Possessive Aliens: Dark Scifi Romance Box Set Page 3
He has a point. If we’d had the foresight to break the one Earth covenant, an agreement struck between various broods to leave the Earth as a sanctuary for humanity, we’d have humans to spare. We could have been breeding them for several hundred years and have tens of thousands of them, but the Scythkin decided that humans, while precious, were not the kind of creature they wanted spreading all over the place. They have a known tendency to colonize and destroy, even more completely than our own species.
“If there are males, there must be females who have borne them. That is how humans reproduce.”
“Eggs are so much more convenient,” Tarkan sighs.
Tarkan and I were laid in the same brood. We are in some sense what humans would call brothers because we share a matriarch. That means we are forever connected. Usually a clutch would number in the dozens, but before we could hatch into our larval stage, our matriarch was destroyed and most of her eggs along with her. Only Tarkan and I survived to emerge and grow into fully formed Scythkin.
We are not brothers in the human sense, but we do share some genetic code. Scythkin do not have the same sense of family that humans do. There aren’t mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. There are clutches. In every clutch, a dominant Scythkin is hatched. Others fall into their place in the heirarchy. I hatched first, cementing my place immediately. Tarkan was next. In a full sized clutch, he would have the rest of the brood to dominate, but in our smaller number, the dynamic is difficult.
We have been working against the odds our entire lives. The other broods we grew up encountering almost always numbered in the double digits. We were forced to compete against them for resources, food, water, everything we needed to survive. The council gave us less than a 2% chance of surviving our first year. We have now survived hundreds, growing stronger and larger with every passing solar cycle. Each year our exterior hardens and then splits to allow new growth. We are now both nine feet tall and three feet wide, containing two three hundred earth pounds of solid muscle each. The next molt is only a matter of months away, and at that point we will both grow yet again. I have been loading on proteins in the hope of inching above Reaper. It’s unlikely to happen. We have precisely the same dimensions as one another since hatching and likely always will.
…
I have been watching these men for several minutes now, and I have decided that I do not like them. There’s something wrong with them. They’re too tall. Their voices are too deep. Something about the way they move makes my stomach feel funny very low down toward my crotch. I sense danger, even though I know I am safe up here in the secret cave above the cave. This is where I hid when the bears came to investigate my hide. They did not find me, nor will these men.
I do not know how long I will have to stay up here. Hopefully they leave soon. I can see a mouse scuttling along the far wall. That would make a nice little snack if I could catch it, but I can’t take the risk.
They are looking at everything, touching it with their big hands. My things are not theirs to touch. I want to take one of my sharpened sticks and poke it through their soft, fleshy parts. That would teach them. But I know better than to expose myself to predators. My mother taught me how to survive, when to fight and when to run away. This is definitely a stay-away situation, even though my aggressive instincts make me want to rush down there and stab and stab until they run away.
I hope they don’t take all of my things. It has taken me many years to scavenge enough to have a functional camp. Everything I have is something I need to survive. It’s possible that they will hurt me even if they don’t find me if they…
CRASH!
Delicate glass smashes all over the cave floor, sending dangerous shards skittering into crevices and nooks where I won’t find them until I stand on them. Threat of septic cuts being inflicted on my feet aside, they just smashed my water extractor - which means they just killed me.
It doesn’t matter if they don’t find me now, that was my one way of getting several ounces of fresh water every day. The lakes and rivers in this region are poisonous. Water has to be evaporated and the droplets from the steam saved. I watch helplessly from my hiding place as my precious reserves sink into the sandy cave floor.
Reaper
“Idiot!” I curse at Tarkan. He’s so incredibly careless. He doesn’t even seem to notice that he’s just broken one of the human’s possessions. He just goes stomping through the glass, picking things up and throwing them down, making what was an orderly little area into a mess. We do not want to alienate the first humans we meet and yet now it is inevitable that we will anger them.
“Don’t break things!”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re not yours, Tarkan”
“There’s nobody left for it to matter, Reaper.” He uses my name with a pissy growl, then shakes himself. “This suit is restrictive. I’m taking it off.”
“Not until we’re back on the ship. Regulations…”
“Fuck regulations. This is killing me.”
“Tarkan! Keep it…”
He’s already taking it off. And by taking it off, I mean he has burst out of it, split the seams and utterly ruined it. That’s going to have to be completely recycled and remade before our next excursion. Now he’s storming around the cave, snorting like a bull, smashing the place into pieces, destroying all chance of gathering anything as evidence. I’ve lost all semblance of control, and there’s no way of regaining it while I stay in this human suit.
…
The man just… exploded. One moment he was standing there, and the next moment he was rippling and making feral noises. I thought he was dying, that he was going to fall to the ground and expire right in the middle of my cave, but something worse happened.
His skin split, dark and greasy looking flesh emerging from inside. He must be poisoned. I don’t know what disease causes that to happen, but I don’t want to catch it. I cover my mouth with my hands, and squeeze my nostrils as close to shut as I can. If the disease is in the air, I don’t want to breathe it in.
