She met his eyes for a precious second, wishing she could kiss him. The last person who believed in her that way was her mother.
“You can buy me a sympathy card after I ditch these creeps.”
Moni swerved the car back and forth. A moment later, several gunshots popped off. Now both the muscular man in the truck bed and the driver with his free hand were firing. Moni darted her car through the desert like a jackrabbit, preventing them from connecting. The pickup had more straight line speed and it could plow through rough terrain, but the Prius was still more nimble, and it had plenty of open space out here.
Her car smashed through a brittle scrub bush, launching it over her windshield. Moni turned right hard just before they started firing, then banked left as they were about to adjust their aim in front of the car’s path.
“You’re awesome.”
She sent him a quick grin. “My dad was a mechanic. Sometimes he let me drive junker cars in muddy fields until the engines blew. Of course, he’d still curse at me when they died.”
“You could have been a demolition derby girl.”
“Yeah, a real upward career path.”
“So what’s the plan? Drive in circles until they run out of ammo?”
“Even after they exhaust their bullets, and that would take a while, they’re not going away. I’ve insulted their manhood and they can’t have that. I’ve seen the kind before. Mariella showed me how to stand up to them. This curse has its perks too.”
Fanning out with her mental reach, Moni detected a large animal in the area. She couldn’t speak its language, but she didn’t have to. “Want it to work for us?” they told her. “Implant it with an impulse, a desire, a fear. Manipulate its instincts and it’ll do what you want.”
If she put an overwhelming urge in its head, the animal would follow it, at least for a while. It was the best she could do short of infecting the animal, as the aliens had done. Moni implanted hunger into the animal, and told it that the largest light held food. The creature sniffed the air and darted towards it.
She straightened out her wheel. It didn’t take long for the pickup truck to jump on her tail. The animal couldn’t hit a swerving target, so she straightened out. That only made things easier for the gunmen.
“Get down,” Moni messaged Aaron.
“I hope this is part of your plan.”
A bullet burst through the Prius’ rear window. The projectile whooshed by Moni. It ripped into the center of the dashboard. Moni checked her arm. Not a scratch. But as the pickup closed within 30 feet, that wouldn’t be the case next time.
“Where are you? Damn, was my signal too weak?”
A pair of yellow eyes emerged from the darkness. A four-legged, shaggy body bounded across her path. For a moment, Moni though the animal had gotten confused and come for her, not seeing that the pickup had the largest light. “The bigger one has food,” she told it, drawing out its hunger.
The outline of the coyote’s arching back zipped by as it raced down the ton of steel barreling toward it. Any rational animal would have moved, at least any one besides a deer or a possum. Coyotes were smart, but sometimes desperate hunger overwhelmed survival instincts.
“Your food’s sitting atop the light. Eat.”
The coyote leapt over the hood, smashing into the windshield, shattering it. The brutal impact sent the bloodied canine soaring through the air and caused the driver, with glass shards slashing his face, to slam the breaks. The muscular man got launched from the truck bed and landed in front of the vehicle just before it skidded to a halt. Her connection to the coyote ceased the moment it hit the ground. It surprised Moni how much this bothered her. She hadn’t even met the animal, hell it would probably try to eat her if she had. But she bore the responsibility for its death.
As for the muscular man, Moni detected his mental signature out there, but weaker. His cohorts stopped their pickup to check on him while Moni sped away. This time, she turned off the lights and rolled slowly through the darkness. A quiet engine; another advantage for a hybrid out here.
“Was that a coyote?” She nodded in response. “Did you summon it?”
“Summon? What am I a witch?”
She probably did seem like a witch. Drinking gasoline, pissing fire, calling wild beasts. She just needed a black cauldron.
“I learned how to send messages to animals. I can’t control them, but I can encourage them to do things for a short time. They’re not as strong willed as humans, or most humans.”
“You learned? Who taught you?” She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. “The aliens can help you learn to use your body, but you can’t trust them. You know what they want. Everything they give you has a price.”
