WP — Prisons and Aliens
I felt like writing late on Boxing Day so I fired up Reddit and pulled out another writing prompt — this one about Aliens and a Correctional Facility Officer.
As always I’ll have a few thoughts at the end about the write up. Here’s the prompt:
You’re a corrections officer watching the cameras. You see a bunch of prisoners and a few guards getting zapped by some sort of alien. Then you see the conspiracy theorist with the tin-foil hat get zapped, and he doesn’t go docile like everyone else. Luckily, there’s a roll of tin-foil in here.
Life as a corrections officer in a minimum security prison wasn’t that bad, even if you wished it was Friday so the week would end and you could escape annoying coworkers. Most of the people here were eager to stay on the good side of the officers, as they weren’t going to be here too long they hoped. The better conditions, helped with this from the dormitories they lived in, to freedom of movement around the facility. That’s not to say you didn’t have to keep your eyes open, or be prepared to stand up to toughs, but as far as life in this field went it was pretty good. There was even the chance some of the people coming in might be serious about improving their lives. George had seen it a few times at least, and even had the opportunity to work with a couple.
“I’m going out on a brief round,” came the deep baritone of Nicholas across the room, “You have cameras George.”
George turned and nodded, “Alright. Any problems you’re expecting?”
Nicholas shook his head, “No, but I’m feeling like I’m missing something around Dormitory C. It just looks a bit off over the last bit and I can’t quite place it. I’ll meet up with Liz and Alan there.”
George sighed, “We’re not detectives Nick. Lighten up man,” he shook his head as he looked at some of the monitors labelled around the room, and pulled up the feeds on Dormitory C, and nearby cameras on some of the screens.
“It’s Nicholas. And it’s our job to make sure nothing wrong or … illegal goes on here. We can’t let criminals take advantage of the lighter secur…”
“Nick.” George says the short form emphatically, “This is minimum security. This is people on their way out or folks who haven’t done that much. Sometimes there are problems sure, but if you’re looking to break heads, you’re in the wrong place.”
“You’re just lazy. And I don’t want to break heads, but stop any of these convicted criminals,” he says emphasizing the last words, “from doing more crimes off camera because you’re lazy.”
George shook his head, as Nicholas walked out of the head, back straighter then a floorboard, baton polished and ready at the side. George turned back to the monitors and his thoughts wandered for a few moments as he saw nothing particularly odd going on around Dormitory C or in the place outside where a few of the inmates were walking carrying several recently finished pieces of art as there was supposed to be a display of some of them tonight after supper.
As he was watching, George saw one of the inmates… Mitchell his name was he thought, not carrying any but wearing an odd tinfoil hat. In fact, it wasn’t his old really crappy one, but it seems to have been his art project was to make a really nice tinfoil hat.
‘Wonderful,’ George thought, ‘Mitch is going to provoke Nick just by being there with his theories on aliens. That tinfoil hat will drive him crazy.’ George picked up the line to call Liz quickly to give her a heads up.
“Hey Liz, its George. Nick is on his way with his normal attitude and really ready to be a Grinch. Also, it seems Mitch’s art project was a new tinfoil hat, and he seems to be preaching the word of alien threats. Just a heads up.”
A melodic voice replies, “I saw Mitchell making it. I think he even has extras made as Christmas gifts. I stored them for him. I’ll try to keep Grinch away from him, and you keep him from finding those.”
George chuckled and started to reply when a shout came across from the same voice, gone from the playful melodic tones to a scared and shocked tone “Oh Shi…” as a crashing sound was heard.
George spun back to look at the cameras, and there was some yellow lines of energy moving like slow motion lightning and hitting some of the people. One of them was Alan, the other security guard in the area, and he stopped moving, falling back and banging hard off the wall, and then the floor appearing to be unconcious or dead. Other prisoners were similarly falling around the area, as George watched, he realized there was a place it was all coming from.
There was something inexplicable standing there. For a long time mankind has come up with images of alien creatures, and not long ago George was joking about Mitchell’s belief in them. But there… there was something that could only be explained as Alien. It looked just like they had often been described, gray, a bit short with a big head, buglike eyes and just wrongly shaped. The way the limbs was different with the arms having 4 joints it seemed, and the legs three. The small mouth on the face was closed, and his six fingered hands at the end of the his arms was where the weird yellow bolts were emerging from as he pointed and it began slowly jittering through the air.
One person seemed to be standing in a hallway untouched by it all oddly enough, even as everyone else was hiding or disabled. Mitchell just stood there with his tinfoil hat on and glared at the monster, shouting something at it that the Alien Being couldn’t seem to locate. Suddenly, from the corner of the screen you see Nick charge the Alien, brushing past Mitch, who is knocked down and the Alien seems to see him for a moment but focuses on Nick who has his baton out. The Alien taps its foot, and when Nick is five feet away points at him, and a series of yellow bolts jitter at the guard, who runs into them and he stops in his tracks, turning stiffer than he was at any given time, and fell face first onto the floor, moving no more.
