Chapter 4
As Mel sat and watched the traffic of people coming and going from the cafe it occurred to her that everyone seemed so normal, so average. Young and old, tall and short, fat and thin, handsome and homely, they all shared one very basic thing in common: they were all perfectly normal 100% Human people having perfectly normal 100% Human problems and concerns.
Unlike her.
It would never even occur to any of these people that they might not actually be Human, that they might be part something else, part something not even of this world, deliberately created to serve the purposes of a more advanced race.
Bloodlines of Keepers', bred to function like guard dogs.
What part of these bloodlines was Human and what part was the something other'? And exactly how much of a part was this other'?
How much could it possibly be, anyway? Nothing untoward or unusual had ever shown up in her yearly physicals.
So, okay. Maybe her normal body temperature was a little higher than what was considered the Human average. But it wasn't drastically so, not enough to have ever raised any medical eyebrows by very much. At least, not once it was realized that 99.9 degrees was normal for her.
And 99.9 degrees didn't even approach a Cirronian's normal range!
And so maybe she had healed from the assorted bumps, scrapes, cuts and bruises she'd gotten during the course of her life a little quicker than most people did from such things. But not a single eyebrow had ever raised at the time frame.
And as far as she knew, that was really the extent of it.
She'd grown up and developed exactly as any normal Human female would be expected to. She'd donated blood a number of times in her life and she knew there wasn't anything unusual about her blood pressure or her standard-issue, universal donor O-positive. Similarly, she'd had plenty of dental x-rays over the years, had gotten several mammographs and once, when she'd broken her collarbone (the one and only time she'd been skiing) she'd had a chest x-ray. If there was anything off' about her internal anatomy in some way, it hadn't been noticed by anybody.
And if being part something other' was supposed to have conferred some special other-worldly talents or abilities, they'd never made themselves manifest in any way before, never even gave a hint of their presence.
She couldn't sense the auras of lifeforces or Track their traces. She couldn't move at hyperspeed. Or even at zip speed. She considered herself to be fairly bright, but she knew she wasn't a genius by any means. She wasn't much of an athlete and she didn't possess unusual physical strength. She certainly couldn't shape-shift, let alone morph herself into something else at will. She couldn't exist without sleep. She couldn't just blithely ignore gravity and scale up and down the sides of buildings. She couldn't download electronic information directly into her synapses or plug herself into a computer's virtual world on a micro level as Cole did with that thingamajig ... Hell, she'd likely electrocute herself if she ever tried!
But somehow she had not only been able to make his Collector function, she'd actually been able to Collect one of the aliens.
She still wasn't exactly sure how she'd done that, only that she had set her mind to do it and it just happened.
And she couldn't suppress a shiver of revulsion at the memory. She'd been far too angry and pumped with adrenaline at the time to consciously react to it, but the sensation of Collecting a lifeforce had been supremely creepy, like that of an intruder passing like rancid breath through her soul, leaving behind a residue of vengeful bloodlust, somehow amplifying her mindset into an entirely different zone.
"Be careful ... with that..."
Not an experience she would ever want to repeat.
"I re-energized your lifeforce then ... You can do the same for me."
And somehow, with Cole's guidance, she had been able to re-energize his polarities.
"... find that one thing you've always been afraid of ... Don't be afraid of it ... Embrace it ... It's yours..."
She stared at the palm of her right hand, the hand that had done that, vigorously massaging it as she remembered the split-second jolt of current she'd felt, a scorching yet painless rush.
She still wasn't exactly sure how she had done that, either! Or even what she had done, let alone whether she could ever do a repeat performance.
So what part of her was this other' and what did it mean?
And how the hell was it supposed to serve in securing anything from the clutches of nihilistic alien beings who could easily chew up a Human army like a platter of hors d'oeuvres (sans the cocktail sauce)?
She hadn't a clue.
And whatever happened to personal choice? To free will? To inalienable (ha!) Human rights?
No matter how noble or necessary the cause or ideal, the bottom line was that these bloodlines had been specifically bred to serve a master in a pre-ordained role, to function as little more than slaves.
Maybe as nothing more than slaves.
Maybe as nothing more than disposable slaves.
But Cirronians didn't live in a slave-based society.
