The Bond

                Lidia wearily stared out the ship's window. Her heart was heavy with sorrow. She was old enough, at twenty-five, to remember the world as it had once been. As she looked out at New York’s sky line her eyes burned with many tears. The landscape was marred with broken and jagged sky scrapers, structures that had once risen into the heavens as a testament of humanity's ingenious were now no more than warped tombstones commiserating what had once been.

              The setting sun cast the city in beautiful shades of oranges and ambers, the light reflecting harshly off the metallic ships that dotted the sky. The H.A.D.T. (human and alien disease team) tirelessly scoured the streets in hopes of finding any survivors.

              Lidia stepped away from the small porthole and curled up in a ball on her bunk bed mattress. It was all too much, too surreal. Her life had become the plot of some sci-fi movie, and subsequently horrific, in the blink of an eye. The rapid succession of world changing events left most people, like Lidia, in a state of shock. While she silently lay in bed, contorted into the fetal position, her mind kept reviewing the events that had irrevocably changed her life.

                                                  *******

         “Scientists are concerned over the recent fluctuations in temperature, and many environmentalists are claiming that this is the beginning of the end. The U.N. will be holding an emergency meeting tomorrow in-.”

         Lidia looked up at the television, her cereal half-way to her mouth, waiting for the newscaster to continue the broadcast. The image on the screen was frozen, causing Lidia to curse under her breath. The clock above the T.V. read six a.m., which meant she had a little over an hour to get to work. Coffee cup in hand, Lidia walked the short distance from the kitchen to the living room, and tried the television. The first image to appear was of the emergency broadcast system, accompanied by an annoying screech. Aggravated, Lidia tried another station, and then another. Each and every time she received the same result; the emergency broadcast. She stood stock still in the middle of her living room, remote controller in hand, coffee cup in the other, with her mouth hanging open. Her cat Mittens strode into the room rubbed against her ankles. She picked up the old feline and began stroking him out of habit, her mind racing all the while. She couldn’t remember a time in which ALL the stations ran the emergency broadcast at once. No, something big and bad was going on. She glanced out her living room window. The sun was shining high in a clear blue sky, crisp autumn leaves littered the pavement, and her neighbor Bob was walking his German shepherd Andy. It was business as usual. She sat on the couch and continued petting Mittens while looking out the window. She contemplated the morning’s peculiar events. Just as Bob stopped at the curb so Andy could do his business the usually placid animal let out a high-pitched howl, and his eyes exploded in a mist of blood. Mittens stiffened in Lidia’s lap and began shrieking. Instinctually Lidia tossed the animal onto the ground, where she suffered the same fate as Bob’s dog. Lidia gasped in shock and then ran out her front door to Bob. He was holding his dog in disbelief. “What the-.” He began but never finished.

            The sky darkened, as if night had decided not to wait its turn. Large baseball sized pellets of hail began raining down from the sky, shattering windshields and setting off car alarms. Lidia grabbed Bob's hand and the two of them sought refuge in Lidia’s foyer. They looked out at the nightmarish scene in utter silence, neither of them knowing what to say.

            Within an hour the hail stopped but the sky remained pitch black. None of the radio or television stations were broadcasting. They secured the house and placed Mittens in a heavy duty plastic bag on the back porch. The two of them sat at the kitchen table drinking tea and chain smoking. From their brief conversations with one another the only thing they concluded was that terrorists weren’t involved, mainly because they couldn’t control the weather. “May I use your bathroom?” Bob asked timidly. Lidia showed him the way, grateful for a few moments to be alone. She became lost in contemplation. When the wall clock chimed at noon she looked up at it with wide disbelieving eyes. Bob had been gone for over an hour.

            Lidia stood outside the bathroom door, hands shaking, calling Bob. For ten minutes she received only silence in response. Her heart pounding and palms sweating, she used a credit card to break in. The scene she met upon gaining entry was wholly unbelievable. Bob was dead, his torso ripped open, eyes glazed over and staring up at nothing. On the tile floor beside Bob laid a blood covered creature. It slightly resembled a human infant. It had two large blue eyes, a petite torso, four thin arms and a long thin tail. The creature squirmed slightly and sucked on one of its fingers. It was obvious the creature had burrowed its way out of Bob, resulting in his death.

              Despite the horrific scene Lidia couldn’t help but feel protective of the child. Fear, and an unexplainable desire to protect the baby, warred within her. When the baby began crying Lydia couldn't help but  wrap it in a towel and coddle it. Both Lydia and the baby drifted off to sleep sometime later.

