Jelly Cooper: Alien

That night I dream, but not of him alone.

I dream of a planet. People. War.

I dream of two species pitted against each other, the slaughter of masses, destruction of civilizations.

I dream of a mad, psychotic hunter than wants to find me and wrap his hands around my throat.

I dream of his pleasure when he squeezes the life out of me.

I dream about dying.

Before I wake, in the palest hours of the day, I dream of another.

“Run, Jelly, run.”

Tears stream down my cheeks, which is odd. I never cry.

“You can. Now RUN.”

I don’t react well to people giving me orders. I spin, trying to pinpoint where the voice is coming from.

“I WON’T,” I scream, thoroughly traumatised by a night of horror.

“Run, Jelly, run.” The voice is quiet, but insistent.

I slump to the ground, my hair hanging around my face, shielding me from whatever is out there. I close my eyes and, in the absence of ruby slippers, whisper, ‘wake up now, wake up now, wake up now.’

I peek from behind a curtain of copper hair and jump. There is a pair of sandal-clad feet on the ground right in front of me. Squinting against the yellow sky, I look up and see a man wearing a blanket.

Wait, make that a toga?

His eyes are green and locked onto my face.

Julius Caesar smiles and I click my fingers.

“You’re the voice in my dream telling me to run. My other dream, I mean.”

He nods, once. “I am Crin.”

Something else pops into my head. “How do you know my name?”

The corner of his mouth twitches. “I know many things about you, Kamile.”

I let the whole other name thing slide (the guy’s crazy – arguing about my name isn’t going to change that) and take the opportunity to get a good look at him.

He’s tall, I notice, easily over six foot, with dark brown skin as if he’s out in the sun all day every day; like an old cowboy. His hair is brown but I see grey poking out here and there. My mother would call it salt and pepper (I call it getting on a bit). His eyes are the deepest, brightest green I’ve ever seen and are a bit disconcerting.

I try to guess, but I can’t put an age on him.

He sees me staring and stares back; how annoying. I wish this dream would hurry up and end so that I can maybe get ten minutes sleep before school.

Toga man smiles a lopsided smile and says,

“The Hunter is coming, Kamile. He’s coming for you.”

Without warning, he grabs my shoulders and something passes between us. I see yellow skies and green clouds. I see a white city at the edge of a meadow of purple grass and strangely dressed people walking around. I see children in class, learning, I see parents working, I see friends laughing and then I see flames, destroying everything and everyone, and I hear the screaming.

I wrench myself free, feeling sick. He watches me with those green eyes and I want to hit him.

“It’s the death of Javoria, your home.”

I nod, once. It is.

“Go on.” I say through gritted teeth. Spit is squirting into the back of my mouth and I’m trying very hard not to be sick.

“Your name is Kamile Sakiiri and you are Javorian. There are two sentient species on Javoria: us and the bashrak. Forty seven years ago, under a new ruler, the bashrak decided that they wanted the planet. The whole planet. We fought them off for decades but they grew too strong. Everyone was dying, everything was dying, so we evacuated the planet. You were sent to Earth and placed with a family. One of the bashrack’s best Hunters has recently learned of your location. His mission is to find you and kill you. It’s the only purpose in his life. He won’t stop until it’s done.”

He touches the back of my hand with his finger and I see it all. Images of the planet appear in my mind; the battles, the victories, the defeats, thousands and thousands of infants being evacuated, being left with strangers. I see the bashrak pressing forward, hunting and slaughtering.

Oh my God.

They don’t hesitate; they just murder and destroy.

“I can’t fight him.”

When he touched me, sandal man exchanged more than pretty pictures.

He shakes his head, once. “No, you cannot.”

What am I supposed to do?

“You run,” he says.

Whoa horsy.

“How did you do that?” I whisper. “You read my mind. How did you do it?”

He shrugs. “Javorians are Telepaths.”

“Of course. Silly me.” Amidst the total insanity of this conversation, I have a thought. “Why haven’t I been reading people’s thoughts already if I’m Delorian?”

“Javorian,” he corrects with a frown. “It’s a skill you have to develop. If you had grown up on your home planet, you would be accomplished by now.”

I almost blurt out “Earth is my home planet.” I don’t know why I stop myself. Maybe it’s because he’s suddenly very sad; I can feel it.

“So,” I say instead, “how do I manage this mind boggling feat?”

“You focus.”

Silence.

