Dealing with the Devil

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Once my little son’s scary face goes public, things get bad in a hurry. We run around like chickens with our heads cut off for a short while, wondering where the hell Boyd and I can run to. My aunt makes the very sensible suggestion that we take my son and go to my mother’s house for now. As far as we know, whoever took the picture doesn’t know us, so if Boyd isn’t here anymore, they won’t know where to find him.

We put a baseball cap, with big sunglasses taped to it, on him, only letting him peek up just far enough to see out the window. Boyd, who has never been anywhere but my aunt’s house, is fascinated by all the new sights and sounds. When we get to my mother’s house, he actually whines at having to go inside. Personally, I’m thrilled to see my childhood home again, having not been inside it since Boyd was born. I feel comforted by its familiar surroundings, safe in my little room, although I know that’s an illusion. Boyd and I will never be safe anywhere now.

They don’t give us enough time to get our bearings before they swoop in and grab us. It’s not the tabloids that come to snap more shots, it’s the military, the same branch that wanted to quarantine me forever. They come in the middle of the night, hoping to surprise us. Only Boyd, with his Yautja hunting instincts, foils their plans. I start awake to a Yautja challenge roar, not a full-throated adult roar, but as much of one as my little son can manage. It’s clear he’s not playing.

By the time I reach the hall, there is a gutted soldier on my floor. Boyd is in shock, staring at his bloody, shaking hands. He has no weapon, so he can only have inflicted that damage with his claws. His reaction was pure survival instinct.

“Mama,” he chokes, looking lost.

I wanna tell him it’s okay, but how do you tell a child who has just killed a man that it’s okay? Before I get a chance, soldiers swarm us. When they grab me, Boyd goes berserk, attacking every man in the hall. Two more fall, groaning in pain, before my endless screaming of his name gets Boyd to pause.

“Stop,” I intone when his fierce eyes are finally locked on mine. “Boyd, stop. There are too many. We have to go with them.”

I can see him start to get his mad rage under control when a soldier clubs him on the back of the head, knocking him out. Then I lose it. I wouldn’t have thought I had the strength to break away from two big men, but I do it. Must be my Yautja-modified blood. I lock my body around Boyd, refusing to let them hit him anymore. I figure any minute now, they’ll kill the both of us when I hear an order to stand down.

When I look up, there is a lean man with sharp cheekbones and icy eyes elbowing his way through the soldiers. For the first time, I see beyond him my mother and sisters in the hall. They have that glazed look people get when they’ve been sedated.

“Let them go,” I say to him. “All they’ve done is let us live with them.”

I’m shocked when he actually smiles wanly. “They managed to shield your existence on this planet from us for several years. Most impressive for a bunch of untrained civilians.” He turns towards them and says, mock cavalier, “Hats off to you, ladies. Unfortunately, it’s not up to me. My orders are to bring you all in. You, and a Helen McGruder. Another relative, I presume.”

“Please,” I beg, “don’t ruin their lives over this. You can test them until you turn blue, but they’re going to test out normal. No dangerous bugs or anything.” I reach down to stroke Boyd’s quiet face. “He was born here, no germs to bring. I would’ve had them, but none of my family got sick when I first got back. There’s no danger of contamination.”

Several emotions ripple across his hatchet face, none of them good. “Name is Dryden, rank is unimportant, just know it’s higher than yours. Orders are orders, something you knew before you decided to go AWOL.”

That makes me laugh out loud, but it’s not because I find it funny. “So, after everything you can see I’ve gone through, you’re going to court martial me?”

“You know that’s the least of your worries,” Dryden opins, and there is that scary sympathy again, the kind I heard the night they thought I was unconscious. Then he is looking beyond us, with undisguised admiration, at the dead soldier and his two injured comrades. “I find it hard to believe that little kid could inflict so much damage. What weapon did he use?”

I hold up one of Boyd’s sticky, clawed hands. “The ones he was born with. This could’ve been avoided, you know. Sneaking in here at night was pretty damn stupid.”

There is a flicker in his pale eyes that lets me know this time was chosen on purpose. Dryden and his cronies wanted to see what Boyd could do. “Satisfied with the results?” I sneer, disgusted that they would deliberately sacrifice men’s lives and turn an innocent child into a murderer.

“Quite,” he admits, with absolutely no remorse. “We’ll have to restrain him.”

“No, you won’t,” I snap. “He’ll listen to me. Boyd,” I call, tapping lightly on his mandibles.

