Alien or Alian

Ozias wasn’t sure when he blacked out. He was awake when Ezra and Ethen came charging through the trees and shrubs to get to him; he was awake while they used themselves as human crutches to keep him stable as they trekked all the way back to Ethen’s waiting car at the front of the house; he was awake while they assisted him into the back seat of the car, and he managed to stay awake for only a short time during the ride, but after that things went blurry. The main thing he could remember while riding in the backseat was Ezra cupping both of his hands to keep them as warm as possible, and also letting him rest his head on his shoulder. That must have been when he passed out.

As Ozias finally regained consciousness, he was surprised to find himself inside of a porcelain white room with four evenly squared walls. His head felt heavy, and he was somewhat groggy as if he had just rolled out of bed after sleeping in, which he only ever did on weekends so it wouldn’t disrupt how much time he had to get ready for school on weekdays.

His eyes flickered across the room, partially squinting at a silver bench with a clump of colourful thin tubes dangling above it from the wall. Then it hit him. This had to be the box — the hyper-inversion chamber.

A door heaved open and Ozias looked over to see two people he didn’t recognize step inside. They came towards him, both of them wearing blue latex-gloves, and one of them — a boy — carrying a small beige bin filled with some kind of supplies. The boy had olive skin and a buzzcut, and the low breadth of hair he did have was a strawberry blonde. The girl accompanying him had slightly more tanned skin, and dark auburn curls that were tied loosely in a ponytail. They looked about Ozias’ age, but Ozias couldn’t tell for certain without his glasses on and his still fuzzy vision.

“Hey, finally awake?” the boy said, his voice subdued. He set down the bin next to Ozias before taking a seat himself, and that’s when Ozias realized he was sitting on the other silver bench inside the chamber.

His back was slouched against the wall, and when he tried straightening up he felt an uncomfortable tugging of something thin and long inside the flesh of his arms and wrists.

The girl bent down on her knees in front of him and seized his shoulders to keep him still. “Don’t move so much, at least until the tubes are out.”

“W-who are you?” Ozias stammered out.

“Lyza,” the girl firmly replied. She lifted one of Ozias’ arms and started to take out the two tubes one by one.

“Dimitri,” the boy answered with an affable smile attached. He dug around the bin and pulled out a box of bandaids and a clear plastic bag filled with cotton balls.

Ozias winced each time a tube was pulled out; it felt like a tiny snake burrowing through his skin. “You’re Sid’s cousin. Both of you, I mean.”

“So you’ve heard of us,” Dimitri smirked. He was fast following Lyza with a cotton ball to Ozias’ skin every time she removed a tube. Ozias glanced at him as he did, and he saw some distress mixed in with his convivial disposition. He tried stealing a look at Lyza, but her face was hidden as she focused her line of sight on the tubes still in his arms.

“How long have I been here?” Ozias hadn’t noticed until now, but he felt a thousand times warmer both on the inside and outside of his body.

“Well, it was almost an hour inside the chamber. You had some serious frostbite on your arms and hands, but luckily the H.I. chamber knows how to deal with that. Afterwards your vitals were checked and it was decided you still needed to rest. About another hour since then,” Dimitri explained. He had patched on the last bandaid on Ozias’ right arm just as Lyza had pulled out the last tube in his left arm.

Ozias’ senses suddenly sobered up and his sight was finally unclouded. His recollection of the day’s events were played out on a kaleidoscopic display inside his head, and he let his eyes fall closed so he could see it all clearly. The mental clip of Sid’s body being hijacked was the only scene that replayed a few times. He couldn’t be rid of how helpless he felt while watching the horrid sight, and how terrifying it was to think that it could have been him if his body was any closer to the blob instead of Sid when it retired from Mr. Halton.

His eyelids slowly raised and he gazed wistfully between the muzzy cousins who were almost finished tending to his tube incisions. “Where...is Ezra?”

Both Lyza and Dimitri only had time to glance at him before a figure sped into view, crashed briefly into the chamber’s door, and rushed the rest of the way inside.

“Oz, you’re awake!” Ezra dove straight for the scanty space next to Lyza and beside Dimitri’s legs, and reached out to softly grip Ozias’ right arm. A touch Ozias didn’t know he would miss so much. Aside from unremarkable pats on his back and unmemorable hugs from his parents, Ozias often didn’t usually have the pleasure of cordial human contact.

But Ezra quickly retracted his hand as he became aware of his hasty reaction. “Oh, my bad.” His teetering eyes bounced between the cousins. “If you guys aren’t done here-”

“No, we’re finished,” Lyza interjected.

“Feel free to take it from here,” Dimitri added. He stuck one last band aid on Ozias’ left arm, handed Ozias his glasses, then collected the dispersed items back into the bin.

