Alien Nation #8 - Cross of Blood

by K. W. Jeter

  The pregnancy of Newcomer Cathy Frankel by her human boyfriend, Matt Sikes, ignites tensions city-wide as extremist groups who fear the implications of the birth of the first half-human/half-Newcomer child threaten Cathy’s safety. The danger escalates when the medical facility treating Cathy is attacked, forcing her into seclusion.

  Meanwhile, George Francisco is drawn into a Newcomer cult headed by a mysterious messianic figure. Obsessed with the cult, George quits the police force to devote all his time to his new religion.

  Now with his partner gone, Sikes must defend his newborn baby from a hostile band of criminals determined to destroy anyone who's different—even an innocent child.

  A worried expression crossed

  Cathy’s face as she

  adjusted her seat belt.

  “Maybe there really is something wrong.” She touched his arm as he slid in behind the steering wheel. “Maybe you’d better go back and—”

  He didn’t hear what else she said. Her words were swallowed up in a deafening roar, the shock wave of an explosion hitting them like a massive hammer, hard enough to rock the car sideways on its suspension.

  Sikes shielded her with his body, a rush of flame heat rolling over his back. With one forearm he gathered Cathy tight to his chest. He could just hear her gasp of shock as he looked back over his shoulder toward the clinic.

  Or where the clinic had been.

  As the first blackened fragments began to rain down upon the car, a tower of fire, churning with coils of smoke, rose into the sky.

  Alien Nation titles

  #1: The Day of Descent

  #2: Dark Horizon

  #3: Body and Soul

  #4: The Change

  #5: Slag Like Me

  #6: Passing Fancy

  #7: Extreme Prejudice

  #8: Cross of Blood

  Published by POCKET BOOKS

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 1995 by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.

  ALIEN NATION is a trademark of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-87184-6

  First Pocket Books printing July 1995

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  To Bob Stephens

  C H A P T E R 1

  THE DEAD SPOKE.

  It didn’t matter that he was dreaming, that he was safe in bed, his wife Susan beside him; George Francisco could feel the blankets across his chest, and still his hearts labored against the soft weight. Not fright, but dread, the wordless, deep perception of the sacred’s approach, tensed his pulse. He squeezed his eyes shut tighter, but the vision behind them remained.

  The dead spread wide its arms, the light of a world without form or substance streaming through the folds of a tattered robe, outlining the corpse that stood revealed before him.

  He could feel the sheet sweating in his clenched fists, but still there was no waking, no escape. He wanted to cry out to Susan, to rescue him—a touch of her hand, he knew, would be enough. She could still be asleep, and he would turn and wrap his own arms around her, and he would be safe . . . at least for another night. Until the next night’s dreaming.

  The dead spoke his name.

  That had never happened before, in all the chain of nights and dreams that had enwrapped him. Though he had known it was coming. It was inevitable. Every time that he had managed to fall asleep, the figure had stepped closer toward him. When he had first seen it—how many nights ago?—the robed figure had seemed hardly more than a distant speck, the light surrounding it a tunnel into an infinitely remote darkness. And now it stood so close to him, he could have reached out in his dreaming and touched it . . . if he had dared.

  Again, his name, in a whisper that was softer than his own forced breath. Not the name that had been given him on this world, the new home that his people had found, but his old one, in the gently curved and twined syllables that his people had spoken before. The name that the other dead, his mother and father, had given him.

  Stangya . . .

  He shook his head, feeling the back of his skull roll against the pillow. “No . . .” His murmured denial brushed across his lips. “That’s not my name. Not any more . . .”

  The figure’s pitying gaze—sensed, but not seen by him—pierced his breast. Your true name. The name of your blood.

  No reply was possible. He wanted to shout aloud, cry that his name, in the world outside his dreaming, was George and nothing more—it had to be. He was glad that the past was as dead as the figure who stood before him. But his voice stayed locked in his throat.

  Not dead. One of the outstretched arms turned, the shadowed hand reaching toward him. Nothing ever dies. You know that, don’t you?

  A stone broke inside, as though he had managed to strike it into shards with his fist. “No! You’re dead . . . it’s impossible . . .” His shouting rang inside his ear canals. “No—”

  “George?” Another voice, living but not his, spoke the name. “Honey, are you all right?”

  His eyes flew open, to the smaller, comforting darkness of the bedroom. Awake, not dreaming; his wife beside him; his panicked breath began to slow. Through the eyeletted curtains that Susan had mail-ordered from Lands’ End, the first smoldering red traces of dawn could be seen, cutting at a horizontal angle through L.A.’s dense air. He was grateful for that sight; it would only be a little while longer before the alarm clock on the bedside table went off in its usual trilling bomblike way. Even though he felt exhausted from the rigors of fitful sleep, it would be easier facing the daylight world than more of a night like this. Though they had all become like this lately, he noted glumly.

  “It’s nothing.” Propped up on one elbow, George leaned over and kissed his wife’s brow. “Don’t worry. I think perhaps I shouldn’t have eaten that squirrel pancreas just before coming to bed.” He thumped his breastbone with the side of his fist. “A bit too rich.”

