by H. R. Romero
“I wonder what happened. What killed them all?” says Connors.
“Rose,” says Dr. Shaw. “Do you have any knowledge of this vessel? Can you sense anything, or does it remind you of anything?”
“No, Dr. Shaw. I’ve never been here before.”
“I know you haven’t, but I was hoping maybe you might know, like you knew about the picture of the jeep, before.”
“I’m sorry,”
“It’s okay, Rose,” Let us know if you recognize anything that might help us,” says Shaw.
“Look around for something that might be a weapon. We need to be ready to fight those things off when they come.,” says Connors.
They follow a corridor leading up a spiral staircase, which, in turn, lets out to a room filled with chairs and controls dispersed throughout. The Major thinks this may be the bridge of the ship, because of its location near the forward hull and the layout of the control systems.
A sleek wall to one side of the room is filled with flat glass panels, and on them are images of the inner ship. Some of the panels show the land surrounding the vessel.
Rose quietly studies the levers, switches, dials, and buttons, and flickering lights, while Major Connors searches for weapons to fight the Red Queen when the time comes. Dr. Valentine and Dr. Shaw intrigued with the technology of the ship, talk amongst themselves on the other side of the bridge.
On one of the flat panels, there’s movement. Small symbols, like the ones Rose has seen in her mind before, scroll across the glass screen. The symbols spell out the word SEVENTY-THREE UNIDENTIFIED LIFEFORMS DETECTED. LOCATION OUTER SHIP PARAMETER. The Red Queen and her Hive have arrived.
“Major Connors! Look,” says Rose.
The Major rushes across the supposed bridge. He’s still found nothing that would serve as a weapon. The Turned have come, and they’re looking for a way in.
“What in the hell are we going to do?” says, Dr. Shaw.
“They’re coming across on the trees,” says Dr. Valentine. “If they get in here, we’re all dead.”
Rose jolts. She notices a control panel laid out before her. The schematic, and the purpose, and the knowledge of when and how to use it, flash before her vision.
Before anyone can stop her, she shouts, “I know what to do!” She punches a button and a for the briefest time the flickering lights dim all around them, draining power from the ship’s limited supply.
Something somewhere made a whirring noise, and one by one the trees bridging the gap, from rim to craft are vaporized, along with any Turned unfortunate enough to be on the trees at the time. Other Turned who were waiting to cross, were thrown back from the perimeter of the ship.
“What did you do, Rose?” says Connors.
“It’s like an invisible barrier,” says Dr. Valentine. “Incredible.”
“How long will it keep them out?” asks Dr. Shaw.
“Not long. The ship is dying,” says Rose, she looks saddened by the thought. “They will be in before the sun goes down.”
“That’s an hour from now,” says Connors, watching the panel, showing the Red Queen rampaging along the rim of the canyon, and her soldiers throwing their spears, only to be harmlessly reflected away from the invisible barrier.
There is a schematic of the ship on one of the panels, and Connors asks if Rose can point out an armory.
“It was here,” says Rose, pointing to a section of the vessel, entirely destroyed by the crash.
“What about a science department or a medical facility?” says Dr. Shaw.
“Here.” Rose places her little finger down on the glass panel.
“It’s not far,” says Dr. Valentine, who glances at Connors.
“You and Dr. Shaw go. See if you can find out anything about the Turned, what they are, why they’re here, who these dead aliens are, anything the fuck at all,” says Connors. “I’m going to keep searching for weapons and keep my eyes on our friends out there.”
The craft is vast, and there are many twists and turns throughout. The ship seems to have no logical layout, and at closer scrutiny appears to be something that would have been grown rather than constructed; or maybe a bit of both. There is a multitude of organic components built into the walls and floors and arched ceilings.
Finally, Dr. Valentine, Dr. Shaw, and Rose come to the place where Rose indicated the medical facility was located.
The chamber is outfitted with several long, rounded pods. The pods look more like an oversized magnolia blossom than a piece of otherworldly medical equipment. Inside are more shriveled up alien corpses.
Dr. Valentine is startled by movement above. It’s just birds, thank God. But now, something that isn’t ‘just birds’ is speaking in a robust and guttural voice. It reminds her of a mix of Swedish and Russian.
“What is it?” Dr. Valentine says.
A shadow falls across her. Something is moving between one of the gaping holes in the hull and where she and Rose are standing. Dr. Shaw is several feet behind them.
“What is it saying, Rose, do you know?” says Dr. Shaw.
“It’s saying something about detecting an injured lifeform entering the room. I have a strange feeling, it’s talking about me,” says Rose, though she’s only certain when a light-bodied sphere floats across the room and shines a light in her face. Its exterior casing reminds Rose of the leafy texture of the hull of the spaceship.
