Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV)

by JC Andrijeski

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well...what?”

  “What’s my role?” she said. “How do you want me to play this, whatever it is? Rings champion? Media icon? Revolutionary symbol? Housepet? Sex kitten? Richter usually gave me a head’s up before he dragged me out to meet the sharks.”

  Trazen’s eyes widened perceptibly.

  Then, as if in spite of himself, he let out one of those soft Nirreth chuckles.

  “I do not doubt that he did,” the Nirreth murmured, his tail darting sideways through the slat between the bench and the back rest. He gave her a less-guarded look. “I haven’t made up my mind yet,” he added, voice blunt. His smile inched higher. “But I appreciate you asking, Jet. It will simplify things considerably for me, if you are able to think strategically in such a way. More so, if you can follow orders.”

  Jet frowned. She knew her confusion showed on her face, but couldn’t think of a good reason to hide it anymore. He put her out of her misery quickly that time, making that soft purring noise that Nirreth used to convey reassurance.

  “I suspect they want to hit me with a request for a challenge match,” he said.

  Understanding bloomed in Jet’s mind. “Oh.”

  “Yes,” Trazen smiled. “...Oh.”

  “Who is it?” Jet asked.

  He made a dismissive gesture with his fingers.

  She realized he really wasn’t going to answer and frowned again, fighting not to let that bother her. But it did bother her. It bothered her enough to risk annoying him by asking again. When she opened her mouth however, he looked her directly in the face.

  Something in his expression caused her to hesitate.

  “Jet,” he said, leaning closer to her, folding his three-fingered hands. “Whatever your role, you are owned by me in this conversation. I trust you can remember that.”

  Jet blinked, fighting with how to take his words.

  When his expression didn’t change at her stare, she forced herself to swallow it, then to shrug it off. Folding her arms over her chest, she leaned back in her own seat, recreating the distance between them. When that didn’t help, she turned her head, gazing out the window.

  “Aren’t I always owned by you, Trazen?” she said.

  She spoke without thinking about whether her words were particularly wise.

  When she looked back at him that time, he didn’t seem angry, though.

  Instead, his dark eyes had grown thoughtful, confusing her more because she couldn’t read them at all. She watched his tail make lazy arcs, even as he gave her another of those subtle Nirreth smiles.

  “What is up with you?” she said finally. “Who are you?”

  That smile widened. “Suffering from amnesia, are we?”

  “I don’t think I’m the one with the memory problem,” she said, frowning.

  Fighting a sudden urge to cut the crap with him, to just ask him what he was doing, what had been going on with him since they’d left Astet, she stalled instead, watching his face. Seeing a sharper look rise to his dark irises in the pause, she changed her mind altogether, or lost her nerve maybe. After all, he could make her life extremely difficult, if he wanted.

  So far, he’d chosen not to. Given that, why pick fights with him?

  This was probably all some head game anyway, maybe to get her to lower her guard. Maybe he wanted her to trust him now that he owned her. Or maybe he’d ceased to care about her at all, now that he had her under his heel.

  Maybe he’d only kept her alive to make him money in the Rings.

  Whatever his deal was, she didn’t really need him monitoring her closely again. He’d finally given her a breather with the venom. She didn’t want to go back to losing her mind and sense of self under his stinger, just because he’d decided she was unreliable. Maybe if she acted docile enough, he would decide he didn’t have to sting her so much.

  Clearly, he wanted her in the Rings. He even seemed to want her to win for him. Maybe she could really get him to trust her, like he seemed to want her to do of him.

  Maybe this could be more of a business arrangement than she’d ever imagined.

  When she glanced up next, Trazen was still watching her, but his eyes held an added layer of scrutiny. Seeing the intelligence behind that look, Jet smiled, forcing a shrug.

  “Believe me, I’m not complaining,” she said, subduing her voice, then letting it grow teasing. “I’m just wondering if someone came and replaced you in the middle of the night. If so, I wonder if it’s my duty to report it...?”

  Trazen let out another low chuckle. Even so, his expression grew perceptibly more taut before he flicked his tail a little sharper behind his back.

  “You wouldn’t know if they had,” he said softly.

  It took a beat for the meaning of the words to sink in.

  Then Jet found herself flushing.

  She averted her gaze from his high-cheekboned face.

  She turned over his words, looking for some other meaning, but kept circling back to the one. He’d just made a crack about the fact that he’d refused to sleep with her. Whether that crack was to let her know he’d been sleeping with someone else or merely to remind Jet that he’d refused her, she had no idea. Either way, it felt like a blatant dig.

  She found herself remembering the times she’d asked him...begged him, really.

  As the memories resurfaced, she felt her face warm more.

  That time, it felt more like anger.

  Knowing he would have seen that, too, not only from the color that must have risen to her cheeks but from their damned infrared lizard eyes that could see heat spectrums as well as visual light...didn’t help. Tightening her jaw, Jet looked back out the window.

  They didn’t speak again until they reached the outside of the eating establishment.

  By then, the sun had disappeared past the horizon line.

  Trazen had taken her to a part of the Green Zone Jet had never seen before.

