by A. R. Daun
“Hi there darling.” He said softly. “I'm new to the city, and I'm looking for someone to show me the sights, have a little fun. You know anyone like that?”
She smiled up at him, and he had immediately upped her probable age to early to mid-thirties. She had the beginnings of wrinkles radiating out from the corners of her brown eyes when she squinted up to take in his features. He squelched the rush of disappointment that had rolled in at this realization. He liked them young, but he would take them so long as they were slender and had nice titties, which this one most definitely had based on the generous cleavage that fairly erupted out of her otherwise conservative outfit.
“I think that depends on how much fun you'd like.” She had said coyly, though her eyes were still cool and calculating, and it took every iota of willpower for him to dampen the sudden strong urge to slap her face. He knew that what he said next would determine whether or not she would go willingly with him, or whether she would decide that he was too risky a john, money or no money. This was New York after all, and working girls like her disappeared all the time in the maw of the beast.
“I am always up for a lot of fun,” he replied. “Tell you what. I got a little room over at the Blue Moon. Why don't we go there first and freshen up a little before you show me the sights?”
Her eyes had lit up at the name of the hotel, and he knew that she had taken the bait. The Blue Moon was a little place with apartment style rooms a few blocks over, though it was far from rinky-dink, and the girl must have decided anyone who could afford such accommodations would likely not be a risk.
She moved closer.
“I think that's a great idea, handsome.” She had whispered in a breathy voice that he thought was meant to sound sexy. The smell of stale pepperoni pizza, probably from her dinner, had wafted over and made him nauseous, but he had gallantly taken her arm, and they walked hand in hand up Orchard St, chatting amiably about nothing at all. Just another anonymous John and his hooker, he thought, and chuckled inwardly.
The Blue Moon itself had an unassuming facade squeezed awkwardly between two dingy looking fashion warehouses. The interior lobby was immaculately clean, surrounded by gleaming wood paneling, but the front desk consisted of nothing more than a rather rickety looking wooden desk with a flat panel screen perched precariously to one side. He had timed their entrance so that the front desk clerk had been busy with a rather frazzled looking couple as he slipped in with the girl and walked quickly to the elevator, and up to the third floor to his room.
He had made his move the moment the room door closed.
He slapped her hard. She went down without a sound, her hands flying to her face, and he immediately grabbed a fistful of her thick brown hair and dragged her to the bed. Her long legs windmilled aimlessly, and he glimpsed pink lace panties in brief exciting flashes.
He had slapped her again repeatedly. He was afraid that she would cry out, and when she went limp, he had rummaged through his backpack and cuffed her to the bed posts. She felt soft beneath him, so vulnerable and weak, and he had ripped off her clothes in a frenzy of lust and desire that had only been fully sated after he had strangled her in the final shuddering moments of his orgasm.
Now he lay gasping to one side of the bed. Sounds from the city that never slept wafted in the stale summer breeze from down below. He was spent and closed his eyes and let his mind drift, and for the first time in years remembered the tall angular figures that had waited in the rice fields of New Savannah.
He saw them now in his mind's eye, their chiseled bodies all sharp angles and thorny protrusions wrapped in dark red ropy musculature, as they stood silently in serried ranks that stretched from one side of the horizon to the other. A faint breeze rustled the ripened panicles and caused sinuous waves to pass over the golden hued stalks, and he could hear their susurrus whisper as it rolled past the moat that surrounded the main wall of the town to reach the ears of the defenders.
These stood in haggard groups along the crenelated parapets that lined the upper portion of the outer defensive wall. They were somewhat evenly divided between old-time humans in ragged clothes, many of whom looked slightly malnourished, interspersed with larger and bulkier harnessed oni. A few of the people were armed with bows, but the majority carried long iron pikes and spears.
There had been many many more of them at one time. But the war with the invading avatars from the Deep West had been raging for months now, and the humans had been slowly pushed back until they had nowhere else to run. They would stand and fight here and die to the last man, woman, and child.
Some signal passed amongst the invading horde, and suddenly, from one moment to the next without any discernible warning the avatars were in motion. They trampled the precious rice stalks as they surged towards the human fortifications, and a great cry of defiance and desperation and blood lust rose from the defenders on the town battlements as death and destruction rushed towards them.
The sleeping man jerked awake.
He shook his head, then stood up and went to the small bathroom, splashing cold water on his face. It was an hour or so until midnight, and he knew he had some time before the body would be discovered.
When he came out of the bathroom the dead woman was smiling up at him.
“That was fun.” She said, stretching her body languorously. “Could we do it again baby?”
He started trembling. He couldn't help it, and this always shamed him. He turned without another word and slipped out of the room, but behind him he could still hear the woman calling out to him, pleading with him to take her again.
He should have taken the saw to her, but that always made a mess. Plus, it never made any difference really. In the end, they always woke up and called to him for more. They were insatiable, inhuman. Their thirst for his brand of punishment was probably the only thing that kept him alive given the thousands of killings he had done across the years and centuries.
But he did not make a single ripple in their pond. He had slain whole families, mutilated them after torturing their bodies, then burning the corpses so that the stench of pig meat cooking had enveloped entire suburban neighborhoods, but the next day there would not be a single mention of the incident in the newspapers or newscasts. He was like an invisible man, like some sort of roach surviving at the edge of their civilization, too small and inconsequential to merit even the attention of their police forces.
And yet something different had been happening recently. He had seen her skulking at the edges of his kills. She acted like a plainclothes detective, but he knew she was something else entirely because he had seen her not only here in the northeast coast, but also when he had been trolling the meat markets of the sunshine state down south.
