I shrugged. I peeled the wrapper off another granola bar and stuffed it in my mouth. “Which one? I have two types of alien devices in me at the moment.”
She moved closer. I was very aware of the musky scent of her skin.
“So what other super powers do you have?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Supposedly I’m a bomb, too. Though that didn’t seem to go according to their plan,” I said.
“That’s a good thing,” she said.
She put her hand on the back of my neck and pulled me into a kiss. Fireworks went off in my head. Every part of my body tingled.
After a glorious eternity, Liz pulled away.
"You have a bedroom in this place?" she asked.
Fifty-Eight
I woke to the smokey, greasy odor of frying bacon. It smelled like heaven. I lay in the tangled sheets on my bed for a few moments and let my brain catch up. It all seemed like a dream.
It had to be. There I was in my familiar bed in the tiny bedroom in my tiny apartment. There was my alarm clock with its blue letters, sitting on the wobbly wooden nightstand I’d gotten at a flea market when I first moved to Albuquerque. Pretty soon Julie would come in and wake me to come have breakfast with her. There’d be bacon and eggs and thick sourdough toast from the bakery down the street. She’d pour me a cup of coffee and give me a kiss as she set it in front of me.
Then maybe she'd get under the table and give me a blowjob.
Yeah, that was definitely a fantasy. Julie would not: A. cook me any damn thing at all, much less bacon, because she said she was a vegetarian, and B. Even if she cooked something, she sure as hell wouldn’t make any extra for me, much less serve it to me. In the year we’d been together, all the cooking had been done by yours truly. And finally, C. Blowjob? Ha! I’d asked once and gotten a withering look. I’d never gotten the courage to ask again. Though I was expected to give oral satisfaction upon her nether regions upon demand.
Which left me with a question as I lay sweaty and naked on a bed that looked and smelled like it had some recent, enthusiastic activity.
Did what I think happened actually happen?
“Hey stud,” Liz said, “Bought time you woke up.”
I propped myself up on my elbows. Golden late afternoon like streamed through the window. Liz sauntered into the room. She wore one of my long sleeve button up shirts. Except it wasn’t buttoned up. And she wasn’t wearing anything under it. And she had a plate of bacon and eggs in one hand and a beer in the other.
She was so stunningly beautiful I almost cried.
It was like every fantasy a man could ever want suddenly coming true.
She sat on the bed and handed me the plate. I wasn’t sure what I wanted more. Her or the food. My stomach growled. She laughed.
“Eat,” she said.
She didn’t have to tell me twice. I shoveled it in as fast as I could. The bacon was perfectly crisp, the buttery eggs firm and the yolks soft. The flavors were almost orgasmic. She took a sip of the beer and handed it to me. It was icy cold and delicious. I looked into her dark eyes as I drained it. She seemed amused by my hunger.
“Looks like you need more,” she said.
My hungry eyes roved over her. “Yes, I need more.”
She laughed and stood up. Took the plate and empty bottle from me. She set them on the dresser, then shrugged out of my shirt. I drank in her curves. The firm lines of her golden skin. Suddenly my eyes locked on the hollow below her throat.
“Oh my god, I know what it is!” I said.
She put her hands on her hips. “Well I should hope so,” she said, “You seemed to have figured it out pretty well earlier.”
“No, the other thing!”
I jumped off the bed and scrambled for our clothes. I found the pants I stole from the sergeant. I dug into the pocket. It had to be there.
“The thing Claire’s grampa gave me,” I said.
“He gave you something?” Liz asked, “What would he give you? He never gave anyone anything. Except a hard time.”
My fingers closed around the disk. It was warm. Was it from body heat, or something else?
“This,” I said, holding the gold disk up. Sunlight glinted off it.
“A coin? That’s not much to get excited about,” Liz said.
“No, it’s from the alien crash site,” I said, “I remember it from the dreams.”
Liz’s brows furrowed. “What dreams?”
Oh, right. I hadn’t told her about the dreams. The ones of the alien king and his female warrior consort. Of course, Liz and I hadn’t yet had a lot of time to just hang out and talk about things. Talking really hadn’t been on the agenda yet.
“When I got knocked out–or killed–I had these dreams about an alien king and there was this alien woman with him,” I said. I held the disk up. “And in one of the dreams, she wore this.”
“So?”
So. A good question. I turned the disk over in my fingers. This was important, I could feel it. I looked at the soft flesh on Liz’s chest beneath the hollow of her throat. I stood and went over to her.
The disk had a flat side and a slightly convex side, like half a lens. I raised it up to her chest.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
She didn't move to stop me. For an instant, I wondered if I should be doing this. I knew there was no going back from this. Whatever it was.
My hands moved to her. I placed the flat side of the disk on her skin, exactly where I had seen it in the dream.
Liz gasped. Her eyes went wide and her body stiffened.
I prayed I hadn’t made a horrible mistake.
Liz’s eyes took on a distant look, like she was staring into forever.
“Liz? Are you okay?” I asked.
Slowly, she raised her hand. Long, delicate fingers touched the golden disk. The air around her shimmered. Power and heat radiated from her. I was torn between wanting to step closer to her and wanting to step back from the shimmering heat coming off her body.
