Always Welcome

Her body undulated, creeping around me, fat, heavy coils lined with scales so imperceptibly smooth they might as well be skin brushed against me. Her chubby tail encircled me in a prison made of taut muscle that flowed like liquid. I struggled impotently, my limbs bound tightly against my body, but it was pointless, I could no more escape from her clutches than a fly could escape a spider. Images of monstrous snakes played through my mind as the great animal loomed over me, its imposing shadow casting me into darkness. It struck with the speed and force of a moving train, bringing it's vicious teeth down towards my face. I braced myself for the killing blow, hollow fangs puncturing my fleshy neck and injecting me with corrosive toxins, but it never came. Instead I felt large, soft lips press against mine, and a warm, wet tongue snake it's way into my mouth. My tense body relaxed and I began to see stars, the kiss was deep and long, the thick organ almost covetous as it entwined with my own. She pulled back, a strand of saliva linking our lips, and those penetrating amber eyes burned into me.

I awoke with a start, sweat dripped from my chin and my groin ached. My sheets were damp with perspiration, the night air from an open window failed to alleviate the uncomfortable heat of my small apartment. I threw the sheets off me, and swung out of bed, wiping sweat from my brow.

Another dream. I had been having them for days. I walked across the cramped space in a few short strides and pulled a carton of orange juice from the fridge, taking a long draw. I hated this new apartment, my family's farm house had been taken from me by ADVENT, the clinic my guest and her cohorts had been assigned to protect had been destroyed completely by XCOM terrorists in a daring raid, and in the fallout many of the surrounding farms and residences had been evacuated, mine included. My house was miles from that clinic, but it was all very hush-hush, they didn't want anyone snooping around out there. The Elders, in their infinite grace, had provided me with a shitty 10x10 cube in the nearest residential district. I scoffed, and took another swig of juice. ADVENT took care of all your needs, your employment as well, and now they had me working down at the bottling plant, the work was more tedious and paid less than my assembly plant job had, and if I didn't like it I was free to complain to the civil police and have them wave stun batons at me. I hated this apartment, I hated this city, I hated those XCOM rebels and I hated ADVENT for putting me here, I had been a good citizen, I had done everything I was supposed to do, and I had lost my property and my job as a result.

I couldn't get her out of my head. That damn alien who had been foisted upon me, that girl who had intruded into my life and shown me experiences I didn't know existed. She had left so abruptly, and by the time she was gone I had only just started to realize how much I wanted her to stay. Thinking about her made my head spin, the whole ordeal had short-circuited my brain and now all I could think about, all I could see when I closed my eyes, was that creature. There might be plenty more fish in the sea, but friendly Vipers were in short supply. Most nights she intruded into my dreams as she had my house, taunting me with memories of her unearthly grace and her ravenous lovemaking. I wondered if there might have been some way to stay in contact with her, but it had never been in the cards, she was tied to her job, as were all aliens, they had traveled millions of miles to be here, it was no idle undertaking. Still, I missed her terribly, and returning to my bachelor lifestyle after she had left had been jarring, I felt empty and alone. I looked at the wall clock, it was 5am, I might as well make some instant coffee and power through, I'd be due at work in an hour and a half.

My boots splashed on the sidewalk, the neon signs of the service district reflected in puddles as I marched, my head bowed, braced against the downpour. The smell of rain permeated the cool morning air, and the sun was slowly rising behind the buildings as I made my way to the factory. Every intersection here had a checkpoint, where ADVENT peacekeepers would demand your papers and push you around if you gave them any lip, and they weren't exactly the highlight of my daily routine. I dug in my pocket for my ID card and walked up to the checkpoint, stopping at the barrier. One of the soldiers waved me forward and swiped my ID, scrutinizing it through his opaque visor. He babbled to his companion in some offworld dialect and handed my card back to me, motioning impatiently for me to continue.

