Army of the Goddess: A Bona Dea Novel (Stormflies Book 2) (5 page)

“You okay, Jon?” Kyle paused to question. “You look anemic all of a sudden.”

“Um… must have been the…heat today. Dehydration,” he offered, searching for a plausible explanation, something better than “something isn't right here,” an answer that would assuredly be shrugged off by these men.

“Oh, let's get you some water then,” offered someone from the shadow of a rack loaded with hand tools. “Come with me. We'll take care of you.”

Jon's feet wouldn't move. His mind screamed at him to flee.

“Well, come along now. Don't just stand there.”

“I'll wait until we get back to the hostel,” he refused. “I'll be fine.”

“No need to torture yourself, Jon Irons. You're in good hands.”

He should have run sooner.

The figure in the shadows made an aggressive step toward him, hand outstretched like a claw.

Falling back, Jon tripped over an unseen seam in the floor.

The Colin and Kyle bore down on him, pinning one of his arms. Was Kyle infected? How long? What about his boys, if they were his at all?

Jon swung his free arm in a half-strength punch, striking Kyle's nose hard enough that blood sprayed out and the man staggered back. But the pain Jon hoped to inflict was all but ignored.

“What are you doing? Help! Someone help me! Get off of me!”

He flailed any free part of his body, hoping to delay whatever they had planned. He shouted as loud as he could, hoping to draw attention from someone outside, if anyone was nearby. Three men against one, Jon just wasn't strong enough to pull himself free, and his punches and kicks failed to break their hold.

“This is the one?”

“Yes. The Grand One showed him to us, the one the host left. She wants this one.” It was Kyle's voice, but it sounded gravelly and strange. Maybe Kyle had only been infected recently for him to sound so different at this moment.

Kyle was responsible for that mixer. He was the one who reported it broken, the one who opened it up. A lure—and Jon had bitten the hook. The Stormflies wanted him because he had intimate contact with the woman who was now the Protectress. They wanted to get close to her. The Stormflies had a vendetta.

They had him. They would infest him and use him to get what they wanted.

He steeled himself against what he understood would be painful.

I'm sorry, Axandra
, he said in his head.
I would never hurt you on purpose. You know I wouldn't.

He clenched his eyes shut, but fingers dug into his flesh to pry open his left eye. He resisted as long as he could manage, but eventually his attackers prevailed. The light was so bright, his eyes watered profusely.

Fire blazed against the soft tissue. His eye seemed to boil. Then the pain moved into the nerves of his skull so that his hair felt like hot wires on his scalp.

Then the pain transmuted into euphoria and his entire body reacted by striking a rigid pose, the sensation where extreme pleasure meets satisfaction at the end of a sexual encounter. The Stormflies made sadistic love to their victims, trapping the human bodies in a realm of reward in intense pleasure and punishment in intense pain.

The human race had no chance to defeat these tactics. Human bodies were weak and prone to distraction. In an instant, he understood why their people had already been enslaved for the last three hundred years.

20
^th
Unimont, 308 (Hopesday)

The PAIN! PAIN!

Why me? Just stop. Stop feeling. Let go. You don't need to go through this. Just let go.

As the swirling cacophony of buzzes and sizzles swarmed, and the pain seared every nerve within her body, Axandra felt the tautness leave her muscles. For a euphoric instant, the pain receded completely, and the body sank upon the stone altar. Death meant freedom from physical form, but entrapment with the Stormflies.

Her own whimpers woke Axandra from sleep. For a brief moment, her body refused to move. She feared the dream was true and the Prophets had her trapped in the Haven. She waited tensely for footsteps on stone, for thunder to roll through the air.

With her eyes open, black and gray faded into one another. Shapes were all abstract illusions, globs of not-color in two dimensions that may have been a chair or cupboard or a vase of old flowers. She could not count the minutes that she lay there on her back staring at the gray static her dark room provided.

The silence of the room, the softness of the bed, and the sweet night noise of the garden reminded her that the terror ended months ago. Fifty kiloms away, the rocky home of the Prophets sat abandoned. Without the protection of the Great Storm, the isolated subspecies moved elsewhere to find solitude. No village would take them in, not after the crimes they committed. She last heard they had sailed to an uninhabited island to the south. There was no proof to this rumor, yet she clung to the idea as an anchor to avoid drifting further into the sea of paranoia. She could not continue to heal if she thought the devils watched her every move.

Trying to still the pounding of her heart, Axandra lay flat on her back and used every muscle for the strict purpose of breathing. Despite her effort, sobbing spilled forth, followed by hyperventilation and a very real need to flee.

To where? What place could be safer than this, her home, her bed, beside a person who loved and cared for her?

Regardless, the fight or flight instinct prompted her to rise from bed on quick feet and dodge into the bathroom, closing the door tightly behind her so that the smaller room served as a refuge.

Back to the door, she slid shakily to the floor and wept into her knees.

