NOVEL NEXT The Cambion
Chapter 7: The Cambion
Quinn briefly flashed a look of confusion at me, which immediately changed to bottomless fear when he realized what I’d said. He nodded up at me, then sprinted inside the house as quickly as he could. The backyard was empty, and there was nobody to help me. My heart was racing, and I could taste the bitter venom in my mouth.
I scuttled across the roof to look over the front entrance. Carefully leaning over the edge so that only my eyes were visible, I looked down on the walkway. The bald man with the bodysuit was standing at the door… talking. Someone, probably Miri’s aunt, had opened the door to talk to him, and from what I could see, they were just chatting like neighbors. Part of me wanted to shout out that he couldn’t be trusted, and I had to wrestle that part of me to the ground and remind her that if any of the spectrademons found out where I was, I’d get shot in a second.
As I looked down on the scene, I glanced around, trying to figure out how many spectrademons were present. Their disguises were too good; while I could barely discern the shimmering in the air if I focused intently, the shimmering wasn’t distinct enough to tell me anything beyond “there are spectrademons there”.
The man in the bodysuit stepped into Miri’s house, letting the door slip closed behind him. I had to cover my mouth to stop from screaming at whoever had let him in. The door suddenly stopped moving, not quite closed but not open. I had a flashback to the attack on my house, the image of the spectrademons’ freakishly long arms flashing into my head. Slowly but surely, the spectrademon pushed the door open, so slowly as to make it completely quiet. I could imagine its hunched-over form having to squeeze through the door like a rat squeezing through a crack.
Once it was through, the door started to slip closed… only to be stopped and opened once again. Whoever the man in the bodysuit was, he had an entire retinue of those monsters. I had to do something, or else Miri’s family wouldn’t stand a chance. Thinking quickly compared to my usual, I tore a ceramic tile out of the roof next to me and gripped it in all four arms.
The door started closing for the third time. I looked around and couldn’t see any shimmers. Then the door stopped in midair, and I took my chance, hurling the roof tile down with all of my strength. If pedantic jerks making fun of the Home Alone movies had taught me anything, it’s that a chunk of rock thrown from the upper floors of a building was a lethal weapon.
The brick hit home, shattering into a thousand pieces on what was, indeed, the hunched neck of a spectrademon. A lot of things happened at once about a quarter of a second later.
The first was that the spectrademon de-cloaked, the shimmer growing larger and more distinct until I had the displeasure of having to look at one of those misshapen things again. It didn’t get more pleasant on the second viewing. The second thing was that it looked up, searching for me with its piggish yellow eyes. Those things are like spotlights; it’s terrifying. The third thing that happened was someone started screaming from inside the house. At first the scream was one of terror and confusion, but a second later it abruptly turned into a scream of utter agony.
The spectrademon below me started to say something in a guttural language I didn’t understand, but before he could finish, I’d pried out another tile and hurled it down. My aim was, of course, impeccable, crashing down on the spectrademon’s deformed skull. Two bricks to the head was too much for the killing machine, and it slumped down, dead or unconscious.
Just a moment later, another spectrademon pulled its way through the door, walking partially on its elongated arms like a gorilla. I ducked back behind the edge of the roof, not wanting to be seen by the reinforcements. The rifle that the second spectrademon was carrying, a faintly familiar device that looked like a six-foot-long piece of stretched taffy, did not make me want to try fighting.
There were a few petrifying moments where I wasn’t sure if the spectrademon had seen me; its widely-spaced eyes could very well have caught me even with its attention on the dead spectrademon. It said a short phrase in that same unpleasant language, then fell silent. I strained my ears and my antennae for any sign that it had found me, but it must have either gone back inside or taken up a silent guard in front of the door. Either way, I was too busy panicking to check.
The facts were simple: my friends were under attack by at least two spectrademons and a weird guy in a gray bodysuit. Miri might have had a black belt, and Quinn could kick more ass than I’d ever seen, but I doubted a bunch of aliens with guns were going to be stopped that easily. I had only been able to take one of them out because I was attacking from surprise and attacking a weak point. Worse, now that I was all chitinous and many-limbed, there would be no way of hiding that I was the Emissary they were looking for. Whatever an “Emissary” is.
So, skittering back to the center of the roof, I prepared a plan of attack. Or at least I would have, if I could come up with a plan that held up to more than five seconds of scrutiny. So instead of doing anything, I huddled down and let the plans run through my head, while listening for any signs of what was happening below. I heard muffled noises, shouts, things being knocked over, and if I strained I could hear some electrical sound, similar to the laser guns I had encountered before but also distinctly different. I wanted to run out there and fight back, I wanted to help my friends, but fear of death and pain paralyzed me. My friends wouldn’t have wanted me to throw away my life for them… would they?
