by Maia Starr
Araxis seemed lost; his eyes were elsewhere as he continued to walk. I chased after him and insisted, “How does your body not cry out for the blood of your brother?”
The red Vithohn sighed and continued to walk. Looking at me with some sadness in his expression, he said, “He was my brother, yes. Of course, I want to avenge him.” He repeated, “Of course I do.”
My eyes went wide as I watched my once-closest ally move toward a half-shredded skyscraper that looked over our whole city; it was half lit with what remained of Earth’s energy.
I could feel the skin of my eyes hit my brow bone as they shot up, watching him ascend a small staircase up from the shattered building’s courtyard.
A woman, human, stepped into view, and he set his hands on her thick waist. She had light hair that was short, cut to her chin, and thick bangs that hid her brows. Axaris told us he’d stolen her from a human pack: that she was something important to them. It was beyond me why he didn’t kill her then and there.
Instead, she was still in our base and causing trouble. This was the second troupe of humans who had come to find her. Except this time they murdered one of our own in the process.
“Tessoul,” she said coldly to regard me.
I blinked, but said nothing, simply cocking my head to the side and feeling my turbulent rage building up again.
Karen was her name, and she nestled into the crook of Araxis’ arm as we walked back to base, still miles away.
“Are you alright?” she asked in a softer tone then, reaching her pink hand up to Araxis’ long face.
“Dreicant was taken by the humans,” my leader said.
Her brows perked, though I couldn’t tell if it was out of sympathy or a delighted interest as she asked, “Dead?”
He nodded, and my thoughts were confirmed as an amused, hidden smile crept up the side of her mouth.
I inhaled sharply and gritted my teeth at the sight of it. Araxis noticed my attention and leaned into Karen, mistaking the close proximity for privacy.
“How many are there?” he asked in a whisper.
“I told you,” she chided. “Just a couple; a handful at most.”
Araxis looked down at his hand and then up at her quizzically, and she laughed, and then he smiled, and I felt a familiar anger at their flirtation.
One of our men just died, and our glorious general, our Voth, was playing coochie-coo with some human monster as she laughed about it.
“Five?” Karen relented with a smirk. “Six?”
“Are they coming here?” he asked, and she shook her head, nuzzling into his chest and tilting her head down, walking in unison with him.
“No, my love,” she said.
The two spent the walk talking, and I purposely slowed my steps so I didn’t have to walk with them anymore.
Araxis mated with her. I knew this not only because he’d shared it with me, but because I’d heard them on a number of occasions. Her strange noises offered through the walls as a slap in the face: a mockery of our dead. Now we were letting one of them
We fought for this land, and Araxis was disregarding it all. He’d lost his will to fight; he was a slave to the girl.
The red Vithohn was my friend and the leader of our team, so I had kept quiet about it, but I had a feeling I wouldn’t be able to stay quiet for much longer.
“What do we do now?” I heard him whisper to the girl, rubbing up her arm as she shivered against the cold.
“I want to leave,” she pleaded.
Leave us, she meant. What sickened me most was that it seemed Araxis was actually considering it.
“I can’t be without you,” he said desperately, touching her face.
My stomach turned.
“They don’t like me,” Karen said softly, turning her head to make direct eye-contact with me. I raised a brow to let her know her assumptions were accurate: a warning. “They want to kill me,” she continued.
Araxis let out a small ‘humph’ and then said, “Then they go through me.”
We got back to our base within a few hours: a large military space station with six different wings sprouting out from the center building like spider legs. While some of the Vithohn had taken up in skyscrapers, the majority of us preferred to stay in the space station. It gave us a direct line to all things tech, military, bedrooms, and most of all, food.
As the three of us entered a spacious metal warehouse, Karen and Araxis quickly paired off from me and began talking at one of the warehouse’s various stations. Large pilotable machines were arrayed at raised platforms, eight in all, and the couple quickly walked to one of the lifts.
They pretended as though they were going to board the robot fighter, but I knew they simply wanted their privacy from me.
The ceilings of the building were atrociously tall and made me feel cold and small. I followed the bright yellow lines on the floor and watched as the various stations heated up with an exhale of smoke.
Nazaarad approached me with a smile and set a thick hand on my shoulder.
“How did it go?” he asked, and I shot him an unimpressed look. “That bad?”
“He’s dead,” I dismissed, my eyes now fixated on Araxis and Karen in the distance.
Nazaarad’s face fell then: the same fury that had overtaken me apparent, flowing up from his feet and into his gut. I could see it hit his middle as his fists clenched uncontrollably.
“Is that so?” he enunciated and then suddenly a calm washed over him; concern replacing his tense brows. “And Araxis? How’s he doing?”
I pointed to the couple coupling on the platform and snipped, “Just fine.”
Nazaarad had a smooth skull that sloped back into a rounded point with a large spire that fell limply from the base of his neck. We looked like brothers, so always acted as such: both born with a pale tan skin and green hues that created a gradient along our foreheads. Tall and broad, my younger ‘brother’ was just shorter than me now.
“Something’s wrong,” I said quickly, staring off at the couple.
“You don’t like keeping the hostages?” Nazaarad said, sounding bemused suddenly.
