Moni felt every ounce of the poor child’s agony. She dipped her fingers in the blood. She wished she could put it all back and stitch her baby together again. The smoldering grief swelled up inside her throat and nose so bad that she could barely breathe. No, it wasn’t grief alone.
That bastard had shot her baby. Her child might bleed to death in her arms. Sneed had tried stealing Mariella away from her since the moment he saw them together. Finally, he had his wish. In no time, the spark of life that represented the only hope for a species, and Moni’s only remaining love on this earth would vanish, leaving nothing behind but a broken doll.
As she saw the huffing Sneed climbing to his feet, intent on bringing his gun to the girl’s head and extinguishing the last remnants of her life, Moni drew her pistol. She shot him in the head. She shot Sneed again before he hit the ground. The bulldog wouldn’t get up from that.
One officer had run down the street searching for help and another sped away in a cruiser looking for his mother, but the other three were coming around to reality now that Mariella lay in critical condition. Moni pumped a bullet into each of them as calmly as if she were putting away the dishes. The men fell dead. She swiveled around with her gun extended until its aim settled on Aaron. Her impulse told her what she must do. He stood in their way. He had brought those cops here and exposed the secrets of Mariella’s people. Now that Aaron knew Mariella’s identity, he would no longer defend her. He’d destroy her if someone doesn’t stop him.
“Wha-What are you doing?” Aaron asked through trembling lips as he recoiled from the gun pointed at his face. He looked even more terrified of Moni’s gun than he did of Darren’s back at her house. Maybe the thought of who would shoot him scared him more.
Moni wanted to explain. She couldn’t part her lips.
“This isn’t you, Moni. You’re not in control.”
No, they hadn’t conquered her mind. She sighed so she had proof that she could still talk. Moni had followed their instructions. She had agreed with them. For a split second, she glanced at the cracked melon that formerly served as Sneed’s head. She couldn’t argue with that.
But, the three other officers. They were here under orders, just like I’ve done hundreds of times.
They would have shot us. And if she let Aaron go, he’d call more officers and they’d catch them before they could reach the lagoon. In one simple pull of the trigger, they would have a clear path. Mariella might survive.
“I’m sorry, Aaron.”
“Wait! I’ll take you there!”
She must kill him now. She refused. He had given her a chance when any other man would have fled from the lady cop with explosive baggage in her past and a problematic child in her home.
“Mariella’s losing buckets of blood,” Aaron said. “I don’t know a lot about her kind, but I know that’s not good. If I drive you both to the lagoon, maybe her people can save her.”
Not waiting for her response, Aaron scurried to the police cruiser and got behind the wheel. The long-haired kid looked as suitable in the cop car, as a clown behind the wheel of a military hummer. Yet, it got him away from Moni’s pistol. She lowered the weapon and hustled into the back seat of the cruiser with the dying girl in her arms. Then it hit her. Every second she had wasted playing gangsta with that pistol had cost Mariella precious blood. She didn’t understand why the girl didn’t mentally cry out, and demand that she immediately take her to the lagoon for healing. Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe the weakened Mariella hadn’t been in her head during the shooting spree, Moni thought. If so, then she had ended four lives all on her own. That truly terrified her.
Perhaps she had grown so used to Mariella’s thoughts intermingling with her own that they had become ingrained in her mind’s clockwork. If she lost Mariella now, a piece of Moni’s soul would die with her.
She grasped the ailing child in her arms and rocked her back and forth. The lips and cheeks that once shined with such rich skin had gone pale. They grew chilly and clammy-the first traces of the icy grip of death. Her dark eyes appeared glassy and all too human for such a magnificent creature. When Moni grasped her hands, she didn’t feel the fluttering in her soul or the electric tingle separating her body from her consciousness. She got no response besides a slight twitching of the girl’s fingers. The ignorant cruelty of mankind had reduced an astounding being to an invalid. Moni had promised the child this wouldn’t happen. Like everything else she had loved in her life, she couldn’t save her.
“Hold on back there,” Aaron said as he sped the cruiser west down Pinetree Drive and blew through the stop sign at Patrick Drive. Swerving to his left and cutting across the grass, he steered the cruiser down a long driveway lined on both sides by thickets of palms that shielded the lagoon-front home from the road. Normally, the foliage provided privacy for the homeowner, but now it felt like getting stranded in an elevator with a rattlesnake. If the owner had an ounce of sense, he would have gotten the hell out of there.
They found the man of the house after the cruiser plowed through his wooden fence, and skidded to a stop between his pool and the lagoon. They found his arm, anyway, and the shotgun beside it.
Moni should have felt that familiar gag reflex she got at gruesome crime scenes. Somehow she knew the man had it coming. He had assaulted Mariella’s people, and he wouldn’t have treated these intruders in his backyard any better if he had still been alive.
Moni stepped over the severed limb while carrying the bleeding girl. She marched in awe towards the doorstep of the massive yellow bubble arching towards the heavens. From so close, she felt as if she were Abraham bringing his son up the mountain for a sacrifice before the Divine.
With Mariella lying across her arms, Moni extended the girl into the bubble. It felt so warm, like reaching into the womb. She felt the small body slowly reanimate. Moni knew that Mariella would blossom inside this place alongside her kind. She would lead their rebirth and abundant growth. It would all happen away from human eyes. Moni couldn’t see her child again. Unless…
“Moni! What are you doing?” Aaron shouted from behind her.
From the other side, Mariella’s slender hands slid into her palms. Moni grasped them and followed them inside.
Chapter 48
One step transported Moni thousands of light years away, and eons back in time. The inside of the yellow bubble was unrecognizable as the Indian River Lagoon, or any landscape belonging to earth.
Smog weighed heavily on the air. The crystal clear water bubbled, and burped out steam, which congregated on the ceiling of the dome. It gave it the illusion of an alien sky with translucent yellow and black clouds. The creatures that flew up there weren’t birds. Their black wings where moth-like and they had long tails that swept through the clouds like nets.
Along the water, Moni could see all the way to the barren gray bottom. It resembled the dusty surface of Mars. Mariella’s kind wouldn’t let that last for long. Out in the center of the lagoon, a massive worm-like creature rolled its flabby body out of a ditch. Tendrils sprouted from its flesh, and then broke off. Within seconds, the independent beings grew into giant organs. They crawled across the bottom as slow as slugs. In their wake, they left an aquamarine sludge. Moni understood the meaning at once. They were like agricultural machines planting crops. Just as Moni’s ancestors did when they came to America, they were harvesting the land.
Realizing who had explained the purpose of those bio-machines to her, Moni turned and gawked at Mariella. The little one stood ankle-deep in the lagoon flashing a healthy smile with her purple gums and shimmering violet eyes. With the acidic water withering her pants away, Mariella removed her clothes and tossed them into lagoon for disposal. As much as it surprised Moni that the girl had just a thin scar on her chest from the bullet wound, what really alarmed her was Mariella’s skin. Below her neck it resembled the smooth, shiny black of obsidian stone. All of her human orifices besides those on her face had been filled in and made solid. She had become as featureless as a mannequin.
If she could get better-than-new in a few seconds, was she really that close to dying?
The question faded from her mind when she saw that Mariella still possessed the face of that little girl Moni had pulled from the mangroves. Of course she was different-all her life Moni had been shunned as an outcast as well-but her Mariella still peered out at her from inside that morphing body. She had fallen in love with that girl, and none other. That was her daughter.
Yet, in this world, the roles were reversed. Moni stood in ankle-deep water, but it didn’t burn her. She saw a
