by Gini Koch
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
I WENT TO THE BOX AND LOOKED IN.
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.
“What are they? And don’t say mutants,” I added.
“Superbeings is what we call them,” White replied. “Roswell’s history is somewhat true. 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. 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.”
“What did the books say?” I asked, wanting to stop looking at the dead superbeing in front of me and not being able to.
“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. 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 them into a superbeing, capable of great destruction. They’re attracted to rage and fear, or whatever pheromones are given off from those emotions. That’s how they pick their new host.”
DAW Books Presents GINI KOCH’s
Alien Novels:
TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN
ALIEN TANGO
(Available December 2010)
Copyright © 2010 by Jeanne Cook.
All Rights Reserved.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1506.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-18632-9
First Printing, April 2010
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To Steve and Veronica,
for being mine and, in your own ways,
always being ready to “bring it.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
They say writing is a solitary pursuit, but not the way I do it. Unsurprisingly, therefore, I have a lot of people I want to thank for a variety of reasons.
First off, a huge thank you to my agent, Cherry Weiner, for taking me on even though she had a full list, and for also being the best agent, and friend, any writer could hope to have.
To Sheila Gilbert, my awesome editor, thanks so much for taking a chance on a new author and making the entire publishing and editing process a joy—I’m spoiled by having the best the first time out of the gate.
Special thanks to Lisa Dovichi, critique partner extraordinaire, BBFF and barometer. Could not, literally, have done it without you.
And now, the really long roll call. Thanks to: Phyllis, for saying “of course you can write” way back when and never taking it back; Mary, for being the best and most dedicated beta reader in the world, and Sal, for not complaining about the reams of paper used in the pursuit of this dream; Kay, for always believing in me, even those few times when I didn’t; all the girls (and guys) at Innerlooks Salon, for biweekly support and cheerleading; Dixie, for pushing for me to “write funny” for years; Pauline, for always being excited about my writing career and getting everyone around her excited about it, too; Kenne, Joe, Amy, James, Michelle, Keith, and Peggy, for always making even my most minor literary accomplishments sound like I was taking the world by storm; Willie, for speed beta reading and the English Professor eye; Mom, Dad, and Danny for being excited and supportive before they even understood that writing was going to consume my life; Jeanne, Michelle, Melba, Carol, Barbara, Cathy, and Marlene for being there when I had to scream about real life and then reminding me that writing was my real life; all the wonderful women and brave men in Desert Rose—you set a fabulous example of success and made it easy to duplicate; Danielle, Sean and Hilary, for long-distance European atta girls; Josh, partner in crime; Nick, for emotional support and soul cleansing at any time of day, from any and every part of the world; the Big Dawg Pack, for moral as well as writing support; Absolute Write Water Cooler, for education, support and motivation; Brittany, Kathie, Kathy, Norma, Ellen, Evelyn, Amy, Suzella, Jo, Carole, Mike, Christine, Akiko, John, Jill, Miranda, John, Mike, Michelle, Tom, Talene, and everyone else who helped along the way—you know who you are.
Most importantly, love and thanks to my most demanding critics: Veronica, for being supportive, excited, helpful and understanding of her mother’s obsession; and Steve, for being the most patient, supportive and understanding husband any writer could hope for, especially after I burned out the fifth PC in a row and all you said was, “Let’s go get you a better one.”
WHAT GETS ME IS THAT IN ALL THE COMIC BOOKS and movies and even novels, whenever someone gets superpowers, there’s at least
an eighty percent likelihood they’ll use said powers for good.
It’s always some man or woman of science looking for a cure for the world’s ills who gets hit with the gamma rays, or an outcast kid who happens to have a wise oldster around to show him the right ropes as soon as the mutation hits. The few bad guys who turn superpowered always have some fatal flaw that renders them easy pickings for the good guys, who also manage to outnumber the baddies every time it matters.
In real life, of course, it never works that way. At all.
In real life, there are no superheroes.
Of course, this doesn’t mean there are no superpowered beings.
