Fiction Excerpt: The Aurora Skies Incident
Chapter from an unreleased book
A while ago I was working on a book about a historian who was writing a history of an alien invasion. I never ended up finishing it, so I figured I’d post a chapter from the unfinished manuscript here. It’s about an alien attack on a cruise ship. I hope you enjoy it.
The Aurora Skies Incident
Present day
“You survived the deadliest maritime disaster since World War II,” I said.
Don had a closely cropped buzzcut and clearly spent time in the gym. He leaned forward in his seat, grimaced, and looked at the ground. He put his elbows on his knees and started twiddling his thumbs. I couldn’t tell if he was nervous or just trying to gather his thoughts. Realistically, it was probably a bit of both.
“Yeah, man, I did. Let me tell ya, it was the worst day of my fuckin’ life.”
Onboard the Aurora Skies – February 6, 2026 – Near the Bermuda Triangle
It was supposed to have been a night that would replace the bad memories with the good.
Don had booked a trip on the USS Aurora Skies, a cruise ship that had departed from Florida three days ago. His fiancée had just called off their engagement, and after sitting at home in front of the TV beer in hand for one too many nights in a row he just had to get the hell out of there. So he had bought himself a ticket for the cruise and now here he was.
The massive ship had bars scattered throughout the different decks. The one he was sitting in right now was on the sixth deck, two from the top. This was the ‘luxury’ bar, the one where you could go to escape the hordes of poorly-dressed cruisegoers and have a real cocktail in peace.
Don was sitting on a barstool (bolted onto the floor) drinking an Old Fashioned. He’d been talking to the two girls next to him for the past hour and it seemed like it was going in the right direction. The one directly next to him kept touching his arm every time she made a point. Just keep playing it cool, he thought as he lifted his glass off the bar, twirled the ice around a few times, and took another sip. He glanced at his watch. 12:36 AM. He looked over his shoulder. Rain was pelting the windows, and there were flashes of lightning outside.
“And what do you think about that?” the girl said, her hand on his elbow.
“Sorry, what did you say?” Don said.
“I said -”
There was a loud thump that sounded like it came from outside the ship. The entire ship lurched a bit. Don heard the sound of glasses falling off tables and shattering on the ground behind him. He didn’t bother to take a look.
“Maybe it was an iceberg,” someone yelled.
A few people laughed. A drunk person started singing the Titanic song.
“Near, far, wherever you are…”
More people laughed.
The sound of dozens of conversations picking up where they had left off put an end to the awkward moment.
Then there was another thump. This one was much louder than the first, and the ship rocked violently to one side. Now all the glasses in the bar fell onto the ground and shattered. Don watched as his half-finished Old Fashioned slid to the end of the bar and fell off. He grabbed the edge of the bar with both hands. The girl he had been talking fell off her seat and grabbed onto his shoulder, barely managing to stay on her feet.
A few people started streaming out of the bar. Don’s seat was directly next to the exit to his left, so he had the distinct pleasure of being accidentally bumped into from behind by several of the panicked patrons. One or two even managed to apologize. The girls he had been talking to grabbed their purses off the floor and bolted as well.
He was back in the situation he had come on this cruise to get away from: alone. Damn it. He looked over his shoulder at the lounge area behind him. The venue was still at least half-full, but the vibe had definitely shifted. No one was joking now. People were talking to each other again, but the conversations were muted and serious. No one knew what the hell was going on.
Don faced forward again. “I’ll have another Old Fashioned,” he said.
The bartender stared at him uncomprehendingly. “What?”
“I said, I’ll have another -”
The world outside turned bright green. When Don looked through the windows, he could see everything. The raindrops, the surface of the ocean; it was all visible in the green glow. It was so bright that he had to actually squint his eyes to keep looking.
There was an enormous crashing sound. Unlike the previous sounds, were were definitely from somewhere outside the ship, this one came from the ship itself. And there was no doubt about what it was. That’s a fucking explosion.
