Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Everything hurts.
I slowly lift myself up off Lora’s body, creaking with sore muscles and a crick in my neck that makes me gasp. I blink back tears of pain as I get reoriented in life. I’m still in the closet, and Lora is…
Unthinking, I cock my head to the side curiously and yelp in pain at the sharp lightning strike of pain from the stupid way I fell unconscious.
Lora looks dead. I’m not even kidding. He’s not breathing. He’s not moving. That waxiness of his skin is exaggerated more than ever. He’s room temperature. Everything about him looks lifeless.
I scramble off of him and then knee walk back to him, checking his body for any kind of pulse.
I don’t even know where his pulse points are, but I get nothing, and eventually I overcome the stupid neck pain enough to put my ear to his chest where I know he has at least one heart because I’ve heard it before, but there’s nothing at all. No sound, no beating, no thumping…
“Lora?” I whisper, shocked and horrified.
My entire body starts shaking, trembling with a tsunami of emotion. I shake him, but he’s stiff as a board like he’s been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in.
A cry of grief erupts from me as I sit back. I hold myself, arms crossed to keep my guts inside when they feel like they’re being ripped out. Tears soak my cheeks as grief buries me. I didn’t even know him that well. We were just starting out. What the fuck? What the fucking fuck??
“Ollie?” Bee’s voice breaks through the grief and shock, and I turn to see my cousin standing in the doorway with her phone in her hand. “Oh my god. Ollie!” she cries out, falling to her knees beside me. “I got a text from the empire that you were in distress.”
I indicate Lora. “He’s gone. I don’t know what happened. He drank my blood to heal from his wounds, but when I woke up, he was like this. Just… dead.” My voice breaks on that word, and I curl into my cousin, crying harder than before.
Bee hugs me around my shoulders tight for just a brief moment before pushing me back.
“I’m going to check him. I’m a literal emergency care worker, and I was a nurse.
I’m going to check him,” she repeats, pulling out a touch screen device similar to the one I use, but hers has some fancier attachments.
She holds it over Lora’s body and the thing scans him. It’s hard to breathe, but I manage to get air into my lungs before my cousin makes a sound like she’s not as worried about my loss as I am. “Uh. This says he’s sleeping,” she explains, sitting back and showing me the results of her scan.
I blink away more tears, reading what the scanner says: Recuperative parasomnia, indicating deep puncture wound restoration.
A timer next to the diagnosis is counting down what looks like sixty eight hours.
“I think he’s going to wake up in about three days,” Bee explains.
I wipe my eyes. They’re still leaking, but the emotional upheaval has leveled out into relief, hope, and a little bit of fear that the hope is going to be crushed. “Ok. What do I do?”
“Did he tell you anything?” she asks with a shrug.
I shake my head. “He just asked for permission to be in my closet.”
Bee gives me another tight side hug. “Well, then leave him in your closet. This is where he wanted to be, and you’re the one who told me that the aliens don’t share their sleeping spaces with each other because they’re really vulnerable during that time.
Well.” She waves at Lora, who looks for all the world like he’s really dead.
“I mean, how much more vulnerable can you get than mimicking death?”
I mentally grasp onto that like a lifeline. “Fuck. That’s fucking stupid,” I whisper, cutting a look to Lora and poking his death-like body. “Your species evolved stupid sleep patterns,” I tell him in a loud voice just in case he can hear me while he’s sleeping like the dead.
Bee laughs, flowing to her feet and offering me a hand up. “Come on, let’s shut him into his coffin-of-choice and go get blitzed on wine. You got the shit for a decent charcuterie?”
I close the closet door and let her pull me to the kitchen. “Yeah. I got the good stuff. Lora keeps me stocked up.”
She eyes me a moment, shakes her head and points to the bathroom. “I’ll prep the board. You go shower. You look like a test dummy for a pin cushion store.”
Oh Bee. “I don’t think pin cushions get test dummies, but the point is made. I’ll go shower.”
***
My head is only a little achy as I check in with Vera after a night of wine, cheese, and hot tubbing with Bee. Lora was still rock hard and dead to the world when I looked in on him this morning before teleporting to the hospital for my contribution shift.
Vera glances at me with a curious rattle after I say hello, and I explain because I know what the rattle means. “My cousin and I had two bottles of wine last night because of what happened yesterday.”
Vera rattles in understanding. “Yes. It is unfortunate that the InvasiveParasiticBodySnatchers have already sent their advance scouts to Earth. There will be many more incidents like the one you experienced before we eradicate them, and then we will engage in warfare when the main contingent of their war machine arrives in four weeks.”
Every word out of her mouth makes my eyes widen. “What? Are you saying that the thing I saw yesterday body snatched some poor woman and took her over?”
Vera rattles her confirmation. “Yes. The InvasiveParasiticBodySnatchers easily inhabit the dead or dying, so they often start their invasions of planets in places where the host people die. This species consumes without restraint, but we will repel them as we have on many planets before this one.”
“How did they even get here without you guys noticing?” I demand, letting myself feel anger instead of the paralyzing fear that her words bring to life.
Vera’s rattle chastises my anger. “It is likely they arrived before we did.”
I take a deep breath and push away the thought that the ScaryDarkAlienVampires are responsible for the InvasiveParasiticBodySnatchers, and give myself permission to appreciate that they translated that alien species name using a movie classic.
I wonder if they will use the same translation for other languages…
actually, I wonder what they call themselves in languages from cultures that don’t have the word “vampire” in the lexicon.
No, no. That’s not important. She communicated exactly what the aliens are to me and that’s what matters. I’m sure they are able to do that in every language. “So, is there anything we can do to prepare?”
Vera considers that for a little while before responding. “We will spread the information for how to identify the InvasiveParasiticBodySnatchers, and humans will help us identify them so that we will be able to eliminate them.”
“Humans will probably take initiative to kill them once you tell them what to look for,” I point out, because humans are nothing if not driven to fight.
Vera rattles negatively. “Any human doing that will be reeducated. We will not allow humans to engage in violence while you are under our care. That would be extremely irresponsible of us and we would likely be fined by the galactic alliance for endangering our charges.”
This is where I choose not to mention that incident that brought Lora into my life. No need to stir up trouble because he got his settings mixed up.
“You might add that to the announcement to the humans. You will still have to reeducate some of us, but that’s going to be inevitable either way.”
Vera’s black eyes narrow slightly and she gets that look like she’s listening to her translator for an explanation of what I just said.
I guess I did just confess that humans are stupid about violence and more information doesn’t always help, but I should probably explain, “Fewer people will engage in violence if they have all the information up front. There are still idiots who want to kill something, but education always makes a difference even if it’s only slight. ”
Vera dips her chin in acknowledgment. “I will make the others aware of this human trait.”
I let out a sigh, thinking maybe I shouldn’t be the voice of humanity, but then again, at least I’m a realist. Someone else might try to undersell how defiant humans are even when defiance is stupid.
As a species we have some kind of oppositional defiance disorder, and I’m going to be real about that unlike some people who’d want to always highlight the best of human resilience and tenacity.
I mean, we are resilient and tenacious, but we’re always that in the face of opposition. It’s a flaw when we’re being resilient and tenacious against the people trying to save us from ourselves.
My phone buzzes.
Unknown: LOOK UP.