Capes Read online

  Being so low down on the totem pole meant that she had to take her own photos everywhere she went, so now there was a Canon camera in her hands as she approached.

  There were several uniformed people standing about just staring, and her heart skipped a beat as she knew something big was unfolding.

  At first, she assumed that the wreckage was bad or that there were casualties. What she could never have guessed in a million years of guessing was that the subject of the audience’s attention was a giant lizard man.

  Her camera had fired rapidly while the others had only stood and watched – a flashing, buzzing whirl of modern technology that she assumed must have seemed absurdly primitive to the alien standing next to a crashed spaceship.

  The flash of her camera seemed to break the spell, and suddenly, everything turned into a blur of movement and panic. Everyone started yelling at once. The police officers started barking orders at the lizard man, and one of the paramedics started screaming in fear.

  Jamie-Lyn locked eyes with the alien through the throng and saw a great sadness there, a pleading confusion. It opened its mouth to speak a single word – “Please” – and was immediately hit in the chest by a taser gun from a panicking police officer.

  “Wait! WAIT!” Jamie-Lyn yelled as she leapt forward.

  The alien looked down at the crackling charge running through the prongs in its chest before plucking them out, unperturbed. Jamie-Lyn stepped between the now advancing officers and the alien, holding her hands up to ward them off.

  “Just wait a minute now. Take it easy,” she said slowly.

  “Get out of the way,” a sneering PC said, advancing menacingly with his baton drawn.

  “What the hell are you going to with that thing?” she asked incredulously.

  “I’m gonna put him down,” came the Neanderthal response.

  “I’m sorry,” came a sad voice from behind her, and suddenly there was a gloved hand on her shoulder.

  Jamie-Lyn turned around to face the visitor and was aware of a bright purple light surrounding and encasing them. Her whole body seemed to hum with an electrical charge, and then, with a blinding flash, they were alone and standing in the middle of a different field.

  Jamie-Lyn opened her mouth to exclaim something but then promptly threw up on the dewy grass.

  “I’m sorry,” the lizard man reiterated.

  “I’m okay, it’s…”

  Jamie-Lyn’s words were cut short as she vomited again.

  “Okay… I think that’s it,” she said, standing up straight again, slowly.

  She looked around at the deserted field.

  “Where are we?”

  “I believe around five of your earth miles away,” the alien said, looking around for confirmation. “Maybe seven.”

  “What else can you do?”

  “What else?”

  “Yeah, what other things can you do?”

  “I’m not sure. I didn’t know I could do that,” the alien replied, looking down at its own hands.

  Jamie-Lyn tried to gather her thoughts; it wasn’t easy with her head still buzzing.

  “Okay… Look, we need to get a handle on this. As you saw back there, people are… well, people can be nuts.”

  “Are you?”

  “Nuts? Not yet, but looking at you, I kind of feel like it’d be a short trip.”

  Her words were supposed to be lighthearted, but they weren’t entirely incorrect.

  “Do you have a name?” she asked.

  “I wanted to blend in with you humans, so I chose a common name. Jones.”

  Jamie-Lyn studied the alien. Up close, there was a luminous quality to the alien’s skin. While there may have been a scaly reptilian appearance to it, the skin in fact seemed soft, and small twinkling beams of light bounced off it under the rising sun. The fin on the top of its head was thin-skinned, and the light shone dimly through it. But its eyes! Its eyes were the most startling thing about its bizarre appearance – bright yellow and widely horizontal, eyes that seemed to be able to see everything, and Jamie-Lyn could feel an odd sensation inside her head as it looked at her.

  “Yeah… I think it’s going to take a little more than a common name to help you blend in.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You know, you say that a lot. A lot more than you should.”

  “I am here in peace. I am here to help, to share, to protect. Alas, I have already failed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There is a man, back there. My ship was damaged upon entering your atmosphere. My navigation systems failed and my landing was not… it was not a safe one. When I crashed, I… I… the man…”

  Jamie-Lyn felt a tidal wave of grief wash over the alien, and she thought he might cry, if aliens could cry, that was.

  “It was an accident,” she offered.

  “Accident?” he replied, his tongue tasting the word as if for the first time.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault. I’m sure that you did everything you could. Sometimes…, well sometimes bad things just happen. It’s nobody’s fault.”

  She reached out and touched his arm gently, and he seemed reassured.

  “I must make amends for this accident. I will make amends for it; I swear this to you.”

  Jamie-Lyn looked around again at their current location.

  “Can you take us back? I’m guessing that those people are probably freaked out enough by now.”

  “Of course.”

  He closed his eyes, and the air around them started to crackle purple again, but this time it fizzled out and died.

  “Oh,” the alien said, looking down at his hands.

  “Problem?”

  “It would appear that I cannot do that again – not yet, at least.”

  “Great. Well, I guess we’re walking.”

  With that, a small-town reporter, at an even smaller-town-newspaper, and a visitor from outer space, who had travelled to Earth in a spaceship from who knew how far away, started to slog their way back through seven miles of farmland. As they walked, they talked, and so began Jamie-Lyn’s first world-changing interview.

