Chapter 10: Chapter 10: This So-Called Life, Part 1
It had been a week since Carmella had seen the Blob. She no longer liked venturing outside, afraid that it would be out there lurking somewhere. When Sunday arrived she didn't sit out on the porch reading, and she kept her ears perked for unusual sounds. Her life had been simple and predictable, and Carmella hated the disruption to her comfortable pattern. She had to be heavily armed to milk the cow and collect the eggs. She didn't tend to her garden, which always relaxed her. Her other yard work was left to multiply, and soon it would be unmanageable.
She thought fleetingly of moving but dismissed it. Wolf. How would he find her? She kept a gun under her pillow when she slept and nailed boards over the windows on the lower level of the house. There was a shit-ton of windows in the old farmhouse, and it took her most of the day to finish the task, but she felt better at night knowing that nothing could get in without making a racket and alerting her to it.
After a week of being on hyper alert and obsessively staring through cracks in the boards, Carmella knew she couldn't maintain that level of stress. She slept poorly, and her so-called life became a tedious wreck. Day after day she roamed her house and peeked out windows. When she thought she might finally be able to relax, convinced that the alien creature had either died of its wounds or had no interest in her, Carmella decided to remove the boards from the windows as the sun hung low in the sky.
As she pried away the first board, she saw movement in the yard.
A Blob had moved swiftly from one tree to hide behind another, its ability to camouflage itself a split-second too slow.
Carmella panicked and nailed the board back into place. She stared out the slit between the boards, eyes peeled to the partially hidden alien. What do you do when you are the only person left in the world and there is something lurking in your yard that scares the hell of you?
Carmella dashed for her rifle. There could have been several more out there circling her house, ready to snatch her and take her to some alien world—or worse. She had hurt one of badly. Maybe she'd be punished. They wouldn't take her, and this she swore. There was a wine cellar in her lower level, which also included a cement and steel bunker. She'd retreat there if it turned into a stand-off. Carmella peeked out the window into the darkening night. She could no longer see the Blob, but her body knew that danger was just outside her door.
When total darkness fell, Carmella did not light any candles. She brought a chair closer to the window and peered through the boards out into the night. When the sun rose, she didn't go outside to tend to her animals and barely tended to her own needs.
Why was it here?
II
It had been three days since the woman had come out of her house. Bilal was certain she had seen him, and he chastised himself for being careless. He had moved dangerously close to the house in an attempt to see inside. It was stupid. But she had put up the boards, and he could not see inside to get a sense of her.
Maybe she was sick ...
He shuffled in consternation, his flesh rippling and changing from the camouflage of greens and browns to nearly black.
III
That fateful night, he had been healing his own damage and hers as well. The wounds to her breast had been too much for him. It had taken nearly all of his strength, and he needed enough energy to make the long trek back to his pod. He'd done the best that he could, ashamed that he couldn't completely remove all evidence of the injury. He certainly had the ability. Bilal's tentacles shielded fine filaments that could join with objects for the purpose of exploration and understanding. He understood each cell and neuron and found its pattern. He could detect and repair any anomaly. His kind had long since eradicated human diseases such as cancer, Parkinson's, and AIDs. It was part of being processed on the mother ship before being reintegrated with humans on Earth 2.
He had worried about her as he had carried her injured and bloodied body back to her home. She was in shock and was losing a great deal of blood. Despite this, he was curious about her. She had long dreadlocks and he formed a tentacle for the purpose of examining her hair. Now that he was an adult, humans generally shied away from him unless they were his friends. He knew that humans didn't like to be touched by Centaurians, and he understood. They didn't like the feel of his cool, smooth flesh.
But Centaurians had to touch. They didn't see well with their eyes and saw with their sensors, which were confined within their tentacles. They could taste, see, hear, and sense things with the fine, sensitive filaments. Once exposed, the filaments didn't have to be connected to an object to "observe." But it was the preference of Centaurians. Humans called them touchy-feely. He found it interesting that humans considered that a bad thing.
Bilal had placed her on her sofa and had connected a tentacle to several different areas of her body. She was a strong female, healthy despite her self-imposed exile. He found a vertebra that needed straightening. She probably had some pinching in her neck because of it. He didn't have time for that, though. Bilal concentrated on her injuries, tackling the smaller ones first in case he ran out of "juice" and had to leave them unattended. He liked that particular human euphemism. "Juice" was a good interpretation for what he needed to use to facilitate the woman's healing.
He allowed his filaments to go beyond her injuries in order to collect "samples." He stared at her dreadlocks and her brown skin while he should have been concentrating on his task. He could tell that she was right around forty Earth years old. She was tall and what humans called "shapely." He determined that she had carried a child to term, and his flesh rippled. She lived alone because the house only had one human smell. He understood from Earth 2 that the loss of a child was the most devastating loss that humans had endured during the epidemic. Many humans never recovered from it even twenty years later. He wondered if the offspring she had lost had been a victim of the disease or had been taken to Earth 2. He thought it was the first. The most resistant humans joined with the Centaurians sometimes for the sake of their children.
His body turned black. How could she live like this—alone?
He completed his task and withdrew from her body. He had felt as close to death as he ever had and wondered if he had finally gone too far. He thought about his parents and friends and wondered if he met his end on Earth would anyone truly care. Bilal hunkered into a ball and shivered knowing that if he retreated completely within himself and passed out, the human would likely awaken and cover him with kerosene and torch him. It would damage him in the way that a bullet really couldn't. As long as his filaments retreated and coiled into a ball within the mass of his body, then he might survive being burned alive.
Not wanting to take that chance, as soon as he could, Bilal sluggishly left the house. He didn't know if he could make it back to his pod, but he had no choice. It took a day, but he made it, programmed the pod to return to the mother ship, retreated into himself, and lost consciousness.
Gifts
-- Gift
received Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone