Chapter 2

The Uber trip to the airport was uneventful – at least, if you ignored the number of calls that were blowing up my phone. I didn’t answer any of them, though I was sorely tempted to have one final, spiteful chat with Mike, my now former employer.

I took an extraordinary deal of pleasure in tipping the driver the full amount of what Leo paid me for his sparring session. Money wasn’t going to be necessary where I was going.

I did suffer a moment of terror, as airport security pulled me aside. Fortunately, it was just your regular ‘random’ security check. In my short life, I hadn’t flown often. Still, I’d learned by now that being ‘randomly’ selected would be a fact of life for somebody like me. It wasn’t just my size, though I was sure that applied too. Weighing in at two hundred and twenty pounds of mostly muscle at a little less than six feet apparently made me take up more than my allotted space in any given room. Of course, my buzzcut, selected solely for the purpose of not having my hair pulled in the ring, didn’t help. If that weren’t enough, my oft-broken nose and ears that had suffered a lot of abuse, completed the image. I looked like trouble. Hence, the extra love.

The security check was easily wrangled. I’d brought nothing for the flight except for my phone, my wallet, my bag with toiletries and a single change of clothes. What I did fear was that they’d called the police on me and I’d get stopped and miss my one chance to leave Earth behind.

Thankfully, the level of competence of the Bobbies in Northumbria Police hadn’t suddenly skyrocketed. A couple of intimate pats and rote questions later, I waltzed into the departure lounge, overpaying for a sandwich and beer with a solid grin on my face. And two and a half hours later, I left England behind. Excitement mixed with relief, as the wheels of the airplane left the ground, and I embarked on the first leg of my journey toward Portal Home.

***

I rode in monkey. Even though I was holding nothing back, saving nothing, no normal people were able to afford business class or better for any flights going to Asia anymore, and particularly not Indonesia. Today, we’d touch down in Abu Dhabi, refuel, and continue to take off again. Then, I’d be nearly there.

I could see it on the other passengers, as well. Just last month, the passengers on this trip to Jakarta likely would have been a decent blend between businessmen, retirees going to play golf and visit prostitutes, and screaming kids with overbearing parents.

Not so anymore. I spotted a few suits, but apart from that, the passengers looked different. By that, I wasn’t only talking about the gender disparity, with at least three fourths being men. It was more that there were few older people. Not a single kid. And nearly every person here looked haunted, decided or half-panicked. I imagined it wouldn’t be too dissimilar from taking a look into a bus full of people going to war. These people knew what they were doing. And they knew that it was serious.

I’d splurged for a window seat. Regular airplane seats were already cramped enough. A middle seat, for my bulk, was just… no. I’d gotten in early and was just considering how best to keep myself entertained, when a muscular, short-haired girl in front of me played the video.

The video. If you asked anybody, they’d know exactly which one you meant. The video that changed life on Earth for good. The video that took everything we knew about science, space and life in general and tore it a new one. The introduction of the Lord of Freedom.

She had ear plugs. I didn’t need sound to know what was going to happen. Most people across the globe would be able to repeat the entire scene by heart. It had broken all records for streaming, anywhere. And it went down in Bradenton, Florida of all places.

The cell phone video was crisp and clear – high quality stuff for a phone recording. Even so, the image was disjointed, jolted about, like the person recording was experiencing nervous jitters. Sometimes, the sound of the woman recording hyperventilating drowned out words. I couldn’t blame her.

Trying to take in what was going on in the image was confusing, the first time you watched it. Of course, like the rest of the damn world, I’d watched and re-watched the video religiously and I knew what to look for. There, billowing clouds of dark smoke half-hid the scene, courtesy of a homemade meth lab that had exploded, taking three lives and eight trailers with it.

The girl holding the phone zoomed in, focusing the image. There. A person stood out from the background. Even if the zoom made the image grainier, he would have stood out anywhere. Mostly, because he was not human!

