Alien Nation #8 - Cross of Blood

by K. W. Jeter

  At the curb, the van turned right onto the street, heading past the empty delivery vehicles and lots fenced with barbed wire that filled the city’s industrial zone. A few seconds later the second of the two vans with its cargo of hardened HDL commandoes rolled out of the garage, turning left instead. The carefully drawn plans called for them to rendezvous at the hospital’s target site.

  “Looks good.” Noah checked his watch, synchronized with those worn by the rest of the team. The tip-off from their source inside the hospital had come less than five minutes ago. “We’d better get our asses in gear, too.”

  “You’re the boss.” The assault tech pulled himself up behind the wheel of the truck. He started the engine as Noah scrambled up beside him.

  Once outside, Noah waited until the truck had gone a block away from the garage; then he leaned out the passenger side window and thumbed the button of the small metal box in his hand. He felt the wash of heat against his face as the building went up, flames roaring out of the open door, then bursting through the roof in a churning fireball. A few seconds later, he could see people rushing out of the nearby buildings, alarmed by the roar of the explosion; they stopped in their tracks and stared at the fiercely burning ruins, shielding their faces with upraised arms.

  “There—” Noah turned back around in the truck’s cab. “That oughta keep some of ’em busy for a while.” As the assault tech drove farther away from the area, Noah expected that it wouldn’t be long before they heard the first sirens racing toward the scene, fire engines and police black-and-whites converging. That was part of the plan as well; now, not only were the signs of what the HDL assault team had been putting together in the garage effectively erased, but a distraction had been created, which should draw at least part of the LAPD’s forces away from the hospital.

  He touched the automatic slung at his hip, and felt a heart-speeding pump of excitement. Everything was happening at last, everything he had been waiting for.

  The smile made him hesitate. The smile, and the absolute calm the other man radiated. They spoke of knowledge greater than any George possessed.

  “I’m sorry I cannot act surprised.” Ahpossno’s gaze moved toward the gun, then back to George’s face. “Is that what you wanted? But I knew you would come here, intent upon this deed. When I told the other brethren that I wished to see you, I instructed them that no search was to be made of your person. Nothing was to impede your progress toward the destiny you had chosen for yourself.”

  “You knew that I was coming here to kill you?”

  “How could I not?” The shoulders inside the cassock lifted in a slight shrug. “I have walked inside your dreams, George Francisco. I know more of your thoughts and fears and hopes than you do, despite your efforts to turn your soul into a mask capable of concealing your intentions. The pain that you inflicted upon your own wife and family, the abandonment of them and your embracing this new faith, your apparent commitment to the Light and all you’ve done to help spread the message—who could doubt your sincerity? And no one does. Except for the one who can see more deeply into your soul, into what you truly believe.” Ahpossno’s gaze sharpened, piercing George like a lance of steel. “You believe that I am a being capable only of evil. That I bring only suffering and death to the Tenctonese people—”

  “And isn’t that the truth?” Anger flared inside of George. He squeezed the gun more tightly in his fist. “Even if I were to believe everything you’ve told me—how you came back from the dead, what you found there, how you made Matt and Cathy’s child possible—why should I alter my decision? It is death that you bring us; you’ve as much as said so. Are you so blind that you can’t see it? What you want to accomplish, this making one blood, one species, out of the Tenctonese and the humans—that would be the death of our people. We would no longer exist. Everything: our culture, our faith—our true faith, not this sham you’ve created—that would all be over. If what you say is true, we would eventually be reabsorbed back into the human species . . . or into some common species that both we and the humans were derived from. You would destroy us as surely, as completely, as the Purists would like to, if they could. And I’m not supposed to think of that as evil?”

  “There are others who believe as you do.” Ahpossno’s gaze had saddened, as though weighted with grief. “Not just the Purists, but others of the Tenctonese race as well. They don’t understand, and neither do you. This is the only way possible for any of us, Tenctonese or human. None of us will survive; the hatred and fear that divides our species will consume us. We can become one blood again, or we can lie in our separate graves. There is no alternative. That is the Light I have brought to this world. It is the way out of this trap that the slave-masters put us into, so many thousands of years ago.”

