by Ken Douglas
He wanted to see her eyes when he pulled the trigger.
He wanted to savor the moment.
“ Move and you’re dead!” he said and the women froze. “Hands on your heads or I punch a whole through Lila big enough for me to put my fist through.”
The women did as he instructed.
“ Turn around.”
The women did.
If he’d thought the cancer was bad, the pain radiating out from his back was ten times worse. Any other man would be on the floor, but Manny prided himself on the fact that he wasn’t any other man. He’d grown up thinking he was extraordinary, believing it, and the fact that his hand was steady, that the big gun was unwavering, proved it.
“ Did you wet your pants, Manny?” Lila had a sneer in her voice and a smile on her face. She wasn’t afraid. Neither was Eisenhower, but then she needn’t be, she knew he wouldn’t harm her. At least not until he’d learned her secret.
“ Tucker?” Manny had to know for sure.
“ Dead,” Lila said.
“ As so shall you be.”
Izzy braced herself as the sound of a single gunshot ricocheted throughout the room. But instead of Lila collapsing to the floor, Manny Wayne jerked backwards, like he’d been swatted with a sledge. His gun flew from his hand when he hit the floor, body quivering in it’s death throws.
“ I really didn’t like that son of a bitch.” A man’s voice from behind said as Manny Wayne’s body went still.
Lowering their hands, the women turned as a lanky man came down the stairs, with Amy and Alicia following. He had a pistol in his right hand and it was trained on Lila.
“ Dr. Eisenhower, we meet again.” He nodded toward Izzy, but kept his eyes on Lila. Then to her, “Sorry I didn’t keep my word. I tried, but sometimes shit happens.”
“ You got here awful fast, Detective Mouledoux,” Lila said, “considering how we left you.”
“ Yeah, I guess I did,” Mouledoux said.
“ Are you one of Manny’s tame cops, like Peeps?”
“ No, not like Peeps.” He was at the bottom of the stairs now, in the living room, but a respectable distance away from Izzy and Lila. The girls flanked him, Amy on his left, Alicia on his right.
“ He’s a good guy, Miss Booth,” Alicia said.
“ You know me?” Lila said.
“ I heard him talking about you?” Alicia pointed to the dead Manny Wayne.
“ He didn’t want to admit it,” Amy said, “but he was afraid of you.”
“ And well he should have been,” Lila said. She turned toward Mouledoux. “There is no police business here. You can put your weapon away.”
“ I think not just yet.” He kept his gun on Lila, but Amy grabbed the barrel, snatched it from his hand.
“ What-” But before Mouledoux had a chance to react, Lila whipped the forty-five from her leg holster, trained it on the cop. She was fast, like any of the quickdraw cowboys Izzy had read about when she was a little girl.
“ Now I feel a bit more comfortable,” Lila said.
“ Don’t shoot him, Miss Booth,” Alicia said.
“ Yeah,” Amy said. “He was rescuing us.”
“ Really?” Izzy was surprised.
“ It’s true, Nana.”
And to Izzy it did look true. The man could have done the cowardly thing and grabbed one of the girls to use as a shield, but he didn’t. And neither did the girls run from him once he’d been disarmed.
“ We can’t kill this one,” Izzy said.
“ I know,” Lila said, “but it would be so much tidier if we could.”
“ I understand that,” the policeman said. “You need to keep Dr. Eisenhower’s secret safe.” He spread his hands, palms forward, in front of himself. “I’ve already forgotten it.”
“ You gave me your word once before and you broke it,” Lila said. “How can I trust you now?”
“ I didn’t have any choice,” Mouledoux said. “I could have stayed out of it, like I promised, but I’m a cop, these girls were in trouble.”
“ You’re not here because of Izzy’s secret?” Lila said. “You’re not after the Fountain of Youth?”
“ If I was, that would be you dead over there, instead of Mansfield Wayne.”
“ Good point,” Izzy said. “You can put your gun away, Lila.”
“ Not just yet.” She kept it pointed at the policeman. “Izzy and I and these girls are going to have to leave this place before it’s crawling with cops. Then I’m going to disappear, maybe Izzy’s going to vanish too, I don’t know, but I am and so I need a favor.”
“ Ask,” Mouledoux said.
“ There’s an old man named Harvey Weinstein.” She told Mouledoux where he lived. “He wants a big dog. Out back there are two who are needing a new home.”
“ What are their names?” Mouledoux said.
“ They’ll be needing new ones,” Lila said.
“ I’ll see he gets them. Anything else?”
“ You forget all about us.”
“ That goes without saying.”
“ Isadora Eisenhower, are you in there?” A woman from outside shouted. A woman with a strange accent.
“ I know that voice,” Izzy said. “It’s Marlan. She’s why I’m like I am.” Izzy turned to Lila, “What should I do?”
