People of the Sun

by Jason Parent

  President Kennedy’s expression began to change. Her look of elation became one of concern, then discomfort. She shrank beneath Lenyx’s hand as though he were squeezing hers too hard. Lenyx must have noticed. He recoiled his arm and stepped back. There he remained, staring at the President, aghast and stupefied.

  Her face contorted into storms of agony and horror. Tryst listened as the crowd mumbled around her. Some of the reporters and agents moved in for a closer look. Confusion ensued. President Kennedy’s mouth dropped open as if she were screaming, but no sound came out. She fell to one knee. Her left hand gripped the wrist beneath her right hand, or at least, where her right hand had once been. It had vanished entirely, save for the ashen remains beneath her feet.

  President Kennedy’s wrist was bright red, then purple, then black, then ash. The transformation was slower than before, but still only took a matter of seconds. The fingers of her left hand soon suffered the same fate. That look on her face, pale and panic stricken, alone and afraid, begged for an ending. That look exuded understanding; the leader knew her fate even as it unfolded.

  So did Tryst. What she didn’t understand was why it was happening.

  “Someone help her!” a voice yelled from the crowd. Others screamed and ran. Humans pushed and shoved and clawed their way free of the press room, each vying for escape, feral and frenzied. No one dared touch President Kennedy. No one dared help her.

  The incineration of the American President came quickly after that. It shot up her arms to her shoulders, where it spread across the remainder of her body. For a few seconds, the bulk of President Kennedy’s body remained intact, a black, ashen silhouette of her former self. Tryst froze, and those who remained in the room, mostly agents and aliens, froze with her. A few brave journalists and cameramen kept to their trades, scribbling notes and filming the madness. The only sound Tryst heard in a room still holding several people was that of pen against paper, chronicling every moment with cruel accuracy.

  President Kennedy’s body fell to the ground in little gray snowflakes. Some pallid fragments suspended themselves in the air near Tryst.

  A camera snapshot broke the silence. Bullets broke the peace. Tryst heard the command to open fire, and she could only presume she and her crewmates were the targets. Remaining non-military or security personnel were escorted from the room.

  “What do we do?” she asked Lenyx. Her commander didn’t respond. Bullets pelted off his skin, but he seemed oblivious to them. His vacant stare revealed his desolation. Tryst bowed her head. Lenyx, what have you done? Her disbelief almost trapped her in his despair. But one of them had to be strong. It had to be him.

  “Lenyx!” she shouted. Tryst was losing her faith in his ability to lead. His mind and body seemed petrified, locked within the moment that had been his second human kill. She shook him violently. Finally, Lenyx came back to the here and now.

  Kazi and Milliken gathered beside them. They were surrounded by humans and being bombarded with bullets. They shouted to each other over the gunfire. Smoke from hot pistols clouded the air. Shells dropped at their feet. Tryst ignored the projectiles. They were nothing, ping-pong balls bouncing off a brick wall. Everything had happened too fast for her to panic. Her instincts told her to react, to fight back. But like Kazi and Milliken, she waited for her leader’s command.

  “Everyone, remain calm,” Lenyx said. “Their weapons cannot hurt us. Eventually, they’ll see we don’t want to harm them, or they’ll run out of bullets.”

  “And then what?” Kazi asked. “What do you expect them to think? That this was some kind of misunderstanding? You just killed their head of state. It’s as much a formal declaration of war as anything else I can think of. They’ll want retribution. We need to kill them. All of them.”

  “Remember your post,” Tryst said. As much as she hated to admit it, she saw the logic in what Kazi had to say. Lenyx would still try to salvage peace, and she saw logic in it too, despite the continuing human assault. But if they weren’t going to fight the pebble shooters around them, then it was as good a time as any to investigate his actions, to see if he was still fit to call their commander.

  “What happened?” Tryst asked. She reached for his hands and turned them so his palms faced upward. She saw no hole. It was the only explanation that came to her, that there must have been a hole in his glove. She was at a loss when she couldn’t find one. Maybe it’s too small to see?

