Alien Nation #8 - Cross of Blood

by K. W. Jeter

  “We’ve got company.” Noah took his hand away from his brow and pointed. “They’ve caught up with us.”

  Buck leaned his hands against the bottom edge of the Jeep’s fender and looked where the outstretched hand indicated. A long dust cloud was settling in the distance, out in the barren countryside. Closer than that, where the strip of road diminished to the horizon, another vehicle could be seen, a dark speck growing larger with each second and heartbeat. “Who’s that? Your friends in the HDL?”

  “Look—” Noah turned a slit-eyed glare toward him. “I don’t need you getting on my case about my being hooked up with these guys. I know it was a mistake, so just back off, all right?”

  He made no reply; even if there had been time to argue about the point, Buck could see no reason to. Another memory flash had unreeled inside his head, something he’d viewed on a blurry TV screen in the lobby of a run-down hotel: the image of Noah Ramsey preventing another member of the hospital assault team from blowing away Matt’s and Cathy’s baby, the baby that the little girl Aalice was holding right now. Plus, Buck knew, he’d put his ass on the line by scooping the baby and Aalice out of the HDL camp and hitting the road with them. So if Noah’s brain hadn’t been ratchetted down too tight when he’d gotten involved with these Purist bastards, at least he’d tried to make up for it since.

  “Fine,” said Buck. “We can talk about all this some other time. Right now, what are we going to do about these guys?” He pointed back toward the road.

  “Frankly—I’m not in the mood for letting them get any closer.” Noah ducked his head and upper torso inside the upside-down Jeep and rummaged through the other articles that had been strapped to the floorboard. He re-emerged holding a high-powered rifle complete with a telescopic sight. “There’s nothing I feel like talking about with this bunch.” Noah shoved an ammo clip into place, then laid the barrel across the Jeep’s underside, bringing his face tight against the scope’s eyepiece. “Keep your heads down.”

  The rifle shot brought a howl from the baby. Crouching down, Buck peered through the Jeep’s interior. Either Noah was a natural marksman or the HDL had put him through some kind of field training; the windshield of the approaching vehicle shattered and flew apart, specks of glass flying bright in the desert sun. Buck watched as the vehicle swerved crazily, its tires smoking against the strip of asphalt as the driver slammed on the brakes. It came to rest turned sideways, half off the road and onto the gravel shoulder. He could see the men who’d been inside the vehicle scrambling out and taking cover behind it.

  “There,” said Noah with grim satisfaction. “That oughta give ’em something to think about for a while.” He ducked down beside Buck and Aalice when a the sound of a distant rifle-shot was followed instantly by the ping of the bullet hitting the other side of the Jeep.

  Buck leaned his shoulders against the sun-heated metal. “Is there another gun in here?”

  “No.” Holding the rifle to his chest, Noah gave a shake of his head. “This was the only one I had time to stash.”

  “How much ammunition you got?”

  A sudden volley of shots, from more than one weapon, raked the ground at either end of the Jeep. Holding the baby tight, Aalice pressed herself closer to Buck.

  Noah pointed to a couple more clips he had laid out on the ground. “That’s it.”

  “Oh, that’s great.” Buck shook his head. “We just got the one rifle, this many bullets—and there’s how many of those guys? With how many guns?” Another shot and clang of metal made him duck instinctively. “Boy, I don’t recall you being any whiz at math when we were in school, but I didn’t know you were this bad at it.”

  “You’re such a genius, then you figure out what to do.”

  “Could you open this for me?” Between them, Aalice held up one of the cans of formula. “I might as well feed the baby, while you two sort it out.”

  Feeling somewhat surreal, Buck managed to get a bottle assembled for the infant. Aalice winced every time another bullet hit the other side of the Jeep, but the two children stayed quiet otherwise. The kid must trust us, thought Buck, watching her tend the baby. He wished he felt as confident of the outcome as she appeared to be.

  “Maybe if we can hold ’em off until dark—” Noah fumbled a new clip into the rifle. “Then we might be able to sneak away. We could reach the next town or something.”

  Keeping his head low, Buck leaned closer to Noah. He didn’t want the little girl to hear him. “I don’t think we’re going to get that chance.” He pointed toward another section of the road. “Check it out.”