“ Beats me.”
“ I think you should answer her,” Mouledoux said.
“ Yes, I’m here,” Izzy shouted back.
“ Are they all dead? Is it safe to enter?”
“ You,” Izzy said to Mouledoux. “Get out of sight.” She pointed to a sofa backed up against the wall on the opposite side of the room. “Think you can move that out a bit and squeeze behind it?”
“ Don’t need to tell me twice.” Mouledoux darted over to the sofa, pulled it a couple feet from the wall, squeezed in behind it.
“ Amy,” Izzy said, “you and Alicia push it back.”
“ Okay,” Amy said and she and Alicia pushed it back toward the wall, sandwiching Mouledoux in.
“ I think you should put your gun away,” Izzy said.
“ Yeah.” Lila did. “What about the girls?”
“ My instinct tells me they’re safe, you too,” Izzy said. “But not him.”
“ Why?”
“ I think she knows we came to rescue the girls.”
“ How can you know that?”
“ I don’t, but I think it’s true.”
“ I hope you’re right.”
“ Dr. Eisenhower,” Marlan shouted out again. “Did you hear me? Is it safe for me?”
“ It’s safe, you can come in,” Izzy called out.
The front door opened and Marlan came in, looking slender and fit, not anything like a woman who had just given birth. She went straight to Izzy, looked her in the eyes, touched her cheek. Then she went to Lila, looked her in the eyes as well, touched her cheek as well.
“ She’s like us,” Marlan said. It wasn’t a question. To Izzy, “You did this?”
“ Yes.”
“ But not them.” Marlan pointed to Alicia and Amy.
“ No, not them,” Izzy said.
“ Other than the four of you,” Marlan said, “everybody who knows about what happened to you, they’re all dead, yes?”
“ Yes,” Izzy lied. She hoped Marlan didn’t discover Mouledoux hiding behind the sofa. And then there was Black back in Oregon. She didn’t know what was going to become of her, but instinctively she knew if Marlan knew about her, it wouldn’t be good. And she was starting to worry about the girls and Lila. What did Marlan have planned for them? Maybe she should have had the girls hide as well.
“ You and you,” Marlan touched both Izzy and Lila on the left shoulder, “have to come with me. You have no choice.”
“ What about us?” Amy said.
“ You have a choice. You can come or not.”
“ You’re not worried we might tell?” Alicia said.
“ And who would believe you?” Mar
lan said.
“ Yeah, you’re right about that,” Alicia said. “People would think we were crazy.”
“ If we go with you, it’s for good, isn’t it?” Amy said.
“ I’m sorry, but yes,” Marlan said. “You can never come back.”
“ Go where?” Lila said.
“ Jeez,” Alicia said, “I’ve figured that out.”
“ Then tell her,” Marlan said.
“ The stars,” Alicia said. “Where else?” Then, “And I’m going.”
“ I’m in,” Amy said.
“ Maybe you should think about this.” Izzy didn’t know what the future held for her and Lila, but more then ever she wanted Amy to grow up safe, to have a life.
“ Maybe she’s right,” Lila said to Amy, then to Marlan. “So how does this all work? You mix up their blood with yours, like Izzy did me?”
“ Not exactly,” Marlan said. “We have more sophisticated methods and safer.”
“ What do you mean, safer?” Izzy said.
“ Sometimes, if blood is mixed, more than just getting young happens.”
“ Like what?” Izzy said, but she already knew what, she just wanted to hear Marlan say it.
“ Sometimes, because the DNA is commingled, it’s possible for one person to take on the features of the other.”
“ Like what features?” Lila said.
“ Don’t worry, you’re going to be okay,” Marlan said.
“ What features? she said again.
“ Well, eye color, skin color, it’s even possible for an older person to turn not only younger, but to switch sexes. It’s rare.”
“ So,” Izzy said, “You’ll be using the safe methods on our girls?”
“ Of course, it’s necessary,” Marlan said. “Now if it’s been decided, we have to go. Your authorities will be here soon.”
“ I don’t hear any sirens,” Lila said. “We have a few minutes and I have a few questions.”
“ As I said, you have to come,” Marlan said. “You have no choice.”
“ I understand that,” Lila said. “And I understand you probably have the means to make me even if I don’t want to go, but these girls have a choice, so why don’t you tell them what’s really going on here.”
“ What are you saying?” Marlan trained a scowl toward Lila.
“ I can spot a liar a mile away,” Lila said, “and my bullshit detector is on full alert. You may not be lying full out, but you’re not telling the whole truth either, so spill it.”
“ Bullshit detector? Spill it?” Marlan said.
“ She means she doesn’t believe you’re telling us everything,” Izzy said. “She thinks you’re hiding something and she wants you to tell us what it is, so the girls don’t make a mistake, because maybe if they knew everything, they might not want to go.”
