Learning to Blush (37 page)

That bumper sticker was right—
life sucks and then you die
.

She closed her eyes and waited for it all to be over.

CRUNCH. Something heavy fell on her.

A body. The
prime’s
body. She gasped, sat up and scrambled backwards before she looked up to try to discover how this could have happened.

It couldn’t be. That gorgeous, earing-wearing, brown-eyed, dark-haired, muscular and brooding man couldn’t possibly be Thorton. She must have died and gone to heaven.

“Dude—that was
sick
. You did that Vin Diesel style!” Mike was suddenly next to him, in all his over-sized and very red-headed and freckle-faced glory. He was squinting down at the body, and then he turned to Penny. “Does our timing rock, or does it
rock
? You are
so
making us a victory cake when we get home…”

Thorton fell to his knees by her side. “Penny, Penny…” he whispered, picking her body up and curling her into his arms like she was a doll, kissing her forehead and rocking her. “My Angel!”

Penny slowly reached her hand up and touched his face. “You’re real…” she said weakly.

He smiled at her and made a wry sort of laugh before he squeezed his arms around her. “I’m here,” he whispered to her. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you when I’m here,” he promised, and then he rubbed her gently across her swollen cheek.

She felt a lump in her throat and tried to swallow around it. “I love you,” she told him, honestly.

His face softened even more. “I love you, too, Babygirl.” They looked into each other’s eyes for a long moment.

Mike, of course, broke the silence. “So… Should I step outside? I was kinda hoping you’d come with me and head back to the ship. I don’t like being in the same room with a dead guy, quite honestly.”

Suddenly, Penny remembered every ridiculous thing Jazeel had said. “Thorton, Jazeel is sending a plague to the other main Swarii planet—Libii! And then he’s planning to take out Earth!”

“Alright, somebody got smacked around a little too much,” Mike said with a sigh.

“We can’t go back to the ship!” Penny snapped. Thorton got up and pulled her to her feet. “We’ve got to stop this!” She looked up at Thorton. “Thorton, I can prove it if you can just get me to the main computer frame. Besides, Ellie heard it—” she put her hand over her mouth as she remembered. “Oh, no!
Ellie
! Ellie’s in trouble!”

“What kind of trouble?” Thorton asked urgently. “Do you know where she is?”

* * *

“I am in some
serious
trouble,” Ellie thought to herself. Jazeel wasn’t buying her angel-act, mostly due to that ugly wife of his.

She had spent the whole morning getting tortured by electric shocks, only to walk in on Penny getting worse. Now she was being dragged to God-knows-where to do God-knows-what to her unborn child.

She had never been much for motherhood, and Graham’s constant yammering about it had occasionally even freaked her out, but now that she was carrying Graham’s child… she couldn’t help but love it. She already knew she’d miss it once it was gone. She imagined that it would be a boy with his father’s dark hair and her turquois eyes. Hopefully his father’s height…

Jack was so looking forward to being a grandfather, too! She was glad to have known him. She loved him like he was her actual father. She wondered what he was doing now. Probably pacing a hole in the floor with worry for her…

* * *

Jack walked over the bloody Frian, the one who had his throat ripped out. “That was a little theatrical, don’t you think?” he asked with annoyance, wiping blood spray from his eyebrow.

“He was makin’ all sorts of noise,” Peyton grumbled, wiping the blood off his face.

“Hm…” He wasn’t convinced as he put an explosive device onto the planet’s communication field. “I didn’t hear him make any noise.”

“Well, he was probably going to. More than likely.” Jack looked over at the too-powerful-for-words human, who shrugged and then kicked the body with his boot. “Couldn’t take the risk…”

“Hm,” Jack hummed again, still unconvinced.

“
Thorton
would have appreciated this,” Peyton assured, pulling his gun out of his pocket to patrol the door opening.

“Yes. I’m beginning to think I let him watch far too many violent movies when he was growing up. My wife told me not to, and I certainly didn’t let my
girls
watch them, but I thought because he was a boy that it was different so I let him, despite…” He programmed the bomb with his dexterous fingers and then pulled his gun to head back down the hallway with Peyton right behind him. “I’m not a big fan of violence.”