Dr. Valentine shouts and reaches out for Rose, but the moment her hand makes contact with the girl’s arm, a blue light shines down on them, and she’s bombarded with memories and thoughts that aren’t her own.
Her mind is connected with Rose’s, and together they stand locked in a beam of light, and it’s speaking in an alien language, but Dr. Valentine can somehow understand precisely what it’s saying.
“Head trauma. Loss of memory detected. Conducting repair to host’s brain,” says the voice.
A tangle of vines springs from the sphere and touch Rose’s face and neck. They undulate and pass over her skull, then there are images forming as if from vapor, but then they become as tangible as if they are right in front of them. They are images of what must be Rose’s forgotten memories.
“Come down from that tree. You are going to break your fool neck,” The woman is laughing out of sheer nervousness. “Now get down right now and go wash up for dinner.”
“Okay, mommy,” says Rose.
The undulating vines reposition themselves and Rose moans.
“Mommy, mommy,” cries a small girl.
It’s Rose, but much younger. Her bedroom door bursts open, and a woman comes in.
“What is it, baby sweet?” says the woman.
Rose can only point at the rocking chair in the corner. A pile of clothes sits there, still unfolded. “Monster! It was looking at me.”
“It’s not a monster, just laundry, see, baby sweet?” The woman hugs and kisses Rose and tucks her in, before taking the clothes and leaving the bedroom. The vision dims.
“Not a monster, baby love,” Rose echoes as if she’s reliving the moment.
The image changes and a green man shoots her with a sharp needle, full of medicine, and she’s getting very sleepy. She tries to climb and get away, but she can’t hold onto the tree. She slips. Then she screams and falls to the ground where blackness consumes her.
Images as thin as a veil come and go, pulsing like a dying heartbeat. Visions of waking up at Camp Able with Dr. Shaw holding his sharp knife over her. Images of the time she spent as a research subject, and of the trip from Texas to where they are trapped inside this alien ship, with a Red Queen biding her time outside, waiting to kill all of them.
There is something more here though. The light is changing from blue to red-orange. And the voice says, “Communication with symbiont established.”
Dr. Valentine feels fatigued and short of breath. The red-orange light is eating away at her. She can feel that Rose is experiencing the same level of exhaustion. This is taking a toll on them both.
There are more images coming into view. Alien images. It’s difficult to conceive their meaning at first, but then Dr. Valentine slowly begins to understand. Rose is being given information about what has happened, more so, what has gone wrong.
Dr. Valentine stirs, the world is coming back to her one, unfocused, frame at a time.
“How long have I been out?” she says.
“About an hour,” says Dr. Shaw, helping her to stand on her unsteady legs.
She rubs her face and tries to make sense of her surroundings.
“What happened to you?” says Connors, who has joined them.
She fumbles for the right words, they escape her. She’s talking incoherently, but then she stops trying, remembering the visions she shared with Rose. She swallows hard. “Where is Rose?”
“She came to just a few minutes before you did, Emara,” says Shaw. “what happened?”
Dr. Valentine ignores the question. “Where is she?”
“She says she knows how to stop the Turned. She went up there,” says Shaw gazing up to the gaping maw in the hull, high overhead.
“Oh God, we have to stop her,” says Dr. Valentine, trying to gain a secure purchase on the floor beneath her feet, which seems to be doing its best to move from beneath her.
“What is going on?” shouts Connors, who is already chasing after her.
Dr. Valentine doesn’t answer, she’s already making her way to a pile of fallen beams and pseudo-metallic gridwork, and vines, and cables, which appear to be the only and quickest way up to the hole in the roof, and to the outer hull beyond. She wastes no time starting her ascent.
Connors and Shaw are climbing up close behind her. She knows only one thing. Her initial hopes that Rose was a cure, that she could be saved that she is just a child and not a monster… they were all rubbish. She was wrong. She just didn’t realize until now how wrong she was.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“The only way out is to die.”
-Bullet for My Valentine
Rose’s feet are planted on the hull of the ship. Far below them, she can hear someone climbing up to where she is.
The Red Queen has spread her army out along the canyon edge, and they are unceasingly testing the failing barrier with stones and sticks, saving their spears for the moment when it fails altogether. And it will fail. It’s only a matter of time. It's already shimmering and crackling. Phasing from invisible to the visible spectrum of light, showing delicate crosshatches of muted colors.
Rose has changed. She’s grown. She feels the difference. The vines growing in her hair, have grown thicker, and longer, and the buds are full and swelling, on the precipice of blooming.
The very sight of her enrages the Red Queen immediately. Not too long ago this would have frightened Rose, but no longer. Rose knows what to do now. She knows how to bring down the Red Queen and the Turned. She had forgotten for a long time what she was supposed to do, but since being treated in the ship for her amnesia, she can remember everything.
