by Maia Starr
“You okay?” Baxley asked, pulling me close to him. With a hint of guilt, he added, “I saw the Vithohn fall; thought you’d make it out okay.”
“And here I am,” I said, but I wasn’t okay.
I was far from ‘okay.’
“Tiffany Caites was with one of them,” I said evenly. “After you left.”
“What?” he grimaced. “How do you mean?”
“I mean holding one another, fighting together,” I shrugged and raised both my brows, surprised at my next sentence, “Kissing.”
Baxley blinked, digesting the information.
“She took out her gun; she was ready.”
“Ready to what?” he nipped, wanting me to get on with it.
“Ready to shoot me,” I offered, sounding as perplexed as he looked.
I told him what I knew: that they were both looking for the one we killed, they talked, then they kissed and left. Baxley expressed just as much shock as I did that the creature was talking.
Vithohn were renowned for their almost mindless aggression. When some sort of prey or enemy was in sight, they weren’t prone to reasoning or sitting down for a healthy chat. They went right for the jugular, literally.
“You’re sure he was talking?” he asked for the second time.
“Positive,” I said firmly. “He spotted me.”
“She distracted him?”
“No,” I shook my head. “He let me go.”
Baxley’s eyes were so dark they looked almost black in the night; he exhaled, and a plume of white breath flowed out from his lips. “You sure, kid?”
“I know it sounds weird, but yeah. We locked eyes for like, a solid minute. The guy just… let me go. Told her he didn’t find anything.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah,” I said absent-mindedly. “You know…”
“What?” he said sternly. “That sounds like the start of a sentence I’m not going to like.”
I laughed. “You won’t.”
“Out with it then.”
“Well,” I breathed into my hands, “Karen had this theory she was working on. Something like… how the Vithohn aren’t fully formed. Or that they have this gene that can be quelled to stop the madness.”
“Stop the madness!” he repeated with dramatic emphasis; throwing his hands skyward with a laugh.
I laughed along with him and then let my voice go somber. “She said if we can mate with them, something clicks. Their aggression goes away, or something.”
“If you mate with them?” he repeated, disgusted.
“Hey, she didn’t
“Clearly she knows your love for the salacious side of stories.”
I offered him a playful wink and then shrugged; then I asked, “So, what do you think?”
Baxley drew his brows into a deep frown, creasing the lines on his forehead so much it made me want to smooth it out with my thumbs.
“Go get your gun,” was his only reply.
Baxley gave me exactly thirty minutes to get my shit together before calling a meeting of our militia.
I walked into my trailer, with its shag carpeting and purple walls. My favorite item I’d ever procured from six years back was when we still lived at Wainsfleet farm, packing and cowering in a tin storage unit like anchovies. We were scouring the farmhouse for food or supplies, and I’d come across a giant flower pillow, bright pink and yellow, in a little girl’s room.
At first, I’d felt guilty about taking it, along with the matching flowered quilt that lay strewn across the little girl’s bed, but I convinced myself that the dead inhabitant of the farm wouldn’t miss it since she wouldn’t be coming back.
It was my prized possession, and I knew that the day we had to leave our trailer park home, I would make damn sure to take it with me then, too.
I splashed my face with water and stared at the cascade of freckles that trickled across my fair skin; my deep red hair was making me look like some sort of vixen.
Baxley said I was wild; he said that’s what he liked about me. I was a real rough and tumble kind of kid, and one of the rare ones who couldn’t remember what it was like before the Vithohn came, so I was born ready to fight.
I scraped the last of my lip balm out of the measly tin I’d been trying to salvage for the last two years and smattered it across my chapped lips. Then I grabbed my coat, my guns, and headed for the door.
We all met outside of Baxley’s trailer: a pale-yellow unit that must have been white at some point or another. It had a distinct green stripe around the top of it, making it easy to find when we’d first moved in. It also had a handful of plastic flowers that decorated its front, even during the winter months.
A large bonfire boomed from within a metal trash bin, warming the lot of us who sat in a semi-circle.
“Tell us what you saw out there, kid,” Baxley spoke in his gravelly voice, lighting up a cigarette and taking a quick puff on it.
The small audience of my fellow soldiers looked at me like I had a tale to tell and I wondered what Baxley had made our little venture in the woods out to be.
As I repeated the story—Karen’s theory—Baxley frowned at me, taking another long drag from his cigarette.
“So here’s the deal,” Baxley said into the crowd. “If Karen really believed that the creatures go straight-lined after mating, then I think that’s a theory worth checking out. Especially if what Sidney’s saying is right about the Vithohn talking. Sounds like Karen and Tiffany are already establishing a relationship with these creatures.”
“Are you kidding me?” the wispy blonde, Evelyn, spat out. Her Southern drawl always got heavier when she was mad, and right now she seemed entirely pissed. “And you wanna send ‘Sid out to be the guinea pig?”
She said it like I was special. Like she knew something I didn’t; that it would be appalling for him to choose me of all people. I cocked a brow at this but said nothing, feeling awkward and centered out.
“Yeah,” Baxley snapped. “Sid knows exactly what she’s doing. She has more experience with fighting these things, outsmarting these things, than the rest of us put together.”
