Touched by an Alien (23 page)

“You need to know what you’re getting into. I didn’t think I was going to marry your father, either. It just sort of happened, falling in love, real love, not lust.”

“I do lust Martini,” I admitted. “I don’t know if I love him.” I thought about the flashes of pain I’d witnessed and the way he’d looked lost and lonely talking about the home world he’d never seen and never would see. “I care about him, though.”

“It’s clear he cares about you, as well. Just be aware—he’s not the only one.” Mom stood. “We’d better go. I’m sure you’re hungry after getting a lot of, ah, exercise last night.”

“Says who?” I stood too, hoping I looked righteously innocent.

“Says the supremely satisfied glow and relaxed body language. I’m your mother, let’s please remember. Lost your virginity in college my ass,” she added as we went to the door.

“Oh, let him keep his illusions.”

“I will. He’s hard enough to live with when he’s got them intact. Every shattered illusion takes weeks to get him over.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’m used to it. Besides, he makes up for it in other ways.”

“Too much information! I don’t want to hear another word about your sex life. We’ve already covered more of mine than I wanted to share.”

“That’s fine, we can talk about your shoes instead. Starting with, why?”

We wandered down unfamiliar corridors, but Mom was striding along as if she’d lived here all her life. “All I had, thanks so much. You were packed for a trip, and Dad got to bring whatever he wanted. I was lucky Martini broke a rule and took me back to my apartment to change out of my suit. Besides, they’re comfortable.”

“You look as though you’re trying to bring the eighties’ suit and tennis shoes look back. Comfy, yes. Attractive, not so much.”

“What are you, the Terrorism Fashionista?”

“Just get a more appropriate pair of shoes before we have to go anywhere.”

We hit the dining area just in time. It was a sea of black and white Armani. I saw Martini waving, but I’d have found them without the help—Dad’s yellow polo shirt stood out like a beacon. “Why don’t you do something about
his
wardrobe?” I asked as we made our way to them.

“He’s married, you’re single.”

“I thought we were avoiding that train of thought.”

“Only for now.”

The dining room was filled with long tables and typical industrial-type chairs. It gave me the feeling of being in a military unit that just happened to wear designer fatigues. Dad and Martini were at the end of one table; Gower, Reader, Christopher, and White were with them. There was an empty chair between Martini and Reader and one between Dad and Christopher. I knew where I was sitting. We reached the table, and Martini pulled out the chair for me. Christopher beat Dad to Mom’s chair. I saw Dad give him a glare similar to the one he’d shown Martini earlier. Good, at least one of them wasn’t ready to adopt Christopher into the family just yet.

There was no menu. Food was served family style, with a wide variety of options. This was a relief—hearing Dad’s complaint about pig products being the only breakfast option was never fun, and I’d learned it by heart before I was five.

Mom and I filled our plates and started eating, while Martini gave the others a very high-level and abbreviated version of last night. He left out any form of innuendo, but I had a good view of Christopher’s expression, and it was clear from the glaring he’d made the same assumptions as my parents. Either that or the room wasn’t soundproof, and the whole compound was aware that Martini had introduced me to the Alpha Centaurion Love Knot.

Gower waited until Martini finished. Then he leaned forward so I could see his face clearly. “I’d like the full details from you. But it’ll be easier if I’m touching your head. Are you all right with that?”

“Sure.” I didn’t have makeup on and my hair was in a ponytail, so no big deal.

Gower got up and moved behind me. He put both palms flat against the sides of my head. “Go on. Tell us about it, but I’d like you to try to see it in your mind as well.”

“No worries.” I couldn’t get the images
out
of my head any time I thought about them. I went through the whole dream again, and it was just as horrible as reliving it for my parents had been. I ended up closing my eyes because that way I had a better chance of not crying.

I repeated everything, including what Christopher said before I killed him and Mephistopheles’ closing line. Then I stopped and tried to clear my mind so Gower would get the hint.

He took his hands away slowly, massaging my temples as he did so. Some of the horror dissipated. “Rub her neck,” he said quietly to Martini. “Base of the skull in particular.”

Martini’s hand slid up my back to my neck. I managed not to arch into him, but it required effort. His ministrations relaxed me, and I was able to open my eyes safely.

To see Christopher looking at me with a mixture of anger and hurt in his expression. It was different from being glared at, but still unsettling.

“I don’t actually want to kill you,” I told him. Mostly, I added to myself to remain somewhat truthful.

“Paul, what do you think?” White asked.

Gower sat down. “I’d like to hear what Kitty thinks, first.” He sounded guarded.

“I’ve got nothing, other than I’m scared by Mephistopheles. A lot.”

“But it’s Yates you should be afraid of,” Reader said thoughtfully. “He’s the one who tried to replace you with a robot.”

“Maybe she’s not afraid of him because she didn’t interact with him,” Mom suggested.

I felt something tickling inside my brain, but not enough to form an idea yet.

“Or it could be she just figures her mother will handle it,” Dad said with some pride. I noted his arm was around the back of Mom’s chair. Not unusual, but rare for them in a group situation. I got the impression he was jealous of Christopher.

“Maybe it’s just a nightmare,” White suggested. “People do get them.”

Gower shook his head. “Come on, Richard. All dreams mean something, you know that.”

“James, what do you think?” I asked. The tickling in my brain got more intense.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just want to hear what you think about all this. You were the only human besides me who was there. Mom doesn’t count because she was unaware of the aliens or superbeings before the incident at JFK.” My conscious mind wasn’t where this was coming from.

“Okay. I don’t think Yates is real to you because you’ve never met him.”

