5 Minute Reads | Anthology

Spectrum by RickyPine

For the simple crime of not letting my body get snatched, they've turned my girlfriend against me.

When the Lumisi came, the military was uncharacteristically smart to put a tight lid on it. For "put a tight lid on it," read "capturing all the aliens' victims and locking them up, under the pretext that they would one day cure them of whatever parasite they were infected with."

Guess how well that worked. It didn't. Talk about impatient - not two days after they made their mass breakout, the cure was finally tested and found to be effective. But only because their chosen test subject was the last one in line to escape.

The Lumisi's human puppets are out there now. Meat suits hijacked by an alien queen from somewhere in space, spreading her pernicious infection to unsuspecting denizens of this planet.

One of them is Taylor Leonard. My Taylor. I promised I'd get her out of Wiseman before the Lumisi could take her. I failed.

My mission - and I choose to accept it - is to rectify that mistake.

I wish I could say I can do that alone, but I don't have the necessary skill set. I do have a skill - the only good thing the Lumisi invasion did for me - but it's not going to come in handy unless I can get into Wiseman again and track Taylor down. As far as necessary skills go, that's what the voice in my head is for.

"If there's still satellites taking feeds of the town," Spike says as I stalk down the sidewalk towards Taylor's place, "you'd think the army would just decide to end it all by dropping a MOAB on the place."

"Don't even kid about that," I whisper, using the "subvocalizing" technique I learned from reading a few good books by James Rollins. That way, nobody can hear me except Spike, through the ultra-sensitive mini-mike stuck directly to my neck, where my Adam's apple would be if I were a guy.

"I'm just saying-"

"This is my town we're talking about. Don't make me shove your own words back down your throat."

"Or up my ass," Spike snickers.

"Didn't know you were into that."

"I'm not, honey. But only for you."

I can't help but roll my eyes. Spike's endless flirting can get annoying after a while. He knows that we're destined to be just friends, and nothing more. But somewhere, subconsciously, he must think that if Taylor dies (God forbid), I might eventually have eyes for him too. It's not a possibility I'd rule out - I'm attracted to Y-chromosomes as well as double-X's. But right now, my heart only has room for Taylor.

I can't stay still very long, though. The main reason why Spike told me, time and time again, to not return to Wiseman has nothing to do with his hormonal nature. For once, it was his big brain, the one in his head, talking. He warned me that the Lumisi would recognize and remember my physical presence if they saw me again, and they would redouble their efforts to complete my transformation into an obedient superdrone.

However, my argument included a friendly reminder that I had the same ability to sense others with parasitic Lumisi cells in their DNA. Everyone in Wiseman has that power. It's how they really got their hooks into people - first, give them a taste of their hippie-dippy alien collective with the infection's waterborne first stage. People would not only start talking oh-so-reverently about a pantheon that almost sounded straight out of the pages of L. Ron Hubbard, but then they'd look at their neighbors as if for the first time, and feel all, "OMG free love at first sight! must b 1 w/every1!" Then, they'd use one well-placed plant to trick almost everyone (meaning, those without a nugget of doubt in their brains) into breathing in the chemicals containing the airborne final stage.