Page 15 of The Commander

Cara had been born after the fall of civilization—long after the apocalyptic effects of the Cyclops meteor. Her father taught her that the big rock ended eighty years of Corporate Governments, sinking the base of their operations to the bottom of the sea and knocking out the world’s power grid.

The Cyclops kicked off years of disasters, pulling the last of mankind’s arrogance out from under their collective feet and leaving everyone equally on their ass.

Dad wanted her to know her history, afraid that the loss of schools and libraries would simply wipe it all away. He read her stories and made her listen to recordings when she was young, teaching her to read using old financial magazines and critically compare state sponsored news recordings with the radio broadcasts he managed to tune into. He also collected any media he found which they devoured together and left behind. Being always on the move, heavy media, and its equipment didn’t travel well.

Thin armed and short, Dad possessed twice the intelligence of anyone Cara knew. In a different era, he might have thrived as a doctor, engineer, or teacher. But he lived in a time of lingering radiation poisoning.

Cara missed him. It had always been her and Dad. His death had left her an orphan at seventeen. He’d equipped her with knowledge, but they’d never spoken out loud about the point of survival.

It was just them. He told her it would be hard after he died. Tried to teach her to be prepared. Warned her to trust no one. But he hadn’t told her how difficult a self-imposed isolation would be.

Now she’d never be alone again.

The odd sense of connection to the alien lived inside of her now. An irritation she couldn’t find to rub at. Was it in the back of her head? Behind her heart? In her mad-mind-of-its-own-pussy? If couldn’t put her finger on the place where the growing pulsing, betraying sliver lived, she couldn’t pull it out.

When the alien woke her up in the shower, an insane little voice told her to curl around him. Ask for his cock. The horror in his black eyes, strange angular features, blurred, softened around the sliver of connection, lessoning all the distress. Told her lies. It was no big deal that he’d cut her skin and sucked at the blood. No big deal that he’d tied her up and threatened to kill her. Chased her down. Had the weirdest cock she could ever imagine.

The rough edge of fear vanished, replaced by the fulfillment of a lifelong dream of kinship and understanding—a bond she’d assumed impossible. Sleepy and sex drugged, that lovely thing shone brighter than everything else.

What aliens? What curfew? What life as a sheep with no meaning? Compared to this, those questions were wee little intrusive thoughts. They could go away for now. Nothing had been this good for her in a long, long time.

His pulsating cock was a direct line to more yummy light. More deep connection. More warm and not alone. And, god, she wanted that. It filled her up and silenced all the other shit in her head. This was better than chocolate. Brenda’s voice, Dad’s lectures—all faded into a distant hum.

There was no resistance to the alien’s arm slung loosely around her body, keeping her steady, while his other hand slipped between her legs and cupped her.

“Pretty Kitten,” he said. Against her ear she heard that sound again, the rattle in his chest.

Pleasure burst from her throat in low sounds when his fingers deepened the caress. Perfect. There. Like that. His skilled touch eclipsed lonely explorations, fumbling attempts at satisfaction. Her body unfurled, blooming for him with slick, dewy wetness.

He crushed her against his massive frame. Their skin fused with the wet. Steam carried his scent, and that smell went right to her head. His approving growls vibrated through her bones while he orchestrated her pleasure with devastating precision. Paradise existed in this cocoon of sensation—this sacred space where two beings merged into one perfect whole.

She forgot herself. Lost time. Lost will. Lost everything but what they were sharing. And he was into it. Fully into her. As if he had no other place to be, and nothing else to do. He touched her until she came and couldn’t take it anymore. Her orgasm hit with a full body bone melting heat that left her hardly able to stand, totally reliant on his arm around her waist.

Was this what had made Brenda a fool for Andy?

No. There was no way Brenda had this mindless rush of electric connection. Andy was a slimeball.

The alien invader held her easily. Lifted her off the floor like a toy, found the spot on her neck he’d bitten before, and kissed it. The scrape of his predatory teeth sent shivers running down her back that roused her from her blissed out stupor. Not enough. Instead of shrinking away, that newly created, insane part of her brain tilted her head to give him better access.