As he did so, the Alien shot the bolt at Mitchell, who rushed against it to put back on his hat. As he did so the Alien Being looked around, as if he couldn’t see Mitchell any more, and the bolt struck the alien believer. Unlike the others though, Mitchell didn’t straighten and fall over. Instead, the yellow energy seemed to all flow up around the tinfoil, and then jolt away briefly, upwards in all directions before disappearing.
This left George with only one inescapable conclusion. Somehow, tinfoil hats were the key to stopping aliens.
It made no sense as far as he knew. But then sense had stopped mattering a moment or two ago when an Alien Being had appeared in the middle of his place of work and started shooting everyone with weird yellow bolts from his hands. Hurrying out of his chair, George tripped over his chair and struggled to catch himself on the desk with his hands and avoid falling over, without even alien involvement.
“Calmly George, knocking yourself out won’t help anyone,” he mutters to himself, “Aliens, tinfoil hats, and talking to myself? I must be going crazy,” he says, with a hysterical laugh escaping before he gets himself under control.
“Focus. Crazy can come later.” With that thought in mind, he remembered what Liz had said about storing the tinfoil hats. Where would Liz have hid them that Nick wouldn’t have looked to hold them for Mitch?
Only one thought came to mind for George, as there was one spot that Nick refused to really interact with, and that was the library corner of the office, where books for inmates were examined briefly, and sometimes served as break reading for the staff as well. Heading over to the somewhat messy corner, George began sorting past the legal books (‘oh dear god not another person thinking how they can sue us’, he thinks), through the wood work crafts books (‘why didn’t we just print out google pages for this’ he ponders), under the newspapers (‘a daily dose of depression’), and there the magazine corner. At the top of it was a magazine titled Ancient Aliens saying As Seen On History Channel, and George knew he had found the spot. Tearing out the magazine of the box, along with UFO Post, and Conspiracies Monthly was a single, invaluable, hat.
Far less than he expected, but what he needed, and George picked it up with a reverance that he could never have imagined handling an object like it with. As he did, he realized that this must have been the first of the bunch Mitch made, and it had a fabrice interior with slits for the tinfoil to fit in and make contact. There was a sheet of notes beside it with scribbled writing.
Putting on the hat, George read the note, in Mitchell’s characteristic messy writing. “Prototype Aluminum Comfort Hat. Needs an exterior layer for appearance but aluminum must be touching head at all times to stop ALIEN MIND PROBES. Don’t use Tin. Comfort layer here is a bit too big…. There’s a few drawings underneath the notes but none of that mattered right now to George.
George straightened out the hat, and pulled on the foil, to make sure it was touching his head. Thinking, he grabbed some tape, and wincing at how stupid it would look, he taped the aluminum to the side of his head so it wouldn’t easily fall off. Looking around, he saw a roll of aluminum down there too, and he grabbed that… and in a thought wrapped his baton in it, figuring that it couldn’t hurt.
Sticking the roll into his pants, George went back to look at the monitors where the Alien had left the Dormitories C area, and wasn’t visible quickly when he heard a frantic knock at the door. Looking outside, was the only person who looked about as ridiculous as George right now — Mitchell.
“ALIENS! THE ALIENS ARE HERE!” Came the shout from outside the door by Mitchell. “Is anyone left? Or Am I alone? Have the aliens abducted you all? Are they turning you into food? Are they planning to make us all batteries? AM I HERE A” His voice was panicking, and rushing until George walked up and opened the door where the young man’s frazzled appearance let out a whoop of excitement.
“George! You got a hat,” Mitch exclaimed
“Actually, its your hat Mitch. Liz told me where she was keeping it for you and after I saw the cameras I figured it was time to hat up.”
“Well that’s good. Now, we need guns to go take it down.”
“The guns are generally kept elsewhere. We’ll have to go aways to get them. You think lead bullets are the only answer here?”
“Lead? No not lead. Wait why are you asking me?” Mitch stopped looking puzzled.
“I’m new to the whole aliens among us thing. So you’re the expert here Mitch. Do we need aluminum weapons?”
“Aluminum stops them, but it isn’t enough to hurt them. It will confuse them too. But no what we need is Water Guns. Load them up with water, with as much aluminum as we can fit too to make them invisible… and just like the wicked witch they melt! It’s why the aliens fear us. We’re made up of water!”
“Water?” George asks disbelievingly
“Yes water! We’re 70% water!” Mitch excitedly said as he runs into the room and starts tearing through things. “Don’t you have water pistols around here?!”