The ship shook so aggressively that it felt like it had actually been picked up and tossed in the air before being dropped again into the sea. Don (along with everyone else in the bar) fell to the deck, and he hit it hard. Groaning, he slowly managed to get up to one knee. Just as he was about to stand, the world turned sideways. Everyone and everything that wasn’t bolted to the ground began sliding down the floor.
Don reached out and grabbed onto the last of the bolted-down barstools. The formerly flat floor was now diagonal, and the exit that had been so close and easily accessible just a few steps to his left mere moments ago was now almost directly above him and seemingly out of reach. His reaction time made him one of the lucky ones. The people who hadn’t been able to grab onto any of the bolted-on furniture kept sliding and came to a stop at against the far wall with the windows that were now pointing almost directly to the sea below. He looked at his watch. 12:38 AM. I wonder how much time I have before this thing sinks.
Getting through the exit door and to the stairwell outside was the only way off the ship. The problem was that the angle of the floor was too steep for his feet to gain any traction. He was going to have to climb his way up, one piece of furniture at a time. Don held onto the bar stool with one arm while reaching his arm out in an attempt to grab one above him with the other. He grimaced as he stretched his arm as far as it would go. He barely managed to wrap his hand around the bottom of the next bar stool and pull himself up to it. Life and death was now a matter of upper body strength. He had six more bar stools to go.
The mental battle was just as difficult as the physical one. Each time he managed to climb up to the next bar stool (and one step closer to the exit above), he paused, arms shaking, and looked up at the door. It seemed so far away, and it was a struggle to motivate himself to continue. Then he would glance down at the people pinned to the wall below, the ones with no hope of escape, and his motivation was renewed again. In this way he managed to make it up to the final bar stool, the one he had been sitting on not too long ago.
He was as close to the exit door as it was possible to get to, but it was still too far away. It had been two or three steps when the ship was level, but that small distance was now insurmountable. There was nothing else he could grab onto to pull himself up there.
Just when his despair was on the verge of consuming him, a human chain started to form from the open door. Someone reached out, grabbed him, and pulled him up and out of the door and into the hallway. There was another deafening explosion and the ship rotated even further onto its side. The floor was now too steep, and the human chain collapsed. Many of those people who had been trying to help slid down to the far wall below. Escape for them and everyone else trapped inside the venue was now impossible.
Don was one of the lucky ones. Now out in the hallway, he started making his way to the main stairwell. Many of the doors to the individual rooms now swung open inward, forming small death traps that he had to jump over to escape. He glanced down into some of the rooms and saw that they were filling up with water. Fast. People were trapped in some of them, pinned against the far wall with no chance of escape.
There was something curious that he noticed. Many of the people out in the hallway making their way to the staircase were in their underwear, while many of the people trapped in the rooms below were fully clothed. The ones who had understood the gravity of the situation they were in and acted decisively to escape were the ones who had a chance of survival. The people who had decided to stay in their rooms for a few extra moments to get dressed had condemned themselves to death.
A form of Darwinism played itself out within the confines of the ship, a microcosm of evolution in all its raw brutality, compressed down to a few harrowing minutes.
Base survival instincts, decisiveness, and raw strength kept you alive. Hesitation and physical weakness meant death. The compassionate perished and the selfish survived. Displaying high-level, noble human emotions cost you your life. Love was fatal. The only thing that mattered was the raw animalistic desire to live at any cost.
To get to the stairwell, Don had to jump across a hallway that, now that the ship was mostly on it’s side, had turned into a deep well. He knew he shouldn’t look before he jumped but he did anyway. The water was about thirty or forty feet below him, and he could see the heads of people who were trapped treading water below. He took a running start and jumped over.
Inside the main stairwell was another brutal Darwinian test of physical strength. It was impossible to climb up the stairs. If you wanted to live, you had to use your upper body strength to pull yourself up by grabbing onto the railing.
He watched as a man’s wife and mother, who were unable to pull themselves up, begged the man to go on without them. The man didn’t hesitate. He turned his back on his family and started climbing. Don looked further up the stairs and saw a man pulling not just himself, but his wife and two children, who were clinging to his back, up the stairs. He lost his grip on the railing and tumbled all the way back down to the base of the stairwell. This was a climb that everyone had to make for themselves. The ones who understood the situation and accepted it were the ones who had the best chance of making it to the top. The rest had no chance.
