Chapter 17: The Enemy
"Wake up..." The voice was fuzzy and distant, he could barley understand it. he felt like it was calling to him, but he did not wish to follow it. He was warm and cozy where he was and did not want to go.
"Wake up!" It called again, clearer than before and beckoning him to answer. He still did not want to, for the voice sounded unfriendly and cold. Amun began to feel his body, or what felt like his body, he was not too sure.
"Ok, hit him again." The sharp jolt of pain brought him violently awake. His head snapped side to side, looking for the source of pain but found nothing but metallic objects. He slowly realized that everything he was seeing was lab equipment of some kind, but there was something between it and himself. his gray scale vision became more clear as his mind became more awake. His head throbbed and he could feel blood flowing from a few locations.
Something felt wrong, his head was too heavy. It felt as though something had been placed upon it, something that was not attached and would not come off. As he moved his head around he came to notice the scene in front of him.
He was looking through a large plane of glass at a crowed of what he could tell were people. He did not see any colour around them, the pheromones being blocked by the glass. However he watched their silhouettes moving in the gray and could follow their movements. He attempted to stand and break the glass down, wanting to escape, but nothing moved. He shifted his body and found that every inch of it was being pinned down by large clamps of some kind. He let out a roar in frustration.
"O stop being a baby and stay still, you are going nowhere." He hear a male voice over a speaker tell him. He looked out passed the glass to the humans who were watching him and could not tell who had spoken. He ignored the warning and began to trash around in attempts to break free. "Give it up, those restraints are used to hold the space shuttle in place. And that things packs way more of a punch than you can ever put out."Amun settled down, realizing that his words were holding true, nothing was moving an inch. He let out a large sigh.
"Damn it." Amun's head snapped up as he heard his own thought through the same speaker system that the male's voice had come through. His voice was more robotic that anything, but perhaps that was because of another reason. "What the hell? How can I hear myself?!" He proclaimed, still shocked to hear it out loud.
"O, that would be the nifty little device that I screwed to your head. It reads your brain waves and neuro patterns to transform them into an audio frequency. My own design that took forever to nail." Amun listened to this person and could tell he was full of himself. Proud of what he was and what he had done.
"Let me out of here! And I'll nail you to the wall!" Amun yelled. "Show yourself!" He said in attempts to provoke the man. He watched as one gray figure made its way from the crowed to stand in front of the glass that separated them.
"Drop the attitude, you have no control here Amun. Here, I am god and you do as I say." The man spouted off, both arms behind his back. "Do you really think that you can harm anyone right now?"
"Let me out and let's find out." The man laughed.
"Now where would be the fun in that! Besides we both play with our strengths do we not? You with your immense power and strength, and I play with my intellect and brains." The man paced the length of the glass as he spoke, gesturing with his hands as he did. As he watched the man, Amun realized that he had not heard a thing from Abby! He could not speak to her for fear it would come through the sound system and give her away. He simply shifted his weight in his restraints to press against his back tube. When it compressed a bit easier than it should, he knew that she was not there. He let out a sigh of relief that was short lived.
"O, the Xeno that was in your back? You will be happy to know she is alive and running around the facility. She is giving my security team a run for their money but I have something else that will find her soon." The man explained with a smile in his voice. Amun's fear grew for his daughter, but he was glad that she had not been captured with him.
"You did not answer me. Who are you?" Amun asked again, this time a bit more threatening.
"Me? Ha Ha! I thought you would have figured that out by now! I'm the guy who's lab you blew up and who's Queen you stole. Do you think I would really let you get away with that? Do you know how hard it was to get Emilia to molt into a queen?! How many tests we had to run! How many experiments we had planned!" As his words reached Amun, his anger grew.
"And cutting her arm off? Is that what you call an experiment you sick freak!" The electronic voice did Amun's word no justice on how angry he was.
"A yes, that. Well I had warned her not to contact you again but she didn't listen. So I took once arm, big deal, she had three more." The comment granted him a roar from Amun. "Ooo touchy are we? No matter, I will have her back soon enough. We know where she is, along with the other ninety eight Xeno's you have acquired since I got rid of the last batch." Amun snapped, had he heard him right? He was the one responsible for killing his family? For causing so much pain and suffering to him and his family? Amun's heart began to race and his breathing became heavy.
