by Koch, Gini
CHAPTER 2
I WOKE UP INSIDE THE CAR. I was sitting up, leaning against someone who had his arm around me. Even the confusion of waking up from fainting didn’t cause me to wonder whose arm it was. That I didn’t mind made me want to turn myself over to Gloria Steinem as a real failure as a modern woman.
“. . . think she’ll be willing to be an agent?” It was a man’s voice, but not Martini’s and not the older man’s, either. I kept my eyes closed and tried not to change my breathing too much.
“Hope so.” This was Martini. “Be nice to have someone easy on the eyes around.”
“Jeffrey, this isn’t a dating service.” This was the older man. “You’d better hope she doesn’t slam that pen of hers into your groin when she comes to.”
“I didn’t give it back to her yet,” Martini said with a laugh. I could feel him move a bit. “Can’t wait to find out why she used this.”
“It was all I had.” I opened my eyes to see him holding my pen out to the others in the car. I snatched it out of his hand. It was still covered with slime.
“I’m more interested in how you knew where to stick it.” The third man’s voice. I looked around and realized Martini and I were facing the back of the car, Martini across from the older man, me across from this one. He was built along the same lines as Martini and the older man—big, handsome, and Armani-clad. He was also bald, and his skin was the kind of black that looks almost ebony.
“All the men handsome in this agency?” I asked the older man. “Because, if so, trust me when I say I can help you recruit all the women you want.”
He laughed. “I’m Mr. White.”
“Right. And he’s Mr. Black?” I said, indicating the man across from me.
“Great sense of humor,” the black man said dryly. “No, I’m Paul Gower. But thanks for the compliment. His name really is White. Richard White. Don’t call him Dick.”
“Unless he acts like one?”
“Not even then,” Gower said with a small smile. “Now, you going to impress us with your manners and tell us your name?”
“No. I’m sure you all went through my purse while I was out.” I looked up at Martini who contrived to look innocent. “Right. So, you know who I am.”
“Actually, you woke up before I could find your wallet,” Martini admitted. “I don’t know how you found that pen; your purse is like a black hole.”
“I prefer to think of it as Mary Poppins’ carpetbag. Okay, okay,” I added to the looks I was getting from both White and Gower. “I’m Katherine Katt, k-a-t-t, and yes, before you ask the obvious, my parents call me Kitty.”
“I like it,” Martini said with a sly grin.
“What do your friends call you?” Gower asked.
I gave him a long look. “You’re not my friends yet.”
White chuckled. “Fair enough, Miss Katt.”
“Oh, let’s call her Miss Kitty,” Martini pleaded.
I wiped the slime on my pen off on his pants. “I’m not gracing that with a response.”
“My God, I think I’m in love,” Martini said with a laugh. But he didn’t take his arm from around my shoulders.
“I’ll bet you say that to every girl who stabs some weirdo with a pen.” I tried not to think about the fact I liked his arm around me. There was more going on, and I had to stop acting as though we were at a singles bar.
“Only the sexy ones,” Martini replied, pretty much wrecking my not-a-singles-bar mind-set.
“I’d have gone with beautiful,” Gower said. “Women tend to prefer that compliment.”
“But we want her because she’s smart and resourceful,” White said, and I could hear something in his tone that sounded like my father’s when he’d finally had enough and wanted us focused on business.
Martini and Gower heard it too, because they stopped bantering and both looked more serious. Me, I didn’t care about White’s wants. Yet.
My phone beeped and I pulled it out. I’d missed a lot of calls. “Thanks for not letting me know people were trying to reach me.”
“We could hear the phone,” Martini said. “Just couldn’t find it in that thing.”
I took a look at my missed calls list. “Mr. Brill, Caroline, Chuckie, Janet. Normally I’m not so popular at this time of day.”
“Maybe they’re lonely,” Martini said. “Who’s Chuckie?”
“A friend, why?” One of my oldest friends, actually, but I didn’t see any reason to share this with Martini.
“He the one who has the ‘My Best Friend’ ringtone?”
“Yes, what of it?”
“Just like to identify the competition early,” Martini said with a grin.
“There is no competition, because we are not an item.” There, I was back on firm, feminist footing. Besides, Chuckie and I weren’t dating, and one fling a few years ago didn’t count. “However, I really need to call these people back, particularly my boss, who I’m sure would like to know why I’m not back at the office yet.”
White shook his head. “No, we can’t allow that, I’m sorry.”
My phone rang again. It was Sheila. Martini snatched the phone from me before I could answer it. “Look, that’s one of my other oldest friends. I need to answer.” The phone stopped ringing, but started right up again.
Martini looked at it. “Amy. Don’t tell me, let me guess . . . another old friend?”
“Yeah. Sheila and Amy are my best girlfriends, Chuckie’s my best guy friend. I’ve known them since ninth grade. I really think I need to answer my damn phone.” It stopped ringing again and I snatched it out of Martini’s hand.
“So, why does only this Chuckie guy get the special ringtone?” Martini asked.
“I’m not gracing that question with a response.” I looked at my phone. Text messages were pouring in.
