A shudder rattled through me.
I turned back around. “What’s your name?”
“DeLorean.”
“Like the car?”
“Yes, like the car.”
I pulled out zipties from my cargo pocket. “Okay then, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to take you out of your shackles, but put these around your wrists.”
“Oh please,” she begged. “Can we have a safe word? Pretty please can we have one? Huh? Please?”
I sighed inwardly. “Tiberius is your safe word. If things get too scary or painful for you, Ms DeLorean, just say Tiberius.”
She blinked happily.
I removed the shackles, barely managing to keep her from kissing me or touching me. My traitorous hard on lingered, but I ignored it. I managed to hold her arms behind her back and snap the zipties around her wrists.
“We’re going to the party?” she asked.
“Not sure what we’re going to. I guess we’ll find out together.”
We hadn’t gotten but three steps when she stiffened, her eyes rolled in the back of her head, and her knees bent, making her fall. Because I was holding one of her arms, I was able to keep her from hitting the ground. I was barely able to reach around with my other arm before her entire body began to jerk and spasm. As I held her, I glanced over at the discarded helmet. Now I got it. Seizures. It was to protect her from bashing her own head in while she was chained to the wall. I held her for a good five minutes as the spasms finally slowed. She’d gnashed her teeth the whole time. I was afraid she’d swallow her tongue. Eventually she stilled, only her heaving chest evidence that she was still alive. I took the moment to put the helmet back on her head.
Several minutes later, her eyes fluttered open.
She looked at me, not as a sexual object, but as a person. “Tiberius,” she whispered.
“Are you okay?”
“I had a seizure didn’t I?” she asked.
“Yes. It looked pretty bad.”
“I can tell because all of my muscles feel as if I’d been in a wrestling match against ten people and lost.”
“Do they come often?”
“Only when I get excited.”
“Then let’s not get excited.”
She seemed about to respond, but then her face went blank for a moment. Her lascivious smile returned. Her eyes narrowed. “Now that you have me here on the ground with my helmet on, don’t you want to finish what we started before?” She rubbed my crotch. “You can bang my head against the ground as hard as you want. I see you’re still flying the flag for me.”
“Tiberius,” I said, more forcefully than I wanted. I stood and hauled her to her feet. “Come on. I want to get this done.”
“Take me to your leader,” she whispered.
“That’s my line,” I said, then marched her up the stairs and out the door.
The two guards saw me coming and lifted their rifles.
I held DeLorean with my left hand and pressed the barrel of the M4 into her neck. I’d taped it in place with a roll of duct tape I’d wrapped several times around her neck as well as the barrel of my rifle. Duct tape was also wrapped around my hand and the trigger well, so I couldn’t let go even if I’d wanted to. She still wore her helmet. She was whispering to me as we walked, promising to do things to me I didn’t know were possible.
The guards looked at each other, unsure of what they were seeing.
“Hello, boys,” I said. “Got room for two more inside?”
They nodded and stepped aside. Clearly I hadn’t been part of their guard shift briefing.
We proceeded through a small door inset into the larger barn door. The first thing I noticed was that the barn was far larger than it should have been. The rafters above were cloaked in darkness. Bright generator-powered lights speared the rest of the interior, bathing it in an almost painful light. Someone had removed the floor and dug down at least fifty feet, making it more into an indoor theater, something from one of those old eighteenth century doctors’ pictures where a single person was at the bottom operating on a body, while a host of dozens looked on. But in this case, a man sat in a wooden throne at the bottom while a hundred other people in all form of dress stared eagerly in his direction, each one seated in stone-made benches formed in concentric circles from top to bottom.
But that’s where all normalcy ended.
Beside the Rev at the bottom of the operating theater was a nine-foot monstrosity that had been chained to a metal cross, crucified. The Cray’s hands and feet had been removed, as had its knee and elbow spikes. Part of its chest and legs were raw with open wounds that seeped blood. Its head hung, not with the predatory gaze to which I’d become so keenly accustomed, but instead into something whipped into submission, light gone, soul caged, much like the look I’d often seen in Suzie’s single eye.
And as much as I hated the Cray, to see it treated like this brought forth my fury.
The Reverend spoke, “Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this flesh to offer, which you hath given and human hands hath made. It will become for us the bread of life.”
He pulled a knife from the side of his altar and cut a chunk of meat from the Cray’s thigh.
The alien mewled, screeching only once at its agony. By the look of its wounds, this was far from the first time.
“Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood,” the Reverend said as he drained blood from the meat into a goblet.
Then the congregation said, “Blessed be God forever.”
“Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this wine to offer, fruit of your divine intervention. It will become our spiritual drink. Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood.”
I almost wretched as I watched the Reverend take a bite from the meat, ripping at it with his teeth, then taking a sip of the blood to wash it down. I was seeing a profane version of the Eucharist.
The Reverend placed the meat on a silver tray and a woman came, took the goblet and the tray and began to pass it around. One after the other, the members of this unholy congregation took a bite of the Cray’s thigh and drank from the cup, crossing themselves, then lowering their heads in prayer when they were done.
As the offering passed from one to the other, the Reverend prayed. “Pray, my brothers and sisters, that our sacrifice may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father.”
“May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands,” the congregation said.
“Pray that He shall protect us and come down upon these invaders like He did with Noah and the Great Flood.”
“May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands.”
“Pray, my brothers and sisters, that the Earth will be once again cleansed and returned to the hands of the faithful.”
“May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands.”
I’d been searching for Suzie throughout the entire farce. It wasn’t until the end that I saw her, locked in a cell behind the crucified alien. Even across the great space between us, I could see her looking at me, her mouth moving over and over speaking something silently. It took me a moment to make it out and when I did, I smiled.
WWWSD.
Confronted with such a scene, I knew exactly what William Shatner aka Captain James Tiberius Kirk would do. There was a single bible quote I knew and it wasn’t because I went to church. No, it was a quote from my favorite Quinten Tarantino movie and I said it now, filling in the silence where the last of the congregation was eating and drinking of the flesh of the alien, believing that some celestial transubstantiation was making them part of god.