This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Man With Three First Names.

Simon hit the ground with full force, sending a shockwave out around him in all directions. It’s almost a good thing the pulse had already taken the land because he would have disrupted the electricity for several blocks, and toppled some of the closer buildings to the ground. He stood up. His clothes were in tatters, and his rucksack lay on the side of the street. He stood to his full height, which while transformed, was about eight and a half feet, and shook his long black hair out of his face. His gray-green skin showed through his tattered shirt. His mind was awake and alive, he could sense telepathically in all directions around him. He closed his eyes. In the buildings by him, he could hear the conversations of everyone in them.

“Did you do your homework young lady?”

“Mom! Can’t you see outside there are monsters everywhere!”

“There is no such thing. Do you know what time it is?”

“No, but mom!”

He shifted his attention and focused on another house.

“Billy, you need to take a bath.”

“Mom! Can you see them? They’re in the sky, everywhere.”

“You need to stop lying—“

He shifted away again.

There was a girl standing on the street corner not a hundred yards from him.

He drunk in her presence and listened to her mind.

“Can you hear my thoughts?” she thought.

It began to rain.

Simon turned to her. “Yes.”

“Where did you come from?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your name?”

“Simon, but it’s hardly fitting is it? I’m more of a troll or something now.”

“You were human, not one of these creatures?”

“I don’t know what I am anymore.”

“It’s okay.”

She stepped closer to him. She couldn’t have been a day over seventeen.

“What’s your name?”

She didn’t speak but continued to just think her responses.

“Alice, that’s nice.” He heaved in a deep breath and felt the strength in his body.

She hugged her arms. “Are you real?”

“I don’t know anymore. I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel real.”

She stepped closer to him, and reached out to him, the janitor of secret projects, and put a hand on his chest. “You feel real,” she thought.

“Then I suppose I’m real.”

He shook the rain out of his hair, and one of the larger creatures flew over them, its long snout reaching down from the clouds and sniffing over the land. The snout, long and hairy, was all that could be seen beside the slow manta-like wings it used to glide through the air. He looked back at Alice. “Is this your world, or are you from mine?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know anymore.”

He looked down at her as the creature floated above them, and smelled the rain around him. The smell was alien, oily and strange, it stung the interior of his nose and clung to it.

“Does the rain sting your nose?”

She looked at him and considered that. Did it? She inhaled, as the rain-soaked her hair.

“I can’t tell. I can’t tell if it’s stinging or not.”

He knelt down and faced her eye to eye.

“Did you know one of your eyes is bigger than the other?”

He felt his face and his eyes. He didn’t know.

“I must be grotesque to you.”

“I think you’re beautiful.”

He stood.  “I must go.”

“Don’t.”

“I’ll return?”

He leaped up into the air, forcing himself to ignore the second glance in her direction. He must stay focused. He landed on the top of someone’s house and began to jump from rooftop to rooftop. He found it easy to do so, almost as if he was floating under his own power. He found it easy to soar like this, just a few hundred feet at a time, stepping stones across a pond.

He increased his speed and took a flying leap over one house. Then they swung up through a tree and found himself heading for the side of an office building. He twitched the muscles in his torso and turned to face the building, grasping onto the sides of it easily. Then he started climbing up like it was level ground. He stood atop the building and looked back at the neighborhood.

Behind him, some of the houses remained, and some others did not. Where they were there were now great rolling hills of purple flowing grass whipping in the wind. His larger eye seemed able to focus farther away, almost telescopically, and focused back, looking for Alice in all of this.

She was still standing on the corner where he’d left her.

She gave him a smile like she knew he was going to look back for her. Then she waved and turned to step into one of the houses.

He looked around, checking out the grasslands.

Grazing creatures stood in the tall grasses. Their long tusks and tall tails poked above the line of grass as they shifted and plundered through the weeds. Were there eyes on the ends of those tails? Were they warning devices or something like that?

He watched them chew the grasses around them to the ground until he could see them for what they were. They were short, maybe four-foot-tall mammoths, covered in long brownish-green fur. He took a closer look at the tail, It did have an eye on it, a single eye capable of looking in any direction that it needed to. There must have been thirty of them standing in the field just eating the long purple grasses. In his mind, Simon realized that on some level all the purple grass was the dimensional drift of houses that might not come back again once this pulse faded if it ever did.

