Chapter 8
TWINK
That was how I died…
Well, at least I thought I was dead.
Should’ve known.
When Daddy went psycho on me, I kept thinking about what Eric said when I told him we were getting together:
“There’s a lot of red flags there.”
“You should not be meeting this man anywhere.”
“He’s literally going to kill you.”
At the time, I thought him dramatic, especially considering I’d already spent a night with the guy—hell, if he’d wanted to kill me, he could have done it then.
My eyes flitted open, and I recovered from being knocked unconscious, struggling to remember what exactly had occurred.
I’d been nervous about following Daddy into an alley, but it was broad daylight.
Then he’d stopped and told me to get into a vent, which assured me I’d made a mistake by not listening to Eric.
I pepper-sprayed the serial-killing bastard, which was as much as I could recall before becoming far more concerned with my immediate circumstances—I was restrained to a table, with bright, oval white and blue lights overhead. The blue lights faded in and out.
“Twink,” I heard Daddy say, and squinting, I turned to see him approaching.
Even knowing what he’d done to me, he was still hot as hell.
Seriously? I couldn’t even become less attracted to him when I knew he was going to kill me?
“What’s happening? What are you doing to me?” I spit out.
“I’m so sorry.” He glanced over his shoulder, and judging by the worry in his expression, I was tempted to believe him, but between what happened in the alley and me being tied to a damn table, that would have been foolish.
I could imagine, when they found my body, Eric would attend my funeral, an X-Men comic folded under his arm. He’d stand before my headstone, shaking his head and whispering to Roger, “Told him so.”
Now, though, I had bigger concerns than stressing about my inevitable funeral because seeing Daddy brought back the rest of what happened in the alley.
But no.
What I believe had transpired after I’d sprayed him, I must’ve made up.
I’d watched enough true crime TikTok vids to know the brain can do some wild things when traumatized.
I thought Daddy grabbed my leg, but when I looked, it wasn’t a hand holding it.
It was like a pink snake coiled around me.
Only the snake was attached to Daddy, and then another snake wrapped around my waist. No…
they weren’t snakes. They were…it feels so stupid to even think it…
Tentacles. Like octopus, sci-fi monster tentacles.
That couldn’t be right, and I immediately scanned Daddy over, hoping to assure myself this was all some wild story my brain had concocted to make sense of the quick series of events, but there was something like a tail coming out from his back.
It reached over to a nook with panels and screens, the tip tracing shapes in the air, a blue holographic light illuminating wherever it touched.
“What—what?” was all I could manage as I stared at the tail in horror.
“Huh?” Daddy seemed to catch on, and the tentacle-tail pulled close to him until I couldn’t see it anymore.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he lied, his eyes bulging.
As panicked as I was, I was more than a little offended. “Okay, I’m not an idiot. I know that wasn’t nothing.”
“Twink, I’m sorry. I had to do this for your own good.”
He said that in the alley too. It didn’t make sense then, and it didn’t make any more sense now.
“Then why do you need to tie me up?” I asked, stating the obvious.
“I don’t know how much of this is you and not her.”
“Her?”
“I’ve seen how she controls you, how the technology of your community has taken control. I brought you in here to perform a few scans to see if I could find any component in you she might be using to control your behavior. There was synthetic material in your teeth…”
Synthetic material?
“My fillings?” I inquired. “That’s because I had cavities.”
“Okay, okay, so then that’s not it for sure… See, I’m trying to determine if Chelsea’s controlling your species.”
What the hell was he talking about? Chelsea?
“My goddamn phone?”
“Yes, that. The device she controls you with.”
“Are you having a psychotic episode?” I asked, for a moment entertaining the thought that Daddy was still a conspiracy theorist, ignoring the things I’d seen with my own eyes, which prompted me to ask, “Am I having a psychotic episode?”
Daddy moved closer, and I tried to jerk away, but I was flush with the table, with no room to maneuver.
“You need to tell me more about your world. I can take you somewhere safe. It’s a tiny planet, but there must be a rebellion or maybe another country where the technology hasn’t seized control yet. Please, I want to help you, Twink.”
His gaze was pleading, sincere. This wasn’t the menacing psychopath I’d expected to encounter. If anything, he seemed to genuinely want to help me, but this shit about my phone was unhinged.
