Chapter Six

Andy Caulfield lived in a relatively small flat somewhere amongst a compact batch of edifices (a little west from the oceanside). 

His carpeted room had dark-blue walls with posters of human skulls, two windows on both the left and the right side, and a white ceiling fan. A dim purple light glimmered about, followed harmoniously by a scented air freshener. 

Lavender sprigs, he thought. Gentle, like wildflowers in the early spring. 

And in the background: a playlist of slow, sleep-inducing tunes. 

Andy was just wrapping up the closing lines of his English homework. Huddling up against his desk, he sat comfortably on a swivel chair, typing away on his computer (he had been a quick typer). 

He wore a white polyester sweater along with a pair of tracksuit pants. 

An essay had been due for Monday – so he googled all sorts of fancy words and linguistic sentences. Sure, it was wrong, but so much had happened recently that he simply didn't have the time – or the energy – to spend hours planning and writing nonsense about Shakespeare's obsolete plays. 

It was just nearing the end of the day (11.34 P.M.). By that time, the sun had completely bled into the horizon and the moon had risen from its slumber. A biting wind brought remnants of a wintry cold along the shoreline, snow, or was it sleet that Andy saw? It didn't matter; either way, he enjoyed the gentle sound of lingering rain, the smell, too. It usually came around the wintertime after a heavy downpour.

When he completed his writing – or rather, when he came close to completing it, he received a notification on SUP-X from a familiar profile picture. It was Gecko, calling with a low ringing sound. A message came with the call: answer bitchass. The screen popped up with two options: ACCEPT – IGNORE.

He reached down to his computer mouse and clicked on ACCEPT; the screen unfolded, hazily at first, and displayed Gecko's face. A tan, unshaven face bearing a resemblance to that old Disney movie character – Maui from Moana. Andy had heard the others refer to him as that character, but only now did he understand why. 

"What you want, Maui?" Andy asked, stifling a laugh. 

"What can I saaaay exceeeept you're welcome!" Gecko sang. "Andy, what's up my G? We haven't talked in a minute."

"I'm about to head to bed my man; sorry but I can't speak right now unless I want my parents to come barging in," Andy said in a low voice – not quite a whisper, but not quite a regular tone. 

Gecko scoffed and laughed. "Aight, man, did you see the video I sent you?"

"Video?" Andy scratched his ginger hair. "What video you on about?"

"The one I sent you earlier, blind-ass. The one about the alien."

Andy went quiet,  clicked down on their SUP-X DM's and scrolled up; once or twice – maybe three times – he saw the number of memes they were sending back and forth, and it only occurred to him that that's all they really sent each other, most of the time, anyway. Except for the links to the social media posts. "Alien video?" he spoke. 

Andy found the video link: www.theycamefromthemoon.com

CLICK!

It brought him to a page about greymen and UFO's; there had been images of supposed UFO's caught on camera as well as some questionable videos that he had already seen before on other sites. At the bottom right there was a category labelled: MOST RECENT!

"What the fuck is this shit?" Andy asked. 

"Just check the most recent video. Bottom right of the screen, blind-ass."

Andy reached down to his computer mouse and clicked on the most recent upload. At the bottom left side of the screen, a video began downloading. He scrolled further down and found a block of text from the website developer. 

THEY'RE HERE! Continuous updates about extraterrestrial beings. For those of you out there who crave the truth, and for all of you out there with IQ's much beyond our comprehension who are about to question their own existence . . . We finally have video evidence of the celestials in the sky, the aliens that have boggled much of us since the beginning of time. UFO's AND ALIENS DO EXIST. 

WARNING: WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO SEE IS 100% REAL. There is no excuse for those who doubt their existence . . . NOW, YOU WILL JOIN US.

"No way . . ." Andy said. "This can't be what I think it is."

"And this is the point where I start reenacting the federal state agency and say: those be famous last words, B," Gecko said. 

A moment of silence passed as the video continued downloading. "Bro," Gecko began, "some funky-ass alligator walkin' down the street about an hour ago."

Andy laughed a little. "Yeah, awesome man. Good for you."

He lay back on his swivel chair and said, "This is prolly fake if it has an alien in it. An actual alien." He began biting the neck of his sweater. 

"Hm," Gecko said. "I thought that too at first; trust me: if you watch it, you'll see what I mean."

The video began loading. A triangular play icon popped up in the centre of his screen. The thumbnail: a poor-quality image of a dark house. Or maybe it was a factory.

The picture was grainy and unfocused. It was hard to tell where it was; way too dark, way too blurry.

Andy hit play. 

The greyish-hued images unfolded, at first soundless, to a distorted soundtrack of harsh coughing. The first thing he could see was a man in a white hazmat suit tearing a black overcoat off of a body on an operating table; a blurred flash of a lizard's tail; a stolen glimpse of the creature's face, eyes bulging from the sides of its green head, popping open in the shadows of the room – before the man in white grabbed a scalpel from a tray and said, "Operation X. December, one-zero-eight. Subject appears to be lifeless – without form."

Andy saw enough sci-fi movies to know what a fake alien looked like. This looked real. It had the features of a lizard that he knew, all along, were real.

"Holy shit!" Andy said. "You have got to be fuckin' kiddin' me!" His eyes widened with disbelief. 

"Bro," Gecko said, "they really be out here, huh? Like they out here uploadin' images online about how they been in the sky and in space and they been on Earth this whole time. That's some real shit. And imagine once the FBI finds out this been leaked and the government start locking down streets and Obama rises from the dead to save the day. You better hope that they don't catch me hittin' them with my special move, Fatman's Embrace. They go flyin'."

"What are you even saying?" Andy laughed, then shut his lips abruptly. He didn't want his parents thinking he was still up. 

"Everything. Hol' up, ya boy gonna get some frosted flakes, be right back."

With the man in white slicing his scalpel through the thick, green layers of the creature's skin, he coughed and said, "Subject is missing vital organs. What appears to be . . . empty."

"Oh my God . . ." Andy whispered to himself. "This isn't possible."

A couple more minutes passed, and nothing significant caught his eye. Then there was blackness; the video had ended.