The sounds of chaos from below me slowly settled into quiet. For a moment I wondered if they had actually managed to escape somehow… I leaned out over the edge of the roof over the backyard, until two spectrademons shattered the back door of the house, lumbering through. One spectrademon was holding Miri in its hands, and the other was holding Quinn. A few moments later, the man in the bodysuit followed them out.
The way he moved was wrong. It wasn’t the lumbering awkwardness of the spectrademons, and in fact it was the opposite; his every motion was perfectly smooth and measured, giving off an impression of inhuman agility. He turned around, and I ducked out of sight, but not before I saw that he had taken off the sunglasses. I understood instantly why he’d put them on; his eyes were made out of some kind of metal or plastic, and appeared to be a solid red, no pupil or iris in sight. He carried a pistol in one hand and a knife in the other, just like Stephanie.
He moved out to the center of the yard while I hid behind a chimney. Turning around in a full circle, he announced, “We know you’re out there, Emissary.” His voice was disturbingly unremarkable, like someone you might overhear in the grocery store. “Your friends may not have told us where you are, but if you had left then they would clearly have run. Give yourself over to us, and we will allow them to live.”
Oh shit. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. He was pulling the favorite technique of every cheesy villain, and now I had to make a choice. Did I come out and let him kill me, or did I stay hidden and let him kill my friends. Of course, if he killed my friends then he wouldn’t have any leverage over me, so he would have no way to get me to reveal myself anyway, and then he would have killed two people for nothing. I stayed hidden.
“One of them just glanced up to the roof,” said the man in the bodysuit. “Which means we now know where it is. Blast it.”
Before the spectrademons even had a chance to open fire, I was already dashing across the roof. In a panic, I fell right off the edge, my wings fluttering until I landed painlessly on the grass of the back lawn. I made a break for the fence while the spectrademons pulled out their little carbines, blasting chunks of earth and plaster from the objects around me. I made use of my wings, jumping awkwardly to make it harder to guess where I’d be and shoot me.
I might have actually made it out if it weren’t for the human-looking guy. The moment I touched the ground, he broke into a sprint in my direction. His limbs moved fast enough that they turned into a blur as he shot towards me. He must have been going faster than a galloping horse, because within two second he had leaped at my back, slamming into me like a flying spear and bearing me to the ground. The concrete rose up to hit me in the face, sending my skull ringing, and I was sure I’d broken my elytra with how hard he hit me.
For a second, the whole world was a dark blur with my face pressed against the ground. I forgot about the people trying to kill me, I forgot about my friends being in mortal danger, I even forgot about having turned into an insect for no clear reason. All in all, being nearly knocked unconscious was nice. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and the man in the bodysuit did it by yanking me off the ground by my neck.
Spinning me around by my shoulder, he looked straight into my eyes with those red orbs. “Do you even know who I am?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Jogging enthusiast? Maybe a Russian gangster?”
“I am a cambion,” the cambion said with a sneer, “an elite warrior of the Order of the Pale Star. I have ascended beyond the limitations of human flesh to become a perfect killing machine. You, meanwhile, are a member of a weak and degenerate species, fit only as target practice.”
“Cool,” I said. “I don’t know what any of that means.”
The cambion forced me onto my knees, hard enough to hurt, and he did it with only one arm. “It means that I am going to kill you,” he said with a wide grin. He turned to the bag slung over his shoulder, still holding onto me with a viselike grip, and produced a long black-bladed knife. His eyes went wide with glee as he activated the blade, sending a trail of sparks trickling into the grass.
“I am going to enjoy watching you bleed, girl,” he said, raising the knife to strike.
I didn’t feel like correcting him on the “girl” part. Instead I just spat a stream of grey saliva into his face.
“What the… you would dare to spit in the face of your superior?” The cambion wiped some of the spit off of his face, only for his expression to fall as he noticed the unusual color and realized what that meant for his odds of survival.
“Oh hell…”
Once again, several things happened at once. The first was that, suddenly panicking, the cambion started ruffling through his pack, desperately looking for something. He let go of my shoulder, stumbling back away from me.
At the same time, Miri took the opportunity to escape, wriggling out of the spectrademon’s grip and making a break for it. She didn’t make it more than twenty feet before the spectrademon had drawn the strange, elongated rifle from its shoulder and fired. A weird distortion zipped through the air and encompassed Miri, and her whole body went rigid as she screamed and screamed, a scream of pure and utter agony. Writhing in pain, she fell to the ground, totally unable to do anything but scream.
