by Elin Wyn
“Yes, anti-alienists shot them down on their way back from a supply run. Cazak and Sakev were nearly killed, and a lot of the anti-alienists died.”
“Intriguing. And most useful.”
My father—no, not my father, the thing wearing his skin—had heard of how two good men had nearly been killed, and he thought it was intriguing. I was truly disgusted by what had been done to him.
“Thank you for this information, offspring. I want you to know that we are not heartless beings. I am sorry for the pain I am about to cause you.”
“Pain?” I stepped away from the bars, fearing the worst. Could my father, under the Ancient Enemy's control, tear right through the bars of his cell?
My father's mouth opened so wide I could see his molars. He let out a scream which would have been more appropriate in a jungle or zoo than coming out of a man's mouth. Later, I would realize it was the same type of scream the newly possessed made.
He dashed across the cell toward the concrete wall. At the last moment, he ducked his head and a sickening thud made me cover my mouth in horror.
My father fell backward, his forehead bleeding into his left eye. But he didn't blink, and the white of his eye soon turned crimson with the constant flow of blood. Another scream ripped from his mouth, and he charged at the opposite side of his cell.
“Father, stop! You're killing yourself.”
I couldn't watch as he slammed into the wall again.
The room was monitored and as security guards rushed to the door, I hoped that they’d stop him.
But it didn’t work. The door was jammed from the inside with something alien I couldn’t make out.
I closed my eyes. When I opened my eyes, there were two matching bloodstains on opposite sides of the cell. Groggily, my father rose to his feet and swayed a moment before taking aim at the iron bars which separated us.
“No, don't make him do this, please.” I had changed my appeal to the one in control of the moment, which was the Ancient Enemy. “Stop. Please don't hurt him anymore.”
The alien entity screamed, and charged for the bars. The resounding impact rang in my ears for what felt like an eternity. My father fell to the concrete floor, bleeding badly. He lifted his head with difficulty, and one of his eyeballs dangled from the socket by a strand of bloody tissue.
“Oh my god.” I covered my mouth with both hands. I wanted to vomit, I wanted to scream, I wanted to run away, but all I could do was watch as my father's body was pushed back to its feet by the monster in the driver's seat.
He screamed again, a guttural, horrid sound, and half-ran, half-stumbled across the cell toward the first bloodstain he had made. My eyes remained transfixed in utter, gruesome fascination as his head crashed into the unyielding concrete. That time, that final time, there was a wet sound, akin to a ripe melon being dropped on the floor.
My father fell backward onto the cold concrete, his forehead caved in. The bloody mask that used to be his face made me scream until my throat was raw.
Dead. My father was dead. And I had watched him be murdered right before my eyes.
Cazak
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat at the council table, hemmed in on all sides by bigwigs. I felt like a teeny tiny fish in a gigantic ocean.
I knew Sybil had been planning to visit her father that day, but I couldn’t miss this.
No one could.
General Rouhr was in charge of the proceedings. The severe military commander had an uncharacteristically worried frown adorning his already dour face. Given the topic of conversation, I didn’t blame him one bit.
Fen, Evie, Dottie, and the rest of the science crew were part of the proceedings, as well. The science types seemed less worried than the rest of us, more focused on their tasks. I guess it goes with being a scientist. They were looking at the Ancient Enemies as a problem to be solved, rather than a terrifying force which could seize control of any of them at the drop of a hat.
Most of the strike teams were present as well, including our leadership. Sk’lar had an inscrutable, blank expression on his ebony face. But then again, my commander always was hard to read, so he could have been panicking on the inside for all I knew. You’d never have known from his poise, though.
Cousin Jalok was on duty, so I didn’t see him in the chamber, but Sakev was there. Our recent experience with the anti-alienist movement seemed to make us expert witnesses, or something.
You couldn’t turn around without running into somebody important in that room. In short, it was the last place I wanted to be, other than a battlefield.
The room buzzed with low conversations, most of them focused on the Ancient Enemies, but more than a few sounded personal. It seemed like many of the people in that chamber knew someone, even if only by proxy, who had suffered a possession-type event.
At length, General Rouhr rose to his feet and tapped his metal drinking vessel on the table. The conversations died down to a total hush quickly, but he waited patiently while everyone settled in and turned their attention toward him.
“I’m certain that many of you know that this meeting was called so we could disseminate information about our new, daunting foes, the Ancient Enemies. We’ve made something of a break-through, thanks to the efforts of Fen and the Puppet Master.”
It was at that point that I realized there was another presence in the chamber, even if it was only mental. The Puppet Master’s consciousness was focused on that room, and once I picked up on his telepathic presence, I was unsure as to why I hadn’t noticed it before.
General Rouhr turned his gaze on Fen.
“Doctor, if you’d care to take the floor?”
Fen stood up and took us all in with her gaze. As a Urai, she’d always been inscrutable, but her eyes burned with a cold passion that made me especially uncomfortable on that day.
