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    Iris Incredible
    Iris Incredible
    Iris Incredible
    Ebook267 pages4 hours

    Iris Incredible

    By J.S. Frankel

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    Vicar—Vic—Farbstein, seventeen, resident of Eugene, Oregon, an average high school student in every way, happens upon an alien who has come to Earth in search of warriors to defend her world. With a long, unpronounceable name, he calls her Iris, with her blessing. Iris has abilities—flight and strength—and soon, the NSA discovers what she can do. Led by Agent Randolph Haynes, he urges her to keep a low profile and blend in. Blending in, though, isn't something Iris can so readily do, as the destroyer of her world, Kherter, a fearsome giant of a man, sends his forces to Earth to destroy her as well as enslave mankind. Iris manages—barely—to beat them back the first time, and in doing so, reveals herself to the world. Vic accepts her as a friend, and so do many others at first. The press dubs her Iris Incredible, and she's hailed as a savior, a mantle she is unwilling to assume. Her only goal is to find someone who can help her in her own cause. When Kherter and his forces return to ravage downtown Eugene and subsequently threaten the world, human nature takes over. Trust turns to mistrust and fear, and Iris becomes a pariah, as does Vic. Soon, social order breaks down as the worst of human nature comes to the fore. In spite of the public's antipathy, Vic and Iris take on Kherter's forces in one, final, all-out assault. Iris knows what she has to do, as does Vic, and they engage in a battle that will determine the future of mankind.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublishereXtasy Books Inc
    Release dateJan 8, 2021
    ISBN9781487428365
    Iris Incredible
    Author

    J.S. Frankel

    J.S. Frankel was born in Toronto, Canada, a good number of years ago and managed to scrape through the University of Toronto with a BA in English Literature. In 1988 he moved to Japan and started teaching ESL to anyone who would listen to him. In 1997, he married the charming Akiko Koike and their union produced two sons, Kai and Ray. J.S. Frankel makes his home in Osaka where he teaches English by day and writes by night until the wee hours of the morning.

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      Iris Incredible - J.S. Frankel

      Dedication

      To my wife, Akiko, and my children, Kai and Ray, thank you for putting up with my quirks and hogging the computer at all hours. And to—in no particular order—Sara Linnertz, Lolo, Emily Linnertz, Joanne Van Leerdam, Eva Pasco, Toni Kief, Michelle Holstein, Elizabeth Zervos, Julia Blake, and too many more to count, thank you for your support. A special thanks to my sister, Nancy D. Frankel, for never giving up on me.

      Chapter One: As Things Stand

      Eugene, Oregon, downtown. Midnight. April first. I-Day.

      I’d heard an old saying once in one of those popular apocalyptic movies—when the end of the world comes, either you confront it head-on, or else you stick your head in the ground and hope to hell it passes you by.

      It was a common saying, almost trite. Man up, nut up or shut up, blah, blah, and more blah. Talk about overuse! Anyway, those screenwriters wouldn’t have known. Fantasy was all they knew.

      Point of fact—this was reality, the apocalypse had descended and it wouldn’t pass anyone by, so those who confronted it fell into three basic categories. Group A took up arms to defend themselves. Group B blamed certain elements of society, and Group C partied like it was the turn of the century.

      After all, if the world was going to end, then why not go out with a bang, get hammered, do all the drugs you could, and have the mother of all blow-outs?

      That was the attitude some people had, and in the two weeks prior to today, about thirty percent of Eugene’s citizens decided to do the party-and-steal-’til-you-drop thing.

      The police were hamstrung, looting was rampant, racism was worse, and not a single person could do anything about it. Even if the police had been able to control the rioters, realistically speaking, did they want to?

      Personally speaking, if today meant the end of humanity, then I was going to face it head-on. No booze, no drugs, and I’d keep a level head. Screw what happened. To the outsider who didn’t know the sitch, it might have sounded like suicide, but that was the furthest thing from the truth.

      For me, my life had been effectively over for three weeks. As for everyone else, well—not everyone, but many—they’d already given up. They were resigned to their fate, and they didn’t care.

      It took a measure of courage to face extinction, and while I didn’t think I was overly brave, still, I didn’t want to go out without a fight. Hide out or man up. Facts were facts. The world, our world, would end, just the same.

      In this case—this case meaning tonight—while half the populace decided to go out and party, the other half chose to confront the passing of our planet by taking the fight to the destroyer. Points to them for showing up. Deduct points for not bringing anything to defend themselves with when the ol’ you-know-what was about to go down.

      The crowd, two thousand strong, shifted this way and that, everyone jostling one another in order to get a better view of a portal that would appear right about this time. They carried bats, knives, chains, and a few had guns, but they weren’t going to turn on each other. No, they were restless and waiting.