“I focus? I focus. Of course, why didn’t I think of it before – it’s all so simple. I focus when I’m in class every day. I never know what the English teacher is about to say next, or what’s going on in Agatha’s head, or Humphrey’s.”

His voice is patient, but the impatience in his unsettling green eyes is hard to miss.

“Focus is the key to every one of your gifts. They haven’t developed because you were unaware. Now you are aware and they will develop. It is this simple.”

I screw up my face, forgetting that it makes me look like a field mouse. “I’m not really following this.”

He brushes away my concern with a flick of his hand. “When did you first dream of him?”

He knows about the dreams. I’m at once relieved beyond belief and terrified, because bit by bit this nightmare is becoming real to me.

“The night of my fourteenth birthday.”

Sandal man swears in front of me and I’m not talking about a minor, ruffle some old lady’s feathers kind of curse; this is a full blown, out and out, gutter curse.

“This is what we feared the most. Many graclings were sent from Javoria fourteen years ago, but your signal was stronger than the others.”

“Signal? I have a signal?”

He nods. “All living beings have a signal, Kamile. Each one is a little different and unique. Some can tune in to other people’s signals. It’s a skill the bashrak have. They knew that you had left the planet when your signal faded. They assigned a Hunter to track you down. He’s been looking for a long time, waiting all of these years, attuning himself to you, trying to pinpoint you. When you turned fourteen, it would have been like a telepathic beacon. He would have picked up on it immediately.”

His eyes slide away from mine.

“Come on,” I say, arms crossed. He’s hiding something. I know it. “Finish.”

He won’t look at me.

“Your signal must be stronger than we thought for the Hunter to pick it up so quickly. It will help him find you and he is desperate to find you.”

That’s just fabulous.

“Let me get this straight. The day I turned fourteen, I opened up a telepathic link between me and this Hunter psycho bloke which makes it that much easier for him to track me down and kill me? That’s fantastic, just fantastic.”

I kick the dusty ground between us. Whichever way I look at it, the outcome’s the same: I’m screwed. I round on him with a speed that surprises us both.

“How long have I got before he reaches me?”

The corners of his mouth turn down. “Not long. He will have narrowed in on the area. He hasn’t worked out who you are yet, but he’ll be watching for any signs.”

“Like?”

“Your powers will reveal you. Don’t use them in front of anyone.”

I grunt. “There’s no chance of that happening. For a start, I can’t read thoughts,” I tick them off my fingers one by one, “I have no other special powers and I run like a person standing in quick drying cement.”

He looks confused. “I don’t understand.”

“And I don’t understand how to use these ‘special powers’, so I guess we’re even.”

Slightly unfair comparison, I know, but I am highly emotional at this point and it can’t be helped.

He mutters to himself. After a while, he turns and with a small shrug says, “I had better teach you how to evade him, little one.”

Little one.

“Don’t call me that,” I whisper through lips too stiff to work properly. “Don’t ever call me that.”

“Why not?” He whispers.

“He calls me that in my dream. He calls me that and then drops me into the canyon.”

The cry of rage that erupts from his mouth happens so suddenly and with such ferocity that I jump back. The emotion pouring off the guy is insanely intense. Images flash in and out of my head so quickly that I can’t make any sense of them.

Except for one.

In the vision, he stands over a small baby and strokes her cheek with the side of his finger. ‘Sleep tight, little one’.

Oh shit.

You know when you hear something or see something that you really wish you hadn’t because your life was much less complicated before you witnessed whatever you witnessed? Yeah, that.

I’m looking at my father. My biological father.

I can’t deal with this. Not now. I push the revelation to the very back of my mind and with sheer, blind, panic-driven determination, ignore it.

Cue one almighty breakdown in the future.

If I have a future.

My life sucks.

“He’s extracting it from your memory.”

He’s looking at me and I struggle to look back.

“How’s that again?”

“I used to call you little one. He’s retrieved this information from your memory during your dreams and using it to provoke me.”

“I don’t remember you,” I whisper.

Sandal man allows himself the smallest of smiles. “Not while you’re awake.”

I shake my head. “Oh man, Agatha is going to love this.”

His fingers clamp onto my upper arms.

“Don’t tell them, Kamile. I mean it. He’ll murder every one of your friends.”

He looks at me for a long time and my head feels spongy.

“Don’t tell them.” He insists. “You’ll regret it for the rest of your life. Trust me.”

“Don’t read my mind,” I whisper. “I don’t like it.”

