Chapter 4: Answers

 

Amanda looked at me oddly. “Answers about… oh. Oh, I see.”

“It’s going to be okay, kiddo,” said Stephanie. “I know this is a confusing time, but if you want to know what our plans for the future are… We can tell you anything you want to know.”

“Why don’t you sit down,” suggested Amanda.

I wasn’t sure what Stephanie was talking about. I wasn’t concerned about whatever plans for the future my parents had when the present was already confusing as hell. I sat down. 

“Your mother and I have been… short-sighted,” said Stephanie, sitting on the couch next to me. “But we think we have an idea of where to go once everything has…settled down.”

“Settled down from what?” I asked.

Amanda pressed her lips together and narrowed her eyes, the way she did when she was remembering something painful. “The meteor from two night ago wasn’t a meteor. It was a spacecraft entering the atmosphere.”

I was stunned into silence. My mom, the lawyer, the perfectly sensible and responsible human being, had just admitted that a spaceship had arrived in our city.

“We didn’t think it was possible for someone to find us, especially so far into the Forbidden Zone,” Stephanie said. “Apparently we were wrong.”

“So for the time being, you just need to focus on finishing your schooling, assuming you can do that before the change. We don’t know for sure if the people in that spacecraft are… friendly or not. But we are working on it, and you don’t have to worry.”

Apparently my parents had been keeping a lot of secrets from me. Like something called the “Forbidden Zone,” or the fact that there were spacecraft arriving that might not be friendly. Then again, considering how much they’d been hiding from me, how was I to know if they were lying about this too. 

“Am I a genetic experiment?” I asked, quietly.

“What? No, of course you aren’t,” said Amanda. “What you’re going through is perfectly normal for a boy of your age.”

“Perfectly normal?!” I screamed, my voice cracking. “I poisoned someone yesterday! When I had that fight with Ian Underwood, the other guy he was with… I bit him, and now he’s in the hospital from a deadly dose of some sort of neurotoxin.”

I tried and failed to hold back tears.

My parents looked at me with a mixture of shock and confusion. Then Amanda slowly turned to Stephanie and asked, “Didn’t you say you were going to tell him?”

“I thought you said you were going to tell him?”

They both looked back to me, confusion replaced with fear and pity. It was a very parental set of emotions. “I’m so sorry,” said Amanda, pulling me into another hug. 

“I don’t need apologies, mom, I need answers. Things have been getting so weird around here, I just saw someone die, and now you’re saying that you forgot to tell me about something huge that caused me to nearly kill someone else because my spit is toxic now, and, and…”

“You saw someone die?!” Stephanie said. 

I nodded over Amanda’s shoulder. “The school cop, Officer Cover. He was talking to me because Ian accused me of poisoning his brother on purpose. There was this invisible thing nearby, and he went to check it out, and the thing just cut him apart…”

My parents changed. I don’t mean in the sense that they transformed into reptiles or something, but they definitely changed. Stephanie straightened up and got all tense, like she was ready to lunge across the room at any moment. Her eyes flicked from left to right, looking. Amanda kissed me on the cheek and released the hug, cracking her knuckles as she rose to her feet. It was like watching Clark Kent take off the glasses.

“Dammit…” muttered Stephanie. “If they were able to track him down to his school then…”

“They’re probably already here,” Amanda agreed. She turned to me. “Alex, I need you to hide. I don’t care where or how, but you aren’t going to be safe out here.”

“Wh— what’s going on?” I asked, jumping to my feet as well.

“There’s no time!” Amanda said. I froze in place.

Stephanie dashed over to the fireplace and crouched down into it. Reaching back, she pulled out a loose brick and tossed it aside. Then she reached deep into the back of the fireplace and pulled out a sword. About three feet long, with a rectangular blade made out of something carbon-black, one edge sharp and one edge flat. A sword. My moms had a sword laying around the house. Why?

Stephanie tossed the sword to Amanda and kept digging around in what I had to assume was some hidden compartment. Amanda caught the sword by the hilt, slipping her fingers into the knuckle-guard and pressing a small button on the side. It was like the sword came to life, the edge shining like a perfect crystal. She gave it a single swing, smooth and forceful, and sparks poured from the blade as she did. It made a sound like crackling flames, a louder version of the sound that marked Officer Cover’s death.

Stephanie grabbed two knives from the alcove, both made of the same material as the sword, keeping one for herself and handing Amanda one. Then came the guns, or what I assumed were guns. The huge glassy lenses on the front made me think of cameras for whatever reason, and the silvery metal it was made out of looked more like a mirror than like any weapon I’d ever heard of. Amanda took a small pistol, dual-wielding it with the sword. Stephanie, meanwhile, hauled out a full-blown rifle thing, even longer than the sword and covered with little dials and buttons.

While my parents opened up the small armory that had apparently been inside the walls the whole time, I sat on the couch, slowly shrinking back.

“What the hell is going on?” I screamed. 

Stephanie’s posture loosened. She lowered the gun, and looked right into my eyes, her own eyes blurry with tears. “There are some very, very dangerous things coming after us. Things that we could have done a much better job of preparing you to face. We didn’t want you to grow up fighting a war, like your mother and I did.”

