Chapter One
Brooklyn
“Did you hear? Did you hear?” came the jovial cry of Maddie Layna, my nurse.
I spilled coffee all over my lab coat, stifling a curse and looking up at Maddie with mild annoyance. She didn't seem to notice the brown liquid dripping down my front, or that she had been the cause of it. I loved this girl, but her high-pitched exclamations were known to ruin many a uniform since I had started at Randor Heights Hospital.
“Oh my gosh, isn’t it horrible?” another nurse, Liz, exclaimed.
“Not you!” Maddie said, looking pointedly in my direction. “Brooklyn! Did you hear what they found?”
I smiled but offered a mild eyeroll in her direction.
“What?” I scoffed, pointing to the television with a laugh. “That? The thing that’s been all over the news and radio and lighting up every notification on my phone?”
“Well, I just heart of it this minute!” Maddie argued back before leaning against the counter of the break room. She looked deeply into her black coffee and poured in a cream, watching it swirl around like she was in a trance.
Maddie was my eyes and ears around the hospital. We’d been friends for five years, ever since she was hired. She had short blonde hair that cuffed at her ears and expressive brown eyes.
I looked up at the television once more, turning up the volume from its closed-captioning state to hear what the reporters were saying about the crash.
A spaceship exploded in a field just north of our big city and all the media cheered with delight, believing it was aliens.
I shook my head.
“Have we had any intake?” Maddie said, asking about the potential crash victims.
“Us?” I said, holding off a frown. “Not that I know of. It’s sort of far from here, isn’t it?”
“No!” Maddie exclaimed, and we both paused momentarily to watch as Chris, another nurse, walked in and marched straight toward the coffee. “Didn’t you hear? North Harbor Hospital is down.”
“What?” I said.
“Yeah, since Friday,” Chris piped in. “Massive power outages all throughout the north end of the city.”
“Ah, yeah,” I said with a nod, sipping my coffee. “I heard about that, but I didn’t connect the two.”
“What do you think?” Maddie said, finally taking a seat at the lacquered table that sat in our small coffee room, craning her neck to look up at the looping footage of the crash. “Think they’re alien like the news is saying?”
“Nah,” I said, waving a hand and sitting down as well.
“Hey!” Maddie laughed. “Don’t dismiss it so quickly.”
“I’m sorry,” I shook my head and wrapped my hands around the base of my coffee mug. I loved my mug. Having coffee was one of the only moments I had for myself. I enjoyed coming in and slipping my hand through the black, shiny handle.
The cup had a picture of a white cartoon cat doing its best shrug. The bold, capitalized text read: IT’S A CAT’S LIFE.
I liked that, for some reason. I didn’t have a cat, but the mug gave me the idea that I could have one if I wanted. And that he would be sassy as hell.
“I don’t buy into all that,” I said finally.
“The Parduss?” Chris said with a scoff, joining us at the table and staring straight into me. “Come on, don’t be insane! This isn’t the Loch Ness Monster. This is fact.”
Chris was handsome and tall, still in med-school looking to be a doctor. He had dark skin and a cut jawline. But, he was a stickler for science and would fight you to the death on a topic if he believed in it.
I raised my brows, incredulous at the fact that the Loch Ness Monster was actually being used as a talking point in an argument.
“You don’t believe in Nessie?” Maddie scowled.
“Oh boy!” I said with a chuckle. “Now you’ve got her going. Can we please talk about something else? I’m mid fourteen-hour-shift, and my mind can’t take the madness anymore.”
“Whatever you say, Doc,” Maddie said with a sigh, still narrowing playful eyes at Chris.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Chris demanded, looking at me with a broad smile and leaning far over the table, arms propped up on elbows. “You’re actually refuting this?”
“I’m saying it’s something I’d rather not think about,” I said, taking another sip of my coffee. I licked my bottom lip and looked up at him as if to dare further questioning on it.
I hadn’t slept in what felt like days. One surgery after another kept cropping up, and with Dr. Michaels out for an extended mental health leave, it only left me and a handful of other doctors.
I was a trauma surgeon. For the life of me, I wished now that I’d gotten into something with a happier ending most times, like an OB-GYN. But no, I had to go for something fast-paced.
“Why don’t you want to think about it?” Chris started up again, removing me from my thoughts.
“Um?” I shrugged. “Because I’m not the Secret Service?” I laughed, and Maddie joined me. “Come on, Chris. Doesn’t the government already have some sort of ban on the Parduss? Wasn’t this discussed before?”
I’d never seen one in person, but I’d looked at photos. They looked mostly dragon-like, with broad scales, thick spined spikes crawling down their necks, and thrashing tails.
The first time I’d heard about them was while I was still in college. News reports of dragons filling the skies were everywhere, but we all thought it was some sort of hoax. It wasn’t until NASA confirmed it that my spine stiffened and my blood ran cold.