      Soldiers ringed the perimeter of the plaza. Keep back, they announced through bullhorns. For your own safety, keep back!

      Armed and ready, they had their weapons trained on the sky. That was where the enemy would come from. Many in the crowd were young, not much older than I was—seventeen.

      It was cold, around forty-five degrees, but in spite of that, a nervous sweat trickled down my back. On any other day, it would have been ideal to stay home, watch television, kick back, and enjoy life, or get into bed and keep warm.

      But tonight, many religious leaders were calling it the Armageddon. They pointed to all the signs, chiefly that this piece’s main villain was a reddish-brown SOB who had all the appearances of Old Scratch himself—minus the horns and tail.

      Who cared what religion it was? They had the knowledge. They had the facts. Never mind it was from a source that couldn’t be verified outside of having, ahem, faith. They believed.

      Look at where that creature came from!

      Explanation number two came out with an exclamation point attached to it. They pointed to the ring of fire the creature had entered from.

      However, said ring of fire didn’t come from underground. There was no fiery pit. No, this ring of fire came from the sky, so, wrong there, too.

      Salvation is at hand. The end of days is nigh! You can still be saved!

      Repent—that was the way to salvation. Sorry, reverends and ministers and imams and rabbis and other true believers, I couldn’t listen to that kind of religious BS and not laugh. They were in the minority, but their numbers had grown exponentially since the crisis began.

      Attacks on anything different, like minority religions, had gone up tenfold since the announcement that an off-world presence was due to invade our planet. In short, things were going to hell at an incredibly fast rate.

      The government of the United States does not believe this event is religiously inspired. We believe it has been perpetrated by outside forces, forces outside of our planet.

      Yes, that came from the White House. In other words, aliens, that six-letter word meaning visitors from elsewhere. After all, they’d previously entered our world through portals, so nothing new there.

      They’d used otherworldly tech to destroy buildings and kill a lot of innocents. As for their method of conveyance, they rode sky cycles. They were large, noisy, clunky-looking things that resembled flying snowmobiles. So, once again, alien status confirmed.

      Our government sent out the National Guard to watch over Eugene. When they couldn’t handle it, the government dispatched the armed forces, one thousand soldiers, to defend us.

      The lead bad guy, whose name was Kherter, hadn’t attacked anywhere else. Not yet. He’d confined his attacks to this city, but he’d promised to do worse elsewhere when the time came—and the time was now.

      Every single time he’d come before, his forces had slaughtered people and he’d demanded that the person we sheltered—Iris Incredible, as the newshounds had come to call her—show herself and fight it out.

      You are harboring a fugitive, he’d intoned in the deepest basso profundo possible. His voice was guaranteed to send ripples of fear up one’s spine, and, to his credit, it worked. Everyone was scared spineless, witless, and other esses.

      "Because you are harboring a fugitive, that makes you accomplices after the fact, and that means none of you shall be spared."

      To take my mind off the possibility of dying along with the rest of Eugene’s population—not to mention eleven billion other people on the planet—I took a few steps to my right.

      What with so many citizens there, it was almost impossible to move. But after a few slip-slides here, a few there, I was free from the crowd.

      By some miracle, a nearby bench lay unoccupied, so I took a seat and tried to remember all the details. Everything had happened so fast, comparatively speaking, that it was hard to keep track of it all.

      Instead, the thought of school entered my mind, and, what, now? As a junior, bored out of my mind, school was a place where friendships were forged, so the experts said. It was a place to learn about learning. It was a place to have fun.

      Someone didn’t get the memo, in my case. School had been sheer drudgery. Not that I was the best student around—hardly. Good at English, sucked at Math, and so-so in the other subjects. In short, I was average.

      Below average in popularity, though, and that was the deciding factor. It seemed as though the cliques wanted to keep me out, or maybe they were determined to keep me out.

      Or, being honest about it all, maybe it was my own sense of solitary-ness, even though that didn’t count as a word. I might have been a washout at the sciences, but spelling wasn’t a weakness of mine.

      What counted as a weakness was my inability to talk to anyone in a meaningful way. It was like the student body seemed to be moving in one direction, while I was moving in another. That was just how it was. I never hung out with anyone. No best friend, no bro-ships, no enemies—I was practically invisible.

      Oh, wait, when it came to the female side of things, count me totally invisible. Experts on self-esteem always talked about how looks didn’t count. Well, to the female population, mine didn’t count—at all. At the height of five-ten, around one-seventy, lean, with short brown hair and brown eyes, call me Mr. Average.