Suddenly gold flowed out from the disk. It ran out over her body in all directions. An instant later she was covered in shining gold. Her body was like a golden statue. With a featureless face and small bulges on her arms, legs and back. She looked just like the armored warrior from my dreams.
Liz raised her golden hands in front of her armored face. Turned them back and forth.
"Holy, fricking shit," she said.
Fifty-Nine
Holy fricking shit, indeed.
In the stifling warm bedroom of my apartment stood a golden statue shaped like an idealized woman.
Liz. What had I done?
Made her really happy, that’s what.
The alien armor was more than just protection. As Liz played with it, we found it enhanced her strength. For a few minutes, she had fun twisting the metal frame of my bed into pretzels.
“I’m Iron Man!” she said, “Iron Woman!”
For a moment I was confused until I remembered the ancient movies I’d watched as a kid. Iron Man was a superhero who had an advanced suit of armor that gave him super strength and let him fly.
This suit of armor was something different, though. It covered Liz seamlessly, flowing like liquid metal as she moved. In addition to enhanced strength, it gave her her enhanced senses. She could view something on a microscopic level and when she looked out the window, she could zoom in on things miles away.
She flexed her arms in my tiny bedroom, next to the ruin of my bed frame. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door.
“This is awesome,” she said.
It did look awesome. The armor was form fitting, but obscured the details of her body, including her face. There were slight bulges on her forearm, shins and the back of her shoulders.
I pointed to the bulge on her forearm. “What do you think that does?” I asked.
“Let’s see,” she said. She raised her arm, pointing it at the TV resting on my dresser. Nothing happened. “J
ust a second, let me think about it.”
Something warned me to put a shield around myself.
The bulge rippled and an intense beam of white light blasted from her arm. The TV exploded. Hot pieces of plastic pelted us. Flying shards ripped my bedding to shreds. When the smoked cleared, there was a smoking crater in the wall behind where the TV used to sit.
“Hoo hoo! That is sooooo cool!” Liz said.
I kept my shield up. “Maybe we should test this somewhere else,” I said.
Like maybe out in the desert were the only things she could blow up were rocks and maybe some scorpions.
“Yeah, I suppose,” she said.
“Can you turn it off?” I asked.
“Hmmm, I guess I should try to,” she said.
I had the impression she would be happy to wear it forever.
She stood still for a few moments, arms at her sides.
“Is it stuck?” I asked.
“No, I’m talking to it. Or it’s talking to me, I’m not sure which,” she said.
“It’s communicating with you?”
“Yeah. It was really strange when you first put it on me. I felt like it was ransacking my mind. That lasted just a second or two, then it started...I guess interfacing with me is the best way to put it. Kind of like it was learning how my body worked.”
She folded her arms. Brought them up to an X in front of her chest. The armor receded, uncovering her body. A second later she was back to being a beautiful naked woman standing in the smoking ruins of my bedroom.
I probably wasn’t going to get my cleaning deposit back.
The gold disk stayed on her chest, just below the hollow of her throat. I pointed at it.
“Does the disk come off?” I asked.
She smiled and ran her finger around the edge of it. “No. It’s never going to come off. It’s mine now.”
That wasn’t exactly what I asked. I let it pass. She stepped close to me. I dropped my shield. She glanced around at the shattered bedroom. Her hands moved over my body. I realized I was still naked.
"You have a couch in this place, don't you?" she asked.
Sixty
It felt good to be in my own clothes again. Maybe blue jeans and a simple long sleeved, button up cotton shirt weren’t much, but it was comforting after the last couple days. It was a little piece of normal. I clung to it because that was about as normal as things were going to get.
Liz crouched behind the line of juniper bushes in front of Dr. Kincaid’s house. The juniper scented night air was refreshingly cool.
“Tell me again why we’re breaking into this guy’s house?” she asked.
I scanned the area. There were no lights on in the house. A single streetlight illuminated the house in orangish light. Kincaid's neighborhood was on the lower end of well-to-do. Which was still a lot higher than I ever expected to attain. His closest neighbor was a couple hundred feet away, surrounded by an ornate iron fence.
“Kincaid’s been hiding stuff,” I said, “Stuff he wouldn’t be able to take into the lab.”
“What kind of stuff?” she asked.
“Alien stuff. He’s been working with the Dons. Kincaid may be an asshole, but he’s an organized asshole,” I said, “He’ll have files somewhere. Probably locked in a safe or something.”
Liz peeked over the bushes again. “So? Even if we find something, what good is it going to do us?”
An excellent question. I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for. I just knew I’d recognize it when I saw it. Something was niggling at the back of my mind. Something Kincaid had told me once, but I couldn’t quite remember.
“You’re going to have to trust me on this,” I said.
“All right. Can I use the armor?” she asked.
I put my hand on her forearm. “I’m sure at some point in all this you will need to use the armor. Probably in an extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation. And when you do use it, I am totally sure you are going be awesome and kick serious ass.
She gave me a narrow-eyed look. "Now you're just being a jerk."
“Just don’t use the armor unless it looks like someone is going to kill us, okay? I don’t know if the Stickmen or the Dons or who knows who else can detect it when it’s activated.”
