Book 6: Chapter 1: Booger |
Volume 6: Earth
The dog’s barking.
Dylan grunts and rolls over and opens his eyes to the darkness. He takes his phone up from the nightstand—the background is a photo of the little bastard who just woke him up, smiling his brainless smile behind 3:26.
“Fuck,” he mutters, and clambers from bed. He slips into his lounge robe—he’s keeping the heat low to pinch pennies, but November’s getting long in the tooth and it gets cold earlier than he’s used to up here.
He stomps into the kitchen and flips the light. Booger the french bulldog is standing on the linoleum freaking the fuck out at nothing.
“Boogs. Dude.” Dylan sighs and picks his frenzied dog up. “What the fuck gives, man? It’s three AM.”
A woman materializes, crouching on the kitchen table. She is naked, she is gorgeous, she is half his height, and she is purple. Her eyes are shiny and red. The pupils dilate and pulse bright crimson.
“Stay where you are,” she says. “Don’t speak.”
Dylan screams and sprints from the room.
Dylan is halfway out the door of his condo when he remembers keys. I need my keys. He doubles back and seizes his jacket. Its pocket jangles as he pulls it from the peg. Then it’s out into the night, breath puffing in the November air. He clicks the fob and yanks the door of his Tacoma pickup. Booger elatedly leaps into the passenger seat, tail wagging, home invasion seemingly forgot. Dylan slides behind the wheel and pats himself down as his jittering grip foils his first attempt at getting the keys in the ignition. Phone, phone, why didn’t he pick up his phone? He forces breath back into his lungs and turns the truck’s engine over. Its lights flare on and splash across the cul-de-sac.
There is a robot in the road. A robot or someone in some kind of sci-fi armor.
Dylan floors it before he can think.
The engine roars. The truck powers forward and slams into the armored wraith, sending it sprawling back. It catches itself on its feet and skids the last yard in a shower of sparks. Dylan slams the clutch into reverse. Too slow. One step, two, and then a vaulting leap, and the front of the truck puckers under the weight of the warrior as it lands on the hood. The thing it points at Dylan is boxy and alien, but unmistakably a gun.
“Freeze,” it says.
Dylan freezes. Booger has both his front paws up on the dash, barking his brave, tiny brains out.
The passenger-side door opens on its own. A pair of long braids shimmer into being, followed by the naked purple goblin lady they’re attached to.
Whatever she is, she’s not human. He can’t know what’s in her mind. But for all the world her expression seems to mirror his own fearful bewilderment.
“Dylan Thorogood,” she says. “You must come with us now.”
Dylan stares across the metal table, seated atop a low-backed swivel chair that’s just barely big enough for his butt to park in. On its opposite end, Booger lounges in his doggy bed, yawning as the alien scratches him behind the ear.
Earth’s out the window. Figuratively and literally. It takes up most of the view of the floor-to-ceiling glass.
Framed before the nighttime continent Dylan’s been stolen from, crisscrossed by a spiderweb of light, sits the purple woman from his kitchen. Her blackcurrant hair is pulled into two long braids which snake from her head, halfway down her back. She isn’t naked anymore—now she wears a sleeveless black tunic, with an off-center stripe of scarlet fasteners along its chest. Her arms are impressively muscled; from the panicked memories of her crouched in his kitchen, he recalls that she’s quite well-built under that tunic. Built enough, in fact, that the remembrance starts to feel sorta pervy. She almost looks like that British lady from Street Fighter, if she was two feet shorter and purple.
She coos as she rubs Booger’s head, the bangles on her wrist clattering. His stubby tail’s wagging, the little traitor.
Dylan’s pulse has finally calmed. His panic attack is finished. He’s not sure if that’s because they’ve spiked him with some kind of alien drug or because Booger seems to like the alien that kidnapped him.
“He is adorable,” she says, in an even, precise voice. Lower than he thought it might be, considering she’s half his goddamn height. “What’s his name?”
“Uh,” Dylan says. “Booger.”
She chuckles. “Booger? Like these?” She gestures to her delicate little nose.
“Yeah.” He rubs his knees together, feeling at the fabric of the pants they gave him. They’re slouchy and draw stringed; silk, maybe. “What’s yours?”
“My name is Xamika nai Qena-Qel.” Her accent is more like a careful lack of accent; every word is mindfully exact. “Your journey here was frightening, I know. But please do not be afraid.” There’s a bit of a narrowing burr on that word’s r, almost like an Irishwoman’s. Afreed. “I know that’s not easy—I made a dog’s breakfast of your initial contact. Did I use that phrase correctly?”
“I think so.”
“And Booger is a dog, right?”
