Hostile Genus: An Epic Military Sci-Fi Series (Invasive Species Book 2) Ben Stevens (best contemporary novels txt) 📖

“From the darkness came the stings. I felt molten pain in several places over my body at once. I could hear the slithering and sucking of a hundred mouths. I screamed, and my cries of pain echoed off the cave walls, driving me mad. It was a nightmare, and I thought for sure that I was just another victim of the Drops, another post-Storm casualty, that my life was finally over and had meant nothing in the end. It bound me in its vast array of tentacles and fed on me until the darkness of the cave was replaced by the darker black of unconsciousness.” Don Luis opened and closed his hand, making several fists as he recalled his torture at the hands of the Drop-Beastie.

“After some time, I have no idea how long, I awoke. There was no pain and my first thought was that I was in Heaven or Hell. A leftover from my early childhood; my poor mama was a simple-minded Catholic woman, but it’s not her fault, for it was part of our culture before the Storm and the Drops. Now, even the most innocent child knows the only god is he who takes and makes for himself. As I have.” His eyes glowed with self-righteous pride as he spoke. Maya felt a chill run down her back as she attempted to digest this man’s misguided way of thinking.

“Soon I realized that I was still on this Earth—the cold dirt floor of the cave gave it away, though I wasn’t keen to the fact that I was not quite alive.” At this, he grinned like a spoiled child who got the toy he felt he deserved. “I was attacked, but not killed… or so I thought. I knew not where the stinging tubes were, and I didn’t want to stick around to find out. To this day, I have wondered deeply as to the exact nature, the mechanism of this thing, and the vampiric, immortal qualities it bestows on its victims. Are they a side-effect of this being’s eating habits? Its alien biological needs? Or is it simply how it breeds? Sure, that sounds crazy, but who are we to question the mechanics of alien and human interaction? I call what I am “vampire,” but what does that mean? That is a human word, from ancient mythology, yet here I stand, bitten—well, stung, rather—eaten and killed by an alien, yet now immortal, superhuman. Truly born again. Fire and sunlight kill me, and I need blood to survive. The shoe fits, and I care not to ponder semantics.”

“It’s as good as a description as any,” Maya agreed, looking back and forth from the alien urchin to Don Luis.

“I left the cave in a weakened state, having been killed and not yet having fed. I was in a fever, a dream state, and I remember not where I wandered. The last thing I remember is the night sky beginning to turn lavender with the promise of dawn soon to be, and collapsing on the desert floor, the weight of the sky pressing me down. A band of human survivors came across me; they must have. I only remember vague images as I floated in and out of consciousness. Men and women, inheritors of pre-Storm military equipment and weapons, carving out a meager, post-apocalyptic life. I remember the noise of their vehicles, the old kind that still ran on fossil fuels, and their voices. They just happened to be on the move, and their paths crossed mine that fateful night. Good for me, bad for them. I faded in and out over the next day and a half. Maybe longer. They must have put me in the back of one of their large trucks and assigned someone to care for me. I don’t know how it all played out… I never got the chance to ask them…” Don Luis waxed nostalgic and smiled.

The urchin lunged for him again with a volley of outstretched tentacles. They fell short, unable to reach him. Their vain attempt snapped him out of his reverie, and he spun on them, striking one with the torch. Maya blinked as the torch left a comet’s tail tracer through the chamber’s darkness and blinked again when she heard the flat, wet smack of the tentacle being hit. The spine tubes withdrew again, like a beaten dog, and attempted to bite Don Luis no more.

“It must have been days now that I think about it, but at one point, I was back, only it wasn’t the old me. It was the new me. I awoke in the back of a truck on a bed that my saviors had prepared for me. I could hear the cicadas of the night blanketing all the other sounds, but what I remember most is the hunger. Like this thing here,” Don Luis pointed at the urchin with his torch, “I was possessed by an insatiable hunger, the likes of which I had never experienced, even as a starving, malnourished youth, hustling in the streets of Old Puebla, back before the dons took me in. I remember then, for the first time, I could smell my cure. I could smell the blood that lay trapped inside the bodies of every man and woman in that caravan’s camp. Back then, that first time, it felt like I had no control. It wasn’t until after, when I had had my fill, that I saw a better way. I tore through that camp the way the tidal waves and hurricanes from the Great Storm had torn through the coastal towns of my country. Nothing could stop me. Nothing. I was a force of nature.” Don Luis’s eyes glinted red, and his voice rose in volume as he told his tale.

“Toward the end there, some tried to stop me. They shot me full of bullets, which I squeezed out of my body by simply thinking about it. The ease with which I slaughtered them, all thirty-something