Where r u? Jenny texted.
Just got home, Russell texted back.
What evil r u up to?
Russ shucked off his sweatpants and T-shirt, flipped his customized, cleated sneakers into the corner of his bedroom, and considered his options. Counting my toes.
Really? Counting your toes? Sounds like a lot of responsibility.
It is, he texted, careful not to make as many spelling mistakes as usual. Coming up with diffnt # every time I try.
Jenny Brenner laughed, almost letting her cell slip from her grasp and distract her from the oncoming traffic. Russell Connors had lived two blocks away from her since grade school. He was the smartest, cutest, and funniest guy she knew or, for that matter, anyone knew.
Cassy, her identical twin sister, was also crazy about Russell, but kept the secret to herself, and never let it compromise her devotion to Jenny.
Wnt help?
Itz harder thn I thought it would be, he texted back.
How long have u been at it?
A couple of days. At least. I don’t rember.
Home in a few minutes and come over.
And save my ass, as usual?
Hey, I’ve seen ur ass. Itz definitely worth saving, she texted, and refocused on the lights flashing yellow on the corner of Gleeson and Riverside.
He sniffed his T-shirt. It was soaked, like everything else. After a two-hour scrimmage and an hour in the weight room, he was almost too tired to move, much less go downstairs and grab a soda, or a mouthful of his mom’s homemade, cream-filled, chocolate-chip crumb cake.
He texted Jenny to let herself in and grab the cake on her way up. She called him a lazy slob, knowing nothing was further from the truth. They exchanged emogies and he fell back on his bed.
His bedroom shelves were crowded with trophies from track, football, and a brief stint at basketball. Ribbons covered half of the wall opposite his bed. Displaying them was his adoring, baby sister’s idea.
He pulled off his right sock with his left big toe, then repeated the exercise on the left sock with his right big toe. He raised his feet overhead and wiggled his toes.
“Twelve little fuckers,” he said, wiggling away with the abandon of a five-year-old, “and every one of you is working your little asses off sending me to college,” he added referring to the manufacturers who vied for his parents’ approval to design his sneakers as part of their promotion in support of the best young athletes in the country.
Supernumerary digits on the feet, statistically rare and almost unheard of when bilateral, he was in the press when born, and every few years afterward, some minor local TV station did a follow-up segment on how he was progressing. After his eighth birthday, his mother stopped responding to news stations and doctors all too ready to treat what she had accepted as God’s will, which had already paid for much of her baby’s future education.
The gray, overcast October afternoon quickly darkened, compromising the shadows in his room. He dozed off for a few minutes and woke in a sweat.
He reached for the lamp near the bed, but the switch wasn’t working. He tried it several more times with the same result, then he felt his body and the floor vibrate and was thrown from his bed as the entire two-story ranch shook violently. Trophies fell from every surface and his hockey stick jumped the width of his bedroom.
“What the fuck,” he got out before the entire home stopped shaking. “Tornado,” he finally realized and staggered to his feet.
Every light was off. Glass, ceramics, frames, and artwork fell and shattered from every wall in his home. “Get to the basement. Get to the fucking basement. Just do the drill,” he repeated, recalling how his parents had taught him and his younger sister, reminding them on all major holidays how vulnerable their grandparents’ Nebraska home was in “Tornado Alley,” the path of the most destructive tornadoes in the country.
Disoriented, he quickly checked Caroline’s room. She was somewhere, at ballet class, he realized, then prayed she was safe. His baby sister was his treasure, which he protected as if she were his own.
At the top of the stairs, the vibrations stopped and a single light came on in the kitchen. The rest of his home was dark. A soft, metallic rattle skidded across the roof overhead.
“Jenn?”
What sounded like a tree branch, banged into the roof at the other end of the second floor. Russell grabbed his hockey stick. His wristwatch read 6:00 p.m. His parents were supposed to be back by 5:30. When did he text Jenn? Wasn’t she supposed to come by after school?
The rattle of metal continued across the roof.
“Russ?”
He jumped back. It was Jenn, but not quite.
The voice was lower pitched. He’d kidded Jenn from sixth grade about how half the time she sounded like a mouse that just escaped a mousetrap. Now, it wasn’t funny. He flipped on the wall switch in his bedroom, then in his sister Carol’s room, then their shared bathroom. Nothing.
“Russ?”
This time the voice was at the foot of the stairs, and it wasn’t Jenn’s.
More clatter and banging along the roof, now directly overhead. As he tightened his grip on his hockey stick, the ceiling breached and something struck him in the head, propelling him back to his bedroom. He fell against his desk, got to his feet just in time to see two large animals half-covered in plates of silver armor rush at him.
