It's Better This Way: This Way, #1

By Travis Hill

Twenty-three years ago, the 'bulls' appeared in orbit and destroyed Earth's infrastructure in less than ten seconds. These days, the alien invaders aren't as much of a problem as the surviving humans are.

Evan Greggs learns that things aren't always as bad as they seem, but sometimes the choices to be made are as murky as they are difficult when it comes to living on The Farm, a community of survivors near the Cascade Mountains in central Oregon.

When a detachment of the old United States Army arrives with new information about the invaders, the citizens of The Farm are tasked with making another hard choice.

24,000 word novella
LGBTQ Friendly
Adult language / situations

• Language: English
• Publisher: Travis Hill
• Release date: May 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781501497827

Travis Hill

I'm an author in the Pacific Northwest. I live with my five completely worthless but awesome cats. I write stories I want to read that no one else is writing. My mailing list: https://www.angrygames.com Writes: Science Fiction / Fantasy / Horror / Adult Fiction / Drama / Humor

Book preview

It’s Better This Way

By Travis Hill

Copyright 2013

Cover art by: Cheryl @ CCR Book Cover Design

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

CHAPTER 1 - The Wreckage

I poked my head up over the rocks to get a look at the wreckage. No smoke, no signs of life. I looked over at Tony, a hundred yards away, to see what he wanted to do. Our scouts hadn’t been in this particular valley for almost six months, but that wasn’t unusual since there were no humans and there was nothing of interest to the Bulls to bring them here. Except now one of the alien dropships, or troop carriers, or possibly even a mining vessel was splattered over a fifty yard area half a mile down the hill from us. Tony gave me the hand signal asking if I saw anything moving, and I signed him back a negative. He gave me the cover me signal and waited for me to acknowledge. I pointed to the AR-17 that was between my feet and gave him a questioning gesture. Tony shook his head vigorously before beginning his descent down the hillside to the wreck.

I lifted my head above the rock again, just enough to be able to see everything before me. In case a Bull, or an army of Bulls were hiding out in the rocks lower down the hill waiting for a rescue ship. We didn’t know anything about them other than they had destroyed every single electrical grid on the planet, landed thousands of ships, built thousands of massive towers, and began mining some kind of mining operations. All this while another group of Bulls took enormous machines into major cities like Portland and Salem and ground them up into dust, one block at a time. The only two things we truly knew about them were that they looked weirdly like the minotaurs from Greek mythology, and they killed any human they came across who carried a gun. If you weren’t carrying a firearm or some other piece of military hardware and weren’t interfering with whatever a Bull was doing, you got ignored as if you didn’t exist.

The last time I’d ventured up to Portland, I spent almost ten minutes walking behind a Bull. I yelled at him (we assumed all are male since no one has ever reported one that looked like it might be a female), ran around in front of him while making rude gestures, and I even threw a brick at him. The only time he paid even the slightest attention to me was when I acted like I was going to pick up an old computer tower lying in the middle of the street. As I reached down, I saw his attention shift to me in an instant, his lower right arm swinging what looked like a short-barreled gun toward me. I immediately broke into a run. I darted under his weapon and kept going for the next five blocks or so, shrieking with hysterical laughter. Dane Bodeker told me he’d nearly pissed himself watching me mess with the Bull, and that he did pee himself a little when it turned its weapon on me.

Tony made it down to the first scorch in the earth. He looked back at me and gave me the hold signal while he did recon on the area. I was a bit spooked. The Bulls had technology straight out of science fiction, which meant we had no real idea of what they might be capable of beyond what little they had shown us in twenty-three years. They might ignore us unless we were armed or stealing from them, but I didn’t think they’d be too appreciative of us snooping around one of their wrecks. We’d always heard through the network that the Bulls slagged anything that crashed or stopped working, down to the molecule, as if to give us a big fuck you for thinking we might be able to salvage some useful tech from it. For the first few years there was the hope of acquiring tech to burn them off the face of our world. Then it was just to acquire some kind of tech to add something to ease the drudgery of everyday life. Now it was rarely even a thought. We’d learned to do without and still survive.

Tony gave me the all clear sign. I shouldered my rifle and started forward. A sharp whistle from him made me look up from watching for rocks at my feet to see him frantically waving the rifle off my shoulder.

Right. I propped the weapon up behind the rock I’d hidden behind and restarted my journey down to the crash site. Just in case there were some live Bulls around, or some decided to show up while we were snooping around, I’d be glad I didn’t have my gun. Hopefully.

I came around a large metal compartment that might have been a cockpit if it’d had any windows. Two seats and what looked like two desks from the old days were inside, along with about ten gallons of what had to be alien blood. It was black and crusted like it had been exposed to the dry central Oregon air for a week or more. I reached down to touch it, but Tony tapped my shoulder and shook his head. We didn’t know if it was toxic or psychedelic or just harmless like our blood. Maybe it had some killer virus that made human insides turn to bloody gelatin.

About ten yards ahead was the first body. The Bull had to have been exposed to the elements for a week or more. The sun had desiccated a good amount of the flesh, but surprisingly the body hadn’t been munched on by critters or insects. What caught our attention was the fact that this Bull didn’t have his armor activated. Very few words came down the network about what the aliens really looked like without their matte-gray armor.

Bulls had two squat but powerful legs, four arms, and a single head on a huge frame. Altogether, they stood almost nine feet tall—giants that towered over humans. Apparently the rumor was true that they were all flesh and muscle and bone with armor that could only be a millimeter thick, if that. Humans had endlessly debated about whether or not the aliens were spindly little creatures with giant heads that required power armor to function on a world with gravity.

The dead Bull’s four sunken, sightless eyes stared at a sky that was growing more cloudy by the hour, most likely one of the spring storm systems that could survive its trip over the Cascades and into the central wastelands. The alien definitely bore some kind of odd resemblance to the minotaurs I’d read about in school when I was a kid. The protruding nose and strangely shaped head were the aspects of its face that made it look like a minotaur. The four eyes and four slits I assumed were for breathing were creepy as hell, but nowhere near as weird as the thing’s mouth. The creature looked a lot more like a minotaur with its armor activated. Without the armor, it looked like an abstract painting of a four-eyed, four-jawed cow.

I pulled my knife from its sheath on my leg and knelt down to peel away one of its four cheeks. Tony looked like he was going to stop me, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the Bull anymore than I could. I flipped the knife over and put the dull edge under a mouth flap and gave a tug. It felt like I was trying to cut leather for a moment before the cheek flipped back along the side of the Bull’s face. A vertical jaw lined with a mix of sharp canine-like teeth and flat molar-like teeth greeted me. It was such a shock to see it that I jumped a little, causing the cheek flap to fall back into place along the jaw.

This time Tony did touch me on the arm, but I ignored him and reached back down to flip a few of the cheeks back all at once. Both of