Corruption

Alien Pandemic

  Anora found herself unable to aim the gun at her husband, who had been turned against her. She dropped it to the ground. Out of all the ways she imagined finding Nelson, it was not like this. They had messed him up! She was in tears. "Please..." she whimpered, "...you..please stop..." she begged. His expression was serious, unwavering. It was all she could do to try to beg him to come back and stop all of this. She prayed he would fight whatever hold Miranda had over him. "Please..you don't have to do this.. just come back.." she pleaded. She knew him. Though he had changed, through her tears she could see doubt in his eyes. He could have killed her by now if he'd committed to it. She didn't know what she has to say to convince him. He seemed hurt, as if he'd gone through allot of pain, even at this moment. "Y-you..." he muttered, "That.. is.. that couldn't be someone else's?" From the way he was looking at her belly, her suspicions were confirmed. Miranda had somehow faked the pregnancy test. Why had she gone so far to screw them over??? But maybe if he knew the baby was actually his...
      "Nelson wait..!" She gasped, struggling to think of the right words that might convince him, "You don't understand, this isn't what you think! This is y.." she didn't have a chance to finish. He had apparently reached his breaking point, and kneed her unbelievably painfully in the stomach, causing her to throw up. Is this really how I'm going to die...? She thought, giving up. She couldn't breathe. She gave up. She went unconscious, unable any longer to face the unforgiving reality of what was happening.
*******
She woke up in a bed, bright white lights surrounding her. She squinted her eyes, trying to focus. Am I dead? Is this.. heaven? After a moment, she realized she was in a hospital bed, and those bright lights were the ceiling lights directly above her. Much to her surprise, a familiar face stood over her, monitoring her progress. "I'm glad you made it, Anora," Cherry said. "Cherry??" Anora gasped, "Am I dead?" "No," Cherry replied, "I'll explain everything to you shortly. Allot of people died and me and James weren't able to save as many as we'd hoped. And there's also a couple of other... problems.." "Other problems?" Anora struggled to remember what happened. She looked around wearily.
It was your typical hospital room, nothing particularly special about it, and Samuel, Jasmine, and Henry were sitting in chairs beside her bed. Jasmine had a cast on, and Henry had a robotic arm like Samuel did. Anora had a bunch of tubes going through her. Then she remembered. "Anora,"Cherry said reluctantly, "First things first... your unborn child..." Anora froze. Her heartbeat began to race. "Didn't make it..." She told her sadly, "Sometimes, when the mother gets injured, the fetus will assist the body with trying to repair itself.. the doctor can explain it better.. but you were close to dying, and the fetus was already damaged, and it gave the rest of its cells... to save you.." Anora gulped. "I'm so sorry... the doctor didn't have it in her to tell you.." Anora had a hard time concentrating. This couldn't be real. There's no way this was real. "Also.. unfortunately..." Cherry frowned intensely, clearly not wishing to continue with whatever she was about to say. "Also.. Paul, Kelly, Tyler, Arthur and Mary.. the kids.. are dead.." Anora noticed Samuel sniffle at the news. Jasmine comforted him as best she could with her free arm, as the other one was in a cast. "You did save Jasmine from bleeding out though," Cherry said, "We just had to give her some donor blood. But that leaves us with one more problem.." One more? Anora thought miserably. What else could there possibly be?