He’d just jumped for the twin windows in his bedroom when a claw grabbed his shoulder from behind and threw him to the carpet. The grip bit into his shoulder and easily tossed his 6-2, 210 pounds across his bedroom as if he were a rag doll from his sister’s grade school collection.
He called out for Jenny, though not the one that he heard moving up the stairs. That one, that person, wasn’t Jenny. His Jenny. The love of his life he’d confessed to his parents a month back. They weren’t as surprised as he thought they would be. He knew then that they would marry after college, but he decided not to admit to that much.
He smelled something foul and caustic, and coughed. There were two of them. They were enormous. He tried to protect himself as they crowded him into a corner. He started to gag. His vision began to cloud and was quickly lost.
He called out for her again. Something gripped him around both ankles and jerked him upside-down and into the air.
Blood surged to his head, his arms fell limp overhead, and voices—there were voices—though none he recognized, and not like the one pretending to be Jenny. He had to get free and find her before something happened. She was in danger, but he couldn’t coordinate his movements. Every time he inhaled, a stinging, acrid scent filled his lungs, and his focus further dissolved into a spasm of uncontrollable movements. His arms and legs were free, but he couldn’t get them to work together.
Something struck his gut, as if he were targeted by one of those three-hundred-pound monster linemen over at Lucas High School. He was hit again. Harder this time, and purposefully in the same spot. His bladder give way. His shirt was quickly soaked with urine.
The pressure around his ankles tightened. He was shaking, or being shaken, lifted and lowered over and over until he was completely disoriented, and what fear had gripped him was replaced by the urgency of absolute terror.
He started to retch as the toxic fumes filled his insides and the capillaries in his lungs began to rupture. He coughed fragments of red until his body, beyond the crushing vise around his ankles, was consumed with pain.
The jerking up and down and side to side, as though he were a tiny toy suddenly stopped. He retched again and tried to catch a clean breath, but the acrid stink was already too deeply infused in his chest.
What caught his attention and momentarily distracted him from his complete disorientation was a searing pain that quickly sliced through both legs.
His entire body convulsed in agony, and he screamed until he could no longer hear himself. The pain was beyond terrible and had so taken him by surprise that he didn’t realize his head struck something firm, though not quite hard, as the rest of his body collapsed around him.
He tried to open his eyes and speak. He tried again and again, but his tongue could not be compelled, though a slit of light slipped into his right eye, a faint, imperceptible glow of light and movement and no sound. He couldn’t understand why there was no sound. He had been sleeping, then he got up, heard a voice, then some animal on the roof crashed into the hall then… then what?
The searing pain in both legs turned to a blanket of ice. The shock sent his body into uncontrollable spasms as air exploded from his chest. He coughed over and over, desperately trying to hold onto what little life remained.
He forced himself to breathe shallow, controlled breaths and fight back the numbness that had so quickly consumed his legs. The acrid, biting scent lessened, and some distant movement came back into focus. He coughed over and over, and each time he filled his lungs with uncontaminated air.
Then the voices, or rather sounds, returned. They were voices, though nothing like he understood. They were foreign, mechanical, and more animal than human. He knew computers could emulate even the most complex animal hunting cry, but this was different.
He started to shiver uncontrollably. He squinted his right eye under control and smelled the carpet in his room. His mother was right. It needed cleaning. She didn’t understand how Jenny could come there almost every day and let him get away with such a stink.
His mother refused to clean it. She joked that in spite of him being a seventeen-year-old, “twelve-toed celebrity,” he was old enough to take responsibility, for something.
Flashes of movement turned into recognizable forms. There were three of them. The one furthest away from him in the hall near his parents’ room shot up into a gaping hole in what remained of the hall ceiling. The second followed moments later. The third paused and turned back to him.
He was a giant, only able to move about with his head bent and shoulders arched in. The width of his metallic bulk blocked the light behind him. Russell could just make out what might be eyes, but there was no nose, and no hair. In a daze of pain, and with one eye, he couldn’t be sure of anything. The frozen clamp that sealed his legs resolved itself until it was replaced with another, more terrible sensation.
He cried in terror, flailing his arms and rolling around on the bedroom floor in an effort to gain control of his body as the third creature lifted something in each claw and waved it in his direction, then turned away, and was gone.
“Russ. Russ. Russ. Russ.”
This time it wasn’t the voice he first heard calling out from downstairs, but it wasn’t altogether Jenny’s either. And it was close. Very close, but he couldn’t focus in his frenzy of fear.
His other eye slowly came into partial focus. It saw a blur of brown splatter stains on the carpet and covering the side of his bed and they slowly resolved themselves into a deep, terrifying red.
He screamed and cursed and tried to get up, trying to reach out to his legs, through the unremitting agony that consumed his body. Instead, he rolled onto his right side, his cheek coming to rest in a pond of blood-soaked carpet. The more he cleansed his lungs of the poison he had been forced to breathe, the quicker he gained control of his arms and legs.