  “Mm.” Susan sleepily regarded him. Eyes closing, she nuzzled her face against the pillow. “There was that infomercial . . . on the TV . . .” Her voice sank to a drowsy mumble. “Time lock for the refrigerator . . . maybe we should get that . . .”

  He didn’t have to say anything; she was already asleep. He lay back down, gazing at the ceiling’s faintly discernible outlines.

  Stangya . . .

  The dead’s voice, his name; it whispered in memory. He squeezed his eyes shut, not to sleep, but to make all that go away for a little while.

  It looked like Jesus had climbed down from the wall of Sister Mary Torquemada’s fourth grade classroom, presumably with the same heavy, brass-edged ruler in His hand that the parochial school nuns employed with such painful effectiveness. Inside Matt Sikes’s head, a nine-year-old boy was already crying out that he hadn’t done it. I mighta done it last time, but I didn’t do it this time. It was somebody else, honest to God . . .

  “Oh, man . . .” He could hear himself groaning aloud. He rolled his tongue around his dry mouth. The taste indicated that some small animal had camped there, sneaking in during the couple of hours in which he had actually managed to catch some sleep.

  One eye peeled open, enough to glance over at the figure beside him in the rumpled bedcovers. Cathy lay on one side, her back toward him; his thrashing around and mumbling didn’t seem to ha
ve woken her the way it had a couple of times before. His other eye opened, the better to study the tapering line of spots that ran down her spine. The other evening, he and Cathy had gone out fancy for dinner, celebrating the six-month ‘anniversary’ of her moving in with him. She had worn one of those slinky Newcomer fashion numbers that exposed her back right down to where the swell of her rounded butt started—it’d clicked right into boyhood memories of seeing Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, wearing a pretty similar item. When they’d gotten back home, he had kissed Cathy between the shoulder blades, and had discovered she’d put on something that both smelled and tasted kind of like cinnamon, the net effect of which had been like hooking his 110-volt libido up to a 220-volt wire.

  Simmer down, boy. Cathy’s spots were a lot more pleasant to contemplate than these Goddamn stupid dreams. Matt pushed his hair away from his sweat-dampened brow.

  The outstretched arms, with that spooky ghost light streaming from behind like the cheap special effects in some imitation Spielberg movie, was what made him think of Christ. Though there was no way the figure in the recurring dreams could be the Big Guy; the nuns’ bloodiest, stigmata-laden crucifixes had never inspired in him the same heart-pounding apprehension and shouting nerves that this nightly vision was capable of. The dreams were altogether creepier than whatever Catholic damage he might still be lugging around with him. How long had they been going on now? It seemed like months, maybe even years, though he knew rationally that it was only a matter of a few weeks. Though every single night, he reminded himself; no wonder he’d been traipsing into the station the last few mornings with dark raccoon circles under his eyes and generally feeling like the wrath of God. The other police detectives’ jokes, concerning the effect that stepping up to live-in status with Cathy was having on him, were getting pretty old.

  He sat up, swinging his legs out from under the covers and getting a cold shock from the floor on his bare feet. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that Cathy was still asleep, each small breath just barely visible in the blue streetlight that tinged the room. Quietly as possible, he stepped toward the bathroom.

  Sitting on the lowered lid of the john, an edge of cold porcelain against his back, Matt considered that there had been a time when he would have headed to the fridge for a beer after getting uprooted from sleep like that. Bad dreams and flashbacks were occupational hazards for cops—they came with the territory. Which meant alcohol was a hazard, too. But he’d cut way back on that dismal action, even before Cathy had moved in with him. One, to clean up his act for her sake, and two, just because it no longer seemed necessary. A six-pack of Rolling Rock lasted a month in the refrigerator these days. Why bother, when he could just as well wrap his arms around the woman he loved and lay his head in that angle of shoulder and neck that seemed like home—the one that nature on both Earth and Tencton had made for weary men.

  That was what worried him about these dreams. He knew he had a good thing going with Cathy; he didn’t want to screw it up. After the flaming wreckage of his long-ago first marriage, and the desperate fun of his born-again bachelor days, this was heaven on a bun. Nice time to start losing your mind, he thought glumly.

  He didn’t even know what the damn things meant. Only that the figure in the tattered robes, face shadowed in darkness, had gotten closer with each successive night’s dreaming; it had been the night before last when the figure had spread its arms in that Christ-like pose. And then this night . . .

  This night it had spoken to him.

  A shiver brushed across Sikes’s bare shoulders. Spooked to the max, even here in the little room’s bright mirrored light. Memory touched his heart with a fingertip of ice. First, the dream figure had spoken his name . . . Matthew . . . and that had been bad enough. How come nightmares always seemed to have your name and address in their Rolodexes? What came after that, though, had been worse. Something about a stream of blood—no, two streams of blood—that was what the creepy dream figure had whispered about. There had been more, but Sikes couldn’t remember it now; by that point, he had been scrambling up from the depths of sleep, like an out-of-air diver heading for the surface with aching lungs.

  That sure didn’t sound good. He slowly shook his head. Whatever the dream wanted to tell him, it didn’t seem like anything he wanted a piece of.