After I do this a few times, he rouses, coming to battle ready, his little face flared. Seeing me, he relaxes. “Mama, am I in trouble?” he asks.

Hatchet Face’s stunned expression is most gratifying. “What language did you think he’d speak?” I taunt. I soften my voice when I turn back to my son. “No, baby, they were intruders. People are allowed to hurt people who break into their house,” I say, firmly, knowing the law really would be on our side in this. “Can you get up?”

Boyd climbs to his feet with me, seeming a little dazed, and buries his face in my side. I hug him against me. I can feel his body trembling.

“He seems upset,” Dryden says, his disbelief plain.

“He’s four years old, you asshole,” I hiss, finally losing it with him. “He hasn’t been raised to be a killer. He had no idea he could do this. It’s your fault he had to find out.”

My insult doesn’t faze him. “Did you really think you could raise him to adulthood without something like this happening?”

I can’t respond, because this has been a concern of mine since before Boyd was born.

“I didn’t think so,” he adds, in a tone that makes me feel like a total failure. Turning to the soldiers, he gives the order to move out.

******

They let me keep Boyd with me. I’m sure it’s not out of any respect for his tender years, but because I’ve proven I can control him. They’re not sure what he’d do if they tried to separate us. Considering his performance in the hall, I doubt they want to find out. They put the two of us in the back of a car with windows so dark we can’t see out and equally dark plexiglass separating us from the front seats.

“It’s ‘cause a me,” Boyd says, forlornly, his head in my lap.

I stroke his skull, like I have since he was a baby, and listen to him purr. He simply can’t help it when it feels good. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t ask to be born.”

“I look like Daddy,” he says, drawing the logical conclusion.

“You do,” I confirm, gently.

He rolls over so his big golden eyes can look up into mine. “Where is Daddy?”

“Far, far away,” I say, and it hurts to say it. I miss Chak’tou still.

“Why’d he leave us?” his eyes search mine, longing to understand.

I smile down at him, trying to reassure him. “He didn’t know about you. You were in my belly and very small.”

“He knew ‘bout you,” he persisted.

I shake my head, at a loss. How do I explain that they wouldn’t let me stay on Chak’tou’s planet? That I left his older brother there, the one he knows nothing about? Boyd, such a little child, needs to know such complex, adult things, but I don’t know how to tell him and have it make any sense.

But Boyd has been mulling over what I’d said. “If Daddy knew about me, would he come get us?”

“Perhaps,” I hedge, because while I think he did know, I don’t know for absolute certain.

When we get to where we’re going, they wisely continue to keep us together. We’re taken out of the car in an underground garage. It looks like every other parking garage I’ve ever been in and smells like damp cement. There are no markings that might give me any clue as to where we are. Boyd clings to me like glue, his still bloody hand sticky in mine.

They usher us into a space that’s so white it’s as if the white sucked up all the color. White, pristine, quiet, antiseptic. Welcome to the lab, rats. We turn a corner to a wide hall lined with people. Every eye fastens onto Boyd, as if they can’t believe what they’re seeing.

“It’s not nice to stare,” he admonishes them, fidgeting under all that attention.

An incredulous murmur goes up.

They can’t believe the little green monster can speak English, I sneer inwardly.

I can’t help but challenge them with my eyes, daring one of them to say it. A tall, elegant woman in a lab coat detaches herself from the crowd, walks over to us and squats until she’s at Boyd’s eye level.

“You’re right, it’s not nice,” she agrees with him. “Would you like to go somewhere with less people?”

I‘m sure she’s just trying to gain his confidence, but something about her quiet dignity tells me I could be wrong.

“As long as I can go, too,” I reply, just to be sure there is no misunderstanding.

Her eyes are so blue they’re violet; I wonder if they’re real. “Of course,” she assures me, seeming almost offended. “My name is Barbara, Barbara Bradley. I’ll show you to your quarters.”

I’m expecting a jail cell or a hospital room but what we get is a mockery of a house. It’s comfortably furnished and we even have two bedrooms. It reminds me of an old, old show I watched a few times. On one of the episodes, this guy realizes what seems like a house to him is actually a cage in an alien zoo and he’s on display. Only I’m not sure who the aliens are anymore. And I can’t help but wonder if all the people we left back in the hall can still see us.

When Boyd runs to the bathroom to finally wash the blood from his hands, I turn to Barbara. “So what are you going to do with us?”

