“Hold on back there,” Aaron said as he sped the cruiser west down Pinetree Drive and blew through the stop sign at Patrick Drive. Swerving to his left and cutting across the grass, he steered the cruiser down a long driveway lined on both sides by thickets of palms that shielded the lagoon-front home from the road. Normally, the foliage provided privacy for the homeowner, but now it felt like getting stranded in an elevator with a rattlesnake. If the owner had an ounce of sense, he would have gotten the hell out of there.
They found the man of the house after the cruiser plowed through his wooden fence, and skidded to a stop between his pool and the lagoon. They found his arm, anyway, and the shotgun beside it.
Moni should have felt that familiar gag reflex she got at gruesome crime scenes. Somehow she knew the man had it coming. He had assaulted Mariella’s people, and he wouldn’t have treated these intruders in his backyard any better if he had still been alive.
Moni stepped over the severed limb while carrying the bleeding girl. She marched in awe towards the doorstep of the massive yellow bubble arching towards the heavens. From so close, she felt as if she were Abraham bringing his son up the mountain for a sacrifice before the Divine.
With Mariella lying across her arms, Moni extended the girl into the bubble. It felt so warm, like reaching into the womb. She felt the small body slowly reanimate. Moni knew that Mariella would blossom inside this place alongside her kind. She would lead their rebirth and abundant growth. It would all happen away from human eyes. Moni couldn’t see her child again. Unless…
“Moni! What are you doing?” Aaron shouted from behind her.
From the other side, Mariella’s slender hands slid into her palms. Moni grasped them and followed them inside.
Chapter 48
One step transported Moni thousands of light years away, and eons back in time. The inside of the yellow bubble was unrecognizable as the Indian River Lagoon, or any landscape belonging to earth.
Smog weighed heavily on the air. The crystal clear water bubbled, and burped out steam, which congregated on the ceiling of the dome. It gave it the illusion of an alien sky with translucent yellow and black clouds. The creatures that flew up there weren’t birds. Their black wings where moth-like and they had long tails that swept through the clouds like nets.
Along the water, Moni could see all the way to the barren gray bottom. It resembled the dusty surface of Mars. Mariella’s kind wouldn’t let that last for long. Out in the center of the lagoon, a massive worm-like creature rolled its flabby body out of a ditch. Tendrils sprouted from its flesh, and then broke off. Within seconds, the independent beings grew into giant organs. They crawled across the bottom as slow as slugs. In their wake, they left an aquamarine sludge. Moni understood the meaning at once. They were like agricultural machines planting crops. Just as Moni’s ancestors did when they came to America, they were harvesting the land.
Realizing who had explained the purpose of those bio-machines to her, Moni turned and gawked at Mariella. The little one stood ankle-deep in the lagoon flashing a healthy smile with her purple gums and shimmering violet eyes. With the acidic water withering her pants away, Mariella removed her clothes and tossed them into lagoon for disposal. As much as it surprised Moni that the girl had just a thin scar on her chest from the bullet wound, what really alarmed her was Mariella’s skin. Below her neck it resembled the smooth, shiny black of obsidian stone. All of her human orifices besides those on her face had been filled in and made solid. She had become as featureless as a mannequin.
If she could get better-than-new in a few seconds, was she really that close to dying?
The question faded from her mind when she saw that Mariella still possessed the face of that little girl Moni had pulled from the mangroves. Of course she was different—all her life Moni had been shunned as an outcast as well—but her Mariella still peered out at her from inside that morphing body. She had fallen in love with that girl, and none other. That was her daughter.
Yet, in this world, the roles were reversed. Moni stood in ankle-deep water, but it didn’t burn her. She saw a thin yellow glow around the edges of her hand. The same color as the protective bubble, it ran down her entire body. It shielded her from the acidic water and gave her a supply of oxygen so she didn’t suffocate in the carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere.
“You’re doing this so I can come with you? Why?”
