Mute (50 page)

When
Mariella’s words wouldn’t unveil all, Moni delved into the alien bio-machine’s
thoughts. Moni’s lesson hadn’t just extended to safeguarding their species. It
meant killing when confronted. They had learned by studying Moni’s past about
how colonizing humans exploited the weaknesses of others. Yet, humans would
shrink from a dominating show of force.

“Is that what you have in store for
us once the master species breaks free from their fish bowl? You’ll pound us
until we’re so terrified that we won’t go near you?”
Moni
scowled at Mariella, whose shrugging pixie face didn’t look so cute any more.
She wondered how many times an apparently innocent glace like that with some
mental “suggestions” thrown in had influenced Moni into doing horrible things.
Officer Harrison and DCF Agent Roberts died because she had left them to the
gator. She had shot four police officers with the girl in her arms. Detective
Sneed, who had been right all along, damn him, died at her hands. She had
murdered the finest officer she had ever known—the man who would have stopped
the massacre if it weren’t for her. Racist or not, he saved lives. She
destroyed them.

Obviously
detecting her thoughts as well, Mariella seized Moni’s hands and squeezed them
tight enough to grind her bones into dust. Not anymore. She was one of them
now. Moni had equal strength. Her mind no longer bowed. She wiggled one hand
free and drew her pistol from her ankle holster. The acidic water hadn’t
devoured the weapon yet, so she knew it could do the job at close range.

“We brought you into this world
because we trusted you. You rescued us. We love you, mommy.”
Mariella’s
eyes sparkled with a violet hue as she emitted the words into Moni’s head.
“We know how painful and disorientating it
is to become a hybrid species. That’s why we always erase the consciousness. We
kept you because you chose to value us over your own kind, and even your own
life. You belong here with us.”

Mariella
rested a gentle hand against Moni’s cheek as their eyes locked. She had seen
such joy on the girl’s face when she rode that horse at the ranch. She had
seemed so human. Moni thought she could rescue this girl like she had wished
someone could have saved her from her abusive childhood. In some perverse way,
she had succeeded. She gazed upon a thriving Mariella, in the form of an alien
bio-machine bent on capturing a slice of earth at all costs. She had raised an
amazing daughter, for sure.

“I love you no matter what, baby.
Never forget that.”

As
the grinning Mariella reached up and stroked her adopted mother’s cheek, Moni
brought the gun to the girl’s forehead and blew a hole through her skull.

Chapter 49

Moni dropped the gun, and cradled the trembling
body of her adoptive daughter in her arms while the last gasps of life escaped
her. As her eyes traced the once delicate features of Mariella’s face that she
had smashed with her bullet, she burst forth with an outpouring of tears and
nasal great enough to raise the water level of the lagoon. Moni gripped the
tiny hand that she had once held when she led the small one away from the men,
and beasts who tried to take her. It had gone cold and limp for good.

She remembered the warm hugs they shared, and how
the girl’s hair smelled as it rested on her shoulder. She remembered Mariella
sitting on her lap on the couch, and coloring flowers for her. Only days ago,
they were mother and daughter. Moni had promised her from day one that she’d
defend this child, and keep all the people who would hurt her at bay. She never
thought she’d be the one…

“You
betrayed us!”
thousands of voices screamed inside her head.

She had. Minutes after accepting Mariella’s
invitation to her world, she had killed her adoptive daughter without any
outside influence. Mariella had allowed herself to become vulnerable to Moni so
she could give her a gift no person had ever received. And in return, Moni had
murdered the only being who truly loved her.

I
didn’t want to do this! I still love you!

Moni tried sending Mariella the mental message, but
found no consciousness inside that battered skull. She clutched the girl’s body
against her chest, and let the hollowed out head dangle over her shoulder.
Mariella had rested her head on her the same way when she felt frightened, but
now Moni didn’t feel a tiny heart beating against her chest. Even after what
she had done, she begged for the girl’s arms to embrace her back instead of
hang limp at her sides. Her baby’s life had left her for good, and Moni had
made it happen.