            Several hours after the sky darkening Lydia sat on her front porch with the baby pressed against her chest, cooing and gurgling. She couldn’t explain how or why, but she just knew what the baby needed and wanted. The two of them were inexplicably bonded, and with each passing moment Lydia became increasingly connected to the alien. As they sat with one another the baby sent images to her, images of another world not entirely different than her own. If anything, the other world was a better one, full of prosperity and peace. But something had happened and the aliens were forced to seek refuge on Earth. The baby brought its tiny hand to Lydia’s cheek. The instant their skin touched Lydia was brought to another place and time, the scenes before her vivid and frightening.

              She was hovering in the blackness of space, a large blue planet rotating on its axis several hundred miles in front of her. The word for this planet silently came to her, Meelas. Suddenly, a much smaller planet came propelling towards it. The smaller planet, Daken, crashed into Meelas. Meelas had a force field around it though, so instead of the planets becoming obliterated they fused together, Daken sticking out of Meelas’s side like a tumor. The incident resulted in the destruction of Meelas’s eco-system. In order for the Meelan’s to survive they needed to relocate, and since Earth was the only life sustaining planet within reach they traveled for many months to get there.

            The Meelans had met with the U.N. in secret and had asked for refuge, but were turned down. Desperate, they pretended to leave but had really plotted a plan. Their technology was advanced far beyond humanity's.  Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and every major military base were destroyed during the morning. After assuring military action would be inhibited the Meelan’s had used sound technology to impregnate the males of the Earth with their spawn. The sound had been mute to human ears, but not animals, causing all felines and canines to perish. They had impregnated the men because like all infants the alien babies needed to be cared for, and after witnessing humanity's cruelty to their own species the Meelans feared that a swift extermination would have been suffered by their young. The Meelans had discovered that human women were susceptible to a hormone produced by the babies, a hormone that would bond them, and make the women love and protect the child at all costs. The baby’s hormone was a natural one used to bond them to the adults of their own kind, yet the species was close enough to humanity for it to seamlessly work on human females. If anything, it produced a stronger reaction in Earth women. The adult Meelans were dying, the bacteria of Earth wreaking havoc on their bodies, their only desire to continue their species bloodline. The spawn they had sent to Earth had altered DNA, assuring their survival in the new and foreign atmosphere.

                  Lydia pulled away from the baby, nearly dropping it. The communication was overwhelming and heart breaking. Images of Chicago in ruins, its sky permeating with thick purple debris left over from the alien’s bombs, made her sick to her stomach. Her family was dead. Her world as she knew it was gone. Yet her love for the baby was more powerful than any emotion that could be aroused in her. She retreated to the sanctuary of her home and went about fortifying it. Others would come and they would want revenge, and she was willing to die to protect her young. In memory of her mother Lydia named the child Mia.

                                                    *******

                They did indeed come. Seven days after the annihilation of over half the males of Earth militias formed, going from house to house to kill the intruders. Many women were killed protecting the aliens. Mobs went about setting fires to whole towns. Scientists went about studying the afflicted women, and after two weeks a cure of sorts was found, one that would block the hormone and give the bonded women free will. It was decreed that women of child bearing age were to be administered the cure by force. Many groups followed the decree, and many did not.

                Mia was half-grown by the time the militia came to Lydia’s town. The two of them had been playing the piano in the living room when they had heard the gun shots. Mia had been fearless, a look of acceptance on her face while Lydia frantically peered out of the windows in search of the assailants. Telepathically  Mia spoke to Lydia soothingly, telling her not to worry, it would all be alright.

              The militia consisted of over twenty men, all in the prime of their lives, and well armed. They had killed Mia easily, leaving Lydia in a hysterical state. They had bound Lydia and thrown her in the back of a caravan with three other grieving women.

         The smaller towns, like Lydia’s, had remained structurally intact. The damage in the urban areas was colossal. It looked like a scene from an eighties movie. Burned out buildings were covered in graffiti, gangs openly killed one another in the streets, and trash littered the ground. Cars had been left in awkward positions, their doors wide open. Lydia and the other women were too devastated to care, and stared out at the chaos with blank expressions.

         After several days of travel the militia arrived at a dock where several boats were in port. Lydia was sent to a different boat than the others. Immediately she was prodded and poked by doctors, and countless medications were forced upon her. Nobody ever spoke to her or revealed their purpose. She was locked away in her small room when they were finished. She never spoke either, and cared little of her fate. She mourned for Mia and the Earth every minute of every day.