Moni understood the answer the moment she asked the question. After all she had done, especially to Sneed, and those three officers, Moni had worn out her welcome in her land. Mariella’s people offered Moni asylum in their home because of all she had sacrificed in helping them.
“I love being with you, baby. But I can’t live in a bubble forever. And just in case you’re wondering, I’m not eating that toothpaste-looking gunk in the lagoon. Hell no.”
They didn’t intend that she would. Those were only the seeds. The full-grown version would appear more appetizing—with a few changes in her digestive system.
“What kind of changes you talking about?”
Mariella tugged on her hand and led her deeper into the lagoon. Moni fought the urge to swim as they waded so deep that her head dipped underwater. If the bubble let her breathe in the hostile atmosphere, she would last in the transformed water too, she realized.
The lagoon had become entirely alien. Gators adorned with metal plates sifted their massive jaws through the sand until they found the deposits of sulfur they were searching for. She no longer feared them. They had been on her side the whole time. The dolphins with human arms darted around carrying slabs of metal, or large stones. They deposited them into the great worm, which would occasionally spit out a half-metal, half-biological machine. Moni spotted many glowing purple eyes inside those lumbering contraptions. She remembered her vision of the alien home world. Those were their buildings and cars all in one.
“Are they here, Mariella? Did we resurrect your people?”
Mariella grinned like a proud mother hen. Moni realized that the girl hadn’t gone up for air. She breathed as well in the acidic water as the mutated creatures did. Her jaw seized up with dread. The pressure faded as she realized that this represented freedom for Mariella and her kind. She had been out of place among humans, just as Moni had been. Now they were both home. And they had a whole litter of children waiting for them.
Her companion called it a nursery, but Moni thought it looked more like a large transparent stomach with squiggly things swimming inside. Connected to the great worm by a tube, the alien womb swayed through the water with the ghostly grace of a jelly fish. The beings inside were aquatic creatures for sure, but unlike anything in earth’s oceans. Each of them smaller than Moni’s hand, they had well-defined spinal columns—and not just one. Four backbones extended out in opposite directions from a central body with a heavily armored cranium. Each of the spines had a matching set of dozens of appendages attached. The limbs on the ends resembled paddles while the others grew bony pointers, and flexible tentacles. As they gestate over the next week, they would grow slightly larger than the average human head and their hundreds of tiny “fingers” would blossom. The ambassadors would release them when the environmental conditions matched their home world exactly and the food supply became plentiful.
“So while they’re seedlings, you’re still in charge,” Moni said inside her airtight bubble. Mariella gazed at her as if she could hear her voice—not that she needed to. “What happens when they come out? They don’t know me or anybody on earth. What will they think of me?”
It wouldn’t make a difference. She would join them before the master species awakens. That’s how Mariella would protect her.
“Everything you’ve told me about how the lagoon is all your kind wants, that’s coming from you, not them. What if they wake up, look at this big planet and still want more?”
Mariella answered by reaching through the bubble, taking Moni’s hand and showing her. She cast away the barrier that had separated Moni from th
e alien species’ consciousness. She immediately detected so many more of them. They were thickening inside the narrow vein of the lagoon like a blood clot. The resourceful worm had 31 embryo pods growing with seven babies inside each of them. Their Garden of Eden wouldn’t have an Adam and Eve. It would have a small community. She tried peering into their thoughts, but she couldn’t read them. Even compared to gators, birds and fish, their minds were so far outside her comprehension. She couldn’t detect the most basic of emotions from them.
Moni wondered whether the aliens were so young that they didn’t have clear thoughts or feelings. Mariella didn’t answer. She understood anyway. Only if she joined them physically and mentally, would she understand the beings from across the galaxy. Without that link, she couldn’t protect Mariella from her masters. Once the aliens got on their feet—or flippers, or tentacles, or whatever they had—they wouldn’t need the hosts. They might use some mutated animals that excelled at physical labor, but they wouldn’t need an independent brain in a tiny body like Mariella’s.