An alarm rang through Moni’s mind. She gazed
through the clear waters and spotted a bloated manatee with sullen purple eyes
parting the sands of the lagoon bed like a corpse arising from the grave. A
beard of sharp bones took the place of its whiskers. Its normally gentle
flippers were armed with long, curved nails. The disfigured manatee lurked
towards her. Then gators breached the lagoon floor with their snouts, and
emerged into open water carrying abominations of nature on their backs—human
limbs, second gator heads or nests of snakes. They converged on her looking
ready to fight for that scrap of meat. Their jaws bared rows of daggers that
hungered to avenge the assassination of their leader, even though they would
cleave the flesh of one of their own. Just above the surface of the water, the
bizarre flying creatures circled over her head. She had no path of escape.

As the mutants closed within ten yards of her, Moni
shut her eyes and squeezed the empty vessel that had once contained her
precious Mariella. She concentrated on the mental connection that existed
between her and, not just the hosts, but the microscopic ambassadors as well.
Without Mariella and with the aliens still not developed, Moni had the most
powerful mind on the neural network—a mind that Mariella had assured her
brethren they could trust.

“Stop!
Everybody halt!”
Moni broadcast to every being on the alien channel.
The manatee and its gator army bailed out of their charge and sank their
bellies onto the bottom of the lagoon. She saw the flying creatures dart away.
The farming bio-machines ceased planting, and the great worm stopped undulating
and spitting out organs.
“That’s enough. This mission is canceled. Abandon
all possessed organisms. Take down all structures. Stop converting the water
and air. Let the atmosphere seep out the top of the bubble and then take the
barrier down.”

“But
the master species will die!”
protested
one of the dolphins, which were the smartest host brains left in the network
besides Moni.

“Their
DNA will remain in the ambassadors living in my body. Maybe one day—maybe—I’ll
find a safe place to bring them to life. Until then, every one of you outside
of my body is returning the lagoon to the humans, and then shutting down. I
mean it. Even the smallest of you will turn off.”

At first, she noticed the downed gators and the
manatee cease their twitching. They went limp—as limp as the poor child Moni
held in her arms. As the great worm that once promised rebirth dissolved into
particles smaller than dust, Moni gazed into Mariella’s brown eyes. They were
as still and glassy as a doll’s. It relieved her that the girl couldn’t see
what she had worked so hard in building getting torn asunder. She wondered
whether Mariella would have killed her to preserve her world. In pulling that
trigger, Moni had assumed so.

And yet, maybe Mariella would have sacrificed all
of that, and chosen her love for her mother. The shattered mind in her arms had
been denied that choice by the woman who should have nurtured her.

 
* * * *

 
The moment
Aaron saw the footage on his mobile phone of the yellow bubble cracking like a
huge clay jug he turned the patrol car around and sped back to the spot where
Moni had passed through the barrier. Not only did he feel relieved that he
didn’t have to tell his dad how he “borrowed” a dead officer’s cruiser, he was
totally stoked that Moni had somehow done it.

Aaron hadn’t exactly expected that Moni would save
humanity, or at least Brevard County, when she blindly entered the bubble. That
was especially true after she killed those officers. She had to be possessed
during that, he thought. He feared it would never let her go.

Now the sight of the barrier crumbling made him
feel like she had broken their hold, and ended the alien invasion for good.
That same notion told him that Moni would emerge onto the beachside in the same
spot she had left him. When he threaded the car through the dead man’s backyard
once again, sure enough, he saw her.

He hadn’t expected that he’d find her lying naked
and face down in the muddy grass, though.

“Stay right there. I’m coming,” said Aaron, not that
he thought she’d go running through the street in that condition.

Moni’s skin didn’t look right. It seemed darker and
thicker somehow. Aaron didn’t steal too long a glance before he grabbed a
jacket out of the trunk and covered her. Rolling over and clutching the jacket
against her shivering flesh, she didn’t look at her supposed prince charming.
She glared at her hands and then yanked a braid from atop her head before her
eyes. Instead of a bunch of hairs scrunched together, it resembled a bushel of
hair fused into one.