He jumped to another building, and looked out at the remains of the Sublight group, and could barely see the scattered remains of the ship they had been in.

He decided to jump down to see if everyone was all right when the building shook. He grabbed hold of it and held on tight. It shook again, it was a slow rhythmic pummeling. He looked over the side and saw massive creatures, each the size of a house, crawling up the side of the building. Several were already in his view. They hit the side of the building with large padded feet that seemed to dig in, blasting out the windows and making the glass tinkle to the ground. All Simon could see was a gaseous mist down there. He watched them lumber up, and also noticed several of them down the street, starting in on one of the shorter buildings, which just went down without a fight.

They’re building smashers, some kind of stomper. They smashed into the side of his building again, each step with the force of a car hitting the building at a hundred miles an hour. Concrete spluttered out, and gashes in the side of the building sprayed out into the sky, flaking off the building like it was exploding with charges of dynamite. They smashed and smashed as the creatures ascended. He could feel the building starting to become rocky, leaning this way and that.

He jumped to another building.

Then he felt it again, they were already on this building. He jumped to the next one as that building came down like an old Vegas implosion. He realized at the bottom, at the street level, all the mist was the smoke and mess of the other falling buildings.

It didn’t seem to phase the grazers one bit though, who stepped aside and kept to their grasses that were growing quickly up through the asphalt.

Simon jumped to the ground and landed in a crouch. He stood up, and what remained of his shirt flowed around him like a cape.

He stepped forward and looked around. He could hear them. What the hell were they, goblins? Was there a better word for the little beasts? They began to run upon him in droves. Each running on two short stubby legs, and using their four arms held high with swinging daggers to rend and strike and slash. They were screaming, a garble of incoherent jabbering, and leaping at him from the darkness like they were on kung fu wires… They flew at him from all directions. They climbed over him, and stabbed him in the chest many times, then cutting his throat. They stabbed him in the eyes, which popped with a hideous spurt, and he hit the ground. They jumped on him like he was a giant beanbag chair and slashed at him some more. When he was a nothing more than a ragged heap, they slowed down and stood over him to watch him bleed. They stared and wondered at him, as he continued to breathe despite their torture of him.

One of them stabbed him again.

“Alice.”

It healed up.

They prodded him.

His blood was gone from the ground around him. His eyes opened, full, clear, bright and healthy — for the troll that he was — and he stood up in their midst and looked around at them.

He breathed, unhindered for a while, and thought about them all, looking at him like a piece of meat. They jumped on him again.

With renewed vigor, they thrashed and he thrashed back. He threw them from himself, and they careened off into the mist of destroyed homes that covered the land. He kicked them like footballs and punched through their skin as if they were grape jelly. It stained his hands and the remains of his shirt.

Simon strode to the nearby landing strip where he’d seen the saucer go down, then he started to run. Soon he was making great strides and bounding over buildings once more. He rode on the back of one of the crazed creatures for a moment, gave it a pat on the back and flew off again to land outside of the ship, which was standing back up on three repaired landing feet. He walked up and shaking off the troll shape for his normal form, he walked into the shop and looked around.

Lenny and Harry were just pulling Michael from the rejuvenating pod.

“Is he all right”

They turned to see him

“Simon! You’re back!”

“You’re not going to drop me again are you?”

“Of course not!”

They bounced up and hugged his legs, each looking at each other through them, half scared. Michael offered his hand and Simon shook it.

“Come on, we’ve got to take this bucket to Headquarters for debriefing and some equipment. You up for it?”

“Yeah, I’m with you.”

They piled into the ship, and once they were all in their seats in the sunken couch, they were off again.

They glided over the horizon and off across the country, leaving behind the sickened, and pock-smeared area of the country. They blasted from the mist and hugged the ground as they spun off out to the other side of the country. Before long they were gliding over the American southwest. Beneath them, they left behind, desert areas, large rock formations, and beautiful canyons.

They watched as cars, able to see them, skidded off the road and slid off the road behind them.

“What is the cloak thing not on there Harry?” said Michael.

“Oops!” Harry hit a switch and they disappeared from sight.

