The Nechi

By Gene Thomas

Here’s an excerpt from The Nechi® the latest novel by Gene Thomas.
You will never call anyone “four eyes” again.

How it All Started

In the war between us and the Nechi dating back to the last century and for most of my family’s life times, we were getting our asses kicked.

The Nechi were a savage race who had found and studied us long before we knew they even existed. To say they were not human was an understatement, yet they had been living covertly among us for many centuries. Looking back on those days now, I can’t imagine how we didn’t know they were here.

But here they were and once they had an inkling they could exterminate us or use us for more than target practice, all of us realized back then that we were in a battle for the species – one at the outset, we seemed to be losing badly...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gene Thomas
• Release date: Mar 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310332722

Gene Thomas

About the Author Gene Thomas has had several major careers. His first career was in air traffic control. Another was a Defense Contractor during the Reagan era. After a career in Education and extensive travels to different countries, Gene now devotes the majority of his time to pursuing his first love, writing. You will find that Gene’s writing style has always been characterized an easy read. His books in print (Amazon, Barnes & Noble) “Tales from the Tree House, 2010”, “Tree House to Palm Trees, 2011” mark the start of a prolific writing career that includes a collection of short stories, poems and novels already posted on sites like http://www.readwave.com/doceft/ . “Rock Hands” – a Depression Era saga reminiscent of John Steinbeck will be coming out later this year. The rights to that book are currently under contract with Quattro Media Publications. Gene has finished six 26 mile marathons and thousands of shorter races and still maintains an active exercise routine that includes walking no less than four miles a day. Gene currently lives in Belize, Central America, but was born in Brooklyn New York.

Book preview

The Nechi

By

Gene Thomas

Copyright © Statement

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including recording, photocopying, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

Published by

Gene Thomas -- About 61,500 words

Smashwords Edition

Address 3570 Grapefruit St., Belmopan, Belize, C.A.

Telephone [phone] Email: [e-mail]

Fiction Statement

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Review by Jason Sinner

Gene Thomas has once again created an amazing tale!

A story that has aliens, action, and even love. The Nechi will be around for a long while in the reader's mind, even after the story is over.

The Nechi tells a story that has every genre covered—all within the pages of one book. The reader will enjoy the ride. The pages fly by in a smooth, well told tale. Before they know it, the reader is deep into the world that Gene has crafted. The Nechi shows that whatever genre Gene decides to write in, he will keep you entertained.

A definite must read for any reader who enjoys an intelligent romp into another world!

Table of Contents

How it All Started

Searching for our Blood

Hiding in Plain Sight

The Children, the Children?

If You Kill the Father…

It Had to Come to This

Into the Jungle - Again

The Two Group Theory

Pick a Side – any Side

Our New Jungle Playmates

At Last, Sighting the Boys

A Ton of Bricks

Telfair’s Revelation

The Big Fish Knew

Bendac Catches Himself

Somehow…

Was it Really left behind?

Home and Safe, but Not for Long

Revive the Kala

Talk Fast – or Else…

Bendac Has Friends in bad places

The Search for Marta

What they couldn’t get out of Marta

Kala Revolt

Jewel’s ‘Pot’ finally boils over

Bendac is NOT the only heavy hitter

Evolution or Something else?

Epilogue

About the Author

Back to Top

How it All Started

In the war between us and the Nechi dating back to the last century and for most of my family’s life times, we were getting our asses kicked.

The Nechi were a savage race who had found and studied us long before we knew they even existed. To say they were not human was an understatement, yet they had been living covertly among us for many centuries. Looking back on those days now, I can’t imagine how we didn’t know they were here.

But here they were, and once they had an inkling they could exterminate us or use us for more than target practice, all of us realized back then that we were in a battle for the species—one at the outset, we seemed to be losing badly….

My brother Alan and I had spent the last six months looking for Alan’s sons, Falon and Curt, before Alan finally located them, locked away in a prison camp in a tiny little village on the north end of Luzon.

How do we get them out without getting caught ourselves, and what do I tell Marta and Jewel? Alan asked.

Alan Simkins, my brother, was a large man who stood nearly six inches taller than I. Many people found it hard to believe he was my brother, especially when you compared my dark complexion and curly hair to his light skin and mostly straight hair.

But brothers we were, even though our builds were so dissimilar. Alan got the He-man body; broad shoulders, massive arms and thick legs, while I liked to think I was graced with all the brains. At six four and two hundred forty pounds, Alan also more closely resembled our dad than me. If I ever came close to Alan’s weight, most people would have considered me fat.

Well, I was quite happy to have the build that obviously came from my mother’s side of the family—particularly our grandpa. Our mom was tall for a woman and slender all her life. She never looked overweight or out of shape, and while our dad added a few pounds as he got older, Alan took after him, and I followed my mom’s side of the family; not too tall and not too fat.

Funny, there was a time long ago where inter-racial marriages actually caused peoples' heads to turn. But that was nearly a century ago. Today, everyone that I was around was thrilled to see you had only two eyes instead of four.

