Prologue. Mexico, The Cartel Wars

He’s a good kid, but if he gets me killed I am going to kick his ass.

Henry sat in the Humvee, thinking and staring across the windswept stretch of desert hills pocked with dry shrubs and tall cactus, his eyes hard, implacable. Isaac, his new med-tech, was standing on the hood of the truck, digital binoculars in his hands, scanning the plain below for marines, or any sign of the fighting. The call had come in a few hours before and they had left the tent city outside of  Zacatecas, looking for the unit under fire. 

Separatists, if they could even be called that anymore, after so much mindless butchery of their own people, had pinned down a group of marines on patrol outside the city. A voice on the shortwave, desperate and barely audible beneath the sound of small arms fire. Command had refused sending helis or drones out to support the marines. The situation in Zacatecas was desperate too after all. America was tired of the war and funds were drying up. All the real heat was down in DF, so that’s where they sent the good stuff. It looked like the grunts were going to end up dead, but Austen, that fucking kid, had to play hero.

Henry caught him with a full field kit, rifle, and a duffle full of derms, blood, and a surgical unit, headed for the trucks. His dirty blond hair already damp with sweat, face sunburned,  beard unkempt and savage. He reminded Henry of his kid brother. “You going somewhere, Austen?”

He walked past the hulking man and turned to say, “I’m not going to let them die out there, Sergeant. We’ve got daylight, and there’s a chance Miller’s unit fought off the attack. Or maybe they got away and just need a pick up. Maybe they’re okay.”

“Yeah, those militia cabrones sometimes ‘ll just let you off with a warning shot . Good Christians they are,” he said sarcastically as he followed behind. He smiled as he checked the compact LSAT rifle slung over his shoulder.

“So? You coming?”

“Someone’s got to keep your stupid ass alive.” Henry hopped in the driver seat and started up the Humvee and added, “but I’m driving.”

After another hour of searching the pleno Henry started to wonder who was being stupid. The Cartel Wars were one of the bloodiest, and most useless conflicts he had the pleasure to fight in his long military career, and going out as the only fighter in a two man team, four hours from support, on a mission where, he supposed, the most probable outcome would be to find a unit of dead and wounded soldiers under attack by Cartel militia, or maybe even one of the notorious Santa Sangre assassin squads, might be the worst tactical decision he had ever made. Well, one of them anyway.

“There!” Austen screamed over the roaring wind and the huge engine.

“I see ‘em,” Henry said, and his eyes locked on a swath of black smoke coming from a narrow canyon less than a mile away. “Doesn’t look good, Austen. We should run.”

“We can’t,” the kid said, quietly resolute but still afraid.

“I know.”

It was worse than he’d imagined. Nothing to do be done. Burnt bones. Desert sand wet in dark patches. Symbols drawn in blood on the trucks. Skulls in a row on a low rock shelf, the soldiers’ eyeballs left in the sockets. Flayed bodies, hands and feet cut off. No sign of the militia.

“We’re too late,” the kid said, wiping vomit from his chin.“Motherfuckers, stupid-”

“Later,” Henry interrupted him. Unlike the much younger man, he had the experience to never be surprised by the inept cruelty of his commanders. “Right now, all we can do is go. I’ll make a report when we’re back at camp. Santa Muerte death cult. Can’t believe they’re this far north. Command is going to lose their minds.”

Isaac was still walking around the site, looking through the carnage. Either he was the most insane optimist Henry had ever met or he had the mental incapacity to give up. Admirable, but stupid. How many times, in the interest of saving lives, had Henry seen the balance of blood redoubled to pay the toll? Too many to count. In war you keep your head down. You hope for another boring day. You stay the hell away from heroes and try-hards who actually thought they could make a difference.

Isaac bent over and lifted a heavy truck door. Beneath it there was a pair of legs that lead up to a body. Chest heaving, eyes wide open with primal fear. “He’s alive!” Isaac said, and suddenly he seemed calm, focused. He ripped off the wounded man’s shirt exposing a deep gash in his belly. It didn’t look good. A sheen of sweat covered his pale face like a death mask, jaw trembling, moments from the end. Henry had seen it before. Too many times.

The cultists probably left him to watch as they butchered his buddies, knowing he would be dead soon enough. “I can save him, Henry. Get the stretcher out of the truck and I’ll start triage. All I need is-”

The explosion was small and precise. In the slowtime flash Henry saw the locus of the blast come from the wound in the soldier’s stomach. A frag mine. A human bomb meant for whoever found the kill site. Another opportunity to kill an American. Cheap tactic, and it worked almost every time. Henry lay on his back, ears buzzing with the echo of the explosion, and a thought, repeated like a mantra running over and over in his head.

I can save him. I can save him.