"O yes, that was me. Once we had watched you long enough and gathered all the information we wanted. We had to do what one does to control pests and exterminate them. So we waited until you were not around and hit your hive with a few missiles, it was quick. And we could not have you dyeing on us, no no. I needed you alive."As he man talked, Amun's rage grew and grew. His daughters faces ran through his mind and the loving memories that he had played like an old movie. Then he remembered their corpses upon the earth, scattered and broken like they had been tossed away.
"You...you bastard." Amun whispered, his rage was too heavy to say it any other way.
"O don't give me that. I let you have your time alone, to have some fun, be a family. But I needed payback, you took everything I had worked for away in the blink of an eye. Did you not think there would be consequences?"
"That's all they were to you? Revenge, consequences? Those were my DAUGHTERS!" He roared again and this time it was enough to shake the glass in front of him. This caused the man to take a few steps back.
"Your daughters? No, they were mine! I was the one who created the formula that transformed you and Emilia into Xenomorphs! I was the one who granted you the ability to make a hive. They were mine, just as the others are!"
"You will never have my new family! I will KILL YOU FIRST! ALL OF YOU!" He responded, thrashign his head violentally and roaring. This time a few other scientist backed away from the glass. The lead scientist he was chatting with just began to laugh, which made Amun rather confused.
"O my Amun, I'm not talking about your family, I'm talking about mine. Send in number 43 please." He made a gesture to a door off to the side that Amun watch open. he was shocked as another Xeno, a drone, made its way into the lab. For a moment the thought it was Abby, but then realized it was too big to be her. He also reached out mentally and felt something rather strange.
"What the hell have you been up to!" Amun asked as the Xeno made its way to stand before him on the other side of the glass.
"Do you think you were the only subject I had going? I had barrels of that formula made up! You would not believe the money I was given when I told people I could make an army of aliens!" He said as he petted the Xeno on the head, it purred to his touch. "And you would not believe the amount of eggs we have! Boy can I sell those for a lot!" He said with a smile upon his face. Did he say eggs? There was no way, Amun knew there was no way to make eggs without another...another king.
"You have another king?" He said more to himself than the scientist.
"O heaven's no, we still have no idea how you transformed yourself into a king. Making a queen was easy. We just replicated the chemical changed an ant goes through to change from a drone to a queen. But figuring out how to fertilize her, well that was why we needed you. That was why we were there when you came out of your cocoon on the farm. O by the way, thank you for leaving us that little gem. We gathered what we needed from your cocoon to synthesize an artificial fertilization agent to give to our new queen."
"New queen!? How many more people did you capture and do this too?"
"O not many, and this one was easy and came with a bit of fun really. A cherry on top of the cake if you will. The final straw so to speak, to piss you right the fuck off. Go ahead and send her in." The man continued to face Amun as his one hand shot out to his side, pointing towards the same large door at the side of the lab. Amun watched as a few alarms sounded and the door began to open. It did not move much before stopping. And what came out was not what he had expected. It was another simple Xenomorph drone.
"This? This is suppose to piss me off? How on earth did you figure that, is it going to bite off my toes is it?" Amun snapped back at the man. The Xenomorph walked carefree towards the man who had been arguing with Amun and stood by his side. The scientists placed a hand upon its head and gave it a loving pat.
"This is Alex, unlike number 43 who's name is mike by the way, she was the first pure Xeno to be born here. Something I had always wanted to see. But she is not what is going to piss you off, no no. It's where she came from." When the man finished the remark, he moved to a control panel nearby and flipped a small switch. The large glass shield began to move to the side and open Amun's cage to the lab. No one moved.
As the fresh air flooded his holding pen, he was assaulted with all the smells that could not reach him from behind the glass. He saw the fear in all the scientists, the scent of random experiments upon some of their lab coats, the confidence of the man who had killed his family. But what he saw next had him stunned. It was the scent from the Xenomorph drone, Alex, that was now making her way closer to the king.
"That...that scent...who... what is..." Amun stumbled to find the right words. This pheromone that this Alex was giving off, he knew it so well. But there was no way, no possible way that it could be true. As the drone got closer Amun's trapped body, he felt her mentally reach out to him.
