Savage Alien

by Stella Sky

  “I want reports from the girls,” he began, all business as he pointed to the girls in the distance fawning over Tessoul, even despite his body arching and slamming against his confines; despite the attack we’d just witnessed. “They say there’s nothin’ he’s hiding then send him out. But I want Karen back tonight.”

  “Fine by me.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Sidney

  I used to enjoy crashing into Lele’s lab. It was a large purple trailer in the center of the trailer park with yellow stripes along the sides. It was home to innumerous stolen goods and tech.

  Lele, myself, and Rebecca had gathered here with Ed so that I could test Ed: test his DNA against our database. Karen’s database of alien creatures we knew about. I needed to know if Tessoul was right.

  “Where is Tessoul?” Lele asked, blinking curiously and looking around our makeshift lab as though he might suddenly appear.

  “Released,” I said quietly and swallowed hard.

  I hadn’t seen him since Baxley let him go, days ago. The conditions for jealous Baxley was that I was not allowed to see Tessoul; I couldn’t watch him go. I agreed, believing Tessoul would never allow it or that he might wait for me and tell Baxley he wouldn’t leave without me—his one true love.

  But he did go.

  Baxley said he headed to the mountains and my heart hadn’t stopped sinking ever since.

  “I see,” Lele said, fiddling with the sample in her hands before setting it down on the table. “Will he be staying with us?”

  “I don’t think so,” Rebecca said, her saucer eyes looking sad as she regarded me. It seemed that many of the girls had bonded with Tessoul before he left, Lele included.

  “Then…” Lele paused, choosing her words carefully. “I am sorry. He had a kindness to him that was genuine. He seemed good for you, Sidney.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know, because you actually seemed happy?” Rebecca offered with a small, sad laugh. “How many of us get that in this life?”

  “And stable,” Lele added. “You seemed very stable with him.”

  Rebecca snapped her fingers in agreement. “And he seems a little more in your age bracket.”

  “And out of my species,” I mocked.

  Rebecca shrugged at that and began to spin in her stool. Balancing herself with the counter, she asked, “Where is he now? What’s the plan? I’m surprised Baxley even let him go.”

  “Yeah, well, we can to an understanding. It’s called, ‘Get Karen or you’re dead,’” I mocked.

  “Ah,” was all Rebecca said.

  “Where is Tessoul now?” Lele asked.

  The answer to that unnerved me. If he was really headed toward the mountains, I wondered if he was doing so because he was following his calling, if he were waiting for me, or if he was planning an attack on our camp.

  “I don’t know,” I said lamely. “He’s been wandering off to that same spot where I found him. It’s been days.”

  “Well,” Rebecca shrugged. “He’s pissed.”

  “No, it’s something else,” I said, the worry paramount in my voice.

  “Well I don’t blame him if he is pissed,” Rebecca spat and looked to Lele for visual confirmation. “Baxley’s a shit.”

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  Rebecca’s big eyes seemed glassy then, and she began toying with her hands, which made me nervous. “It means... I feel bad for the guy. It's like you took the blinders off him for the first time in his life, the guy feels this horrible guilt and you're the only solace he finds. Then you just ripped it away from him.”

  “Hey,” I said sternly. “I love him, okay?”

  “That is touching,” Lele said in a tone that read the exact opposite.

  “That is actually amazing,” Rebecca added. “Why are you not together right now?”

  “I’m gathering a diagnosis here, okay?” I breathed and pushed myself from the counter, pacing the trailer with mounting worry.

  “Yeah, what’s this about anyway?” Rebecca said, tapping her fingers on the counter anxiously as though my impatience was contagious. “Whoa,” she breathed with sudden shock. “Are you carrying an alien baby? Are you a cute little baby-mama now?”

  “What?” I laughed, horrified. “No! I brought in a sample, and I’m here to collect it from Lele. Not a pregnancy test, okay?”