Our commodore then looked at me for confirmation: for my consent to go out and be raped by one of these creatures or to seduce it, as though that were any different.
Still, I nodded.
I heard a wave of sighs and gasps throughout our little militia, and I looked around in wonder.
Another voice sounded up then: Rebecca Downes. She was thirty-six years old, a full-chested woman with round saucer eyes and auburn hair.
“Are you sending in a team or just Sid?” she asked, perplexed and slightly terrified.
“We’ll be watching from afar; we’ll do check-ins,” Baxley said. “But you think we’re sending in—”
Before he had a chance to finish his sentence, Rebecca was already cutting him off. “Are the Vithohn cognizant enough to recognize whether that would be suspicious or not?”
Baxley inhaled from the stub of his cigarette then, smoking it right down to the filter before throwing it to the ground and stubbing it out with his boot heel.
He looked at me with some unease and said, “Sidney says she saw one of them in conversation; that one let her go. If that’s true, then maybe.”
“What?” Evelyn looked at me. “Why did he let you go?”
“All of our studies have shown these things are driven by instinct,” Rebecca said surely. “Driven by aggression. Are you sure he saw you?”
“We made direct eye-contact,” I said, getting my back up already.
For they love me and don’t want to see me go, now they question me.
“Are you sure?” the auburn woman pleaded.
“I’m sure,” I snapped.
“Then…” Rebecca relented: conceded to our orders, “I guess it’s something we have to look into.”
“Of course it is,” Baxley said, gathering up a bag of pre-packed supplies and walking it over to me slowly. “Karen believed that when they pair
with a mate, there is a hormone released in their bloodstream that wakes them up. Makes them cognizant; gives them some perception and understanding.” He looked down at the papers he’d taken from Karen’s trailer and then finished, “Like being born again.”
“What does that mean?” came yet another protest from a bald man in his mid-forties.
His name was Roy, but I always loved calling him by his full name: Roy Kenneth Darwin. It always sounded so badass to me when I was a kid.
He had a cool-dad vibe; very tough but funny. Someone you both want to hear stories from and stories about.
“Karen seemed to think that the Vithohn don’t have thoughts or perception until they mate,” Baxley enunciated.
I felt like we’d been over the topic for hours already.
“You’re sending her to sleep with the thing?” Roy Kenneth Darwin spat, looking and sounding disgusted. “That’s so dangerous, I don’t even know where to begin my argument.”
“Yep,” Baxley snipped, dropping the bag into my hand. “It’s dangerous. There’s a chance he could rip her apart before even getting… to that.”
“That’s for the visual,” I snarked.
Baxley offered me a playful salute, his only reprieve from the annoyance he was feeling with the rest of our crew.
“That’s your answer?” Roy Kenneth Darwin said, incredulous. “Really?”
“What other choice do we have?” Rebecca now argued. “We have to follow through with every lead. And if Tiffany’s there…” The girl looked at me then, eyes pleading as she whispered, “You saw her, right?”
I nodded.
“Then there has to be some truth to her theory,” she affirmed. “We have to follow up.”
“Or not!” Roy Kenneth Darwin argued, throwing his hands up into the air and closing the semi-circle gap between him and Baxley. “Or maybe we finally admit we lost! The war happened, and we lost, and now this is our lives.”
Evelyn cleared her throat; her tiny frame was looking so out of place in this big argument as she whimpered, “Or we…”
“What?” the man snapped at her, thinking he was coming to my defense somehow. “We have Sid screw them into submission?”
“If it works?” Rebecca stammered. “Yeah! That’s exactly what we do! Otherwise, we’re dead. We’ve all agreed to take risks, right?”
“Enough!” I finally yelled; my head was pounding from the cold and the arguing. “Look, all I know is that when this thing looked at me, he saw me. There’s something to it, guys, and we have the power to make these creatures disposed to reason, then we have to try. You guys may not be willing to go do the footwork, and I don’t mean that as a shot against anyone, but I am.”
“What’s the plan, then?” Evelyn asked.
Baxley offered me sincere eyes and said, “We send Sid to the grassland to the north.”
“Why there?” came another voice from the crowd: someone I couldn’t spot.
“I’ve seen the Vithohn there a number of times. They scout around, eat, gather… One at a time, or at the very least, in a small group,” Baxley began. “Sid shows up there, then there’s a higher chance she can get one-on-one time with the thing.”
“And how does she do this without getting…” Roy Kenneth Darwin began but seemed to think better of his sentence.
Without getting killed is what he wanted to say.
Instead, he finished, “While staying safe?”
“We send Lele with her,” Baxley said, speaking of our resident cyborg. She was a beautiful robot with gorgeous brown hair. “She’s armed. Sid will go out there, try to make a connection.” Then he looked at me. “You’ll have to come at him straight away; you got it?”
I could tell it pained him to ask it of me. A voluntary rape. His eyes darkened as he looked in my direction and I nodded as though he’d given me any other mundane order that served us day to day. I tried to look professional; tried to shield him from any guilt.
