"If we can just hold him off until they get here, you don't have to, Mercy I might need medical --" his words were cut off by his yelp of pain. Somehow even though they were still moving, the alien figure had gotten into range of them again. He was advancing faster than Ian could reverse, and through his blurring vision Curtis could see that he was hovering above the ground, flying, rather than running towards them...
"Put this on! I don't know if it'll help, but, it might shield your brain a little," Sky said, thrusting the helmet on her lap at him, then realizing that he was too dazed to take it, and helping him put it on his head.
"Ian, is there a lighter in here?" Mercy was yelling, and Curtis realized that, though sound was muffled now, the helmet did seem to be reducing the pain. His eyes started to function again, and through the visor, he finally got a good look at the alien gliding toward them.
It was vaguely human shaped, and wearing a long robe with shimmering black embellishments, but he could see now just how different Sky was to this thing - why she aligned so strongly with humans. It was nothing like her at all. Its face was smooth and flat, and the eyes, the same neon yellow as Sky's, were huge and set further apart, more like discs than the orb shape of human eyes. It had no visible hair, and its mouth, if that was its mouth, was surrounded by tentacles or feelers of some kind, all moving independently around the lower portion of its otherwise featureless head. No nose, no ears, no brows or lashes. Its body was covered by the robes, but he could see that its outstretched arms ended not with hands, but with more of those blue feelers, and there seemed to be more of them still, peeping from beneath the robe as he - Sky had said 'he' but how she knew this one was male was anyone's guess - moved smoothly through the air about a foot from the ground.
Sky was doing something next to him, passing back a thing she had pulled from Ian's central console to Mercy, who was wrangling bottles of rum out of the box he'd left on the back seat.
"What's going on? Mercy, what are you doing?" he asked, muffled by his helmet.
She didn't answer, maybe she didn't hear, and he didn't want to look away from the alien to see what she was doing. Suddenly he felt a whoosh of warm air against his arms, as Mercy opened Ian's door and jumped out, her arms full of bottles. Ian closed his own door behind her, and as the car moved onwards, back, he could see what she was doing now. Her already short dress was ripped off at the waist, and so she only had her red panties and stockings covering the lower part of her body, and she seemed to be stuffing strips of the white fabric from the removed parts of her dress into the bottles of alcohol. She had five of them, placed at her feet, and now she was using whatever it was Sky had given her to do something to another scrap of fabric (or was it paper? It was hard to tell, as she was getting more distant by the second).
"What's she doing?" he asked, as loud as he could.
"I don't know, she said she'd found a way to use the alcohol to fight him, but she didn't explain," Sky said, anxiously, "oh, oh, she's --"
There was the sound of an explosion and Curtis could see that Mercy had managed to make some kind of improvised bomb using a bottle of rum, some fabric and some fire. It had landed right in front of the alien, who swooshed almost instantly around the fire that would have otherwise caught his robes. She'd missed, but clearly the creature wasn't fireproof. And she had four more of those bottles.
"Ian, stop - I think the helmet is protecting me, and I don't want to get too far away from her, she might need to get back in fast. But she may just be able to keep him at bay until back up gets here."
Ian did stop, and he also brought up a map screen showing the location of Duke's motorcycle, which was now, it seemed, on its way from the Lucky Buy to their location.
"Sky, what do you think he wants?" Curtis asked, shouting every line now so he could be heard.
"I... I don't know. I thought maybe he had come for me, because I escaped, but the robes... This one is not a bounty hunter. This is an important person among the Aerquan. I don't know him, but, he's wearing the robes, and, he feels so strong..."
"But if he's not here for you, why would he be here at all, and why is he coming for us instead of going away now Mercy has started to fight him? I thought they didn't engage androids in regions like this?"
Another explosion went off, and this time the alien had shot up into the air, higher and higher, to avoid it as it went off directly in his path. Mercy's aim was good, though, and she still had three bottles left.