  In the distance, a couple of figures had moved away from the vehicle that Noah’s rifle-fire had pinned down. He narrowed his gaze at the scope’s eyepiece, trying to follow their movements. “What do you think they’re doing?”

  “Probably circling around us.” Looking over his own shoulder, Buck studied the terrain behind them. A low rise sloped up from the desert floor. “So they can get a clear shot from another angle.”

  “Wait a minute. They stopped.” Noah lowered the rifle. “Now what?”

  His hearts thudding in his chest, Buck took the risk of bringing his head above the level of the Jeep. He looked past one of the rear tires; in the distance, the pair of HDL members who had moved away from their vehicle had taken a position in the gully at the road’s edge. Eyes straining, he could just discern the actions of the two men.

  “They’re setting up something,” said Buck. “It’s got legs like a tripod, but it’s not—”

  “Damn!” Noah gritted his teeth. “They must’ve brought out some of the heavier armaments they had stashed back at the camp—”

  The words were hardly out of Noah’s mouth before a hollow whump sounded from the roadside. A streak of light, trailing brown smoke, shot in a low arc toward them. It hit the ground with a louder explosion a few yards away; flame blossomed in a churning column, stray fragments of fire raining in a wider pattern. The incendiary smell hit Buck’s nostrils at the same time a sharp-edged wave of heat pulsed across him and the others.

  “They’re just getting their range—” Hunched over with the rifle, Noah watched the small group of HDL members below the road’s edge, then turned toward Buck, his face set grim. “Get out of here! Take the girl and the baby—start running—go on!”

  Without thinking, Buck took the infant, from Aalice, holding the small bundle against his chest; Noah’s command had struck him as hard as any of the bullets plowing up the desert around them. “What is it? What’s going to happen?”

  “Don’t you see?” With the rifle barrel, Noah gestured toward the distant road. “They’re aiming for the Jeep—the next shot will be right on the gas tank!” With his free hand, he gave Buck a hard push in the shoulder. “Go on—get out of here!”

  Buck grabbed Aalice by the arm, yanking her to her feet, just as the sound of another projectile was heard. He glanced up and saw the trail arcing at a higher angle, reaching its highest point, then curving back toward the ground. With the baby cradled against his chest, he turned and started running, dragging the little girl only a step behind himself.

  He heard and felt the explosion, but didn’t see it. A fiercer heat struck their backs, sending him and Aalice sprawling forward in the loose sand; he rolled against his shoulder, protecting the baby. Pulling himself up on one knee, he looked back and saw the Jeep transformed into a blackened hulk, the frame and tires roiling with flame and dense, inky smoke. A few feet away, Noah lay face down, his HDL uniform ripped and charred. One hand clawed futilely toward the rifle that had been knocked from his grasp.

  Instinct made Buck take one step back toward the burning Jeep, to try to help Noah. Then he saw the other men running across the road, their weapons held before them. The first bullets lanced into the sand at Buck’s feet.

  He still had hold of the baby; with his other hand, he scooped up Aalice beneath her arm. Clutching his burdens tight against himself, he ran. His feet dug into the pebbly gravel of
the nearest rise, his hearts pounding in his chest as he tried to reach the crest and the safety of the other side . . .

  Another shot seemed louder than all the rest. It was wrapped in silence that expanded outward from a sudden, almost painless impact at the back of one thigh. Keep running, he told himself, but somehow he couldn’t; something was wrong, the earth and his own body had dropped beneath him, and he was falling.

  The bullet’s shock had spun him around, so he landed on his back. He could hear the baby crying, as though from a long way distant—but it was still there in the crook of his arm. He couldn’t see Aalice.

  Farther away, there were more rifle shots. He tried to push himself up from the ground but couldn’t, collapsing back against the loose sand. For a moment he closed his eyes, wincing against the sun’s glare.

  A shadow fell across him; Buck could feel it. Bigger than a man, big enough to set all the earth around him into eclipse. A shadow that roared, a loud mechanical thup thup thup. He’d heard that sound before, but couldn’t remember what it was . . .

  Then he opened his eyes, and saw it hovering in the sky above.

