Disease/Contagion technicalities

Strangetown Community Center. Grocery Store. Spring 199x.

Theodore “Tank” Grunt navigated his shopping cart along the colorfully stocked shelves, across dissections cluttered with sales offers and through narrow pathways that didn’t allow for more than cart to pass. The layout forced the consumer to slow down and re-consider whether they’d probably wanted something put on display here, after all? Tank’s father had explained the thought process behind this elaborate consumer trap to his son when he had been younger already and so Tank had come well prepared: He had eaten well to not fall to the temptation of snacks and checked each item off a shopping list as not to end up with duplicates. Most importantly, the teenager had brought bait to the battlefield: two agemates that would succumb to the shiny advertisement in his place and thus remind Tank to how much more mature he was.

KLIRR! Damn!

The sound of a shopping cart neatly crashing into another rand a teen boy cursing himself for not being focused enough on his immediate task ran through the store. Someone had parked their shopping cart right between two rows refrigerators, effectively blocking the path for everyone else.
Tank muttered something under his breath. He drew back own cart back to the last dissection they had passed. He handed it over to his companions, then strode into the tunnel again where he bent over the other shopping cart. Some time passed while the boy was rummaging through it’s contents, with the other two none the wiser about what was happening here. When Tank returned to them he carried an assortment of goods in his arms.

“Practicing shoplifting by taking the wares out of another cart rather than off the self?” Johnny Smith teased the slightly younger teen.

“Nonsense!” Tank replied. “I’d still have to pay for them, so what would be the use?”

“What do I know how Lawful Neutrals tick”, Johnny said with a shrug. “For your standards that could already be an outrageous act of rebellion!”

Ophelia Nigmos giggled, but also stepped forward to relieve her friend of half of the stuff he was shakily balancing.

“Where would you like that to go?” she asked.

“Right back where it comes from!” Tank said with grim determination.

While putting back everything he had taken to the correct shelf, the boy explained how much he hated shoppers who let their carts standing at random places in the store:

“It’s like they’re setting up a basecamp from which they do forays into the surrounding wilderness to hunt and gather! They never think about what path they may block and if you dare to move their carts to be able to pass, they teleport to your side from where-ever they have been and give you looks reserved for thieves! Inconsiderate oafs, all of them!”

After the final item had returned to it’s place of origin, Tank nodded satisfied.

“I hope that’ll teach them a lesson!”

“Even when you are mean, you only ever have the best of the community in mind!”

Ophelia spoke these words less than that she breathed them.

“Well, hehe… Thank you, Feli!”

An embarrassed smile crossed Tank’s face. The teenboy could only hope he hadn’t just blushed…

Johnny watched the exchange silently. He still didn’t consider himself Tank’s friend by a long shot, but since the Grunt boy and Ophelia went steady the three of them hung out together often. Had Feli ever looked at HIM with the expression of a lobotomized poodle, Johnny wondered? Or treated everything he said as the most wondrous revelation, the pinnacle of wisdom? Most likely not. Theirs had been a relationship of a different kind, less on the infatuated side and more a teaming up of two outsiders: the mutant and the creepy undertakers’ daughter. The creepy undertakers' equally creepy daughter, if you believed some.

That had been before the Genome Project, of course. Earlier this year this program had come to Strangetown, in it’s wake mutants from all walks of life not to mention that the researchers involved in this project weren’t the most adapted or even stable. And suddenly Johnny and Ophelia were blending in nicely, free to discover WHO they were instead of WHAT. In fact, Johnny appeared a rather bland boy, desirering nothing beyond a well-payed job to provide for a traditional nuclear family. Soon his and Nervous’s age difference, that had once seemed to glaring, would mean nothing anymore. Maybe Johnny would date Feli’s cousin soon. But that newcomer Nina Caliente was hot, too! And she had never known Johnny as a child, so she'd never bring up humilating memories from that time!

“…dad sold his manuscript?”

Johnny jerked around. “Ey? Oh, yes, he did! Encounter of the third kind.”

“He should write two more”, Ophelia claimed.

