by JS Rowan
The relief was fantastic. He shuddered and took a deep breath. He began to be able to think. The rage was subsiding.
As he stood up, he heard the same mental voice that had been saying “KILL” make a comment.
“Conversion subject three-five-four-four-one-one-one-three has had his collar removed. Secure another collar and prepare to terminate the other specimens.”
He thought at first that the voice was talking to him. Then he realized that it was talking about him. He also realized by the voice’s tone of thought (?) that it did not think he could hear the remark.
A sound from behind him attracted his attention, and he turned away from the people. He saw the wall open up with a hidden door. Two chicken-lizard things came through the door, walking upright on two feet, like humans…or birds.
Aliens!
The beings were skinny, with bumpy pale skin, yellow beaky noses, dark eyes, and green feathery frond-like “hair” standing up from their heads. They both wore lime green uniform tank tops and shiny green beach shorts—at least, they looked like beach shorts to him. No flip-flops, though.
One of the green-clad chicken-like aliens was pointing a nasty-looking weapon at the other people. He knew it was a weapon by the way the alien was pointing it. The other tall lizard-chicken alien was looking down at a new collar for him, and wasn’t even watching where its feet were going.
He saw his chance. With one massive blow, he took the head off the chicken-lizard holding the collar. Then, moving at a speed that he found astounding, he leaped to the side of the other alien and tore the weapon from its hand. He knocked it down to the floor and grinned at the ooph! sound it made. He put one foot—paw?—on its chest.
As he looked down at his prey, he felt its mind trying to take control of him. He struggled like a fish on a line, shaking his head to clear it.
It calmly thought to him: “Conversion subject three-five-four-four-one-one-one-three, take your foot off me.”
He was struggling not to comply. He could feel, in its thoughts, that as soon as he obeyed, the alien would pick up its weapon and finish the job of killing him and the three humans.
He realized that he was losing the battle of wills, and groaned. He had shifted his weight, and his foot was lifting on its own. The alien knew that he was helpless to stop it.
That’s when Leona kicked the creature in the side of its head. The “conversion subject” looked at her, standing beside him with her eyes on the alien on the floor. She kicked it a second time. The alien went unconscious, and a second later he followed it into the black.
Chanting. The same phrase over and over again.
He climbed back to consciousness with a voice shouting in his head.
“Restrain him before it is too late. He is infected. Restrain him before it is too late. He is infected.”
He opened his eyes and tried to move. Whoever needed to be restrained, it wasn’t him. He was trussed up like a Christmas turkey. Someone must have tied him up while he was unconscious.
“Restrain him before it is too late. He is infected. Restrain him before it is too late. He is infected.”
He realized that it was the alien yelling in his head. These guys were really big on repetition.
“Restrain who?” he thought back.
“The male human—he is infected. If I wasn’t tied up, I would do it myself,” thought the alien.
He tried to speak, but his words just came out as a growl. Man! This was going to take some getting used to!
He thought toward Leona, searching her out with his eyes to attract her attention.
“The alien thinks that the male needs to be restrained. It says that he is infected.”
“Infected with what?” Leona said aloud. Her eyes were dark-shadowed and worried. He thought they were the most beautiful eyes that could be… oh yeah. He turned his attention back to the alien.
“Infected with what?” He relayed Leona’s question to the alien. Man, these guys must be deaf!
“The mutation retrovirus that converted you to your new form is still active in your system. The cuts you gave the male when you picked him up by his arm are going to cause him to convert. When he does, he will be in the same state that you were. He will attack the first thing he sees. If he is not being fed intravenously during the conversion process, he will be ravenously hungry.”
He felt rumbling growls emerge from his throat. Who were these aliens, just “converting” people without their consent?
“If the retrovirus is still active, that means I was recently mutated. Who or what was I?”
“You were one of them, of course. You were one of those primitive half-wits that think they own their planet. Once we convert you, you are ours—as the planet will soon be ours. We will have you attack your family unit, if possible, so that the conversion will be complete from a mental standpoint. You will not hesitate to attack others of your former kind, if you attack people who were close to you when you first regain consciousness.”
A great rage swept over him. He easily broke the bonds that held him. He sat up and saw that the alien was close to him. Without thinking, he reached over and tore the alien in half.
When he started to calm down, he noticed that the male human had the weapon pointed at him and both females were staring at him with shock and fear. He now knew they were females, and it bothered him that they needed protecting—from him.
Leona cleared her throat. “I take it that whatever he is infected with, it is not good news.”
At that, the rage was gone and he laughed. However, the laugh sounded like something between a dog barking and a cough.
“He said that the man is going to change into something like me. He also said we were family.”
Leona stood very still and looked thoughtful. Her eyes were very sad. “Theodore, is that you?”
“No, I don’t think so, it doesn’t sound right.”
“How about the nickname Thor? He—you—never liked Ted, said that sounded like a toy bear.”