“For months we’ve been plagued by enemies which we cannot see, or touch, or smell, or sense in any tangible way. These incorporeal beings have wormed their way into our midst without triggering any alarms, or providing the slightest clues as to their motivations. I’m sure many of you know someone who was possessed by these mysterious and enigmatic life forms.”
Her digital voice seemed ominous as it emanated from her box, even though it had the same calm tone as ever.
A lot of nods went around the table, including my own. I couldn’t help but feel a stab of sympathy for what Sybil was going through with her father. I hoped that they were able to treat him at the detention center and figure out a way to return him to normal.
“We’ve been referring to these strange creatures as the Ancient Enemies, because that’s what the Puppet Master’s species called them. However, while working together with our erstwhile host, I managed to find the true origins of our foes, and their true names.”
Gasps went around the council chamber. General Rouhr didn’t seem to be surprised, so I figured he’d been updated on that information already. He banged his vessel on the table a few more times until the room grew silent.
Once it was quiet, Fen continued her oration.
“We believe that the Ancient Enemies were once a race called the Gorgoxians.”
She fiddled with her datapad, and a holographic display came up in the center of the table. The Gorgoxians seemed much like any other sapient race we’d encountered, with two locomotion limbs and two for manipulation of their environment. Of the various species occupying the council chamber, they most resembled humans.
“These Gorgoxians were very scientifically advanced, light years ahead of their closest neighbors. According to our research, they had solved many of their society’s problems except for one. They had no answer for the eventual expiration of their physical bodies.”
I took a drink of water from my own vessel and swallowed hard. I didn’t like the implications of what she was saying, not one bit.
“That’s right. The Gorgoxians decided to do their level best and cheat death itself. They found a way—we are unsure of how they
managed it, exactly—but the Gorgoxians managed to shed their physical forms and became incorporeal beings of pure energy.”
That jibed with everything we’d learned so far. I was wondering when they were going to get to the good part, though.
How were we going to kill them?
Fen continued with her lecture after the chamber calmed down once again.
“It gets worse, I’m afraid. It turns out that we’ve been fighting the Gorgoxians all along, albeit by proxy.”
She changed the settings on her datapad, and the image of the Gorgoxian disappeared, replaced with the insectoid form we were all too familiar with, the Xathi.
“It would seem that once the Gorgoxians had shed their physical forms, they were unable to directly interact with the physical world. They solved that problem by taking over the bodies of corporeal creatures. We believe it was their influence that led the Urai to create the Xathi in the first place. They manipulated races to breed disorder and chaos.”
Angry, agitated comments rolled through the chamber. Rouhr had to bang his cup several times in an increasingly forceful manner to get silence.
“What’s more,” Fen continued, “the Gorgoxians were the ones who taught the Urai how to use rift technology. When we began to use it, we awoke the Gorgoxians from whatever torpor they had fallen into, and brought them on us.”
Sk’lar and I exchanged glances. The rifts had been extremely useful, and then, all of a sudden, Fen had refused to allow any of us to actually use them. Now we understood why.
I wondered if the Gorgoxians had had anything to do with Tyehn and Maki winding up in the Puppet Master’s main antechamber when they attempted to rift out of the jungle. I only succeeded in making my head hurt. I’m no scientist.
“We can only guess at the Gorgoxian’s intentions, but all of our guesses seem to indicate they are hostile. If they are taking over humans, which they claim make fabulous hosts, then we are on the precipice of a new war, a war which will make the battle against the Xathi seem like a schoolyard scuffle.”
The chamber erupted into questions. It took Fen several moments to get some semblance of order so she could begin to answer them.
“Yes, Commander Sk’lar?”
Sk’lar stood up and straightened his uniform.
“Fen, have you come up with any countermeasures we can use to guard against possession?”
Fen shook her head.
“No, we have not.” She indicated another member of the council, Daxion. The crossbow-wielding warrior didn’t bother to stand up to ask his query.
“Fen, do we have any avenue of attack against the Ancient—I mean, the Gorgoxians?”
Fen's expression didn't change when she spoke again.
“No. We do not.”
That set the chamber into a near panic. Everyone was talking at once, until General Rouhr grew frustrated and declared the meeting at an end.
Many of the beings in the chamber began to filter out, still agitated. I suspected that even though the meeting was supposed to be classified, the news would quickly spread across the colony.
I rose from my seat and started working my way through the throng toward the exit. General Rouhr bent low to take a call at his console, and his face fell as if someone had just walked over his grave.
“Wait, Cazak.” He summoned me over with a furtive gesture.
“Yes, General?”
He looked at me grimly for a moment before speaking again.
“I need you to head to the detention center right away. There’s been a—a development.”
My blood ran cold, because the first thought in my mind was that Sybil had been injured or possessed.
“What kind of development?”
If the general picked up on the panic in my voice, he gave no sign.
“It’s Mayor Anatosian. He’s dead.”
I took off out of the chamber at a dead run. Sybil. My poor Sybil.
Sybil
Someone was holding me.