  As though it were possible for her to forget, Lele blinked in surprise and raced for the sample, watching the results form on the screen. She didn’t have to say anything after that since the answer was obvious.

  “It’s a match,” she said.

  “No,” I breathed and felt the air leave me; I felt my stomach sink into despair.

  “Your sample from… Ed is an exact match for the Kilari,” Lele affirmed officially.

  Rebecca had been petting Ed off and on since we all gathered in Lele’s makeshift lab. Her hand flinched away from the creature, and her eyes shot up to mine. With no small amount of panic, she stayed frozen in place, her arm behind her head as she said, “You’d better start talking right now.”

  The fact that she was so repulsed by the creature only made me feel worse. It made me sad on some level, even though I knew that were I her, I would have felt exactly the same.

  “Tessoul’s been acting really weird lately,” I explained slowly. “And he told me there’s a war coming. And…” I showed my palms to the girls before scraping my fingers down my forehead. “He says the Kilari are coming back to kill the Vithohn. They are arch-rivals or something from the past. They thought they were extinct. He told me Ed was one of them, and he is.”

  I said the words like I was a little kid in trouble, spitting out the sentences quick and short until I lost my breath.

  Apparently, there was no need for me to explain who the Kilari were or what the longstanding war was about between them and the Vithohn. It seemed like I was the only idiot who’d never heard about it before.

  “Then you’re in a quandary,” Lele said so seriously that it made me want to laugh, despite myself.

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  Rebecca cleared her throat and began, “If you tell Baxley, he's going to say to let them come; let them wipe out the aliens. Then we'll have a chance to reclaim Earth.”

  Lele jumped in then. “If you say nothing, then we need a plan as soon as possible because we might have a worse enemy on our hands than the Vithohn. We just learned how to control the Vithohn.”

  “Better the devil you know,” I said, but Lele just stared. I waved her off with an exhausted motion, and she suddenly looked saddened. “Right? I mean, we help the Vithohn, right?”

  Rebecca slapped my arm, hard, and with wide eyes, she said, “Plus, you love the guy! I’m pretty sure that counts for something, doesn’t it?”

  “So what do I do?” I said.

  “First off,” Rebecca continued, “apologize your ass off. Because if he leaves us for good then we have even less of a chance to stop these things, whatever they are.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Tessoul

  I’d been coming to this spot for years now; I crept up to the foot of the mountains where the grass met the snowy base of a towering heap of rock and earth. Drawn by something, and now I knew exactly what it was. The Kilari were here, waiting to kill us all. And my love wouldn’t give it a second thought.

  This would be the last time I came here, I thought. I was determined to end it this time, to make sure nothing bad came from this. I didn’t want what happened to the Vithohn to happen to the humans. They didn’t deserve that—not again.

  "I'm afraid."

  It was her.

  She spoke the words and came up behind me. Her voice was as familiar to me as my own. She moved her hands over her heart. “To love you," she clarified. "I'm afraid."

  "To trust me," I corrected.

  "Yes," she said quietly, brushing my face with hers. "I'm sorry."

  "All is forgiven," I sa
id, resigned to my fate then, even despite her sadness. "Is this visit social in nature, or all business?"

  "Maybe both," she said, scratching her arm and having a flush of red come across her face. "You don't want me here?"

  "I'm confused by you," I said.

  "I suppose you have every reason to be mad. But I can't stop thinking about you, and I'm... I'm ready now."

  I smirked, despite myself. "Is that right?"

  "Would you like me to tell you again how sorry I am, Tessoul?" She teased and grabbed my hands. "Because we have bigger things to deal with right now."

  "I've been coming out to this spot, drawn here by some purpose. I'm lost as to what that is now, so I find my thoughts drifting over to you and our first battle. How fierce you were with me. How badly I wanted you. Being inside you was..."

  "Primordial?" she said lowly.

  "No, just the opposite," I replied and grabbed her face in my hands; shielding her face from the winter storm. "It was the first time I realized why the Kilari were so aggressive toward the humans. Why we were doing this."