“Nothing bad, you have my word. We simply want to study the two of you. We’ve known the Yautja sometimes have sex with human women, but we had no idea a child like yours was possible.”

The way she says it gets my back up. “What? You think I’m lying about this?”

She smiles earnestly at me. “Oh, I’m sure you’re not.”

Unsurprisingly, Barbara Bradley has an agenda. She prattles on about what happened to my team. Apparently, Chak'tou's gutting of Carter was recorded, as well as his finding me. It's not clear if they also have what happened after he found me. She offers to show it to me, which is not exactly how I want Boyd's first glimpse of his father to go down; I quickly decline. She jumps to the wrong conclusion, quickly reassuring me that I'm not responsible for anything that's happened, because I was A Victim.

They must not have recorded what happened after he found me, or they'd know better.

The whole idea pisses me off, since I haven't felt that way for a moment since the first time I got pregnant and not often before that. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

"It's not unusual for somebody who has been through what you have to defend the … person who was responsible. It’s called the Stockholm Syndrome," she continues, the very soul of sympathy and understanding.

"Excuse me, but don't you hafta have a captor for that?" I interrupt ungraciously. "I've been back on Earth for almost five years. With my own family. Not an alien in sight." Her eyes stray to my little son, who is playing with plastic cars in the far corner of the room. "Looks can be deceiving. Besides, I'm not much more human than he is."

Her brows crawl up her forehead at that. "What do you mean?"

Stupid cow probably thinks I'm delusional now."You'll see," I promise, smugly, resisting the urge to tell her to test my blood.

"I'm trying to help you," Barbara protests, incensed at my ingratitude.

"Oh, yeah? Well, if you wanna help me so much, get me a ship and send us home," I snap, amazing both of us.

Until that moment, I hadn't realized that I don't think of Earth as my home anymore. Oh, I love being with my mother, my sisters and my aunt, but it's not enough. I miss Nhaw'che and Chak'tou with every breath I take, every fiber of my being. I may not fit in on Yaut, but the fit is better there than here. I could live with both my sons out in the open, where they would have playmates and mentors and a life that made sense. I could have Chak'tou and other lovers, maybe more than I want and not always on my terms, but it can't help but beat five years of longing for adult male company, both in bed and out. Perhaps I could train for a job like Rah'chond's, or another professional position, once the children are older. Surely one human female who smells like she is always in heat isn't enough to unbalance an entire clan. All I want is one more meeting with the Clan Mothers to plead my case. The odds of that happening are beyond hopeless. It's much more likely Boyd and I are doomed to spend the rest of our lives here, which will only be for as long as it takes them to decide its time for the hands on internal examinations.

Her face closes up, all traces of sympathy erased by righteous indignation. "Do you know what they do to people?" she demands, her voice so tight it's shaking.

"Yes, I know what they do to people, but do you know who most of those people are? Most of them are thugs with big guns and bad intentions, the kind of people who need to be taken out. You insist on sending in troops with big guns to find out what happened to those thugs. To the Yautja, they just look like more thugs, so they get hunted, too."

We stare at each other, in a tense standoff. Boyd picks that moment to wander over and climb into my lap. He rolls over onto his back and spreads his mandibles, wanting me to stroke them. In an adult male, that's overtly sexual, but at his age, it's an innocent bid for motherly affection and reassurance. When I run my fingers over them, he relaxes even further and starts to purr. His purring is always a deeply satisfying sound to the mother in me, letting me know everything is right with his world.

"He purrs," Barbara gasps, her fascination winning out over her temper.

"The grown ones do, too," I tell her, recalling fondly what was often going on when that happened.

Her eyes measure me speculatively, and I think it may have occurred to her that I’m not who she originally thought I was. “You weren’t forced?” she asked, cryptically, mindful of my little son sprawled across my lap.

“I made a deal. A deal that kept me alive,” I say, in a voice that makes no apology.

“And made you pregnant?”

“There’s much more to it than that.” I shake my head at her simplicity, tired of making nice. “So now that you know I don’t need a victim advocate, what’s your real purpose here, Barbara? I’m assuming that was part of your good cop routine?”

Her violet eyes widen and she smiles shrewdly. “They said you were no dummy. We want information. You disappeared out of a secure, secret facility without a trace. We assume it was his father who took you. The question is where did he take you?”

Boyd, who is now in a state of nirvana, gazes at her from under hooded lids. “Another planet,” he offers, lazily. “He’s not from here.”