  As she stepped out of the trolley, she felt nerves ripple her skin as she glanced up at the buildings. The nerves weren’t for her own safety really...rather, Jet felt her reality tilt slightly as she looked around, taking in information that changed some portion of her understanding of the Nirreth world and how things worked here.

  This part of the Green Zone looked significantly different from what she’d grown used to living in the center...different enough that Jet found herself thinking that the center wasn’t as representative of Nirreth society as she’d always assumed.

  She remembered what Trazen told her, about Isreti and his fanatical followers wanting to make sure the “lesser Nirreth” knew their places, as well––not only humans and other non-Nirreth. Looking around, Jet found herself thinking that a lot of those “lesser Nirreth” might live around here.

  She also wondered if the center might be where all the rich Nirreth lived.

  The wide-open spaces appeared to be less here, for one thing.

  Those rambling, nature-filled parks, spotlessly free of trash and nearly spiritual in their quiet, appeared to be totally absent from this part of the Green Zone. The buildings Jet could see looked to be mostly located above-ground as well...and more human in design. They also seemed to be packed a lot more tightly together.

  In fact, the more Jet looked around her, the more the buildings reminded her of what she’d seen in the bombed out human cities of Vancouver and Seattle. These may well be built deeper into the ground in ways Jet couldn’t yet see, but they’d obviously been built upwards too, with organic-looking additions in different colors and out of different building materials that snaked up into the space below the Green Zone dome.

  The outside of the building directly in front of them had either been designed to emulate human architecture, or actually contained some remnants of human architecture that had been expanded upon or added to by the Nirreth who used the building now.

  Looking up the walls, Jet found herself thinking it was the latter.

  Som
ething about the style of the building was familiar to her, or perhaps reminiscent of something she’d seen in one of Chiyeko’s picture books. The materials were almost like mud on the outside, a dark, rich red in color with a sandy texture that blended strangely with the blue-tinted, more metallic additions of the Nirreth builders.

  Jet put out a hand, touching the rough side of the original building.

  “What is it?” she said, not thinking about who she was with.

  Trazen answered her anyway.

  “Adobe,” he said.

  When she gave him a puzzled look, the tall Nirreth only swished his tail, a gesture of mild impatience as he glanced up the mottled sides of the building himself.

  “...The original structure, at least,” he said in Nargili, hissing softer. “I assumed that was what you were asking. It is a material long in use by the indigenous humans from here,” he added. “It is older than the place they called the United States.”

  Jet nodded, but her brow furrowed slightly.

  Maybe that’s why she remembered it. Mishio had books on the original people from these lands...meaning all of North America. So did her mother. Some of them had lived out here in the desert. They must have been the ones to build these mud homes.

  Her hand still on the sun-warmed clay, she glanced up again, seeing the blue metal that merged seamlessly out of the dark red, dustier material. Her eyes took in colored windows, then focused on snaking designs that lived in the metal itself. It must be art, she found herself thinking in wonder, making out shapes of trees and strangely elongated animals, only a few of which resembled anything she’d ever seen on Earth. Someone had actually painted or etched something into the outer hull of the metal. Something about that art struck her as containing more raw feeling than anything she’d seen in the sterile art galleries of the Royals, or even the smaller, private galleries that dotted the wide streets of the center.

  She focused on a snake-like depiction of some water creature, black and white with a long, perfectly formed tail. It struck her that it looked like an elongated version of an orca, the giant, black and white dolphins that she’d once seen along the shores of the Sound. Chiyeko told her they were the last of their kind, which is why they huddled together.

  Chiyeko said once they were all gone, the soul of the world itself would end.

  For some reason that escaped her now, Jet repeated Chiyeko’s words in front of Richter once. Laughing, Richter informed her that the Nirreth were the only reason any orcas still existed now. He claimed the pod had been cloned and modified from the few remaining living specimens, then modified genetically again so they could withstand the higher toxin levels of the oceans following the war. According to Richter, the Nirreth recreated the black dolphins just like they recreated dinosaurs, and blond-haired humans with green eyes.

  Jet asked Anaze if that was true...then Laksri.

  Both told her essentially the same thing as Richter, even though they clearly knew Jet didn’t want to believe it.

  Pushing the memory out of her mind, Jet looked up, taking in more of the building, then those on either side of the narrow street. She saw a round, colored-glass window, like a giant flower between the two towers up above, surrounded by more of those art renderings of animals and trees. The depictions had so much detail, so many colors, that the window looked like a sun surrounded by seething, multicolored rays.

  Trazen just stood there, behind her, watching her look.

  She had an awareness of him––just because she always seemed to have an awareness of him now––but still jumped when he spoke, if only because he’d remained silent for so long.

  “This used to be old Santa Fe,” he said, using English. “Do you know it?”

  Jet shook her head, still gazing up at the sun depicted in Nirreth stone and glass.

  “The lower building was a hotel once, I believe,” he said, his voice still casual. “This whole area is now owned by the Shinkara...”

  Jet turned, staring at him in bewilderment, but Trazen didn’t pause.

  “...It is tradition for them to own half of any settlement,” he continued in the same toneless voice. “Normally they are asked to pick out their area first, before the areas sold privately are put up for sale. In this case, they picked the location of the Green Zone itself, in addition to choosing this part of the settlement for their own.”