She pushed the trio’s cart in front of her, resuming their shopping tour.

Tank nodded. “Yeah! Or do YOU know what the first and second kind of encounter are supposed to be? Now that would be a revelation, whereas alien invasions have been done to the death already.”

“Isn’t that the whole point of the new project?” Ophelia reminded the boys. “To prove that the greenskinned mutants are descended from aliens?”
For that was what the story went like: In the distant past, it was believed, an alien species had left genetic material in the early humankind. Over time the ancestry diluted, but if two carriers of the correct sequences met, something closely resembling the original aliens might be born. The scientists called Johnny a half-alien, his sister was at least alien-blooded and individuals like Apollon “Polly” Smith and Tolgate Curious were believed to express the full alien heritage.

“Yes…” Tank had to admit. “But… I dunno…” At a loss for words he looked to Ophelia.

The girl smiled. “I know what you mean! Mr. Smith and Mr. Curious do not make convincing alien invaders. They could become villains, but they’ve been shaped by the same culture as us. To the contrary with real aliens the danger would come from that no one can tell how they think.”

“Yes, exactly!”

“Back to topic! Encounters of the first kind would be normal, everyday socializing, I think”, Johnny started to speculate.

“Makes sense,” Tank agreed. “And second kind maybe everything including violence and crime. Then third is extra-terrestrial and maybe fourth the supernatural? They never talk about there being a fourth kind…”

By now the teenagers had finished their shoppping. When they checked out, Johnny raised his voice: “Let’s hide and watch what happens when the other cart’s owner realized they lost half of their stuff!”

“I do not draw satisfaction from…” Tank started.

However, Johnny and Ophelia had already taking cover behind an advertisement blackboard.

“Oh, for the love of Ea and Maxis in Origin Beyond!” Tank exclaimed. “You could just as well hide in front of that blackboard. Bloody civillians…”
Tank grabbed the other two and shoved them elsewhere. Johnny ended up behind an assortment of potted plants on account of his green skin. The boy didn’t object, only when Tank attempted to smear some orange pulp into his face to make him appear to be in bloom and garnish him with tiny loose vines did Johnny slap the other’s hand.

“You are making fun of me!”

“Nah. Cover and color alone are only two thirds of the equation, concealment being the final one.”

“Just shut up and hide!”

And that Tank did. He found a niche where he squeezed in to together with Ophelia and then it became increasingly boring.

After a while Tank and Feli started giggling.

Okay, boring and infuriating.

The teenagers waited and waited, but their prey never showed itself.

Twenty minutes had passed – an eternity! – when a scream echoed through the store. And then someone shouted to call an ambulance.
When it arrived Johnny saw his mom exit first. The boy was glad he was hidden so well, because his mother seeing him on site of an accident site would only have worried her needlessly, even if Johnny wasn’t even involved in the accident.

The paramedics carried out a tan, black-haired woman in a red jacket. She was unconscious, probably fevering and radiated a faint smell of urine as she passed the teenagers.

Johnny felt a hand grab his. It was Feli’s. Then another hand landed on his shoulder: Tank’s.

At first they said not one word. Then Tank spoke up, hoarsely: “I think I remember everything she wanted to buy. Let’s… let’s put it back into her cart and bring it to the hospital. It’s on me.”

“Nah, I’ll chip in, too”, Johnny replied. “It’s the least we can do.”

“I mean”, Tanks aid while the teenagers restocked the abandoned shopping cart, “it’s still not nice of her to block the path. And had she taken her cart with her, she’d probably hung on to it instead of collapsing out of everyone’s sight. But that doesn’t negate the fact that she needs help now.”

“As long as you do not greet her with these actual words when she wakes up”, Johnny snorted.

Only the woman never woke up again. She succumbed to what the doctors dubbed “Mystery disease” and was buried on the small town’s graveyard.

Danielle Greaves.

First victim of the Mystery Disease.

Just for the record, all three encounter types refer to UFOs. The first kind is a sighting, second kind is sighting with evidence and third kind is contact.