Before Moni could ask, Mariella reached into her own mouth and extracted a smooth purple marble. The ambassadors inside this “tablet” had been ordered to adapt a human body to the alien environment and connect its brain to the neural network, but without voiding its independent thought. Since Moni had become her friend and guardian, Mariella couldn’t throw away the soul that made her so special.
Moni gazed at the smooth violet marble her child dangled before her as if it were a crystal ball. She could join their family. She and Mariella could become inseparable—a bond in mind and body in consummation of their love.
And yet, Moni wondered why she found love in this alien consciousness implanted through tiny robots into a girl. Why couldn’t she love a real human being? So many of them had hurt her, and betrayed her, but Aaron hadn’t. Even after she killed four police officers, and left two people to die in her backyard, he had helped her save Mariella. She thanked him by leaving him trapped on the beachside. She should…
No, she shouldn’t. Moni realized that people only respected her when they feared her. The police badge had given her so much power, and masked her vulnerabilities, but it didn’t faze people like Sneed, Darren or her father. Aaron only helped her reach the lagoon because she had a new badge, one in the form of a girl who crushes minds. The people out there, even those who she thought loved her, would pick her apart unless she transformed into something stronger. The spirit inside Moni shined too bright for a flimsy, inferior human body.
She plucked the purple marble from Mariella’s hand and swallowed it. Moni expected that it would plop down into her stomach. Instead, it dissolved inside her throat. Everywhere the pieces spread, they swept a stinging jolt through her body. Her lungs seized up and swelled with fluid. She started suffocating. Moni clenched her throat. Her stomach cringed and contorted violently while the intestines below it began recoiling into new configurations like a bed of snakes. Even without a visible cut, she felt her blood rushing from her body. Her arms and legs became so scrawny and dehydrated that they numbed over. Ever so slowly, they were inflated with watered-down blood that required rapid pumping from her heart to circulate through her body. Before she could adjust, Moni’s flesh burned. She started scratching at herself violently. Her skin shed off in flaky lumps. From underneath, a new layer of skin arose that matched her complexion perfectly, but it felt thick and rubbery. It took a few minutes before she could distinguish her own flesh from a bodysuit, and actually feel through it with her nerves. When she did, Moni felt wet. The bubble had been removed. She hacked and coughed the water out of her lungs. Then it hit her. The liquid in her lungs wasn’t drowning her. It sustained her.
The acidic water seared off her clothes, leaving only her slowly decaying boots, but it lathered her new skin like warm bathwater. Moni held her palm before her face. She didn’t see the reflection of a purple glow from her eyes. She controlled her movements and thoughts. They had accepted her.
“Can you hear me, Mariella?”
“Of course I can. You’re with your family now, mommy.” The girl smiled as her mental message rang clearly inside Moni’s head. The connection ran both ways equally. She clearly differentiated Mariella’s thoughts from her own and she could access the girl’s memories as easily as pulling up files on a computer. She zoomed back to when they first met and saw through the girl’s perspective as the black policewoman in the muddy uniform scooped her out of the mangroves and whisked her past a hostile detective Sneed.
Moni felt an odd parallel. This time, Mariella had delivered her from the wilderness and welcomed her into a new world.
Greetings from thousands of voices echoed through her head. From the intelligent dolphins to the crawling critters with simple brains, they all paid their respects. Their animal sentiments were translated into things such as, “Happy you will help us,” and “I won’t eat you now.”
She could access their minds as well, and even gaze through their eyes. She saw a bird’s eye view of the altered lagoon from the vantage point of one of the alien flying creatures. Then, from a mutated snake-headed turtle on the edge of Patrick Air Force Base, she saw hundreds of terrified civilians huddled on the ground behind a thin line of soldiers. Colon stood at the head of the formation looking like a cornered alley cat.
