), Nelson’s Column and the James Bond Museum, it had escaped the invasion madness relatively unscathed. Sure, one of the floodlights had been obliterated when a military jet had crashed right into it, but military jets had crashed everywhere in London, and if you went for a walk along Oxford Street or through Hyde Park, you could hardly move for downed military jets.
Although I still knew little about the events that had taken place in the first few days of the invasion (having spent them in London’s wonderful sewer complex under the watchful eye of a military troop who had told us less than jack shit), I had been able to piece together bits and pieces from my limited time spent wandering around the city and the snippets of conversation I had overheard in the shared canteen. And whichever way you looked at it, it didn’t make us look good.
It seemed that the chief battle plan had been to push the panic button and throw all our military might into every encounter in which the aliens had engaged our forces. There was no hint of a concerted, coordinated effort to strike at a weak point. Nor was there any attempt to infiltrate the Nith mothership and plant a nuclear bomb in their bread bin. In short, it appeared the military generals had flat out refused to pay heed to any of the recurring plot points from the science fiction movies of yonder years of old.
Beep-eep-eep-eep! the battle armour jabbed at my eardrums. A square red box was suddenly superimposed over my vision, and in the centre of the box was the droid, moving swiftly towards my position, cutting left and right through the rain in long, curved arcs.
“Here we go again,” I said under my breath, and my body tensed up. The battle armour might have given my muscles an incredible response time, but I still had to do the hard work of concentrating myself, and concentration had never been my strong suit. (Just ask my old maths teacher and would-be-voodoo-doll-subject Mr Fitzgerald.)
Use the battle armour, I thought as the droid approached. That was what General Dusk had told me. But I had tried to shoot the damn thing down with my hand cannons (that was the name I gave to the beams of pure energy the battle armour enabled me to fire out of the palms of my hands), and the droid had just dodged out of the way like it was an attractive young woman who had accidentally wandered into a singles bar filled exclusively with Frenchmen. I might have been able to get around that particular problem if I had used the battle armour’s temporary time interference mode (or TTI mode) to momentarily stop time so I could creep up on the flying, robotic bastard and knee him in the droid equivalent of the gonads. But General Dusk had expressly forbidden the use of TTI mode, presumably for the understandable reason that it was a bit of a cheat code - the real-life equivalent of pressing UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A, START on your controller at the start screen for your chosen 1990s video game.
A flash of steel on the underside of the droid caught my eye a split second before the armour’s heads-up display projected a triangular red shape over the incoming projectile. There was more of that irritating beeping in my ear, and I tried not to let it bother me as I lightly tensed the muscles on the left side of my body, just like how General Dusk had taught me in the initial basic flight training sessions I had undergone. The movement was second nature now, and a millisecond later the armour slid to the left, taking me with it, just before the foot-long spike shot past, and I narrowly avoided having my nipple pierced - along with my lungs and quite possibly my heart.
Another flash of steel and a triangular shape on the HUD alerted me to another incoming missile. As before, I softly tensed my muscles, this time to the right, and the projectile flashed by, hurrying its way towards the players’ tunnel out of which the England national football team had once walked, their chins raised high as they decimated whatever team they were drawn up against in the qualifying stages of an international tournament (only to go and lose against the first decent team they came up against when they actually got to the real tournament).
I stuck out the palm of my hand, focused my concentration, and a blue beam of light erupted out of my palm. It lanced through the rain, lighting up the field far below, stretching out from one side of the stadium to the other.
The droid dodged it easily.
It moved down, momentarily hiding itself from my vision on the underside of the blast, and when the pillar of energy had passed away (hopefully not in the direction of any of London’s remaining landmarks), the droid was gone.
“What the…”
Beep-eep-eep-eep!
The beeping was more frantic this time, and only in one ear. I spun around just in time to see the barrel of a nail gun inches away from my face. Then there was a flash of steel, and a slender, brain-piercing piece of metal shot towards my eye at point blank range.
Chapter 2
“I thought I made it clear that you were not to use TTI mode,” said General Dusk. I had joined the V’Kral leader along with the contingent of human upper brass that were camped out in the open-air tent on the grass of the stadium. The droid had been vanquished, but only because I had broken the rules about using the battle armour’s TTI mode. I had frozen time - hardly for more than five seconds, but that was long enough for me to move out of the way of the shard of metal moving swiftly towards my head, then rattle off a bolt of energy from my hand cannons that had sent the droid crashing down onto the Wembley turf like one of the England national football team’s vanquished foes (albeit only the ones from obscure nations few people had ever heard of).