“Russ. Russ. Russ,” Jenny said, though now only in a faint gasp of devotion.
“Honey, we’re home. Just barely made it after the storm, but safe and sound. Maybe we should just order pizza and, oh, is Jenny coming over?” his mother hollered from the living room below. “My God, look at my pottery, and my mother’s glass plates from China, all broken. My God, what happened here?”
“Russ. Russ…” Jenny said until her chin slumped down against her chest soaked in tears, and her heart stopped, if only as a way to end her grief and the terrible images she had been forced to witness.
After that, there was really was no point in living. She had managed to shut her eyes as they held up her love and refused to admit into memory what happened next, until she realized they had taken her love’s life and all her dreams and their future, so there was nothing left for her to cling to.
Her heart knew this and simply, in a language all its own, refused to allow a life of unrelenting grief and despair to follow.
Russell finally grasped his thigh and forced his hands down to his knees. His movements were still sloppy and spastic, and sensation was only now returning to his fingers.
His hands were inching close to the pain as his room came into a blur, but better than it was moments ago. Further down were his shins, then he felt a large, bulbous, fleshy mass—and below that, nothing.
His hand darted to his left leg. Both his feet were gone.
“Jenny?” he eeked out, suddenly focused on the form pinned high against a sea of ribbons on the far wall. “Jenn?” he repeated when he noticed she wasn’t moving. The red splatter was everywhere, and on Jenny’s jeans and shirt, but she wasn’t moving.
Her eyes were open in a steady, lifeless stare. The right side of her face was red and swollen, as though she had been struck, repeatedly.
“Jenn? Honey?” he said unable to move further as the image of what remained of his footless legs finally came into focus. The pain coming from the mass of flesh that remained beneath each shin was easing. But the reality wasn’t.
He heard his mother shriek, though he didn’t know at what. His father bounded up the stairs and came into view, running over a pile of ceiling Sheetrock and plaster under foot.
“I think something is wrong with Jenny,” Russell managed to say, before he passed out.
“Call an ambulance, and the police,” his father yelled down to his mother, going to Jenny’s side first. He pulled her off the wall she was somehow splayed against. He felt her neck for a pulse. There was nothing he could do for her, or her parents, or her family, or her future.
Looking at what remained of his son, at the catastrophic damage to the boy’s legs: no more trophies was the terrible first conclusion Lawrence Connors came to before he burst into tears.
They had been planning a hunting trip for weeks. First, he caught the flu, then Russ had midterms. This was their weekend to bag a prized whitetail or mule deer. If they succeeded, it would have been the third consecutive year they brought home a trophy.
His father slumped to his knees, checked his son’s pulse, vital signs, and the grotesque bulbous flesh that remained of the boys legs. “Russ, it’s me, your father. We’re here and the ambulance is coming too. It’s all right. It’ll be all right.”
Cassy Brtenner was right behind and burst into Russel’s bedroom and froze at the sight of her sister who she sensed was in trouble and came running to help. While Russell’s father tended to his son, Cassy embraced her sister, wraping herself around the deadened figure.
Weeks later doctors were able to cut away the mound of flesh that had cauterized and sealed Russell’s open arteries and veins. Though it resembled human flesh, it was synthetic and, when separated from its host, quickly dehydrated and evaporated.
Incidents like this were as rare as twin supernumerary digits, though similar reports had come in from a village in Western Sudan in 1924, from a farm in the Russian steppes after WWII, and from a favela in San Paulo, Brazil, in 1974. Several were reported in small Indian provinces in 2003 and 2004, but never made it to the Indian national ministry.
It took years to recognize the similarities and collect evidence from the dozen or so sites before Dr. Jeffrey Lynton, an evolutionary biologist in Geneva suggested a theory and drafted a paper in 2028, a year to the day after Russell Connors succumbed to an unrelated illness.
The paper was entitled, “The Alien Trophy Hunting Puzzle.”
It was never accepted in scholarly journals.
Cassy Brenner, now a thirty-nine year old mother of two young children was visiting her sister’s grave when the vision of her sister’s tragedy, every terrifying, excruciating moment of it, flashed into view. A grounds keeper saw her collapse and rushed to her side.
When the police and ambulance arrived she was shaking, but awake. “I saw it all. I saw what happened. Oh, my, dear God, I saw them murder my poor Russell.”
But, by then, too many once unexplainable incidents had already been resolved into a recognizable pattern by scientists and Government agencies, and was finally referred to as The Alien Trophy Hunting Puzzle.
There was another life form, and earth had become their private hunting ground, their private game preserve if you will and, with Cassy Brenner’s stunningly detailed description of what the aliens looked like, nations around the world scrambled for a defence, and answers that never came.
by 
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