He nods.
“I have been very excited to meet a dog.” She gives a two-handed scratch to either side of Booger’s thick, loose-skinned neck. “They do not disappoint.”
“Will you tell me what I’m doing here?” he asks. “Why did you take me? How do you know my name?”
“You are here because we need your help,” she says. “And we know your name because you were asked for, specifically.”
“By who?”
“Before I go on, may I ask you something in turn?”
He still feels in a fugue. He pinched himself on the shuttle here—actually pinched himself like in a cartoon. “Okay.”
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“I must request that you do something you might find a little confusing,” she says. Her eyes do that red pulse thing again. “Stand up, please.”
Dylan scoots his chair back and gets to his feet. They’ve given him soft treaded slip-ons to navigate the cool metal floor of their—space station? Ship? He didn’t get a look at it before they docked.
She looks at him with intense, scarlet-eyed focus. “How did it feel to stand up?”
“Uh… normal. Was that the confusing part?”
She shakes her head. The chained beads in her braids clatter. “What I will do now is order you to do a few different actions,” she says. “What I would like for you to do, until I say stop, is refuse to do any of them.”
“This is the confusing part.”
She laughs gently. “Yes, it is. Ready?”
He nods.
Another pulse. “Jump once,” she says.
He keeps his feet planted.
“Say your full name.”
He keeps his mouth shut.
“Remove your shirt.”
“I’m shy.”
She lets out a long, vexed breath. “Stop.”
He puts his hands on his hips. “Is that what you needed?”
“Yes it is. Thank you, Dylan. You may sit.”
The chair squeaks under him. His dog click-clicks over to him and paws at his pant leg. He lifts the Boogster into his lap.
“You are now a guest of my people,” she says, “and will remain with us for a few months. We are called the Taiikari’kiakiam. In English that’s the Taiikari Empire.”
“Empire? Like Star Wars?”
“Not quite. They are evil, and we aren’t.”
Dylan’s brow furrows.
“You’re surprised I know about Star Wars.” She smiles. She has fangs. Like a cat or a vampire. “I watched it as part of my training to come here and meet you. I thought the music was lovely.”
She hums the first bar of the title theme.
“What you’ve had no way of knowing, Dylan, is that you are part of the Taiikari Empire as well.”
“Oh,” he says, because what do you say to that? “Yeah?”
“Yes. You have spent your life under the watchful protection of Empress Zithra the Nineteenth. Your Princess is named Sykora nai Kei’na Terokai.”
“I have a Princess?”
“You do, indeed,” she says. “She’s been a guardian over your world for your whole life, making sure that no threats from outside the planet interfered with it. You’ve always been her subject. Now, as a partial recompense for your abduction, you’ve been made a full citizen of the mightiest Empire in the galaxy, with all the rights that affords.”
“I don’t… um… thank you. Can I go home, though?” He points to the world outside. “I kind of have shit to do down there.”
She giggles. Okay, he made the invisible alien commando giggle. Things seem 25% less bad than they did a second ago. “Your shit will have to wait a while, I’m afraid,” she says. “You’re here to accomplish an important task. You are one of forty Maekyonizari we have brought aboard in order to find out more about your people before we make wider contact.”
“Forty whats?”
“Pardon me. Humans. Please forgive any lapses in your language; I’m a new speaker.” She stands and steps to the wall-sized window. Her tail—she has a tail, he remembers—swishes. “Our word for your world is Maekyon. You are part of a sector called Kei’na Terokai.”
Hesitantly he stands again, and carries Booger to the tableau. The only planet either of them has ever known reflects in the frenchie’s buggy eyes.
“We are all extremely excited to finally meet you, Dylan,” Xamika says. “I have been assigned to be your personal liaison. There are other humans here—you’ll meet them—but I am specifically your assistant.”
“You draw the short straw or something?”
She shakes her head. “I asked for you.”
“Why?”
“You were so terrified,” she says. “When you saw me in your kitchen. I want to see to it personally that by the time we part ways, every bit of that terror is gone. And that you consider me and my people friends. My job is to make your time aboard this station as comfortable as possible. If at any point you require something, I will do my best to get it.”
“A ride home, maybe?”
She gives this a nervous laugh. “I’m afraid not. Not a fortunate start to my time under you.”
He doesn’t try to think weird thoughts about her being under him. Really, he doesn’t. But beneath the tunic, she’s wearing this tight bodysuit, and besides the skin and the tail and the eyes and the ears and the size and…everything, she really is distractingly cute. Is that, like, a hologram or some kind of technology? Is she actually some kind of slug beast who’s fucking with his brain?