“I’m in control of them.”
“Are you? Because next time they offer you so-called help, how will you know it’s not a trick?”
Moni stared ahead into the darkness as the car crept through the desert. They could literally be at the edge of a gorge and she wouldn’t know. All she had was her memory that the land was flat, or at least it appeared that way. What she knew of New Mexico, it wouldn’t stay flat for long. She didn’t need to drive blindly, the aliens told her. If she ceased her resistance, they could make some “adjustments” to her eyes, giving her night vision like the owls they possessed in Florida. Her body had already changed so much. If she allowed them to deviate further from her humanity, they might turn her into something hideous.
She stopped the car. Turning around and looking back, she saw the light of the pickup was nothing but a speck. She could barely detect the mental signatures of two men, although not their thoughts. If either of them had been infected in the fight, they would probably have turned possessed by now and she didn’t sense they did. The third man, she couldn’t get a read on. Her heart heaved. Whether he had it coming or not, that was one more life on her hands.
“Let’s wait until they leave and then head back to the road.”
“That’s what they’re waiting for. I don’t think they’ll venture far into the desert without a trail to follow, not the two of them. We just pissed off the whole familia.”
Aaron sighed and shook his head.
“I’m good at making friends.”
“So what, we stay out here all night?”
She shrugged.
“Did you have to let them shoot the window out? It’s getting cold.”
“We’ll reexamine the situation in the morning. In the meantime, would you like to cuddle up with someone nice and warm?”
“Oh yeah,” he said excitedly.
She reached into the back and tossed a jacket onto his lap. “You can pretend it’s me if that helps.”
Aaron sprayed it with bleach.
As Aaron drifted to sleep with the jacket wrapped around him, Moni wondered what she’d do when the curtain of night lifted, stripping them of their hiding spot. How long would they look for her? She could detect the mental signatures of the two attackers from a few miles away, but she couldn’t distinguish the other gang members from ordinary people. There was a large stretch of interstate for her to return to. They couldn’t cover all of it, but they could lie in wait on the side of the road waiting for her to pass.
Her gaze shifted southward, away from the highway. That was a hole in the civilized world. No electrical grid. Not a human soul. No one to chase her. No one for them to infect. She understood now. Her presence threatened all around her. As much as Aaron cared for her, every moment she spent with him endangered his life. Gazing upon his handsome face in the moonlight, Moni yearned to draw closer and feel his breath on her neck, to plant kisses on his athletic shoulders. How long could she resist? He’d be safer without her.
She closed her eyes and focused her mental reach on the wilderness before her. The emptiness pulled her, magnetized her bones. Moni quietly left the car. She started walking.
9
Nina Skillings stepped through the disinfecting room tent into the portable trailer lab that the
Feds had rigged for the Lagoon Watcher. She immediately recoiled back outside. It wasn’t just the spoiled butter stench but what the rogue scientist had strapped on his examination table. She had heard the stories. She’d just never seen one of them up close.
The four fellow officers she had watched laid to rest in the past two days had encountered much worse. Skillings held her breathing through her nose, readjusted the lab coat and face shield, and strode back in.
“Brought me a soy burger, did you?” asked the Lagoon Watcher, wearing a pair of magnifying goggles that made his eyes fly-like. He shifted them up to his disheveled hair. The man’s lab coat sleeves were stained with a dark crimson gunk. Seated in a chair looking on sourly at the proceedings through his face guard was Leonard Ho, the NASA astrobiologist sent to monitor Trainer’s work, like babysitting a schizophrenic genius.
“Do I look like an intern?” she snapped. “How can you think of food when you’re touching that thing?”
“Oh this little fella?” The Lagoon Watcher’s gloved hand pointed to the monstrosity strapped to his table. It possessed a horse’s long-legged body, a gator’s toothy face and a snake in place of a tail. “I call him Chompbiscuit. Ain’t he adorable?”