“I have to insist that you not contact anyone yet,” White said, before I could type a response of any kind. “I assure you, we’ll let you return calls in a short while.”
I had the feeling White would suggest that Martini crush my phone in his hand if I argued, and Martini looked strong enough to do it. I gave up and shoved my phone back into my purse. “So, what’s this actually all about? I mean, I don’t think that was a movie set, so how did that man sprout wings?”
White sighed. “I’ll tell you about it when we get to headquarters.”
“Just where is headquarters? As I mentioned and my missed-call log shows, I’m supposed to be back at work.”
“If you join us, you won’t be going back there anyway,” White said.
“Great health and dental,” Martini offered. “Mental health benefits are the best going.”
“What about vacation?” I asked as sarcastically as possible.
“I was thinking Cabo, maybe Hawaii. You must look great in a bathing suit, even if you do sunburn,” Martini replied without missing a beat. “I’ll make sure to put sunscreen all over you, though, I promise.”
White gave another sigh, of defeat this time. “We’ll explain it to you as soon as we can pry you away from Jeffrey here.”
“Not gonna happen,” Martini said cheerfully. “She’s looking, I’m looking, no rules about intercompany relationships, so get used to us as a couple.”
“Geez, you sure are confident I’m going to throw myself at you.” I wondered if this really was his usual way with women, or if he was going to turn out to be some insanely desperate, smothering, clingy man who proposed on the first date and then stalked his exes after they ran screaming into the street to escape him.
“Nope. You just think we’re all hot, and I know how to stake a claim early.” Martini nodded to Gower. “Make sure you spread it around—she’s mine.”
Gower shook his head. “He’ll propose on the first date, but don’t let it panic you. He’s not as mentally unstable as he seems, as unflattering as that last comment might be taken by you. Jeff here just knows what he wants quicker than most of us.”
“Great.” I looked back o
ver to White, who seemed both amused and frustrated. “Where, exactly, is this headquarters? I’m asking because I live around here, and I know the fastest routes to the airport at any given time, and we are clearly heading to the airport.”
White smiled. “You are just what I’ve been hoping for.”
CHAPTER 3
IT TURNED OUT HEADQUARTERS was in New Mexico, of all places. Several miles outside of Roswell, New Mexico, to be exact.
It was a short plane flight from Saguaro International. Of course, they had a private jet, gray and mostly unmarked. The limo driver was also the pilot, and he fit the mold, though like whoever had my car, he was smaller than Martini.
During the flight I made several Men in Black jokes that weren’t met with a great deal of real or even forced laughter, and Martini continued to use his considerable charm to make me unsure whether I should start picking out china patterns or consider plastic surgery in addition to going into my own version of the witness protection program in order to make sure he’d never be able to track me.
On the plane I got a chance to take a look at myself, and I figured Martini was just playing around, because I was a disaster. Barring this group having the best dry cleaners in the world on staff, my suit was ruined. My hair was a mess, and my face was dirty. My shoes and purse were about all that had survived relatively unscathed. I decided not to care and felt I could maybe read the Feminist Manifesto again without total shame.
Against all commercial air flight rules, I was allowed to send text messages to those who had called or sent texts to me, mostly because the list kept on growing and Martini wouldn’t let me actually speak to anyone. He also insisted on reading my texts over my shoulder, which he said was for security reasons but seemed more so he could lean over me and breathe in my ear.
Everyone other than Chuckie seemed to take “I’m okay but with the police and don’t know when I’ll be free” in stride. It didn’t surprise me that his response was to let him know immediately if I was actually in trouble. He’d been given the nickname Conspiracy Chuck in high school, and, much as I hated to admit it, it was apt. Of course, all things considered, this seemed conspiratorial in some way, so maybe Chuckie wasn’t that far off.
The trip from the lonely airstrip where we landed to our destination was fast, made in a large, gray SUV. I made a Men in Gray joke that also fell flat. Apparently these guys were not fans of humorous science fiction.
We reached what I assumed was headquarters, possibly the most unexciting building I’d seen in a long time. Corrugated steel, which I figured made the place like an oven inside, painted in good old Navaho White, the most boring of paint choices. It was trimmed in taupe. Nothing could have said “industrial boredom” better.
“Wow. If a building’s importance is directly proportional to how dull, dingy, and unassuming it looks, you guys must work for the most important agency in the world.”
“We do,” White said quietly as he opened the thick metal door marked “Employees.”
He ushered me inside, and I was treated to a spectacle of—not very much. Boxes and crates of all different sizes, mostly. It was a warehouse, and I had guessed the interior temperatures correctly.
“Color me totally unimpressed. What is this, prank week at the mental institution? Or is this the Armani outlet, and you’re just letting me in on some super deals early?”
“She can tell the designer,” Martini said under his breath. “Amazing.”
“Focus, man, focus,” Gower said in the same tone. “Pull it damn together, Jeff. You’re freaking her out. And me, too.”
“I think she likes it,” Martini replied with a grin.
“So, the real thing’s underground, right?” I asked White, doing my best to ignore the other two for right now. “Or are you going to push a button and then everything will flip around and become all impressive?”