We’re told stories as little girls about knights saving princesses from terrible dragons, but you never actually expect to see one.
Their wings were massive. I remembered seeing them on the news and wondering how the hell we were going to deal with them. It turned out they could morph into a hybrid human: a man with scales.
“They’re saying there were women on the ship,” Maddie piped up again, pointing to the television once more.
“Then…I hope they survived?” I said unsurely.
“Where were they going?” Chris said, cocking a brow as though he’d just won his own argument.
“What…the story now is that they were being kidnapped by the aliens?” Maddie’s eyes widened in terror. “Why? What do they want from them?”
“No, not cool,” Chris said, irritated. “Terrifying! What happened the last time the Parduss came to the Earth?”
“I’m not in the mood to get into your conspiracy theories with you,” I snapped, standing up from the table and pouring my cold coffee into the sink.
When the Parduss came to Earth, war broke out. What’s now referred to as the War of L7 was about preventing the Parduss from kidnapping human females and trying to take them back to their planet.
They’d been successful, too. With a few groups of women, anyhow. By the end, they were saying that twenty-seven females were taken from Earth, though it’s speculated that the true count was nearly double.
My sister was one of them.
She was part of a terraforming project, and her ship was ransacked by the Parduss. The first glimpse of those monsters was what the security footage in her ship showed.
So…imagine that. My sister was taken from us, and I had to watch the footage of it day in, day out. For months.
The space program she was a part of paid us off after five years of never finding her. Gave us some life-insurance payout to keep our mouths shut.
My parents and I had reporters at our house daily and harassing phone-calls that were nonstop. Everybody wanted to get a quote for their blogs and newscasts about what it was like to lose a loved one to the monsters.
They all wanted us to say something profound about life and loss and how the Parduss had to be stopped.
I wouldn’t give them anything.
“People shouldn’t close their eyes to this shit,” Chris said with a labored sigh.
“My eyes are open,” I snapped. “I’m just not fond of the subject.”
The species suffered a great loss at the hands of our tech during the war and fled, and while vigilant watch-groups still existed, the threat wasn’t as urgent as it once had been.
Not unless you were one of the unlucky to lose someone at the hands of those creatures.
So…it was understandable, I thought, that I wasn’t fond of thinking about them. Or talking about them. Or wondering about them.
But, Chris didn’t know that about me, so I would give him a free pass.
“They were in the middle of Camden field, B,” he urged to me. “Camden.”
“The center of all aliens,” I mocked with a breath.
“No, but it was the last landing site.”
“And as you can see,” I pointed up to the angled, too-small-for-the-corner television that hung in our private lunchroom, “They didn’t land. They crashed. It was probably some prank or…”
Sirens rang outside the building: ambulances. It was a noise we were all used to hearing on a daily basis, but for some reason, this alarm sent us all into a death-like silence.
Penny, a lovely older nurse from our ward, came rushing in the room. Her salt and pepper hair bounced as she flung the door open and announced. “Doctor Smith,” she said, referencing myself.
I raised my chin to signify I was listening and held my breath as she said, “You’re needed immediately for a trauma victim intake.”
“Okay,” I said dismissively before turning back to my friends. “When I come back here, I don’t want to be talking about this anymore.”
Chris laughed. “B, when you’re done in there, you should be going home.”
“Home?” I said, edging toward the door. “What home?” I mocked with a laugh. “I live here now.”
“Doctor Smith,” Penny urged with widened, panicked eyes.
“I’m coming!”
“Hey!” Penny said, stopping dead in her tracks as she pointed up to the television. “That’s it!”
“Not you, too,” I sighed.
“That’s the guy in the ER!” she mused. “The lone survivor, they’re calling him!”
I swallowed hard and felt shivers run down my arms. I didn’t even want to make eye-contact with my friends as the statement sank in. “You’re kidding…”
“Be careful out there,” Penny said with a playful nudge. “We’ve got security holding back reporters left and right. Everybody wants to know if he’s…you know. One of them.”
“Is he?” Maddie bounded at the thought.
Penny drew her brows together in an irritated decline. “No,” she snapped, drawing out her vowel.
I rolled my eyes and began to head out of the room before Chris called after me.
“Brooklyn!” he yelled. “Take samples!”
I laughed. “Shut up!”
Their idle gossip didn’t bother me. Performing emergency surgery didn’t bother me. In fact, I was up for the challenge. It was the reporters…it was the sight of the reporters clamoring down the hallway that sent a familiar sickness down into the pit of my belly.
I rushed past them before making my way to the patient. They were vultures, as far as I was concerned.
What happened to my sister was hard enough without always having to answer for what happened. People would ask sick and twisted questions like: did we know this was going to happen? Did my sister have any contact with the Parduss before the war? What did we do with the money we received from her death?
I washed up and pulled the medical grade gloves onto my fingers, feeling the familiar squeeze of them as I rushed into surgery.
And then I saw him. The so-called beast.