Earth Man (27 page)
Eventually the pair grew
brave; they had seen no sign of any Avatar to stop them. They moved in amongst humanity in one of the major cities near Egypt. Danny recognized the pyramids when they passed them but he had no clue where they had travelled; his knowledge of the Middle East was limited. Both of them had dark human bodies, their skin almost ebony. They switched bodies minimally, growing fond of each one and mourning over its loss when it was burnt out or destroyed. The Growth was enthralled and perhaps even a little cautious when they learned how cruel humans could be to one another. They imitated everything they saw, everything except rape, that crime they had no comprehension or use for. The concept of sex was as foreign to them as their biology was to humans; it was as useless to them as oxygen. Instead they pushed their bodies to extremes, through burning and piercing and pushing them to physical capacity. Danny saw all of it in his mind, but he could control it, he did not let it overwhelm him. As horrible as some of the images were, he needed to learn all he could about the Growth.
The aliens constantly looked to the stars, expecting to see their
brethren, hoping more of their kind would flutter down and join them in their revelry. Danny knew they were not human but he could not help but see them as a couple; as demented as they were, as psychotic as their actions, they shared a bond between them. As the aliens grew inside the bodies of humans, they absorbed more than just the human meat and bone. They became like us, in their behaviour and in their affection for each other. There was a dark streak of romance to the way they treated each other. They slept with their limbs entwined in one another, intimately sharing their thoughts and dreams as one mind.
Controlling the flow of memory, Danny felt a sense of impending doom for the pair. They were so involved in themselves that the Growth never realized humanity had noticed them and were prepar
ing. Danny saw it all from her point of view, the First, after all he’d seen he could not help but refer to her as a person, a female entity. All of her human bodies had the same look, almost as if she had the same taste. She chose tall, slim, ebony-skinned victims, the darker the skin the more she coveted them. Every one of her victims had small, doll-like faces, if they didn’t she would change their face to match her view of herself.
The Chem-X team came for her in the middle of the afternoon as they slept in an abandoned hut, so
mewhere in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro. They were unprepared for the twelve white men in white plastic suits. The Second fled but the First was too slow. They sprayed her with a chemical weapon that froze the body solid, the limbs utterly paralyzed. They took the frozen meat and sealed it into a box, breaking her down into squares and shipping them off to their secret laboratory. Danny could not help but feel sympathy for her as they took her apart piece by piece. The creature showed no care for itself, the First laughed as it was dissected until it longer had a mouth to mock them with. The black, infected brain was all that remained of it, sitting inside a plastic box for months until the scientists who’d taken her apart could decide what to do with information they’d learned. The body the First had worn was once a human, a beautiful, living, breathing woman but the scientists at Chem-X showed as much concern for the body and who it had been as the Growth.
After what seemed like ages the First was given e
yes again and with them it looked upon a familiar face. Dr. Glass leaned over her/it, his eyes cold and without mercy as they peeked out from behind his darkened glasses. The doctor seemed to smile and then all that remained of the host body was gone and the First was returned to its natural state. Somehow they had found it, removed it and kept it safely locked away. Danny thought the vision would come to an end but the horrific images did not stop there.
The scientists began by feeding the First
, Danny couldn’t see or understand how but they began to give it meat and blood. As it grew it began to change, the flesh it was fed contained no spirit, no soul, no living, malleable DNA it could use. It was dead flesh and inside it the First scream in agony. Soon the alien began to change, to create more of itself inside its own body. The torture of existence inside dead meat forced it to adapt, it began replicating clones to spread out, to survive beyond it once it learned that it had only death to look forward to. Somehow inside the First was the means by which its alien race could multiply, but in the hands of Chem-X its natural cycle was distorted and mutated. The alien had fallen to Earth and lived a human life, as murderous and barbaric as it was, yet it had become nothing more than a swollen, pregnant monster, bloated with the spores of itself inside it. The First had been loved and wanted and it remembered how that felt. It was haunted by the human experience, desperate for a brain and body again, desperate to breathe. All of what it had become was stripped away inside that secret Chem-X laboratory. What it was left as was something far worse than what it had been before coming to Earth. Dr. Glass had taken a strange, beautiful, alien/human hybrid and turned it into a biological weapon, a mindless hungry virus.
When the doctor finally realized what he had done, he panicked. They sprayed the First with chemicals to sterilize and kill the spores and it felt each tiny clone of itself blink out of existence. Its b
ody created more, each strain more resistant than the last. Finally they simply sealed it into an air tight clear plastic coffin and left it to starve to death. While the Second had searched desperately for it, it had waited patiently for Danny. It had chosen its enemy, not its mate, to be the one to end its pitiful life. Only the Avatar, the chosen defender of the planet, would have the power to truly end her suffering. Danny felt good knowing he’d helped it and by destroying it saved the human race. The creature had known that what it had become threatened even its own kind. While the monsters had taken human bodies and corrupted them, humanity had proven to have the ability to do the exact same thing in return. It was over though, Danny had burned it to ashes and when the visions faded, he knew he’d forget all about the monster. He’d gotten the information he’d needed; he had the Second’s scent and he knew where it was heading. There was only one place it would go now that it was all alone, it would return to where it was safe and most familiar. The Second would try to return to Africa but Danny knew it was not heading to the airport.
Walking to the edge of the building, Danny reached out with his abilities, letting the red energy flow out of him in small,
waving ribbons. He connected to every animal in the city and immediately knew his hunch was right. The animals knew something was among them; a foreign predator had enter the jungle. The animals could feel it and they began to panic. The Second had arrived at the San Diego Zoo and the animals screamed inside their cages.