  He stood up, rubbing his stiff face. Through the window across from the sink, he looked out to the street three stories below. The streetlights flickered off as he watched; enough dawn light had seeped between the surrounding building to trigger the lamps’ photocells. Thank God it’s morning—he could shower, get dressed, and get out without any pretense about going back to bed for a couple more sleepless hours.

  In the apartment’s thin silvery light, he stood beside the bed, gazing down at Cathy. She was taking the day off from her job, something about a doctor’s appointment—nothing serious, just the results of her last checkup. But a good excuse to sleep late; he knew the kind of drowsy smile he’d get from her when he bent down and kissed her goodbye.

  Gathering up his trousers and a fresh shirt from the closet, he headed back to the bathroom. These dreams could go stuff themselves, as far as he was concerned. He’d come far enough awake to start feeling irritated about them.

  In the shower, he stood with the water stinging straight into his face, as though that would be enough to wash the dream shadows from his vision.

  He sat and watched her sleep. Sitting at the end of the bed, the lumpy contraption that folded out of the wall with a squeak of rusting metal—he’d tried oiling the ancient hinges and connections but it had done no good; she’d laughed and hugged him, and told him it didn’t matter. But somehow it still did matter to him, though he hadn’t told her so. Now, in the first light of morning, he sat holding his breath, keeping so still that he wouldn’t cause the slightest noise from the metal frame beneath them, so he wouldn’t wake her up.

  Albert knew it was time to get going, to get down the building’s unlit flights of stairs (sometimes the old elevator worked and sometimes it didn’t; he’d learned not to trust it) and out to the bus stop at the corner. The daily journey to the station required two transfers and over an hour each way; by the time he got to work, he was so exhausted from standing up, jammed tight with everybody else who was so poor they had to ride the RTD, that he could barely fumble the mop closet open.

  All these little spaces, the packed, grumbling bus and this tiny studio apartment—the kitchen was so small that for him and May to be in there at the same time required maneuvers like that Earth dance called a “waltz”—they all had some unpleasant memory hooked to them. He even knew what it was. To be so cramped up, feeling other people’s elbows in your ribs, their breath right in your face—that was the way it had been aboard the slave ships, the big silver-metal pods floating their way among the stars. Narrow bunks stacked on top of each other, dark corridors filled with the stink of unwashed sweat, the sounds of whispers and muffled, fearful sobbing . . . Albert’s spine contracted just thinking about those bad things.

  On the Day of Descent, the Tenctonese had been freed . . . of the Masters and the Overseers, and those little tiny spaces. Or at least some of them had; Albert looked around the apartment, such as it was, and felt a familiar glumness weigh down his soul. From slaves to Newcomers; it must have been worth it. Sometimes he couldn’t help wondering about that.

  You’d better go, he told himself; the hands on the plastic clock on top of the TV had inched farther around, just while he had been sitting here, watching May sleep. He’d come to dread the bus ride; sometimes there were tough tert kids aboard, Purist wannabes in their cheap green nylon jackets and high-laced ass-kicking boots. They always gave him a hard time, because they could tell he was a zabeet; he hated being called a retard and all the other nasty words they had in their mouths. He was sure that the only thing that kept them from beating him up was that they knew he worked at the police station, and that he had friends like Detective Sikes, who wasn’t aver
se to dispensing what he called “shoe-leather therapy.” Still, the glowering punks worried him. Some day, he knew, there’d be trouble.

  His shoulders lifted in a sigh. Wouldn’t it be nice, he thought, to crawl back into bed and fall back asleep, all nestled up against May? The way he could on Saturday and Sunday mornings, spending the whole day there with Mrs. Einstein—she liked to call herself that, she had ever since the day they’d gotten married, right in their friends George and Susan’s front room. This room here didn’t seem so small on mornings like that; it seemed like a little world all to itself.

  The notion of bed was so enticing that he just barely caught himself, toppling sideways toward her. Albert shook himself awake, through sheer will power. The bus ride, and the janitor job at the end of it—that was all for her; that was why he did it. He just wished . . . he could feel his hearts swelling, as though they might burst inside his chest . . . he just wished that what he did got more for her. More than this crummy little apartment; more of what she deserved. She was so pretty, sleeping like that . . .

  From the back of one of the kitchen chairs, he took his jacket and slipped it on. Zipping it up, the thought came to him about how wishes could come true. There must have been a lot of wishes aboard the slave ship to have brought everybody here to their new home. So it did work that way; it had to.

  He thought those things because he could feel the envelope inside the jacket’s pocket, the letter that had come for him yesterday. Even without opening it, he had felt the power radiating out of it, the power to make wishes and dreams come true. Somehow he just knew, as though the words on the folded piece of paper inside were as heavy as magic gold pieces in an old Earthly fairy tale.

  He hadn’t gotten a blink of sleep all last night, just from thinking about it all. May didn’t know; he hadn’t told her yet. But soon he’d have to. He’d have to open the envelope and read the letter inside, and then he’d have to tell her. That everything was going to change; nothing would be the same from then on . . .