Also, at some point, we’d have to get back to the tail.
I struggled in my restraints, panic setting in. “Please, please untie me. You’re scaring me.”
He nodded. “If I let you go, will you give me a chance to explain and not try to escape right away?”
“Yes,” I said because I would’ve said anything to get free.
Daddy seemed reluctant, inspecting me before his tail pushed back out and hit a spot in the air that lit up green. The restraints around me pulled away, retracting into the table.
I sat up quickly, eyeing Daddy but inspecting the room in my periphery, trying to decide on the best escape route.
The room was sparse, the ceiling arched, with white and blue oval panels all across it.
Where the hell was I? Why had he abducted me and put me in some weird-ass room?
And what the fuck was he on about with my phone?
I’d have to sort out what any of that meant once I was free. For now, the only objective was to get the fuck away from him. Behind Daddy, I spotted an open doorway that appeared to lead into a hallway. The exit!
My relief was short-lived, as Daddy stepped back, blocking it partly. Was he onto me?
He retracted his tail once again. Where the fuck was he pulling it back to?
“I’m not from your planet,” he explained.
Strangely enough, that was about the only thing that sounded reasonable at that point, which only made me think that Roger had gotten me to watch one too many of his UFO enthusiasts’ TikToks.
“I’m from a place very far away,” he went on, his expression serious as ever. “I crashed here the night we met, and I began noticing the signs of your community’s imprisonment nearly immediately.”
Wait. Daddy was telling me he was really an alien? That was impossible. Although…made slightly more possible with basically everything I was looking at now.
“I’ve seen this before,” he went on. “On other planets. I don’t know the term in your language, but it’s—” He opened his mouth wide and released an ear-piercing shrill sound. I had to cover my ears because of how intense it was.
It reminded me of the morning after I met him, when it had seemed like his shout had thrown me against the wall…and he’d caught me so fast.
As he finished his scream, I lowered my hands.
“Sorry, I should have been more mindful of your vulnerable ears,” he said in the sweetest damn way. I had to keep in mind that killers could be good at charming their victims.
Obviously, part of me was still clinging to the hope that there was some perfectly logical reason why this story he was telling about being an alien from another planet had to be a delusion.
Maybe he’d sedated me with a hallucinogenic?
That must be it, yes. Charles Manson too used drugs to make people hallucinate.
Maybe it’d even made me misremember what had happened before I passed out? Drugs do bizarre things to people.
Despite my spiraling, I had to focus—I had to get to that doorway, and having a minute to think allowed me more clarity.
In the podcasts I’d listened to, victims sometimes could escape killers by luring them into a false sense of confidence, then leverage the upper hand.
Evidently, Daddy was delusional. I could use that against him.
“On that planet,” he went on, “the technology used chips in the native species’ brains to control them, which is what I was expecting to find in your case, but—”
“I’m sorry,” I interjected. “I shouldn’t have fought you. I know you’re only trying to help me.”
I’m no actor, something Dr. Geebley, my high school drama teacher, told me plenty of times when I had those five lines in A Christmas Carol freshman year. But Daddy’s expression relaxed, like maybe he bought it. My desperation to survive must’ve inspired in me something Oscar-worthy.
“Yes, Twink. I am,” he said, wide-eyed and serious, stepping closer.
I was shaking, and I had to stop that or he was going to realize this was all an act. But of course, trying to stop shaking is like trying to stop a boner. And it wasn’t helping that he was close enough to touch me again.
“Because of the way technology has taken over your planet,” he continued, “I didn’t know how to get you alone and ensure we wouldn’t be monitored by whoever had seized control of your mind.”
“So, you’re so worried about someone seizing control of my mind that you seized my body?” I shouldn’t have made the sarcastic barb, but given the circumstances, I was mostly operating off adrenaline.
“Yes, exactly,” he answered, clueless, which was for the best.
“Let me get this straight: You’re saying my phone is controlling my mind and everyone else’s, and you’re an alien who’s come to Earth and who wants to protect me from…my phone?”
The only reason I was able to say any of it seriously was because, while the logic was ridiculous, the situation was…well, also ridiculous, but scary as fuck.
“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing.” He stepped even closer, until he was inches from me. I had to resist the urge to slide farther from him.
“It’s a lot to process right now.” I considered how I could get him to give me some space so I could make a run. “Could I have a glass of water?”