The bomb exploded loudly behind them. Another Frian came from around the corner, and Jack immediately shot him in the head.

Peyton waved his hand towards the dead body, and then the bomb, his face contorted with disagreement.

“Oh, well, I might not be a very big
fan
of it, but I had a calling.” Jack shrugged his broad shoulders and rounded the corner with his gun drawn.

Three human girls gasped loudly and held each other in fear as they looked down the barrel of Jack’s blaster. They were scantily clad, and apparently completely unaware that their planet, and their palace, had been infiltrated.

Peyton started yammering to them in Human tongue, and within seconds, instead of cowering, they had flung their arms around Peyton’s body in a desperate embrace.

“You know them?” Jack asked, confused.

“Of course I do. I was the Prime of this palace for five years,” Peyton replied simply.

Jack watched as one of the girls turned around, looked up at Jack, and then got on her knees and yammered at him in whispers. Human girls were nothing but a bundle of cute! “What’s she saying?” he asked, pointing at her.

“She wants to come with us. Since I left, supposedly it’s been a pretty bad scene around here…” Peyton said over the other girls’ human chirping.

The girl wrapped her hand desperately into the hem of Jack’s jacket. “How many humans do you think are here?” he asked.

Peyton shrugged. “A couple hundred.”

Normally, the idea was ludicrous. Their ship didn’t have life support for fifty people, let alone a couple hundred… But the fact that it only took an insignificant amount of time to travel there because of Jonas-Warp, they could bring back home as many people as they could fit in the ship’s cargo bay!

He pinched the human girl’s cheek and then offered his hand out to her. She smiled hopefully and let him help her to standing. “Let’s go get them then, Kid,” Jack told him.

Peyton blinked. “Wha…
All
of them?”

“I wouldn’t leave my
own
daughters in this God-forsaken place! Why do you think I’d leave someone else’s?” he replied, marching purposefully down the hallway.

“Because… well… I… Uh…” Peyton faltered for a moment, but then he said something to the girls, and soon Peyton took the lead, leading the group down the hallway. “I come in to rescue, and I come out with refugees!” he grumbled to himself, but it was settled—Jack was going to make him save them all!

* * *

“She’s in… the medical bay!” the dying Frian gurgled before Graham coldly shot it in the head and walked on.

Tim and Tom’s blasters were still hot from firing them so much, but the look in Graham’s one eye was very icy and disturbing to them… And so was the way Graham extracted information from the Frian about Ellie’s whereabouts by putting a gun to his head and a blade to the side of its nose. But Tim and Tom walked dutifully behind him.

“Ever feel like you’re in a Quentin Tarantino sci-fi?” Tim asked Tom in a whisper.

“I was just thinking the same thing myself…” Tom replied out of the corner of his mouth.

Graham snapped his fingers, demanding their silence.

They continued to slink down one hallway and then another, looking back and forth for the medical bay. They finally found it, and with it, they saw Ellie stretched out on a table, her wrists and ankles strapped down to it as the Frians forced an oversized gas mask over her nose and mouth.

“What are they doing?” Tim whispered, watching the Frians set a very sharp, yet very futuristic, medical device above Ellie’s body while another Frian cut away the lower half of her tunic.

As they were preparing themselves for the situation at hand, the Frians turned on the medical device, and the surgical blade buzzed closer to Ellie’s body. Graham, in response, charged in like a wild man, complete with a battle cry.

Tim and Tom exchanged startled glances, but came in behind Graham loyally, shooting off their blasters left and right as they watched Graham pick up and throw one giant, 8-foot green alien across the room before he rushed to turn the device off. He seemed to be having trouble, because nothing he was pushing seemed to keep the blade from inching closer and closer to Ellie.

Not wasting time, Graham grabbed a knife from his thigh-holster and sliced at his wife’s bindings and snatched her off the table just before the knife could have cut into her lily-white stomach.

Graham tightly wrapped his arms around her and hugged her limp body close to his chest as he pulled out his blaster again to shoot an on-coming attacker who was fast approaching. He left the boys to finish off the rest, ignoring an “Urgh!” and then a closely-followed “Whoops!”