The really unnerving thing about it was that she never looked the same from place to place. The first time he saw her about two years ago, she had been a medium tall brunette, a butch looking wide shouldered woman who probably could wrestle most guys to the ground. Then two months later she had been a slender blond with legs to die for and a slinky way of walking that would have attracted him if he had not been so terrified at the time because he could tell it was the same woman. She was different each time, her shape varying from short to tall, fat to slim, with face and hair and skin that run the entire gamut of human racial types. She was black in Philadelphia, then a petite Chinese looking woman with almond eyes and raven black hair in Fort Lauderdale, then a Nordic goddess with striking blue eyes and a statuesque figure hanging back in the crowd, as the Detroit police came to investigate a triple homicide he had caused in one of the low rent tenements of that god-forsaken urban ghetto.
Now he waited across the street from the hotel in an abandoned room that smelled of piss and sweat and decay. He had finally decided that this would end today. He could not spend his life looking over his shoulders, always wondering who was following him, forever puzzling over the mysterious woman who might or might not be threat to his continued existence. He was a roach nibbling
at the edges of society in this godforsaken world, but he was alive and that always counted for something in his book.
The hours passed. He was dozing now, his mind flitting in and out of sleep, his butt aching from sitting on the rickety-looking aluminum folding chair that he had found slouched against one bare wall in the room. He yawned, then rubbed his eyes as the first light of dawn made its wary way down the concrete canyons of Manhattan.
He saw her. She was striding along unhurriedly past the small shops and apartment buildings across the street as she made her way to the Blue Moon. She had on a conservative white blouse matched with dark blue knee-length skirt, black nylon stockings, and short-heeled navy blue pumps.
He sat bolt upright on his chair. It was definitely the same woman as before. She had the same undefinable aura that marked her as different from the other citizens. Perhaps it was the way she walked, her left leg dragging slightly to the side with each step, or perhaps the slight facial tick that pulled her right upper lip upwards a few millimeters every time she glanced to the right.
The girl looked around warily, then went into the hotel.
He jumped up and dashed out of the room and into the morning light. He crossed the narrow street without looking to either side, and it was only providence, or perhaps luck, that prevented him from being smeared like red jam on the dirty asphalt by a barreling truck that missed him by a few centimeters. He was so focused on the girl that he didn't even noticed the blare of the air horn.
He entered the hotel and saw the clerk slumped below the rudimentary check-in desk. The woman's eyes were closed, and froth bubbled from one side of her mouth onto the carpeted floor. He barely glanced at her as he rushed past the elevator and into the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time, his breath coming in short gasps.
The door to his previous room was still ajar, and he rushed in, heedless of the danger. His blood was up, a red misty haze had clouded his vision, and the threat of violence was a shrill piercing wail that drilled deep into his skull and drove all other thoughts from his mind. He would take the girl and violently question her, wring it out of her lifeless body if need be; he would dismember her and eviscerate her if necessary in search of answers.
He stopped. The girl he had strangled still lay spread-eagled on the bed, the cuffs in place. Bubbly froth dripped from her open mouth, and her eyes had rolled back, exposing the whites. There was no sign of the woman he had been following. For one brief moment self doubt overwhelmed him and he thought he had been hallucinating the girl all along, then the bathroom door behind him opened and he realized he had been outplayed.
He closed his eyes and waited for the end.
A hand gripped his shoulder and he whirled around, ready to defend himself, but then he took one look at his assailant and suddenly time stood still. He stumbled backwards as the world gave a sudden jerk, as his legs turned weak and as fragile as blown glass, and he sat down hard on the lumpy mattress.
The woman looked at him with cool impassive almond-shaped eyes that glinted with intelligence. Her long straight black hair fell past her shoulders and curled at the tips, the part in the middle framing a slender oval-shaped face with high cheekbones, long narrow lips and a somewhat flaring and regal nose. Her ebony skin radiated a glossy sheen that made her fairly glow.
“Hello Marco.” Ammara Lewis said, and smiled grimly. “It's time for you to stop. They're finally coming.”
CHAPTER 48
Year 1006 A.R.
The ship woke the 63rd queen as it moved to within 20k light-seconds away from the yellow star.
In the first few moments of her awakening, the queen completed a comprehensive survey of all the long range sensor logs and realized that something had gone wrong.
The ship had detected concentrations of high energy on the surface of the third planet from the star, and had assigned a high probability of there being civilizations with power and communication grids located on the world. Faced with this unexpected finding, it had been programmed to forward the information to one of the decision makers on board.
The 63rd took another few moments to assimilate all the data gathered by the ship, assigning a few hundred semi-sentient programs residing on the 4th dorsal segment of her extended gaster to process and evaluate the information. At the same time, her frontal brain fretted over the anomaly and delved into the ship archives. She was hunting for any other instances when colonial ships had encountered full civilizations during final approach, but a thorough search revealed few other examples of such encounters.
She had to make a decision.
They were still years away from orbiting the planet at their present acceleration, but If the civilization present on the planet's surface was advanced enough to pose a serious threat to the ship and the coming Arrival, then a full awakening of a majority of the colony would be necessary to prepare for such a dangerous eventuality.
Given the weight of initiating such a drastic action, the 63rd received the tentative conclusions and proposals from the 4th tergite programs with a silent sigh of relief. Long range data accumulated by the ship indicated that whatever race was producing energy signatures did not seem to be global, but was instead mostly limited to the coastal areas of one of the continental land masses. The majority of the counseling programs suggested gathering more data in situ before Arrival.
The 63rd concurred.
Deep in the bowels of the kilometer-long ship, heavily-armored soldiers woke from their slumber.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48