Kharmic Rebound

by Yeager, Aaron

  “Wow, Trahzi, when you said you were going to go relax in the reactor, I didn’t think you meant it literally.”

  Trahzi pounced out of the beam like a predator and landed on the floor, her body covered in fire. “Why? What did you think we meant?” she asked as the bulkhead beneath her feet melted at her touch.

  The flames covering her body gradually died down. When Gerald realized this he blushed and turned around.

  “What is wrong?” she asked.

  “Um... well, you don’t have any clothes on.”

  “Of course, the heat from the reactor would have vaporized them.”

  She stepped closer curiously, nearly touching his back. “Does nudity make you uncomfortable?”

  “A little, yes.”

  She tilted her head. “That is so strange. You are born naked, beneath your clothes you are naked. It is your natural state. Do you fear your own nature?”

  “Would you please get dressed? We have to go.”

  Her school uniform draped over a chair disappeared in a flash of fire then reappeared on her. “Why?”

  “There’s been an incident. A creature is loose in the school.”

  She blinked. “And you came to warn us?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked around to emphasize that they were alone. “You are not very intelligent are you?”

  “I’ve been called worse.”

  “Do you not see that here I could dispose of you? It would be very simple, just blame it on the creature.”

  Gerald’s eyes grew wide. “I... suppose I hadn’t considered that a possibility.”

  A ball of white-hot flame grew in her hand. “Why?”

  Sweat rolled down his face. A droplet clung to the tip of his nose. “I suppose because I didn’t think you would be so evil as to hurt someone who came to help you.”

  “Evil?” Trahzi paused for a moment. “Evil,” she said again, as if trying to grasp the meaning.

  She took a step forward. “You have surgeons on your world, do you not?”

  He took a step back. “Yes.”

  She stepped forward again. “And when they cut out a cancer from a patient, are they being evil?”

  He stepped back, bumping against a wall. “No.”

  “What about from the point of view of the tumor? It is alive after all, would it consider the surgeon evil?”

  Gerald’s eyes darted around, she had him backed into a corner. “I don’t think tumors are capable, but if they were, I suppose so.”

  “And when a doctor gives his patient medicine to kill off a virus, what would the virus think of that doctor?”

  “Is that how you see yourself?”

  She nodded, and the fire in her hand grew bigger. “Words like ‘evil’ mean nothing to us. There is only strength and weakness, health and sickness. Only the strongest survive in this universe, and we make them stronger by removing the tumors.”

  She raised her hand to strike, and Gerald turned his face, awaiting the blow, but it never came.

  Darkness was gathering around them. The air became greasy, and the sounds of the reactor became warped and twisted, like a dark breathing.

  Trahzi spun around. “What is this?”

  “Oh no, I think it found us,” Gerald said. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.” He reached out and grabbed her wrist, but his skin sizzled at the touch. White-hot shards of pain shot through his brain, and he instinctively yelped as he coddled his burnt flesh.

  Trahzi looked at him in disbelief. “You are so stupid. How do you even survive?”

  The room stretched, as if it were growing. The walls sped away into the distance, fading off into darkness.

  They were small now, so small that what had been a nearby chair was now a mountain to the east. The air became cold. Their breath misted before them.

  They looked at each other, questions on their lips, but the questions never arose.

  The darkness was filling.

  One eye opened, then another. Huge eyes, brimming with hatred.

  More eyes opened, they looked down on the pair judgmentally. Thousands of eyes, then tens of thousands.

  And then the screams began.

  Gerald and Trahzi covered their ears, but nothing could shut out the screaming. It seemed to well up from within them, rattling their bones and throttling their organs.

  “Weak,” it said, and their bodies went cold.

  “You are weak, small, tiny.”

  Trahzi screamed, black blood trickling out of her nose and ears.

  “We hate the small and the weak, and so we hate you!”

  A great black hand reached down and scooped her up, millions of eyes dotted its surface. She reached down to free herself, but her strength was as nothing before it. Cruelly it squeezed her tiny frame. Her bones cracked, her lungs burned. The pain forced tears from her eyes. They rolled down her cheeks and pattered on the floor. She called out for help, but her voice was completely drowned out by the screams.

  “Alone,” the voice said, reverberating inside of her skull.

  “You will always be alone. No one will ever care for you.”

  Trahzi screamed until she had no more breath to scream. Her vision was becoming blurry, darkness creeping at the edges of her sight.

  “You will be hated by all of creation until the end of time.”

  “No,” she whispered as her vision went black. Her whole body was shaking. “NOOOOOO!”

  Then there was a loud metallic bang, and everything dissolved around her. The hand that held her turned to vapor, the endless darkness boiled away, and the eyes vanished one by one until only two remained.

  Trahzi looked up and found Gerald standing over her, the stunned creature in his grip. The room was exactly as it had been before. She was lying on the floor before the reactor, which hummed sweetly.

  “So, Trahzi can feel fear after all,” Gerald observed.

  “What... what was that?” she stammered.