“Are they still considered hostages when you’re mating with them?”
Nazaarad craned his neck to me; slow, comically, letting his spire whip into the background. “You think they are?” he asked with disgust.
“I think you’d have to be blind not to see it,” I mocked.
“Hey!”
I rolled my eyes and exhaled, making my way out of the hangar. “What do we do about the girl?”
Suddenly my body seized, and more heat rose up in me as I thought of the humans: of Karen and what her people had done. The very mention of them made an uncontrollable beast rise up in me.
“We didn’t need the humans before. In fact, I believe we chose to kill them,” I argued, pre-annoyed. “Why change the rules now? What’s Araxis hoping to accomplish?”
“You’re the close ones,” Nazaarad shrugged. “Figure it out.”
“Something’s changed,” I said. “We captured her, brought her here on a platter to question and destroy, and he… what?”
“Cares about her?” Nazaarad questioned.
I grimaced at that, and my friend continued, “You’re not used to it, are you? Not knowing the next move.”
“It’s unsettling,” I said.
As we reached the doors leading out of the main entrance I heard a loud smack, like bone on bone. I spun around, and Nazaarad followed suit. We watched as two of our kind launched toward one another, a new human, Tiffany, at the center of their fight.
It seemed that she’d taken up with yet another one of us—Kez—and a rival of his tried to have a taste. The two of them began whipping at one another wildly, with Kez grabbing the attacker with the tentacle spire coming out the back of his neck and slamming him against the steely ground below.
The echo carried through the building, and I winced at the sharp sound.
“Over her?” I asked with disg
ust as I spun on my heel, hoping she’d be taken down during the scuffle. “She should be bleeding at our feet, not being… fawned over.”
Nazaarad looked at me and shrugged. “Let’s take her on then.”
Chapter Three
Sidney
“She’s back!” a male shout echoed across our sad fortress. I could hear the rush of people coming toward the gate: coming to turn off our guns so that I wouldn’t become worm’s meat.
The abandoned park, depressingly named ‘Sunnydale Ridge,’ was a poor, densely populated city district that was clearly affected by economic hardships before the war and was only worse now.
I entered the gates; our makeshift protection with jury-rigged laser turrets and traps set up against our potential enemies. Luckily for us, however, no Vithohn had ever ventured out this far—to our little corner of nothing.
String lights hung, unlit, along the tops of the trailers. Leftover decorations from days gone by. We couldn’t risk turning them on now, not even for morale’s sake. We couldn’t risk anyone spotting us.
“You nearly gave me a heart attack,” Baxley snapped at me, pulling me deep into our trailer-park.
“Anytime, Commodore,” I said, shaken.
Baxley used to run a ship: Special Forces. Out of respect, we choose to call him commodore over captain. Made him feel more at home.
I shut the gates, and Baxley grabbed my hand, bringing me into the deep center of the trailers. A series of twenty or so abandoned double-wide’s that we’d taken up in. Two brave, or unlucky, soldiers would go out each week and scavenge for foods. We’d picked the local shops clean over the last five years.
The farther we had to travel into the city, the more danger we came under.
Every one of our trailers was inhabited and then some. We had a total of thirty-two survivors. One baby.
If we were about to restart the human race, we were doing a piss-poor job.
I still had no idea if there were other survivors outside of our country. Didn’t know how many of them there were, either.
“You okay?” Baxley asked, pulling me close to him. With a hint of guilt, he added, “I saw the Vithohn fall; thought you’d make it out okay.”
“And here I am,” I said, but I wasn’t okay.
I was far from ‘okay.’
“Tiffany Caites was with one of them,” I said evenly. “After you left.”
“What?” he grimaced. “How do you mean?”
“I mean holding one another, fighting together,” I shrugged and raised both my brows, surprised at my next sentence, “Kissing.”
Baxley blinked, digesting the information.
“She took out her gun; she was ready.”
“Ready to what?” he nipped, wanting me to get on with it.
“Ready to shoot me,” I offered, sounding as perplexed as he looked.
I told him what I knew: that they were both looking for the one we killed, they talked, then they kissed and left. Baxley expressed just as much shock as I did that the creature was talking.
Vithohn were renowned for their almost mindless aggression. When some sort of prey or enemy was in sight, they weren’t prone to reasoning or sitting down for a healthy chat. They went right for the jugular, literally.
“You’re sure he was talking?” he asked for the second time.
“Positive,” I said firmly. “He spotted me.”
“She distracted him?”
“No,” I shook my head. “He let me go.”
Baxley’s eyes were so dark they looked almost black in the night; he exhaled, and a plume of white breath flowed out from his lips. “You sure, kid?”
“I know it sounds weird, but yeah. We locked eyes for like, a solid minute. The guy just… let me go. Told her he didn’t find anything.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah,” I said absent-mindedly. “You know…”
“What?” he said sternly. “That sounds like the start of a sentence I’m not going to like.”
I laughed. “You won’t.”
“Out with it then.”
“Well,” I breathed into my hands, “Karen had this theory she was working on. Something like… how the Vithohn aren’t fully formed. Or that they have this gene that can be quelled to stop the madness.”