Out in the dark regions of the desert, beyond the streets and the shops and the tourist traps, there was a house.

It was just a little farmhouse. Not a good house, and next to it was a five-acre farm. Not a lot, but it looked like someone’s home. Of course, the corn was all made of rubber, and the house itself of solid steel, concrete, and rebar.

As they arrived above it, the house, miles from any observer outside of an armadillo that was standing within a hundred yards of the place, opened up. It split in half underneath them and spread apart until there was a large space open big enough to lower the ship into, which Lenny did without breaking a sweat, not that he could sweat. His race expressed excess fluids under stress through a series of misting jet sprays on their backs, which he did.

“Excuse me.”

When the ship had lowered beneath the house it closed up behind them.

The armadillo gave less than a damn. He was too busy with a candy wrapper and an extra bit of chocolate nougat to give the first whip.

Below the surface, the saucer descended until it was floating over a sea of enormous cubicle shaped cubbies, each with its own starship parked inside it.

Simon came forward and looked out at the expanse. Michael had seen it all before, but it never ceased to amaze him.

Below them, one of the ships was shaped like a giant ice cream cone, with the point of the cone up in the air. Was it Neapolitan? Another of the ships looked like two massive tin cans connected together with a cord of flexible wire that was ten feet thick and seemed electrified. Some of them looked like saucers, which was nice, but there were some of them that looked frankly stupid in nature. These couldn’t be space ships. One of them looked like a fucking Italian restaurant turned on its end.

“What the hell?” said Simon

“Yep it’s true,” said Michael.

“What, these are space ships”

“Some of them are captured or salvaged. Others are just visiting and needed a place to park for the weekend.”

“So this is what, both impound and parking lot?”

“Yeah.”

Michael didn’t tell Simon it was all a lot of garbage, and this was just the stuff they couldn’t have floating around in the sky, the stuff that didn’t cloak, or didn’t look like an average Nissan. He just let him boggle at what was before him.

“Michael, look that one looks like a Bonsai Tree.”

Michael nodded his head. He’d been in that one.

“A fifty-foot bonsai tree!”

“I know.”

“It’s even got an eighteen-foot Buddha sitting at the base of the trunk. Come on! What are these? Disguises gone wrong?”

They were starting to pass into what Michael called his own personal Hell’s Kitchen, and was grinning, waiting for it.

“Good Grief…” said Simon. He failed to notice that he’d changed into the troll-like creature and back again. “That one looks like a food processor!”

“It does?”

Michael acted as he’d never seen it before, mocking but with good nature. He hadn’t been able to show this to anyone for a while.

“Oh you know it does. I suppose you’re going to tell me it was a miscalculation on size before a brief trip to Earth for a weekend at the beach then?”

“Well they were on vacation, but it was to New York for a weekend of Broadway shows and dancing before returning home. Seems they lost the blade while gambling in Atlantic City earlier in the week, and it won’t work without it.”

“And where’s the blade?”

“It’s currently part of a large children’s playground that looks like oversized kitchen gear in a home show open to vendors only. It’s a masterpiece.”

“And you can’t retrieve it and send them on their way because?”

“Because they lost their pilot’s license, traveling on a ship that could chop their heads off, and anyone who was traveling with them. I think it’s safer this way.”

“Where are they now?”

“They are both Blackjack dealers in Las Vegas at the Playboy Casino.”

Simon opened his mouth to talk, and just gave up and looked out at the expanse of space ships there. Did one of them look like a skyscraper-sized lava lamp? He shook his head. He could turn into a massive troll, who was he to say that any of this was impossible, or even just plain stupid. He sat back.

“You’d be surprised how popular blackjack is off-world.”

Soon they were docking and bringing the ship around to land in one of the massive cubicles. In no time they landed, hooked up to supply lines, and several robots glided out on unicycles with round silver balls for heads, and little spindly arms for checking the ship over. They slid out and checked everything they could find as the four of them were coming down the ramp.

Lenny and Harry waved them off. They would tend to the ship. Michael stepped out onto a moving walkway with Simon and they rode off into the great underground building.

As they glided on through the underground, they seemed to be picking up speed. Simon wasn’t sure, but he could feel a slight breeze and Michael was holding onto his fedora.

