Chapter 11: the Story of the Brown-Eyed Baby Part One – Mother's Love
"No, stop, that's a restricted area!"
"Haha! What's it matter? We're all going to die anyway! The sun is dying, and I told you so, hahahaaa!"
The two male guards chased the crazed woman down the hall. It really didn't matter that she went into the rocket storage area, but the men would chase her down if only to keep their sanity during the suns expiration. She had frizzy, shoulder-blade length hair the color of straw that flew out behind her like a wool blanket as she sprinted toward a door labeled 'Authorized Personnel Only.' With a wicked grin on her face and a baby in one arm, she swiped a card into the doors security system and pushed it open; slipping in side with one last "I told you so!"
The woman pressed her back against a nearby file cabinet and pushed it in front of the door, then repeated the action until compiling a formidable blockade. A shrill laugh escaped her lips, and was abruptly cut off, her face straight and serious. She clutched the baby, who was curiously silent, to her chest and looked around the room, twirling around and taking everything in with twitchy movements. "Hah!" She shouted, after spotting what she had been searching for, pointing at it and stomping a foot in success. She then pointed the finger in the babies face, "Hah! Haha! I told you so!" The baby boy stared back with rich brown eyes that matched her own, only hers had the sparkle of an insane person.
In a clipped walk she approached a blocky one-person rocket, ignoring the sounds of kicking and punching coming from behind the barrier. Slinging the infant over her shoulder, she used both hands to open the hatch with an efficiency that showed she had done it before. "Here we are Bernie, that rocket I told you about. I told you I would get you here. I told you!" The woman placed the child into the cockpit and strapped him in. He wore nothing but a diaper.
She pulled out a brown and blue spotted baby blanket with the name 'Bernard' sewn on it from a bag she had, and tucked it around him after strapping him in. "It's cold in space, you'll need this, you will. I'm telling you, It'll be cold, trust me, I know. But don't worry, you won't be cold for long, no no no, you'll only be up there for a few days or so, no no not long at all. And then the blue ones will help you." She slapped her hands over her mouth and strangled an eruption of laughter. "Ohhhh I was right, Bernie. You didn't believe me and I was right, Ohohoho! They didn't believe me either, they didn't but they were wrong. They were! The blue ones are real, Bernie. They'll help you, they'll help you for sure. They've helped us before!" The baby called Bernie looked at her blankly, expression unchanging. "Don't you give me that look, you crazy baby! Pyramids and Stonehenges don't build themselves you know! You know that!"
Her demeanor was suddenly calm and her voice soft, eyes full of static and love. "Yes, you do know. You're my smart baby, aren't you? My very smart, smart, so very smart baby boy." She reached out to touch the single curl of blonde hair on his head with a shaky hand. "Oh yes, very smart. You aren't even crying. Do you know what's happening? No, probably not. But you've got that feeling don't you? Yes, oh yes I can tell," she poked him in his button nose, "you can feel it. I don't know where you get your smarts. Mother isn't smart, no, mother isn't smart." Then suddenly she was ridged again, "But mother knows things, Bernard! I know things! Oh yes, do I know things. I know lots of things!"
"Open this door, right now!" The guards had managed to open the heavy door enough so that they could squeeze their arms through. The woman pecked the baby on the head with chapped lips and stood up to close the hatch, but not before jamming some kind of computer chip into a socket in the interior wall of the rocket. "Programmed and ready to go!" She sang with a too-cheery expression and tears rolling down her cheeks, while the proper emotions failed to reach her voice. "Good bye!" Spinning around, she lifted a leg and smashed a big red button with the heel of her foot, causing cracks and sparks in the control panel and starting Bernard's rocket to launch.
The guards breached the blockade and tackled the woman to the ground just as the single-person rocket started to lift off, filling the room with smoke and flames, puked from the engines. She smacked her head on the floor and started to bleed from her left eyebrow when they lifted her up and hauled her out of the room. "Mother loves her Bernie!" she screamed as she watched the rocket break through the three floors above them and reach the sky.
The men struggled to restrain the woman as she thrashed and roared in their arms. With her mane-like hair, and the strength of a mother on a mission, it was like fighting a human lion. One man grabbed her right wrist and stilled it to read the labeled silver band wrapped around it, "Freya Boyd…The hell? She's a mental patient! How was she able to get this deep into the facility?" The other man gaped, "Freya Boyd? I know that name! She used to work here!"
Freya chortled hysterically and spoke in a deep, reverberating tone that didn't sound like it should belong to her, "No one wants to believe a woman who speaks of aliens when she says the end is near! Not when she has no evidence because they won't look! Not when she does the things she does without permission, to convince, to save! They call her crazy! Lock her up!" Her eyes are wide and grin consuming, "But I was right! I was so right, I knew! I knew before anyone, before all of you! I told you so! I did! I told you so! I told you all!"