“Stop the madness!” he repeated with dramatic emphasis; throwing his hands skyward with a laugh.
I laughed along with him and then let my voice go somber. “She said if we can mate with them, something clicks. Their aggression goes away, or something.”
“If you mate with them?” he repeated, disgusted.
“Hey, she didn’t
“Clearly she knows your love for the salacious side of stories.”
I offered him a playful wink and then shrugged; then I asked, “So, what do you think?”
Baxley drew his brows into a deep frown, creasing the lines on his forehead so much it made me want to smooth it out with my thumbs.
“Go get your gun,” was his only reply.
Baxley gave me exactly thirty minutes to get my shit together before calling a meeting of our militia.
I walked into my trailer, with its shag carpeting and purple walls. My favorite item I’d ever procured from six years back was when we still lived at Wainsfleet farm, packing and cowering in a tin storage unit like anchovies. We were scouring the farmhouse for food or supplies, and I’d come across a giant flower pillow, bright pink and yellow, in a little girl’s room.
At first, I’d felt guilty about taking it, along with the matching flowered quilt that lay strewn across the little girl’s bed, but I convinced myself that the dead inhabitant of the farm wouldn’t miss it since she wouldn’t be coming back.
It was my prized possession, and I knew that the day we had to leave our trailer park home, I would make damn sure to take it with me then, too.
I splashed my face with water and stared at the cascade of freckles that trickled across my fair skin; my deep red hair was making me look like some sort of vixen.
Baxley said I was wild; he said that’s what he liked about me. I was a real rough and tumble kind of kid, and one of the rare ones who couldn’t remember what it was like before the Vithohn came, so I was born ready to fight.
I scraped the last of my lip balm out of the measly tin I’d been trying to salvage for the last two years and smattered it across my chapped lips. Then I grabbed my coat, my guns, and headed for the door.
We all met outside of Baxley’s trailer: a pale-yellow unit that must have been white at some point or another. It had a distinct green stripe around the top of it, making it easy to find when we’d first moved in. It also had a handful of plastic flowers that decorated its front, even during the winter months.
A large bonfire boomed from within a metal trash bin, warming the lot of us who sat in a semi-circle.
“Tell us what you saw out there, kid,” Baxley spoke in his gravelly voice, lighting up a cigarette and taking a quick puff on it.
The small audience of my fellow soldiers looked at me like I had a tale to tell and I wondered what Baxley had made our little venture in the woods out to be.
As I repeated the story—Karen’s theory—Baxley frowned at me, taking another long drag from his cigarette.
“So here’s the deal,” Baxley said into the crowd. “If Karen really believed that the creatures go straight-lined after mating, then I think that’s a theory worth checking out. Especially if what Sidney’s saying is right about the Vithohn talking. Sounds like Karen and Tiffany are already establishing a relationship with these creatures.”
“Are you kidding me?” the wispy blonde, Evelyn, spat out. Her Southern drawl always got heavier when she was mad, and right now she seemed entirely pissed. “And you wanna send ‘Sid out to be the guinea pig?”
She said it like I was special. Like she knew something I didn’t; that it would be appalling for him to choose me of all people. I cocked a brow at this but said nothing, feeling awkward and centered out.
“Yeah,” Baxley snapped. “Sid knows exactly what she’s doing. She has more experience with fighting these things, outsmarting these things, than the rest of us put together.”
Our commodore then looked at me for confirmation: for my consent to go out and be raped by one of these creatures or to seduce it, as though that were any different.
Still, I nodded.
I heard a wave of sighs and gasps throughout our little militia, and I looked around in wonder.
Another voice sounded up then: Rebecca Downes. She was thirty-six years old, a full-chested woman with round saucer eyes and auburn hair.
“Are you sending in a team or just Sid?” she asked, perplexed and slightly terrified.
“We’ll be watching from afar; we’ll do check-ins,” Baxley said. “But you think we’re sending in—”
Before he had a chance to finish his sentence, Rebecca was already cutting him off. “Are the Vithohn cognizant enough to recognize whether that would be suspicious or not?”
Baxley inhaled from the stub of his cigarette then, smoking it right down to the filter before throwing it to the ground and stubbing it out with his boot heel.
He looked at me with some unease and said, “Sidney says she saw one of them in conversation; that one let her go. If that’s true, then maybe.”
“What?” Evelyn looked at me. “Why did he let you go?”
“All of our studies have shown these things are driven by instinct,” Rebecca said surely. “Driven by aggression. Are you sure he saw you?”
“We made direct eye-contact,” I said, getting my back up already.
For they love me and don’t want to see me go, now they question me.
“Are you sure?” the auburn woman pleaded.
“I’m sure,” I snapped.
“Then…” Rebecca relented: conceded to our orders, “I guess it’s something we have to look into.”
“Of course it is,” Baxley said, gathering up a bag of pre-packed supplies and walking it over to me slowly. “Karen believed that when they pair with a mate, there is a hormone released in their bloodstream that wakes them up. Makes them cognizant; gives them some perception and understanding.” He looked down at the papers he’d taken from Karen’s trailer and then finished, “Like being born again.”