Something caught my eye through the rain, a familiar movement that set my heart beating like a drum, rolling hips, a serpentine tail. I met the gaze of a Viper, tall and sinewy, black armor covering her torso and hood. My heart leapt into my throat and my eyes met hers. Her gaze was cold and predatory, she stared through me, not seeing me as a person but as a potential threat to her checkpoint, she fingered the trigger on her oversized rifle as she watched me cautiously. The troops had been placed on high alert due to the clinic incident, they had been displaying holographic WANTED posters of known insurgents all over the city and there were rumors they had been given orders to shoot on sight. I turned my gaze back to the ground, it wasn't my viper. My stomach churned and I chided myself for my foolishness, I would never see her again, and jumping at shadows wasn't going to help me deal with that fact. I trudged on, away from the checkpoint and towards the bottling plant, eager to start my day's work and get it over with.

I clocked out, the sun was already getting low in the sky, painting it a deep orange as I left through the plant's chain-link gates and began to make my way back to my apartment. My shifts were long and tedious, a farcry from the more complex and technical work I had done at my assembly job where I had been a valued employee. As I walked I wondered idly if any of the turrets I had assembled had been used to defend the clinic, and if so, had they scored any hits on the insurgents? I hoped I had at least wounded one in revenge for the loss of my property and my current sorry situation. I had thought long and hard about trying to find a new job, about advancement or promotion at the plant into a less menial managerial position, but in the end the concentration of soldiers and police in this district had kept me from making any waves. I just wasn't comfortable around them, beat cops these were not, they were mean, heavily armed, and they had a propensity to harass pedestrians who loitered or made trouble.

Wherever XCOM operated, so too did you start to see a larger concentration of what people liked to refer to as "X-rays", a term popularized before the end of the contact war that referred to enemy combatants of an extra-terrestrial origin. The term had become somewhat of a slur by those with pro-rebel leanings, who saw them as a foreign occupation force, and much preferred to be policed by soldiers of human origin. My experiences had changed my position on X-rays, and I no longer saw them as alien monsters but as people like any of us, thrust into a hostile alien environment that they were not familiar with, which would absolutely account for their twitchy and hostile behavior. This was rapidly becoming their Vietnam, and as much as I disliked their temperament, I had my sympathies.

After a while I came back into view of the checkpoint, I cursed under my breath and subconsciously removed my hands from my pockets so as not to appear suspicious. What awful luck, there were a lot of checkpoints in this district, but to have one directly between my apartment and my place of work was just snake eyes, and after such a long day of tedium I was in no mood for a shakedown. I didn't know this area all too well yet, but I wondered if there was an alternate route I could take to avoid it. I thumbed my phone idly, bringing up a GPS map of the local area. Yes! It looked like there was an alley that would lead me around the checkpoint and back out near my apartment, it might add an extra 10 minutes to my route, but it would be worth it. Trying my best to appear casual, I took the turn off the street into the alleyway.

The tall buildings cast deep shadows from the low sun, and the alley was steeped in gloom, trash bags and discarded litter covered the ground, and rusted fire escapes lined the walls. ADVENT were big on appearances, they kept the streets clean enough, but these forgotten alleys and old back roads seemed to have escaped their attention. Ever since they had taken over, crime besides sedition was basically non-existent, the penalties for things like mugging were harsh and disruptions to civil society were not tolerated, so I didn't feel vulnerable as I made my way through, absent-mindedly kicking a crushed soda can out of my path.

Then I saw the viper. It looked like the same one from earlier in the day, and I cursed myself for my lapse in judgment as she had been conspicuously absent from the checkpoint, I had noticed but it hadn't registered in my mind. She was coming down the alley from the opposite direction, her massive, winding coils pushing the trash aside as she passed. She was smaller than my viper had been, and I noticed her bust was less impressive, but she was still an imposing creature, her reflective eyes sending a shiver down my spine in the relative darkness. I panicked a little, of course ADVENT would patrol this alley, because it bypassed the fucking checkpoint, oh you moron, now you're really in the shit! Trying to avoid the checkpoint I had passed through without incident this morning looked mighty suspicious, and she had been there to see my face, I had gawked at her like someone seeing an X-ray for the first time. Now I didn't have any choice but to pass her, she would have seen me by now and if I tried to hide or I turned around to go back the way I came, she might just shoot me.