Don grabbed onto the railing and started pulling himself up. He knew he had no time. If and when the ship rolled even more to its side the stairwell would be impossible to climb. There are moments in life where time means nothing, where you can while away the hours without a care in the world. Then there are moments when the entire human experience in all its extremes is compressed down into a few minutes.
This was the latter.
Life was a privilege that now had to be fought for. The former abstraction of death had become a concrete reality that had to be struggled against. The only way was up.
Don kept climbing.
On each landing he saw people leaning against the walls and staring off into space. These were the people who had struggled to their own personal limit and had decided to simply give up. In his heart Don wanted to encourage them, but logically he knew that they were nothing more than dead weight. Life-or-death situations had a way of coarsening your worldview.
A calm voice came over the loudspeakers. “Warning, warning. The situation on the ship is critical. Please make your way to the nearest exits as soon as possible. Warning warning. The situation on the ship is -”. The voice cut off, and he could hear other voices. They sounded terrified. “Let’s go we have to get off the ship now. This fucker is going down.” Then the original speaker said “Oh shit,” and the speaker cut off. Don looked at the person above him on the staircase, who looked down at him.
“Keep going,” Don said. The man nodded, gritted his teeth, and pulled himself up higher.
That was when the lights went out. All of a sudden the staircase was plunged in darkness. People screamed. The screams coming from below combined into a sort of howling sound. It was sheer panic from people who knew that they had no hope of escape and no chance of being rescued.
Finally, when he felt like his arms couldn’t take it anymore, he saw the exit. The way the ship was tilted, it was pointing almost up towards the sky. There was a bright green glow, like someone was shining some type of eerie-looking light on the ship. It was a small hole of light in the darkness, small enough that the distance he would have to climb scared the shit of him but close enough that he realized he could make it if he really tried. He felt a surge of hope. Maybe the light had come from another ship that was picking up survivors. He had to get out.
All of a sudden his arms didn’t feel tired anymore. The mind controlled the body. If you felt like you had a chance, your body gave you one. The moment you give up hope is the exact moment your body betrays you.
Don pulled himself up the final flight of stairs, faster than he had traversed any of the previous floors. He grabbed onto the door frame and pulled himself up and out of the staircase.
The blast of cold air hit him hard. When the explosion hit, he hadn’t even considered going back to his room to get his coat. His mind had been focused on one goal and one goal alone: getting the hell off the ship. It was the right call. If he had gone back, he’d still be down in the staircase, trying to climb his way up to where he was standing now. He looked back over his shoulder into the dark pit below. He almost couldn’t believe he had been down there just a few minutes ago. Looking into the black hole in the door frame was like driving past an old place you used to live in when you were broke. I used to live there? He heard people screaming, the desperation in their voices palpable. He had made it to the surface. Everyone who was still below was on their own. He pitied them, but he had made it past the stage of survival that they were trapped in. Now he had to forget and look forward to the next battle.
Don looked at his surroundings. There were maybe a hundred other people on the deck with him. The angle of the ship meant that no one was able to stand flat on their two feet without holding on to something. A few people were wearing yellow life jackets. The rest had nothing. Based on what he saw, it was almost better to be one of the have-nots.
The brutal struggle that had taken place below decks had selected for a certain type of person. The people on the deck with him were the ones who had prevailed. They were strong, selfish, and decisive. Every single person on the deck had made the right decisions every step of the way. Their own will to survive was their supreme value. Friends, family, morals, compassion. All of it subservient to the one true north star: survival.
Don watched as one man, wearing a life jacket and hanging on to the railing with one hand, was knocked unconscious by another man who then pulled the life jacket off his body and put it on his own. The unconscious body slid down the deck and tumbled overboard.
There were no shadows anywhere. Don realized that the light was coming from above. Squinting and partially covering his eyes with one hand, he looked up. The cloud cover was too severe; he couldn’t see anything other than wisps of the lower-lying clouds dancing in the green light. Whatever it was, it was bright. He couldn’t do much more than glance at it before he had to look away. And it wasn’t moving. Whatever it was, it was directly above the ship and shining the light directly on it.