  Glancing at Jet, he seemed to assess her reaction before adding,

  “As is also traditional, they donated these areas to any Nirreth who did not have the means to own property of their own.”

  Jet turning the information over in bewilderment. When Trazen’s scrutiny intensified, she forced her expression still, nodding her acknowledgment of his words.

  “You do not approve?” he said. “You think it is stupid perhaps? Sentimental?”

  “Why here?” is all she said.

  Trazen’s lips lifted in a faint Nirreth smile. “Why not here?”

  Jet looked around at the reddish-brown buildings that formed the base for everything that had been built over them.

  “It just seems like there was a reason,” she said finally. “They must have liked something about it, right?”

  “Presumably, yes.”

  “What was it like before?”

  He gave her another dense stare. That time, she saw a flicker of confusion on his face, what might hae been a question. It was gone as soon as she saw it, however.

  “There are images, Jet,” Trazen said, purring a softer impatience. “I should not have to provide you a history lesson on the past civilizations of your own people...”

  Jet felt her jaw harden, but didn’t speak.

  He was right of course. But it hadn’t escaped Jet’s notice that a good chunk of the Nirreth she met seemed to know more than she did about the history of humans and Earth.

  That would be even more true soon.

  Soon, only Nirreth would write the histories of Earth...especially after the adults Jet had grown up with died off, leaving nothing but next-generation skags like her. Jet found herself wishing now that she’d paid more attention to Mishio and Chiyeko’s stories, as well as those of her mother and her uncle and aunt. If she ever got back to the skag pits, she would help Chiyeko hoard the print and picture books that the adults kept in the stone lighthouse to keep them from being ruined in the damp.

  She knew a lot of Earth’s histories had been electronic prior to the Nirreth coming.

  Now, a few moldy books were all the skags had left.

  She tried to keep that thought off her face, too.

  “Come,” Trazen told her, motioning with his head.

  Despite the bluntness of the command, he used the polite version of the gesture and the less familiar version of the word in Nargili. Even his tail coiled behind his back in a more accommodating and respectful articulation.

  Jet found all three things strange given what he’d said to her in the trolley about remembering her place in front of whoever they’d come here to meet.

  “You haven’t told me my role yet,” she said, still looking him over warily. “Have you still not decided? Or did you plan to tell me inside?”

  Trazen’s dark eyes remained unreadable.

  He took hold of her arm, his jointed fingers gentle.

  “Come, Jet,” he urged, pulling her closer to him. “We should go inside now. It is not particularly safe out here.”

  “Meaning?” she said. Alarm touched her voice as she glanced around at the empty-seeming street. Streetlights had flickered on at some point while she’d been staring around at the adobe and metal buildings, and now those lamps colored everything orange.

  “How is it not safe?” she said.

  “It’s not safe for humans,” he explained. He tugged her deeper to his side, his dark eyes reflecting light from the street lamps. “...Now come, Jet. Or we will be late.”

  Jet stood at one end of a long, rectangular room with high ceilings, Still lurking by Trazen’s side, she fought to keep f
rom staring around too obviously.

  The building was crammed full of more Nirreth than she ever would have imagined while standing outside. It also looked significantly more luxurious than it had from the sidewalk...although in a way that differed markedly from the opulence of the compound of the Royals, or of Trazen’s own property.

  For one thing, it was a lot more cluttered.

  For another, the opulence itself was pretty hit and miss.

  The room she stood in now had been crammed, pretty much floor to ceiling, full of human artifacts of various kinds, including jewelry, pottery, life-sized stone figurines of animals and peoples, rugs, paintings, knick-knacks in plastic and wood and metal, old road and shop signs, machinery parts, coffee mugs, plates, couches, chairs and stuffed dead animals.

  Some of those things were beautiful, possibly even priceless.

  Quite of few of them were...not.

  A wide stone altar stood at the far end of the high-ceilinged room, covered in more figurines and what looked like an old-fashioned telephone, topped by a castle-like structure in miniature and painted wooden images of people wearing headdresses and feathers and mangy dead animal skins. Above all of that junk, a bigger-than-life, stone or possibly ceramic depiction of a dead man hung from a wooden cross, covered in painted blood and with his eyes rolling upwards towards a stained glass skylight.

  She’d seen that dead man before...a few of the families in the skag pits came from that religion, but Jet didn’t know much about it, really. Her eyes kept going back to him though, if only because his likeness somehow dominated the room.

  Different-colored lights shone on the various artifacts, particularly at the room’s apex where that giant crucifix hung, but also inside the room’s alcoves, which housed rusted machinery along with a myriad of paintings, stone figures, gold masks and goblets, silver platters, manikins wearing rich but moth-eaten clothes, plastic flowers, metal sculptures, pottery, garden gnomes, shovels, pitch forks, lawn chairs, motorcycles...Jet even saw a wheelbarrow that seemed to hold nothing but children’s toys.

  The ceiling itself fascinated Jet, with its high stone arches supported by wooden beams bigger than any tree Jet had ever seen alive.