Lyza promptly stood up, providing Ozias a fleeting chance to catch a clear glimpse of her face again, and her expression being the opposite of Dimitri’s mostly convincing friendly presence. The two crossed the room and sat side by side on the other bench, meanwhile Ezra shot Ozias an anxious look as if he were the most fragile thing in the world.

“I’m fine, really,” Ozias tried to assure. “I feel like a spring chicken.”

It had been several hours too long since Ozias had seen Ezra’s trillion-dollar grin again, and despite its paltry reappearance he was still glad to see it over Ezra’s previously distraught mood.

Ezra stood and moved briskly to park himself on the bench beside Ozias. In the next moment the two were swayed by the same impulse, but Ezra had more strength to act on it first. His hands slunk under Ozias’s arms and around his back, providing enough snug leverage to draw him in for a long awaited embrace.

“I was really worried…” Ezra started, too neck-deep in relief to continue, but Ozias understood without reservation and delicately wreathed his own arms around Ezra.

Three sets of footsteps then marched into the chamber, immediately luring Ozias’ attention away, but Ezra ignored it for a few moments longer.

“Ozias! Oh darling, you’re finally awake!” Nina scuttled over to the two and took up the other spot beside Ozias. She nuzzled in closer and lapped her arms around both Ozias and Ezra, leaving Ozias hemmed in between the two Knillimhyrs.

While Ozias feebly twisted and turned to get free, Ethen continued his stern pace until he reached the other bench and sat next to Lyza; Kaine followed, going over to settle beside Dimitri.

“Is Mr. Halton okay?” Ozias asked the second he was unbound. The question wasn’t directed to anyone in particular, so he made swift but direct-as-he-could-be eye contact with everyone in the room.

Kaine glanced around furtively, and when it seemed like no one else was going to speak first, he straightened himself and cleared his throat. “We haven’t completed all the necessary tests yet, but after a PET and CT scan and an X-ray, they all showed some black gunk stuck to a lot of places inside Halton’s body. Most especially his brain — there’s a high buildup of this stuff lodged in up there. I had similar scans when that thing first left my body, and just like in my case, the gunk starts to dissolve on its own after a while. He’ll be fine after about a day or two.”

“His brain…” Ozias echoed. “Is that how the blob was able to talk? Like connecting itself to his nervous system or something?”

“Or something,” Kaine said absentmindedly. “Actually, it’s a little more like it attached itself with super glue to both the central and peripheral nervous systems. It wasn’t inside Halton for as long it was inside me, so it probably always had that effect allowing it to speak.”

“What about Sid?” Lyza questioned. Her words came at Ozias harsh yet unsteady. “What happened out there?” Dimitri outstretched a hand to hold her back as she heedlessly edged towards the bench’s bottom lip as if she were ready to pounce and attack someone.

“Ozias, darling.” Nina placed a soothing hand against his cheek, and let it rest there as she continued. “I know it might be difficult, but you need to tell us everything that happened after Sid brought you home.”

Darling. That was the second time in under an hour Nina addressed Ozias in that familial way, and whether or not she meant it as a tactic to sway him into so soon recounting the horrific events that took place in the forested area, it worked regardless. Between Ezra cemented next to him, his arm still securely wound behind Ozias’ back, and Nina’s palm still tenderly resting on his cheek, Ozias felt like it was the safest place in the world to talk about anything.

“It followed us somehow,” Ozias began. “Mr. Halton broke down the front door, so Sid told me to run while he confronted him. I ran out the back and headed for the grove behind my house. I couldn’t find anywhere to hide, but eventually Sid caught up with me. He said the blob talked to him...it was looking for me because it thought I knew where Ezra was.”

“To make me its next host,” Ezra ruefully filled in, and Ozias nodded. “So it still had its sights set on me…” He let out a sigh saturated with contrite, then gave Ozias a wary glance before saying to him, “what happened after?”

“...Mr. Halton found us, then he started attacking Sid, but Sid fought back. And then…”

“Then what?” Ethen probed.

Ozias flinched after the fact. He had expected something more abrasive in his tone, but shockingly Ethen sounded wholly pacified and faintly anxious, and the look he was staring at Ozias with wasn’t warlike as it usually was whenever Ozias was around.

For a second, Ozias almost lost his nerve to continue, but a concerned thumb swipe on the side of his cheek from Nina, and a worried waist squeeze from Ezra, brought him back to reality and even gave him a little burst of strength as he unfolded his next words.

