Adaptation: book I (5 page)

Once H1Z appeared, so-called “scientists” committed atrocious crimes against humanity similar to the Nuremburg experiments. People who were resistant to the virus disappeared, imprisoned so scientists could conduct experiments on them, their blood
rumored to be sold on the black market to the rich.

But before the virus had taken its first victims, Jody had stood in the front yard begging Carmella not to come out. He had gone missing for a full day and had returned only for Carmella to throw him some clothes so he could go to one of the centers to be treated safely away from her and the baby. Barely able to stand, Jody coughed into a bloodied tissue, his already pale skin ashen.

Only when Carmella carried Micah to the front porch did Jody come into the house. He wouldn’t make anyone else sick because their son’s pale skin was as white as snow. Micah was too exhausted to cry anymore, staring with cloudy eyes and coughing blood-tinged phlegm across Carmella’s shirt before he allowed his curly head to drop down onto her shoulder listlessly. Jody had stared in misery at the sight of his sick son. He walked up to the porch, took him in his arms, and cradled his too warm body.

Jody met her eyes. “There’s no hope,” his eyes seemed to say. He entered the house and lay down on the couch with Micah in his arms. Carmella covered them with an afghan and then went to the bathroom where she sobbed uncontrollably.

Micah passed away five days day later.

Because he was delirious, Jody never knew that Micah had died.

Jody only lived two more days.

Carmella didn’t want to wait for a “death wagon” like those used back in the days of the Black Plague. She didn’t want Jody’s or Micah’s bodies tossed into pits where they were later burned. The government advised the living to leave the dead in their houses with red signposts
painted on the door with the promise they’d be disposed as soon as possible. In most cases, that didn’t happen.

And later, it just didn’t matter.

Carmella buried her dead in the back yard, not just Jody and Micah but her mother and brother as well. Carmella stayed in her house, broken and lifeless, for as long as she could. When her neighbors realized that she had survived when everyone else in her family hadn’t, Carmella feared she would be taken. She slipped away in the night with a few mementos, mementos she had lost over the years, which she considered both a curse and a blessing.

For years Carmella hoped to die like the others around her. If she caught a cold, she lay in her sickbed until she eventually got better and cursed her resistant genes. How was it that she could keep living amid the sickness and death around her?

~***~

Carmella pushed t
he unwelcomed
memory back to its neat little niche where she hoped to never open it again. With bitter determination, she hunted the monstrosity that had unleashed its virulent cells upon mankind. Near exhaustion, she thought she saw it slithering in the distance.

Fuck! It had changed colors! Now it was the color of the forest around her. For all she knew, she could have been looking right at it all this time. She thought about shooting it but knew it would be a waste of her bullets. Carmella caught a flash of movement to her left only seconds before a large wolf knocked her to the ground.

With a scream she felt the piercing pain of teeth sinking into her arm. While one wolf circled her, another wolf punctured her breast while another clamped onto her wrist. Carmella screamed in pain as she realized that she was about to be killed with a loaded nine-millimeter in her waistband.

The sound of a pained howl cut through her pain-wracked cries, and the wolf clamped at her shoulder went flying through the air as if flung like a doll. Colorful streaks flashed in front her as a tentacle jerked back the wolf holding her wrist and a stinger pierced the third wolf through the side.

Carmella focused with wide terror-stricken eyes at the Blob as it heaved next to her, fluctuating between the colors of gray, green, and brown. Its inky blood still flowed in a steady stream. Its gelatinous mass quivered and rippled and seemed to form two arms.

The Blob scooped her up and lifted her from the hard ground. Her hand still held one of the kerosene lanterns, and she tried to bring it up to strike the monster, but her wrist flopped uselessly and the lantern dropped to the ground.

The Blob turned black eyes to the lantern and seemed to stare at her before another tentacle appeared from its body. The stinger protruding from it dripped some hideous, foul liquid, and she had only a second to try to scramble away before she was stung in the stomach.

She had no time to register pain as the world instantly darkened around her.

There was
beauty
yet profound sadness in a world where all that remained were the remnants of life long gone. Sometimes he would walk through houses and see decayed meals upon cobwebbed plates. Once he saw a man sitting in a reclining chair in front of a television set with a remote control still held in his skeletal hands.

Those were the worst. He wanted to explore his connection with mankind, which was the initial reason he had left the mother ship and Earth 2 in order to go on these lonesome treks. Instead he sometimes felt overwhelmed by the desolation and the complete loss. He tried to keep to places that held artifacts and memorabilia like books and pictures. His favorites were the department stores where he tried to understand some of what he saw. He ran his sensors over the clothing trying to imagine being sheathed in something so uncomfortable. Yet humans had grown accustomed to it. This he couldn’t understand.

He’d once allowed his form to shift into a shape that could slip into a coat. It had stifled his senses so badly that he had felt ill afterwards.

Bilal felt like a nomad more so than other Centaurians. His parents remembered another world, a different culture, but though he wasn’t a human, he still thought of Earth as his world as much as it was for the men and women born here. Earth was all he knew. He had been born on the mother ship and was six Earth years old the first time he saw the humans. Bilal grew to adulthood alongside human friends, influenced by their culture. At one point his fathers wanted to separate him from his friends, but his First Mother said that Centaurians had to adapt.

Bilal was doing only what he was supposed to be doing.