"You remember that meteor right? Well, we have reason to believe it was carrying a disease on it, one we've never even dreamed of having to deal with. I'm not entirely sure, but I think I know how it operates." "It looks like it's a disease that makes you slowly forget things," Henry said, "I know it doesn't sound that bad, but it gets worse. It attacks the hippocampus first, and it ends up deteriorating your brain, causing you to forget literally everything, until you die from forgetting how to breathe. Debris from the meteor, when we blew it up, contaminated the lakes and pretty much traveled through out the whole ocean, so all we have is the water processed before the asteroid impact." "What happened..?" Was all Anora managed to say. For her, at the moment, all of this was too much to take in. She just sort of shut down emotionally. "Long story short," Cherry said, "Miranda basically threatened me and scared me into making you believe that I was the alien spying on you all, to get any suspicion off of her. My running away also I believe sparred my life from her. James caught wind of what I had to do, and well.. we were sort of dating so he insisted he come along with me. We left the country and took refuge at the EED in Toronto, Canada. We were going to start a new life there but we just felt bad. We didn't tell anyone that we knew Miranda was the alien for a long time because we kinda wanted out to be honest. But we started seeing all kinds of crazy stuff on the news, and when a UFO literally popped up in the middle of the street in Hawaii, we knew things had probably gotten out of hand. We couldn't find you there, but we managed to figure out you came to Florida because we saw Miranda on the news again in front of that whole crowd and we knew you all would be somewhere nearby. By the time we got there, you and Jasmine were in critical condition, Estavon and Javen were unconscious, Samuel was barely conscious, Henry was bleeding out of his arm and everyone else was dead... I'm sorry we couldn't get there sooner.." "Shortly after we started recovering," Samuel said, "We started seeing all these reports of people suffocating to death randomly, but only in this area, and it started to spread, not too dissimilar from a disease. We figured the aliens had something to do with it so we started investigating. Estavon and Javen are out doing just that right now." Anora frowned. This could not be ANY worse, she thought. She wanted to cry but her eyes were dry. Anger and frustration and hatred towards Miranda began to swell up inside her. "So..." Anora said quietly, "This is all Miranda's fault." Cherry crossed her arms. "More or less," she said. "No," Anora said, "It's HER fault. I've been thinking. She lied about me being pregnant, she managed to fake the pregnancy test. I kind of had a feeling but I didn't know for sure until the end.. but I noticed I had started to feel weird and different.. that night when Miranda got the recording. Right after she gave me some tums for my stomach pain." "You think she gave you some sort of drug disguised as tums to make you act out of character?" Cherry immediately caught on. "I know she did," Anora said. "She was too involved. I knew something was up. Kelly had wanted me to trust her, to give her a chance. She had us right where she wanted us.." "You're saying she set that whole... situation up??" Samuel asked, "That's... I don't know.. that's.." "That's some that snake ass bitch would do," Anora scowled. "She's a fucking alien! Who knows what kinda shit they can pull off." Samuel stared at the ground, clearly having a hard time with his thoughts. "I don't care what I have to do," Anora said, shaking in anger. "She's taken everything away from me. I'm going to kill her. I'll find a way." She felt she had taken everything she had ever loved away from her; now that she knew she was an alien, that meant she was at least indirectly responsible for her brother's Charles' death, turning her husband against her, destroying her dream wedding, destroying Cincinnati Ohio where she'd started a comfortable life, just to name a few. She was the reason her life was hell right now. But she would make her pay. She didn't care what she had to do. She was getting her revenge. "What exactly did she do to Nelson?" "I'm not really sure," Anora said sadly, "They have him doped up on some alien shit. They're using him for something. I don't get why they couldn't have chosen anyone other than MY husband. I kinda got the impression she had a crush on him, way back before she kidnapped him, but I watched him tell her he wasn't interested." "Do you think she's doing this to spite you because of that?" Jasmine asked thoughtfully. "Turning him into a murderer is a little extreme if you ask me," Samuel commented. "I don't know," Cherry said, "But we should try to figure out how to stop this disease. There's no cure, everyone is panicking and it's impossible to tell if you have it until it's eaten away at a decent part of your hippocampus. I guess on the bright side, it's not too horrible since it can't be spread from person to person as far as we know, you have to drink contaminated water, which is any way made within the last month. "Are you saying I've been out for a while month!?" Anora gaped. "Yes," Cherry said, "You had internal bleeding and we had to deal with... you know.. the fetus.. and you also had a lot of mental trauma liking effecting your body as well." Anora grimaced. "I need to start training again," she said. "You May, as soon as you've recovered," Cherry said, "You've just only regained consciousness for longer than a few seconds. You stomach shouldn't take much longer to heal. Anora looked down under the white sheets at the scar where they had to remove the fetus, and sew it back up. She felt herself tear up. Never again, She told herself, Never a-fucking-gain.