  More Secret Service agents came crashing through the entranceway. They were becoming increasingly bothersome, like flies begging to be swatted. The agents blanketed them with bullets. Tryst glanced around the room and saw nothing but the suits with earpieces, most of whom were blocking the exit. Not one civilian remained, so as far as she was concerned, the room was now a battlefield.

  But until she and the others declared Lenyx unfit for leadership, she would do as he instructed without question. Mutiny without a damn good reason was a capital offense, not that there’d be any Symorian law to punish them. Still, Tryst wouldn’t rush to judgment. She’d always known Lenyx to be the best and brightest among them. He wouldn’t fail them now, not when they needed him most.

  “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense. You have to believe I had no desire to kill her. Something’s not right here. I can’t explain it. It’s almost as if we’re being manipulated, but—”

  Lenyx’s head shot backward, not of its own volition. He grunted and fell to the floor. Astonished, Tryst knelt beside him.

  “Lenyx,” she said, jerking his shoulder. “Lenyx? What’s wrong?” When he didn’t answer, a cry lodged in her throat, her vocal chords temporarily paralyzed by uncertainty and something filthier: dread. She choked it down. “Why won’t you answer me?” She needed a response, some sign that he was okay. She didn’t get one.

  She examined his body for wounds, but could find none. Then, she examined his face. Once again, his stare was vacant, but this time, it was never-ending. He was unresponsive to her voice and her touch. His mouth hung open, his deep-purple blood oozing out of it like grape jelly. Lenyx was dead.

  Kazi crouched beside her. He covered his mouth with his hand. “Keep your mouth closed. My best guess is that a bullet entered his, ricocheted off his insides and passed through who knows how many vital organs before it came to rest in one.”

  A fire igniting within her, Tryst hopped to her feet, gritting her fangs. She snarled at the agents, who kept firing at will. Did they know enough to aim for her mouth, or were they just shooting blindly, hoping the aliens would fall like their leader? She couldn’t know. But at that moment, she knew she hated them. No, it was more than that. Tryst reviled them. She could only think of one action that would appease her.

  “Kill them,” she said, hissing through her teeth. “Kill them all.”

  Kazi smiled. “As you command.” With only a thought, he levitated the podium two feet over the ground. An agent nearby took notice and focused all his firepower on him. Calmly, grinning from ear to ear, Kazi rotated the podium in mid-air until it floated sideways. He tilted it just a bit more and raised it over his shoulder.

  The agent must have known the podium was heading his way, because he fired at Kazi as though his life depended on it. It did. The agent’s eyes widened as the podium rocketed through the air. He juked, but he was too slow. The podium plunged like a javelin into his skull, pummeling the bone into a fine white powder. Fragments of flesh, bone and brain clung to the wooden remains of President Kennedy’s pulpit. The agent was dead. Kazi had never lifted a finger.

  Tryst absently watched the brutality, reeling from her lover’s death. Something about the violence around put fire to her own violent inclinations, a savagery her people had spent ages learning to suppress. The humans and their baser emotions had taken root inside her. Or had this rage she felt been buried there all along?

  She tore off her gloves and lunged at the agent she guessed responsible for her lover’s death. As he fired round after round at
her incoming frame, the human stood his ground. Tryst was glad for it. She felt something sadistic in her she’d never felt before. Whatever it was, it made her feel powerful, and it ached to be released.

  She wouldn’t use her hands to kill the agent. Instead, Tryst buried her fangs into his flesh where his neck curved into his shoulder, tearing a chunk from his body. The agent fell, dead even before he disintegrated. His blood sizzled on her chin then vanished. She felt no remorse. It was vengeance she craved.

  Several agents flanked her, firing off an endless stream of bullets without any effect. It surprised her to see so many closing in on her after what she had done to their associate. They would not give up, even in the face of certain death. If death was what they sought, she would kindly oblige them.