"They don't usually. But, well, it could be that I was being followed by a bounty hunter, and then when they felt the same big group of humans I did in the mountain, maybe they went back and brought a higher up to investigate it... Oh, I'm so sorry, Curtis, if I lead him here..."
"Don't worry. I'm safe for now with this on, and I am sure Duke will be bringing plenty of armed androids to help us fight him. We'll take him out, we just need to keep him away from my brain, I guess, and from you - I won't let him take you back there, don't worry."
The shock of the alien's weird appearance and the ominous way he flew, along with the pain it had caused just being close to him, was all wearing off now for Curtis, and he couldn't see how they could not have the upper hand here. It was just one alien, and Mercy was bothering him with her bombs enough to slow him down from getting too close to him and Sky, who were probably the only ones he could actually hurt. Guys with guns would arrive shortly, they just had to wait it out. It was kind of exciting really, and it was useful, if anything, to see this one lone Aerquan guy out by himself, to see how he moved, and what worked against him. If they were going to be trying to take on the creatures en masse and free the experiments and humans, he couldn't deny that this one showing up was practically a lucky chance to gather intel.
Mercy's third bottle actually hit the guy, too.
But that was when the situation changed quite dramatically for the worst.
Chapter 10
Somehow, the bottle that Mercy had just ignited with her flaming scrap of whatever-it-was had this time smashed against the body of the alien, whose pose hadn't changed - the arms were still spread like Maddy's crucifix necklace even as the glass shattered and burning rum doused his robes. But the feelers around his mouth were vibrating frantically, and a hideous sound was coming from him - a sound that seemed to be only partly made of frequencies a human could hear, and partly made of those that just made the teeth hurt and the chest feel like something untoward was happening to it. It was part sound, part experience, like it was not just affecting his ears, cushioned within the padding of his helmet, but every piece of sinew in his body. Mercy looked unaffected, reaching for the next bottle at her feet, clearly trying to press what she thought was an advantage, but Sky had her arms wrapped around her abdomen as if the sound was making her insides crawl.
But he's on fire, who cares if he screams, I have to endure it, Mercy is winning, and Duke's guys are only five minutes away. Five minutes is nothing. Come on, keep it together.
And he was managing to, too, despite the fact that he was sure that without the helmet, the sound and the power of the psychic attack the alien seemed to just naturally have going on all the time would have driven him to insanity or even killed him by now. That was, until his eye was caught by what was happening behind the flaming, smoking, shrieking alien. What was happening to the mountain.
The mountain was now surrounded by a kind of halo of slowly levitating figures. He wouldn't have been able to tell what they were from this distance normally, but there was now no mistaking them - they were creatures like the one in front of him, arms outstretched, forming an unbroken circle around the area about a third of the way up the mountain. There must have been hundreds of them.
"Curtis! They're - I think they're going to try and hurt the people inside your mountain! Your people! Oh, what are we going to do?" Sky wailed, pained and clearly terrified.
Curtis' stomach clenched. Sanctuary should be safe, though, shouldn't it? The people were inside a fucking mountain
, with thick metal structures inside that were designed to protect them from a nuclear apocalypse. Surely if the aliens could attack through all that rock and metal, nobody inside would have survived invasion day, and he wouldn't have even been born? It had to be safe in there. It had to. He hadn't even rescued his dad yet, and as much as he hated most of the people in there, he had just wanted them to be safe inside their boring little world, leaving his new one alone. He hadn't wanted the aliens to fucking kill them...
"I... Sky, what can they do? Can their psychic attacks hurt people through rock?" he asked, spiked with adrenaline now, his hands suddenly clammy and his legs trembling as if his body had decided it needed to take some immediate action even if he had no possible idea what it was.