At least, she didn't think they did.
But how would she know? It wasn't exactly a question she'd ever thought to ask.
It was hopeless. The more she thought about it, the more she tried to make sense out of it, the less sense it all seemed to make.
"You've been sitting on a bomb that can wipe out the entire enchilada, not to mention the rice and beans on the side."
Once they'd found where the Vardians had hidden the real Brac, why didn't the Cirronians just load the damn thing aboard one of their drone ships and send it out to the edge of the galaxy to harmlessly explode, just as the Migar Council did with the replica? What ever possessed them to leave it on Earth exactly where they found it, a disaster waiting to happen, entrusting generation after generation of part-Human hybrids to stand guard over it as their paltry first line of defense?
And on a world that they held to be so violently dangerous that they'd quarantined it, yet!
How rational was any of this?
Answer: there wasn't anything rational about it at all.
Leaving the Universal Annihilator just sitting around for the taking was like walking through tiger country carrying a bloodied slab of raw meat: completely irrational and totally idiotic, contrary to everything she knew about how Cirronians usually think and behave.
If Cole is any example, then his people are a highly evolved, highly advanced, highly intelligent order of beings, the very definition of enlightened rationality. They're honest, they're known for keeping their word, and they live up to their responsibilities to a fault. And she knew that their very law demands that they pay the price for whatever choices they make...
But is Cole a proper example to go by? It wasn't as if she'd ever known another of his kind. What did she really know about Cirronians and their world beyond what he had told her? And come to think of it, he really hadn't told her all that much.
"The Vardians had shipped the device someplace far away for safe keeping until they were ready to use it."
Earth may well have been "a sleepy little rock back then," not technologically advanced, exactly as Cole had said it was, but that's certainly no longer the case.
"There's a thermonuclear device capable of vaporizing an entire planet sitting in the back of my car ... Can you be a little more reassuring?"
The whole thing made for such lousy reasoning.
The price for not destroying the Brac once and for all was to issue an open invitation, either for the Vardians to eventually return to Earth and seek to reclaim it so that they could use it...
... OR for one of the legions of Human madmen or fanatics or terrorists, driven by their own personal cravings for power and fired by their hatreds, their lust for violence and their thirst for blood, to stumble upon it and try to use it for their own ends.
One way or another, there would be a price to pay for not disposing of it. The only question was, who would be doing the paying here? Earth? The Cirronians alone? All of Migar? Everyone?
And since the Brac was still around, all these threats still remained!
Was she alone now supposed to stand guard and protect it in its new hiding place as Mel Porter, Warrior Princess (Yeah, right!) if more Vardians came looking for it? Just how was she supposed to do that? And with what? Hell, she had a hard enough time guarding her little backyard flower garden from aphids and Japanese beetles!
This whole thing was surreal insane! Not even the most irrational race of people would ever think of being this careless with such a weapon of total annihilation!
So what the hell is really going on here?
"People who would eventually become ... Keepers of a Dark Secret."
What exactly was (is?) the Dark Secret' they (and she) are supposed to be keeping?
It couldn't be the Brac itself simply because there's the mythic' story about it. And at least some Vardians and other Migarians are aware that the myth is true.
Hence, it's only still a secret from Humans.
So why had the Cirronians gone to all this trouble?
Did it have something to do with the secret being Dark'?
If so, could there have been another reason for creating the bloodlines?
And the word bloodlines' is a plural. Are there more like her somewhere? Or more that maybe aren't like her somewhere? Do any of them know what they are? And where are they and how could she recognize them?
Or would she even want to?
And why wasn't she ever told anything?
She simply couldn't believe that both her grandmother and her father thought it unworthy of mentioning! Her grandmother, at least, must have known something. She had to. She had made her promise not to sell the Watchfire. And she'd written down the translation of some of the Key's Vardian glyphs in her diary. But Mel had read her entire diary from cover to cover – three times, in fact – and it said nothing at all, didn't even say what the Key was for.
And if Jess hadn't accidentally found that wooden box tucked all the way in the back of the cubbyhole, she would never even have had the diary. Or the Key.
And where do her mother and father fit into all of this and how much did they know? Were they hybrids as well? Were her grandparents? Or were any of them fully Human? Or fully Cirronian?
