Banished to Earth Book Two

                                             Banished To Earth

                                                                       Book Two

 

                                                      By Curtis Ray Jones

 

 

                                                           Chapter One

 

Page 1

 

 

     Silhouette was not dead. But the shadowy figure staring down at her had been. 

   “Get up, or die in the sand,” The shadow demanded, “I still smell life in you.” Words are human. But the voice that uttered these particular words was not completely human, anymore.  Its harsh crispness grated against her eardrums like the salty beach sand that bit and dug into her chin. As it’s gruff; ‘I’m the man here’ tone slowly screwed its way into her semi -conscious mind it drew up another voice, a voice from her childhood, her father’s voice saying;   ‘The first time is the worst time’. 

   “The first time is the worst time,” she muttered the words as if she was spitting slivers of broken glass as her leather clad bosom swelled with healing cleansing sea air.            

   “First time, you talkin’ about me,” The strange new voice growled down at her, “What are you trying to say? What do you know about me, sit up and tell me plain!”

  The sea breeze chilled her, more than his words. She tuned it out by warming her body with her newly acquired Hunter powers, as she lifted her face from the sand and pushed her father’s lecherous voice back into the slime pit that was her past.

 

 

 

2

   Sensing he was another Hunter, she drew up her bravado like a robe and answered, “All I know about you is that you smell like fish,” She said casually as she pried her salt encrusted eyelids apart and looked up at him. His massive frame eclipsed the morning sun, and dared her to guess what he was.

   A spear of blinding sunlight streaked past what must have been his head, as he recoiled from her searching eyes.
   “Bashful,” she teased, squinting as she rolled over onto  her left side and slung her long sand -flecked black hair away from her flawless cover girl face.   

  He stepped back, “What do you see?” His question was supposed to be a demand, but it came out sounding more like a plea. 

   “Not much,” she replied, delighting in the weakness she heard in his voice. It reminded her of her father’s cries for mercy, “the sun is my eyes. Help me up, please,” she purred in her best little girl voice, pretending she needed his help.

   The shadow man wavered over her like flag flopping limply in a dyeing breeze, and then backed away.

   “Allies now, enemies later, okay,” she said, feigning fear this time, “You are Hunter, and you are like me, are you not?”

   He turned away from her, “I was,” he said, unintentionally revealing the long gray fin protruding between his shoulder blades.

  “Oh,” she said with genuine shock, “what happened to you,” she asked, fearing the same thing might somehow happen to her. The Transit Authority, the highly advanced race of aliens and self-appointed judges of the galaxy that had changed her two days ago, had changed him as well.

   If his transformation did this to him, might it not do the same thing to her? “They weren’t through with you?” She asked, rising to her feet, her bravado sagging.

   “The Aliens did not do this; another Hunter, Chase Gillette, became a monster and did this to me!” He roared. “It-he bit me made me the very thing the Aliens meant me to destroy!”

  “Really,” Silhouette was genuinely surprised, as she carefully circled the strange ‘new man’ until the sun was at her back.

  “You know him,” He asked, almost looking back at her as he spoke.

 “Uh, what, ah yeah,” she stammered, astonished by the impossible appearance of this gray skinned man thing, sporting gray swim trunks he had scavenged from a nearby abandoned house, towering over her. A weird emotion began to rise from some part of her that she thought long dead-pity. “He ah, was this nervous nerdy sort, didn’t take him for much of a Hunter. He did have a monster in tow, a little alien vampire girl, a Criechee named Pri.”

  “His wife,” The man thing shrieked, “he did this to me to save her! Where was he?”

 “I portal shifted behind them in a Wilmington parking lot,” She said, still trying to make sense of what she was seeing, “Stepped right out of the air, just a few feet behind them. He should have sensed the portal opening, but the fool and his little razor haired wifey were too busy trying to save another Hunter to notice it. I saved their lives, jumped right down an alien T-rex’s throat and cut my way out. It would have killed them, if I hadn‘t taken him down. Okay, it was fun too.”

 

4  

“You’re first?” He asked, rising to his full six foot five height as he turned to face her. 

“Wha, what,” Her words caught in her throat as his impossible surreal appearance

struck her full in the face.

     It was as if someone had stripped the pathetic man’s skin right off his body, ‘re dressed’ him in sharkskin, plucked his eyes out and shoved cold black marbles into the bloody hollows, shattered his sinus cavity, pulled all the fractured bone forward until it formed a snout and covered the whole awful mess in hairless gray skin.

