face, acting as if he had never seen another of his own kind.
It was then that she saw the wet streaks on his face. He was crying. That sight shocked her more than anything else.
“Who…” Jodi whispered, trying not to speak too loudly for fear of frightening her captor into using his powerful grip to silence her, “… who are you?”
His hand stopped its inquisitive caressing, and he cocked his head slightly, his face silently voicing the obvious fact that he did not understand her words.
Jodi slowly repeated the question, for lack of any better ideas at the moment. “Who are you?” she asked him again, slowly.
His lips pursed as if he was about to speak, but then he frowned. He did not understand.
Awkwardly, her movements hampered by his arm around her chest, she began to raise a hand toward him. His grip tightened at her movement, eliciting a grunt of air being pushed out of her lungs, and his eyes flashed an unmistakable warning. But Jodi was unperturbed, and after a moment of indecision, he allowed her to continue.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said, hoping that she sounded convincing. She did not really know what she should – or could – do in her present situation. On the one hand, she desperately wished that one of the Marines outside would suddenly burst in and free her from this surreal rendezvous. On the other, she found herself oddly captivated by this… man. If he was what he appeared to be, a human somehow converted by the Kreelans, and not one of the Marines playing out a cruel joke at the eleventh hour, his discovery might be terribly important. Assuming, of course, that any of the humans here survived long enough to tell someone about him.
And that he would allow her to live.
Tentatively, she touched the hand that had been exploring her face, feeling a tiny jolt of excitement, almost like an electric shock, as her fingertips touched his skin.
“Please,” she said, her trembling fingers exploring his opened palm, “let me go. I’m not going to hurt you. I promise.” She almost laughed at the words. Here she was, pinned by a man who had extraordinary strength and whose intentions were entirely unknown, saying that she was not going to hurt him. It was ludicrous.
But, much to her surprise, it worked. Slowly, his other arm fell away from her, and she breathed in a deep sigh of relief. He was holding her hand now, gently, as if he was afraid of damaging it, and his blazing green eyes were locked on her face, waiting. It was her move.
“Thank you,” she said, taking a small step backward, giving herself a little breathing room, but not moving so far as to arouse any suspicion that she might be trying to flee. Besides, with him between her and the door, and only a tiny dirty window looking to the outside behind her, there was nowhere for her to escape to.
Taking his hand, she held it to her chest, just above her breasts. “Jodi,” she said, hoping to convey the idea of a name to her uninvited guest. She felt slightly foolish, because she had no idea if Kreelans even had names. No one knew the answers to even the most mundane questions about their culture. “Jodi,” she repeated. Then she moved his hand to his armored chest, gingerly, shocked at how warm the ebony metal was, and asked, hoping her tone might convey her message better than the words themselves, “Do you have a name?”
He looked at her for a moment, his brow furrowed in concentration. Then his eyes cleared. In a quiet tenor that made Jodi’s flesh prickle with excitement, he said, “Reza.”
“Reza,” Jodi repeated, smiling as she felt a shudder of nervous relief through her body. Perhaps he was not going to kill her after all. At least she had some hope, now. She might yet leave this room alive. Surely he would not bother with this little game if he had come only to kill her. But then again…
“Say my name, Reza,” she said, moving his hand back to her chest. “Jodi,” she said.
“Jo-dee,” he managed. Even that simple utterance was nearly lost to the guttural accent that filtered his speech.
“Good,” she said, elated by this tiny success. She edged slightly to one side, trying to move closer to the door without him becoming suspicious of her intentions. “Come on, now. Say it again.”
He did, and she nodded, breathing a little easier. As she looked at him, forcing herself to ignore the door that was only a few feet away, but still so far out of reach, she was taken by the moist tracks that ran down his face. With her free hand, she touched them, feeling the wetness against her fingertips. “Why are you crying?” she whispered wonderingly. She did not expect an answer.
Reza worked his mouth, as if he wanted – or was at least trying – to say something more than just repeat her name, but a change flashed across his face, a look of such cunning and knowing in his expression that it frightened Jodi. His eyes narrowed suddenly, and he took hold of her and spun her around in his arms like they were on a dance floor, whirling to some insane waltz. In the blink of an eye, she found herself facing the door to the rectory, staring into Gunnery Sergeant Braddock’s surprised and confused face as he opened the door.
“You, ah, all right there, ma’am?” the regiment’s acting sergeant major asked quietly, a frown of concern turning down the corners of his mouth as his hand gripped his rifle a little tighter.
Jodi spun back around to where Reza was and found… nothing. She was alone in the rectory.
“There was…” she began, then shook her head. “I… I mean… oh, shit.” She looked back at Braddock, her face pale, then reddening from embarrassment. She was shaking. “I think I’m flipping out, gunny,” she said with a nervous smile. “I could’ve sworn I was just talking to a Kreelan that looked like a human, a man.”
“That’d be a bit odd for you, wouldn’t it?” he joked, poking fun at her sexual preference, but he got only an uneasy grimace in return.
“Yeah, sure,” she said, trying to control the trembling that was shaking her so hard that her teeth threatened to chatter as if she were freezing. “Thanks, Braddock,” she told him.
Favoring her with a compassionate smile, he left her in peace. A moment later she could hear him barking orders in the main part of the church, rousing the remainder of the able-bodied Marines to yet another fight, their last. Shaking her head in wonder, Jodi rubbed her eyes, then stopped.
Her fingertips were noticeably moist. With her heart tripping in her chest, she looked at them, saw them glistening wetly in the candlelight. Cautiously, she put a finger to her lips, tasted it with the tip of her tongue. It was not water, nor was it the bitter taste of sweat. She tasted the soft saltiness of human tears.
“Jesus,” she whispered to herself. “What the hell is going on?”
She met Father Hernandez as she was moving toward the front of the church and the roughly aligned ranks of her gathered command.
“I see that, yet again, you refuse to have faith, lieutenant,” he said somberly, his eyes dark with concern. He had said the same thing to all of them every morning that they had gone out to fight, hoping that someone would accept his wisdom as the truth and lay down their weapons to let God do the work of feeding them to the Kreelans’ claws. “If only you would believe, God would–”
“Please, father,” she said, cutting him off more harshly than she meant to. But the incident, hallucination, or whatever the hell it had been back in the rectory had really rattled her, and she did not need his well-intentioned mumbo-jumbo right now. “I don’t have time.”
She tried to push her way past him, but he held her up, a restraining hand on her arm. “Wait,” he said, studying her face closely. “You saw something, didn’t you?”
There was no disguising the look of surprise on her face at his question. “What the hell are you talking about?” she blustered, trying to pull away.
“In there, in the rectory,” Hernandez persisted, his eyes boring into hers with an intensity she had never seen in him before. He gripped her arm fiercely, and she suddenly did not have the strength to struggle against him. It reminded her too much of what had happened only a few minutes ago. “I know when people have seen something that has touched them deeply, Jodi, and you have that look. Tell me what you saw.”
“I didn’t see anything,” she lied, looking away toward the crucifix hanging above the altar. The wooden statue of Christ, forever pinned to the cross by its ankles and wrists, wept bloody tears. A shiver went down her spine as
