SQUADRON 128
WRITTEN BY: David Willis
"Squadron 128, where are you?"
These were the last words heard by Squadron 128 as their aircraft hurtled
over the
Atlantic Ocean. The radio flickered with crackly static. With one last
spark of stubborn resistance, the radio died a quick death.
Pilot Walkerton looked up from the broken transmitter. He and his crew
were steadily
decreasing in distance from the ocean surface below. Walkerton’s stealth
bomber, which he never really learned to fly, suddenly stalled after plowing
into an opaque fog about an hour ago. "Oops," he understated.
Walkerton pushed a few obscure buttons surrounding him, hoping that one
of them would do something good.
Walkerton was a pilot for the secret government agency responsible
for clearing
aliens out of the western hemisphere, SEMY. After only half a decade,
the once mighty military force was missing squadrons one by one as they
were hurled into the aliens’ only known base somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle.
This was Squadron 128th’s first actual mission. And according to the current
trend, it would probably be their last mission.
"Oh, this is just perfect," Mike Warner griped. His blonde
hair appeared brown in the
darkness, but his nagging, discontent voice was never muffled. His
face had a constant frown that could bring even the happiest person down
to earth. Nudging the black haired soldier sitting in front of him, he
added, "Dave, you’re the copilot. Do something!"
Dave Rease was sensible, but couldn’t be counted on when he was in
over his head.
He knew that they had to leave the craft as soon as possible, but he
didn’t want to abandon the other ship in his squadron. Dave glanced away
from the dashboard, revealing his panicked expression. "Forget the
other bomber. We’ll have to bail out."
When morning came (rather, when the fog lifted), Walkerton pushed himself
off the
shifting sand with both hands. All around him was a powdery beach,
eventually stretching into foilage, then trees, then a small mountain.
Apparently, he, Dave, and Mike had landed on a subtropical island. Dave,
to his left, was lying face down in the sand. Mike was already up, mumbling,
and sitting with his arms folded. Their parachutes had been caught up in
the wind and were now held hostage in a nearby tree. Although nearly a
mile away, a plumage of black smoke lifted from the wreckage of their stealth
bomber, buried in the distant mountains, was visible from where Walkerton
sat.
Mike spoke. "Well, this is the stupidest island I’ve ever seen."
Mike was as irate as he was
short. No one could figure out any motives for his disposition; he
was just the way he was.
Dave, the one with his head in the sand, was level-headed and courteous,
but he was
the most unlucky human being on the planet. With the horrific things
that chanced upon him everyday, it was a wonder he was still alive.
Walkerton, called "Doritos Boy" by everyone else because
of his affection for eating
the nacho chips, was the boy who would never grow up. Being a year
younger than everyone else at 25, his attention span and actions were of
someone younger than Big Bird.
"Hey, we made it!" Walkerton cheered as he shook Dave up
with a tug on his shoulder.
Dave sleepily nodded, "At least we weren’t captured by aliens."
Before they realized what had happened, a prison robot drone piloted by
an alien snatched them and carried them off into the nearby woods.
After being dropped from the chassis of the robot, Walkerton, Dave,
and Mike slammed
into the hard metallic floor. The surface was amazingly clean, but
cold enough to keep meat fresh. Walkerton sat himself up with his elbows.
His oversized hooded, white pullover protected his skin from the frigid
floor. He sat Indian-style, dropping his pudgy face on his palms.
Surrounding him and his crew were several bars reaching to the ceiling,
forming a prison
wall around them. Walkerton tried to look at their captors, but after
landing hard on the floor, every thing was fuzzy and misty.
Dave, who had landed on his face again, got up and scratched his dark-haired
noggin.
"Where are we?" he asked before setting his brown vest back
in place. Outside of the cell were four metal walls. Covering each was
a supercomputer that reached around the entire room, culminating in a oversized
screen that filled almost half of one of the walls. In one corner, a hallway
led to somewhere else in the building.
"Oh, sure, expect me to know," Mike growled. He sat up in
his trademarked arms-folded
pose again. Finding something else to complain about, he suggested,
"Hey, Dave, you’re the tall one. Go intimidate whatever big thugs
out there that’ve captured us."
Afraid but responsible, the copilot stood up and walked to the perimeter
of their cell.
"Hello? Hello?" Dave called. No one responded. He turned
to Walkerton and Mike and said, "See, nothing’s there."
An unearthly yet high-pitched voice filled the room.
"Greetings, Earth scum."
Mike was unconvinced. "Who’s that? Pee-Wee Herman on helium?"
"Save us, Big Dave!" Walkerton shivered with fear.