A solitary bud opens into a beautiful yellow flower, as Dr. Valentine’s head emerges from the rift in the hull.
“Rose, stop,” says Dr. Valentine.
Rose isn’t surprised to see Dr. Valentine, or Dr. Shaw, or Major Connors, who climb from the hole.
“I can help, Dr. Valentine,” Rose says with a smile.
Dr. Valentine doesn’t smile in return. Instead, the woman who Rose thought cared for her, pulls her pistol.
“I can’t let you do this,” says Valentine. A tear forms in the corner of her eye.
“Wait,” says Connors. “That girl has saved our lives on more than one occasion.”
“What is this?” says Dr. Shaw. “What is it you can’t let her do?”
“You were right, Shaw. You were right about her. About all of them.”
A rock clacks against the invisible barrier, and the shield flashes and sizzles brightly where it struck against it. The smell of ozone fills the protected bubble between shield and ship.
“I can make it all better. I can make the Turned go away forever,” says Rose.
“What the hell is going on, Dr. Valentine?” says Connors. “You tell me right now, that’s an order.”
“This ship,” Dr. Valentine says, “the dead aliens inside it, they’ve been watching us, for a long time. They go to inhabited planets. We aren’t the only world with life on it. They invade slowly over a period of generations, taking it for themselves before anyone becomes the wiser. But something went wrong this time. The Aliens became sick, and the ship was damaged. They were never meant to be discovered. This is how they propagate their species. They study the inhabitants of the planet and program certain, compatible seeds with information of that world. That’s how Rose knew things that she couldn’t possibly have known. It was all preprogrammed.”
“But, she says she can fix it,” Shaw says.
“I saw everything she plans to do. Everything she has to do. Our minds were somehow connected… in the ship. By that alien sphere. She’s not going to fix it. This isn’t going to go the way you think. She’s going to destroy everything. EVERYTHING! She’s not a cure, she’s a weapon of mass destruction. Insurance. The Turned out there…,” Dr. Valentine sweeps her arm across the horizon, “…are an accident. When we blew a hole in this ship, it released seeds that were not compatible for the invasion of Earth… of the human species. That’s the reason for all the different mutations. Rose and the other children… what’s inside them…. The symbionts… they’re compatible with our DNA, that’s why they look so human, and the symbiont inside them was able to move in and take over the host body so effortlessly. But There’s something else. Rose is different. One out of a hundred thousand. If anything goes wrong with the invasion, she has the ability to wipe the slate clean and with it… us.”
“Not everything, Dr. Valentine. The Turned-animals and plants and the Turned-children will survive,’ cries Rose, her heart sinking with anguish because of what she has become in Dr. Valentine’s eyes.
“I can’t let you do it,” says Dr. Valentine. She lifts her sidearm and fires directly at Rose’s head.
A mist of warm, copper-scented blood sprays into the air and a fine speckling of it covers Dr. Valentine’s face, she stands stunned that she has killed, not Rose, as she has intended, but Major Connors who threw himself in front of Rose at the last second. But there is no time to weep before his body slides down the curved hull of the ship, and tumbles into the immense canyon and disappears from sight.
Rose whimpers and tears trail from her eyes. The woman who had once come to her rescue, the woman she had loved like the mother she’d never known, has caught a spear, deep in her back. The barrier has finally failed.
The last rays of the sun are dowsed behind the mountains, and the buds in her hair have all blossomed into beautiful, but deadly flowers in the moonless evening. The stars are beginning to peep out one by one.
Dr. Shaw falls to the hull, hopeless and beaten.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Shaw,” says Rose. Delicate golden-red pollen, from her blooms, catches a ride on a gust of wind and blows toward the Red Queen and her Army. They are preparing to launch their spears and destroy Rose and the remaining human. “We’ll die you know, but the Turned-children will create a new world after the evil is cleansed from it.”
“Self-sacrifice is a noble and human quality. Where did you learn it?” Asks Shaw.
“From Major Connors’s Bible. A man they called Jesus. Goodbye, Dr. Shaw,” she says, as the last of her pollen blows through the angry Queen’s ranks. They are infected with a deadly pathogen, and they’ll all be gone before the sun rises.
The spears are launched and fill the air with a death sentence. Rose looks toward the twinkling stars, and she imagines herself far away, gazing into the Milky Way, above her, on the ceiling of the world.
She’s a happy little girl.
Meet the author
H.R. Romero is a pen name for a well-known American auth
or. He resides in a small Texas town with his family. He has several How-To books and Children’s novels to his credit.
He spends his free time pondering what it must be like to die, by holding his breath for hours on end.
You can contact the author at: [email protected]