"When humans get near them it hurts their brains, sometimes enough to kill them - that's why they breed their own humans for experiments - ones that are immune to it. But that's not their full attack. I've never seen one do it but we all know what it is... they can focus directly on a target, and basically switch off a human's brain without touching them. There's no way to fight it, that's how they wiped out most humans in just a few days - they just instantly killed them like that. Having something in the way makes it harder for them to do it, that's why I thought the helmet might help you, but I don't know, when there's that many of them working together, if there is anything strong enough... But, but they haven't done it yet. When they do it, there is a big flash of energy that you can see... although I don't know what it looks like."
They can switch us off? Like we can switch off androids... Fuck, this isn't the time to be philosophical though.
"Ian! New plan. Communicate to Duke that their party needs to go straight past us when they get here and head for the mountain, fire ranged weapons at the aliens up there - fucking guns, we need guns to take them down."
The alien in front of them suddenly did something strange, just as Mercy threw her penultimate bottle. He dropped to the ground, managing to dodge the bottle which flew past him and exploded on the ground behind him, and started to roll, spinning rapidly, and oddly gracefully, as if to snuff out the flames.
If he wanted to put out the fire, why didn't he do that straight away, instead of the shrieking? Fuck, what's Mercy doing?
Mercy seemed to have decided this was her chance to engage the alien properly, and had run at him and leapt on his rolling body, straddling him and now pounding at his head with her fists.
"I've got to help her, Sky - these things are physically weak, right?" he asked, getting out of the car, not really expecting a response from her, but feeling like if he didn't do something he'd go crazy from the panic.
He ran, he ran towards the dark-skinned android in the red lingerie and half a dress, as she powerfully struck the unblinking, bizarre face of the alien again and again, the shrieking sound getting more and more unbearable the closer he drew. He felt in his pocket as he ran and pulled out his penknife - the only thing he had, but it might just be enough to kill this thing if he could stab him, or give it to Mercy and have her --
But he skidded to a halt and dropped to his knees right before he got there. As Mercy had thrust the fingers of both of her hands hard into the alien's yellow eyes, its sound had changed. A dying wail. And then the sky around the mountain had been filled with a sheet of bright white light.
Chapter 11
Sky was out of the car now, dashing to fall at his side, and put an arm around his shoulders. He could feel her body shuddering with sobs, and he knew what it meant - that flash was what he thought it was. She couldn't feel anything from the humans inside Sanctuary anymore. They'd been switched off. Everyone was dead.
He felt numb, the helmet separating him from reality as metaphorically as it was literally, shielding him from the sound of Sky crying, from the thumping sound of Mercy, still hitting the now motionless alien with the black, oily goo leaking from what had been his acid yellow eyes, as if to check that he was really dead. He tried to stand, but his legs were shaking too hard.
The ground beneath him was rumbling now, and in seconds there were motorcycles speeding past where they were in the middle of the road, followed by cars a moment later, all powering ahead to the mountain, following Curtis' orders, but too late. Perhaps he should try to get back to Ian to call them off. What was the point in risking fighting now? He moved his hands to his helmet, to remove it, to finally experience this horrible scene with all of his senses intact, but Sky grabbed his wrist hard, and now Mercy was upon him too, her hands smeared with the same tar-like substance oozing from the alien's horrible face. They were dragging him to his feet, shouting, panicking, something about getting him far away from here.
Oh, he thought listlessly as he flopped into the back seat of Ian, they're all coming to finish me off, now, are they?
He could see the aliens in the air around the mountain changing formation and heading this way, and volleys of what must have been gunfire. The androids were battling them. But Ian was turning now, leaving the alien corpse in the road, carrying Curtis off somewhere.
"Not the city, yet..." he said, with the last of his energy, before he passed out. It was an almost welcome oblivion.
***
The sound of quiet sniffing somewhere else in the room was the first thing that he noticed. It was the second time he'd come round from unconsciousness in this room, on this bed, and yet he felt just as bewildered as he had that first day out of Sanctuary, when Sarge had stunned him and he'd woken up here with the first androids he'd ever meet at his bedside.