  Behind him, the gunshots were still audible as he ran. Some of the Human Defense League thugs had stood their ground when the helicopter had appeared overhead, turning their guns up toward it. From the side hatch of the chopper, the BNA agents and the members of the LAPD’s security team had returned fire, pinning down the HDL members and sending a smaller group of them scattering from their open position on the roadside. As the helicopter had settled several yards away from the burning Jeep, Sikes had vaulted out even before the struts had touched ground. The wind from the blades whipped up a storm of dust around him. Head down, he was just barely aware of George right behind.

  The figure on the ground was still conscious. Sikes recognized him as soon as he bent down and pulled him over onto one shoulder; the uniform’s charred fabric smeared ash into Sikes’s palm. “Where are they?” Sikes’s urgent shout cut through the desert air. “Where’d they go?”

  Noah Ramsey could barely speak. “There . . .” he breathed, one arm flopping toward the footprints leading away from the Jeep. His eyelids fluttered closed as Sikes lowered him back to the ground.

  “There they are!” George stood beside Sikes and pointed toward the spot where the tracks ended, near the crest of a low rise. Lifting his head, Sikes could see another figure splayed out, with a smaller one, a child, kneeling next to it.

  Behind them, the gunshots died out as the police and BNA agents rounded up the last of the HDL members. A little girl gazed wide-eyed at the two men who came running toward her.

  Blood had soaked into the earth around Buck, from the bullet wound in his leg. With one hand, he had managed to roll himself onto his hip. “Matt . . .” A weak, slightly delirious smile passed across his face as he held up a squalling bundle. “I think . . . this belongs to you . . .”

  Sikes snatched up the bundle, bringing it close before his eyes. With one hand, he brushed back the edge of the dust-soiled blanket. The tiny face that he had seen so briefly at the hospital in Los Angeles was puckered and reddened, his eyes squeezed shut as the toothless mouth emitted its gasping wail.

  As he held his son, hands pressing the warm bundle against his own chest, he could see the little girl standing a few feet away, her silent, watchful gaze taking in everything that happened. His partner George knelt down beside Buck, stanching the flow of blood with a wadded-up handkerchief.

  “You’ll be all right.” George’s voice was controlled and soothing. “We brought a full medical team with us. They’ll take care of everything.”

  “Don’t worry . . . about me . . .” Buck laid his head back against the ground. “The baby . . .”

  “He’s fine.” A wild joy surged through Sikes. He turned the bundle slightly in his grasp to show the others. At the bottom of the rise, he could see the white-suited doctors racing up toward them. “All that stuff that Quinn had in his notes—it’s not true! The baby’s fine!”

  The wail suddenly choked off. In Sikes’s arms, a sharp convulsive shudder twisted through the bundle. He looked down and saw the tiny eyes had snapped open, the centers of the pupils filled with trembling black space. The small face had drained deathly white, the mouth gulping for breath. He watched in horror as a pinkish bubble, the color of Tenctonese blood, burst at the corner of the baby’s lips.

  “Give him to me—” The lead doctor had appeared in front of Sikes, with the others behind. He reached to take the bundle from Sikes’s arms.

  “No!” Sikes backed away from the wall of faces that circled before him. His grip tightened, pressing the baby even closer against himself. He shook his head. “No! you can’t have him!”

  “Matt . . . please . . .” George stretched his hand toward Sikes’s shoulder. “Give them the baby. There’s still a chance . . .”

  “Nobody’s taking him!” The wall forced him back another step. He could hear his own voice shouting out of control, the empty landscape shrinking toward the tiny, trembling thing he held. “Nobody . . . get away!”

  His partner grabbed him from behind, pulling his arms back as the doctor snatched the baby from his grasp. The shouting turned wordless and incoherent, his struggling desperate enough to topple both him and George onto the ground.

  “Matt . . . don’t . . .” George’s weight and strength pinned him down. Sikes reached past the figure above him, hands clawing futilely toward the doctors rushing the small, fragile creature toward the helicopter. “You can’t take him . . . you can’t . . .”

  The world that had been so small, a space that he could hold in his arms, opened around him. A world that was once more vast, echoing . . . and empty.

