Teleporting While Intoxicated
William Petersen
Copyright 2015 William Petersen
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This story first appeared in issue #18 of Far Horizons Magazine in September of 2015. A very special thanks goes out to Kimberly, Ana, Pete, Valery, Scribe Scarlet and the entire Far Horizons staff. - W.P.
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“Okay sir, now I need you to walk in a straight line for me, one foot in front of the other and touching heel to toe. Do you understand what I'm asking?” Charlie inquired as he took his charge through the first steps of the sobriety test, while I attempted to deal with the other. The young trainee was eager and ambitious, almost like a new puppy, brimming with enthusiasm and ready to please me at any moment.
The thin rookie's closely-cropped, dark hair was slick with perspiration and glinted in the moonlight as he moved. He tried to remain stoic, but his curiosity and fascination with the little green creatures were more than he could hide. I watched as he fought off grin after grin, and for just a moment a twinge of jealousy stabbed at my heart. It must be nice to still find anything amusing about them.
That'll change, I thought as I turned my attention back to the three-foot-tall, vividly green being in front of me. Its head looked like an inverted pear supported by a disproportionately small and skinny neck. The torso extended from slender shoulders into a distinct pot-belly lacking a button, which draped over a smooth crotch and jiggled as pudgy legs sporadically impacted against it.
It was on the ground, giggling at nothing in particular, as it wallowed in the foul, yellowish-brown excrement periodically emerging from its armpits. The thing's eyelids were never at the same height at the same time, and its tiny slit of a mouth hung open as it gurgled and groaned through a chinless face devoid of a nose. The solid, black eyes rolled about in its strange head.
“I said, touch your nose...” the rookie told his subject, clearly nervous about his first stop. I looked back to the trainee. The diminutive creature in front of him was reaching around and rubbing the first of its three fingers between the cleaved deposits of tissue on its backside. The fleshy mounds resembled a human rump, and the sight never failed to disgust me.
“That is my nose,” came the slurred reply as the rubbing finger found a new vigor.
“It's a TWI, let's just cuff 'em both and take 'em in to sober up,” I said with more than a hint of resignation. I closed my eyes and ran a hand across my smooth head and down the back of my neck, hoping it would somehow relieve some of the tension built up in my body. It didn't.
I'd been working The Greens for several years now, and it was taking its toll; I had never found them cute or intriguing, and my intolerance of their kind grew with each passing day. It was clear that humans would never learn or benefit from these beings, because they were completely and constantly intoxicated. The scientists speculated that they came from a low-oxygen environment and were inebriated after a single breath of our atmosphere, but I didn't really care what their deal was anymore. I just wanted them gone.
“No way, man...” the miniature, green thing at my feet announced, realizing the ramifications of its situation during a brief moment of lucidity, and then it disappeared.
“I hate it when they do that...” was all I could say. The little shits could teleport at will, without any machinery or visible assistance. They constantly appeared and disappeared, and it was annoying.
My mind drifted back to the first contact; one of them had appeared out of nowhere and found itself in the flight path of a commercial jet. The plane smacked it with a wing, immediately killing it, but the body fell and created quite a sensation. Within hours, more started to manifest all over the city, and days later, they were appearing all over the world. Not long after, the Green Unit was formed out of pure necessity.
Charlie quickly pounced on his charge and pushed the being to the ground. He then rolled it onto its belly, where he secured handcuffs around the creature's pudgy ankles. They had to be secured by their legs, because the things had no bones in their thin arms and could slide them right out of restraints. The cuffs also stopped them from disappearing; they couldn't teleport with anything metallic in contact with their bodies, though it seemed as if they frequently forgot that fact.
“Ahhhh! You're killing me! It hurts! They're too tight! Ahh!!! I'm dying!!!” the creature wailed while grunting between its cries with the effort of attempted teleportation.
The rookie recoiled and looked at me, his dark eyes revealed a mixture of surprise and confusion, “Um, boss? I mean, Sergeant Morgan, sir. Is this for real?”
“Don't buy into that crap, it's just drama,” I confirmed. Short on theatrics the aliens were not, however, their skin was extremely tough. They didn't seem to register physical damage as pain, even when their nearly fluorescent green blood was spilled. But they sure acted as if they were in total agony. If anyone were foolish enough to fall for the ploy, the reward was either a vanishing alien or an explosion of extraterrestrial excrement. “Just put him in the car.”
Charlie obliged, grabbing the chain of the cuffs and dragging the stoned alien to the patrol car. The creature squawked and protested, claiming its face was being torn off, then erupted with laughter as it was tossed into the back of the cruiser. There wasn't so much as a scratch on it anywhere.
A rustling in the bushes just off the dirt road stole my focus, and I moved towards the disturbance. I heard the unmistakable sound of prolonged flatulence and followed the noise to its source; the escaped alien had reappeared not more than twenty feet away. It was common. The things were so wasted that they couldn't teleport themselves with any accuracy or distance. Hence, once they were here, they never left.
I reached into the pocket of my trench coat and retrieved my own cuffs as I approached the drunken alien. I looked down at the slovenly creature now coated in leaves, sand and pebbles adhering to the waste covering most its body. To hell with this, echoed in my head.
“What is it?” Charlie called out.
“Nothing. It must have been an animal,” I lied, not wanting to touch the drunk, disgusting thing rolling around in its own excretions. I walked back to the cruiser and climbed into the driver's seat, waited for Charlie to get in, and we departed for the station to drop off our prisoner.
Within minutes of trading the dirt road for pavement, the obnoxious droning of the alien lush snoring in the back seat assaulted my ears. Charlie giggled, and I let my face drop into a scowl before glancing at him. His elation ran away, but I held his gaze for several seconds to convey my seriousness. The younger man cleared his throat and looked straight ahead.
“They're not cute,” I reiterated for the thousandth time. “These things are a menace.” I focused back on the road and grit my teeth as the rasping snore grew louder.
It was hard for me to grasp that, even though they often caused accidents and appeared in people's living rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms without warning, they were still adored by the masses. And worst of all, they were legally protected. The Alien Rights League, a group of bleeding heart tree-huggers, had lobbied and won them actual rights. No human outside of the Green Unit was allowed to touch them or disturb them in any way. If not for the problems their drunken teleporting caused, they would have free reign to do as they pleased.
After a few moments of strained silence, Charlie succumbed to his incessant need for conversation, “I've always wondered about something since I was in the academy. I know we have to hold them in a low-oxygen environment for two days to sober them up, but I don't really see how that helps. What is stopping them from just teleporting somewhere else when we let them go?”
“Nothing,” I somberly replied, “The idea is that
once they straighten up and become their nasty, aggressive, human-hating selves again, they'll teleport back to their own planet. That's the concept anyway.”
“Do you believe any of the crap they say when they're sober?”
Charlie was referring to the endless tirades spouted from the little turds when they were forced into sobriety; they vehemently seethed about how they came here to take over the planet and enslave the human race.
They boasted about weapons more powerful than mankind could contemplate and superior numbers of highly trained warriors, but it was hard to take them serious after seeing them stumbling around drunk and repeatedly soiling themselves. However, I couldn't dismiss their claims as idle threats. After all, they had to be more advanced than us to get here in the first place, “Yeah... I