I was shaking, I braced myself and marched on, desperate to keep my eyes to the ground but unable to take my gaze off her, they darted back and forth like a frightened dog. I was walking stiffly and I must have been sweating, they could smell that, vipers could taste fear on the air. She approached me, cocking her angular head and slipping her long, gaunt finger into the trigger of her weapon. Her tongue flicked the air as her glare followed me. The alley was barely large enough for me to pass her, it would be uncomfortably close.

As I neared her, she moved her weighty coils to block my path, her massive bulk filling the space between the two buildings, and trained her weapon on me, scrutinizing my face. I could barely tell vipers apart, could she tell humans apart? I raised my arms slowly and deliberately, doing my best to appear inoffensive. I was a country boy, I had never been stopped by an alien before, what was I supposed to do? Somehow I doubted "evening officer" would diffuse the situation. I wanted to reach for my ID, but if she thought I was pulling a weapon she would kill me faster than I could explain myself. She warbled something into her wrist display, keeping me in her sights, then after a few moments I heard the pounding of boots on the moist ground. Two of the three ADVENT soldiers from the checkpoint had come running down the alley, she had undoubtedly called for backup, or perhaps she just wasn't trained to deal with humans and needed their help. I remembered that my viper simply lacked the vocal organs for human speech and so was forced to use an unwieldy translator that she soon abandoned once our interactions became ... less verbal.

One of the soldiers pulled out a stun baton that fizzled menacingly, its blue arcs of electricity reflecting in his glossy red armor, and shouted at me angrily in some language I didn't speak. I stayed motionless, and the second moved closer to frisk me, eventually finding my ID card. This one seemed to speak some broken English, and chewed me out for using the back alley instead of the checkpoint. Because of the recent terrorist activities nearby, a viper had been assigned to patrol this alleyway, I was told that I was lucky to be alive and that ADVENT would not have been held responsible if I had been killed for my suspicious behavior. They would let me go, but only because I was known to the security services at the checkpoint and their records showed that I lived nearby. I apologized profusely, and as the viper continued on her patrol route down the alley the soldiers escorted me back to the road and sent me on my way.

I rushed home and fell into my bed, grateful to be alive. Enough excitement for one day, I would use the checkpoint tomorrow and just suck it up. As I stared at the ceiling, my thoughts turned to the viper again, that was the closest I had gotten to one, or any alien really, since my guest had left and I had been moved to the residential district. As scared as I had been, her intimidating size and fluid movements had sparked memories of my past encounter. My mind seethed with half-remembered images and sensations, running my hands over her firm abs, her skin like silk, the soft swell of her hips tapering into a muscular tail, the weight of her on top of me, pressing me to the ground, those exaggerated, heavy breasts hanging in my face like two watermelons made of flesh, her probing kisses that turned my legs into useless jello.

This was becoming an unhealthy obsession, a fetish, but the things she had done to me, the way she had made me feel, the sensations she had forced on me, I couldn't forget them, conflict wracked my mind as I tried to reconcile her aggressive sexual advances and my own poorly suppressed craving for them. The fact that I couldn't experience those things again drove me insane, and my groin swelled with dissatisfaction and frustration. There was no solution, I had to find a way to deal with these emotions, but their nocturnal intrusions from my subconscious were impossible to suppress, no matter how much I busied and distracted myself during the day. Perhaps I would see a doctor at the local clinic, yes, I would tell him I was having trouble sleeping and maybe he'd prescribe something to induce dreamless sleep, then perhaps I could just focus on my work and I'd be free of these intrusive thoughts. With a potential solution to my problem in mind I felt a little better, and decided to chance sleep.

The next morning I passed the checkpoint as usual, and I was relieved to see that the guards had been changed since the previous night, they didn't recognize me and gave me no special attention, merely impatiently hurrying me through. I noted that the viper was not present today, perhaps she was on a different rotation now, or maybe she was half way down the alley keeping an eye out for insurgents that might be rooting through the garbage. It was as good a start to my day as I could expect, and I continued on to the bottling plant feeling refreshed. I would make an appointment at the clinic during my lunch break and inquire about some sleep medication, and then maybe I would be cured of my obsession and I could live my life again, make a go of it here in residential and see if I couldn't get a promotion. A less self-conscious man might have whistled a happy tune.