“Where are we going?”

“This is the headquarters.”

“Of what?”

“Everything.”

“Of what? Washington?”

“No, everything. The whole Earth.”

“We don’t live in a world government though.”

“You need to understand a few things if you’re going to work with me.”

Michael took off his hat. His hair was a lot grayer than Simon thought it ought to be.

“Understand what?”

“You’ve got understand the score. We’re not living in a democracy anymore.”

“I know, it’s a constitutional republic, right?”

“No, and it never was. the whole history of the founding fathers…”

“Yes?”

“Baloney.”

“All of it?”

“All of it, yes.”

“We live in a global economy, and under a global government. We’ve been doing so for three hundred years at least.”

“Three hundred?”

“Yes, it could be five though, the records were destroyed a couple of times.”

“But what does all of that mean then? To the world?”

“Mostly, nothing. People go about their lives like they always do. The even elect people President and everything, newscasts the works. It’s all real. At that level. Then there’s this level, where we all get along, because we know there’s something else out there. Hell, there’s lots of everything else’s out there, and we’re here to protect the world from it.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Why of course.”

“Is it worth it?”

“It’s the best job in the world.”

“What about the president?”

“He’s a puppet.”

“What, you mean he’s bribed or controlled in some way?”

“No, I mean that. He’s a puppet. Well, that’s not the whole truth, he’s like me, an agent in the field protecting the world from everything else, but we also have puppets of him that we operate. He’s a muppet, I think. Here we are.”

They glided past a room full of full-size and half-size replicas of the current president, and the past few also, stacked up against the walls.

“Oh hell.”

“Yep, there they are. Looks like they are getting ready for a press conference, no it’s an address from the Oval Office.” On the sets, people were starting to haul out the great puppet, wheel it over to the desk, and hook it up to the power feeds. Its eyes lit up, and they started to control it with joysticks.

“No wonder he’s always boring.”

“You got it. We like to keep it that way. The more boring a President is, the easier it is to keep everything under wraps.”

“I can imagine.”

“You see what I mean then.”

“What about those Presidents that just keep getting into trouble?”

“Let them, then it’s even easier. It’s when you get a good person in the office that you have trouble.”

“I’d think a change like that would be good once in a while.”

“It is. It’s just that sometimes they don’t agree with keeping all of this a secret.”

“It’ll come out.”

“Maybe, but not for a while. It’s just too weird.”

Michael held his hand up. They had arrived. The doors before them opened up, and they continued to glide into a dark room. It felt huge and cave-like. Simon couldn’t see, even with the advanced vision of his troll persona, which he switched to for a moment just to be sure. He was getting better at that.

The lights clicked on, and Simon ducked, finding himself hurtling down a corridor that was not much wider than the two of them could stand there in, and just tall enough that he wasn’t scraping his head on the ceiling.

They began to go faster. Could Simon even tell how fast he was going now? He felt that if he reached out to touch the wall he’d end up skipping and bouncing against the tiles, and with such great force that he’d be dead in a second. He closed his eyes and waited for it to all stop, which in just a matter of moments, it did. Willy Wonka anyone?

The air, now cool and calm around him, Simon opened his eyes and found himself in a regular corridor, already walking with Michael who was dusting off his fedora and placing it on his head again. Funny, he had thought for some reason that he’d be standing in a field somewhere looking out at alien flowers or something. He wasn’t certain he was still on the Earth after that ride.

He stepped forward, and Michael led them through a doorway of frosted glass that said Lab 1 on it in large friendly letters.

They stepped through the door, and an ailing human greeted them, with a full beard, a blue lab coat, and his assistant, who was an alien of some kind, sort of a pink frog creature with four hopping legs, and a fifth for writing and another for hand-eye tasks, also in a little blue lab coat. He was about a foot tall. The old man introduced himself as Gregor, and he motioned to the little one, and said: “This is Zip.” Xip licked his eyes with his prehensile tongue, then smiled and croaked.

Gregor motioned them over to the table, and looking at Simon said, “We’ve heard about you, can we take a look please?”

Michael waved them off. “What have you got?”

“Well, we’ve got to shut down that tunnel right?”

“Right.”

“It thinks I have what you need, right this way.”