“A war?” I asked. “What war? Neither of you have fought in a war!” I stood up from the couch, only to be hit by a wave of lightheadedness and a shock of pain from my knees and hips. My headache pounded, and for a second I felt like I was going to fall. “What’s happening to me…”

Stephanie flicked a switch on the side of the gun, physically ignoring my presence. The weapon hummed to life, like a computer booting up. “It’s going to be okay, kiddo…” she muttered. Then she dashed over to the other side of the living room, pressing herself against the wall and glancing through the window. “There’s nothing outside,” she said. 

“You know how little that means,” said Amanda. Unlike Stephanie, who was having a worrying amount of difficulty maintaining her composure, Amanda had gone completely stoic. “You’re going to be alright, Alex,” she told me. She leaned in and gave me a kiss on the forehead. “You just need to stay out of sight while your mother and I take care of them.”

Despite the exhaustion and all the pain racing across my body, I was starting to get pissed off with my parents. Evidently they’d been withholding information from me for my entire life, and now that I asked them for answers, they kept brushing me off, or giving me weird half-answers that didn’t actually tell me much of anything. “I’m sick of this! What’s happening to me? Who are they? What the hell is going on?” I screamed. I could taste venom in my mouth.

The exertion of screaming put me out of breath. The ground started rising up towards me as I felt faint. Amanda caught me, supporting me by the waist. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You’re changing, changing in ways that I will never be able to understand. It’s going to be a scary time, but I promise you’re going to feel better coming out the other side. You’re a strong young man.”

That still said so little. I wanted to ask what I was changing into, why I was changing in the first place. I took in a deep breath, filling my blood with oxygen, standing up. I had to be strong. 

“As for who they are,” Amanda continued. “They are called spectrademons, soldiers created only to cause pain and terror. Their entire bodies are covered in broad-spectrum optical camouflage, they’re tougher than an armored car, and they will stop at nothing until you are dead.” The front door of our house exploded inwards, bursting into huge splinters and shards. Stephanie stepped away from the wall and aimed her gun at the open doorway. “It seems they’ve just arrived,” Amanda said. “Now go, because this is going to get ugly.”

I started walking backwards; I wanted to get away from the invisible truck pain demons, but even in spite of how delirious I was getting, I still wanted to keep my eye on the door. 

A voice started speaking from outside. Or at least, I think it was a voice. It sounded like an Atari console trying to synthesize the voice of a chain-smoking weightlifter. “Turn. Over. The. Emissary. Or. We. Will. Destroy. You.”

“Emissary?” I asked, my back bumping into the wall separating our living room from our kitchen. “What’s an Emissary?”

Amanda aimed the handgun directly at the door. Without averting her gaze, she said, “Alex, you’re adopted.”

I glanced at both of my two mothers. I looked to Amanda, a sheen of cold sweat pouring down her warm, light brown skin.

“I figured, yeah,” I mumbled. I’m not sure if either of them heard me.

“Jump into a hyperstream,” Stephanie said to the open door, “and take your bosses with you.”

The voice came back. “Then. Face. Death.”

I was still pressed against the wall, frozen, adrenaline the only thing keeping me from collapsing into a ball on the floor. 

The thing went in through the door arms-first, which made sense considering each arm was about eight or nine feet long. Its skin was a sickly brownish-green, like a smooth-skinned toad. Worse, they weren’t proportionate arms; they were long but not particularly wide, all wiry muscle wrapped around stretched-out bones, a knobby elbow in the middle and a huge grasping hand at the end. Clutched in one hand was a gun, dark grey camouflage patterns over a boxy plastic instrument of death the size of a toaster, with a short stock sticking out the back. The only way I could tell it was even a gun was the trigger on the bottom and the huge lens on the business end. 

It took about a second after the arms came into view for the spectrademon to drag the rest of its body into our house. My parents held their fire for whatever reason. The arms of the thing didn’t look like they belonged on the same creature; for all that the arms were long and spindly, the body of the creature was squat and heavily-built. It didn’t have any distinct shoulders, or hips, or really any shape besides a rounded, hunched-over form. Any details or features it might have had were covered up by this huge shell, made out of the same black metal and covering the entire body of the creature, front and back, with a gap on the side for the arms and a gap up front for the head, which jutted directly forward out of the torso.

That face… every time I look at a spectrademon’s face, it gives me the creeps. It’s not human, but it's just human enough that you can imagine how it might once have been human. No hair, not even eyelashes, big green eyes with slit pupils, an elongated skull with a huge wide jaw that stuck out like a snake’s mouth. All of that, the same disgusting color as the spectrademon’s arms, and with an expression that read “I am going to rip you limb from limb, and I am going to enjoy every second of it”.

The spectrademon took one heavy, clanking step into the house, scanned across the room with those freaking eyes and raised the tiny carbine to its shoulder. Then Amanda and Stephanie opened fire. It was like the beat of a song, two steady drums pacing out a cool 120 bpm, except if each drum beat was an electric zzap! accompanied by a camera flash of blue-green light.  