  "Why?"

  "To gain sanity," I said. "We'll do anything to get the females. There's something inside of us that knows that once we have you, we'll have control of ourselves. We want to escape this, and now we need you more than ever.”

  "I know," she said with a thick swallow.

  "Did you mean what you said?" I asked, heart suddenly pounding.

  "About?"

  "You love me," I said.

  She twirled her lip in the corner of her mouth and smiled before pulling me into a deep, tight kiss.

  I couldn’t take it anymore, and I had to have her then. I tugged on her pants, and she eagerly pulled them down, revealing herself to me.

  “Fight over?” she teased, and I kissed her again, licking against her neck and sucking it as I lifted her up, pulling myself out to enter her.

  She used my shoulders as leverage, and I lowered her onto me. I kissed her, encouraging her to wrap her arms around my neck.

  Our mouths met and her tongue worked its way past my teeth as I thrust into her and felt the familiar feel of her body. It was too cold to get her completely naked, but I could still remember the way her breasts rippled and bounced as I worked my way into her.

  She reached up to my ear, breaking our kiss, and elicited beautiful moans and breaths into my ear and whispered, “Don’t stop.”

  Her voice was nearly enough to send me overboard. I grabbed her by the backside and slid her up and down, holding her as tightly as possible.

  Going so long without her touch was infuriating; it was like I was missing something somehow—like a piece of me was gone.

  Feeling her body back against mine and marveling at how she writhed against me in perfect union felt almost too good to describe.

  And then it was over, not by choice, but by sound

  I heard a crowd of Vithohn approach; I could sense them.

  Without warning, I lowered Sidney off of me and watched as a crowd of Vithohn approached us and attacked us at will. “Stop!” I yelled, but they were far from reason by now. They were on a mission, and the mission was to have Sidney.

  I watched as they got hard, coming for her, ready to take her from me. I grabbed Sidney, and we ran.

  I was ready to follow the calling then. I closed my eyes and let the pull drag me to it until we were far from my people: until the pull was too powerful for them to follow. A deep cave in the far north end of the mountain: a shallow inlet that glowed and hummed with the call of the Kilari.

  “How did they know we were here?” Sidney asked in a panic, following my lead and crawling down into the cave.

  I jumped down behind her and looked up at the circle of sky visible from within.

  “They followed the calling,” I said and shrugged. “Maybe Baxley told them. I don’t know.”

  “Uh, Tessoul?”

  I followed Sidney’s beautiful voice and turned, regarding the cave with horror and shock. It was filled with eggs: large eggs set on pedestals. I could tell they weren’t anywhere near hatching, save for four that were clearly broken.

  A lilted breath swallowed down my throat, and the cave began to hum.

  “When I say so, you run,” I said to Sidney, and she gave me a dutiful nod.

  Suddenly a group of the Kilari were among us, just as I remembered. We both scrambled around the creatures, and I tried my best not to let her hand slip from mine, desperate to keep her with me as long as possible. The Kilari grabbed Sidney's arm and pulled her tightly into the packed sand bed below us.

  I turned to grab her out of the sinking hole and fell backward as a Kilari leaped forward and tackled me, sinking its dark teeth into my side and sending my body careening with warm, sharp pain. I gripped its jaw as tightly as I could and held its head back, snapping it completely and whipping the creature to the ground, running for Sidney once more.

  I gripped Sidney's arms and began to pull her from the sinkhole, feeling the weight of my wound steal my strength from me. I was suddenly met with towering Kilari, hissing at me, their teeth stained with green globs of mucus being drooled and spewed everywhere. For every tooth it had, it had three eyes that, much like the mouth, produced a green colored liquid. The eight tails smacked against the sand causing the ground to shake, and each time they would do so I would be sent careening back to the ground.

  Sidney pulled me up, and we raced for the way out: a small beam of light still falling through the pit's rocks. She dug at the hole until she could pull herself through. Spinning around, she reached her hand down into the pit for me.

