“I wish I could just go swimming with Kate again. Maybe one day I’ll be able to swim in the eternal waters of heaven with her. What do you guys think?” Ray asked.
“I think anything’s possible. I mean, Earth’s entire population was just threatened by aliens from another world. A week ago, anyone would have laughed at you and called the asylum just for suggesting such a thing was going to happen. Now I’m driving around Panama with three complete strangers in a snorkel van.” I made it sound like a joke, but it was one hundred percent true.
“I’m quite happy to see so few vehicles on the roads out here. I know this part of the country must be sparsely populated, but I wasn’t expecting this clear a path,” Mary said from the seat beside me. I glanced over at her, her brown hair in a ponytail. She had light bags under her eyes, and they did nothing to lessen her piercing eyes’ effect on me. I wondered if she’d relived that small kiss over and over in her head like I had. Since she hadn’t mentioned it, I doubted the impact on her. Still, she had initiated every touch of the hand, every tension-filled eye contact moment. So far apart from what I was used to. I remembered the moment when I’d met Janine and how I’d taken charge and a chance.
I reached across the console separating the two of us and took her hand in mine, giving it a light squeeze. She smiled at me with her eyes, and as I started to pull my hand away, she held it tight. My heart rate sped up and I could feel a bead of sweat drip down my back, and not just from the Caribbean heat.
“Hey, guys, we’re coming up to the Colombian border. That was faster than I expected,” Ray said from behind us. Mary opened her hand and I pulled mine loose. I smiled at her while keeping my eyes on the road.
“GPS is saying that we’re about an hour from the mountain range that we have to go around. I doubt the roads will be very accommodating. I think we’ll have to change out this thing, as much as I love the leg room, in favor of an all-terrain vehicle,” Mary said.
Colombia was going to be a bit of a challenge to navigate through. With mountains cutting through most of the country’s length, running north-south, we’d have to hit them from the top and follow the valley road on the east side of them. There weren’t going to be more than a few little villages along the way, but we knew things should be fairly quiet here. It felt more humid as we approached the border, and I was surprised by the amount of security here. There were gates at each section where the guards would presumably ask for documentation – or bribes, for all I knew. I didn’t know a lot about Colombia short of what the movies told me, and that amounted to some terrorized villages, cocaine factories, and bad guys with moustaches smoking huge cigars.
All of the gates were shut, and for a minute, I thought about pretending I was Arnold in one of those movies, crashing the gates down with the van while machine gun fire sprayed around me, narrowly missing me as the windshield caved in. Instead, I pulled up and we hopped out to check if it would slide open without a key.
“Ray, can you check on Vanessa? She hasn’t made a sound in quite a while,” I said while testing the first gate. It was locked.
“Guys! Something’s wrong here.” Ray was crouched over Vanessa in the back of the van. We hurried over and saw blood on the seat beside Vanessa’s head.
“‘Nessa, are you okay?” Mary asked, fingers on Vanessa’s wrist, checking for a pulse. She nodded and Ray hit the lever and leaned his seat forward, and we lifted Vanessa out, onto the ground outside, on the grass. Her chest was rising up and down.
“Get the water!” I called, and her eyes shot open, blood dripping from her mouth when she violently coughed. She coughed non-stop and rolled to her side. I knew this cough. I’d seen it too many times over that six-month period. I could tell from the looks on the others’ faces that they did too. Whatever Vanessa was, it was the same thing our significant others had been. From my estimation, that made her, at the very least, some sort of alien hybrid. Now that I was sure, I really hoped she was going to pull through so we could get her to tell us the truth.
We tried to get her sat up and against a tree when she seemed like she was going to stop the hacking. She hesitantly took the water bottle and sat catching her breath for a minute before taking a drink. She coughed halfway through her first guzzle and spit water on herself. Three minutes later, she had finished coughing and she leaned back, eyes closed, chest heaving slightly.
“Vanessa, we need to know the truth,” Mary said, crouching low to the ground. I had no idea how this was going to go down, and I felt thankful her gun was under the seat in the van; images of that man falling to the ground dead in front of me flashed in my mind.
FIFTEEN
Vanessa nodded slowly and started to talk. The sun was still high in the sky, beating down on us. I could smell the tropical plants mixed with seawater around me. Her words were so quiet at first, I had to lean closer to make them out.
“My husband died five months ago. Heart attack. He was only fifty but had some sort of hereditary condition that wasn’t picked up until it was too late. He was truly an amazing man. Olympic triathlete, long distance runner, and swimmer. He could swim any length in ice-cold water or run a marathon in the snow; I thought he was invincible, and when I was directed to meet him and make a relationship, it didn’t take much for my mission to become sloppy.” She took a pause and asked for more water. I got the bottle, noticing my hands were shaking from her story. I eagerly anticipated hearing the next part of the tale.
She took another drink and continued. “I think I fell for the guy. We were together for seven years, and they were good years. I knew there was an end date to it all, but I never thought it would end like it did.” Tears fell down her face. “We were born to come to Earth and recruit people to our cause. We knew they were coming to take over the planet, and we’d seen it done to others before you. It was up to us to stop them, without them even knowing it. We brought a fail-safe device a long time ago, and eventually, they would make it here to take your planet from you. The bastards had no care about another race. We started off as a conquered race, when they came. It took many years for them to almost see us as equals. Thousands of years. Eventually, we were trusted enough to have ships of our own, and one of the first things we did was head to livable planets to help them. Instead of just telling our spouses the true story and risking blowing the cover, we figured the best way was to find partners we could trust and leave them the information they needed to save your world.”
“Why didn’t you guys just find people in Peru or close by to make it faster and easier?” Ray asked, eyes wide.
“This world is poison to us. The closer to the equator we get, the worse we get. We basically have an expiration date, and the ring around the center of the world advances the decline of our limited lives. We really aren’t sure why, but it has something to do with the air and the planet’s energy. You all saw it with your other halves. They couldn’t survive, but we had hoped this event would happen while they were still around. We guessed wrong by about three years.”
“This is a lot to take in. Would you be okay if you headed back north?” I asked her.
“It’s too late. I’m in this and committed to see it through. I want to see every last human back on the planet, and my race will have helped one world.”
“So what’s next? What… are you?” Mary asked.
“We’re close to humanoid by your definition. This body is a mix of both DNA’s. By all physical observations, we appear fully human, but on a molecular level, we’re something else. We also have much different cognitive functions. We don’t taste well, and our eyesight is highly elevated over humans’. I was raised in a lab light years away and brought here with the others ten years ago.”