  “I don’t believe that.” The weight of the gun had dropped George’s hand a few inches while he had listened to Ahpossno. The renewed determination in his hearts brought the weapon back up, its muzzle on a straight line into the other’s chest. “And I’m not going to let it happen. I came here on my own; I quit the police so I would be able to do what I knew I would have to. I’m not bound by the oaths I took to uphold the law.”

  “You are bound by laws greater than those.” In silence, Ahpossno looked upon him, and the unwavering gun in his hand, then spoke again. “Go ahead, then. How can the dead be afraid of death?”

  He squeezed the trigger. He willed his finger to tighten upon the tiny curve of metal, to send the bullet crashing into the other’s chest. He willed the simple action, the entire force of his being concentrated into the muscles of his forearm, the tendons that contracted his fist . . .

  Nothing happened. His hand stayed frozen, motionless upon the weapon rendered useless.

  “You see?” Ahpossno’s voice became a whisper once more, as though speaking in the dreams that held this smaller world. “There is part of your soul that knows I am right. Your will is mine, if I will it so. And I have work here yet to do.”

  He closed his eyes, the gun a cold weight that he tried to crush in his grip but couldn’t. With an anguished cry, George threw the gun away. Blindly, he turned and pushed through the door behind him, stumbling out into the corridors beyond, fleeing from the gaze that had pierced his innermost being.

  They let him hold his son for only a few minutes. Then the baby was whisked away from him and Cathy. “We need to check out a couple more things,” the lead obstetrician told Sikes. “Just to be absolutely sure there are no problems.”

  “ ‘Problems?’ ” Sikes followed the doctors to the corridor outside the delivery room. He heard his own voice rising with a sudden anxiety. “What kinda problems are you talking about?”

  “Hey, calm down.” The obstetrician gave him what was meant to be a reassuring thump on the arm. “Don’t worry. This looks like one healthy kid, all right? And I should know, I’ve had a lot more experience in this business than you.” The other doctors, along with the cart the baby was riding in—it looked unnervingly like a chrome version of the cart with which the inter office mail deliveries were made at the police station—were already heading toward the double doors at the end of the corridor. “Just relax and catch your breath. I’ll probably be right back out in about ten minutes or so and we’ll have a lot to talk about then.” The lead obstetrician turned away and followed the scrub-clad parade.

  “She’s taking a rest,” said the nurse barring his way in to see Cathy. “A well-earned one.”

  He was finally allowed to sit down in the obstetrician’s office, and given a Styrofoam cup of brackish cafeteria coffee. On the other side of the door, he heard footsteps and indeterminate voices, and all the other slightly mysterious noises that hospitals emit when somebody is sitting in a room by himself and wondering what the hell is going on. Sikes stripped off the green outfit and the face mask that had gotten looped around his throat, and pitched them on top of the obstetrician’s file cabinet. He sat leaning forward, alternately sipping the coffee and wishing he hadn
’t.

  “There you are . . .” The office door swung open and the obstetrician strode in, carrying a sheaf of assorted papers, computer print-outs, and X-ray sheets under his arm. “I was afraid you might have gotten lost.”

  “Yeah, right.” Sikes set the coffee down on the corner of the desk. “So what’s the verdict?”

  “Same as I told you before.” The obstetrician shrugged. “Most parents should be so lucky. Your son’s as healthy as the proverbial horse.”

  “Okay . . .” He nodded slowly. “That’s cool. But, uh . . . like what is he? I mean . . . I didn’t really get a very good look at him back there in the delivery room. You guys snatched him out of my arms like he was an intercepted pass or something; next thing I knew, you were in the opposite end zone with him.” Sikes made a vague, confused gesture with both hands. “So is he a human kid, or is he like Cathy, or what?”

  “Well . . .” The doctor started to spread the papers out on the desk.

  “Don’t give me ‘Well,’ just tell me.”

