Requested file: S1-001 - "The Encounter"
The Encounter


The alien attack had come quickly and without a warning. People had fled the cities as fast as they could. The cities were now dark and burnt out. The only inhabitans were the still smoking corpses of those who had not escaped in time and a minority of people that had not yet been found by the muton death squads that were patrolling the streets. High above Paris, an alien battleship was hovering. It was lighting up the streets with flashlights and whenever it spotted any human individual it fired its plasma beams.

About 100 kilometers away, a military transport plane had been shot down by an alien ship of the class "Large Scout". The remains were still burning and small fires had risen in the area around the wreckage. The wreckage had been examined by a floater squad soon after it had hit ground. Inside the wreckage, Stephen Davies had been forced to act dead as the floaters came. He had seen that a few of the soldiers on the plane had survived the crash. When the floaters came, Davies' closed his eyes and hoped for the best. He could hear gruntling noises as the floaters found any survivor, then there was the sound of a plasma blast. The procedure was repeated a couple of times. Then there was silence. Davies waited for at least half an hour before he dared to open his eyes again. He looked around, there were no other survivors.

Scott Wright was sitting on a rock at the entrance of a small cave. He had been forced to escape from the conferance he was attending. His car, a jeep, had been standing nearby. He had forced three other people into his car and then set off for the woods. His car was followed by a number of other cars. A group had formed, it consisted of about twenty people. As a colonel from the British Army, Wright had been put in charge of the group's security. It was now his task to protect the group from the aliens. The cars had made it easy to avoid the squads of floaters and sectoids wandering about in the forest, in fact, the group had already escaped such teams a couple of times. However, they were going to run out of gasoline sooner or later and then he was not as sure what he could do. He had practically left the conferance in what he was wearing, army camouflage gear and a pistol as sidearm. He heard a sound, he sharpened his ears to hear better.
It was the sound of the sectoid language, it was time to move again.

Davies crawled out of the wreckage. He had been hurt quite badly but it was nothing fatal. On the ground he found a more or less unused medikit. It came in handy. His clothes were already dirty and his face was greasy from a tube of oil that had been sitting beside him in the military transport and bursted when the aircraft was shot down. Davies realized the danger of remaining at the crash site for too long and as soon as he had regained some of his powers, he grabbed a rifle, some ammunition and the few supplies he could find and headed into the woods.

The group of people had escaped the sectoids. Wright looked back over his shoulder, at the same time the jeep stopped, it was out of fuel. The group was now going to have to make it on their own. Wright feared the day when he was going to have to leave one of the slower members of the group to help the others to escape.

Davies had taken cover in a group of bushes for the night, it had been about a week since his plane was shot down, yet he had only been forced to hide from alien patrols a few times. It was twilight and the sun seemed to have a red colour and so did most of the sky. However, Davies did not have the time to enjoy the beautiful sight, all his senses were at maximum alert to detect any movement nearby. And there it was. Davies heard steps coming from the west. He made sure to camouflage well in the bushes and took a tight grip of his knife. They were not going to get him without putting up a fight. The steps came closer, Davies could not see the ones who the steps belonged to but he could hear that they were just outside the bushes by now. "This is it Stephen, this is your moment of death." he thought. He grabbed his rifle instead of the knife and prepared to die. When all the steps had passed him, he jumped out of the bushes and prepared to fire.

Davies was surprised to hear a human voice scream as he jumped out.

"GET DOWN!"

Davies found himself standing face to face with a human soldier pointing a pistol at him. All around there were humans who had threw themself to the ground. The soldier slowly lowered his pistol and Davies lowered his rifle. The two looked at eachother for a while.

"Scott?" Davies said.

"Stephen?" Wright said.


Created February 6th 1999 by Mattias Blennow, AKA Scott Wright