“Alien invader,” Cara’s analytical side insisted, clinging to outrage.

“Lover. Mate,” her pussy answered.

It was a conflict she didn’t want to deal with. In the conversation with herself—there was no way it was her heart saying that. Her heart wasn’t that stupid, and her emotions weren’t that vulnerable. There was no reality in which she could accept that she wasn’t drugged, brainwashed, and taken over without her permission. The daughter of Stephen Benedict would never fuck an alien and like it. Or want more.

Never.

“What have you done to me?” she asked as he carried her out of the shower.

“Pleasured you,” he answered simply.

It was more than that. Much more than that. There’d been no drug. No injection. Maybe his scent? Was there venom in his saliva? His cum was pink. Was that some kind of pussy poison?

He grabbed a towel for her, a huge fluffy sheet of fabric. Cara sniffed it, surprised that it smelled to her like the old magazine’s advertisements for clean wash. Just like she imagined it should.

She’d never thought to smell laundry soap that didn’t have a natural base of lard.

But this was either old salvage, or new, clean, alien factory made. He was an alien overlord.

A commander. Of course, he would have all the good stuff.

After the Cyclops storms started to clear up and became more random, the rest of mankind who’d managed to survive all the mess came limping out of their hiding holes to find pockets of their previous world preserved. Dad was a kid then. All those pockets, as far as Dad had understood it, were cut off from other pockets. Until the aliens came.

The invaders had an endless supply of their own workers. Cara never understood why they needed or wanted humans. She and Dad had watched from afar while towns were cleared, cleaned, and rebuilt as needed with electricity and running water in weeks by a huge, busy array of strange looking beings.

The aliens rebuilt the industrial age, so that humanity had a cozy place to live. They kept control over things like communication, energy, data storage, and transportation. All of that stuff had been knocked out with the Cyclops, anyway.

Holding the cleaned, remade towns out as a treat, the aliens invited the people to live in them. And oh, hey, what would they do all day? How would they earn that comfort, food, simple health care, a cure for the cancer that had killed Dad? The aliens had jobs for them. And taxes. So familiar. Easy. It was just like life used to be, the old timers said.

Was she gonna do the easy life now? Only instead of working, she’d let an alien fuck her. Was he planning to add her to a harem somewhere, a brothel? Turn her into a broodmare? What was the plan?

Bastian took the towel from her. “You’re tired, yes? Sore? And a hungry Kitten. Your blood sugar is low, I think.” He told her as he rubbed the bath sheet over her back and head.

“Damn wankers ruined my catch,” she muttered.

She had been so hungry. Now, she was past that point. Her stomach felt dry and shriveled, and every joint in her body ached. Eating was the last thing she could think of doing. She didn’t want anything from an invader.

The alien picked her up and took her into the kitchen, pulled a silver package from the cupboard, sliced it open, and poured the contents into a bowl. Meal provisions.

Turkey, mashed potatoes and green peas mixed with gravy. The smell of it was an assault to her senses. Avoiding that factory made crap was one of the blessings of Dad’s teachings.

She much preferred the clean, perfumed scent of the towel. Cara had expected something different in an alien’s cupboard. He wasn’t a being that looked like he ate the daily distribution of corn based mashed potatoes and gravy.

“You don’t like this? I have beef too. The chicken is all gone.” He must have seen her wrinkle her nose.

“It’s fine. I’m not hungry anyway,” If he put that stuff in front of her cold, she’d toss her guts up all over the table.

Packaged meals were standard during and after the corporate wars. There was a fortified grain hot/cold cereal for breakfast and nutrition bars for snacks. One day, some black suit decided people were too fat and standardized all the food. The only way to get variety was to grow it in your own garden and hunt it in the free lands.