      Perhaps that was it. I tended to blend in, and when it came to party time, those that blended in also tended to fall into the ignored category. Again, that was how it was.

      Moot point, considering the arrival of Iris. Once she came to Earth, my days at school were over. No way could I go back. In any case, I doubted those who attended my high school cared much. They were too busy checking their smartphones and hooking up and so forth...

      Oh, God, it’s I-Day, it’s I-Day!

      A man in his forties, wearing a dirty, torn suit, and with his hair flying wildly around his head, yelled that as he ran past me. The faint aroma of alcohol and body odor trailed after him like an invisible banner. Party time for him—live it up!

      He ran into the throng, screaming at the top of his lungs, It’s I-Day. Soon someone—or more than one person—shut him up, probably by knocking him out.

      The term I-Day was something else coined by the reporters, same as they’d coined Iris’s nickname. I-Day meant Invasion Day. Kherter had said so the last time he’d come here, roughly ten days ago.

      Like a great bird but with no wings—an anti-gravity belt around his waist supported him and enabled him to fly—he hovered in the air above City Hall and said that as a race, humans were on their last legs, or words to that effect.

      Most of whatever else he said got lost in translation when those in the crowd started panicking, screaming, and running in all directions.

      But I could never forget what he said before he vanished through the same red portal he’d come through. It went viral in an instant. I am amassing my army to invade this blue bauble of yours. You will serve me, or you will die.

      Those were his exact words, and they chilled everyone to the marrow. He was hell-bent on conquering Earth, and for what? To put another trophy on his mantelpiece on his world? To kill all those who stood in his way? The man was a tyrant, and only tyrants understood their motives...

      Hey, man, I know you, someone said.

      I looked up and saw a large dude, maybe late teens or early twenties, sporting a stubbly beard. With a light blue jacket and ripped up jeans, along with a floppy cap and a belly that stuck out six inches ahead of his chest, he reminded me of a fat Smurf.

      On the other hand, he held a mallet studded with nails, so that made him someone to be careful of. I couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t turn on me.

      That’s nice, mister, I replied in an even tone. So?

      Far from getting angry, his eyes shone with recognition and respect. Hey, you’re Vicar Farbstein, ain’t you?

      That guy would have to mention my name. I’d never liked it, although my parents had their reasons for naming me that. My mother’s maiden family name was Vicar—shortened from Vicaravitch or so I’d heard, so... guess who got stuck with it? Not Victor or plain ol’ Vic, no.

      Vicar. Good luck in getting anyone to call me by my proper name. No one had for all of my seventeen years. At school, the other kids used to call me Victoria Fartstein, among other, worse nicknames. It provided an endless source of amusement—for them.

      To say that I wasn’t amused could be considered the understatement of the century. Fights had been started over less. While growing up in Eugene and putting up with crap like that on a constant basis, sooner or later, it took a toll.

      All of those so-called self-esteem experts said it was only a name, only a word. Maybe so, but those know-nothings didn’t have to listen to everyone deliberately doing a hatchet job on their names or picking fights with them. I did.

      Let it go, let it flow, they said. Well, sometimes, I didn’t. The only times I ever hit back were when they started something. Sometimes, it was the only way...

      My mind came back to the present. Time to focus up and get sharp and stay sharp. Yeah, I’m Vic Farbstein. So what?

      Awe painted his face. You know Iris, right?

      Iris Incredible, a visitor from very far away. We’re, uh, friends.

      Technically, I was her liaison on Earth. She’d come here by accident, and the government, in its infinite wisdom, not to mention her own insistence, had put me in charge of her.

      Immediately, I took back that thought, thought about explaining the situation to this guy, but explaining it was complicated, not to mention awkward, and at that moment, I didn’t feel like going through the dynamics of it all.

      The man grinned. Yeah, you’re tight with her. Can’t say I blame you. She’s pretty hot, right?

      He gave me a conspiratorial nod as if we were bros and would share any secret, no matter how intimate, between us. Really—he expected me to tell him about my relationship with Iris, especially at this time? Dream on!

      She’s my friend. Leave it at that.

      I turned away, and he muttered something about ungrateful celebs and their snobbish ways. We stood in front of City Hall, right in the heart of the city, and it was one minute before midnight.

      In exactly sixty seconds, things would happen. The battle of the millennia would begin. We were here to oppose the tyrant. Everyone waited with bated breath. This was it. This was the moment of truth.

      Since Iris had come here about three weeks ago, Eugene had never been the same. She’d intercepted what someone had called a deep-space radio beam. After finding it, she traced its origins back to Earth, to Eugene, and then she’d used her tech—which was way ahead of ours—to come here...

      She’s here, someone whispered in a voice full of awe.