  Gerald tossed away the now bent chair he had used to stun the Vlukkia. “I think I understand now.” He held up the leech-like creature. “Somehow this thing taps into your mind, floods you with images of your worst fears. Keeps you paralyzed while it eats you.”

  Trahzi shuddered and brought her knees up to her chin. “That sensation was... terrible.”

  Gerald regarded the slimy thing strangely. “It would appear that you and I are not so different after all. We are afraid of the same things. Being weak, being alone, being hated. We share the same fears.”

  Trahzi looked around in shame. “But, how come you were not... crippled by it?”

  Gerald looked at her sympathetically, then leaned over and extended his burnt hand. “Because I live it every day.”

  Chapter Eleven

  It is not widely known, but the famous Tindorian crash-landing during the Super Bowl was not the first contact humans had with other races. A similar crash happened a few years earlier during the winter Olympics. However, because the crash occurred during the televised curling event, no one saw it.

  -A Tourists Guide to Earth, 2nd edition, page 13, Valium Press

  Ms. Stubbs gripped her laser pointer tightly in her hands. “Now class, I have something important that I need to discuss with you. Probably the most important thing I may ever teach you.”

  This caught everyone’s attention.

  She whipped out the pointer and thrust it at Tiboe, making him jump. The red dot squared on his furry forehead. “Mr. Tuchir, what is the proper way to make a sandwich? Meat-cheese-lettuce, or lettuce-meat-cheese?”

  Tiboe scratched his bear-like ears in confusion. “Um, well, I suppose it can be made either way, can’t it?”

  Ms. Stubbs’ frayed black hair crackled with electrical energy. “Exactly. You get it, why doesn’t he?!”

  Tiboe looked around. “He who?”

  Ms. Stubbs’ eyes darted around wildly. “And so, it should go without saying, that judging a woman’s value by the way she makes a sandwich would be u
nforgivably stupid. Now, girls, I want you to remember, you must never EVER date a man who insists that he cannot eat a sandwich that is made meat-cheese-lettuce. I mean, who cares if the cheese and the lettuce touch? That shouldn’t matter at all, right? What should matter is that you took the time to do something nice for him.”

  Tulda leaned over to Cha’Rolette and whispered, “Is Ms. Stubbs having trouble with her boyfriend?”

  It would seem so.

  The laser pointed snapped in half in Ms. Stubbs’ hands. “And boys, you’d better not grow up to be such a huge proog as to fuss over how your sandwhich is made, okay? When she does something nice for you, you’d better just say thank you and eat it up. Because, if you don’t, then you will be an enemy to all women, and I will hunt you down at the first class reunion and destroy you!”

  “Why is she airing this in class?” Kamanie wondered.

  “Maybe the pressure of having Dyson in her class is finally getting to her,” Tulda speculated.

  Trahzi slammed her palms on her desk as she stood up, making Ms. Stubbs jump.

  “We are finished with our work. We will be going now.”

  Ms. Stubbs fidgeted with her broken laser pointer. “But... but class isn’t over yet, we still have a number of cases to cover.”

  Trahzi opened her pupil-less black eyes. “You’re going to cover cases 2401, 2407, 2409, and 2010, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll find that our summaries and conclusions have already been entered. In each case the wife was the guilty party.”

  Gerald chuckled and whispered to himself. “Spoiler alert.”

  Trahzi turned her icy gaze to him. “We beg your pardon?”

  “Oh, sorry that’s just something we humans say.”

  “Obviously.”

  Gerald couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. She was acting the same as before.

  Soeckism had a strict policy that one must never expect anything to change, or for anyone to treat you differently after you have helped them. Service must be done without thought of reward or not at all. But still, there was a little part of him that still hoped that maybe just once...

  Trahzi turned back to her teacher. “Since we have completed our work, sitting here serves no purpose. Goodbye.”

  As Trahzi gathered her things and walked out, Ms. Stubbs panicked. She twisted about, electricity arcing off the tips of her frizzled hair. She stammered out a “but wait” and a “you can’t just,” but was too afraid of Trahzi to put any force behind it.

  When Trahzi reached the door, she stopped and turned back to Gerald. “You will come up to the roof during lunchtime with us.”

  “I will?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we are hungry.”

  A wave of hushed murmurs spread through the class after Trahzi disappeared. Ms. Stubbs fell to her knees, mumbling something to herself about her career being flushed. Ilrica, Tomar, and Cha’Rolette came over to Gerald’s desk, looking very concerned.

  “You idiot!” Ilrica yelled, smacking him on the side of the head. “I told you not to talk to her.”

  “But, classmates should be friendly to one another.”

  Cha’Rolette leaned in. Don’t you know what she is?

  “An alien.”

  She pursed her lips. Of course she’s an alien. No, you dummy, she’s one of the Banished.

  Gerald thought hard. “Wait, I’ve heard that term. Isn’t that what they call the races that...”

  Yes, the races who fought alongside the Archtyrant during the war. She helped turn over a thousand worlds to ash.

  Gerald could feel a cold sweat forming on his neck. “But, surely Trahzi herself wasn’t a part of that,” he said, grasping at straws. “She’s too young to...”

