Alexis counted down the cases and found the two phage vaccine containers. They were heavy enough that she had to sling her rifle and drag them out one in each hand. She could hear the truck as it peeled around the corner of a street near the checkpoint, and she knew that they were almost across the finish line. The young woman’s muscles burned as she drug the two cases out of the container maze and into the open area just on the other side of the detainment pod. As she emerged she could see that the resistance fighters had eliminated the guards and were ushering in the truck even as the remnants of the assembled crowd had scattered. She was saddened to see that nearly a dozen bodies of citizens, some of them obviously too small to be adults, littered the pavement in front of the checkpoint. It was no wonder, in her mind, why the general human population hated the resistance so much. To the average person it made sense that Alexis and her comrades were seen as insurgents, and that their leader MacArthur was a terrorist apostate. Her heart was heavier than the phage cases as she hauled them over to the entrance to the checkpoint, where the assembled resistance fighters were scrambling to pile as much food and water onto the truck as they could. Magna was layering a fresh magazine into his machine gun, though he paused long enough to plant a kiss on her lips as Alexis approached.
“Looking sharp there soldier,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
“Don’t get cocky surfer boy,” retorted Alexis as she hefted the cases one by one onto the truck.
Magna laughed as he picked Alexis up by her waist and hefted her to his lips for a sloppy kiss. As he let her down the truck rumbled to life and sped down a side street opposite of the one it entered from. The containers of food and medicine they’d stolen took up the cargo space on the truck, so the rest of the fighters had to walk.
Already most of the fighters were scampering this way and that as they sought shelter and escape, doing their best to melt into the scenery before Izrid and Complex forces arrived. Magna, Alexis, and several others made for a sewer manhole that they’d scoped out on a previous recon. The first and second fighter went through, and then Alexis held Magna’s machine gun as he squeezed his muscled bulk through the small opening. Alexis handed down his machine gun, and was about to step in when several bullets chewed up the concrete next to her. The gun dropped and hit Magna in the face, causing him to lose his hold on the bars and fall into the darkness.
Alexis rolled onto her back and then sprang to her feet to see an armored vehicle come to a screeching halt. The vehicle disgorged a full squad of Complex troops who immediately began to fire at Alexis as she ran back through the checkpoint. The resistance fighter brought her rifle to bear and returned fire as she ran, not caring so much about accuracy as volume of rounds expended, praying that her wild salvo would drive the enemy into cover. Her prayers were answered and the bullets stopped flying towards her as the squad took cover. Alexis fled deeper into the container maze as she slammed home her third and final magazine. Somewhere in the chaos of the battle she had lost the fourth, perhaps knocked loose and lost during the explosion. Alexis emerged from around the corner of a container and fired on the squad, catching one of the soldiers by surprise and putting him on the pavement with three ragged holes in his chest. She exchanged fire with the squad in a furious firefight, and felled another soldier who tried to sprint across the open ground between the armored car and the checkpoint barriers. By the time he collapsed in death Alexis was out of ammunition, and she turned to flee deeper into the shipping container area. She fled back towards the medical container when from around the corner came a half-dragon bearing an electrified riot shield. She was running too fast and was unable to dodge, so caught the full power of the shield-bash with her shoulder. She should have been able to handle the hit and get back up to fight on, though the shock from the shield slammed into her and sent the young woman flailing through the air and losing consciousness before she landed painfully on the ground.
ACT III
Alexis had regained consciousness wearing shackles and in the custody of Complex security forces. The four menacing half-dragons that guarded her continued to grille her with questions of her life, activities, and loyalties, and after being dissatisfied with her answers began communicating with her only by pushing her out of the vehicle and roughly moving her up the steps of the Complex Temple. She was brought to the central chamber of the building, and she realized that she was too young to recall what exactly this building had been used for prior to the Izrid invasion. Now the building had been converted from whatever it had been into a palatial estate for the Complex elite who governed the city, though the alien warlord who stood before her was full Izrid. She and the alien looked at each other for a long moment, her with her two human eyes and he with his single Izrid eye, the other covered in a bejeweled leather eye-patch. It was upon seeing the eye-patch, and the metal throne set up behind him, that Alexis realized she’d been brought before the Serpent King himself. At a nod from the king the half-dragons tore her clothing from her body using their clawed hands as one of their number affixed a thin collar about her throat. Then they stepped back and let her stand on her own as the king approached.
“The Complex has regaled me with the tale of your capture, rather dramatic I should say,” mused Cava-Rek as he walked in a slow circle around the shackled young woman, “One of MacArthur’s rabble of thieves and terrorists. Don’t you see that you’ve already lost?”
“I am a human being. I am the resistance,” intoned Alexis for what seemed to her to be the hundredth time since her capture, as she had answered all questions with the same response. It was the custom of captured fighters, who knew that death was imminent, that torture was likely, and this was their mantra to see them through that darkness.