The first guard slapped her across the face and covered his ears, "Shut up, you're lying! It can't be true, the world can't be ending; I don't believe it! I won't!"
"You'll die in denial! You should move to Egypt, you'll start to believe when the sand turns to liquid glass under your feet!"
"I said shut up! How could you possibly know? How? What do you know?"
"You'd be surprised, the things I know." And then her worded start to skip and she repeated herself, over and over, in different voices and volumes, eyes have glazed over. "You'd be surprised, the things I know… You'd be surprised, the things I know. ..You'd be surprised, the things I know… You'd be surprised, the things I know…"
The second guard cuffed her and started to lead her away, grim faced, "Come on; let's get her back to the institution so she can get to know a straight jacket until… it's over."
It's not until Bernard's rocket emerged from the atmosphere and started sailing smoothly through space that his bottom lip started to quiver. His little hands balled into fists around the soft blanket cocooning him, and he watched the stars through his tiny square window until his face turned red and his eyes swam with tears. One huff. Two huffs. Three huffs, and he finally he started to sob and scream and kick and swing his arms. His blanket fell off in the tantrum.
Just then, as the blanket hit the floor, a robotic and rubber-tipped fingered, fully articulated arm sprouted from the ceiling and picked it up. The baby froze and silenced, and watched with wide eyes as the arm neared and replaced the blanket over top of his tiny frame. At first, he was too afraid to move, and stayed petrified as the hand adjusted the sheet to perfection, and hovered over him. Then he pouted, glared at the blanket, grabbed it, and threw it off of him again. He observed as the hand fetched and rearranged it once again.
Bernard paused, looked at the hand, at the blanket, and then at the hand again. And then he flung the blanket again. And then the arm retrieved it again. And then it turned into a game.
The arm and the child repeated this routine about ten times before Bernard pretended to throw the blanket, and then held it to his chest, eyes expectant. As predicted, the arm went off to get it from the floor, only to find it wasn't there. It returned to hover over him, and waggled a rubber finger at him in a 'no-no-no' fashion, as if it were saying, "No playing tricks on the arm!" Bernard just gurgled spit bubbles and cuddled his blanky closer.
After clasping and unclasping the air for a moment, the arm disappeared back into the ceiling. When it returned, it brought a partner. In one hand was a baby bottle of formula, and the other was napkin. These arms fed, bathed, and acted as Bernard's care providers for the duration of the space voyage to the blue ones.
It was on the seventh day a stray meteoroid collided with Bernard's shuttle and changed the direction he was headed. Even though it was only a small shove, it meant he was now off course, and would most likely zoom past the blue planet he was aiming for. The shuttle's computer conscious seemed to realize this, too, for in that moment the two arms flailed nervously, tapped their fingers together, and finally seemed to accept the fact and hung limp in hopelessness. Then they twitched back to life and redirected their efforts away from trying to fix an impossible problem, too calming the crying baby in the passenger seat by stroking his soft head and giving him a robotic thumb to suck on. It was an instinct from the computer's programming chip that Freya had installed: to make the infant's time in space as relaxing and comfortable as possible until the infant departed – even if that meant until the infant died of starvation drifting astray in the void.
On the eighth day Bernard reached the desired star system, and a different obstruction entered his shuttles path, the obstruction that saved his life and redirected him towards civilization, even if on a planet different from the originally planned destination. As fate would have it, the obstruction was none other than Roxanne's shuttle, the only other human being spared from Earth's demise. The two shuttles crashed into each other; Roxanne's was forsaken in a field of asteroids, while Bernard's was pushed into a direct path to the third planet of the star system, a large golden celestial mass belted by a dense ring of ice chunks and various other particles.
The shuttle narrowly missed the treacherous belt, only hitting a few wandering shards, and pierced the planet's atmosphere like a bullet, sending ripples through the sky. The arms pinned the baby down by the shoulders as they raced towards the ground, where a jagged mountain waited below. Bernard bawled and howled at the chaos surrounding him.
Suddenly the mountain wasn't a mountain, as it lifted its head and blinked open two red eyes, revealing it to be a creature in disguise. Watching with burgundy orbs, and surprisingly sensitive hidden ears, it looked on with interest at the crying thing falling from the sky, which was coming straight towards its face. It would seem to the beast a blessing from above, a meal fit for an opportunistic hunter as itself. Welcoming, it opened its cavernous mouth – jagged and chiseled as though out of stone – and waited for its food to land. The food passed the peak-beak of the creature's mouth but did not crash in the back of its throat as was expected.
