by Guerin Zand
Tim and four of his marines joined us at our table. It was crowded, but there were other tables available. He took a seat next to Maria, which I was sure was the reason he had chosen our table. A handsome young marine took a seat next to Prima. There was a bit of a scuffle to decide which one would get that seat.
Prima looked at the young marine. She smiled and said, “Good morning.”
Maria and I looked at each other and shook our heads.
“Good morning.” The marine offered his hand. “My name is Joe.”
“It’s very nice to make your acquaintance, Joe. My name is Prima.”
“Yes, I know. I’ve seen you working at the Earth Bar. It’s nice to finally meet you.”
Maria and I exchanged looks again, except this time they were looks of surprise. Yes, that initial smile was as seductive as ever, but it appeared the two had struck up what one might call a normal conversation. Maybe there was hope. Still, I was going to keep my eye on them.
Gamma, who was sitting on the other side of Maria, finished her breakfast and left her seat to jump back into my lap.
“Did you like your pancakes?” I asked my new daughter. She simply nodded yes as she snuggled up closer. She looked up at me with those little eyes of hers and my heart melted a bit. I wondered if all little girls had that superpower. You know the one they used to wrap a grown man, even a pirate captain, around their little fingers. I shuddered in a way I hadn’t shuddered since Maria was a little girl. I knew what that shudder meant. I was in for trouble.
We had all finished our meals at the table. Prima and Joe seemed to be having a nice conversation. Tim had been talking with Maria and looked at me to ask a question.
“Guerin, could we talk about your engineer, Senri?”
“What is it, ‘little’ Timmy.” Yes, I knew that nickname upset him, but if he was going to flirt with my daughter in front of me, he had it coming.
He scowled. “She did something to one of my marines.”
“What is this, the fucking Love Boat? Do I even vaguely resemble Captain Stubing?”
Timmy looked confused. “Huh?”
“Forget it. I guess that was before your time.” It did upset me that this younger generation couldn’t be bothered to study American art history. “Look, your marines are big boys and girls. Whatever happens between consenting adults on this ship is none of my business.”
“I wouldn’t bring it up, but he refuses to get out of his bed, and he won’t eat. He’s just curled up in his bunk and will hardly talk to anybody. I’m afraid there’s something seriously wrong.”
“Is he physically injured?”
“Not that we can see.”
“So, what do you want me to do about it?”
“Maybe you can talk to your engineer and ask her what happened?”
“Are you kidding? I sure as shit don’t want to know. Feel free to have a talk with her if you think it will help, but I wouldn’t if I were you. I’ve been told that whatever it is she does with men isn’t for the faint of heart. You may just end up in the same state as your marine.”
“So, what should I do?”
“Well, ‘little’ Timmy, you can wait until we get back to the Earth ship this afternoon and you can have Stella try and help him. Or you could go talk to Julie and see if she can blank out the memory of the experience.”
“Ok, maybe I’ll talk to Julie.”
“Don’t you marines have any lectures on keeping your peckers in your pants nowadays? You know, like the old VD lectures?”
“No.”
“Well, maybe you should. He isn’t the first marine in history to let his dick get him in trouble. You should probably talk to Steve about a little alien sex education before you deploy your marines.”
I called Senri up on a private channel using our comms.
“What did you do, Senri?”
“What are you talking about, Captain?”
“I’m talking about a certain marine who seems more than a bit upset.”
“You mean, Hank?”
“I don’t know his fucking name, Senri. I just know I had the marine team leader complaining that you screwed up one of his marines. You know, I don’t need to be dealing with this shit.”
“Sorry, Captain. He didn’t seem to be complaining last night.”
“Was he conscious?”
“Of course he was, Captain. What kind of woman do you think I am?”
“I wonder sometimes, Senri, I really do wonder.”
“Don’t worry. He’ll be fine. I can’t believe what a bunch of pussies you human men are!”
Chapter 18
The Message
I woke up on what appeared to be a couch of some sort. A blanket, not like any blanket I had seen before, was covering me. It appeared to be made of straw or some sort of thin reeds. Even though I was waking up, I still felt so tired that I just wanted to lay back down and sleep some more. The urge to sleep was overwhelming. I fought that urge, and I started to focus on the occupants of the room where I found myself.
They were friends of mine. There were several friends in fact looking at me from across the room. I knew they were friends, but at the same time, I didn’t recognize any of them. They were telling me it was alright. I could stay there as long as I liked, and I should go back to sleep. I tried to push off the blanket covering me but I seemed to just get more tangled up in it. I was still half asleep. I couldn’t shake that sleepy feeling. It almost felt as if I had been drugged. I lost the fight against sleep and everything went black.
I woke up in my bed. It felt like my bed, but I didn’t recognize the room. I knew I was near the ocean somehow, and I thought I was waking up in my home back in Titusville, Florida. It didn’t look like that house, but for some reason I was sure that was where I was. It felt so familiar. I walked outside and suddenly I knew where I was. I was back on the ranch in Panguipulli, Chile. I knew that was where I was, but I didn’t recognize my surroundings. None of this made any sense. I had to be dreaming. That was it. Now, I just had to wake up. I knew how to do that.
