Rafter Fiction is short stories based on songs by Rafter. I am starting the series with the songs from his newest album, “Terrestrial Extras”.  This is the fourth song, “Kulture Krimes.” Buy the album here

This song has a video.

I tell my sons about when the aliens invaded. The first thing they showed my great-grandparents was that they enjoyed driving fast and driving large luxury cars from the 80s and early 90s, Oldsmobiles, Buicks, and Cadillacs with long hoods. People were able to tell it was an alien driving when they saw a Delta 88 or a Fleetwood flying down the road, too fast and reckless, sometimes going over the yellow line. Most people started pulling over when they saw them coming. The aliens drove fast, crashed hard, and left wreckage strewn across every highway in the world. They never saw dead alien on the side of the road with their crashed vehicles. They wrecked, and they just walked away.
The invasion lasted for a long time, a two decades before it was even called an invasion. At first the aliens landed and negotiated with world leaders, shaking hands with promise of sharing of technology, worlds, and cultures. The aliens seemed to want to integrate into the earth’s society. Except for their love for large cars and driving too fast, the transition was seamless. For the longest time, nobody saw anything wrong, and those who did were considered paranoid. The car mechanic trade started to boom and new car models were designed with the large cars of the past in mind.

This went well for a twenty-five years, until all of the school age males between six and twelve years of age went missing. Frantic parents searched neighborhoods for their boys, and after a few days of looking to no avail, not even finding a child that escaped or a random body part, the focus turned from the victims to the perpetrators. All aliens were blamed and the military started to round them all up and place them in camps. In these camps at night, the guards heard the aliens talking to each other with clicks, screeches and garbled, an alien language that they never used before. Even when communicating to one another in public, before the children went missing, they used a slightly accented English. Now there was no doubt that the aliens were planning something, the clicks, garbles, screeches, and grunts frightened all of the guards. They stood to the ready for anything, grips tight on their automatic weapons, but they still could not stop the attack when it came. The aliens overran them in minutes, broke free from the detention centers, and decided that it was now time to take over.
I told my sons the same thing the history books told, that the bloody war was more of a massacre. Even though the aliens shared a great deal of technology with the world governments, they kept most of their knowledge to themselves, and they unveiled devices nobody had ever seen and were defenseless against. The fighting only lasted a few days before the aliens were on television saying, “Your government, military, and police have been wiped out. To the citizens, we will be living here, and we will be in charge. As long as you do not try to stop us, you will live. We enjoy Earth, the culture, and we enjoy you, the citizens, so as long as you don’t attack us, we can live in harmony. This is what we propose, and you will accept because you have no other choice.” Since then, the aliens had been in charge, driving around in their cars, and pulling up to anyone on the side of the road that they see walking to offer the people rides.

The biggest mystery to all of this was what happened to all of the boys that night. Some legends says that they were killed and thrown in the desert. Some said they were sent back to their home planet to satisfy their women. My parents, your grandparents, told us the stories of the people who disappear from earth were getting eaten by the aliens, and now I will tell you. One of my father’s friends growing up told him his cousin was trying to hitch a ride with a human in Arizona one day. In our distrust in aliens, we started trusting each other again, so everyone hitchhiked as long as a human was the person who stopped. He was walking down the road, trying to get into the city and was looking for a ride. He saw a car flying at top speed toward him, and he knew it was an alien. He stepped away from the road and planned to pretend he did not see the car as it sped by. To his distress, the car pulled up beside him. My father’s friend said that the alien leaned over and opened the door and said, “Get in.” His cousin shook his head, but he also knew that resisting the command was not something to do. When he saw the driver’s eyes widen and the alien said, “I don’t remember asking. I said get in,” the friend could not help but comply. They were driving top speed, the guy said the alien started to open up about his life and how he did not want to be seen as the bad guy. The friend did not tell him that by bullying him into the car, he already was a bad guy. He just kept nodding. The random alien in the speeding car told him everything about the invasion. He said this was the plan all along, to take over and live among subservient humans. When the friend asked what happened to all of the boys that night, the alien said, “Oh. We ate them. That’s the best age to eat humans.”

“Now,” I told my boys when I warned them about the aliens. “The rumor about the aliens eating all of the children has not come from just this one source. Everyone knows someone who has been told that all of those boys were eaten. It might be one of those urban legends, but we can’t take any chances. You must never be alone with any aliens. Even if you trust them completely, they might just eat you, and that’s a chance none of us can take. Stay away from them as much as possible.”