He patted his wife’s face. “Eleanor? Eleanor, Baby? Wake up…” Her vital signs were extremely low, but as he continued to pat her cheek, her eyelashes fluttered and she let out a gurgle. Relief surged through him. “Oh, thank God. Baby, you’re trying to make me greyer than dad already!”

“You shot me!” Tom was shouting at Tim on the other side of the room.

“It must have been a Frian…” Tim replied simply. “
They
had guns…”

“But it
wasn’t
! It was you, you intoxicated ass! You even said ‘whoops’!”

“… I only grazed you.”

“If you grazed me the other way I’d be dead!”

“Then that wouldn’t have been a grazing; that would have been an actual shooting. Fortunately, if something had happened to you, Bro, I’d make a fine replacement. People might not even notice…”

Graham looked over and saw Tom pulling up his shirt to inspect a bleeding scratch across his chest with a winded, amazed expression on his face. “Ohh… I will get even.”

Graham looked back down at his wife, who was still pretty dead to the world. “We need to get her out of here.”

“How is she?” Tim asked, spinning around.

“She’s drugged, but she looks okay.” He hauled her over his shoulder.

“Hey, you got it, Boss-man,” Tim said, spinning his hat around backwards. He slapped Tom on the arm. “Come on. Get the sand out of your vagina. Let’s go.”

Tom grumbled something about what Tim had coming to him when he least expected it as he dropped his shirt hem to let it fall back over his torso.

They all stopped when they heard the sounds of footsteps from outside the door. Everyone paused. Graham shifted Ellie’s weight and pulled out his gun, motioning at the same time for the boys to get back and to get low.

A familiar face suddenly peeked from behind the door. Graham let out a breath of air and said, “Come on in, Thorton.”

Thorton did, but Penny suddenly wheeled in from behind him, her eyes wide and focused directly on Ellie. Graham noticed right away her bruised eye and cheek, and wondered what would have happened if they were any later in showing up! “Is she hurt?” Penny asked carefully, stepping towards her. “Did they… Did they…” she gulped.

“She’s alive,” Graham assured.

“No—but did they cut out her—”

Graham shook his head. “No, I got her before they could lay down the surgery bot.”

Penny’s posture melted for a moment, her face looking tired and weary. “Oh, good,” she sighed, but then she looked alert again. “What’s wrong with her, then?”

“She’s pretty drugged,” he replied simply.

“She can’t be drugged! Those could hurt the baby!” Penny fretted, putting her fingernails nervously to her lips.

Everyone in the room had a very pointed and very confused expression suddenly. “Come again?” Graham was quick to ask.

“She’s pregnant! They found out because of our blood-work, and that’s when everything hit the fan! That’s why they want to take out Earth! They didn’t think the Swarii could even breed with humans! They were going to take it out of her and do experiments on it…” She stopped talking then, maybe because of the panicked look on Graham’s face.

He pulled Ellie off of his shoulder and held her back in his arms as he carried her over to a counter and laid her down on it. He peeled open her eyes, then turned and grabbed an oxygen mask to put over her nose and mouth. “It’s not in her blood stream,” he told Penny. He added wryly, “They probably wanted their lab experiment in perfect condition before they sliced it up.”

“That’s sick, dude!” Tim said, aghast. “So… like… This is big news, right?” He turned to Penny. “When are they gonna take out Earth?”

“Right after they release another plague-bomb on Libii!” Penny announced, causing Graham’s head to turn. “If I can just get into the mainframe, I can get the information we need to stop it… Or maybe I could stop it right there, if it’s led by a navigational computer linked up to the one here at the palace!”

“You can do that…?” Thorton asked, looking skeptical.

“Fuck, Penny can do anything!” Tim boasted passionately. “She’s like a computer super hero!”

“Let’s get her to the mainframe then. Do you remember where it is?” Graham asked.

“This is too dangerous for the girls. I just want to get them out of here,” Thorton divulged, frowning.

“Thorton—we have a duty. Like hell I’m letting those lizards take out more of our wives, mothers, and sisters,” Graham reminded firmly.

“Say that when it’s your wife that will have to go into the middle of the palace! You know they’re calling for reinforcements right about now, don’t you? We’re going to be up to our ass in lizards any second! Besides, there’s no guarantee that she’ll be able to hack the system!”