Self-defence or not, one of the cousins had killed a man today.
One
The Ally
Everything was fine. Nothing could possibly go wrong. There was no reason to be nervous. All he had to do was follow his instructions properly, and he wouldn’t be punished. Your brain wasn’t supposed to be able to feel pain, he knew that. It didn’t stop it from happening, though.
No lights, keep the van quiet, don’t mess up. The full moon was enough of a guide to drive by, and he had his night-vision goggles with him in case the sky unexpectedly clouded over. Besides, he knew this track through the woods. He’d practised this run several times, preparing for tonight’s mission.
He shouldn’t even be thinking about punishment either because then he might start thinking about disobeying, and his head would start to feel like someone had lit a fire in it again. The last time he’d attempted to open up a bottle of his meds, he hadn’t even been allowed to scream as he collapsed. It had been unforgivably stupid and selfish of him to try that! Even when he couldn’t see or hear anything, he knew he was still being watched.
As always, he’d just flopped around, convulsing voicelessly on the floor until he’d passed out. When he’d woken up, hours later, the shame and humiliation he’d felt when he realised that he’d pissed and crapped himself again had only made the fading echoes of agony feel even worse.
“I’m sorry that was necessary, but you know I couldn’t let you do that,” the Companion had chided him disappointedly, “You can’t hear a word I say when you take those pills. Forbidden means forbidden!” It hadn’t needed to add that it never rested, never slackened its vigilance or tried to shirk its duty. Humans were so weak and so piteously vulnerable, and the Companion was always so sad when it had to hurt him. It was much happier when it had reason to reward him instead.
He was special, he knew, and far too valuable to be allowed to live a normal life. Most humans weren’t evolved enough to hear anything when a Companion tried to communicate with them, and the few who could mostly only picked up a lot of garbled nonsense that drove them crazy. They were the failures, and he was the rarest of the rare, a perfect, flawless receiver. Of course, he couldn’t be allowed to use any of the chemicals designed to help those less gifted than he was to shut out the voices. There was far too much important work to be done, and he was an essential part of it.
Reaching his chosen spot, he parked the van before climbing out to slide the side door open. No sound of anyone around, as promised. The prisoner, the one he’d been ordered to bring here tonight, was waking up, right on schedule. The whites of a pair of supposedly terrified eyes stared back at him as he dragged it out into the moonlight, but he wasn’t falling for that. The Companions’ adversaries were very tricky, he knew. This one would look just like an ordinary human to most people, but it wasn’t. It was an alien. He could clearly see the huge, black aura that surrounded it. All the aliens had those in different sizes and colours. The prisoner shivered convincingly as it stared up at him, pretending to feel the sub-zero chill of the January night. A real human, dressed in nothing but a pair of tracksuit trousers, would certainly have been chattering their teeth out here tonight. The breath from its nostrils even steamed in the frigid air, just like his own. Maybe it hadn’t realised that he could see that telltale aura, but it was wasting its time trying silly tricks like that on him. He’d never have guessed that it wasn’t a person if he hadn’t been gifted with the ability to see what it really was.
The thought of one of those awful things getting inside his head and taking his body for itself was too revolting to contemplate, but he was fully protected against that particular danger. The Companion assigned to him was guarding him zealously. Unlike everyone else he’d ever met, he was perfectly safe from that particular horror.
Ignoring the low noises that it was trying to make, he put on his pack and lifted the gagged and bound creature over his shoulders. It was almost time. He set off into the woods.
The ground was nicely frozen, no need to worry about footprints, and he’d secured covers over his boots, anyway. His burden was heavy, but he’d been training for this for a long time, and he only had a few hundred metres to go.
The oak tree he’d been told to use was at the bottom of a hollow, surrounded and vastly outnumbered by the fir trees that dominated the woods. Once he’d reached it, he gratefully shed his burdens and opened up his pack. The mark he’d cut into the trunk at the right height was easy enough to find, and he firmly secured a rope around the trunk there, making sure it couldn’t slip down, before hauling the creature up and clipping its collar to it so that it had to stand upright. Then he added more loops of rope, from ankles to waist, so it couldn’t try to knee him or kick out. Another band, around the forehead, held its head up nicely.
“The arms!” he was reminded, helpfully, and he took out his knife to reach around its back and sever the rope