A subtle rap on the door's wooden material signaled she had not made her escape stealthily enough to avoid waking her bedmate.

“Axandra? Dearheart?”

“Yes,” she responded through a sniffle and a hiccup. Her body spasmed in every which way as a result of her crying fit.

“May I come in?”

“No,” she denied, shaking her head although he couldn't see her.

“Are you all right?” came the next question after a brief pause.

“No,” she replied again. “I'm not. But I can't—can't.” Quivering from shoulders to toes trapped her voice. Another hiccup jerked her innards. “You can't come in. I'm sorry.”

“Oh, darling. I promise, everything is going to be all right.”

Axandra wanted to believe that notion. Everyone said the same thing—that she should be happy to be alive; and, that going forward, everything would be fine. She certainly didn't feel all right. She felt scared and angry and wished for it to stop. The dreams, the amnesia, and the chronic pain of a tortured limb only deepened her belief that nothing was “all right” and probably never would be again.

A wretched wail escaped her throat, followed by suffocating bellows chopped up by sharp breaths. This was the sound of a soul in pain, a wretched, aching lament.

Quinn wasted no time jimmying the door open, a secret he learned months ago when he feared she was drowning in the tub or had slipped, whatever it was. She couldn't remember. When she didn't respond to his knocking, he got scared, and he had every reason to be scared.

The door opened outward, giving way behind her back.

Unfortunately, his touch only heightened her hysteria and her sobbing increased in volume.

“Make it stop,” she begged, squeezing his arm with her fingers. “Please. I can't take this anymore.”

“I know,” Quinn sympathized, embracing her tightly on his lap. “I know. I promise it will get better. You know I'm right here.”

She nodded feverishly, her hands shaking. Her eyes fixated on the bandages encasing her disfigured hand, the fingers that wouldn't move, the scarred skin she couldn't bear to look at. The constant visual reminder made leaving those moments behind even more difficult. Days ago, during the celebration of Landing Day, she felt as though nothing could hold her down short of death. She spoke each and every word of the ceremony with conviction. Today, every meaning in every word sublimated like ice in a volcano.

Quinn had an effect on her like no other person she had ever known. In instances such as these, his presence brought stillness to the storm. He molded his emanations to embrace and comfort her as though erecting a shield against the world. She wasn't even certain he manifested the shield in a conscious manner. The more she studied the latent psi abilities of her people throughout history, the more she realized that, unlike herself, most asserted little control over their talents. What those people emanated and what they received was little more than static in the background of their own thoughts, a byproduct of their physiology. They were each aware of the level of their abilities, but paid little attention to the daily details. Due to the powerful nature of her exceptional talents, Axandra required constant, conscious control to avoid unpleasant sharing.

The same shield, in other circumstances, tended to cause her a great deal of frustration. The protective emanation existed as a natural, automatic safeguard for Quinn's mental faculties. Most people produced a similar emanation in order to protect themselves from unsolicited psychic contact. The safeguards had evolved over the centuries, especially when humans with similar abilities began to bond together in communities instead of hiding their innate talents. The abilities and the natural defenses were passed down among the offspring, creating the subspecies of human beings on Old Earth that was labeled an abomination and therefore needed to be sterilized, thus prompting thousands to flee the planet, leading to this point, to her existence.

Breathing deeply, Axandra allowed the dream images to fade out of her mind. This left behind only the remnant pain of her wounds, for which she asked Quinn to provide one of the useful little green pills that subdued the nerves into a false sense of stillness. She understood why the pills were under Quinn's control rather than her own, as the effect was highly addictive for an individual dealing with chronic pain. In her forgetful and beleaguered condition, she would quite possibly take them continuously without concern for the risk of overdose or dependence. Instead, she forced herself to ask for one only when the pain became nearly unbearable, or when the discomfort prevented sleep or much needed concentration.

Chewing the sweet tablet and chasing the fragments down her gullet with a glass of water, she assured Quinn she would return to bed as soon as she relieved herself and washed her face. Providing privacy, he closed the bathroom door, but lingered just outside, ears focused for any unusual or alarming noise. Shoulders drooping, she regarded her disheveled appearance in the wide wall-mounted mirror. She straightened the nightdress evenly on each shoulder, combed her fingers through her tangled hair, and used a soft cloth to wash the salty trails from her cheeks.

You have to believe that this isn't the end of happiness,
she thought to herself.
You can be happy. You can feel safe. You don't have to be afraid anymore. You already beat them once.

You almost lost
, a voice reminded her, the voice of doubt hiding in a small dark closet in the back of her mind.

But I didn't. I'm here. And I'm not alone.

Rolling those pale shoulders back to straighten her spine and lift her chin, she returned to her bed to sleep with confidence.