  I grabbed her hand and kissed it, feeling farther and farther away from her now.

  "Run," I said.

  "No," she begged. "I know what you're going to do, and just no."

  "Go," I said.

  "Look, we are so lucky to have you stand behind us and be willing to be sacrificed to make this grand gesture. But... please... I'd really prefer if you didn't," she cried, tears streaming down her face as I held her there, our eyes flicking back and forth from one another in a tense gaze.

  “Get the girls,” I pleaded right back. “Take them to my people. It’s the only way we can fix this. Tell them what happened here.”

  She shook her head, red curls falling in front of her face.

  "I believe in a world better than this, for you." I swallowed hard and kissed her. "But sometimes there is no choice but to fight."

  She swallowed then and kissed my hand, shaking her head.

  "Sidney," I said with a choke. "Thank you."

  I left her then, afraid that if I didn't, I could never let her go. There was one thing I could do to stop this, I thought: a bolt of electricity that would occur if I self-detonated my force field.

  Two Kilari bellowed, once again causing Earth to shake. They tossed their combined two-thousand-pound bodies at me, slamming me into the wall.

  I deployed my shield and felt the weight of a Kilari above me. I opened eyes for what felt like ten minutes after and looked up at the Kilari blinking its many eyes back at me. I closed my eyes and hit the button, timing it right for when the creatures came at me.

  In a sliver of my eyelids, I could see a glimpse of something bright that left me deafened. It lit up as it sprayed a thin blue light that soon covered the area of the base, little beads of light forcing themselves forward. When the beam hit the Kilari, they disintegrated, bellowing a horrifying scream.

  Then it all went black.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sidney

  I ran.

  For all the praise that had been heaped on me during my time in the militia, I couldn’t feel more like a coward. Tessoul loved me with an unflinching, unfailing love. He never questioned me the way that I did him. All he ever did was try to protect me, and I ran.

  I stormed the gates of the trailer park and heaved breaths; my lungs were feeling black and airless as I’d been running for hours.

  Baxley. He betrayed me in the
biggest way possible.

  I broke his heart, but he broke us. Our whole team. He destroyed our opportunity to form an alliance and have a real shot at really living.

  I snuck into my trailer, careful not to get spotted by any of Baxley’s closest allies, and began stuffing clothes and my stolen weapons into a large knapsack.

  This was it for me, I thought; I was getting out. Just like Tessoul told me to.

  I heard my front screen door creak open and spun around; goosebumps were shocking up on my skin from the fear. It was Evelyn. She hesitated at the door, her wispy blonde hair tucked under a hood, and then forced her way in. Rebecca followed quickly behind her, snapping the door shut.

  We exchanged eye contact, all three of us, and I knew I was safe.

  “Baxley’s on the warpath, Sid. You need to get out of here,” Rebecca said, wasting no time in helping me gather supplies.

  “What do you think I’m doing?” I snorted and grabbed a hold of a med kit. I swallowed and felt a hard lump of emotion ball in my throat. “Did he set me up?”

  “You gotta go,” Rebecca insisted, harsher this time.

  Then I knew that he really did.

  “Why the hell would he do that? Why would he do that to us?” I snapped, water forming in my eyes.

  Evelyn gave a brief look around the room and a deep crease formed in her forehead as she asked, “Where's Tessoul?”

  “He's in the…” My hands began to shake wildly until I whipped my bag down in frustration. “He's in the cave; he's dead; I don't know! We need to get out of here.”

  My door snapped open again, and Lele walked in, her tan skin aglow. “I will accompany you, ma'am,” she said, clicking the door shut and watching through the windows with her gun cocked.

  “The Vithohn have been in and out of our camp all day. They took four more,” Rebecca added.

  I licked my lips and took one last moment to do nothing: to look around my trailer and remember what it was like when I was happy here. The brief years when we weren’t running.

  “Sidney!” Evelyn shouted, tossing my bag at me. “What are you doing?”