A beast emerges from the bag of skin which now lies tattered and torn on the cave floor. It is not a human. It is a monster. Not human. Not even close to human in spite of the two thick powerful legs, a torso and two arms which make it somewhat familiar in terms of basic shape. There are horns rising from its head, and a ridge of mountainous spikes running the length of its spine. Its shoulders are so powerful and bulky they look like they belong on a bull.
The creature is almost a person, in the same way a wildfire is almost a candle. He is everything animal and human, demon and angel. He is something entirely alien to my experience, and that is saying a great deal given the world is full of vile, feral animals waiting to take my life.
The beast swings around, and the face is worse than the rest of it. At first their human faces were handsome to me, but this face is not handsome. It is something out of a nightmare, beset with great slashing fangs, a powerful jaw, a ridged nose, and a brow which is so heavy it nearly hides the eyes completely.
It takes all my self control not to scream, but I know better than to attract the attention of predators - and this is the most predatory creature I have ever seen in my life. I press my lips together and I become even stiller than before. The other man stays as a man, but I can sense he is the same as the terrible alien creature who now stands in my sanctuary, long clawed feet leaving tracks in the dirt with every step he takes. I can barely bring myself to look at him, but my fascinated, frightened gaze but can’t help explore that face. His mouth and nose protrude slightly in a predatory snout, like a wolf, but not as pronounced. His ears are horns which twitch and move back and forth. His eyes are two dark narrow slits lit with a trace of fire.
He’s not of this world. I don’t think he is even of this reality. He is a walking nightmare, and now that he is no longer muffled by the human suit he was wearing, his voice is deep and resonant, a growl which reaches the very core of me and instills pure terror.<
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I can’t take this. My head feels light. My stomach is churning. Please, I beg myself silently, don’t be sick. Don’t be sick. Don’t be…
I faint.
Tarkan
This is so much better. So much more comfortable. I can finally breathe. The human suits might be protocol, but who cares about protocol. The planet is destroyed and with it any rules and regulations we might abide by. Reaper can whine all he likes, I’m not listening.
“Tarkan!” He says my name with that gruff growl he uses when he’s trying to be authoritative. It’s a pity more of our clutch didn’t survive. He would have made a good leader to a dozen hot headed Scythkin. I would have made a good enforcer. I would have enjoyed imposing my will on others who tried to defy Reaper’s will, and mine. But there are only two of us, so every time I exert my own will I have to defy him. Oh well. At least now that I am out of that suit I can suck some of that much needed oxygen into my four lungs. I take the deepest breath I have taken in a long time and suddenly I get the scent of something I couldn’t smell before.
Human.
In our full form, we have much better senses than when we are stuck inside alien alter egoes. I couldn’t smell her before because all I could truly sense was the inside of that infernal skin suit - but what I am smelling now is definitely human, and it is certainly a female. I haven’t caught this scent in a very long time, but the memory has not faded. Humans have a very particular signature, nothing else on the planet, or off it matches it.
Taking a very distant place in the assault on my senses is Reaper’s voice. “If you’re not going to follow orders, then I’m going to do something about it, Tarkan. I will not have you defying me at every turn. Tarkan! Are you listening? Damnit, Tarkan.”
I ignore him. My full attention is on that very faint hint of the very thing we have come light years to find, a girl who by all measures of likelihood should not exist. It’s a sweet, intoxicating odor which is carried by the breeze which filters into the cave with every gust of external wind.
My eyes follow the smell which seems to be coming from the roof of the cave. That makes no sense. Unless… there are small holes in the roof of the cave. Maybe what seems to be the roof is not. Maybe there’s a space up there where a female might hide herself.
Reaper is still whining about protocol as I stride toward the source of the delicious scent. It grows stronger the closer I get. Nothing smells like human female. There is a richness to them, a primal earthy sweetness which makes every part of me react. It’s not just lust. There is more to our attraction to humans than that.
Reaper thinks I am a brute and an idiot because I don’t speak the way he does, or act the way he does, but I understand many things, even if I don’t say them out loud. Humans are worth finding because they are precious, not just to us, but to everything.
We come from them. We are tied to them. Of course we are far more advanced, and in many ways, completely unrecognizable to them, but Earth is where sentient life first evolved. That spark of intelligence was thrown across the universe, back and forth through time, affecting everything it interacted with on levels which are impossible to describe without the benefit of several years of intense quantum scientific lectures. To put it in a poetic way, humans were the first to resonate with the universe, to call forth meaning from matter. Before their emergence, there was nothing but a series of processes running at random, taking forks in the road, searching for something without knowing what searching even was. And then the first human drew breath, made art, spoke and sung, and all things past and present were transformed.
They were so very alone for a very long time. Thousands of generations of them lived and died without understanding how very special they were. With their little five fingered hands, they had grasped at something which had up until that moment been lost in the ether. They pulled ideas from nothing and turned them into something. The wheel seemed like a practical innovation, but it was much more than that. It reflected the mechanics of their minds. You wouldn’t know it from talking to one of them, they tend to defer to inane topics in favor of intellectual ones, but inside their soft skulls is the key to entire universes.