The aliens rebuilt those factories when they arrived so that humans could feed themselves efficiently. When they observed this planet from space, were they up there thinking, “Humm, those people must like their food this way.” Cara could have offered better things to rebuild. She’d never tasted real chocolate, but she’d heard of it.

“I wasn’t asking, Kitten. You need nourishment,” Bastian said.

“Can’t I just go back to sleep?”

“After you eat.”

“Can I have clothes first?”

He sighed as if she were stressing him out more than he could take. Why was he feeling put out? Had someone captured him, chased him naked through a school and then drugged him with something that turned him into a sex maniac?

Cara couldn’t let herself focus on him, smell him, absorb more of his presence, so she kept her eyes on the floor, griping to herself, acting like a helpless little puppy.

If she looked at him with all his strangeness, this weird wrong alien would be right in her face. Inescapable. She might be able to deal if he was just a bald, muscled giant. She’d seen a guy like that before, next to the laundry soap ads.

Maybe she could get used to the color difference. His skin looked like something that belonged in the ocean, even though there was nothing fishy about him. No, the shape of his face—where were his ears—was not rounded and amphibian. The bony lines of his shoulders and chest with swaths of muscle over his sides, his belly, his back, and his big round ass gave her the impression of some kind of mixed up, demon/humanoid/dinosaur that moved with the light-footed lethal grace of a cat. The parts didn’t fit together right. He was uncompromisingly alien.

His extra-long fingers, the fact that he was naked, but she hadn’t caught a glimpse of a cock—and what she was just realizing were knees that could swing both ways, couldn’t be reconciled with any human shaped reference. All she could come up with were animal or dinosaur comparisons. Even those old outer space reels she’d seen didn’t feature a creature like him.

“Why do you need clothes? I have regulated the room temperature.” He slid a gelatinous mess of food in front of her.

Had it gone from chilly to warm? She was too busy losing her mind to notice.

When she didn’t move, he said, “Shall we bargain? While you eat, I will put something on your scrapes and sore spots. Then, if you are a good pet, you can have clothes.”

“Can you at least heat that?” She pointed to the plate.

“You eat it warm?” He sounded shocked, as if the idea had never occurred to him.

“If I can. How do you eat it?”

“When I need to feed, I just punch a hole in the bag and swallow it down. I do not consider the taste.”

“Human food doesn’t bother you?”

“It has all the requirements.”

“You have turkeys where you’re from?” It was the dumbest question. But as different as he was, it was weirder that they would eat the same foods. It had never occurred to her that the aliens had done something to the prepared food supply, and it should have. Was that why she’d lost her mind?

“No. But we have avian creatures that have much the same make up. There are a few minerals on this planet that are lacking but are easily supplemented. They wouldn’t be good for you and are not in these meals. Do not fret, Kitten. I will not permit harm to come to you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you are mine.” She met his eyes. Couldn’t help herself. It was night outside, his apartment dimly lit, but it wasn’t enough to hide his details. Despite the sharpness of cheekbones and his wide mouth, the alien wasn’t ugly. He wasn’t sloppy like the muzzle heads.

He was handsome. Inappropriately handsome, with a set of damn fine shoulders and the long slope of a back that curved into a cupable round backside. She hadn’t known men had asses like that, or that she’d want to touch it, until him.

His lips curved as if he knew her thoughts, as if he heard her pulse pick up as she eyed his physique, enjoying what she was looking at. The smile became a grin when she blushed, revealing all of his wicked sharp teeth crowded together in rows of upper and lower fangs. He’d rip her skin off if she put a finger in his mouth.

She had to look away, hide her expression, remembering that his mouth had been on her. Between her legs. Giving her nothing but pleasure.

There was a weird indent in his bottom lip, the dark line of a seam in the flesh that went down and under the blunt square shape of his chin. She’d seen him do something to his face out of the corner of her eye that made her think there were other alien things about him that she had yet to explore. Than she ever wanted to explore.

Pulling her gaze away, she watched him take the plate of food out of the heater and bring it to her. It looked like a tiny saucer in his hands. Heating it had bubbled the gravy. Her stomach rumbled.