“The sun. It started to come out, and some of the light hit Mr. Halton. He started spasming and these blotches were appearing on his skin, and eventually he — it, the blob started gushing out of Mr. Halton — out of his ears, his nose and his mouth, until it was this...dark puddle on top of the snow. But then it moved so fast and stuck itself to Sid’s ankle and...and it just went inside of him — penetrating his skin like it was nothing, until it was all inside him. It — he, Sid got up, and he started coming towards me, but then more sunlight came out and he spasmed again until he just ran away...Then I found Sid’s phone and Ezra called.”

Ezra took that as an unspoken cue to reel Ozias back in by the waist for another much needed hug.

“It makes sense,” Kaine started. Heads whirled around at him as he got to his feet, broke out into contemplative pacing, and he went on. “The sun. The heat. We first discovered the blob floating around Jupiter’s freezing gas surface, so it’s possible that it’s never been to Jupiter’s scorching core. Maybe all it knows is the cold and it’s never experienced any semblance of heat at all. Meaning-”

“Meaning if that thing comes into contact with anything remotely humid it’ll start freaking out enough to separate from its current host,” Lyza concluded. She stood next, and at once matched Kaine’s exigent bearing. “If that’s the case, then maybe that could even be enough to kill the damn thing.”

Kaine hummed his optimism and nodded. “To that extent might be wishful thinking. After what Ozias has told us, and all the run-ins we had with it both inside and out of a host, it’s usually been stronger and fast enough to overpower us. We’d have to get it to a place with a concentrated heat source and somehow keep it there until our desired outcomes take effect.”

“We’d have to trap it,” Ethen so decidedly stated.

Kaine nodded again. “But I doubt we’ll be able to bend the sun to our will and have it shine at a requested time and place.”

“What about here, the H.I. chamber?” Dimitri offered. By now he was the third body standing. “We can turn on the warmer temperature settings and take out all the tubes, that way all the heat will just flood in here all together. At least four people can get the door closed quicker, so we’d just need to lure it inside before we did.”

“Right. I can do it,” Ezra declared. He retracted his arm from around Ozias as he got to his feet next.

“Do what?” Ozias asked.

“Be the bait. Blob’s looking for me anyhow, so it’ll follow wherever I go.”

Regardless of it being a valid strategy, Ozias was still ready to express his disapproval, but Nina beat him to it when she stood.

“Ezra, I know you’re pinning much of the fault for all this on yourself, but you should take a minute to rethink what you’re saying.” Nina stepped past Ozias to get to her son, then tenderly clutched his hand as she continued, in quieter urgency, “we can do this another way.”

“There’s no better way than this, and we can’t let that thing run loose any longer,” Ezra asserted. “It’ll be fine, mom. I’ll be careful. All I gotta do is walk around town until it finds me, make sure it follows me, and lead it all the way down here, right?”

“It’d be easier to use the chamber at my house,” Ethen proposed. He finally stood, leveling any sight of his apprehension so that it disappeared behind his steadfast gaze. “Leading the blob to and through the manor, then all the way down the elevator — being inside an enclosed space with it, that’s one too many obstacles.”

“Don’t you live on the noisiest street in Elbel?” Lyza questioned.

“It gets quiet towards the night, especially during exam season. It’s best to do this late; around midnight would work-”

“Ethen,” Nina interrupted. Her hands fell away from Ezra’s, and the tension on her face was palpable as she made her way to Ethen’s side. “Are you sure about this?”

Ethen was an unbreakable wall next to his frangible mother. “That thing has taken over Kaine, Halton, now Sid, and it’s still hunting my brother. We need to stop this tonight, so this plan needs to go off without any problems.” He turned to Nina, the rigid angles of his face becoming soft. “I’m sure, mom.”

Nina’s mouth opened and closed several times but no words came, so instead she let her gaze silently jerk between her two sons. Ozias did the same, but at a more sedate pace. Ozias knew that he and Nina had to be sharing a similar distressing thought: Ethen and Ezra — a persistent force plotting against another persistent force, and so much could go terribly wrong.

“The plan is well grounded,” Kaine commented.

“With all of us on board, it really could work,” Dimitri added.

“It’s the only plan we’ve got,” Lyza noted.

Nina stomped her heel once on the ground in frustrated undecidedness and sighed, and the sound came out coarse and emphatic; the most unseemly Ozias had ever seen her in the time that he’s known her.

“Midnight you said?” Nina at last spoke. Ethen nodded, and though Nina wasn’t looking at him then, Ezra nodded as well to strengthen the inaudible response. “Then we’ll need to prepare a number of things before then.”

It wasn’t exactly a ‘yes’, but it definitely wasn’t a ‘no’ either. Ozias suspected that Ethen and Ezra would have gone through with the plan regardless of whether their mother was against it or not, but he also thought that Nina would have ultimately agreed anyway. The cousins were all right: it was their only plan, but it was a good plan, and Ozias was even willing to set aside his own insistent misgivings to see it through.