Then things started happening all at once. The spectrademon’s hand jerked up and to the side, firing once. A chunk of brick blasted off the wall with a spray of dust. The center of its breastplate lit up, glowing yellow then red then white, splinters of hot metal blasting off like dust off of a punching bag as the invisible assault hit home. The spectrademon stumbled back, its shiny mechanical legs pumping as it tried to adjust for the assault. It raised the small gun for another shot, aiming a shot directly at me. 

I tried to leap to the side, but I was so, so tired. I sort of… collapsed to one side. The burst of hot plaster blew past my ear, burning me, as the shot hit just a few inches away from my head. I landed on my butt, and started pushing across the floor to escape to the kitchen. With each passing second, I was getting weaker, more tired, my strength and energy sapping away. It definitely felt like whatever this sickness was was coming to a head. Maybe I was dying…

The spectrademon’s breastplate cracked, then finally shattered open. The last couple of shots blew open his chest, spraying blood the color of coconut milk across the foyer. Stephanie was still aiming at the door while Amanda quickly dropped her aim to reload. The weirdest thing about it was that she was… efficient. Every motion was quick and to the point, like she’d practiced it a hundred thousand times. My mother was an environmental lawyer from Oregon… how did she know to do that? And the same with Stephanie; when she had been firing at the spectrademon, she had aimed every shot perfectly, like an assassin from an action movie. Who was she? Who were my parents, really?

There wasn’t more than a second to think about that before the fight was back on. A spectrademon smashed right through the window. With its freakishly long arms it grabbed Stephanie around the neck, pulling her up against the window. She screamed, struggling to reach the knife at her belt. The spectrademon got there first, grabbing it and preparing to cut her open in a single quick movement. 

I forced myself to stand. I had to escape, I had to get to safety while my parents fought off the spectrademons. I had to. I let out a scream of pain, of exhaustion, forcing myself to stand. My lips had gone numb, my eyes were dry, my head and my stomach and my arms felt like they were going to shatter open. But step by step, eyes still locked on my parents, silently praying they were going to make it, I stumbled towards my room at the back of the house. 

To her credit, Amanda didn’t hesitate for a second when her wife got grabbed. She dropped the handgun and gripped the hilt of the sword with one hand. With three rapid steps, she was right in front of the spectrademon. She slashed once, sending a shower of sparks through the air, and the thing’s hand was off, the knife still held in its grip. The spectrademon let out a series of guttural croaking barks, maybe a language, or maybe just its equivalent of screams of pain. A second later, Amanda had jabbed the tip of the sword directly through the window, piercing the armor of its shoulder with almost no effort. 

I didn’t see whatever happened after that. I shambled into the hallway, listening intently to the sounds coming from the living room. If there had been a spectrademon waiting for me in my bedroom, I wouldn’t have noticed. There were more crackling sounds from the sword, shouts of pain, the barking of spectrademons, popping shots from the guns. I made it to the door of my room, opened it, took a step in, closed it behind me. I took two steps forward and collapsed.

I wasn’t worried anymore. That or I was too tired to be worried. I just needed to fall asleep, take some time to rest, and everything would be alright. I leaned up against the leg of my bed, near the door to the room. I was sitting upright with my head leaning against the mattress. Then I closed my eyes and let the tiredness wash over me. I fell asleep to the sound of laser-fire.

I dreamed of that same place again, the enormous field of glass. I wasn’t a girl this time, and I didn’t have four arms, though that’s because I wasn’t really anything. It was like my entire body was just… a cloud, floating above the floor. Still, there was something in front of me. It was a gun, I think, though being about six feet long it was bigger than any gun I’d seen before. It had an odd shape to it as well: it was smooth, like the shape water gets when you pour it out of the faucet just right and it looks like a still sculpture. It still had a trigger, and a scope, and a defined point at the end where it flared out like an old blunderbuss.

I was… disassembling it. I didn’t have any limbs, but through sheer focus I was taking it apart, examining it piece by piece. I knew this part was the resonating chamber, this part the psychic choke, this part the pain modulator…

The light was there too, though I was too focused on the thing in front of me to really acknowledge it. I knew it was there because of its reflection off of the glass floor. 

“Things are progressing more quickly than expected,” said the light. “Indeed, it is unlikely we will be able to continue for much longer than this.”

“Do not rush,” the light continued. “We don’t want to damage the container.”

“No, we do not. Our hope must be maintained, however, and if it is to survive, a small bit of haste may be necessary.”

“Of course,” said the light. “Hmm. I think it may be noticing us. This is unusual.”

I looked up at the light. The gun-thing was totally disassembled on the floor in front of me. “Who are you?” I asked. My voice came out high, pure, like a singer.

“No matter, little hope,” said the light. “The hateful ones move. Sleep now; there will be much hardship ahead, but you have more strength than you think.”

And I was unconscious. It’s odd; they say you can only remember a dream if you wake up at the end of it, and normally that’s true. But I have never forgotten the words that the light said to me then.