I stand on my feet and head towards Jay’s tent. Right then, everything that happened back in the shuttle comes back to me. By constantly being in this form, Jay has started to lose his mind. I can’t sleep with him, not when I don’t know if I’ll wake up alive. Every other day I would have trusted him with my life, but tonight, I want to keep it for myself.
So, when I turn and head toward Silver’s tent, I fumble the grip of the laser gun I keep on me.
I have many people I want to protect as well, and I’ll do everything in my power to do so, even if I have to lose everything in the process.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 21
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jay
The morning comes, and Pyro wakes us up. It’s time to start for the City Hall. Silver managed to calculate the position of the energy signal, so it’s easier to plan our route there. I feel better than last night, but still, my feet are a bit wobbly, and my neck is stiff. My eyes are also sensitive to the light, but in every other way, I’m perfectly fine.
You aren’t fine, Jasih. You’re falling apart. You have to change back. You have to let me out.
His voice comes to me clear as day, way louder than the dream I had last night or any other occasion until now. How does he get to have such a strong connection to this body while I have not?
You’re a parasite. You never belonged to this body, to begin with. You’re just a live armor, and I’m the owner of this body. You have to understand that!
Okay, now he can invade into my thoughts, too. I kinda preferred it when he didn’t talk at all. Now I just want to hit him in the face, but I know that it will hurt me more. We share a fucking body.
I feel some kind of discomfort deep into my stomach. He’s forcing me out of this body, but I’m not that weak yet. I can still endure his shit. I don’t give a damn, you hear me? You gave me control of this body. She loves me more, and you know it. Don’t resist.
“Jay, are you okay?” Dale suddenly appears out of nowhere. “We have to start towards the City Hall as soon as we can. Get ready as fast as you can.” He’s the only one that bothered to check up on me since we woke up this morning. Eladia, on the other hand, is nowhere to be found.
“Yeah, I’m fine!”
He arches his brows in surprise. I was more aggressive with him than I wanted. Does he hate me now, too? Does he also think that I’m only a parasite born to obey his orders? Shit, don’t they get it? I’m fucking alive.
He turns his back on me and walks ahead. He finds Pyro and whispers something to the other man. He shakes his head. What the hell did he say to him?
“Good morning, Jay.” Eladia’s voice calms me down a bit. She does a good job distracting me for a moment.
“Where have you been?”
Again, I talk louder than I want. What’s wrong with me? It’s like I can control my body anymore.
“Hey, tone it down a bit. We’re in the middle of the danger zone. If they hear you, we’re gonna have to fight them,” she says.
“Fight who? I thought we were alone on this planet. Isn’t this planet Purged or something?”
“Come on, Jay. We talked about this in the briefing two days ago. No, the planet is still populated by undead monsters that destroy everything in their path. They are highly sensitive to sounds and will attack us if they spot us. But, it’s not only that. Dale thinks that there are also black-maskers here. We have to be careful if we want to get to the City Hall without any more troubles,” she explains to me in a calm, condescending tone.
Still, Dale this, Dale that. Isn’t she the one that was calling him with his last name until yesterday?
“You and the doctor—are you back to being friends?” I say.
She shakes her head and looks at me with disappointment in her eyes. “Didn’t you hear me? We have more important problems now than my relationship with Dale.”
“Maybe this is the only things that really matters to me right now. After all, you didn’t come to our tent last night. Was there a reason to that?”
“Fuck off, Jay,” she suddenly says. “First, you threaten me and then you act like nothing has changed between us? Go to hell,” she bursts out.
Why is she angry at me? Why I roar at her? I only understand what I’ve done after my cry echoes through the empty streets of Mosa.
“Are you out of your mind?” Pyro quickly bellows to me.
But it’s too late already.
The first attack comes from behind me. I hear the haunting sound of a body crawling behind me. A man, missing a hand and a leg, is trying to get me, but it’s moving way too slow to be any danger to anyone. I kick him in the head and then I return to the rest of the crew. Only then I see the horde of monsters amassing around us, pushing us to the corner of our camp.
They all have that metal thing on their heads, a flashing red button that keeps on shimmering. The crew, everyone except Silver and Zan, quickly get in formation. That means that Pyro, Dale, and Eladia are standing back-to-back and examine the horde getting closer to them, ready to devour them.
The undead hesitate to come closer to us at first, but like wild animals being hungry as hell, they soon decide that dying is worth it if they just manage to get a bite on us.
My bloodlust gives me the strength I need to fight them. I smack their craniums on the ground and kick them back as fast as I can, but where I manage to kill one, two more appear. It’s fucking impossible to kill them all. At that moment, Zan and Silver decide to join the battle. Morphing into her thruster form, Silver burns the bodies to a pulp. Zan, on the other hand, uses a metal staff, one similar to Eladia’s staff, to pierce their heads and kill them on the spot.