  PRESENT DAY

  Jamie-Lyn watched on as the approaching group bustled their way through the studio, with a very tall green reptilian alien at the centre.

  He stopped, and being so tall, looked over the heads of those surrounding him. His eyes caught hers and he offered a small wave. She waved back.

  The name Cosmic Jones had been her suggestion during a drunken night when they had been sharing government provided accommodation.

  While technically he wasn’t being detained, he was never allowed to go anywhere without a couple of smart-suited, dark-glasses-wearing, armed chaperones. His only demand to the nervous officials was that Jamie-Lyn should be his official liaison. She had already released multiple articles about him, and as such, his face was quickly part of the fabric, enough so that he was unable to simply disappear.

  They had spent months at the safe house discussing every subject, both serious and nonsensical. She was positive that the house was bugged, but after a while, it was like reality TV where she forgot they were being observed. While ordinary alcohol had no effect on his system, simple water gave him an intoxication akin to being drunk.

  One of their guards had a habit of reading comic books and would often leave a pile of them lying around. The alien was quickly fascinated with daring tales of adventure and heroism. Jamie-Lyn was the first to draw comparisons with his original story and the colourful costumed beings inside the comic books.

  He had been very taken with the thought of being a real-life hero, a being who came to Earth with powers beyond those of mortal men. While her teasing had been good-natured, he had been dead serious about a career choice.

  “Cheers!” she toasted as she raised her vodka bottle.

  “Skoal!” he toasted back.

  “You’ll need a name,” she’d told him, her words slurring as a half-empty bottle of vodk
a sloshed in her hand.

  “I could be Super Alien!” he cried aloud, his own hand spilling a glass of expensive glacier water. “Spaceman!”

  “I thought you liked Jones?” she said, remembering his love for the anonymity of the sheer volume of Joneses in the phonebook.

  “SPACE-JONES!”

  “I think she’s a model,” she’d cackled. “How about something else, something spacey, something like… Cosmic… Cosmic Jones!” she exclaimed.

  “Cosmic… Jones… I like it. COSMIC JONES!”

  He’d punched the air and his hand had fired off a careless energy blast at that point, smashing a hole through the roof, showering them in plaster dust. The chaperones had come bursting into the room, guns drawn, while Jamie-Lyn and Cosmic Jones rolled around laughing.

  Her interviews with him had introduced him to the world, and for a while there, they had been a double act joined at the hip. Her job on TV had only come about because they had been a package deal – where he went, she went, and everyone wanted a piece of him.

  Across the studio floor, for a moment it looked like he was about to change direction and head over to her, but then one of the show’s producers was pulling him away and onto the news set.

  Summer Sloan came rushing over to greet him, and from this distance, Jamie-Lyn couldn’t hear the words, but the anchor’s body language was wide open as she leaned in, touching his arm and flicking her hair like a flirty teenager.

  It had been a long time since they’d last talked, and she missed his friendship.

  For a while, she had been just that – a friend to an alien who, compared to humans, had abilities akin to super powers.

  For Cosmic, or CJ as most of his friends called him, the whole world seemed to be divided into two camps: those who were excited and those who were scared.

  The concept that we were now unequivocally not alone in the universe rocked perceptions to the core.

  Religion probably took the biggest hit. If God created man in his own image, what did that mean for a green lizard spaceman? Did we share the same god or were there multiple deities?

  Pro-groups vied with anti-ones for public airtime. Many of the more paranoid believed that CJ was the first in an invasion, no matter how much he protested otherwise.

  Jamie-Lyn had been glued to CJ’s side during those early months. She was his insurance, along with the fact that he kept his abilities very close to his chest, close enough to keep the government at arm’s length.

  She documented all of the interviews and studies, a constant stream of public information that started the day he landed, which effectively blocked the government from seizing CJ and locking him away out of sight.

  His video diaries became instant essential viewing. He spoke openly and honestly about his planet, Thoraxis, and how he’d been a scientist who’d been off planet carrying out routine research when his ship had been struck by an unseen explosion and forced off course through what he assumed was a black hole.

  He’d sobbed as he’d spoken about the wife and child that he’d had stolen from him and how he wished to trade his knowledge for help in finding his way home. That last bit seemed to resonate. While his appearance could not be further away from being human, his love and sorrow were all too similar.

  Jamie-Lyn had stuck close to him with her video camera despite the government’s objections, and she’d been dragged aside on more than one occasion and threatened, with an increasing lack of subtlety.

  CJ had worked with government scientists but it had quickly become apparent that Earth technology was grossly insufficient to even find his planet. But CJ had been true to his word and had shared some of his world’s technological advances.

  Slowly, when the earth kept on turning, when the sun kept rising and setting, and when no armada of alien spacecraft arrived to enslave us all, the human race started to settle down, and CJ became something of an ordinary illegal alien in the eyes of many.

  CJ had been working with some of Earth’s premier energy scientists, and they had been trying to develop a clean power source.