He looked into the dark water off the side of the ship. There were at least four or five inflatable lifeboats full of people, all of them seemingly trying to get as far away from the ship as possible. Onboard, a group of people pushed a partially-inflated lifeboat overboard and started to climb in. This prompted a stampede among the survivors on deck, who all rushed the boat. The ones who had made it onboard were frantically paddling, but survivors jumped off the ship into the water and started trying to climb aboard. Some of the people on the lifeboat started beating them away with paddles. Don watched as one man got both of his arms over the edge of the lifeboat and started to climb in. Just when it looked like he would make it, one of the men onboard booted him in the face and he went tumbling back into the water. The man who had kicked him slipped, and one of the people in the water grabbed onto his foot and yanked him off the boat. There were so many people in the water all trying to climb on the barely-inflated lifeboat at the same time from the same side that it actually flipped over upside-down. All Don could see was frantic splashing as the lifeboat started to go under.
For the first time that night, Don didn’t know what to do. He stood there, supporting himself with his arm on the bulkhead, and just watched as the few people on deck punched and shouted at each other.
Then there was a loud, mechanical creaking noise. The ship lurched and began rotating onto its side. Don had to climb again, this time making it to the railing and pulling himself over just as the ship completely turned on its side. He heard screaming and splashing as the people who didn’t move quick enough lost their grips and fell into the water below.
He stood on the side of the ship, his arms out by his side to try to maintain balance. It was just him and three others at this point. “We have to jump,” one man said, grimacing with his hands clasped behind his head. Don tried to speak, but his throat was so constricted with fear that all he could get out was a barely audible groan. He looked at the man and nodded in agreement.
Don looked down into the black water below. The last thing he wanted to do was jump.
A man and a woman standing next him were holding hands. The man said, “OK babe, on the count of three. One, two, three”, and then he jumped. The woman sat down on the side of the ship with her hands behind her, and started crabwalking backwards while shaking her head and saying “I can’t, I can’t.”
There was another loud metallic groaning sound, and the ship started started sinking much faster. Don knew he was going to end up in the water one way or the other. The only choice he had was whether it would be on his own terms or the ship’s terms. And if he went down with the ship it would probably pull him under and he would be dead. At least if he jumped, he might have a chance.
So he jumped.
He took a running start. It was only a few steps, but those few steps might as well have been a lifetime. It might be cliche to say that time slows down in moments like this, but cliches wouldn’t exist if there weren’t an element of truth to them. The feeling of willingly choosing to jump into the open ocean was so surreal that his mind almost couldn’t even accept that it was really happening. Just went he was about to jump, he felt his foot slip on the wet slimy hull of the ship, almost to the point where he would slip and fall, but he recovered without breaking his stride and launched himself into the air.
There was nothing graceful about it. He damn near belly flopped, and his face slammed into the surface of the water hard. The stinging sensation felt like a slap in the face, but fortunately/unfortunately the pain only lasted about a millisecond because his entire body went immediately numb as soon as it was completely submerged in the frigid black water. He frantically kicked his legs to try to get to the surface, but it was useless. He was fighting gravity itself. With the momentum of the jump he was actually going deeper and deeper underwater.
Out of all moments since the first explosion, this was the one time Don felt true panic. Fear comes from lack of control. In every moment leading up to this, he had always felt like there was something he could do to influence the outcome. But now his whole world was black and ice cold. He was at the mercy of the most merciless force known to man: mother nature herself. For a split second, he actually felt his grip on sanity slipping away.
