The Visitor: Alien Hunger Special Edition Read online

  The Visitor: Alien Hunger Special Edition

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  The Visitor:

  Alien Hunger

  By

  Kaitlyn O’Connor

  ( c ) copyright by Kaitlyn O’Connor, July 2015

  Cover Art by Jenny Dixon, July 2015

  Smashwords Edition

  New Concepts Publishing

  Lake Park, GA 31636

  www.newconceptspublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

  Prologue

  Bill stared at the pale object on his screen until it abruptly winked out. He blinked at the screen several times, his mind perfectly blank with shock. No flare. No explosion. No impact. One minute it was there and the next second—vanished. Finally, he emerged sufficiently from his surprise to run a frantic check on his equipment.

  Every test came up negative for defect or malfunction.

  What the hell was he supposed to make of that?

  It wasn’t the equipment, but the object had disappeared.

  It occurred to him after a few moments that he might try the infrared to look for a heat signature, but that would require authorization from his supervisor and he doubted Frank would go for it.

  What to tell him?

  For days, almost a week, he’d been tracking a new object that had entered the system—an object that seemed to be traveling far faster than anything ever detected before—and then it had just disappeared.

  Would Frank believe him? Or think he was incompetent?

  That thought brought him to his data—his proof that he hadn’t been chasing ghosts on the screen—and he pulled that up and checked it.

  No doubt about it—the object was there—and according to his calculations, the speed, size, and trajectory made it a definite threat.

  Or would have if it had gotten closer.

  Because it was huge—easily as big as 747 and it had been approaching Earth orbit at a frightening velocity if it impacted.

  “Problem Bill?”

  Bill jumped at the voice near his shoulder and whipped a look at his supervisor.

  Apparently there was something about his expression that increased Frank’s alarm. “What is it?”

  Bill licked his lips. “I … uh … I don’t know. I’ve run checks on the equipment three times. I don’t see a problem with it ….”

  “Your equipment is malfunctioning?” the supervisor asked with an obvious mixture of irritation and relief.

  “That’s the problem! It isn’t! Malfunctioning, I mean. Not that I can tell. Maybe ….”

  “Bill,” Frank ground out with determined patience, “why do you think the equipment might be malfunctioning?”

  Bill stared at him self-consciously.

  “Spit it out, man!” Frank said impatiently. “You must have seen something that scared the hell out of you!”

  Bill shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought it might be a glitch. That’s why I was checking everything. I was … well I’ve been tracking this new object for the past several days—spotted it last Thursday—way out near the ort cloud. It was big—moving fast—and … well it entered the system like an arrow and looked like it was headed straight for us.”

  “Good god! And you didn’t think to mention it? Wait! What do you mean ‘was’?”

  “I was trying to verify my data before reporting it!” Bill snapped indignantly. “It wasn’t moving like anything I’d seen before.”

  “Explain!” Frank growled impatiently.

  Bill shook his head. “Well, it’s gone now. It doesn’t matter.”

  Frank frowned. “Hit something?”

  Bill shook his head. “No. It just … vanished.” He struggled with his discomfort. “I was thinking about asking you if we could recalibrate the infrared to check it out.”

  Frank stared at Bill’s computer screen in silence for several moments, but it was clear his brain was functioning at light speed. “Send your data to my computer and then use your data to calculate where it would be if it hasn’t changed course.”

  “Changed course?” Bill echoed, stunned. “How could it …?”

  But Frank was already gone.

  When he’d gathered his wits, Bill managed to focus on pulling up the data he needed and running the calculations. He took his findings directly to his supervisor.

  Frank was studying his computer screen when he arrived at his office. He didn’t even glance up when Bill knocked. “Come!” he said absently.

  Bill entered, hesitated on the other side of the desk, and finally simply put his drive down on the desktop. Deciding he’d been dismissed, he straightened.

  “Come have a look at this,” Frank commanded before he could even step away from the desk.

  Curious, he rounded Frank’s desk to stare at the computer screen.

  It was his data! A mixture of confusion, anger, and suspicion flooded him. “You already had the data?” he asked.

  Frank glanced at him. “This looks like what you saw? Just like it?”

  The questions threw him for a loop. He looked at the screen again. “That isn’t my data?”

  Frank pointed to the lower right hand corner of the screen. There was a time stamp on the video. It was dated nearly ten years earlier. He shook his head, as if by doing so he could clear away some of his confusion. “I don’t understand.”

  “This looks like what you saw?” Frank persisted.

  Bill shrugged. “Yeah, pretty much.” He frowned. “I’ve seen some freaky weird things in space, but this takes the cake. What do you think it is?”

  Frank stared at it. “Visitors.”

  Bill recoiled as if he’d been hit. “Visitors?” he echoed.

  “Looks like maybe four to six pods or landers or whatever they call them.” He turned to study Bill’s face. “Looks like they’re back.”

