H.A.L.F.: ORIGINS

by Natalie Wright

  Tex was not sure of what options he had. He was sure of nothing. He knew only that he wished to see Erika again and that he wanted to live if for no reason than to save her from dying at the hands of the aliens currently plundering Europe.

  “You care for this woman?” The man handed the pipe to Tex.

  He had never smoked before, but he took the pipe and drew the smoke deep into his damaged lungs. It was an inopportune thing to do, given that his lungs were already compromised, but the smoke did not burn or hurt. It filled him with warmth and eased the pain in his head.

  “I do.” As Tex tried to focus on Erika, spikes of pain reared in his brain, and his head felt as if it would split open.

  His hands flew to his head, and he pressed against his skull as though he could stop his head from shattering into a jigsaw puzzle. A strangled cry escaped his lips, and he knew the sound existed not only in the dream world but also in the material world that his body inhabited.

  Strong arms wrapped around him and cradled his shivering body. A coolness grew at his temples and feet. The air was still, but he felt a low rumble, steady and rhythmic. Drums pounded a rhythm in time with his heart.

  The whole Earth pulsed at the same speed, a gentle thrump, thrump, thrump. A chant rose. Male voices sang in unison, strong and low, melodic and hypnotizing. The sound was melancholy. Is it a death song?

  Tex sank deeper still into the gentle arms that held him. The spike of pain was gone though his head still ached. He allowed himself to be rocked and carried away on the wave of the beat of the drums.

  “Go to her,” the man said. “She will be your guide now.”

  “I cannot,” Tex said. “I am broken. Fractured. I cannot show this to her. I cannot let her see me this way.”

  “She has already seen all of you yet remains at your side. Trust in her. She will help you choose, and when your choice is made, the fracture will heal.”

  “How can I go to her? I cannot move.”

  The man did not answer, but the drums beat more loudly, their pace quickening. Tex sank into the rhythm. Deeper and deeper he went, into the heart of the Earth, the waiting arms of the Great Mother. Young sapling branches with new shoots of green cradled him. A thick canopy of forest leaves and bark surrounded him, gentle shafts of dappled sunlight peeking through here and there. This place was mostly dark and warm and quiet, save for the insistent thrum of the drums and the beat of the Great Mother’s heart.

  “Go to her,” the man said though his voice sounded far off.

  Tex did not know how to find Erika in that realm of dreams and smoke. He recalled his times with her, from first seeing her in the desert, Joe’s prisoner, to watching her as she helped him dump Gary’s lifeless body into a watering trough. From the first moment he’d seen her to the last, he was intrigued by her nature, so foreign to him, so unlike his own. He tried to understand her, yet each time he thought he had figured her out, she showed him something new, and she was an enigma once more.

  The drums called him, and he sank even further. He was in a cocoon of branches, swaying gently as a leaf caught by a breeze.

  He remembered the moment Erika had pulled him to safety in A.H.D.N.A. She had held him, and her heart beat against his back, her body warm, gentle yet unyielding against him. Her heartbeat from his memory melded with the steady rhythm of the drums and the beat of the Great Mother’s heart. One beat. One song.

  “Tex?” she called.

  “Erika!” He was suddenly running |through a brightly lit white hallway. He opened door after door, but each room was dark and empty.

  “Tex!” she yelled.

  The corridor seemed endless. For every door he opened, two more sprang into existence.

  A voice—the man’s voice—from far off said, “Follow the rhythm.”

  Tex stopped, his heart hammering wildly in his chest. It beat out of time with the drums, but as he calmed himself, he got back in sync with the cadence of the Earth’s thrum. “Erika?” he called again and listened.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  Her voice was louder, the beating stronger.

  He went toward the voice as they called back and forth to each other. The endless hall disappeared, and he was once again on the mesa. The sun was no longer high overhead but low in the sky. The heat that had threatened to immolate him from the inside out was gone, chills returning.

  A lone house sat at the edge of the mesa, its two windows like bright, yellow eyes winking at him in the dusk.

  “Erika?”

