Monsters Ink

In the arid and mountainous interior of British Columbia, in the year 2121 A.D., a ranching family is surrounded overnight by sasquatches, all gibbering in apparent terror and staring fearfully at the mountaintops. The father of the Nelson family and the two teenage boys climb up one of the mountains to investigate. Approaching the summit, they see that numerous space-ships are landing up there and a great many green, reptile-skinned aliens are aggressively securing the area. Returning to their ranch, they enter into an uneasy alliance with the sasquatches, who smell horrible and are bad-tempered as well, mostly because their deeply instinctive secretiveness has been violated. The farm animals are reacting to their fetid presence with frenzied panic, so Mr. Nelson guides them himself to a nearby cave situated inside a deep gorge with a stream at the bottom, a congenial habitat for sasquatches, who rely very much on their remarkable climbing ability. The rancher does not see the sasquatches as the immediate threat – at least they are terrestrial. He would tell the rest of the family to keep quiet about them for the time being – the Nelsons don’t want to stretch their credibility too far just yet. But Mr. Nelson admits to himself that he is disturbed by an impression that the sasquatches want to tell him something. There is something in their angry, babbling speech that sounds quite urgent. But when he gets back to the ranch he doesn’t say anything about these thoughts. Having over time devolved from a few surviving proto-humans who had taken refuge in marginal areas, in haste to hide from the mass migrations that surged out of Asia when the great North American glaciers finally receded about 10,000 years ago, the sasquatches have survived almost entirely through concealment. Despite their size, they are uncannily silent in their movements and wonderfully skilled at remaining motionless for long periods oftime, a very useful adaptation in the higher altitudes which they prefer. And of course at those altitudes, in that steep and airy environment, their powerful body-odor would not be the dead give-away to their presence that it becomes closer to sea-level. The Nelsons are dismayed to find that repeated attempts to alert the authorities and the media are met with disbelief and ridicule but no actual response. The alien invasion-force continues to occupy the highest elevations, with terrible rumbling and screeching noises and occasional showers of green and purple sparks into the night sky. The terrestrials huddle together on the ranch below, perplexed and afraid. The sasquatches normally live in the small, isolated units that are natural in a barren landscape, and they are not at all sociable. It is remarkable that the two teenage brothers are able to extablish a rapport with the furry primates and even begin to learn their simple langage. The climax of the story occurs when the two brothers lead a scouting party of sasquatches up the mountain and manage to capture one of the aliens. The sasquatches excitedly insist that the green-skinned creature is not an alien at all, merely a severely disfigured human. The Nelson boys would never have believed such a thing to be possible but, using desperate measures, they are able to ‘deprogram’ the ‘alien’ at an old motel near an abandoned mining-town. They proceed to discover that the vicious ‘aliens’ are in fact members of a covert assault-force originating from the Grand Cartel which by then controls South America. They have been raised for this purpose in isolated jungle compounds, where they have been both surgically and chemically altered. They have also been brainwashed to believe that they are on the planet Zalomar, where their ancestors were supposedly imprisoned centuries ago, after having been rounded up and taken away from their home-world, the beautiful planet Tiffawil. Here on Zalomar, they believe, they have been enslaved and condemned to mining ore in the very deepest tunnels and under conditions of extreme heat and danger. Their Zaloman overseers are muscular and masked, and they speak only in a crude and heavily accented English. The brainwashed ‘Tiffawillians’ are convinced that, following a successful rebellion under the leadership of the great Tixtlan – who is no doubt a figurehead created by the Grand Cartel – they are now engaged in a righteous war of conquest and liberation for the entire planet of Zalomar. When the two brothers demonstrate the truth of this situation to the rest of the Nelson family, a public rally and news-conference is arranged with the help of the local small-town newspaper editor. The covert invasion is stopped, being quickly met with overwhelming military force. One sad consequence of these events is that the Grand Cartel ruthlessly decides to scrap ite reserves of false aliens and there are terrible and gruesome massacres in the jungles of South America. The End

Happy 2009 Redbubblers! Time to kick off the new year with a new volume in the excellently creepy On Consecrated Ground series. So far I have managed to gather 4 writers and artists that were apart of Volume 2, except for Jason Barthelemy hes new to the series. Glad to have him with us I have finished reading his book that I bought from Lulu.com, great work. I have not discussed the deadlines for this with the guy who brought this all together Dillon Langlands. For the future of further volumes I can say that there will be more but possibly under a new title. Maybe one of these days it will be televised so a larger audience can experience it for themselves. In the meantime I am planning on turning some of the stories into comics pages so there may be a comic series out maybe in 2010! Hopefully many of the writers will be up for it. Thanks for your time. Peter J. Hodgson (author of The Evil Season anthology, Dead Letters, Vault of nightmares, On Consecrated Ground’s “Picket” “Doors without a keeper” “Document of fear”)

I want to thank all the members of The Group Of Death, and the other Moderators, in seeing my writing as worthy to be featured. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Where Did I Go Wrong * / “http://www.redbubble.com/mybubble/writing/2130222-chapter-1-where-did-i-go-wrong/edit”