Jelly Cooper: Alien

by Lynne Thomas

  I let the whole name thing slide (the guy’s crazy – arguing about my name isn’t going to change that) and take the opportunity to get a good look at him. When I explain this dream to Humphrey and Agatha, I’m not going to miss out a single thing. I’m going to be like Columbo or maybe Poirot, but without the funny little moustache.

  He’s just a bit taller than Agatha’s brother James, who is a total hotty by the way, so he must be around six-two. His skin is tanned and brown, which makes his green eyes zing. His hair is brown but I see grey poking out here and there. My mother would call it salt and pepper. I call it getting on a bit. I try to guess, but I can’t put an age on him.

  He sees me staring and stares back; how annoying.

  “Come on then, spit it out. Tell me what you’ve come here to tell me and we can all go home, wake up, whatever, and get some sleep.”

  Sleep! I remember that.

  “We don’t have very long,” he says, sounding tired himself. “They are stronger. I had to use a collective to shut him out so that I could reach you safely.”

  “Whoa, back up there a minute. Who’s ‘he’ and where are you shutting him out of?”

  I know who the ‘he’ is, but I want him to say it. I want another person, even an imaginary one, to say that the psycho alien bounty hunter exists.

  He looks up at the sky and blows out his cheeks. “The Hunter, Camille, as you know. I had to use a collective to shut the Hunter out of your head while we spoke.”

  I laugh. I know that I shouldn’t but I can’t help myself. It’s a teeny bit much, even for me.

  “My head?”

  I chuckle some more.

  He doesn’t smile back. “Yes. Unless we shut him out of your mind while I talk to you, he’ll know who you are and where you are.”

  “Sure he will.” This guy’s an absolute scream. He should work the comedy circuits; he’d make a killing. The toga would have to go though.

  He sighs. “The Hunter can reach you through your subconscious, when you sleep or dream. Any time your mind is relaxed, he can get in. That’s how he’ll track you, pinpoint your location and kill you.”

  “Sure, yeah, of course.”

  Without warning, he grabs my shoulders and something passes between us. I see yellow skies and green clouds. I see a city at the edge of a meadow of purple corn and strangely dressed people walking around. I see a park full of children and I see an empty, black future full of fire and persecution and death for these people.

  My eyes go wide and I stumble away.

  “It’s real, Camille. This is going to be hard for you to accept at first, but please try; we have little time. You are not human.”

  I shake my head. No, I’m not.

  “You are Javorian.”

  I nod, once. Yes, I am.

  “Go on.”

  “Your name is Camille Sakiiri and you are from Javoria. There are two sentient species on Javoria: us and the bashrak. Forty seven years ago, under a new ruler, the bashrak decided that they wanted the planet. The whole planet. We fought them off for decades but they grew too strong. Everyone was dying, everything was dying. We dispatched the graclings, the um, babies, to far away planets to save them. You came here, to Earth. Unfortunately, so did one of the bashrack’s best Hunters. His mission was, is, to find you and kill you. It’s the only purpose in his life. He won’t stop until it’s done.”

  He touches the back of my hand with his finger and I see it all. Images of the planet appear in my mind; the battles, the victories, the defeats, thousands and thousands of infants being evacuated, being left with strangers. I see parents crying over lost children and the bashrak pressing forward, hunting and slaughtering.

  Oh my God.

  They don’t hesitate; they just murder and destroy.

  “I can’t fight him.”

  When he touched me, sandal man exchanged more than pretty pictures.

  He pulls a face. “You were not meant to feel that.”

  To hell with that. What about the not being able to fight thing? How do I combat that?

  “You flee,” he says.

  Whoa horsy.

  “How did you do that?” I whisper. “You read my mind. How did you do it?”

  He shrugs. “We are telepaths. Javorians, I mean.”

  “Of course. Silly me.” Amidst the total insanity of this conversation, I have a thought. “Why haven’t I been reading people’s thoughts already if I’m Delorian?”