Thor sounded right. He knew that had been his nickname of choice.
He saw that the man and the other woman were looking very sad as well. The other woman wiped tears from her cheeks and walked over to stand close to the man.
“I guess now Ted would be more fitting than Thor—you look like a cross between a werewolf and a grizzly bear,” Leona said.
“No, I still like Thor,” he thought to her.
She looked pensive for a moment. She looked away from Thor and toward the man and woman that were standing together.
“Thor, that alien said my dad was infected with that virus, and now you have killed the only one who could help him!”
“Um, yeah…I never really thought of it like that.”
He bent over so that he could look her in the eyes. She was mad; really, really mad. She reached up and grabbed the considerable beard he had on his chin.
“Listen to me, you overgrown fur carpet, from now on you don’t kill anyone unless I tell you to. Got it?”
Looking into her face, he remembered other times she had looked at him like that. A trickle of memories started returning to him. He remembered the names of her mom and dad: Mary and Will.
Leona was still looking at him sternly, not sure if she was getting through to him. He decided that he had better agree—and pronto!
“Right. No killing anyone unless you tell me.”
Leona turned to her mom and dad. “We need to go in the next room to check it out and see if there’s anything that can help us in there.”
Her parents nodded. Some colour was returning to their faces as complete terror receded.
Thor decided to follow Leona to the next room so that he could see if anything there would be useful. They entered by the sliding panel that the aliens had used—still standing open. The lab was a large room lit with bright panels in the ceiling and one wall. All the walls were smooth and there was only one desk. The chair looked kind of weird.
There was no
thing on the desk—which was not square but oval in shape—but the surface of it seemed to be a large display screen. Coloured holograms floated above the surface. Leona tried to make sense out of what was being shown.
He happened to see a reflection of her on one of the wall panels. Beside the brown-haired woman stood an immense hulking creature with reddish-brown fur. It was ten feet tall (assuming that she was six feet tall, which he thought she was) and had heavily muscled limbs and shoulders. Its claws were extended beyond its paw-shaped hands, and large fangs projected out beyond its lips. He looked down at his hands and discovered that he was able to retract the claws.
His respect for Leona rose. She had grabbed the chin whiskers of a monster—and the monster was him!
On the walls were quite a number of lit panels. Each of the panels had what appeared to be writing on it. As he was walking past the panels, he decided to touch one. Images of what was contained in the panel behind the wall came flooding into his brain. He jumped back and bumped into Will, who was standing about ten feet behind him. He’d gone a couple of yards in a jump!
“Whoa, what the hell was that?” Thor snarled.
“What happened?” Leona looked up from the desk, startled.
“Sonny boy here flattened me to the floor, is what happened!”
Will was recovering his feisty spirit. Memories came back to Thor of good times, trash-talking each other’s football teams and debating which quarterback had a better throwing arm.
He looked down at his feet, which were also hairy and clawed. Will was laboriously getting up from the floor. Mary helped him.
“When I touched the panel, my mind was flooded with images. I think those panels are telepathically operated by the aliens. Touch them and see if you get anything,” he thought to Leona.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to be walking around and randomly touching panels. You might set off an alarm,” she said aloud.
“So how are we going to find out what is behind them? We don’t know how much time we have until Will starts to change. Like me.”
“Leona,” said Mary, “I really wish you’d let us know what’s going on. It’s obvious that you and Thor are talking—even if your father and I can’t hear him.”
Leona reached out to the panel nearest to her. She touched it.
“Thor thinks that the panels are telepathically controlled, but I don’t feel anything.”
“Concentrate,” he thought to her, “calm your thinking, and try again.”
Leona touched the panel again, a look of calm concentration on her face. This time, a bed at the back of the lab lowered itself from the wall.
“Well, that’s special,” said Will.
“Did you get any images?” Thor asked.
“No, but I was thinking of how tired I was, and the bed just popped out.” Leona turned to her parents. “Mom and Dad, Thor said he saw images in his mind when he touched the panel before. That’s why he jumped back so surprised.”
Will decided to try touching a panel, but no matter how much he focused on it, nothing happened.
Leona tried again on the desk. This time she looked as if she had fallen into a trance. Two minutes later she spoke.
“I know how this works. The machine just gave me a tutorial. The amount of information you can transfer in direct contact is incredible. How long was I sitting there?”
Thor told her.
“Wow. It felt a lot longer than that. I would have guessed a couple of hours.”
Thor started to ask her more questions, but she brushed him off.
“We need to get Dad onto the table in the other room right now. Thor, pull four of those orange containers from the shelf that I opened up near the door. Mom, you grab the straps from that shelf over there.”
She took the weapon from Will and guided him toward the table.
“It’s a good thing that you didn’t try to fire this weapon, Dad. It needs to be reinitialized to you. If you had tried to shoot it without that, it would have given you a huge shock.”
Will did not say anything. He was already looking gravely ill. He climbed up onto the gurney and passed out.
