The Savants

I'll admit, this is dark. 

            They landed on Earth on a Tuesday, for some reason I remember that. So many decades of wondering; we had imagined golden bodies and tentacles, green dwarfs or scarlet gods. We wondered about their size, their metabolism, their lusts. When they came, though, they seemed quiet and reasonable, and both terrifyingly and disappointingly like us. They had translucent blue skin, eyes that glowed nebula orange or green or violet, depending on their mood. They spoke quiet, strangely accented languages, but limited themselves to English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Cantonese. We humans, trained by decades of alien movies, expected annihilation. Instead, the domination was short, minimal, and brutal. They had soldiers that we called Samurai who wore sleek black armor that shrugged off tank rounds like a leather jacket shrugs off hailstones. They were nearly invincible. News cameras captured footage of a single Samurai punching holes in tanks, catching armor piercing rounds like footballs and slinging them back. Twenty of them destroyed the human resistance in New York, seven took Berlin, only three strode into Paris. We hoped that was all they had but when one was slain, with a subnuclear ICBM outside Baltimore, thousands dropped out of the sky, falling from their worldship that anchored itself to our moon and disrupted tides. They quietly, almost apologetically, dragged world leaders into the streets and blew their brains out with weapons that shot glowing slugs. Several of their chieftains politely arranged a press conference and explained that Earth was no longer ours, and to avoid decimation and sterilization we would quietly resume our business and allow them to go about the business of extracting the minerals they needed from our core. Afterwards, they would allow us some measure of autonomy. Their name in their language was long and musical. “Call us Savants,” they said.

They didn’t mean any of it.

Millions died. Those who resisted the massive, gaping holes they tore in the surface of the earth were put down like rabid dogs. The skies were blackened with soot.

            I don’t know who discovered the properties their blood carried. No one ever knows these things. We called them Cannibals. A few fighters in Saint Petersburg managed to kill a Savant who had removed his armor and perhaps in some orgy of bloodlust, drank the blood. They became godlike. They moved nearly faster than people could follow, ran on walls, gained strength beyond natural abilities. They attacked six more Savants and tore them apart. They stole their weapons and assaulted a shuttle heading for the worldship.

            And then the effects wore off. They had assumed the effects lasted forever and hadn’t bothered to put on a samurai’s armor. They were slaughtered like animals when their reflexes slowed, their motor skills returned to normal. They weren’t able to raise the guns the Savants carried like pistols.

            More followed suit, stealing bodies of Savants and draining them of blood they then injected into their arm like heroin. The long-term effects became apparent. They went crazy. Cannibals craved Savant blood. They snapped and snarled. They became feral and would lose themselves in that place in their mind, the eternal ecstasy of the bloodrush. They would hurl themselves, naked and furious and totally without the protection of armor or bloodrush at an armored Samurai, leaving us to dejectedly hose them off the streets. If they had enough blood, though, they could be kept sane enough to keep fighting the way they had. We stole more weapons from them, because as it is with any species, the ones who know best how to kill them belong to their same species.

            I heard about the Cannibals and their fight to get the Savants’ God-King in the worldship, but I continued to hold to my strategy of remaining quiet and going about my business.

Everything changed when the Savants found my wife and daughter had a rare type of gene they wanted for their genetic museum back on their homeworld. They broke into my house at one in the afternoon, found my wife and child there with me, and while one of them smiled gently and held me back, dissected them on the living room floor and harvested them like cuttlefish. I still remember the Savant who did it tying his golden topknot back before surgically laying my still-living wife open from clavicle to pelvis, ignoring her screams as they snipped her organs from their places and sealed them in plastic. Then, my daughter, my child. I went away. I remembered holding her hand as she skipped to her first day of school. I remembered watching her blow out the candles on her fourth birthday. I remembered teaching her how to say her alphabet. And now, along with those, I remember a blue-skinned Savant snapping her ribs as he opened her like a box, taking out her tiny, perfect organs and hosing the blood off of them as she screamed for me, until he took her lungs too.

People ask me why I fight, why I am a Cannibal. I tell them it’s because I’m crazy.

Maybe I am.