“That would be awesome but for now, can you do me a favor? Do you have enough computing power in this shuttle to calculate the general direction the cube transmits at?”
“Yes. It will take me a minute, though,” she says.
I lean on the main console and check the incoming data from the energy ray the cube emits when I feel a hand gripping my shoulder. For a moment, I wish it’s Jay’s, but I know inside me that I would have known it if it was indeed him.
I turn around, and my heart sinks ever deeper; it’s Dale.
“I know this must be the worst time possible but can you explain to me what’s going on in here? I thought you were going to spend a couple nights in the station, enough for them to bring the crisis under control, and then return to Mosa and continue whatever you were doing. But now...now you sound like you want to leave the planet.”
His eyes, those deep brown holes that swallow your soul, seem concerned. I can almost feel his worry through his hand squeezing my shoulder. He’s afraid.
“I’ll explain everything to you as soon as we get to my spaceship, Dale. Until then, please bare with us. Nowhere it’s safe to discuss what we’re doing, especially inside the space station.”
He nods but I can see that I did nothing to reassure him that everything's gonna be okay. As a matter of fact, I have no idea what am I doing or if we’re gonna survive this adventure. In the end, maybe I avoid answering his questions because I’m afraid what I might hear coming out of my mouth as well.
When everyone gets seated, we’re finally just outside the space station. The number four is flashing on both sides of the entrance. The shuttle is soundproofed, but the chaos out there has its own, distinctive sound, the kind you don’t have to hear to know it’s bad.
People are running up and down through the entrance hallways, trying to serve the demands of the ship owners and not cause panic at the same time. What I see is pent up anxiety blowing up to hysteria. It’s bad out there and for once, I’m happy we’re heading straight to our spaceship.
I turn to say something to the rest of my crew, but right then I see the giant holo-screens on the walls of the space station. A great part of Mosa is already in ruins, fires raging and moving corpses killing people in their path. The crisis is worse than I expected...way worse.
I then realize that Yaerus is the second planet humanity brought to an apocalypse.
Silver finally ends with her calculations. A sign on the intergalactic map appears before me, a large circle born in the middle of a blank area of the Known Universe.
“This can’t be possible!” I say out loud.
“What? What’s wrong?” Dale asks me.
“The cube transmits straight to a lost planet. That means that it transmits straight to nowhere.”
Everyone’s looking at me as I utter those two sentences. Hell, I have no fucking idea what’s going on.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 8
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jay
Our shuttle arrives at the spaceship without any serious implications. I thought I’ve seen everything back in my days, but corpses walking? That’s a first. Or at least feels like that. Something inside me tells me, though, that if I’ve seen corpses walking in my past life, I would certainly remember it.
Back in the hospital, while we were fleeing from the corpses chasing us, they suddenly stopped. It felt like they wanted us to get away. But, since then, everything else went to hell. Mosa has declared that the city is in a state of crisis, the local authorities trying their best to take control the situation.
We were flying for about an hour in that tiny, metal box and it feels good stretching my feet inside the spaceship. Eladia’s spaceship is big, I admit it, but not as big as mine before it crashed on Primordial Earth. What I wouldn’t give to be there now, repairing it. I never did a good job searching for information related to my past while being there.
And that’s Eladia’s fault. She had to come and romance her way inside my head with her damsel-in-distress incidents and those big, brown eyes.
Damn! I hit my fist against the wall. The rush of pain from the punch helps me clear my head a bit. I turn and see the rest of the crew looking at me. Eladia and Silver look scared (Silver not so much since she’s an android and all), but Eladia certainly looks mortified.
She has that look on her face like I’m one of those monsters down on Mosa. To be honest, not knowing what’s hiding inside me, I feel like a monster. But for her to look me like that? It’s even worse than I thought.
In a sense, we’re all still shocked after a horde of corpses chased us, but Eladia seems like she can’t even recognize me.
Dale, the blond doctor, gets closer to me. I look at him sideways; this man smells differently from other men. His scent is fresh and gutsy like it wants to become your friend no matter what. At first, it felt reassuring having him here, but now, I don’t trust him. A man with that strong a scent can’t be trusted.
“Jay, you scared us all down there. It seemed like you couldn’t control yourself, beating those corpses. Is something going on? Do you have something you want to share with us?”
Yes. I want to say how sorry I am that I hurt Eladia, and you, and Silver, and Zan.
Stop the nonsense. You’re an Esuh. They have to respect you.
Here’s that voice again...my voice. Fuck, I’m going crazy. My anger drives me closer to insanity every day.
“No. Nothing. I’ll be in my room,” and I walk away.
