Boom!
“What the hell was that?” Jose said, ripping his headphones off and heading for the window.
“An explosion, I’d say by the decibels and vibration.” Ming followed to the same window.
Jose couldn’t see anything except the usual Chicago skyline. Ming was spinning slowly feeling out the direction the still ringing vibration was coming from.
“No, it’s to the west near the lake.” Ming ran to the window in the kitchen.
“Damn!” Jose said making it a three syllable word.
“What?”
“It’s…ah…ship.”
“A ship blew up in the lake?”
“No.” He made that a two syllable word.
“Tell me what you see!”
“A spaceship. It landed on the shore. It is massive!” He whispered.
Ming had stuck her head out the broken window listening. Her boyfriend was leaning out the window too so as to get a better view. The ship was taller than the twenty-some story hotel on the beachfront. It sat with landing struts dug into the sand but a ring spun around the center of the ball shaped hull making it look kinda like Saturn. He described that to Ming who just hushed him as she was still listening.
“The vibration is not the ship. It’s the ground ringing like a bell.” She gasped.
“The roads are cracked like there was an earthquake. A couple of buildings fell down.”
Guadalupe, their big black maine coon cat had crawled back out from under the couch and joined them at the kitchen window.
“Buddha? You okay Amigo?” Jose called back to the other, their tuxedo cat who was still cowering under the couch.The cat meowed an answer.
“Me too Buddha!” Jose answered the cat’s meow as if he understood some exclamation of awe from the creature.
“We gotta do something.” Ming said, pulling on her coat.
“You wanna go out there?” Jose nearly shouted.
“Come on this is historic, it’s amazing, it’s …it’s…”
“Crazy.” Jose finished for her. Nevertheless he was grabbing his coat as well.
Guadalupe was resisting Ming trying to put her down on the sofa. The cat dug her claws into the arms of Ming’s hand knitted winky face emoji sweater. Jose handed Ming one of the cat carrier backpacks that they carried their pets in when they took walks. The cat instantly crawled into it and looked out the little bubble window on the back as Ming strapped it on.
“Buddha ya wanna come too, Amigo?” Jose placed the other backpack on the floor by where Buddha was hiding under the sofa. Buddha meowed again loudly but stayed firmly put.
“Ok, Buddha. You hold the fort. Stay away from the broken windows and don’t let any aliens in.” Ming called as she ran out the door.
Jose followed with a bit less gusto than Ming was displaying. They hurried down the nine flights of stairs as the elevator was not working. Ming, Jose, and Guadalupe poured out onto an empty street.
“Looks like most people are sheltering in place, Honey. Maybe we should?” Jose reasoned.
“No way! This is it! This is a monumental shift in consciousness, in history, in everything.”
“Yeah, it is that. So we are heading toward the spaceship.” Jose said as three people hand in hand ran the other way past them.
Ming was running. The black cat in Ming’s backpack was meowing the song of her people. Jose was worrying. More and more people fled past them away from the boom but they kept running towards it.
When they arrived a few others had taken up position in front of the spaceship’s side. The twirling ring around it was still going around and around almost too fast to see. The spaceship’s back two landing struts were sunk deep into the beach. The front two were drilled down into the concrete parking lot of the hotel that the ship dwarfed.
“Has it done anything?” Ming asked the small crowd gathering.
“Not since the boom.” One guy whispered. He was dressed as a hotel valet driver. “One second there was nothing there. Then boom. It was there. I didn’t see it in the sky before.”
“Nothing has come out of it?” Jose asked.
“No.” The Valet said but then screamed like a teething baby as a door just then opened up from the bottom of the sphere.
“Jose what was that I heard?” Ming said over loud meowing from Guadalupe.
“A Damn door, Honey.” Jose shouted over the other screams erupting from the small crowd around them.
“Tell me what’s happening.” Ming said, bouncing up and down. Her cat seemed to not mind the bouncing and just kept meowing.
“Ah…okay…a door opened on the underside. A pole came out sunk into the sand just at the water’s edge. Oh, !Madre de Dios!”
“What?” Ming jerked Jose’s arm nearly outta the socket.
“Ah, people…I mean aliens, I guess. Two slid down the pole like firemen.” He steadied Ming and the backpacked cat on her back, as several of the other onlookers started running away bumping into them. “They are huge! Like twelve feet tall.”
“What do they look like? Greys? Green? Reptiles?” Ming stuttered excitedly.
“Can’t tell. They are wearing spacesuits, like our astronauts.” Jose made a choking sound. “!Hijo de la gran puta!”
“What? All I can hear is people screaming.” Ming was pulling on Jose’s arm again.
“They are coming straight for us.”
“How many of us are left? I hear lots running away.”
“No, to us. Me and You. The first one is taking off its helmet. Ming, we should run too!”
“What does it look like?”
“It’s furry and black. Ming. It’s a giant!”
The two explorers approached slowly. The Commander had taken off her helmet to see the aliens clearer. Her Lieutenant followed her lead and took off his too. They approached the only one their computer had identified as perhaps being able to fully communicate with them. The Commander held out both hands, palms down in the gesture of respect.
“What do you want?” Jose said as calmly as he could as the first giant reached out toward him and Ming. Everyone else who hadn’t already ran off, slowly fell back in fear.
“We would speak to your rider.” The Commander said.
“Rider?” Jose asked.
“Her’s.”
“Rider?” Ming said shakily. “Guadalupe? My cat?” She pulled her backpack around to her front so Guadalupe could look out the bubble window at the aliens.
“Yes. Gratitude. Thank you for the introduction.” The Commander said to the female furless one. “Madam Guadalupe. Will you speak with us?”
Jose swore in Spanish again as their cat answered the giants with three meows, that they seemed to understand better than he did and he always felt like he knew what their cats’ meows meant. The giants answered back in growls and hisses sounding like twelve foot tall tigers. Though they looked more like solid black sasquatches.
Just then the fire truck, an actual tank, and several police cars came screeching into the hotel parking lot. Armed men poured out taking aim at all of them. Jose instinctively grabbed Ming and twirled her around to protect her. The giants grabbed them both to protect their cat, with their own big weapons drawn.
It was a tense scene that took an hour to sort out. Finally after a hundred or so exchanges with the giants, Guadalupe had convinced her alien cousins to stand down. They put their weapons away and walked back to their ship. Both of the giants jumped up the firemen pole as easily as they had slid down. Within seconds of the door sliding closed there was another powerful boom that knocked Ming, Jose, and most of the police, fire, and military personnel to the ground. The ship was gone. It was more like it disappeared than it took off. Everyone was searching the sky for any trace of it. There was nothing to see. The spaceship was just gone.
“What in the hell did that cat tell those monsters to get them to leave?” A man in a Navy dress uniform who had arrived by helicopter mid-way through the close encounter asked Jose.
“That humans are dangerous wild animals.” Jose said.
—the end—
Back to Top of Page | Back to Fiction | Back to Volume 19, Issue 1 – Summer 2025
About the Author
Ginger Strivelli is a disabled artist and writer from North Carolina. She has written for Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Circle Magazine, Third Flatiron, Autism Parenting Magazine, Silver Blade, Solarpunk Magazine, The New Accelerator, various other magazines and several anthology books. She loves to travel the world and make arts and crafts. She considers herself a storyteller entertaining and educating through her writing.