His hands fall away and he puts some distance between us. He’s so angry and desperate that he’s choking on it and the weird thing is that I sense it so clearly. I can read every one of his emotions. He wants to say more, but pulls back and switches focus.

Wow. Did I just read his thoughts?

He smiles.

“Almost, Kamile. You got a blurred, muffled version; more like intuition than mind reading. Telepathy is one of the skills that cannot be taught. Once aware of the power, it will develop unaided. You simply have to will it.”

Hmmm. Maybe if I will it real hard, Luke Jenson will feel an overwhelming urge to remove his shirt whenever he sees me.

“Okay, I’ll give it a shot when I get back to Kansas.”

He frowns. “You don’t live in Kansas.”

Nobody ever gets my Wizard of Oz references.

“Never mind that. What about running away? I hope that’s as easy as reading minds.”

This time, the hand on my arm is gentle.

“Believe me. You have the potential to run faster than any of the people at your Earth school, Kamile,” he smiles, “including the boys. But it takes time and practice.”

He sounds certain, but I doubt he’d be so confident if he saw me run.

“That’s why I’m here. I have many things to teach you, but the priority is to teach you how to pre-empt attack and then how to get away. He’ll be coming for you soon.”

I shiver and try to push all thoughts of capture and torture to the back of my mind. It’s a tough cookie to crack. As I struggle with the cookie, I have a thought.

“How do you know it’s a him and not her?”

He tried not to laugh and shakes his head.

“The Hunters will not take the female form. All of the bashrak Hunters are born male and find it impossible to deceive effectively as a woman. To understand the form and character of a woman is simply beyond their comprehension.”

Hang on one cotton-picking minute.

“What do you mean ‘assume the form of’?”

Sandal man looks at me like I’m the village idiot or something.

“The Hunters aren’t human, Kamile, or Javorian. They are not close. They need to transmute into human form to live on Earth without suspicion.”

I choke. “You’re saying that they change shape, like Mystique in X-men?”

He nods, though looks a little mystified. X-men obviously wasn’t a box office smash back on planet insano.

“Wow.”

“Yes. It’s hard to see them, to really see them, which gives them an advantage. But all bashrak emit a force that you should be able to feel. It takes masses of energy to appear human and to keep the shape and sometimes, Javorian’s can pick up their energy pulse. Have you felt strange recently? Dizzy, weak, displaced?

“Displaced? I don’t even know what that means!”

“Dislocated; like you’ve moved sideways but the world has stayed in the same place.”

His words go ping, ping, ping in my head like a slot machine hitting the payload.

“Yes! Yes, I’ve felt like that for the last couple of months, but lately, it’s been bad. Some really weird things have happened.”

Sandal man shakes his head.

“No, that’s different. That’s down to your powers. Nothing happens when you pick up on the pulse, other than that you feel…odd. Like,…like…oh, I don’t know how to explain it!”

“Do things squirm in your belly?”

He looks at me closely. “No, that is not exactly the feeling, but why do you say it?”

I shrug, feeling a bit silly. “There’s a new teacher at school and when I see him I feel…wrong. It’s like I’m afraid of heights and out on a window ledge.” I raise my hands. “That’s not much of a description either!”

“It’s not what we normally feel, but you should stay away from this man. The bashrak could have evolved or found a way to change the signal. It could be him. I can’t think of another reason for his effect on you.”

“How can I stay away from him? He’s a teacher at my school.”

His mouth drops open and he runs a hand into his hair.

“You can’t go back to school, Kamile. Everything’s changed, don’t you understand? I’ll teach you all I can in the time we have left but it won’t be enough. When you wake, you have to convince your parents to leave Seabrook. Put some belongings in the car and drive until you can’t go any further. I’ll come to you when I can.”

“You’re off your head.”

“HE’S COMING TO KILL YOU, YOU LITTLE IDIOT!”

He roars at me and the shock of it is like a punch in the face. He swallows and says, quietly,

“He’s coming to kill you and he will unless you get away and stay ahead of him. I can’t teach you enough in one session to defeat an animal that has been hunting and murdering its whole life. It’s a soldier, Kamile, a soldier that has been programmed with one order: to find you and end your life. You’re fourteen years old and this isn’t fair, but this isn’t a dream and it isn’t a game. You have to face up to the danger you are in and you have to think about surviving. It’s the only thing that matters anymore.”

I turn and walk away. He shouts after me, but I don’t stop.