Marilyn Peake - The Other

Holding onto the tree for support, I dragged myself back up to a standing position, so that I could watch everything going on and keep track of where Waylon was. As I peered through an opening in the leaves, I saw more torches floating in the darkness, moving toward the group in the front yard. Word must have gotten out to people in the village about what was happening here.

Soon, I heard many angry voices filling the air. And then people holding the torches became visible.

The dogs continued to bite and tear flesh from Mary’s body. Her beautiful face was completely gone. I looked away. Sadness and horror welled up inside me. I fought back intense nausea.

Finally, the plantation owner shouted, “Enough! Call off the dogs!” Staggering, he walked around Mary’s body. Taking another swig from his bottle, he said, “And here lie the remains of a witch.” He pointed to one of the men holding a snarling dog by its leash and said, “You clean this up later, you hear me?” Pointing at another man, he said, “And, you, get a priest from the village to cast her demons out before her remains are put to rest. I don’t want our plantation haunted by Satan.”

The crowd roared and shouted.

The plantation owner said, “Men, we need to teach all our slaves a lesson. These three were planning to escape.” He waved his bottle in the direction of Jessey, Henry and Basil. “Nothing will stop them, now that the government has set them free. If I’m to lose them anyway, something that will seriously harm my profits, I say let me get one more benefit from them. Let them serve as an example to any more that think running away is a good idea. Hang them! And see if you can hang the demon!”

No! No! No! No!

The crowd descended on the three darker skinned humans and on Waylon. Several men carrying ropes placed a loop around each of their necks. They dragged them, writhing and kicking, to the area below a tree. Throwing the free end of their ropes over the bottom branch, the men pulled until the bodies flew upwards, necks snapped and the captives hung like dolls.

I didn’t realize it; but as I saw Waylon’s body go flying up off the ground, his neck snap and his body go lifeless, I screamed.

The next thing I knew, I was being pursued by a mob and their dogs. I ran as fast as I could all the way through the forest to the pod. Falling off the downed tree into the stream, I scraped up my knees and lost time. I barely made it to the pod before the dogs caught up with me.

It must have seemed that I was a supernatural being—another demon exactly as they perceived Waylon to be—to the people pursuing me. When I jumped into the pod, I became invisible under the protection of its camouflage cover. It was like I had popped into another dimension.

In the next moment, I did exactly that.

The ship flew up into the air and disappeared with an explosion of light.

When I made it back to the TTA, I felt like a shell of my former self. Reporting Waylon’s death was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do in my entire life up until that point.

Another team went back to retrieve his body. Had the angry mob and the dogs not been chasing after me, I would have done that myself—both out of respect for Waylon and in order to keep from violating the Law of Noninterference to such an extreme degree. Leaving a green-skinned body behind in times where our kind did not exist would mess with timelines to an extraordinary degree. Even so, we didn’t avoid the problem completely. It fills me with revulsion and horror every time I think about it, but some of the people from the village sliced off parts of Waylon’s skin and used it to make potions.

Just like the people of East Africa, or the cannibal tribes who ate their enemies for strength, they wanted to absorb supernatural powers they believed he possessed. It made no sense to me. If you thought someone was evil, why would you want to take that into yourself? The analyses I’ve read suggest that it’s an attempt to gain the perceived power of the demon or the enemy.

I couldn’t bear thinking about this happening to Waylon.

I went to his cremation service. It was a beautiful tribute. We saw his life story and his accomplishments play out across our lenses. His body was ignited upon the stone altar in the memorial hall of the TTA. His parents led the procession down to the stream that carried his ashes away on a tiny boat to the wasteland beyond. Our enclave felt that the ashes were going out to wide open spaces where only the dead could thrive, and we hoped the ashes of our bravest heroes might somehow fertilize those lands.

After the cremation service, I was sent to the hospital to recover from shock syndrome. The doctors turned my empathy completely off. I felt nothing. I floated in a kind of netherworld haze. The doctors monitored my body signs and gave me potions until it looked like I had recovered enough to face the world again.

After that, I had a month to rest, to wander the hospital gardens and swim in the fountains and under the waterfalls.

Eventually, when it was determined that I was strong enough to resume my time traveler duties, I was prepared for my next mission: Roswell, New Mexico in the twenty-first century to procure blood and other human substances that would be used for splicing aggression into our DNA. It suddenly dawned on me that this wasn’t completely dissimilar to cannibalism or making potions out of albinos… or out of Waylon. Even with photosynthesis, we seem to have a need to perform some kind of cannibalism in order to insure our own prosperity. I put those thoughts out of my mind. I would get consent from the people from whom I took samples or I would steal samples from a hospital or medical facility. I would never hurt a living human being in order to protect the future of the human race. That made no sense.

The place in Roswell where I was to conduct this mission was the absolute best and safest place I could possibly be sent. It was a compound built by a cult who had named their organization The Astral Plane. The name referred to their belief that aliens from another planet would visit them and take them out through the astral plane to their home planet. The members of this cult revered these supposed aliens as gods sent to rescue them from Earth’s problems.

I and my new assigned partner, Zander, would be gods. That had to be a whole lot better than being viewed as demons.

I started watching the news on my flight to Roswell, but turned it off and watched a daytime talk show instead. The news was covering a story about people who had lost their ability to concentrate and started having hallucinations after a bright light exploded over Roswell, New Mexico—exactly where I was headed. Several doctors commented on the situation, saying they thought this was the result of an alien virus. I did not need to hear that. It scared the living daylights out of me every time I thought I might catch a virus that would scramble my mind. I already felt scared to death that I had cancer. The talk show was all about people who had silly dance moves. Now, that I could handle.

When I finally got to Roswell, I took a taxi to my hotel. It was the cheapest hotel I could find that was close to the compound where my biological mother was doing research.

There were stencils of silly-looking aliens with green skin, huge heads and large black eyes on the windows of the reception building. Faded by the sun, they were seriously out of date. No one thought goofy alien images were funny anymore. People were afraid. Recent comic strips showed them with fangs, and horrible red rashes to illustrate the virus they had brought to Earth with them.