If the humans are lost, then the universe itself is lost. Though their gift may now have been given many times over to many species across the galaxies, they are the originals. It seems unthinkable that they would have died out. We were waiting for them to break free of their insulated world and discover the glory of all things. Instead today we found the husk of their planet, and we almost lost hope.
But that scent sparks it anew. It tells me that all is not lost, that there are still a few humans left, one at least, and she is nearby, in this very cave.
I can hear Reaper telling me to hide back in that basic flesh, but he is about to realize what his adherence to protocol could have lost us, if I were not prepared to break the rules.
“She’s close. I can smell her. Female.”
He shuts up for all of a second.
“Really?”
I turn around, looking down at him. “Take off your skin suit and find out for yourself. Better for both of us to look.”
He hesitates, but the promise of human female is stronger than the rules which say we must disguise ourselves to them. He discards the flesh mask with a casual toss and peels the rest of the tight body from his true form, showing all the same relief I felt when I was free of it.
“Up there,” I say, pointing with a claw. “Do you sense it?”
“Yesss,” he hisses the word, taking deep breaths. We are like addicts getting the slightest hint of the substance we need. It takes several minutes of investigation to find the little aperture she must have crawled through.
“There,” I say, pointing down a hole. “Do you see her?”
Nothing has ever looked less impressive than this human female. She looks like a lump of dirty flesh and tattered cloth wedged tightly in between the rocks. It is hard to see what features she has, or even that she is anything other than a mop of hair and some dirty curled limbs.
“She’s insensate,” Reaper says. “We’re going to have to pull her out.”
It is a very tight fit. We would have been better off if one of us had stayed in the human suit. I’m not saying that out loud though, I don’t want to set Reaper off again.
It takes what feels like an eternity to pull her free from the hiding spot. Reaper eases her out slowly little by little until she tumbles down into my arms, her weight far less than it should be. I clutch her close to my chest so she doesn’t fall, marveling at the misery of her circumstances.
This is not the kind of human we expected to find. The women we used to mate with were glossy haired, long legged creatures who cleaned their faces and then smeared them with cosmetics to highlight what they considered to be their most appealing features. This girl is nothing like those creatures who used to stalk up and down the streets of the city, offering themselves to males with come hither glances and the kind of bold sexuality which I always found irresistible.
“Look at her,” I breathe. “Hard to believe this little thing is so important.”
“Be careful with her,” Reaper says.
“Of course I’m going to be careful. What do you think I’m going to do, drop the last human?”
“Don’t hold her too tightly either, they bruise easily.”
“I’m not going to hurt her, Reaper!”
“Careful!”
He blocks her head from hitting the cave wall as I swing around to growl at him.
“You should let me carry her,” he insists.
I hand her over, not because he says, but because of the two of us, I know I am the more likely to injure her by accident. Reaper is careful to a fault. She’s safer with him.
The pair of us leave the cave and make quick retreat to our shuttle. Reaper acts as the beast of burden while I keep watch for an aggressive animals which might walk these plains. We move at a quick pace. The shuttle is only a mile or two away, bu
t I see signs everywhere which indicate there are predatory creatures in this landscape. Large prints mark the sand here and there, three toed like large birds, paw prints and cloven hooves. This planet might look dead, but there is dark life everywhere.
We reach the shuttle without incident and embark on the return journey to our orbiting ship. What we are doing is completely against all regulations, but Reaper is not hesitating to remove the human from her natural environment. The directives when it comes to human contact are very clear. We may not interfere in natural processes occurring on their planet, including disease, famine, war. That directive has been strictly adhered to over thousands of years, and by breaking it we are becoming criminals of the highest order. If Scythkin command ever discovered we had done this, we would both be sentenced to death.
And yet, it is not even a topic for discussion. We see this girl in a desperate state, we know she is one of the final few of her kind left, and we are taking her because in doing so we may yet save the species.
“I think we should take the human forms when we handle her,” Reaper says. “I think seeing us for what we really are would be too much. Humans are easily traumatized.”
I let out a grunting growl at the idea of being completely covered in fake human flesh yet again, but I know he is likely right. Humans panic when they see our true forms. Once or twice, they have even died as a result. A few have, in the past, caught glimpses of us without us knowing, and those tales have turned into an archetype of ultimate evil. We are associated with death, lies, torment. We are devils on this Earth. Though being the last of her number, perhaps she doesn’t know that.
“Tarkan…”
“Fine.”
Chapter Three - The Last Human
Reaper
I cannot believe I have what might be the last human in my arms. Her condition is very poor. Her skin is covered in welts and sores and bites, she is far too skinny, and her hair is matted with dirt. If we had not found her today, I do not know how much longer she would have survived on her own. She is yet to regain consciousness, though there doesn’t seem to be anything obviously medically wrong with her beyond obvious exhaustion.