  “Come to me,” she whispered.

  He opened the door of the tiny house. He hesitated, his feet as though in quicksand, his breathing ragged. The last time he’d followed the man into a house, it turned out to be a cave of nightmares.

  The light inside was warm and inviting, though. Heat poured from within.

  “I am here,” she said.

  Tex stepped across the threshold, and as soon as he did, the house was gone.

  Erika sat with her back against the thick trunk of a tall tree. She stared toward the western sky, ablaze with brilliant orange, purple, and azure, the sunset painting the canyon walls. She turned toward him, her smiling face lit pink by the sky. She waved him over.

  His legs were like lead. He tried to run quickly, but every step was an eternity. Her smile never wavered, and he was glad of that as it was the only thing allowing him to keep his legs moving.

  He finally reached her and sat across from her. He wanted to look into her eyes, to know if she was really there or another illusion planted into his mind by someone—or something—beyond his control.

  Erika’s brown eyes were rimmed in red and shot through with tiny blood vessels. A yellow splotch of a faded bruise surrounded the right eye, and a pink scar marred her upper lip, the remnant of the injury she had received the night he’d first met her.

  Tex reached out slowly and gingerly touched her cheek. His fingers shook as he made contact. “Erika?”

  She smiled and put her hands on top of his. She sighed lightly, closed her eyes, and kissed the inside of his hand. A single tear escaped her eye. “I thought… I thought you were gone.”

  “No,” he said. His other hand found her hair, and he smoothed a stray strand back from her face, his fingers trembling. “Not yet, anyway.”

  She opened her eyes and stared into his. “Don’t go.” She moved closer, her lips mere inches from his own. “Don’t leave me,” she whispered. Her warm breath was a fluttery kiss against his cold skin.

  Shivers ran the length of his spine. He wanted to kiss her, but he had never kissed a woman before. He didn’t want to ruin their closeness with an awful kiss. Instead of kissing her, he pulled her hair free of the band that held it in a ponytail. A long, thick cascade of black hair fell around her face, and he caught a bunch of it in his hand.

  “I am very ill.” He caressed her hair, which was soft and silky in his fingers. “I have lost so much of myself. I am… fractured.”

  Erika took his hands in hers and held them. “Maybe you’re not lost so much as never found.”

  Her statement was at once confusing yet the most sensible thing anyone had ever said to him. “Find myself?”

  “Maybe it’s a choice, Tex. Who do you want to be?”

  Images flooded his mind. He was killing the attendant when he was a child, then he was strangling the life out of a snake and the man called Nacho. He dispassionately noted the death of Gary, his latest victim. “You are a weapon,” Commander Sturgis had said. That was a phrase drilled into his mind, over and over. A phrase repeated often enough becomes a truth, even if it is initially unwanted and unbelieved.

  Erika kissed his open palm, sending a chill up his spine. “You’re more than a weapon,” she said.

  He felt as though she was as much inside his mind as he was inside hers. Warmth spread up his arm and through his limbs and finally settled in his loins. The images of death were replaced with memories of Dr. Randall, Ian, Erika, and even Jack Wilson. All had
shown him kindness that he likely did not deserve. Even Dr. Dolan had given his life in the end to help Tex escape A.H.D.N.A.

  “I need help to become the man I want to be,” he said.

  His fingers traced the outline of her face. They were so close that he felt heat radiating from her.

  “So let me help you,” she said.

  Erika leaned even closer. Her lips—soft, warm, and yielding—were on his. He did not know what to do, so he was still, his eyes open, his hands at his sides.

  Erika took one of his hands and put it on her back.

  “I do not know—I’ve never—”

  “Follow my lead,” she said, her voice husky.

  Her lips were again on his, and that time, he kissed her back. Their lips still touching, his hand at her back, he pulled her into him. Her heart beat against his chest, a steady thrum, thrum, thrum in sync with the drums and the Great Mother. The beat was in her—of her. Her arms flew to his neck and drew him into her. There was no beginning or end—only the two made one in a neverending embrace, a kiss that melded day to night and man to woman.