  Bill gaped at Frank, trying to wrap his mind around what Frank was suggesting—but he just couldn’t.

  Because he couldn’t swallow that they’d had alien contact a decade earlier and no one knew!

  No one but Frank.

  He was still trying to figure out how to respond to what Frank had said—actually if he should respond or if he should go straight to Frank’s superior with his suspicion that Frank might have had a psychotic break—when he discovered Frank had grabbed his zip drive and inserted it into his computer. That distracted him from his thoughts and refocused them on the strange incident he’d recorded.

  An hour later they were looking at images from the infrared telescope—images of the object that had disappeared from Bill’s computer screen—images amazingly like the one Frank had shown him before with one significant difference.

  “Only one,” Frank said, voicing Bill’s thoughts aloud.

  “One,” Bill repeated like a parrot.

  “The mother ship seems to have taken up orbit around Jupiter.”

  “Mother ship,” Bill repeated, trying to wrap his mind around what seemed to be happening on the screen.

  Frank picked up the phone
on his desk and dialed a number. “They’re back. Yes. Confirmed. Only one this time. Coming in fast. You got it on your screen?” He was silent for several moments. “Ok. Confirmed. I’ll take care of things over here.”

  When he hung up, he looked at Bill assessingly. “Best thing you can do is forget this happened. There will be no confirmation data if you decide to go public.”

  Bill stared at him. “That was a UFO. Is.”

  Frank shrugged. “I suppose if anybody had seen it they might have thought it was.”

  “But it’s coming here. Somebody’s bound to see it!”

  “Actually, they aren’t bound to. These … visitors used a sophisticated cloaking mechanism when they came before. No doubt they’ve got something as good or better now. Unfortunately for our visitor, we have a lot better technology than we had the last time. He won’t slip through our nets this time like he did before. We’re going to nail the bastard and then we’ll know what the hell they’re doing here!”

  Chapter One

  Chelsey paused in her attempt to apply her makeup and studied the tremor in her hand that was making the task nearly impossible. She didn’t think she would’ve minded it so much if she’d known the shakes were from excitement rather than plain old fashioned dread. Unfortunately, there was no convincing herself that she felt an ounce of anticipation and her frustration mounted at having to work so hard to prepare for something she didn’t want to do at all.

  She’d been so angry with Marla when her sister had announced that she was throwing her an early birthday bash! She didn’t know why Marla couldn’t get it through her head that she just needed time to lick her wounds! She didn’t feel like partying! Maybe sometime in the not too distant future she’d begin to feel alive again, start feeling as if there was actually something to look forward to, but not yet. She wasn’t ready yet!

  She was still trying to come to terms with the fact that her son—her only child!—had brushed her off just like his father had, had chosen to live with his father! She didn’t think it would’ve crushed her nearly as much if it had been a matter of the money, of being practical. She knew she couldn’t provide for Larry like his father could. It would’ve hurt that he hadn’t loved her enough to be willing to live with a little hardship to be with her, but it wouldn’t have hurt nearly as much as it had to see him look at her like his father did—like she was some kind of … lower life form like an … amoeba!

  She was as angry with herself as she was with Lawrence Sr.! She’d known he was waging a psychological war with her, had been almost from the time they’d gotten married. Of course she hadn’t really understood what obsessive compulsive disorder was in those days. She’d thought Lawrence’s ruthless determination to control everything around him was just a manifestation of his machismo! If she had known, she might have had enough sense to cut and run.

  And maybe that was all it really was, at first? Maybe the problem had grown with time and become OCD?

  Or maybe she was just looking for excuses for herself for allowing him to crush her when she should’ve refused to allow him to control every aspect of her life? She’d known he was working to turn Larry against her almost from birth, certainly from the time their son was old enough to begin brainwashing him! She’d at least suspected it. She didn’t suppose she’d actually acknowledged it until she’d seen that it was working.

  She should’ve left the bastard sooner, before he’d had time to convince her son that she was as worthless as he thought she was!

  That train of thought brought her close to tears as it usually did, part grief and part anger. Sniffing, she struggled to grasp another thought to divert herself to keep from breaking down again, and focused on her reflection. Who was this woman, she wondered abruptly? She hardly recognized herself—maybe because, bit by bit, she’d allowed Lawrence to erase the person she was?

  Or maybe simply because she’d stopped really looking at the person she was, or had been, and begun only to look at herself as a canvas where Lawrence sought perfection? He didn’t particularly like her nose. It was a bit too long for his tastes and what was up with that little hump on the bridge? Had she broken it sometime? He actually preferred something a little more pert, more elegant.

  Of course he didn’t want to shell out his hard earned money to fix the damned thing! Just because he’d made her self-conscious about it didn’t mean she should ‘mess’ with nature. He preferred natural beauty. Her lips were too thin, too—looked like somebody had slashed her face when she wore lipstick. She should avoid the red lipstick he’d told her he liked.