  The obstetrician sighed. “Mr. Sikes. A lot is going to depend on some pretty extensive lab analysis of the tissue samples we took from your son—don’t worry, they were little tiny samples. We’ll be doing a full genetic workup on the boy, but that’s going to take a few days just to get the preliminary data. This infant—your child, Mr. Sikes—represents an unparalleled scientific opportunity for scientists all over the world; we’ll be working for years on all this information—”

  “Hold it.” Sikes leaned across the desk. “Just wait a minute, doc. If you think you’re going to stick some kid of mine in a laboratory somewhere and wire him up with electrodes, lemme tell ya, that ain’t gonna happen.”

  “Please.” The obstetrician held up a hand against Sikes’s fury. “We have absolutely no intention of doing anything like that. After all—” A disarming smile appeared on his face. “That would be unethical, wouldn’t it? Believe me, if anything interferes with you and Cathy and your baby having a perfectly normal family life together, it won’t come from any kind of research being done. All right?”

  Sikes nodded. He knew what the obstetrician was talking about. The hospital, with its guards at every door, was a little bubble of safety. The big bad world, with all its maniacs and murderers, lay outside. Shit, he thought sourly. We’ll have to deal with that when the time comes.

  “Anyway,” continued the obstetrician, “I want you to understand that what I’m telling you now is just based on our first examination of your son. Here, take a look at these.” He handed a photo, then a second one, across the desk. “We just took these.”

  The first Polaroid showed the same red, squinty face Sikes had seen in the delivery room; in the second, the small head had been turned to one side. “Looks like a baby, all right.” Actually, it looked more like a shaved and boiled monkey, but he had thought for a long time that that was what all newborns looked like.

  “If you look closely—” The obstetrician leaned over the spread-out papers and tapped the photos with a ball-point pen. “You’ll see that’s there an interesting cross of human and Newcomer characteristics. Underneath this fine, dark hair that the baby was born with—he gets that from your side, of course—there’s a light scattering of Tenctonese-like head spots. They’re more visible here, where they taper down the neck and a little farther along the spine. Also in the profile shot, you can see the formation of the ear. The pinnae—that’s the outer ear—is almost entirely absent; the distinctive Tenctonese ear canal shape is there, but with an actual opening rather than a membrane covering . . .”

  Sikes nodded as he listened to the doctor’s description. Somehow it all sounded perfectly fine to him. He supposed that was an indication of how used to the appearance of Newcomers he had gotten over the years—more than ‘used to,’ in the case of Cathy. So there didn’t seem anything wrong with a combination of her looks and his. “What about the, uh, stuff on the inside? Like his heart?”

  “Your son has a single heart, completely human in structure from what we’ve been able to determine so far, not the Tenctonese double heart. In fact, physiologically this infant seems to be almost entirely human; if there is any significant difference in either the gross internal or cellular makeup, we haven’t found it yet. Of course, we’ve just started looking. But it does raise some interesting possibilities about what we’ll find in the genotype analysis: either this child is essentially human in nature, with very little genetic donation from its Tenctonese parent, or the Tenctonese genes are largely recessive when combined with the dominant human genes . . .”

  Once again, he found himself listening to the obstetrician with fading attention. The baby was all right, healthy and sound; that was all that mattered. Sikes felt as if some iron coil that had been wound up tight inside himself for over half a year had suddenly been allowed to relax. There was stuff he was going to have to tell these doctors, about what Quinn had told him before being killed right in front of him, but that could wait. Right now, all he wanted to do was find whatever room they had taken Cathy to and, even if she were asleep, just sit there beside her bed.

  “Look, doc, maybe we better talk about some of this stuff later. Like tomorrow, maybe—”

  That was when all hell broke loose. The sound of an explosion—a big one, and close, right inside the hospital—slammed into his eardrums, with enough sudden shock to almost knock him off his chair.

  “What the—” Sikes’s ears were still ringing as he gripped the chair arms and pushed himself up. Across the desk from him, the obstetrician stared in unfocussed surprise, eyes wide and mouth gaping open. Sikes shoved the chair away and dove for the office door.