But never fear—I’m on it.
Yeah, it doesn’t sound all that comforting to me, either.
CHAPTER 1
MY FIRST SUPERBEING WAS AN ACCIDENT. Literally and figuratively.
I was walking from the courthouse to the parking garage. Jury duty was over, I’d been released early, right after the lunch break, so I was free to go back to work and try to catch up on my missed half a day.
The parking garage was across the street, so I had to wait for the light. As I stood there hoping I wouldn’t sunburn, I witnessed a small fender bender. One slow-moving car rear-ended another right in front of the courthouse, about fifty feet away from me.
The drivers got out—man from the front car, woman from the rear—and he started yelling at her immediately. At first I figured he was raging because he’d been hit and the start of summer in Arizona always makes everyone here a little crazy, but I could hear him, and it dawned on me that this was his wife.
She was apologizing, but he wasn’t having any of it, so she got mad, too. Their fight escalated into shouting in a matter of moments. This was a full-on domestic dispute, the kind the cops rightly want nothing to do with.
The light changed, and I wondered if I should just head across the street to avoid getting involved with these two when it happened. The man’s rage went supernova, and all of a sudden he sprouted wings out of his back.
I’m not talking little wings, either. They were huge, easily six and a half feet high and I guessed the span as double. They had feathers, but they were odd looking, which, I know, you’d figure would be a given in the first place. But they didn’t look like bird feathers—they gleamed, and not with blood. There was a viscous substance on them, and as I watched, the man turned toward his horrified, screaming wife and shot blades out of the feathers that lined the wings’ edges.
She was cut to ribbons in a matter of seconds, and he turned toward the courthouse and let more blades fly. The main Pueblo Caliente courthouse, a nine-story building with mostly glass walls, was built a few years ago and was really very modern and attractive, doing its best to pretend the city hadn’t once been a pioneer cow town.
I flinched as the projectiles hit. Glass shattered and flew everywhere—the courthouse went from sleek to rubble in a matter of moments. I could hear screams—the people coming out of the courthouse, those near the windows in the first few floors, anyone in his path, maybe more—were all being cut down, possibly murdered by this man. I couldn’t guess how far the projectiles went; for all I knew, they were going deep into the building.
I don’t know why I didn’t try to run or hide. In hindsight, I could say maybe I just knew it would be futile. But at the time, that wasn’t what I was thinking. I was scared, but more, I was angry, and I just wanted to stop him. He wasn’t slowing the attack at all, and I realized he was enjoying it, enjoying the power, the fear, the death.
His back was still to me, and I could see a spot, right between where his shoulder blades had been and wings now were. Something was there, pulsing, almost like a human heart, but it didn’t look like a heart. It resembled a small jellyfish, really.
I tried to think of what I could use to stop this monster—it wasn’t as though they equipped marketing managers with Uzis. I didn’t take my eyes off the pulsing thing on the man’s back as I dug through my purse and my fingers found my weapon—my heavy, expensive Mont Blanc pen. It had been a gift from my father when I’d gotten a promotion at work. I doubted this was what he’d hoped I’d use it for, but I wasn’t holding any other options.
I dropped my purse, kicked off my heels, and ran, straight for his back. He was moving closer to the courthouse but was still less than a hundred feet away from me, and back in school I’d been on the track team. I was a sprinter and a hurdler, and some things don’t leave you, even if you haven’t done them for a while.
Because he was a little taller than me, I knew I needed to be airborne when I hit him. I judged it and leaped at the last possible moment. My pen slammed into that jellyfish-like thing on his back just as he started to turn. I could see his eyes—they were wide, glowed red, and no longer looked human.
As I drove the pen into his back, his mouth opened, but he didn’t make a sound. His eyes, however, went back to human, and they glazed as I watched them die. Then his body fell forward and mine with it. I scrambled to my feet, covered with ooze from his wings and the exploded jellyfish thing.
The police arrived. After all, many of them had been inside the courthouse. The scene was chaos—people screaming, glass and blood everywhere, sirens in the distance—but as I stared down at the dead body, all I could think about was whether I should retrieve my pen or not.