My work day was uneventful, at noon the lunch break whistle blew, and I walked into the parking lot to make my phone call. The clinics were always running efficiently and it was as easy as ever to get an appointment for later that afternoon, many of them even ran into the night. Public health was a huge concern for ADVENT and one of the things people appreciated them for. The secretary assured me that sleep problems were common and that there were many medications the doctor could recommend for different symptoms. I ate my lunch, elated by this, and returned to the production line once my half-hour was up with a positive attitude.

As I left the plant in the late afternoon, the sun was just beginning to bleach the sky a cool pink, framing grey clouds with a pleasant glow. There was very little traffic and few pedestrians as I made my way to the clinic, it wasn't too far out of my way and didn't add much time to my usual route. I entered through automatic doors and greeted the secretary, presenting my ID that also served as a healthcare card. She motioned for me to take a seat in the waiting room, which was fairly populated, many younger people took advantage of the new healthcare system to get gene therapy and cosmetic surgery to correct perceived flaws or hereditary problems. If you had brown eyes and fancied blue ones, the clinics could do that for you, if you had a club foot or a family history of heart disease, the doctors could fix that too.

The technology being used was poorly understood by humans, far in advance of anything developed on our planet, but it's effects were obvious to all. Again doubts about the origin of the vipers swam in my head, the oddly human mannerisms and scents of my viper had made me question if she had really come from space or if she was some sort of genetic chimera, created on Earth for some unknowable purpose. I banished it from my mind, soon such doubts wouldn't matter, I was done with vipers, and if I could just dispel them from my dreams my normal life could resume. The lofty concerns of wars and political upheavals were not something I had time for. Eventually my turn came, and as I had hoped the doctor was sympathetic, he advised gene therapy to correct what he suspected might be a thyroid problem preventing me from sleeping soundly, but after I declined he was happy to prescribe sleeping pills, which he ensured me would bring on a refreshing, and dreamless, sleep. I left the clinic satisfied, and made my way home, anticipating the first good night of sound sleep since I had moved to the residential district.

The sun had gone down now, billboards and streetlamps illuminated the sidewalk with their incandescent glow, and my footsteps echoed between the tall buildings as I walked alone through the streets. The cool wind blew between them and ruffled my hair, and only one vehicle passed me on the road, it was a peaceful night. I saw the light of the checkpoint in the distance and it soured my mood. I had had a good day today, a great one even, and I didn't want those damn jackboots giving me a hard time because I was out late. I toyed with the idea of taking the back alley again to avoid them, I had not seen a viper at the checkpoint this morning, and I had the morning before. ADVENT liked to stick to routine to the point that it could become grating for humans, and I doubted that she had been on patrol at that time, was it safe to assume there was no viper today?

I didn't want to take the risk after the scare I had gotten the previous afternoon and the talking down I had been subjected to, but maybe I would just stick my head around the corner on the way past, and if I saw her coming towards me I would just continue on my usual route. I crossed the street and made for the alley, and once I was close enough I leaned in. The alley was vaguely U shaped, inverted in relation to the street. There were two blind corners, I would have to enter to see past the first. I crept in, trying to minimize the noise I made, and peeked around the first corner. No vipers in sight. The alley was almost pitch black, only one inward facing window on an upper floor was illuminated and it cast a dull yellow rectangle across the floor and the opposite wall. I listened, and heard no telltale shuffling or scraping.

I mustered my courage and continued on, my shoes squelching on the moist ground. I got about half way down the alley when I heard trash bags rustling. My heart stopped, and I froze, listening intently. Shuffling, what sounded like something heavy being dragged across the ground. My body went cold and I looked around frantically for a hiding spot, it might be futile but it was better than just waiting to be shot. I spied a recessed door in one of the walls, perhaps the rear entrance to a restaurant judging by the dumpster just outside it. I hurried over trying not to make too much noise, I crept into the recess and tried the handle, it creaked audibly and I cursed under my breath, it was locked. I heard shuffling drawing closer and I pressed myself up against the door, hoping against hope that the viper, or whatever it was, wouldn't see me hidden here in the shadows.