Once they began to move among us, the Nechi were careful to hide the extra set of eyes, small as they were, under hats or scarfs. But as soon as we began to understand who they were and what they wanted, every one of us began to look for the telltale bulge in the hat or scarf, just above the eyebrows of the turned down head covering.

About the time Alan and I grew up, everyone had become used to the cold climate brought on by the war we had with ourselves more than a century ago.

Some fool politician had decided the other country would capitulate to our demand for their fossil fuels if we arbitrarily blew up one of their cities. Before anyone knew it, nuclear missiles had destroyed several cities in countries that had no stake in the oil game, and nuclear winter was upon us. But again, that was over a hundred years ago, and the climate hadn’t changed much since all the bombs had stopped falling.

So it was not unusual for people to wear hats and heavy coats when they went outside. Nor was it unusual for everyone in the north to keep their head coverings on indoors—at least not until we discovered they were among us.

We first noticed the Nechi in the colder climates—those places far from the equator that, after the bombings, never got above freezing even in the summer. All the animals either died off or migrated south. The ones people used for food mostly just died off. By then there was a thriving market of synthetic food created from chemicals. People from the southern and warmer climates never touched the stuff.

But many people in the north decided to stay put and not migrate with the animals to ‘warmer’ climates. What they soon discovered was the atmosphere in the colder climates had also been impregnated with something that increased the life expectancy by as much as one hundred years.

Before anyone knew it, one hundred eighty year old people living in the northern climates became the norm rather than the exception. Our own grandfather—our dad’s dad—would have celebrated his two hundredth birthday had the Nechi not ambushed him last year while he was ice fishing.

People living in the southern, warmer climates actually found out about the age differences by accident. When a few southerners went north on business, they realized they were dealing with people their parents’ age, but were as youthful looking as they were.

However, the cold climate was too much for the southerners, so they returned home with stories of people who had outlived their parents by many decades, not to mention how much bigger the northerners were.

Southerners had discovered their bodies had grown leaner and darker, more suited to the warmer southern climate, while the northerners had—in addition to a longer life span—also gotten lighter and bigger.

For many southerners, the age and size thing wasn’t enough to entice them to move north. In fact, after fifty years, the physical differences between northerners and southerners was so stark, most groups didn’t want to mingle. Fortunately for Alan and me, our parents were two who did.

While humans were evolving so dramatically, the Nechi had quietly been observing us from a discrete distance. While their outward appearance was—at least from a short distance away—indistinguishable from any other human, the extra set of eyes located just inside their hairline on their foreheads always invariably gave them away.

The Nechi were a humanoid race that migrated to our planet nearly two centuries prior to us even knowing they existed. Where they came from, only they could say. But this much we knew; there were only a few of them when they arrived, and because of that, they had decided to wait until their numbers (and the climate conditions) were right for them to take over. Unfortunately for my generation, the Nechi had decided the time was now right.

The Nechis‘ first public appearance came when my father’s ancestors (northerners) decided to visit a remote area not too far from where the last nuclear bombs had fallen. Scientists had discovered a way to counteract the radiation effects, so the water and land became suitable for use. What they discovered were ‘people’ already living there.

The Nechi at first welcomed my father’s people into their cities, and then turned on them. Only three of the thirty person party escaped.

The Nechi over the years had developed a taste for certain parts of the human body, namely the rib cage. Every other part of the human body was of no interest to them.

In fact, once the Nechi realized the beneficial nature of human ribs to them (added life and health), they began a systematic process to capture and grow humans to produce larger and larger rib cages. The fact that northerners had larger rib cages to begin with and lived in a climate more suitable to the Nechi race was not lost on humankind, most especially northerners.

The Nechi had no interest in looking upon humankind as anything more than a food source, so any contact they had with us over the last fifty or sixty years was for the purpose of either capturing us as food stock, or wiping out our Armies wherever we met.

Since we had long ago moved away from nuclear technology-based weapons and anything no more sophisticated than Hunter-gatherer munitions, the Nechis‘ high powered electro-dynamic weapons put us at a distinct disadvantage.

The Nechi were also excellent tacticians. Raids on northern cities were almost always unexpected, and sprang from areas where an attack was least expected. My grandfather was killed when two Nechi sprang up from under the ice, shot him with their weapons and dragged him back under the ice. The only trace of the attack was grandpa’s stringer of fish, his poles and one of his boots—with the foot still in it.

More recently, the Nechi had taken to capturing younger people and using them as breeding stock, much like farmers used to breed cattle. But what they found out was as a result of our nuclear war, and its aftermath of nuclear winter and climate change, all humans—whether they started out in cold or warm regions, bred quicker in warmer climates than colder ones.

So the Nechi overran almost all the islands in the south Pacific and set up breeding colonies in remote towns back in the hills that were easily defensible. That inaccessibility was the main reason why it took Alan and me so long to find his sons.

Hey, dear brother, I’m talking to you. What do we tell the women? Alan said, jolting me back to the moment.