I woke up back on that same couch with that strange blanket covering me. There was a fire burning in a fireplace on the other side of the room. My friends were there. I knew they were my friends, but still I could not name any of them. I stood up from the couch and headed to what appeared to be a bar. One of my friends standing at the bar began to say something.
“I must defeat Bayru before we can be free.”
The name did not sound familiar.
“Bayru? Bayru? I am here waiting for you,” my friend said out loud as he looked down a hallway at the end of the bar.
I joined him and we both called out. “Bayru? We are waiting.”
A beast, I have no other name to describe what I saw, came out of the hallway. Its fur was white as chalk and mottled with black. It had a small snout with large teeth bared as it rushed towards my friend. It was not some wild animal or beast. It wore clothes and attacked with the intent to kill. I knew this without knowing what I was seeing. The attacker, Bayru I assumed, was much stronger than my friend. He immediately had my friend pinned against the bar in the room and his hands were around his throat.
I moved to help my friend. My right hand found what appeared to be an ice pick on the bar, but it was longer than any ice pick I had ever seen. It looked like a knitting needle with a wooden handle. Bayru turned his attention away from my friend and reached out for me. When he got closer, I drove the pick up through the bottom of its mouth and into its brain. Blood poured out of Bayru’s mouth and covered my face and the front of my clothes. It was a lot of blood. As Bayru fell to the ground I was frantically trying to wipe the blood off my face. The blood was everywhere, including in my mouth. I was trying to wipe off the blood, but as I did, I became even more soaked in blood. It was in my mouth. I tried to spit it out but again there was always more blood. I heard laughter in the crowd.
A woman was laughing. It was my mother. I knew this even though her face
was not that of my mother. “Guerin, you are such a joker. Ha, ha. Look at you all covered in blood. Ha, ha.” Why was my mother laughing like this? The crowd that had gathered started laughing as well. Still, I continued to spit up the creature’s blood and I just became covered in more blood. Where was all this blood coming from? Why was this crowd laughing? Why were my mother, my friends, laughing?
Something on the opposite side of the room drew my attention. As I turned around to look, a large hand came around from behind me. The hand covered my face while something pulled me back. The hand covering my face was black as coal and it had the feel of leather. It reminded me of the hand of a large gorilla. I tried to look back at my captor and could only make out bits of his face. His face was as black as the hand covering my face and appeared to have the same leathery texture. He had a large forehead with a protruding brow ridge, much more pronounced than any human. His entire head was significantly larger than a man’s. He must have stood seven foot tall. As he spoke to me I could see the oversized canines exposed.
“You must recognize them to move on.” The creature spoke softly in my ear as he pushed me forward in the direction where something had earlier drawn my attention. I looked to my right side at the friend I had just tried to help. I could see him through the gaps in the fingers around my face. He stood there with the rest of the crowd as though he could not see me. I tried to cry out.
“HELP ME! HELP ME!” But my screams were muffled. No one seemed to notice. It was like I wasn’t in the same room as my friends. The continued to drink and laugh, oblivious to my circumstances.
My captor continued to push me forward repeating to me in a soft and unthreatening voice, “You must recognize them to move on.”
Recognize who? I didn’t know what this being expected of me. Still, he continued to push me forward. In front of me, I saw three people wearing red cloaks that looked like hooded capes. They were women. I didn’t recognize them. The creature continued to push me forward towards the three. One appeared smaller than the other, a child perhaps. My captor continued to repeat the same instruction. “You must recognize them to move on.”
The three women looked at me and their faces were very old, even the child’s. My captor repeated, “You must recognize them to move on.” Their mouths opened as if to smile at me, and I saw their sharply pointed teeth. My captor took my left hand in his, then moved it towards their faces and still repeated that same instruction.
Terror started to build inside of me as he forced my hands towards the faces and those sharp teeth. My hand appeared to be inside a crimson glove that fit as if it were my skin. As my hand reached the faces of the three women, their teeth came down upon my fingers. The tips of my fingers appeared to stretch as the women bit down and pulled back, but I felt nothing. It must have been the crimson glove stretching I thought. Their teeth were now bloodstained. Their heads were moving back and forth while each had a fingertip in their mouths. They were feeding on my blood and my fingers were like the tits from which they suckled.
“You must recognize them to move on.”
All I could do was scream for help. I did not recognize them. I was screaming, yet no one seemed to hear my screams. Even I couldn’t hear my own screams.
“DAD! DAD!”
I could hear Maria’s voice calling me, but she wasn’t there.
“DAD! ARE YOU ALRIGHT? DAD!”
I was in my bed covered in a cold sweat. The sheets of the bed were soaked. Maria was looking down at me and I reached up and grabbed her shoulders. I was shaking her and yelling, “I RECOGNIZE YOU! I RECOGNIZE YOU!”
“Dad! Let go you’re hurting me. It was a nightmare.”