  Displaying her strength, Tryst leapt high in the air. She landed in front of her target, an agent who shrieked as she closed the sixteen-foot gap between them in a single jump. She gave him no time to react, boxing his ears with her palms and watching his head simmer between them. A moment later, palm touched palm, and the headless husk of an agent fell to the floor, burning into dust.

  The consequences of her actions became real. Her rage diminishing, she thought she might feel some guilt later, but for the moment, she felt none—no regret, no despair, and, especially, no sorrow for the humans. But logic was slowly returning, unbidden. Killing the agents had come too easily to her. Retaliation would be forthcoming. There was no going back.

  After emotionlessly slaying a few more humans insistent on taking her down, Tryst checked the warzone for her companions. “We need to get out of here,” she said, more to herself than to anyone in particular.

  The room was filled with broken bodies and the ashes of many fallen, all human except Lenyx. Kazi stood not far from her, surrounding by a cloud of smoke and soot, his eyes wild and his smile big. He stomped his heel into the throat of an agent who futilely clawed at his leg. He was covered in blood, none of which was Symorian. Only a few humans remained intact. Fewer remained standing. How many could he have killed in such a short amount of time?

  An agent fired a bullet that flicked her behind the ear. Tryst turned and growled, and the agent ran to a far corner. She didn’t pursue him, instead searching for Milliken.

  Gunfire at the exit caught her attention, and sure enough, Milliken was at the center of it. He raised a human above his head as if he were military pressing him against the ceiling. Then, he slammed the human spine-first down over the back of a chair. The human’s body folded perversely like a hyperextended elbow, his body forming a V-shape of cracked bone.

  “We need to get out of here,” Tryst repeated. “Sooner or later, they will find a more effective way to kill us.”

  “There’s more coming,” Milliken yelled, shutting the door. He leaned his back against it, blocking entry and locking the three Symorians in with a few human stragglers who had lost their will to fight. Kazi picked them off one by one with indifferent precision. He left no survivors. When he was finished, he trotted over to Tryst with the pride of a housecat delivering a dead bird to its owners. Only, there had been much less skill required for his conquest. Though far greater in number, the humans had been severely outmatched.

  “Leaving won’t be a problem,” he said.

  Kazi moved in close to her. She found his savage appearance loathsome and shied away. Before Tryst could retreat, Kazi had his arms around her. As she squirmed in his arms, she became lightheaded. The room around her faded; she thought she was fainting. The very fabric of existence unwove around her until nothing but she and Kazi remained in a visceral, blurred world.

  Just as quickly as her surroundings had vanished, new surroundings reappeared. Trees, lots of them, stood tall in all directions. Somehow, her new environment was familiar. Is that the rock Connor stood under to get out of the rain? The remains of Matthew Simpson confirmed her suspicions. Somehow, someway, she had returned to the forests of Pittsburg, NH.

  “What just happened?” She looked at Kazi, at first too distracted by her inexplicable journey to notice she was still locked in his nauseating embrace. She pushed against his chest, breaking his hold.

  “What did you do?” A dozen questions ran through Tryst’s head. How did we get here? What happened to the President? Where were the others? Was Lenyx really dead? Was she? Her mind raced. She needed answers. She looked to Kazi for them. “You’d better start talking.”

  “It’s simple, really,” Kazi said. “We teleported.”

  “What are you talking about? We can’t teleport.”

  “We can’t?” he asked, a smug smile curling his lips. “I thought it, and now we’re here.”

  Tryst had difficulty believing it, but Earth had awakened things in her, amazing and frightening things, the veracity of which she no longer could doubt. “Another side effect of this planet?” Calming just a little, her heartbeat thudded as she considered if there were any limits to what an Earth-dwelling Symorian could do.

  Kazi laughed. “Telepathy, telekinesis and now teleportation? So much power we have, and they lack. Are there no limits to our superiority?”

  “This is no time for levity. Where’s Milliken… Where’s Lenyx?”

  A ferocity she hadn’t seen since the old wars overtook Kazi’s countenance. He looked powerful, virile, flaunting a confidence she wasn’t aware existed in him. “We are gods here,” he said. “These humans treat us as though we’re their enemies and worse, as though we’re beneath them. Their weapons bite at our flesh like bedbugs. And like bedbugs, their owners are parasites, deserving of extermination. Look what they did to our leader.”