“Neither,” White answered. He went over to one of the crates, nodded to Gower and Martini, and the two of them pried the lid off. “Take a look,” White said. It was an order, not a suggestion.
I decided I was dead if they wanted to kill me anyway, so it wasn’t as though giving them the opportunity to push me into a big box was being more foolhardy than anything else I’d done all day. I went to the box and looked in.
“Oh.” I wasn’t screaming, and I was really proud of myself. Martini moved next to me, and I knew without asking that he was ready to catch me if I fainted again. I found this comforting because what I was looking at wasn’t comforting at all.
It was a man, dead, as far as I could tell. At least, I hoped so. He had long, sharp claws where his fingers and toes should have been, and his teeth were long and jagged and looked razor sharp. His expression was a contortion of fury and hatred.
“He looks like the man I killed. Right before I killed him, I mean.”
“They all look like that,” Martini said quietly. “The faces are different, some men, some women, but they all end up looking at humans like this.”
“What are they? And don’t say mutants,” I added.
“Superbeings is what we call them,” White replied. “It’s not a perfect description but it’s good enough.”
“How?”
“Roswell’s history is somewhat true,” White said. “In that aliens did crash-land here in the late nineteen-forties. However, when we opened the ship, the aliens were all dead. Our scientists studied them, of course, but they didn’t find anything of much interest. Different body structures, but they were more like humans than not. There were what we took to be books with them, and those were in a language so different from ours that it took decades to decipher.”
“It took a supercomputer,” Gower interjected. “No one made any decent strides until the eighties.”
“What did the books say?” I asked, wanting to stop looking at the dead superbeing in front of me but not being able to. This creature would never protect the weak and helpless, you could see it in every part of him.
“Turned out the aliens were on a mission of mercy,” White said. “They weren’t the only ones sent out, just the only ones sent to Earth.” He let that one sink in for a bit before he continued. “Their planet had been invaded by a parasitic race. They’d learned how to fight against the parasites, but they knew this would only make other planets targets. So they sent emissaries out to warn the other populated planets of the threat.”
“What do the parasites do?”
“Guess,” Martini said softly.
When White didn’t counter that, I gave what I was in some way hoping was the wrong answer. “The parasite attaches to someone and alters him or her into a superbeing, capable of great destruction. They’re attracted to rage and fear, or whatever pheromones are given off from those emotions, and that’s how they pick their new hosts.”
“I say it again, she’s mine,” Martini said.
“And,” Gower added, “because the parasite amps up everything, the emotions are enhanced to the point where the host isn’t able to think rationally.”
“Under most circumstances,” White corrected. “There have been some who were able to control it.”
“Good guys?” I managed to pull my gaze away from the clawed beast in the box.
White shook his head. “There are no good ones, not that we’ve ever run across. There have just been some who have been able to control their reactions to the parasite and successfully survive. Until we find and stop them.”
“How does anyone survive being like . . . that?” I pointed to the thing in the box.
“Those few who can control the parasite in some way are able to revert to human form. We aren’t sure if they’re aware of the parasite or not.” White looked sad for a moment.
This struck me as odd. “Why not?” No one answered but they all looked uncomfortable and a little embarrassed. “So, you aren’t sure because you’ve never caught any of them, right?”
“No,” Gower said. “We’ve caught them. But only in their superbeing form.�
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“No,” Martini corrected. “We’ve killed them in their superbeing forms.”
“You’ve got this monster in a box. Why not box up these other ones?”
“They’re a lot harder to kill, the in-control ones,” Martini added. “Hard to follow them back to their lair or whatever when you’re dead or injured. And so far we’ve only been able to stop them by destroying them. Not a lot of pieces left kind of destruction.”
“The longer a superbeing can remain in control, the stronger it grows,” Gower added. “We have a few we know of that have survived for years. They stay dormant, in whatever their human form is, until something triggers them. We haven’t been able to determine who they are in human form.” He looked just a little uncomfortable—I had a feeling he wasn’t telling me everything. However, I wasn’t in a position to push it.
“Nice. How long have they been around?”
“The first ones showed up right about the time we’d made a little headway in the translations,” White said. “So, call it the late sixties, early seventies. We’d gotten enough to know the aliens were warning us about something, so when the first superbeings appeared, it wasn’t a complete shock.”
I thought about it. “They showed up in Vietnam, didn’t they? The rage from both sides would have drawn them, right?”
“Oh, yes,” White said quietly. “The unrest that war caused undoubtedly drew the parasites here. But both sides were able to destroy them. The superbeings become somewhat invulnerable, but when you’re using machine guns and tanks, you can destroy them nine times out of ten.”
“What if you kill the human part but not the parasite part?”
“You can’t kill the host unless the parasite wants it dead. The parasites can move, but it’s iffy. It’s not just the strong emotions—there has to be some connection between parasite and host for the pairing to take.”
“If you hadn’t killed it first try, it might have moved to you,” Martini offered.
“Thanks a lot. So, I’m being recruited because I’m homicidal maniac material?”