No matter which approach she tried to use to analyze it all, the Gordian Knot held fast, refused to untangle, refused to even loosen. There were just too many multiplying and inter-related questions with virtually no answers that made any sense to her. The only thing she was positive about was that she had to be missing a good many important pieces of information to this puzzle.
Since she could in no way be certain of what she would be looking for (let alone where she should look for it!), without Cole's assistance it was unlikely that she'd ever have a prayer of finding any of those missing pieces.
Or even recognizing them if she did.
What was she? Why was she? And how?
This last was the one question her mind kept skittering around, afraid to examine it too closely, even more afraid of the labyrinth of directions any answers would take her. Yet it was also the one question that haunted her, the one question her unchecked thoughts kept insisting on returning to.
What had the Cirronians done and how exactly had they done it? Did they just arrive on Earth one fine day and announce to the Humans they found that they were going to impregnate the women and breed them like cattle? Or were they sneaky and insidious about it, morphing into Human form and then pretending to be Human, just as Cole had to do, and not clueing the people in to what was happening and what they were doing to them?
As much as these thoughts repulsed her, she had to admit to their possibility. She knew that Cirronians were very pragmatic when it came to reproduction, well aware that their mates were not necessarily their best genetic compliment for producing offspring. In fact, usually weren't the best genetic compliment. Since they held that procreation must always be responsible, a Cirronian's biological sire and his father weren't often the same individual and weren't expected to be. A female joining with another male during her High Season did not change the strong pair bond she had with her mate and her behavior couldn't be equated with the Human concepts of immorality or hedonism. For their part, males fathered the offspring their mates birthed. There was no regard as to whether it was their biological child or not for such wasn't considered either relevant or important.
Wouldn't they have had to do much the same type of thing with Humans to establish their bloodlines, to develop the Keepers' they needed?
The very essence of animal domestication is in the strict control of reproduction, in mandating who should breed with who and who shouldn't breed at all, all to choreograph the development of bloodlines in a predetermined direction conforming with certain parameters – be it to lay more eggs or to have more meat or to grow denser wool or simply to exhibit some Human concept of beauty. There would be no such thing as draft horses or lapdogs or beef cattle or Siamese cats or anything else if these animals hadn't been specifically designed and bred for their qualities.
Could the Cirronians have done such things with Humans?
Would they have?
Wouldn't they have had to?
Was it even worth her trying to find out?
Could she live with herself if she didn't at least make the attempt?
Could she live with herself if she did?
Her whirling thoughts chasing after each other in overlapping spirals, Mel pressed her splayed fingertips to her temples, as if she could quell the turmoil in her brain if she could just somehow exert enough physical pressure. Her mind felt clotted with pain and confusion, thick with the heavy liquid of grief. She was afraid that if she shook her head in an attempt to clear it, it would emit squishing and gurgling sounds.
She needed help.
"I need your help, Mel."
A five-word request, a plea that had brought her life to a previously unimaginable level of strange and completely changed her and her world forever.
A five word request from an alien being who then put his complete faith and trust in her, who had simply surrendered himself entirely into her hands.
A five-word request she hadn't been able to refuse, never even occurred to her to refuse.
"That was instinct, wasn't it?"
It had probably been the summoning voice of instinct operating on the both of them. Something within the blood of each of them had recognized the other and had responded, something resonating in the marrow of their bones, the voice of racial memory speaking through the elegant double helix of chromosomes and genes.
Although she really didn't understand it, the concept itself certainly went a long way to explaining their affinity, why the two of them had been so drawn to each other, why they had been so accepting and accommodating of each other from the very start, long before there was ever any rational reason for either of them to do so.
Hell, how many women would've picked up a man like him from the side of the road under circumstances like that? When she'd first laid eyes on him, she'd thought he was a total pervert. He'd been in his underwear and completely incoherent, staggering around as if he were drunk or stoned out of his gourd. Even she had recognized that offering him a ride was nuts!
But she hadn't been able to just drive away and leave him there.
And from there she had just proceeded as if it had been the most normal and natural thing in the world for a woman to not only have picked up a very weird near-naked man from the side of the road, but to have dressed him in her clothes, taken him into her home – and then kept him!