"Not this time, Mountain Trap!" declared a woman, who swooped down from the sky to swipe the rocket from the beast's jaws. She had heard a call of distress that sounded like an infant, and came to the rescue just in time. She almost looked human, besides the bulging muscles that shaped her entire body, and the fact that she was floating away with Bernard's shuttle with impossible speed and strength. The woman didn't know why a baby had fallen from the sky encased in foreign technology, nor did she care; it was an instinct to go to the aid of any baby in trouble. Survival of a species relied on survival of the offspring, and since Bernard sounded like one of her kind, hesitation was not an option.
The mountain trap rumbled in frustration and two smaller mountains to either side of it turned into legs as the giant lifted itself up, showing a smooth white underbelly divided into segments. The segments flipped like panels to black sides, and soon the entire underside of the beast was black. Now that its belly was black, it held itself up as though it was suddenly lighter in weight, and pushing off with its two legs, it floated. With a swish of its ridged tail, it was flying off, giving chase to the third meal it was denied in the past 1,800 hours.
Hearing something, the woman looked back and was surprised to see the mountain trap following her in increasing speed. She in turn tried to speed up, but soon the beast was on her tail, snapping at her with its boulder bite. The grinding of rocks filled the air at the creatures every movement. They weaved and wove through surrounding mountains and peaks, and she dodged its every attack with ease, which only fanned the flame of its anger.
While flying, the woman brought the shuttle down from above her head and looked within, seeing the baby inside. She pealed the door back and grabbed the infant within with one hand, ripping the child from the protective robot hands. She then turned and tossed the spacecraft into the predator's mouth. "Here, eat this, pebbles-for-brains!" The robot hands waved goodbye and Bernard, if possible, cried even louder as the rocket flipped and crashed into the mountain trap's multilayered stalagmite-teeth – killing his mother arms, how he came to know them in his tiny mind.
It grinded metal and glass before deducing what it was chewing was completely lacking in blood and flesh, and then roared in frustration. It rooted itself back to the ground, flipping its belly back to white, and spread its jaws wide. Burgundy eyes burned crimson, and a ball of energy started to form at the back of the beast's throat, glowing brilliantly. The flying woman glanced back to see the mountain trap had stopped, but did a double take at the charging light in its mouth. She took a sharp turn to the right and yelled out, "Death ray!" to anyone within hearing range – which was apparently quiet far.
The mountain trap had been spending a long time baking in the light of the star the planet orbited, soaking up stellar rays of heat and radiation. Once charged, the energy ball in its mouth erupted into a beam and stretched out, reaching beyond the horizon before finally hitting something unseen with a Swiffoom…POW! A mushroom cloud rose in the distance. Anything on the ground felt the quaking power of the impact, while anything that was near where it had touched down was dead, notwithstanding the full concentrated power of Igneefe. But the mountain trapped missed its target, failed in its revenge, and collapsed in defeat, stored energy wasted.
The woman found a spot and landed, and instantly a buff man was at her side. "There you are! What were you thinking, instigating a mountain trap like that?"
"I was thinking…" She began, looking at the tiny life form she held against her rock-hard bosom, "…a baby needed my help. Look, Huya, he fell from the sky. It's a sign, he was meant for me."
Huya eyed the alien, "Orey, it won't replace the one we lost. Look at it, it looks almost povoiran, but it's not our kind." He poked Bernard in the arm, and a bruise formed when he took his finger away. Bernard began to cry again.
"Careful, he's fragile! I don't think he can even fly…listen, I know he won't replace our own, but…he needs me." She smiled down lovingly at the helpless thing in her arms, already smitten. She made sure to cradle him gently, now that she knew how easily damaged he was. Orey coaxed her pinky finger into his mouth to quiet him, and she worried at how pathetic his suckling was. Well, breast feeding is out of the question, she concluded sadly. Her mind was made up, however. "I'm keeping him, Huya."
The man groaned, "Fine, but don't be surprised if he doesn't make it very long. By the looks of it, it'll be hard enough picking him up without breaking his spine. And how on Geoluperia do you expect that mushy thing to survive if he can't even fly?"
Orey fixed Huya with sharp brown eyes, "I'll protect him. You'll see. He didn't come to me just to die before he can walk." She lifted the baby up and gazed into equally brown eyes. "Isn't that right, my little sky child?" She noticed the blanket he was white-knuckling for the first time, it had little symbols on it. She'd find out what they meant later. The fingers on the infant's free hand twitched and he acted as though he was trying to lift his arm, but the gravity of the planet was too strong. His chin tucked down to his neck as the force pulled his head down. Orey lifted his arm up and brought the hand to her face for it to explore. "That's right," Orey said, grinning, "the face of your new mother."