Chapter 1. Isaac Austen and the Alien from Outer Space

It took me five years locked inside my own broken body before I learned how to leave. As soon as I woke up in the hospital and realized that I couldn’t move, that not one single muscle responded to my brain’s commands, I had been desperate to escape. I couldn’t even dream, as I never slept. The part of my brain that needed sleep had been damaged, I assumed, in that explosion everyone kept talking about- I had no memory of it. Every moment of every day I was screaming inside my own skull, my mind writhing and twisting, pushing at the walls of my sanity until something just had to break. At first I had hoped that I could will myself out of the coma. That if I just used logic or thought hard enough, for long enough, I could make my fingers move. That I could open my eyes.

But there was nothing for it.

That was a fact that had been firmly reiterated to my parents as they sat at my bedside in the hospital in Ketchikan, Alaska. Doctor Julian Allesandro, Dr. Dave, and the few specialists that the VA sent to see me in the beginning, all of them had said the same thing. “Your son is in a deep and irreversible coma, like a dream from which he’ll never wake. His spinal cord is damaged, beyond any help from gene therapy, or from stem cell transplants. He’ll live the rest of his life in this bed.”

So that’s where I stayed, until the night of my twenty sixth birthday. 

My mom and dad had come to read to me, and to check the batteries on my omniphone, now completely useless to me and serving only as a player for the audiobooks that substituted for human interaction while my parents were away. They got a nice payout from the Army since my CO had let me, a lowly med-tech, get myself blown up by a bomb hidden in a corpse on a mission that I should have never been on. It was hush money mostly but I was glad they were using it to have a nice retirement. For them, the shock of the tragedy had worn off years before and now they spent their time doing nature cruises through the southwestern archipelago of Alaska and fishing for salmon and halibut between Ketchikan and Sitka. And checking up on their comatose son every other day or so.

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“Goodnight love,” she whispered on her way out of my room. “Wake up soon. I’ll make you a tater-tot casserole.” If anything was going to get me out of my bed it would have to be her cooking, she assumed.

My eyes had randomly snapped open again and I got to watch them leave. My dad turned out the lights and I started to cuss in my head about just when my goddamned eyes open he goes and puts me back in the fucking dark! Being used to disappointment I was getting ready to play a rousing game of ‘remember every stupid thing I ever did and stew in an abyss of regret’, when a nurse I didn’t recognize came in and flicked the light switch.

An angel, I thought, God has sent me an angel.

I was a pretty staunch atheist, since the universe had dealt me kind of a shitty hand, but the sight of this woman, this goddess, about had me ready to reconsider everything. She was a viking warrior princess in pink scrubs. Her shimmering blond hair hung in two perfect pigtails down to her ample chest. Athletic, yet so archetypically feminine that I swore I felt something begin to stir under my blanket. She sauntered over, looking me straight in the eyes the entire time. I was used to people treating me like a piece of furniture, even my parents and the few friends that had come to visit, but with her it was as if she knew that I was awake, that I could see everything.

“Hey, soldier,” she said softly. “Got a little something for you. Birthday present.” She pulled a syringe from her pocket, uncapped it, and jammed it painlessly into my arm. “Sweet dreams,” she said before leaving. Her hips like a half seen mirage in the very corner of my periphery.

Then I was lose.

My first thought was that I was dead. The blond nurse had poisoned me and now I would be doomed to wander the hospital as a ghost. It wasn’t ideal, but it beat the hell out of lying in bed like a corpse until an infected bedsore killed me or some nurse tripped over the cord of my ventilator. I was floating, looking down onto my own body, and seeing a thing tether of what looked like electrified blue fog connecting the limp form on the hospital bed to... to what? I was pure consciousness, a 360 degree cloud of perception. If I wanted to move I could. I could reach out new tethers, like wispy tentacles, but I couldn’t grab hold of anything. As curious as the experience was, I didn’t waste much time worrying about metaphysics. I got the hell out of my room.

Out the door. Down the hall. I was going to leave the hospital for the first time since I had regained consciousness, and I didn’t care that I was leaving without my body. I exploded through the elevator lobby and down four flights of stairs, passing several people, each their own small bubbles of electric clouds, aural and spectral, and all of them unaware that an invisible part of their being was radiating from them like steam. Then I was on the ground floor, past the fat security guard reading a newspaper, past the receptionist, and then slam! 

I crashed into an invisible wall. For some reason I could not leave the hospital. I tried the emergency exits and windows, all to the same end. It appeared that my tether, that wire-like bit of spirit, or aura, or whatever the hell it was, was keeping me in the hospital, attached to the useless husk of my body up on the fourth floor.

That was tough. Even though I was happier than I’d been in years just to move, to experience a new place, I felt as though paradise was dangling just out of my reach. The night outside, dimly lit by the parking lot lights, might as well have been on another planet. As I gazed out of the open door to the emergency room lobby I felt myself begin to dissipate, my tether fading, and all around a darkness began to set until I woke up in my bed. Still paralyzed. Still a broken man trapped inside my own head. I found myself lying there just trying to believe that the experience had been more than a dream. Then a burst of corruscating colors, electric blue with ribbons of soft purples and yellows, began to bathe the room in cascades of shimmering light.