  “Javorian,” he corrects with a frown. I hide a smirk. Gotcha.

  My lovely smug glow at pushing his buttons suddenly evaporates as I realise that my question has made him incredibly sad. I can feel it.

  “It’s a skill you have to develop,” he says. “If you had grown up on your home planet, you would be accomplished by now.”

  I almost blurt out “Earth is my home planet.” I don’t know why I stop myself.

  “So,” I say instead, “how do I manage this mind boggling feat?”

  “You focus.”

  Silence.

  “I focus? I focus. Of course, why didn’t I think of it before – it’s all so simple. HA! I focus when I’m in class every day. I focus when I talk to my friends. I focus when I pour milk on my cereal. I never know what the English teacher is about to say next, or what’s going on in Agatha’s head, or Humphrey’s.”

  His voice is patient, but the impatience in his eyes is hard to miss. His green eyes. Hmmm.

  “Focus is the key to every one of your gifts. They haven’t developed because you were unaware. Your powers will reveal themselves despite your lack of experience; it’s your birthright.”

  I screw up my face, forgetting that it makes me look like a field mouse. “I’m not really following this.”

  “Had you been on Javoria, you would be fully developed and your skills would be perfected. You have had no stimulus on Earth and as a result, your powers have been…um…asleep.”

  “You can say that again.”

  He ignores me. “Now you have come of age and your powers are waking.”

  “You’re telling me that my fourteenth birthday was the trigger for all of this?”

  He nods.

  “Oh man. That’s harsh. I thought sixteen was the big one.”

  He allows himself a half smile. “How soon after your birth date did you start getting the dreams?”

  He knows about the dreams. I’m at once relieved beyond belief and terrified, because bit by bit this nightmare is becoming real to me. I weigh up my options – they don’t amount to much - so I go back to the beginning and tell sandal man about the guy in the yellow raincoat. I dreamed of him before my birthday.

  He dismisses it with a wave of his weathered hand and mumbles,

  “That’s nothing, it’s not connected. What about the Hunter? How soon after did you start dreaming of him?”

  Not connected? Not connected? I’ve been dreaming of a guy in a yellow raincoat for months and it’s not connected? Oh, well, that makes it all OK then!

  Breathe, Jelly, breathe.

  I shrug my shoulders (just to emphasize that if he doesn’t care, I don’t care).

  “The night of my birthday I dreamed of yellow raincoat guy, as usual, and the night after I had a new, less pleasant, visitor.”

  Wow! Sandal man actually swears in front of me and I’m not talking about a minor, ruffle some old lady’s feathers kind of curse; this is a full blown, out and out, gutter curse. I’m impressed.

  I can’t seem to wipe the silly smile from my face, but it disappears soon enough when I catch his eyes.

  “This is what we feared the most. Many graclings were sent from Javoria fourteen years ago, but your signal was stronger than the others.”

  “Signal? I have a signal?”

  He nods. “All living beings have a signal, Camile. Each one is a little different and unique. Some can tune in to other people’s signals. It’s a skill the bashrak have. They knew that you had left the planet when your signal faded. They assig
ned a Hunter to track you down. He’s been looking for a long time, waiting all of these years, attuning himself to you, trying to pinpoint you. When you turned fourteen and unlocked your birthright, it would have been like a telepathic beacon. He would have picked up on it immediately.”

  His eyes slide away from mine.

  “Come on,” I say, arms crossed. He’s hiding something. I know it. “Finish.”

  He won’t look at me.

  “Your signal must be stronger than we thought for the Hunter to pick it up so quickly. It will help him find you and he is desperate to find you.”

  That’s just fabulous.

  “Let me get this straight. The day I turned fourteen, I opened up a telepathic link between me and this Hunter psycho bloke which makes it that much easier for him to track me down and kill me? That’s fantastic, just fantastic.”

  I kick the dusty ground between us. Whichever way I look at it, the outcome’s the same: I’m screwed. I round on him with a speed that surprises us both.