  It was a shame she didn’t have bigger boobs when he liked big boobs on a woman but they wouldn’t be real if she got a boob job, so what was the point?

  Her hair didn’t look nearly as blond as it had when she was younger. It had started to look like dirty dishwater. Did she used to bleach it? Or was she putting something on it now to make herself look like white trash?

  Squeezing her eyes closed as if she could crush the thoughts by doing so, she focused on the image in the mirror when she opened them again rather than the image Lawrence had built in her mind. What she saw jolted her—hollow eyes and hollow cheeks. It was a damned shame, she thought wryly, that the ‘waif’ look wasn’t ‘in’ for women her age! She’d struggled for years to attain the weight Lawrence had thought ideal and never managed it … until the divorce. Now she was starting to look like an escapee from some starving third world country!

  It wasn’t just the fine lines that made her look every year of her age! It was the dullness in her eyes and her skin and hair! She looked beaten down! Even she thought so. She probably looked worse to everyone that looked at her. Her hair wasn’t just unfashionably long—because Lawrence had turned wrong side out any time she mentioned cutting it—she looked like a throw back from centuries earlier with hair down her waist! Or maybe like somebody trying to pretend they were still a kid? Or trying to fool people into thinking she was?

  The thought brought the first surge of rebellion she’d felt in years. She wasn’t old just because her ex-bastard had hooked up with a girl barely old enough to be considered an adult!

  Well—ten years younger than her, which made Lawrence fifteen years older!

  She probably just wanted his money—not that Lawrence didn’t look good for his age! He kept fit, but he still looked enough older than his girlfriend people thought she was his daughter! It would serve the bastard right if she took him to the cleaners!

  She resented the fact that the woman would get what she’d put into the marriage, but, hateful or not, she thought she would almost rather that than knowing Lawrence was enjoying it!

  Pushing the thoughts aside when she flicked a look at her watch and saw she was running late, she rifled through the beauty products Marla had been piling on her in an effort to build an interest in ‘fixing herself up’ when she didn’t have one. She thought it would make her feel better to at least put some effort into her appearance and it was bound to make Marla happy.

  And she might cut her a little slack.

  She didn’t really want to arrive late, though. She was so uncomfortable in big gatherings! She hated doing anything that might attract attention!

  Shrugging it off with the reflection that she wouldn’t be very late if she hurried, she grabbed the shampoo and rinse that was supposed to ‘brighten and repair tired or damaged hair’ and leapt into the shower before the temperature had even adjusted. It occurred to her as she was scrubbing frantically with her loufa that she hadn’t bothered to shave. She debated and finally grabbed the razor. It wasn’t like she had to worry about a man discovering she had hairy legs, she thought wryly, but she needed to feel like she was preparing for something special, she decided. She needed to work on trying to feel attractive—starting from the skin up!

  Neither the attitude adjustment nor the hot shower had served to banish the bruised look around her eyes. Fortunately, there were cosmetics for that! She used them sparingly anyway. Lawrence had nev
er liked for her to use a lot—not that she gave a damn what Lawrence liked or didn’t like anymore!—but she wasn’t use to wearing much. It wasn’t as if anything was going to hide the fine lines anyway! Makeup only seemed to emphasize them.

  Her hair was still wet when she’d finished making up her face. She debated whether to try the blow dryer and dismissed it. The heat would just make it frizz. She could just leave it loose until it dried and capture it in a hair tie once it had.

  Marla had said it was a hen party and she should just dress comfortably. She debated over those instructions for a few moments and finally decided to grab a newish pair of jeans anyway. Comfortable to her might mean the well warn and roomy, but it meant designer casual to Marla.

  Not that she had designer anything! She had several pairs of jeans she hadn’t worn before because they were a little tight, though, and an outrageously skimpy top Marla had given her for Christmas that she hadn’t had the nerve to wear—because there was no way to wear a bra with it!

  She felt the next thing to naked when she’d put it on but, really, her hair was long enough she could’ve made like Lady Godiva and nobody would’ve known if she was completely naked! If she felt uncomfortable, she reasoned, she could just leave her hair down and hide behind it. The jeans weren’t tight anymore—at least not too tight to breathe or sit down. They created a slight ‘muffin’ top around the waist, but she decided the shirt hid that well enough.

  It was just ‘hens’ at this party anyway, she reminded herself, promising herself she’d choke her sister to death if she discovered she’d slipped in another eligible bachelor. Grabbing something to tie her hair back if she decided to once it dried, she stuffed it in her purse, slipped her feet into a pair of thong sandals and dashed out of her apartment.

  The damned car wouldn’t start!

  After banging her forehead on the steering wheel a couple of times, Chelsey debated whether she even wanted to try to make the damned party! Finally, deciding Marla was going to be pissed off if she didn’t, she pressed the catch release on the hood and the trunk and got out. Grabbing a screw driver from the trunk, she went around and lifted the hood to stare blankly at the engine.