“Those hair treatments you used on your braids
combined with that nasty water, make something foul,” Aaron said. “Let me help
you dry it off.”

He fetched a blanket from the cruiser’s trunk. It
absorbed the water from her hair pretty well, but Aaron smelled something
burning. Her damp hair had singed the blanket. She had swum in the acid, and
strolled on out. Moni blinked at the damage she had caused the blanket. She
didn’t seem at all surprised.

Suddenly, she reached out and grabbed his wrist.
When she stood up, Aaron figured he better follow. They dashed through the yard
away from the lagoon, even though putting weight on his tender foot made him
buckle. Seconds after they started running, what Aaron heard behind him sounded
louder than a hundred school buses falling from the sky. The entire yellow
bubble started collapsing, and splashing down into the lagoon. The initial
cracks widened into fissures, and then massive patches with narrow strips
connecting them to the greater wall. It didn’t happen in random spurts like
some avalanche; each layer fell together, level by level atop one another. It
looked as organized as a planned building demolition. The problem was they
didn’t bother moving the bystanders out of the way. Before Aaron’s eyes a wave
of crystal clear water lapped ten feet onto land. He bounded backwards as the
skin-scolding tide rolled in toward his feet. Moni gripped his arm and locked
him against her side. She had already brought him far enough away. When the
acid receded, it left everything it touched charred and withering. If they
hadn’t moved, they would have been stripped of their flesh.

Aaron and Moni stood side by side, marveling at
what remained of the former ecological treasure. Fragments of the yellow alien
dome floated on the surface of the water like a great scab. Corpses of gators,
manatees, dolphins and bizarre blobs of biomass bobbed in the water in place of
buoys. It reeked so bad of rotten eggs and decaying raw meat, that Aaron
coughed and covered his mouth. It didn’t bother Moni, though. The stench slowly
dissipated, along with the pieces of the barrier. The repairs had begun, but
life in the lagoon wouldn’t become normal for a long time, Aaron thought. He
just wished he knew where he got that notion from.

Turning to Moni, Aaron figured he better not ask
the obvious, yet painful, question about Mariella. When he saw her emerge from
the lagoon by herself that told him enough about her fate. But, the way she
loved the little one, he never thought she’d do it.

“I know you did some bad things, and hell, I really
screwed up too,” Aaron said. Moni finally locked eyes with him. Her exotic
beauty, with her scalded yet resilient hair and bare shoulders, knocked him so
far for a loop that he could hardly continue. “I don’t know how I’m so lucky
that I made it through this with you. A lot of amazing people didn’t… They had
us confused and we did horrible things that we would have never done. If we had
been in control of our minds, we wouldn’t have let the people we care about get
hurt.”

A single teardrop streamed down her cheek. He
caught it with his palm. Moni drew closer and wrapped her hands around his
shoulders. Every fiber of Aaron’s being wanted to lock lips with Moni and pour
his heart into a most improbable kiss. He couldn’t do it without first asking
one more question of her.

“You know who did this to us, Moni. But what I
don’t understand is how you overcame their brainwashing. How did you destroy
them?”

Moni parted her lips and started mouthing out
words, but not a sound came out.

Also
available from Silver Leaf Books:

Jared Angel

ENDLESS WAR
OF THE GODS

In the world of Seibu, an endless
war between the gods of Light and Dark threatens to destroy all life. Crevahn,
mother of creation, struggles to save her newly created world and all life.
Without the help of Vyas, a mighty jiva, and Malla, a humble human, Crevahn
will fail. Will Vyas survive and maintain his sanity long enough in his battle
against the God of Dark? Will Malla overcome her subordination and inevitable
execution in her battle against the God of Light? Find out if the world will
end or be saved in this high adventuring tale by debut novelist Jared Angel.