  “How long have I got before he reaches me?”

  The corners of his mouth turn down. “Not long. He will have narrowed in on the area. He hasn’t worked out who you are yet, but he’ll be watching for any signs.”

  “Like?”

  “Your powers will reveal you. Don’t use them in front of anyone.”

  I grunt. “There’s no chance of that happening. For a start, I can’t read thoughts,” I tick them off my fingers one by one, “I have no other special powers and I run like a person standing in quick…drying…….cement.”

  Oh bugger.

  He looks confused. “I don’t understand.”

  Tendrils of fear uncurl in my stomach. PE, the race, the freaky running skills.

  I can’t let sandal man know. I have to distract him.

  “And I don’t understand how to use these ‘special powers’, so I guess we’re even.” I snap, plonking my hands on my hips.

  Stubbornness has always been an ally of mine and I gratefully turn to it now.

  He mutters to himself. After a while, he turns and with a small shrug says, “I had better teach you to run, little one.”

  Little one.

  “Don’t call me that,” I whisper through lips too stiff to work properly. “Don’t ever call me that.”

  He looks upset. “What? Little one? Why not?”

  “He calls me that in my dream. He calls me that and then drops me into the canyon.”

  Green eyes snap to mine and I see rage burning in them. Rage and …

  Fire!

  Oh shit.

  You know when you hear something or see something that you really wish you hadn’t because your life was warm, fuzzy and much less complicated before you witnessed whatever you witnessed? Looking into his eyes, the locks start to tumble in my brain. Unless I’m way off track, I’m looking at my father. My biological father.

  I can’t deal with this. Not now. I push the sneaky suspicion to the very back of my mind and with sheer, blind, panic-driven determination, forget it.

  Cue one almighty breakdown in the future.

  If I have a future.

  My life sucks.

  “He’s extracting it from your memory.”

  “How’s that again?” I ask.

  “I used to call you little one. He’s retrieved this information from the depths of your memory and he’s using it to get at me.”

  I splutter. I can’t help myself. I mean, come on; I think that I’ve taken the news that I’m an alien from another planet squarely on the chin. I think under the present circumstances, I’m doing an award winning job of keeping an open mind. But enough is enough. Memory retrieval? Can they even do that on Star Trek?

  “How could I possibly remember you?” I ignore the hurt on his face, because to acknowledge it would be to admit to a fact that I’m no where near ready to handle. “I was still a baby when I left your planet and I haven’t clapped eyes on you since, until today. Not even in my dreams.”

  Hold on…

  Sandal man allows himself the smallest of smiles. “You’re thinking with a human mind, with human restrictions. With training, you could remember the day that you were born. It’s all there, in your memory, held back by being on Earth.”

  “Yes, well. There’s no need to be smug about it.” I can’t make up my mind if I believe him or not. I decide to give him the benefit of the doubt because an image of a yellow raincoat refuses to budge from my mind. The corners of my mouth twitch upwards. “Oh man, Agatha is going to love this.”

  His fingers dig into the soft flabby bit of my arms.

  “Ow! Get off me!”

  The fire in his eyes flares and I think that I really do not want to get on this man’s bad side. “You must not say anything,” he insists. “To anybody. It will mean the end of your life if you do. And theirs.”

  And I thought Rhiannon was over-dramatic.

  “I don’t lie to Humphrey and Agatha.”

  Well, not usually.

  He shakes me! It hurts and I struggle.

  “Camille, Jelly, please. Don’t speak of this; your birthright, your gifts, any of it. This is serious. He will kill you, your family and your friends without pause or emotion.”

  Best get off the subject and doubly quick.

  “OK, OK. So this, um…this reading thoughts thing; I just concentrate on doing it and it works?”

  He looks at me for a long time and my head feels spongy.

  “Don’t tell them, Jelly. I mean it. He’ll murder every one of your friends.”

  “Don’t read my mind again,” I whisper. “I don’t like it.”

  “Don’t tell them. You’ll regret it for the rest of your life. Trust me.”

