Adaptation: book I (6 page)

Hours later she stretched and stifled a yawn and made to turn over in bed before she realized she wasn’t in her bed but on her sofa. She sat up quickly, remembering wolves and a Blob that had stung her. Swiftly her hands moved to her belly, and she pulled her shirt upward to explore her belly for a stab wound.

She saw nothing.

“Shit!” she screamed, and she jumped off her couch.

Blood covered her ripped shirt, but she found no bite mark. She scrubbed frantically at the bloodied flesh and saw not even the faintest mark. Carmella lifted her shirt over her chest and looked down at her right breast. Her bra was snagged and bloodied, and when she touched the area where she had been mangled, it was sore—but not as sore as it should have been. She tugged at the bra until it exposed several faint punctures that seemed years old.

Her eyes darted around the room. The Blob had to be here because it had brought her home and had somehow fixed her wounds. She narrowed her eyes and scanned every nook, cranny, and corner of the room. Her eyes spotted the dark fluid on the floor next to the couch. There was so much of it …

A smeared trail led to the front door, and she hurried to it and flung the door open without thought of her gun. Her eyes scanned her yard for several minutes before she returned to her home, shutting and locking the door behind her.

Carmella went through her house making sure that nothing was out of place or hiding and then she got a bucket of hot water and scrubbed the floor. Both guns were gone, but she had plenty more. She retrieved two before going out to spray disinfectant on the pool of alien blood in the front yard. She grabbed a shovel and covered it with fresh dirt, grimacing in disgust.

And though it wasn’t Sunday, she drew a lukewarm bath and washed thoroughly, examining her healed wounds in her bedroom mirror afterwards. She was exhausted and hungry and still needed to tend to the animals. Carmella sat down at her kitchen table and ran her hand through her dreadlocks instead.

She was so confused.

It had been
a week since Carmella had seen the Blob. She no longer liked venturing outside, afraid that it would be out there lurking somewhere. When Sunday arrived she didn’t sit out on the porch reading, and she kept her ears perked for unusual sounds. Her life had been simple and predictable, and Carmella hated the disruption to her comfortable pattern. She had to be heavily armed to milk the cow and collect the eggs. She didn’t tend to her garden, which always relaxed her. Her other yard work was left to multiply, and soon it would be unmanageable.

She thought fleetingly of moving but dismissed it. Wolf. How would he find her? She kept a gun under her pillow when she slept and nailed boards over the windows on the lower level of the house. There was a shit-ton of windows in the old farmhouse, and it took her most of the day to finish the task, but she felt better at night knowing that nothing could get in without making a racket and alerting her to it.

After a week of being on hyper alert and obsessively staring through cracks in the boards, Carmella knew she couldn’t maintain that level of stress. She slept poorly, and her so-called life became a tedious wreck. Day after day she roamed her house and peeked out windows. When she thought she might finally be able to relax, convinced that the alien creature had either died of its wounds or had no interest in her, Carmella decided to remove the boards from the windows as the sun hung low in the sky.

As she pried away the first board, she saw movement in the yard.

A Blob had moved swiftly from one tree to hide behind another, its ability to camouflage itself a split-second too slow. 

Carmella panicked and nailed the board back into place. She stared out the slit between the boards, eyes peeled to the partially hidden alien. What do you do when you are the only person left in the world and there is something lurking in your yard that scares the hell of you?

Carmella dashed for her rifle. There could have been several more out there circling her house, ready to snatch her and take her to some alien world—or worse. She had hurt one of badly. Maybe she’d be punished. They wouldn’t take her, and this she swore. There was a wine cellar in her lower level, which also included a cement and steel bunker. She’d retreat there if it turned into a stand-off. Carmella peeked out the window into the darkening night. She could no longer see the Blob, but her body knew that danger was just outside her door.

When total darkness fell, Carmella did not light any candles. She brought a chair closer to the window and peered through the boards out into the night. When the sun rose, she didn’t go outside to tend to her animals and barely tended to her own needs.

Why was it here?

~***~

It had
been
three days since the woman had come out of her house. Bilal was certain she had seen him, and he chastised himself for being careless. He had moved dangerously close to the house in an attempt to see inside. It was stupid. But she had put up the boards, and he could not see inside to get a sense of her.

Unless … she was sick.

He shuffled in consternation, his flesh rippling and changing from the camouflage of greens and browns to nearly black.

~***~

That fateful night,
he had been healing his own damage and hers as well. The wounds to her breast had been too much for him. It had taken nearly all of his strength, and he needed enough energy to make the long trek back to his pod. He’d done the best that he could, ashamed that he couldn’t completely remove all evidence of the injury. He certainly had the ability. Bilal’s tentacles shielded fine filaments that could join with objects for the purpose of exploration and understanding. He understood each cell and neuron and found its pattern. He could detect and repair any anomaly. His kind had long since eradicated human diseases such as cancer, Parkinson’s, and AIDs. It was part of being processed on the mother ship before being reintegrated with humans on Earth 2.

He had worried about her as he had carried her injured and bloodied body back to her home. She was in shock and was losing a great deal of blood. Despite this, he was curious about her. She had long dreadlocks and formed a tentacle for the purpose of examining her hair. Now that he was an adult, humans generally shied away from him unless they were his friends. He knew that humans didn’t like to be touched by Centaurians, and he understood. They didn’t like the feel of his cool, smooth flesh.