“No one swooped down on us earlier,” Liz said. The tone of her voice suggested disappointment. Somehow I kept attracting bloodthirsty women. Though I had to admit, I liked Liz’s style.
“Let’s just try to keep a low profile for now, okay?”
I raised my head over the juniper bushes. There was a rocky expanse between the bushes and the house. Like most people in Albuquerque, he had the place xeriscaped. Only serious masochists grew lawns in the desert. From previous visits to his house, I knew there were motion activated flood lights near the front door and the garage. He also had an alarm system.
But I had the number to disarm it. Assuming he hadn’t changed it in the last month.
“So are you going to us your superpowers to fly us through the window or something?” Liz asked.
I shook my head. “No, I’m going to walk up to the front door and hope no one calls the cops on us.”
“That sounds boring. Do you have a key?”
“I have a code. Hopefully.”
“I think using superpowers would be cooler,” she said.
“I agree, but I’m trying not to call attention to ourselves. Not yet anyway.”
“But eventually, right?”
I sighed. “Oh, I have no doubt of that.”
We stood and walked boldly up the flagstone walkway like we owned the place. About fifty feet from the house the floodlights came on. No sirens started blaring. So far, so good.
"Have you been here often?" Liz asked. She had her arm looped around mine. We'd taken a shower before we abandoned my apartment. She'd used some of Julie's shampoo. It had a lavender scent that reminded me uncomfortably of my ex-fiancé.
“A few times. Mostly to courier stuff to the lab when Kincaid didn’t feel like coming in. The dick had me bring him some chicken enchiladas from Porto’s once.”
And a six pack of Dos Equis, too. I had two masters degrees in computer engineering. And I was shuttling beer for my jerkwad boss. I had a sudden insight. Somewhere along the way, I had picked up some serious self-esteem issues. Why else would I put up with that crap?
“You okay?” Liz asked.
“No, but I think I’m getting better,” I said.
We stopped at the front door. The house itself was faux adobe style and the door was red fiberglass with a fake scratched and nicked wood texture. At one time I’d been impressed. Now the place seemed tacky.
The keypad above the door handle lit up as my fingers hovered over it.
“Get ready to run if this doesn’t work,” I said.
“I thought you had the code?” Liz asked.
“I do, but he might have changed it.”
I punched in the code. And waited. Was the house computer already calling the cops? I held my breath.
The light above the keypad blinked green and the door lock chunked open. I pushed the door open.
We were in.
Sixty-One
I turned on the lights in the entryway. The alarm panel beside the doorway said DISARMED. Nice to know. Liz was already moving into the main part of the house.
“Jeez, this guy is a slob,” she said.
I had to agree. His living room looked like the pad of a confirmed bachelor. Big, overstuffed furniture, covered with dirty clothes. A coffee table in front of the couch held empty pizza boxes and take-out boxes from Porto's. The place had the stale sweat, rancid food smell of a guy who didn't give much of a shit what people thought.
“Amber has her work cut out for her,” Liz said.
“Really? You think she’s going to stick with him?” I asked, “Traitor to humanity and all, remember?”
She shook her head, a sad look on her face. “Even Hitler had a wife,” she said.
I refrained from smacking my head. “Hitler had a girlfriend. They got married shortly before they killed themselves, if I recall.”
“Okay, then Hitler had a girlfriend,” Liz said, “Besides, Houston hasn’t even proposed yet.”
“Yet? Yet? ” I made some sputtering sounds of indignation, but Liz walked off toward the kitchen.
“I bet he has ten kinds of salsa in his fridge,” she said.
“We’re not looking for salsa,” I said as I followed her.
She put her hands on her hips. “Well, what are looking for Mr. Smarty Pants?”
“Not salsa,” I said. Yes, it was lame. Arguing wasn’t one of my superpowers.
She opened the fridge. “Yep, just like I thought. Salsa verde, chipotle salsa, mango salsa, extra spicy salsa, dijon mustard, lime salsa, honey mustard, red taco sauce, green taco sauce...”
The list went on. Women didn’t understand the condiment thing. When we got engaged, Julie threw out my entire collection of condiments. Including my jar of sweet onion chili mustard. That stuff was really good on turkey, bacon and guacamole sandwiches.
“...and of course, the ever popular Sriracha sauce, savior of crummy food everywhere,” Liz said.
“I don’t think what we’re looking for is in the fridge,” I said.
She gave me a wide-eyed fake astonished look, batting her eyelashes at me. "It's not? Well gosh, it sure would help if we knew what were looking for, wouldn't it?"
Was this the same woman who shouting out to deities in my bed, and on my couch, just a few short hours ago? I rubbed my face. Willed calm unto my being.
“We’re looking for something alien,” I said, “Something that he might be working on, or communicating with in some way.”
“I still don’t see how this is going to help,” Liz said, “What if we find something? What are you going to do with it? Are you going to go to the government with it? Or take it to the Stickmen?”
I leaned against Kincaid’s black granite countertop. It looked very nice. Especially compared to the ancient chipped and cracked plastic laminate in my dinky apartment kitchen.
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