In the beginning he had made her feel like a teacher with a gifted student, sometimes like a mother trying to cope with a highly precocious child, still other times like a big sister tutoring a baby brother. More than just occasionally, she had felt like the baby sister to his big brother. And then sometimes there were those unbidden sparks he inspired in her and she'd get all flustered, hot and bothered, not having a clue how to handle it. And he ... Well, he just seemed innocently oblivious to the impact he was having on her without ever even trying.
He had ended up turning her life upside down and inside out many times over; had made her laugh and get angry and irritated and frustrated and annoyed and completely exasperated; had sometimes badly freaked her out and frightened her; and had often maddened her and delighted her and confused her and caused her to fret, obsess and worry more than anyone else she'd ever known.
But life with him had also been undeniably exciting, surprising and challenging, even exhilarating.
And now she'd never see him again...
No! No tears! She angrily berated herself, swiping a hand at her eyes, forcing them back. She was not going to cry. She refused to allow it. She had no right to selfishly weep and mourn.
Cole had never been hers, never could have been hers.
He was home now, back in his own world, done with the necessity of his charade and where he belonged.
"Yes, it does feel pretty good..."
She should be happy for him
She should be proud of herself for having helped him.
So why did she feel as though she'd so willingly dug her own grave, climbed down into it and then ordered the flowers?
She'd known from the start that his stay here on Earth would only be temporary, that he'd be returning to the Migar System when his mission was done, that she couldn't afford to get too emotionally attached to him.
And she had tried not to. She really had.
For all the good it had done her.
The first few weeks he was with her she had tried to ignore his physical attractiveness, concentrating instead on his education and on the soul within the package. But in less than a month, and with increasing regularity thereafter, he began to replace Rod in her dreams. Sometimes those dreams would seem so vividly real she'd awaken with a start, drenched in sweat and all tangled up in her sheets, acutely aware of the song playing along every axon and neural pathway in her body. Then she'd lay there in her bed, trying to catch her breath, trying to calm, listening to the whirr of the chair casters from the other room and the slight squeak of one of the wheels, knowing it would be near impossible to meet his eyes over the breakfast table.
It wasn't that she'd never had X-rated dreams before, but some of them were so intensely vibrant that they both worried and frightened her.
Every male she'd ever been attracted to in her life had at least been allegedly Human (although she had to admit to having strong doubts about some of them). Thus, the near overpowering attraction she felt for him had been enormously unsettling and very unnerving, rather like finding oneself harboring an unexpected and entirely inappropriate lust for a Saint Bernard.
Sure, Cole had looked completely Human on the outside. Hell, he was drop-dead-take-me-I'm-yours gorgeous! And she certainly wasn't blind to that fact.
But heaven only knows what kinds of organs he's got on the INSIDE, a whispered voice in her mind had often reminded her, always sounding more than a bit snarky about it, even to Mel.
And early on she knew that his appearance was nothing more than an illusion, that he was nothing more than an illusion. He was an alien from outer space, for God's sake, no more Human than a shaved gorilla all dressed up in Armani would be! She was also very well aware that the exact Human image he'd ended up with had only come about as a matter of chance. If he'd seen a billboard ad for a theater revival of the Hunchback of Notre Dame instead of that one for Cole-brand Briefs, he would've fashioned himself in the image of Quasimodo.
All she had initially known about his true appearance was that he was a being of light and energy and that "all six lifeforms in Migar have visual organs," presumably including Cirronians. Hell! A creature having eight tentacles, four eyes, a forked tongue, warty skin and a curly piglet tail could very well fit that description!
Eventually, he'd further explained with something she still found totally incomprehensible, something about plasmatic ions and photons and electrical and magnetic particles and positive and negative polarities. Physics had never been her strong suit and her imagination wasn't up to envisioning anything beyond a cartoon light bulb with stick-figure arms and legs.
But with his eyes. Always with his utterly amazing eyes.
Yet if he hadn't looked so very perfect, so very Human, then maybe she wouldn't have felt the need to latch on to a fully-functional relationship with a real Human male as a defensive buffer.
Poor Vic. So eager for the two of them to resume their relationship, pulling out all the stops to court her again, he'd just been ... handy.
God! How could she have ever done such a thing?