   Surprisingly, his mouth still bore most of it human attributes, at least in size and shape. Though lipless, he was still able to strain intelligible words through a zigzag of chalk white triangular teeth that were more suited to tearing live flesh than chewing cooked food.  

   Crayon white skin covered his thick heavy chest and densely muscled stomach.  Chiseled timber arms poised half curled by his chest ready to spring and slash at the slightest provocation.

   His mountainous form swayed over Silhouette on thick tree trunk legs that were far faster and much more flexible than they appeared.

   “I asked you a question,” the shark man roared, “the T-Rex,” his voice softened, “was it your first kill?”

    Silhouette nodded yes, as she struggled to find her voice.

 “The Criechee would have been my second,” he said, watching her squirm before his nightmarish visage. “I have a name.” The sudden bluntness of his statement was cold water in her face.

5 

“Yeah, well so do I. Call me Silhouette.” She said feeling more like herself again.

 “Sounds made up,” he snapped.

She could hear a sneer in his voice even though his lipless slit of a mouth could not quite muster one.  “What’s yours then, Albert, Frank, Murray?” She asked.

  “Grant Stayner.”

  “Chunky name for a chunky guy.” She quipped, making a point to call him a guy, “I could have died out here. One of them blind-sided me. If you hadn‘t found me some monster probably would have.”

  “You’re not blind, but you are a liar,” Grant accused, “A monster did find you.”

  Silhouette smiled, “Okay monster, kill me and eat me,” she said, slapping her hands on her hips and glaring up at him. He bowed over her like an approaching storm, but did nothing, “You’re not a monster Grant, you’re not a cannibal either.” She spoke each word with chess master care. “Grant you’re just as much Hunter as I am, so let’s hunt.”

   “Chase Gillette?” He asked leaning back, away from her.

  “Who else?” Silhouette replied.

 “And the Criechee, I want her scalp hanging from my waistband.” He said, closing his eyes as he turned toward the direction of Chase’s beach house. “He took a piece of my flesh to save her, and left the rest for the sharks. One of them ate my head.”

  “And,” she recoiled at what she was about to say, but said it anyway, “and became you.”   “As it is a part of me,” Grant said slyly, finally embracing the truth, “so I am a part of him. I feel him even now,” he said, as a great inner wheel began to turn, “somewhere out of there, behind the trees, in a white house with an old friend. He thinks I‘m dead, good.”

6 

“You see all that?” She asked, not bothering to hide her admiration.

  “See,” Grant sighed as if in a dream, his face still turned in the direction of Chases’ beach house, “ no, not see, not yet, but I feel him, know him, at least in part, and in time, with effort,  his body will become my glove, his eyes my windows and his wife, my toy.”     

  “Really,” Silhouette said weakly, through a thin brittle smile as she remembered and thought bitterly,   ‘been there, was that… .’.  

   She had dreamed about this time her whole life. Things were supposed to be so simple now. She and those like her, those hand picked by the Transit Authority because of their genetic capacity for change, would receive from their unearthly benefactors a new life and a new reason for living.  The Authority would transform them into super beings, while using their advanced technology to render the world’s defense systems useless.

   Once changed they would be given the ability to Portal Shift (teleport), they would also be given a very simple mission; subdue or kill the Authority’s menagerie of misfit unwanted creatures, collected from every earth like planet in the galaxy and dumped on earth, to punish and destroy it’s backward civilizations for their poor stewardship of their planet.  

   Afterward the surviving Hunters would fight amongst themselves for supremacy-simple.

   However, as Silhouette studied her new ‘friend’ and thought about his plans for the Criechee she realized that nothing about this new world was simple. “I couldn’t kill my Daddy. I can’t kill my past. Things would be so simple if I could,” she thought as Pri’s

compassionate eyes looked back at her from the night before. “I almost killed you Pri, but

7

I‘m not so sure why,” she wondered, just before she heard Grant mutter something nasty about the sun and his dry skin.

  “Goin’ back into the water,” he barked, lumbering back toward the churning foam, “stay

or go woman. I don’t care. I don’t need you anyway. If I find him, I’ll find him alone, out there, in the sea, plowing the current. The ocean is my sky. I can fly there; fly right out of this twisted thing and straight into his mind.

   It may take days or weeks maybe even months, but eventually I’ll take his flesh and free myself from this abomination. One thing woman, he is mine, do not kill him. This is my hunt, so stay away.”

    “If that means staying away from you, you crazy sardine head, that I will happily do,” she said, sneering as she spoke.

   He roared and ran at her. She swung her arm; neatly side stepped into a portal and ducked out of sight.