They don’t need me to help them; they don’t need anyone to help them anymore. They move fast and efficiently, taking out three to four of them with one sweep. Eladia and Dale move in unison, clearing wave after wave of the undead until a small pile of bodies gathers around them. Pyro, on the other hand, is a lone wolf using an old fashioned sword to sever their heads, but never even breaking a sweat.
I...well, I’m struggling with three of them, but soon, I keep up with the rest of the team. It’s almost funny how we get to kill people without having to regret it afterward. I would be genuinely happy if I wasn’t too tired of this shit. I really need to sleep.
After I kick the heads of three undead humans off their bodies, I stop and see that there’s no one left to fight. We managed to kill them all in a matter of minutes, a feat that we wouldn’t have been able to manage a year ago. Eladia, especially, was in the heat of the battle and after the end of it, she looks like this has been just a warm up exercise to her.
I walk closer to her to congratulate her only for Dale to stop me with a punch in the face.
“What the fuck?” I shout at him.
“You could have killed us all. You endangered this whole mission, and almost killed Eladia and even yourself with this nonsense. Keep your shit together, Jasih, or else wait here until we clear the City Hall and then come in. Millions of lives depend on us! Don’t fuck this up!”
I stare at him and then at Eladia; they all look at me like I’m a piece of shit.
Before I can say anything, they all move ahead, leaving me behind. At that moment, I understand. My anger is deep-rooted, and my mission is now clear in my head. Humans are the most selfish and unstable creatures of the Galaxy. It’s them that I have to destroy, not the Phadh.
I sink my hand deep into my pocket and fumble the cube. It’s warm, bursting with power. I feel the same too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 22
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Eladia
Three hours of walking can have their toll on you, especially when you start your day with an all-out battle against zombies and an unstable man that doesn’t know when to stop. Jay is way behind us, walking all by himself. Dale...well, he shouldn’t have done that. But he was right. Mosa is in no way the place it used to be before. Danger is lurking behin
d every corner.
It sort of reminds me of Primordial Earth, the place this adventure began. Instead of booming plantation and trees matching buildings in width and height, the planet is a forest of debris and half-buildings. How can dead humans cause that much destruction? Does someone control them?
In my mind, the first time we met those monsters pops up. It was back in the hospital while Jay, the platinum-skinned one, was severely wounded. We’ve just met Dale back then and didn’t know anything about his true identity, but still, he was able to help us in his own way, coming up with solutions about Jay and his alien nature.
Back then, the undead monsters appeared out of nowhere and almost killed us. Except they mysteriously stopped when they had the chance to do it. They had frozen in place and didn’t move until we were safe and they were unable to reach us. Dale thinks that the Originators control them, but I’m not so sure anymore. Aren’t they the ones that wanted us dead back then? Why didn’t they finish their jobs when they could?
I’m not sure about anything, anymore. Pyro, never removing his mask, is the most suspicious of them all. The Organization is nowhere to be found, and the Ocean, the other high-ranked member, isn’t here to help. I don’t know if I’m supposed to ask or anything, but I’m starting to feel less certain about the people I walk with.
Dale has done everything in his power to train and protect me, but he also told me that I’m just as important to the mission as Jay is. What did he mean by that?
“We’ll stop here for now,” Pyro suddenly says.
His voice snaps me out of my train of thoughts. Still, it strikes me as odd that he, of all the people, ordered us to stop before arriving at the City Hall. If anything, I thought he would want us to get in and out as fast as humanly possible. Something is going on.
I move closer to them; Pyro sees me and stops talking. “What do you want?” he asks, calmly.
“Why did we stop? I thought you wanted to get there as soon as possible. We’re losing light, and we’re not equipped for a night raid,” I say. Dale has also trained me to work in a team and made me memorize various pieces of equipment so that I could use them all with closed eyes. It was a busy year after all.
“For such a promising operative, you lack the perspective and the leading skills of a professional. Take a look around and tell me, what do you see?” Pyro tells me.
I follow his order and look around me. I see destroyed buildings, a thick, cloudless sky that’s sickeningly bright, and a team of exhausted members unable to keep going. Well, Zan and Jay are the ones that seem that way. I, Dale, and Pyro could go on for some more before stopping, and Silver is an Android. Androids don’t get tired last time I checked.
“Now I get it. You want all of us to be ready for the fight in the City Hall. That means that you’re probably expecting heavy resistance.” He nods and I can sense a smile forming behind his mask. “So, you believe that the black-maskers are here too and that it’s them that orchestrated the attack on Mosa, right?”