“Why would they come to a planet covered in water?”
“I’m not one of the Grays, don’t ask me! H2O and AL beat AL IEN.” George groans a bit and turns into the break room, pulling out a a couple super soakers that were kept there from a party last summer. Strictly speaking they shouldn’t have been there, and they were buried deep, but since Nick came there was no chance to smuggle them back out.
George takes the big water gun rifles to the tap, and fills them up. “Now, you’re sure about this?”
“Yes! It was…”
“Alright.” He turns the taps up higher, and fills up both guns, tossing the smaller bright orange one to Mitchell, as he also fills up a separate back carried case for the larger gun he was carrying, that was painted black. “Fire discipline. Don’t point at anything you don’t intend to shoot. Take a breathe, use finger to aim, and then slowly pull the trigger. Don’t get everyone wet. We need to act quickly to get the …” He stops taking a deep breathe “get the alien before it hurts more people. Dear god how am I saying this?”
“Welcome to the revolution!” Mitch says as he grabs the gun and pumps it up, “Lock and load.” He says with a grin, “Astlavista baby.”
With a long suffering look on his face George goes over and puts his backpack full of water on, as he picks up his Super Soaker CPS 3200, and readies it up, looking at the vintage water gun that had been painted black a couple years ago for their water warfare games. “Well Mitch you have the short range shot gun type there that sprays water all over. I have the tanker here. I have a lot more ammo then you do, so I want you following me, and keeping an eye behind me and on other sides. We can’t treat this water gun fight like a game,” George says, and just ponders, how he ended up in a situation where he’s having to discuss this seriously.
“Yes, Sir.” Mitch says, saluting with his gun, “We’ll get some back on those gray bastards.”
“This isn’t the military. Just… try to keep quiet, and follow me.”
Opening the door, a yellow bolt shines through, hitting George but being absorbed by his aluminum hat. Stepping out George sees the alien dancing down the hall, moving by almost pirouetting with its three jointed legs down the hall, looking in each direction as it goes by, with bolts of yellow energy flying as it spins out with its hand.
“Take a swim Gray,” his voice growls out as he pours out water on the alien, the litre of water in the gun going as he continually pressures it recharging it. The Alien down the hallway stops. And just looks back almost mystified by the wet liquid. It makes some grotesque sound with its mouth, bending in inhuman ways as its left side opens up nearly to its eye and its right at an odd angle, as it turns around with its mouth moving in odd ways.
Mitchell charges out, and ignoring the fact that the water pouring down the hallway isn’t working, shouting “This is for ELLA!” with the water shotgun firing an almost horizontal splash bomb in front of him, further apparently confusing the alien. Dropping the water gun and backpack, George pulls out his baton, and takes a step forward, as he sees Mitch reach about 5 feet from the alien, with water spewing at it.
The water continues to do nothing, but Mitch’s head got wet from George’s shots at the Alien and his hat fell off, and the alien made a loud cry firing several bolts of yellow energy at the conspiracy theorist. Without his aluminum protection, Mitch freezes up and falls straight down, his nose banging on the hard plastic of the water gun and a crushing sound where his body landed on the main part.
The Alien starts walking over towards Mitchell as George begins a quiet, determined walk up the hall, and fires another bolt at the disabled Mitch, and some more around the hall in general. One of them hits the water that has begun pooling in the area from Mitch and George’s spraying, and like electricity it spams all over it, but it grows more and more powerful as the water evaporates, and it all goes into the Alien standing in the pool near Mitchell, frying him to a dark black cinder of ashes, and leaving George speechless.
“Well I guess today is a fry day,” George comments, wondering what to do about this mess and what comes next.
This was an interesting write — though it got away from me at over 2700 words. I probably need to do better at setting limits on things.
One thing that stood out to me when starting this one was deciding what sort of jail it would be, and while generally in fiction we tend to talk about high security prisons, this time I decided to go with the opposite, minimum security prisons and did a brief amount of reading on it. There’s a lot we could do to better these places, while I presented a decent view from George, that was his view more on it which is going to be coloured more favourably. These facilities generally house non-violent offenders, or those who are close to leaving and are a place we should be heavily focused on rehabilitation, something that our system often leaves out.
But enough soap-boxing here I decided I wanted Nick to be my obstructive guy to get his comeuppance quickly. Deciding on the aliens took a few, but I kinda went with a weird take on the grays, and I had Mitch have some of the answers, but not all.
I hope the idea that the yellow energy was jolting around helped bring lightning or electricity to mind, as if not I worry that makes the ending seem like it comes out of nowhere. If it did work, hopefully it feels like a bit of a double blind, the water was the answer, but not in the way thought of.
As always, I’m eager to hear what you have to say so let me know!
