Crazy Seduction(erotica)

“Status report, Mick,” Crane commanded through his mic. Their radios were shielded, so they still worked.

The sergeant was still a little overwhelmed by the shared emotions, but she pulled it together and answered. “Colonel. The pseudo-clouds appear to be dead. The strike zone of the last prolonged bolt is too energized for us to enter. In the center of this zone is a body. We can’t get close enough to make a positive identification or to determine if the person is alive or not. It looks to be a male based on body shape and clothing. The area is sprouting new growth unnaturally fast. Grasses and flowers are actually growing before our eyes. The four Silver People we met in Tennessee were here before we arrived, and they showed us how lightning affects the plant life where it strikes.

“And how exactly did they do that?” Crane asked, weariness in his tone.

Mick felt a little uneasy with what she was about to confess, but she pushed ahead. “Uh, it seems we can speak mind to mind if we hold hands. We can see each other’s memories if we share them. Feel each other’s emotions, too.”

“Crap. The brass is gonna shit bricks. Okay, secure the area. We’ll send in troops to take control of the strike zone,” the Colonel said.

Sam was on his hands and knees with his face almost to the ground, trying to get a look at the face of the body in the circle, but it was in a fetal position. Yablonski squatted down next to him.

“What are you doing?” the soldier asked.

“I think this might be the fella who asked us to save the people when we first arrived,” Sam replied as he rested back on his heels. Looking at the expression of interest on the young soldier’s face, Sam reached over and touched his hand. The image of the glowing man suddenly appeared in Yablonski’s mind. He yelped and fell back on his ass.

Mick joined them. “What’s going on?” she asked crossly.

Sam looked at her. “I just showed him an image of the guy we met when we arrived. He said he was drawing the lightning to himself and needed us to move the people to safety. This has to be him as the lightning sure got him.”

“Let me see that meeting, please,” Mick asked, holding out her hand.

Sam took her hand and shared the memory with her. When they released, Mick looked closely at the body. “I think you’re right. There should be more scorching on his clothes, though.”

Orange light suddenly shone up from the ground under the body as a crack formed under it. It widened, and the body slipped through to fall into the upstretched hands of beings made of glass. Sam and Mick stared in shock through the tear in space and saw they were looking down at a red grassy field where three Silver People were smiling up at them and waving. Sam waved back, and the tear snapped closed.

“What were we looking at?” Mick asked.

“No idea. Maybe a better question is, where were we looking?” Sam replied. “I ain’t never seen a place where the grass is red like that. Jake, you ever seen that in your nature shows?” He reached out, and they touched hands.

When they let go, Jake pondered for a moment. “There’s Japanese blood grass, and some prairie grasses but nothin’ quite like that. Such a rich scarlet shade with wide blades. It looked soft as well, the way it was moving in the wind.”

Mick looked at Sam, who grinned. “My buddy Jake is a bit of a nature show nerd. Documentaries too.”Content rights belong to NôvelDrama.Org.

“If that wasn’t Earth, where was it?” Mick asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine. Did you see those Glass People?” Sam asked.

Mick’s expression froze as she was aware of the existence of Glass People but wasn’t at liberty to talk about that.

Catching her hesitation, Sam nodded to himself. “Ah, I see. Well, that was a first for me, if not you,” Sam said gently.

“Did you see them too! So beautiful!” Jeannie gushed. She’d been standing on the other side of the circle when the rip opened, so she had a different perspective.

That gave Sam an idea. “Everyone who was looking through the hole that appeared, please link hands and share the memory of what you saw.” He looked at Mick. “This may give us a kind of 3D view.”

Almost all of them had watched, so when they linked hands and brought up the memory, it blended together until they could see down into the other place. There’d been a large number of the Glass People standing in the field as well as a few Silver People. Orange sunlight was playing over their glossy surfaces. The angle didn’t allow for a horizon view.

“Sam! The shadows!” Jake exclaimed through their link.

Then they all understood as he shared his epiphany. The sunlight was coming from almost directly above. They weren’t looking at light made orange by sunset. It was orange at noon, so either something in the atmosphere was tinting the sunlight orange… or the sun shining on that place was orange.

“That’s not Earth!” Yablonski exclaimed, his shock reverberating through their connection.

“Next question, why did the glass people take the body?” Mick asked.

“I think he was alive,” Brenda said.

She pushed her memory of seeing his hand closing into a fist as he was lifted down through the tear.

“Shit! Could that have been like an involuntary twitch? I mean, he was hit with lightning for a long time!” Jake exclaimed. “How could anyone survive being hit with that much?”

“As the Sergeant said, he shoulda been burnt crispy, but he’s not. Let’s not pronounce him dead until we know for sure,” Sam suggested.

Mick looked around and suddenly noticed everyone and everything around them had slipped into slow motion. She glanced at Sam, who was smiling at her.