I head straight for the elevator at the end of the narrow hallway. I can sense their eyes nailed on my back, but I don’t care. My head feels clouded, and I’m starting to lose consciousness. I’m afraid that something will happen, and I’ll end up waking up like before, in the middle of a blood bath.
The automatic doors open as I stand before them. I walk inside and turn my body around and watch the strange bunch of people standing across the hallway. It’s at that moment that it happens.
My left-hand feels cold and my right hot. I raise both of them and I startle at what I see; a dark substance oozing off my nails, starting to cover my arm while my other arm is burning just by holding the cube, that wretched tool. Before the doors close, I raise my head and see Eladia running towards me.
That’s when the light flashes…
I’m in the middle of a crumbled city with metal and glass buildings, none of them floating in the same peculiar way they floated on Mosa. I look around me and see many of those buildings in ruins. It kinda looks like Primordial Earth, only that it isn’t Primordial anymore.
The sky is strikingly white, so much it makes my eyes hurt.
“Where am I?” I shout at the emptiness of the city.
But nothing. The only thing that replies to me is my voice echoing all the way back to me, just a bit distorted.
Where am I?
Am I….?
I…?
Until it finally vanishes.
I take a deep breath. For some reason, the air is heavy and heady. It’s the same feeling you get on a really hot day. I keep breathing heavily although it doesn’t seem to work anymore. I lean above my knees; every scorching breath feels like the end is a step closer and everything around me is spinning faster.
Follow me.
There it is again. That voice. I raise my head and spot the beautiful lady with the blond hair. The color of her hair matching that of the human doctor, but hers being way more beautiful.
Follow me.
She keeps saying the same thing inside my head in that commanding tone that I can’t refuse. Either way, even if I don’t want to follow her, there’s nothing else I can do. She’s the only one here.
We walk for a while passing in front of many metal boxes with big rubber wheels below them. All of them are black, scorched by flame. But, we don’t stop walking until we arrive at a crossroad with four huge roads intersecting with each other.
Stay.
I stop and look at her standing in the middle o
f the intersection. A bright column of light falls on her. The sky’s now dark except the spot above her head. The light gets brighter until I can't see anything of her actual figure.
But, as suddenly it appeared, the same way the column of light disappeared. When the bright spot above her vanishes, it leaves behind two humans, one dark and one bright, seeming like a body and it’s shadow at the same time. Only that the shadow has its own body as well.
The dark figure sinks into the ground and disappears, while the bright one falls on its knees and runs away.
I know that the girl was trying to tell me something, but I can’t keep up with her. I feel cold and alone in the middle of this ruined city, and the only thing that comes to my mind is if I’ll ever see her eyes again.
Eladia.
The things I would do if I could see her again.
Suddenly my eyelids get heavy, and I spend a moment breathing in the dark. The cold feeling that covered my hands before has now returned, only that it comes straight from my heart.
A moment later, I’m falling into an endless pit. I stretch my hands above my head, trying to find something to grab onto, but it’s hopeless. I give up and fall to the great darkness.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 9
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Eladia
I stumble and fall on the closing doors. I hit my fists on the wall but nothing happens. Jay was just lost in a flood of light and darkness, the light coming from the cube and the darkness from his parasitic transformation.
Dark Jay is once again awake and now, more than ever, I’m not sure how I feel. Even so, it’s never good when he is around, and it’s certainly not good that Dale saw him change. Now, he has to come with us no matter what. He knows way too much to be safe on Yaerus.
Zan and Silver arrive at the same time behind me. The young boy seems overly energetic like he’s happy that Dark Jay woke up, but I don’t share his feelings.
“Eladia, Eladia! You have to follow him,” he says to me.
Why should I be the one that goes after him? He can come and find me himself if he wants. I won’t make the same mistakes I did before. But, something in the boy’s voice draws my interest. Those two were always somehow connected. When the one felt danger, so did the other. And Zan was always somehow protective of Jay and the other way around.
Maybe he’s right.
Dale suddenly appears next to me. He has something to say, I can tell, but I stop him. “Look. I can explain everything to you, but you have to decide now. If you’re staying with us, then you have to stay with us until the end. If you don’t, then it would be better for you if you fled Yaerus for some time, at least until the crisis is sorted. What’s your decision?”
I know that I should have asked him earlier, but he can’t stay on Yaerus, and if he doesn’t want to come with us, then he has to flee the planet until the men with the masks get as far away as possible. Either way, we’re losing time. We should have been on our way to the blank spot for some time now.
I stare him deep in the eyes, and I see he’s trying to avoid my eyes. He’s on a dilemma, a pretty bad one at that. But, as he probably knows already, there’s no time for him to procrastinate.
“Yes or no, Dale?” I push him until the man gives me a slight nod.