But Centaurians had to touch. They didn’t see well with their eyes and saw with their sensors, which were confined within their tentacles. They could taste, see, hear, and sense things with the fine, sensitive filaments. Once exposed, the filaments didn’t have to be connected to an object to “observe.” But it was the preference of Centaurians. Humans called them touchy-feely. He found it interesting that humans considered that a bad thing.

Bilal had placed her on her sofa and had connected a tentacle to several different areas of her body. She was a strong female, healthy despite her self-imposed exile. He found a vertebra that needed straightening. She probably had some pinching in her neck because of it. He didn’t have time for that, though. Bilal concentrated on her injuries, tackling the smaller ones first in case he ran out of “juice” and had to leave them unattended. He liked that particular human euphemism. “Juice” was a good interpretation for what he needed to use to facilitate the woman’s healing.

He allowed his filaments to go beyond her injuries in order to collect “samples.” He stared at her dreadlocks and her brown skin while he should have been concentrating on his task. He could tell that she was right around forty Earth years old. She was tall and what humans called “shapely.” He determined that she had carried a child to term, and his flesh rippled. She lived alone because the house only had one human smell. He understood from Earth 2 that the loss of a child was the most devastating loss that humans had endured during the epidemic. Many humans never recovered from it even twenty years later. He wondered if the offspring she had lost had been a victim of the disease or had been taken to Earth 2. He thought it was the first. The most resistant humans joined with the Centaurians sometimes for the sake of their children.

His body turned black. How could she live like this—alone?

He completed his task and withdrew from her body. He had felt as close to death as he ever had and wondered if he had finally gone too far. He thought about his parents and friends and wondered if he met his end on Earth would anyone truly care. Bilal hunkered into a ball and shivered knowing that if he retreated completely within himself and passed out, the human would likely awaken and cover him with kerosene and torch him. It would damage him in the way that a bullet really couldn’t. As long as his filaments retreated and coiled into a ball within the mass of his body, then he
might
survive being burned alive. 

Not wanting to take that chance, as soon as he could, Bilal sluggishly left the house. He didn’t know if he could make it back to his pod, but he had no choice. It took a day, but he made it, programmed the pod to return to the mother ship, retreated into himself, and lost consciousness.

~***~

Upon awakin
g, Bilal
had found himself surrounded by his four parents, their tentacles pressed into his body. His eyes focused on his First Mother. Her skin was mottled black and red because she was angry, yet a tentacle formed to caress his face. He formed a tentacle and intertwined it with hers. It was akin to a human hug and kiss.

A First Mother’s bond was strongest because she had carried him. Bilal had two mothers and two fathers. Their DNA had been mixed in order to create him before he had been implanted into his mother. It was the most efficient way to coexist on a mother ship that traveled through space for years on end. The limited space meant that one family consisted of multiple parents. Offspring generally lived with their parents until it was time for them to reproduce and to form their own family units. Parents went through a great deal to negotiate the best match. Certain traits possessed by a Centaurian were more desirable than others. But that was not the only consideration. Social standing also factored in.

Mina, his First Mother, had been highly desired despite her being much older than his other parents. She was a high-ranking official in the Centaurian hierarchy and was one of the few Centaurians who had only one mate like in the old days. Her first mating had occurred long before her new mates had been born, and unfortunately her original mate had died of old age. A short time later it was negotiated that she would join a newly formed family. When it was time to create a child, she had demanded to be First Mother. Perhaps that was why there was some animosity between Bilal’s mothers. His Second Mother, Baba, had argued that Mina had already given birth to a child and it was her turn. Mina had never bonded with the family because of her previous mating, and the fathers thought that if she bore the child then it would help her.

It hadn’t, and once Bilal had become an adult, she moved into her own home.

His First Mother had gone against tradition when she had formed her own separate house away from her partners, a luxury only now possible since the formation of Earth 2 and the extended living space afforded to them. She had then invited Bilal to live with her, which he had done happily. It had deepened the animosity with his Second Mother, who didn’t even like him. It shouldn’t have ever mattered, but it caused a huge scandal within the Centaurian community. Some tried to pass laws against it fearing the collapse of Centaurian family units, but it was more unpopular to pass such laws than to allow an unhappy partner to leave. Because Centaurians were so rooted in tradition, not many considered doing such a thing.

Baba removed her tentacles from Bilal, and he gave her a weary look. Here it comes …

“Child, what have you done to yourself this time?”

Child? He was an adult. His body formed into a ball, and he reached out a tentacle to communicate without words. “Mother-baba, I was attacked.”

“Attacked?” his fathers asked, listening to his conversation through their own tentacle connection. “By what?”

“Wolves.” He lied. Why was he lying? He prevented his skin from turning yellow in shame.

“You were nearly dead, Bilal,” his Father-Tom spoke. Centaurians had selected simple names that were easy to form with their foreign mouths and tongues. 

“There were a lot of wolves Father-Tom. I dispatched them but not before I lost much strength.”

“What if you had died?” Baba asked.

Then you would no longer be ashamed of me, would you?
Bilal thought. He reached out a tentacle to wrap around hers. “But I didn’t.”

~***~

He rested with
his First Mother and was thinking about the brown woman when his two best friends entered the set of rooms allocated to him. His rooms were “human-friendly.” He had chairs and couches and utensils for eating and drinking. He didn’t lie to his mother that the things were for when his friends visited him. He didn’t have to. His mother understood that he liked having manmade items around him.

“I heard you got your ass handed to you by a pack of wolves,” Lawrence said with a broad smile.