Something snapped inside me, seeing my girlfriend in that state. “You bastard!” I shouted, leaping forward into the cambion. My jaws found his shoulder and bit down with all of their might, while at the same time I grabbed him by the wrists, two arms against four. We grappled back and forth, me nearly on top of him, screaming and swearing and scratching and biting.
Quinn still had a spectrademon’s hand holding onto his neck, but that didn’t stop him. He spun around, neck still being held on to, then jabbed his outstretched thumb into its beady yellow eye until it bled. Letting out a guttural roar of pain, the spectrademon let go of Quinn and started to reach for something at its harness. Quinn, thinking quickly, punched it in the throat, stunning it for long enough that he was able to grab at the spectrademon’s harness himself.
Eventually, using three of my hands in conjunction, I was able to rip open the cambion’s grip and pull the knife from his hand. I was running on pure instinct and rage, and plunged the knife right into his collarbone, passing through it like it was nothing. He gasped for breath once, twice, then stumbled and collapsed. If I’d been able to, I’d probably have hit the ground running and charged the spectrademon that hurt Miri knife-first. As it was, the cambion landed on my right arms, and he was heavier than he looked.
Quinn knew how to fight, or he was just really lucky, I can’t tell, because he figured out how to turn on the long knife that he stole from the spectrademon, and carved the thing to pieces, though not before it gave him a black eye. Side note: spectrademons bleed something white and viscous, which is uncomfortable on a whole bunch of levels.
Worse was Miri’s situation. The spectrademon that had shot her with that… weird rifle didn’t feel like killing her with the other, smaller gun. Instead, it pulled a knife, and with long strides of its elephantine mechanical legs prepared to make the kill. By the time Quinn had dealt with his captor, it was already over her, foot planted on her chest, knife raised to make the kill.
I screamed, a high and totally inhuman shriek, finally yanking my arms loose from under the dead cambion. Even free, there was no way I could get to the spectrademon before it lowered the knife; and all that assumed that Miri wasn’t already dying from whatever weapon it had shot her with. Even under its weight, she was still thrashing and whimpering, and for the briefest moment I locked eyes with her and it felt like I’d been shot, myself. I leapt towards her, knowing it wouldn’t be enough.
Which is why it’s a very good thing that, with an electric snap and a popping blast, a hole was bored into the raised hand of the spectrademon, sending the knife spinning through the air until it embedded itself in the dirt a few feet away. The spectrademon turned, taking a step forward and reaching for its long gun. It didn’t have a chance to reach it before the all-too-familiar drumbeat of laser shots started hammering into its torso and face, blasting off bursts of dust and shrapnel.
I landed right next to Miri. Though she wasn’t screaming anymore, the sheen of sweat and the tightness in every muscle told me that she was still in pain. I picked her up as gently as I could, holding her to my chest. She was still breathing, quick and shallow breaths, but breaths nonetheless. I tried to tell her that it was going to be okay, that the pain would fade, but the untruth of it caught in my throat. I wordlessly stroked her back, waiting for the noise and the violence to be over.
It was only a few seconds before the spectrademon slumped over, dead at last, and only a second or so longer before Quinn was right up next to us, looking concernedly between me and Miri.
“Alex? Alex, is that you?”
I shut my eyes. Time to face the music. Nodding at Quinn, I handed off Miri to him, then straightening up to my full height I turned around and looked to the exhausted faces of my parents.
“Hi,” I said, waving my hand at them.
In an instant, they both dropped their weapons and ran right to me, crushing me in a double-mom hug.
“We were so worried about you!”
“What happened?”
“We’re so sorry you had to do this…”
“You molted very well.”
“We still love you, Alex.”
“It’s been so long since I’ve seen—”
I pushed myself out of their crushing embrace, stumbling back until my leg hit Miri and Quinn. “Even now, you two are completely embarrassing…” I muttered. “Is Miri going to be okay?”
My parents both looked at me confused. Stephanie glanced down at the ground and grimaced. “A long gun, fired something just barely visible, right?”
I nodded.
“Agony rifle,” Stephanie said. “Right now she probably still feels like every nerve is on fire, like she’s going to die. But she’ll be fine in a minute or two. It’s all pain, no actual damage. The spectrademons like to use them for some reason.”
“Did you hear that, sweetie?” I said to Miri. “You’re going to be fine.”
“Why did you run away?” asked Amanda.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“We were following the last few spectrademons,” said Stephanie. “The spectrademons must have been tracking you, now that you’ve molted.”
Amanda crossed her arms and tried to look angry. “That doesn’t answer my question, Alex. Why did you run away when you knew you were in danger?”