I looked up to see Cazak’s orange face looking down at me and his eyes looked as if he had been crying.
Why was he crying?
It wasn’t his father that had been taken over and killed by some being that no one knew anything about.
Everything felt distant, wrapped in cotton.
It wasn’t his father that had bounced his skull off the side of the cell so many times that it broke open and spilled blood and brains onto his face and onto the floor.
Oh my god, my father was dead.
I didn’t bother to hold it back anymore. I just let the sobs rack my body and I cried into Cazak’s chest.
I didn’t know how long I’d cried for and I no longer cared. I didn’t care about anything anymore. There was no point.
There was nothing left for me, except memories.
Like the ones I had of my mother. She was a beautiful woman, full of life and nothing but smiles. Even when she was mad and disappointed, she always found a way to smile. She’d probably find a way to smile at this, as well. She’d probably say something like, “Baby, keep your head up. Your father wouldn’t want you to dwell on the final moments when his mind and body were not his own. You need to focus on the good things, the happy memories. Do you remember that one time camping out by the waterfall?”
Of course, I did remember the waterfall. It was one of the happiest moments our family had had. It was also the last happy memory we had before my mother was diagnosed with a disease we determined recently to be called NOX. NOX, that genetic disease that ended up killing everyone afflicted with it before, or shortly after, they turned fifty.
Mother was fifty-one.
I didn’t have it, though. It may have been genetic, but apparently it could skip a generation. She had gotten it from her mother, but so far, I’d been spared.
I was given a clean health report as recently as three months ago, but I’d always go in for tests.
The waterfall trip had been fun. Dad had set aside everything business and political to spend an entire week camping with us. And he was terrible at it, but we didn’t tell him that. The fact that he had been trying so hard to camp, to look like he knew what he was doing, and to look like he was happy, we didn’t want to mess that up. And, he was happy.
We all were. We spent an entire week at that waterfall that we had found by accident. Instead of making the turn that we always made to go to the small lake in the mountains like we did every year, Dad had missed the turn, swearing that he hadn’t. Then we’d ended up finding the waterfall, and everything was perfect.
It wasn’t a big one, maybe ten or twelve feet tall, but it was fed by an amazingly clear stream that dropped into a beautiful pool of water that was so insanely clear and cold, that it was impossible to stay out of it. We had, after bravely getting ourselves used to the temperature of the water, spent the first day swimming and playing together.
I was fourteen at the time.
I had been growing into the role of a teenager, the one that didn’t want her parents around. The one that was petulant and mean because her friends were that way. The one where fashion and material things were more important than taking care of the people around you.
But that week at the waterfall, all of that meant nothing. All of that was gone as I spent time with my parents and hurt myself laughing. We weren’t a successfully rich family, we were just a family. We weren’t politically oriented, we were family oriented.
The third night there was etched into my memory. We had gone hiking earlier in the day, found a small pond full of fish and fished, then went back to the waterfall to cook them and eat them. We had gotten up at first light and had a nice breakfast. Then, while we were hiking, my mom and dad were holding hands and smiling at each other.
That was something they hadn’t done outside of the house in years, thanks to my dad’s public persona. They were happy, and I was happy. I didn’t have a care in the world and I wasn’t a teenager anymore, I was a little girl with her parents.
&n
bsp; I laughed when dad broke his fishing pole. He had cast out the line, gotten it stuck somehow, and in a little fit of frustration, yanked on it and snapped the thing. The look on his face when his super expensive, unbreakable fishing pole broke, my mom and I laughed until we were in tears, and I still laughed. I’d laughed so hard, I’d pulled a muscle in my ribs. I spent the next few days groaning in pain whenever I laughed or took a deep breath.
But it had been worth it. That look on his face had been so priceless. He did better with my spare pole. We ended up fishing for hours and had a competition on who could catch more fish, me or him. Poor mom, she tried so hard, but she only caught one fish, never able to set the hook right.
It came down to me and dad, and he cheated. I had the fish on the line, everything was set and I was reeling it in, then, when dad grabbed the net to help get the fish out of the water, he “slipped” and dropped the net, letting my fish go. He caught one more before we left, giving him the nine-to-eight win.
He’d cheated. Not that I’d cared, really. We had fun and we were acting like a family.
Then, three days after we got home from the trip, mom got sick and we rushed her to the hospital. That’s when we found out about the NOX. That’s when dad stopped smiling and got really serious. He had me tested so many times, the doctors said I was anemic.
Seven years later, four hundred tests later, only a few dozen times smiling together as a family, and mother was in the hospital, dying. My last memory of my mother was seeing her connected to machines with dozens of tubes that were monitoring her, helping her breathe, and beeping in rhythm to her heartbeat.
Daddy didn’t want me to see her that way, so he led me out of the room. She was gone a few minutes later.
Just like dad was now. Both of my parents taken by something I couldn’t see. Both of my parents killed in front of me by something I couldn’t see, something I couldn’t understand, something that I couldn’t fathom. And all I wanted was to get away from it all.