At that moment, I hear the engines of the elevator working, only, this time, it’s coming down. Silver gets in front of us and opens her arms wide, ready to use her fencing ability if needed be. I’m not sure that all those precautions are needed, but you never know with him.
When the elevator finally arrives and the doors open, Dark Jay is lying on the floor, and his white hair cover his face. He’s sleeping.
“Thank god. I couldn’t have handled another monster today,” Silver says in her robotic, emotionless voice.
How she manages to have so much character in her voice without tone variations is above me, but still, she’s my best friend. And I’m certain that this fact says way too much about me.
Dale suddenly rushes forward, pushing Silver and me out of the way. He checks his vitals and opens Jay’s lids to check his irises.
“He’s okay. He has just passed out. Now, is someone going to explain to me what’s going on here?”
We all look at each other, but none of us takes a step forward. Well, I and Silver don’t move. Zan, on the other hand, has other plans.
“This Jay, he’s bad. He kills and frightens Silver and Eladia. But, he talks more. The other Jay is good, but doesn’t like to talk.”
He said everything with such a serious face that I burst out into laughs, thinking that it’s a joke. Dale flashes a wry smile at me, but Zan doesn’t seem to get what’s going on. Soon, my laughter fades and only the memory of it remains as I move to Dale’s side.
“Silver, we’ll move Jay to his room. Can you start the engines and get us on track to the blank spot? Also, let me know when you have an ETA. Okay?”
She nods and disappears behind the closing elevator doors. Now it’s just Dale and me in the small room.
“I’m not sure if I’m doing the right thing telling you what’s going on with Jay, but it’s the best thing I can do to thank you for helping him back at the hospital.”
He looks at me with the same confused eyes as before. He opens his mouth, ready to talk, but I don’t let him. This is a long story he’s asking me to share with him, and that’s without answering all his questions.
Soon, we’re in the middle of the upper floor hallway, him carrying the heavy upper part of Jay’s body, me his feet, talking about my past like we’re old friends.
During our way to his room, I explain to him everything that happened between us during our short adventure on Primordial Earth. I tell him about the dangers of traveling to a primitive planet, and Silver accidentally picking up the signal to his crashed ship. Then, I describe everything in great detail, how I helped him out of the cryo-pod, and how he changed to his dark self to kill those predators.
The hours pass by, and I can’t stop talking. I tell him about the insectoids, the feline that almost attacked us, about the other, underground human. At that moment, I had to explain to him Zan’s origins to fully understand what we went through. He seems more confused.
He goes through an outburst, telling me that it’s not possible for humans to evolve so fast, but as soon as I explain to him that there was a Nusae Artifact in the area, he kinda nods and lets me go on. I continue by telling him about our latest adventure, this one on Mosa. I leave out all the embarrassing parts, including mine and Jay’s intimate night together. When that scene pops in my head, I shudder. He quickly asks me if I’m cold. I shake my head and continue.
At some time, I reach to the part that we arrive at the hospital, and he’s shocked that the man in front of him was still alive. I decide on the spot to keep the part of the two Originators that got assassinated a secret; and that a man wearing a red mask is the murderer; or that another man with a blue demon mask saved us.
And so, when I finally get to the end of the story, I realize that all this time we’re in Dale’s room, drinking a second glass of scotch. I feel a bit dizzy, but sitting on his bed, his hand touching mine, I kinda feel safe. It’s not something erotic, but it’s more than enough for me. I just want someone to tell me that everything is going to be okay
“And so...you and him? What’s going on between you two?”
He’s perceptive as well. I see. There is no point in hiding it then, I think at first, but as I watch deep into his eyes, his anxious stare that kinda reminds me how I was when I was watching Jay that night, I stop.
“I think I should go,” I suddenly say to him.
I thought he would try to stop me, but he’s a gentleman, as always, and even escorts me to my room. However, feeling like I was dreaming, I don’t remember him leaving my room that night. He just left me there and by the moment I blinked once, he had vanished.
Where am I? What am I doing outside? And where is Dale? All those que
stions suddenly appear at the top of my head. I know we were together just now, but I can’t remember what we were talking about.
It’s weird, I’m not all that drunk. I should be able to remember at least a part of our conversation, but something is wrong with me. Or Dale’s hiding something behind those big, blue eyes. My feet hurt, my back hurts, my head hurts. Everything on me has that numbing sensation of hours sitting on a bed.
I open the door to my room and walk inside. I change to something more casual, something more suitable for sleeping. Before lying on my bed, I walk all the way to the only window in my room. I look outside and see the stars standing still, fixed points of gas and fire. The stars have been kind with me since I’ve started researching the Great Mystery, but now, I’m not sure that it was luck that made me get this far.
Alien Romance Box Set: Alien Cube: The Sci-FI Alien Invasion Romance (Books 1-5) Page 17