“We don’t intend to kill any more of them, but we can’t let them leave,” Mariella said. “The thoughts of their commander told us that they weren’t engaging us with their most powerful weapons, because of the presence of non-combatants. I hope you can talk to them and buy us more time. The master species will be ready soon.”
How the alien race would make a difference in relations with the military, Moni didn’t know. So she probed Mariella’s mind. They could either initiate direct diplomatic efforts with some help from mental “persuasion” or they could ratchet up the war machine and raze Patrick along with everybody there. They had gained a detailed layout of the base by capturing a soldier’s head and accessing his brain.
“Before you do anything, let me speak with my government,” Moni told the thousands of collective mental listeners. “I don’t think they’ll launch an attack if they understand that we’re the only surviving refugees from your planet. If you let the civilians go, and sign a peace treaty, they might back down. But, in case they won’t listen, you better get ready because the military will go all out.”
Moni figured she’d help them by probing deep into the captive soldier’s brain and looking for signs only a human would understand. The massive worm hosted the collection of brains, which it utilized much like a computer might use spare hard drives or backup servers. The consciousnesses were gone, but the memories and processing power remained. Since they weren’t labeled neatly, Moni skipped between each captive brain and combed through its memories looking for the soldier.
She saw herself topless on the bed with tattooed black hands squeezing her breasts. That familiar deep voice said, “Yeah, girl! Give it to me!” Moni tried pulling out of his head, but Darren wouldn’t let her go. She watched through his eyes as he grabbed her hair, called her a bitch and then smacked her in the eye. The battered woman fell to her knees. Not reaching for the firearm at her side, she buried her face into her hands and pressed them on the kitchen tile as she balled tears. Standing over her, Darren said, “You ain’t leaving me.”
She didn’t leave. Moni had stayed with him for another month—until he cheated again. With his memories now open, she found that he had been fucking around since their third month together and she had caught him only twice.
Darren wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been honest with her.
“Why’d you keep his horrible mind? Why didn’t you erase what he did to me?”
“We could have destroyed his memories, but that wouldn’t erase what happened to you,” Mariella said. “You must remember why you can’t return to the humans. Their nature is violent.”
Meeting her with a steely glare, Mariella no longer res
embled a little girl who drew adorable pictures with crayons. Her words sounded so stark when they came directly from her mind, instead of as persuasive thoughts inside Moni’s head. She wondered whether she had been talking to a clever machine the whole time.
“Humans are violent. And your nature is peaceful?” Moni asked. “So many people died so you could have your lagoon.”
“They died out of the necessity for our survival. We didn’t take anyone without reason. Most of them were hostile toward us.”
“For real? I’ll see about that.”
Moni cycled through the brains tethered to the worm until she found the one. Accessing the last memories before the woman had been taken, she saw her wading into the lagoon and grabbing a girl floating face down with her black hair swaying in the emerald green water. “Mariella!” she cried as she rolled her daughter over and gawked at her puffy face. The girl’s eyes didn’t open, but she retched up water and gasped for air. “Gracias a Dios!”
The woman scooped her limp daughter up in her arms and brought her ashore. She asked the girl how she felt. Mariella shivered and chattered her teeth. Her husband rushed over and asked her what happened in Spanish, which Moni understood from the woman’s perspective. She chastised him for not watching her. In the middle of his apology, Mariella wiggled out of her mother’s arms and knelt by her side pointing at the lagoon. “No, you’ve had enough of that for one day, muchacha,” the woman said. Stubborn little Mariella felt otherwise. She took the woman’s hand and led her to the water’s edge. Her husband followed curiously.
“That’s enough,” the woman said as she stopped and planted her feet. She didn’t know why, but the woman sensed impending danger in the water. The girl clenched down on her hand. When she tried pulling free, Marellia’s grip intensified until a bone in her hand snapped. “Ow! Mariella, what are you doing?”
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