Episode 21

"But who are you?" Father Mario Garibaldi asked the stranger Lily Sloan brought to his basement with warnings of things to come. "And how do you know all this?"

With a hint of dread, despite having known this inevitable moment would come, he cautioned, "Try not to scream. Remember that, like Lily, I too have another form to keep secret."

"Another form?" But before Rose DeVega could audibly ask what he meant by that, she slapped the palm of her hand to an agape mouth, which almost screamed. Rose had read about such things all her life, but to actually see one mere steps away from where she stood... Father Garibaldi, having labored his whole life under the arrogant assumption that humans were God's only intelligent creatures, was doubly shocked. He immediately forgot all about the mild distaste felt while aware of Lily Sloan and Rose embracing earlier and focused his attention on the beige-skinned, blond-haired fiftysomething male who had transformed into a green-skinned, oval-headed, almond-eyed being before his very eyes. To his credit, Garibaldi did not scream, having already been fairly desensitized from a lifetime of human rights activism.

And Lily Sloan, who had already seen this transformation before, took a step forward from a very stunned and startled Rose, who certainly wouldn't have minded their embrace lasting a bit longer. "'He' is a Cablinasian‹at least, that's the closest our vocal cords can come to properly prouncing it‹and I say 'he' only because 'it' would be rude and his people are asexual. Mainly so they can shapeshift, as y'all just saw, into males and females... They, uh, lay eggs."

"Involuntarily, actually," the creature said. "Once every 10 of your years, and only a couple out of the dozens that are laid ever survive childbirth. And you can call me Iqu, because that was the name of the one who laid me. You see, four of my people were found dead when they crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947‹"

"I knew it!" Rose said, then shushed herself, realizing she might attract undue attention from outside the basement they were all in. "Sorry."

"‹but it just so happened that one of the four was pregnant and about to deliver. I was the only egg out of 36 that Iqu laid postmortem. Being telepathic, my first thought consisted of the last things on Iqu's mind before the soul drop rejoined the spirit ocean." Noticing the look on Garibaldi's face, Iqu added, "Yes, father. We too have our theories concerning what happens to our consciousnesses after death.

"So for the past 53 years‹all of my life‹I've been living in a laboratory inside Base 11. Over the years, your government would occasionally abduct other members of my race who survived crashlandings or being shot down. When they were brought in, I'd enjoy a rare opportunity to learn more of my culture and what's happened on my world since 1947. We only live to be 50 to 55 Earth years old. I myself am dying of old age, and I've never even been to my own home world because your government never let any of us leave. It cannibalized and coverted all the means to travel back to our dimension into‹stealth bombers. Excuse my bittereness, but I've been through a lot lately.

"When Colonel Kruger and the other monsters invaded Base 11 the other night, I was barely able to sneak out and stow away aboard a truck that had just dropped off plastic bags of human blood and dried human bodies. That's how I wound up at the blood camp. The truck was heading back there for more blood and bodies. Once there, they heard me and I had no choice but to read their minds for the most nonthreatening image to them and change into it before I was seen."

"An elderly Aryan," Lily deduced. "So that's why you took that particular form."

"They were just about to ask me and several others with my assumed skin/hair color if we wanted to be Leeches‹"

"'Leeches'?" Garibaldi asked.

"A bunch of sellouts who sit around all day draining blood from fat folks for the monsters so they can be turned into monsters one day," Rose answered.

"But before I snuck out, as I said earlier, I found out Kruger plans on abusing my people's technology in worse ways than your government ever imagined."

TO BE CONTINUED