I say we don’t tell them anything until we’re sure they’re alive and we’ve got them out of that place. The last thing we want to do now is give them false hope. I said, realizing I had mentally wandered off. Some things seem so obvious now, once you’ve had to live with them year after year.

Well we’ve found them, how do we get them out without getting them and ourselves killed in the process? Alan persisted.

I haven’t figured that out yet, but when I do, we keep it to ourselves —ok?

Alan had learned to fly a few years after he’d met his wife Jewel, who was a pilot for a small freight line in Wisconsin. He took to the air like a bird, and before the rest of us knew it, Alan was flying the beat up old jets still lying around the mostly abandoned small airport near our home. It was a good thing too. It would have taken us several months to travel to the Philippines by sea and land—what was left of it. So flying made the most sense, even though jet fuel was extremely hard to come by.

Yet here we were, touching down on an abandoned military strip on the west coast of Luzon in the Philippines, barely fifty miles from where Alan’s sons were being held—we thought.

How can we possibly tell anyone what we’re doing now that we’re here? In a few hours we’ll be hip deep in jungle and mosquitoes. Think they’ll care once they start tasting our flesh, little bro? Alan said as he brought the aged Westwind jet to a screeching halt at the end of the runway.

Both of us sat forward in our seats and peered out the cockpit windows, looking down at the South China Sea stretching out from the cliffs that began only three meters from the end of the plane’s nose.

"Did you really have to use every bit of this old runway, big brother? Do we have to get out and push this thing back, so we can turn around and taxi back to that old shack of a terminal?" I said sarcastically.

Both my brother and I knew the Westwind was one of the few old jets that actually had the capability of backing up without the use of a tug or manual labor.

Save the comedy for after we get my sons out of the Nechi meat locker. Right now, we’ve got to hide this crate and locate some ground transportation before it gets dark. Hey, looks like we’ve got a welcoming committee, Alan said.

He was distracted by the three men in an old Jitney approaching our jet at high speed. From a distance we couldn’t tell if they were Nechi or humanoid. But we both learned from experience to doubt first and be ready to shoot, even if our eyes said things were ok.

As the Jitney got closer, Alan and I could see that all its passengers were wearing headgear pulled down past their eyebrows—a dead giveaway as to the true identity of our ‘reception committee’.

Alan backed the Westwind up to where he could safely turn it around and pick up the taxiway leading back to the loading ramp tarmac area. In the meantime, the occupants of the Jitney sat in their seats and waited for us to open the cabin door for them.

They didn’t have long to wait.

As soon as we came to a stop on the crumbling and pot hole strewn tarmac, the Jitney drew closer and the three ‘men’ flashed their weapons. There was no mistaking Nechi weapons for anything else, nor did the ‘men’ continue to hide their true identity.

Ripping off their hats exposing all four of their eyes, the two passengers in the Jitney jumped out and took up positions near the front of the cabin door, while the Jitney driver drove around to the front of our jet in an attempt to block our departure.

What they all failed to realize was the cockpit windows could be opened, and with the exception of one man who had set up just under the left wing and to the rear of the cabin door, their positioning made them easy targets.

Long ago, our dad had given us several weapons he said should only be used for defense or hunting; two old nine millimeter hand guns, and two old—but well cared for—two-two three rifles with fifteen shot clips.

After many years of practice, Alan and I could hit any target we chose from whatever distance our guns could handle. Since we always carried the handguns strapped to shoulder holsters, it was a simple matter to get ourselves into position to provide a warm greeting to our ‘welcoming committee’. We only hoped that our ‘greetings’ wouldn’t bring too much attention to our presence.

On that score it turned out we got lucky; our three ‘greeters’ were alone and looking to quickly overpower anyone who landed at this old air strip. They probably figured they’d struck the ‘mother lode’ when they saw our plane circle and come in for a landing.

Alan and I synchronized our fire, picking off the driver and the ‘man’ standing closest to the front of the jet. As soon as I could, I raced to the back of the plane and threw open the baggage hatch door. The ‘man’ in back whirled around and tried to fire, once he’d realized there was a hatch behind him, but it was too late; I shot him twice in the chest and face before he could raise his weapon.

Well, it was sure nice of the Nechi to provide us with ground transportation, wasn’t it? I really like the curb service, too. Where should we hide these bodies? Alan said casually.

Why should we hide them at all? How many of their buddies are going to come pokin’ around here looking for them anyway? I shot back.

Hey, we don’t know how many of them are around here. If they should come looking for them, at least we can make it difficult for them to figure out what happened. I hear those Nechi are a curious lot. Alan replied, using his rifle barrel to poke the driver of the Jitney to insure he wasn’t faking death.

Well pile ‘em into the back of the Jitney. We’ll take ‘em over there to the end of the runway and dump ‘em off the cliff. That should confuse things for a while. I said, grabbing the Nechi I’d just dispatched by his feet and dragging him towards the Jitney.

In a half an hour, the Nechi bodies were disposed of and we were in the process of trying to hide the plane among the rest of the abandoned aircraft that lined the far end of the tarmac.

Some of the planes we looked at did seem to be air worthy. Alan and I decided that the trick we’d hatched of