Nice to look at or not. She recognized an edible meal when she saw one. He handed her a spoon. “After I eat, I get clothing?”

“I will get the ointment for your scrapes.”

The kitchen was a small cubicle meant for a family of three. His bulk filled it, blocking the hallway which led to the front main room, she guessed, and the front door out of this place.

Scooping food into her mouth, Cara ate without tasting.

He’d just left her there. Like she didn’t want to escape him, like she had accepted this arrangement, like Mister Big And Tall would get whatever he wanted and after one good bang, she was his.

Cara was both insulted and suspicious. Could she really just walk out the front door?

Was he so superior and big headed that he’d leave her alone, untied?

He came back with a square thing that looked like a med kit and kneeled beside her chair. “Tell me more of what is happening in the town.”

It was a request and an order, packaged in authority, that left no room for argument.

Cara pulled her legs together, hiding her naked center, and hunched over the table, giving him a side eye. He acted like he didn’t notice how weird this was. Opening the kit, looking for a tube that must contain the ointment he wanted to put on her scrapes.

Scratches and minor cuts covered her knees. They hurt to bend, but she’d had worse. There was a cut somewhere on her back side too, making itself known every time she moved in her seat.

“I told you. Danov is holding all the food as a protection fee. He calls it his tithe. If people don’t pay the tithe, he accuses them of not doing their fair share. The only way he would let Brenda and I pay the tithe was on our backs. We wouldn’t so we got kicked out.”

“Kicked out?”

“He closed the gate on our asses and told us not to come back about an hour before the fucking sun goes down. And you know what happens then.”

The alien didn’t blink. “Yes. I do know.”

“There’s a squatters camp down by the river. It’s hidden in some brush and trees and the muzzle heads don’t bother it.”

“I did not know that.”

“There was an old guy there. Some others.” Cara watched his expression carefully.

His expression didn’t change.

“I started looking for food as soon as I could. But the whole area is barren. Is there radiation here?”

“No. Nothing like that. That’s all cleaned up.”

“Well, something scared away all the extra game outside the town and up and down the river. No fish. Nothing. There aren’t even any rats.” She’d looked. Desperately.

“How often does the duty come to town?” he asked.

“The duty?”

“The red hats.”

“Who?”

“Alien soldiers, the muzzle heads,” she clarified.

He made a noise in his throat that sounded like impatience. “How often do you see the hairy aliens in your town?”

“There are two every day. Danov must pay them the protection fee. But other than that, they come on Fridays and check in with Danov, unless he reports in earlier because someone broke one of the laws.”

The ointment was cold when it hit her skin, startling Cara. She jumped and kicked out. He caught her leg, less than a second after her brain sent the impulse to react to the cold, moving so quickly. His muscles didn’t even bulge. He just caught her. Held her still.

“Two every day? You wouldn’t by any chance know the numbers on their cheeks, would you?”

“Those squiggle tattoos are numbers? I knew it.” Cara had always suspected.

He grunted. “I have arrangements with the human leadership of the towns. They obey my laws, no one dies. Every town, every working human, pays the same the tax.”

“There was no tithe in Springfield,” Cara said. She hadn’t loved it there. The single people lived in dorms, rather than private houses. All the work available was backbreaking farm work. They gave the easier stuff to a large population of senior citizens and teenagers.

“I send the duty to count, record, and pick up the taxes every month. If there is any help needed to maintain peace or provide protection, the mayor sends a message. I’ll send the duty or take care of it myself.” Once he’d smeared the cold stuff on her knee, he searched for other injuries. Or else he just ran a hand up and down her leg, feeling her up.

“There is no need for protection from the red hats.” He spread the ointment over cuts on her elbow. “The duty is supposed to patrol for wankers, be seen, and make sure there is order at all times. They are not supposed to interfere in daily life.”

She nodded. She’d rarely seen the muzzle heads in Springfield. The mayor there had a few people to keep order because the little Friday night bar had alcohol, but no alien presence in the town at all until tax day.