“Thor, take two of those containers and attach them to him, one on each arm. Then take two more for the legs.”
Leona did not bother to wait for him to comply. She just hurried into the adjoining lab and willed the door to close behind her and Mary.
Once Leona got to the desk, she brought up the image of the table where Will now lay. There was mental prodding from the system asking for permission to begin. Once she said yes, the table started its process.
Thor was startled when table with Will on it suddenly turned on. The sides and ends of the table moved up and over Will, and formed a half tube that completely encapsulated him. Graphics on the outside of the tube showed the processes going on inside. The virus was apparently being assisted by the tube.
Thor could not begin to understand the process, but Will was being transformed before his eyes. There seemed to be a checklist of items to be done, as well as a timer. Thor could not decipher the alien readouts and lights. However, the process looked like it was going to take a while. Leona and Mary stood at the desk.
“This transformation is going to take a bunch of days. Seems like maybe two weeks! This room seems to be a self-contained area. I’m starting to understand the computer system better.”
Even with the door between them, Thor could “hear” what Leona said. Leona looked daunted, but determined. Thor thought she, with her tired face and messy hair, was as beautiful as he had ever seen her. But…back to business.
With Will safely contained inside the tube on the alien table, Leona opened the door between the two rooms again.
“Why are you able to access their computer?” thought Thor.
“There are no passwords on the system. I guess in a telepathic society they would be useless, and I guess no other races that the aliens have subjugated had telepathic abilities. So the captives usually don’t have the capabilities to access the system. The werewolves can only access the parts of the system that their unique brain wave patterns are allowed to access. Any other area will produce an effect like you felt before.”
Leona’s voice was matter-of-fact, almost like she was reading a product manual.
“You are starting to talk like them,” thought Thor. “Be careful with that thing.”
Leona looked at Thor and a shudder passed through her body. Her chin quivered and tears squeezed out from her eyes. Her throat convulsed, and she rubbed the ache there.
“Oh, Thor!” she squeaked.
Leona’s lips clamped even tighter than they had been, and her mother walked over and gathered her daughter into a hug.
“Sweetie,” she whispered to Leona.
Leona nodded and hung her head a moment, then released the hug and stepped back toward Thor.
“I will never be like them!” she hissed. “Their whole economy and all their technology is based on taking and enslaving and killing innocent people!”
Thor nodded. He awkwardly went and sat down on the floor near the women to relieve the soreness that was developing in his neck. Too much looking down! “Did you find out why you can access their computer, but your mom and dad can’t?”
“I think so.” Leona’s expression lightened a bit and she seemed a little embarrassed. “Mom,” she said to Mary, “Thor has asked why I can access the alien computer and you two can’t. I think it might have to do with the courses he and I had at university—and how we met.”
“You were studying psychology, you said,” answered her mother. Her expression relaxed a little too, as if remembering old times helped to relieve some of the stress of the last few hours.
“Yes, both of us took this silly ‘bird’ course as a degree requirement. He needed it for the arts elective in his engineering studies, and I needed it as a psych elective for my sociology degree. And then, we got hooked! Both on that course and the following levels that followed, and…w
e got hooked on each other.”
Leona smiled, and her mother patted her shoulder.
“Yes, we could tell. Whenever we visited or talked on the phone, you enthused about that fantastic course and a certain wonderful young man, and your voice told us that you were falling in love with him.”
Thor felt an itch behind his ear, and scratched it. Ah, that was good.
“Well,” said Leona, “that course and the ones that followed were a mix of cognitive psychology—how the brain thinks—and experiments in parapsychology, to see if any part of the brain could be linked to ESP, and we kept being in the same classes. So we learned the same…things, and hung around together, and became stronger and stronger friends. And somewhere along the way, we started being able to send thoughts and images to each other and receive from each other.”
“Oh,” thought Thor, “psych courses.” A series of memories rose in his mind. Endless series of cards with circles and stars on them, MRI sessions, talking excitedly with the professor (a tall man wearing brown clothes, with eyeglasses and a receding hairline), sitting over drinks and food talking with each other. Good times.
“So, really?” Mary sounded incredulous. “Really ESP?”
“Yes, Mom, really ESP. And…” Leona shrugged. She waggled her head back and forth, as if to say, “Yeah, it’s weird, totally weird, so what!” But her voice was respectful and her manner forthright. “And, the more experiments we did, the better we got at it. Professor Shore noticed there was an area in our brains that lit up when we were doing the card series, and on the basis of that activity, he could predict whether the responses would be accurate or not. It was awesome!”
Mary looked bemused. She huffed a little, and ran her fingers through her tangled grey hair absentmindedly. Then she smiled and raised her eyebrows. “Well, it’s a good thing you two got so good at it, then. And, I guess I can understand why you didn’t tell your dad and me.”
“Yeah, not the kind of thing we could tell anyone outside the department. But there was a whole group of us that kept doing the courses. We were a little community.”