  “Lenyx!” Tryst cried, no longer able to hold it back. She had left him, and it made her feel lower than the dirt beneath her boots. “We have to go back for him.”

  “He’s dead, Tryst. He was a fool to think he could reason with the humans. He’s paid the ultimate price for his foolishness. His mistake is not one I intend to repeat. We are all that is left. I know that may be hard for you—”

  “Now!” Tryst shouted. “We can’t be certain he’s dead. Milliken has already cheated death once. Why not Lenyx? And even if he’s gone, would you leave Milliken to the same fate?”

  “As you command,” Kazi said, disdain hiding poorly in the shadows of his face. In a flash, he was gone.

  Tryst crumbled beneath her own weight, the horrible events of the day finally catching up to her. Her legs felt like they were made of solid iron, refusing to lift under the heavy burden of her sorrow. A faint ray of hope lingered. Lenyx could still be alive. Couldn’t he?

  There, alone in the New Hampshire wilderness, she found her despair. Hope died. Lenyx was gone. She could no longer fool herself otherwise. Tears burst from the corners of her eyes, swelling over the dams that had promised to hold them back.

  Several minutes passed with Tryst down in the dirt and grime, where she felt she belonged. Her commander, her partner, had fallen, and she had done nothing to stop it. What kind of Symorian am I? Filth, no better. She no longer blamed the humans for Lenyx’s injuries. She blamed herself.

  With a bright flash resembling the lightning that had struck there only two days earlier, Kazi returned. He stood arm in arm with Milliken, who appeared as dumbfounded by the teleportation as she’d been. Lenyx lay slung over his shoulder, still dead.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  When the bullets started flying and the humans started dying, Connor sat among the press in a seat of honor near the front. As President Kennedy’s flesh and bones blackened and charred until only ashes remained, he could only gawk, stunned by the turn of events that may have branded him a traitor. He regretted his bad luck at being the human who unwittingly helped aliens kill the President. Worse still, his nation’s leader didn’t deserve her fate. He found little consolation in the thought that he could have done nothing to save her. When the reporters ran, he came to his senses and ran with them, thinking he’d forever abandoned his role as unofficial alien liaison.

 
The screams of the dying echoed through the hallway as he sprinted to the exit. People pushed and clawed their way out a single doorway. Several were crushed and trampled in the ensuing bottleneck. Connor thought back to the fire drills in which he’d been forced to participate, first as a student and later as a professor. The reality of this emergency was a far cry from the single-file order of those drills.

  A woman in her forties fell about ten feet in front of him. No one stopped to help her up. Instead, they stepped over her. Others stepped on her.

  By the time Connor reached her, the woman seemed shaken but not terribly injured. He pulled her up, almost losing his balance as frightened attendees behind him pushed forward. The woman thanked him, and he forced a smile, desperate to get out of the building like everyone else. Arm in arm with the woman, Connor made his way through the exit.

  The hallway opened into a foyer. At the front were several sets of doors, one group for entering and another for exiting. Security guards and metal detectors normally guarded the entrance, but the security personnel were long gone. The panicked journalists filed out each doorway, the more agile of them setting off metal detectors and hopping over turnstiles to escape the building.

  Still propping up the woman, Connor made his way through the exit and down a long flight of cement stairs. When they reached the bottom, the woman thanked him again and said she’d be all right on her own. They parted, and Connor made his way to the sidewalk, having no particular destination in mind. Anywhere, as long as it’s far away from here.

  He didn’t get far before uniformed men with sidearms bulging at their hips nabbed him. They forced him into a black sedan, where they cuffed his hands behind his back and pulled a black bag over his head.

  Who are they? C.I.A.? Black ops? I thought this shit only happened in the movies. Am I going to end up detained in some foreign location without ever being tried and convicted? Or are they the types who bury people in the desert? His stomach turned over.