IXUS

Chapter 1

A/N: So there's a picture of the main character, Dirk, on the side.

Chapter 1

Present

“Dirk! In here,” Rye whispers loudly. I turn my head to his direction and saw that he has unlocked the combination of the door. I follow after him and looked around. It’s the control room. After ten treacherous minutes of searching and sneaking around in the building, we finally found it.

Rye scans the controls. Frankly, I don’t understand any of it but he seems to know what he’s doing. He’s been preparing for this his whole life and we’ve been doing this from time to time now when we find one of the Ixus’s headquarters.

After a while, Rye starts punching buttons and finally, I hear the familiar sound of self destruction. I smile and pat Rye in the back. We run quickly, hiding and ducking and when we can’t find a hiding place, we shoot the Ixus.

If they were human, I might’ve felt guilty for killing them. But they’re not and they killed my parents and Vera. I’m doing this for them and the rest of the humans, whom they kidnapped, tortured and killed.

Suddenly, a bunch of them caught up with us and they’re heavily armed. I grab Rye’s arm and drag him inside a room.

“Hide,” I hissed and we went our separate ways. As I was running to find a hiding spot inside this big room. I noticed that this was were they put the Halflings. The Halflings are the children of the Ixus. They mate with every female human they capture and it only takes the female human one day to conceive them instead of nine months and then they’re born. They keep the Halflings in this container that is made of water so it looks like a big water ball. They made the female humans their personal baby giving machine. They usually die afterwards because they couldn’t handle it. I hate the fact that Vera had to go through this.

The Halflings were all lying limp on the ground. Despite the fact that they were only conceived for one day, they still needed to be kept inside the water ball for five years until they reach the age twenty-one physically in human years.

Some of the Halflings in the ground look like they’re around twelve year olds in human years. They must be one and a half in Ixus years. I crouched down and hid behind one of the control machines that is used to preserve the Halflings.

I heard the Ixus running and talking in their strange language. Soon they retreated away, thinking that we outsmarted them again. Which, in a few moments, we did.

When the coast was clear, I stood up and called for Rye when I saw a silhouette stumbling in the far end of the room. I thought it was Rye so I walked towards it slowly. I quickly raise my gun when I noticed that this was a girl. Her face was covered by her thick veil of dark hair. Her skin was so sickly pale and she’s coated in slime and she’s naked. She’s a Halfling.

But she’s supposed to be dead.

“Who are you?!” I ask it. She raised her head slightly and my eyes widened. I lowered my gun slowly. I know her.

“Dirk!” I heard Rye call for me. I quickly erase the thought I was having and raise my gun to shoot this Halfling. I counted to three. She was looking at me with big eyes. I knew she wasn’t Vera because Vera had dark eyes, this one, like the rest of the Halflings, has pale icy gray. I was about to shoot it when Rye caught up with me. “Dirk, we need to go…”

His eyes move from me to her. Then his eyes widened. Vera had taken care of Rye as well when we were younger. He was the youngest among all of us and he always preferred the company of Vera rather than his very own sisters.