  His lungs burned and ached as cells reproduced and divided and repaired. New alveoli stretched their way this way and that and filled the empty space in his chest with new lung. A part of him wanted to seek out an answer to how growing a new lung was possible, but Erika’s warm embrace and the deep, resonant thrum, thrum, thrum drew his mind away from questions. He was with her, and she was all that mattered.

  Erika kissed his cheeks, her lips a tiny flutter at his neck and collarbone. He sought her neck, nuzzling her hair. She smelled of soap and sweat and smoke from the fire. He drank it in, her pale skin smooth and cool against his lips as her fingers ran through his hair, twisting the wavy locks in her fingers.

  Liquid fire burned through every capillary in his body. He felt not the flame of Conexus torture but the heat his body was producing as it repaired the missing pieces of him. His head swam, dizzy from the sensation of her lips on his, her body warm and soft against his own.

  Memories flooded his mind—not of torture and death, but of sitting on Dr. Randall’s lap when he was a child as Dr. Randall read him a story about a family of rabbits, of a kindly aide walking slowly back from the testing lab so Tex could spend a bit more time away from the sedating high humidity of his quarters.

  Synapses repaired, and neurons connected. His head throbbed, but the memories kept coming, of standing on Bell Rock, naked, cold, and aware that Erika stood behind him and saw him. He had wondered what she thought of him.

  “I was curious.”

  Her mind was in his. Or she existed only in his mind. He could not be sure. Her lips were on his again, her hands seemingly everywhere.

  His mind and body were becoming whole again. No, for the first time. He made his choice, and he became the being that he had always wanted to be.

  As his mind repaired, the fractures were no more, and in that instant, he knew what he had to do. He knew what he had to become.

  His hands roamed over her face, memorizing every feature. He picked her up in one easy motion. She was light in his suddenly strong arms, her body soft against his firm chest. He placed her gently on a bed of soft green grass he hadn’t recalled being there before. That didn’t matter. All that mattered was her body beneath his, their minds intertwined, her thoughts only of him, not of Jack.

  He explored every inch of her, from armpits to toes. His lips lightly caressed her forehead, the crook of her elbow, her knees. They were interlocked for what seemed like hours yet might have been only minutes. They explored each other so wholly and completely that he could have identified her body from seeing only a few inches of her.

  Afterward, she curled into the crook of his arm and rested her head on his chest. Exhausted, she dozed on him. Tex was not tired. His time with Erika left him exhilarated, but he was content to watch her sleep, trying to emblazon the moment into his mind. He felt he would likely need those memories to carry him through what was to come. He left her to sleep in peace, blissfully unaware of the full extent of the danger of the outside world that would soon creep in on them.

  Tex unwound Erika’s arms from around his waist and lay her sleeping body down gently to rest on the soft ground. He took a moment to drink in the beauty of her—the curve of her waist and rise of her hip, the cleft where her collarbone met her shoulder and the soft plumpness of her breasts as they gently rose and fell with her breath.

  He kissed her gently one last time and reveled at the soft moan of pleasure that escaped her lips.

  “My love,” he whispered in her ear. The words felt good to him. They felt true.

  “I love you,” she said softly.

  He knew it to be true. His heart beat in time with hers, their bodies in rhythm with the Great Mother, the cosmic rhythm of the universe.

  Tex left her there in a pleasant dream. He left the soft grass. He followed the scent of the smoke and followed it back to his body, which still lay in the hogan. He hovered over it and was pleased with what he saw.

  At once, he was one with his body again, the dream world a memory. His eyes fluttered open. The hogan was dark and filled with thick smoke. Tex pushed himself up to sitting. His head no longer swam.

  Niyol’s voice was hoarse. “It is done.” He handed the pipe to another man and rose.

  Tex rose too. The sweat on his naked chest evaporated almost instantly as he left the darkness and warmth of the sweat lodge. The drums had stopped, but the air was not quiet.