Then, finally, the momentum of the jump extinguished itself and he came to a stop at the deepest point in the water that gravity would force him to. He kicked his legs to propel himself in the direction that he assumed was up. After he kicked for what felt like a few heartbeats too long, he felt his tenuous grip on sanity slip even further away as he imagined himself swimming straight down even deeper into the abyss. At the exact moment when the fearful, panic-ridden, animal-like part of his consciousness was about to totally overwhelm whatever remnants of rationality he still held on to, his head broke above the surface. He took a deep breath. He muttered “Oh God, oh fuck,” and rubbed the saltwater out of his eyes and shook his head. It was so cold that breathing actually took conscious effort. Only a small portion of the massive cruise ship was still above water, with a few people clinging on, too scared to jump. Everything was visible in the green glow from whatever or whoever was shining the light on them from above. There were dozens of people treading water, their heads bobbing in the waves all around him. The lucky ones were wearing yellow life vests, but most were battling nature on their own. The sound of frantic splashing and screaming from the people who couldn’t swim added to the general chaos and the contagious virus of total panic. It was too much. With no destination in mind other then away from here, Don turned his back on the ship and started swimming.
He had barely managed to paddle a few strokes when he heard a high-pitched mechanical whine from above that sounded almost like an engine revving. He stopped swimming, rubbed the saltwater out of his eyes again, and looked up at the green light. Squinting, he tried to peer through the clouds. Just then the light disappeared. He heard a loud splash, then a massive wave formed. Don rode the wave before it broke, then looked around. The world had just become pitch black. Some of the other survivors started screaming and shouting.
“It’s down below us,” someone yelled.
Don looked down. There was a small green light almost directly below him, getting larger and larger the longer he looked. “It’s coming back up,” he shouted.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” someone said.
Don started swimming faster than he had ever swam in his life. His lungs felt like they were going to explode with the effort, but fear and adrenaline kept powering him forward. The light below kept getting bigger until the entire area was again lit up in a green glow, only this time the light was coming from the water instead of from the clouds above.
He rode the swell of a wave and saw another man doing the same next to him. He was about to say something, he wasn’t sure what, maybe shout a word of encouragement, maybe just a simple acknowledgment of his presence from one human to another caught up in the same life-or-death struggle. Right when he started opening his mouth to speak, a rope-like metallic tentacle reached up out of the water and wrapped itself around the man’s body. The man yelped before being pulled under. Just like that, so fast that Don would have missed it if he would have blinked. The man was there and then he was gone.
Riding the top of the swell, Don looked around at the green-lit surface of the ocean below. Every way he looked, he saw people’s being pulled under by the tentacles. Some screamed, some didn’t get a chance to.
That’s when Don stopped thinking and started swimming. His brain simply shut off, his body nothing more than a primitive organism trying to survive. The next morning a helicopter found him laying down on top of a piece of plywood about a mile away from where the ship had sunk.
Present day
“So you have no memory of how you ended up on the plywood?” I asked.
“Nope, I don’t remember nothing,” Don said, shaking his head.
I looked down at my notes. There were 3,272 passengers on the Aurora Skies. Only 142 were pulled out of the water alive, with three of them later dying in the hospital.
There were rumors about the ship, about why it was targeted. They had been dismissed by the powers-that-be as nothing more than conspiracy theories propagated by weirdos on social media. I wasn’t sure that I believed them, but I wasn’t sure that I didn’t believe them either. I looked at Don and tried to decide whether he was the type of person who would get angry at me asking or if he would take it in stride. I opened my mouth and took in a breath of air. There’s still time to back out of this.
Then I just spit it out. I almost couldn’t believe I was really asking a survivor of the Aurora Skies about this even while I was in the middle of asking him.
“What do you think about the rumors circulating about the Aurora Skies being targeted? Some people have claimed that the ship was carrying secret weapons to Russia, newly-developed technology that the Beings wanted to suppress. Did you see anything like that onboard?”
Don looked at me. I tried to read his facial expression but came up with nothing. He was either taking it in stride or one of those guys who stayed calm for a moment while he processed what he just heard before exploding in rage. I leaned back in my seat and waited.
Finally, Don frowned and shook his head while looking at the ground. “Nope, didn’t see nothing like that. But I wasn’t really looking either, you know? I was there to take my mind off of things,” he said.
“I understand completely,” I said. “Just thought I’d ask.”
“Man, I wish I had never got on board that fuckin’ ship,” Don said, continuing to shake his head.
If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both physical and ebook editions.