His brows tugged together, as though he sensed something was off, but then he said, “Of course. I’m sorry. I infused some into you after rendering you unconscious, but maybe it wasn’t enough.”
He walked around the table, to a panel on the opposite side of the room from the doorway. This was it! My chance to escape! And if it didn’t work, I was really fucked.
I slid off the table, which was taller than expected, and between the surprise and the lingering effects of whatever he’d used to knock me out, it wasn’t as easy as sprinting out, but I headed through the doorway, which rounded a corner before I hit another wall.
“Ow,” I called out as my body absorbed the blow, my head hitting last. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” It seemed I was lucky to not have the strength to break into a sprint since if I’d gone any faster, that might’ve knocked me right back out.
“Twink?” I heard behind me, his tone unassuming, reminding me how easy it was for him to gain my trust.
In a panic, I knew I needed a weapon. I dug into my pocket for my keys and retrieved them, positioning them between my fingers to use as a claw.
Hey, it was the best I could do!
I walked back into the room where he’d been holding me captive.
He was still on the other side of the table. “That wasn’t a way out,” he explained in such a calm way, the sort of way a guy who knew I was fucked would talk.
“Where is the way out?” I shouted at him, hoping to make him feel that I was more confident than I was. “Tell me!”
“Don’t you see that I’m trying to help you?”
“Don’t you see I’m really struggling to see how that’s the case? What do you want from me? I’m just a guy who works at a bookstore, whose boyfriend cheated on him because I wasn’t good enough. I’m messy and my life is fucked up enough as it is. You could have picked anyone. Why me?”
He was quiet, studying my expression. He looked almost sad. “Is that all you think of yourself? I see more than that when I look at you.” His eyes lit up in a way that both concerned me and reminded me of the chemistry that had initially drawn me to him.
Fuck. Eric was right. I really did have a broken picker.
Fortunately, my terror outweighed any attraction as he started to approach again. Clearly, the keys weren’t a big threat to this space monster.
No, not a space monster! That was impossible.
“Look,” I said. “This stuff about my phone, you’re wrong.
Like, yeah, we enjoy our phones, and sure, they might have some influence on us, but not in the way you’re thinking.
We’re freely choosing to obsess over our phones, and maybe that’s a waste of time, but it’s not trying to hurt or control us.
And…and…” Tears started sliding down my cheeks. I was so damn desperate not to die.
His gaze drifted, as though for the first time, he was reconsidering his delusion.
“You’re telling the truth,” he said, which wasn’t what I was expecting.
“How do you know that?”
“Your heart was beating faster when you lied before and said you were thirsty so you could get out.”
How could he know how fast my heart was beating? Could he really be an alien? No, that couldn’t be true!
“So at least I know you believe what you’re saying about Chelsea,” he added.
Was he really still on about my damn phone?
“There isn’t even just Chelsea,” I said. “There’s Siri, and Google, and God knows what else.”
“Warring technologies within the same group?”
“No? Yes?” That wasn’t too far off. “But again, not in the way you’re talking about. Just fun devices we use to make our lives easier, and maybe sometimes harder, but it doesn’t control us.”
“Oh…” He searched around the room. “Well, if that is true, then this all seems like a lot of fuss over nothing.”
“That’s a fucking understatement.”
His brow creased. “So you use this device because it makes your life easier? It’s a convenience?”
“Sometimes it’s an annoying way for Mom to get ahold of me.” It wasn’t the time to crack a joke, but it was like some part of me wanted to convince me this situation wasn’t as dangerous as it so obviously was.
He turned around, reached into a space in the wall, and retrieved a strange-looking cup—almost like a child’s version of an amoeba mug.
As he approached, I realized it was the water I’d asked for.
He passed it to me, and I stared at the water, uncertain if I could trust it after the guy already drugged me.
Although at this point, maybe it would have been better for me to have been unconscious.
I braved a sip, the water soothing as it slid down my throat. Then I set the cup on the table where I’d been restrained only minutes earlier.
He didn’t seem nearly as threatening as he had in the alley. If anything, the way he glanced around, it seemed he was…maybe embarrassed about his conclusion.
And maybe I was falling for this delusion, but what if it wasn’t that? What if he really was an alien?
Oh, what the hell had I gotten myself into?