Home Birth

By Jessica McHugh

The largest and most hostile creature in the galaxy needs an heir.

Eibal has grown embryos for nearly every species in the galactic web. As a “sympathetic genetic,” she and her crew provide procreation services to infertile creatures like the gentle yaerla, the star-sea kreb, and the third most aggressive race in the galaxy, human beings.

When the queen of the darkogs makes Eibal an offer she can’t refuse, she and her partner Naka risk everything to give her an heir. But few places in the galaxy are more dangerous than the darkog kingdom of the Southern Ring, and Eibal soon finds herself entrenched in a brutal war between humans, darkogs, and her own body.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apokrupha LLC
• Release date: Nov 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370302284

Book preview

Apokrupha

All Rights Reserved

Home Birth

Jessica McHugh

Kaiju Revisited #2

Published by Apokrupha

Cover Art by Chris Enterline

chrisenterlineart.com

copyright, 2016

apokrupha.com

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Part One

Chapter One

The stone in her womb wakes first. It howls like a jackal and writhes against her organs, so she punches her gut until it’s still.

Little bastard. It isn’t supposed to be animate on Earth.

Acrid vomit sits wooly on her tongue. Her pores ache with filth, and the bruises run so deep through her bare, borrowed flesh she wouldn’t be surprised if they’re still there when she goes home.

If she goes home.

Michigan Avenue isn’t the most hospitable place right now, either. The Chicago streets are smoldering mounds of rubble and glass. Smoke stains the sky, and blood blemishes the pavement in puddles, spatters, and the varied tracks of animals that have scuttled through. Her brain swims with grog-nausea as she simultaneously tries to make sense of the destruction and wonders if there’s any liquor left in the bottle awkwardly positioned under her left flank.

Her head feels both overstuffed and leaking, and as she struggles to push herself up onto her elbows, she finds her left hand submerged in a congealed smear of blood and hair. What the hell had she done? The last she remembered she was leaving the office to get more grog, considering burning the place to the ground. If a spark from her office caught the discount dentist next door, so be it. If it spread to the trashy t-shirt shop, good riddance. If the flames carried to the rest of the building and beyond. she wouldn’t care in the slightest. Now that she was sober, naked, and aching in the alley, she hopes with every shred of her broken heart the wreckage peppering the alley is not her doing.

You all right, Miss?

She groans and rolls off the bottle. Shielding her eyes, she looks up at a gaunt man holding a flask marked with brown fingerprints. Ash and blood streak his face, and like the surrounding city, his suit is ruined beyond repair. As he approaches, trauma judders his bones with a horror story she can read without touching him.

That dirtbag didn’t hurt you, did it? he asks her.

She can’t remember the last time she said something aloud. Squeezing her eyes shut, she rides a swell a pain through a creaking reply. I’m fine. Long night.

Everyone had a long night, Miss. Not everyone lost their clothes. He looks around for something to cover her but only finds a tattered square foot of bloody fabric.

He flaps it in her face, and she smacks it away.

It’s not safe for you here. The city’s gone to hell since the attack started. It was a female but deadly as all get out. She was sick as a dog too. She probably brought the damn plague with her. You need to see a doctor, Miss.

My name’s Eibal. No ‘Miss.’

Okay, Eibal. Just take my hand. I’m not going to hurt you.

You couldn’t, she says. As she pushes herself to a squat, the six-inch stone in her abdomen protrudes slightly.

The man’s head is like bait on the craned fishhook of his neck as he stares at the bulge. His focus momentarily drops to her crotch, then shoots back up as the stone melts into her gut. He tells her that everything’s going to be okay, but his voice sounds like a violin with slack strings, sappy and ineffectual.

Peering down the alley at Millennium Park, Eibal’s stomach churns with the acidic reminder of her weeklong bender. She knows she’s near the Chicago office of Growth Associates but not close enough to tell if it’s been smashed to rubble like so many of the other buildings on Michigan Avenue. The beast path led it to the park, smashing numerous sculptures and benches, where its arthropodous body is coiled like a dried up worm and several of its jointed appendages broken and torn from its segmented torso. A significant portion of its scaly epidermis has been burned away, but patches along its swollen throat still glitter with neon paint. Its side is split open, reflecting wet black meat in the bean-shaped Cloud Gate while a scrub crew sprays the corpse with dissolvent, giving the park a miasma of dizzying death.