Using the energy as a form of rocket propulsion Danny flew like a missile straight toward the Zoo. The scent was different and difficult to track from the air but Danny didn
’t need it now; the animals were everywhere. Birds fill the skies overhead, all of them relaying the Second’s arrival to him like a direct video feed. It had run across town to get to the Zoo and was able to leap the outside barrier with ease. It leaped clear over the wall and landed in the petting zoo. It tore the front of a cage off, stepping inside and grabbing the hapless vulture by the neck. It consumed the large bird easily, the wings still flapping as it was eaten alive by the alien. The Second had resumed a human shape and strode through the zoo like it was a buffet laid out just for its arrival. There were only a few families in the petting zoo and they ran at the first sight of the monster, grabbing their children close and fleeing without looking back. The goats and ponies were not so lucky; with no way out of the pen they could not escape the alien's grasp. It dropped the corpse of the bird it had picked clean and smashed through the wooden fence that stood between it and the goats. It was able to use any of the gifts it had absorbed simply by activating the victims DNA inside itself and it easily formed a pair of massive black wings using bones consumed from the vulture itself. The wings lifted it off the ground and it picked off the goats easily. Their meat was young and soft and tender from a life of incarceration. A large black beak formed over its mouth, helping it break the small animal bones into smaller pieces. The Second had no interest in the few humans in the zoo that day, for a variety of Earth’s life-forms lay before it for the taking. It planned on tasting them all.
When Phil had jumped in his car he figured his plan was going to work, but his every attempt to reach the Chem-X building seemed to end up turned around. For the life of him he could not understand how he’d ended up on a highway overpass headed toward the San Diego Zoo. Every time he tried to change lanes the traffic would come to a halt. Even as he told himself he was headed the wrong way, he’d find himself slipping back into the same direction or absentmindedly turning away from where he thought he wanted to go. Something was drawing him toward the Zoo but Phil refused to comply with it; he was in charge of his life and the more he lost control, the harder he fought for it. Some force was carefully nudging him along, trying to place him where he needed to be, but Phil was determined to control his own destiny.
After trying time and again to change directions and finding traffic congestion, disaster or bad luck, he reluctantly let whatever was pushing him take control. All the while telling himself he was not collab
orating. Instead he thought of it as trusting in a benevolent force. He was reluctant to think of himself as a servant of the Lord and he was not even sure the God he believed in was involved in all that had happened to him and Danny, but he had to believe that he’d know if he was a vassal for evil. All he wanted to do was help his best friend and if some kind of outside power seemed to know how to do that, he thought it best to listen. The only other option was to continually drive around in circles until he was so confused he couldn’t think.
From the moment he'd left Monica's he'd felt befuddled and confused. At
one point Phil even tried to do a complete U-turn and somehow ended up facing the same direction. The old car was unreliable and finally he had to tell himself that maybe, in some way, it was Danny pulling him to the Zoo. Almost as if they were on the same page, just when he thought he’d gone completely crazy, he saw Danny fly past overhead. He was nothing more than a red blur overhead but Phil knew it was him. He’d flown directly over Phil’s car, headed in the same direction Phil was being drawn. It was too much of a coincidence to be ignored.
It had all begun with a hunting trip in the woods and now, in the heart of San Diego, Phil ha
d an awful sense of foreboding. He knew as he passed the cars fleeing the Zoo parking lot that whatever had started that day in the forest was coming to an end. Their strange adventure had come full circle, from the quiet solitude of nature to the heart of a bustling city. Phil thought back to the movies he’d seen, running through the scenarios he’d pictured in his head. Every time he’d imagined the human race coming to an end, he thought mankind would be standing side by side, fighting to the last man and woman against their alien aggressors. If they were all to be exterminated, Phil had thought it would have been face to face with their conquerors. The Growth wore human faces and bodies and Phil was deeply worried that no one would even recognize them. Even he was not familiar with them, he had no clue what Danny was up against, but he hoped someone, somewhere with authority and power was aware of what was happening. He’d considered calling the police and warning someone but dialling 911 and sharing everything that had happened seemed like a great way to get himself locked up. Even when there was overwhelming evidence and scientific fact to back up stories, people still disregarded the truth in place of their opinion. Phil had lost most of his trust in humanity after spending a day reading Moon Landing Conspiracies on the internet.
Danny had made it sound as if Chem-X was in control of the situation, but from what he
’d seen on TV, Phil was sure they’d screwed it up. All Phil could think of was the novel he’d read in college, Puppet Masters. While he’d forgotten the authors name and possibly even the books’ title, the way that humanity had assisted and worked with the aliens in the book had stuck with him. To work against your own kind, to betray your own blood or turn your back on your people was something Phil had no tolerance for. Phil was one of those men who were born loyal. When he’d found out that Danny had gained incredibly abilities, he was not the least bit surprised. Danny had a hero’s heart; he was trustworthy in a world where people were far too easily corrupted. Phil had no faith in his fellow man and he knew Danny was in deep. Chem-X was not going to save his friend, he knew that for certain. While he did not know what help he could be, he had to be there. There many things happening that was beyond his understanding, but he understood loyalty. The Growth was evil and had to be destroyed. Good had to win, that was all there was to it. He was just a divorced ex-jock who only worked half the year; he would leave the cosmic reasoning for someone else.