"You're awake... Sky told me..." Maddy said, rubbing her red-rimmed eyes and moving softly from the armchair to sit on the bed beside him.
"They brought me here, then," he murmured, noticing that Sky, or Mercy, or somebody here had removed his helmet and most of his clothes, "do you know if..."
"They defeated them all - yes. Duke called for as much back-up as possible, so Sarge tells me, as soon as you gave the message to attack the aliens at the mountain, and - well, I've never seen this place so quiet before - there was just me and Dora and Estelle, even Pinky went to fight. There were some police or military guys, I'm not sure, they brought along more weapons from some base somewhere, I think, to help the androids who didn't have guns of their own. You'll have to ask them what went on, but they came back a couple of hours after you, Mercy and Sky, and Sarge said the aliens were all taken out. No android casualties..."
"I need to talk to Sky - we have to figure out what this means. Whether they'll try to hunt me down. And you..."
"Wait, Curtis," she said, as he tried to move to get out of bed, her hand on his arm, "shouldn't we talk about... Sanctuary?"
He looked out of the window. The sun wasn't even close to setting yet. The whole day hadn't even passed since he'd left, and now here we was with Maddy, fighting for some words to say about the fact that everyone they'd known their whole lives, people Maddy had been with just a couple of days ago, they didn't exist anymore.
"It was instant. Faster than instant. They won't have felt anything. They won't have... been afraid," his voice cracked and his throat felt too thick, suddenly, thinking about how this was the best way, for his dad, who was scared of everything.
Maddy let out a painful sounding gasp, thick tears spilling out of her eyes, her face contorted.
"I feel so wrong, being out here, alive, just because you rescued me... just a few days earlier and I'd be..."
"Madeleine... If either of us is going to feel guilty about this, it shouldn't be you. I could have gotten everybody out. I actively worked to make sure they couldn't get out, and that if they did, they wouldn't ruin my nice little fucking set-up. I pulled a fucking gun on Sophie rather than bring her out here. I got you out because I felt like I owed you, and because I knew you would add to my fun out here instead of stopping it. I did every single fucking thing for myself, and now they're dead, and I won't let you share the guilt, and the fucking blame for that, because it's all on me. Blame me, for fuck's sake, hate me!"<
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He pulled his arm away from her, looking fixatedly out of the window, his jaw tense, not daring to look at her now.
"But, Curtis, if they followed Sky and that's how they found the people, and she, she was living outside Sanctuary before you came out... they might have killed everyone in Sanctuary even if you hadn't left. Then you'd be dead too, and none of us would ever have known there was a world outside Sanctuary. You didn't kill anyone, you just didn't save them from something you couldn't have known was coming... and you still saved me," she said, almost whispering.
"It's not Sky's fault, I told you, it's mine."
"I didn't mean it was her fault, but if you can believe that she wouldn't have gone anywhere near a hidden bunch of humans if she knew this would happen, and that there was no way she could be held responsible for it, why can't you believe the same about yourself?"
A part of him would eventually agree that Maddy's rational thinking was right, but not today. Today his anger would be at himself. But as the days passed, as the androids were sent to clear out Sanctuary and give the humans inside a proper burial at the foot of the mountain (which on Sky's orders, he and Maddy reluctantly agreed they wouldn't visit while there was still the threat of another attack), his anger started to put out some feelers, and find what would be its sole direction for the years that followed.
"We aren't just going to free all of those humans and half-breeds and bring humanity back from the brink of extinction, Madeleine. We've seen what androids can do against these assholes. We're going to wipe every last one of these fucking psychic monsters off of this planet. And if I don't feel better after we've done that, then we'll build a fucking spaceship, and we'll go and hunt the fuckers wherever else they fucking go, too..."
END OF ARC ONE - THE SANCTUARY ARC
A Message From Natalie Hunter
Android Alien Apocalypse Harem - Arc 1 Box Set Page 16