                                 ******
      She was bedridden for another week before the doctors felt safe letting her up to train. They were in the EED base hidden in Florida. It was essentially a series of underground caves with rooms built into them. She didn't waste any time. She didn't feel strong enough. She practiced honing all of her weaknesses; close quarters combat, specifically. She also honed her sniping abilities, which were already second to none. She already own the best sniper anywhere in the EED, but she wished she had something that could penetrate those extraterrestrial force fields. She could've killed Miranda otherwise. She wanted Nelson to come to his senses one day. She hoped that Miranda's death would help. She became less friendly than she was used to, and quite a bit more colder. She didn't want to be nice and make friends. She wanted Miranda dead, no matter the cost. The was all that mattered, all her life would revolve around now. Being kind could prove to be a nuisance in certain situations. She had to have no mercy. She was done feeling weak.
             Her training went on like this for another two weeks, until Estavon and Javen returned with a familiar face. She believed his name was Eugene. Henry immediately recognized him. "Eugene? You made it!" Eugene seemed a bit confused at Henry's enthusiasm. She was in the training room, and she had noticed them walking by. She joined them to listen in on the conversation. "You're never gonna believe what happened mane!!" Javen exclaimed once everyone had gathered around them to hear their report, a couple of rooms over in a wide open area, where all of the vehicles were kept. "Go ahead and tell us then," Samuel said, then noticing Anora joining them, he commented, "Wow it's been awhile Anora. Can't believe you actually came out of that training room." She didn't bother to reply. They were wasting time with small chat. "Anyways," Javen said, "We was just chilling right? Hadn't really found shit out there, just chilling eating on some good food, ain't nothing like a good cheeseburger and shit wit some fries.. but anyways. Mane I get up to get some salt, turn around and one of them little gray alien things was behind me just staring at me. Right in the middle of the restaurant. Everyone else was like under some kinda trance or something, like Estavon don't even remember what I'm talking about. So of course I'm startled mane. I'm like 'ahhh!' I drop the salt in my hand. It fall in the ground and buss open, and some salt get on its little gray toes. Tell me why that shit start burning that dude toes off!" "Wait are you saying their bodies or weak to salt?" Henry asked, fascinated. "That's certainly the last thing I would have expected. Why don't we try throwing condiments at the next alien we see?" They all chuckled a bit at that, except for Anora, who was debating on whether or not that gray alien might have the means to locate Miranda. Sure they were two different species of alien, but they can both travel interstellar distances, which Anora could not do alone. Eugene also seemed confused, like he didn't quite understand why anyone was laughing.
           Anora coldly interjected, "Where's it at? I need to ask it some questions." They seemed surprised at her tone of voice. "That's the thing, dude," Estavon said. "When I snapped out of my 'trance' or whatever, the little fucker was gone." "Yeah it ran off mane," Javen confirmed. "While we were searching for it, we ran across Eugene, recognized him, and brought him here." "The way you describe it makes it sound as if the gray wanted to speak to you directly," Cherry said. "Also, why were you out there, Eugene?" "More importantly," Javen added, "Why was that gray alien's toes out?" "Damn good question," Jasmine agreed amusedly. "I had just gotten released from the hospital," Eugene replied, "Dylan didn't answer... so I um. I started looking for something? Or something like that. And then.. I'm not too sure. Then you two showed up." Samuel frowned. "I'm in charge now," he told Eugene, "And Dylan is dead, rest his soul. But you know that doesn't make much sense?" "What restaurant?" Anora asked impatiently. "Uh I wanna say it was a Wendy's, the one right next to here," Javen seemed to have more to say, but Anora was already leaving. Even if that little shit can't help me at all, she thought, I'll at least kill it. One less alien to worry about. She also had a feeling it at least knew something about this disease.