+++

20
^th
Unimont

Tyrane stretched his long neck to the right in an attempt to ease the ache of his head upon his shoulders. In the centuries of training the Protectresship Heirs in the art of harboring the Stormfly, he had heard described the sensation of a heavier head, an increased weight that caused physical suffering. He had always assumed this a figment of the imagination of young girls burdened with a destiny beyond their comprehension. He understood now that the Heirs spoke the truth. The weight brought with it invasive, physical pain.

The Goddess, the queen of the parasites, resided in his physical body. He accepted the role of carrying her forth in hopes of renewing the truce and saving the humans so long under his protection. Instead, she imprisoned his soul. He had little control of his limbs, only those menial functions beneath her capacity to understand or tolerate, such as voiding his bladder and consuming food. She controlled everything else. He and the other Prophets hid here, in this dark cave beneath the hills, waiting, collecting the other Stormflies, providing sustenance, housing the parasites within the human bodies they kidnapped from the bus route. He attempted to refuse the act of the abduction, but he had no control in the matter, nor did any of his subordinates. The Goddess enacted her plan without care for the humans she damaged.

Resistant moans emanated from the mouths of the unwilling. Without proper preparation, the installment of the creatures caused immense anguish. Adequate training ensured that a body could carry one of the creatures with little distress or damage, in the way the Protectress carried the creature for decades. They did not have time or opportunity to train enough bodies. Tyrane attempted to convince the Goddess of the importance of providing suitable hosts in order to prolong the supply of nourishment, but the Stormflies' hunger overruled any rational plan. They wanted to eat. They wanted vengeance on the people who imprisoned them. They wanted to finish what they started three centuries ago before the Prophets convinced them to stall.

Despite their prophetic titles, Tyrane and his followers could not anticipate the consequences of encountering the foreign life forms they eventually named the Stormflies. Their ship, destined for the north central portion of the continent, was steered toward the mountain range to explore as the crew sensed the strange population below.

What they found was an abandoned, ancient village carved into a peculiarly solitary, mountainous outcropping in the arid center of the continent. Similar to the cliff dwellings of the ancient Pueblo people on Old Earth, some past civilization utilized the security of this rock for shelter, using the enormous cleft to deter predators and protect them from the heat and weather. Once upon a time, hundreds dwelled in the hollowed caverns. These empty caverns were all that remained centuries later.

Tyrane could not help but recall that fateful first week. To this day, he still remembered the pained and startled faces of his dying comrades.

+++

Year 1

Miram was the first. She fainted while unloading supplies from the ship, right after she let escape a yowl. Upon examination the doctor noted capillary damage to her left eye, suggesting a blow to the head or even a ruptured aneurism. Otherwise, she appeared to be suffering from fatigue and malnourishment, peculiar symptoms considering she ate the same meals as everyone else and slept in the same camp. Suspecting a single-celled culprit—viral in this case—they created and injected a vaccine derived from her own blood, hoping to halt the infection and bring her back to health. Her death came suddenly in the night, no more than thirty-six hours after the first symptom appeared.

Tyrane sat vigil at his sister's side, willing himself to cure her with the solid power of his own mind. He'd done it before. He'd taught others to heal with purely psychic energy, mending broken bones, healing flesh. They relied less on medicine and more on using the doctor's mind in conjunction with the patient to accelerate natural healing. A certain natural propensity was required, but many had learned the technique so far, changing the practice of medicine as it was once known.

However, he could do nothing for Miram. He discovered too late the parasite entrenched within her brain with tendrils sucking every morsel of nutrition from her blood, robbing oxygen from her lungs, siphoning bioelectrical impulses directly to its core. Upon discovery, the entity removed itself, leaving the host with fatal, irreparable damage. It escaped the way it had come, tearing through the vitreous fluid of the left eye and flying away like a lone firefly. Miram gulped her last breath of air, and then lay eerily still.

His sister was his life. He had no wife or children, nor did she. Brother and sister were born on the generation ship and had lived their lives in pursuit of enlightenment and mastery in the mental arts, learning to use their mental powers to guide the future of their species. Together, they wanted nothing more than to be a part of the great adventure.

Her death left him with only that quest.

Within another thirty-six hours, five more contracted the ailment. Tyrane found the parasites, but even for these five, he was too late to save their lives. Diving into their minds, he fought battles with the glowing orbs and their snaking tendrils. They tore at his sanity. They battered his barriers. He even found physical marks upon his body, like bites, only appearing from the inside out. The creatures were vicious and territorial. And deadly.

The fifth patient, the fifth parasite, startled Tyrane when it spoke to him.

“Weaklings,” a voice berated. He sought an origin, but found the source came from within the dying man. “Your species makes for easy prey. How many came? Enough to sate our appetites for now.” It knew what he knew—or at least what someone had known. These creatures were not brainless parasites driven by instinct. They absorbed the knowledge of their hosts. They strategized and planned. This was a race of sentient beings like nothing they could have imagined. But these things were not the original dwellers of this rocky home. They traveled from another world in search of nourishment.