“A baboon’s ass is adorable next to that thing,” Nina said. “Is that an alien?”
“The true alien form hasn’t been revealed,” Ho said. “This is a splicing together of animals created by the aliens. Their mastery of genetic manipulation is beyond anything I’ve seen.”
“That’s because all you do at NASA is look through telescopes at what might be out there,” the Lagoon Watcher said. “What about the life-forms here on Earth, the ones that are dying before our eyes because of our gluttonous lifestyles? Tell the public the truth about our planet’s demise.”
“I told you, I will not entertain your delusions.” Ho crossed his arms.
As the scientists jostled for nerd superiority, Nina focused on the creature’s yellow eyes. Maybe it was her lack of experience with reptiles, but it didn’t seem dead. They were focused. She took a step sideways further from its head. The gator eyes followed her. The leg near her bucked, grazing her arm with its hoof.
“Holy shit, it’s alive!” Nina jumped back. She drew her gun. She doubted those two gurney belts could restrain a beast with the combined muscle of a horse and a gator. The snake-head tail started rousing, writhing around.
“The tranquilizer is wearing off,” Ho shouted. “I told you an animal of this size needed a double dose.”
“Don’t tell me about animals, astro boy.” The Lagoon Watcher rummaged the beaten up tackle box that served as his instrument bag. “The only biological life forms you come into contact with on a regular basis are the lice in your hair.”
The gator head rose off the table and angled toward Nina. It lunged for her, aided by the long horse neck. She skirted out of the way. The restraints on the animal saved her, but she heard one of them tear. She’d rather not destroy evidence the Feds valued, not if she wanted them to trust her with Moni’s pursuit.
“If you don’t put this motherfucker down right now, I’m shooting it!”
The Lagoon Watcher retrieved the needle and approached the mutant from behind. Its snake tail lashed at him with extended fangs, which met the clipboard he held in his other hand. He plunged the tranquilizer into its neck. Its yellow eyes rolled back into its head. Then he tranquilized the gator’s thick neck.
“Put the gun away before you ruin my specimen.” The Lagoon Watcher lowered the gator head into a more comfortable position like it was a sick Doberman.
“You mean the federal government’s specimen,” Ho said.
“Excuse me?” he asked.
“You can stuff that thing and put it in your den for all I care,” Nina said. “How is this helping us find Moni?”
The lab was stocked with brains, intestines and a host of other body parts and organs in formaldehyde jars. Some of them were human sized, but none carried the familiar purple of the alien infection. Studying what the aliens did here could wait. Moni and the girl unleashed this bloodbath and they could do it again. With the evidence she found a few hours ago, Nina had no doubt that the aliens continued plotting their invasion.
“The girl is infected and the cop might be too, so I assume they’re leaving a trail of infected creatures,” the Lagoon Watcher said. “What I don’t understand is why mutants like this no longer have a trace of alien presence. Since the invasion stopped, I haven’t seen any sign of them.”
He explained that the alien nanotechnology were microscopic machines carrying alien DNA with the ability to manipulate genomes. These mini cyborgs produce thiobacillus – bacteria that thrives in acidic environments and oxidizes sulfur and iron, which creates a habitat that suits the alien beings. The bacteria are present in all water and host life forms the aliens inhabit. Since they had disappeared, most of the mutants had perished, as their bloodstreams had become dependent on the bacteria or their respiratory systems had been modified for the sulfuric acid-rich water the lagoon briefly became. Yet, a handful of them had survived after the invasion ceased.
“The National Guard found Chompbiscuit doing laps in some poor family’s swimming pool.” Ho looked pained as the nickname rolled off his tongue. “It looks stronger than it is. It can’t walk straight with that heavy head. Its own snake tail was biting its hide, like it rebelled against sharing a body. The gator brain couldn’t operate the horse body.”