A voice spoke to me, “Hello, Isaac.” and I began to rise from the hospital bed, into the air. 

The alien -a term I will use for now instead of Plop ‘ik, which I found out later, is what he preferred to be called- was somehow holding me about four feet above my bed. Then I saw him. I was serenely calm, unnaturally calm, as I gazed into the glistening sphere of his single, chameleonic eye.

A tall creature, maybe seven and a half feet -not including the stubby tail- with wide shoulders and long arms. Its arms seemed to have at least five joints and they twisted in a way I had never seen another living being move, monstrous and inhuman. Its legs were thick and wide and sat, not under, but to the side of its round abdomen, like a reptile’s.

Wispy tendrils of translucent skin rose from his arms and torso like eels, and at the tip of each one was an iridescent orb, blinking with blue and violet light. It reminded me of one of those fish that carry bioluminescent lanterns on the end of stalks that hang in front of their mouths.

Its head, about half again the size of a basketball, was just one great lidded eye with a bright green pupil. Dangling from beneath it, was a long tube with a slimy pair of blue lips at the end.  It spoke from this tube but if hadn’t been able to see it, I would have had no idea that I was talking to an alien. It introduced itself in perfect English. Its tone reminded me of my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Larson. Purposeful, confident, and above all soothing.

“Good morning. Do not be alarmed. You are in no danger. I have come, as an ambassador of peace, to offer you a unique opportunity.” His tube swung around like a cat’s tail making his lips bob and list in erratic patterns. The massive pupil was waxing with the pulsing light from its waving orbs. The strange lights that stretched from his skin swayed as if there was a soft wind blowing in the bedroom of the tiny hospital dormitory.

         I could feel my eyes begin to expand out of their sockets and I blinked hard, then looked again. He was still there. My sense of calm vanished like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water on me. “Please don’t eat me!” I thought. But no! It hadn’t been just a thought! I had actually talked. For the first time in five years I had spoken!

I had unwittingly pissed myself but given the situation I am not ashamed to share this fact. I have heard that pissing one’s self is an adaptation that allowed cavemen not to be eaten by predators who did not care for the taste of piss. I have no idea if this is true but it seems to make sense. Aside from the wet pajama pants I was feeling amazing.

Plop ‘ik set me down on the edge of my bed where I sat up straight, no muscle fatigue, no pain. Just as if I had never been paralyzed.

     “I promise not to eat you, Isaac. My kind do not eat human beings, for you are our greatest resource and our finest creation. I would sooner starve to death than eat one single human being.”

The cascades of light played across my sparsely decorated hospital room, turning it into something that should have dayglow bean-bag chairs and Pink Floyd coming from the stereo. I was entranced by the dazzling lights playing on the walls and ceiling of my tiny apartment. It was like having my own private Aurora Borealis..

“I know you, Isaac, though we have never met. You have proven yourself a suitable candidate for a very important project that involves your world and my own. Much hangs in the balance for both of us.” His flagella-like tendrils were bending like stalks of bamboo in a swirling wind. “I work for a consortium of beings like myself. Beings from a distant star system with one common interest. Do you know what that could be, Isaac?”

With only the one eye and no face it was fairly difficult to tell in what manner this question was being asked. I chose to remain silent and await further explanation, a tactic that still works whenever I find myself in conversation with aliens or anyone who wants to talk in hypotheticals and absolutes.

“Uh,” I stammered. “Not really.”

“If I told you the secret behind all of human history and even the purpose of life itself, what would you do with that information?” Plop ‘ik paused and reached out for my hand. He squeezed it gently, and ever more tightly, as he spoke. “If you knew the true purpose beyond all science and religion, Isaac, what kind of power would that be to you?”

“I... I honestly don’t know.” Plop ‘ik was leaning over me and staring into my eyes. He seemed to me, at that time, quite sweet. He stroked my palm with an elegant tentacle that he used like an opposable thumb. The alien’s skin was gelatinous yet firm, like a wet suede water-bed filled with tiny ball bearings, and always vacillating with different shades of light.

We spent a moment in silence, the soft light from his inconceivable appendages saturating the room. I sensed that he might feel sorry for me. That, for a reason I could never understand, he pitied me. He spoke again, quietly.

“I know you are scared, Isaac. It is right to be scared. You want to live and you want to continue living, always. This is the dream of all intelligent creatures and this is what I offer you. Our work is simple. We shall preserve life.”

“Right. Simple. I think … I can...” I began to feel an overwhelming sense of exhaustion and the room darkened.            

“We will speak in forty eight hours time. Until then, Isaac. It was good to meet you.”

Then he was gone, and the room was pitch black. I don’t know if he beamed away or if he jumped out of the window like Batman but when he left he took all of the light with him. I spent the next day and a half in a perfect and peaceful slumber. It was almost enough to catch up after five years of unrelenting consciousness. I woke up at eleven am on a Tuesday and it was as black as midnight outside, thanks to the sunless Alaskan winter.