      Everyone else in the crowd stared at the figure as she flew through the night sky. Like a beautiful bird or an angel, as some called her, she drifted effortlessly along the wind.

      Iris. Dressed in her white-on-white bodysuit, her raven black hair trailing behind her, she flew over the crowd and waved at them. Somehow, she spotted me, and for the briefest of moments, I had hope that things would turn out all right...

      They’re coming!

      That cry wasn’t full of awe. It was full of terror. It came from the fat Smurf behind me, and as I pivoted around to tell him to shut up, he pointed to another portal, this one red and full of fire.

      Oh, holy crap. It was Kherter and more than one hundred of his warriors. For personal reasons, they’d chosen the Earth to use as their own personal toilet. Iris had come to stop them, along with our armed forces. Could she, though? Could they? That was the question.

      God, help us! the man cried out once again. God...

      That was the last word he spoke. A nanosecond later, a greenish ray consumed him. With his disappearance from reality, the crowd broke and ran in fifty different directions, dropping their makeshift weapons as they bolted.

      Naturally, I ran with them, and along the way, I picked up the Smurf’s mallet. Panicky people blocked my way, and I found temporary refuge at the entrance to an alley. I had to see this. Not a smart move, but I had to see this. I had to see Iris.

      Sure, it wasn’t her real name, but that was what the press and I had dubbed her and she went along with it. The crowd had gathered to see what was going to happen. This was the day—the day that Kherter had said would come months ago, and now it was here and everyone was justifiably terrified.

      Considering someone had just been erased from existence, it was a given that El Bad Guy Supremo and his gang of marauders intended to make good on their promise.

      In previous battles with them, Iris had held her own. That was due to dumb luck, Kherter’s overconfidence, and the fact that the Grandanian tyrant truly didn’t understand that people on Earth wouldn’t go quietly. Perhaps he knew that, but more than likely, he didn’t care.

      People of Earth, he intoned as his men positioned themselves fifty feet apart, their guns at the ready. This is your last chance to bow down before me. I have no equal in power. I have no equal in fighting skill. I have no equal in the weaponry you see before you. Bow down, accept me as your ruler, and perhaps I shall let some of you live to serve me!

      There it was—the ultimatum. General Maxwell, who was in charge of the armed forces, already had his men in place. They had bazookas and machine guns up and waiting. Six tanks, positioned around the plaza, had their muzzles pointed at the red portal. All he had to do was to give the order.

      Someone in the crowd threw a rock at Kherter. It hit his foot, and he glanced at the person who’d thrown it. Is that your final answer?

      Maxwell yelled, Open fire!

      And all hell broke loose.

      Kherter’s men gleefully discharged their weapons. That took out a lot of the soldiers, and then they fired upon the crowd, vaporizing more than fifty hapless bystanders by my count.

      Maxwell’s forces shot back. One of Kherter’s men fell screaming to his death, his snowmobile a fireball that smashed into the ground and exploded. Then another fell, and then five more.

      Kherter had an effective fighting force. They were powerful, but they weren’t indestructible. And, more telling, they were overconfident. None of them wore body armor.

      However, they had tremendous firepower, far superior to our forces, and they were more than willing to use it. They flew in wide circles and fired indiscriminately into the crowd, screaming in joy every time they annihilated a civilian or a soldier.

      I ducked as a blast of green fire came my way. It took out a chunk of the wall above my head, and a few bricks tumbled around me, one of them catching me on the side of my head and causing me to fall face down.

      Damn it, that hurts! With a groan, I got up and put my hand to my head. Blood covered it, and after another wave of pain hit, something else struck me.

      I looked up, only to find the main man himself, Kherter, staring at me, a weapon of mass destruction in his seven-fingered right hand. You, Earth-bag, he said, practically spitting out the epithet. You are the one who brought all of this to me. Now, you shall pay.

      He raised his weapon. As his thick finger tightened around the trigger, two thoughts ran through my mind. One, I was about to be erased from reality. Two, why did all bad guys never use contractions?

      Chapter Two: The Arrival

      Three weeks ago. G.R. Renfrow High School. Eugene, Oregon. March eleventh. Noon.

      Hey, Fartstein, what’s your next class after lunch?

      With a sigh, I opened my locker, took out my lunch, and the smell of tuna fish wafted into my nostrils. Tuna—again. Four days out of five, I had tuna. That was what I got for having a guardian who worked as a personnel manager at a canning factory and got to take home leftovers.

      Fartstein, you gonna answer me or what?

      The whiny voice came again. Paul Quivers was the resident jerk and bane of my existence. Every single day he had to call me that, and every day I’d either correct him or ignore him. Today, I chose to ignore him.

      At the height

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