She’d heard a story that once during the collection, some idiots tried to set a trap for the aliens. The aliens responded by ruthlessly going through the town and killing every male over the age of ten. Had Commander Bastian ordered that? Had he gone himself to deal with it?

She thought he probably had.

“They don’t know your rituals, why would they? You humans were supposed to govern yourselves in your little towns,” he said.

“And when they don’t?”

He reached for her other knee. “If they don’t, it is dealt with.”

That answer came out of his mouth as crisply as if he’d told her what time of day it was. Had he killed children and thought nothing about it?

She wasn’t. Because something was wrong with her. She didn’t hate him the right way. Didn’t feel the right way.

Her father told her that the aliens stepped into the role left by the lack of a governing body. The people craved someone to be in charge. She should have taken his advice and stayed far from the alien towns. Found a place with low radiation, four walls and a roof and never left it.

She tried. She really did. But one night, while out hunting, she crossed a group of wankers around a fire, laughing. Drinking something alcoholic. They sounded happy. And she’d been tempted to join them.

That had scared her so much she decided to find a nice, quiet alien town. The fields and farm animals around Springfield were inviting. Despite the singles dorm, there were locked doors on the individual shower rooms and toilets. And the water was gloriously steamy hot. As long as no one was waiting in line, she could take as long as she wanted. Then she found out that there was cake on Saturdays. It wasn’t chocolate or vanilla, but still—cake.

The ointment spread on all her sore spots and gashes. Bastian sat back to look at her, an odd tilt to his lips. He was quiet so long she finally had to ask, “What’s that look?”

“I would like to sit you on this table, spread your legs, and have my food now.”

“Oh.” How did she answer that? How could she answer the way his words went right to her pussy?

He sniffed the air. The tilt to his lips widened.

She had the impulse to put her hand on his shoulder, draw closer, put her mouth on his neck and kiss him with an open mouth. Would he like that?

Would she like that? Her face went hot. She went hot everywhere. Why did she like how he smelled? Why didn’t he disgust her? Why couldn’t she get it into her head that his kind were the enemy? Just yesterday. Less. Hours ago.

“Finish your food, Kitten,” he said as he stood up. He brought her a jar from a cold storage, sitting it on the table next to her. Someone had handwritten apple juice in black ink across the front.

Cara looked from the jar to the alien.

He opened it for her.

She took a sip from the jar. The cloudy yellow juice smelled like ripe fall apples and tasted the same. Not as good as cake. But wow. She couldn’t resist several swallows, washing away the taste of the salty packaged food before she could answer.

“You said you were only in Dalewood a short time before being kicked out. Where were you before that?”

“Springfield.”

“What was your job there?”

“I had two choices, shoveling cow shit or loading unloading cow shit.”

He nodded, as if that sounded about right. Had he decided who would do what job? One of the things about the towns was that you got what you got. The mayor in Springfield said it was random but Cara never believed it.

With him standing she was face to face with smooth crotch. There were ridges over his abdominals, but they looked like extra rib bones, not muscles. There were round pads on his chest that mirrored pectorals without any nipples, but she knew from experience that rock hard was not just descriptive thinking.

He reminded her of a male doll she’d found once. She knew he had a cock, had felt it, seen the shape of it, had it erupt inside of her and made her orgasm, but she didn’t know where or how he’d managed to put it away. It was as if his skin were a suit.

“Lean forward a bit,” he guided her over her empty plate. “I just need to get this.” His fingers traced down her spine, between her shoulder blades, finding wounds she hadn’t realized were there, efficiently spreading the cold stuff over them.

He touched a sore spot mid-back, the pain a sharp zing before he soothed it with the ointment. “There. Perfect.”

Cara frowned. He sounded very satisfied.

“You have finished your food, little one. I’ll go find you something to wear. If you wish you can rest, too. Beddy bye, don’t let the bed bugs bite and all of that. I need to go to Correction and check on something.”