  Trust him! I shake my head. “Not for a long time.”

  His hands fall away and he puts some distance between us. He’s so angry and desperate that he’s choking on it and the weird thing is that I sense it so clearly. I can read every one of this Crin guy’s emotions. He wants to say more, but pulls back and switches focus.

  Wow. Did I just read his thoughts?

  He smiles.

  “Almost, Camille. You got a blurred, muffled version; more like intuition than mind reading. Telepathy is one of the skills that cannot be taught. Once aware of the power, it will develop unaided. You simply have to will it.”

  Hmmm. Maybe if I will it real hard, Travis Jenson will feel an overwhelming urge to remove his shirt whenever he sees me.

  “Okay, I’ll give it a shot when I get back to Kansas.”

  He frowns. “You don’t live in Kansas.”

  Nobody ever gets my Wizard of Oz references.

  “Never mind that. What about running away? I hope that’s as easy as reading minds.”

  This time, the hand on my arm is gentle.

  “Believe me. You have the potential to run faster than any of the people at your Earth school, Camille,” he smiles, “including the boys. But it takes time and practice. That’s why I’m here. I have many things to teach you, but the priority is to teach you how to pre-empt attack and then how to get away. He’ll be coming for you soon.”

  I shiver and try to push all thoughts of capture and torture to the back of my mind. It’s a tough cookie to crack. As I struggle with the cookie, I have a thought.

  “How do you know it’s a him and not her?”

  He laughs and shakes his head.

  “The Hunters will not take the female form. All of the bashrak Hunters are born male and find it impossible to deceive effectively as a woman. To understand the form and character of a woman is simply beyond their comprehension.”

  Hang on one cotton-picking minute.

  “What do you mean ‘assume the form of’?”

  Sandal man looks at me like I’m the village idiot or something.

  “The Hunters aren’t human, Camille, or Javorian. They aren’t close. They need to transmute into human form to live on Earth without suspicion.”

  I choke. “You’re saying that th
ey change shape, like Mystique in X-men?”

  He nods, though looks a little mystified. X-men obviously wasn’t a box office smash back on planet insano.

  “Wow.”

  “Yes. It’s hard to see them, to really see them, which gives them an advantage. But all bashrak emit a force that you should be able to feel. It takes masses of energy to appear human and to keep the shape and sometimes, Javorian’s can pick up their energy pulse. Have you felt strange recently? Dizzy, weak, displaced?

  “Displaced? I don’t even know what that means!”

  “Dislocated; like you’ve moved sideways but the world has stayed in the same place.”

  His words go ping, ping, ping in my head like a slot machine hitting the payload.

  “Yes! Yes, I’ve felt like that for the last couple of months, but lately, it’s been bad. Some really weird things have happened.”

  Sandal man shakes his head.

  “No, that’s different. That’s down to your powers. Nothing happens when you pick up on the pulse, other than that you feel…odd. Like, um…like…oh, I don’t know how to explain it!”

  “Do things squirm in your belly?”

  He looks at me closely. “No, that is not exactly the feeling, but why do you say it?”

  I shrug, feeling a bit silly. “There’s a new teacher at school and when I see him I feel…wrong. It’s like I’m afraid of heights and out on a window ledge.” I raise my hands. “That’s not much of a description either!”

  “It’s not what we normally feel, but you should stay away from this man. The bashrak could have evolved or found a way to change the signal. It could be him. I can’t think of another reason for his effect on you.”

  “How can I stay away from him? He’s a teacher at my school.”

  His mouth drops open and he runs a hand into his hair.

  “You can’t go back to school, Camille. Everything’s changed, don’t you understand? I’ll teach you all I can in the time we have left but it won’t be enough. When you wake, you have to convince your parents to leave Seabrook. Put some belongings in the car and drive until you can’t go any further. I’ll come to you when I can.”

  “You’re off your head.”

  “HE’S COMING TO KILL YOU, YOU LITTLE IDIOT!”