Bilal is the name that he took for himself after meeting a man with brown skin and hair that was twisted into long tendrils that ran down his back. He was six years old then and had seen humans with straight hair and curled hair, but he’d been intrigued by dreadlocks. The
man had been equally intrigued by the smaller being. Unafraid, Bilal allowed the man to touch him and to satisfy his curiosity, and in return the man had allowed him to touch his braids and his brown skin. The brown man’s name was Bilal Akunyili.

After figuring out how to make his vocal chords speak the word, he announced it as his new human name. His Second Mother did not like it, perhaps because he had already changed his name four times, or maybe because she had a difficult time forcing her mouth and tongue to form the proper shape. Whatever the reason, it was hard for Bilal to know for sure because his Second Mother found displeasure at most things Bilal did. She always faulted him for trying to be human, reminded him that he was more evolved, and scolded him for trying to emulate humans. “They should be emulating you,” his Second Mother had said.

This had made no sense to him. He wasn’t
trying
to be one way or another. He was only himself, and like it or not, Bilal was an Earthling even if he was not a human being.

Centaurians did not breed as often as humans did. He was the third offspring of his First Mother and only the second of his other parents. Of the several thousand Centaurians that
remained in the known universe, only a few hundred had produced offspring within the last thirty years. He had met a few of them and didn’t like them nearly as much as he liked his human friends. They acted and thought like his parents, and some had never befriended a single human.

Bilal knew that many of his parents wished he would conform because they were important, high-ranking officials in the Centaurian hierarchy. Though there wasn’t an exact word in his language for “embarrassed,” Bilal knew that was what many of his parents were. They were ashamed of the way he spoke and acted because he had little interest in his own culture. It was why he was allowed to travel down to Earth for extended visits, something forbidden to other Centaurian offspring.

Earth was hard and rough with none of the smooth edges of their mother ship, where their bodies glided without hindrance. Not many Centaurians cared to leave the mother ship for Earth, where the death of so many billions still disturbed their senses. Bilal’s desire to study the anthropology of Earth mixed with his parents’ shame of having a son who had no connection to his own species made the decision to allow him access to the restricted planet an easy one. Perhaps time away from his humans would help him readjust to his role in this new world order.

Bilal spent months
at a time away from home going to places his human friends had told him about. He kept communication with the mother ship and his parents using the sensor signposts set up all over the world. He had a space pod he used only when he wanted to travel back home and spent most of his time combing the land and making discoveries the Centaurians had never known, could never know because they refused to immerse themselves into human culture they way he attempted to.

Using his sensors, he collected samples of plant life, which he stored within his body until he returned them to the mother ship for analysis. Bilal once discovered a special treat, a plant that caused him to feel joy and contentment in an exaggerated manner. It sometimes caused him to do things out of characteristic, like pretend to be human. Once he had awakened to find that he had shifted his gelatinous body into the shape of a human and had been walking around on two legs. He would never do that on Earth 2 or the mother ship. When he was a child, his human friends had urged him to form himself into a human, and when the Centaurians saw him, they became outraged. His parents admonished him never to do it again. He didn’t know why at the time—though he now understood.

The first time he returned with his samples and the strange plant was analyzed, it was determined that it had the same effect on the Centaurian’s system that marijuana had on humans. He was admonished never to interact with it, and he promised not to. Whenever he returned to Earth, however, he would find more of these strange plants and get stoned for a couple of days before getting down to his anthropological studies.

~***~

Bilal was stoned
when he saw the woman. For a moment, he wasn’t even sure if he was seeing what was real. In all of his travels over all of these years he had never seen another human. He wasn’t naïve enough to think that the Centaurians had collected every single human from Earth. Many resisted and had died of the virus for their efforts. Some were living in madness brought on by years of solitude, perhaps even going below ground to hinder detection.

He was taught that should he cross paths with a human, he was to bring them to the mother ship for processing and reintegration with other humans.

Bilal had failed to consider that if he met a human, he or she would be hell-bent on killing him. He had found himself staring at her from across the yard. He hadn’t camouflaged his gray color and didn’t realize he should probably hide.

He regretted his decision to consume so much of the strange plant that his movements were slow and clumsy when he tried to grab her. She should have never been able to outmaneuver him. He had never had to deal with a violent confrontation before. Yes, with wolves and other wild creatures, but never a human. It went against his grain. Violence of any sort was not tolerated on Earth 2. Humans were prone to commit violent acts against one another, and their punishment was solitary confinement. He had tried to sedate her but was clumsy, and before he realized it, she had produced a gun and shot him.

When the first bullet entered him, it had done a great deal of damage. It had rendered him immobile, paralyzing him as it cut through several important synapses. Bilal had lain quietly rejuvenating and repairing the damaged portions of his body, fully aware that the woman intended to kill him.

She had disappeared for a while, but he knew that she might return to finish the job. As soon as he could, he retreated, repairing his injuries as he traveled back to his space pod. He was shocked to find that she was pursuing him. He knew that he could outrun her, even though he was losing much of his life fluid, but he sensed the wolves. Somehow he had to make sure the wolves wouldn’t take her and that she wouldn’t shoot him again. Another shot in a vital area might mean the end of him.

When the wolves overtook her, he doubled back to assist her. But instead of being grateful, she tried to harm him further. He produced his stinger and sedated her, wishing that he had been successful in doing it the first time, and then neither of them would be half dead right now.

~***~

Carmella’s chest
was on fire, and for some reason she couldn’t move. She tried to open her eyes, but that wouldn’t happen either. Yet it didn’t cause her any alarm. Instead, the gentle movement felt as if she was being carried, and the rocking motion made her feel sleepy.