“But I have, in a sense. He’s as much a part of Mephistopheles as Mephistopheles is of Yates.” Almost there.

“But Yates doesn’t know he’s a part of Mephistopheles,” Christopher said, sounding exasperated. “We told you that last night.”

And there it was, another epiphany. Alien sex was great for my mental processes. “That’s it. I think there are two plans.”

“Well, we know Yates has a plan.” Mom said patiently. “It would make sense that Mephistopheles would be a part of it.”

“No, I mean two different plans, planned by two different beings who don’t know their plans intersect. As Christopher mentioned, you all told me an in-control superbeing’s brain is split, and the human brain doesn’t know it’s part of an alien hybrid. Well, maybe the parasitic brain doesn’t know, either. Yates has his plan, and it’s terrorism-based. That’s why he wants to kill my mother. But Mephistopheles has a different plan.”

“What plan would that be?” White asked carefully.

I closed my eyes and thought about it. “In my dream, Mephistopheles’ parasite moved to me, but he stayed the same. I didn’t change outside, but I could feel the change inside. I wasn’t me any more, I couldn’t stop doing what Mephistopheles wanted.”

“Oh, my God,” Gower said. “That explains it.” He looked at me. “Your dream didn’t feel right. It was subtle, but not normal.”

“You think the parasite’s already in me?” I could hear my voice, and it had moved to squeak-of-terror level. Martini increased the massage pressure on my neck. It helped. A bit.

“No,” Gower said reassuringly. “We know you’re still you. Believe me.”

“We couldn’t touch you if you were infected,” Martini added.

I thought about his and Christopher’s reactions to touching Yates’ image last night. “Why not?”

“Just something in our physical makeup,” White answered. “We haven’t been able to pin it down, though we do have a team working on it.”

“Have them focus on what’s different, really different, genetically between A-Cs and humans. Because when Mephistopheles picked me up, I didn’t have any kind of reaction like the one you all did to just touching the image.”

“What did you feel?” Mom asked quietly.

I tried to think back. “I wasn’t scared,” I said finally. “I was mad. Him picking me up made me madder. And I never got scared, even when I thought he was going to eat me.”

“It’s rage,” Reader said immediately. “Humans have a greater capacity for rage than A-Cs do. Not that they can’t get mad,” he grinned at Paul, who laughed, “but they don’t do it to our level.”

“Yeah, but is rage really controlled at the genetic level?”

“It is in us,” Martini said quietly. “Somewhat in you, too.”

“I thought it was lame, too, what he said to me,” I added. There was silence. I waited for the sound of crickets. “What?” I asked finally.

“You could understand what he was saying?” Christopher asked.

“Well, only two short sentences. I mean, it was obvious he was talking to you all in some alien language, and I couldn’t understand a word of that. But he talked to me, when he had me near his head.”

“How?” Gower asked flatly.

I shrugged. “His eyes changed. They went from that red, glowing, superbeing creep-out look to almost human. He said I was trouble,” I added.

“He got that right,” Christopher muttered.

I chose to ignore Christopher’s little comment. “Then when he was about to stick me in his mouth, he said I wouldn’t be trouble much longer.”

“They can’t do that,” White protested. “Human or superbeing. No in-between.”

“He did with me. Then I hit him with my hairspray, and he dropped me.” I looked around. All the A-Cs looked, to a man, nervous. “Again, what?”

Gower broke their silence. “It wasn’t a dream, Kitty. It’s an implanted memory.”

“It hasn’t happened.” I could hear the “yet” no one spoke aloud but I was pretty sure everyone was thinking. “I mean, what, do these parasite things work backward in time or something?”

“Not that we know of,” White answered. “But you could be overlaying your own experiences onto the implanted memory.”

“Maybe he’s figured out how to make more superbeings.” This wasn’t a great thing to be suggesting, especially since I had a feeling I was supposed to be Test Subject Number 1.

“Maybe it’s more that he’s just remembering how,” Christopher said quietly.

“From,” Gower added, “touching you.”

“WE ONLY KNOW ABOUT THE PARASITES
from our translations of the Ancients’ texts,” White explained as we all headed to the Research level. This was at my mother’s insistence on knowing, fully, what the hell was going on.

Martini had his arm around my waist. He wasn’t being possessive, he was keeping me up and moving. Hearing I was not only parasitic-alien bait but was also likely triggering some sort of alien Armageddon wasn’t doing a lot for my ability to remain calm.

We arrived in what looked like the biggest library on Earth. I figured it probably was. The room was vast, bigger than the science level we’d been on last night. The stacks of books seemed to go on forever, like a huge maze of literature.

It was all computerized, though. A-C efficiency in action. Gower punched in what we needed on one of their free-moving light board screens, and then we went into a reading room to wait for our selection to arrive.

This room was big enough to hold fifty people comfortably, but it actually had walls. It also had a large screen in addition to another huge conference table and plenty of chairs. The translations of the Ancients’ books were available in hard copy, but the originals were computer-created documents.

Everyone was arguing about what portion of the text to look at first when Claudia and Lorraine came in. They grabbed me away from Martini and took me over to a corner of the room.

“We heard,” Claudia whispered. “Are you okay?”

“I’m totally freaked out.” I hoped they were talking about my dream and not my sexual escapades with Martini.

“Who wouldn’t be?” Lorraine asked. “Mephistopheles has been in existence for twenty years, and we’ve never been able to kill him.”

Twenty years? This was a little tidbit no one had shared with me yet. “How have you allowed him to do all he has as Ronald Yates?”

“We didn’t make the Yates connection until a couple of years ago,” Claudia admitted. “It’s hard for a dead agent to tell us much.”