“That truly is remarkable,” Barbara comments, finally letting her awe show.

I’m really getting tired of these people reacting to Boyd like he’s a trained chimp.

“English is the only language he’s ever heard, so he learned it,” I say, struggling not to grit my teeth. ”Just because they don’t look like us doesn’t make Yautja stupid. Look who’s got the better technology.”

To my surprise, Barbara relents. “I never thought they were stupid. It’s just that all we see of them is the savagery. They don’t have civil conversations with us.”

“No doubt that’s what Hatchet Face wants Boyd for, a savage killing machine. You should’ve seen how smug that bastard was after putting Boyd in a situation where he was forced to hurt people.”

Beneath my hands, Boyd’s purring stills. “One died,” he says, with such melancholy I can feel tears form behind my eyes.

Suddenly, the bastard responsible for Boyd’s misery enters our pseudo-house. “You’ve made him too human,” Dryden says, sourly.

Not unexpectedly, our dressed up cage has no privacy.

“What did you expect?” I counter, wishing he had been Boyd’s murder victim. “He’s my child.”

He nods, his icy eyes flat. “We need to know how that happened, Malloy. One way or another, the two of you are going to tell us.”

******

Over the course of the next month, they take blood and fluids from both of us several times and perform countless uncomfortable, intrusive tests. They ask me a blue million questions, just not the right one. We're not allowed to see any of my family, which saddens Boyd and worries me. Eventually, Hatchet Face comes, Barbara in tow, to tell me the obvious.

"You may look human, and you have all the basic organs, but you are not one of us. How did they do it?"

I figure there's not much point in dissembling, now that they’ve finally figured it out. "Sex with them makes us sick. Chak'tou gave me a shot of his blood to lend me his immunity; it changed me. The change was more extensive than most, extensive enough to let me get pregnant."

Dryden's fascinated to the point of salivation, which nauseates me. "Oh, it's much more than that. Your bones are denser, your muscles are stronger, you're immune to every pathogen on our planet and you've almost stopped aging entirely. It's extraordinary."

I'm really not interested in his glee. "So, have you let my family go yet? You have to know by now that they're just ordinary, garden-variety humans who happen to live with me and Boyd."

I want to smack his face when he snorts disdainfully. "They're of no use. We released them, but we told them if they breathed one word to anyone, we would kill you."

"That sounds counterproductive," I sneer, fixing him with my best what-an-idiot face.

"Why? We would still have Boyd."

Fortunately, my little son is asleep in the other room, because that makes me launch myself at his smug throat. Several soldiers have to rush into our pseudo house and beat me off of him.

"You bastard!" I howl. "If you hurt my son—"

" –you'll do what?" Dryden tries to sound high-handed, but the damage I did to his vocal cords kinda ruins it. "You belong to us now, the both of you. Since you're not human, you have no civil rights."

"What're you going to do?" I demand, struggling to get free of my captors.

"Well, we think it would be incredibly useful if we could create an army of soldiers just like you. If we're careful to be conservative, Boyd should be able to supply us with all the blood we'd need for that."

I feel like I just woke up in a grade Z Frankenstein movie. "Are you crazy? Chak'tou knew how much to use. Do you? Since Boyd is half mine, my DNA is buried in him somewhere. Do you know what effect that might have? How about what it'll do to human males? Will you tell them it might make them infertile? What about to people who aren't sick? From what I understand, the Yautja only inject the blood from a male into a human female infected with the pathogens from that same male. You can claim Boyd and I have no civil rights because we're not human, but your soldiers are. Do you think anybody'd be dumb enough to volunteer for this?"

I finally run out of breath, but I can feel the soldiers holding me shifting uneasily, ensuring what I just said will spread like wildfire. Hatchet Face knows it, too, and decides to nip it in the bud.

"If this gets out, I'll court martial the lot of you," Dryden warns the soldiers. "You better come up with believable stories when you refuse to participate in what will be offered as a routine vaccination."

When I first met Chak'tou, I thought he was evil, but in this moment, I know I was wrong. He was only hunting what to him were challenging members of an inferior species. The man before me, one who would blithely experiment on unwitting members of his own kind, is surely the Devil's own. Barbara, who has been silently watching the entire conversation unfold, seems to finally get it. Her horrified violet eyes meet mine over her superior's shoulder.

Maybe she can help us get out of here. Or at least get word to my family about where we are.

If not, a lot more people than just Boyd and me will be doomed.