“The power to choose is the greatest resource I have discovered on this planet, and so you choose to resist, this I can respect, and you do make such precious enemies,” rasped Cava-Rek as he slowly ran one of his hands up her naked back and entwined her hair in his firm grasp, “The power to take that choice away from you is what I bring to this distant and primitive world of yours.”
With that Cava-Rek depressed the activation key on his wrist module and flooded the young woman’s body with the arousal compound.
He had grown bored with the petty manipulations of the human citizenry. In many ways he missed the dark and bloody days of open war with the human race. When it was just he and his single war hive, battling across this blue world, reaping the glory and spoils of conquest. Now Earth was an occupied planet, and though he was its undisputed Izrid master, he could not help but to crave an enemy worthy enough to test him at the zenith of his power. MacArthur’s resistance, however ineffective it was on a planetary scale, was one of the few pleasures left to his jaded self. In the last several time mega-segments he had found himself unable to achieve full arousal, much less orgasm, beyond his liaisons with the brood bearer. Despite the debaucherous half-dragon and human elite culture he had created when he allowed the Complex to form, he found that this blue planet had turned to ash in his hands. That is, until he personally interrogated his first insurgent.
The captive had been a human male, and though Cava-Rek had little care for the man’s name, what struck him was the dedication the man held for his ideals. The courage the man displayed in the face of certain torture and death. Something about the man’s guileless defiance had sparked the flame of arousal in Cava-Rek, and he had used the arousal compound on the fighter. After hours of vigorous coupling Cava-Rek achieved an orgasm of such potency that he was reminded of his first non-reproductive sexual experience, many time mega-segments in the past, with a human fighter named Tara. The one-eyed warlord felt as if he had been re-invigorated, and though the captive had come from Chicago in the former United States, and Cava-Rek had been touring his mineral refineries in a place once known as the Congo, he had chosen to return there at once. He had discovered that the Complex elites of the city had been waging a war of attrition with the rag-tag remnants of MacArthu
r’s human resistance. Cava-Rek was so moved by this discovery that he had his grand temple relocated, and the very throne he had chosen to sit up on rested on a shallow dais before him as his thoughts returned to the petite yet battle-hardened woman who stood trembling next to him. The arousal compound was coursing through her system, infinitely refined and instantaneous, tailored with such scientific finesse that the compounds targeted not only the physical pleasure receptors of the human body, but also triggered the emotional centers of the brain. Within only a few time segments of the initial dosage the young resistance fighter’s own brain chemistry would begin to form artificial emotions. Cava-Rek had particular tastes, in that he preferred his partners, both male and female, to be the hardest of the species. Nothing pleased him more than to have the most radical of insurgents profess their love for him even as they submitted to whatever heinous abuses his imagination could invent for them to endure. Knowing what he now did about the brood bearer, and her ability to push him even as he pushed his human playthings, brought his excitement to even greater heights.
“Come little human, I want you to see the throne against which you resist to violently,” he whispered in the young woman’s ear as he licked the side of her face, eliciting a strained moan from her lips as she tried and failed to resist the effects of the compound, “Crawl proud warrior.”
He pulled the fighter’s hair and she sank to her knees, then as he pulled her forwards she began to crawl like a beast of the field. The entire time they approached the throne she whimpered and her breaths came out in short bursts. When they reached the throne he forced her to lay her face to on its left side, and without being able to stop herself she arched her back deeply and pushed her bottom up into the air invitingly. Cava-Rek let go of her hair and stepped around behind her as he slid open his robe to reveal a throbbing Izrid erection. He ran his hand over his chest to coat it in his sexual secretions and began to stroke his cock, lubricating it as he prepared to take her.
“Tell me what you are,” Cava-Rek commanded her as he stuffed his glistening cock into her tight pussy.
“I am a human being,” Alexis moaned as the Izrid warlord wasted no time with foreplay or sensuality as he slammed himself into her harder than any man she’d ever had inside her, “I am the resistance.”
“Say it again little one, over and over and over,” the warlord commanded her huskily as he marveled at the hardness of her body and the prolific battle scars she bore for a human woman of such a young age, “Make me believe.”
“I am a human being,” she whimpered as Cava-Rek continued to pound her, and after a few more moments he pulled out of her pussy and rammed the full length of his cock into her ass, which was a kind of sex she had never experienced before, even with a lover as adventurous as Magna.
Alexis wept, both for the chemical love of the alien who was sodomizing her with brutal savagery, and for Magna, who was out there somewhere alone in the night. She was overwhelmed with feelings for the warlord, who mounted her, and she breathed deep of the scented throne, and she reveled in the knowledge that her beloved ruler was taking such pleasure from her body. Yet, in the depths of her mind, she felt a stirring, as if the words he kept making her repeat had actual meaning, and weren’t just something she said at his pleasure.
“I am the resistance,” she moaned as Cava-Rek dosed her again, and the chemicals hit her system so hard she achieved blissful orgasm even as she lost consciousness while he continued to pound her ass.