"Hello Amun. I have heard so much about you from Mother." Her words were soft, as if talking to a long lost friend. However, each one of them filled him with confusion.
"You...you cannot be her...she...she is..." Amun was cut off.
"O she is, my ugly friend. But through the magic of science she lives on." Amun could not find the words.
"Jo...Jolene?" They finally left his mind.
"Bing bing bing! We have a winner! And would you like to know how this came to be?" The scientists words did not even reach Amun's mind, he was too fixated on the small Xeno that was now right in front of him. Her scent matching that of his old love. Amun could never forget it.
"How..." He asked the small drone.
"Mother...She is the one you remember, not I. She remembers you and tells us of you and what you meant to her." If Amun could cry, he would be.
"She...is alive?" The scientist laughed with Amun's comment and then cut in.
"Did I not just say she was dead? She is gone you big idiot. I used her DNA that we found in the forest and on the road to clone her. We spliced her with a Xenomorph, just enough to transfer her memories, personality and scent." He said with a sinister grin. Amun could tell that this was the moment he was waiting for, the moment where he would break the kings mind. Make it snap in a feral rage.
"No...I...I don't believe you! You are lying!" He screamed, letting out a mighty roar that made a few of the other scientists in the lab step back even further. "It cannot be done!"
"Ooo you bet your alien ass it can. You have no idea what I am capable of Amun, no idea! I developed a formula to manipulate you genetic code into some horror film monster. I created a machine that tures thoughts into sound yet somehow you think this was hard?" He yelled back at the trapped Xeno king. "And just to prove it...send her in." Amun's shock grew to a new level, was she really about to appear? The large door on the side of the lab began to open further, this time quite larger than the last which caused Amun's fear to grow.
"Please no, no don't be real, please don't be real." He prayed to himself, hoping that nothing would appear from the other side of those doors. He prayed that it was all a sick joke just to get inside of his head. However, his breath was taken away from his body as a Queen slowly began to make her way from the door way. Her big strides were thought out as to not step on anything upon the ground. Amun could not keep his gaze from her, he was waiting, waiting for her scent to make its way to him. And when it did...
"Jo...Jolene..." His thoughts were so broken he could barely form the name. He felt her reach out and mentally touch him.
"H-hay...you...you big bug." The words came over the sound system and were like a sword strait through his heart. The queen sounded exactly as Jolene had. And the fact that she knew his nick name had cause so many emotions to flow into his mind. Happiness, excitement, anger and rage. Amun could not focus on one long enough for it to take hold.
"You...you are not her..." He said quietly.
"No, I kn-know I...I am not. But...but I know y-you. I have...have so many-many memories Amun. So m-many emot...tion connected with...with you." Amun shook his head as much as he could in denial.
"No, you are not real! This is some trick!" He shouted and looked to the floor, the only thing he could do to show his denial.
"Do you...you remember how...how you sp-spooked me in the...the dark that first...first night? In my..my..basement? I near-nearly fainted." Amun snapped his head to look at her. There is no way she could know that. He had just escaped and no one knew where he had been. No one but the real Jolene would have known about that night.
"No...no it's a lie, you figured that out somehow from watching us. You cannot know that, you cannot be her!" Amun began to thrash within his restraints as much as he could, causing some of the metal to groan.
"Amun, I'm not...not her. But...I know...know you. I...I'm so sorry." Her words were filled with sadness that he could fell were true. He stopped moving and watched as the queen before him scooped up the small drone and stood before him. As he felt her emotions flood into him, so many memories came flashing back.
He remembered how sad Jolene had been when they had been at the farm, and when he was about to make his second cocoon. He remembered how sad she had been when talking to him as he changed, about what some man had done to cause her sadness. It was the same feeling that now washed through every part of his being. Amun could no longer deny it, she had been created from his lost love. The figure that was before him knew her memories and knew about their short time together.
He had really done it, he had put the cherry atop the cake. He had done something that would get under his hard exoskeleton and break him. He had used his dead love to create some sort of lab play toy.
Amun head lowered to the floor in defeat or pure pain he did not know. But at this moment his crown was to heavy to be held high.