“You finally noticed how slow everyone’s got?” he asked, and she could only nod. “We noticed that when we speak in our heads like this, our brains get faster, we can talk faster, and the world around us gets much slower. When we have to speak the old way, our brains have to stay slow,” Sam explained.

“This could be really useful!” Specialist Green enthused, and the others agreed.

Jake noticed an army truck coming towards them. “Is that truck carrying that machine you used on us back at the shack?”

The soldiers looked where Jake was pointing and saw he was right.

“It looks like a larger transmitter. It’s probably a lot stronger,” Mick said.

Sam frowned. “I think we’ll make tracks. I suggest you do the same.” He and his three friends raced away from the group of soldiers before Mick could protest. She picked up her mic and tried to speak into it and felt her perceptions slow right down as everything around her sped up. The truck was getting much closer.

“Colonel? The approaching truck seems to have a larger version of the knock out field projector. Why-”

“G2,” was Gordon’s only response. It was the code they’d worked out on the flight back to Washington.

Mick signaled her team, and they ran away from the truck at maximum speed. The emitters kicked in, and they wobbled as vertigo destabilized them, but they’d managed to get out in front of the maximum range of the wave, and they pulled away. The sergeant led the way and reduced their speed to eliminate the infrared tracking capabilities of the satellites. They’d go to ground and attempt to contact the Colonel in twenty-four hours.

Mick hoped he’d be okay.

-=-

Colonel Gordon Crane sat in a chair in the same windowless meeting room in the bowels of the Pentagon. Across from him sat Colonel Keith Palmer, the leader of the team who’d tried to capture Crane’s team back on the Mall. When he’d been unsuccessful, he arrested Gordon and his driver, Corporal Dulane, and brought them to the Pentagon.

Palmer didn’t look happy. Crane was content to wait. He’d read the report his sergeant had texted him before she went into hiding, and he knew he was sitting on a goldmine of information.

Stephen Dawes stepped into the room with a frown on his face. Following him were the two men Crane didn’t know the names of. He noted that Palmer immediately looked to the older of the two men. So, Gordon assumed he reported to that man as he reported to Mr. Dawes. The third man aimed a crooked smile at him before taking a chair.

“What the hell is going on here? Why have you arrested Colonel Crane? And who are you?” Dawes asked Palmer.

“I’m Colonel Keith Palmer. I report to General Baines. I was ordered to observe Colonel Crane. When his team was replaced with the silver aliens, he brought them to Washington. When I attempted to secure them, he allowed them to escape. He is jeopardizing the mission.”

Gordon watched Palmer and saw an officer dedicated to the preservation of the country he’d vowed to serve. Basically, he saw himself, so he held no ill will against the man. There was just a conflict of orders, and now he had the name for the old man.

Dawes looked at Crane and held his eyes. “Is this true?”

Gordon shook his head. “No, sir. He is incorrect on several points. May I speak freely before Colonel Palmer to explain?” Dawes nodded stiffly. “We attempted to capture the four silver beings using the energy projectors but were unsuccessful. In retaliation, they turned my squad into Silver People. Then they stopped to talk to me and explained why.”

“You spoke to them? They speak English?” Dawes asked.

“Yes, sir. They aren’t alien. They were human. They’ve just been altered by artifacts from the pseudo-clouds. They’re Sam and Jeannie Lagrange and Jake and Brenda Miller. Two Midwest farmhands and their wives. The two men accidentally became Silver People when they messed around with something they found in a pseudo-cloud that another killed. They, in turn, exposed their wives to the same components, and they’ve been chasing the clouds ever since.”

“So, you’re saying they’re human under that silver skin?” General Baines asked.

“No. They don’t claim to be human, physically, but they do say their minds are still human, and their ideals seem to hold true.” He looked to General Baines. “My squad is still my squad. Loyal and duty-bound. We were ordered back to Washington to assist with a potentially catastrophic situation. They knew they would be subjected to the idiocy they encountered after the crisis passed, yet they followed my orders and returned with me. They saved many lives.”

“Are you missing the point that they aren’t human any longer, and we need to know how they tick and what kind of threat they represent?” Baines snapped.

“I’m well aware of the facts, General. What you aren’t aware of are the facts we collected from the initial group of Silver People, the four midwestern Americans. We know how they became Silver People. They told us how it happened. They showed us how we could make more if we choose to. I witnessed it happening to my squad. When I spoke to the soldiers afterward, they indicated that it actually felt good. Another fact my people collected tonight was how the Glass People escaped from the locked gymnasium. It’s as we feared. They can open tears in space and step through. My people reported that they were able to see through a large tear and witnessed a large number of Glass People and some Silver People standing in a field of red grass under an orange sun. They’re not on Earth.”

“What?!?” the General exclaimed.