Humanoid, sure. He was tall, slender, with a skin colour somewhere between ashen grey and the turquoise you’d see in the ocean on heavily photoshopped travel brochures. His skull was also slightly oblong, with pronounced bone ridges across the temples and a single, mohawk-like fin running across the centre of his skull. All told, you might have mistaken him for one of those freaks who were into body mods. Except, he was nearly three meters tall. Of course, the five-meters-tall gleaming portal right behind him was a giveaway, too.

Despite being dressed only in a simple, white garment that led the thoughts to Rome and knock-off toga parties, the alien didn’t need additional adornments. He wore the countenance and self-importance of a king. Or, at the very least, a duke, drunk on his own importance.

He opened his mouth, and started to speak. At first, it sounded like he was talking to himself. “What garbage. What absolute disgrace. The scryers were wrong about this place.” Mid-sentence, his ire was directed. With a sneer, he turned. “Ah. There we go. The local peons are present.” He cleared his throat, raised his chin, showing off a weird bubble like a frog’s vocal sac underneath, and intoned. “On your knees, cur, or suffer! You are privileged to witness the arrival of our take-over. My takeover. Serve, and you may live, to tell your fellow slaves that you once bathed in the splendour of Nazkhevedar, Lord of the Waters.”

“Oi, you talking to me, bih?” Another voice appeared. This one was hoarse, and high-pitched. The screen jumped to take in the newcomer, then went horizontal to fit both of them at once, wavered as she zoomed out to get the size right.

The new addition to the scene was human. Very much so. He was also barefoot, emaciated, wearing a skin-tight set of tiger-striped leather pants and enough mismatched silver and gold necklaces to kickstart a pawnshop. The jewelry stood in stark contrast to his pockmarked face and, as he grinned, he showed off a set of disgusting brown and yellow teeth. It was impossible to tell if he was twenty-five or fifty – but his eyes were insane, gaze jumping back and forth to take in everything. From the crook of one thin, scarred arm, a large polka-dotted black and white handbag dangled precariously.

“I don’t judge nobody. Yo mom got dirty with a gator? Good fun. Good fun. I do mind that you just cost me my best shake n bake. So. You finna pay me, bih? Or do I get to make a coat of your hide?” His wide smile never wavered, even as he dug into the handbag and extracted a large knife that seemed almost too large for the handbag.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it’s taken without the author’s consent. Report it.

“Pay you?” The alien was too taken aback to even register the insult. “Did you not hear me? I am the Lord of the Waters.” The volume of his voice grew as he spoke. His hands moved in intricate gestures, suffusing his slender body with light, causing a gleaming spear to grow into being from his webbed hands. He raised the weapon to the heavens, ending in a roar. “Prostrate yourself or die.”

“Lord o’ the Waters?” The Floridian took a look at his knife, snorted and tossed it to the ground. “Ya don’t say?” He rummaged around in the handbag again, and extracted a gun. It was a ridiculous piece. Tiny enough to disappear inside his hand, draped in the colours of the Stars and Stripes, with fake rhinestones studding every free surface. Slowly, he raised the gun. “Well, I’m the Lord o’ Freedom. Welcome to Earth, bih.” He pressed the trigger.

In most situations, the self-proclaimed Lord of Freedom would likely have ended in jail, serving time for the creation and destruction of his home-made meth lab – oh, and the murder, of course. However, the video exploded onto every single social media platform out there, and by the end of the day, the Lord of Freedom was the single most famous person in the world.

The American government tried to put a lid on it. Of course they did. But it was pretty hard to deny the authenticity of the video, when the portal was still right there for everyone to see. By the time they managed to put up scaffolding and hide the gleaming, silvery mirror from the public, the damage was already done. And, of course, the stream of additional invaders blew the lid wide off the damn thing.

I spent the first couple days like everybody else on Earth, glued to my phone, trying, and failing to put the least bit of interest in my actual work, while drinking in every new development with a burning passion – a need to know what the hell was happening.