ACT IV
Her mind was a blur of images and sensations. In one moment she was positive that she was suspended in a clear liquid and was being penetrated by dozens of needles, then in the next she was in a cool dry chamber alone and in the dark. There were voices, and probing hands, though she never could manage to move or speak beyond meek moans and the occasional muscle spasm. She lost her sense of time, though she could feel as if she was changing, how she could not say, though the more and more she experienced the cycle of needles and dry chamber the more unlike herself she felt.
Alexis awoke to the bitter cold, and as she opened her eyes she saw that she lay in a gutter on the side of a street that looked all too familiar. It was the first experience she could easily recall that was not the liquid and needles or the dry chamber and the voices. There were people in the street that looked at her with revulsion, and she could not understand why. The young woman struggled to her feet and as she wandered the cold streets she began to get an idea of where she was. Back in Chicago, it seemed, and in the southern slums. After several hours of walking she managed to find her way back to the hovel that she shared with Magna, and stumbled her way into the main chamber.
She was on the verge of collapse when she entered, and could see that nobody was home. Suddenly she caught her reflection in the polished chrome of the overturned vessel they used as a clean water basin. Something was wrong, she could feel it, and she rushed to the small room they used as a latrine. It was no bigger than the bathrooms of her youth, though with a simple seat and bucket that Magna had built. Such were the times they lived in, she mused, and she stumbled over to the large shard of reflective glass that passed for a mirror in their decrepit home. She looked back at herself for a long time, refusing to believe what she saw there. A half-dragon, with the telltale extended canines and the golden eyes, with the tiny scales at the edges of the mouth and eyes. She even had the extended tongue. Was this what she had been suffering through during her delirium of needle and chamber? Had the Serpent King forcibly changed her into one of his half-dragons? At the realization of what violation had occurred she fell to her knees and vomited. Her memories of her sexual encounter with the Serpent King came flooding back to her, and try as she might she could not force herself to be disgusted by them. It was as if her brain had been reprogrammed to enjoy being abused by the alien warlord. As she looked at herself again in the mirror she could not help but to take involuntary pleasure and pride at her appearance, and it was this very trick of biology that made her resist it. Alexis screamed and punched the shard, breaking it into several smaller pieces, one of which she snatched up. Without pausing to thing she carved deep gashes in her wrist, determined to slay the alien abomination she’d seen in the mirror. As her blood sprayed across the wall she collapsed, and just before she blacked out she heard Magna’s voice screaming her name.
“I want to die Magna, please just let me die,” was all she could think to say as his powerful arms encircled her.
Seeing her like that had been more than he could bear. Magna had already taken up arms against one lover who had been turned by the Izrid’s foul science. To see another captured and returned to him in such a state was enough to break his already troubled spirit. He had seen too much of this life, endured more than he was willing to take, and it was time for it all to end. Alexis had to die, and even though he’d saved her out of pure instinct he knew that it had to be done. Though unlike Lysa all those years ago, Alexis wanted to die. She hated what the Serpent King had made of her, and had already tried to end herself once.
“Magna you can’t stop me baby, I can’t live like this, as one of them,” she had said as MacArthur bound her wrists in bandages, having been summoned by the bereaved resistance fighter to help with his woman.
“The Serpent King thinks to shame us, to show us that his power extends beyond even our biology,” said MacArthur as she secured the last bandage, “He wants us to be afraid.”
“Fiona, I am afraid,” whispered Alexis as she looked down at her bandaged wrists, then at the drying blood that had covered her hovel of a home, “It was a shit life, but it was mine, he’s taken that away from me.”
“Then let’s get it back Alexis,” growled MacArthur as she looked the young half-dragon in the eyes, “Let’s show the Serpent King the kind of power we really have.”
ACT V
The resistance fighter who had been throwing refuse bags into the back of the truck gave him a nod, and Magna knew it was time to make his play. He and the o
ther soldier, whose name the older man could not seem to recall, had been posing as trash collectors. The Complex had begun using the disenfranchised citizens as freelance collectors, paying them in food, water, and medicine. This was one of the nicer parts of old Chicago, what used to be downtown. The resistance fighter had been working this route for the last six months, having taken the job so that he was well positioned deep within Complex territory if ever the resistance needed a covert action. After six months of hauling trash, he had been only too happy to assist the two soldiers. Magna leaned his forehead against the steering wheel and took a deep breath while willing himself to turn the key in the ignition. He had endured many hard years of combat in his lifetime, too many for a man whose only real goals in life had been tending bar and getting laid. He had been good at both of those things, and though he had never made all that much money, his life had always been an adventure. Magna thought of the cruise ship job, on the Caribbean, and how sweet a gig that had been. Paid him enough to get that studio apartment in Chicago he’d been dreaming of, and that had lead to the speakeasy bar tender gig, which as a fan of old crime novels he had always wanted. It was a simple life, and he loved it, while it lasted, until the war.
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