I looked around and saw I was in my bedroom back on the Earth ship.
“Dad, let go. It’s ok.”
I could hear her. She could hear me. Was I really awake this time? I released my grip on Maria and continued looking around the room. I was looking for anything that might tell me if what I saw was real or not.
“Are you ok, Dad?”
“No!”
“It was just a nightmare. A really bad one it appears. You’ll be fine.” Maria look surprised more than worried.
“It’s not fine, Maria. Somethings wrong. Somethings very wrong.”
“It was just a nightmare, Dad.”
“It wasn’t just a nightmare. It was real.”
“It just seems that way, Dad. You need to calm down.”
“You don’t understand, Maria. Somethings wrong. I need to go to medical. Call Stella and have her meet me there.”
“You’re overreacting, Dad. Just...”
“I AM NOT OVERREACTING!”
“Ok, ok. I’ll call Stella and have her meet us at the med center. Just try to calm down. Why don’t you take a quick shower and we’ll head down there together? I just nodded to Maria and headed for the bathroom.
When we arrived at the medical center Stella and Julie were waiting there. They asked what was wrong.
“He had a nightmare but...”
“It was not a nightmare, Maria. I mean it was, but it wasn’t. It was real.”
“Guerin,” Stella said in her best therapist’s voice. “Sometimes they can seem very real and they can be quite upsetting...”
“You’re not listening to me. I know what a nightmare is. This was more. Everything is still perfectly clear. I can remember every detail of this so-called nightmare. I can remember all the faces, the details of the rooms, and everything I saw.”
I then proceeded to describe in vivid detail what I had experienced. I described the smells, the tastes, how things felt, the texture of objects. There were no foggy details. Over an hour had passed. It was all as clear to me still as if it had actually happened or was still happening.
Julie motioned me over to the scanning device and I placed my feet in the appropriate spots. As usual, the scan took no time from my perspective, but how long it actually took was unknown to me. I heard Julie and Stella talking softly.
“What is it?”
“It may just be a glitch in the machine. We want to take another scan, this time without placing you in temporal stasis. Just hold still.” Stella said it as if it were no big deal, but her expression said something else. The scanning hoop lowered, but this time I was conscious of what was happening. It appeared they were only concerned with something in my head. The hoop made several passes up and down and then the scan ended.
“So?”
“Hold on, Guerin. Try and be patient.”
Stella went back to the console and was busy with something.
“What are you doing now?”
“We’re running a diagnostic on the equipment. It will take a few minutes and then we want to do another scan with you in stasis. Try not to worry so.”
“Whatever, Stella. There’s something wrong. I know it.”
About half an hour later they were done with their diagnostics and their last scan.
Stella motioned to one of the chairs at the desk in the room. “Have a seat.”
“What did you find? You found something.”
“Calm down, Guerin. We’re not sure. Let me try and explain what we saw.”
“Ok.”
“Alright. As you know the scanner places you in a temporal bubble of sorts. Inside we can slow down time to where, from the subject’s point of view, time virtually stops. All the internal processes in the subject’s body also essentially stop. We do this so we can get a good static snapshot of the subject’s physical condition.”
“I know that, Stella.”
“Let me finish.” Stella was getting upset with my interruptions. “Sometimes we need a dynamic picture to see how the physical processes are performing as well. That’s why we took the other scan with you not in stasis. We saw something odd in the first static scan, but nothing in the dynamic scan. That’s why we ran the diagnostic and reran the first scan. Still, there is something we can’t explain.”
“What is it?”
“While
in stasis, we recorded brain activity in two locations. There should have been no activity since you were in stasis. The dynamic scan showed the identical activity in those same areas. There is nothing unusual in the amount of brain activity, or the areas where we saw this activity, during the dynamic scan. What we can’t explain is why the activity in those two areas continued even when you were in stasis.”
“What does that mean?”
“We don’t know, Guerin. We ran the diagnostic just to rule out any sort of issue with our equipment. The diagnostic showed the equipment was working correctly. What we are seeing is not possible, at least not with our level of understanding. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“So, there’s a temporal anomaly in my brain?”
“There’s not always a simple answer, Guerin.”
“Then what, Julie? It was just a nightmare? Are you saying that what I experienced had nothing to do with this or not?”
“We simply don’t have an answer. We have sent out the results for our experts to study. They may have some ideas, and they may not. We would like to wait and rerun the test again tonight before you go to bed. Then again tomorrow morning after you wake up. We simply need more data.”
“We did take a memory dump and reviewed the time period in question. It was blank. From the dump, it appears you had a dreamless night sleeping. Nothing we’ve seen makes any sense.”
“So what you’re saying, Stella, is that I was right. It wasn’t simply a nightmare. There is something wrong.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, ok?” Stella was giving me one of those reassuring doctor looks. Don’t doctors know that when we see that look we know something’s wrong? “The fact that we can’t explain it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. How do you feel now?”
“I feel fine physically, but I’m anxious, or nervous. I don’t know why, but whatever it was, it has me concerned.”