“Once he’s claimed you, you’ll continue to establish a connection with him, then find the girls, Tiffany and Karen. Try and get in contact with us, unless it’s too difficult. Find a way to bring him back here. Then we get information out of him, lock him up, and go from there.”
The night wore on, talking about what I might do to seduce the alien lifeform and gain his trust.
We’d long left our group in the middle of Sunnydale, and I found myself drawn to Baxley’s trailer, watching the flakes of paint come off the railing leading up to his door and rapping gently on it before walking in.
Walking in felt brave and brazen: characteristics I had taken on drunken nights of days past. I thought I might catch him in bed, but he was sitting at his desk, loading and unloading the cartridge of his gun.
His ears pricked back when my footsteps hit the floor, and I walked up to him, setting a hand on his shoulder.
“This is it, kid?” he said, not looking at me.
“Wise man once said it’s better to leave at night,” I teased. “They have bad night vision, right?”
“We don’t know if they can sense heat or not,” he warned numbly.
“It’s okay,” I smirked. “I run cold, remember?”
He grabbed my hand then and pulled it from his shoulder and up to his lips, the hairs of his beard bristling against me as his square lips made contact with my eternally-cold hands.
I swallowed as he made the movement, remembered that he was my commodore, but still, I left my hand in his when he finished the peck.
“Scared?” he asked, still not making eye contact.
I shook my head, and he finally turned to me.
“You?” I asked.
“Damn well terrified,” he laughed bitterly.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I teased, and he pulled me into his lap. He leaned back so that my whole body could fit on him, taking me into his arms even as I pulled my legs up to my chest. I thumbed across the cleft of his chin and leaned in, tasting his lips with mine.
He followed my lead, as he did in most moments where I breached the boundaries of our relationship. His tongue flicked into my mouth, and I felt a lilt in my chest that made me want to do things we didn’t have the time, or the emotional capacity, for at the moment.
I pulled back, finally breaking out contact and then pressed my forehead up against his.
“I’m terrified,” he repeated with a big swallow.
“Don’t do that,” I whispered with a sad laugh, smelling his salty breath on me while our faces were still so close together. “If you’re okay, I’m okay: remember?”
“Yeah,” he breathed.
I allowed myself one minute longer of utter silence with the older man, and then I stood up, fast, and briskly walked across the small trailer.
“Lele’s waiting,” I said, signaling my leave.
The doorknob turned in my palm, and I didn’t wait for him to say goodbye.
Chapter Four
Tessoul
“Don’t touch that!”
Yet another order I wasn’t fond of hearing. Still, coming from Jareth, my short little friend who I’d grown quite attached to, it sounded quite comical.
I looked through the various gadgets and buttons hoisted on the metal walls of the science lab and then turned to a frantic Jareth, a Yaclion species, who was talking gibberish into a recording device.
While the Vithohn were towering, broad creatures, the Yaclion barely came up to my thigh. He was a blue being in heavy armor to hide his scrawny figure. Long, wispy arms and thick stubby legs assured the land dwellers moved slowly.
“I’m so glad to see you arrived safely, Tessoul,” Jareth said, waving me over to him.
Jareth inhabited the science wing of our space-station base. He was always coming up with new ideas and weapons for us: ways to cultivate food. Sometimes I thought he was the smartest among us.
In fact, I knew he was.
He was the only one of us who had managed to figure out how to put human technology to good u
se.
“The wind is so cold out there,” he weaseled, brushing his shoulders with his long, thin arms and bristling his four immense fingers against them. “I hate it.”
“I’m troubled,” I said, dismissing his interest in human weather.
“I sense that,” he said. He had a good knack for that. “Do you want to see what I’m working on? Earth has fascinating resources.”
“Sure, why not,” I laughed, walking up to his table. “Lay it on me.”
A collection of swords and pistols were laid out before me, and I began fingering each weapon, hearing their descriptions with fascination as Jareth spouted off.
He had a narrow, square jaw and round skull with a rock-hard fin set in the middle of his forehead. His eyes protruded from his face, big and red, and his nose consisted of two small slits.
I picked up one of the pistols and felt it in my hand, crisp and rubbery as the grip bumped against my palm. It felt good.
Really good.
Jareth had a massive arsenal he’d accumulated for the Vithohn, yet I still couldn’t shake the need to destroy with my bare hands. To be able to feel what was happening, not just to make it happen.
“You’re in poor spirits, friend,” Jareth said, seeming to remember somewhat late that I’d come to him with a problem. He spoke slowly, with a nasal drawl. He was an eager, scatterbrained genius. But still a genius.
He continued to lay out various gadgets and tech onto the matted table, toddling slowly across the office. “What seems to be troubling you?”
“My commander,” I breathed.
His red eyes went wide, and I could tell he wanted to smile, but he didn’t.
“Best not to say that too loud,” he offered shyly.
“Let him hear!” I yelled: my voice echoing across the lab.
“Temper, temper!” he swatted a tall finger at me. “Now, what’s the problem?”
“The humans,” I said.
He blinked. “Well, is it your commander or the humans?”
I chuckled, taking a seat in the tiny, swirling stool at the counter. “It’s both.”
“Ah. The humans.” Jareth look startled, running his hands along the weapons over and over again like he was nervous about something.