My antennae pulled back like her anger had been a wind. Then I got pissed back, balling up my fists until my palms hurt. “Because you didn’t tell me anything! I’m a bug now, and you didn’t warn me about it! How am I supposed to trust you with anything if you can’t even tell me what species I am?!”
Fortunately for both my sanity and my continuing relationship with either of them, Stephanie and Amanda both immediately looked sorry. They looked at each other, a look of both regret and hope.
Amanda spoke first. “It was something we always knew we were going to have to tell you. But our life here was so peaceful… we didn’t want to have to ruin your childhood with thoughts about war and death.”
“Because I’m an Emissary, some kind of alien. And this so-called ‘Order of the Pale Star’ wants me dead because they’re fashy dickheads.”
Amanda nodded. “They think themselves the ultimate form of life because they have learned how to integrate organic and cybernetic components.”
“Are you Emissaries as well?”
Stephanie shook her head. “We did tell you you were adopted.”
“So then why are you raising me?” I asked. I had an idea of what the answer was, but I asked anyway, in the hope that I was wrong.
“Your biological parents are dead,” said Amanda, “killed by the Order, along with the entire population of the planet they lived on before you even hatched.”
It didn’t really hurt to hear that like it maybe should have. I mean, I had never met another Emissary, or visited the Emissary homeworld. Nothing I knew had been lost. I just sort of felt… empty. Looking past my parents, I saw the dead cambion on the ground, the knife still stuck in him. Roiling green sickness pulsed in my gut, the knowledge that I had killed someone. Worse, I didn’t regret it.
“You’re either lucky, or you’re very good at this,” said Stephanie.
“Huh?”
“You managed to kill a cambion by yourself," she continued. "He didn’t even have the chance to use his antivenom. And all that without using your claws, judging by the… knife in him.”
I looked at my hands. “Claws?”
“The instruction manual says you should have a claw on the… fourth finger of the lower pair of arms.”
I examined my lower hands more closely. At first, it looked like I only had three fingers and a thumb, and that was what I had assumed was there up until that point. It took me a good few seconds to notice a fourth finger, resting in a position that on a human hand would have been bent back far past the natural range of motion. I tried moving it, and it flicked forward, revealing that most of the length of the finger was hidden in a weird slot in the carapace on my wrists. The claw was shaped like a switchblade, and it was at least four, maybe five inches long.
“Oh my god,” I muttered. “That would have been useful to know about. Wait a second, did you say I come with an instruction manual?”
“Alex? Alex are you okay?” Miri asked.
I immediately dropped to the ground next to her. Miri was sitting up now, though she still looked miserable. “Yeah, I’m fine. I got rid of the main guy, and Quinn took out the other spectrademon. You can thank my parents, though. They’re the ones who saved you.”
“Thank you, Mrs. and Mrs. Sierra!” she said, waving lazily. “I’m glad you’re okay, lovebug. I’m glad I’m okay, given how much that hurt.”
“Apparently it’s a weapon that causes pain without damage.” I turned to Quinn. “How did you know how to do that?”
He shrugged, looking morose. “I’ve been in fights before. Never killed someone before, even if it was a… what the hell was that thing?”
“Creations of the Order of the Pale Star,” Amanda interrupted. “Synthetic beings of flesh and metal, designed from the zygote stage to be the most fearless, the most dangerous, and above all the most sadistic fighting creatures in all of existence. Feel no mercy or remorse towards them; pity, maybe, anger at the ones who created them, but never remorse.”
Stephanie was already with the bodies, emptying a vial of something thin and gray over each one. I didn’t have the energy to ask what was up with that.
“So what do we do now?” I asked.
“Rest and recuperate,” said Amanda. “You’ve just been through a lot, more than anyone your age should. Your mother has to dispose of the bodies, and I have to talk to Miri’s aunt, and her parents if possible.” With that said, she walked into the Hewitt’s house.
I nodded, well after she was gone. Disposing of the bodies. Just adult things. I took Miri’s hand, and she took mine. It felt wrong holding her hand the way I was now. I was cool and hard and chitinous, while she was warm and soft and fleshy. It didn’t matter; after what we’d been through, I held her hand. Slowly, as we worked through everything that had happened, the three of us started talking again. We didn’t talk about anything important, just catching me up on the last few days, or making dumb jokes at each other.
About an hour later, Amanda returned from the house and wordlessly motioned for us to follow her. At some point in the intervening time, the dead spectrademons and the cambion had just… dissolved. There were a few puddles of brownish slime left, but that was it. We all followed my parents as they walked us back across town, still staying mostly out of sight. Broadleaf felt oddly quiet now, muted, like everyone except us had gotten the memo that there was to be an hour of silence. Getting back to my house and collapsing on the couch felt like a relief.