The words come out of my mouth as I’m thinking them; I’ve never connected the dots of the Mosa incident to the black-maskers before, but it actually makes sense. They’re everywhere; on Zeania, on Mosa, on every planet, we have been so far.
“Now, there you go. You can be perceptive after all. You have to keep this attitude every waking moment if you want to survive in this world girl. If only we had more time, I would’ve sent you to Ocean to train you and then you’d be all mine for a year. Yeah, that would have been great,” he says.
“I don’t plan on being an assassin any longer than I have to. And I don’t belong to this organization. You have to understand that my goal is knowledge and not killing off strategic targets with a religious fervor. I’m not a fanatic; I’m a scholar,” I say.
I can hear him giggle behind his mask; why doesn’t he ever remove that damned thing off his face to reveal his identity? What is he thinking?
“For a scholar, you’ve done a pretty good job hiding that laser gun. Also, your trail of dead bodies is too long already, even if they’re not of the living kind, but you’ve become way too attached at killing for survival. We all started like that but look at us now. We’re saving the Galaxy for the fifth time this generation.”
The fifth time? What is he talking about? “What do you mean?”
Pyro was ready to tell me, but Dale stopped him. “Eladia, you don’t belong to this world. If you learn more about it than what you already know, then you have to be ready for the consequences. You can’t live in the darkness if you’ve seen the light. And what Pyro is talking about is some kind of sick, twisted light that will drag you in and consume your life. So let it go and find a way to calm your friend. He’s still not in a fighting position, and we’ll need his strength down the road.”
Dale is looking at me straight in the eyes; I can’t look away, not before what he said sinks in. Being a scholar means you have to use your mind and logic to analyze your findings and then take your decisions. But right now, I feel an itch deep in my heart, the same itch that drove me in asking Jay to change so that I could choose him over his platinum-skinned self.
Yesterday I decided to never follow that itch again, no matter how much it bothered me. So, when I turn my body and move towards Jay, I mean to forget of that itch and stop using my heart to take my decisions. I have to use my head, and my head tells me that Jay has to change back long enough to recover. If he doesn’t, then he’ll die way before we arrive at the City Hall.
When I get right beside him, I think of what Pyro told me before. I’ve been hiding a laser gun in my pocket for some time now, but it seems that both of them had noticed. The old Jay would have noticed too in mere moments, but this ashen creature standing before me doesn’t have his mind into noticing anything.
He just keeps his hand in his pocket and stares at him, worn out with black circles under his eyes. Jay is on the brink of a mental breakdown, and history has taught me that when this Esuh gives in to his emotions, bad things happen.
I steel myself and get ready to talk to him.
“Hey,” I say.
“What? Are you here to mock the parasite as well?” he says with a tired, calm voice. He’s...different.
“You’re out of your mind, Jay. You can’t keep going on like that. You have to change to your other form so that you don’t drag the team behind. You’re in no shape to fight like this.”
Suddenly, I feel like he stabs me in the heart with his hollow, hateful eyes. My hand is itching to draw my gun out and use it on him, but I decide to trust my instincts once again and just take a step back.
“You humans think you know everything. All you talk about is how your feelings change you, how you fall in love with someone and then when you abandon them for the next, best thing, you don’t feel guilty or anything. I’m tired of your bullshit, Eladia. You were the one that asked me to get to this form, so deal with it.”
Okay, that’s it. I’m done with being reasonable.
“I asked you to be your fun, adventurous self, Jay, not this horrible thing you’ve become. I love you and every different color of you. I’m just asking for you to step down and recover before the big fight. Why can’t you understand that?”
He shakes his head and presses his lips tightly. Then he turns his head and walks away. I can’t even cry anymore. My hands rest on gun’s grip. He’s not the same person I met a year ago. However, I’m not the same person as I was a year ago, too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 23
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jay
Walking down the big streets of Mosa is a torture. My feet hurt, my back hurts, everything on my body seems to plot against me so that the other son of the bitch can regain control of this body.
He has to understand though that this isn’t just his body. It’s our body. We share it. He has to understand that. But no one understands, especially that whore, Eladia. She loves both of us, huh? She loves the one that makes her feel bette
r about herself, and now, I’m not doing a good enough job.
The other Jasih doesn’t talk that much anymore. He spends his time sighing, twisting my guts inside, making me want to puke every other step. Why is he such a prick himself? Can’t he just give up and let go of this body? I would have done the same thing if I could.
The walking gets faster and more intense, meaning we’re probably getting closer. I want to stop and explore this marvelous city, the one I used to hate so much before. Right now, destroyed and empty, it’s just a memory of its glorious past. It’s like us; me and Jasih. And it’s fine. The city’s dark side fits me better after all.
Alien Romance Box Set: Alien Cube: The Sci-FI Alien Invasion Romance (Books 1-5) Page 31