  Turmoil filled the corridor outside, the light of the overhead fluorescent panels dimmed by pungent smoke. Through it, Sikes could make out the milling, white-coated figures of the hospital staff, and the darker shapes of several guards running past the central nursing station. A shot rang out in the distance, echoing along the walls like thunder; a guard fell and tumbled with the bullet’s impact, stopping at the feet of one of the nurses. Her scream was blotted out by the sharp percussive blast of an impact grenade; the glaring light flash came from far enough away that Sikes wasn’t blinded, his vision filling instead with a static overlay of wavering, purplish after-images. Shielding his eyes with his forearm, he ran toward the intersection of the corridors with his gun drawn from inside his jacket.

  He spotted the others then, a half-dozen men in black combat gear, faces masked with terrorist-style balaclavas. Concealed by the explosion’s smoke, Sikes braced himself flat against the wall, just as one of the black-clad figures raked a burst of automatic rifle fire across the stunned and blinded guards. The intruders hadn’t caught sight of him; he kept his spine and the back of his head to the wall, watching as the group’s apparent leader fanned the rest out across the area.

  Something had gone wrong; the shriek of alarm sirens had already started to cut through the air, but Sikes knew that more guards, drawn from their posts throughout the building, should have been pouring onto the scene. The security arrangements must have been broached from the inside; either the automatic lock-down panels had been triggered, sealing this floor off from the rest of the building, or the HDL hit team—he knew instinctively that it must be a Purist operation—had already taken out the other guards.

  An electric charge shot up his spine as he saw one of the intruders coming back down the corridor on the other side of the nursing station. The man had his assault rifle slung in one hand; the other was gripped tight on Nurse Eward’s elbow as he hustled her along. In the nurse’s arms was a cloth-wrapped bundle . . . just big enough to be a newborn infant.

  Force of will kept Sikes against the opposite corridor’s wall; his impulse had been to hurl himself forward, straight toward the sonuvabitch who was endangering his son. The coldly rational part of his mind told him that he would be cut down in seconds by the rest of the HDL team; even if he could get off a shot of his own, it was too much
to risk with the child and the nurse in the middle of the action. Sikes ground his teeth together in impotent fury, the gun sweating in his grip.

  He crouched down, silently creeping toward the wall’s corner. From this angle, he could see only a tight wedge of the space around the nursing station, but he was close enough to hear the men’s voices.

  “Okay, we got what we came for.” The leader’s voice was only slightly muffled by the balaclava over his mouth. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He’d heard that voice before, but he couldn’t place it. Shifting a few inches away from the wall, he kept himself close to the floor, gun poised ahead.

  “We’re getting out, all right.” A harsher, deeper-pitched voice answered. “But this brat’s not going anywhere.”

  His heart thudded in his chest as he raised his head. He could see, just past the counter of the nursing station, the tallest of the group of intruders shoving the muzzle of a rifle against the bundle in Eward’s arms.

  “What the hell are you doing?” The group’s leader gripped the other’s forearm. “You know the orders Bryant gave us. We’re supposed to take it out of here alive—”

  “Bryant’s lost it.” The sneer in the man’s voice was easily discernible. “She’s been locked up so long she doesn’t know what’s going on anymore.” He shoved the other’s hand away. “Something like this doesn’t deserve to live.”

  The group’s leader grabbed the rifle’s muzzle, wrestling it away from the small bundle. There could be no waiting now. Sikes aimed and fired, steadying the gun in his doubled fists. The bullet caught the man in the angle between his neck and shoulder, knocking him back from the nurse, the assault rifle flying in an arc behind him. One hand reached out and clawed across the group leader’s face; the fingers snagged the eyeholes, tearing the thin cloth away as the man fell.

  Sikes had no time to see the leader’s face. The rest of the assault team had snapped alert at the sound of the gunshot. He rolled into the safety of the corridor’s other wall as a quick hail of bullets spattered across the floor where he had been.