                                                    *******

              Lidia couldn’t be certain of how long she had been imprisoned on the boat, but she suspected it had been for a little over a week. While she lay in her bunk bed, softly crying a soft knock came from the door. The handle turned and a small slightly balding man in military uniform entered. He looked at Lidia with an expression of hate, his faded gray eyes filled with cynicism and distaste.

         “Get up.” He gruffly commanded, his hands clasped behind his back. Lidia did as she was told, too numb to disagree. The man circled her slowly, his eyes never leaving her form.

         “You have an important choice to make today. You see, the ‘cure’, as the docs like to call it, ain’t a cure at all. Oh, hell, we thought it was. Turns out though it works for a little while, and then, BAM! You gals go right back to being obsessed with those damn aliens. The human race is on the brink of extinction. About seventy percent of the male population is dead, and over half the women who made it through the apocalypse are sterile, a nifty side effect of The Bond. But you're special gal, you are one of the lucky few. So we are prepared to offer you a deal. You agree to be bear three human children, and you will be placed in The Compound.”

         Lidia was obviously confused. The army man simply smiled knowingly, and took her by the hand, leading her off the boat and to a waiting car.

                                                  *******

         The Compound was a four hour drive from New York. It was a huge lot of land, well over two-thousand acres, and home to over six thousand women and alien babies. Large estates, farms, and common areas dotted the land. All the women Lidia observed were happy and in varying stages of pregnancy. Alien and human children played alongside one another, their contented mothers lingering nearby, glowing with happiness. The moment Lidia stepped foot in the compound she had agreed to the deal. Several hours later she was given a small cottage, a menial job on a farm, and a newborn alien to call her own. She was artificially inseminated a week later, and confirmed pregnant several weeks after that. Life was good and Lidia was as blissful as she’d ever been.

         The military had developed the compound out of desperation. Between the numbers of people killed by the attack, the number of people killed during civil discontent, and the amount of women made sterile, humanity was staring extinction in the eye. Civilians didn’t know about the compound, only higher up Military personnel were privy to the top secret project. The military had used advanced alien technology to cloak and put a force field around the compound’s perimeter.

         The women of the compound loved their alien and human children immensely. They didn’t forget the injustices they had suffered at the hands of the military though. The sorrow of losing their original children haunted them, but they walked around with a smile on their faces because they knew in the end they’d be the ones ruling the earth. Little did the military know that the ‘human’ children born weren’t exactly human. The sounds that had impregnated the men, and killed the animals, had also left its mark on women as well. But that was kept the compounds secret, and none knew it other than those who would take it to their grave.

                                                              *******

                                                        (One year later)

         Lidia sat by a babbling brook, her alien child climbing a nearby tree, and her ‘human’ baby nursing at her breast. She contemplated all that had come to pass, and all that was going to be. Once matured the children of the compound would release their full powers on the remaining men of Earth, exterminating them, and assuring eternal peace. The children born after the apocalypse would be able to produce a-sexually, allowing the continuation of the Meelan/Human bloodline. There would be no more discrimination, for all would be of the same race.

         A smile warmed Lidia’s face while she imagined the world as it’d soon be. She sang a song to her children in a language never before spoken on Earth. Her Meelan child came up behind her and stroked her hair, and her infant cooed with pleasure. The midday sun shone brightly, and peeked through the tree branches every so often. If you looked at the right angle, and at the right moment, just when the sun hit Lidia and her baby directly, you would swear their skin shimmered ever so slightly, and that their eyes glistened a strange violet color. But you’d swear it was the tricks of shadow or lighting, the result of tired eyes, or simply your imagination…but you’d be wrong.

         Lidia faltered momentarily while she sang, an odd sensation gnawing at the back of her mind. She dimly remembered her own mother singing to her when she was a child, the thought quickly followed by visions of Chicago’s demise, but before she could follow the thought through her child began stroking the side of her face, and she forgot what she had been worrying about. Everything will be alright, everything is alright. Protect the children, protect the bloodline, for soon there will be a New Earth filled with only peace.

         Lidia continued with the song, her heart once again at peace.  “Everything will be alright.” She said to her children, unsure as to why she said it at all. For the rest of the afternoon her child sat in her lap rubbing Lidia’s hands and stroking her face affectionately. Lidia was grateful to have such an affectionate and doting daughter….but every now and then; she couldn’t help but wonder, and then forget.



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