“You can laugh at this one, but we don’t know what else the aliens left behind,” the Lagoon Watcher said. “What if some of them are strong and intelligent, like super predators? Even if the aliens no longer control their brains, we can’t predict what they’ll do. They could wipe out our native animals and ruin our ecosystem.”
The fear of losing healthy animals made sweat drip down the Lagoon Watcher’s scalp, but Nina didn’t bat an eyelash. She had real life humans to protect, and catch.
“That’s too bad, but we’ll let the wildlife officers take care of that,” Nina said. “What I need to know from you is…”
The door swung open behind her and FBI Agent Cam Carter hustled in covered in sweat inside his face shield. Those dark suits were brutal in the Florida sun, especially with a lab coat atop them, but she could tell it wasn’t the heat that bothered him.
“I’ve got something to show both of you,” he said, holding up a tablet with a sketch of two familiar faces: Moni Williams and Aaron Hughes.
10
Agent Carter showed the sketches of the two suspects to the Lagoon Watcher and waited for his reaction. The loony scientist’s orange cheeks grew even ruddier as his eyes lit up.
“That’s the marine biology student who was out on the water with Professor Swartzman when he died. Wannabe environmentalist. He only cared about preservation so he could exploit nature for his sporting activities. And that’s the police officer who fell under the spell of the infected girl. I’m lucky she didn’t kill me when I tried to destroy that filthy thing.”
“Some people weren’t so lucky,” Nina said.
Carter let his eyes linger on her face, studying not just the bruises from the attack but her thirst for vengeance. Many of the officers and soldiers who survived the invasion were traumatized, but not her. This motivation might come in use later.
“Where did you get this?” she asked. The agent observed the intensity simmering in her eyes.
“Louisiana,” he replied. “A man confronted them when they trespassed on his property, just north of Interstate 12. Moni knocked him out cold and fractured his jaw. When he came to, his fingernails were gone.”
“His fingernails?” Ho asked. “None of the alien attacks targeted fingernails. They were after vital organs, especially brains.”
“Or so you read. You didn’t actually see them like I did,” the Lagoon Watcher reminded him. He turned to Carter. “I assume they were in a scuffle?”
“Yes. He found them in the woods with a gas canister and told them
to leave. Officer Williams was on the ground and appeared sick. When he offered help, she jumped him.”
“Did Moni say anything?” Trainer asked.
“The victim said the young man did all the talking. The woman didn’t say a word.”
“Just like the girl!” Nina said. “Moni could never keep her mouth shut, especially when threatened, that whiner. She wouldn’t be silent unless…”
“She was infected,” the Lagoon Watcher cut her off. “That explains the gas canister. She was having a little refreshment.”
“Are you serious?” Ho threw his hands up. “That would kill her.”
“It would kill a human, but not what Moni is now.” He directed his gaze at Carter. “I need to find her. She might be carrying the last strain of alien nanotech on Earth.”
“And she’s aiming to spread the infection somewhere else,” Carter concluded.
“Maybe, but not yet,” the Lagoon Watcher said. “When she removed the victim’s fingernails that reduced the chance of infection. Remember, the most common DNA swap during a fight is on the fingernails. Our victim can thank Moni that he’s still human.”
This wacko knew his forensic science, Carter thought, and he understood how the aliens operate better than anyone. Too bad his extreme political views and mercurial personality made him a liability. On this mission he needed people he could control.
“She didn’t want to infect that guy because she wasn’t ready yet,” Nina said. “The aliens weren’t forced out of Florida, they voluntarily withdrew. What if they found a better place to launch their invasion?”
“We should search the Louisiana marshes and Lake Pontchartrain,” Ho suggested. “Those environments are similar to the Indian River Lagoon where they were thriving.”
His face turning white, the Lagoon Watcher gasped. “If they did to the Bayou what they did here…”
“If they did it to a city like New Orleans with a low water table and surrounded by water on three sides,” Nina said. “It would be a massacre.”
Silence the Living Page 6