Apparently, she was royalty on her planet, the man says. A princess or something.

Queen. Eibal rakes her scalp, the jagged nails catching in her hair.

He nods. A queen, that’s right. She destroyed three blocks before they took her down. After it was over, I heard the rescue teams couldn’t tell blood from brick. He slugs from his flask and wails in the corpse’s direction. Well, who’s laughing now, you dirtbag bitch?!

"Darkog bitch," Eibal says.

What?

She points to the huddled lump in the park. She’s called a darkog. Show some respect.

Respect? He spits a bloody wad of phlegm at the ground, and his eyes fill with tears. They’ve attacked more cities in the past year than all the decades since they came out of the woodwork. That one killed hundreds of people today. It killed children. It killed— He knees turn to jelly, and he sinks to the ground with a sob, his face buried in filthy palms. "It killed my children. They were all I had left, and you’re defending the demon that killed them?"

I would never defend this carnage, but the more you use these degrading nicknames, the more you believe you’re actually superior. You’re not. Belittle them, and you be making ’em bigger.

He snarls in disgust. You act like these monsters have feelings.

"Well, humans do, don’t they?"

His nostrils flare. Humans would never do what these beasts have done. Destroy thousands of lives, obliterate so many people’s families.

"Not just people’s families, Eibal says, her sinuses stinging in memory. Besides, a crimson sin is no better or worse than a cherry one. Human crimes, darkog crimes. The chicken and the egg, ax."

The man growls as he stands, his face so tense a blood vessel in his left eye pops and flowers through the sclera. They were innocent, he says. They didn’t stand a chance.

And where were you while these innocent families were obliterated? Eibal asks, twiddling a finger at the flask. Filling that up, were you?

The word no gets caught in his throat, and he averts his eyes.

You’re lying. Why? What good could it do you now?

The flask clangs against a dull ring on his left hand, and he lifts it to his lips.

You should give that to me, she says. Grog’s caused you nothing but trouble.

They’re dead, he says, whimpering. I need it. I need it now more than ever.

Eibal smirks, her brain populated by painful color. How sweet of them to give you a good excuse.

The man’s lips quiver, and when Eibal closes her hand on his wrist, she steals his trembling lips. His sallow complexion, too. She steals his pale green eyes, which widen by the second. His hair, his nose—she adopts every facial feature—but her body remains feminine as it shudders and elongates, and her transfiguring bones become tent poles, stretching and making canopies of her skin. His own face looms above him as Eibal’s limbs and neck stretch like taffy on a summer day, undulating like a slow-motion whip crack that casts her bizarre shadow across him.

It’s not her best decision. Most travelers do all they can to avoid being exposed. It’s more dangerous since Earth passed the Universal Immigration Act. Even though a great deal of humans don’t take issue with interplanetary immigrants and are generally welcoming to Eibal’s kind, the two most aggressive races like darkogs and mutguns put a lot of Earthlings on edge. It is strange considering the rest of the galaxy regards Earthlings as the third most aggressive species.

The man’s face looks like warthog sucking on a lemon when he hisses, What the hell are you?

A vella, Eibal says. And I’ve had a really bad week.

"Jesus Christ. A fucking sympgen? Are there any humans left on Earth?"

As she floats the man’s mimicked face closer, it slowly melts back into her own, and her body shrinks to its normal, striking figure. Definitely fewer since your lot joined the web.

And whose fault is that? he snaps, looking to the park.

She releases him with a shove but nabs his flask before he falls on his ass. The fault of every human who died during a jump. That’s what thinned your ranks. Not darkogs. Not my people. It was all you, ax.

Don’t call me ‘ax.’ I’d never be friends with alien scum like you.

She throws back a gulp of his liquor and chuckles as she licks her lips. I like to keep better company anyway. When you travel as much as I do, what good is a molecularly inferior friend? More than half of you people can’t jump, let alone understand how other races and their homelands function. The fungus on Bajin is more complex than you.

"You’re poisoning this