  The morning sun was bright and hurt his eyes after days in the small dark hut. Outside the hogan, dogs barked and men shouted. In an instant, the dream world was a hazy memory. Worry for Erika filled him.

  He reached out to her with his mind, but she did not answer. Their telepathic communication—if it had been real—was severed.

  He pushed through the flaps of carpet that served as a door. He had to find Erika.

  16

  ERIKA

  In Erika’s dream, she was filled with a peaceful joy she had never known. She rested in Tex’s arms, her head on his firm, bare chest. His body heat seeped into her and warded off the cold of the hard ground beneath them.

  In the next instant, Tex was gone. The withdrawal of the warmth that had suffused her vanished as well, leaving her with a bone-chilling void that reminded her of how she had felt when she’d been taken aboard the Conexus ship.

  Her eyes flew open. She was alone in the tent. The sunset by the tree, kissing Tex—that had all been a dream. She was dressed in three layers and cocooned in the sleeping bag, but still the cold made her shiver.

  The experience had been so real that she thought for sure he had been with her. Before her eyes, as they kissed, he had changed. His eyes had gone from black to glimmering glacial-blue pools. His body filled out, and his face morphed into a more human-looking one.

  That wasn’t real, though. Surely it had been just a dream. A fantasy I didn’t know I wanted. She blushed at the recollection of his lips on hers.

  The blush gave way to guilt. Even if it had been only a dream, she’d allowed herself to kiss Tex without a thought about Jack. Why do I feel guilty? It wasn’t even real. Besides, she and Jack had been in the friend zone.

  Howling and barking dogs interrupted the confusing tension of her thoughts. Outside the tent, people were talking loudly, no longer keeping their voices down in a reverent respect. Her usual morning grogginess was gone instantly. Tex.

  She shimmied out of the bag, threw her shoes on, and unzipped the tent flap to peek her head out.

  The sun was only just peering over the horizon, but the makeshift camp was full of commotion. Dogs ran and barked. People exited the many tents. Still others were already out. They talked to each other and gestured toward the hogan.

  Erika pulled herself the rest of the way out of the tent. Dust flew into the air as a line of cars made their way up the dirt lane leading to Niyol and Kai’s refuge. The lead car was a sheriff’s SUV, but just behind it was
an all-black Hummer. The driver of the Hummer wore a black Makers uniform, and the other men inside appeared to be dressed in black as well. People darted about Niyol and Kai’s property as both men with the sheriff’s department and Makers men disembarked from the newly arrived cars.

  The passenger seat of the Hummer was occupied by none other than her Aunt Dana. Erika tried to meet Dana’s eyes, but Aunt Dana kept her gaze averted. She did not appear to be in distress. Dana spoke calmly to the man who had driven the Hummer and pointed toward the sweat lodge. She still wore her pistol in her waist holder and was still in uniform. There were no visible bruises or injuries to evidence a struggle.

  Erika’s fear that the black-clad men had captured Aunt Dana gave way to the realization of betrayal. She swallowed hard to keep herself from dumping the contents of her stomach onto the ground. As much as she wanted to have it out with Dana right then, that would have to wait.

  Erika ran toward the hogan. I have to protect him. Even after three days and nights of healing, Erika imagined Tex as still too weak to do much to help himself. She made it no farther than the edge of the bonfire when she stopped dead in her tracks.

  Niyol and half a dozen men were standing just outside the hogan. They surrounded Tex, so she couldn’t see him fully, but he was there in the center of their human shield, and the transformation she’d seen him undergo in her dream was not merely the hazy mist of the dream world. He was indeed changed.

  She could explain neither how he had been remade into a new man by three days in a healing ceremony nor how she had known that in her dream. It was true, though. His new face, while by all accounts more human, was in its perfection perhaps more otherworldly than the one he’d had before.

  The sun rising behind him made his billowy, shoulder-length white-gold hair glow about his head. Nearly all the time Erika had spent with Tex had been in the dark recesses of a dank, underground world. She had rarely seen him in daylight. The full effect of his unnatural beauty caught her off guard, and she gasped.