Sorry this has taken so long. it is not a stroke story. it is an exposition of what happened to Kirk and his family after the invaders took over, and how they eventually drive them out. knowing the last chapter left some with a bad taste, i hope this makes up for it. jb7
Fever 07
Kirk surveyed the field before him. Once it had been a wheat field; now, it was not much more than weeds and wildflowers. On the other side, nearly a half-mile to the west, just barely visible, he could see the remnants of the alien invaders. At the northern edge, the field was limited by a thick hedgerow of gorse running along the highway; the southern edge, a bluff overlooking the Missouri River.
It had taken nearly four years of forced attrition, but they had slowly whittled the invaders in this hemisphere down to this last force of roughly 300 aliens: officers, troops and breeding drones, plus nearly a thousand fighting drones. Similar results had been achieved in the rest of the world following his game plan.
The invaders had initially come in twelve ships, each with 24 officers and 288 'soldiers,' supported by 600 fighting drones. On each of the ships, there were 12 selective breeding drones, genetically altered so they could breed with up to five human females at a time, producing a viable drone in as little as four earth-months.
Based on their experience in other, similar, invasions, they counted on being able to fertilize a hatch of women every half hour, to produce up to 240 fighting drones every day. Once a week, barring interference from the female, they expected each breeder to produce another breeding drone.
In the years following the Vietnam conflict, the aliens had covertly landed advance scouts, surgically altered to resemble humans, who had insinuated themselves into positions of power and influence, where they could identify people with ESP abilities, hoping to breed the trait into the fighting drones. They had also seduced several hundred natives with false promises of wealth and status when they took over.
Erica's advisor had been one such quisling, not only identifying her to the invaders, but also participating in her capture. It had taken Kirk a bit over a year to find her, but he had finally been able to rescue Erica and eliminate the traitor during her third delivery of a drone.
That night, Orion Jones, PhD, her advisor, was serving as midwife, delivering the night's hatch of drones and placing them in the incubators where they would finish their fetal development. Jones had just caught Erica's latest delivery and was carrying it to the mechanical incubator when Kirk and his team suddenly materialized in the hatchery. The quisling opened his mouth to scream, but found his voice cut off by a thought from Kirk. The other members of the team released the women from the cribs where they were kept during their pregnancies, and readied them for their escape, aborting the unborn drones.
Kirk, with a mental shove, pushed Jones up against the wall and started a telepathic interrogation, gathering information about the drones and their masters. When he was done with the turncoat, Kirk slowly and methodically destroyed the mechanical incubators and their contents. He then sent a mental blast, similar to the blast Sonny had tried to use on him, at the collaborator, incinerating him, leaving only a pile of cinders.
He rushed to Erica, to assure himself she was okay. As he hugged her, one of his team sent him a silent alarm. A second later, two breeding drones walked into the hatchery. One was obviously older, adult. The other, developmentally, appeared to be an adolescent. Kirk felt Erica shrink in his arms, moving closer to him. Reflexively, he sent his killing blast at the two breeders. Seconds later, the hatchery was empty, Kirk, his team, and the rescued women, safe, somewhere in Central Illinois.
Erica still had her arms around Kirk. "Thank you," she sobbed. "Oh, god, thank you. I don't know how much more of that I could have taken." She tightened her grip on his neck, pulling him to her for a kiss of gratitude.
He gently disengaged and stepped back. With a wry grin, he said, "Careful, girl. Those bastards seem able to follow the smell of sex and track down recent participants without any problem. Let's get all of you somewhere safe, then you can tell us about what you've been through."
"Scan us first. Make sure they haven't implanted any kind of tracking devices; especially the non-telepaths, to make sure none of them were cooperating with those bastards. It seemed like some of them had easier times than the two or three telepaths who were caged with me."
"Thanks. I hadn't thought of that. Seeing what they've done to the men, I can't imagine anyone collaborating, but I guess, if conditions are bad enough..." Kirk called two of his team mentally and gave them some instructions. He turned back to Erica.
"This war has brought out all sorts of latent abilities and strengths. Before the aliens showed up, I wouldn't have bet a quarter that any of the people who traveled with Lorenz's troupe had any ability to teleport, or to blast an enemy, or exert any kind of mental control on an individual. Now, it's rare to find anyone who's been in a battle who can't do all three."
He had been running his hands up and down her sides and over her back and shoulders. "I don't...wait, what's this?" he asked, running his hands over her lower abdomen. "It looks like they left something in your uterus. Hold on, this may hurt a little."
"Just get rid of it, then tell the others where to look. I knew there would be something. Can you teleport them all to the Great Lakes or the Gulf? The drones don't like large bodies of water; anything over an acre in size, they try to avoid. When they moved us from New York, they could have gone along the coast, but they moved inland and traveled through Pennsylvania. It must have taken them at least a day longer."
At that moment, one of the members of the rescue team came up to them. "Kirk, all the women have some sort of chip in their abdomen, apparently in the uterus. Two of the women are giving off an aura of anger, like they don't want to be with us. None of us can get through the anger. Will you try? And what should we do about the chips?"
"Remember that subterranean lake up on the Wisconsin border? Send the chips to the large rock in the middle. I'll be over in a moment to check the women." He looked at Erica. "I'm sorry, sweets."
She felt a brief burst of pain, causing her to emit a gasping scream, echoed by all the women who had been rescued. "Oooh, shit!" she moaned. "Thanks, I think. I don't suppose there was another way, but, god!"
"We could have taken them out the same way they were inserted, but by then, they'd have found us. This way, they'll be walking into a pitch black cave with no outside light, and a large, deep lake, with no warning. One of the traits we've noticed is they have no sense of danger unless they can see the source, and with their eyes so deep set, they practically can't see what is in front of their toes.
"Come along and help me with these women." The five members of the rescue team were comforting and consoling seven of the ten women they rescued. Erica was number eight. The two remaining women, apparently of Slavic descent, were standing slightly apart from the others, arms crossed across their breasts, looking angry. Average in size and brunette in coloring, on a beauty scale from 1 to 5 (bulldog ugly to kitten cute), neither would have quite made it to 3. Calling them plain was being kind.
Kirk and Erica quickly scanned them, looking for evidence of either outright collaboration or sympathetic feelings for the aliens. What they found was manifest resentment at being removed from the best situation either woman had ever found herself in.
It appeared that they were one time prostitutes. Getting fucked two or three times a year was, to them, better than the ten to fifteen tricks a night they had to turn to avoid getting a beating from their pimp. They were warm, dry, and relatively well fed. So they had to deliver a baby every six months, and have their breasts milked every day. To them, it was a small price to pay for security.