Dave moved as close to the bars as he dared. Suddenly, five aliens
materialized out of
the air. Dave gasped. Each alien was identical, with purple spacesuits,
an upside-down teardrop shaped met with an orange visor, and a claw for
a right hand. The sight would have been truly frightening except for the
fact that the aliens were only three feet tall!
"Ready yourselves for doom," the alien in the middle warned
sinisterly.
"I was born ready!" Walkerton smiled in his usual naive expression.
Mike reached over
and slapped the childish pilot upside the head.
The middle alien swung his pointed claw to the right, in the direction
of a hallway door.
"Take them to the torture chamber!"
Finally, they reached their destination. A door opened vertically from
top to bottom and
the small band of aliens and the three humans walked right in. "Wonderful,"
Mike said outloud. "A torture chamber." Scattered throughout
the room were various machines, Nordic-Tracks, and a few screens showing
reruns of Gilligan’s Island.
"You’re not going to make us watch that, are you?" Dave shuddered
as he pointed to
the screens.
An alien shook his helmet. "Oh, no. That’s for us!"
"Yeah," another added. "We love that show."
Walkerton squirmed with happiness. "Can I watch too?" An
alien armed with something
that looked suspiciously like a cattle prod pushed Walkerton back into
the group.
The aliens walked the prisoners from SEMY to the left side of the torture
chamber toward
a dark hall in the corner. "You’ll be staying over here."
The second purple-clad alien sat them down in chairs facing another large
screen.
"What are we watching?" Dave asked.
The short alien gave a cackling laugh. "You’ll see." It quickly
pressed the PLAY button
on the remote control and darted out the door. The screen flashed on
with terrific brilliant light. After a few minutes the Copyright Infringement
Laws appeared on the screen and disappeared shortly. The SEMY soldiers’
very fears were realized as the screen was suddenly filled the images and
sounds of the Full House opening title screen.
Their eyes opened wide with horror along with their mouths.
"AAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!" Walkerton, Dave, and Mike screamed together.
In all of known civilization, no other television show has threatened
mankind with its very sanity as that horrid Olsen-twins farce. Oh, the
humanity!
Walkerton’s feet flung in every which way, hoping to lose the grasp
of the clamp holding
him in his chair. He knew that any prolonged amount of time of being
subjected to Full House could lead to madness or death. Yet all his efforts
were for naught.
Dave’s brain felt like it were going to implode with all the false
cuteness being shoved
down his throat. "No," he winced as he squinted his eyes
and tossed his head back and forth, "not another family talk! I’ve
lost all sense of reality! Nooo!!!!"
"Arrgh!" Mike frowned with obvious pain. Michelle Tanner
was on the screen.
"Such....bad acting! Must free myself!" His face turned red
as he tried to block out the sappy message from his mind.
Pow! The steel door behind them was blasted from its hinges and bounced
a few times
before it rested on the floor. Two human figures stepped through the
door frame and over the smoking debris.
"Hey, there ya guys are!" Sal Walters smiled as she and Jason
Patterson pumped their
laser guns and sized up the room for any more aliens. Sal and Jason
were other members of Squadron 128. Apparently, they had crashed too and
had finally found the three missing members of their squadron.
Jason adjusted his red bow tie. "We’ve got to get out of here
before my deodorant runs out!"
Jason was the most self conscious person in all of SEMY. His life was
devoted to matching his clothes perfectly and trying to stay clean and
tidy. He whipped a Dust-Buster out of no where and began vacuuming up the
scattered dust from the explosion.
"It’s a wonder we found ya three," Sal frowned as she unstrapped
Walkerton. "Jason
was convinced that the aliens would leave us alone as long as ‘ur outfits
matched ‘ur guns."
Jason was busy setting Mike and Dave free. "Well, my clothes wouldn’t
be so black with
soot if you hadn’t crashed your stealth bomber for the first time in
your career!"
Sal, who had a reputation for being the most daring yet skilled pilot
in all of SEMY, rolled her dark-colored eyes and blasted another hole in
the opposite side of the room with her laser gun. As the smoke lifted they
saw the sunlight call to them from the hole in the wall.
With Walkerton, Dave, and Mike free, Jason and Sal moved to their newly-created
exit.
The low sun forced a silhouette on the rescued squadron.
"C’mon," Sal commanded as she gestured toward the hole. "Let’s
get outta ‘ere!"
With a twirl of her long brown hair, she turned and hopped out into
the blue and green outdoors. The four others followed her.
Using Sal’s stealth bomber, which wasn’t damaged as much as Walkerton’s
bomber, Squadron 128 became the first SEMY squadron to complete a mission.
Although not many things about the purple-suited midget aliens were learned,
hundreds of files had to be updated. This would be just the beginning of
a longs series of wars between two worlds.
THE END