A man appeared out of nowhere. He was over six feet, big and broad. I didn’t register much else, other than his suit, which I was pretty sure was Armani and looked excellent on him, meaning he probably wasn’t with the police. My eyes were drawn back to my pen, still sticking out of the dead man’s back.
“How did you know what to do?” he asked, without any opening formalities.
“It just seemed . . . right,” I answered, winning the Lame Reply Award of the hour. “Can I take my pen out?”
He squatted down and examined the body. He pulled the pen out slowly. I got the impression he was ready to ram it back in if the body gave the slightest indication of coming back to life.
“I saw his eyes. They weren’t normal, and then, as I killed him, they went back to human again. And I saw him die,” I added. I wondered if I was going to have hysterics and realized I wasn’t. I was somewhat relieved.
The man looked up at me. I registered his face now—rather broad features, strong chin, light-brown eyes, dark, wavy hair. Handsome, definitely. I hated myself for it, but I looked immediately to his left hand. No ring. I looked right back at his face, but he’d noticed and grinned. “Jeff Martini. Single. No current girlfriend. And you are?”
“Wondering if I’m going to be arrested.” I noted several of Pueblo Caliente’s finest bearing down on us with a determined attitude.
Martini stood up. “I don’t think so.” He turned around. “Our agency will handle it, gentlemen. Please perform crowd control.”
The cops all stopped and did what he said, no arguments, no issues. I felt nervous now, much more than I had before.
He turned back to me. “Let’s go.” As he said this, a large gray limo with tinted windows pulled up across the street. Martini took my arm and led me over.
“I need to get my car,” I protested. “And my shoes.” I hopped from foot to foot. I contemplated standing on top of Martini’s shoes, then figured the brevity of our relationship probably meant I shouldn’t.
“Give me the keys,” he said.
“I don’t think so.” I pulled my arm out of his grasp and managed to find a tiny patch of shade to stand in. “What the hell is going on?”
An older man got out of the back of the limo. He was built like Martini but was at least two decades older. They didn’t look related, but I was pretty sure they were in the same line of work—whatever that was.
He gave me a long look. “Give Jeffrey your car keys, please. You’re wasting time, ours and yours.”
“Then I get to sleep with the fishes?” I asked with as much sarcasm as I could muster.
He laughed. “We’re not the Mob, we’re
an authorized world-government agency. You can stay here and be questioned by the police about the death of that unfortunate, or you can come with us.”
“You’ll tell me what happened? I mean, what really happened?”
“Yes.” He moved aside and indicated the car’s interior. “We’ll also help you get cleaned up and keep you out of the papers.”
“Why?” I didn’t move toward the limo or to get my purse.
He sighed. “We need agents. Ours is a dangerous job. And it’s a rare thing when a civilian not only has the courage to do what’s needed but also the natural instinct to know where and how to kill a superbeing.”
I felt a nudge, and as I looked around, Martini handed me my purse. He had my shoes as well. “Pickpocketing part of the trade?” I asked as he tossed my car keys to another man who’d appeared out of pretty much nowhere. Same Armani-clad look, maybe a bit smaller in build, but still obviously one of the crew. “I don’t think I fit the agency’s look,” I added as I grabbed my shoes and put them back on.
Martini grinned again. He had great teeth and a great smile. I was already disgusted with myself for looking for a wedding ring and more now that I was paying attention to his looks while I was possibly teetering on the edge of life or death.
“We can use some female intuition,” Martini said. “That’s what it was, right? You didn’t know what was going on, but you knew what to do.”
I shrugged. “I have no idea. Can I have my pen back?”
Martini laughed. “Only if you get into the car with us.” He leaned down. “And only if you tell me your name,” he whispered in my ear.
My knees went weak then. Somehow, this made it all real, not something I’d wake up from in a moment. I felt myself blacking out, felt Martini catch me and lift me into his arms, and then . . . nothing.