  Jamie-Lyn had been with CJ at a public relations event when one overly eager researcher had tried to fire up a generator despite CJ’s warnings that it wasn’t ready. The subsequent explosion destroyed a lab and three people were injured at a facility in Boulder Ridge.

  There was one woman – Cynthia Arrow, a religious zealot – who had set up an organisation in the aftermath of the accident, which she called SOUL. . It was so named as in their minds, it was to defend the Sanctity Of Uncorrupted Life. The group believed that any non-human could not possibly be a creation of God, and that they must be, by definition, soulless and therefore evil.

  The SOUL organisation made a lot of noise, but it was mainly a case of a handful of angry misfits simply shouting louder than anyone else.

  The accident was relatively minor, but if Cynthia Arrow had one talent, it was a charismatic approach to PR. By the time she was finished, the minor accident had become a full-blown disaster that had killed dozens of humans, and she obviously laid the blame squarely at CJ’s feet.

  Rumours spread quickly, and suddenly, there was a groundswell of people who cared little for facts. Instead, rampant paranoia was ignited as talk of a government cover-up ran wild, and now some fringe members of the public were talking about all kinds of craziness going on behind the scenes.

  Suddenly, Cosmic Jones was thrust back into the limelight and the SOUL organisation were demanding to know what other crazy experiments were going in secret. One theory floated by Cynthia herself was that CJ was actually converting humans into space lizards, and that the prime minister herself had already been replaced, all for the sake of an unholy takeover.

  The turning point in the public relations war had come when rogue members of SOUL took over the National History Museum and promised to film themselves executing a roomful of terrified hostages unless the government came clean on the secret experiments and their alien invader.

  It was then that a high-ranking officer, within the sort of military department that governments won’t admit even exists, came forward with an idea: to take a figure of fear and turn him into a hero.

  The idea of an alien becoming the world’s first real-life superhero should have been laughable, and plenty of people did indeed laugh – that was until they saw what he could do, then people started to be afraid.

  Cosmic Jones had teleported himself into the building, taking the armed men by surprise and vaporising them before they could even begin to process his appearance.

  Due to the burgeoning panic amongst the population at his power and abilities on full view of the covering television cameras, Cosmic Jones was quickly deputised by the authorities.

  A desperate prime minister, overseeing a failing government heading for certain failure at an upcoming general election, seized upon their visitor like a drowning woman.

  The PR campaign was swift and uncompromising. Millions were thrown at the problem and then the solutions, and quickly, only those loudly supporting Cosmic Jones’ appointment were heard while the dissenting voices were drowned out.

  SOUL were officially tagged a terrorist organisation and the Anti-Radical-Religion was enacted.

  The far Christian Right were correctly targeted for their extreme views. SOUL was soon gathering up small fringe groups into their midst and finding willing soldiers to fight and die for their cause. But as is often the case, laziness played a part in the middle mainstream, and soon, any Christian groups were being eyed with suspicion simply by the vaguest association.

  A call to arms went out from the SOUL organisation at seeing their brothers murdered by an alien invader and their numbers grew as did their attacks, and the war began.

  The government’s response was to create a new department, and place CJ with a few carefully chosen humans to show the public that he really was on our side – a team, if you will; a super team, if you must, dubbed the Queen’s Guard.

  Jamie-Lyn’s positio
n altered from CJ’s personal manager to the PR machine of the newly formed team, but as their actions became increasingly military in nature, she found herself unable to continue putting her name to an agenda that made her ever more uncomfortable.

  While undoubtedly SOUL were a very real danger, the response from the government and the Queen’s Guard had been increasingly merciless right up until the incident at Havencrest. After that, she could stomach her position no more and had left the team.

  For her, the thrust into the national media as the PR face of the Queen’s Guard had opened many doors and the TV stations had come calling quickly. She had been appealing to viewers firstly through her looks and confident manner, but she had tried to transition that into a serious journalistic career.

  Now, as she stood in the studio, Jamie-Lyn could only watch from the sidelines as for the first time in almost 20 years, her once friend sat in front of the cameras, only now it wasn’t her interviewing him.

  chapter 3

  SIX-SHOOTER

  “ANDY! HURRY UP. IT’S ALMOST TIME!”

  Andrew Marshall looked up from his desk in the basement towards his wife’s shouting voice.

  “I’LL BE UP IN A MINUTE,” he called back.

  The basement was converted into a man cave for him. The walls were lined with marksmen plaques and medals as well as various framed photos showing him through the ages in varying military uniforms.

  It had been Sharon’s idea that he find a space to display his awards, and while he wasn’t a vain man, he did want to honour the sheer dedication and effort that had gone into making him once the greatest marksman in the world.

  He leaned back in the swivel office chair and tried to ignore the aching moans in his back. There was a copy of News Day on his desk, the paper folded to the piece on the Queen’s Guard that he’d kept on returning to.

  Normally, he didn’t take much notice of the ill-informed ramblings of the right-wing media or their agenda, but something had caught his eye with the News Day piece.