“Will you give me my phone back?” He deposits Booger on the floor. “There’s going to be people looking for me. I have friends and family and coworkers. I need them to know I haven’t died.”
“That is a reasonable request. I will see if it’s possible.” She purses her lips contemplatively. At this point he’s convinced he can apply human cues to her finely-featured face. “I doubt we can return your phone, but we can arrange calls to the outside.”
“Monitored calls, I’m guessing?”
“Yes.”
He watches Booger experimentally pace circles around the table’s rubberized legs. “So I’m a prisoner.”
A tinge of guilt in her reply. “In a way. But be assured that you will be compensated for all the time you spend here.”
“I wanna make sure this isn’t a language barrier thing. Compensated for us humans usually means—” he rubs his fingers together and realizes that’s probably not a universal gesture. “Money. It means money. Especially because I am absolutely losing my job over this. Unless you write doctors’ notes.”
“Money is what I mean, yes. We could try a doctor’s note?”
“And I’m talking about human money,” he says. “That I can spend back home. I hope I’m not being too difficult here—”
“You’re being quite reasonable.”
“But it would be one hundred percent my luck if I end up getting a fortune in, like, Imperial Gromblecoin or whatever.”
He can’t help but feel pride in making the pretty alien laugh again. “You might be surprised as to how useful a Gromblecoin will be, Dylan, once Earth is annexed. But we’ll pay you for your time in whatever currency you wish.” She climbs back into her seat, hooking her tail to its crossbar. It’s much higher up than his to let her up to his eye level.
“Okay.” He returns to his place across from her. “How much?”
“Well… we anticipate your stay lasting a couple of months,” she says. Dylan’s not sure what he expected—longer? shorter?—but the length piles another brick of this is fucking real into the kiln of his stomach. “In that time your nation—you are American, right?”
“Yeah.”
“In the period of your absence, your United States will spend ten billion American dollars seeking a cure for cancer.” She rummages in the satchel slung across her seatback. “And with the knowledge we gain from observing and speaking with you, it is our hope to create a bond of close sisterhood between our species. Should that prove successful, we can simply give it to humanity.”
“Give what?”
“The cure for cancer.”
“Oh,” he says. “Of course.” Of course they’ve cured cancer. That’s his planet out the window, that’s a purple alien shortstack sitting across from him. What should really surprise him at this point?
“So we’ll call this research of equal importance, at the very least. And you and your fellow Maek—pardon me—humans are its most crucial part.” Xamika lays a little cadmium-yellow box on the table and taps the array of buttons on its front. “As I mentioned, we have a total of forty subjects we’ll be studying. So… ten billion, divided by forty…”
She turns it around and he realizes it’s an Earth calculator. A cheap liquid crystal display one. Written on it is:
250,000,000
“How about this?” she says. “In American dollars. We’ll give it to you once our research is complete.”
He has to work to shut his hanging mouth. “You’re fucking with me.”
Her big red eyes widen. “What?”
“Uh, sorry. Uh—are you serious? That is a fuckton of money.”
“Ah. Well.” She rubs her forehead. Were those two little bumps always there? “It’s as I said. This is what your help is worth to us. You are crucial to the annexation.”
He stares at the calculator and its impossible number. “I’m… yeah. Okay. That’ll do.”
“Splendid.” Xamika beams. “You’ll see, Dylan. It will be a wonderful time. I’ll make sure of it.”
Is he a gullible sheep if he’s actually starting to believe her?
“Any further questions before I show you around the station?” she asks, perhaps off his mystified face.
“Yeah, actually.” Dylan picks at his sleeve. “You keep saying annexation. What does that entail, exactly?”
She delves back into her satchel and removes a small spiral-bound notepad with pale pink pages. “For those details, the Prince of the Kei’na Terokai has requested to speak with you personally.”
Dylan’s heart freezes. “Personally? Like just me?”
“Yes. He is the one who asked for you. I believe he knows you.”
“He knows me,” Dylan repeats dumbly, in an effort to hammer that the rest of the way into his racing brain. “He knows me? How is that possible?”
“You were his…” She squints at the page. “Uh… Fresh Man Room Mate. Hmm.” She looks up from her notepad inquisitively. “That’s what it says. Does that mean something to you?”
“My freshman roommate?”
She nods as she internalizes the pronunciation. “Yes, that’s right.”
“That’s—I’m a human. He was a human. Wasn’t he?”
“He was,” she says. “And he is. He’s waiting to speak with you—he’s quite anxious to.”
Dylan grips the end of the table as if whatever impossible gravity keeping him here had shut off. “The alien overlord of Earth is Grant fucking Hyde?”
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