It was so easy for her to recognize what had happened in hindsight, to see why and how all her previous reservations had so quickly fallen by the wayside. Where before it had been completely unacceptable that Vic was so married to his job he didn't really have time for anyone or anything else, it then became okay that they only saw each other a few times a month, just as long as she had a bonafide relationship going to help keep her growing attraction for Cole safely at bay.
She genuinely cared for Vic and she'd never meant to use him like that.
It had just ended up working out that way.
What an idiot she'd been. Given the circumstances, how could they have ever worked out otherwise? At the very least, a good relationship absolutely must have openness and honesty going for it. And theirs just didn't. It couldn't. From the start she'd found herself having to conceal a very important part of her life from him and regularly making up excuses and telling him stories on top of lies.
All along, she'd only been fooling herself. And as a result, fooling him.
Vic was such a nice, sweet, gentle, caring and compassionate man who offered her love, security, stability, a family, a real future ... But while her head told her that he was the kind of man she'd always wanted, the truth is, something vital was missing between them, had always been missing between them.
And as fond as she was of him, he had always been a poor second in her heart after Rod.
Just as Rod had become second to...
She squeezed her eyes shut again, biting her lower lip nearly hard enough to break the skin and draw blood while the tidal wave of loss crashed over her again, using the self-inflicted pain to brace herself against once more succumbing to the power of the undertow.
Dammit! She was NOT going to cry over him anymore!
For all she knew, this had nothing to do with Cole as an individual. Breeders always aim to optimize certain behaviors, traits and qualities in their stock. Maybe she'd been deliberately wired to respond this way with any male Cirronian and didn't really have a choice in the matter
A flash of raw, unfocused rage stopped her tears as nothing else possibly could.
Whatever they had done to make her this way, she was still a Human being, far more so than anything else, and she was NOT an animal. She had to keep believing that. And she absolutely and uncategorically refused to be treated as if she were a breeding cow! If nothing else, she did have a choice on whether she ever allowed herself to be controlled by such a response!
"Want some more coffee, hon?"
Mel looked up, grateful for the distraction from the increasingly dark and painful web of tangled thoughts weaving through her mind. "No. No, thanks ... Margo." She cleared her throat, dabbed at her eyes, then blew her nose in a paper napkin, trying to find her voice. "I think my ... my kidneys would be staging an open rebellion."
Margo chuckled at that while Mel checked her watch.
It was nearly nine. She'd been hanging out in this place long enough.
She dug in her purse, put four dollars and twenty-seven cents on the table to cover the tab for her nearly untouched breakfast, then handed the surprised waitress a fifty, firmly closing her hand around it as she began to protest and tried to hand it back.
"I want you to keep it," she insisted. "Now, if you or someone else would be kind enough to give me directions to Chicago, I'd..."
"Chicago!?!" Margo emphatically shook her head in negation as she not-too-grudgingly pocketed her windfall. "Listen, hon. It ain't any of my business but, if I was you, I'd stay well far away from there, far away from any big city."
"Why?"
Margo snorted in disbelief. "You mean you ain't heard!?"
"Heard what?"
"Hell, hon, it's all over the news and everybody's talking about it! Yesterday, somethin' like fifty or sixty people just keeled over and dropped dead in Chicago alone! All at the same time, it appears. At least another fifty or sixty elsewheres. Probably more. Even north through Canada and south through Mexico and Central America, they say. Heard it happened in England and Europe, too."
"I think I ... I might've ... heard something about that," Mel stammered, realizing what the woman had to be referring to.
Cole never had been too bothered with leaving most of the Human host bodies wherever they happened to fall, she ruefully noted. Likely, he thought he wouldn't be around long enough to have to deal with the all the messy aftermath. And with that remote Collection he'd done... Still, he'd been steadily wracking up the body count and there would've ended up being a stack of them all told even if he'd continued hunting down the fugitives one at a time.
"Yeah, well, it ain't over with. They's still findin' more bodies and lots of people are scared shitless – pardon my French – and gettin' themselves out. Anyways, now they's saying the C.D.C.'s gonna be investigating. Maybe the government and the military, too. Talk is, it might be some sorta weird plague or a terrorist attack or somethin' going on. Maybe even an alien invasion. Can't be too careful these days, ya know."