“ That’s what I thought she meant,” Marlan said. Then to Lila, “I’ll make this fast.” She sighed. “We have a common ancestor, you and I, my people and yours. Eons ago a force none of us understands, a force you call God, scattered us throughout the many universes. We think we were never supposed to find each other.”
“ But you found us,” Alicia said.
“ And others,” Marlan said. “The first step was conquering what you call DNA. We developed a drug that optimizes it. You become a young adult, in your prime and it slows down the aging process. You live a very long time, hundreds of years. The drug was both a blessing and a curse.”
“ Let me guess,” Lila said. “Everybody got the drug. Nobody died and your world got overcrowded, so you had to send out spaceships and colonize other planets.”
“ No, we didn’t colonize. We found another way. Worse really, much worse.”
“ You sterilized yourselves,” Izzy whispered.
“ We tried, but failed for years. Vasectomies reversed themselves and hysterectomies also didn’t work, the uterus grew back overnight.”
“ Like my hair did when I shaved it off.”
“ Yes, if your body detected no hair, it would grow back. Hair grows as it normally does, but if you shave it all off, your body detects it and replaces it.”
“ So what did you do?” Lila said.
“ Condoms worked, but they’re messy and inconvenient, but that’s what we used till our scientists were able to come up with a birth control pill that actually worked. Take it one time and you can’t get pregnant.”
“ So nobody ever has children?” Lila said.
“ But what about you?” Izzy said. “I delivered your daughter.”
“ The birth control is reversible,” Marlan said. “Take another pill and you can get pregnant.” She sighed. “Most women are satisfied not having children. It’s like the DNA understands the problem and the urge or desire or whatever you want to call it women have to bear children is gone, but not in all of us. A very few of us still want to. It eats at us, we have to conceive. It’s like the mother instinct is stronger in us to make up for all the women who don’t have it anymore.”
“ So you took the pill to turn it off,” Alicia said.
“ Yes, but the penalty was high,” Marlan said. “The government passed a law saying all children would become wards of the state, which meant that if you had a child, they took it.”
“ Chalk up another reason why I hate government,” Alicia said.
“ All of the women who needed to conceive were urged to come forward and we were presented with a horrible choice. We could have the pill and have our children, but we’d have to leave. We were banished.”
“ From the planet?” Alicia said.
“ Yes, from the planet.”
“ How’d they do that?” Alicia said.
“ They built a starship. It took time, years. And in the meantime we lived in a special place, a city just for us, but it was really a concentration camp. Not like the ones in Germany during your World War II. It was what you would call a gilded cage, but a cage nonetheless. We were walled in, kept out of sight till the starship was finished, then we were sent away, to start over, to find a new world to live on.”
“ How long have you been traveling around in your spaceship?” Alicia said. “And how fast does it go?”
“ We can do light years in days and we’ve been living aboard for very long time. It seems there’s always a reason why we can’t settle when we find a star system like this.”
“ And why can’t you settle here?” Amy said.
“ You saw how people reacted to Dr. Eisenhower. Imagine if we moved in among you, never growing old. We would ruin your world and that’s forbidden. Besides, we’re not allowed to interfere, sort of like that Prime Directive from your Star Trek movies.
“ But you interfered with the fog and the noise thing, that engine sound, whatever it was,” Izzy said.
“ That was against all kinds of rules, but I wanted you to live and I wanted those bad people dealt with. We could never do it, not allowed, but I cheated a little and helped you. Now can we go?”
“ Not just yet,” Lila said. “When we leave here, where are we going, exactly?”
“ We’re hoping we can find a planet where the people have evolved enough to welcome us.”
“ That doesn’t sound likely,” Lila said. “Your own people weren’t evolved enough.”
“ You’re probably right,” Marlan said, “but there’s always the chance we can find an uninhabited planet that can sustain life. One with oceans, fish, animals, but no humans. But, you know, every island on earth that has fresh water, has people on it. That seems to be the way it is with planets like this.”
“ But you’re going to keep looking?” Amy said.
“ Yes, we are.”
“ How many people on your little spaceship?” Lila said.
“ We left with just over ten thousand, we’re twice that now.”
“ Wow, not so little.”
“ No,” Marlan said. “Fortunately we can cloak it, so the systems we visit never know we’ve been there.”
“ Hey, you have me,” Alicia said.
“ Yeah, yeah, I was thinking about Nana and Miss Booth.”
“ I hear sirens,” Lila said.
“ Time to choose,” Marlan said.
“ I’m going,” Alicia said.
“ Me too,” Amy said.
“ Alright then,” Marlan motioned with her hand to Amy and Alicia, “come over here by us.”
The girls obeyed.
Marlan tapped her right ear and said, “Five to beam up.”
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