  “Why do you keep calling it that?” Tomar pressed. “Trahzi isn’t her name, Trahzi is her race. They don’t have individual names, they all share a single collective consciousness.”

  Gerald’s mouth was dry. “So, you’re saying she IS the one who fought in the war?”

  Yeah, and you’re having lunch with her, you big dope.

  Ilrica leaned in close. “Gerald, don’t you know anything about anything? Trahzi eat souls.”

  Gerald’s fingers felt cold. “Wait, so you mean when she talked about lunch and being hungry... she meant...?”

  “Yes, you’ve got to get out of here or she’s going to track you down and eat your soul.”

  * * *

  After morning classes, which were completed with a substitute after Ms. Stubbs was taken away to see a psychiatrist, Gerald snuck out of the building as inconspicuously as he could. Taking a peek across the quad, he snuck through a row of crystalline bushes, then took cover behind the marble statue of Emperor Qetimong. A crack appeared on the statue where Gerald’s shoulder brushed up against it. Pulling out a small glass mirror, Gerald used it to peek around the corner of the statue to view the fenced rooftop.

  Relieved to see no one looking down from there, he straightened his robes and made to sprint across the quad and out into the parking lot. That is when fire erupted all around him, and when it disappeared, he was standing on the rooftop next to Trahzi, who was kneeling comfortably on a blanket she had laid out.

  “Ah, right,” Gerald said.

  “Please sit with us,” Trahzi said, motioning to the open spot before her on the blanket.

  Unable to think of any alternative, Gerald sat down and really looked her over for the first time. She was amazonian, about seven feet tall from what he could guess, with bright red skin like a fire engine. Her figure was far more hourglassed than that of a human female. Her enormous breasts strained against the fabric of her uniform. Her waist was so small he could probably have reached all the way around it with both hands if he cared to. Her hips flared out beautifully into long, toned legs. Her long hair and large eyes were completely black, and it looked like she painted her nails and lips to match, although he couldn’t really be sure. For all he knew, that could be her natural coloration as well.

  If he ignored the pigmentation, which was surprisingly hard to do, she looked like a hyper-sexualized version of a human female. It was no wonder her people were called demons, they looked like something out of a friar’s nightmare from the Middle Ages. Some kind of infernal succubus sent from hell to tempt pious men. Well, pious men with a weird fetish for red skin, anyway.

  Give her a pitchfork and some bat wings and she could pass as Satan’s concubine... or a Marvel superhero.

  “Thank you for coming out to us so willingly,” she said. For the first time he caught a hint of her quiet language during the delay between when she spoke and when his translator kicked in. A series of low whispers and hisses, sultry, but menacing. For some reason, just hearing the sounds made him feel like he was about to be stabbed from behind.

  “Actually, I was trying to sneak away,” he confessed. “It didn’t work.”

  “We know,” she said as she took out a small silver flask. “That was sarcasm.”

  “Ah, so you have that too. Seems we have another thing in common.”

  The low hiss of irritation she gave off informed him that his comment had the opposite effect of what he had intended. She popped the seal and pulled out of the flask a clear vial containing a floating ball of energy. It pulsed like a little heartbeat, and folded in on itself as it rolled about in the air. Colors rolled about over it like ripples in a disturbed pond.

  The black fingernails on her thumb and forefinger extended out into long, sharp claws. They glowed with a strange black light as she used them to reach in and fish out the floating soul. Hungrily she threw her head back and popped the thing in her mouth, savoring it slowly. Despite his impending doom, Gerald could not help but marvel at the oddity of this situation. For hundreds of years scientists and philosophers on earth had debated endlessly about the existence of the soul. And now, here it was right in front of him, and she was munching on it like it was
nothing more than a Twinkie.

  “Did you... um... take those souls yourself?” he asked cautiously, unsure of what to say.

  “Of course not,” she clarified, shaking her head. “These souls are supplied by the Alliance government as part of the exchange program. Death row inmates, child molesters, animal rights activists, those sorts of people.”

  “Oh good, so these aren’t human souls,” he said, relieved.

  “No,” she said, smacking her lips distastefully. Human souls are quite bitter.”

  Gerald’s face went blank. “You’re kidding, right?”

  She looked at him oddly with her black eyes. “My translator can’t find that word, what is ‘kidding?’”

  Gerald swallowed hard. “Yikes. So... may I ask what they taste like?”

  She looked at him inquisitively. “Why, do you want to try one?”

  He held up his hands. “Oh no, just curious.”

  This answer seemed to satisfy her. “That is one thing we actually do have in common.”

  She thought for a moment as she chewed. “Most races do not have a strong flavor. Humans are quite pungent, but the rest are rather mild. We would not say that souls have a distinct flavor as much as a texture.”

  “Can you describe it?”

  She thought hard on this. “It depends on the soul. We would describe this one right now as... feathery.”

  She got a little unsure of herself and shook her head. “We are sorry; this is something we are unaccustomed to.”

  “What is?”

  “Describing sensations to another. Since we all share the same mind, it is not something we normally have to do.”

  Gerald smiled at her. For a moment, she didn’t seem all that threatening. She seemed just like a normal person.