  C H A P T E R 1 7

  “THERE WASN’T ANYTHING we could do . . .”

  She sat with him, with her husband, on the edge of their bed. With the house and its rooms all around them, spaces that had seemed empty when he hadn’t been there, even with the voices and sounds of their children still present. The emptiness had been in her hearts, Susan knew. For now, although she realized there were still so many things left to be taken care of, for now all that mattered was that he was with her again.

  “Nothing anyone could do.” Despite all that he had done, a tone of weary defeat sounded in George’s voice. He had stopped halfway through tying his shoelaces, as though that small task was momentarily beyond what remained of his strength.

  Susan pressed herself close to him, her arm around his shoulders, head bent toward his, trying to give him some of her strength, of what they shared between them. And listening to him, though she had already heard it all. But listening because she knew that he had to talk it through again.

  “Doctor Quinn was right.” George slowly nodded, his gaze resting sightless on the bedroom’s distant wall. “We knew he was. That was his job, after all—to know all about what happens with matings between humans and Newcomers. And what happens to the children . . . the babies.” His shoulders lifted, followed by a deep sigh. “He knew because he had seen it happen before. With the first child, the first hybrid infant. Maybe that one would’ve been named Aalice, if it had lived more than a few days.”

  She said nothing, feeling a chill against her own skin, grief for a baby that had died so long ago, less than a year after the Day of Descent, when the Tenctonese people had stepped onto the soil of this world. A baby that had had no chance to live, that had been doomed from the beginning by the conflict inside its own small body.

  “That was what Matt and I found in Quinn’s research notes . . .” George’s voice was little more than a whisper in the bedroom’s silence. “That was what made poor Matt even more desperate to find his and Cathy’s child . . . before time ran out. Before the doctors could at least try to save it.” He squeezed his hand together, the knuckles bloodless. “Quinn knew it all along; that had been the whole point of what he had been trying to do, to find a way around the essential instability of a Tenctonese/human hybrid. He ca
lled the condition ‘inter-genetic warfare.’ ” Another slow nod. “It could never be. We should’ve known it was too much to hope for. With a cross between humans and Tenctonese, the result isn’t a true reversion to an original, common stock. The human genetics are dominant for only a little while after the birth of a hybrid. The Tenctonese genetics eventually reassert themselves. That’s what happened with Quinn’s ‘Case AA,’ the first Tenctonese/human child. That’s what happened to Matt and Cathy’s baby. The genetic systems are too different from each other; they can’t co-exist in the same body. How did Quinn put it in his research notes . . .” George closed his eyes. “ ‘With catastrophic loss of homeostasis and death the inevitable result.’ When Matt and I read that . . . we both knew what was going to happen. We just didn’t want to believe it.”

  “George . . .” She tenderly rubbed the back of her husband’s neck. “You have to stop torturing yourself about this. You said it yourself, there was nothing you could do.”

  “I know.” He turned his head, gaze meeting hers. “But there was just so much that I didn’t see—that no one saw. Even the little girl, the Aalice that was up there in the HDL camp. They should’ve known that she wasn’t real . . . that she wasn’t a hybrid at all. Just a human child, that’s all. What made her different—that was all Quinn’s doing. It was something he thought he had to do, so he would keep on getting the money for his research from the Sleemata Romot. They didn’t know that the real Aalice, the first child born of a mating between a Tenctonese and a human, had died just a few days after it was born. Quinn had developed his skills at making one thing appear to be another—that was how he was able to fake his own death. But Aalice—the Aalice that he created—she came first. An orphaned human baby—we haven’t been able to track down who her real parents might have been—that Quinn surgically altered, the restructured formation of the external ears, to give her the appearance of being a human/Tenctonese hybrid. He even found a way of changing the distribution of the subcutaneous melanin of her scalp and along her neck, so she would have something of the head spots of a Newcomer. So she would be at least a little like us.” George nodded. “Quinn was thorough, all right. No one but him knew that the real Case AA had already died; he was completely successful at substituting his Aalice for that one. And of course, she didn’t know. When she grew up, she believed what he told her, that she was the first child ever to be born of human and Tenctonese parents.”